second world war | House of SpeakEasy NYC

Posts From Author: second world war

Love in the Time of Genocide

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014; 320pp …how did “a sleepy country of poets and dreamers,” and the most highly educated nation the earth had ever seen, how did it yield to such wild, such fantastic disgrace? What made its people, men and women, consent to having their souls raped — and raped by a eunuch (Grofaz: the virgin Priapus, the teetotal Dionysus, the vegetarian Tyrannosaurus rex)? Where did it come from, the need for such a methodical, such a pedantic, and such a literal exploration of the bestial? These are the questions that orbit the singularity at the center of twentieth-century history. In his second Holocaust novel, The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis sketches a few possible answers while acknowledging — in a thoughtful afterword — that we nevertheless “know almost nothing about the why.” In Time’s Arrow (1991), his first foray into this particular zone of interest, the Holocaust is glimpsed obliquely — like the Medusa reflected in Perseus’s shield — through the lens of Amis’s formal fireworks. The action happens in reverse: people spring to life and are packed on trains that take them away from concentration camps; relationships begin with rows and end […]

Inside the Lie

September 29, 2014. As an amber-violet sunset spread across a CinemaScope sky to the west of Manhattan, the House of SpeakEasy returned to City Winery for the inaugural show of its fall season. Almost three hundred guests gathered to listen, to laugh, to share, and to refill their glasses as six writers — Marcelo Gleiser, Natalie Haynes, John Guare, Gary Shteyngart, Gail Sheehy, and Andrew Solomon — took to the stage to ponder this month’s theme, Inside the Lie. This month’s guest stars? Copernicus, RFK, Oedipus, Sophia Loren’s panties, an uncommon family set-up, a Bavarian porn star… We’ll be posting videos from the show soon, but here’s a sneak preview of what went down when the curtain went up… Marcelo Gleiser: “We matter because we are very rare…” Marcelo Gleiser set the scene in 1543 with the death of Copernicus. The Prussian math genius supposedly died with his newly published masterwork, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in his hands, horrified by the preface tacked on by Lutheran nay-sayer Andreas Osiander that essentially discredited all that followed. Copernicus’s theory — maybe the sun… doesn’t orbit the earth? — would of course turn the world upside down (pun). But reversing the cosmic order, especially one which […]

Comedy = Tragedy + Time: A Chat With Natalie Haynes

You know that bit of clip art your computer used to throw up when you typed in drama? The two classical masks, one happy, one sad? That’s sort of like Natalie Haynes’s career. Not in a bad way, though. Thalia, the Muse of comedy, oversaw her first act — as a hugely successful stand-up (she was the first woman to be nominated for the prestigious Perrier Best Newcomer Award at the Edinburgh Fringe). Now it’s Melpomene’s turn, as the Muse of tragedy, to take over for Act II. The Furies (St. Martin’s Press, 2014), just published in the States, is a clever synthesis of Greek tragic tropes and modern crime fiction, set largely in a pupil referral unit in Edinburgh. (Read my review here.) Her earlier (nonfiction) book The Ancient Guide to Modern Life (Overlook Press, 2011), with its irreverent but perceptive rediscovery of contemporary culture through Greco-Roman eyes, bridged the gap. Natalie was kind enough to drop by the blog for a chat about Sophocles and Mickey Rourke, patricide at school, and the drunks of East Anglia. Charles Arrowsmith: Hi Natalie, thanks for your time. So The Furies is ostensibly a book about what might happen when you mix Greek tragedy with troubled […]

Six Degrees of Reparation: John Paul Stevens Amends the US Constitution

Constitutional law has always been a game of semantics. So it’s a pleasure to discover that former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s new book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (Little, Brown, 2014), is so clear in expression and purpose. For many, in these ultra-partisan times, this slight yet impressive book may not tip any balances. But few could find much to criticise in Stevens’s clean, thorough, economical style. Reading Six Amendments is like being taken in hand by the best tour guide in the world as he rehearses arguments for and against, lays out the relevant legal history, and pulls clean the knot of his conclusions. At times his dexterity is almost moving. The book begins with a statement of confidence: confidence “that the soundness of each of my proposals will become more and more evident, and that ultimately each will be adopted.” This is the confidence of a man who recalls Prohibition, the Wall Street Crash, and the Second World War; who has seen now seventeen presidents; and whose ninety-four years make him well over a third of the age of the nation. His sureness will be reassuring to some. But what are his concerns […]