Monthly Archives: August 2008

Letter from Patricia Patterson to John Powers

I’ve just discovered that the comment concluding my Afterword to my article about Manny Farber on this site was grievously mistaken and misinformed. So I’ve just added this letter from Patricia—written in response to a John Powers broadcast about Manny on NPR’s Fresh Air—to my Afterword as a postscript, but I also would like to highlight it here.—J.R. [8/28/08]

Dear John Powers,

Manny was not a “Conservative,” a “Libertarian,” a “Republican,” an anything. In his early twenties he tried to join the Communist Party but they didn’t want him. During WWII he tried to enlist in the army but they rejected him. After inviting him to join, it took just one meeting for the New York Film Critics Circle to ask him to leave. He came home that night saying, “They fired me.” He also told me that even a therapist in Washington had “fired him” for not working hard enough. Manny was not a Republican because he never knew any. He didn’t quarrel with them because he was never around them. He quarreled with the people he knew: artists, writers, teachers, carpenters. When he saw smugness, complacency, and superiority — and often those qualities went together — then he would get going, and separate himself from them. Read more

Sátántangó (the novel)

I’m a member of PEN, and Nick Burd, their Literary Awards Program Manager, just forwarded to me the following note from Barbara Epler at New Directions:

Dear Jonathan Rosenbaum,

I was reading through PEN’s very interesting “What are we missing?” forum, and saw your SÁTÁNTANGÓ suggestion, and just wanted to say we are waiting on the delivery of its [English] translation by the great George Szirtes, eagerly waiting, and will publish it as soon as we can. (We already have his translations of László [Krasznahorkai]’s THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE and WAR & WAR.)

I thought you’d be interested — and, by the way, we are always interested in hearing suggestions from readers who seem on our wave-length so if you have more ideas, please let me know.

All the best,

Barbara Epler
New Directions

P.S. (from JR): THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE is the 1989 novel that served as the basis for Béla Tarr’s 2000 film WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES. And SÁTÁNTANGÓ (the film) has recently been released in a box set by Facets Video. [8/21/08] Afterword, 2012: The English translation of the novel has finally been published.

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Unfit for Publication

A good cable-news feature tonight from Rachel Maddow on Countdown about the boondoggle of bulk sales pushing a lunatic-fringe book of abusive misinformation, Jerome R. Corsi’s Obama Nation, to the head of the New York Times best seller list. The best antidote–a detailed 40-page rebuttal, Unfit for Publication–can be accessed for free at Obama’s website. Check it out; it should be disseminated as quickly and widely as possible.

Too bad that John Kerry didn’t do something similar in 2004 with the Swift Boat smear campaign, another Corsi job. And the fact that Obama’s campaign has responded this quickly and this thoroughly is cheering –even if one knows that this will barely make an impression on those idiots who’ll believe anything that’s shoveled between hard covers that they want to believe. [8/14/08] Read more