A Nobel Prize in Literature for Salman Rushdie? That’s what David Remnick enthusiastically — perhaps over-enthusiastically — argues for in The New Yorker. It is impossible for any individual of conscience not to feel for Rushdie, still recovering from a brutal attack that may cost him an eye. But it should be noted that the madman who attacked Rushdie had no direct contact with the Iranian government. And Remnick’s argument for a Literature Nobel for Rushdie rests largely on the symbolism of “free speech.” However, even there, you feel that Remnick is stretching the bounds of credulity. “He was so insistent on living his life without performing the role of a ‘Statue of Liberty,’ as he put it, that he played himself on an episode of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ counselling Larry David on the forbidden pleasures of ‘fatwa sex,’” Remnick writes, a little too breathlessly. “Solzhenitsyn was capable of many deeds, but not that.” So much the better!
Certainly, neoconservatives would be on board with Remnick’s uncritical valorization of Rushdie. Rushdie signed the infamous Harper’s Letter, siding with the frightened Establishmentarians, wholly misreading the power of “cancel culture.” A Nobel for Salman might bring around some of these right-libertarian corners of thought towards the relevance of the award, but it would do little else. Iranian novelist Shahrnush Parsipur, who wrote Touba and the Meaning of Night after four years of imprisonment in the beseiged country, and Korean novelist Hwang Sok-yong are both more worthy contemporary novelists, and not largely for symbolic reasons. Also — no black woman from Africa has ever won the Nobel for Literature, though there have been many deserving, like French-Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga.
We wish Salman Rushdie the best in his recovery. Godspeed, Salman. But we wish the Nobel Prize for Literature — not Symbolism — for Mukasonga.
“All happy families are more or less dissimilar,” wrote Nabokov, turning Tolstoi’s quote from Anna Karenina on its head, “all unhappy ones are more or less alike." Christina Oxenberg’s family, as distinguished as Count Tolstoi’s or Nabokov’s is pretty disfunctional. Perhaps that is what makes her such a compelling writer. I encountered her writing first in her startlingly original novel Royal Blue and felt then, as now, that her voice was forged through the fires of great tribulation, in spite of the grandeur or her name. Her complicated childhood made her into the writer that she is today. This week Christina delves deep into her family secrets. Yesterday, she wrote about how the man that she knew as her father revealed to her that JFK was probably her real father. And today she reveals that her unhappiness with her family was not a subjective perspective but — from the point of view of health professionals — objectively toxic. (Christina Oxenberg)
“Monday’s announcement by Apple, the distributor of the most recent best picture Oscar winner, CODA, that it will release Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation, a film starring the most recent best actor Oscar winner, Will Smith, in 2022 rather than in 2023, sparked widespread speculation about how members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will react to the film and its central performance. Oscar voters will, of course, be judging the film less than one year after Smith’s infamous slap of Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards, which caused the Academy considerable embarrassment, and led to Smith’s resignation from the organization and to him being banned from attending the ceremony for the next decade … The Hollywood Reporter decided to go right to the voters to find out, surveying dozens from across the organization, including members of the actors branch, who will solely determine whether Smith should receive another best actor Oscar nomination … Member of actors branch: ‘I think more time should go by before Will Smith is considered for any award. I’m surprised Emancipation is being released, but I assume it’s for financial reasons, as well as hoping for award nominations. However wonderful he may be in the film, it will be hard to watch it and not continually think of the slap … ‘ Member of directors branch: ‘Will Smith should have been asked to take part in an Academy-mandated anger-management program before being readmitted or having his work considered for awards. Apple, of course, can do whatever they wish, but the Academy should not feel compelled to buy into the circus that will surround this project.’ Member of directors branch: ‘No chance I would vote for him. However, I support the release of Emancipation. We need some good films out there, which I am assuming and hope this is …’” (THR)
“Trump is attempting to smear Elaine Chao as ‘China loving’ because of her ethnicity. In fact, Chao immigrated to the United States as an 8-year-old and came from Taiwan, which has the most hostile relationship with China of any country in the world. (Calling the child of Taiwanese immigrants ‘China loving’ is a bit like calling a Palestinian immigrant ‘Israel loving.’) Also Trump appointed Chao to his own Cabinet but decided he hates her after she resigned following the January 6 insurrection. Trump’s smear is of a piece with his regular habit of describing American immigrants and their descendants as foreigners who have no right to participate in public affairs. He called Judge Gonzalo Curiel a ‘Mexican’ who was inherently biased, has insisted that Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not have any say in ‘how our government is to be run’ and instead ‘go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,’ and so on. When Trump was first running for president, Republicans conceded comments like these were the ‘textbook definition of a racist comment.’ But once it became clear Trump’s connection to the party’s base could not be dislodged, Republicans decided to stop acknowledging his racism. Asked whether the former president’s attacks on Chao were racist, Senator Rick Scott delivered the kind of prototypical evasion that has defined his party’s response. ‘It’s never, ever okay to be a racist,’ Scott said without referring to Trump’s comments. ‘I hope no one is racist.’” (NYMag)
“Disney heiress Abigail Disney ripped her great-uncle Walt Disney for being ‘fascist’ and stoking anti-Semitism and racism when he ran the company he co-founded with her grandfather Roy O. Disney. ‘He bordered on rabid fascism,’ the 62-year-old heiress said of Walt Disney on Marc Maron’s ‘WTF’ podcast last week. The wealthy film producer and activist spoke with Maron about her new documentary that takes aim at her family’s company, called ‘The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,’ as well as her family’s battle with addiction.Disney told Maron that while her great-uncle Walt was a ‘chaotic genius,’ he and his brother played up prejudices of the time. ‘They weren’t shy about delving into the stereotypes if it served them,’ she said. The Post reached out to the Disney company for comment. The heiress noted that Disney positioned the wolf from ‘The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf’ as a ‘Jewish peddler’ and named one of the wisecracking black crows from ‘Dumbo’ Jim Crow.” (NYPost)
Despite the multibillion dollar defamation lawsuits facing NewsCorp, a “scrappy” Australian digital site named Crikey is getting an outsized amount of attention from the Murdoch’s. Crickey, according to Joe Pompeo of Vanity Fair, has been holding the Murdoch’s to account down under. “For a long time Crikey’s Murdoch accountability went unchallenged. But as Lachlan consolidated power atop the family business and moved his immediate family from Los Angeles back to Sydney, the heat began to rise. Over the past two and a half years, Lachlan’s lawyers have dispatched four legal threats to the small but scrappy website. Crikey complied with the first three of these, including one pertaining to a headline in which it had mistaken Lachlan for his brother, James Murdoch; in another, pertaining to Lachlan’s membership on the board of the Australian media company Ten Network Holdings, Crikey forked over a redress of $10,000, which Lachlan donated to an organization supporting women’s crisis shelters. The fourth legal letter was the one that landed Crikey in its current predicament. It came on the heels of a June 29 opinion column, by political editor Bernard Keane, headlined, ‘Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator.’ The kicker of the piece elaborated: ‘Nixon was famously the ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in Watergate. The Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this continuing crisis.’ Lachlan’s lawyer, arguing that the article had defamed his client, immediately demanded a deletion and a public mea culpa. Crikey took the article down but refused to apologize, instead offering to cover Lachlan’s legal fees and publish a lengthy clarifying statement, in which it would say that while the site ‘does believe that Mr. Murdoch bears some responsibility for the events of January 6 because of the actions of Fox News…’” R’uh-r’oh! (Joe Pompeo/VF)
Loretta Lynn, a pioneer of the music of Appalachia, has passed. “In a traditionally conservative genre, Loretta Lynn crafted singles about birth control and divorce. As she recounted on her signature 1970 song ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ Lynn grew up in rural Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. She was married at 15, and her husband Oliver ‘Doo’ Lynn pushed her to start performing at clubs. She signed her first recording contract in 1960 and made the charts with her single ‘I’m a Honky Tonk Girl. That same year, Lynn made her debut on the Grand Ole Opry. In the 1960s, she would find success with singles like ‘Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)’ and ‘You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man).’ Her rise to fame was chronicled in her 1976 memoir and its 1980 film adaptation (starring Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones), Coal Miner’s Daughter. Her contributions to country music broke ground for female artists across the board and won her the first Country Music Award for a female vocalist in 1967. Several of her songs were pointedly sung from a woman’s perspective; she was openly threatening on 1968’s ‘Fist City’ and sang about the stigma that came with being a divorced woman on 1972’s ‘Rated X.’ ‘The Pill,’ an honest song about birth control that Lynn herself co-wrote, got her banned from some country radio stations and was the most controversial song of her career.” (PITCHFORK)
“RONAN FARROW ‘I think the first significant conversation around this stuff was just learning that you had pursued the Weinstein story. The Hollywood Reporter had asked me to write an op-ed [‘My Father, Woody Allen, and the Dangers of Questions Unasked,’ May 11, 2016] about my family’s personal experience and balancing that against my journalistic feelings about these issues. It was an important turning point for me because it took an issue from which I had fled — people whose families are touched by this kind of violence often want to go nowhere near it professionally — and opened my eyes to just how much of a nerve this touched. That op-ed set off a larger media cycle than I anticipated and clearly was scratching at the surface of something that deserved more journalism. In the wake of that, I was pursuing these stories about the dark underbelly of Hollywood and trying to get at some of those same issues more deeply and hence wound up looking at Weinstein. And when I [visited] The Hollywood Reporter, I believe that might have been the moment at which I was alerted to how long and concerted your effort on [the Weinstein story] had been.’ KIM MASTERS ‘Yeah. Intermittent but definitely going back many years. I had heard about Harvey assaulting women. I didn’t realize then how prolific he was, that it was like his second job. I only came later to understand that it’s always a pattern. But I had heard about Rosanna Arquette and Gwyneth Paltrow as victims. And then you called me. You were still struggling with [interference from] NBC News, and I think my biggest contribution to what you were doing was just to say, ‘You’re absolutely on the right track.’’ (THR)