Surviving Success: A Review of Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me

You can hardly blame people for misunderstanding Britney and misconstruing her circumstances, but after the memoir it is all the harder to ignore their casual commentarial cruelty. Reports about Britney getting snapped partying panty-less with and without Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, marrying a childhood friend for a day, having a public meltdown and shaving her head for no clear reason made it really easy to conclude she was troubled if not severely mentally ill. Like a hit song taking on a life all its own, its words no longer restricted to the original text, scenes from her life constructed out of page three news and celebrity gossip columns took on the complexion of something very like but also much more narratively persuasive—simpler—than the life itself. For those used to construing everything Britney has said and done before, during, and after the thirteen years she spent under an exploitative conservatorship overseen by her ghoulish father Jamie Spears as being conditioned by her mental instability or personality flaws her memoir comes like a thief in the night.

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Read more about the article Review: Mircea Cartarescu (2022) Solenoid.
Mircea Cartarescu

Review: Mircea Cartarescu (2022) Solenoid.

Whether literature will save us or not is a poetic question, and the narrator’s prosaic denunciation of its false promises cannot settle the matter one way or another. Towards the end the narrator throws his manuscript into a burning abyss, choosing to save his child with Irina. How then are we left with this lexical arabesque delineating the contours of the possibility space occupied by human consciousness in an indifferent world? Solenoid answers the riddle by positioning itself qua literary work as a noble lie. In successfully reporting the narrator’s choice of the human satisfactions of love and commitment the literary work overcomes its chimerical destiny.

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Review: Anya von Bremzen (2023) National Dish

"Focusing on iconic dishes from Paris, Naples, Tokyo, Seville, Oaxaca, and Istanbul von Bremzen attempts to bring light rather than the usual heat to the concept of a national dish in a globalized world where surprisingly nationalism is resurgent. She doesn’t to her credit pretend that stories about a few dishes from six countries provide a comprehensive account of the productive tension between national and world cuisine, although a sequel covering other national cuisines is acknowledged as a live possibility. A first principles approach to the question of theorising the national dish shows even a book covering every existing national cuisine is not up to the task. This is because—as von Bremzen acknowledges—the constitutive concepts of nation and national culinary identity are themselves of recent vintage and subject to ongoing negotiation; they are open to influence from actors at home and abroad."

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Read more about the article On Hating Writers but Loving Writing
Amy Hungerford introduces the CEO of Misogyny, David Foster Wallace.

On Hating Writers but Loving Writing

Are some writers so morally unsavoury that their novels, however admirable, are incapable of being lovable? Amy Hungerford, Ruth Fulton Benedict Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, certainly thinks so. In her polemic against Wallace in general, and Infinite Jest in particular, she opines that Wallace’s zealous defence of the length of his doorstop against a condescendingly described Michiko Kakutani’s protestations can only be evidence of his misogyny.

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Read more about the article David’s Secret Chord: Sour Notes in Infinite Jest
David Wallace by Cain S. Pinto

David’s Secret Chord: Sour Notes in Infinite Jest

There are several specific references to pitches and chords in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Most of these are unfortunate and reveal a lack of adequate research or editorial oversight. We can love writing and writers without losing perspective about the difference between the two. Learning to live with a beloved writer’s foibles, and triumphs, is not a betrayal of the writer’s vision but a blow for their work’s longevity and enduring relevance in the face of its own and its author's failings. To acknowledge our heroes have feet of clay is not to deny their heroics, but to find them grounded in our world. It’s all well and good to say Wallace achieved something transcendent in Infinite Jest, but to deny the sour notes in his recital doesn’t establish his virtuosity as much as it shows us to be tone deaf.

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