“We are not concerned with the very poor,” wrote E.M. Forster in a famous passage from Howards End. “They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.” As a writer’s creed, these lines […]
Richard Woodward
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Snapped Judgments
The views of the loser do not typically fill prominent chapters in the history books. We know what Julius Caesar thought of the barbarous tribes in Gaul and Britannia, but almost nothing about what they thought of him. His descriptions of savage resistance to his military campaigns suggest just how much the latter wanted to […]
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Sunday Night Fever
Sunday is the existential night of the television week. The rueful end to the traditional day of rest and the last gasp of free time before the long, hard slog of school or job ahead, it’s one time when many people don’t have to tape or TiVo; they’re home, decompressing from the weekend or taking […]
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The Terrorist Channel
The writer-director David Cronenberg is often decades ahead of his peers in dramatizing the psychic perils of contemporary life, and never more so than in Videodrome, his wicked 1983 satire of McLuhanesque techno-bliss. The plot concerns a sleazy cable-television executive named Max Renn (played all too convincingly by James Woods), who is constantly in search […]
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Hauteur Theory
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had not yet visited the United States when they completed Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). Luckily, they didn’t let this deter them from pretending they had. Brecht’s libretto, one of the most wild-eyed and unflattering portraits of this country ever put […]
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Picture This
The news reports from Iraq in the last few weeks have proven once again that, when it comes to weapons of war, nothing packs as much firepower as a camera. The shock and awe of some crude snapshots taken by amateurs may well be more devastating than all the cruise missiles in the U.S. arsenal. […]