Plus: Peter Hujar; Giorgio Agamben; Vigdis Hjorth; Toscanini
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Zephyr Teachout investigates America’s scam economy; Andrew Durbin reviews Peter Hujar’s Day; Adam Kirsch makes sense of Giorgio Agamben; Ursula Lindsey reads Vigdis Hjorth; a poem by Karl Kirchwey; and, from the archives, Michael Kimmelman on Arturo Toscanini. How did multilevel marketing schemes come to be legal, let alone so widespread? The answer has to do with how we think of workers and how we think of consumers. Ira Sachs’s adaptation of Peter Hujar’s Day quietly captures the careful attention its subject brought to his intimate, delicate photographs. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben exalts an ideal of what he calls “inoperativity”—a kind of passivity as an antidote to the West’s politics of power and domination. The Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth has a gift for depicting painful, confusing, and mortifying relationships. Free from the ArchivesOn opening night for the Metropolitan Opera’s 1908–1909 season, 117 years ago today, Arturo Toscanini made his American debut conducting Aida. He had by that time made his name as the principal conductor at La Scala, and for the next seven years he led the Met, then went on to be the music director of the New York Philharmonic and the conductor of the NBC Symphony. Achieving international fame through concerts broadcast on radio and television, he thrice appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Such fame, wrote Michael Kimmelman in the Review’s November 7, 2002, issue, is “inconceivable for an orchestra conductor today—Toscanini inspired a veneration in the press that mass-market magazines now lavish only on television or movie stars and pop musicians.” “Life seems to have been a Puccini opera for Toscanini, in which he absorbed something of Cavaradossi, something of Mimì: he saw himself as a hot-tempered lover, the last good man, a martyr—long-suffering, uncompromising.” “The amplitude, the riot and hoot…of One Battle After Another make for cineplex joy. It is only once out of the theater that we may sense that this frantic diversion has left its central material essentially unconfronted.” “Beckett pared language down and reconfigured it into a strange new register to produce effects of absurdity and alienation: too intensely sincere to be ironic or parodic, but too bizarre and blasé to be tragic.” A New York Review Online Event The State of the Left
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