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Boston Globe
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Vicki Goldberg dies at 88; saw photography through a literary lens
'Goldberg,' she added, 'brought a broad education, insatiable curiosity, and relentless ambition to her work. She showed us that photography was part of our social and cultural landscape.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Ms. Goldberg had a windfall in the case of Bourke-White. In 1973, two years after the photojournalist's death, 8,000 of her photographs and other artifacts were discovered under a stairway in her house in Darien, Conn. Bourke-White had burned most of her diaries, Ms. Goldberg told The New York Times in 1986, but had 'saved everything but the Kleenex,' including menus, receipts, and Time Inc. memo pads. On one pad she'd written, 'Should I marry Erskine Caldwell?' (She and the novelist had a brief and stormy marriage.) Advertisement Ms. Goldberg pored over the trove for an article in New York Magazine and soon embarked on her Bourke-White biography. Advertisement Bourke-White was America's first female photographer to be accredited to cover World War II, a swashbuckling personage who worked for Fortune and then Life magazines. She shot Nazi rallies, and, in agonizing images, the liberation of Buchenwald in Germany. She flew in a Flying Fortress bomber to get shots of a raid on Tunis, Tunisia. She photographed a smug-looking Josef Stalin. Away from the war, she perched on a gargoyle atop the Chrysler Building in Manhattan to photograph its twin and made perhaps what is the most famous portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, sitting cross-legged with his spinning wheel. Ms. Goldberg captured her contradictions. As an ambitious photojournalist, Bourke-White was wily, opportunistic, and courageous, but she was also manipulative, doing whatever it took to get her shot, including crying on cue. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Timothy Foote, a former foreign correspondent for Life magazine, called Ms. Goldberg's biography 'an intricate and provocative portrait, as revealing as fiction, part 'Great Gatsby,' say, part 'I'll Take Manhattan.'' Ms. Goldberg's scholarship was rigorous and her knowledge expansive. Yet as a critic for the Times, where she was a regular contributor during the 1990s, her tone was light and often slightly bemused. When Madonna's much-ballyhooed 'Sex' book appeared in 1992, wrapped in Mylar, like a condom, Ms. Goldberg had this to say: 'This must be the most gorgeously, even lavishly, produced piece of junk food since Midas tried to sneak a potato chip and found his touch had turned it to gold.' In 1997, she wrote about Irving Penn, the celebrated Vogue photographer. 'Penn has spent over half a century wielding a camera against the most implacable enemies: disorder, imperfection, the distracting natural world, mortality. He has not exactly come to terms with any of these but erected what barriers he could -- a stringent sense of order to fend off chaos, a fierce devotion to a kind of photographic purity, a stripped-down sense of isolation to counter the world's insistent clutter.' Advertisement Victoria Hesse Liebson was born on July 24, 1936, in St. Louis to Alice (Schwarz) and Louis Liebson, a shoe company executive. She earned a bachelor of arts at Wellesley College in 1958. A year earlier, she had married David Goldberg, a banker. After the couple moved to New York City, Ms. Goldberg worked as a publishing assistant at Simon & Schuster and began pursuing a doctorate in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She didn't get around to defending her thesis, however; instead, she went to work as an editor for American Photographer magazine when it was launched in 1978. In addition to her son Eric, she leaves another son, Jeremy, and six grandchildren. She and David Goldberg divorced in 1973. Another marriage, to Loring Eutemey, a graphic designer and illustrator, also ended in divorce. Her third husband, Laurence Young, a professor emeritus of astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died in 2021. She lived in Waterville Valley, N.H., before moving to the Manhattan assisted living facility. Ms. Goldberg was a frequent lecturer on photography and the author or editor of a number of books, including 'Photography in Print: Writing From 1816 to the Present' (1981), a collection of essays by photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and critics Charles Baudelaire and Susan Sontag. Advertisement Another book by Ms. Goldberg, 'The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives' (1991), is a lively history of the medium and its cultural impact, from daguerreotype to X-rays, moon shots, and Photoshop. Even back in 1991, Ms. Goldberg cautioned readers about the tricky nature of photography, writing, 'We could end up being more copiously supplied with news and less concerned, as well as less willing to believe the reports, than any society in history.' She added, 'These photographs walked into our lives and in some way managed to change them. So it seems appropriate to ask the questions one would ask any intruder: How did you get in? And what are you doing here anyway?' This article originally appeared in
New York Times
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
50 Years After ‘Jaws' Terrified Filmgoers, a Reporter Looks Back
Steven Spielberg's movie 'Jaws' hit theaters 50 years ago this month, in June 1975, and became a phenomenon almost instantly. In some ways that was no surprise: The Peter Benchley novel it was based on, also called 'Jaws,' had been a huge best seller the year before, and the public was primed for a fun summer scare. Brian Raftery — the author of 'Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen' — wrote about 'Jaws' for the Book Review last year in honor of the novel's 50th anniversary, and this week he visits the podcast to talk about the book, the movie adaptation and the era of blockbuster thrillers. 'If you've seen 'Jaws,' you could probably guess what the opening chapter of the book is,' he tells Gilbert Cruz (who has indeed seen 'Jaws,' dozens of times). 'It's this shark attack, where this shark at night just devours this young female swimmer. The writing is really fun. It's really gnarly, and it's one of those amazing opening chapters where the book is moving as fast as the shark. After you read that first chapter, you are just completely pulled in.' We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
Washington Post
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A troubling chapter in William F. Buckley's life
CAMDEN, S.C. — In breaking news this week, former New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus finally finished his authorized biography of William F. Buckley Jr. It took him only about 25 years to complete the 1,000-page tome — 'Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America' — which is approximately how long it likely will take me to read it. Given actuarial projections on aging, I'd better get cracking.
Boston Globe
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Alice Notley, poet celebrated for ‘restless reinvention,' dies at 79
Ms. Notley took traditional forms of poetry such as villanelles and sonnets and laced them with experimental language that fluctuated between vernacular speech and dense lyricism. She also created pictorial poetry, or calligrams, in which she contorted words into fantastical shapes. In her 2020 collection, 'For the Ride,' one calligram took the form of a winged coyote. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'The signature of her work is a restless reinvention and a distrust of groupthink that remains true to her forebear's directive: to not give a damn,' David S. Wallace wrote in The New Yorker in 2020. Advertisement As Ms. Notley herself said in a 2010 essay, 'It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against ... everything.' She wrote without restraint, saying that she never edited or revised her work. And she largely shunned academia; poetry, she said in a 2009 interview with The Kenyon Review, 'should feel hugely uncomfortable in the academy.' Advertisement Though often identified as a key figure in the second generation of the New York School of poets -- alongside Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Ted Berrigan, who became her first husband -- Ms. Notley shirked the labels critics gave her: feminist, expatriate, avant-garde provocateur. 'Each of these labels sheds a little light on Notley's work, but it's the fact of their sheer number that's most illuminating,' the poet Joel Brouwer wrote of her 2007 collection, 'In the Pines,' in The New York Times Book Review. 'This is a poet who persistently exceeds, or eludes, the sum of her associations.' Padgett praised Ms. Notley for her 'vastness of mind.' 'Alice's main influence was herself and her interior life,' he said in an interview, 'and by interior life, I mean both her conscious waking thinking and her dream life, especially.' Ms. Notley realized early in her career that, as she wrote in a 2022 essay for the website Literary Hub, her 'dreaming self was better at some aspects of poetry writing than I, awake, was.' Her dreamlike style lent a 'sort of seer quality' to her poems, Waldman said in an interview. 'There's this traveling through realms,' she added. 'There's a great fluidity in her poetry, a lyric quality -- these different voices and modes -- and then there's magic: dreamlike connections where it shifts and suddenly you're somewhere else.' In the 1980s, several of Ms. Notley's loved ones died: her husband, Berrigan, in 1983 from complications of hepatitis; her stepdaughter, Kate Berrigan, in 1987 after she was struck by a motorcycle; and her brother Albert Notley, a Vietnam War veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, in 1988. Advertisement Ms. Notley said their voices had continued to speak to her, so she translated them into poetry. 'At Night the States,' written two years after Berrigan's death, reflects on the absence of a person: At night the states I forget them or I wish I was there in that one under the Stars. It smells like June in this night so sweet like air. I may have decided that the States are not that tired Or I have thought so. I have thought that. The poem 'Beginning With a Stain' is an elegy for her stepdaughter. And 'White Phosphorus,' one of her most acclaimed poems, was written for her brother: 'He said, 'I've come home; I've finally come home' then he died' 'flowers' 'Magnolias & lilies' 'innocent now' 'I've come home. Who's there? at home? all the dead?" 'To come home from the war' 'years after' 'To die' Albert Notley's death also influenced Alice Notley's best-known work, 'The Descent of Alette' (1992). Mired in grief, she began riding the subway in New York City. 'I would go from car to car and imagine these fantastic scenes,' she said last year in an interview with The Paris Review. 'I conceived of the subway as being this place that no one could leave.' In 'Alette,' a story evoking the descents into the underworld in Greek mythology, a female narrator, banished to the depths of the subway, must kill an all-powerful tyrant. She imagined 'Alette' as a feminine epic that sought to reclaim the form from men; in 2010 she called it 'an immense act of rebellion against dominant social forces.' Painter Rudy Burckhardt, a friend, called Ms. Notley 'our present-day Homer.' Advertisement Alice Elizabeth Notley was born Nov. 8, 1945, in Bisbee, Ariz., and spent most of her childhood in Needles, Calif., on the edge of the Mojave Desert, where her parents, Beulah (Oliver) and Albert Notley, ran an auto supply store. The Latin lessons she took in high school would later inform the prosody of her poems, as did folk and country songs. Her childhood was happy, 'but I was very impatient to grow up, and I wanted to leave Needles,' she told The Paris Review. 'I knew I had to, because I was going to become a weirdo.' She moved to New York to attend Barnard College in 1963. After graduating, she pursued a master's degree in fiction and poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she forged a close relationship with poet Anselm Hollo, who taught there, and met Berrigan. They married in 1972 and lived nomadically, keeping afloat through Berrigan's teaching jobs. They briefly stayed with painter Larry Rivers in the garage of his home in Southampton, N.Y. In Bolinas, Calif., in Marin County, they resided in what she called a 'chicken house' that belonged to writers Lewis and Phoebe MacAdams. Ms. Notley's early work, in the 1970s and '80s, centered on new motherhood -- her sons, Anselm and Edmund, were born in 1972 and 1974 -- and her writing was colored by the intermingling voices of her and her sons. 'Mommy what's this fork doing?/What?/It's being Donald Duck,' she wrote in her 1981 poem 'January.' 'Notley wrote extensively about pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing at a time when the poetry world was often inhospitable to women,' Wallace wrote in The New Yorker, adding that 'her influence for a later generation of poets exploring these same subjects is hard to overstate.' Advertisement In early-1970s Chicago, she edited Chicago, an important mimeographed magazine, and helped build the avant-garde scene there. In New York, she taught workshops to a generation of influential poets, including Eileen Myles, Bob Holman, and Patricia Spears Jones. Despite their prominence in the community, she and her husband struggled financially and lacked medical care; Berrigan's hepatitis went untreated. 'We had 20 dollars on the day Ted died,' Ms. Notley said. Throughout the 1980s, her poems grew longer and acquired more mythical tones. That trend continued in the 1990s, when she moved to Paris with poet Douglas Oliver, whom she married in 1988. They founded two literary magazines there, Gare du Nord and Scarlet. Oliver died in 2000. In addition to her sons, Ms. Notley leaves two sisters, Rebecca White and Margaret Notley, and two granddaughters. This article originally appeared in
Geek Girl Authority
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Girl Authority
Just Emilia Archives
Categories Select Category Games GGA Columns Movies Stuff We Like The Daily Bugle TV & Streaming Geek Girl Authority reviews Jennifer Oko's third novel, Just Emilia, a speculative novel about a woman facing her past and future.
