Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This issue sponsored by The Hedgehog Review

This week on nybooks.com: The French president’s historic speech on the Holocaust, 300,000 books for sale in Texas, the dangers of Paul Ryan, a cultural guidebook for soldiers headed to the Vietnam War, novels and copyright, poets and money, and the costs of Olympic gold. Plus the treasures of Edward Gorey, watery movies, the singular sound of saxophonist Sonny Rollins, the Bo Xilai scandal, acting and posing on the campaign trail, and two responses to the Aurora shootings.
History ‘This Crime Was Committed in France, by France’ François Hollande This speech was given by President Hollande to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup in 1942, when the French police arrested 13,152 Jewish men, women and children from Paris and its suburbs. They were later deported to German concentration camps. Eight hundred and eleven survived the war.
Literary Marketplace The Last Book Sale Larry McMurtry In a summer when the shoreline temperature in the Little Arkansas River reached 98 degrees—bad news for catfish—should I really have attempted to bring a bunch of citified northerners into the heart of the heat, which peaked locally at 116? Well, yes. It’s just weather, as my popular hero Captain Woodrow Call often said if he heard a complaint. So I threw a book sale.
2012 Campaign Romney’s Choice Elizabeth Drew Paul Ryan is the charming ideologue driven by an ambition robust even by Washington standards. He has been the young man in a hurry, with dead aim; the indefatigable persuader; the self-created “man of ideas,” articulate and conspicuous.
Propaganda Advice for Soldiers in Vietnam: ‘The Fish is Good’ Jonathan Mirsky Most American soldiers landing in Vietnam in the 1960s were handed a ninety-three-page booklet called A Pocket Guide to Vietnam, produced by the Department of Defense. We are “special guests here,” the guide says, and should be courteous at all times, treat women politely, and make friends.
The Novel Does Copyright Matter? Tim Parks Officially the idea is that the writer, artist, or musician should be allowed to reap the just rewards for his effort. This is quaint. There is very little justice in the returns artists receive. Works of equal value and quality produce quite different incomes or no income at all. Somebody becomes a millionaire overnight and someone else cannot even publish.				Poetry Poets and Money Charles Simic Poets work for nothing, Tim Parks says. In other words, they turn poems out the way a sweatshop in a third-world country turns out cheap toys. Wonderful! I said to myself after I read this. The world is going to hell, but we poets have something to look forward to. We never got rich in the past and won’t see a dime in the future.
					Sports The New Olympic Arms Race Ian Johnson Seventy-seven of the world’s countries or territories have never won a single Olympic medal. If they weren’t for the most part poor, one might consider them the lucky ones—free from the arms race that has consumed the would-be champions.
Art A Treasure Trove of Edward Gorey Eve Bowen Gorey’s work tends to combine whimsically grim storylines with dour yet dancerly protagonists. Whether they are Edwardian ladies, fur-coated gentlemen, ill-fated children, or unusual animals, his characters are almost always on some kind of journey. His stories often unfold in wallpapered rooms, on barren estates, or among statues, beast-shaped topiaries, and urns. “Few seem to return from the borders to which I’ve sent them,” he wrote.
Film Floodplain Fantasy Geoffrey O’Brien To say that Beasts of the Southern Wild was filmed in southern Louisiana understates the case—it seems like an enormous construction made from pieces of southern Louisiana, and inhabited by the people that the film’s young director found there. Yet this is no documentary but a work of purest fantasy, set in a world just adjacent to the real and operating with all the liberties of folklore.				Music The Singular Sound of Sonny Rollins Christopher Carroll At age 81, Sonny Rollins remains one of jazz’s most talented improvisers. He has almost inexhaustible stamina, complete control of his instrument, and a seemingly bottomless reservoir of musical knowledge (ranging from jazz standards and pop, to folk songs and classical music), to say nothing of his decades of experience playing with almost every major figure in jazz. More important still, he has an impish sense of humor.
China Bo Xilai: The Unanswered Questions Perry Link Bogu Kailai is a scapegoat—not for her husband but for the whole Communist Party. By focusing all the blame on her, and “bringing her to justice,” the Party, in its tradition of maintaining decorous exteriors, can extend the fiction that everything is basically fine.					2012 Campaign Posing for the Senate Christopher Benfey It is hard to watch the verbal sparring between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown, the candidates in this fall’s closely watched Massachusetts Senate race for the “Kennedy seat,” without recalling the classic 1949 Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn comedy Adam’s Rib.
After Aurora No End to Grief Charles Simic One of the blessings of rural life is that newspapers are not readily available and cell phones often don’t work outside larger towns, so the news of the world reaches us late, unless one has the TV or the computer turned on at home. I didn’t hear about the shooting in Colorado till late the next day on my car radio, while driving to the town dump. The Devil We Don’t Know Francine Prose Perhaps we no longer need a mythical being with horns and a tail now that the media is so eager to offer us the latest example of malignance made flesh. Mass killers become celebrities of evil, and like any media stars, lose some of their luster once someone more violent and photogenically mad comes along.