Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: Rumsfeld’s war, sea monsters, sex scenes, Mike Tyson, Leonard Bernstein! Also: Hamid Karzai’s high-stakes game, literature and bureaucracy, and the City Opera’s swan song.
Here Be Monsters Marina Warner Monsters still fascinate precisely because they express what might lie beyond the light of common day.
Gazing at Love Lorrie Moore The overdirected ecstatic scenes in Blue Is the Warmest Color go on too long and are emotionally uninformative, almost comedically ungainly and dull to watch, as most long sex scenes are. (Did we learn nothing from Vivien Leigh’s little morning-after smile in Gone With the Wind? There are more elegant and succinct ways of communicating coital satiety than perspiring and exhausted flesh.)
Lenny! Robert Gottlieb All conductors have highly personal characteristics, but has there ever been one as theatrical, as showy, as hammy as Leonard Bernstein was? Or as exciting, as persuasive, as dedicated?
Rumsfeld’s War and Its Consequences Now Mark Danner In Iraq, the sectarian guerrilla war set off by the US invasion goes on, the suicide bombers continue their work, hundreds of Iraqis die in horrific violence every month. That most Americans would prefer to ignore this does not alter the reality that we live in a world the Iraq war has made.				Mike Joyce Carol Oates To see Mike Tyson’s fights in quick succession, the shared incredulity of the boxers who have found themselves in the ring with him, their disbelief and astonishment at the sheer force of their opponent as he swarms upon them, is to witness a kind of Theater of the Absurd, which is perhaps the most helpful way to understand boxing.
					ALSO IN THE DECEMBER 19 ISSUE Christopher de Bellaigue on Turkey Cathleen Schine on Julian Barnes John Banville on Isaiah Berlin Fintan O’Toole on Jonathan Swift Michael Wood on Orson Welles Julian Bell on Félix Vallotton Colin Thubron on Cees Nooteboom Geoffrey O’Brien on Nebraska Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Philip Roth Nicholas Kenyon on William Byrd Sue Halpern on HealthCare.gov
December events: Edgar Allan Poe’s manuscripts and first editions, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, andmore.
Afghanistan: Risking a Collapse Anatol Lieven What on earth is Hamid Karzai up to? When I visited Afghanistan in October, most people with whom I spoke assumed that he would resist signing a long-term military basing agreement with the United States until the Loya Jirga (grand national assembly) had approved it. But now Karzai is putting at risk the willingness of the US and the West to remain engaged in Afghanistan at all.
Literature and Bureaucracy Tim Parks If I were asked what was the greatest problem in the university I work in today, I would definitely say bureaucracy: in particular, the obsession with codifying, regulating, recording, reviewing, verifying, vetting, and chronicling, with assessing achievement, forecasting achievement, identifying weak points, then establishing commissions for planning strategies…
High Culture Laid Low: A New York Requiem Martin Filler As the winter season of New York high culture kicks into full swing, one thing seems quite apparent: there is little appetite for the new in the performing arts here, because innovation carries so much financial risk. The demise earlier this fall of the adventurous but profligate New York City Opera provides a kind of case study in the predicament of major cultural institutions today.