In 1926, Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about an innocent young art form: the silent cinema. Woolf argued that the movies were too literary. They would have to find their own artistic language, since they were currently imprisoned in a system of dead convention and mechanical semaphore: “A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse.” Once in a while, she had found herself in a darkened cinema with an apprehension of what film might achieve. “Through the thick counterpane of immense dexterity and enormous efficiency one has glimpses of something vital within,” she wrote. “But the kick of life is instantly concealed by more dexterity, further efficiency.”
In the same year, the English writer W. Somerset Maugham published “The Casuarina Tree,” a book of six short stories. Maugham was at the height of his success, as a great, and greatly rewarded, writer of immense dexterity and enormous efficiency. As his biographer Selina Hastings writes, “For much of his long life”—he died in 1965, at ninety-one—Maugham was “the most famous writer in the world.” He had the kind of celebrity that now attends actors, musicians, and criminal politicians. Wherever he went, his spoor was tracked by readers and journalists.
Esta historia es de la edición November 13, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición November 13, 2023 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.