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LITERARY EDITOR
Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltier has been the literary editor of The New Republic since 1983.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1952. After three years as a graduate student in Jewish history at Harvard University, he was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard from 1979 to 1982. He also attended Columbia University and Oxford University.
He is the author of Nuclear War Nuclear Peace, Against Identity, and
Kaddish.
Post date 06 18, 07
Really, the most that can be said of a great film is not that it islike a great book. Film is its own literature; and whereas Iunderstand the comparisons of The Sopranos to the masterpieces ofthe realist novel, and I myself have not been immune to thehyperbolic impulse in praising this magnificent enterprise, itstrikes me that the achievement of The Sopranos is not so much thatit puts you in mind of Balzac or Dickens, but that here ontelevision, for most of a decade, were tales that could stand in thecompany of Fassbinder, and Kieslowski, and Mike Leigh, and Chabrol.The subtle ramifications of plot and character; the absence ofvulgarity (I mean vulgarity in the bad sense) from this painstakinginvestigation of the most vulgar people on earth; the closebraiding of comedy and tragedy, so that neither optimism norpessimism is ever the last word; the unrelenting maturity ofattention that it demands of its viewers: the thing is so good itis almost not American. The Sopranos stands as a lastingchastisement of its medium, in that it accomplishes what Americantelevision most abhors: an improvement, by means of art, of theAmerican sense of reality. In America, there is no higher service. |
Post date 03 19, 07
What I want to share with the group this morning is that I am in thefourth or fifth stage of working through my feelings about BarackObama. In the beginning, I was exhilarated by the appearance ofsomebody to challenge, and torment, Her Royal Highness, whosedazzling intergalactic celebrity blinds many people to the factthat she may be the most plodding and expedient politician inAmerica. I was troubled by the extent of Obama's own reliance onthe machinery of celebrity, and wondered how it was that in his fewyears in the Senate he found time to write a big book but almost nolegislation. (The Hart building is not Yaddo.) But he was plainly aformidable individual, a living mind. And I confess that I plan tobe moved to tears on the day that I vote for a black man for thepresidency of this stained and stirring country. I was historicallytitillated even by his middle name, and resented the mildly uglywhispers of Clinton's supporters that a man called Hussein cannotget elected. Where is their faith in America? Anyway, Clinton isthe one who, in her long march through the institutions,market-tested every one of her own names. |
Post date 08 06, 07
Was I alone a few Sundays ago in thinking that the photograph of Sanford Weill on the front page of The New York Times was much too small? I mean, it took up only about a third of the page, though it was nicely centered, above and below the fold, so that the news of all the other kinds of people in the world that week, the worried and the hurting kinds, could revolve condignly around the image of the money man smiling in self-congratulation beneath the beatifying halo of the ceiling lights at Carnegie Hall. If ever there was an emblem of the Manhattan cosmology, this page was it. And there is more to come: The page announced that this glorification of the grotesquely rich was only the first installment in a series excitingly called "Age of Riches: The .01 Percent. " No doubt this latest bath of pluto-porn at the Times will be partly justified as an interest in the philanthropic consequences of the new fortunes; and while it is true that the generosity of some of the new rich is extraordinary, it is also true that charity is not economic justice. (It is the absence of economic justice that makes charity necessary.) I wonder how the largesse angle will handle the obscene Stephen Schwarzman, who is very bad for the Jews. |
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