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Salmagundi – Fall 2006

Number 152

Fall 2006

Quarterly

Anna Sidak

This non-fiction issue of Salmagundi includes, along with much else, Richard Howard’s response to disdain for works older than one’s self—”A Lecture on a Certain Mistrust of the Past among Young Writers”—and “The Women of Whitechapel: Two Poems” by Nancy Schoenberger, whose second victim, remarkably perceptive under the circumstances, comments: “[. . .] a gentleman’s a man where darkness lurks until it’s sprung by some medicinal.” Linda Simon’s curious title, “What Lies Beneath,” is a review of Virginia Blum’s Flesh Wounds, the search for redemption via cosmetic surgery. From David Bosworth’s “Auguries of Decadence – American Television in the Age of Empire”: “If the rude yoking of the picayune to the profound is a feature of the post modern [. . .],” his brilliant 50-page rumination on TV’s spectacles of pain and folly—weeping Kurdish women, Extreme Makeover‘s cosmetic-surgery desperadoes—is postmodern, indeed; and also a hard-hitting indictment of the Bush administration. “D. H. Lawrence, Comedian” by Jeffrey Meyers must concede the humor of Lawrence may be easily mistaken for misogyny, as in this example: “[. . .] I feel such a profound hatred of myself, of the human race, I almost know what it is to be a Jew.” Informative and entertaining as all this is, one expects no less from a journal claiming Russell Banks, Carolyn Forche, and Mario Vargas Llosa among its regular contributors.

This non-fiction issue of Salmagundi includes, along with much else, Richard Howard’s response to disdain for works older than one’s self—”A Lecture on a Certain Mistrust of the Past among Young Writers”—and “The Women of Whitechapel: Two Poems” by Nancy Schoenberger, whose second victim, remarkably perceptive under the circumstances, comments: “[. . .] a gentleman’s a man where darkness lurks until it’s sprung by some medicinal.” Linda Simon’s curious title, “What Lies Beneath,” is a review of Virginia Blum’s Flesh Wounds, the search for redemption via cosmetic surgery. From David Bosworth’s “Auguries of Decadence – American Television in the Age of Empire”: “If the rude yoking of the picayune to the profound is a feature of the post modern [. . .],” his brilliant 50-page rumination on TV’s spectacles of pain and folly—weeping Kurdish women, Extreme Makeover‘s cosmetic-surgery desperadoes—is postmodern, indeed; and also a hard-hitting indictment of the Bush administration. “D. H. Lawrence, Comedian” by Jeffrey Meyers must concede the humor of Lawrence may be easily mistaken for misogyny, as in this example: “[. . .] I feel such a profound hatred of myself, of the human race, I almost know what it is to be a Jew.” Informative and entertaining as all this is, one expects no less from a journal claiming Russell Banks, Carolyn Forche, and Mario Vargas Llosa among its regular contributors.

[www.skidmore.edu/salmagundi/]

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