Today in culture: Mitt Romney‘s foreign poise is discussed, and Alison Bechdel redesigns Highsmith, we prep for Antony Hegarty‘s Meltdown festival (by getting excited), and get deeper into Dickens.
-Finally, the New Yorker is stepping up its fiction section with new, refreshing work that harkens back to its glory days as a sophisticated weekly. This weeks contributor? F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Don’t ask.)
-An idiot abroad: Just how representative of strained foreign relations was Mitt Romney’s fabled London visit? Steve Coll finds out.
-Under the heading of things we didn’t really need but are grateful for anyway: a special edition re-issue of Claire Tomalin‘s exhaustive Charles Dickens biography. For an epic tale of abandonment, debtor’s prisons, and rat-infested lodgings, it’s almost better than the fiction it inspired.
-Antony Hegarty’s Meltdown festival starts Wednesday, with performances and appearances by Light Asylum, Planningtorock, Lou Reed, and Charles Atlas.
-”There is nothing in my life that is impacted by knowing Ricky Martin, for example, is gay.” Roxane Gay meditates on the trend of coming out by way of the media.
-Twitter in the 17th century? Aristocratic gentlemen John Aubrey and friends match spar off in an insult deathmatch.
-In one of the best literary convergences of all time, Alison Bechdel has designed a new cover for Patricia Highsmith’s second novel (written under a pseudonym) The Price of Salt. Let’s hope Penguin is taking notes.
-Robert Koehler makes the somewhat doomed case for L’Avventura, Antonioni’s incredibly boring 1960 alienation epic (not to be confused with his other, more famous one, Red Desert in 1964) that follows a missing girlfriend, her boyfriend, and her best friend across Sicily in what amounts to a 2-hour long Bulgari watch ad.
-For its annual film benefit, MoMa will the man least in need of praise: Quentin Tarantino.
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