Stephen Akey | The Smart Set

Randy Newman’s Land of Dreams

Stephen Akey — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:30:43 +0000

In “I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It),” Randy Newman takes some potshots at rock stars continuing to grind it out long past their prime. The joke, of course, is that the chief target of the satire is he himself. Although the cleverness and self-awareness of the song belie the indictment, “I’m Dead” invites the […]

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Singin’ in the Rain for the 68th Time

Stephen Akey — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 13:57:13 +0000

It’s a bit specialized, admittedly. Nonetheless, Ben Davis’s Repertory Movie Theaters of New York City: Havens for Revivals, Indies and the Avant-Garde, 1960-1994 delivers exactly what the title promises. If you were ever dying to know what sort of programming choices distinguished the Carnegie Hall Cinema from the Bleecker Street Cinema in the 1970s, this […]

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Mother/Painter

Stephen Akey — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 12:24:26 +0000

No one would dream of painting such a picture now. A pubescent girl, half-draped in a Greek tunic and preparing for a bath in a reedy pool, covers her breast and turns her head as if surprised by an intruder. And though the pose may be based on classical precedents of “Susanna and the Elders,” […]

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Let Me Ruin This for You

Stephen Akey — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 12:30:03 +0000

About halfway through his essay “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool,” George Orwell offers a startling explanation for Leo Tolstoy’s notorious antipathy towards Shakespeare: Tolstoy is “trying to rob others of a pleasure he does not share.” Further, “Tolstoy does not know, perhaps, just what he misses in Shakespeare, but he is aware that he misses […]

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I, Cecil Vyse

Stephen Akey — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 11:22:43 +0000

We all have fears, dark premonitions about the future, troubling recollections of the past, anxieties about the present that weigh on our minds and ruffle our sleep. Have I been a loving parent? Was I to blame for my divorce? What possessed me to vote for a Republican? Is she faking her orgasms? It may […]

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He’s Got the Fever

Stephen Akey — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 11:30:22 +0000

Towards the end of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a newly graduated magistrate is sent to a small Colombian town to investigate the circumstances surrounding the murder of the novel’s ill-fated protagonist, Santiago Nasar. 25 years after the murder, the narrator, conducting his own investigation, travels to the Palace of Justice in […]

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Reading Emily Dickinson

Stephen Akey — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 16:34:08 +0000

Scholars have been laboring for more than a century to transform Emily Dickinson’s faint pencil jottings on envelopes, letters, and sewn sheets into accurate and readable editions of some or all of her 1,800 poems. Recently, there has been a counter movement to return Dickinson’s verse to something like the textual fluidity of its original […]

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How To Laugh At God

Stephen Akey — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 13:00:16 +0000

It’s hard to know exactly what moment we occupy in regard to the New Atheism and its concomitant backlash. Are we in the backlash of the backlash? Or the backlash of the backlash of the backlash? As Tim Whitmarsh shows in his recent Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, this debate is about […]

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It’s the Drummer That Matters

Stephen Akey — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 14:15:46 +0000

My first idea was to compile a brief and brisk user’s guide to recent rock memoirs, a sort of Consumer Reports of the best and the worst, perhaps grading them with an A minus or a C plus, the way Robert Christgau used to do with his surveys of pop records in the once-influential Village […]

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English Majors’ Twilight

Stephen Akey — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 14:00:42 +0000

Once we were mighty. Once we were legion. Once we reigned over colleges and universities like demigods. Well, OK, we English majors were never that important, except maybe in our own eyes. According to a report in the New York Times, degrees awarded in English at American universities fell from seven point six percent of […]

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