Jess Martinaitis

“When I started out, they didn’t know what to do with me in the US,” he admits. “My music was rooted in rock’n’roll and that wasn’t what was happening with black artists at that time. Everyone was into categories and putting people in boxes. I looked how I looked and I dressed the way I dressed and so they sent me to Europe – the Europeans will dea... See more

But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, pe... See more

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

Paul Verhoeven, the director of “Basic Instinct,” has a new skeptical-scholar’s book, “Jesus of Nazareth” (Seven Stories; $23.95). Verhoeven turns out to be a member of the Jesus Seminar, a collection mostly of scholars devoted to reconstructing the historical Jesus, and much of what he has to say is shrewd and learned.

As its title suggests, Unnamed Figures not only illuminates Black appearances in the visual culture of this period but also asks how our encounters with them are shaped by the erasure of Blackness from art and archives.