Ian Penman

Aug 7, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Richard King |Ian Penman

Iwas​ still half asleep when I heard the story on an early morning TV show one day in April. It was so odd I wondered later if I had dreamed it. But it was true: government authorities in Chechnya had imposed a ban on any music deemed too fast or too slow to comply with the ‘Chechen mentality’. Taylor Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too slow. There would seem to be a political subtext here, along the lines of ‘One’s just as bad as the other,’ but let it pass.

Feb 2, 2024 | harpers.org | Ian Penman

Discussed in this essay:Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year, by Paul Alexander. Knopf. 368 pages. $32. Early on in Billie Holiday’s 1956 memoir Lady Sings the Blues, she recalls the picaresque world of New York nightlife in the Thirties:Prohibition was on its last legs then. And so were the blind pigs, the cribs and clubs and after-hours joints that Prohibition set up in business. Some people thought it would go on like that forever.

Feb 2, 2024 | harpers.org | Ian Penman

Discussed in this essay:Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year, by Paul Alexander. Knopf. 368 pages. $32. Early on in Billie Holiday’s 1956 memoir Lady Sings the Blues, she recalls the picaresque world of New York nightlife in the Thirties:Prohibition was on its last legs then. And so were the blind pigs, the cribs and clubs and after-hours joints that Prohibition set up in business. Some people thought it would go on like that forever.

Nov 25, 2023 | city-journal.org | Ian Penman

Ernst Jünger’s World War I narrative Storm of Steel was first published in 1920. Other titles appearing that year include Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love; T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was just around the corner. It was the high tide of modernism—a world in ruins, incubating strange new blooms. Storm of Steel belongs in the company of Eliot and Lawrence as a self-contained work of art.

Oct 16, 2023 | bfi.org.uk | Martyn Conterio |Sound archiveJukebox |Ian Penman

With The Exorcist back in cinemas for its 50th anniversary, we plot a beginner’s path through the shock and awe cinema of the late William Friedkin. 16 October 2023By Martyn ConterioWilliam Friedkin’s debut was Good Times (1967), the Sonny and Cher musical, but it tells us nothing about his talent or the direction of future travel.