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The Year in CultureStanley Crouch, Azar Nafisi, Michael Pollan, and others on the most amazing—and disappointing—events of 2006.


Updated Saturday, Dec. 30, 2006, at 6:04 PM ET

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Sid Jacobson, co-author, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation
Finding that by far the best film of this year was a Spanish one. This with all the American ones we were asked to watch. Of course, I mean Volver, which in so many ways is a masterpiece with so many masterful performances.

Ben Karlin, co-creator, The Colbert Report
The Russian government is poisoning enemies of the state again. Awesome, just awesome. And why is it cultural? Generations of people grew up fearing the U.S.S.R. They found great comfort in a monolithic enemy. It made a neat dichotomy and Red Dawn. Russia may not be back, but that warm feeling of nostalgia and mutually assured nuclear destruction sure is nice.

Laura Kipnis, author, The Female Thing
I was gripped by the minor scandal involving hard-punching literary critic Lee Siegel, who was suspended from the New Republic after it turned out he'd been anonymously writing glowing tributes to himself on the magazine's Web site. Before being exposed, he'd celebrated himself as brave, brilliant, and witty—all this under the alias "sprezzatura," which is Italian for "studied carelessness." In the New York Times Magazine, Siegel defended himself by declaring that he is constitutionally childlike. What's so interesting about the genre of the minor scandal is that new rules for proper social behavior get invented in the very act of someone's transgressing them: Thanks to Siegel, we all now know not to blog flattering things about ourselves under a pseudonym while in someone else's employ. In case there was any doubt.

Jim Lewis, author, The King Is Dead
The most extraordinary artifact I encountered this year was J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (which was published in 2003). It's one of the strangest books I've ever read, an object lesson in the possibility of impossible intentions: Every time I thought I'd figured out what Coetzee was up to, he made some move that I couldn't comprehend. As I was reading, I kept saying to myself, "He can't possibly mean to do this" (attack Paul West—of all people—while hiding behind a frail protagonist; purvey ludicrously ill-considered positions about animal rights; skip blithely and erratically from fiction to polemic to parable and back again), and yet apparently he did mean to do it. It's a vexing book, an irresponsible book, at times an appalling book. I read it with great pleasure and admire it enormously.

Michael Lewis, author, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game
I still find myself intrigued by the incredibly vanishing New Orleans. A major American city has been largely wiped off the map. Natural forces obviously played their role, but the tragedy was very much man-made. At its bottom was the negligence of the federal government in the construction of flood walls. Sixteen months later, there is little sign of human intervention in the destroyed areas of the city. Anderson Cooper has come and gone, along with most of the rest of the national media. The New York Times is the great exception, and even its efforts feel increasingly worthy and dutiful. I get the sense that most people would just like to move on. The destruction of a culture was interesting for about as long as it made for good television.

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Megan Marshall, author, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism
I was lucky to be present at Authors Ridge in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery last June for the reunion of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne—after a 142-year separation. The couple, whose happy marriage had been so powerful an example of romantic love that even marriage-skeptic Margaret Fuller envied the pair, had been buried with an ocean between them. Nathaniel died first in 1864 at age 59, borne to a grave just yards away from Henry Thoreau's by pallbearers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Franklin Pierce, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His grieving widow left transcendental Concord for Europe, dying in London seven years later, to be buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, where her defunct neighbors included Trollope and Thackeray. By the 21st century, that real estate was no longer good enough for her, or for the order of Dominican nuns founded by the Hawthornes' youngest daughter, Rose (now up for canonization for her good works), which had assumed responsibility for tending Sophia's grave. When an enormous hawthorn tree, planted at the time of Sophia's burial, withered in recent years, and then collapsed on the London gravesite, the Dominican sisters took it as a sign that it was time to bring Sophia home. Her entry on Kensal Green's registry of literary luminaries now reads: "Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (1809-1871) ... remains translated to Concord, Massachusetts, USA, 2006." And while we're on past lives—reading Robert Richardson's new biography William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism reminded me of everything I love about the genre. In his preface, Richardson writes that "biography begins in the mysteries of temperament, lives in narrative, but aims beyond it ... to resurrection." Sophia Hawthorne literally sprung from her grave, William James resurrected literarily—it was a good year!

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Photograph on Slate's home page of Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon courtesy of the National Archives/Getty Images. Photograph of Pluto by NASA/AFP Photo. Still of Kate Winslet in Little Children copyright New Line Productions. Photograph of Nathaniel Hawthorne courtesy Wikipedia. Photograph of America Ferrera in Ugly Betty copyright American Broadcasting Cos. Inc. All rights reserved.
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