Poetry After 9/11
By Emily Gordon
POETRY AFTER 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets. Edited by Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians. Melville House, 112 pp., $12.95.
110 STORIES: New York Writes After September 11. Edited by Ulrich Baer. New York University Press, 333 pp., $22.95.
POEMS OF NEW YORK. Selected and edited by Elizabeth Schmidt. Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets/Alfred A. Knopf, 256 pp., $12.50.
“It is difficult to get the news from poems,” William Carlos Williams wrote, “yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.” After the horror of Sept. 11, both professional writers and ordinary people rushed to fill that void–to tell, in effect, the news. As Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians write in the foreword to “Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets”–one of the many commemorative anthologies to come out this fall – “there were, in the immediate aftermath, poems everywhere. Walking around the city you would see them–stuck on light posts and phone stalls, plastered on the shelters at bus stops and the walls of subway stations.”
Seasoned poets, meanwhile, were struggling to break the muteness that kept threatening to take over in those frightening first days and weeks, and started producing their own responses to what was happening around them: grief, fear, guilt, dissent, war.
“Poetry After 9/11” and “110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11” are both specifically local; they collect poems (in the former) and a variety of writing forms (in the latter) to give readers a highly concentrated sampling of the reactions New York writers had to Sept. 11 both as New Yorkers and as writers. Johnson and Merians have assembled an impressive roster of poets for their anthology, including Jean Valentine, Stephen Dunn, David Trinidad, Molly Peacock and David Lehman. Lehman’s 1996 poem “The World Trade Center” serves as frontispiece for the book; it begins: “I never liked the World Trade Center./When it went up I talked it down.” And yet, he goes on, after that year’s bombing “my whole attitude … changed overnight.” The monoliths’ sudden vulnerability had made them precious. The other poets in the collection take the same attitude toward the relative peace New York enjoyed before last fall; they aim to capture the new insecurity even as they mourn the lives, and the world they occupied, that were lost.
They do this in an astonishing variety of ways. Several poems are recollections of the immediate experience; Eliot Katz’s “When the Skyline Crumbles,” for instance, is a week in the life of the aftermath. Stephen Dunn casts himself into the minds of the hijackers: “It just takes a little training, to blur/a motive, lie low while planning the terrible,/get good at acting one way, feeling another.” Miranda Beeson, writing about a wayward finch found after the towers’ collapse in her poem “Flight,” uncovers some beauty and a hint of continuing life in the bewilderment of the destruction.
Throughout “Poetry After 9/11,” poets find comfort in small moments, connections with the living or dead. Other poets are haunted by the idea of who died that day and who was spared, which inevitably brings up questions of divine absence or responsibility. In “Circling,” Shelley Stenhouse writes, “God is probably passed out somewhere warm and dark,/still sleeping off his whole world, seven day binge/and it’s just us, warring unhinged teenagers/trashing this big beautiful park.”
“110 Stories,” with an arresting cover image by Art Spiegelman, presents a more fractured view of last year’s events. Editor Ulrich Baer asked 110 writers–poets, fiction writers, dramatists, journalists and others–to fill about two pages each with writing they had produced since Sept. 11. There are plenty of famous names here, too (including figures as disparate as the avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman, academic Catharine R. Stimpson, novelists Jonathan Lethem and Edwidge Danticat and Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky) and an almost disorienting range of responses.
Writers are moved to remember other disasters and brutalities, both historical and personal: a Civil War battle, Guatemala, the deaths of parents or friends. Many of the pieces deal, directly or indirectly, with the glut of stimulus, information and memory the time provided (and continues to provide). Paul Auster recalls his friend Philippe Petit, the high-wire artist, walking between the towers in 1974–“a small man dancing on a wire more than a mile off the ground–an act of indelible beauty. Today, that same spot has been turned into a place of death.”
Other pieces bring back the shock and confusion of the days immediately following–Jessica Hagedorn documents the “hard, brilliant blue” of the sky–and the lives that both adults and children struggled to continue. Masood Farivar, an Afghan writer, writes about buying an American flag and being startled to see a man openly reading the Quran on the commuter train. Tony Hiss gives a brief but lyrical history of the towers and their place in New York’s imagination.
Not all the vignettes or narratives here are set in New York, or in the present. Some writers turn inward, to their origins and the past, others outward to politics and the world community. What we’re left with is the way the tragedy fits into individual lives, the impression it makes on impressionable, expressive people.
Amid all the remembrances, it’s well worth noting what drew those people to New York in the first place. A handsome edition in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, “Poems of New York” shows off the city through the voices of its great chroniclers–from Walt Whitman to Audre Lorde, Frank O’Hara to Galway Kinnell, Hart Crane to Li-Young Lee. As Crane writes in “The Tunnel,” “Someday by heart you’ll learn each famous sight.” These poets have done that, and more.
–Published in _Newsday_, September 8, 2002

CHARLES DICKENS, by Jane Smiley. Lipper/Viking, 212 pp., $19.95.
By Emily Gordon
A SHORT BIOGRAPHY of Dickens! It seems no less a task than wrestling an elephant into a thimble. Yet the Penguin Lives series has summoned such a biography to life, and chosen for the elephant-wrangling an accomplished and prolific novelist of our time, Jane Smiley. Smiley’s own books are Dickensian in scale and scope; novels such as “A Thousand Acres,” “Moo” and the recent “Horse Heaven” are epics of intertwining characters, grand themes, comedy and tragedy. Surely, she’s the ideal writer to capture Dickens’ multiple personas and quintessential modernity, as well as the grand scale of his personal and professional lives.
At first, however, it doesn’t feel that way. In her novels, Smiley has plenty of room to let her characters stretch and shift; here, she’s confined to a truncated style that takes some getting used to. Dickens wrote, as Smiley notes in her preface, “15 novels, 10 of which were 800 or more pages long … numerous stories, articles, travel pieces, essays, letters, editorial notes and plays.” He was also a newspaper editor, journalist, traveler, political reformer and actor, and fathered 10 children. How can an expansive novelist get this gargantuan figure into the slim Penguin Lives format? (The series, which assigns prominent writers to famous subjects, already has covered figures from Joan of Arc to Marcel Proust to Andy Warhol.) Smiley solves the problem by writing in an extremely compressed style whose density sometimes recalls, well, a Victorian novel.
But if “Charles Dickens” first seems to be a dark and narrow tunnel that one must crawl through on hands and knees, it opens up into a green meadow that readers will be glad to explore. As familiar personalities and recognizable patterns emerge from Dickens’ life, Smiley’s careful eye and intuitive brain weave them together. Smiley’s mind, like Dickens’, is a mighty compendium of facts and ideas, and it is her triumph that she is able to turn a life that was and is — as she observes — relentlessly documented into a kind of literary fireside chat, a dense and yet somehow personal conversation.
Her approach is not to write a conventional biography that starts with the novelist’s birth and ends at his death. Instead, as she explains, her intent is “to evoke Dickens as he might have seemed to his contemporary audience, to friends and relatives, to intimate acquaintances, to himself, filling in the background only as he became willing to address it in his work.” So we begin the book when Dickens is 21, the author of a sketch in a monthly magazine and high on his newest accomplishment. Smiley moves swiftly through his life from there on, chronicling each stage of his public career and inner life while rounding them out with anecdotes, parallel stories, supplementary texts and hindsight.
To this end, she leaves almost no subject untouched: Dickens’ work habits (and the effect on his fiction of writing in installments, some of which sold better than others), his marriage, his political views, his travels, his fantasy life, his finances and place in the class structure, his psychology, his spirituality, his friendships, his childhood and children, and the social and intellectual movements of his time (especially the upheavals in English literature that Dickens himself sparked in part). As each of Dickens’ novels is published, Smiley leaves her narrative to present the book to us. These critiques are telegraphically brief, which may be frustrating for those who haven’t read the books recently and would prefer fuller synopses, but Smiley makes it clear how each novel’s driving theme and circus of characters tie into Dickens’ life as a whole. Being a novelist herself, she has great feeling for what a writer is capable of at different stages of his or her career, and consistently puts Dickens’ novels in the context of what readers want and need in the 21st century, as well as what they demanded in his own time.
She’s also a sympathetic biographer, which is a good thing in this case. Dickens is easy to like most of the time, but he held a number of political views that will sit badly with many contemporary readers. He also had serious personal failings — most notably in his relationship with his wife, Catherine. Dickens had the gift of almost inexhaustible energy (Smiley also characterizes it as restlessness), which allowed him to, for instance, walk as many as 30 miles each day through the streets of London (which was for him an inspirational “magic lantern”); travel twice through the United States on reading tours; visit the kinds of places — orphanages, the poorest schools, prisons and factories – that he later wrote about in minute detail; edit newspapers; do physically draining performances of his work and act in amateur theatricals. He thrived on incessant activity, even when he felt unwell or simply had too much on his plate. Catherine, alas, did not share his zest and was indeed frequently depressed — perhaps, as Smiley notes, because of the 10 children she bore and the nine she raised (one, whom Dickens named after a character he would shortly kill off in “David Copperfield,” died in infancy).
The two eventually divorced, and Dickens was so unpleasant in the process that a number of his closest friends (including William Makepeace Thackeray) stopped seeing him, having sided with the long-suffering Catherine. To some extent, this ostracization worked to Dickens’ advantage, since he conducted a second, secret life after his divorce, in what was probably an affair with the actress Ellen Ternan. (The evidence is scant because the letters between them have been lost or destroyed, but Smiley is sufficiently convinced by the documentation of, among other biographers, Claire Tomalin.) This is not an altogether attractive side of the novelist, but Smiley deftly uses even the most disquieting facts to highlight how much Dickens’ experiences anticipated the modern divorce culture. Smiley uses this device often, making a natural segue from some aspect of Dickens’ life or work to the quandaries facing any novelist, past or present — or indeed, anyone trying to balance creative enterprise with private responsibilities.
Though Smiley is unembarrassed to acknowledge her own — and the reader’s — interest in Dickens’ romantic life, it is, of course, only a part of his remarkable story. As they piece together his life from Smiley’s thoughtful, conversational collage, readers will be struck by his triumph over nearly every obstacle, as well as his sheer stamina. Like many of his child-heroes, the young Dickens was a cog in the cruel machinery of adults’ money-driven world – at 12, he was forced to work in the front window of a shoe-blacking factory while the rest of his family was in debtor’s prison — but emerged capable of translating that experience into art that both transported readers and challenged their social and political views. By the end of “Charles Dickens,” having traveled through his life with him, we feel we know Dickens personally. Smiley’s biography will serve as the history of both a singular character and an entire era for those new to Dickens, and illuminate the author further for those already steeped in his work. A longer, more languorous study, such as Angus Wilson’s illustrated “The World of Charles Dickens” (out of print but available from used-book sellers), would make a perfect companion to this Penguin Life, but it stands on its own as an acrobatic — and also deeply satisfying — achievement.
First published in Newsday on April 28, 2002

MY TINY LIFE: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, by Julian Dibbell. Owl / Holt, 336 pp., $14.95 paper.
By Emily Gordon
THINGS ARE different online. E-mail, for instance, has notorious problems with tone. That stark, blocky text can be maddeningly hard to read into, and hard to write unambiguously within the conventions of brevity and a tossed-off veneer that are not really conventions at all. E-mail is still a new world of correspondence, as unwieldy in content as it is convenient in form. Yet it manages, hourly, to create and accelerate intimacies among all sorts of people — intimacies that have never been possible on so enormous a scale.
The Internet, of course, makes these oddly heady exchanges even easier, as groups of people interested in a given topic put themselves out on a multitude of limbs without ever speaking or seeing one another’s faces. Whatever the context, it’s clear that what Internet lurkers want most is to simply encounter other people and, just as important, to encounter them at arm’s length. The presumed (if deceptive) anonymity of online communication allows connections that — however impersonal-seeming the technology — involve a high degree of emotional risk. (That risk can blur into the real world, as in the recent case of a Barnard College student’s date with an e-mail correspondent that turned into a session of torture.)
Before the Web’s technicolor arrows and ads – and before goofy gloves-and-helmet getups for navigating in “virtual reality,” tackily rendered interior-decorating sites and whitewater rapids — there were MUDs and MOOs. These were (and continue to be) text-only forums — similar to real-time Internet chat rooms but intricately and gracefully programed so that once “there,” one may explore myriad landscapes and behold objects by typing a few simple commands. It’s something like simultaneously reading a novel and writing it; and the experience is shaped in large part by the other people — as many as several hundred — reading and writing that novel at the same time. Strange as that might sound, Julian Dibbell makes the garrulous terrain of one such online community admirably lucid in his new book, “My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World.”
The world Dibbell introduces us to, called LambdaMOO, was created in 1990 by a Xerox programer named Pavel Curtis and opened to the Internet-using public (at the time mostly composed of fellow programers and students) the following year. When Dibbell got there, LambdaMOO had passed through several cycles of its own history. By chance, he witnessed one of its signal events: “A Rape in Cyberspace,” as the 1993 Village Voice article Dibbell wrote about the incident was titled, and which was the seed of this book. His account of the rape — which involved, of course, only type on a screen — has provided Internet users and cyberlaw professors with fodder for countless debates about the power of words; and Dibbell presents the quandaries and characters involved humanely and with a journalist’s circumspection.
The rape furor ended up transforming LambdaMOO’s legal system from a Pavel Curtis-ocracy to a democracy, complete with referendums and policy arguments, and it’s a riveting topic. But Dibbell has undertaken a more comprehensive project in “My Tiny Life” — a necessarily patchy field report. He documents not just the electoral politics of LambdaMOO but its economics (disk space for building new things is a hot commodity, monitored by a tough Architecture Review Board); the effects of various outlaws and upstarts on the larger Lambda society; the tangles of identity made possible by MOO residents’ ability to change gender at will (an experiment Dibbell himself conducts, with charming results); the depth and suspension of disbelief inherent in MOO friendships (and relationships: ASCII love and desire flourish here), and the roots of MOOs themselves in maps, board games and — you guessed it — “Dungeons & Dragons.”
Cleverly, Dibbell tells his stories both in standard prose and in a mock-up of the script-like scrolls of LambdaMOO, using the latter to describe incidents in his real life: most compellingly, the tensions in his relationship with his live-in girlfriend caused by his increasing entanglement with the MOO. He also gets down the peculiar feeling time spent MOOing produces: “After a couple hours glued to monitor and keyboard trading words as fast as finger muscles will allow, he can sometimes start to feel a kind of meltdown going on inside him, as if the part of him that usually does the talking and the part of him that usually does the writing are getting all mixed up together.”
On the whole, Dibbell is entertaining and illuminating. His self-deprecating humor and skepticism offset the more theoretical passages of “My Tiny Life,” which (like the Internet itself) can be a headache-inducing stream of questions without answers. Dibbell is aware of the frustrations in trying to convey an essentially subjective and present-tense experience: It nearly always becomes less vital in the attempt. Some of his technical explanations, as a result, are overlong and didactic, and he gets goopy and meandering when elaborating on his own MOO programing masterpiece (a Garden of Forking Paths modeled on the principles of the “I Ching” — ’nuff said). The liveliest sections, and the ones readers are most likely to connect with, are those on human intimacies.
In the end, the main impression Dibbell leaves is that whatever their utopian limitations, MUDs and MOOs are playgrounds for lovers of language, and that nothing the singing, dancing Web offers up can replace moments such as a Lambda Fourth of July, at which someone has designed an O. J. Simpson firework (“A thousand tiny lawyers come sparkling out of the OJ Rocket, falling like pin-striped rain through the darkness”), or a political volley in which an exasperated participant, “proclaiming the discussion now `contentious nigh unto the point of incoherence’ [proposed], for the sake of entertainment if nothing else, that future contributions to the mailing list be made `in limerick form if you oppose the ballot, and in haiku if you support it.’ Almost all the leading participants in the debate took up the challenge.” Dibbell provides, throughout “My Tiny Life,” an eloquent answer to the obvious question: “Do these people have lives?” If any writer has a life, they do.
Published January 10, 1999

TALKING WITH EDWARD GOREY / The Doubtful Host
Nov 8, 1998
By Emily Gordon
E IS FOR Edward, who likes to pet cats. It doesn’t have quite the shadowy pall that most of Edward Gorey’s work does, but then, Gorey is far from a one-dimensional character. On an early fall day in his Cape Cod house, viney with a calamitous garden amid tidy New England clapboard and a proper village common, Gorey sits in his kitchen and holds forth in a deeply amused, somewhat theatrical drawl that, despite his trajectory from Chicago to Harvard to New York to here, is untraceably singular. You might not expect the author of — among many, many other odd, funny, vaguely terrifying illustrated books — “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” “The Unstrung Harp” and, out this month, “The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas” (Harcourt Brace, $15), to make exclamations like “Oh grand,” and “Anyhoo,” but Gorey’s surprises are as ceaseless as his conversation.
“Tea-Cosy,” which first appeared in The New York Times Magazine, is “A Christmas Carol” retold, sort of. “They sent me a copy of Dickens’ `Christmas Carol,’ and they said . . . would you like to do your version of it? . . . I wrote the text for that and sent it off to them, and they said, Whoopee! and I thought, you people really are crazy.” The tea-cosy, property of one Edmund Gravel — “known as the Recluse of Lower Spigot to everybody there and elsewhere,” as the book’s first page informs us — is haunted by a six-legged emcee for various “subfusc but transparent” ghosts, whose lessons, unlike those in Dickens, are dramatically inconsequential. Nevertheless, at the end of the book, Gravel is compelled not to buy turkeys for urchins but to celebrate with all Lower Spigot and a fruitcake. “I wouldn’t buy [the book] as a present, but then apparently they’re hoping for lots of people to,” its author says impishly.
Gorey has been coming to Cape Cod for more than 50 years and has lived in this house since 1985. He says of the explosion of plant life outside the window, “I just let this run totally crazy. I’m sure everybody could cheerfully kill me.” He talks about his garden in fatherly but laissez-faire tones — his philosophy of landscaping is “Let them all fight it out!” Dear as it remains, his retreat has changed considerably since he first moved here. “It’s much more suburban. . . . But on the other hand, I’ve been here forever. We all sit around crabbing about it all the time – there’s nothing to do here, so you might as well have something to crab about!”
Still, he’s no Recluse of Lower Spigot. He and his cousins prowl local yard sales, where “there’s one thing that they can always get me to buy: rusting iron. I have boxes filled with rusting iron objects.” He also receives visitors when in the right mood; he offhandedly mentions the regular pilgrimages of a pair of aspiring comic artists, whom he chats with despite his bafflement at their product. (“Comic books I feel have long since escaped me — I’m trapped back in Marvel comics.”) As for crazed fans, “I haven’t actually been attacked. Sometimes people come and knock at the door, or waylay me someplace or other.”
Gorey has five cats (the woman at the pet store “knew I was a sucker”). Why no cats in “Tea-Cosy,” or, for that matter, any other Gorey concoctions? “I think there are a number of rather depressed-looking dogs in there somewhere. Ordinarily I don’t have regular cats in my books. I wouldn’t presume on their . . . something or other.” Dignity? “Sure,” he says, addressing one. “Cats are seething with dignity, aren’t they, dearie, you great fat pig.”
Gorey traces his immediately recognizable style to 19th-century book illustration, “the kind of stuff that Max Ernst cut up for all the collages and whatnot. It’s always sort of fascinating, because to us it looks so sinister and lugubrious and everything, but it obviously can’t have looked that way to anyone in the 19th century — I mean, they would have all committed suicide back then!”
Though this is his first commercially published book in about a decade, Gorey draws many smaller books and has an infinite number of works in progress. “I’m so far behind on all my drawing I’m thinking of giving it up entirely,” he says with a comic grimace. He gets loads of requests to illustrate classics, but proceeds with caution: He refuses to do any Jane Austen, for instance, calling her — with awe — “totally unillustratable,” and says that people who redo the “Alice in Wonderland” illustrations “shouldn’t even be let near a drawing board.”
But Gorey is the first to admit his mind hasn’t been on his art much lately. He’s busy with theater: specifically, puppet plays, which he writes, directs, designs and stages all around the Cape. He just put on Hilaire Belloc’s “Cautionary Tales for Children” with puppets whose heads he describes as “little shapeless lumps,” and recently he did one of Seneca’s tragedies with puppets in eight minutes. Not to mention Shakespeare: “I just finished doing . . . the first quarto of `Hamlet,’ which is completely loopy, and I’ve made it even loopier by reducing it to 216 lines.”
Gorey procrastinates, like many of us, with television. In keeping with his eye for the otherworldly, ” `The X Files’ and `Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ are the things I live for,” but he doesn’t have much truck with any of the prime-time animated shows. “On the other hand, `Ned’s Newt’ I feel is the greatest . . . It’s about a little boy named Ned Flemkin, who has huge jug ears.” (It’s on Fox at 2:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays.)
And, of course, he reads. How about Dickens? “Well, I am a Dickens fan. Unfortunately, there was an anecdote I read about Dickens, and I haven’t read a word of Dickens since. I haven’t told anybody, I don’t wish to burden anybody with it. It haunts me.” Much like a certain presence his cats kept noting up in the rafters. “It was nothing you could see or anything. And then it disappeared a couple months ago,” Gorey says. “I have no theory at all.”

April 19, 1998
THE BAKER, by Paul Hond. Random House, 360 pp., $23.
By Emily Gordon
ONE OF THE most familiar oven-mitted characters in recent fiction is Raymond Carver’s sinister baker in the story “A Small, Good Thing,” who offers redemption in a batch of fresh rolls. Paul Hond’s first novel, “The Baker,” also tackles the themes bread and baking summon up: nourishment, creation, destruction and, bread being another name for money, that, too.
“The Baker” is the story of Mickey Lerner, onetime boxer, family man, inheritor of Lerner Bakery in Baltimore, who at nearly 60 finds himself wanting. His wife, internationally celebrated violinist Emilie (Emi) Lutter — whose improbable love is his “chief accomplishment in life” — travels constantly and is increasingly distant. Their 18-year-old son, Paul, seems to care only about video games, basketball and hanging out with Nelson, the bakery’s young black delivery man.
There seems to be little place for Mickey among the impersonal chain stores of this new city, where the great Jewish boxers no longer rule the rings, where next to Emi’s longtime pianist Mickey feels like an unsophisticated nothing. Mickey — whose business was burned in the rioting after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot — doesn’t even have the confidence for the kind of racism his friends use as a shield against the perceived threat of a changing Baltimore. He wonders what he has made of his life.
Naturally, something happens to shake him out of mid-life muddle — something so terrible everything in his world is overturned. For a time the book reads like a mystery. There are secrets to unearth, griefs to reconcile and, ultimately, a self and purpose to discover.
“The Baker” is a story of men in which the tensions between father and son resonate deeply. Bodies speak eloquently: Hond evokes all the power of the basketball court, the thrill of driving with a gun between the legs, the boxer’s face “flat as a photograph,” the comfort and inadequacy of male fellowship. Hond shows the novel’s two female characters, Emi and Nelson’s mother, Donna, only through Mickey and Paul’s impressions of them. While no fault in itself, the resulting sketchiness is frustrating. There’s little sense of Emi’s daily life as a musician, or of what her playing is like. Donna is reduced to her role as long-suffering single black mom (“Bad men all around,” she sighs) trying to keep her son decent.
Above all, “The Baker” is Baltimore’s story, as Pete Dexter’s unswerving books are Philadelphia’s. The two young men, Jewish and black, navigate the minefields of class and race laid by generations before them. Paul is no bridge to racial harmony: arrogant, impressionable and naive, he sees his friendship with Nelson mostly as a boost to his own gangsta fantasies; he’s unaware of his and others’ casual cruelty.
There are many inconsistencies, wrong notes and absurd plot developments (there’s a Paris sequence as endearing in its dottiness as it is unbelievable). Just about every loose end is tied up, everyone gets off the hook and the epiphanies come fast and furious toward the end like a runner sprinting at the finish. The lushness of Hond’s language can approach poetry — “he’d slept deeply, as if buried at sea, dreaming of women he’d never seen.” He also has a love of overloaded sentences, mixing his metaphors with a muscular stroke of the spoon: “Mickey knew that his part was over, that the evening he had merely launched would now assume its own shape and rhythm, and that the conversation — Mickey was helpless to stop it — would soon alight like some pregnant insect, on the frail-stemmed topic of murder.” One suspects that there’s an anti-Carver sensibility at work here, but when Hond does let himself speak simply, his power is considerable: “It was the day of emergency, the day without limits.” A death scene is heartbreakingly wrenching.
Once out of the oven and left to cool, “The Baker” is fresh and filling. Hond has a good ear for dialogue, some suspiciously genial Frenchmen aside. (Nelson’s nicknames for Mickey and Paul, Bread and Crumb, are a nice touch.) Hond switches among the various plotlines skillfully, keeping the story moving at a brisk pace.
Some things are never made clear, such as why Mickey’s level of sophistication seems to fade in and out. (His references to “the little colored girl” and “the gays,” amid rhapsodic accounts of Beethoven concertos, don’t ring quite true.) But Mickey is very likable; his evolving understanding of his role both within his family and in the world at large is subtle and moving. In the end, “The Baker” makes you want to go out and get a really good loaf of bread — the kind you stick your thumbs into and rip apart, the kind that gets flour and moist crumbs all over you. That’s a testament to the book’s high heat, and to Hond’s promise as a novelist.

May 25, 1999
HE PUT THE HOP IN THE LINDY / Frankie Manning, the last king of swing
Emily Gordon and Robert L. Fouch, STAFF WRITERS
IMAGINE THIS SCENE: In a packed ballroom, hundreds of women edge closer to the dance floor, angling for a chance with that handsome fellow with the brilliant smile, the one who moves with such power and grace. Never mind that the man is 85 years old. This is the legend of lindy, the king of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in its heyday, who danced for royalty and has sidestepped old age as he would another couple on the floor. This is Frankie Manning, and as the song begins to swing, the women clamor to be one of his 85 partners — one for each of Manning’s remarkable years.
Swing dancers, musicians and jazz and dance lovers from all over the world will descend upon Roseland Ballroom tomorrow night to celebrate the man who helped create the lindy hop — the dance Life magazine once pronounced “this country’s only native and original dance form,” which has hooked a new generation on partner dancing.
Manning, as any young swing fanatic can tell you, was a member of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, a celebrated ’30s swing performance troupe that performed at Radio City, the Moulin Rouge, the Royal Albert Hall. Manning also choreographed movies of the era, including jaw-dropping scenes in “Hellzapoppin'” and the Marx Brothers’ “A Day at the Races.” Perhaps Manning’s most famous legacy, though, is the invention of the air step — or, as it’s now called, the aerial. “You have to remember that those were the beginning days of lindy hop, that everything that was created was ours, was new,” he says. “So a person could never say, ‘That’s wrong.'”
So when he told Frieda Washington, his partner, “Get on my back, roll over, come down in front of me,” what was her reply? “Just think of this,” he says now, “something you’ve never seen, don’t know how to do it, your partner don’t know how to do it — and she said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ Brave girl, very brave.” The Savoy in the ’30s was the place to dance. It was New York’s only integrated club — unlike, for instance, Roseland, where Manning and some friends were once turned away at the door. At the Savoy, “They didn’t care what color you were. All they wanted to know is, ‘Can you dance?’ … Clark Gable walked into the place and somebody’d say, ‘Hey, Clark Gable’s in the house!’ ‘Oh yeah, can he dance?'” Manning knew the legends — Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie. He played point guard for Cab Calloway’s basketball team.
Today’s swing dancers speak with awe about Manning’s career. “Frankie’s stuff is so out there,” says Janice Wilson, who teaches lindy and won the 1999 Dancesport International lindy hop championship with her partner, Paolo Lanna. “When you see the old films, all of [Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers] were phenomenal dancers, but you have a really hard time looking at anyone else.”
But those days would soon end. Manning was drafted, and spent five years fighting in the South Pacific. When he came home to New York, they were playing bebop, and the lindy hop was passé. So Manning took a job at the post office, where he stayed 30 years. He still danced — “If I wasn’t dancing, I don’t think I would be here” — and when they played rock and roll, “I learned how to do those dances, too.” It seemed that Manning, and the lindy, had had their day. But not quite. In the ’80s, rockabilly and swing bands grew out of a retro subculture. Erin Stevens, co-owner of the Pasadena Ballroom Dance Association, and her dance partner, Steven Mitchell, set out to track down the finer points and pioneers of lindy hop.
They had the old films but, Stevens says, “we didn’t have any names” — African-American dancers and choreographers at the time often weren’t credited. Finally, they came across Manning’s name, and found him in Corona, Queens. He eventually agreed to teach them, and thus, says Stevens, “we learned the heart, the soul, the feeling, the basics, from Frankie Manning.” It wasn’t long before Manning was coaxed out of his living room and into the studios. For Manning, swing is as much about socializing as it is about dancing, and now, he says, “People want to get back together again, they want to be friends, they want to talk to each other.”
And that’s what Manning preaches: affection and respect. “A lot of times if I get a class of beginners … I say, ‘OK, now you’re going to have to put your arms around the lady.’ For some ungodly reason, they are very reluctant. I say, ‘Fellows, touch the girl, she doesn’t mind. Do you mind, ladies? No. See there?'” He always tells them: “Make sure you treat her as if she’s the queen, and you’re just a jester in her court.”
Given that their teacher has 71 years of dancing experience, his students tend to listen. Manu Smith, Webmaster of yehoodi.com, New York’s central swing Web site, says, “You look at Frankie and you think to yourself, OK, you’re teaching us this step. You might have invented it. When you look at Frankie, he is lindy hop…. You feel honored to be corrected on a step by Frankie.” Manning seems to breathe the dance, as another student, Katherine Lewis, puts it. “Instead of counting out the steps the way other teachers do, he just scats. ‘Be-dop-a-oody-ah-be-doby-yonk-ah!’ — and you’re like, oh, that’s it! All of a sudden, you feel it in your body.”
For his part, as is obvious from Manning’s gigantic grin when he watches his students, the swing revival has given as much to him as he has given to it. “I see some of these young kids get out on the floor, and sometimes they don’t even know what they’re doing, but I see something that I say, ‘Oh, wow. Yeah, I can do something with that.’ … They’re creating also, just like when I was young.” Some of modern lindy hop’s best will be performing at tomorrow’s birthday bash — dancers from Sweden, London, Singapore, California and New York. Manning chose the bands: Grover Mitchell’s Count Basie Orchestra and George Gee and His Make-Believe Ballroom Orchestra — “That’s one of the swingingest bands in the land,” Manning says. His old friend Buster Brown will tap dance. More than 100 couples will dance the Lindy Chorus, a routine Manning choreographed.
Lindy-hop teacher Laura Jeffers is counting on being in the lucky 85. “He has this dance in him. You can watch him and listen to him talk about it, but you can get so much of the dance from just being near him. He is the most goodwilled person I have ever met in my entire life, about people and the world — aside from everything else. It’s like a gift.”
Tickets for Frankie Manning’s 85th birthday tomorrow night at Roseland Ballroom, 239 W. 52nd St., are still available; call 212-269-4849 or check www.frankie85ny.org for information. Tickets are $50;$60 at the door. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.
Note: Manning died on April 27, 2009, just before his 95th birthday.

Living in a Material World

By Emily Gordon

When essayist David Rakoff takes a good look at himself—or anyone else, for that matter—the results are extremely endearing. One such feat of honesty takes place in the office of a fancy plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, where Rakoff is getting the lowdown on the state of his face on assignment from GQ. “I am not a handsome man,” he reflects, matter-of-factly. “I have some pretty eyes and, like everyone, I have my moments.”

He has plenty of them. In this collection of pieces for, among others, This American Life and Details magazine, Rakoff shoots glances into both common and extraordinary occasions and describes them with casually wicked panache. A freelance writer with a full deck of adventurous pitches, he’s willing to put himself in any number of potentially humbling or enraging situations, not just in Beverly Hills but in, for instance, the company of both scary anti-gay and enigmatic gay Republicans.

Critics have compared Rakoff to humorists such as George Carlin and Dave Barry, but despite his occasional bursts of glee, Rakoff is far dreamier and uneasier—and more openly brainy—than those confident comics. At times, his style recalls the engaging modesty of David Sedaris. Yet Rakoff’s most spirited inventions are delightfully off the map, and in an age of comedic and rhetorical meanness, he’s a rare model of genuine empathy.

The subjects of “Don’t Get Too Comfortable” (whose title echoes Rakoff’s discomfort with narcissistic quests for material perfection) are various. In one piece, Rakoff—a native Canadian who’s become an American citizen—muses on the nature of patriotism; in another, he champions Martha Stewart (they both make their own gifts). He accompanies—somewhat warily—a group of followers of “Wildman” Steve Brill, who forages for edible plants in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. He loiters in Cayo Espanto in the Caribbean with Latin American Playboy models and their crew during a shoot. He also works at a hotel pool in South Beach, does the Paris fashion shows, flies on the Concorde, goes on a Manhattan midnight scavenger hunt, reviews a play performed in the nude in Times Square, talks to people outside the “Today Show,” attends the Extreme Life Extension Conference and fasts.

It is with these larger groups—Americans, Concorde passengers, the fashion aficionados he calls “the Ladies”—that his sharpshooting wavers somewhat. He’s much better one on one: describing Diana Ross in “Mahogany” (“she drips melted wax onto her torso, laughing mirthlessly all the while”), indulging in a fantasy that Log Cabin Republican Patrick Guerriero will suddenly feel like buying Al Franken books with him, dolloping into a description of “Wild Man” Brill that the naturalist is “John Cleesing across Grand Army Plaza and into the park.” When he really works to understand his more outlandish subjects, it shows in the urgency of his puzzlement.

And when he allows himself (or, perhaps, more to the point, when his editors allow him) to really go to town with his descriptions – “Glorious, glorious polyurethane! To your gorgeous fumes, a woozy hymn, with half the words missing! O resinous forgiver of countless mistakes, whose mirror-bright nacre confers authority, a glassy rime of reason to objects large and small! Hooray and huzzah, I wax for Miniwax!”—well, how can you resist? In those bursts of pure enthusiasm, he’s a delectable Cole Porter, Nicholson Baker and Sarah Vowell smoothie.

“Don’t Get Too Comfortable” may not be the final word on American consumerism—though Rakoff’s political analysis is impeccable. But Rakoff’s portraits of the consumers themselves are remarkably sound in their lightness, on par with the great Stephen Leacock’s “Sketches of a Sunshine Town.” Snark is fun, and high seriousness is satisfying, but Rakoff is most wonderful when he sets them both aside.

(Published in Newsday, September 18, 2005)

(A note about clips: Many of my articles aren’t available online, but they’ll be uploaded here eventually. If you’re looking for something in particular, please email me.)
Review: Don’t Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff [Newsday]
Review: Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy [Newsday]
Review: Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley [Salon]
Review: Seasons of Her Life: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright by Ann Blackman [Salon]
Review: On Parole by Akira Yoshimura [Salon]
Review: My Dark Places by James Ellroy [The Nation]
Interview: J.K. Rowling [Newsday]
Roundup: September 11 poetry anthologies [Newsday]
Review: Two books by Scott Dikkers: You Are Worthless and The Pretty Good Jim’s Journal Treasury [Salon]
Editorial: Borders Belabored, with Liza Featherstone [The Nation]
To be continued…