Monthly Archives: February 2007

Penguin Check; Alvarez on Plath, Hughes, &c.; Rebecca Mead and Bridal Madness

James Wolcott, who always speaks his mind and does it in such sublime sentences, makes an omelette with some familiar eggs, in particular Adam Gopnik, whose book Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York he’s reviewing. (From The New Republic, signup required.)
A bird-minded blogger wonders: Is there an avian misidentification in this week’s Glen Le Lievre cartoon?
The Ham & High (that’s the Hampstead and Highgate Express) has a winsome, chummy profile of Al Alvarez. Who? Read on, philistine (sorry about the ellipsis points; it’s a long story):

In fact, the poet, novelist and critic is pretty good-natured about most things, inclined to seek out the amusing, quirky side of life in his lengthy essays for the New Yorker, the New York Review and other publications…. A collection of his favourite articles, entitled Risky Business, is published this month…. They cover Alvarez’s well-documented passions for poker, mountaineering and flying – and articles on writers from Philip Roth to Sylvia Plath that remind you how rare it is to find beautifully written, lively, perceptive journalism…. But then Alvarez is several classes above most hacks. As influential poetry editor of the Observer in the 1950s and 60s, he championed the work of Plath, Thom Gunn, Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes…. He reminisces fondly of the days when The Observer devoted pages to work by unknown poets and the New Yorker would commission a 50,000-word article that consumed the magazine over two issues.

Keep reading, it’s fascinating.
Meanwhile, mark your calendars for May 24: Rebecca Mead has an event at the New York Public Library, and it sounds like a pip. It’s inspired by her forthcoming book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding (out on May 10): “A conversation with Rebecca Mead where she will discuss why the American wedding has become an outlandishly extravagant, egregiously expensive, and overwhelmingly demanding production.” In that vein, if you don’t mind being sickened by pinkness, check out this truly hideous site devoted to Cinderella bridal accessories that I discovered the other day after reading Peggy Orenstein’s terrific Times magazine piece on the marketing of princess mania.

Books by Whitney Balliett for Swingin’ Lovers

Balliett, who seemed a permanent voice in the New Yorker chorus, died yesterday. From the Washington Post obituary (to which I’ve added Amazon links):

Mr. Balliett contributed short articles for the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section as well as book, film and theater reviews. He also wrote poetry. He left the magazine staff in 1998.
Collections of his New Yorker writings were published frequently over the years. His books included American Singers and American Musicians. [Followed by American Musicians II: Seventy-one Portraits in Jazz.] One massive volume, subtitled “a Journal of Jazz,” came out in 2000 [Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2001].

Here’s the link to the full Amazon listing for Ballliett, sorted by publication date; here it is at Powell’s Books. In 1996, Balliett and Murray Kempton co-wrote (it seems) a 1,037-word piece on the occasion of Frank Sinatra’s retirement for The New York Review of Books. I’d say that’s worth $3!

Friday Squib Investigation: A Nut Museum, Tad Friend, and Enterprising Squirrels

Martin Schneider, our trusty Squib Reporter, writes:
On Wednesday, Emily noted: “And R.I.P., too, Elizabeth Tashjian, who seems to have been, among many other things, the subject of a New Yorker piece.”
Yes, she was; more than one, in fact. Two times, more than twenty years apart, she was the subject of a Talk of the Town item. The dates are March 26, 1984, and April 18, 2005. The first one, “Raided,” by William Franzen, covered the hibernatory habits of small northeastern museums like Ms. Tashjian’s Nut Museum. Her problem that winter, and for all I know every winter, was that hungry chipmunks and squirrels were prone to invade the museum, eager to usurp all the nutty goodness. We see her deciding to place her museum’s holdings under glass, but she has a place in her heart even for the greedy little poachers: “They’re making a nut museum of their own, I guess.” Note that Franzen does not call her the Nut Lady.
The second piece, “Legacies,” by Tad Friend, is especially poignant, as it has largely to do with her impoverished last years. Somewhat strangely, Friend does refer to her as the Nut Lady, even though he states quite clearly that she dislikes the nickname. Still: Friend puts the focus squarely on her plight, emphasizing her loss of control over her holdings. We learn that after being declared a ward of the state, she won back her
right to manage her own affairs. However, her museum had been sold to a woman who them cut down her nut trees (!); the item ends by describing a dispute over her (at the time) eventual burial. All in all, a terribly affecting article.
The only real question left is: Will Ms. Tashjian be interred in a plot of her choosing? I hope so.

Whitney Balliett, 1926-2007

It is my understanding that longtime New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett has died. If anyone knows more, please confirm. What a week for deaths. Which every week is, but they seem to be snowballing.
Here’s Balliett’s short review in the magazine of A Great Day in Harlem, and a November 18, 1961, Talk of the Town about Sonny Rollins; as with all old Talks, it has no byline, but the reliable Greg.org credits it to Balliett, so I’m going with it. (It is indeed by him.) It begins:

When life becomes nothing but a bowl of clichés, how many young and successful people of non-independent means have the resilience and backbone to withdraw completely from the world and reorganize, refuel, retool, and refurbish themselves? Well, we know of one such heroic monk—Sonny Rollins, a thirty-one-year-old tenor saxophonist. In the summer of 1959, Rollins, finding himself between burgeoning success and burgeoning displeasure with his playing, dropped abruptly and voluntarily into oblivion, where he remained until this very week, when he momentously reappeared at the Jazz Gallery, on St. Marks Place, with a quartet. At the time of his self-banishment, Rollins was, among other things, the most influential practitioner on his instrument to come along since Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins; the unofficial head of the hard-bop school (a refinement of bebop); and one of the first of the now plentiful abstract or semi-abstract jazz improvisers. As a result, his Return—rumored for months—took on a kind of millennial air, which we got caught up in several days before the event by having a chat with the Master himself.

Friday update: Balliett’s death has been confirmed. Also now online at newyorker.com: the critic’s December 26, 1970, Profile of Bobby Short. Here’s the Newsday obituary: “‘Whitney’s knowledge of the jazz world was encyclopedic, his passion for the music unbounded, and his prose as fluid and as joyful as the subject he wrote about,’ said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker…. ‘Whitney’s heart might have been with the music of the golden era of jazz, but he was also perfectly capable of writing with sympathy about the later innovators, such as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman,’ said Remnick. ‘He was especially brilliant writing about singers and drummers—in fact, Whitney himself was a damn good amateur drummer himself.'” Other obituaries: in The New York Sun, in The Washington Post, in The New York Times, and on All About Jazz.

Not Molly Ivins, No, No!

A tribute by John Nichols for The Nation. And from Good Texan (an excerpt, but worth reading the whole post):

The obituaries, both the CNN version and the one Lloyd linked to in the NYT, just barely hint at what she was like.
At least the Times is honest enough to repeat her words about her stint with them: “The New York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.” however, they remain fussy enough to circumlocute that her dog’s name was an “expletive” — according to Dad, the dog’s name was Shit. Which just proves the point. There’s a saying that some people wouldn’t know shit if they were standing in a big pile of it; it might be more accurate to say that most folks would *pretend* they didn’t know shit for the sake of politeness. Molly never did that. She always said exactly what she thought.

Not that it’s a surprise or anything, but Bush’s comment about Ivins’s death was spectacularly lame. From the Times story: “On Wednesday night, President Bush issued a statement that said he ‘respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase…. Mr. Bush added: ‘Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed.’ ” I hate everything about this smirkingly anti-intellectual, evasive set of non-statements. The passive voice says everything.