Author Archives: Jonathan

An Obit Fit to Blog, and Print

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Having taken note of Ben Bernanke’s possible slowness on the uptake about the country’s financial situation, it is, sadly, now an occasion to pay tribute one who did see what was coming, and who has died of ovarian cancer: “Tanta” of Calculated Risk, Doris Dungey. I recall reading a lot of predictions that there was going to be hell to pay from the mortgage market quite a while back, mostly at Atrios‘s place, and if I recall correctly, a lot of those posts were inspired by the work of Calculated Risk; naturally, I’ve been reading the site more and more in recent months.
I was also a little struck by the headline on Tanta’s New York Times obituary: “Doris Dungey, Prescient Finance Blogger, Dies at 47.” After all, an archive search shows that Tanta is just the third person identified primarily as a “blogger” to have been the subject of a Times obit. (The other two were Cathy Seipp and Steve Gilliard.)
Having attended the recent roundtable on obituary writing at the New York Public Library, I’m led to wonder how the Times is keeping tabs on who’s worthy of an obit (not to mention The Verb) among bloggers. Not to be too morbid, but there will be more blogger obits, and Dungey’s includes what may one day become a classic trope:

The blog quickly drew a lively and informed group of commentators, few livelier and none more informed than someone who called herself Tanta. She began by correcting some of Mr. McBride’s posts. “She would tell me either I was wrong or the article I was quoting was wrong,” he said Sunday. “It was clear she really knew her stuff. And she was funny about it.”
Tanta soon graduated from merely commenting to being a full-scale partner. Her first post, in December 2006, took issue with an optimistic Citigroup report that maintained that the mortgage industry would “rationalize” in 2007, to the benefit of larger players like, well, Citigroup.

“Writer Gives Long Account”

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Matthew Yglesias, seemingly not a print subscriber with access to Digital Reader, reminds me of something I’ve been wanting to take note of here: the pleasures of the New Yorker abstracts. Directed by The Atlantic‘s Ross Douthat to Rebecca Mead’s 2003 article about Jaime Pressly, “The Almost It Girl” (Digital Edition link here) he points to what must be the longest abstract I’ve seen on the site (and the article itself isn’t particularly long):

She compares her role to Reese Witherspoon’s in “Election.” Describes a synchronized-swimming lesson she took for the role. Recently, she was asked to audition as the replacement for a minor character on “That 70’s Show,” but she had misgivings. While working hard to become a name, Pressly has had to witness the galling success of actresses who were born names, like Kate Hudson. Pressly comes from humble theatrical origins: her mother ran a dance studio. Her parents separated when she was in her early teens, and she and her mother moved to Orange County. She dropped out of school to model and left home at 15. She now lives in a million-dollar house and recently became engaged to Jay Gehrke, a former professional baseball player. “People will take me more seriously if I’m married…” She has also created a lingerie line called J’aime. In the space of a week, she learned she hadn’t gotten “Blade 3,” “That 70’s Show,” or “Mask 2.” The launch of J’aime took place at the Palms Casino Resort, in Las Vegas. Describes the runway show. Mentions two frat guys who said they didn’t know Pressly’s name but remembered her from “Not Another Teen Movie.”

An Yglesias commenter observes that the poker-faced cataloging of details had to have been a bit of abstracting humor. Another of my all-time favorite abstracts, of V.S. Naipaul’s 1984 essay “The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,” is rather negligent in taking note of the narrative content of the piece, seemingly intent on parodying Naipaul’s essentializing vision and brutally simple style:

150 miles inland the President’s ancestral village of Yamoussoukro has been transformed. The President would like it to be one of the great cities of Africa & the world. Tells about its ultra-modern splendor. Down one side of the Presidential palace there is an artificial lake into which have been introduced man-eating crocodiles. These are totemic, emblematic creatures & they belong to the President. There were no crocodiles in Yamoussoukro before. No one knows precisely what they mean. The crocodiles are fed with fresh meat every day. People can go & watch. Most visitors are tourists. Writer gives long account of a visit & discusses the crocodile ritual which is mysterious. He interviews a number of people, mainly expatriates, about the Ivory Coast. He learns that life in the interior is truly African. Daytime city life with its Western influence is not the real Africa.

James Wood wrote in this week’s issue about Naipaul “the Wounder,” so it’s interesting that Edward Hoagland said of “Yamoussoukro,” “Though these are the same kind of excursions he has made in other countries with mordant mockery in mind, this time he is not exploring ‘the great wound of Africa’ but instead its astonishing, unknowable and hypnotic ‘completeness.'” A dubious proposition itself, but, as Hoagland writes, in this case, Naipaul’s piece is “full of honest changes of judgment about particular people, generally on the side of appreciating them better.”

The New New New Journalism

Perhaps, like me, you’ve heard about Claire Hoffman’s “interview”:http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/11/24/081124ta_talk_hoffman?yrail with Prince in last week’s Talk of the Town, even if you haven’t read it yet. The one where, tapping a Bible, he’s “all”:http://emdashes.com/2008/11/punctuation-update-new-yorker.php, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ” (Okay, now I’ve read it, to get the real quote.)
Feel free to keep it meta with this “interview”:http://www.brianmpalmer.com/clairehoffman.html of Hoffman by Brian Palmer, a rangy discussion of Hoffman’s techniques and the journalists she counts as influences, at _The New Yorker_ and elswehere. About her Prince interview, she reveals that he “wouldn’t let me use a tape recorder or my notepad. I walked out and sat in my car and wrote for an hour. I don’t have long chunks of dialogue, but I was able to remember stuff.” (Wow. I interviewed someone on the phone last night _with_ a notepad, and I’m not sure it will yield a chunk as long as the quote above.)
This revelation of Prince’s tape-recorder prohibition puts a new angle on the claim, reported by “Perez Hilton”:http://perezhilton.com/2008-11-17-prince-was-misquoted-the-singers-camp-claims, by “Prince insiders” who say that Prince was misquoted and point to the fact that Hoffman…didn’t record the interview.
Now, if I was doing this right, I’d interview Palmer, and then maybe someone would interview me….

Deadline Poets: Obituaries Panel at the NYPL

Jonathan Taylor writes:
I got a last-minute ticket to Monday’s sold-out “Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries” event at the New York Public Library. It’s fair to say that The Economist‘s obituaries editor, Ann Wroe, stole the show, or was smartly handed it by the NYPL’s Paul Holdengräber, on a platter of quotes from Aristophanes and Rilke. Wroe and her predecessor, Keith Kolquhoun, have edited the new Economist Book of Obituaries.
The Economist publishes just one substantial, often heroically sympathetic, appreciation a week. Wroe frequently plucks a relatively obscure figure from among the deaths covered by other papers to illuminate his or her illuminatingness, as in the case of Martin Tytell, New York City’s last typewriter “surgeon.”
However, Wroe evidently does have the latitude to commit the occasional “double-header,” in an instance such as the synchronous deaths of Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley. This obit rather belabors the obvious contrasts between the two rich women before concluding with a leveling wave of the scythe: “Both ended sadly, left alone with their dogs and the ghosts of their husbands in dust-draped city apartments or empty summer homes. But in the memory of most New Yorkers one was a saint and the other a sinner. Richesse oblige.”
Unlike newspapers like The New York Times and London’s Daily Telegraph (which, Wroe noted, specializes in “colonels” and “decadent aristocrats”), The Economist doesn’t have need for an extensive file of prewritten obits. Only seven, in fact, one of which is Saddam Hussein’s, evidently never published for whatever reason; she let slip that others include the (now former) king of Nepal, bookish former British Labour Party leader Michael Foot, and Nelson Mandela. It was not clear whether the bigger package she promised for Margaret Thatcher’s death was counted as one of these seven. Prince Philip, she said, was not among them, although she declared he wasn’t “looking too well lately” (!).
The presence in the audience of Times obit writers Bruce Weber and William Grimes, along with former public editor Daniel Okrent, steered the event toward Times protocol fetishism. For a lot of people present, I don’t think this was an idle concern, although in reality it is. Weber piped up at one point with an allusion that I think went mostly unheard, to the status conferred by the inclusion in an obit’s headline of “the verb”—presumably “Dies.” Something else to take account of in the morning scan.
The obit of the day to crop up in the conversation was that of southwestern mystery novelist Tony Hillerman, with Okrent emitting, virtually in a heartfelt cry, that “the world has changed.” Before the event, I had been looking in The Complete New Yorker at the magazine’s obituary practices over time (81 under the category “Obituary,” another 85 under “Postscript,” numerous others under “Comment”), and bethought myself to see whether it had taken note of Hillerman’s novels.
The earliest citation was from 1970; author: Edmund Wilson. Here was a find! I thought—Wilson, famous for his blinkered dismissal of “detective fiction,” on Tony Hillerman!? In fact, the interminable Wilson piece was the second part of a consideration of “Two Neglected American Novelists,” Henry B. Fuller and Harold Frederic.
Hillerman’s The Blessing Way was reviewed in the appended Briefly Noted section: “Highly recommended.”

Norman Lewis’s Letters From a Vanished Spain

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Patrick French’s authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, will come out in the U.S. next month, complete with its salacious revelations of marital cruelty. After it was published in Britain in spring, the formidable Stephen Mitchelmore questioned the connection being hastily drawn between the writer’s vices and his books:

When I found out Naipaul was married, it was after I’d read and enjoyed the overtly autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival which does not (if a twenty-year-old memory serves) mention any other presence in the narrator’s Wiltshire cottage. Does this demonstrate a protective love or contemptuous indifference? Such is the ambiguity of writing.

Another new British bio, Semi-Invisible Man by Julian Evans, is not set for U.S. release. Like Naipaul, its subject, Norman Lewis, was a novelist and travel writer whose work appeared in The New Yorker. This work, too, turns on the writer’s sculpting of lived experience, switching, almost silently, between fiction and nonfiction as needed. An observation about Lewis in the Times Literary Supplement review of Semi-Invisible Man nicely illustrates the parallel. Lewis’s Voices of the Old Sea (1984) is a spare memoir of three summers he spent in an isolated Catalonian fishing village in the 1950s:

Lewis’s visits, we learn from the biography, were made in a large Buick, in the holidaying company of his partner of the the time and their children. You wouldn’t guess this from Voices of the Old Sea. Lewis was a secretive, contradictory man who nursed his inconsistencies because they fitted his understanding of how the world worked.

I haven’t gotten my hands on Semi-Invisible Man yet. But the UK reviews sent me to Voices of the Old Sea, and thence to some of Lewis’s New Yorker articles, mostly published in the 1950s and 60s.
Voices conjures the elemental traditional life of the village he called Farol, on the eve of its destruction by the tourist industry. This conquest was decades old by the time Lewis wrote the book. Farol’s residents were adamantly attached to a hardscrabble subsistence economy and a culture of atavistic paganism still not yielding completely to Catholicism, much less to anything called “Spain.” Their cosmology was dualistic: one world was Farol, the seaside, cat-infested village whose authority figures were fishermen. Its eternal Other was Sort, and inland, dog-riddled hamlet of cork farmers and other peasant landlubbers who wore shoes rather than rope sandals (chief among Farol’s superstitions was an abhorrence of leather).
As land and houses are bought up to build a hotel, a kind of suspense builds slowly, even though the final outcome seems obvious. And in fact it is shocking when suddenly the villagers, once dismissive of the possibility of change, cheerfully exterminate any private habit of life once the price became irresistible, to be replaced with something palatable to visitors’ expectations of Spain. It’s a sobering read for anyone historically minded who has been to the Costa Brava, or any other part of Europe extensively developed for tourism, and is tempted to think they have an eye for what is “authentic” to the place.
Lewis’s contemporary account of his sojourns in southern Spain, in a March 10, 1956, New Yorker “Letter from Ibiza,” has the same principal theme. He sought out Ibiza as he migrated “farther south each year to keep ahead of the tourist invasion.” Ibiza also exhibited a basic dichotomy between fisherman and peasant.

The existence of the generous, impoverished fisherman and that of the peasant, with its calculation and lacklustre security, are separated by a tremendous gulf. For a fisherman, to be condemned to plant, irrigate and reap, bound to the wheel of the seasons, his returns computable in advance to the peseta, is the most horrible of all fates.

However, the fisher and the farmer had in common their absolute faith in methods and customs that Lewis dated back to Roman, Carthaginian, and Arab rule over the island, equidistant between Iberia and Africa.

The Ibizan peasant is the product of changeless economic factors—a fertile soil, an unvarying climate, and an inexhaustible water supply from underground sources. These benefits have produced a trancelike routine of existence…. Much of the past is conserved in the husk of convention, and archaic usages govern his conduct toward all the crucial issues of life.

But already, Ibiza had a steady flow of transient bohemians and “modern remittance men—the free-lance writer who sees two or three of his pieces in print a year, and the painter who sells a canvas once in a blue moon.” And as in Catalonia, mass tourism was approaching, luring Ibiza’s fishermen into the unthinkable occupation of captaining boat excursions, and sometimes into trysts with “fair strangers.”
In Ibiza, Lewis describes this phenomenon almost whimsically; when he refers to the island’s “first cautious step forward into the full enlightenment of our times,” the undoubted irony is gentle. Similarly, in his October 15, 1955, New Yorker “Letter From Belize,” Lewis sees a “glamorized and air-conditioned Belize emerging as another Caribbean playground for the people of the industrial North” as a bona fide solution to the country’s economic problems, however unappealing it might be to the discriminating traveler. While alluding knowingly to the New Yorker reader’s distaste for “the chagrins of the tourist area,” he concludes with tips for “someone seized by weariness of the world” to retire in Belize, “Gaugin-style.”
But by the 1980s, Lewis had no remaining illusions about “the full enlightenment of our times.” His 1968 London Times article “Genocide in Brazil,” which exposed the oppression of Amazon peoples, had led to the founding of the tribal rights group Survival International. And in place of the little ironies facing the lucky discoverer of an “unspoiled” place, Voices of the Old Sea is a terse requiem. The beginning of tourist boat outings in Farol represent the collapse of the main pillar of the existing order, recorded with the bitter knowledge that there is now no traditional society that is not doomed, if it has not already disappeared.
Given how much Spain’s Costa Brava had changed already by the time Lewis was writing, Voices of the Old Sea is devastating in its understatement. Refraining from overtly referring to the full extent of the later transformation of the place, Lewis lets us fill in the blank sequel ourselves with the shocking knowledge we already have about our “enlightened” age. (I can only wonder what Lewis would have made of The New Yorker‘s other “Letter from Ibiza,” by Nick Paumgarten in 1998.)
Some differences between the article and the book point to the ways Lewis reshaped his experiences in order to bring out what he saw, in hindsight, as their ultimate meaning. An apparent allusion to Farol in the “Letter From Ibiza”—”my favorite Catalonian village”—gives it a “native population of a thousand,” and says 32 hotels had already been built. Without saying so explicitly, Voices of the Old Sea gives the impression of a village of perhaps a few dozen households, and the drama focuses on the creation of a single hotel, heightening the sense of nearness to extinction of the bearers of the old ways.
This misleading effect seems to amount to a clever method of omission, rather than an altering of the facts outright. But without the biography, I haven’t even succeeded in tracking Farol down to correlate his account to any known place. This epic blog comment is the most extensive discussion I’ve found about whether the village exists, or existed, under that name, or was perhaps a fictionalized place in which Lewis synthesized his area experiences.
Lewis’s longest New Yorker work was the 1964 serialization of his book on the Sicilian Mafia, The Honored Society. What keeps him interested in Sicily is the same thing as in Ibiza. The glittering history of an island, its Roman and Arab past seemingly concealed under a decrepit present, but to the lingering eye, actually revealed by it. The Mafia, he writes, is the descendant of an organization formed to defend the poor from the depredations of the Inquisition, which were more economic than theological. It eventually allied itself instead with the feudal landowning class, and after World War II, inhabited the shell of electoral politics (with the help of the U.S. military).
It is the same deadly combination of atavism and modernity that is also often Naipaul’s subject; the two also share a dazzling focus on its material manifestation in landscapes scarred by man. Joan Didion wrote in 1980 that for Naipaul, the world is “charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact.” The World Is What It Is, indeed. Or, as Lewis put it in the title of a memoir: The World, The World.
Like any other writer, a biographer is wrestling with “the tension between the idea and the physical fact.” French has the goods on “the physical fact”: Naipaul handed over his wife’s damning diaries, sight unseen, and The Guardian says they “take us probably as far as it is possible to go to the core of the creative process.” Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books notes that in Semi-Invisible Man, Evans, who was Lewis’s editor and friend, reveals his misgivings about whether and how to use his own diary entries about a maritally sensitive incident. O’Hagan suggests the degree to which Evans grapples with “the idea,” in fact calling the book “an improvisation on the very idea of being Norman Lewis.”
In either case, it’s worth remembering that, however close we are getting to “the creative process,” it’s only through another’s creative process. I for one am looking forward as much to reading Evans’s book as French’s.

Vile Bodies: David Levine’s Prickly New Yorker Past

Jonathan Taylor, whom we’ve just welcomed to the Emdashes team, writes:
This article in the November Vanity Fair explains the disappearance from The New York Review of Books of the artist who helped define its virtually unchanging look: David Levine, who caricatures the glorious and the notorious of belles lettres and statecraft with huge heads on vestigial bodies (or, sometimes, vice versa). His vision succumbing to macular degeneration, Levine in 2006 for the first time had work rejected by the Review for reasons of execution rather than scurrilousness. The article is a fine sidelong portrait of a publication that’s venerable, yet in fact still young enough to be only now exiting (slowly) the era of its founders.
It also turns out that Levine had several taste tiffs with The New Yorker, for which he has provided 71 illustrations. One reject was this watercolor of Bush in flightsuit atop an array of coffins, which ran in 2005 instead in the Review. It seems practically banal today, but plausibly exceeds the limits of The New Yorker‘s political prudence. (The magazine’s emphatic Barack Obama endorsement is still careful to specify that “There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime.”)
A little more alarming is the tale of a cartoon of Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon that the magazine altered unilaterally. It removed some missiles that accompanied Sharon as a counterpart to the machine-gun wielding masked militants looming behind Abbas. David Remnick told Vanity Fair, “David Levine is a great political artist and kept on publishing with us after this, but all I remember about this was thinking that with Sharon being so ominously huge in the drawing, the bombs were too much.” It certainly seems that Levine has a thing about Sharon’s hugeness, if not his enormity (the kaffiyeh on this Sharon I think perfectly typifies Levine’s blunt sharpness, if you will).
Perhaps the context is useful in reading Levine’s rather sweeping take on the state of New Yorker cartooning in an interview with The Nation: “I think they’ve let down the barrier of quality, and it is just terrible.” (Can this be true of every current contributor, including the older cartoonists who continue to draw regularly for the magazine?) But the anger seems rooted in his determination that cartooning have a legible positive purpose: “Caricature is a form of hopeful statement: I’m drawing this critical look at what you’re doing, and I hope that you will learn something from what I’m doing.” Levine compares the cartoonist to the golem created by a rabbi to fend off anti-Semitic attacks: “When things are settled, he’s not needed.”
The New York Review‘s site hosts a complete Levine gallery, searchable by subject name or categories like “Tycoons, Plutocrats, Midases.” The overlap of the two magazines’ preoccupations means there are a lot of images of New Yorker interest over there: David Remnick; William Shawn; a passel of Updikes, from 1971 to 1994; a quorum of Malcolms, including a Gladwell and two contrasting Janets; a Joan Didion or two; a couple of somewhat disturbing Rebecca Wests; even a rather calming Helen Vendler.