Martin Schneider writes:
A couple of weeks ago Emily, Jonathan, and I attended an event at the New York Public Library with David Remnick and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I wrote about it here. The New York Public Library has posted a video of the event here.
That event was pegged to the publication of Remnick’s new book about Barack Obama, The Bridge. In line with that fact, Remnick has recently appeared on The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher. The Daily Show‘s website has video here; HBO, which airs Real Time, doesn’t let you see video for free, but a free audio podcast of all telecasts is available on iTunes.
In the Daily Show appearance, Remnick called Jon Stewart a “sweetie pie,” and Stewart confessed to an unhealthy obsession with The New Yorker‘s weekly caption contest. The two men briefly discussed Barry Blitt’s originally notorious and now merely legendary cover featuring Michelle and Barack Obama from July 2008. Remnick remarked that The Daily Show “saved our bacon” on that particular subject. It’s well worth checking out Stewart’s coverage of that furor, to recall both the truly ridiculous (and apparently unanimous) condemnations The New Yorker received from the cable news outlets and Stewart’s own bottomless sensibleness.

Martin Schneider writes:
On Tuesday, April 6, I joined my Emdashes colleagues Emily Gordon and Jonathan Taylor at the New York Public Library for the publication day event for The Bridge, David Remnick’s eagerly awaited book about Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States. It was an hour of spirited discussion about Obama, moderated by Atlantic Monthly blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has written two articles for The New Yorker and also appeared as a panelist at the 2008 New Yorker Festival.
In the summer of 2008, Remnick and New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden entered into a wager about the election’s outcome—Remnick’s full explanation of his pessimism was a slow repetition of Obama’s full name. Today, as Remnick rightly says, nobody thinks much about that “Hussein.”
Remnick is so eloquent that I think we may have to invent a new word to describe him. Let me explain. When one listens to Remnick speak, he is so effortlessly precise and profound that one almost wants to use the word “glib”—but, of course, that word implies a want of substance, and nothing could be further from the truth. Is there a word for someone who appears to be glib but in fact is supplying all manner of valuable insight and even profundity? I don’t know, but we need one.
I’ve seen Remnick speak before, but always as the interviewer or moderator, never as the subject. Emily afterward pointed out how easily Remnick took to the role, comfortably reminiscing about his suburban New Jersey upbringing, in a household where radicalism was defined as “sitting too close to the TV set.” In short, a more personal Remnick.
The banter between Remnick and Coates was very amusing—much was made of their offstage editor-contributor relationship. For me, the funniest moment of all came during the Q&A section, when Paul Holdengräber,Director of Public Programs at the NYPL, asked Remnick about “that famous New Yorker cover,” obviously a reference to Barry Blitt’s “notorious” July 21, 2008, cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama after having converted the Oval Office into a den of Islamist Black Power. Remnick: “The one with the bowl of fruit? The one with the abandoned summer house with the clothesline going across?”
Remnick’s take on the cover was, as always, astute: “I think it’s fair to say that not everybody liked it …. I was surprised at the scale of the not-everybody-liking-it.” It’s a lovely irony that Remnick, of all people, so convinced that the key to Obama’s undoing lay in his middle name, would be the editor to approve that cover. But of course, Remnick’s responsibility was not to ensure Obama’s election. And, in my view—as unpleasant as it must have been for Remnick to be hectored on live TV by the likes of Wolf Blitzer, who noted, with characteristic subtlety, “This could have been on the cover of a Nazi magazine!”—it was an entirely worthwhile gamble. (Remnick, for his part, drily noted that he hoped his mother was not watching CNN that particular day.)
To this day, Coates objects to the cover, on the grounds that the cover showed the right-wing conspiracists’ worst fears as “not ridiculous.” But of course, that is precisely what it did, it rendered them ridiculous. You couldn’t ponder that cover for very long without all of the scary right-wing premises seeming preposterous. I quote Art Spiegelman to that effect here, and contribute my own thoughts here. It may have been in a stealthy way, but Blitt’s cover, if anything, probably helped Obama just a little bit.
It’s impossible to discuss the meaning of President Obama without discussing race, and when the moderator is a black man who has written a memoir that would appear to be a bit similar to Obama’s own memoir, the subject of race is all the more unavoidable—and welcome. Remnick’s and Coates’s comments were unfailingly astute—but I did want to push back on one point that surprised me a bit.
Everyone has a theory about how Obama’s blackness helped him or hurt him. Obviously, Obama was able to maximize the ways it could help him and minimize the ways it could hurt him, the same way that Hillary Clinton would have tried to exploit/downplay her gender, or any other candidate would try to extract the positive aspects of any other notable trait he or she possesses.
But it remains a thorny subject. Our first “black president” is half-white, just as white as he is black, one might even say. Yet he signifies as black, culturally speaking, for reasons that stretch back to the abhorrent “one-drop rule” of slavery. Biracial Derek Jeter might not signify as “all black,” but in the more charged arena of politics, Obama usually does.
Add to this a subject that Remnick and Coates treated with some delicacy, that Obama’s father was not culturally African-American but simply African, which means that Obama had no obvious recourse to the cultural traditions and territory of regular African-American males, the ones descended from slaves. Obama is not a descendant of American slaves, and Remnick and Coates quite properly presented that as a problem for a candidate (Obama) trying to win the votes of African-Americans. You could almost say it could have been a problem along these lines: whites would disinclined to vote for him, since he signifies as “black”—but some black voters might also be (relatively) disinclined to vote for him—because he signifies to them as insufficiently “black.” Certainly that would have been a pickle.
Remnick and Coates were making the point that Michelle Obama sliced through this particular Gordian knot rather tidily. Michelle Obama, née Robinson, namesake of America’s most historic African-American baseball player.
So far, so good. Where Remnick and Coates lose me is their assertion that a hypothetical Obama with a white wife would have faced unusual—possibly fatal—problems. I should stress that I’m not shocked by that statement, and I’m not calling them on it for reasons having to do with political correctness. I’m just not sure the statement is as self-evidently true as the two men seemed to think.
Remnick’s statement was that Obama would not have secured 94% of the black vote if Obama’s wife had been white. Coates’s version, allowing for the usual ambiguity that occurs when people speak extemporaneously, seemed to bleed into the premise that Obama would not have won the election at all. Remnick’s statement is probably true in the narrow sense, if one adds the caveat that he could have secured 93% of the black vote and the statement would still remain true. As for Obama’s general prospects, it’s … a difficult statement to parse.
In some degree, this hypothetical seems to elevate cultural concerns over political ones. The fidelity of black voters to the Democratic Party is a political fact strong enough to trump a lot of other factors. It’s worth pointing out that in 2004, a white native of Massachusetts married to a white ketchup heiress (born in Africa, oddly enough) secured 88% of the black vote—and that was a low figure, in historical terms. And of course, Kerry lost the election. But are we saying that Obama would have done worse than Kerry? Are we saying that Obama’s political career would have stalled in Chicago because he would not have been able to appeal to “more authentically African-American voters” the same way? The counterfactuals are too involved to figure out, and—my real point—they ignore the salient role that the characteristics of specific human beings play.
Racially, Obama is whatever he is. In addition, he’s thoughtful, careful, eloquent, whip-smart, not prone to verbal gaffes … this is the man we are saying who could never have overcome his choice decades earlier to wed a white woman? I see the dynamic involved clearly enough … I just don’t think we can rule any outcome out so easily.
Predictions and hypothetical questions are bedeviled by recourse to average, typical exemplars. As an example, if you had asked a sportswriter, on May 30, 1982, whether any current major leaguer had a chance to break Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak, that sportswriter would very likely have said, “No. That is not possible.”
But of course Cal Ripken played the first game of his (quite a bit longer) streak that very day. Obviously the mental processes of that sportswriter would not have been up to imagining the possibility of a glorious outlier like Ripken—even though by definition that record would necessarily be broken by an outlier. Thinking about the ordinary major leaguers are of no use in answering a question like that.
Similarly, if we imagine this white woman that would supposedly have hindered Obama’s chances of becoming president, who is this woman, exactly? Or, more precisely, who might this woman be, exactly? Hillary Clinton? Cindy McCain? Teresa Heinz? Nancy Reagan? Nancy Pelosi? Barbara Ehrenreich? Sandra Bullock? Lorrie Moore? Even that short list of remarkable women shows the potential range involved.
Maybe I’m naive. Obama’s task was formidable enough as it was, and (as Remnick pointed out) his eventual path was in part the result of astonishing good fortune. Maybe it is true that Obama would never have gotten elected within Illinois, much less across the whole country, if he had not had an easy way to make regular black voters relate to him. But I tend to think of the issue in the following way.
Barack Obama married a remarkable woman. It’s safe to assume that if his chosen bride had been white, she would have been a pretty remarkable woman too. Her race might have complicated Obama’s political life. But alongside that, there are two other things one might venture as well: Obama excels at overcoming circumstances that would hold other people back, and this woman would have brought something to the project (I almost wrote “ticket”) in her own right.

Martin Schneider writes:
Last night I was lucky to see a unique literary event: New Yorker book critic James Wood speaking for an hour or so about David Foster Wallace’s second short story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, at the 92nd Street Y.
An a Wallace enthusiast, I was a bit worried about where Wood would come down on BIWHM. Wood’s tastes can be a bit arid—at one point during the address, he cited Henry James as a model Wallace might have profited from emulating—and it was all too easy to imagine Wood not cottoning to Wallace’s verbal, stylistic, and formal excesses.
I need not have worried. Wood was generous in his praise of Wallace, albeit (quite properly) not unreservedly so.
I have seen Wood speak once before, at the 2008 New Yorker Festival, but it was on this occasion that he showed what a prudent, insightful, excellent critic he is. While never deviating from the basic stance of fulsome praise, Wood showed that he admired Wallace’s writings and appreciated his concerns and approach, while also pointing out some of the dead-ends that Wallace had constructed for himself.
Wood’s discourse started with an appreciation for Wallace’s “extraordinary ear for speech,” to demonstrate which he quoted several passages. At the very end Wood commented that Wallace, like Henry Green, understood the way in which people “invent” their own words as they speak. To which I’d add, the key to Wallace’s dialogue—as the title suggests, BWIHM has huge chunks of spoken discourse, which also creeps into the omniscient narrator’s patterns as well—is that he understood that even quite ordinary people speak in remarkably pretentious ways, which lead them to mix in (and mangle) hifalutin words like “environs” when they probably shouldn’t.
From there Wood moved to a discussion of a quintessentially Wallacean problem of “the helplessness of the self.” For Wood, Wallace constantly undercuts what ought to be “naive” gestures like a praise of generosity by pointing to the underlying selfishness of the act—and, importantly, each person’s awareness of the contradiction—a condition most thoughtful people suffer from. In his story “The Depressed Person,” we see all too vividly the tendency towards solipsism, a word that informs a great many of Wallace’s characters.
With reference to a brief, Xeroxed passage from Beckett, Wood demonstrated that Wallace has a knack for cannily eliding the meat of a subject, “withholding and repressing what we would actually want to know.” Several of the stories feature “ellipsis and occlusion” about key points.
At the same time, Wood (probably correctly) chided Wallace for an unwillingness to just leave it alone, to let the ambiguity remain. Wallace “tends to overplay his hand,” which tendency leads him to unveil narrative corkers in his stories’ finales that might better have gone merely suggested: “Beckett does not give you the key; Wallace spoils it by giving you the key.”
During the Q&A, there was an excellent question by an older gentleman that went something like, “Can you address the idea of meta-fiction, and meta-meta-fiction, and … how many metas one can tolerate without losing one’s mind?” Wood clearly found this very resonant, stating that one of Wallace’s key themes is indeed precisely that “one can’t escape all of those ‘metas,’ and one also can’t, unfortunately, lose one’s mind.” That is, we lose ourselves in the recursive mental spirals, in which consciousness tends to keep us mired.
I raised my hand too! Riffing off of the earlier questioner, I asked something like, “Wallace resorts to a lot of ‘tricks,’ like footnotes and brackets and so on. Do you ever find yourself wishing that there were an … alternate version of Wallace, who could display his great moral sense and feel for language and precision and character and narrative in a “cleaner” form, without all of the distractions?”
To my great satisfaction, Wood’s answer was terribly expansive and in some ways got to the heart of the conundrum of reading Wallace. He started by saying, “Yes…. I often think that Wallace is ‘performing,’ and sometimes I wish that he would ‘perform’ a bit less.” This was followed by a wonderful impression of a reader encountering a Wallace story, noticing the matchless prose of the opening passages and then flipping ahead to see how far Wallace was going to sustain the performance—and then becoming dismayed at its daunting length and complexity and, perhaps, tricksiness.
Wood then spun out a dichotomy in Wallace’s work, between the “performer” and the more straightforwardly “moral” writer, referring to Zadie Smith’s recent essay on Wallace (which Wood praised) that defended Wallace as precisely an uncomplicated sort of moral writer at root. Wood dismissed this view, citing some of the darker elements in these purportedly clean, positive, and “moral” resolutions, insisting that this tidy, “moral” version of Wallace misses his essence.
Wood felt that what forced Wallace into his great length (and tricks and repetitions and refractions) was his status “also as a great realist—too much of a realist, for my taste.” In other words, the desire to be accurate compelled Wallace to pursue the logic behind the thoughts to their logical conclusion. Wood mentioned a trope of Henry James, that it is the role of the artist to “draw a circle” around the story—in other words, it’s not necessary to replay the inescapability of the dynamic at such length: we could also get the same point in five pages. However, Wood added, even this excessive, mimetic urge within Wallace is an honorable and serious one in an artist.
Afterwards I had the pleasure of meeting well-known literary bloggers Ed Champion and Sarah Weinman for the first time. We gabbed about Wallace and Wood for a while until finally reaching the table behind which Wood had graciously agreed to sign some books. (Most everyone had fled by this time.) When Wood saw me, he eagerly took the opportunity to round out the train of thought my earlier question had sparked. It was a joy to see such a fine critical mind at work—occupied with an object worthy of his contemplation.

Martin Schneider writes:
There is a fantastic event coming up at the 92nd Street Y this month—New Yorker literary critic James Wood does a “First Read” of David Foster Wallace’s adventurous, uneven, maddening, delightful, never-boring short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The event is on Monday, March 22, at 8:15pm, and has a hipster-friendly pricing policy: $19 admission, but only $10 for those 35 and younger (ID will be checked, people, so no funny business).
I had the great pleasure of seeing Wood speak at the 2008 New Yorker Festival, and his intelligence, gentleness, and patience were extraordinary. As a longtime fan of Wallace, I’m genuinely excited to hear what Wood has to say about BIWHM (and by no means do I expect it to be entirely positive).
The announcement of this event induced me to discover that, in case you have not seen it already (I have not) and are a Netflix subscriber, John Krasinski’s 2009 adaptation of the collection is currently available to be streamed on Netflix.
Expect a writeup of the event after it happens! And meanwhile, here’s a lengthy account of the enthralling 92nd St. Y event with Frank Rich and Jane Mayer from last spring.