The new issue of The Southern Policy Law Center’s “Intelligence Report” arrived just in time with a complimentary “Racist Skinheads Roll Call DVD.” I didn’t know what I was going to watch after the final episode of Mad Men.
[Joke aside, do consider contributing to this important institution.]
“‘The more conservative churches need to be reassured that their religious liberty is going to be respected here,’” Rev. Jim Wallis told the Times, which is ridiculous considering how clear the president was declaring a campaign of strategic inquisitions in order to establish his gay-friendly caliphate.
Just about the only thing an Adam Gopnik think piece is good for is to remind you of what a blessing it is not to know him personally, that he doesn’t have your phone number, that he can’t harass you over coffee with some daffy new certainty, that you don’t wake up in the morning to find your inbox sedimented with email upon email of his wee-hour epiphanies. “Gary, I was pondering an essay about Sarkozy and bagels”; “Gary, did you ever consider that our doormen are really our secret sharers?”; “Gary, wait till you hear what I realized about marital lovemaking and all these arcane new banking fees!” Historian, art critic, man of letters, pop culture consumer, francophile, foodie, lover—he’s got all ten fingers on the pulse of his own femoral artery. He never stops with the ideas, his brain is an unmanned fire hose dousing everything in its circumference with his preposterous analogies and analyses, all voiced with a hyperventilating neuroticism implying he shares your wonder at his ability to make our world visible to us anew.
He sees his noble calling as that of the patient explainer who puts things in the terms you can understand, making connections you’d never dream of that place everything in perspective; he talks down to you but only to raise you up. He’s the kind of of apple polisher who would take the history lesson and “translate” it into the kind of jive the kids can dig. “You see, if you imagine that Hitler is kind of like Darth Vader.” Now I get it.
That he is genuinely intelligent and occasionally lucid, particularly when he’s reined in by an external subject not of his own contrivance, makes the word-count shopping spree The New Yorker hands him that much more exasperating. You want to say, as I’m sure many teachers have, Put your hand down, Gopnik, give some of the other students a chance, but it wouldn’t shame him. In every essay you can hear him listening for when one of the grown-ups in the room whispers to another, “What doesn’t Adam know?” The source of his adorable irrepressibility is that he knows he shouldn’t put his hand down, it would be punitive because nobody sees things quite the way he does. Adam believes himself a culture-critical Moses: unto him alone are the Laws of the universe revealed.
I devotedly read his New Yorker musings, as many do, for the inevitable inanity of his essential insights and equations. He is, as was his beloved Darwin, a taxonomist, inventing his own irrefutable classifications. It can’t often be said that solipsism is an ingredient of a writer’s appeal, but Gopnik’s narcissism is inclusive, commodious enough to encompass us all despite the fact that none of us enjoy his leisure and privilege. We are so pleased that he is pleased that we know what he means when he calls a restaurant “equal parts Petit Trianon and Chez Panisse.” We, too, can look back with a triumphant smirk at those who called us “yuppie” back then, “derisively before the world was ours.” For us, too, a seven-course, mid-week Manahattan dinner party is just like Dante’s dark wood. Gopnik’s myopia doesn’t see far beyond himself, but we are flattered that he does see us.
“The Forty-Year Itch,” the thought bubble he salivated for the Comment section of the April 23 issue, is a disappointment. Using an unthreaded needle, he tries to patch together a case for what he calls, “The Golden Forty-Year Rule” (I have to learn another rule?). Several seasons too late, he uses the worship of “Mad Men” as his starting point.
The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past.
While his mystical disclosures about the world are often incoherent, they always have a panting vigor. A mind must do some real stretching, say, to see the correspondence between cookbooks and the Canadian constitution. “The Forty-Year Itch,” however, is lazy, which is a complaint I never thought would apply. And worse, its most trenchant conclusion is cribbed from Daniel Mendelsohn’s rumination about “Mad Men” in the February 24, 2011, issue of The New York Review of Books.
Trying to dissect for himself “Mad Men“‘s appeal to “viewers in their forties and early fifties,” Mendelsohn locates it in the desire of children to understand the behaviors of their parents. He observed:
It’s only when you realize that the most important “eye”—and “I”—in Mad Men belong to the watchful if often uncomprehending children, rather than to the badly behaved and often caricatured adults, that the show’s special appeal comes into focus….[I]t occurs to you that this is, after all, how the adult world often looks to children; whatever its blankness, that world, as recreated in the show, feels somehow real to those of us who were kids back then. As for the appeal: Who, after all, can resist the fantasy of seeing what your parents were like before you were born, or when you were still little—too little to understand what the deal was with them, something we can only do now, in hindsight? And who, after having that privileged view, would want to dismiss the lives they led and world they inhabited as trivial—as passing fads, moments of madness? Who would still want to bash them, instead of telling them that we know they were bad but that now we forgive them?
Here’s the Gopper:
Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories…Matthew Weiner, born in 1965, is the baby in his own series….And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time.
The similarities between the two essays go beyond the quotations here. The comment, Gopnik himself admits, is a “jeu d’esprit,” and does not bear analysis, though it’s not a jeu anybody asked to play.
He should still be a Critic, just a lot less at-Large. Since no one at the magazine will edit—let alone discourage—him, I wish they would at least hire a New Yorker house teacher, one with a ruler, to stand above Adam’s desk and say, Put your hand down, Gopnik, somebody already answered that question.
The Times deserves a special citation today for Unconscious Misogyny and Leering Objectification in its account of the already sordid story of the Secret Service Colombian escapade.
Vajazzled with two beguilingly oversaturated red-light district photos of Colombia’s licit working girls, the article required two male reporters on the ground in Cartagena to gather the indispensable details about the pretty woman at the center of the controversy.
Sitting in her living room wearing a short jean skirt, high-heeled espadrilles and a spandex top with a plunging neckline, the prostitute described how she and another woman were approached by a group of American men at a discotheque.
The fact checking department was hard at work last night confirming with the Styles Section that “espadrilles” was in fact the correct term for the thick-soled, calf-enhancing sandals worn by Latina hookers and the on-duty staffer consulted the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage to certify that the neckline was legitimately “plunging” (“if the collar of a woman’s dress top, shirt, blouse, or other garment concealing her torso exposes not less than two-thirds of the full line of her potential breastial cleavage”).
Neither sartorial nor anatomical description of the men involved was provided. È strano. Bring back “The John Hour.”
Terminate Overly Restrictive “Merry” Expression (TORME), a loose coalition of infants and 93-year-olds, has arranged for several Occupy-type Christmas Day demonstrations in malls and public spaces where PA systems relentlessly stream holiday music.
The group’s chief complaint is the prevalent exclusion of their demographics from the traditional greeting “Merry Christmas,” as directed by the seasonal classic “The Christmas Song.” Long held to be the gold standard of modern Christmas ballads, “The Christmas Song,” written in 1944, has been performed by artists ranging from Nat “King” Cole to Christina Aguilera.
In the last verse, the singer offers “a simple phrase, to kids from one to 92: although it’s been said many times, many ways, ‘Merry Christmas’ to you,” thus, according to a TORME press release, “ostracizing those most vulnerable and most in need of Christmas love and good wishes: the dependent young and the superannuated.”
Harmoniously unifying the normally cantankerous nonagenarian set, the cause has become a rallying point bringing together those at the bookends of life. “We have chosen 2011 as the year to speak out both for ourselves and those unable to speak for themselves,” said, Ida Withers, the surprisingly lucid 98-year-old spokesperson for the group. “We have more in common with the newly born than at first meets the eye.”
The similarities did not escape the notice of conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, who called TORME an “anarchist brigade of the toothless, bald, and immobile.” The childless radio show host said the movement was yet another politically correct attack on traditional Christmas values and said it was “almost enough” to make him reconsider his positions on both abortion and death panels.
“All we ask is for the same respect and graciousness accorded to everybody else,” said Ms. Withers, who has not received a Christmas tiding since 2006. As an alternative, the group has proposed this revision: “And so, I’m offering this simple phrase, before the Reaper comes to call: although it’s been said many times, many ways, ‘Merry Christmas’ to all.”
The press release concluded, “To discriminate against the most frail and needy among us because of an arrogant, lazy lyric tossed off by a scat singer 67 years ago is unconscionable, and we cannot let it stand.”
The literary world is both atwitter and aghast. Joan Didion, whose best-selling memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking and the new Blue Nights recount her disorienting, disconsolate grief over the deaths of her husband and her daughter, respectively, is preparing to reveal the subject of her next book.
“I could not let go of the topic,” Ms. Didion said. “Mourning and bereavement, neither of which is escapable, no matter how long we put off thinking about it, has become my preoccupation. Or, should I say, that it has not let go of me? That kind of sadness, the kind that wraps around your shoulders like a heavy shawl, does not let go. Life, it seems, changes, and your work changes with it.”
Knowing that an announcement of the object of her latest lamentation is imminent, many of those closest to Ms. Didion personally and professionally have had strong reactions.
Her longtime agent, Lynn Nesbit, commented by email that, although she has worked with Ms. Didion for more than three decades, they’re “really not that close.”
“She’s on some kind of streak,” said Robert Silvers, 81, who for many years has been her editor at The New York Review of Books. “She’s never had success like this and she’s not going to stop now. It would be like asking Hershey’s to stop making chocolate. I just have my assistant tell her I’m not here. I love Joan, I really do, but I’m nearly 82 years old and I’ll be damned if I get in the way of her stink eye.”
“I’ve never felt better,” said Sonny Mehta of Alfred A. Knopf, her most recent publisher. “Anyway, it’s contractual. I don’t know who it’s going to be yet, but if she wants someone to publish her, it ain’t gonna be about me.”
“Almost everything in our lives is revocable,” remarked Ms. Didion. “Our love, our democracy, the wines we drink in the summer. The only irrevocable thing is death, though our minds, passively accustomed to the accommodations of a decadent culture, are unable to process irrevocability. This is my afflatus now, the direction my writing is taking. I cannot wait for death to visit me again to pursue this dreadful muse.”
Quite a different response was elicited from one of Ms. Didion’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders, Michiko Kakutani, the lead book critic at The New York Times. Having for years championed her work, Ms. Kakutani said it would be an “honor” to become the focal point of Ms. Didion’s despondency. “I can only hope that her reflections on my death inspire a book containing the same coruscating yet controlled prose that she brought to the passing John Gregory Dunne and Quintana Roo,” Ms. Kakutani said, referring to Ms. Didion’s late husband and daughter. “My one regret is that I won’t be alive to review it.”
Henry Fountain, Poet-in-Residence at the New York Times, was spontaneously awarded the 2011 Bollingen Prize, one of the most prestigious distinctions available to American poets, for his free verse description of Hurricane Irene, the storm which battered the East Coast this weekend, though largely spared the metropolitan area.
The choice of winner is usually the subject of long and heated debate by a panel of experts which considers the work of thousands of candidates and weighs the literary merits of each. But, according to a spokesperson for Yale University which offers the prize, this year’s decision was quick and soundly unanimous. “After a calamity of this magnitude,” she said in a statement prepared by the judges, “it can sometimes take decades, even centuries, for poets to put it in perspective. It is a rare thing, indeed, to see words so soon after such an event and know that they have captured the experience for posterity.”
Mr. Fountain, who claims to have been deeply influenced by the English Romantic poets Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, drew upon his inspirations to write about the changeable, fearsome storm.
In an acceptance speech, Mr. Fountain remarked on the role of the poet, “Like all men, we are a part of nature. Nature’s serenity and its fury are merely translated by us into words we hope remain faithful to their source. The bar Wordsworth set for himself is my own, ‘to describe the natural world in a language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over it a certain coloring of imagination.’”
The eminent Yale University literary critic Harold Bloom, who has written several long books in praise of Mr. Fountain’s work, said, “Without resorting to imitation, he brazenly invokes his poetic precursors, yet still manages, through a Gnostic vision that is strongly his own, to wrest supremacy from them.”
The Yale spokesperson said that the panel’s decision was based on a particular passage from Mr. Fountain’s winning entry, titled, “Hurricane Lost Steam as Experts Misjudged Structure and Next Move”:
But when finally chugged into the New York area on Sunday, it was like an overweight jogger just holding on at the end of a run.
For comparison, Professor Bloom recited from memory lines from Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” to illustrate the strength of Mr. Fountain’s unique poetic vision:
Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning!
“Without question,” Professor Bloom continued, “Fountain’s latest composition for the newspaper changes the way we hear these lines, as if, perhaps, Shelley had learned his craft from Fountain.”
From the Journal:
With Irene approaching, President Barack Obama planned to return to Washington from vacation on Friday night rather than Saturday morning, to deal with the hurricane.
According to a highly placed source close to the President who did not want her name revealed, Mr. Obama was overstating his concern about Hurricane Irene and the welfare of Americans caught in the storm’s path.
“He does this every year,” said the source. “He always comes up with some excuse to leave the night before so he doesn’t have to deal with the traffic getting on to I-95 around Providence.”
According to White House officials, President Obama has strict policies with regard to long car trips which include bathroom stops only at on-highway rest areas and welcome centers, in-car snacks, and he will entertain no questions regarding estimated arrival times.
“One year it was some healthcare bullshit,” said the source, “one year it was Bo. If it wasn’t a hurricane this time, he would have said he was worried about the White House vegetable garden. I’m like, ‘Don’t drag me into this, hon. Just admit it, you campaigned on that inspiring Father’s Day speech, but you’re just another uptight dad like all the rest of them.’”
The news came today:
We could be friends, Jay, but I could never, ever “like” you.
Millions of American bloggers have expressed ambivalence towards the plight Pham Minh Hoang, the French-Vietnamese professor sentenced to a three-year prison term for blog posts considered to be seditious by the Vietnamese government.
“I’ve been doing this for 12 years,” began blogger Matt Green, 32, of Rockville, MD, articulating a complaint common to many in the Western online community. “I post four or five times a day, I tweet, I link to everybody, and my page traffic still sucks. I swear, I can’t get arrested.”
So absorbed in the government’s stalemate over the decision to raise the debt ceiling, the bitterly partisan deficit debate, and now S & P’s downgrading of nation’s credit status, all but a few of the almost 160,000 American troops deployed to combat zones around the world even remember they are at war.
The downing of the Chinook helicopter in the Tangi Valley of Afghanistan on Saturday, which claimed the lives of 30 Americans including Navy SEAL Team 6 commandos, made for the deadliest day of fighting in the decade-long war. But like most American consumers of the media, soldiers from the valleys of Afghanistan to the deserts of Libya were less concerned with the escalating violence in their regions than with the inability of Democrats and Republicans to forge a civil agreement as to the economic future of the nation.
“It’s really hard to be here,” said Maj. Andre Conela of the Fourth Brigade Combat in northern Afghanistan. “My family is back in the States and it hurts to think about what they must be going through.”
President Obama’s speech concerning the nation’s declining credit status was watched with great interest by our servicemen and women who fear for their loved ones back home.
“I was glad for the shout-out that the President gave to us soldiers in his speech, though when he said that ‘No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a triple-A country,’ we all had tears in our eyes,” said Lt. Col. Theodore Willis, the commander of the 10th Mountain Division’s Task Force. “We were especially grateful that the President said the helicopter ‘crashed’ during its mission. The truth is that it was mercilessly shot out of the sky by violent enemy forces who hate our presence, but what is that compared to the freefall of the Dow?”
Reading the news and watching the television reports today, many were relieved that coverage of the country’s overseas adventures was hidden deep inside the front sections of the papers, if it appeared at all.
According to Marine Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, “Once upon a time we used war to distract ourselves from the disastrous economy. Now it’s the other way around.”
The summer of 1987 I was 20 years old and worked as a technician at a company called Cardiopet. Based in my hometown, Cardiopet was a service that provided remote EKG readings for small veterinary offices. Subscribing vets were furnished with a special machine sprouting electrodes which, when properly administered to their animal patient, translated the electrical signals into a buzz like the sound of a dial-up modem. When everything was in place, the doctor would call Cardiopet and a technician would answer the phone to run down a checklist of diagnostic questions before taking the EKG transmission. In addition to species, breed, age, and weight, I’d ask about body temperature, breathing, arrhythmias, sleep apnea, appetite, seizures, bowel irregularities, (when applicable) feline leukemia, and blood levels. Then the vets would hold their phone receiver to their machine while I attached my receiver to a corresponding machine in my cubicle equipped with a needle and tape which would construe their buzzings as a charted line legible to our in-house staff of veterinary cardiologists.
All of this preamble is to say that, by the age of 20, staying with my parents on Long Island during summer break, I’d lived a little, seen a few things, been around the block. This was back in the ’80s, mind you, when I still drank a lot of Coke. I could quote verbatim from Glengarry Glen Ross—the play! I knew the score.
Now, “lived a little” means I read deeply—aspirationally—into the pages of New York Magazine and Vanity Fair. “Seen a few things” means I read Michael Musto’s nightlife column in The Village Voice. “Been around the block” means I drove around the block. And “knowing the score” means I’d read Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and took sniffy displeasure at its gimmicky second-person address (his “you,” doing lines in a bathroom stall, was certainly not me; I was working at Cardiopet) and its earnest Hemingway sentimentality. But I nevertheless envied the starry life of its author whose debauched handsomeness was relentlessly captured in overexposed flashbulb photographs and carried the supercilious prerogative of literary acclaim.
The illicit urbanity, such as I perceived it, of the New York Brat Pack was a lodestar for this inchoate, undirected, entirely licit suburban Jewish boy. I was only a 35-minute drive from New York City but was held back from its grown-up raptures by the velvet rope in my mind. That didn’t stop me from envisioning myself in McInerney’s circle, jousting with vicious bon mots, lounging on Memphis furniture in someone’s spotlit Greene St. loft with lots of vodka and cigarettes and only the Eric Fischls lining the walls to absorb the English Beat booming from the speakers. I had no idea what might merit my admission. Did I imagine I’d written a witty Vintage Contemporaries collection with one of those New Wave covers like a Duran Duran album? I doubt it. Even my fantasy life wasn’t that ambitious.
Unlike me, my best friend, Jon, had substantial dreams and measurable talents. Conjure a confident, good-looking 20-year-old with disarming intellectual precocity, quick verbal reflexes, and an impressively mature conscience; that was Jon. He always attracted the most interesting people and the summer before, at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, one of them was Dick Cavett.
Early in June, Dick invited Jon to accompany him to a spectacular event being held on the Upper East Side. AmFAR had used its considerable celebrity muscle to organize Art Against AIDS, an auction fundraiser to be held at Sotheby’s. For reasons I’m unclear about, Jon invited me to ride shotgun. He magnanimously sprung me from the Cardiopet parking lot and in no time at all, driving against rush hour traffic, we were outside the building waiting for our escort. I stood there on the curb next to Jon in my only suit and a tie borrowed from my father’s closet as black Lincoln cocoons released flutters of butterflies right in front of us. Bianca Jagger and Roy Lichtenstein. We waited. Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere. We waited. Robert Rauschenberg and Yoko Ono. We waited long past our rendezvous and in those benighted days before cell phones we had no reassurance at all that Dick was still coming.
A yellow cab pulled up and an apologetic Cavett stepped out followed, incongruously, by Jay McInerney. Dick greeted Jon warmly, me graciously, and explained that they both found themselves in Times Square futilely hailing off-duty cabs, late for the same party. He introduced us to Jay and we four walked together into the lobby. The plan was that Dick would go to the wicket and try to cadge an extra invitation out of them for me. He and McInerney set off and in a few moments McInerney returned to where we were. The three of us watched Dick apparently in negotiation with the woman behind the glass. Meanwhile, there went Debbie Harry and Elizabeth Taylor and Larry Fortensky. Even in a room with Larry Fortensky I felt like an Arial Narrow preposition on a page of boldface.
When it seemed clear that Cavett wasn’t going to bring back the extra ticket, McInerney turned to us and said, “Looks like it’s gonna be Burger Heaven for you guys.”
There it was: I was living inside a daydream. In my imagination, I had been right about him all along. That Jay McInerney would expend his arrogance, his condescension, his disdain on us was like an anointing. I basked in the supererogatory cruelty.
Seconds later Dick handed Jon and me his two tickets; we presented these boarding passes and Dick swanned past the gatekeepers with courtly fame his only credential.
* * *
Things have changed for you and me, Jay. It was hard to know then what would happen to us. Time slows us all, forces reflection. The books don’t come so easily anymore and don’t matter much when they do. The world isn’t waiting for your every word. Unless you want to count that wine column in the Journal, maybe there is no second act. Even I don’t think of you that often. You don’t photograph quite so well now, but who does? The lines are etched in my forehead, even in repose. We have both moved on.
I see that you simultaneously avowed the same to 342 others, as in some Moonie wedding, but that does not dilute, Jay, the history and the memories we exclusively share. So, it is in the spirit of ripened reconciliation that I am proud to announce that, finally, after 24 years,
[UPDATED HERE]
“[I]t was necessary to betray as hideously as possible those who loved him best…. And the same was true of his suicide as a career move, which was the kind of adulation craving-calculation that he loathed in himself….” - Jonathan Franzen on his friend David Foster Wallace, The New Yorker, April 18, 2011
“And I still have to read The Pale King. That’s high up on the list.” - Jonathan Franzen on his summer reading, TIME, July 11, 2011
No one was more surprised than I to learn that, according to the Venezuelan constitution, “in the case of office holder’s grievous dereliction of duties, extended absence, or incapacitation due to reasons of ill health,” I become the president of Venezuela! I’m honored and proud. Does anyone have Rosetta Stone software for Spanish (Latin America)?
