Margaret Talbot's New Yorkerarticle about Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the gay-marriage case that could end up before the Supreme Court, is a piece of first-rate reporting. Its central question ("Is it too soon to petition the Supreme Court on gay marriage?") leads to interesting parallels with Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Loving v. Virginia (1967), which made interracial marriage legal in all 50 states.
David Grann's New Yorkerarticle about Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas for triple infanticide despite expert analysis that made him appear innocent, is remarkable, heartbreaking, and worth reading every single word of. I couldn't put it down until I finished it. Beautifully structured and written, with a memorable figure at its center and many illuminating passages on the criminal justice system, the death penalty, and the nuances of arson inspection. One of the magazine's finest articles this year.
Novelist (and novel addict) Nicholson Baker took a good, hard look at Amazon's e-reader last week in The New Yorker, and ended up recommending... the iPod Touch or iPhone. Ouch.
If you find yourself around a copy of this week's New Yorker, make sure to read Paul Rudnick's hilarious account of writing a comic screenplay about nuns for Disney. (Spoiler alert: It eventually became Sister Act.) The guy has never been funnier. His tell-all piece reads like Sedaris in his prime, with a showbiz edge, or like the best work of This American Life veteran David Rakoff. Just excellent stuff, from start to finish.
The latest New Yorker features not only a review by Malcolm Gladwell of Wired editor Chris Anderson's new book, Free (about the Internet phenomenon of something -- music, information, etc. -- for nothing), but also a profile by Ariel Levy of Nora Ephron, with an emphasis on her soon-to-be-released Julie & Julia, in which Meryl Streep plays Julia Child.
I've long been snobby about romance novels, and though Lauren Collins' interesting profile of genre queen Nora Roberts didn't change my mind, it does offer considerable insight into how these books get written, and why people read them. (It's not, apparently, because they're miserable and loveless and want pure escapism. Well, at least not always.)
One of my favorite New Yorker writers examines that age-old question – can writing be taught? – in the current issue. (The image above depicts Robert Frost, second from left, as a writer-in-residence at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.)
The artist I first encountered on C89.5 gets the New Yorker profile treatment this week. (I've had "Poker Face" stuck in my head, off and on, for longer than I care to admit.) Also worth reading: Margaret Talbot's piece on the off-label use of Adderall and other "neuroenhancers." Particularly interesting is the following passage, which echoes the dilemma I faced before going on Lexapro:
Chatterjee told me that many people who come to his clinic are cognitively preoccupied versions of what doctors call the “worried well.” The day I visited his office, he had just seen a middle-aged woman, a successful Philadelphia lawyer, who mentioned having to struggle a bit to come up with certain names. “Here’s an example of someone who by most measures is doing perfectly fine,” Chatterjee said. “She’s not having any trouble at work. But she notices she’s having some problems, and it’s very hard to know how much of that is just getting older.” Of course, people in her position could strive to get regular exercise and plenty of intellectual stimulation, both of which have been shown to help maintain cognitive function. But maybe they’re already doing so and want a bigger mental rev-up, or maybe they want something easier than sweaty workouts and Russian novels: a pill.
My conundrum, like that of the woman Chatterjee cites, was of the chicken-and-egg variety. Maybe regular exercise, a better diet, and, say, a healthy dose of Landmark Education would have done the trick -- or maybe I needed a chemical boost before I could even muster the energy to try any of those strategies. I had to decide, before using medication, whether I was a member of the "worried well" or genuinely unwell and in need of pharmaceutical intervention. The result has been a mixed bag -- Lexapro is hardly a cure-all -- but I don't think I'll ever regret giving it a try.
What do I enjoy reading about in my leisure time? That's right: torture. Specifically, solitary confinement, the subject of Atul Gawande's excellent article in a recent New Yorker.
The New Yorker's fiction isn't as uneven as its poetry, and I should read it more often. Tessa Hadley's recent "She's the One" is a fine, low-key tale of buried sorrow, sharply and straightforwardly written. Well worth a read. Plus, that photo!
Jeffrey Toobin has an enjoyable article on Obama's Senate replacement in the latest New Yorker. Not only does it boast one of the wittier illustrations to run in the magazine of late (see above), its portrayal of Burris as "a figure of fun, because he was highly egocentric" -- so says former Chicago ward committeeman Alan Dobry -- offers the reader an opportunity for genuine schadenfreude. That Burris has already commissioned a mausoleum with "words of self-celebration carved into the wall," and that the achievements it records aren't overwhelmingly impressive, is entertaining enough; that he named his son Roland Jr. and his daughter -- wait for it -- Rolanda (not making this up) pretty much takes the cake. I've always loved The New Yorker's political profiles, and this one, in its sly way, posits an interesting idea:
In his very ordinariness, Burris may represent a triumph of sorts for the civil-rights movement, which was, at least in part, a struggle for black people to be seen as just like everybody else.
D.T. Max's article in this week's New Yorker explores The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's unfinished third novel. The quietly iconic author of Infinite Jest committed suicide last year; my favorite of his works is the long essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which lays bare the creepy nature of luxury cruises. Wallace's voice was consistently dazzling in its intelligence, and his sense of humor was both pointed and good-natured.
His superficial cleverness tended to give way to a kind of aching sadness, and Max's excellent piece reveals that this melancholy existed both inside him and in his vision of America, and Americans. His dissection of media and marketing, of the tiny tragedies of our consumerist society -- like his examination of the "courtesy smile" that's become a cloying, wholly counterproductive staple of customer service -- was rarely less than brilliant. I found a few of his observations, as noted in the article, particularly compelling:
In a letter to Nadell, he had made a promise: “I will be a fiction writer again or die trying.”
This, it seems to me, is precisely the kind of fervor that aspiring writers want; to those who possess it, however, it can be more affliction than blessing.
Wallace was pushing himself to get beyond the facile skepticism of “Broom.” In 1993, he told Whiskey Island, a literary magazine, “This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values, and it’s our job to make them up.”
The quote above leads nicely into the next one:
As he told Salon, “I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values."
Indeed. That's more or less what I'm working through these days; no wonder Wallace resonated with Generation Y. And finally, the quote that might hit closest to home for me:
To DeLillo he wrote, “I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do, but it does, and now I’m back here flogging away (in all senses of the word) and feeding my own wastebasket.”
I feel this way about writing journalistic pieces versus writing fiction -- the former isn't that hard for me, whereas I can barely get myself to contemplate the latter. Writing, it seems, was the ultimate "supposedly fun thing" in Wallace's life. Yet unlike the frighteningly prepackaged cruise he describes in the essay, he could never get himself to abandon writing, to never do it again. For that, at least, we can be grateful.
The first trailer gave me hope. In fact, I thought it was one of 2008's best, thanks in part to the oddly appropriate Smashing Pumpkins song it's set to:
Then I saw the newest trailer, and my sneaking suspicion that 300 director Zack Snyder wouldn't do right by the legendary graphic novel -- well, it seems a lot more justified now. No surprise, but still disappointing:
What worries me: the instrumental music, which makes the movie seem like a fairly typical superhero flick; the frequent use of slow motion; and the sight of Matthew Goode in his Ozymandias outfit. (Masked-avenger costumes don't always make a dignified transition from page to screen, as Batman & Robin's George Clooney can tell you.) Also, Muse? I have nothing in particular against the band, but the choice of "Take a Bow" is so much more obvious than the apocalyptic Pumpkins B-side that helped make the first trailer so memorable.
I'll be in Vancouver on March 6, when Watchmen opens, so I'm not likely to see it with the most ardent fanboys, but I'll get around to it once I'm back in Seattle. After all, 2009's biggest event movie thus far has been... what? He's Just Not That Into You? Give me crime-fighting freaks over tepid rom-com fluff anytime. Well, not anytime, but certainly this time. Also, however the script and direction shake out, Little Children's Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach (who narrates the second trailer) is a brilliant bit of casting. No doubt about that.
One last note: I hadn't yet read Tad Friend's wonky piece on movie marketing when Cloverfield smashed January box-office records last year, but I've read it now, and I'll be eager to see how Snyder's final product compares to what the ads have been selling us for the last six months or so.
The New Yorker writer responsible for "The Next Big Bet," one of the magazine's finest arts features of the '00s, is back with a piece about movie marketing, and you know what? I might just read it right now. Can't believe I missed it the first time around. Maybe my new pledge to take the bus to work three times a week (which will be a lot more meaningful once my car is fixed and I actually have the option to drive) will help me get back to my peak New Yorker-reading pace. Believe it or not, there were a couple months in which I wasn't behind. At all. I'd actually be ready for each new issue when it arrived. Brigadoon, I know.
In other news, I've created a Wikipedia article about Childhaven. It's a work in progress (note Wikipedians' request for the citing of references or sources), but I think it's off to a pretty decent start.
Reading The New Yorker's artful collection of excerpts from the late author's oeuvre is like taking a tiny master class. From a droll poem about neutrinos (which in 1960 were a hot topic) to the sensuality and unnerving suspense of "Elsie by Starlight" (2004), the magazine's tribute effectively demonstrates to Updike neophytes why he's so widely celebrated.
As a writer, I appreciate the way this assortment hopscotches from fiction to poetry, then to memoir, and back to fiction, with a few book reviews tossed in for good measure. It's an impressive display of Updike's versatility, but it's also inspiring, since he makes genre-hopping look tremendously fun and rewarding. Also well worth a look: Adam Gopnik's lovely obituary, and Roger Angell's even lovelier one. The first makes me want to read Updike; the second makes me want to write fiction.
It's Bon Iver's "Skinny Love," and I blame my fixation with it on Sasha Frere-Jones' recent New Yorker piece. And while we're on the subject of The New Yorker: John Updike, a frequent contributor to its pages, has died.
