Today’s Elliot Spitzer scandal sent me back to the New Yorker archives, to revisit Nick Paumgarten’s excellent profile, from December 10. This time around, I was struck less by the “what you see is what you get” thesis of some Spitzer intimates, than by this proposition, from an unnamed source: “Spitzer lunges. He seems not to be a person of strategy. He slipped on a banana peel, or six, and once down has thrashed around.” It remains to be seen if, amid the thrashing, his newfound talent for “extracting oneself from an intractable position” holds up.
Deeper into the Quicksand
From the Newsstand: Michael Lewis on Shane Battier
We at The Millions are fans of great sports journalism and of Michael Lewis, so recommending Lewis' New York Times Magazine feature on Houston Rockets forward Shane Battier is a no-brainer. The hook:Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.Lewis goes on to make the (slightly Gladwellian) case for a new statistical approach to basketball. Nonetheless, his piece implicitly underscores what we've suspected all along... nothing captures "the intangibles" like good writing.
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A List With A Twist Revisited
In the spring, we reported on an unusual event unfolding in the Books pages of The Globe and Mail. Each week, through 2008, someone - typically a published author or an academic - would write an essay for the Globe championing a book. Fifty books in total. They were not ranked in any order, and in reality they form a jumping-off point into a world of knowledge and literary imagination.About a third of the books championed were novels, from such usual suspects as War and Peace, Don Quixote, and Middlemarch, through Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, and One Hundred Years of Solitude.More interesting were the non-novels on the list. There were collected shorts from Borges, Kafka and Chekhov, and collected poems from Eliot and Yeats. There was Dante's Divine Comedy, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Decameron, and The Mahabharata, a 2000-year-old verse from India. Lady Murasaki's 1000-year-old The Tale of Genji pops up. Plays by Becket and Goethe were also championed.The King James Bible is there; as is the Koran. Books of philosophy by Plato and political economy by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx made the list.Darwin's Origin of Species is there; so is Diderot's Encyclopedia, Herodotus' Histories, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Rachel Carson's proto-environmental Silent Spring. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her 300-year-old rebel yell, is there, as are St. Augustine's Confessions, and de Montaigne's Essays, his 16th-century invention of a genre.Beside each essay are links to all the essays that came before it. So you should go to the 50th essay, championing Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, to get easy links to the other 49. Thank goodness for that, because there doesn't seem to be a central web page listing all 50, and I advise against trying to search through the Globe and Mail's Books section archives unless you want to get a blinding headache.
Voting on Britain’s best living writer
The new British quarterly, The Book, is kicking things off with a poll to determine, by popular vote, "the Greatest Living British Writer." As Gordon Kerr writes in his essay introducing the poll, "Now, there's a question! It's such a big one, in fact, that it requires capitals at the beginning of each word!" Indeed. If you've got an opinion on the matter, cast your vote. I couldn't decide - how does one pick in polls like this? - so I selected John Le Carre, who seems to be sufficiently influential and popular while at the same time a little bit outside of the literary box. Thoughts?
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War Issues
Some weeks my New Yorker shows up on Tuesday; other weeks it doesn't arrive until the weekend. This week it showed up late, and that's why I'm writing about it even as it's being removed from news stands to make way for next week's issue. But I was glad to finally get to it, especially after noting that it was the summer fiction issue. But it's not the typical summer fiction issue and certainly doesn't fit the accepted idea of "Summer Reading." This issue is about war, and I'm glad that the New Yorker decided to put together an issue like this, since it is shockingly easy - three years after we invaded Iraq - to forget that this country is at war right now. It's also fitting since we've been discussing war quite a bit at The Millions lately. Last month I reviewed An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson, which led readers to help me compile lists of World War 2 fiction and nonfiction. Vasily Grossman appeared on both lists, and his story "In Kislovodsk" (not available online) is in this New Yorker. Also contributing is Uwem Akpan with "My Parents' Bedroom." Akpan was in last year's debut fiction issue.But more broadly, the issue is a nice reminder that as life goes on here in the States, war rages on in Iraq. The New Yorker has done this most vividly by providing "Soldiers' Stories: Letters, e-mails, and journals from the Gulf." The magazine has also created an audio slide show for the online version of the piece:This week, The New Yorker publishes a selection of letters, journal entries, and personal essays by soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines who served in the current war in Iraq. The writings are part of a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts called Operation Homecoming. An anthology of the work, edited by the historian Andrew Carroll, will be published this fall by Random House. Here, in an Audio Slide Show produced by Matt Dellinger, five of the servicemen read from their work, accompanied by their photographs.
A modest proposal?
They eat babies in Guangzhou. This appalling side note appeared in this week's issue of Newsweek International in an article about problems with Chinese food safety. The article profiles Chinese journalist Zhou Qing who was nominated as a finalist for the Lettre Ulysses Award for his work covering food safety issues. According to Zhou, Chinese captains of industry blithely pickle vegetables with agricultural strength insecticides to keep flies away and sprinkle preserved fish with "sulphur salt," an industrial additive deadly in amounts as small as three grams.None of this is very surprising, after a recent shipment of poisoned Chinese toothpaste and cough syrup caused a spate of deaths in Central and South America. What is surprising, however, is the inspiration for Zhou's book: an unusual dish he claims was served to him in a Guangdong restaurant. From the Newsweek article:[The soup was] placenta soup... The placentas come from the aborted fetuses of migrant women workers who are unmarried or out of line with the government's one-child policy. During dinner, Zhou peeked into the back kitchen and saw the cooks scooping out fetuses.While this tidbit doesn't seem to have earned even a blink from the jaded staff at Newsweek, I practically spit my morning coffee across the monitor.Could this really be the one child policy in action? Or is it a hoax perpetuated by an overzealous reporter? Poisoning cough syrup is one thing, but eating babies? Although stories of women eating their own placentas abound, the issues raised by the potential commodification of the placenta are profoundly troubling. China's moral compass must be spinning like a dervish.A cynicism well honed on long exposure to fabulist reportage on Asia, immediately took me to Snopes.com, the vaunted debunker of rumors and urban legend. The Snopes team decries a similar story as nothing more than racist claptrap. But a quick trip to Google uncovers a wealth of articles, including one from Bloomberg in the International Herald Tribune (which introduces a new wrinkle... the placentas are imported from Japan) and one from the Daiyuan Times... in Chinese. Who to believe?The blood libel has been around for at least as long as the Jews, and probably well before. There are few crimes more transgressive and titillating than cannibalism, and people with an axe to grind are often quick to call their enemies out as baby eaters. A quick background check on the Daiyuan Times, for example, shows that it is owned by the Falun Gong, a Chinese religious organization that has experienced ruthless oppression at the hands of the Chinese government. If you can't trust the food from China, how can you trust the journalism?Not that the United States is much better. Even putting aside purebred fictionalists like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, we're still left with a herd of reporters so eager for a good story, they're unwilling to get to the bottom of it. With old hands like Judith Miller selling entire wars based completely on rumor and innuendo, it's hard to find fault with an ambitious tyro for practicing his chops on a bowl of fetus soup.So do they eat babies in China? Newsweek, at least, is sticking with Zhou's account. His book, What Kind of God?, is currently only available in Chinese, but the general hysteria building up around Chinese exports seems to be making room for a bestseller. Eat your heart out Upton Sinclair.See Also: The Lettre Ulysses goes on hiatus
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Gossip Girl and The New Yorker
For some weeks now, in a pretense to professorial hipness, I've been using the TV show Gossip Girl as a sort of all-purpose pop-cultural referent with my students. Whenever I'm at a loss to explain a concept, I say something like, "This would be like on Gossip Girl, if Blair Waldorf told Serena van der Woodsen..." The ugly truth, however, is that I've never seen the show.My students seem to take this in stride, and to find it both hilarious and tragic that I imagine it to be a cultural touchstone for their generation. In fact, they tell me, it is more of a cultural touchstone for mine. Other teachers apparently share my delusion that Gossip Girl is the central televisual event of the lives of undergraduates. Meanwhile, the undergraduates order Six Feet Under from Netflix.So where, one wonders, did the Gossip Girl meme gain traction? I can't answer for my colleagues, but Gossip Girl got my own attention through two roundabout connections with The New Yorker magazine. First, Janet Malcolm (of all people) penned an essay on the literary merits of the book series on which the show is based. Malcolm was critical of the TV adaptation, but noted, of the books, that adolescence is a delicious last gasp (the light is most golden just before the shadows fall) of rightful selfishness and cluelessness... I would like to go on telling Blair stories until they are gone.Then, Wallace Shawn - a great playwright and actor and the son of the late New Yorker editor William Shawn - landed a recurring role as Blair's mother's boyfriend. "The life of an actor can be very enviable," Shawn told the New York Times this week. "If the phone rings and somebody says, 'I see you as the leader of a group of aliens with enormous heads... I think that's fantastic."That its glancing acquaintance with these two writers was enough, in my mind, to establish Gossip Girl's centrality to the zeitgeist probably says more about The New Yorker's role as a taste-maker for the thirtysomething set than it does about the CW's role as a taste-maker for teens. Still, the primetime hours have not been quite the same for me since The O.C. went off the air. Janet Malcolm, literary to the end, would have me fill them with Gossip Girl books, but with Wallace Shawn joining the cast, I'm tempted to brave her disapproval and start watching the show.
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