Gossip Girl and The New Yorker

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November 18, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 3 2 min read

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coverFor 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.

is the author of City on Fire and A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.

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Quality Issue: Last Week’s New Yorker

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June 25, 2007 | 1 book mentioned 2 2 min read

This week’s New Yorker is already on newsstands, but before last week’s issue is a distant memory, I wanted to praise it for being one of the best issues I’ve read in a while. Calvin Trillin’s piece on an episode of vigilante justice in Canada was engaging and well reported and David Owen’s profile of the Arup structural engineering firm was an interesting departure from the magazine’s usual coverage of cultural luminaries in the architecture field (neither article is available online.)The issue was anchored by Seymour Hersh’s most important article since he helped break the Abu Ghraib story in 2004. In this follow up, Hersh delivers compelling evidence that responsibility for Abu Ghraib goes well beyond the handful of soldiers who were said to have acted on their own.But what really capped off the issue for me was Helen Simpson’s refreshing story “Homework,” which had a startlingly different tone from the typical New Yorker short story. Instead of brooding and cereberal, the story is almost joyful from start to finish, augmented by a wry undercurrent of second meaning. Whereas many contemporary stories are played in a minor key, thriving on disfunction, “Homework” is built on a healthy relationship between mother and son as she helps him complete an assignment to describe a “life-changing event.” Rolling her eyes at the silly assignment, the first person narrator mother dictates a made up life to her son, one that includes divorced parents and in particular a globe trotting, carefree mother. There are a few subtexts below the surface as she crafts the story for her son: her own difficult childhood, her desire for a more exciting, less domestic life. But the story is also about imagination and being a kid. I thoroughly enjoyed it.I hadn’t read Simpson’s work before, but I’ll keep an eye out for it now. She’s penned several short story collections over the years, including In the Driver’s Seat, which came out last month.

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From the Newsstand

Fantastic fiction: Allegra Goodman

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July 7, 2005 | 1 book mentioned

I enjoyed the short story in this week’s New Yorker. Allegra Goodman’s story, “Long-Distance Client” gently pokes fun at the exuberance of the late 90s. But the story is also quietly weighty, touching on pain and religion and the whole idea of being “centered” mentally and physically. Very funny, but also moving.I wasn’t familiar with Goodman’s writing before reading the story, but she has a good collection of links up at her Web site. She’s written four books, too:Kaaterskill FallsParadise ParkThe Family MarkowitzTotal Immersion

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From the Newsstand

From the Newsstand: David Foster Wallace’s Philosophical Investigations

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December 16, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 2 min read

Don’t let the lame title fool you – James Ryerson’s Times Magazine essay on David Foster Wallace’s early philosophical writings is a valuable step toward understanding both the novelist and the intellectual situation in which he found himself. Most substantially, Ryerson’s reading of Wallace’s senior thesis reveals a writer concerned not with language qua language, but with the ostensibly discredited field of metaphysics – or rather, with the space between the two.Wallace was the kind of writer who could do anything with language, but seemed to see native gifts, including his own, as pitfalls rather than accomplishments. (Spare a thought for poor Orin Incandenza, trapped under glass.) His pyrotechnic prose style made it easy for some critics to miss, but even as an undergrad, Wallace was aiming higher than mere felicity.Characteristically (for anyone who made it through Everything and More), Wallace’s thesis defends the possibility of metaphysics through a kind of reductio proof. He shows the insufficiency of other philosophical premises, including those of the philosophy of language, for addressing the basic experience of being in the world. This phenomenological move seems to me be about as far as anyone has gotten in the modernist project of clearing the field of philosophy; it echoes the struggles of Wittgenstein, which in turn echo through Wallace’s two long novels. And it explains the sense of aesthetic aporia that hangs over discussions of contemporary fiction.At the same time, Wallace’s ostensible shift from philosophy to fiction points toward an exit. Most of what philosophers have achieved since the modernist moment has come in some genre other than the propositional argument: manifesto, koan, literary criticism… and, yes, literary fiction. And so the end point of Wallace’s thesis seems to mark the beginning of his career as a philosopher – a career he pursued by writing fiction. In literature, he found a “conceptual tool with which [to pursue] life’s most desperate questions” that shortened the “distance from the connections he struggled to make.” It will be the work of future critics to elucidate those connections, without neglecting or negating the singularity of their expression.

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From the Newsstand

The British Best of the Last 25 Years

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October 8, 2006 | 1 book mentioned 1

Not wanting to be left out of the fun and controversy generated by the New York Times list of the top books of the last 25 years, the Guardian has rounded up 150 celebrity judges of its own (120 agreed to particpate), like Monica Ali, Rick Moody, and Jonathan Safran Foer, to vote for the best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005. “How they defined ‘best’ was up to them” is the caveat the Guardian gives us.After the votes were tallied, they bestowed the honor on Booker winner Disgrace by Nobel Laureate J.M Coetzee. Money by Martin Amis was runner up, while Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, Atonement by Ian McEwan, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie all shared third place. Will this list generate as much fevered dicussion as the Times list? I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.

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3 comments:

  1. I watch it. For what it is, it's pretty good, the dialogue is good and clever and alot of times even drops some literary references. The plotting is pretty lame and they almost always use a "someone overhears something he shouldn't have or sees something he shouldn't have" lazy crutch to further the plot. It's no gilmore girls but then what is. And umm, the chicks are hot.

  2. I think part of the reason it makes such an impact for the late 20-30's set is that the lives of these teenagers much more closely resembles the dream-lives of much older, more settled individuals. To my knowledge, not only does the average 17 year old not spend the night sipping martinis at a bar and gallivanting about town in a limo, but that's not what they're shooting for anyway. Also- there was an incredible fuss made about the show that weighs much heavier on its 'older' viewers. It became very culturally relevant for all of the respectable coverage it got in major media, and for the controversy surrounding its content. My guess is that the 19year old college kids don't give a damn about cultural critique or media controversy, unless their film kids- and 20 year old film kids would sooner cut their own throats than admit to watching Gossip Girl no matter how good it is.

  3. I definitely agree with the idea that adults (of the early 30s and onward variety) care a lot more about Gossip Girl than anyone else. Sure the tween set reads the books and the mid-older teens (supposedly watch it for the fashion) but a) there are quite a few book series hip with the tween set, GG doesn't really stand out and b) I believe I read a report somewhere that the tv show's actual ratings from week to week is not as proportionally high as it's media exposure.

    I just started to watch it — I'm sorta a film kid — and it IS a pretty addictive replacement for the OC. I can get away with it by saying I watch it ironically. Something like that.

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From the Newsstand: Michael Lewis Goes to Iceland

From the Newsstand
March 4, 2009 | 1 book mentioned

Michael Lewis turns in yet another tremendous piece in the current issue of Vanity Fair. This one is about the catastrophic financial collapse in Iceland:Walking into the P.M.’s minute headquarters, I expect to be stopped and searched, or at least asked for photo identification. Instead I find a single policeman sitting behind a reception desk, feet up on the table, reading a newspaper. He glances up, bored. “I’m here to see the prime minister,” I say for the first time in my life. He’s unimpressed. Anyone here can see the prime minister. Half a dozen people will tell me that one of the reasons Icelanders thought they would be taken seriously as global financiers is that all Icelanders feel important. One reason they all feel important is that they all can go see the prime minister anytime they like. For those following along at home, we’ve also noted Lewis’ two takes on the Wall Street collapse and his more recent piece on the NBA.

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From the Newsstand

A List with a Twist

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April 21, 2008 | 1 book mentioned

It began at the start of the year with Huck Finn, and Gulliver put in an appearance this week. Along the way, Gatsby and Don Quixote stood on the pedestal and took a bow, their tales championed, their authors heralded.The Globe and Mail, that venerable institution which, not incidentally, happens to pay my salary, has summoned a panel of experts (not, repeat, NOT including yours truly) to choose 50 books – the finest fifty in literary history – drawn from fiction and non-fiction, and including tomes both classic and modern.But this isn’t just your garden variety list. No sir. For each book chosen, an essay is written by a noteworthy scribe (Alberto Manguel makes a case for Dante’s Divine Comedy; Michael Ignatieff for Machiavelli’s The Prince).Each week, one essay is published. There is no order to the publication of the fifty.We’ll check back at the end of the year when the project comes to a close, but in the meantime, here’s the latest essay, Victoria Glendinning’s case for Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. From there, scroll down and look on the left for individual links to each of the other essays published so far.

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From the Newsstand

Found In Translation

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June 5, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 1 2 min read

In the summer of 2004, in what seemed like a simpler time when the Millions was barely a year old, and I was still a couple of months away from adding my two-cents worth (Canadian) to it, Max introduced me to the writings of Ryszard Kapuscinski. While reading Shah of Shahs, and marveling at the reportage and at the powerful, witty and humane voice jumping off of the page, I had to keep reminding myself that I was reading a translation, and that not only were Kapuscinski’s magnificent words and images being translated, but William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand had managed to capture the subtleties of his literary voice.Delivering those translated words so that the reader gets the full experience – all the nuances hidden in the shadows of the language – seems to me to be a monumental task. Think, then, what is involved in translating something which is entirely image. Where the flashes of color, and the music of the words, the rhythms and the tones, must all be conveyed to the innocent reader. Think what must be involved when translating poetry.A recent Globe and Mail article, “An Athlete in the extreme sport of poetry,” profiles Erin Moure, who, along with Robert Majzels, has translated Nicole Brossard’s Cahier de roses et de civilisation (Notebook of Roses and Civilization).On the seemingly daunting task of translating Brossard’s poetry, Moure says: “There are challenges because she has a kind of tone and register, on what we call the macro and micro level, that we have to maintain. Plus, Brossard does things in French that are syntactically strange that we have to find a way of doing in English as well.”The article also discusses the collaborative method that Moure and her co-translator used. Moure would “do three pages in a row, then Bob’ll translate three pages in a row, the next three pages, and so on.”As an interesting aside, Moure also wishes that there were other translations of Brossard’s book: “You can only start to see the texture of the original language really, really when there’s more than one translation.”

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