Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Me.
Me who?
Whom?
I don’t get it.
We have a winner!
Year: 2005
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Bullseye
We haven’t had a chance to look at the new issue of the New Yorker–the one that has been entirely underwritten by the Target corporation. That’s because we haven’t received our copy, and this is added to the bank of anecdotal evidence that the magazine is delivered to nicer neighborhods first, or perhaps to readers who are more loyal than we are–though that’s hard to believe. Our mad love is documented–published even!
But we have already been sucked into the vain conversation about whether that was a good thing to do or not. Some are getting quite shrill about this, and where there are shrill journalists, there usually aren’t nearly enough drinks on the bar.
Lewis Lazare, for example. Down in Chicago, from his seat at the media desk at the unimpeachably righteous Sun-Times, where advertisers are held to the highest standards (of, you know, check-signing and remittance–post office will not deliver without proper postage!), Lazare calls this “the most jaw-dropping collapse of the so-called sacred wall between editorial and advertising in modern magazine history.”
Like we say, we haven’t seen it yet, so we’re not sure whether the hyperbole is warranted. But we’re suspicious. First, in principal the idea is not all that galling. Think, for example, of Firestone’s long, singular, solo underwriting of the radio concert series, and an entire symphonic orchestra. Or of Mobil’s unassisted check-signing for Masterpiece Theater. Practically every season, there are a couple of television programs that are presented without commercials, the largesse of Ford, say, or Microsoft, or Bill McGuire. (Uh, maybe not Bill McGuire.) It’s not unprecedented in the world of magazines either, and in recent years, some of the very best glossies are actually owned and operated by major blue-chip advertisers. (Think of Sony Style, or Benneton Colors–both terrific titles where, one could argue, the fact that Corporate Daddy has chased the wolf away from the door, actually makes the magazine more delightfully idiosyncratic, interesting, provocative. But that’s a different animal.*)
The way Lazare describes some of the issue is a little troubling, if it is–as he claims–as difficult to distinguish ad from edit space. This would suggest the collusion of editors with the advertising people, but then again maybe the conclusion should be a big fat “So what?” It sounds as if the Target campaign is mostly visual, and in a magazine that is typically about 85 percent edit to art, can it be that difficult to discern edit art from advertising art?
Most troubling of all, we guess, is Lazare’s sort of cavalier dismissal of the creative work that undoubtedly went into the “project”–Target wished to credit the artists involved, and this stinks to Lazare’s high heaven.
Often, prigs of Lazare’s stripe assume an awful lot about the history of “modern magazines.” We just happen to be reading a biography of E.B. White lately, and we were interested to learn that some of the best, smartest advertisements in The New Yorker in the halcyon 30s and 40s were actually written by White . (Granted, most were house ads to build subscriptions. Note, though, that White was first an advertising copywriter before he ever took the woolen tunic and vows of poverty of the Edit department. ) We’ve mentioned before, too, that editor Harold Ross actually read the ads in the magazine, and in some cases edited (or suggested edits) in the ad space–largely because advertisements were narrative in form, and looked almost exactly like edit space, and he didn’t want the ads to be held to a lower standard than the edit, because he felt it brought the whole magazine down a notch.
When Lazare expresses outrage at crediting the artists for a project he believes readers are too stupid to recongize as an advertising project, he echoes a most common prejudice. Creative people working in the ad space are paid handsomely, so they don’t get the byline and the non-monetary compensation in prestige that their poor little brothers and sisters get in the edit space. But this too is not a timeless truism inscribed on the stone tablet of Ye Old Testament of Magazine Rules. In a history of Esquire magazine, for example, we recently read that legendary founding editor Arnold Gingrich actually argued the other way-that the fine art appearing in rpestigious advertisments of the 30s and 40s really demanded to be signed by the artists, the readers deserved to know who had created it. (As far as we can tell, the impulse has only survived in those Absolut and Absolut-inspired ads that are commissioned and credited to various strutting cocks of the fine arts world.)
We have a whole week to check into this–if our copy arrives before we leave for vacation. So more when we get back, possibly, if anything more needs to be said.
*FULL DISCLOSURE, in the first-person, and besides, it’s interesting though slightly off-topic: I was for several years the editor of Request, a now-defunct magazine that was owned by Musicland/Sam Goody. I know from first-hand experience what good can come from a corproate sugar daddy who is free from the scimpy margins of traditional publishing. My opinion is biased, of course– I thought it was a terrific magazine. But whatever people might have thought of it, I can say that it was entirely mine to make as bad or as good as I pleased, without any interference whatsoever from our benevolent, Armani-armored overlords. By the way, it is defunct now largely because larger financial pressures eventually made those same overlords say to themselves, “What the hell are we doing in the publishing industry, anyway? With those scimpy margins?!! ” Musicland has been sold several times since then, and my only lasting grudge is that the new owners deleted from the web about five years of my life.
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Keening: A Brief Primer
The world is a complex fatigue.
—Hayden Carruth, “August First”
Whatever asks, heart kneels and offers to bear.
—Jane Hirshfield, “What the Heart Wants”
Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps? —
Till it seemed men never go anywhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.
—Mary Oliver, “No Voyage”
I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.
—John Ashbery, “The New Spirit”
Earth, give me back your pure gifts,
the towers of silence which rose
from the solemnity of their roots.
I want to go back to being what I have not been,
and learn to go back from such deeps
that amongst all natural things
I could live or not live; it does not matter
to be one stone more, the dark stone,
the pure stone which the river bears away.
—Pablo Neruda, “Oh Earth Wait For Me”
Fold your wings, my soul,
those wings you had spread wide
to soar to the terrestrial peaks
where the light is most ardent:
it is for you simply to wait
the descent of the Fire –supposing it to be willing
to take possession of you.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn to the Universe
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from the bird which flies out of its ashes,
that for a man,
as he goes up in flames, his one work
is
to open himself, to be
the flames?
—Galway Kinnell, “Another Night in the Ruins”
It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.
—E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born
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My Days As The World's Most Confused Scrabble Player
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
–T.S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton“
It is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.
—Elias Canetti, Notes From Hampstead
Broken world:
How is it that I came to find myself in the courtyard of an unfamiliar apartment building, seated on a bench in front of a poor excuse for a fountain, stammering and watching people –all of whom seemed to be afflicted with some sort of mental or physical infirmity– shuffle away into the shadows?
Where is Beyond the Shadow of a Doubt?
Find it for me on a map.
Show it to me.
Take me there.
Don’t bore me.
Please don’t bore me.
Keep me moving.
Keep moving me.
Make me work.
I am wanting.
I want.
I want something.
I want, I believe, something more.
I frankly don’t understand anymore how people make things out of words. It sometimes takes me days to build a single word, any word at all, even when I have elaborate plans and dictionaries and Scrabble letters scattered all over the tabletop in front of me.
I’ll make what I think is good progress, I’ll have something that almost resembles a word in the dictionary, but the instant I carefully remove the tip of the pen from the paper a mysterious breeze will materialize and blow the whole thing down. Quite often it will simply –not so simply– carry the letters away. I’ve seen them float off through the windows and evaporate into thin air. Sometimes they drift up to the ceiling and just disappear.
Other times my clumsy attempts at words combust of their own accord, and dissipate in the air around me like smoke. I once labored for days, working around the clock, to construct what I thought was a serviceable sentence –“When the old man arrived in San Pedro he was thirsty and in need of a shave”– only to collapse from exhaustion. I was then startled from a deep stupor at some point in the middle of the night by the smell of smoke, and discovered a pile of smoldering ash where I had left my sentence lying on the table earlier in the evening.
It has taken me more than two weeks of the most difficult labor to reconstruct from memory an approximate version of that original sentence, and even now I have little faith that those words, that any of these words, will survive another night.
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Texas Tea
Yesterday, the Bush administration leaked the bad news that it will likely abandon a proposal to require better gas mileage for the largest SUVs. The reason will come as a surprise to no one: because it might hurt the “fragile bottom line” of many American automakers. See, the funny thing is that CAFE requirements that apply to cars and light trucks do not apply at all to the largest SUVs classed as heavy trucks. In other words there are no requirements whatsoever for Hummers and Ford Excursions and Lincoln Navigators. (The original CAFE regulations were drafted in 1970 and really haven’t been changed since. In 1970, “heavy trucks” were almost entirely commercial. Today, there’s one in almost every driveway in Eden Prairie.) Thus, it also comes as no surprise that sales of these types of vehicles has softened this year, with the meteoric rise in gas prices.
These vehicles were all gravy for automakers, and they will continue to be– the profit margins on the largest vehicles far exceeds those for more reasonable passenger vehicles. If automakers lose a few down-market consumers who are concerned about the cost of running a vehicle that averages in the single digits MPG, so what? The rest of the supercharged upper-class, enjoying the fruits of this amazing economic recovery we keep hearing so much about, will be glad to pay more at the pump. But they could be required to spend more at the dealership too, in order to subsidize better mileage as required by their federal government. The conservative monopoly in public office today can surely be expected to argue against penalizing those who can most afford to show off their banking muscle with the best form of American conspicuous consumerism ever devised. But the more direct, emotional takeaway from all this seems to be that industry is more important than consumers. Americans are, of course, themselves to blame for gas-guzzling behemoth SUVs, and they should lay in the bed they made for themselves. God knows, it is not the role of government to require more responsible behavior by–well, requiring it.
There are some interesting political ramifications of the present conundrum at the gas pumps. When gas prices soar, the people who are most hurt by it are the people who are most dependent on automobiles–professionally, socially, economically–are in the deep-red Western states. These are the people who have been trained to vote against their own best interests by appealing to their own worst instincts. Will the good people of Wyoming see out-of-control gas prices (and, by the way, record profits in the pockets of American gas producers) as a good reason to increase subsidies and tax credits to oil companies? Will they understand that insane gas prices (on a par with what our effette friend in Europe pay, but of course they’re into that whole soft-headed mass-transportation thing) will incentivize alternative, renewable energy sources?
Well no. They want lower gas prices and they want them now, and pretty soon they’ll start blaming the only person they can think of to blame–a president with generational ties to the oil industry.
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Trying To Climb Back Up On That Horse That Threw Me
Just you watch: the Twins will now proceed to go on some kind of unholy tear, winning twenty-three of their next thirty games, and they’ll still come up short and miss the playoffs.
That would be just my luck. Yes, my luck, because it’s clear the mess of this season to date has been purely a personal thing between the Twins and me. They’ve had my number all year, and it’s played out exactly like one of those backyard fights I used to have with my brother all the time; I’d finally get him pinned to the ground, he’d plead peace, and the instant I released the little bastard he’d take another swing at my teeth and we’d end up right back where we started.
I’ll give the Twins this much credit the last week: they’ve at least been watchable again. For awhile there I was reminded of the time in the late nineties when, at the tail end of yet another wretched game in yet another wretched, knee-walking season at the Dome, a visiting scout in the press box turned to me, shook his head, and said, “You’ve got my sympathy, brother. This team ain’t worth free.”
But, still, it’s been the pitching, stupid. The team hasn’t really won one game with the bats. They’ve just been out-pitching the other guys, and I guess the good news –with Liriano and Baker on the way– is that I don’t think it’s going to take much tweaking and twiddling to make this a very good baseball team once again.
I’ll tell you what’s pissed me off more than anything else this year. The lack of offense has been maddening, no doubt about it, but it’s been the mental breakdowns we’ve seen all season that have really fried my patience. Failure to execute in fundamental situations –advancing runners, laying down bunts, swinging at good pitches in hitter’s counts, the inability, with less than two outs, to hit a simple fly ball with a runner at third, or a ground ball to the right side with a runner at second. I mean, really, all we’re asking of guys in these situations is that they make a lousy freaking out, and they’ve all pretty much demonstrated they can at least do that; they just can’t do it when it actually might count for something.
There have, of course, been all sorts of other breakdowns and brain farts, the kind of stuff you shouldn’t expect to see in Legion ball, let alone in the big leagues: How many times, for instance, have we seen guys at second base get thrown out trying to advance to third on a ground ball hit right in front of them?
Lots of times. Too many times. More times than I care to remember.
And have you noticed how often various Twins have completely lost track of how many outs there are in an inning? There was the infamous Shannon Stewart screw-up, of course, but there have been scads of other instances that, while they may not have been as costly, have nonetheless demonstrated that this team hasn’t really had a proper focus all year.
This has been a season of missed signals and missed opportunities. A season of shameful squandering and dashed expectations. It’s not over yet, though, and there’s no denying it was hugely satisfying to see the Twins beat the White Sox at their own game –the blueprints for which they basically stole from the Twins.
For one night, at least, our disappointing club looked like the Twins of the 2003 stretch, and it was fun to watch.
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Sent, I'm Sure, With Only The Best Intentions
I received this message –or these messages– from my old friend Ruckert today, scrawled in his almost microscopic handwriting across the back of several subscription cards for a magazine called Country Living:
Late last night, as I was in the basement digging around for a book on the Black Hole of Calcutta, I stumbled across a photograph of the two of us (taken, if I’m not mistaken, by a now famous actor), from god knows when, but certainly long, long ago, before you assumed your current identity (such as it is) as a transparent imposter in polite society and stopped returning my phone calls.
In the photo we are standing on the tin roof of a trail shelter somewhere in the Green Mountains of Vermont, with the sun collapsing in the sky behind us. We look like two men on top of the world.
How could we have possibly known at the time that shortly thereafter we would both commence the very long, steep climb back down?
I’m not even sure, in fact, that I could properly call the journey of these last many years a “climb.” I’m not even sure that I could properly call it a “journey.”
To say that we fell off the top of the world would not, perhaps, be too much of an exaggeration.
For all I know, you may have an entirely different and far more cheering perspective on the years since that photo was taken, but if so, poor fool, I can assure you that you are sadly mistaken.
At night now I sit out on the porch in the darkness and listen to the chirping chorus of banjos from the surrounding woods.
Surely, you think, those can’t possibly be banjos I’m hearing.
Go ahead and think whatever you want. I’m pretty sure I know a chorus of banjos when I hear one.
What in god’s name, I wonder, made me think I wanted to live in the country?
Often, in the hours after midnight, I see lanterns moving through those woods, and I imagine that some locals –in all likelihood the feral characters I routinely encounter at the Casey’s store in town, buying giant jugs of Mountain Dew and cases of generic Sudafed– are hauling bodies back there to bury.
This is, I’m sure you’d admit, a most comforting thought for an entirely friendless man in his middle years, living alone in the absolute middle of fucking nowhere, to entertain as he makes one more futile attempt to find his way into sleep.
Come on out and pay me a visit sometime. You can help me stalk and kill that donkey (I think it’s a donkey) that’s been lurking around my property and nosing at my windows in the night. (Be sure and bring your camera.) We’ll build the biggest bonfire you’ve ever seen. Honest to god, there isn’t one thing left here that I wouldn’t burn.
It’ll be just like old times.
Happy trails, sucker.
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DWZ: July 15, 1933-August 14, 2002
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.
—George Orwell, “Reflections on Ghandi”
Poems are hard to read
Pictures are hard to see
Music is hard to hear
And people are hard to love
But whether from brute need
Or divine energy
At last mind eye and ear
And the great sloth heart will move.
—William Meredith, “A Major Work”
Do not die out, fire. Enter my dreams, love. Be young forever, seasons of the Earth.
—Czeslaw Milosz, “Unattainable Earth”
That last one standing is him.
He is not expecting rain.
And even if it does rain
He’ll be good and god damned
If he’s going to lay down
With the rest of the cows.
He needs to go to town.
From the scrap of his
Own damaged heart he
Is building a new,
Flawed (but healthy) part,
And wiring it with
A fierce, desperate
Desire for goodness.
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The view from here
The news that countsBarcelona, Spain
One of the things about being out of the country for a week is you see how the other half lives without the constant bombardment of propaganda from our government. (They have their own to BS them, of course.)
There has been the news of Britain’s crack down on Muslim extremists, and the Iranians saying “You must be on crack” when the nuclear powers threaten them over their nuclear program. But so far, a glorious absence from the Spanish papers of George Bush.
Imagine the bliss of living over here and not having your papers full of his crap every day.
I did make the mistake of picking up the International Herald Tribune yesterday, though. (I just wanted some baseball scores, which I could have had on the internet, but there is some tactile pleasure of seeing box scores in print.) But there to spoil my day, was Bush on the front page (no picture, thank God) but just a quote about Iran.
The one paragraph story was about his comments, evidently delivered after he’d leveled some more brush at the ranch, that “all options were on the table” regarding Iran, “including force.”
He continued, “But force is always a president’s last option.”
Is this guy so stupid? Ok, don’t answer that. First, does he think anyone believes that he isn’t willing to use force at the drop of a falsified intelligence briefing? And second, does he not know why Iran wants nuclear weapons? Maybe the same reason why Saddam wishes he’d had them–so they can protect themselves from Bush?
If there’s anything that should be clear, it’s that Bush’s attack of Iraq has made every other country in the world eager to join the nuclear club. In the opinion of every other country in the world, it’s Bush who’s brought the world to this, not Iran.
Now, back to the soccer scores. Barcelona 3, Betis 0.
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When Things Weren't Looking Good For The Last Time
It hadn’t been good for quite some time, but it was time for them to admit to themselves and to each other that now it really wasn’t good, and wasn’t going to get any better. Neither of them liked the doctor, a young Indian. He was a man who’d built too much science around himself, and he seemed to look upon them as if they were images on a satellite map. Almost a year they’d known him, and they’d never seen him smile.
What kind of a life did he have, for heaven’s sake, a man like that? Richard would sprawl there in the dark some nights trying to imagine what it was the doctor went home to each night. He tried with no success to imagine him in swim trunks, swimming laps at the YMCA, singing in the shower, or laughing with friends over dinner, but it was not possible.
How ridiculous to put your fate in the hands of someone so thoroughly, so reprehensibly competent.
They’d made a mess of Richard, and they weren’t going to fix him now.
“I’m afraid we are done with you now, more or less,” the doctor had said that afternoon. An unfortunate choice of words, Jan had complained later, but Richard was by now used to the man’s often infuriating English, which somehow managed to be both clumsy and precise at the same time.
Richard was trying to feel terrible in other ways than the ways in which he was recently accustomed to feeling terrible, but he didn’t have much room left for that sort of thing. He’d gone under pretty much for good several months earlier, but he’d had a brief rally that had given them a glimmer of something that was not quite hope. He was trying now to recognize the full and terrifying pity he felt for his wife, trying finally to imagine what her life might one day be.
He pulled himself up from the edge of the bed and eased himself a few feet to a chair by the windowsill. Jan had left him in the dark a few moments earlier, alone with all his machinery. She’d looked so tired, so resigned. That was the most discouraging part of the whole deal, her obvious resignation, which had been apparent now for the last couple weeks. Richard realized that he could no more imagine the life she was going home to right this moment than he could imagine his doctor as anything but the grim and impassive character who’d earlier that day washed his hands of him.
Richard saw his wife there on the street below him, hunched in the oddly granular twilight, waiting at a traffic signal, her arms full of things –his things– she was taking back to a home he would likely never again see. He watched her as she finally crossed the empty street, moving so slowly. She’d stood there at the red light for at least a minute, despite the fact that there had been no traffic that would have precluded her crossing at any time. That was so like her, Richard thought, so careful, so damned law abiding. He sat there at the window and watched his wife until she was folded into the darkness of a side street and disappeared entirely from view.
