Category: Blog Post

We were a little sad that our old friend Ted Genoways (Virgina Quarterly Review) didn’t manage to pull off an upset and bring home a National Magazine Award yesterday, after being nominated in two categories. Likewise, the upstarts at 5820 did not win—but these small, passionate puiblications can certainly make plenty of hay out of their finalist status.

In today’s Washington Post, Peter Carlson yawned at the results of the NMAs. He notes that watching the New Yorker win five awards reminds him of the 1927 New York Yankees. We have two thoughts about the New Yorker’s success. First, it’s vaguely possible that there really are no other magazines doing the sort of quality work that the New Yorker does, and it is certainly true that there are no magazines that use better writers. The New Yorker really is the Yankees of the magazine world, in the sense that anyone who is at the absolute top of their craft will eventually find a way into the magazine. The brand is thus self-sustaining. (Downside of this is that it is left to other magazines like, say, the National Journal and Mother Jones and Virginia Quarterly to find and publish the next generation of New Yorker writers.) Second, the New Yorker’s success among its peers is probably a positive sign that editors everywhere (or at least the editors who jury the NMA’s) still have old-fashioned values about what constitutes good, quality magazine journalism. (Downside of this is that most editors are presumably frustrated non-Yankees who wish they had the freedom to look less like Lucky and more like the New Yorker.)

Mildly related note, before getting back to the bottle-washing room: We’ve finally got around to reading Ian Frazier’s wonderful little book, “The Fishes Eye,” a collection of his essays about fishing and fishing-related subjects. We’ve always enjoyed Frazier’s work, and can’t think why he doesn’t immediately spring to our lips when people ask who we like best in the world of writing. Frazier has won a fistful of NME’s himself, most recently for a wonderful piece published in Outside magazine about… ice. Yes, frozen water. That article actually made the anthology of NME winners that ASME publishes each year—one of those books we tend to avoid on some vague principle of avoiding industrial antholigies.

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

This is the first stanza of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. If you like, and April hasn’t been too cruel to you, you can find the rest here.

We’re big fans of our TiVo, but we don’t hold much stock in its ability to recommend and record shows it thinks we’ll be interested in. To be fair, we haven’t really done our part—by constantly jabbing the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” button every time we’re watching the tube. This is a function of being fully immersed in TiVo behavior; we simply don’t channel surf at all, going instead straight to the current playlist of shows we’ve specificially asked TiVo to record. No passive TV watching, no ratings, no meaningful associations or recommendations. People we know who do not have TiVo (or any of its inferior copycats) often say they aren’t interested in digital video recorders because they don’t want to increase their TV viewing. But this is precisely the point of TiVo—it allows you to watch only the programs that you want to watch, when you want to watch them, accelerated through the commercials and the slow bits. We watch a lot less TV than we did before TiVo. (We’ve reached the point where we wish reality had that ingenious button that sends you back in time thirty seconds.)

Still, the TiVo can’t help itself from quietly recording things, apparently to keep itself occupied, and if you scroll down your playlist, you’ll notice what it’s been doing in its downtime. Last night, we noticed that TiVo had speculated that we might be intersted in a new program called “Tom Friedman Reporting,” which turned out to be a camera crew following the Times’ best columnist (and Minnesota native) around, watching him do his job. This was on the “Discovery-Times” Channel, a cable channel we’d never heard of before. Anyway, the estimable Friedman was, in this episode, sauntering around Europe trying to answer the question “Does Europe Hate America?” Well, not ten seconds into the program the answer becomes painfully clear: Yes! With gusto! But it is Friedman’s particular genius that he spends the next hour speaking with everyone from Americans at Oxford (Rhodes and Marshall scholars) to islamic high school students who claim Osama bin Laden as a personal hero. Much of this material Friedman turned into a series of columns a few months ago, but gathered into one place and one TV program, it was an artful piece of reporting. Friedman brings together a tremendous amount of material, and he’s sharp enough to debate even the most convincing Parisian peace activists (“You are against using force always, even if it means to displace a violent tyranny? How do you feel about America liberating France from Hitler?”; “The EU is shutting out American cosmetics companies for trace carcinogens—and yet, you can’t eat in a French cafe without having smoke blown in your face the entire meal?”)

Like any great acrobat, Friedman makes his job look easy. With clear, clean prose, he handles the world’s most pressing issues with a compassionate and reasonable voice, and he does enough behind-the-scenes reporting to have a firm grasp of the issues. (Behold, the rise of the EU and China, and the twilight of America.) Friedman is loyal to no party, he is merely loyal to the facts. If we could establish an award for “most trusted news analyst,” he would not only be at the top of our list, he would be the only one on our list.

We got a kick out of DC SOB’s funny item today, “Washington’s Most Loathsome.” And while the SOB pins the tail on many high profile asses—like Robert Novak, Michelle Malkin, and Charles Krauthammer—we were especially gratified to see syndicated “advice columnist” (and Washington Post typist) Carolyn Hax on the list, described thusly:

“11. Carolyn Hax: Are there any among the lovelorn who aren’t sorry after they’ve taken their plight to this Fen-Phenned harridan of hackery? Operating from the position that there’s no better medicine than woefully uncalled for ridicule, she generously peppers her advice with belittling barbs. It might yet be amusing if she wasn’t recycling the same old put downs week in and week out, but she’s too damn dim to notice she’s about eight short of playing the dozens. Of course, her own marriage was no great shakes, though to her credit, once she managed to break her ex-husband illustrator, he stayed broken. Still, it’s impossible to see her column as anything other than the bitter remodeling of her own glass house.”

We couldn’t hope to say it any better than that. Now, we have it on good authority that at least one co-worker here in the office is a serious fan of Carolyn Hax (who is included no doubt in some sort of syndication package over at the Star Tribune—you want Friedman? You gotta take Hax! No Hax no Friedman. Oh, and Family Circle stays, capiche?), which certainly beggars the imagination. One of the crosses we bear as editors is the steady trickle of writers and would-be writers who wish to write an advice column. As with every proposal that comes through the door here, we try to seriously entertain the idea. We read clips and cover letters, we skim resumes, we chew on it and sleep on it, and in the end we most likely have to say “thanks very much, but we’re not in the market for another column.” This is undoubtedly heartbreaking, but it is for the best for everyone concerned.

We have a number of standard replies, but we have not tried this one out: Be careful what you wish for. Just look at that harridan of hackery, Carolyn Hax! A column, especially an advice column, may look like a gilded throne, but the pressure of regularly producing something—anything, much less anything worth a damn—can certainly be a millstone around one’s neck. No matter what the frequency (monthly, weekly, daily),even a professional writer will often find herself in a tight spot from which no amount of prestige or artistic freedom or compensation can save her.

Well, we’ve now managed to write a lot more than we felt inspired to write about twenty minutes ago. Confidential to Reilly: You’re lucky to have the couch, bud.

Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
by Billy Collins

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything –
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

Wow, who hasn’t wanted to do this? God, I hope someone did.

Here is Miss Emily’s poem, Death, from which we get the tulle tippet:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, be passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

According to her biographers, she always wore a white dress, even while gardening.