Category: Blog Post

It’s the first we heard, but apparently Dan Kennedy is leaving his post as media critic at the Boston Phoenix. Over the years, we’ve enjoyed reading him—especially his smart, clean copy about the rivalry between the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.

One of the best things about the alternative press is its self-conferred (and now somewhat disingenuous) outsider status, which you can always recognize by its generally relentless advocacy and polemicism. It also allows a paper to write about “big media” competitors without pulling any punches, and in a town like Boston, that is certainly the least readers expect. The Phoenix has been around long enough that both of Beantown’s daily papers keep a close eye on it, and have not missed their own opportunities to shake Steve Mindich’s tree to see what sort of rotten fruit falls down.

Here in our genteel berg, we have no good counterpart to Dan Kennedy. The serious media beat seems to be a dying breed, which we think is a mildly frightening canary-in-the-coal-mine omen. Despite the financial health of the Star Tribune, the reinvigorated anger of City Pages, and the terminal stasis of the Pioneer Press, no one in print is writing about print with any regularity. Of course, we have our own selfish reasons for wishing it were otherwise—and we certainly wish to count our blessings. But it is a somewhat odd consequence of Minnesota Nice that there seems to be a gentleman’s agreement among all parties to go easy on each other—that is, to not write about each other at all.

Tronnes and Levine had, for some time, been keeping a lively grip on the neck of all local media, and those silly men at Powerline have their little spats with Nick Coleman, and someone named Hugh or Howard something-or-other claims to be hosting a permanent “swarm” on the Strib, and City Pages admits to reading the daily papers each day, so there is some hope—we suppose—for the world of media criticism as it pertains to print.

But when we point our finger, of course, three fingers point back at us, and we have to admit that this here blog may be the best place for regular hit-and-run commentary of an industrial sort. We have always had a strong feeling that readers care a lot less about us as people—working at desks in our shoes with our petty complaints and triumphs—than we think they do, and we have never seriously thought about migrating regular print-media criticism to the pages of the magazine.

That doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t be doing it. To pretend that “media criticism” should be limited to TV, with the occasional bit on Tom Barnard or Gary Eichten—that is being part of the problem, not the solution.

A very funny bit from today’s NY Times on the problems of the poet laureate of England having to write a marriage poem for Charles and Camilla. Aside from having to compete for headlines with the funeral of the Pope, imagine Camilla having to endure the jibes that John Paul, even today, looks better in white than she does.

So, two marriage poems today. One short and sweet, another more, more…

Epithalamium
By John Gardiner Calkins Brainard

I SAW two clouds at morning,
Tinged with the rising sun,
And in the dawn they floated on,
And mingled into one:
I thought that morning cloud was blest,
It moved so sweetly to the west.

I saw two summer currents
Flow smoothly to their meeting,
And join their course, with silent force,
In peace each other greeting: 10
Calm was their course through banks of green,
While dimpling eddies played between.

Such be your gentle motion,
Till life’s last pulse shall beat;
Like summer’s beam, and summer’s stream,
Float on, in joy, to meet
A calmer sea, where storms shall cease—
A purer sky, where all is peace.

Epithalamion
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

HARK, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe
We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood
Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood,
Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,
That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured, where a gluegold-brown
Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between
Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down.
We are there, when we hear a shout
That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover
Makes dither, makes hover
And the riot of a rout
Of, it must be, boys from the town
Bathing: it is summer’s sovereign good.

By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise
He drops towards the river: unseen
Sees the bevy of them, how the boys
With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out,
Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about.

This garland of their gambols flashes in his breast
Into such a sudden zest
Of summertime joys
That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best
There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest;
Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood
By. Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on the air,
Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels there,
Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots
Rose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: off with—down he dings
His bleachèd both and woolwoven wear:
Careless these in coloured wisp
All lie tumbled-to; then with loop-locks
Forward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp
Over finger-teasing task, his twiny boots
Fast he opens, last he offwrings
Till walk the world he can with bare his feet
And come where lies a coffer, burly all of blocks
Built of chancequarrièd, selfquainèd rocks
And the water warbles over into, filleted with glassy grassy quicksilvery shivès and shoots
And with heavenfallen freshness down from moorland still brims,
Dark or daylight on and on. Here he will then, here he will the fleet
Flinty kindcold element let break across his limbs
Long. Where we leave him, froliclavish while he looks about him, laughs, swims.
Enough now; since the sacred matter that I mean
I should be wronging longer leaving it to float
Upon this only gambolling and echoing-of-earth note—
What is … the delightful dene?
Wedlock. What the water? Spousal love.

Today, the New York Observer pulls a nifty stunt. Media writer Tom Scocca recreates the masthead of The New Yorker, which has never published such a thing in its seventy-five years of publishing. We wish we’d thought of that. (We’re thinking Spy magazine must have thought of it before, too; they used to publish the hilarious and informative “Letters to the Editor of the New Yorker” at a time when The New Yorker still did not publish letters from readers, either.) Then we realized what a Herculean task of research it must have involved, poring through contributors notes—also added just a few years ago under the reign of Tina Brown and her celebrity editorship—book jackets, lecture flyers, and so forth.

People who are obsessed with magazines often wonder why The New Yorker does things in such an odd, backward way. There have been lots of other examples, though most have slowly been evolved to resemble how other magazines are built. For example, for more than fifty years, the magazine had no Table of Contents. Bylines came at the end of long articles, and most shorter items had no byline at all.

When they were asked about this sort of thing, editors Harold Ross and William Shawn usually said they did these things simply because that’s the way they had always been done. Famously, Ross said of the TOC that no one ever thought to do it in the early years, and the oversight just seemed to gain momentum. But we have a sense that this was just a deflection, and that in the star chamber of the editor’s offices, there were plenty of justifications for marching to the beat of their own drummer.

There are three very good, old-fashioned reasons not to publish a masthead. First is to subsume the egos of all who contribute and participate in the magazine to the larger project, to the sum of its parts. We live in an age of self-aggrandizement and instant gratification; the age of Me as a personal brand, free of loyalties to anything larger than ourselves. The New Yorker’s non-masthead is a reminder, if anyone needs one, that the magazine comes before any of the individuals responsible for producing it. Second, one of the subtle services a masthead performs is to sustain the longterm employability of its staff—other people in the industry tend to obsess about mastheads, and they poach from each other, and often times it’s the only public credit a hardworking editor gets. Anyone who has ever worked at The New Yorker does not have this worry; they are at the top of their game at the top team in the league, and they subsit on prestige. Don’t call them, they’ll call you. And that’s the third reason: the moment you make public a handful of names at your magazine is the moment you are inundated, by name, with dozens and dozens of queries from writers, press releases from record companies, and fat promotional folders from Manhattan crystal shops.

Sailing to Byzantium
by W. B. Yeats

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

This is for Bob, whose funeral is today.

We never did get a satisfactory answer as to why magazines are conspicuously excluded from the Pulitzer prizes, although yesterday we received word on who’d won. Fiction, history, drama, poetry—musical composition, fer chrissake—are all Pulitzer categories, along with fourteen newspaper categories, but no room at the table for the glossies. What’s more, newspapers are actually free to nominate themselves for the ASME national magazine awards—the Chronicle of Higher Education managed nominations in both the Pulitzers and the Ellies this year.

One colleague reported to us that he’d asked Marlene Kahan about this—she directs the American Society of Magazine Editors. Given that Columbia University sponsors both awards, why not just fold the less pretigious NMEs into the Pulitzers? (Well, we in the magazine industry have certainly committed our fair share of sins—but, you know, glass houses!) Kahan reportedly had no idea.

But we’re not here to bellyache about awards and the politics of awards, we just wanted to note that the Star Tribune was nominated in one category—Jim Gehrz in feature photojournalism. More impressive, editor Anders Gyllenhaal was on the nominating board.

Of course, the biggest surprise in this year’s Pultizers was Willamette Week, the Portland, Oregon, alternative weekly that broke the sordid story of a beloved state legislator’s involvement with a fourteen-year-old girl, and the subsequent decades-long cover up. Today, the editor of the daily Oregonian congratulated the local upstart on its massive national scoop—this is a newsworthy development in itself, given the arrogance and complacency of Big Media Newspapers these days (as eloquently opined by Jack Shafer more than once).

On the face of it, the Plain People of America no doubt wonder why such an apparently pointless, salacious, and sensationalist scoop is worthy of the highest award in journalism in the nation. Here, we que the usual pre-prepared clips about “speaking truth to power,” “comforting the afflicted,” “if this prevents one future case of child abuse from happening, it’s worth it,” and so on. (Do we sound cynical? We only wish to admit that there is a not very noble, animal satisfaction that accompanies the journalistic “gotcha” moment. This tragic tale of corrupted power and child abuse translates directly into huge numbers in the circulation category—driven by the satisfaction of the morally righteous, but essentially depraved mob of single-issue buyers. We know, Willamette Week is a freebie, but the rubric is the same. If you think the Oregonian didn’t get a bump in sales by following the parade, you missed the note of earnestness in editor Peter Bhatia’s congratulations.)

But the real achievement—the whole, implied basis for the Pulitzer honors in the category of investigative news—is not so much reporting or composing an unpleasant story. It is a skill that actually preceeds all that: it is the power of private persuasion, which allowed Nigel Jaquiss to turn a gossip story into a news story by convincing key sources to speak on the record and offer real evidence. Thus a rumor that was undoubtedly circulating in the corridors of power for years rose to the level of real journalism, by meeting its professional and ethical standards.

It’s a fine achievement (we especially like the part about the Oregonian eating crow), but one that is leavened by a heavy dose of sadness for all the victims of this story. Despite appearances, we are a rational people that tends to believe that bringing a story out into the light is the first—and best—step toward justice and peace. We’re not always so sure about that.

My Papa’s Waltz
by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

This one was suggested by a friend and poet. Is is a dance of joy–a small boy with his father? Or a fearsome waltz with an abuser?

Manuscript evidence shows that Roethke’s small dancer was originally a girl. Does that shed light…or make it even stranger?