Category: Blog Post

Every industry has its peer-reviewed awards competition, especially industries that are fueled mainly by ego and vanity the way the media industry is. There are serious awards and then there are somewhat ridiculous awards,but basically there are enough awards to make sure just about everyone can win something sometime. This has become such a cliche that one can really distinguish oneself these days by at least claiming never to have won an award for anything. This would be an asset for a couple of reasons, not the least of which would be evidence of strength of character, comfort in your own skin, a sort of clarity of vision to recognize that you do not want to belong to the club that would have you for a member.

Still, we cannot bear not to mention that the ASME finalists have been announced. As usual, the New Yorker dominates the field, and this is as it should be. We were especially gratified to see Louis Menand nominated in the commentary and criticism category, less so for Adam Gopnik. We love Adam, but mostly for technical reasons. Menand is just as smart and gifted, but he also happens to be genuinely funny and selfless; those are virtues of age that Gopnik may grow into, if he’s lucky. Other notable nominations: James Woolcott gets a much-deserved nod in the same category, and Ted Genoways—formerly of the Minnesota Historical Society Press—gets TWO count them TWO nominations for his Virginia Quarterly Review! Well done, fella! Notable ecxlusions: The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, an unfailingly, jaw-droppingly great art critic, somehow slipped through the cracks, and neither the scrappy, sincere Salon nor the self-evidentally great Slate made the finals in the online category. (To be clear, without inside information, there is no way of knowing whether they even entered, which they’d have to do in order to be nominated as finalists. It is probably better not to ask. Eyes are red and skins are chafed right now.)

Now it is important to note that the “Ellies” (as they are known to us editor-types; they are also known as the national magazine awards) are an essentially credible merit badge worth bragging about, especially among other editor-types. We’re not sure the public cares a whole lot, and if they do, they are not going to be especially surprised that the New Yorker received ten nominations, nor that Vanity Fair received seven, and they certainly aren’t going to think that Vanity Fair must have turned a dramatic corner in the last year, since they were shut out of the nominations last year. (By the way, here is our national magazine award-winning writer—though, of course, she won years ago for her work in the New Yorker, not her work in The Rake, which we have not entered into the competition.)

But here some salient facts that may interest regular folks—and by regular folks, we mean people who are insanely and irrationally obsessed with glossy magazines. Unlike some idiotic magazine awards that are run like college alumni clubs, anyone can enter the national magazine awards. The Awards are juried by members of ASME—that is, the American Society of Magazine Editors. That is, the editors-in-chief whose magazines are competing against one another. Naturally, there are all kinds of personal issues, high levels of favoritism, a certain predisposition to celebrate that which has already been celebrated frequently, a compulsion to look more seriously at the magazines of editors who eat lunch at the Four Seasons, and so on. But there are just enough surprises to keep the whole thing generally on the up-and-up, and these are all basically good people with unimpeachable ethics. Plus, the awards are administered by the Columbia School of Journalism, which puts a very high premium indeed on credibility.

What is the price of vanity? To enter the ASME awards, applicants must submit $400 per entry (that’s for the general excellence category; $200 if you are a member of ASME; membership dues are generally in the range of $200-300 per year). Needless to say, smaller independent publishers find it difficult even to enter the competition—magazines that spend disproportionately on quality editorial content ) are the most disadvantaged of all, because they would benefit the most from national notice, while being the least able to afford the steep entry fee (we’d spend $400 on a page and a half in our magazine, and our writers need the money more than ASME does, probably). If you think about it, it would really be shameful if huge, powerful, intensely profitable companies like Conde Nast DIDN’T monopolize these sorts of awards, even if their editors weren’t favorably judging each other’s titles-—oh, but wait. They surely aren’t allowed to do that, and knowing what we do about the insanely cut-throat culture inside Conde Nast, there is no guarantee that the dogs wouldn’t kill each other if they were caged together.)

The ASMEs are the Oscars for magazines, and that is not saying much, to be sure, but it is what we have. We have wondered for years now why magazines are conspicuously excluded from the Pulitzers—a cut far above the Ellies in terms of public prestige—when that award is spread from the daily fish wraps, to hardcover books, to freakin stageplays. What’s up with THAT?

Anyway, if if the Ellies have their limitations, they still give us hope each year that there ARE a number of magazine editors (and publishers and writers) out there who DO use their powers for good, even when the whole world is pushing them to be evil.

UPDATE: Because of bad wording that we are too lazy to edit right now, we implied the opposite of what we meant to say out loud somewhere in this little taradiddle: We did, in fact, enter in one category, GE. Alas, we did not escape relegation. If we had, we would not be here talking to you right now, we’d be drinking martinis across the street.

Yesterday, we had the pleasure of speaking to the Minnesota Book Publisher’s Roundtable. Even though we were running late and trying to duck the falling ceiling timbers, we managed to make it to our appointment, where we met old friends and made some new ones.

One friend mentioned to us that the Pioneer Press had last weekend published an item on polar explorer Will Steger, a man who is near and dear to our hearts after his very generous gifts to The Rake. We’d actually been thinking about Steger on the way over to St. Paul, as we heard reports from Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, who are presently trekking across the Arctic again.

On top of all that, we had a terrible desire to get an early start on St. Patrick’s Day tippling—our generally high spirits had been deflated by the unbelievably depressing news that our elected officials in the UNited States Senate had voted narrowly to allow oil drilling in the Arcitic National Wildlife Refuge. (Steger and Senator Mark Dayton have travelled together to ANWR; few people understand better than these gents that fragile polar environments are the best barometers we have for the health of the entire globe. What we are already doing to these wildernesses, at a great distance, is itself criminal, and now we’re going to simply rejoin chickens and eggs.) So let’s be clear about this: Effectively the vote of ONE PERSON, in the entire United States, has resulted in a razor-thin majority to allow a complete reversal of a longstanding trust—resulting in the permanent desecration of national property for the short-term profiteering of the oil industry and a handful of belligerent Alaskans. (The vote was 51 to 49.) President Bush, ever the master of simple and moving, if reductionist , slogans had this to say about the momentous decision:”This will help us get some more oil reserves on the books.”

We are still almost too angry to see straight, but we need to vent on a few issues here. First, thank you very much to Senator Norm Coleman who “kept a campaign promise” and was one of seven Republicans to vote against opening ANWR. Second, shame on Hawaii Democrats Ionouye and Akaka. We’d very much like to know how these fine gentlemen—normally a real credit to their state, their country, their people, and their party—justify their vote. Is there some special caucus for states that are not a part of the contiguous “lower forty-eight” that would compell them to side with the money-grabbing, self-serving, screw-you-me-first, nevermind-the- grandchildren-I-want-mine, God-gave-us-oil-to-make-us-rich Republicans of Alaska?

We note that Senator Akaka, in particular, sits on the Senate’s Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. His website describes his seat there in the following way:

“This post serves the Senator’s longstanding commitments to safeguard our precious natural resources.”

Perhaps he could tell the Plain People of America how voting to open ANWR to oil drilling comports with this statement.

And we can’t help wondering what would happen to Hawaii’s lei industry if the Big Island were surrounded by oil rigs, and its volcanoes porcupined with geo-thermal taps.

UPDATE: We poked around in the Hawaii newspapers, and learned that the good senators from Hawaii chose to frame this issue as one of native (indigenous peoples’) rights. Apparently, there are a number or local inuit tribes that strongly favor oil drilling. (Well, duh. “Think of the money! We’ll be rich, rich, RICH!—cough, cough.”) So we have the very bizarre phenomenon of a tyranny of the (razor thin) majority passing a law that certain Democrats justify in their minds by framing as an issue of minority rights– in other words, all Americans must now agree to allow their property–their legacy–to be turned over to the profit of a very few, whether they be Inuit or Exxon.

We have been flooded with letters from readers who want to know, apropos of yesterday’s edition, whether there have been any writers banished from the pages of The Rake for various misdemeanors, infractions, transgressions, or naughty behavior.

Yes, there have been many. The most celebrated example of a writer banishment at The Rake is, of course, the legendary St. Paul writer Larry Wyler. In his 2002 critical review of The Rake for The Newer York, Wyler viciously attacked our magazine. It was not necessary, really, to read beyond the headline—”Never Mind The Rake, Grab the Gun and the Shovel.”

We really shouldn’t say more than that, because the wound was deep, and the tears still spring to our eyes with alarming ease. Needless to say, Wyler and his agent and his publisher and his kith and his ken are not welcome here. We might reconsider, under very specific circumstances. Like, for example, if he submitted a story for us to publish.

Another celebrated case is Dorian Hayes, a fine writer, whom we approached on bended knee years ago to write for us. Reading his published work elsewhere, we felt like we were kindred spirits, lost together on the cruel seas of post-industrial anomie. Hayes produced some of our most memorable early features, including a seven-part series on Bassett Creek that won a cordon bleu in the Hormel Awards for Meat and Meat-Related Journalism. Hayes, it is true, was socially intolerable—never introduced us to his friends, rarely paid his tab, drank to excess, stuck chewing gum to the bottom of our desk. Worst of all, he refused to use the serial comma, despite frequent warnings. Ultimately, it was Dorian Hayes or us, and we decided on us. He has not appeared in the magazine since his 1989 interviews with Steven Soderbergh (“Sex, Lies, and Videotape”) and Peter Greenaway (“The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover.”)

Finally, we put Mr. Jem Casey on a long boat to China for a number of infractions. First, Casey found it impossible to write critical reviews of films, books, or CDs without referring, at length, to Nick Drake. This was compounded by his energetic hatred of children. Then there was the arrest for wearing spurs and carrying a Colt forty-five on the Light Rail (also a charge of public urination, later dropped). The great whoopie-cushion fiasco was the final straw.

We never got around to mentioning Roger Angell’s nice little remembrance of his step father, E.B. White, of a few weeks ago. It didn’t add a lot to the canon, as far as the personal and professional lives of Andy and Katherine Angell White, other than the lovely image of them working across the hallway from each other—the writer and the editor at their antipodes, which Roger Angell describes in a memorable turn-of-phrase that is certainly worthy of his stepdad:

“Soon the noises of her typing out another letter to Harold Ross or Gus Lobrano are joined by the slower clatter of his Underwood: a New England light industry is again in full gear, pouring out its high-market daily product, and the labor force, for the moment, seems content. Soon it will be lunchtime.”

The other interesting aspect of the piece was Roger’s thoughtful meditation on the Whites’ complimentary cases of hypochondria. One of the things we mourned about the only biography that has ever been written about Mrs. White, an above-average personal history by an amateur biographer, was that it dwelled heavily on her later years, and gave the impression that she was constantly afflicted with one dread disease or another—to the exclusion of what a singular role she had in shaping and maintaining the voice of the New Yorker throughout her life. (This topic has been given short shrift in every book ever written about the New Yorker, including Ben Yagoda’s excellent “About Town” and Thomas Kunkel’s “Genius in Disguise.” There are plenty of bread crumbs for the serious historian, though, sprinkled through the published “Letters From the Editor” in which Harold Ross cannot hide the fact that Katherine was his right-hand-woman from almost the beginning.) Roger toys with the idea that the White’s hypochondria was actually an important expression of their dependence and love for one another, and a meaningful development in their identities in later life, not an artifice or an affectation.

The other thing we noticed: In discussing Andy’s main gift to writing, which was a sacred committment to clarity, Roger slipped a sly inside-joke into his piece:

“Clarity is the message of “The Elements of Style,” the handbook he based on an early model written by Will Strunk, a professor of his at Cornell, which has helped more than ten million writers—the senior honors candidate, the rewriting lover, the overburdened historian—through the whichy thicket.”

This was, of course, a gentle slap at Tom Wolfe, the most high-profile case of a well-known writer who has been excommunicated by the New Yorker. The cause? Wolfe’s most famous early magazine story was a 1966 takedown of William Shawn written for Clay Felker at New York magazine. The title of that piece was “Tiny Mummies,” and it poked a great deal of fun—at the apparent exepnse of the truth—at the New Yorker’s intense, well-oiled machine of old-fashioned prose. He lampooned the style as being full of “whichy thickets.”

Ever since, professional writers have held Wolfe in a kind of state of horror-envy. There is no higher aspiration in the business than being published in the great ship of state once helmed by Ross and Shawn; the converse is that there is no greater transgression than disrespecting it. There is no consolation for permanent exile—such are the contingencies of an icon—and we think we can detect the bitterness in almost everything the dapper southern gentleman writes.

Well, the credit card companies didn’t waste any time. Emboldened by the Senate’s passage of the new bankruptcy bill last week (also known as the “Buy the Government Now and Pay Later” Bill,) my credit card company today sent me “IMPORTANT AMENDMENTS TO YOUR COMMERCIAL CREDIT AGREEMENT.”

The first amendment is that they can immediately report late payments to the credit bureaus. I take this to mean, “We used to give you a little grace period and try to work things out with you, but now we’ll do our best to start causing you grief right away.”

The second amendment was even better. The old agreement on foreign currency transactions, for which they could charge you the actual wholesale rate for those currencies (which is what banks, i.e. credit card companies, get it for,) is now out the window. The new agreement is that they can charge you whatever they want to charge as an exchange rate, and then add up to three percent on top of that.

Just when you thought the credit card issuers couldn’t get any greedier, they fool you again.