Category: Blog Post

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?

We detect a recurring meme on the subject of product placement as an alternative to advertising. An article last week in the Times made it clear that the cost to place a product in a popular TV show or movie can be roughly the same as buying an equal amount of advertising, and the impact can be singificantly higher. Yesterday, Rob Walker’s column in the Times magazine looked at the acme of product placement, Donald Trump’s silly television show called “The Apprentice.” In the last season of that show, teams of contestants were given the difficult assignment of producing an advertisement for Dove Body Wash—an actual product that won the right to be featured front and center for the low, low price of $2 million. Dove was less a placed product than a featured player, and they were undoubtedly thrilled with the results.

This is relatively easy to do in the surreal world of TV and film, where the line between fake and fact is gone—if it was ever there. In print, it is a much thornier proposition, although there is one very interesting way that it DOES happen. We’re not thinking of the redoubtable Carl Steadman, who once launched a website called “placing.com” that proposed to create an entertaining fictional narrative out of brand-names. (That conceit didn’t ultimately work, because the result inevitably looked exactly like hipster ad copy rather than fiction. Maybe it would be more convincing in the hands of a novelist, rather than a pranking disciple of Lacan and Derrida.) No, we’re thinking of the rise of targeted Google “ad-sense” panels. These are ads that are generated after Google’s search spiders have automatically crawled a body of text, and then generated advertisements based on key words. (This results in some pretty funny, unintended bedfellows, particularly at the more heated political blogs that have signed up for ad-sense.) The result is that technology is allowed to do what no human editor would ever do—place an advertisement directly adjacent to copy that refers to that product, service, or brand name. Why is this not a problem? Because readers are assured that it was the search engine that recognized the relationship, not the writers, editors, publishers or even the advertisers.

There is an editorial reason to place products that has nothing to do with a behind-the-scenes transaction: In an age of hyperactive consumerism and intense, ubiquitous advertising, successful brands become a kind of short-hand in themselves. No one has to ask twice what a NASCAR dad is anymore, right? We think it would be useful to develop a kind of dictionary for editorial product placement. It would be especially useful to understand the more subtle distinctions between closely related brands in the same market. (Please feel free to join in!)

Nike= Proud but aging; tarnished by scandal

Adidas=Resurgent, hip on the streets, possibly shoddy

Lexus=Bullheaded solipsism; flaunting neo-con values

Dodge=Utilitarian; never too proud to steal good ideas or theme music

Coke: Don’t fix what isn’t broken

Pepsi: No matter what the ramifications, more sugar

Budweiser: Lacking imagination, safety in numbers, xenophobic

Miller: Contrarian, willful, individualism

Cooking Light magazine: Living right is easy/fun/brightly lit/profitable

The Rake: Living wrong is easy/fun/brightly lit/profitable