Category: Blog Post

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.

There is fire falling from the sky, the timbered ceilings are barely holding, the low-pile carpet is soggy with rising bile, the white boards are weeping away the month’s strategy, the troops are rebelling, the dogs are snarling, the elevator alarms are bawling.

No, but the new issue of the magazine is due to the printer this week, which means we begin to slough off on this here blog. No time to muck around with the internal politics of the New York Times, no time to argue the finer points of punctuation, no time to gripe about writers and poets who childishly refuse to capitalize their initials—nor to celebrate the brave editors who refuse to comply.

But we do note with a small fizzy kick of pleasure that CJ, our friend over at the Star Tribune Newspaper of the Twin Cities, seems to believe that she has a copyright on the facts. It would seem that someone over at Page Six clipped a tragi-comic item she penned back in February regarding some charity event or another, about some quaint risposte between vulgar comedian, schoolmarmish grandmother, and the princely sum of $25 thousand.

We’ve been over this before—one man’s poaching is another man’s public information. We feel your pain, CJ, and wish to take this opportunity merely to suggest that no one is immune from the old Reach Around.

Now, we know that CJ would never pick up an item from any other gossip columnist, at least without a little credit. She is, after all, the hardest working woman in local print journalism, writing as often as three times per week, in a news-generating community that is an open-pit mine of rich gossip concerning professional athletes and the news readers who dig through their garbage. Also, occasionally, a movie star has a layover out at our International airport.

So when CJ asks, “Is there no honor among gossip columnists?” we think the answer is pretty obvious, but we’ll have to check first with our sources.

UPDATE: We have been asked by “Bewildered” to explain how we find time to read CJ during production week. Easy. Our rigorously adhered-to schedule and patented Deluxe Peerless Editorial System allows us to raise our nose from the grindstone at least once a day for a period of up to thirty seconds–precisely the amount of time it takes to read and digest CJ, when necessary.