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Quick Inauguration Links: Poetry, Bluegrass, and Jill Lepore
Filed under: Headline Shooter Tagged: Barack Obama, Doc Watson, Elizabeth Alexander, George Packer, Jenna Krajeski, Jill Lepore, Jimmy Carter, music, newyorker.com, Philip Hamburger, poetry
Emily Gordon writes:
We’re all in a whirlwind—or, in my case, a state of advanced humility barely distinguishable from a blue funk—after the inauguration’s pomp and stirring addresses, in plain speech, rhetoric, verse, and song. While you’re coming down from the high—or, in my case, shooting for neutral—here are some links to savor and explore.
Jill Lepore: “Our Better History,” an “In the News” post on newyorker.com about Obama’s inauguration speech today, and a long piece written before today, “Have Inaugural Addresses Been Getting Worse?” Is there anything Jill Lepore can’t write about, I wonder? She is my current favorite contributor to the magazine. I’m reading her piece now on the possibly exaggerated death of newspapers, and while I might add a footnote about doomsaying bloggers’ mixed motives (Vanessa Grigoriadis has a good handle on the panicked retaliation of the “creative underclass,” many of whom were probably editors of their high school or college papers), I am, as ever, all admiration. Her sprightly, scholarly sentences brighten the pages, and she teaches, too. I’d read anything by her, and thanks to the editors’ ever more frequent inclusion of her pieces, I intend to.
All the newyorker.com inauguration coverage, which includes…
Various responses to the George Packer post (and Packer’s post-post) on the choice of Elizabeth Alexander as inaugural poet, including this one from Book Bench writer Jenna Krajeski.
Elizabeth was my teacher when I was a graduate student at NYU, and I was thrilled to see her at the podium, calm and dignified. At the Irish bar where my workmates and I watched the inauguration telecast, the crowd was as alert and contemplative during her poem as it was during the most solemn, lively, and challenging moments of the prayers and speeches, if that’s any indication of how a poem goes over with a populace that persists in believing it doesn’t like poetry, the same populace that delights in song lyrics, nursery rhymes, rhyming slogans, hip-hop, and so on and so forth. I did a quick look around the web for the printed poem, but ran out of time; let me know if you spot it anywhere. (Update: Here’s one; thanks, reader!)
If you haven’t read much of Alexander’s poetry, you can read some in The New Yorker; here (via Digital Edition) are “Autumn Passage,” “When,” and “Smile,” which is perhaps particularly riveting reading today.
Finally, remembering hopeful inaugurations past, here’s a terrific White House concert from 1980 to download for free. It’ll either make you happy, or keep you happy, I swear it. (Then, if you like, you can read Philip Hamburger on Jimmy Carter’s inauguration on your Digital Edition.) From Jesper Deleuran of the Facebook fan group “Doc Watson Rules!!!” (which you should join, since he does):Here is a link to a site, where you, among other things can find this live recording from 1980, where president Jimmy Carter had invited Doc Watson and Bill Monroe to play on the lawn of the White House. It is possible to download the 16 tracks from the concert. First 6 with Doc, then 7 with Bill Monroe and his band, and last but not least 3 tunes where Doc and Bill play together alone. This is a must for a Doc Watson fan.
Happy inauguration day, all, and before tomorrow, let’s all start by doing something small to honor the service Obama spoke of so passionately. Vain musclemen who never seem to notice the mothers struggling up the subway stairs with bags and carriages, I’m looking at you. Right after I finish looking at me, of course.
Comments
Regarding Emily’s rave comments about Jill Lepore’s New Yorker writing, I respectfully dissent. Frazier, Paumgarten, Kolbert, Remnick, Bilger, Thurman – all the great New Yorker writers – they leave their offices at some point and go out into the world – raid reality – then report back, describing, analyzing. I eat it up! I don’t want this approach to change. Lepore’s pieces are all facts, facts, nothing but the facts – all gleaned from books and papers, nothing learned first hand. As I skim her lines, I wait in vein for her to enter the frame. But she never does. She never goes anywhere; she never talks to anyone. I love it when a great journalist like Judith Thurman mentions in the course of her report on, say, kimono painting, that she had lunch in a Zen temple in Kyoto. It’s personal and it authenticates the story. Lepore never does this! Her writing may be some form of narrative art, but it’s not journalism – at least not in the classic New Yorker sense; it’s more like … fancy lecture notes!
I love the intrepid and observant reporting of all the writers you mention, too. But for a history and literature professor, aren’t reading and exploring archives a significant part of living? Shouldn’t we honor that kind of adventure?
I’m sure Lepore travels and takes notes on the world as well. She added a personal, experiential note in, for instance, her story on the history of American board games, in which I recall her mentioning playing Life or a similarly status-quo-preserving game (I’ll have to check the story) while wearing love beads and listening to Janis Joplin, or some such funny juxtaposition. I don’t think that’s a singular occurrence of Lepore’s life in her reporting. Besides, there are countless New Yorker pieces whose frame doesn’t include the writer. In my view, though, Lepore is in the frame of each of these stories; some of her turns of phrase and inspired comparisons are more charmingly revealing than a whole issue full of personal history.
By the way, as I listen to that terrific Doc Watson concert again (it’s a special tribute to bluegrass and country music), I’m startled to hear Watson playing and singing “Dixie,” one of “two national anthems,” he explains, and the crowd keeps time by clapping along. Now that’s old-fashioned!
I think there’s a fundamental difference in the implied task of a historian. A historian can’t write about herself, in the normal course of her work, the same way a feature writer can. That would be grandstanding, showboating, and some other trisyllabic gerund. The details of Lepore’s shopping list are clearly irrelevant to, say, Thomas Jefferson, just as much as Simon Schama’s childhood doesn’t truly tell us anything about bloodthirsty citoyens. The same might not be true of any number of Calvin Trillin articles, in which he is interacting with the article’s subjects.
In the most fundamental way, if the historian can’t assume the basic noteworthiness of the facts or narrative in question, no amount of personal detail will improve it. What we ask of historians is first and foremost “facts, facts” over any presumption that the author’s personal details count for more than (or as much as) those of … Cardinal Richelieu.
I take my direction from the writer whose writing turned me on to The New Yorker in the first place, and whose brilliant reviews in the magazine held me spellbound for over sixteen years: Pauline Kael. In her Introduction to “For Keeps,†where she talks about her experience as a movie critic before she joined The New Yorker, Kael says, “I had written about movies for almost fifteen years, trying to be true to the spirit of what I loved about movies, trying to develop a voice that would avoid saphead objectivity and let the reader in on what sort of person was responding to the world in this particular way.†As a New Yorker writer, Jill Lepore lacks that kind of voice.
I feel like there is a lot of talking past each other going on. Driedchar, I think, just has a strong sense of what Driedchar wants and doesn’t want to read in the New Yorker (so do I). At the same time, I think Emily is right to note that a writer’s voice and command of her material can, and indeed should, constitute an engaging presence, even in the absence of first-person narration. But to me, Martin is too quick to dismiss the possibilities for such an explicit presence in a historian’s work. Certainly, if a historian had always to conform entirely to Martin’s prescriptions, I think the New Yorker would indeed not be the natural home for her work.
Driedchar’s own counterexample, Pauline Kael, points tellingly to another category of writer. This writer often makes specific reference only to “books and papers” without field reporting, yet nevertheless has a powerful presence in the narrative: the critic. This is the mode in which a scholar writing for a magazine such as the New Yorker will probably do best to operate. One person I thought of when reading these comments is Stephen Greenblatt, a literary scholar who can be said to function as a historian, and is known for exuberance even in his most “academic” writing. In an October 11, 1993, New Yorker review of a book on National Geographic, he indeed begins with a personal anecdote; but it is his intellect, and the “books and papers” he brings to bear—a weird 16th century English watercolor, an Elizabeth Bishop poem—that gives the piece its real thrill.