“Madison has its own reasons not to feel warm and fuzzy where The New Yorker is concerned,” writes Doug Moe of our mutual hometown (and Lorrie Moore’s adopted one). Like many Midwesterners I know, Madison has a quiet countenance and a long memory, and Mad Town has endured more slights to its good name than Oconomowoc has syllables. Moe describes a wound as deep as a chainsaw cut through ice:

In the fall of 2001, just weeks after the terrorist attacks in New York City, another New Yorker writer, Mark Singer, came to Madison after hearing the city was in an uproar involving the School Board and the Pledge of Allegiance, which eventually resulted in the ultimately unsuccessful effort to recall School Board member Bill Keys.

I spoke to Singer while he was preparing his piece, and he was full of good will toward Madison. “I have never been in a place where people were more willing to talk,” he said. “It’s a fascinating story. You’re lucky. Madison is a great place.”

Then Singer’s article came out, and for much of it he gave a well-written analysis of both sides of the contentious pledge debate, only to change course in the last paragraph and savage us for unseemly self-indulgence:

“Underlying the rhetoric about what a valuable civics lesson Madison has witnessed,” Singer concluded, “there’s a less noble quality, a failure to acknowledge the self-indulgence implicit in all the carping. The semiotics of the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem and the schoolhouse are abstractions that one has the luxury to dwell upon when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and dense concentrations of grieving survivors happen to be several hundred miles away. ‘Democracy’ is one way to define the dialectic. Other terms apply as well.”

That was nasty, as well as wrong-headed. As a letter writer to the magazine noted of our pledge debate: “At a time when political discourse is dominated by almost menacing calls for ideological unity, it is hard to imagine an issue more timely.”

Well, that was almost four years ago now. I hate to break ranks with Jimmy Breslin [who called the mag pretentious after it teased him in the ’60s] in on anything, but my feeling is that we should forgive and remember, to quote Lee Dreyfus.

Which would be exactly in character for a town that’s repeatedly sunk the Statue of Liberty in Lake Mendota, but not all the way. Moe encourages his fellow citizens to go see Hertzberg, Chast, Gladwell, Borowitz, and the gang on the New Yorker College Tour’s March 8-10 Madison stop, since “it really is a great magazine, and worth supporting.” In the phrase of Wisconsin Hamlet, a character invented by my childhood friend Diane Schoff, “Ta be…er no?” In Madison—voted one of Utne Reader‘s Ten Most Enlightened Cities and Outside magazine’s Dream Town—it’s always Ta be.

New Yorker, talk of our town [Capital Times]
Lady Liberty on Lake Mendota [Museum of Hoaxes]
Madison, Wisconsin [Runner’s World]
Oh, Madison [Nipposkiss]
Another Round [Jimmy Breslin review of Joseph Mitchell books, NYT]

Welcome to the human heart! Isn’t it knottier and more slippery than you expected, with so many more than four chambers that you’ve had to stop counting? There are enough Snoopy valentines for the whole class, but the ones I cut and glued myself are for

Donald Antrim, whose essays about his fabric-wild mother and bed-mad self have made life both easier and harder to bear, and who is welcome to visit the kissing booth when I am working it; and for

Lorrie Moore, whose stories in the magazine and elsewhere have made all of us stop breathing as Billie Holiday did for the 5 SPOT listeners in Frank O’Hara’s poem, and who is always surprising us again with her bravery (“The Juniper Tree” being only the most recent example). Her stories are news, and not because they remind us of who’s richest and most popular in the fiction game, but because they affect things—the way art is said to, but sometimes doesn’t. I like this anecdote:

“You’re Ugly, Too” was the first of many of her stories to be published in The New Yorker (and then to be reprinted, with regularity, in annuals such as The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories), but, in 1989, it was a controversial piece for the magazine. “All through the editing process, they said, ‘Oooh, we’re breaking so many rules with this.’ ” Robert Gottlieb had taken over as the editor, but the turgidity of his predecessor, William Shawn, still gripped the institution. “I could not say ‘yellow light,’ I had to say ‘amber light,’ ” Moore remembers. “And that was the least of the vulgarities I’d committed.”

A candy heart of lust and admiration to Steve Martin—with whom I fell in love at a birthday party in 1984 on first sighting of his silver hair and wistful-seducer eyes in All of Me—for giving a million bucks to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, one of the prettiest places I’ve ever been and beloved by scholars. Martin (who, fittingly, designated the money for the American art collection) says, “The Huntington is clearly interested in … bringing significant works of American art to light, contextualizing them, and helping visitors become better acquainted with the artists, the techniques and the significance of the pieces.” It’s not enough that this man made all those movies that make us happy—he writes fiction, Shouts & Murmurs, and plays, and throws money to art into the bargain. Steve, you’re great. And even more handsome than you were, somehow.

Two more hearts wrapped in wrist tape for Edwin Pope and William Nack, who just won A.J. Liebling Awards (to be presented on May 6) for excellence in boxing journalism. Maybe they could do double duty as film critics during this trying time, when Clint Eastwood has duped an entire nation into believing, among other unlikely things, that a gorgeous young waitress who boxes in all her free time would never have the slightest temptation to try out some of her fellow trainees. I’m just sayin’. Movie man Gene Seymour agrees with me, and he’s no mollycoddle in the critical ring.

And to you, reader, who ask so charmingly for more and make me want to give it to you. You know who you are. Thank you.

About Lorrie Moore: A Profile [Ploughshares]
Moore’s Better Blues [Dwight Garner interview, Salon]
Steve Martin donates $1M to support U.S. art [CBC]
A.J. Liebling Awards [East Side Boxing]
The Edwin Pope Collection [Amazon]
My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money, and the Sporting Life [William Nack, Powell’s]

Categories: Antrim, Moore, Martin, Movies

In the Financial Page this week, Jim Surowiecki muses on the seemingly unstoppable power of Wal-Mart and the futility of companies like Gillette and Procter & Gamble’s trying to gang up on the price-cutting behemoth:

It’s certainly true that manufacturers have a lot less pull in the marketplace than they used to. But they haven’t lost it to Wal-Mart and Target. They’ve lost it to you and me…. In a sense, Wal-Mart is the elected representative of tens of millions of hard-bargaining shoppers, and, like any representative, it serves only at their pleasure.

It seems only fair to point out that Wal-Mart routinely declines to serve the cost-conscious shoppers closest to it—its own employees, who are denied adequate health care, proper wages, and the opportunity to advance for those who happen to be women (the company’s aggressively saccharine ads notwithstanding). Any attempts by those people—many of whom started working at Wal-Mart for precisely the reasons Surowiecki describes, as reported in my friend Liza Featherstone’s must-read book Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart—to actually choose a representative for their interests (a.k.a. a union) are promptly squashed hard. Yes, workers are consumers too. But they can’t consume much at minimum wages; Henry Ford figured this out in the ’20s, when he decided he had to pay his workers enough money to buy his cars. Wal-Mart’s done a brilliant job of imitating Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, handing out dollar bills to the panicked masses when the bank goes bad. Trouble is, we’re all living in Pottersville. (The FBI’s COMPIC investigation ruled Capra’s movie communistic for seeking to “discredit bankers” and “deliberately malign the upper class.”) When the likes of P&G look like meek David eyeing a slavering Goliath, you know we’re in trouble.

Down and Out in Discount America [The Nation]
Wal-Mart: The Facts [NOW]
Our Committment to People [Wal-Mart]
Film Industry Surveillance FBI Files [Paperless Archives]
All Hail Pottersville! [Salon]

Categories: Surowiecki,, Wal-Mart,, Movies