Author Archives: Emdashes

John Leonard, 1939-2008

Emily writes:
Apart from my parents, there are two people most responsible for whatever success I’ve found in writing and journalism. One is Katha Pollitt. The other is John Leonard, who I’ve just learned has died. He was loquacious and brave, extravagant and rigorous, profound and mischievous, demanding and incredibly generous. He believed in older writers’ service to younger ones and put his money where his mouth was. He knew more than a football field of literati. His sentences were outrageous Cyclone rides, until later in his life and in his illness, when they settled down a little in syntax, if not in erudition and clarity.
I will miss him.
Later: Andrew Leonard, John’s son, read a “eulogy for my father’s words,” at John’s memorial service on March 2, 2009, and the eulogy is now on Salon. It was one of many moments that made up an evening worthy of John’s greatness of spirit and boundlessness of language.
Do read Scott McLemee (another believer in those overlapping categories, books and justice), Hillary Frey, and Jane Ciabattari at the National Book Critics Circle’s Critical Mass (which is collecting more remembrances as they appear) on the loss of John.
And in honor of his irresistible passion for juicy word combinations, here’s the title of a book he published in 1999, and a link so you can buy it (and I hope you do): When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien Sperm-Suckers, Satanic Therapists, and Those of Us Who Hold a Left-Wing Grudge in the Post Toasties New World Hip-Hop. From the Times obituary: “The comma seemed to have been invented expressly for him.”
Tom Nissley at Omnivoracious has written a graceful tribute. This sentence from his post was hard to read but deeply good to know: “I know he managed to get to his polling place to vote in New York on Tuesday, and I hope he was able to appreciate the results of the night.” Laura Miller’s remembrance in Salon includes the doubly astute observation, “To say John Leonard was a reviewer at heart is to pay a great compliment to a profession that currently seems to be limping toward an undeserved obsolescence.” And: “Unlike most of his colleagues, he never burned out, never grew bitter or nasty about the books.”
Art Winslow, another force in my Nation years who gave me a leg up for which I’ll always be amazed and grateful, writes in the L.A. Times: “In a literary sense, he took it as his mission to drive the money-changers from the temple and to feed the multitudes, or at least try.”
At The New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog, Ligaya Mishan quotes John from his Harvard Crimson years, on “Ginsberg and his fellows”: “In a critical sense, we academicians know these men as psychopaths, and perhaps they are. They believe in sensuality, not sense; in thrill, not mere experience.”
Which made me think of a story John once told about leaving the Crimson office at near-dawn after a long closing night, with the snow falling on the Boston streets making his footsteps almost completely still, when suddenly he heard a voice singing so sweetly it couldn’t possibly be human. It was a very young Joan Baez, maybe at Club 47, where my mother also saw her perform around that time, and John went inside and listened till she stopped singing—it was that beautiful.
I also just remembered that it was John who told me about the scene in Renata Adler’s Speedboat in which a tour guide on a bus full of visitors to the city calls out, pointing at the protagonist, “Look, there’s one of them now!” And how he always identified with that sense of targeted mystery, wondering what the world makes of you, what they think you are. I hadn’t seen him in a while, just heard bulletins, read Meghan O’Rourke’s excellent profile in CJR, and was my usual optimistic, time-senseless self. The world of words is poorer, and so is mine.

Prescient Finnegan Gleans Political Roy Hobbs, Future President, in 2004

Oh, man. _The New Yorker_ put up William Finnegan’s 2004 “article”:http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/31/040531fa_fact1?currentPage=all about Barack Obama, and boy, is it an interesting read on this day of all days. It’s a kind of Rosetta Stone of Obama studies, so many telltale indicators of a personage we can now recognize as a future president. (One quick example: at that time they called succumbing to his charisma to work tirelessly for him “drinking the Obama juice.”)
There are tons of delicious morsels in this short article I could pass on, but I’ll just leave you with my favorite. (I remember it from when I read it at the time, too.)

Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “obama” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, _I_ don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’ ”

That’s right, George. By now even you know that he’s your _successor_. He’s the fellow who disassembled that ornery coalition you and Karl Rove cobbled together. That’s who he is.
_Update_: Finnegan has “expanded”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2008/11/the-distance.html on the unmistakable subtext of the article, never enunciated explicitly, that Obama could someday be president. That claim seemed too bold to include in the pre–convention speech article, but reality has a way of confounding our opinions of what is and is not too bold.

A Link for the Incoming President, and a Link for You

Scott McLemee has asked some smart folks to help him compile a “reading list”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/11/05/mclemee for the new president. The suggestions include Thucydides, Henry Adams, my dad’s old boss Herman Kahn…. so _ponderous_! I think President Obama will be in need of some good beach reads to let him unwind, so I’d recommend Kate Atkinson or Tim Powers.
And “Behind the Candidates”:http://behindthecandidates.com/ is a brilliantly designed website that will help you follow who’s influencing the new leader of the free world. Sure, half the site (McCain’s half) is obsolete, but the pink and blue layout is very soothing.

My Other Favorite Moment of the Early Campaign

I already “mentioned”:http://emdashes.com/2008/11/now-is-the-moment-to-recognize.php how stirring I found Super Tuesday, that chilly day when all of New York was debating the merits of these two superlative candidates. It snowed that day; I handed out Obama leaflets at my local train station in the morning and saw William T. Vollmann speak at the Chelsea Barnes and Noble in the evening (our campaigns are so long that that branch has since closed). As I got my book inscribed, I asked Vollmann if he was supporting a candidate this year (halfway expecting a loony answer like Ron Paul or something); he said he was for Obama.
My other favorite moment was hands down, Saturday, January 26, date of the South Carolina primary. I had spent the previous two months in Austria and I was traveling back home to the tri-state area. I had a two-night layover in Madrid, where I was going to meet up with a good friend flying in from London. I had experienced a trying few weeks and was relishing the rare opportunity for a little drunken revelry. My friend and I stumbled all over central Madrid that night, I think we hit 5 different places—if you don’t know me, it’s difficult to express how out of character this sort of evening is for me. We enjoyed ample beer and _tapas_ and engaged in conversation with each other about the primaries and the economy, and talked up a number of our fellow bar patrons (those who could speak English) about Spain and Europe. It was a grand night all around.
Between 2 and 3 am, we staggered into our hotel room and switched on the TV, which of course was showing CNN. We’d forgotten that all of South Carolina had voted that day, and the result—a mammoth Obama victory—was just breaking. We watched Obama give an utterly electric acceptance speech, and drifted off to sleep knowing that the race had just changed significantly.
A couple of days ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates “posted”:http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/11/the_moment_i_went_all_in.php a YouTube clip of that speech, calling it “the moment [he] went all in.” I was already all in, but it’s really instructive to watch that speech again. We’ve all become accustomed to the power of Obama’s rhetoric, but repetition has rubbed the edges off it a bit. On this night, the difference was the audience, going completely bonkers at every pause or cue. They knew that they had upended the entire primaries. I’ll be honest, Obama’s loss in New Hampshire shook me (although it apparently “didn’t shake”:http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_stump/archive/2008/11/04/in-which-i-empty-out-my-obama-notebook.aspx Obama’s team much, as Ryan Lizza would discover), and I was getting dispirited by the rough tactics of the Clinton team. But to watch this speaker speak to this audience, you’d never know that there was anything to worry about.

Now Is the Moment to Recognize an Unsung Heroine

Hillary.
I mean, wow.
She was as good as her word, and then some. There’s something almost novelistic about the position she found herself in. A figure of such polarization, loathed by the right wing and even loathed among plenty of Obama supporters for a brief period (now over, one hopes!), obliged to support her rival, about whom she surely had and perhaps still has profound doubts, in a situation that lent itself to scurrilous speculation (she wants to run in 2012!), leading to a triumphant outcome in which her own contributions proved to be scandalously underemphasized—that’s some weighty stuff, right there.
You have to feel for her. She deserves the unmitigated thanks of every Obama supporter. One always knew that her support for the liberal project was unquestioned, and she proved that in every way one could possibly want every single day for the last few months. She is a champ.
So what is Hillary’s fate, now? I hope it is Senate Majority Leader, if she wants that role; I assume she does. I do think that she has the mind, nerve, DNA of a legislator right down to her very core; freed from the burdens of perennially preparing for her next presidential run, I fully expect her to fulfill the greatness that everyone knows her capable of.
David Remnick “said”:http://emdashes.com/2008/11/remnick-the-conservative-era-i.php that the Obama-Clinton battle of spring 2008 “is something we’re going to be talking about and thinking about for a long, long time.” I think that’s absolutely correct. My favorite moment of that race was Super Tuesday, February 5, when New York and a host of other states took to the ballot box, and all of New York City was pitched on the razor’s edge, unable to decide between the two candidates, a dynamic captured to perfection by Seth’s flippable “Eustace Tilley cover”:http://theispot.net/arttalk/seth/sethcover.jpg, which came out a couple of days before.