Author Archives: Emdashes

Speaking of Pigeons

…as I often do, here are some “Secrets of Feral Pigeons,” thanks to a winsome comic called Wild Toronto that puts Mark Trail to shame.
But if you prefer fish to fowl, perhaps you’d like to witness this year’s Mermaid Parade at Coney Island, at which I will be shaking my tailfeathers (or gilding the gills) in a Dixieland-tastic swing routine that will lead off the parade tomorrow afternoon.
It’s always a great occasion; come say hello (or just make appreciative dolphin sounds and wave) if you’re there!

Cyd Charisse, 1921-2008

She had more famous roles, of course, but I love to think of her in the 1946 movie The Harvey Girls, starring a fiesty Judy Garland and a particularly fetching Ray Bolger. Charisse is one of the trainful (that’s the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe, to be exact) of gals who’ve come to civilize the west with starched shirtfronts and tender cuisine.
Charisse, in her first speaking role on film (according to a few web sources, anyway—feel free to correct me), plays Deborah, who back home was a dancer (of course), and here in rowdy Sandrock is a tall, dreamy, exceptionally graceful waitress who falls for the piano player at the local bordello (madam in chief: the proud, resplendently decked out, and lovelorn Angela Lansbury).
Anyway, there’s quite a bit of silliness involving steaks, snakes, horseshoes, and yokels unaccustomed to the pleasures of the waltz, but just try to resist Charisse singing (in the voice of Marion Doenges) “It’s a Great Big World” and dancing in the saloon for her sweetie. This one’s not about The Legs—they’re tucked under yards of fabric in the tidy Harvey uniforms (“Black shirtwaist, cuffs neat and trim/The apron must be spotless from the collar to the hem”)—but about her gentle voice, shy smile, and searching, wistful eyes. R.I.P., dancing lady.

Richard Yates: Getting His Due at Last

Richard Yates, the toughest and least sentimental of American realists, has been getting a lot of good press lately, as his work is reissued, and it’s high time. After all, he died in 1992, too late to benefit from the attention. (This new appreciation for his work has already become absurd, though, almost before it’s begun. His excruciatingly depressing novel Revolutionary Road has just been made into a movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, that will be in theaters later this year.)

I’m a huge fan of Yates, mostly because I admire the heck out of Liars in Love, a story collection I recommend as the best introduction to his work. Reading those stories, it’s mystifying that Roger Angell should ever have written, as Richard Rayner reported in the L.A. Times, “It seems clearer and clearer to me that his kind of fiction is not what we’re looking for.”

Nine years after Yates’s death in 1992, though, his story “The Canal” was published in The New Yorker. I wonder if Angell liked it better than Yates’s previous work, or underwent a change of heart.

For a detailed summary of Yates’s sad, angry life and the great fiction it yielded, one can do no better than to read Stewart O’Nan’s passionate essay in The Boston Review. Don’t have time for it? Then I recommend Nick Fraser’s shorter overview, in The Guardian.

If those guys don’t make you want to read Yates, nothing will.

Political Dispatch from the Distant Past: Two Weeks Ago

I know that, more than a week now since Hillary Clinton threw her support behind Barack Obama, it may seem odd to draw attention to her speech of four days earlier, but Hendrik Hertzberg’s expansive thoughts on the subject on his blog are required reading for anyone looking for a final wrapup of that crazy, long primary.
The animus directed toward Clinton that night had as much to do with expectations as anything else; if the networks had been primed to say, “This night is about Hillary and her supporters; the concessions come later” before the fact, there would have been no outcry at all. In that sense, that night’s mismatch of expectation and outcome stands as a microcosm of her campaign.

Libretto: Oratorio for Spin and Ten Flacks

Alex Ross is right. This compilation of news footage, compiled by the dogged geniuses at Talking Points Memo, is sublime. (It’s a lengthy series of clips of Bush administration officials, mostly, explaining why Scott McClellan’s book has come as such a doggone surprise to them.) As Ross notes, the compilation is diabolically edited in such a way as to maximize the musique concrète quotient of the speech acts. Which of course also has the effect of dramatically boosting the perceived inanity and desperation of the speech acts.
In an effort to help out, I have charted out a kind of score or perhaps libretto of the major themes of the piece, in the event that anyone wants to mount a production at the Met someday. Peter Gelb, call me.
Even without the Harry Partch angle, the mere fact of Ari Fleischer ruminating about how he is all “heartbroken” makes my very heart sing.
Full text after the jump.
Oratorio for Spin and Ten Flacks
“Anger”
“Shock”
“Confusion”
“Out of the loop”
“Out of the loop”
“He shouldn’t have been in those loops”
“He wouldn’t have been”
“He wasn’t in the meetings”
“Was he at the meetings?”
“Frankly I don’t recall Scott being at a lot of those meetings”
“I was there”
“I saw it”
“I saw it a lot more than Scott did in fact”
“I think his view is limited”
“He didn’t have the right access”
“What was said behind closed doors”
“Puzzled”
“Puzzled”
“Puzzled”
“Puzzled”
“Puzzled”
“Puzzled”
“Puzzling”
“Puzzlement”
“Puzzled”
“Perplexing”
“Perplexing”
“Puzzling”
“Scratching their heads”
“Scratching their heads”
“Scratching my head”
“Scratching our heads”
“Baffling”
“Bewildered”
“Shocked and surprised”
“Shocked and saddened”
“Shocked
“Surprised”
“Disappointed”
“All of the above, maybe?”
“It’s kind of hard to make head or tails of it”
“It’s kind of out of left field”
“Surprised”
“Puzzled”
“Puzzled”
“Puzzled”
“Puzzling”
“Puzzling”
“Puzzling”
“Puzzling”
“Puzzled”
“Puzzled”
“Puzzled”
“A book that doesn’t make sense”
“Make no sense”
“Something is wrong”
“Smething doesn’t add up”
“It doesn’t match”
“It doesn’t match”
“It doesn’t match”
“It doesn’t match”
“It doesn’t match”
“It doesn’t add up”
“I can’t figure it out”
“We were so surprised”
“Not just puzzled”
“Puzzled and surprised and disappointed and saddened”
“Saddened by it”
“I thought his heart was in it”
“I’m heartbroken”
“I just don’t understand it”
“It’s so hard to understand”
“I still don’t understand”
“I still can’t understand”
“It’s just too hard to understand”
“I am stumped”
“I am really stumped”
“I just am so stumped”
“I’m stumped and I’m stunned”
“You said you were stumped”
“I’m still stumped”
“That’s what leaves me kinda heartbroken”
“It’s so horribly unfair”
“I feel like crying”
“This is heartbreaking to me”
“I find this whole thing heartbreaking”
“Heartbroken”
“So heartbreaking”
“This doesn’t sound like the Scott McClellan folks knew”
“This is not the Scott we knew”
“This is not the Scott we knew”
“This is not the Scott we knew”
“This is not the Scott McClellan we knew”
“This is not the Scott McClellan I’ve known for a long time”
“It’s a different Scott”
“Maybe this is a new Scott”
“Maybe this is a new Scott”
“Almost like a out-of-body experience”
“Scott’s words don’t even sound like Scott”
“This doesn’t sound like Scott”
“This doesn’t sound like Scott”
“What did Scott sound like?”
“You’d know how Scott sounds”
“Scott’s a soft-spoken person”
“Scott was known for sitting quietly”
“Sounds like somebody else”
“Sounds like a left-wing blogger”
“Scott uses the very same words as the far left uses”
“Moveon dot org”
“The John Kerry campaign”
“The DNC”
“Even Dan Rather during the 2004 campaign”
“Did you have a ghostwriter?”
“The editor tweaked the content”
“Tweaked it?”
“That’s the way Scott put it to me”
“The publisher didn’t hold a gun to Scott’s head”
“He held a checkbook”
“I don’t know”
“I don’t know”
“His disgruntlement”
“Sad and disgruntled”
“Scott, we now know, is disgruntled”
“Disgruntled”
“He was not a happy camper”
“Disgruntled employees”
“Disgruntled”
“Sitting on the front porch swinging in Crawford with Scott”
“Didn’t sound like he thought he was ever going to sit on that swing”
“Total crap”
“Total crap”
“Total crap”
“Scott uses these very inflammatory words like shading the truth”
“Total crap”
“I actually don’t care”
“I’m more concerned with American Idol”
“I care more about American Idol”
“Need any brownies or anything?”

Praise Be: America Extols Summer Fiction Issue

Martin Schneider writes:
I agree with the editors of America, the national Catholic weekly, that the most recent Fiction Issue may have represented a stealthy way of having a “Faith” issue in America’s most prestigious secular magazine. They note that “the magazine’s literary critic, James Wood, wrote a 4,000-word essay on the problem of theodicy, a term one does not often encounter in the pages of Eustace Tilley’s journal.”
America can cheer in recent hire Wood, then, because the guy has mentioned theodicy in five different articles so far! And, of course, the magazine does mention The Brothers Karamazov quite a lot, which is almost as good.
It will surely further cheer America that James Wolcott didn’t like all the wintry God stuff.
Myself, I have no objection to an emphasis on rabbinical or Jesuitical disquisition in the magazine. But June?

Pigeons in the Grass Kick Ass

classicalpigeons.jpg

Our friends in Rome, from a recent visit.

Martin, who has done some lovely flights of pigeon reporting himself, just let me know that according to Gothamist, it’s National Pigeon Day today, and here’s the pigeon post from those eagle-eyed swifts at City Room. I don’t want to hear any boring cliches about winged rodents; these are our birds, and we’re all living together trying to peck out a living in this pitiless metropolis, so let’s show our fellow citizens a little compassion. And appreciation: They’ve got a beauty and gumption all their own. (John Tierney knows so, too.) Cast not the first stone at a beaked neighbor, lest you be shat on in return!
So, to paraphrase Pogo’s Churchy LaFemme, Friday the 13th comes on a bird’s day this year.