I’ve been thinking about this passage by Eggers, from that year-2000 Harvard Advocate interview, for precisely two months, ever since I saw it quoted in Rob Brezsny’s humanity-celebrating anti-horoscope. (About which I enthused to a Times reporter a millenium ago. Hi Brian!)

Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

Since this was published, some people went through all of high school and half of college. Isn’t that amazing? How did this change them? What kind of critics will they be? I can’t follow Eggers’ prescription to the letter, but I’m trying to wait until all the facts are in, in general.

From the L.A. Times review of Linda R. Hirshman’s new book Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World:

“Get to Work” showcases a concern for the fate of elite, educated women in the U.S. that is both off-putting in its narrow scope and refreshing in its candor. The polemic expands on her December “American Prospect” article “Homeward Bound,” which argued that these women, especially, should stay in their jobs after they have kids, so that they are in a position to effect real change in the world, and so that they can force men to shoulder more of the workload at home.
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This is her chaos theory of work-life balance: Women shouldn’t constantly worry about whether the milk’s gone sour or their husband’s socks are strewn across the kitchen table. In the case of “a choice between something that engages your full human capacities and gives you power, honor, wealth and so forth in the world on the one hand, and something that’s repetitious, physical, low-level on the other hand, do the higher thing,” she said.

But is corporate law, for example, the “higher thing”? Reached by phone, Katha Pollitt, a columnist for the Nation and author of the forthcoming book “Virginity or Death!”” said she admired Hirshman for “laying down the law like the anti-feminists” who are “very free in telling people what to do.” But Pollitt also said, “There’s a lot of work that isn’t very exciting, and you can easily find yourself thinking: ‘What’s this all for?’ Then the notion of putting your energies toward the family seems very appealing because the alternative is continuing to do something that’s not all that interesting or fulfilling.” And, indeed, some women might enjoy working in the home. “Well, everybody needs a hobby,” Hirshman said at this suggestion. “I am an elitist in that I believe people have different capacities.”

A well-versed reader alerts me that in the current Voice, David Ng skewers John Updike’s May 22 New Yorker review of Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island:

Mankind asks for everlasting life, and he receives it. But as Daniel25 learns, it’s a mixed blessing at best. What does zero times infinity equal? Each Daniel realizes in his own way that life is neither good nor bad; it’s just there. And so are Houellebecq’s novels, which exist far beyond the realm of morality. Reviewers intent on taking him down (as John Updike attempted in a recent New Yorker) come off as prudish and puny. Houellebecq’s infinite void swallows everything and spits nothing back.

The last time I read Ng (who pre-softens his barb with an admiring Kael citation in the lede), he was carelessly misreading Juliette Binoche’s character in Caché, but perhaps he’s right here; Updike may not have been the ideal critic for this sort of book. These two bloggers (“like a 1st year undergrad in lit class, I’m going to highlight The Important Pointth and Themeth in Updike’s critithism”) agree (“The catch is that Updike himself offers Hef-style hedonism; it’s exactly his softcore sensibility that is turned off by the dissociated raunch Houellebecq peddles”), mounting the podium in aggrieved defense of Fun. Dissenting opinions welcome.

And because the web is eternal, one link is from 2000. Which one? This interview with Susan Orlean on Powells.com about The Orchid Thief and redheaded girls, among other things:

Orlean: The Internet didn’t exist when I left Portland. I’m beginning to feel like I shouldn’t say that anymore because it makes me sound so old.

Dave Weich: When did you leave?

Orlean: 1983. We didn’t work on computers at Willamette Week, that’s for sure. People thought it was a principled stand. I’m not going to work on computers! That’s bad!
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Dave: Part of the book’s success stems from how informative or educational it is – I don’t know what word to use without making it sound dry. That’s been a problem when I’ve tried to explain it to people. I felt like I’d learned a lot, but at the same time, it’s really entertaining. It’s one of the fastest, page-turning books I’ve read in a long time, which is why I think it works so well: because it’s neither one nor the other. It’s both.

Orlean: Sometimes I think, Oh God, I don’t want people to think they’re learning. That’s so boring! Why write about it if they could go and look up all the information at the library? Well, because they’re not going to. Much the same way you could say, “Why read about the swamp when you could go see it?” Well, most people will never see it. And that’s what I do for a living: I go see it and describe it.

Dave: You said writing helps you understand what you figured out. So what did you figure out?

Orlean: That you need to care deeply about something or you’re going to feel lost in the universe. I’ve felt that from my stories before, but this really confirmed it. It’s a deep instinct people have: to be able to make sense of this weird, chaotic experience of life, you have to figure out some order, some logic, something to desire. Otherwise, why wake up in the morning?

At the same time, I thought maybe that instinct was disappearing, that people are just too cynical nowadays to feel devoted to something. So maybe it didn’t apply anymore. Look at me: I didn’t think I was particularly devoted. I love my family and my friends – it’s not that I don’t care about things – but I don’t identify so strongly with any one thing.

I was pleasantly surprised to realize toward the end of this process that that was entirely untrue. Not just a little bit untrue, but so wildly untrue that the obviousness of it caught me up short. I’m madly passionate about my work. There’s something really important about doing it well, doing it right, and being able to say to someone, “Come read this book. It’s about orchids, but it’s not really about orchids.” That meant so much to me that I was willing to be quite uncomfortable, walking in the swamp, and to be lonely, away from home.

It struck me as almost hilarious to suddenly think, How could I have been so oblivious? Yes, I’m cynical and skeptical. I’m not a joiner. I don’t see myself fitting in to some niche. But it was exhilarating to think, Oh, this isn’t so strange to me. I get it.

And this one’s brand-new: a satisfying, sweet NPR interview with John McPhee (“A familiar name, but a rarely seen face”), John McPhee: A Reporter’s Reporter. From the NPR site:

John McPhee has written at length about fish, geology, oranges, nuclear power, basketball… and the list goes on.

At 75, the prolific journalist feels he has plenty of words, characters and subjects left to explore. He has already published 27 works of non-fiction. His long pieces in The New Yorker are treasured by his many fans.

A shy man, McPhee shuns most interviews and doesn’t much like having his photo taken. But he connects deeply with his subjects. His latest book is Uncommon Carriers, a collection of stories about freight… and like all of McPhee’s best work, about the people involved with sorting it, flying it, floating it and trucking it.

Special features: a 1978 interview with McPhee and Howard Berkes on “A Sense of Where John McPhee Is.” Not that you can really tell on the radio, with all those clever sound effects. Here’s a New Yorker Q. & A. from last year with McPhee and Matt Dellinger.

Big news, right? I finally read To Hell With All That this weekend. I’ll be happy to discuss it with whoever asks. And I finally watched her interview with Stephen Colbert here on Salon. It’s very off-putting and perky. Where it will all end…

Love for the ’80s rages on, and who can blame the younguns who never got to wear plastic triangle earrings the first time? Thus, the Bright Lights, Big City musical is getting another chance in the sun. From Bloomberg:

The infamous “Bolivian Marching Powder” of “Bright Lights, Big City” has marched its way to Philadelphia.

Twenty-two years after Random House published Jay McInerney’s first novel, about a magazine fact-checker whose cocaine-fueled nightclubbing dulls the pain of his failed marriage and mother’s death, a newly revised musical adaptation is playing at Philadelphia’s Prince Music Theater.

The tuneful rock opera aims to be a story of loss and redemption, onstage and off. In 1999, critics clobbered its premiere at the nonprofit New York Theatre Workshop (where the premiere of “Rent” had resulted in a decidedly different outcome). They liked the music, were mixed about the lyrics and lampooned the production, in which its hopeful Scottish composer and lyricist, Paul Scott Goodman, appeared onstage playing guitar and narrating.

Nonetheless, New York’s Sh-K-Boom Records, which specializes in preserving musicals and solo work by Broadway performers, recognized its strengths and produced a 2005 recording. It features the original lead, Patrick Wilson, as well as Christine Ebersole (“Grey Gardens”) and Sherie Rene Scott (“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”).

Worth Preserving

“Everyone felt there was no reason this should be forgotten,” said Sh-K-Boom President Kurt Deutsch, an actor and musician who is married to Scott and owns the rights to the show. “It has some of the best rock songs ever written for the theater.”

Created with McInerney’s blessing, the musical has less satire and more sentiment than the 182-page novel, which skewered young, striving New Yorkers enjoying the fruits of a nascent stock-market boom. In Philadelphia, Jeremy Kushnier, who resembles a young Jack Lemmon in blue jeans and a three-button brown jacket, plays the protagonist Jamie as a sympathetic roué.

He sings in the frenetic opening number, which like many of the songs quotes from the book: “I am not the kind of guy who should be in a place like this at this time of the morning, Sunday morning 6 a.m. I should have cut my losses about 3 a.m. but I said no, I need more blow to get me on my marching feet again.”

Jamie careens from nightclub to party to his job at “Gotham” magazine, based on the “New Yorker.” His mother appears as a ghost, singing up-tempo remembrances and ballads; his ex-wife, a model, sings a Burt Bacharach-inspired ode to the catwalk.

Cont’d.

OK, Sasha Frere-Jones may already have this on his blog somewhere (it’s from April, National Feel Uneasy Because Poetry Might Make You Feel Things Month), but I can’t resist finally posting something from YouTube: an episode of The Million Poems Show, in which Sasha expresses a tuneful appreciation for the Million Poems, or at least some of them. Jordan Davis, my college classmate, is the host of the show, and seems (in his impresario mode) to be channeling Paul Simon during the Concert in Central Park: “Well, it’s great to do a neighborhood concert!” (This is just from my initial foray into New Yorker life on YouTube; more finds, like this tiny clip of Bjork talking about celebrity gossip at the New Yorker Festival, TK.)

In case you were wondering, there was a sentence missing from Sasha’s new Radiohead review. Meanwhile, there was a funny Nerve animation months ago (now on YouTube, too) that featured The New Yorker (and Mad!), vividly. Should I NC-17ize my site, or should I make you hunt it down for your naughty selves?

As I enjoyed a few nostalgic internet moments of actual surfing, I happened on two things I skipped last year but shouldn’t have: Liesl Schillinger on the disappointments of Turkish Delight, and, related, the British Narnia rap. Scones outdo even Magnolia in their starchy glory.

Can you play golf without leaving New York, and not the silly CEO-on-the-carpet kind, either? Longtime New Yorker great David Owen says you can, in Golf Digest. Owen, as I’ve said before, is grievously underrated, and I’ll keep saying it till the situation improves. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel interviews David Remnick:

“I haven’t written a proper book-length book since I started editing the magazine,” he says. “(Writing) is what I can do given time. Mostly what interests me – and not incidentally the capacity to have a greater impact – is the magazine. And I cannot let (my) writing detract from the magazine one iota. If I’m thinking of writing something for the magazine and another writer comes along with another idea, I bail out.”
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He doesn’t plan to monkey with the magazine’s current mix. Despite the technology-driven changes in reading habits, he believes readers remain thirsty for The New Yorker‘s signature 3,000-word or longer pieces, and he owns up to taking them home to edit in the quiet of late evenings. He’ll gallop on so happily about his job and the magazine – “a gift”- that you begin to think: Oh, my, he needs to sit around downing margaritas some days.

But Remnick protests he has a life. He’s become ruthlessly efficient as he’s gotten older, he says. He watches mindless TV but he also does not forget his priorities: “I only do three things. Devoted father and husband. The New Yorker. And once in a while I write these pieces.”

And from Media Buyer Planner:

HBO will be the sole sponsor of the June 16 issue of The Week, Mediapost reports. All the ads will be part of a single photo spread featuring the stars of HBO’s drama Deadwood, which kicked off its third season of 12 episodes yesterday. The move will probably renew the branded editorial content debate raised when The New Yorker devoted all the advertising in its Aug. 22, 2004 edition to retail marketer Target. Cont’d.

As you know, I thought the controversy was absurd, though I prefer many-sponsored issues from an aesthetic point of view. Also, renegade reporters/substancers and sudden celebrities Iraq reporters Jeff Neumann and Ray LeMoine have been making friends: “‘These people put it in perspective that Jeff and I were unique characters over there,’ LeMoine said of the encounter with, among others, John Lee Anderson [no h in Jon, though], a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. ‘Somebody else just realized that our story was one of the best stories to come out of Iraq.’ “

Finally, the ascendant prince of British podcasting, Brian Luff, has hit the even bigger time: a story in The Independent (and every other paper in England) about his downloadable novel, Sex on Legs, which is making audiobook history for not having been a physical book first. Can the Olympic 100 meters be run in zero seconds? Download the novel and find out. It’s suspensefully perverse! No, it’s perversely suspenseful. Both, really.

Criterion sponsored a May Haiku Contest with, naturally, a movie theme. One of my favorites, by Dana Gustafson:

Need more DVDs
My wife does not agree so
I hide them from her

And this one by Milo George:

Rainy Saturday;
Watch the Cassavetes box.
Oh, now it’s Monday.

It brings to mind Tom Bartlett’s very funny recent series on Minor Tweaks, “A brief dialogue between THE ME WHO SELECTS NETFLIX MOVIES and THE REAL ME,” which begins here (“Oh crap. What is this?” “It’s called ‘The Story of the Weeping Camel…’ “).

In The New Criterion. As usual, Wolcott is careful with his subject, with the language, with the fears and rewards of the critical process:

When word arrived last autumn that The New Yorker was releasing a deluxe boxed CD set of every issue of the magazine published since its monocled dandy espied a butterfly on the cover of the February 21, 1925 debut, my first thought was: “Happy-doodle-day!” That may speak to a certain lack of excitement in my life, but for a magazine junkie, this was the mother lode, the treasure of the Sierra Madre. Never again would I haunt the flea markets for back issues from the 1930s and 1940s, hoping to luck into a John O’Hara story I hadn’t read before, or a sporty Peter Arno cover. Professionally, it was also a must-have. For journalists, researchers, historians, educators, and average buffs, the technological breakthrough in the digitalization of magazine archives is a boon to cultural preservation, putting the past—history as it happened—within fingertip reach. Other weeklies, such as The Nation and The New Republic, have digitized their archives, but those virtual libraries are maintained online, requiring subscription fees or single payments to access articles. (I’ve used both services to excavate art and movie reviews by Manny Farber, one of my critical idols, that otherwise would have remained orphaned within bound volumes.) The New Yorker was doing The Nation and The New Republic one better by bypassing the entire online rigamarole and giving readers the complete works in a handsome, handy, illustrated multi-disk set.

After some initial apprehension, he digs in:

After I finally broke down, sliced through the plastic, split open the accursed thing, and inserted the installation disk into the laptop, I found myself lured into a Borgesian labyrinth of interlocking chambers, spiral stairs, and odd detours that unearthed archeological finds wherever the links led. Daylight disappeared as I descended into permanent dusk, the thumbnail covers of The New Yorker instilling a nostalgia for a time I had never known.

I like his allowances for time’s various effects on taste, including his own:

The “Staffs of Life” series came to typify and symbolize the monumental tombstone tedium of the New Yorker fact piece at its most didactic-pedantic, and even now, decades later, I still hear the occasional chortle, “Remember when The New Yorkerran 50,000 words on grain?” I inserted disk two into the laptop to see if Kahn’s articles were as boring as I remembered, and, as I began to read, I realized that I never had read them, only given them a skim when they were originally published, having taken everybody’s word for how boring they were. I can’t say I was riveted, but the pieces were, I have to confess—interesting. Reams of research braided into elegant histories, and nothing to belittle.

I was sorry to see such a tinny dismissal of the cover artist Gretchen Dow Simpson (and the seeming suggestion that it was fiction’s, ahem, “maidens of sorrow” who were primarily responsible for “low-cal” minimalism). At least one of Wolcott’s closing questions will get people arguing: “Why does The New Yorker’s current slate of female byliners (Susan Orlean, Joan Acocella, Nancy Franklin, Caitlan Flanagan, et al.) seem so much girlier than its former greats (Flanner, Kael, Lois Long, Andy Logan, Maeve Brennan, Emily Hahn)?” You think Nancy Franklin is girly, really? Rebecca Mead? Arlene Croce? Larissa MacFarquhar? Cynthia Zarin? Katha Pollitt? I can’t agree. (Incidentally, Dennis Johnson at Moby Lives tallied up the women writers in the magazine throughout 2002, and found a dearth. I’d be interested in another survey for ’05; I think the statistics would be sunnier—more Flanagan, more Zarin, more Mead—but I can’t be sure.)

Anyway, the reason I bow, deeply if not especially girlishly, to Wolcott is for sentences like this: “A product of the George Jean Nathan-H. L. Mencken 1920s with a dash of Punch, Harold Ross’s New Yorker flashed its grin like a marquee, its jibes and quips syncopated to the staccato rhythms of newsrooms typewriters and the tap-happy Broadway stage.” Or this description of E.B. White: “A prodigious miniaturist who composed hundreds of cartoon captions, newsbreaks, short stories, essays, and Talk of the Town notes and comments (scroll through his credits on the archive search and it’s like watching an endless armada enter the harbor), White taxed his feathery touch of concentration to the breaking point.” Or this summary of the magazine’s new stance after World War II: ” It was the genius of The New Yorker that it recognized this evolutionary shift and, instead of making incremental adjustments at a stately pace, launched a preemptive strike on its readers’ expectations.” The subject (and the reader) enjoy the same level of respect and genuine institutional knowledge that’s here in The New Criterion as they do in Wolcott’s Vanity Fair pieces and on his blog. Say what you will about the wacky standards of new media—Wolcott makes the high-wire somersaults look (that’s look) easy.

Wolcott’s piece cont’d. Thanks to T.P. for the tip.