Put It on My Gab: Slate magazine's popular political 'Gabfest'

ARTS & IDEAS: Remember back when the internet was young? Like, 1996?

So a guy named Bill Gates had this notion that people would actually read articles on their web browsers (Yahoo, Excite, Lycos). And he hired the famous editor Michael Kinsley to build him a web magazine.

They called it Slate.com, and it was based in Seattle. It was such a novel idea — with such uncertain prospects for success — that they also made a weekly print edition, a low-fi stapled affair, that they mailed to subscribers who were unsure about this whole internet thing.

Well, Slate.com made it. It is now owned by The Washington Post, and it has been through a couple re-designs. But it has persevered and become a web must-read.

One of its most popular features is the "Gabfest," which was to political podcasts what the magazine itself was to web magazines: one of the first, and still one of the best. On Wednesday evening, the "Gabfest" comes to New Haven.

This week's panelists will be Slate editor David Plotz; senior editor (and New Haven resident) Emily Bazelon; and political writer John Dickerson (who's also political director of CBS News). They will talk election, Obama, and whatever else moves them ... and who knows, there may be room for audience participation.

Show up with something witty to say.

And it's the web, so it doesn't matter how you dress.

IF YOU GO What: Slate's "Gabfest" When: 5:30 p.m. June 27 Where: British Art Center, 1080 Chapel St. Tickets: Free Info: artidea.org

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Where the Wild Things Are: Kids events at the A&I Fest

ARTS & IDEAS FEST: Face it: Your three children under 7 probably aren’t going to wait as you soak in the riches of Tamar Gendler’s lecture on ancient philosophy, and they can’t stay up until the end of one of the fabulous performances on the Green. Doing Arts & Ideas with kids is its own thing: You won’t get to all the stuff your retired or empty-nester or pre-procreation 20-something friends will get to. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a fabulous time, tykes in tow. Here are some of your best bets for when A&I hits town, organized according to what kind of kid you have.

• for the Maurice Sendak lover: ERTH, the Australian troupe that brought gargoyles to town in 2001 is back with a menagerie of dinosaurs for its Dinosaur Petting Zoo. This is scratching one of those itches straight out of your best night-time dreams, like the one you wake from to think, “Dang, I wish I could really fly!” Well, walking with big, furry, real-seeming dinosaurs is pretty cool, too — and even cooler for your 5-year-old who won’t shut up about T. Rex. Six afternoon show times, June 16-17, New Haven Green.

• for the music lover: The Imilonji Kantu Choral Society, or, If the Music Won’t Get Them, the Outrageously Beautiful Costumes Will. But don’t worry — the African classical music will get them. 5 p.m. June 21, Morse Recital Hall, 470 College St.

• for the crunchy kid: Box City is an interactive world of recycled cardboard and other art supplies that participants use to structure a city of the future. Do it for the memory of Ray Bradbury, who was all about alternative worlds that maybe could come true. Probably not for your toddler, but definitely for your teenager (or your wiseacre 12-year-old who thinks he is a teenager). 1-5 p.m. June 16-17, New Haven Green.

• for the kid who likes to dance: Crazy Great Music on the Green. OK, we named it that. It’s actually called Family Stage. It’s a series of performances of high-end music accessible to low-end age groups, as well as their parents, as well as their dogs. In some ways, this is kind of music you just happen by downtown, which seemingly never ends for the duration of the festival, and it's the best part of A&I. It’s the stuff you don’t plan — you just hear it from your rolled-down window and have to pull over. Look for Bob Bloom’s interactive drumming, 1:15 p.m. June 20; or Hip-Hop Dimensions (with break dancing, too!), 1:15 p.m. June 21; or Annalivia, 1:15 p.m. June 26; New Haven Green.

• for the kid who is not scared of the circus: Submerged!, Antfarm’s Circus for a Fragile Planet. In which overfishing and rising sea levels are lead characters. 1:15 p.m. June 22, New Haven Green.

• for the active child: Bike tours! Helmets! Wheels! Spokes! Those crazy contraptions that hipper parents than you use to tote their kids who are better dressed than yours! About a dozen different velocipedic experiences, including safety training (1 p.m. June 16, on the New Haven Green); a trip down the Farmington Canal Greenway (9 a.m. June 16, leaves from the Green, and you need “moderate ability”); and trips to East Rock and West Rock (5:30 p.m. June 20, leaves from the Green).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAR3emJoDSs[/youtube]

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That n+1 piece was mighty good, but needed reporting

Slate has posted what I take to be all of Chad Harbach's n+1 piece about the two worlds of publishing, the MFA world and the New York world (these are his terms). A few comments: First, I admire the gutsiness of making such a big, bold, ridiculous generalization, one that can immediately be torn apart with lots of counter-examples, exceptions, alternative schemas and taxonomies, etc. Such grand generalizations are almost always intellectually flawed, but they can advance how we think about a topic, open up new insights, etc., and I think his does. I mean, I could nitpick him--OF COURSE the MFA students are interested in Gary Shteyngart, and plenty of MFA students are working on novels, and, well, you get the point--but I think his division is an interesting one. And he sure wrote the heck out of it. I mean, the essay is really fun to read, which is odd, since it is a topic with absolutely no consequences for anybody except the people talked about in it.

Second, here is a criticism: The essay does not really deal with nonfiction writing at all, which is a shame, and limits the conceptual reach of the essay. After all, David Foster Wallace's nonfiction was his really great stuff. I think J-Saf Foer's nonfiction boo, Eating Animals, is his best by a lot. And Zadie Smith may yet prove to be a more lasting essayist than novelist. You would not know that any fiction writers even write nonfiction, to read Harbach's essay.

Third, I envy how much Harbach's name is perfect for a Pac-10 quarterback.

Fourth, the piece could have benefited from some reporting. Reporting is when a person, often called a "reporter," makes phone calls, or knocks on people's doors, or sends emails, or even Google searches, so as to find supporting evidence. It would not have been hard, for example, to find actual syllabi of courses taught in MFA programs. Then we would know if in fact all these kiddoes are reading is Joy Williams and Ann Beattie, or if maybe they are reading classic works of literature from the 1880s or 1910s or 1950s. Maybe when these profs teach their classes, they assign "Araby," by Joyce. Maybe they read My Antonia in its entirety. Or early short stories by Philip Roth. Or excerpts from Trollope novels. Who knows? I don't. I don't have an MFA. I don't have an MBA either. But if I were writing an essay about MFA fiction, I would go find out first. I realize Harbach was in an MBA program, but that only makes it more puzzling he didn’t share what particular books he was assigned.

Finally, I wish Harbach had spent more time puzzling over his own assertion here:

And the NYC writer, because she lives in New York, has constant opportunity to intuit and internalize the demands of her industry. It could be objected that just because the NYC writer's editor, publisher, agent, and publicist all live in New York, that doesn't mean that she does, too. After all, it would be cheaper and calmer to live most anywhere else. This objection is sound in theory; in practice, it is false. NYC novelists live in New York—specifically, they live in a small area of west-central Brooklyn bounded by DUMBO and Prospect Heights. They partake of a social world defined by the selection (by agents), evaluation (by editors), purchase (by publishers), production, publication, publicization, and second evaluation (by reviewers) and purchase (by readers) of NYC novels. The NYC novelist gathers her news not from Poets & Writers but from the Observer and Gawker; not from the academic grapevine but from publishing parties, where she drinks with agents and editors and publicists. She writes reviews for Bookforum and the Sunday Times. She also tends to set her work in the city where she and her imagined reader reside: as in the most recent novels of Shteyngart, Ferris, Galchen, and Foer, to name just four prominent members of The New Yorker's 20-under-40 list.

I can't decide if this is anything more than a tautology: young NYC writers are young and live in NYC. Or a truism: a lot of hip young writers will tend to live in hip, young neighborhoods of major cultural centers. Whatever the case, the interesting question to ask is why, in a culture whose great writers have tended not to be New Yorkers — Cather, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Sinclair Lewis, Roth (NJ is not NY, and he lives in CT anyway), Bellow, and I could go on — so many writers now do live in New York. I attempted some musings on that question here.

But look, Harbach (9 TDs and 4 interceptions so far this season) did serious yeoman's labor getting these thoughts down on paper. I was turning his essay over in my head as I fell asleep last night. I think I kicked my dog beneath the covers as I cursed out one of Harbach’s conclusions. Good work, QB.

Also, could I have some money?

20 Non-fiction Writers Under 40

OK, so you may remember that a few months back a little magazine called The New Yorker decided to make a list of 20 top fiction writers under the age of 40. Another magazine — something called “Granta” — does similar lists from time to time. But why does nobody ever make such lists for non-fiction writers? Some would say that non-fiction is rather vital right now. So we made such a list. We asked ourselves, we asked our friends. There is nothing scientific about this list. They are in alphabetical order. Some are in fact over 40 years old, but not by much. There are more than 20 of them. We did not all agree on all of them; some of us have substantial conflicts of interest with some of them. We hope you will meet some people you had not heard of. We hope you will seek out their writing. (Nota bene: much of the research for this list was done by our fabulous intern, and rising literary star, Jeremy Lent.)

There are hyperlinks here, but you have to hunt for them with your little mousie. Make it a fun game.

• Rachel Aviv is a freelance journalist and is currently a Rosalynn Carter Fellow for mental health journalism with the Carter Center. She’s written for the New York Times about off-beat educational topics, such as the death of Braille and naked parties at elite American colleges. In one of her greatest piece, she wrote about Toastmasters for The Believer.

• Eula Biss teaches and writes at Northwestern University, and she is the founding editor of Essay Press, which publishes long-form essays. After college, Biss taught in the New York City public school system before beginning to write essays and books. Her collection of prose poems, The Balloonist, was published in 2002. Notes from No Man’s Land (2009) is a book of essays about race and racial identity in America, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• Tom Bissell (b. 1974) began writing after a bout of depression cut short his stint with the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan. After his return, Bissell worked as an editor for Henry Holt before going on to write travel journalism and books. The Father of All Things (2007) is Bissell’s account of his father’s military tour in Vietnam and a recent father-son return trip to the country. In 2003, Bissell co-authored Speak, Commentary, a book of fake commentaries on science fiction films. (The supposed commentators include Noam Chomsky, Ann Coulter and Dick Cheney.) Most recently, Bissell wrote about his more sedentary pursuits in Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010).

• Dan Chiasson has published three collections of poetry and has been the poetry editor for The Paris Review. In 2007, he published One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, a collection of essays on the pros and cons of autobiographical material in modern American poetry. He frequently reviews for The New York Review of Books. Chiasson teaches poetry workshops and courses on American poetry at Wellesley College.

• Ta-Nehisi Coates (b. 1975) is a senior editor at Atlantic Monthly, where he writes about politics, race and pop culture. He also writes a popular blog at TheAtlantic.com. Coates dropped out of college after a rough ride through the Baltimore public school system, but he was hired by Time in 2005. In 2009, Coates published a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood about his father’s complicated role in his childhood.

• Joshua Cohen (b. 1980) is the author of six novels and story collections. Most recently, he published Witz (2010), a novel about an imagined future in which only one Jew remains alive on earth and yet Jewish culture is all the rage. Cohen also wrote A Heaven of Others (2008), a novel about the afterlife of a Jewish boy killed by a Palestinian child. Cohen also writes a regular column for Tablet Magazine about literature in translation. The majority of his personal webpage is written in Latin.

• John D’Agata’s (b.1974) most recent work is About a Mountain (2010), a book-length investigative piece about the U.S. government’s thwarted plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas. D’Agata also published Halls of Fame (2003), a collection of essays. The eponymous essay explores America’s nearly 3,000 halls of fame, including one dedicated to shuffleboard players. In 2009, D’Agata edited the anthology Origins of the Essay, which begins with prose selections from Sumerian and Akkadian writers in 1500 BCE, then approaches the modern era by way of Petrarch, Bacon, Swift and Woolf. D’Agata currently teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.

• Jason Fagone (31 years old) is a freelance journalist living in Philadelphia. He writes about science, sports and culture for GQ, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Slate and other magazines. In February 2010, he published an investigative piece in GQ about a 2008 Philadelphia shooting, possibly perpetrated by former Colts wide receiver Marvin Harrison. As a result of Fagone’s reporting, the Philadelphia D.A. began reinvestigating the case. In 2006, Fagone published his first book, Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream, which chronicled his journeys to 27 eating contests.

• Keith Gessen (b. 1975) is one of the founding editors of n+1, a twice-yearly journal started in 2004 that publishes articles on politics, literature and culture. Gessen has also written book reviews for magazines like New York and Slate. Gessen was born in the USSR, and although his family moved to the U.S. when he was six, some of his writing has focused on Russia. That includes a 2004 article in Atlantic Monthly about the caretakers of Lenin’s tomb and a 2005 English translation of Voices From Chernobyl, an account of the nuclear disaster by the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich. In 2008, Gessen published his first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, a tale of three recent college graduates, each struggling to make a life as a writer.

• Joshua Glenn (who is 42!) is the cofounder of HiLobrow, where he describes himself as a “freelance writer, editor, and cultural semiotics analyst for international brands.” The blog has various contributors who write everything from fiction to posts about web technology and, of course, cultural semiotics. Glenn was an editor and columnist for the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section. In 2007, he co-edited the anthology Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects With Unexpected Significance, a collection of first-person essays about favorite objects. In 2008, he co-wrote The Idler’s Glossary, a listing of the etymology of hundreds of words and phrases used to describe people in various states of not working.

• Chuck Klosterman (b. 1972) worked as a journalist in North Dakota and Ohio before moving to New York City in 2002. Since then, he’s written freelance articles for the New York Times Magazine, The Believer and Esquire, among other publications. Some of his freelance work focuses on sports: Klosterman contributes to ESPN.com’s Page 2, which published his week-long blog during the 2006 Super Bowl. Perhaps best known for his nonfiction books, Klosterman has published six books since 2001. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (2003) is a collection of humorous essays on such topics as MTV’s The Real World, Billy Joel and the computer game The Sims. In 2010, Klosterman released HYPERtheticals: 50 Questions for Insane Conversations, a card game involving unusual conversation-starters. His greatest work remains his first, the memoir Fargo Rock City.

• Brendan Koerner is a contributing editor for Wired, where he writes the monthly “Mr. Know-It-All” column, responding to reader queries about 21st century ethical issues in technology, medicine, video gaming, etc. Koerner also writes feature articles for Wired, covering topics like the continuing enigma of Alcoholics Anonymous, a fungus that’s threatening crops across Africa and the Middle East and the possibility that Facebook and Twitter help their users be more productive. In 2008, Koerner published Now the Hell Will Start, a biography of an African American soldier in WWII sent to help build a supply road between India and China.

• Gideon Lewis-Kraus is an American-born writer who lives in Berlin. We have no idea how old he is, but we think he is young; he writes young, and we mean that in a good way. He has contributed articles to Village Voice, The Nation, and Harper’s, among other publications. In 2008, Lewis-Kraus wrote an article for Harper’s called “The Last Book Party: Publishing drinks to a life after death,” a first-person report from the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair and a consideration of publishing’s future. The piece spawned a lot of talk. And that was because the piece was very, very good. He wrote this too.

• Dayo Olopade is currently a political reporter for the online news site The Daily Beast. She began her professional writing career at The New Republic, where she covered the 2008 presidential primaries and election. Olopade is also a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation. Her fellowship duties include reporting on the effect of disruptive technologies on human development, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. In June 2010, Olopade published an article in Foreign Policy about Apple’s troubling non-presence in Nigeria and surrounding countries.

• David Orr is a writer and lawyer living in Ithaca, New York. During law school at Yale, Orr began writing about poetry for various publications. In 2008, he wrote the article “The Politics of Poetry” for The Poetry Foundation, in which he used a comment made at an Ohio rally for Hilary Clinton (“[Obama’s] a poet, not a fighter”) to discuss the misconception that politics and poetry don’t mix. He has the virtue of making people mad. Orr also writes the column “On Poetry” for The New York Times Book Review.

• David Samuels (b.1967) is older than 40, but we included him anyway. He is a contributing editor at Harper’s, where he’s written about such topics as Super Bowl XL, America’s nuclear-testing program and Woodstock 1999 (an attempted revival of the 1969 rock festival). He writes for a lot of other magazines. In 2008, Samuels published The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Imposter James Hogue, about a 28 year-old convicted thief who successfully passed himself off to Princeton admissions as a 16 year-old cowboy and self-taught orphan. At the same time, he published a collection of his work, Only Love Can Break Your Heart.

• Kelefa Sanneh has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2008. Prior to that, he was the pop-music critic for The New York Times, beginning in 2002. His article “The Rap Against Rockism,” which appeared in the Times in 2004, discusses a perhaps-ungrounded set of prejudices held by many “old school” rock fans. Sanneh’s New Yorker articles have included profiles of lesser-known pop-culture figures and a report on Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ (led by embattled pastor Jeremiah Wright). Sanneh’s work has appeared in the yearly anthology Da Capo Best Music Writing in 2002, 2005 and 2007.

• Samantha Shapiro is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and has also written for Slate, Mother Jones, Wired, and others. Many of Shapiro’s articles deal with religion: for instance, an obituary of “Reverend Ike,” a New York preacher who spearheaded the “power of positive thinking” gospel; a 2006 speech by the outgoing chancellor of the New York Jewish Theological Seminary that ruffled many Jewish feathers; a first-person account of how her atheist-leaning nephew finally got bar-mitzvahed. Here is a recent piece.

• Jake Silverstein (b. 1975) was named editor of Texas Monthly in 2008. After college and graduate work in English, Silverstein moved to Marfa, Texas, and began writing for the Big Bend Sentinel. Then, he embarked on a freelance writing career, roaming Texas and Mexico in search of magazine stories. The details of that search are chronicled in Nothing Happened and Then It Did (2010), Silverstein’s first book. In 2007, Silverstein won the PEN/USA Journalism Award for a Harper’s article about a deathly automobile road race in Mexico.

• Lizzie Skurnick is a critic, poet, essayist, blogger and author. She regularly contributes book reviews to The New York Times and The Washington Post. She has published her poems in The Iowa Review and The New Haven Review (among others), and in 2005, she released a collection called Check-In. Since 2003, Skurnick has maintained the blog Old Hag, to which she posts book reviews and her thoughts about various literary and journalistic matters. And if that weren’t enough, Skurnick has published ten teen novels, including some in the Sweet Valley High series. She writes a weekly column about teen lit for Jezebel.com, and in 2009, she published Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.

• Zadie Smith (b. 1975) is crazy famous, deserves to be, and soon will start writing the New Books column for Harper’s. If you only know her novels, check out her collection of essays.

• Touré (b. 1971) is a music writer, novelist and TV personality. Since 1997, he’s been a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, where he’s published cover stories on such hip-hop artists as Alicia Keys, 50 Cent and Jay-Z. He has released two collections of his magazine writing, as well as Soul City (2004), a magical-realist novel about a mayoral election in an imagined utopia of African-American culture. Touré is also the host of two music programs on Fuse TV.

• Lindy West is the film editor for The Stranger, a weekly arts and culture newspaper in Seattle. She also makes a lot of noise online, both through her blog (posted on both TheStranger.com and Telegraph.co.uk) and on Twitter. On her blog, West’s bio says that she writes about “film, popular culture, lady stuff, animal attacks, and amusing garbage she finds on the ground.” Her film reviews are first-person, humorous and highly opinionated. She wrote this bit of awesomeness about Sex and the City 2. We have no idea how old she is.

Hitch-22

By Christopher Hitchens (Twelve, 2010)

I just finished Christopher Hitchens’s magnificent new memoir, Hitch-22. I hated his last book, the one about God — or, as he would have it, god. Well, fair enough. I always thought the big-G god thing was an unfortunate bit of deck-stacking. But it was a truly ill-informed book, one written in bad faith (so to speak), one whose main use was to remind one of the utility of Cicero's dictum that we must state our opponent’s position in the strongest possible terms. When writing about religion, Hitchens never misses a chance to ridicule, or to understand. But this new book...

Well, it should have been obvious that the best book he could write about now would be a memoir. As he tacked from political left to right over the past ten years or so (although he makes a good argument in the book that the shift was much longer coming), his persona, and his writing, have increasingly been self-centered. Even when unintentionally so: whether or not he chose to foreground himself, we the readers certainly began to read him as much for the Him as for the ideas.

So it is a treat, now, to have a book that gives the whole Bildung. And it's just delectable, sassy fun to read about swinging London in the 1970s, when he was part of a set (he reluctantly uses the word) that included Martin Amis and James Fenton, and later Ian McEwan and many others. Their “Friday lunches” became the Algonquin on the Thames, full of wit and wordplay and political swordsmanship.

And those weren’t the only swords unsheathed. The man had sex with a lot of women — and, one is intrigued to learn, a lot of boys and men. Hitchens here makes a convincing and sympathetic case for the public-school incubation of the Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name as a rather beautiful thing, something one can develop a taste for. He is quite frank about his homosexual “relapses” that continued into his twenties, before he gynocentered himself for good.

My one complaint: that he never comes clean about his caddish end to his first marriage, and that he only briefly, economically confess what an absent father he has been, before moving on to more achievements and (wholly convincing) self-justifications about this, that, and the geopolitical other. He has suggested elsewhere that he doesn’t talk about his ugly disregard for his first wife and children because, well, it’s their story to tell, not his. I am not quite buying that. But one friend did make the very cogent case that his glaring omissions actually say something good about him: "Look,” she said to me, “he is open about sleeping with men, but obviously ashamed of the way he has treated those close to him. That actually shows he has a pretty good moral compass — he knows what is shameful and what isn’t.” That makes sense, I suppose. But I still wanted to watch him wear the hairshirt a bit more enthusiastically.

That said, this book is intelligent and humane, and it tells you more about Cypriot history than you thought you wanted to know. Hitch-22 reminded me why I love the author of The Missionary Position, his fervent slapping of Mother Teresa, and his book about the war crimes of Henry Kissinger. Hitchens takes no prisoners, not even himself.

A missed opportunity

Here at NHR, we try to lean more heavily on good books, but every once in a while a book is such a missed opportunity that it's instructive to point out how. Hence my review of Daniel Menaker's A Good Talk, posted this morning to the New Republic's web site. Menaker is a major publishing macher (is there any other kind?), having worked at the New Yorker, Random House, and HarperCollins. And his editor, Jonathan Karp, is quite savvy. So one wonders how the stone and the flint failed to ignite. Or something like that. Menaker had a hand in a recent slight disappointment, Judith Shulevitz's book about the Sabbath, which I reviewed here. I don't know if he was the final editor; he acquired it and then left Random House some time later.

Both books — and Shulevitz's is by far the better book — seemed to need tougher editing. Having just gone through some tough editing for this forthcoming book, I know the process isn't always fun. But it's usually necessary, and it's the writer who loses out when the editor gives him or her too much of a pass. (Heck, if I were editing Shulevitz, I would probably be too ginger: she is very smart, and she knows her stuff.)

The End of Oldies Radio

Over the holiday, I read Michael Chabon's new book, which has in it a very poignant essay about (among other things) oldies radio — how one day the songs you grew up with are now oldies, while meanwhile the the songs that used to be your oldies, like Elvis and doo-wop, are falling away from radio forever. In today's radio culture, a song like Ben E. King's "Stand by Me," a baby-boomer favorite that had resonance for the generation of two after the boomers because of of the movie Stand by Me and, moreover, because it's a great song, is now lumped together with all the way old crooner stuff, the Como and Sinatra, the Rosemary Clooney, which, while it has its own merits, is for the boomers and all the rest of us basically grandmom's music. Even early Beatles don't really make it onto FM radio much any more — if you remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, then you almost sixty or even older, which is to say a small percentage of the radio listening audience. And not a demographic advertisers care about (unless they are advertising prescription drugs). What does this all mean for me? Only that today, driving back from New York City with my 3-year-old fast asleep in the back seat, I flipped through the radio until it landed on the sublime "Super Freak," the 1981 hit by Rick James.

I grooved through the last minute or two of that song, it faded out, and then I was hit with "Ventura Highway," the 1972 bit of lite Americana by the band America.

Now, I love both "Super Freak" and "Ventura Highway," truly. They are both catchy and lyrically memorable, and they both have the power to evoke a certain time in one's life. Now, the times they evoke in my life never really happened, but rather seem as if they must have happened — but it's a special kind of song that has the power to do that, too. BUT, and this is the point, they are two songs with nothing in common artistically, thematically, or culturally. They have been yoked together by some radio programmer out in ClearChannelLand only because they figure some guy in his forties (or maybe in his mid-thirties, but with an affinity for both music of his own time and the lite fare of his father's time) will remember and enjoy them both.

In other words, if one thinks that a radio station ought to have a character, then this is a purely cynical programming move, putting "Super Freak" and "Ventura Highway" together. Which is another way of saying that nobody really expects radio stations to have a character any more. DJs don't get to make playlists, and radio stations don't serve meaningful communities of listeners.

To that latter point: there used to be a New Haven DJ named Vinnie Penn, who worked the morning show on WKCI ("KC-101"), a Top 40 station broadcasting out of Hamden, one town to the north of New Haven. Vinnie — who also had the honor of working with Glenn Beck when Beck was a crappy New Haven–based morning jock — wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but he was beloved by others. He could be crude and juvenile, to say the least, and at times could be quite smart. Anyway, what I liked about him was that he was a New Havener. His show was peppered with references to real New Haven hangouts, to what New Haven was like in his 1980s childhood, to stereotypes of surrounding towns in Connecticut, etc. In other words, he was our neighbor: Our Neighbor Vinnie.

After he resigned/was fired/was forced out, he was replaced by this dude with the fake name Mike Maze. (To be fair, Vinnie Penn was a shortened, so fake, name too. If I ever stalk the airwaves, it will be as Mark Oppenheimer, as in "Oppenheimer," the song by the Old 97s.) From what I can tell, Maze isn't the biggest moron on the air, but he is no New Havener, nor do his ClearChannelBosses seem to have any expectation that he be. His show could come from anywhere, and it seems to go nowhere. It has no grounding, except in the pop-culture reality-TV ether. For some reason, the idea behind a lot of morning shows now is to re-hash the TV of the night before.

I miss the way radio used to be. I came along way after the heyday of free-form. I never knew a time when DJs had any real power over what they played. But at least they weren't playing "Ventura Highway" after "Super Freak."

Clothes make the man

You may have noticed in this morning's New York Times the article in which it's asserted that men in their twenties and thirties are actually more dapperly dressed than our boomer parents. As one bit of evidence the author selected Prof. Samuel Rascoff of NYU Law School. Quoth he:

“The fashion gene skipped a generation,” said Samuel Rascoff, 36, a law professor at New York University who specializes in national security law and who, being a fastidious dresser, has given serious thought to the trend, which he sees reflected in his students.

“There’s a sense that this return to style, or to a consciousness of how you look, is an attempt by young men to recover a set of values that were at one point very much present in American society and then lost,” he said. “It strikes me as being of a piece with the way young people buy their coffee or their food: paying attention to authenticity or quality, and to whether something is organic or local. They stand for a rejection of the idea that all consumer goods are ephemeral and inevitably made in China and bought at Wal-Mart.”

Here is Prof. Rascoff:

Now, it so happens that I knew Sam Rascoff when he was a wee law student (not that I was a law student—I was not), and he did have a way with clothes. But unless his style sense has taken a major leap forward, he is at best the fourth-best-dressed man I know. In ascending order, I nominate these men as better dressed still:

3. George Raine, my old college classmate, now an associate at Ropes & Gray, the Boston law firm. George puts the white shoe in "white shoe." Consider:

2. Prof. Willard Spiegelman, the editor of Southwest Review and a teacher of English literature at Southern Methodist University. So well dressed that he appeared in a fashion spread in the New York Times Magazine. Consider:

1. D. Graham Burnett. This guy is a sartorial legend. He teaches the history of science at Princeton. I have only met him twice, but sweet Jesus does he have threads. In fact, he may violate the old principle (which I have heard attributed to Diana Vreeland, late of Vogue, and generally late) that if you dress elegantly they notice the person, not the clothes. (Or was it Coco Chanel?) He dresses so well I can't for the life of me remember his face. These pictures don't quite capture the texture of the fabric, the warp and woof, the weave, the whoo-whoo of his how-de-do. And one of the pictures is weirdly gay (Burnett is a married man). But they will have to suffice:

While I am at it, may I say how much that second Burnett photo, the rent-boy pose, reminds me of the author photo the late Yale historian John Boswell used?

Don Draper, eat your heart out.

Losing my religion

Reading today's cover story in The New York Times Magazine, by Elizabeth Weil about her couples therapy with husband Daniel Duane, was for me a bit like reading a second novel by an author whose first book I loved: I want to read it—indeed, there is no chance I am not going to read it—and I hope it turns out well, but the whole situation is fraught because I will be devastated if it turns out badly. The things is, I really love Daniel Duane's writing. Let me put it this way: I am from Springfield, Massachusettes, land-locked and cold, and yet he made me enjoy reading about surfing. In fact, it would be a uncomfortably accurate to say I have a man-crush—OK, let's call it a crush—on Duane. He climbs mountains, he surfs, he cooks, he makes a living as a freelance writer, he re-built his own house, his house is in the Bay Area. What's not to love?

But could my love survive his wife's article?

The answer turns out to be yes, my love survives. But it is weakened, and will probably never return to full ardor. To judge from her article, he is a loving husband and father, but he is a serial obsessive of the kind I can't abide in person for more than about ten minutes. He mastered climbing—then surfing—then carpentry—then cooking! (What am I missing?) To know his passions through his writings is endearing; to know them through his wife's long-suffering observation is to make me realize how unlikely it is that he and I could be friends. Partly this is because of the inferiority complex all of us ineffectual, lazy non-starters have when in the presence of real doers; partly this is because of the moral valuation I find myself placing (perhaps unfairly) on anyone who would rather cook really well than order pizza and have more time to play with his kids. (Don't believe me? Read the article.)

I am not sure how to sort this all out. The issue of Daniel Duane is way too close to my face for me to see it clearly. I love his writing, envy his career, sometimes envy his life, don't envy his wife ... you get the idea.

Does this all bore you? Well, at least his books won't. Read them.

We partied like it was ten years ago

1999, to be exact. On Saturday, the New Haven Review took over Lyric Hall, the antiques and restoration house on Whalley Avenue. Owner John Cavaliere has retrofitted the old vaudeville space in the back, and so what choice did we have but to throw a party to celebrate issue #5? First, we ate and drank for an hour. The mango champagne punch was swell. Then the 75 or so guests retired to the theater, where NHR editor Brian Slattery (violin, guitar, piano), Craig Edwards (violin, guitar), and Joe DeJarnette (upright bass) played backup music as local notables (“locables”) read stories by their favorite authors. (Thanks to Laurel Silton for taking the pictures.)

Actor Bruce Altman read from Philip Roth’s Indignation and The Breast.

Alice Mattison read Grace Paley.

Janna Wagner read Lorrie Moore.

Nora Khan read James Salter.

And Lisa Sanders read Ian Frazier.

And then we drank again. And we ate more. Arlene Ghent catered, with pastries by Manjares. Have you had their brownies? I ask you—have you had their brownies?

We raised some money in pledges—low four figures, since you asked—but that wasn’t the point. The point was seeing people, meeting people. Tom Gogola was there. New Haven native Darius James, late of New York Press, was there. Katharine and Nicholas Fox Weber were there. My mom was there. Pang-Mei Chang was there, seeing John Cavaliere for the first time since high school. Bruce Tulgan and Debby Applegate were there. Betty Lockhart was there.

You were there. And if you weren’t, you should have been.

Or were you home watching this?

Strength in What Remains

By Tracy Kidder (Random House, 2009)

I almost didn’t read the new book by the great journalist Tracy Kidder, and I’m not proud of either of the reasons why.

First, I didn’t like the title. Tracy Kidder has had some memorably evocative titles (Among Schoolchildren, an allusion to a Yeats poem, whether he knew it or not; Home Town; and one of the best titles ever, The Soul of a New Machine, which among other virtues always reminds me of the Police album Ghost in the Machine). But he now has two terrible titles to his name. First, there was Mountains Beyond Mountains, a portrait of the saint on earth Paul Farmer. And now comes Strength in What Remains, about Farmer's also quite saintly Burundian colleague Deogratias Niyizonkiza. There's something about good people that, for Kidder, makes for bad, treacly titles.

I also didn’t want to read a book about genocide. Having skipped Philip Gourevitch’s book about the Rwandan genocide, avoided David Rieff’s writings on genocide and intervention, and missed every book about death and destruction in Iraq (except Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s, which I correctly suspected would be fun to read because it’s all about what incompetent boobs the Bush administration were), I thought I might as well keep up my streak: no books that threaten to convince me that mankind is irredeemably evil and God, if he exists, doesn’t care.

But I read a review of Kidder’s new book on the day in August that my annual birthday gift from my in-laws, an Amazon gift certificate, arrived in my e-mail inbox. So I bought it. And in the last week I have finally read it.

And it’s warm, and humane, and at times funny. There’s no shortage of intense misery, described all too well. Of the frequent flashback scenes that take us from Deogratias’s more comfortable life in the United States back to the hell he endured less than ten years ago in his native Burundi, where as a Tutsi he was hunted by Hutu génocidaires, the most haunting involves an orphaned infant whom Deogratias could not save. I won’t tell you any more than that—partly because I don’t want to give away too much, partly because I just don’t want to re-live it in the typing.

For me, the book’s most unusual achievement is to show us a big American city, New York, through the eyes of a penniless refugee. Before Deogratias was taken in by generous Americans, before he enrolled at Columbia, before his graduate work at Harvard and then Dartmouth, he was delivering groceries for below minimum wage and sleeping in Central Park, hoping to one day figure out that subway system. No matter how impressive the accomplishments that bracket this period—surviving, on foot, and evading his would-be killers; becoming an educated American and building a hospital back in Burundi, a hospital which opened in 2007—it’s Deogratias’s early days as a nameless, faceless, dark black man in a city where he knew nobody that I will always remember best.

Honor, thy father!

About a year ago, I wrote a review of The Bishop’s Daughter, Honor Moore’s memoir of her father, the late Episcopal bishop of New York, Paul Moore. The review never ran, but the recent release of that book in paperback prompted me to return to the review, and I still think it contains some points worth making. So here it is; read on: In the strongest sense, literature has no ethnicity, of course. Beloved is not African American, even if its author is; Studs Lonergan is not Irish-American, even if its author is. Art, that’s what they are. But for the sake of shorthand, and to describe our acquired tastes, we do use ethnic language for literature (and so Portnoy’s Complaint is obviously Jewish, to take a familiar example). By those arbitrary standards, The Bishop’s Daughter, Honor Moore’s memoir of her father, the late Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, is a distinguished contribution to the very small genre we might call WASP confessional. Other writers have delivered the juicy, clam-baked goods, dishing on the sex and drugs and general dissolution hidden behind the brownstone walls, but the most notable of these works have usually been fictional, if just barely: from Edith Wharton to John Cheever, from Evan Connell to Louis Auchincloss, all can be told if no real names are used. In The Bishop’s Daughter, Moore quite plainly has decided that the old rules aren’t just old—they’re dead.

The book is thus instructive as an example of how meaningless ethnic literary categories are becoming, if they ever mattered all. Having decided there’s nothing to be said for her tribe’s traditional discretion, Moore can thus yank her bisexual father, who died in 2003, quite rudely from the posthumous closet and write of her mother’s descent into mental illness, of her own abortion, of lesbian affairs, and of straight affairs too numerous to keep straight. Much of the book’s compelling scent is the strong whiff of transgression. It’s the odor of dirty sex coming off those sheets of paper. Who writes like this about her dead father’s sodomite tendencies? Who besmirches the church this way? Certainly not a Radcliffe alumna descended of a founder of Bankers Trust! Thank God few of her father’s St. Paul’s classmates are alive to see this. Moores just don’t do this.

That was, in any case, one way to read the message of several anguished letters that Honor Moore’s siblings wrote to The New Yorker after the magazine published an excerpt from The Bishop’s Daughter in March 2008. But what they actually spoke of was common, not aristocratic, decency. “With moving elegiac sentiments, my sister Honor Moore has outed my recently deceased father, Bishop Paul Moore, against his clearly and often stated will,” Paul Moore III wrote. “Many of her siblings were astonished when she decided to do so. Our family resembles many others in that we presume a natural confidentiality as we share our struggles in life.” Osborn Elliott, the former editor of Newsweek and a neighbor of Paul Moore’s in Stonington, Conn., added his two, acerbic cents: “Writing about what she learned growing up as a daughter of Bishop Paul Moore, Jr.—and later about his secret life—Honor Moore seems to have forgotten the Fifth Commandment: Honor thy father and thy mother.”

I for the most part agree with Honor’s younger siblings and with Mr. Elliott: it’s a bad thing to write a book like this. Not because it libels the dead, who in this case is quite guilty and therefore not libeled in any case. And not because it violates class protocol. Rather, there has to be a very good reason to to go against the wishes of those friends and other family who would rather not see their beloved exhumed for the purpose of Amazon rankings. And Moore’s defense, straight from the canons of romanticism, does not cut it: “I came to understand that my own sexual development was inextricably tied up with my father’s complicated erotic life, and…I thought that story important for me to understand. [B]ecause I was a writer, understanding meant telling.” “So you have to write this for your integrity?” Moore is asked. “Yes,” Moore answers.

Nonsense, I answer. And I say that as a writer, one with the same good notices and poor sales as Honor Moore. Our integrity cannot require us to hang Daddy’s dirty laundry in public, nor to ignore the feelings of our siblings. (As another eldest sibling in a large family, I am particularly galled by Moore’s sororal irresponsibility.)

Meanwhile, however, the book is very good. The language is lovely, showing Bishop Moore vividly in all the stations of his cross: as the prep school boy slowly coming to Jesus, the worker priest serving the poor yet conflicted about his own family’s wealth (and about his lust for men), the sad, widowed father of nine children, the nationally famous left-wing bishop of New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, and the elder pastor, outed to his family and hoping for some portion of their compassion. And not only is the book beautifully written—a published poet, Moore will surely be remembered for this exercise in prose—and anthropologically interesting, taking us inside that world where possessions are rarely bought but always had, where every friend and lover has a summer home, and where practically the only Jew to be seen is “Arnold Weinstein,” a Portnoy-figure who honors the much younger Honor by making love on her “in daring, experimental ways.” The book is also theologically profound, making a powerful case that Paul Moore’s progressive episcopate depended on his homosexual urges. He was an enlightened clergyman because, not in spite of, what he believed was his sin-darkened heart.

In his daughter’s telling, Paul Moore appears to have been that rare creature, a genuine male bisexual. As a bachelor Paul Moore had courted more than one woman, and Honor, using her parents’ letters, reconstructs for us the winding road that led to Jenny McKean’s triumph over the competition. Then, beginning at least in seminary, already married, Paul Moore was having gay relationships. He continued having gay sex throughout his marriage. But when he and Jenny separated in 1970, probably because she knew about his affairs, they agreed to see other people…and soon, Honor later discovered, he was “dating no fewer than five women.” After Jenny’s death from cancer in 1973, a grieving Moore connected with at least one old female love but soon was re-married to a new love, Brenda Eagle. He seems truly, if inexplicably, besotted with his second wife, a falling-down drunk who wastes none of her small capacity for kindness on her stepchildren; but the marriage does not, at least, seem like a cynical arrangement meant to maintain a public persona. Meanwhile, Moore keeps his long-term male lover, abandons him when Brenda finds out, then goes back to him after Brenda’s death. He also goes back to women, taking at least one lover shortly before his death. (He told me about her when I interviewed him in 2002.) Long after he was out of the public eye, when he had no reputation to uphold, and when his children all knew about his gay past and present, he continued to love and make love to both men and women.

Honor Moore is very sensitive to the nuances of her father’s complicated sexuality, and she never tries to fix his erotic life to any theoretical matrix (his sexuality is never “on a continuum,” for example). She lets the facts speak for themselves, and saves her interpretation for the relationship between those sexual facts and his ministry. First, Honor notes, the overriding desire in Paul Moore’s life was not sexual but pastoral. He wanted to serve God in a very specific way: not as a theologian or church educator or deacon or choir director, but as an Episcopal priest of the traditional parish kind. That meant, in his estimation, having a wife, not just or even mainly for appearance’s sake, but rather because he would need a helpmeet in serving God. “Eventually,” Honor writes, “he found himself in love with my mother, his misgivings about her and his other desires subordinate to his quest for a partner in the life he was becoming more and more determined to pursue, a life in the church.” Attracted to both men and women, he chose to settle down with a woman, and as a young bride that woman helped him feed the poor and shelter the destitute in their parsonage in Jersey City; their joint ministry became a model in the church for engaged social action.

Honor seems to believe that the will does have some sway over the libido. Not only does her father choose women, but after a rocky time with men she loves only women for a long time, then returns to men. In this view, it is plausible that the bishop chose his double life in part because of the kinship it would give him with the suffering. Moore’s first great causes were justice for the Negro and for the poor man, and he was as far as can be from either. He did, however, have his own burden—homosexual love—and it’s one that gave him a sense of otherness, of what it was to be the Invisible Man.

“As my father lived his sexuality with men, it certainly was ‘something else,’” Honor writes, “something that moved beneath the surface of the life he lived with his wives, with his children, with parishioners and colleagues; something that moved between the interstices of language in the charged realm of desire, of imagination, of relationship with the unseen, informing his theology and compassion.” What’s more, if he “had disclosed that existence to his wives and children, he would have had to give up one life or the other….” This is not the time-worn drama of the tragic closet-case. Rather, Honor is arguing that her father’s refusal to choose between two worlds, even in old age, when gay rights were a fact of the world, and even at great cost to honest relations with his family, was the crucible in which his special Christian charity was forged.

That’s not to say that Paul always saw his bisexuality as a blessing. He was a man of his time, ashamed of his same-sex attraction, and he could be blunt about what he saw as a terrible failure. He did not valorize gay love as some sort of manly, Platonic ideal; to the contrary, he saw it as inferior to what a man shared with a woman. “It was an addiction,” he once told Honor. By contrast, “I loved your mother, and I love Brenda.” And at a time, the late 1960s, when other preachers, like the philandering William Sloane Coffin, were preaching a “situation ethics” that might allow for extramarital sex, Moore was slow to give up the belief that “all sexual activity outside marriage was per se sinful,” as he wrote in his memoir.

But of course that unflagging sense of rectitude contributed to Moore’s suffering, and therefore may have made him an even finer pastor. In 1969, Jim Stoll, the first openly gay Unitarian minister, once compared the plight of homosexuals to the plight of blacks in America. “[T]here are many different groups of ‘Niggers’ in this country,” he wrote. “Mexican Americans, poor people, women, and yes, homosexuals.” Moore would never have preached in such off-color language, but he would have been in intuitive agreement with Stoll. “But what of the suffering?” Honor writes. “It was my father’s sacrifice and his gift. It was, as he had once told Andrew Verver”—his longtime lover—“what kept his ministry alive, what made his faith necessary.”

What made his faith necessary. The late twentieth century was not a good time for liberal religion, and certainly not for mainline Protestantism. The old establishment churches, the Congregationalists and the Episcopalians, hemorrhaged membership. People like Paul Moore were losing faith all around him; Honor is quite typical in having rejected the church of her patrician ancestors, the church of her dad. But Paul Moore remained a believer; his faith did not waver. Was it being bisexual that made his faith not only possible but necessary? Without it, would he have been just a rich old white man with a sentimental side and a soft sport for high-church ritual? Did the poor and benighted whom he served have his “addiction” to thank—for his willingness to lead them into the light, for his table where he fed them?

When Paul Moore told his eldest daughter, “It’s come out that I’ve had gay affairs,” he followed up quickly that “it is not public, and…you are NOT going to write a short story about it.” Honor was disoriented, and one of her first thoughts was, “Doesn’t he know I don’t write fiction?” She sure doesn’t. This is an exercise in confessional, the kind her father knew only in a liturgical context. We cannot know how her father would have felt about this fine exercise in non-fiction, and we can only wonder if her siblings will ever forgive her. But for those interested in what makes even some flawed men great, what makes them give their lives over to an ideal that leads them to serve others, this book offers a fresh, provocative answer.

Kindle a book, light my fire

I was in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, and I went into Bridge Street Books, located nowhere near Bridge Street, from what I could tell. It was on Pennsylvania Ave., off M Street, the main thoroughfare of Georgetown. The proprietor, who sat to the left, immediately upon the entrance, sitting between a two-sided counter, a wall of books, and the front window facing the street, was not particularly friendly (that seems to be a species of booksellers, deeply in love with books but not much for customers—it seems a unique form of vocational torture). When I asked him what was upstairs, for I had noticed a staircase, he said, "More books." When I asked him what particular sections were kept upstairs, he impatiently ran off a list for me ("fiction, psychology, sports" — something like that), but clearly wasn't keen to do it. I had hoped he might enjoy telling me about the vast selection in his store; he clearly hoped I'd have the decency to leave him be and go look for myself. When I did go look, I discovered that his was one of the best-curated selections of any bookstore I'd ever seen. Put another way: he's a splendid buyer. There were a dozen books I'd seen reviewed over the past six months but had never seen in a store; there were even more books, including some by famous or prestigious authors, that I had not seen reviewed, but which he had ordered from publishers' catalogues. He (or his buyer) quite simply had a terrific eye. The store was very, very well stocked, with reasonable quantity but unmatched quality.

It wasn't just that he had good taste, but also variegated and eccentric taste. This clearly was not a scholarly bookstore, although there were many fine books from scholarly presses. Nor did it suffer from the book-clubby quality of so many independent bookstores, the proprietors of which seem to buy books, primarily "literary fiction," with the predictable tastes of local book-clubbers in mind. (This tic results in shelf after shelf of Barbara Kingsolver.) And he was not a snob: there was no shortage of beach reads or what in Washington might be called Metro reads.

I ended up buying from his Architecture section a book I had never seen before, even as my current interests mean that I always look in a store's Architecture section. It's called Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness, and it's by an Australian critic named Elizabeth Farrelly. I'm nearly done with the book now, and while in some ways it is familiar—her impatience with suburban sprawl will be familiar to readers of Philip Langdon, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Bill McKibben, David Owen, and many others—she has a deeply philosophical bent; her references range from Milan Kundera (on kitsch) to Richard Sennett (on the modern tension between our interior and exterior selves) to Aristotle, happiness psychologist Martin Seligman, and weirdo supremo Alvin Toffler. She misspells Nietzsche, but we all do sometimes; less forgivable is her misspelling of Lemony Snicket. The book is spellbinding, and I am grateful that I went browsing in a store that had it.

In other news, my friend Jonathan now has a Kindle; he is the first of my friends whose literary flame has been Kindled. He loves it, so far. From the public domain he has downloaded Hume and Freud; from the private domain, Gladwell and Michael Lewis. Jonathan said it even came with a little beach tent to keep sand out. Party on, my dear friend, party on.

Farah Fawcett died. She didn’t pass away.

Today, my Yahoo home page informed me of the news that Farah Fawcett “passes away.” No thank you— she DIED. Euphemisms be gone. What next: “Farah Fawcett goes to Jesus”? Or, in weird John Edward (the psychic) New-Age-speak, “Farah Fawcett passes”? It’s sad, people, very sad. I miss her. But that’s no excuse for tawdry euphemism. She died.

The street where I live . . .

I have been thinking about turning this article I wrote about my street, West Rock Avenue, into a book, and so I have been doing a lot of reading about urbanism, town planning, and architecture. Basically, I am trying to figure out what makes some streets livable and others not. A good deal of the literature — by people including New Havener Philip Langdon, whose A Better Place to Live has given me a whole new outlook on what makes a space a happy one in which to dwell — boils down to this: don't depend on cars. People are happier when they can walk to see neighbors, ride their bicycles, and live close enough to their neighbors that they know them. This small-town mythology is one that I am particularly susceptible to, having grown up in a neighborhood that had many of a small town's virtues. And I find myself, as I read these books, falling prey to an unfortunate smugness, as if growing up on streets laid out on an easily navigated grid, with houses on quarter-acres instead of large lots, is the only way to have a happy childhood.

But that can't be right. For one thing, this mythos runs contrary to another important American mythos, the rural farm. I don't think many of us would want to say that children growing up in the countryside, learning to milk cows by their parents' sides, are unhappy. Nobody thinks that that's an uninspiring or despairing way to grow up. And, to be fair, the writers I'm reading aren't reacting against that way of life, which may be dying out; they are reacting against suburban sprawl, which until recently seemed poised to dominate the American landscape.

But what of that suburban sprawl — especially those cul-de-sac developments that have proved so popular in late-20th-century construction? Can one have a happy childhood where there are no sidewalks, where it's too dangerous to ride a bicycle, where there are no secret passageways behind garages or corner stores at which to buy candy?

I don't know. On the one hand, I don't want to underestimate children's capacity for self-mystification. I suspect that most children, at least most of those who grow up middle-class, and sheltered from anything too abysmal in the family's home life, look back at their early years with a certain sense of awe and wonder. Those lookalike houses in Del Boca Vista Estates are not lookalike to the children inside them, who know which house has the best video-game system, which kid has the dad who makes the best forts with the dining room table and some blankets, whose parents go out late and don't hire a babysitter (all the better for watching verboten TV channels).

On the other hand, there is empirical evidence that suburban life of this kind can lead to bad things: obesity, too much time in the car, fewer friends, less play. And teenagers—forget about it. If they can, they flee to the city. Or at least the curious ones do.

But what I don't have are good sympathetic non-fiction books about life in suburban sprawl. For every book critical of that way of life — Langdon's book, Duany et al.'s Suburban Nation, Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place — there seem to be exactly zero books about why it can be pleasurable to grow up in spaces that are, after all, safe, predictable, and quiet, which are all good things.

I want the other side of the story. Ideas, anyone?

George Scialabba v’Eretz Yisrael

At long last, the critic George Scialabba is getting some love. I only met George once, about ten years ago, and I had forgotten how articulate he was in conversation; I was reminded by listening to an interview with Christopher Lydon on his web show (which is as good as anything on NPR). I did, however, want to take issue with one comment George makes—and I hope that my minor quibble will be taken in the context of the huge respect I have for George, who is an essential writer and whose new book you should buy and read. At one point, George takes a stab at explaining how many Jewish intellectuals moved right-ward politically; his explanation, and it's not his alone, is that the 1967 war, when Israel's survival seemed to be at stake, caused many American Jews to become more attached to Israel, a country that until then had not been a major part of American Jewish consciousness, especially among intellectuals. Since then, he says, many Jews have been unwilling to follow their progressive principles if those principles might put them at odds with (their perception of) what's best for Israel's survival. And so we can understand how, for example, there was no large Jewish outcry about the invasion of Iraq, which they took to be in Israel's interests. (I hope this is a fair representation of George's position; I'm talking about one or two minutes in a 44-minute interview otherwise filled with fascinating discussions of Randolph Bourne, Walter Karp, and other too-forgotten intellectuals. If this is an unfair statement, I hope George will let me know in the comments section—although I understand if he has better things to do!)

On one level, George is of course right; in fact, he does not go far enough. Israel's remarkable victory in the '67 war not only heightened Jewish concern about the survival of their several million co-religionists in Israel, but it also—more important, I think—increased Jewish pride in identification with that state. Even my fervently anti-Zionist, left-wing grandparents were a little astonished at a country that had produced successful Jewish soldiers (or so my mother recalls). (And here I am reminded of the comedian Jackie Mason's line about the difference between Jews and Italians: Jews are wimps on the street corner, while Italians can f— you up; but put them in an army, and Jews are indestructible, whereas Italians can't shoot straight.)

But I think we have to know which Jews we're talking about. The Jews who became the famous neo-conservatives—Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, most famously—were well on their way to the right before 1967, and they were swinging right in a way that was bound to sweep all their opinions to the right. Indeed, I have often marveled at the sheer, improbably drift of their move to the right—how can it be intellectually honest to just happen to move right on labor, foreign policy, economics, etc., at the same time. Such a comprehensive move is more likely to be the result of cynicism or careerism. There is no reason, after all, why becoming more hawkish on foreign policy also entails becoming more hostile to labor unions. But with these guys, so it went, and there you have it.

Anyway, I don't think 1967 had much to do with where Kristol, Podhoretz, and Himmelfarb ended up. Nor did it have much effect on a lot of Jewish New Left types who were pretty irreligious to begin with, and Jewishly uninterested, and who make up one important core of anti-Zionism today. After all, while most Jews are not anti-Zionists, a lot of outspoken anti-Zionists and Israel critics actually are Jews. Jews may, in fact, be more disproportionately anti-Zionist than they are disproportionately Zionist, compared to the American population at large. Pretty much all Americans are, in their unthinking way, supportive of Israel—a goodly number of Jews, in a very thoughtful way, are critical of Israel. Especially among intellectuals, and that's whom Scialabba is talking about.

So who are these Jews whose foreign-policy ideas were warped, or subtly shifted, by the 1967 war? For whom was the war decisive in that way? The best case could be made, I think, by looking at my contemporaries (I am 34), rather than at neo-cons in the sixties and seventies. I would hazard that a lot of New Republic types (to just pick one useful marker), people like Peter Beinart, say (although there is no reason to pick on him, and he's written a lot about how his position on this has changed), were more inclined to support the Iraq invasion because of having grown up in a post-1967 world where the survival of Israel was an issue for young American intellectuals in a way that it wasn't for, say, my dad.

But I think what George was really getting at is a general despair, his and others', that the same people who have been central—indeed, indispensable—to so many other social-justice movements in America have seemed, to him, relatively absent on foreign policy. And that is a shame. But the causation isn't so simple.

Another point about Jews: most American Jews, even those who went Communist or socialist, have, in their own ways, been very supportive of the American project. This is, after all, the land that saved us from what had been happening, and what lay in wait, in Europe. So that deeply felt Americanism has been channeled into certain domestic progressive causes—like Civil Rights—where it is apparent that the United States is not living up to its ideals. And with our long tradition of women being at least moderately educated, and working outside the home (in the shtetl, scholars' wives often worked to support their husbands endless hours in study), Jews were at the forefront of Second Wave feminism. And there was a history of labor radicalism that Jews brought from Europe. But Jews have not historically been pacifists, and we have been enthusiastic soldiers in every American war (including both sides of the Civil War). It may, therefore, be a bit of a mistake to read into that Jewish progressivism a congenital anti-war inclination. Yes, many Jews were at the fore of the anti-Vietnam movement (although perhaps not out of proportion to our representation on liberal college campuses, where the movement was centered). But it's not my sense that the leading pacifists in the Great War or World War II were Jews—they were Protestants, often of the Anabaptist or Radical Reformation stripe: Quakers, Mennonites, etc., with a smattering of Jehovah's Witnesses, and some more mainline Protestants.

So while it would be nice if there were a strong, identifiably Jewish foreign-policy left today, and in the run-up to the Iraq War, I am not sure that that was ever likely, or that there was a historical precedent, and I don't think its absence is as clearly related to the 1967 war as George Scialabba seems to think.

We Partied like It’s 2009

On Saturday night at the house of Debby Applegate and Bruce Tulgan we rolled out issue #4. It was a seriously good time, although I fear I made myself look like a dunce talking into John Spalding’s little Flip — I remember saying something about how the Paris Review may have more subscribers, but I have better hair than its editor. Which I don’t think is even true; from what I can tell in photographs, Philip Gourevitch actually has a nice head of hair. I think I can sum up the party by saying that both NY Times deputy editor Jill Abramson and Moira Darling, one of Brooklyn's premier knitters (she owns Advanced Knit-Design), were both there. Also spotted: gonzo science writer Carl Zimmer (also with good hair, salt-and-pepper), memoirist Roya Hakakian (fabulous hair), journalist and master writing pedagogue Fred Strebeigh (legendary beard), New Republic critic Alexander Nemser (precocious beard), award-winning science writer Jenny Blair, memoirist and NHR board member Pang-Mei Chang (her hair is the stuff of urban legend), NHR contributor Sarah Borden (her great hair is the least of her attributes).

Lest I forget: novelist Rudolph Delson, short-story writer Liz Edelglass, condom blogger Jonathan Oppenheimer, noted chemist Frank Torre, historian Kirk Swinehart, literature scholar Nicole Fluhr, Australian Lee Faulkner, and man-about-town Josh Safran.

At some point after the gin kicked in I was talking to somebody about Gay Talese’s essay about the Paris Review in its 1960s, Plimpton-edited glory days. As I remember the essay, Talese’s main point seems to be that while Plimpton, Mathiessen, and the others had some talent — especially for spotting other talent — their main genius was for creating community. Largely this was about parties at Plimpton’s place (where, Talese reports, women were treated like so much furniture), but more generally it was about using a magazine as the centerpiece of a world. As I was speaking these words last night, I realized — or hoped — that I could have been talking about NHR, right down to the middling talent of us editors.

Or such, at least, is the delusion-producing quality of gin.

Taking it to the streets

Welcome to those of you who read in the New Haven Independent about the poetry crawl we sponsored last night. I have to say, it was a pretty cool event. When was the last time you heard poetry read in the car bay of an auto body shop? Or in a day spa? Hey, if you want to subscribe, click on the button on the left. If you want to come drink for free at our party on May 16, send an email to editor@newhavenreview.com and request an invitation.