Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Robert Grossman
SEPTEMBER 15, 2008 BY DOREE SHAFRIR
FEMOCRACY ’08
Sisterhood Is Powerful, But McCain Running-Mate Sarah Palin Has Fried the Circuits of Post-Clinton New York Feminists
SINCE AUG. 29, WHEN JOHN MCCAIN ANNOUNCED HIS SELECTION of Alaska’s governor, Sarah Palin, as his running mate, the news cycle has been consumed by Ms. Palin’s politics, her family, even her eyeglasses. The speech she gave at the Republican National Convention was perfectly calibrated to appeal to two core constituencies: the evangelical base that Mr. McCain has had so much trouble attracting, and women—hopefully former Hillary Clinton voters among them—who might look at balancing her day job (governor!) with her five children, including a baby with Down syndrome and a 17-year-old daughter with a baby on the way, and think that in Ms. Palin they had finally found someone in national politics whom they could look up to and admire.
In the days after Ms. Palin’s saucy Minneapolis salvo, underneath the giddy left-wing blogosphere blowback and smug IM banter—she looks just like Tina Fey! Imagine what Saturday Night Live is gonna do with this!—there were distinct rumblings of self-doubt. Had the feminist narrative suddenly been seized from the Democrats, who in their anxiety to “inspire,” have been not thrilling but simply inspiring—i.e., exhausting (and clunky-shoed in the bargain)?
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
SEPTEMBER 22, 2008 BY ADAM BEGLEY
D.F.W., R.I.P.
A DOZEN YEARS AGO, I SPENT three weeks with David Foster Wallace. Not the guy—not the man who hanged himself, age 46, on Sept. 12—but the writer, the novelist who invaded my house with a huge, wonderful, impossible book, Infinite Jest. For 20 days or so I did virtually nothing but read and reread the 1,079 pages of a novel that thrilled and infuriated me. There were long hours, pinned on the couch under his 3-pound, 5-ounce tome, when I hated him with a pure and righteous rage—my wrist hurt from holding the thing, my brain was weary from the footnotes and the cleverness and the strangeness of the world he’d plunged me into. I think I was dazed by the tenacity of his obsessions (drugs, tennis). But even when I hated him, I never doubted, after the first day, that I was reading an amazing book and that the 33-year-old author was some kind of wild genius.
Death is gruesome. I don’t have the talent (or the heart) to make Wallace’s suicide seem funny. Wallace could have done the job himself—and who knows? His auto-obituary, a piece of writing that will heal the hurt of his sudden absence, may be among the works published posthumously.
Until then, I’d urge anyone who wants to mourn David Foster Wallace to go back to “Forever Overhead,” a gorgeous story from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), about a boy on his 13th birthday at a public pool just west of Tucson, Ariz., who screws up his courage, gets in line, and climbs to the top of the tower for the high dive.
Wallace leaves him up there, on the board, clenched by fear.
But first he gives us the climb to the top of the tower’s ladder: “The rungs are very thin. It’s unexpected. Thin round iron rungs laced in slick wet Safe-T felt.”
The boy is disturbed (and so are you) by the two “dirty spots” at the end of the board: “They are from all the people who’ve gone before you…. They are skin, abraded from the feet by the violence of the disappearance of people with real weight….” And below? “The square tank is a cold blue sheet. Cold is just a kind of hard.”
Goodbye, David Foster Wallace.
SEPTEMBER 29, 2008 BY JASON HOROWITZ
Mayor Bloomberg: Suddenly Seer of Financial Crisis
MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG shrugged his shoulders, turned up his palms and rolled his eyes in what is now his well-practiced impression of an exasperated person.
It was another question about whether he would consider helping the next administration by swooping into Washington to rescue the economy as secretary of the Treasury or as the appointed overseer of a proposed $700 billion fund to buy and resell troubled mortgages. This time, a reporter wanted to know if he felt qualified for the job.
“It’s sort of pressing it to say that I was interested in running a mortgage business, which I don’t have the expertise in, incidentally,” Mr. Bloomberg said over a dozen tape recorders resting on his podium.
Standing alone on a stage in a gleaming new terminal at Kennedy Airport, the mayor turned to take the next question. “Yes, sir,” he said.
But then he couldn’t leave it there.
He had one little qualifier to add to that lack of expertise he had just mentioned: “I could get it, I assume.”
That Mr. Bloomberg is now wording his answers with all the care of a cabinet nominee at a confirmation hearing says something about the perfect storm that has swept him up since Wall Street melted down.
Without actually doing much to stoke it—just by being there, really—Mr. Bloomberg has somehow become a catch-all messiah, coveted by both major-party nominees, cited by federal officials on either side of the aisle and wielded by pundits as a synonym for fiscal expertise and market wisdom.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
“It’s one of the oldest games in the political book,” said Ralph Schlosstein, a former White House aide in the Carter administration and co-founder of the private-equity group BlackRock, explaining the ongoing political stampede in Mr. Bloomberg’s direction. “You like to have your name associated with talented, popular leaders.”
As with all commodity bubbles, there is something more than slightly irrational in the current mania for all things Bloomberg.
It is likely, even, that Mr. Bloomberg, who made his fortune by inventing and marketing the Bloomberg Terminal, knows this—as evidenced by his half-retracted admission that he’s not actually a mortgage expert at all.
But for now, as a practical matter, it’s not really important whether expectations about Mr. Bloomberg’s ability to heal the financial world are realistic. Given the mayor’s current circumstances—term-limited mayor seeks options for prolonging time in current office or obtaining national one—it’s all upside. And the mayor, quite naturally, has taken to his role enthusiastically.
SEPTEMBER 29, 2008 BY MAX ABELSON
MRS. ASTOR’S PRODIGAL SON COMES HOME—TO SELL IT
Anthony Marshall never spent a night in his mother Brooke Astor’s Park Avenue apartment. Now, Max Abelson tours it and talks to the son: ‘You can’t change the past’
ON SEPT. 17, JUST AS HIS LATE MOTHER BROOKE ASTOR’S $46 MILLION duplex co-op was coming back on the market after a summer hiatus, and one day before a court appearance, Anthony D. Marshall slouched in his white living room armchair, one hand resting on his neck. The senatorial 84-year-old, unsmiling and handsome in his gold-buttoned navy blazer, blue-checked white shirt, pressed gray-striped pants and black loafers, said he had regrets. “Oh, yes. But that’s awfully…” He paused. “To be retrospective about anything is being retrospective.
“You can’t change the past.”
Nearly a year after pleading not guilty to a 16-count criminal indictment that accuses him of stealing millions from his mother while she was suffering from Alzheimer’s, American-born but Victorian-voiced Mr. Marshall still makes the Metropolitan Museum’s outgoing director, Philippe de Montebello, sound like a barfly: His “yes” can arrive in two distinct syllables; his “past” rhymes with “lost.” Does he wish things were different at the end of his mother’s life? “Yes,” he said. “But I can’t comment any more than that.”
Mr. Marshall wouldn’t speak about the charges, but he was very gracious about sharing his memories of his mother’s apartment at 778 Park Avenue and its six terraces, five wood-burning fireplaces and one very famous red-lacquered library.
“Do you want to begin or shall I?” he said. Ms. Astor bought the place in 1959, although her only son never slept over. “Sleep there? Never did, no. Well—I was an old man by then.”
There’s just one real bedroom in the whole duplex. Four rooms went
to maids; a bedroom upstairs was turned into a second sitting room; two bedrooms downstairs are office and storage space.
OCTOBER 6, 2008 BY JOHN KOBLIN
OFF THE RECORD: THERE GOES THE SUN
INSIDE THE NEW YORK SUN’S spacious Chambers Street offices on Tuesday, Sept. 30, the old-fashioned journalistic decorum that had defined the paper’s culture was nowhere in sight. The 20-somethings that made up the reporting ranks were in for one last time wearing blue jeans and T-shirts—a far cry from the conservative broadsheet’s long-standing dress code, which required reporters to come in with polished shoes and nice suits. “It’s the casual Friday that The Sun never had,” said Grace Rauh, the 29-year-old city hall reporter.
Staffers seemed in buoyant spirits, some even laughing.
It was a far cry from the month-long anxiety that had followed editor and founder Seth Lipsky’s announcement that the paper was in danger of closing at the end of the month if it didn’t find new financiers.
As early as Sunday night, informal e-mails began circulating to that effect. “I look forward to working with you at my next post,” wrote Rebecca Fox, associate features editor, in a missive to business contacts.
But all day on Monday, Sept. 29, there was not a word from Mr. Lipsky. Would there be a lifeline?
Then, at about 4 p.m., Mr. Lipsky told reporters and editors to drop their phones and gather round in that office, the size of a big, bright lunchroom.
Whatever funding Mr. Lipsky was hoping for had not arrived, and it probably didn’t help that at the moment he was waiting for a last-ditch investor to save the paper, the Dow Jones plunged 777 points. Mr. Lipsky, who had described losses as “substantial,” told Columbia journalism students back in 2006 that the paper lost up to $1 million a month, according to The Columbia Journalism Review.
Money wasn’t the only thing expended.
“There’s always been a ton of amazing energy—in an era when newsrooms are being gutted and shrunken down, and The Sun had this amazing can-do spirit,” Ms. Rauh said.
OCTOBER 6, 2008 BY PETER W. KAPLAN
THE OBSERVATORY: PETER W. KAPLAN DESCRIBES A FEW LIFE MOMENTS HE SHARED WITH PAUL NEWMAN IN 1983
DON’T GET ME WRONG, I DIDN’T KNOW PAUL NEWMAN. But I spent a few weeks with him in 1983, when I went down to Florida to watch him direct a father-and-son picture he had also co-written and produced, Harry and Son, with himself, Robby Benson, Wilford Brimley, a young lop-smiled actress named Ellen Barkin and Joanne Woodward. Movie sets, as you might know, are excruciatingly boring places where time moves slowly, really underwater, and the director asks for the same thing over and over until whatever he or she wants revealed shows up.
Paul Newman’s set was a happy set. The weather was good, the actors were kind to each other and every day at 3, three or four giant Hefty bags of popcorn made by the director showed up. My memory of the director and his wife—with his taut, focused affection and her internal discipline, goodwill and generous warmth—was watching an undemonstrative, unbroken marital choreography of intimacy and regard. Newman implausibly died at the end of the movie, but you’ve never seen an expiree so tanned and vital. It seemed impossible that his corpse wouldn’t come back in the last reel and whip all the other actors in a speed-round of tennis.
After the shooting weeks, I went to see him race his cars in Georgia: a movie actor doing his best to escape the fetid weight of fame, enduring a hovering reporter from Life, which even in its diminished state was still a name he had to put up with. He was completely consumed with his racing team. One afternoon I met him at his motel, in Athens, to drive him into Atlanta to meet his wife. He came out of his motor court door looking like the usual trillion bucks and had big racing sunglasses on. It must have been around 5; he said he was late for dinner with Joanne. I told him we’d get there faster if he drove; I have to admit, I wanted to see what my budget-priced rental car would feel like being handled by Paul Newman.
The last time I saw him was up in Westport, Conn., at the musty old narrow summer stock theater where he played the Stage Manager in Our Town, much more a member of the Westport community than Hollywood legend. It was a deeply democratic performance, the Stage Manager less as omniscient codger than as another slightly addled human.
Almost at the end of the play, standing in the dark in his collar and vest, he got to answer Emily’s big question as she surveys her former life from beyond: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?”
“No—” the Stage Manager says, “Saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”
Paul Newman came close on both.
APRIL 28, 2008 BY DOREE SHAFRIR
The Brooklyn Literary 100
The idea of a Brooklyn literary “scene” is one that has become so ingrained in the city’s consciousness that, in true Brooklyn style, it has now become fashionable to consider writerly Brooklyn in an ironic manner, to comment on the ridiculousness of the idea that a place can, in fact, be said to help define a literary community. Take, for example, Colson Whitehead’s cheeky New York Times Book Review essay—“I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It”—from last month, in which he questioned the very idea that the borough could be said to inspire any kind of literary imagination. He wrote: “There was the famous case of the language poet from Red Hook who grew despondent when the Shift key on her MacBook broke. She couldn’t write for weeks. Overcome by melancholy humors, she jumped into the enchanted, glowing waters of the Gowanus Canal, her pockets full of stones. And…she was cured! The metaphors came rushing back. With eccentric spacing between the letters, but still.”
Of course, as Mr. Whitehead himself tacitly acknowledges, writers have long found refuge across the East River (if often for financial reasons). Norman Mailer held his famous late-night parties in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone (his neighbor, for a time, was the playwright Arthur Miller); Truman Capote lived in the neighborhood in the ’50s and ’60s; poet Hart Crane lived in Brooklyn Heights for part of his short life. Poet Marianne Moore lived in a Fort Greene brownstone for decades. In Brooklyn Heights, at 7 Middagh Street, was a writers’ and artists’ commune of sorts that at various points in the 1940s counted Carson McCullers, Richard Wright, W. H. Auden, and Jane and Paul Bowles among its residents. (“I think Auden was kind of the father to the house,” said Evan Hughes, a 32-year-old writer in Fort Greene who is writing a history of literary Brooklyn. “He made sure the bills got paid and whatnot.”) And of course, no mention of literary Brooklyn is complete without reference to its patron saint, Walt Whitman, who first moved to Brooklyn at the age of 4 and made his living as a journalist at a number of local papers while writing poetry.
Still, it’s true that Manhattan—especially the Upper West Side and Greenwich Village, and Elaine’s—for years occupied a special place in the city’s literary landscape, and still, today, it’s not surprising to find those neighborhoods clinging to the tops of mastheads, with older authors and senior agents and editors living in the Classic 6 on West End Avenue, where they’ve been since the 1970s. But making the jump across the East River, and onto Carroll Street and Clinton Avenue—along with the assistants and junior staffers and newly minted MFAs—are now the likes of (No. 1 New York Times best-selling author!) Jhumpa Lahiri; Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, who famously bought a Park Slope townhouse for $3.5 million in 2005; and the veritable Renaissance man Kurt Andersen, who makes his home in Carroll Gardens. And so they clack away on their MacBooks at Ozzie’s or the Tea Lounge in Park Slope or the Central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza, and do readings at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg or the Brooklyn Lyceum, and contribute to A Public Space or One Story or n+1, and meet their editor for drinks at Union Hall, and play football in Prospect Park on the weekends and tutor kids at 826NYC and buy their friends’ books at the Community Bookstore or Book Court and raise money to fight the Atlantic Yards project by contributing essays to a book called Brooklyn Was Mine, published by River
head in January
Thus a Brooklyn literary community has, stubbornly, taken root, despite Mr. Whitehead’s disavowals, and yet, we wondered just who the members of this community were—everyone from its longtime to its newest denizens. Preemptively, we must warn the reader that the Brooklyn Literary 100, like any list of the Best or Worst, or Most Important or Most Popular or Most Expensive, is necessarily arbitrary to some degree. That being said, there were some criteria that we attempted to hew to. We restricted the list to people we (again, somewhat arbitrarily) deemed “literary.” If a writer, preferably he or she has published a book and/or regularly contributes to a well-known publication, be it magazine, newspaper or blog; if an editor, someone who is either prominent in his or her field or recognized in the book or magazine publishing world as a comer; if an agent, someone who has a client roster that would be at least somewhat recognizable to the average literary follower. But prospective listees also got points (on an undetermined scale in this reporter’s head) for other literary endeavors beyond writing and publishing, such as hosting parties known for their writerly attendees. We surveyed our own bookish acquaintances and trolled the Internet in search of hints that list-worthy people might live in Brooklyn. (Though sometimes our suppositions were wrong: Believer editor Ed Park, for example, lives on the Upper West Side; Harper’s literary editor Ben Metcalf, Chelsea!) But we must also, once again preemptively, say that we of course missed some people who deserve to be on the list. Next time! And, yes, Mr. Whitehead is on there. Much to his chagrin, we suppose.
Brighton Beach Lara Vapnyar, author
Brooklyn Heights Elizabeth Gaffney, editor, A Public Space; author • Philip Levine, poet • Norris Church Mailer, author • Dinaw Mengestu, author • Simon Rich, author • Valerie Steiker, editor, Vogue
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 70
