Search Results for: This Magazine

Can the Navel-Gazing Norwegian Novelist Tell Us Anything About America?

By Soppakanuuna. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Peter deemed my proposed plan — driving 12 hours back east to Maine to glimpse my dreamed-of American landscape — completely unrealistic, and rightly so, as I realized with a sudden sense of shame. At the same time, I had the feeling that he really wanted me to see Detroit. And why not? It was just a few hours north, so we could get there this afternoon.

As we drove through the snow-covered landscape, surrounded by cars with smoke fluttering out of their exhaust pipes, under the gray-white sky, past rows of run-down buildings, interspersed with clumps of colorless trees standing in colorless fields, the feeling I got was that something here was over, that something had been emptied out and that nothing new had begun. But perhaps that was too harsh a judgment to pass on a whole country after spending three hours in it?

-From Part One of Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s travel narrative across the United States of America for the New York Times Magazine. Knausgaard’s My Struggle, the bestselling and award-winning series of six autobiographical novels, are considered to be a breakthrough in style and format, winning a wide readership despite their some 3,500 pages in length. This portion of his American journey touches on the blight of Detroit, Nabokov’s Lolita, Kerouac, Vikings, and Minnesota’s hoax ancient archaeological Scandinavian artifact, the Kensington Runestone.

Read the story

Raymond Chandler on the Oscar Voting Process, Circa 1948

I am also intrigued by the voting. It was formerly done by all the members of all the various guilds, including the extras and bit players. Then it was realized that this gave too much voting power to rather unimportant groups, so the voting on various classes of awards was restricted to the guilds which were presumed to have some critical intelligence on the subject. Evidently this did not work either, and the next change was to have the nominating done by the specialist guilds, and the voting only by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

It doesn’t really seem to make much difference how the voting is done. The quality of the work is still only recognized in the context of success. A superb job in a flop picture would get you nothing, a routine job in a winner will be voted in. It is against this background of success-worship that the voting is done, with the incidental music supplied by a stream of advertising in the trade papers (which even intelligent people read in Hollywood) designed to put all other pictures than those advertised out of your head at balloting time. The psychological effect is very great on minds conditioned to thinking of merit solely in terms of box office and ballyhoo. The members of the Academy live in this atmosphere, and they are enormously suggestible people, as are all workers in Hollywood. If they are contracted to studios, they are made to feel that it is a matter of group patriotism to vote for the products of their own lot. They are informally advised not to waste their votes, not to plump for something that can’t win, especially something made on another lot.

***

The governing board of the Academy is at great pains to protect the honesty and the secrecy of the voting. It is done by anonymous numbered ballots, and the ballots are sent, not to any agency of the motion picture industry, but to a well-known firm of public accountants. The results, in sealed envelopes, are borne by an emissary of the firm right onto the stage of the theater where the Awards be made, and there for the first time, one at a time, they are made known. Surely precaution would go no further. No one could possibly have known in advance any of these results, not even in Hollywood where every agent learns the closely guarded secrets of the studios with no apparent trouble. If there are secrets in Hollywood, which I sometimes doubt, this voting ought to be one of them.

Raymond Chandler, writing in The Atlantic. His critique of the Academy Awards appeared in the magazine’s March 1948 issue. This wasn’t Chandler’s only Hollywood essay for The Atlantic; he wrote about tinseltown scribes in November 1945.

Read the story

The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman

Longreads Pick

Marilyn vos Savant, a former child prodigy and the “world’s smartest woman,” according to the Guinness Book of World Records, had carved out a niche for herself as an advice columnist for Parade magazine. It was in the body of one of these columns that she politely answered a reader’s inquiry on a probability puzzle, and then all hell broke loose.

Source: Priceonomics
Published: Feb 19, 2015
Length: 9 minutes (2,278 words)

Inside the Advertising Industry: A Reading List

Photo: SenseiAlan

From fashion bloggers to food “fluffers,” it takes a village to make you want to buy stuff. Why do some brands connect with us, while others take us by surprise or make us angry? Here are six stories examining the advertising industry.

1. “Nice to Meat You.” (Adam Kotsko, The New Inquiry, February 2015)

On the creepiness of the Burger King king (you know the one), Freud’s “uncanny,” and more. (This excerpt is a classic example of why I love The New Inquiry.) Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…

A Resourceful Woman

Jeff Sharlet | Longreads | February 2015 | 24 minutes (5,994 words)

 

  1. Mary Mazur, 61, set off near midnight to buy her Thanksgiving turkey. She took her plant with her. “He doesn’t like to be left alone,” she later explained. The plant rode in a white cart, Mary in her wheelchair. With only one hand to wheel herself, the other on the cart, she’d push the left wheel forward, switch hands, push the right. Left, right, cursing, until a sweet girl found her, and wheeled her into Crown Fried Chicken. “Do not forget my plant!” she shouted at the girl. I held the door. // “I have a problem with my foot,” she said—the left one, a scabbed stump, purple in the cold. Her slipper wouldn’t stay on. // Mary wore purple. Purple sweats, purple fleece. 30 degrees. “I bet you have a coat,” she said. Not asking, just observing. Measuring the distance. Between us. Between her and her turkey. Miles away. “You’ll freeze,” I said. “I’ll starve,” she said. I offered her chicken. “I have to have my turkey!” Also, a microwave. Her motel didn’t have one. // “Nobody will help you,” she said. “Not even if you’re bleeding from your two eyes.” // Two paramedics from the fire department. Two cops. An ambulance, two EMTs. “I didn’t call you!” she shouted. “I don’t care who called me,” said one of the cops. One of the paramedics put on blue latex gloves. “She won’t go without this—this friggin’ plant,” he said. “You’ll go,” said the cop. “You’re not my husband!” said Mary. The cop laughed. “Thank god,” he said. The whole gang laughed. One of them said maybe her plant was her husband. That made them laugh, too. “I’m not going!” said Mary. “Your plant is going,” said the cop. Mary caved. Stood on one foot. “Don’t touch me!” They lowered her onto the stretcher. “Let me hold it,” she said. “What?” said the EMT. “The plant,” said the cop. He lifted it out of the cart. “Be careful!” she shouted. He smirked but he was. “Thank you,” she rasped, her shouting all gone. Mary Mazur, 61, shrank into the blankets, muttering into the leaves, whispering to her only friend.

Read more…

How ‘George Washington Slept Here’ Became a Real Estate Cliché

There are no shortage of places where the nation’s first president “slept.” According to popular real estate site Zillow, of all the homes and real estate listings that boast celebrity provenance, Washington holds the record for most mentions.  Flickr has an entire photo pool entitled “George Washington Slept Here,” devoted to pictures of properties and historic sites that Washington visited. The pool contains 333 photos, though the group does leave room for a little more leeway, specifying that although sites Washington actually “spent the night at are preferred,” “any site he has a historic tie to is permissible.” And according to Barlow Burke’s Law of Real Estate Brokers, the claim of a Washington sleepover can even have a “significant” effect on home prices. In an article about George Washington from the December 1999 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, Timothy Foote expanded on the phenomenon. An excerpt is below:

Eventually the father of his country would sleep in a very great number of beds, so that one of them seems suitable enough as an object at hand. All through the 1750s he traveled the Western wilderness, first as a surveyor, then as a colonial officer. He had two horses shot from under him in battle, helping England fight France for possession of the continent. After some years building up Mount Vernon as a farm, in May 1775 he was off to Philadelphia as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He would be back soon, he wrote Martha after he left Mount Vernon, but it was eight and a half years before he got home for good.

***

He was unanimously elected President in 1789 and headed for New York City, chosen as the first seat of the new government. His job? To set sound political precedents and show how the first President of the world’s most promising but precarious political experiment ought to behave.

Driven by duty to present himself to the citizens of the shaky new union, he spent the night in so many inns and private houses that “George Washington Slept Here” became a real estate cliché, as well as the title of a clunky 1940 stage (and screen) comedy by Kaufman and Hart. Our object at hand was not one of the many beds Washington slept on while upon his travels. It is rather his first ‘best bed,’ as a particularly fine bed was then described, inherited, like Mount Vernon itself, from his half-brother Lawrence.

Read the story

The Inscrutable Tragedy of Reetika Vazirani

Why did a talented, generous, brilliant poet destroy herself and the person she loved most in the world?

We are fascinated and horrified by the myth of the suicidal poet(ess). Dangerously, we tend to romanticize these women in order to make sense of their lives (and deaths).

In a 2004 piece for the Washington Post Magazine, Paula Span writes carefully about Reetika Vazirani’s life, drawing from her letters, her poetry and her friends’ testimonies. In doing so, Span delves into the financial, societal and emotional struggles of the contemporary artist.

When Reetika’s friends offered help—to visit her, to pay for therapy or medication:

Reetika would shrug, decline, offer excuses, simply melt away, or leave subsequent upbeat phone messages without providing a number to call back. Or she’d go off to Callaloo or Bennington and be her usual dazzling, spirited self, so that friends who had worried would relax: She was okay; they could back off.

Her time in Vermont seemed to confirm it. How could she still be in trouble if she could wow everyone with her Bennington lectures and readings, attract writers to a 6:30 a.m. yoga class, appear so cheerful with Komunyakaa, who arrived a few days later with [her son] Jehan? One afternoon she and Ethelbert Miller sat back to back on a campus bench, rocking contentedly in the sunshine. “I said, ‘I can feel where your poems come from,’ “ Miller remembers. “We felt good. We said, ‘This is better than sex.’ I thought she’d put everything together.” She seemed to be cycling between happiness and despair, possibly a sign of manic-depression, another mood disorder.

But laypeople often don’t recognize the symptoms of psychiatric illnesses or the dangers they pose. “There is, in some people who are very creative, a great deal of independence and originality, the capacity to stand back and see the world differently, to have a great number of friendships, good relationships — and still have an absolutely devastating disease,” psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison cautions. And such people can tailspin quickly.

Read the story

How Anthony Lane Wrote a Book Review Disguised as a Movie Review

Madame Bovary. Image via Wikimedia Commons

So how does the movie, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, stack up against the book? And what’s in it for non-Jamesians? Well, we lose Ana’s introduction to fellatio, set precariously in a bathtub; in a similar vein, we skip the breakfast that she shares with Christian at an International House of Pancakes. Above all, we are denied James’s personifications, which are so much livelier than her characters: “My sleepy subconscious has a final swipe at me.” “YES! My inner goddess is thrilled.” “NO! my psyche screams.” Couldn’t someone have got Sarah Silverman to play the psyche?

On the other hand, the film, by dint of its simple competence—being largely well acted, not too long, and sombrely photographed, by Seamus McGarvey—has to be better than the novel. It could hardly be worse. No new reader, however charitable, could open “Fifty Shades of Grey,” browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth. There are poignant moments when the plainest of physical actions is left dangling beyond the reach of her prose: “I slice another piece of venison, holding it against my mouth.” The global appeal of the novel has led some fans to hallow it as a classic, but, with all due respect, it is not to be confused with “Madame Bovary.” Rather, “Fifty Shades of Grey” is the kind of book that Madame Bovary would read. Yet we should not begrudge E. L. James her triumph, for she has, in her lumbering fashion, tapped into a truth that often eludes more elegant writers—that eternal disappointment, deep in the human heart, at the failure of our loved ones to acquire their own helipad.

-From New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane’s movie review of 50 Shades of Grey.

Read the story

Unusual Hobbies: A Reading List

Photo: MTSOfan

My boyfriend and I share a love of cryptozoology and hidden places. For Valentine’s Day, he bought us matching “explorer” jackets with Nessie and Mothman patches affixed to the sleeves. We have standard hobbies, too—reading, writing, listening to music—but podcasts about Bigfoot and poring over Atlas Obscura is where things get a little weird. In this collection, you’ll meet folks who look at planes, at compasses, at building blocks and at each other (in full Civil War uniform, no less).

1. “Things Are Looking Up For Planespotters, the World’s Most Obsessive Aviation Geeks.” (Andrew McMillen, BuzzFeed, February 2015)

On Saturday mornings, when I was little, my dad played a computer game called Flight Simulator. He’d always loved planes, and flying them virtually was his way of taking to the skies without increasing his insurance payments. I thought of him immediately when I read Andrew McMillen’s reporting. Planespotters photograph, memorize, categorize and share the planes they see from their homes and the runways. Government agencies may be suspicious, but many airports welcome the free publicity, camaraderie and a fanaticism for flight. Read more…