The Mandarin and the Hipster
An examination of authors Gore Vidal and Terry Southern’s literary erotica:
“Gore Vidal was a friend and admirer of Terry Southern, calling him ‘the most profoundly witty writer of our generation’ and he could not have failed to have had the example of Candy in mind as he embarked on his own adventure in black-humored sexual satire, Myra Breckinridge. Like Candy, the book had its inception in a high-porn enterprise: Kenneth Tynan had asked Vidal to contribute a sketch to his planned erotic review Oh Calcutta! But as soon as he set to work, the mysterious sentence ‘I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess’ sprang to mind and Vidal knew he was heading somewhere else entirely. The book became an outrageous theater of polymorphous perversity, a heady cocktail of Aristophanes, Marcuse, and Nietzsche married to an encyclopedic knowledge of the American cinema of the thirties and forties.”
Big Med
What can hospitals learn from a national restaurant chain like Cheesecake Factory?
“‘It is unbelievable to me that they would not manage this better,’ Luz said. I asked him what he would do if he were the manager of a neurology unit or a cardiology clinic. ‘I don’t know anything about medicine,’ he said. But when I pressed he thought for a moment, and said, ‘This is pretty obvious. I’m sure you already do it. But I’d study what the best people are doing, figure out how to standardize it, and then bring it to everyone to execute.’
“This is not at all the normal way of doing things in medicine. (‘You’re scaring me,’ he said, when I told him.) But it’s exactly what the new health-care chains are now hoping to do on a mass scale. They want to create Cheesecake Factories for health care. The question is whether the medical counterparts to Mauricio at the broiler station—the clinicians in the operating rooms, in the medical offices, in the intensive-care units—will go along with the plan. Fixing a nice piece of steak is hardly of the same complexity as diagnosing the cause of an elderly patient’s loss of consciousness. Doctors and patients have not had a positive experience with outsiders second-guessing decisions. How will they feel about managers trying to tell them what the ‘best practices’ are?”
Thought for Food
How a second-generation Chinese daughter of two doctors in Birmingham, Mich., became one of New York City’s finest chefs:
“Wanting to expand her culinary outlook to include more Eastern flavors, Lo moved to a French-Vietnamese restaurant, Can, where she met Scism, who was working as a grill cook. But it was when Lo took the helm of a Korean restaurant called Mirezi that she caught the attention of the New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl, who praised her inventive dishes and ‘beautifully arranged food’ in a glowing review. After Mirezi closed in 1998, Lo and Scism spent a year traveling the world.
“‘Anita will eat anything,’ says Scism, recalling a day in Bangkok when a vendor challenged Lo to eat a cockroach. ‘At one point, I told her she had a wing stuck in her two front teeth,’ says Scism with a laugh. ‘The thing about Anita is, she didn’t try the bug because she was challenged; she tried it because she really was curious about how it would taste.'”
A Man Walks into a Bank
A man receives a non-negotiable junk mail check for $95,093.35 in the mail, and decides to deposit it in his bank account as a joke. It actually clears his account:
“The first friend I phoned informed me that it was no mistake at all. Just standard bank policy, crediting my account with the dollar amount but putting a hold on all the funds until the cheque bounced. I couldn’t touch the money and my bank balance would be embarrassing again in three days.
“But seven long days later the lottery-like amount was still there and I visited the bank where an employee told me that the funds were now all available for cash withdrawal. All $95,093.35 was mine for the taking. All I had to do was ask. Windfall money begs us to take it and run. But I restrained myself. And gave the bank another two excruciatingly long weeks to do their job, catch up with their mistake, and bounce the cheque. But at the end of three hellish weeks, during which I hourly resisted the urge to take the money and run to Mexico, where it would be worth twice as much, I was told by my branch manager, ‘You’re safe to start spending the money, Mr Combs. A cheque cannot bounce after 10 days. You’re protected by the law.'”
The Long, Lawless Ride of Sheriff Joe Arpaio
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, 80-year-old Joe Arpaio has made a name for himself “for being not just the toughest but the most corrupt and abusive sheriff in America.” He’s now being sued by the Justice Department for civil rights violations against Latinos:
“Arpaio began focusing on illegal immigration about six years ago, after he watched an ambitious politician named Andrew Thomas get elected chief prosecutor of Maricopa County by promising to crack down on illegal immigrants. In 2006, shortly before the Department of Homeland Security empowered local law-enforcement agencies to act as an arm of the federal immigration effort, Arpaio created a Human Smuggling Unit – and used Thomas’ somewhat twisted interpretation of the law to focus not on busting coyotes and other smugglers, but on going after the smuggled.
“The move may have been indefensible from a legal standpoint, but it was political gold: Arpaio quickly ramped up his arrest numbers, bringing him a round of fresh media attention. The sheriff made a splash by setting up roadblocks to detain any drivers who looked like they could be in the U.S. illegally – a virtual license to racially profile Hispanics. Reports of pull-overs justified by little or no discernible traffic violations were soon widespread: Latinos in the northeastern part of the county, one study shows, were nine times more likely to be pulled over for the same infractions as other drivers. Arpaio’s men, the Justice Department alleges, relied on factors ‘such as whether passengers look “disheveled” or do not speak English.’ Some stops were justified after the fact: A group of Latinos who were photographed sitting in a car, neatly dressed, were described in the police report as appearing ‘dirty,’ the ostensible rationale for the pull-over. Testifying on the stand on July 24th in a federal trial over his department’s blatant record of racial profiling, Arpaio himself acknowledged that he once called the crackdown a ‘pure program to go after the illegals and not the crime first.'”
The Graphing Calculator Story
In the early 1990s, a contractor for Apple had his project cancelled. He then decided to “uncancel” it, and began sneaking into corporate headquarters to finish the job:
“I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn’t ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive. We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Greg had unlimited energy and a perfectionist’s attention to detail. He usually stayed behind closed doors programming all day, while I spent much of my time talking with other engineers. Since I had asked him to help as a personal favor, I had to keep pace with him. Thanks to an uncurtained east-facing window in my bedroom, I woke with the dawn and usually arrived ten minutes before Greg did. He would think I had been working for hours and feel obliged to work late to stay on par. I in turn felt obliged to stay as late as he did. This feedback loop created an ever-increasing spiral of productivity.
“People around the Apple campus saw us all the time and assumed we belonged. Few asked who we were or what we were doing.When someone did ask me, I never lied, but relied on the power of corporate apathy. The conversations usually went like this:
“Q: Do you work here?
A: No.
Q: You mean you’re a contractor?
A: Actually, no.
Q: But then who’s paying you?
A: No one.
Q: How do you live?
A: I live simply.
Q: (Incredulously) What are you doing here?!”
The Kickers
A writer digs through his personal library of quitting-smoking books as he attempts to quit smoking:
“Step 3: Go to the Strand. Buy a book you already own—Richard Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime. (Your old copy—a gift from one of the girls next door senior year, the same ‘friend’ who another time gave you a carton of duty-free Dunhill Reds—has been in storage recently because your den has become a nursery.) It was published in 1993 by, very perfectly, the university press at Duke: A school endowed by tobacco fortune sponsored an excellent silk-cut riff on the cultural logic of coffin nails. Its title toys with Kant’s idea of ‘negative pleasure’: ‘Cigarettes are bad. That is why they are good—not good, not beautiful, but sublime.’
“Klein, a scholar of French by trade, sinuously riffs on Sartre and Baudelaire, on Bizet’s Carmen andRick’s Café, by way of delivering a cultural critique with a practical purpose: ‘Writing this book in praise of cigarettes was the strategy I devised for stopping smoking, which I have—definitively; it is therefore both an ode and an elegy to cigarettes.’
“Linger for a while over the idea of the elegy. Where a conventional smoking-cessation preacher tells the reader he has nothing to lose but his chains, Klein acknowledges that to quit is to experience a loss, and takes his time mourning a dying idea of fun.”
99 Ways to Be Naughty in Kazakhstan
Cosmopolitan magazine is often spurned as “mindless,” but it has also grown into 64 editions worldwide, and a readership of 100 million teens and young women in more than 100 nations—including those “where any discussion of sex is taboo”:
“Akisheva, the editor in Kazakhstan, told me that until recently, she received a handwritten note from Brown after the publication of each issue. ‘Our readers might not be very familiar with Helen Gurley Brown’s books and biography,’ she said, ‘but they surely are influenced by her original ideas. Because this is what Cosmo keeps telling them: You are strong, you can control your life, you can earn as much as men do and you can have sex before marriage and not be condemned by society.’
“But what about the other stuff that Cosmo is telling them? One morning at Cosmic, a panel discussion included talk of some favorite Cosmo topics: sex toys (said to produce ‘the most incredible combinations of orgasms’), how to help men get erections more quickly and anal sex (‘backdoor booty’ as the magazine has called it). One panelist, a young Spanish woman, said that she teases her boyfriend with anal sex and then, jokingly, that she has to save something for marriage. The crowd roared. ‘Only at Cosmo,’ said the editor of Cosmo Australia, Bronwyn McCahon, between bites of miniature muffins and sliced melon, ‘will you be talking about anal sex at 10 a.m.'”
The Loved One
The troubled life of Sage Christensen, who was born in the Ukraine and adopted by a man who would later be accused of sexual abuse. Christensen would eventually be charged with murder:
“After being taken from Myers, Sage spent the next three years in a blur of foster homes. Myers fought for custody, spending more than $300,000 on attorneys and eventually filing for bankruptcy, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
“In June 2005 Sage was adopted by Dean Christensen and Jane Olingy, a married couple in Wilmington. He became Sage Christensen, his third name in 12 years. A social worker told his new parents about his rough upbringing in the Ukraine and about Myers. Sage, they were informed, had recently torn up every picture he had of Myers. ‘When he first moved in with us,’ Jane tells me, ‘he made sure the doors were locked 24/7, even during the day…. He told us there was always the shadow of a man outside of his window.’ At times, Sage went to bed with a knife under his pillow. He had frequent nightmares, and woke his new parents in the middle of the night with his screaming in Russian. Sage’s parents say that he was generally outgoing and playful, but became quiet whenever the subject of Myers arose.
“Still, the couple fell in love with the 12-year-old’s teasing sense of humor, quick mind, and desire to be part of a family. Olingy calls their first three years together ‘the honeymoon.’ But when Sage hit puberty, the trouble started. Small and skinny, Sage was picked on. A girl shoved him into a locker during his first day at middle school. Bigger students bullied him. ‘We told Sage that if you start a fight, we won’t support you,’ Christensen says. ‘But you have to stand up for yourself.'”
Eyes of a Blue Dog
[Fiction] A man and woman encounter each other every night in their dreams:
“I said: ‘Sometimes in other dreams, I’ve thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that’s why you’re cold.’ And she said: ‘Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate. Then, when the blood beats inside me, it’s as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the bed. It’s like- -what do you call it–laminated metal.’ She drew closer to the lamp. ‘I would have liked to hear you,’ I said. And she said: ‘If we find each other sometime, put your ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you’ll hear me echoing. I’ve always wanted you to do it sometime.'”
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