If I write a piece that does not appear under my name, you might call me a ghostwriter. But what about the inverse? What if I don’t write a piece that does appear under my name?
According to the slang I just made up, that would be called figureheading. Which would make me, metaphorically, a wood carving. Or, one-metaphor-removedly, a celebrity taking credit for words I did not write. But I am not a celebrity, and I never asked anyone to be my ghostwriter. So why are two pieces I didn’t write masquerading under my name?
[Originally published at The Huffington Post]
NEW DELHI — In his Cairo speech, President Obama made reference to seventeen Muslim-majority countries. He also spent a lot of time discussing a country where Muslims are a minority: his own. But he did not mention, at least not by name, one nation that Muslims have called home for centuries; a nation whose Muslim population exceeds that of the entire Persian Gulf; a nation where some of the Muslims best known to Americans were born, from Fareed Zakaria to Aasif Mandvi to Jamal Malik.
How could Obama forget about India?
[I wrote this about four weeks ago. First for one editor, then for another. They all dropped the piece--capriciously, I thought, but then I'm biased. Anyway, now I have this piece with an expired news peg, so I'll just throw it up here. Oh, freelancing...]
On May 21, 2005, David Foster Wallace—by then recognized as one of America’s best living writers—spoke to the graduating class of Kenyon College. Wallace had earned a reputation as a wily postmodernist, but his address that day was straightforward and sweet. It began this way:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’
Last week, the speech was published posthumously as a short book. This Is Water will not be remembered as the pinnacle of David Foster Wallace’s literary career, but it reminds us that, beneath all the virtuosity and above all the footnotes, Wallace was a humanist. He was not just our generation’s greatest prose stylist; he was our greatest spiritual writer as well. read more…
[Originally published at The Huffington Post]
Last night, The Moth’s musician was late. Not that they really needed a musician–his only job was to noodle when a performer’s time was up, a role that could have been relegated to a CD player or a tap on the shoulder–still, the musician is part of the Moth schtick, and the organizers were sad to start without him.
But the show did go on. The emcee laid out the rules: Each performer had ten minutes to tell a story. Not a rant, not a stand up routine, and, for heaven’s sake, not a reading (no notes allowed). Some Moth performers make their living as comedians, some as engineers, some as surfers. Last night, as the event was co-sponsored by the PEN World Voices Festival, most were internationally recognized novelists. But when they take the stage at The Moth, they all become verbal storytellers. All that is required of them is a true, first-person story; one that “sets up stakes”; one that has a beginning, middle and end; and one that hews, however loosely, to the theme of the night.
Last night’s theme was “You Say You Want a (R)evolution: Stories About Change,” adapted from the Evolution/Revolution theme of the World Voices Festival. (Evolution is also the theme of this year’s Burning Man, which inspired in your humble blogger a brief but terrible image of Salman Rushdie, clad in spandex and glow sticks, breathing fire.)
[Originally published at The Huffington Post]
When the novelist Jose Manuel Prieto left Cuba to spend a decade in Siberia, he could only fit a few books in his suitcase, so he packed several volumes (not all) of “A La Recherche du Temps Perdu” by Marcel Proust. When winter closed in, Proust was more or less all Prieto had, and he read with a concentration “bordering on obsession.”
So when, in preparation for Tuesday’s panel, Prieto was asked to identify a favorite classic work, he immediately thought of Proust. He highlighted an excerpt from a minor Proust novel about diamond forgery, which his interpreter then read in English. Meanwhile, further down the dais, another interpreter whispered a simultaneous translation to the Syrian-French writer Salwa Al Neimi.
Thus was Proust translated from French into Spanish, then into English, and back into the original French, by way of Syria and Siberia. (With so many far-flung luminaries struggling to be understood, it was as if the UN had convened a Special Commission on Synecdoche.)
The text below comes from a poster for 311, a New York City government hotline. The poster tries to make 311 sexy (a tall order for a hotline) by using “311″ as a transitive verb. They don’t want you to “call 311 to find out where your towed vehicle has gone”–that sounds so pedestrian–rather, you “311 your towed vehicle.” In order to form imperative sentences of this type, on the poster, each of the phrases below was preceded by “311.” I didn’t get this at first, so I just read the text below, objects without predicates, and thought of it as a poem about urban life.
senior services. your noisy neighbor. graffiti cleanup. food assistance. domestic violence counseling. a tree request. summer meals for youth. recycling and trash collection. a broken streetlight. an unsafe building site. health care for your family. a pothole on your street. a dog license. alternate side parking. a park. youth employment. a heat or hot water complaint. your towed vehicle.
Even in the throes of campaign excitement, chugging along at breakneck speed on the Hope Express, most of us had a few sober moments. During these moments, we realized that not all of Obama’s campaign promises would come to fruition. Even if he was sincere about wanting to fix healthcare or education, his plans might be blocked; or they might be enacted and not work.
Still, at a minimum, we knew that President Obama would be able to do at least a few real, consequential things. He would order the closure of Guantanamo. (Check.) He would bring the troops home. (Um…impending check?) And he would push through a bipartisan bill that would grant free education in exchange for national service. Sure, this one would require congressional approval — but who would oppose an expansion of voluntary public service? Who could possibly launch a PR campaign against AmeriCorps?
I should have known the answer, of course. Who else but the wackiest conservative around, the lady who makes Glenn Beck look like Charlie Rose, Michele Bachmann:
Where is this paranoia coming from? By “philosophical agenda,” does she mean, perhaps, the agenda put forward during the Sermon on the Mount? I am going to stop writing about this before I start getting angry. The point is: this is not a question of competing political ideologies, but of incommensurate versions of reality. When Michele Bachmann looks out the window, or reads the (liberal) news, she simply does not see the world I see.
[Originally published in Killing the Buddha]
“You heading to the second line?” the stranger asks. He is standing in the middle of the street, where the dividing line would be if there was one, picking catfish from a Styrofoam box. “Just up there a few blocks. You can hear the music almost.”
I am on my way to the second line, but I don’t answer right away. I have just left New York, and am still following that city’s unspoken code—that any stranger who wants to chat is crazy, or soliciting money, or both.
I have to remind myself: this is New Orleans, where strangers make small talk and eye contact; where “All right” is a greeting; where “How are you?” is more than a greeting; where people are nice to each other for no reason.
“I am going to the second line, actually,” I say. “Are you?”
He spits out a bone. “I’ll walk with you a bit. Can’t go too far, though. Have to watch the museum.” I guess he means the Backstreet Cultural Museum, half a block behind us. As I passed by it I considered going in; but I couldn’t tell if it was a hidden treasure or a scam, some guy trying to charge me $8 to fondle his tchotchkes. (Later, when a New Orleanian suggests I visit that very museum, I ask her which she thinks it is. “Both,” she says, without a pause.)
He walks with me a bit. Asks me if I knew the woman.
He must mean the lady who died. “No. Did you?”
“Oh, sure. Everyone in the Treme knew her. You must not be from around here.”
I am not. I am visiting for a weekend. The wrong weekend, most people would say: the first weekend of Lent, four days after Mardi Gras. The streets are quiet. The French Quarter looks like a living room the morning after a house party: sticky sidewalks instead of sticky floorboards; plastic beads instead of plastic cups. The city feels diffident, not sure what it did last night and afraid to find out.
New Orleans is a deeply Catholic city. Before the storm, 40 percent of the city’s children went to Catholic schools; the city is still split into parishes. Even Ignatius Reilly, main character of A Confederacy of Dunces and the great literary anti-hero of New Orleans, was a grudging Catholic. Reilly disdained all modern institutions—capitalism, democracy, courtship, kinship, even New Orleans itself—but he never renounced the Church.
In a bona fide Sin City like Las Vegas, the hedonism buffet is open year-round. In New Orleans, though, the revelry runs in cycles of indulgence and guilt, delineated by the liturgical calendar. After all, Mardi Gras, that bacchanal of bacchanals, is a Catholic festival, and it ends with a hell of a whimper: forty days of fasting and repentance. This is New Orleans—the country’s biggest party followed by the universe’s biggest buzzkill.
The catfish docent and I part ways, and suddenly here comes the second line, and suddenly I’m swept up in it. Two white horses draw an ornate gharry carriage with the casket inside. The band marches in front, playing those sweet sad dirges everyone knows—”When the Saints Go Marching In,” “This Little Light of Mine”—and we go along with them, in equal scale weighing delight and dole.
Is a jazz funeral really a funeral or a party? Both, I say.
A lady near me wears a torn tank top and no shoes, a cigarette burning in each hand. The first time I look over she’s gyrating wildly, grinding her hips and shouting with primal, aggressive joy; the next moment she’s bent over a parked car, racked with sobs. She might be the sister of the deceased, blind with grief, or she might just be out of her mind. read more…
***
“I like an escalator because an escalator can never break. It can only become stairs. There would never be an ‘Escalator temporarily out of order’ sign. Only, ‘Escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.’ ” — Mitch Hedberg
Went to see the elephants last night. They were walking across Manhattan in the cold, starting at the Midtown Tunnel at midnight and ending at Madison Square Garden. (They had to get to the Garden to perform in the circus and, as my friend put it, “How else are they gonna get there?”)
It all sounded like a great idea around 9:00 pm. When someone asks you if you want to go see the elephants, it seems that yes is the only right answer. But by the time it was 11:30 and time to go, I was having doubts. Then after an hour underground, the Q train lurching, then stopping, the whole time wondering whether I was missing the parade, I picked a mental fight with Del Close: You can’t always say yes!
Off the train and above ground: We had not missed the elephants. We were just in time. The crowd was pressed up against the barricades, brimming with a kind of self-conscious, self-fulfilling enthusiasm. (The logic seemed to be: “This is a childish thing to do, so I will do it with a childlike sense of wonder.”) We were shivering, but every few minutes someone would yell “Whooo! Elephants!” and we would all break into a cheer. The elephants were not here just yet, but they were coming, goddammit.
This is the amazing thing about New York: whatever crazy, self-destructive thing you decide to do, you can take comfort in the fact that hundreds of people will be stupid enough to do it with you.
