Roy Miller's Blog, page 198
May 6, 2017
Being an ‘Old Lady’ Role Model in Hollywood? Not Easy
This content was originally published by BROOKS BARNES on 5 May 2017 | 9:25 pm.
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She does not discuss her films. (“What am I going to say, ‘We used this lens here and that one there?’’’ she told me. “Boring!”) But she does write about her childhood, the cosmetic indignities of aging and travails of motherhood, including accidentally ripping the tail off her son’s hamster and subsequent Neosporin applications to its “anal cavity” with a Q-tip.
Below is a condensed version of my conversation with her about it.
How often does your lack of a filter get you into trouble?
SHEILA NEVINS Very often. A boss once said to me, “Do you ever have an unexpressed thought?” Probably not. But there was a point in my career when I did have to learn to lean back. My candor now depends on who is in the room. How high up the ladder those men are.
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Men. Interesting. I think your frankness makes the book. I’m not sure I needed to know the details of your gallstone removal, though.
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NEVINS The hospital gave them to me afterwards, and I brought them to the office in a little cup. I made people guess what they were. No one got it right. (Howl of laughter.) I think I might not be normal. Do you want them? I still have them somewhere.
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I think I’ll pass.
NEVINS I think you are really rude.
You write that you felt it was necessary at HBO to hide your age. Really?
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NEVINS Oh, so true. Older women are terrified they will be disregarded or discounted. Older men get to be called “distinguished.” There is no equivalent word for women. Nobody wants to listen to an old broad.
How do you know?
NEVINS I work in media! All people talk about is wanting a young audience — young, young, young — and you read the writing on the wall. It’s not like you pipe up in a meeting and say, “Actually, older brains can think smart and young too.” You go and get Botox.
Why are you talking about your age now?
NEVINS It’s time to be old out loud. I’m trying to own it. I’m trying to be a role model. There aren’t many old lady role models. But it’s not easy. In fact, even saying that I start to feel a little weepy. I don’t seem to be able to embrace being in my late 70s. I just can’t tolerate it on some level.
Toward the end of the book you have a punch-in-the-gut line: “I’m angry that it’s almost over, just when I understand I’ve just begun.” Was that hard to confront?
NEVINS It was much harder to write about my son, who has Tourette’s, although he told me I could. The next-hardest was the story about my mother. I really didn’t want to go back there. In fact, that was the one I almost didn’t write. And that one — that one! — was the one Meryl Streep most connected with and wanted to read for the audiobook. What a dope I am.
You got an incredible group of celebrities to read chapters — Kathy Bates, Martha Stewart, Gloria Vanderbilt, Lily Tomlin, RuPaul. How did you manage that?
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NEVINS And I didn’t pay anyone. Hah! I don’t really know how I did it. It’s impossible to think that Meryl Streep might agree to read your story. So you don’t think. You just do. With her, I knew someone who has an office next to hers, and we got it to her assistant. Suddenly I’m opening a letter from Meryl Streep saying she wants to do it. I almost passed out.
You know you’re one of the true originals, right?
NEVINS No, I don’t. I don’t like that. I think you pay an enormous price for being “an original.” I think I’m empathetic. I catch rising stars. I catch falling stars.
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I don’t know what that means.
NEVINS It’s not my fault you’re not smart enough to figure it out.
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In Conversation With Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This content was originally published by CONCEPCIÓN DE LEÓN on 5 May 2017 | 9:33 pm.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Vladimir Weinstein/BFA.com
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a feminist icon and mainstay in conversations about women’s equality, did not originally intend for her newly released book, “Dear Ijeawele; Or, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions,” to be published. It started first as a private letter to a friend who sought Ms. Adichie’s advice on how to raise her newborn daughter “so she doesn’t take the kind of nonsense that I took,” before being published on her Facebook page and now, finally, in print.
In a TimesTalks conversation on Thursday, The New York Times’s editorial director for books, Radhika Jones, spoke with Ms. Adichie about her reasons for making her words public, what has surprised her about motherhood — she now has her own daughter — and why there’s something to be said about sexism being “refreshingly obvious” in her native Nigeria.
Video of the interview is below.
TimesTalks: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Video by TimesTalks
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May 5, 2017
5 Books to Read on Kentucky Derby Day
This content was originally published by JOHN WILLIAMS on 5 May 2017 | 9:43 pm.
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To get a handle on which horse to bet among the 20 entrants in tomorrow’s Kentucky Derby, turn to The Times’s Joe Drape and Melissa Hoppert. While they were busy handicapping the field, I was turning, as I usually do at this time of year, to my fairly robust shelf of books about the sport. Assuming you’re already familiar with Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling “Seabiscuit” (and if not, then with its film adaptation), here are a handful of other books to read on Derby Day, and during the rest of the Triple Crown season that follows it.
C. E. Morgan’s novel “The Sport of Kings” (2016), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is a slightly off-kilter but powerful place to start. Horse racing itself is not its central concern, but the sport is a vivid background to the story of several generations in a Kentucky family.
In his review for The Times, Dwight Garner called the book “ravishing and ambitious,” and “a mud-flecked epic, replete with fertile symbolism.” He wrote that Morgan has “a special and almost Darwinian interest in consanguinity, in the barbed things that are passed on in the blood of people and of horses, like curses, from generation to generation.”
In “Blood Horses” (2004), John Jeremiah Sullivan strongly shares that interest in things that are passed on. His elliptical book is partly about horses (in an encyclopedic way: from modern horse racing to zoology to ancient myths), and partly about his relationship with his sportswriter father. It includes, among other things, a moving description of Secretariat’s astonishingly dominant win in the 1973 Belmont Stakes.
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Sales, Earnings Rise at S&S in Q1
This content was originally published by on 4 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Revenue at Simon & Schuster rose 11% in the first quarter ended March 31, 2017 over the comparable period a year ago, while operating income increased 8%.
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Ivanka Trump Promotes Her Book on Social Media (but Not in the Media)
This content was originally published by RACHEL ABRAMS on 6 May 2017 | 1:08 am.
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“Little moments matter, especially for working moms!!” Ms. Trump wrote in the caption.
Norman L. Eisen, the chief White House ethics adviser under President Barack Obama, said her actions could send the wrong message to other government officials: that promoting Trump businesses was O.K. On Thursday, the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues reposted a Twitter message promoting Ms. Trump’s book but later deleted it.
Are government officials “responding to a signal from the Trumps?” Mr. Eisen wrote in an email. “That is a legitimate question, and an important one.”
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Richard W. Painter, the chief White House ethics adviser under President George W. Bush, said the person responsible for the State Department retweeting could have violated standards prohibiting federal employees from promoting products. A spokeswoman for the department declined to comment.
But Ms. Trump does not appear to have violated any laws, ethics experts said.
“We don’t outlaw the appearance of conflict,” said Edwin Williamson, a government ethics expert who was the State Department’s legal adviser under President George Bush.
Ms. Trump, who wrote the book before her father was elected president, has had to navigate a minefield of potential conflicts of interest since she became an official federal employee. She continues to own her fashion brand, and she retains the ability to approve potential new deals through a newly formed trust — a mechanism that her advisers say will help minimize potential problems.
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Cardoso, Pizarnik Win 2017 Best Translated Book Awards
This content was originally published by on 5 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The 2017 Best Translated Book Awards were announced at a ceremony at the Folly in New York on May 4. Lúcio Cardoso and Alejandra Pizarnik took home the prizes for fiction and poetry, respectively.
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Peter Spier, Illustrator of Children’s Books, Dies at 89
This content was originally published by RICHARD SANDOMIR on 6 May 2017 | 1:28 am.
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“Noah’s Ark” brought Mr. Spier the Caldecott Medal, the highest honor for illustrators of picture books.
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He said that he created children’s books “for the kids and the child within myself.”
One of his earliest books was inspired by a trip to Vermont with his wife, Kathryn. They were singing the old English folk song that begins, “The fox went out on a chilly night,” when Mr. Spier suddenly told her that the song — about a fox who steals a duck and a goose from a farmer to feed his and his wife’s 10 cubs — would be the ideal source for a children’s book.
“When we reached home a week later, I grabbed a few sketchbooks and drove back to New England,” he recalled. He filled the pages with notes about colors, weather and locations, and later added drawings of the covered bridges, cemeteries and farms of Newfane, Vt. Back home, he fleshed out his vision for the book with three full-size paintings.
“My editors at Doubleday took one look at them and said, ‘Great, go ahead,’ ” he wrote in 2012, the year “The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night” (1961) was released as an e-book. For that reissue, he colored the pages that had originally been printed in black and white to save money.
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“He went back to his original line drawings,” said Frances Gilbert, editorial director of Doubleday Books for Young Readers. “He took the old drawings, scanned them and used them as the starting point for the colorizations.”
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Illustrated Books by Peter Spier
CreditAll Rights Reserved, 1977, Peter Spier, via Random House Children’s Books
Peter Edward Spier was born on June 6, 1927, in Amsterdam and grew up in the small town of Broek in Waterland. His father, Jo, was a newspaper illustrator and cartoonist, and his mother, the former Albertine van Raalte, was a homemaker. His formal education ended in his early teens, about a year after the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940.
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The elder Mr. Spier was imprisoned by the Nazis for an illustration of Hitler that speculated about what would have happened had he stayed a painter. He was subsequently deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, as were his wife, his sons and his daughter, Celine. They were liberated by the Soviet Red Army in May 1945.
Mr. Spier’s younger brother, Thomas, recalled in a telephone interview on Friday that the first children’s stories Peter wrote were about a zebra named Tommy who took pills to travel to the past and the future — an evocation of the freedom the brothers no longer had. “They were in pencil with a little color,” he said. “I’d say it was a precursor to what he did in the future.”
Mr. Spier returned to his homeland after the war and served in the Royal Netherlands Navy for four years before immigrating to the United States in 1951. He worked in advertising before he began to write and illustrate children’s books. At a visit to Doubleday’s office in the 1950s, he spotted a manuscript on his editor’s desk that immediately interested him.
“It was about a cow that lived in Holland, in fact in the exact location where I grew up,” Mr. Spier told Publishers Weekly in 2015. “I asked if I could take the manuscript home and make some drawings for it.”
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The finished book, “The Cow Who Fell in the Canal,” by Phyllis Krasilovsky, about a bored cow named Hendrika, was published in 1957.
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This was not the only time Mr. Spier evoked the Netherlands in his work. “Of Dikes and Windmills” (1969) was a full-length book with diagrams, maps, street scenes and landscapes. In a review in The New York Times, Ormonde de Kay Jr. wrote that Mr. Spier’s epic themes — “puny man against mighty nature, little Holland against large and expanding Spain and England” — were rendered with a “light, informal style as he recounts, with humor and affection, the astonishing deeds (and, on occasion, misdeeds) of his redoubtable countrymen.”
In addition to his son and brother, Mr. Spier is survived by his wife, the former Kathryn Pallister; his daughter, Kathryn; and two grandsons.
By the mid-1990s, Mr. Spier had largely stopped writing children’s books and turned his fuller attention to building model sailing ships and steamships, a longtime craft that evoked his time sailing in the canals in the Netherlands and his stint with the Dutch Navy. Out of fallen trees or scrap wood, he carved hulls and built planks. He used miniature lathes to make cannons and little saws to make anchors.
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“These were real ships,” his son said. “With each one, he’d say, ‘I’m making heirlooms for you.’”
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Free the Copyright Office
This content was originally published by on 5 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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A bill that just cleared its first congressional hurdle takes a step toward modernizing the Copyright Office and giving it more independence, argues the Authors Guild's Mary Rasenberger.
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Staff Pick: 'Nutshell' by Ian McEwan
This content was originally published by on 5 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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PW's vice president of business development recommends Ian McEwan's 'Nutshell,' a novel about a fetus who overhears its mother plotting the murder of its father.
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Research Institutions Now Cater to the Prejudices of Wealth
This content was originally published by NOAH MILLMAN on 5 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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Credit
Flavio Morais
THE IDEAS INDUSTRY
By Daniel W. Drezner
344 pp. Oxford University Press. $27.95.
The word “idea” comes from the Greek “to see.” Originally, an idea was a pattern, something that, when you saw it, enabled you to understand the true nature of a phenomenon. “Industry” comes from the Latin for “diligence,” and means an economic sector producing a particular product. An industry that reliably produced understanding of the true nature of things would be an extraordinary achievement of civilization.
But the political scientist and blogger Daniel W. Drezner’s new book, “The Ideas Industry,” isn’t about anything so revolutionary. Rather, it’s an account of how the marketplace of ideas, the metaphorical bazaar where academics and think tankers and pundits hawk their intellectual wares to policy makers, has changed over the past generation.
As he tells it, three large-scale forces have remade the marketplace of ideas. The erosion of trust in prestigious institutions has weakened the position of both academia and the traditional journalistic perches of public intellectuals. The polarization of American politics has segmented that marketplace into distinct and separate niches. Most important, the dramatic growth in economic inequality has made wealthy individuals and corporations into the primary buyers, dominating the market.
It’s this last trend, Drezner says, that accounts for the transformation of a marketplace into an industry. In a marketplace, wares are traded among participants with diverse needs, but an industry produces to meet the specific demands of its customers. Whether it’s the predominance of economics over political science, the transformation of research institutions and the rise of private intelligence operations, or the phenomenon of the superstar intellectual — each of which gets a chapter in Drezner’s book — a common thread is the enormous financial incentives that now exist to cater to the intellectual tastes and prejudices of modern wealth.
Those pressures — and the opportunities they present — have clearly affected Drezner himself, in ways that both gratify and worry him. His book’s subject lies well outside his area of expertise (Drezner is a professor of international politics), but he obviously relishes his ability to reach an audience beyond academia. Moreover, his book is framed as an explanation of the world’s new rules in the style of David Brooks or Thomas Friedman, people Drezner calls “thought leaders,” as distinct from the more traditional “public intellectuals,” because they push big, contrarian ideas rather than critiquing and complicating the public’s understanding of a topic. This very distinction, meanwhile, is his own buzzwordy bid for “thought leader” status.
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But in chapters on the perils of intellectual superstardom, on social media and in the final one, where he discusses the takeoff phase of his own career, he expresses profound concerns about how the incentives of the ideas industry work against careful or serious thought. The thin reed on which he places his hopes for reform is the notion that intellectuals will police themselves.
The question Drezner doesn’t ever ask explicitly is: What is the ideas industry’s real product? If the plutocrats who dominate the market demand ideas that are already congenial to them, then they aren’t evaluating ideas based on their efficacy — as, indeed, they have little incentive to do if they are insulated from their consequences. It’s probably not an accident that the industry Drezner describes frequently sounds like a luxury brand of entertainment, the ideas akin to the witty confections served up by Louis XVI’s courtiers in the French film “Ridicule.”
I make the comparison advisedly, for looming in the background of Drezner’s narrative is Donald Trump. Drezner calls Trump the “brassiest thought leader in existence,” but this is to stretch his own definition of the term beyond utility. Trump won the presidency substantially by running against the entire edifice of ideation that Drezner’s book describes, both traditional academic experts and the Davos and think tank sets. He may well be a consequence of many of the trends Drezner identifies. It remains to be seen just what ideas, if any, that consequence has.
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