Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 54
December 20, 2014
Blaspheming Dorothy Parker
I was checking out The Millions’ Year in Reading again this morning and came across the entry of one William Giraldi. Giraldi is a critic I’ve run into a few times before. He once wrote a weirdly angry review of two books by an acquaintance of mine. This got him pilloried all over the internet. It was really more of a reap-what-you-sow moment than an outrage moment. I think if you write something angry, you should probably be prepared for people to respond in kind.
What I am about to describe is not something angry he wrote though. It’s just something that made me stop short, before I’d even looked at the byline in my RSS feeder:
Imagine the irredeemably WASPish, cloistered Connecticut world of John Cheever if rendered by James Thurber, or John Updike’s suburban New England strivers and cheaters delivered by Oscar Wilde, or, better yet, imagine if you could make an alloy of H.L. Mencken’s irreligious perceptions and Dorothy Parker’s cagey sapience, and you might come close to beholding the vibrant abilities of Peter De Vries.
I’ve never read Peter De Vries. Let’s stipulate that he’s probably wonderful in all the ways described. I 
suspect, though, that this sentence would have benefited from about four fewer names included in it. The adjectives could have left too. I am no stranger to long, looping, complicated sentences, and in fact it annoys me that in my own work I have to use the shorter ones so often. The windup here simply goes on too long.
None of these are what bother me, though. What bothers me is this reference to Dorothy Parker’s “cagey sapience.” It’s so totally wrong it took my breath away. An insane overreaction, I know. This is the problem with writing a book about dead writers: you sometimes find yourself with highly developed opinions about other people’s tossed-off remarks about them.
So, caveat emptor, this is a nitpick. But I’m going to unpack it anyway in the interest of intellectualism and all that.
Which, by the way, Parker was never very much for. It wasn’t that she couldn’t be serious. She had a strong interest in politics, which you can see in the fact that she left the rights to her work to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the NAACP, thereby forever incurring the wrath of her friend Lillian Hellman, who had hoped to inherit that herself.
But “sapience”? That word implies that Parker believed herself to hold wisdom. For all her meanness, for all her pose of authority in her Constant Reader column in the New Yorker, her style does not present itself as wise. Parker did think of herself as funny, but as we know, there’s often a hollow core to humor. There’s often a punishing self inside. This was certainly true of Parker, and not because of the caricatures that posit her as perenially suicidal (she wasn’t always) nor falling-down drunk (more like “tipsy,” most of the time, people said).
Besides, all her work was founded on doubt. Doubt that people were as wise or as talented or even as important as they said they were. And putting yourself out there as a doubter and a ridiculer is not the same as wisdom. If anything I feel like half of Parker’s problems with herself came from her keen awareness of the gulf between “funny” and “wise.” So forget “sapience.”
Second, this matter of “cagey.” How was she withholding or careful or secretive in her work? Reading the better half of it she is in confessional mode. Her stories and poems often correspond closely to events in her own life. That’s not the same thing as saying they’re purely autobiographical, of course. But Parker wasn’t hiding, not remotely, in her poems and fiction. If anything I think she thought they were too honest, too close to what she perceived as her own weaknesses. She’d often plead to write as something other than herself: “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman.” Which is very sad to think about, especially given that so many people found her “self,” that Dorothy Parker persona, pleasant enough to buy her books in droves.
My point, I guess, is if you going to lard Parker up with adjectives you should at least use ones that indicate more than surface familiarity with her work. Pick up the Dorothy Parker Reader instead of the thesaurus. Or else risk offending Parker pedants like me.
(Photo via Wiki)
Face Of The Day
Michael Zhang captions:
Photographer Shelley Calton grew up in Houston, Texas and was raised by a father who owned guns for both hunting and self-defense. She and her two sisters all learned to shoot firearms from a young age.
This background is something Calton shares with the subjects of her project “Concealed.” It’s a series of portraits that looks into the lives of women who arm themselves. Calton writes that, in doing this project from 2011 through 2014, she “sought to more deeply understand [the women’s] collective experiences as concealed carriers.”
Craig Hlavaty has more:
Most of these women grew up with guns, Calton says, so they didn’t have an aversion to them. Some women had a traumatic incident in their past that lead them to always have a handgun nearby. One was briefly kidnapped. Others were sick of feeling vulnerable and threatened. Some carry now because their significant others wanted them to be able to protect themselves and their children if needed.
“Some carry on their bodies everywhere they go, some in their purses, and some just in their cars and homes,” says Calton. One woman carries her concealed piece in a small Coach purse, with the pistol taking up most of the space.
A Short Story For Saturday
This weekend’s short story is Tim Parks’ “Reverend,” just published in The New Yorker. You can surmise the subject matter from its title, which has autobiographical significance for Parks. In an interview, he had this to say about the story’s relationship to his own life:
Reams could be written about the autobiographical links, of one kind or another, in pretty much all of the fiction I have written. If anyone were interested, that is. Let’s say that the distance fiction allows—talking in the third person, declaring from the start, “This is not me, these are not people I know”—enables me to meditate on experiences close to home, on characters like myself, like my father, without being swept away by them. There is also a constant and, I hope, exciting tension between memory and invention, an awareness that, even when you try to say exactly how something was, it is still largely reconstructed through memory and language; it is still a “creative” act.
How the story begins:
After his mother died, Thomas started thinking about his father. All too frequently, while she was dying, there had been talk of her going to meet him in Paradise, returning to the arms of her husband of thirty-two years, who had died thirty-two years before she did. This would be bliss.
Thomas did not believe in such things, of course, though it was hard not to try to imagine them, if only to savor the impossibility of the idea: the two insubstantial souls greeting each other in the ether, the airy embrace. She had been ninety at death, he sixty. There would be some adjustment for that, presumably, in Heaven. The madness of it confirmed one’s skepticism.
Keep reading here. Read the rest of the interview with Parks about the story here, and peruse previous SSFSs here.
The View From Your Window Contest
You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book, a new Dish mug, or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.
Last week’s contest results are here. Browse a gallery of all our previous contests here.
December 19, 2014
The Best Of The Dish Today
Today on the Dish, Michelle shook her head at the long-overdue exoneration of a black teenager executed in 1944, reflected on a perceived sexist remark made during her J-school days, and added her final thoughts on the Serial finale. More from Michelle on Dorothy Parker tomorrow and a sign-off post with reflections on TNR’s collapse on Sunday.
Our most popular posts today were Howard Roark and the Hacker’s Veto and On The Right Not To Be “Triggered”. Two other posts from Will included his musings over the rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage and his hatho-induced awe over Glenn Beck’s newest video.
Phoebe, our wonderfully bright intern leaving the Dish soon, examined the evolving ways we look at gentrification, highlighted French author Éric Zemmour’s look at his nation’s decline, and joined Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart in considering the role of masculinity in their lives and literature.
Be sure to check out Andrew’s cameo in the Colbert finale and this hilarious story from a reader who ran into the senior Senator from Colbert’s home state of South Carolina. More Santa-crushing stories from readers here.
We’ve updated many recent posts with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your 
unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @dishfeed. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here (you purchase one today and have it auto-delivered on Christmas Day). Dish t-shirts are for sale here and our coffee mugs here.
One of our newest subscribers has been a regular emailer since 2010:
The Dish staff photo finally prompted me to subscribe today. I had been dodging the pay-meter on a daily basis since its inception, but seeing the staff photo helped humanize the team, replacing my mental image of a gaggle of flaming liberals – though if I squint real hard, I think I do see a few sparks coming off a couple of you. Happy holidays!
Andrew will be back on Sunday night and likely torture-blogging throughout the week, so be sure to tune in for more on waterboarding, rectal feeding, and war criminals … Merry Christmas!
(Photo: A sign shows the departure times for flights to Cuba at Miami International Airport on December 19, 2014 in Miami, Florida. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Glenn Beck: Better Than Marina Abramovic
I won’t say that this is the greatest thing that I have ever seen, but neither will I say that it is not glorious to behold. Glenn Beck, American, offers a voice of warning … from the future:
Kyle Mantyla of Right Wing Watch (I’d rather watch grass grow) writes:
The best thing about Glenn Beck owning his own network is that he answers to nobody and so there is nothing to stop him from indulging every insane idea that he has, resulting in hour-long programs like last night’s end-of-the-year recap in which a 90-year-old Glenn Beck recorded a dire message from the future about how 2014 was the year in which the whole world fell apart.
Living alone in an abandoned building with only a few tiny candles and a small fire for light and heat, future Beck somehow managed to scrounge up some batteries and video cameras with which to record his message. And even though the world in 2054 is apparently short on food and fuel and energy and everything else, future Beck still somehow managed to obtain stockpiles of footage from news programs that aired forty years earlier and even had the capacity to edit those clips into his dire message about how everything from Ebola, to ISIS, to the Federal Reserve all brought about the complete collapse of capitalism and society starting in 2014.
Glenn Beck, in my opinion the world’s greatest performance artist, has built a fortune on the crackpot credulity of extreme conservative. This video is just delightfully bats. Will Menaker tweets:
My favorite part is that the example of humanity’s great potential for the miraculous is a wedding and the terrible is the missing plane lol
— Will Menaker (@willmenaker) December 19, 2014
It’s like he wants us to know he’s pulling our leg. But then he’s totally not! Glenn Beck is a living magic eye poster. You squint and you see the winking irony, but you try to pull it into focus and it vanishes! All you see is the authentic wild-eyed paranoid ideologue. But then you catch the wink! Agh! The mercury-blooded cipher! I love him so much I wrote down what he said:
Forty years ago, 2014, your history books claim, that was the year of the dawn of progressivism! The dawn of a new beginning! The end of capitalism! I’ll tell you know that it was that. That this new era of equality, and diversity and tolerance … I beg to differ with your history book! Forget your books! I was there! I saw it! I remember 2014, I remember four words that came to me… There was a clash of the “evil” tea partiers. There was a clash on a ranch in the middle of the country. A man said he had a right to his own land. It was at that time that I heard, and I’ll never forget it in my prayers, four words: “And. So. It. Begins.” Over and over again I saw it, over and over again I heard it. I was like Nebuchadnezzar without Daniel… Sorry. You probably don’t even know what that means. Right. I’m not crazy. I was naive, but I was not crazy.
Not crazy … like a fox! So the turning point in American history is the standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch? Of course. And the bewhiskered ghost of Glenn Beck future apologizes for his biblical reference because … why? Because the Bureau of Land Management was not brutally overthrown, and so the Bible has become illegal? Who knows! Who cares! This is art, people. Beck’s historical-reenactor-from-the-dystopian-future scenery-chewing raises the bar for avant garde thespians everywhere. In twenty years, when Beck steps out for his bow, I’ll be first in line for the MoMa retrospective celebrating this luminous American original and his mind-bending decades-long post-modern meta-satire of unhinged populist demagoguery. Who needs spineless Hollywood? The bleeding edge of culture is happening at The Blaze.
The Gentrification Of “Gentrification”
Emily Badger suggests chucking the word:
Even researchers don’t agree on what “gentrification” means, let alone how to identify it. (And this is to say nothing of its even more problematic derivative, the “gentrifier.”) … The definition matters… not purely for linguistic nit-picking, but because we seldom talk about gentrification in isolation. More often, we’re talking about its effects: who it displaces, what happens to those people, how crime rates, school quality or tax dollars follow as neighborhoods transform. And if we have no consistent way of identifying where “gentrification” exists, it then becomes a lot harder to say much about what it means.
Badger has me convinced, but I’d push further: “Gentrification” has taken on a life of its own as a lifestyle-section problem. The same language gets used to discuss concerns that a neighborhood has become unaffordable for poorer residents as to lament the fact that a favorite (pricey) coffee shop or boutique has closed its doors to make way for a chain store. NIMBY complaints hide out under the socially-acceptable – noble, even – guise of anti-gentrification advocacy.
This conflation of problems is not new, but when I read a NYT op-ed over the summer by a prominent restaurant owner, who was pointing out that because of rising rents, he may have to… change the location of one of his high-end Manhattan restaurants, I started to think that perhaps it’s gotten out-of-hand in recent years. Of course, The Onion was on the case in 2008, with its “Report: Nation’s Gentrified Neighborhoods Threatened By Aristocratization.” At any rate, Benjamin Schwarz addressed the phenomenon with great precision in 2010:
It’s entirely reasonable—in fact, humane—to argue that the state must ensure decent living conditions for its citizens (and God knows we are terribly far from that situation). But it’s a wholly different proposition to argue that, in the name of what [Michael] Sorkin calls “the protection of … the local” and to forestall “a landscape of homogeneity,” the state should create the conditions necessary for favored groups—be they designers, craftspeople, small-batch distillers, researchers, the proprietors of mom-and-pop stores—to live in expensive and fashionable neighborhoods or boroughs. That effort would ultimately be an aesthetic endeavor to ensure that the affluent, well-educated denizens of said neighborhoods be provided with the stage props and scenery necessary for what [Jane] Jacobs and her heirs define as an enriching urban experience.
So these are really two additional problems with “gentrification” – that it’s used by the rich to protest the arrival of the even-richer, and that it’s sometimes code for saying that a neighborhood has gone tacky, touristy, mall-ish, i.e. that it’s become more accessible. I’m not sure any of this is reason for scholars of urban planning to abandon the term, but the time has probably come to treat it with skepticism in magazine articles, social-media posts, and the like.
Faces Of The Day
Kashmiri Shiite boys wear blood stained shrouds on December 19, 2014 in Srinagar, India as a sign of protest against the recent killing of the schoolchildren in the terror attack in Peshawar, Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban killed 141 people, including 132 children, at an army-run school, and it was the deadliest in Pakistan’s history. By Waseem Andrabi/Hindustan Times via Getty Images.
Leaning In, Tumbling Down
Reacting to a story about Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Annie Lowrey reflects on “the ‘glass cliff,’ a relative of the ‘glass ceiling’ that holds back businesswomen, the ‘glass closet’ that stifles the ambitions of gay executives, the brick walls facing many managers of color, and the ‘glass elevator’ that helps so, so many white bros up to the top”:
The term comes courtesy of two psychologists, Michelle K. Ryan of the University of Exeter and S. Alexander Haslam of the University of Queensland. In a pioneering study published a decade ago, they found that women were often promoted to board positions after a company had started faltering. Women weren’t picked to lead companies on an upswing, in other words. They were promoted to help manage turbulence and decline.
To show it, the researchers looked at the performance of firms before and after the appointment of a male or female board member. “During a period of overall stock-market decline those companies who appointed women to their boards were more likely to have experienced consistently bad performance in the preceding five months than those who appointed men,” they found. …
Why might companies gravitate toward female executives during times of turbulence and distress? The explanations tend to boil down to gender essentialism. Women are perceived to be more nurturing, and thus better at healing a broken business. It also might be easier for a corporate board to scapegoat a female executive than a male one, some researchers have theorized, given that women are expected to be worse managers in the first place. But perhaps that is just correlation and causation, as indicated by the glass-cliff theory itself.
Lowrey then pinpoints why the “glass cliff” matters:
The problem with the glass cliff is that it might cement the stereotype that women are worse managers and executives than men, all because they are asked to manage worse businesses then men. “Women who assume leadership offices may be differentially exposed to criticism and in greater danger of being apportioned blame for negative outcomes that were set in train well before they assumed their new roles,” the original study’s authors conclude. “This is particularly problematic in light of evidence that directors who leave the boards of companies which have performed poorly are likely to suffer from a ‘tarnished reputation.’” That might be why the stock of a company drops after the announcement of a female chief executive, but not a male executive.
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