Month / December 2003

by DrMabuse

Dale Peck Statistics

Number of times the word “gay” is mentioned in the profile:

Salon: 3
James Atlas’s NYT Profile: 3
The Guardian: 2
Gawker: 0

Word Count of Profiles:

Salon: 2,629
James Atlas’s NYT Profile: 4,123
The Guardian: 3,288
Gawker: 2,379

Comparatively, Approximate Word Counts for Classic Short Stories:

O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi”: 2,000
James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”: 2,050
Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder”: 4,300
Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”: 6,200

A Sure Way to Keep Dale Peck from Manhattan: “For the next year I am working for Howard Dean or whatever Democrat gets the nomination or whenever Hillary decides to enter the race, I guess. And if a Democrat wins, I will be far more prone to stay, but if George W. Bush is reelected I think I really want to leave and just get the hell out of Dodge.”

Dale Flexing His Wit : “I am not sure if you can print this. But they are a bunch of pussies.”

If You Disagree With Peck, You’re…: “ditch-dirty stupid” or “homophobic.”

The James Atlas Memorial Brown Nose Generalization Award: “This really is a man writing, as the cliché has it, for his life: Domestic violence is a gift and postmodernism is the religion through which he interprets it.”

Dubious Peck Prose Sample: Zoetrope, “Making Book”: “‘Fuck off!’ I yelled at the TV in general and at Ace’s ass in particular, but with the video paused and the television suddenly silent–there had been a bass track, courtesy of these two like totally obnoxious dudes who’d been next to us on the beach, but it disappeared when I paused the video–I could almost see my words carry past the television to my door, and then push on through to my mom at the top of the stairs.”

Better Peck Prose Sample: Zoetrope, “Bliss”: “The shapeless clouds, the crisp diamond lattice of the chain-link fence through which I saw them, the fat gate guard, his uniform stretched so taut across the gelid curves of his body that it seemed to cry out for the pierce of bullet or knife. Black eye-shaped puddles reflected the limestone walls of the prison and rendered them hollow, insubstantial, penetrable, until a car traveling the length of the parking lot spat grit into them, causing the walls to disappear momentarily. Then the water stilled, revealing the image of Shenandoah Manson. He was dressed in stiff jeans and a chambray shirt faded nearly white, the sleeves rolled up over arms nearly as faded, and etched by pale blue veins and razor-blade-and-Bic-ink tattoos of Jesus, Mary, and a snarling Ford pickup.”

by DrMabuse

Slow Fade to Black

Jan Wong has some great tips on how to kill your journalistic career. “Try to come across as sympathetic, nice and non-threatening,” she says to aspiring journalists. Wong apparently reads through hundreds of articles, looking for contradictions. That kind of preparatory work is fine. But Wong isn’t applying her bum rush approach to sacred cows. Instead of going after potential contradictions within the story of a breast cancer survivor performing self-biopsies in Antarctica, Wong asked her subject about her troubled marital woes. And when a Beijing University student approached Wong for help in fleeing to the West, Wong turned the student over to the Communist Party.

And that’s not all. After putting away her tape recorder and paper, Royal Bank CEO John Cleghorn confessed to Wong off the record that his wife had, at one point, left him. Wong used the quote anyway.

It’s one thing to be a muckraker, asking the tough questions and exposing the hypocrisies within a subject. Rattling the chains is what good honest journalism is all about. But when trust means nothing, when one cannot distinguish between the interview environment and the off-the-record comments that subjects confess sotto voce (I’ve heard more than a few in my on-again, off-again work and, no, I ain’t fessin’), then what’s the point of journalism? In the long run, as more subjects catch whiff of Jan Wong’s style, they’ll be less likely to reveal anything or even present themselves for an interview.

This is exactly what happened to Rex Reed. Reed made a name for himself in the 1960s with frank, confessional pieces (if you can find it, the now out-of-print Do You Sleep in the Nude? includes some of these career-building interviews), even earning Tom Wolfe’s seal of approval, before he humiliated Warren Beatty in Esquire. The Beatty interview (in name only) involved Reed writing a lengthy profile about trying to interview Beatty, using hearsay and unsubstantiated facts in an effort to sabotage him as a has-been, just as Bonnie & Clyde was to be released to the American public. It didn’t work. Predictably, Reed’s career drifted away from profiles, towards uneducated and flamboyant film reviews (case in point: read the end of this Roger Ebert Jurassic Park 3 review) — all best avoided, unless you think the vapidity of People Magazine is sui generis. The Reed-Beatty “interview” is now regarded as a textbook example of dishonest journalism.

Of course, Wong’s hypocrisy has had a few side effects. The article also notes that Wong can be found cowering from Margaret Atwood and Allan Fotheringham at Toronto writer functions. My guess is that in ten years’ time, we’ll find Wong replacing some major critic on a Canadian movie reviews program, before writing a column that nobody reads in a major Toronto newspaper.

by DrMabuse

The Voices of Authors

The New York Times (user: dr_mabuse, pw: mabse): “When A. A. Milne reads from ‘Winnie-the-Pooh,’ his creations sound like Victorian gents ? soothing, paternal Victorian gents reading a bedtime story, it’s true, but rather Victorian nonetheless…..Virginia Woolf is startling for a different reason. The voice that is so graceful and elegant on the page sounds deep and distressingly like that of an effete schoolmarm…..Arthur Conan Doyle is as crisp and straightforward as you’d expect Sherlock Holmes’s creator to be, explaining how he decided to write a story in which, he says, ‘science would take the place of chance.’….And although there is a crackling sound behind the 1890 recording of Tennyson reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ it captures how well his sonorous reading suits the heroic attitude of the poem.”

Incredibly, you can listen to a few samples of these recordings online. Doyle is, yes indeedy, beautifully crisp with a charming Scottish lilt. Florence Nightingale, who was recorded at age 70, is edgy and feisty, offering us a hint of the grand reformer she was early in life. And Edith Sitwell reads William Walton’s “Man from a far countree” along with an orchestra, but she doesn’t seem to know whether she should sing or read. And Edgar Wallace, who was the UK king of the mysteries during the 1920s, is more formal than you might expect for a man describing horrific behavior.

by DrMabuse

Putter Patter Silver Platter

Hugh Hefner plans to auction off his black books. Among the entries? “Big blonde from ‘Wild Women of Wongo.'”

Brian Stillman remembers Hal Clement.

Stories from Eric Kraft at The Hamptons.

Life working at B&N (via Maud).

Sad news from Ohio: Almost half of the third-graders failed a reading test, with a wide gap in race. And in Scotland, half of the 14 year-olds failed a national writing test. Writing of an altogether different sort might be in the horizon for NYC subways.

And a comparative oldie, but a goodie: J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel speech.

[1/20/06 UPDATE: What I didn’t know at the time was that The Wild Women of Wongo was a bona-fide film directed by James L. Wolcott (no relation as far as I know to the blogger) and not a secret codeword at all. This Wolcott, apparently born in 1907, is still alive. But which of the blondes did Hugh Hefner bed? Further, the black book question raises other issues, such as whether other celebrities’ black books are worth auctioning. And is Hef’s black book the closest we get to Casanova’s memoirs?]