→ April 13, 2010
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Street Gang.

Michael Davis’ Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street is one of my new favorite non-fiction books, both because it’s thorough, well-written, and shows the author’s strong affinity for his subject, and also because of my own affinity for its subject, a television show that defined my preschool years and introduced me to the Muppets, whose later “grown-up” variety show was in turn my introduction to both vaudeville-style humor and dark comedy.

Street Gang focuses primarily on Sesame Street‘s prehistory, from conception to launch through its first season, a period loaded with bold ideas, coincidences, and enough drama to sustain a compelling narrative. Davis weaves personal histories of staff members, cast members, and Muppets into the overall history in a way that keeps the tale from becoming monotonous – as much as I enjoyed the book, it’s hard to create much tension when you know everything more or less works out in the end – and also enlightened me by giving new dimensions to people I’d only known as characters or names on the screen. Bob McGrath’s history as a successful singer and the amazing coincidence that launched Carroll Spinney’s puppetry career stood out as two of the more interesting back stories, excluding, of course, the stories of Muppets from Kermit to Bert and Ernie to Elmo, Zoe*, and Abby Kadaby.

*The Zoe story is as close as the book comes to out-and-out controversy, to me at least, because she was part of an entire makeover called “Around the Corner,” a show change that came from a top-down business plan rather than an organic development from the writers and Muppeteers. That plan was a direct response to the scourge of children’s television known as Barney – a show I have forbidden from my house, even though my daughter has at times asked to watch it, and if that makes me mean so be it – but also included elements of merchandising strategy, a reflection of the declining age of the typical Sesame Street viewer, and questions of whether a sanitized part of the neighborhood strayed from the show’s original goals of reaching inner-city kids and was perhaps motivated by the most subtle racism. The fact that a successful character emerged from this mess only adds to the relevance of the story, and another 20 pages on Zoe would have been welcome.

The star of the book is Joan Ganz Cooney, the determined, willful, yet wholly inexperienced (at first) life force of the project who sold the vision, got the show launched, and saved it (at the expense of The Electric Company, sadly) in a 1970s anti-public-television push in Congress. I felt grateful while reading about her refusal to let the show die or deviate from its mission, even through a difficult period in her personal life, because of how important those two shows have proven in my life. Sesame Street and The Electric Company influenced me in a number of ways – I watched both programs voraciously, as well as other PBS education fare from 3-2-1 Contact to Write On to the Letter People to a now-forgotten show called The Metric System to which I can still hum the theme song to another one with teenagers working at a newspaper and fighting some villain named “Dunedin” – of which their educational influence was only a part. I grew up in an almost completely white neighborhood; it wasn’t wealthy, or privileged, but it was nearly devoid of minorities; Asian-* and African-American students constituted under 2% of my high school’s total enrollment while I was there. Most mainstream television programs were all-white at the time, and if there was a minority character, the writing was forced and he’d end up somewhere between a mildly offensive stereotype and a horribly offensive one. Yet I grew up not just tolerant, but largely ignorant of skin color – it’s never really crossed my mind, no more relevant to the discussion of someone as his hair or eye color. I can’t prove the source of that character trait, but I think the ethnically mixed cast of both Sesame Street and The Electric Company played a major role in it – if you present an impressionable child with daily images of people of different races or ethnicities interacting in normal, even boring ways, he’s going to believe that that’s the way everything should be. And I also believe that these shows helped shape the dramatic change in attitudes from my parents’ generation to the generation after mine, or even from mine to my daughter’s; racism isn’t gone, but it’s been driven underground in much of our society, and overt expressions of racism or sexism will often get you shunned or fired.

*One of those Asian-American students was the best man at my wedding and remains my closest friend, even though he kicked my ass in Zooloretto the other night.

Of course, the educational aspects to these PBS shows weren’t lost on the two-year-old me – I read at a very young age and always had a thing for numbers, which I’m sure is a shock to you all, but my parents have never described doing anything unusual to teach me letters or words or math. If you watch an old episode of either Sesame Street or The Electric Company today, it’s hard to miss the almost propaganda-like educational agenda: They hammer the letter and number of the day into the child’s head, through repetition and through context, and the fact that thirty-plus years on* I can still remember songs and sketches is testament to how powerful and effective they were.

*We own the Sesame Street Old School Volume 1 DVD set, which I recommend more for parents than for today’s kids, and when my wife saw a sketch she hadn’t seen since the 1970s, about “two little girls and a little dollhouse,” she got all teary-eyed. That’s the power of Sesame Street.

Davis finishes the book with some notes on how the show has changed, including the shift in format to suit the Sesame Street‘s ever-younger audience. The original show had a single storyline of street scenes that carried through the entire show, with cartoons and sketches interspersed throughout. The new format gets that entire story out of the way in a single uninterrupted segment off the top, and of course the final 20 minutes are now devoted to “Elmo’s World,” a scourge on my existence that seems to insult the intelligence of any three-year-old who might have learned something from the first 40 minutes of the program. Unfortunately, it seems to me that they’ve dumbed the show down – yes, they’re trying to reach the one-year-olds plopped down in front of the set, but they have to be losing the three- and four-year-olds along the way. Shouldn’t “Elmo’s World” be its own show, rather than altering such a long-term success to serve an audience outside those covered by its original mission? My daughter seems to agree; once she outgrew Elmo’s World, that was it for Sesame Street in our house. She’ll watch Word World and Peep and the Big Wide World and Sid the Science Kid and Dinosaur Train – I haven’t gotten her hooked on the new The Electric Company yet, although I think it’s very good – but Sesame Street just bores her. Maybe I’m just being nostalgic, but that makes me a little sad.

Speaking of which, my one warning on Street Gang: Buy a pack of tissues. The prologue is a long description of the memorial service for Jim Henson, and his was but one of a series of major, often premature deaths to hit active members of the show’s cast and crew. Many of you are the right age to remember the episode when Mr. Hooper (played by Will Lee) died, and Davis includes the portion of the script where the adults explain to Big Bird that “Mr. Looper” isn’t coming back. It was a brilliant, award-winning episode, and the text plus the description of the cast members’ reactions will bring anybody down even as you appreciate how well it was written.

Next up: I’m halfway through Richard Russo’s Mohawk. I’ve also got Junichiro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters lined up after that – if anyone has tackled it, I’d love to know how you liked it and whether it’s worth the time.

Filed Under: DVDs, Media, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ February 10, 2010
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NCIS: LA.

My wife enjoys both flavors of NCIS on CBS, and I find the original one pretty solid for a network TV program, so I watch along with her; if she wasn’t a fan, I doubt I’d give either a second thought. We’ve been watching NCIS: LA this season, and “watchable” is about its ceiling right now – but I think that, if the writers have any stones, they have an opportunity to turn it into something much better.

If you’ve seen the original NCIS, you know the formula: well-developed characters, lots of witty banter, incredibly simple plots where the perpetrator is always one of the first three non-regular characters you meet, and some serious fast/loose play with technology. If you’re looking for riveting stories, this isn’t it. It’s entertaining, and the writers have done a good job with the characters, but if they get CBS in the afterlife Agatha Christie scoffs for an hour every Tuesday night.

NCIS: LA follows the pattern of the clones in the Michael Keaton movie Multiplicity – it’s a copy, but the quality is below that of the original. The plots are even sillier, with higher stakes and more ridiculous resolutions, and even the show’s very premise – a secret NCIS unit in Los Angeles that, if you’re a stickler for things like accuracy, is WAY out of its jurisdiction in almost every episode – is absurd. The writers are pushing hard to flesh out the various characters, but only one (G. Callen, played by Chris O’Donnell) is at all compelling, and, amazingly enough, LL Cool J carries most of the episodes. He’s the best actor on the show after Oscar winner Linda Hunt, who is outstanding as the eccentric unit manager in a fundamentally supporting role, and the writers have wisely put his Sam with G. Callen in a “bromance” at the center of the show. The rest of the cast is bloated even after the recent elimination of Dominic, the biggest cipher. Kensey, played by Brazilian actress Daniela Ruah, serves primarily as a pair of legs and as the token female agent, while Eric, the techie, has the same cliched TV-geek’s inability to stop himself from going into excessive detail on technical subjects, something that was already hackneyed when NCIS started using it for McGee.

Despite its many flaws, NCIS: LA is the highest-rated new show of the 2009-10 season and one of the top-rated shows on network television because it has an incredible lead-in audience from NCIS and serves as an extension of the prior show. The writers and producers could, of course, rest on those laurels, let the money roll in for a few years until either it or the original NCIS runs out of gas, and move on to something else, older and perhaps a bit wealthier. But I see this as opportunity: If audiences will tune in by the millions to watch a mediocre show, why not experiment with something edgier that might not have found the same audience if it hadn’t been handed enormous ratings from the start?

The episode where Dominic was removed from the cast of characters reminded me of one of my favorite British shows, MI-5 (known as Spooks in the UK), which easily beats any network crime drama I’ve ever seen in the U.S*. MI-5 is the British equivalent of the CIA on matters of “internal” security (meaning on British soil), and the show puts the agency and its operations at the heart of the series, rather than the characters. That focus and the serious subject matter give the writers substantial latitude to break with the audience’s normal expectations for a crime drama, where main characters may be killed or otherwise eliminated with little or no notice. Even though things do usually work out in the end, they don’t always work out, and successful operations on MI-5 often come with sacrifices, costs, or casualties. As a result, the show brings a tension unlike any I’ve seen on network TV here.

*I’ve never watched Fox’s 24, because I have little or no interest in a show with a storyline that demands that I watch every week, given my travel schedule and irregular work hours, but I get the sense that that’s one show that matches MI-5 for anything-goes tension. I’m open to other suggestions, as always.

NCIS:LA almost nodded to MI-5 in the episode where Dominic departs the show, but it proved an outlier with the following episode, which brought the series to new depths of ridiculousness when Callen saves an entire mall from botulinum toxin exposure by diving to catch a bottle of the bad stuff that was thrown from two levels up … right near where he happened to be standing. And he made a shoestring catch, of course. That’s fake tension – there was no way in hell CBS was showing a mall full of people dying from botulinum toxin poisoning – whereas MI-5‘s history of less-than-happy endings provides real tension, not to mention twice the freedom for the writers to craft compelling and at least moderately realistic stories, where characters burn out, quit, get hurt, and die, and you never quite know what’s going to happen next. If NCIS: LA took that risk, which would be reasonable given the subject matter of the show, not only would it help them turn over a fringy cast of characters beyond Sam, Callen, and Linda Hunt’s Hetty, it could turn a merely watchable program into a can’t-miss one.

Filed Under: Media Tagged With: , ,
→ August 22, 2009
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On copyrights.

A week or so ago I pointed out to reader BSK that his practice of copying CDs to his hard drive and then trading thephysical disks on swaptree was both illegal and unethical. He didn’t accept my argument, so I contacted the Copyright Alliance to get a professional opinion.

The response I received was unequivocal: This practice violates federal copyright law. Excerpts of the reply, interspersed with my comments:

The RIAA explicitly states on their website that this is illegal. (Scroll down to the bottom under “copying CDs”).

The most relevant part on that RIAA link, about copying CDs you own for your personal use: It’s not a personal use – in fact, it’s illegal – to give away the copy or lend it to others for copying.

You may, of course, trade a CD or book or DVD that you own (the “First Sale Doctrine”) as long as you do not make or keep a copy.

But, would someone agree that it is okay to buy a
book, scan it into your computer, and then sell the hard copy? Probably
not (I hope not). So, why is music different? It’s not – the law is the
same for all creative forms. Consumers have asked to be able to buy a CD
or a song from itunes and listen to it in their car, on their computer,
or ipod. So, with music it is generally accepted (though not technically
legal) that one can use music on multiple devices for personal use.

As long as you’re keeping all the copies, you seem to be in the clear.

It is also not legal to download a digital copy of a work and then print
it out or put it on CD and sell that. So, why would the opposite be
true?

Well, it wouldn’t, and I think this is just common sense.

I’ve run into a similar issue with people copying articles found online and pasting them into emails. Again, this is illegal, and no, it is not “fair use” – it is patently UNfair use. (It fails fair use on two grounds – the sender reproduced the entire work, and by reproducing and sending the entire work the sender impacted the market for the work because the recipient no longer has to click on the original site or pay for access to the article.) Pasting a link to the original article is legal. Pasting the entire article is copyright infringement, and while your potatoes are probably too small for the copyright owner to sue you, that doesn’t make it any less illegal. One longtime friend sent me an email like this, and copied so much text that he included the copyright notice at the bottom of the article … but sent it anyway. And he was offended when I objected to the practice.

In addition to being illegal, it’s completely unethical. If you make a copy of a CD, then sell or barter the CD (or even give it away), then two people have use of the copyrighted material while the copyright owner has only been compensated once. Isn’t it obvious that this is wrong?

Final point: BSK argued that this was about “freedom.” We do, in fact, have exceptional freedom in our ability to create, distribute, and purchase copyrighted works in this country today. If you want access to formerly banned books like Huckleberry Finn or The Grapes of Wrath, to hardcore pornography, to Pungent Stench’s Been Caught Buttering (if you’ve seen the album cover, you know what I’m talking about), you’ve got it. That freedom does not mean the freedom to make unlimited copies of these works and sell them or barter them or give them to your friends. We have laws designed to protect the rights of those who create intellectual property so they’ll be financially able to continue to do so. If you don’t like the laws – and I wouldn’t argue that they’re perfect, particularly the ever-increasing time of protection for copyrighted works – try to change them. But don’t steal from the authors and musicians whose works you enjoy.

Filed Under: Media Tagged With: , ,
→ May 30, 2009
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The Phantom Grammy.

Today’s mental_floss quiz: Can you name the fifteen departments run by the Secretaries in the US Cabinet?

Anyway, this is kind of stupid but I’m going to mention it anyway because it annoys me. The University of New Mexico has a reliever named Cole White with a big arm and poor command, and he’ll be drafted somewhere in the top 5-6 rounds. When that happens, you will hear something, somewhere, about how he was nominated for a Grammy, because that’s what it says on his bio page on UNM’s athletics site.

It is also false. Cole White was never nominated for a Grammy, which is easy to prove since Grammy nominations are announced publicly every year. I contacted UNM’s media relations department in late April, asking them to clarify, and was told: “As we dug deeper into it, he ended up in the top 100 for Best Rock Song.”

So I called NARAS and asked them if they issue any sort of top 100 rankings for award categories, and was told no. As it turns out, Cole White wrote a song that his former band recorded, and their record label submitted it to NARAS so that it could be considered for the ballot, but it was not nominated or otherwise recognized for anything other than the fact that it was released commercially and met the general requirements for nomination. His song was one of 15,000 entries on the overall ballot from which the nominees are eventually chosen.

I notified UNM’s media relations department that this was all incorrect on April 29th, and did receive a reply, but they haven’t corrected it on the site, which means the inaccuracy will be repeated once White is drafted and/or signed. I was hoping UNM would just fix it and the story would go away, but a month is probably sufficient grace period for them to fix the error, and it annoys me tremendously that they haven’t. ESPN.com wasn’t interested in the story – and I agree with them, as it really is small potatoes – but I feel like a mistake like that, however innocent, should be corrected.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: , ,
→ May 17, 2009
→ By

So Big.

You’re probably not familiar with the name Edna Ferber – I wasn’t until I saw it on the list of winners of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel – but you’ve probably heard of her work by way of the movies. She wrote the novels behind the films Showboat, Cimarron, Saratoga Trunk, and Giant, the last perhaps more notorious for being James Dean’s last work than for anything else. So Big, the novel that won Ferber the Pulitzer, has been adapted three times for the big screen but, by all accounts, never successfully, and given its leisurely pace and deep characterizations, I’m not terribly surprised.

So Big is the story of a mother and a son, starting from the mother’s sudden thrusting into the world after her father’s sudden (and somewhat comical) death and running into the son’s late twenties and early thirties. The mother, Selina Peake, is admonished by her father that life is an adventure if you get after it, but lets life lead her along until she’s forced to take the reins, after which she shows herself as a woman of spirit and initiative:

Youth was gone, but she had health, courage; a boy of nine; twenty-five acres of wornout farm land; dwelling and out-houses in a bad state of repair; and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.*

*I’m about 90% certain I read a passage similar to this one that used almost identical wording at the end in Lonesome Dove, used to describe Clara, but of course, I didn’t write down the page number and I’m not likely to find it by skimming through a 900-page book. If any of you choose to tackle that tome in the future, keep an eye out a phrase like “Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”

Selina, widowed with her young son Dirk (nicknamed “Sobig” after the “How big is baby?” game played with him as an infant), takes over the family farm and, with the help of the novel’s one substantial coincidence, carves out a living and eventually a life for the two of them, making Dirk’s well-being her driving force, ensuring that he receives an education and can start life with the advantages she lacked. It is, along those lines, a bit of a love story in the way that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is – a parent, alone, who will do anything for his/her son.

Somewhere past the novel’s midpoint, the focus shifts from Selina to the adult Dirk, first in college, then in his aimless early adulthood both in work and in his personal life. He starts out in a career he likes but finds no success, then in a career in which he finds success but no pleasure. He is good-looking and inadvertently charming, but almost apathetic towards women, with no interest in the type of woman he “should” be seeing:

The Farnham girl was a nice girl. She was the kind of girl one should fall in love with and doesn’t. The Farnham girl was one of the many well-bred Chicago girls of her day and class. Fine, honest, clear-headed, frank, capable, good-looking in an indefinite and unarresting sort of way. Hair-coloured hair, good teeth, good enough eyes, clear skin; sensible medium hands and feet … Her hand met yours firmly – and it was just a hand. At the contact no current darted through you, sending its shaft with a little zing to your heart.

It’s a pleasant read with dry wit like that of the passage about (I found “hair-coloured hair” rather clever) and an incredibly compelling and well-drawn character in Selina, for whom one must root as she faces adversity, although her one big low moment ends prematurely with the aforementioned coincidence (you could even call it a deus ex machina). Dirk is less compelling, by design, although it slows the book’s final third considerably until he meets someone who, more than anything, is spirited like his mother. The book also slowed a bit for me for the unclear theme – what are we looking at here: Selina’s trials? The rise of an independent woman? Her dedication to her son? Her son’s lack of lust for life? The rural/urban divide of Chicago in the early years of the 20th century? I couldn’t tell you; all of the above are present, none is dominant. I like my novels to be about something; this was about many things, but perhaps it was about too many things for a novel so short.

Next up: From the seventh winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel to the second-most recent winner of its successor award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Filed Under: Literature, Media Tagged With: , ,
→ May 5, 2009
→ By

The TIME 100 Q&A.

Quick admin notes: NYC 1050 AM hit moved back to 9:25 pm tonight. Podcast of my chat with Jeff Erickson is available here. Tentatively scheduled to appear on 101 ESPN in St. Louis Wednesday at 1:20 pm CDT.

I’m working my way through a half-dozen greatest books lists, from the Novel 100 to the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel/Fiction winners, but I think the most successful one for introducing me to books I liked or loved has been the TIME magazine list of the 100 greatest English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005. (Details on all the lists I use are on the FAQ.) On a whim, I contacted Lev Grossman, one of the two critics behind the TIME 100, and he and co-conspirator Richard Lacayo agreed to answer some questions I had about their list. Lacayo wrote about the process behind the list’s construction when it first appeared, and that essay may be useful background for those of you unfamiliar with the list itself.

Lev, you mentioned in your first response to me that you didn’t care for Tropic of Cancer, yet it’s on the list. How much did literary influence or academic value weigh against readability or trivial things like plot?

LG: I wasn’t that interested in academic value. I’ve spent some time in academia, and I feel like I have a good sense of what that’s good for it, and what it isn’t. As for readability, I’m a major backer of it. It was the fashion in the earlier part of the 20th to write very challengingly and elliptically and occasionally boringly. Which was a mode that was appropriate to its time. But not all those works are still worth the tremendous trouble they put the reader through.

I am however very interested in literary influence — works that changed the literary landscape through their sheer force and power and visionary newness. I’ll forgive a book a lot I would say I weighed those heavily.

RL: That was my pick, and one that I re-read for the list to make sure I still liked it. As I mentioned in that essay I wrote to introduce the list and explain how we made it, we didn’t agree on every title, and we decided not to, because we thought it would be more interesting for the list to include non-consensus choices. As for Tropic, I love the shaggy dog quality of that book. I don’t care whether it goes anyplace in particular. That willingness to blow off the “responsibility” to provide much of a plot is part of Miller’s personal ethic. The book is a demonstration of its own philosophy.

I was aware of the book’s history as the object of a landmark obscenity trial in the U.S., but it didn’t play any part in my judgment. And as for academic value – is Miller much read in “the academy”?

Unlike most lists of this ilk, yours was unranked. Why? If you had to choose a top 5 from your 100, what would it include?

LG: Oh, you know how it is. Lists are arbitrary enough as it is, without bringing ranking into it. You start splitting hairs, comparing apples and oranges … it started to seem absurd.

Top 5, off the top of my head?

Brideshead Revisited
Mrs. Dalloway
The Sound and the Fury
The Sun Also Rises
The Great Gatsby

RL: I just don’t think that’s possible. There’s no rational unit of measurement. You can do that with a poll of numerous critics by counting up which titles got the most votes, the way Sight and Sound magazine does every ten years with the greatest films. But I couldn’t claim with a straight face that Pale Fire is 22.5% better than Appointment in Samarra.

But if I had to pick a top five, it would probably be To the Lighthouse, Pale Fire, The Crying of Lot 49, 1984, Midnight’s Children but ask me a year from now and I might choose five others.

Your list was limited to novels first published in English. Why exclude works from other languages as long as they were eventually published in English? Did you consider, at the time or afterwards, creating a parallel list so that Franz Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez could be similarly recognized?

LG: We did consider creating a parallel list. But the body of work was just too vast — how could we pretend to have read all of world literature, even in translation? We needed ways to narrow the field. That was one.

RL: We weren’t belittling “foreign” literature by not including it. We were paying it our respects. We felt we could not plausibly tell readers we had sifted the fiction of every nation. There’s simply too much of it – French, Japanese, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Latin American. Halldor Laxness may have won the Nobel Prize, but never made it on to my bookshelf. Lev and I both have English lit. degrees and have been reading for decades and were comfortable claiming to know enough of the range of English language work to make what we hoped were useful evaluations of it.

Also, I can never find the umlaut on my keyboard.

The Modern Library’s list, which covered the entire 20th century, was criticized for its lack of female and minority authors. Did you consider the authors’ genders or ethnicities at all in assembling the list? Should those be factors?

LG: I think it’s worth considering those things, along with everything else. There is a subjective dimension to the idea of ‘literary value,’ a big one, and Richard and I were conscious that the people making this list were two white men. We did our best to ensure that a broad range of points of view was represented.

RL: Lev speaks for both of us when he says we were aware that we were both white men drawing up this list, but I didn’t find it necessary to worry about that too much. For starters there were always going to be plenty of women on the list. Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers. Likewise Muriel Spark. Beloved? Death Comes for the Archbishop? These are no-brainers. In the end I think there are 19 titles by women.

Similarly with black authors, You don’t put Invisible Man on the list to be “correct”. You put it there because it’s so obviously brilliant. James Baldwin? Zadie Smith? We didn’t have to go searching for them. The only book by an African-American writer that I picked up because I hadn’t been introduced to it before and felt I needed to know it was Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I loved. Along with Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates that book was the fun discovery of this whole process for me. (Re-reading Portnoy’s Complaint was also a nice surprise. I had forgotten how good it was. Not just funny. Good in many ways.)

As I mention in that introductory text, there were writers who almost made the cut but didn’t quite — Dawn Powell is in that category for me. And as I also there, there are a number of women writers whose greatest work is in stories, not novels. Flannery O’Connor is a genius, but her novel, Wise Blood, doesn’t do it for me. Likewise Annie Proulx, The Shipping News notwithstanding, who once said to me herself that she considered stories her real forte. Close Range is my idea of a masterpiece, but it’s a story collection. Karen Blixen, Katherine Anne Porter, Shirley Jackson, Eudora Welty – same thing.

What I didn’t do was include a book simply because it represented any kind of social or political breakthrough. I love Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man, about a gay man living in California after the death of his lover. It was published in 1964 and really is a breakthrough book in terms of introducing a gay character who’s not troubled by his own sexuality, just carrying on with his life. But good as it is, as a book it doesn’t measure up for me to The Berlin Stories.

If I had an agenda of any kind it may have been British novels of the 20s, 30s and 40s. I like Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, the novels of Aldous Huxley beyond just Brave New World. Waugh. Graham Greene. It’s not the Masterpiece Theatre aspect, it’s just something about the ease with which they practice the conventions of novel.

Richard wrote at the time that you agreed on roughly 80 titles more or less off the bat. What book that made the list sparked the biggest disagreement? How about one that missed?

LG: It’s been a while since we formulated the list, and I’m trying to remember. Richard is a staunch Pynchonian, which I definitely am not — I’m sure I rolled my eyes at putting two Pynchon novels on the list. But I did it quietly. Likewise I expected resistance to some of the science fiction entries on the list — Dick, Gibson, Stephenson — but got none. Likewise the YA novel (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret) and the graphic novel (Watchmen). I wish I had stories for you about shouting matches and fisticuffs, but it was a pretty civilized process. I think Richard’s essay has all the dirt there is in it.

RL: Not to sugar coat the thing, but there weren’t that many, partly because we had this agreement that there would be titles we just wouldn’t agree on. Lev likes graphic novels. It would never occur to me to put Watchmen on the list but he loves it. Meanwhile, I really enjoy a lot of what you might call classic modernist writers, the ones who play around with the conventions of the novel, from Woolf to Pynchon. That stuff bores some people, including sometimes Lev. It’s ice cream to me. As he mentioned to you, I would have put a third Pynchon title on (V.), but there wasn’t room. (And I’m not somebody who pats Pynchon on the head for everything he does. I pretty much panned his last book in the magazine.

Have you reconsidered – or regretted – any of the entries since the list was published?

LG: I haven’t.

RL: Only the books there weren’t room for, but that’s list making for you. As mentioned, Dawn Powell. Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights. Maybe The Wapshot Chronicle by (John) Cheever. E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. (Saul) Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift.

Are there any works published since 2005 that you would place on a revised list?

LG: Yes, one. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

RL: Oscar Wao, definitely.

KL: It’s on my to-be-read shelf and just moved up in the queue after that response.

Did you consider other lists or awards, such as Pulitzer Prizes, as criteria for inclusion or even as “bonus points” for specific books?

LG: We really didn’t. I’ve sat on enough awards committees to know how arbitrary they are. I don’t give them much weight.

RL: Did we care whether a book had won prizes? Not at all. The Nobel didn’t get Patrick White on the list. And The Pulitzer has gone to many dreary books.

*KL: Concur.

One inclusion that confused me at the time that I read it was Watchmen, which is really a short story stretched to novel length by illustrations. To me, it offers none of the complexity of even a short novel like Red Harvest. Tell me about the decision to include a graphic novel in a list of prose works.

LG: There are plenty of things to complain about in Watchmen, but a lack of complexity? I couldn’t disagree more! I’m a great believer in the power and importance of graphic novels — or comic books, as I prefer to call them — and I think they’re one of the most exciting things to happen to the novel in the 20th Century. To me the list would have had a hole in it without them.

I’ll throw some titles at you that I thought should have made the list or at least been considered. Tell me whether they came up at all, and if so, why they didn’t make the cut.

Cry the Beloved Country
Tender is the Night
A Confederacy of Dunces
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Empire Falls
The Dud Avocado

LG: Now we’re really going to expose the ugly underbelly of subjectivity in this list. A Confederacy of Dunces – I’ve always felt this book was rather heavy-handed and unfunny and hence over-rated. I know it’s beloved by many, and I’m buying myself some serious ire by saying that, but if there’s one rule I have as a critic, it’s never lie. And I couldn’t in all honesty put that book on the list, because I just don’t feel it’s great.

Tender is the Night was a tougher decision, it’s a beautiful novel with reams of great writing in it, but I think ultimately it’s slightly overstuffed and ungainly and melodramatic, especially when you put it next to the jewel-like perfection that is The Great Gatsby, which I think is better suited to represent Fitzgerald on the list.

I could go on slagging the classic works you’ve listed, but you get the general idea. I’ll just add that, to my shame, I had never read or heard of The Dud Avocado. There’s that ugly underbelly I was talking about.

RL: I read Cry the Beloved Country long ago, but wasn’t moved to re-visit it. I like Confederacy, but wasn’t in love with it. Tender is the Night was on my short list – an adolescent favorite, adolescents love doom. But Fitzgerald’s problem is that he wrote one book so perfect it makes everything else he wrote look a bit dim, even the good things.

The Dud Avocado – I’ll have to go looking for that one.

Awesome stuff. I’ll even forgive you for trashing Tender is the Night, which is my favorite novel by an American author. My readers will enjoy you taking me to task over Watchmen, although I stand my ground – it was thinner than a sheet of phyllo dough.

Thank you both for your answers and for the great list.

Filed Under: Literature, Media, TIME 100, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 5, 2009
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Media & links.

I’ll be on XM Radio channel 144 with Bill Pidto and Bruce Murray on Tuesday at 9:25 am EDT, and will appear via phone on First Take at either 10:50 am or 11:25 am EDT, time TBD. I’ll also be on with longtime friend Jeff Erickson’s Fantasy Focus Internet radio show, although we won’t do straight fantasy content. If you remember Jeff’s radio show on XM, this is the same show, but he moved it online after the Sirius-XM merger.

My most recent post on my main ESPN.com blog now has BP video of Buster Posey. There’s also video up of Tim Wheeler and Drew Storen in my most recent draft blog entry. I should have more draft notes and videos later this week.

Jason Whitlock had some strong (and dead-on) words about Selena Roberts and accuracy. Shysterball had similar words last week. I’ve pointed this out previously, but Roberts has gone after A-Rod at odd times before, like writing her 2007 World Series post mortem about him, even though he hadn’t played in that or the previous series. Squawking Baseball takes aim at Roberts’ implication that A-Rod couldn’t have tripled his bench-press ability without the use of PEDs.

Is Twitter the CB radio of Web 2.0? (HT to Shysterball.) I kind of hope not, now that I crossed the 1000-followers mark.

JoePo is obsessed with cycles. I couldn’t agree less; I think cycles are boring – statistical oddities that hold no interest for me. One reason is that a player who goes 1b-2b-3b-hr has hit for the cycle and goes on that list that some guy keeps that gets trotted out the next time some Joey Bagodonuts goes 1b-2b-3b-hr, but some other player who goes 2b-2b-hr-hr had a better day and doesn’t make any list, unless there’s some other guy keeping some other list that he really doesn’t get to trot out that often because no one gives a crap about guys who went 2b-2b-hr-hr.

This clip cracks me up: auto-tuning the news. (HT to mental_floss from their post earlier this week auto-tuning.) I’m not sure which I like best – the facial expressions on the guy “talking” to Katie Couric, the angry gorilla, or the ever-present tambourine.

Filed Under: Appearances, Humor, Media, Sports Tagged With: , ,
→ January 27, 2009
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Pre-vacation Youtube links.

A few links and notes before I take off for warmer climes…

First off, there’s a lot of bad information out there about the arbitration process in baseball, and one error I have seen, heard, and been asked about repeatedly is how multiyear contracts factor into the process. The answer is that they don’t. Because of the disagreement over whether to consider AAV (average annual values) or actual year-by-year salaries, and the question of what sort of “security” discount the player might have taken, these contracts are usually ignored or discarded after cursory arguments in any arbitration negotiation or hearing. So the second year of Prince Fielder’s deal does not affect Ryan Howard’s hearing. (How could it? You can’t compare Howard’s “platform year” to Fielder’s, because the comparable season for Fielder – second time through the arb process – hasn’t occurred yet.)

“Subway:” A vintage song from Sesame Street – or so they say, since I don’t remember it at all even though it’s from my era. It’s, um, a bit dark for the target audience: “You could lose your purse/Or you might lose something worse/On the subway.”

SlapChop: I know JoePo has been talking about the Snuggie and the ShamWow!, but this is the best of the new breed of infomercials. The line at 0:37 is just priceless. I would work it into a KlawChat, but there’s no way they’d let it stand.

Easy Reader: It’s groovy. But mostly it’s a segue to talk about the new version of the Electric Company, which I caught by accident last week while trying to get Barney off my television before my daughter noticed. It’s good – very good. Not quite the same as the original, but the original – while brilliant – looks pretty dated now. The new version is a little more frenetic, and the opening song is a little awkward, but the sketches have some of that second layer of humor that good children’s shows have, there’s a lot of music (like this song by Wyclef Jean with Canadian jazz singer Nikki Yanofsky, who is very cute and can’t dance a lick), and the language is never dumbed-down for the young target audience. The breakout star here is Chris Sullivan, who plays the character Shock; he’s an an amazing beat-boxer, enough that I would turn and watch whenever he was on the screen. (I’m trying to figure out who he reminds me of – I’m leaning towards a cross between Jamie Oliver and Daniel Radcliffe right now.) My daughter’s too young for the show, although it did hold her attention for 15-20 minutes, and I’m hopeful that it will stick around long enough for her to grow into it.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: ,
→ January 3, 2009
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At least he’s consistent.

Jay Paris screws up a ballot.

Again.

(Hat tip to Jeff from Rotowire.)

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: ,
→ December 27, 2008
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“Girls were also romancing each other.”

Now that I have your attention, go read the excellent New York Times article from which I took the title quote. It’s about the recruiting of a star high school football player, and let’s just say that the University of Texas’ PR department is probably displeased with the Gray Lady this week.

(Hat tip: Infinite Sportswriter Theorem.)

UPDATE: Texas fans and supporters are questioning the veracity of the recruit’s claims about Texas – shocking – and the Texas section of rivals.com has a retort (but not a disproof – more of a claim that the Times writer is biased against Texas) here.

UPDATE #2: The recruit himself is now backing away from some parts of the English-class essay that was quoted in the Times article.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: , ,