Don't Gel Too Soon

A Quick Trip with Leonard Cohen

I can see the room.  It's a little scruffy and smells like pot and incense. (Yes that's a cliche but there you are.)  There's a mattress on the floor, crazy Berkeley posters on the wall, a turntable and speakers, one window over the bed, another on the long wall.  Lots of bookcases, record albums, a coffee grinder for stems and seeds, a big old stuffed chair, and us.

It was a long time ago.  Hasn't crossed my mind in years.  Then, right there, on the Spotify singer-songwriter channel, comes a young Leonard Cohen singing this:

Music is dangerous.  Suddenly I was back in Massachusetts almost half a century ago, when Suzanne, and Sisters of Mercy too, were part of my lexicon, along with everything from Milord

     to Ruby Tuesday

  

to Blowin' in the Wind. 

Years ago Garry Trudeau published a Doonesbury thta included the line "You've stolen the sound track of my life!"  I don't remember the context but it's disconcertinly accurate, as he usually is.   Every song is a movie of the past, running -- sometimes joyously, sometimes with enormous sadness, in my head.

It was such a different time, full of righteous anger and, at the same time, joy at being alive, sometimes in love, always part of the changes taking place all around us, many at our instigation.  

Now, as we face the rage and disappointment of many of our children and their peers, it's kind of heartbreaking to look back with such nostalgia at a time that they clearly see as debauched and destructive and, even worse, egocentric and selfish.  

It's paricularly hard when these songs rise up, so transporting.  Everyone, if they're lucky, has fond recollections of the younger times in their lives.  But for me, as the music carries me there, it was so much more.  Hope, freedom, equality, beauty, love and peace -- every song an anthem moving us forward.  And  lovers in a scruffy dorm room, a little bit stoned, listening, and sometimes, singing along.

The Wolf of Wall Street: Greed, Sex, Cruelty and Martin Scorsese

I understand about Martin Scorsese.  I really do.  From Mean Streets to Taxi Driver, Raging Bull to Goodfellas to Boardwalk Empire, much of his work has been dark and violent.  Decent people don't show up very often and when they do, they seldom prevail, so when we went to see The Wolf of Wall Street this weekend, I wasn't expecting a pleasant experience.  I was not expecting what I got, either.

By the end of the film I was so angry I was shaking.  After three hours of unrelenting greed, emotional violence, ruthlessness, the cynical exploitation of the weak, casually abusive and emotionless sex, indescribable disregard for and destructive treatment of women, it was tough to walk out of the theater without throwing something.  

It was excess beyond anything that words could describe; images, sadly, are more successful.  There's nowhere to hide and there are so many moments where we wish we could.

I was a broadcast producer in the and 80's and covered the excesses of that time.  I knew that, in Bonfire of Vanities, Tom Wolfe was demonstrating his skills as a reporter as well as a novelist.  

Even so, the rank, brittle ugliness of this film, of these people and of the fact that much of the story really happened turned what we know into what we wish we didn't.  The criticism by the daughter of one of its main characters, that it glamorizes the Belfort universe and makes them some sorts of rakish sweetie pies wasn't what I saw. The are all reprehensible from first to last.

Of course the film wouldn't have had the impact it did if it hadn't been so well-made.  Its impact is indisputable.  Even so - maybe his next undertaking, after all this darkness, will bring us the Scorsese behind The Last Waltz and Concert for New York City.  After all, they say music tames the savage beast, and in this film, he certainly unleashed a hell of a creature.

So Long Mr. Salinger, and Thanks

 All I wanted when I was a kid was to be Franny Glass.  To be part of the Glass family, intellectual, quirky, and with lists of beautiful quotes on a poster board on the back of their bedroom door.  They were sad and weird and wonderful.

And now, today, we lose their creator, most beloved for Holden Caulfield, the eternally adolescent hero of Catcher in the Rye.  Holden is worthy of every affectionate word written about him, and his palpable pain is familiar to those who've journeyed through the teen years, but the Glasses -- well  -- they were a different kind of lovely.

They are all the children of one man, and he died today.  I wish I could tell you what it felt like to read Catcher in the Rye at 13.  I can remember where I was sitting as I read it - how I felt - and the deep sadness that accompanied Holden's story.   It must have been traumatic though, because later, when my son and I read it together, I was shocked to learn that Holden's brother had died.  I had jammed that fact someplace hard to reach, which means it was even more disturbing than I remember.  Reading it with my own child was a beautiful experience to share with a young man of deep compassion and great sensibility - a memory I cherish.  So Salinger gave me that, too.

(I'm not mentioning Joyce Maynard here.  She had a right - but sheesh!)  And I really don't have much to say about the quiet recluse in the hills of New Hampshire.    Farewell to him, yes, but also to yet another connection to the days when I was young - and more like Holden than like women of a Certain Age.  The passions, the pain, the poetic anger at people for not being what we expect them to be and the desperate longing to rescue the imperiled and the lost.

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me.  And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.  That's all I do all day.  I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.  I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."  

I guess those who don't dream of being the catcher long to be the one who is caught.  And those longings don't go away whether you're 13 or 63 (right - I first read it FIFTY years ago!)  Imagine.  No, it doesn't go away, but your perspective changes.  The loveliness of that kind of protecting -- or being protected - it isn't around much in the real world.  All the more reason to be grateful for the rare observer who can remind us of its sweetness, and of what we are capable of aspiring to. 

And grateful I am.  For Franny and Zooey and Seymour and all their craziness and for Holden, what he gave me then, and what I remember, even today.

Ellen Goodman Doesn't Write there Anymore

As long as I've worked in media, which is a long time, Ellen Goodman's been there too.  Her Pulitzer-prize-winning column, originating in the Boston Globe, has been a beacon and a landmark and a treasure. 

And now it's ending.  No, nobody fired her, she still has a large audience and many adoring readers but she's decided to stop.  Here's part of what she said in her valedictory meditation on covering women in America - and I recommend you go read the entire thing:

My generation -- WOMEN -- thought the movement would advance on two legs. With one, we'd kick down the doors closed to us. With the other, we'd walk through, changing society for men and women.

It turned out that it was easier to kick down the doors than to change society. It was easier to fit into traditional male life patterns than to change those patterns. We've had more luck winning the equal right to 70-hour weeks than we've had selling the equal value of care-giving. We have yet to solve the problem raised at the outset: Who will take care of the family?

As a young mother and reporter, it did not occur to me that my daughter would face the same conflicts of work and family. Or, on the other hand, that my son-in-law would fully share those conflicts. I did not expect that over two-thirds of mothers would be in the work force before we had enough child care or sick pay.

Yes - those things are true.  My own sons expect (and one has) wives who keep their names and expect to remain in the workforce.  And yes, they still face issues of child care and equal pay and glass ceilings.  The sad thing is, they won't have the provocative, inspiring, funny and very gifted voice of Ellen Goodman to cheer them on.  Maybe she'll write another book though; if she does, I'll send a copy to each of them.

Art Imitates Life and Dr. Horrible's Nemesis Is an Author!

I'm not sure who's on first, which chicken chased which egg or even how to tell you about this.  See this book cover?  It's a real book - and Entertainment Weekly says it isn't even bad.  But the author - well, the author isn't real!!!  He's a character on an ABC TV program called - guess what --- Castle! 

Played by Dr. Horrible's own Biggest Enemy Captain Hammer -- aka Nathan Fillion - he's a debonair, wealthy mystery writer with an actress mother and a typically New-York-wise daughter with whom he has a refreshingly healthy relationship  (Mom too, actually.) 

So there's nothing wrong with the show; it's slight, sweet and kind of funny although it could certainly be better written.  In fact, from the reviews I've read, it might be better if Richard Castle (who remember, doesn't exist - really) wrote the scripts as well as his books. 

Yes books because apparently this is the first of many.  And you can get it on Kindle and Castle even has a brief (equally fictitious) bio on Amazon "Richard Castle is the author of numerous bestsellers, including the critically acclaimed Derrick Storm series. His first novel, In a Hail of Bullets, published while he was still in college, received the Nom DePlume Society's prestigious Tom Straw Award for Mystery Literature. Castle currently lives in Manhattan with his daughter and mother, both of whom infuse his life with humor and inspiration."

Got that?  Fillion/Captain Hammer (this guy) also plays a fictitious writer on a lightweight TV show and somebody - whose name isn't anyplace and as far as I can determine hasn't played anyone (other than a ghostwriter) has written a novel in his name.

This isn't a scandal or a crime - it's just so damned funny.  Fillion seems like a fine fellow and Castle is certainly likable enough.  But it's hard to get books published these days - especially fiction. 

So all you struggling writers out there -- now you know how to sell your novel.  Make it into a TV show and your literary career is assured.

As my mom used to say, "Only in America!"

Paris is a Movable Feast - and We Are Making the Most of It

Ernest Hemingway is pretty passe these days, but in his wonderful memoir of his time in Paris, he wrote something that returns to me every time I'm here "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast."  And so it is.  Right here it's going to rain, and the sky is far more grey-blue forbidding than I could get the camera to record, and it's around 4 PM and we've been walking since 10 AM this morning.  And we haven't really done anything - not in the way tourists go into museums and enrich themselves.  For us these streets, and the Seine, and the beautiful old buildings and boulevards - well, they're the richest of all.

It's pouring rain on the bookstores of Boulevard St. Michel on the Left Bank near the Sorbonne, but that doesn't stop the book shoppers. Paris is a city of readers, one where great writers have been held as heroes and mourned by the city - and much of the entire nation when they died. There are many restaurants and cafes on the Left Bank, which had been home not only to Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach but also to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre and so many others. They are crammed with people all the time - whether it's the Deux Magots or the Brasserie Lipp or Cafe de Flore because these places have an enormous literary history and those who visit here know that these are the places to visit even if they've never read The Second Sex or The Sun Also Rises or even The Great Gatsby.

Or maybe they just know, like these two troubadours, that Paris, when you're young, (or, hopefully, any other age) is still a gift. So many have already written better words about the indelible impact of this lovely place; I'm really just here to agree with them.

It's Pretty Different for an American in Europe With President Obama in the White House

At the big Paris flea market, Marche aux Puces St-Ouen de Clignancourt, which takes up several city blocks, this portrait was among the items for sale. I've seen people reading Dreams from My Father on the Metro (seriously, the guy next to me, honest) and everyone wants to talk about him. What a difference!

Brick Lane in the Real World - Things Have Changed in London

You can see it there - the street name in English and,  I think, Bengali - the street brought to life in Monica Ali's wonderful book.  Brick Lane was a sensation, well reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, as well it should have been.  Reading it, a reader not only felt the feelings, but also heard the voices and smelled the cooking smells of a crowded immigrant neighborhood in London's East End.Well we went there today, expecting to see the veiled women, street food and crowded food markets that orient us in a neighborhood like the one we lived in as we read Brick Lane.  But the book was published six years ago.   And Nazneen, her sad husband, lover and daughters have surely moved on.  

Gentrification has arrived - as surely as this old shop will soon be transformed into a web-connected, foam and half-caf coffee joint.  As we walked the streets today, they were full of cool people in multiple earrings, tight skits, hip tee shirts and modern demeanor, and with the goods to satisfy them.  Revealing, low cut short skirted dresses, funky feathered jewelry, pork pie hats and weird purses hung from stalls in side markets and on the Lane itself.  Music was bluegrass and Hendrix and newer than that  -- nothing remotely ethnic.  There are lots of curry and other ethnic restaurants but they have wine lists and chic fonts for their menus.  And there are liquor stores.

I'm not sure precisely why I'm telling you this except to remind us to be grateful for gifts like this wonderful novel.  Things have surely changed here on Brick Lane, but thanks to Monica Ali, her ear, her eyes and, especially, her heart and empathy and imagination, we have a lovely document of life as it was here just a decade ago.  This immigrant literature, whether it's Ali, or Lahiri or Henry Roth or Saul Bellow or Amy Tan or Betty Smith, provides historical scrapbooks as communities shift, or are displaced.  So it's nothing new; it's just so dramatic to arrive on the Tube at a place so recently real to me and to see it, already, well past the point it lives in in my mind.

Farewell to Eden Lipson, A Great Mother, Editor and Friend

There were so many of us in 1968, joined to battle the Vietnam War by helping Eugene McCarthy run for president.  We lost the Senator several years ago, and Eli Segal, one of the best, soon after.  Today I learned of the loss of another of the dear ones, Eden Ross Lipson.  She died this morning of pancreatic cancer.  You can see from this photo that she was a woman who relished life and laughter.  Her greatest joys: her husband and her kids.

Although we shared a history from the campaign, we also shared some great lunches and adventures in Manhattan, where she had dozens of friends who loved and respected her.  Principled and kind, she was a joy and support to so many.

In her work as Children's Book Editor of the New York Times Book Review, Eden produced what is still the classic work on children's literature.  I knew her as she wrote the first edition; it was a real labor of love.  Her understanding of kids, of books and of writing and purpose made her an ideal guide for anxious parents and savvy librarians alike.

Her generosity went far beyond the love of children that made her such a great advocate for the joy they would find in their books.  It was she who gave me my first review assignment and it led to an entire side career as a book reviewer that lasted for years.  She was a tough and smart editor, too. 

I remember my review of one of my favorites: Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic.  A time-travel Holocaust story, it is a beautiful book.  I submitted a very positive review.  Soon after, Eden called.  In a tone slipping between amused and professional, she reminded me that not all parents were as open as I was, and that I needed to add some kind of caution to parents who were more protective about at what age their kids were exposed to tough information.  She was right, of course.  I began an embarrassed apology.  Her response:  if people didn't need editors she wouldn't have a job!  I fixed the piece and it ran.    Later, it was Eden who connected me with the editor who published my first book.  She did it, as she did all things, with no expectation of reciprocal benefit.  These sorts of things are typical of the warmth and kindness she showed to everyone who knew her.

Life is strange.  Eden was someone I knew, respected and cared about.  I lost touch with her, as with so many others, when we moved to Los Angeles.  My life then just didn't allow for working to stay connected; there were hard things happening and they made it difficult to think outside the immediate circumstances of my life.  And so I'm doubly sad as I struggle to write about a woman with such a mind, and a spirit, and a heart.

I'm comforted to know, though, that she had friends and family around her, supportive and caring, in her last days. That's no surprise; it's what she offered so many others.  

Farewell to Judith Krug - and Thanks from All of Us (Readers, Libarians, Kids, Computer Users and Gamers -- Yes, Gamers)

You're looking at a heroine here, a tireless advocate of "freedom to read" and the First Amendment.  Her name is Judith Krug, known to many as "Judy" and a brave and wonderful woman.  As Director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom since it was founded in 1967, she also founded "Banned Books Week" in 1982. That's how I met her.

I'd done stories before about First Amendment issues and someone gave her my number.  She called to tell me that the last week of September, 1982, would be the first ALA Banned Books Week and wouldn't the Today Show like to cover it?  Of course we would.  Look at some of the most banned books over the years - here in the US!  Surprising at best, eh?  They include Harry Potter, Huck Finn, Of Mice and Men, The Catcher in the Rye and Kaffir Boy.  Appalled by the list,  I remember starting the piece with film of the Nazi book burnings in Berlin.  Judy loved it! 

In the years since 1982 we repeated the story almost every year -- and every year new books joined the list.  Not always from the right, either.  Some liberal parents challenged Huckleberry Finn as racist, and the other ban efforts came from all over the place!  Harry Potter as Satanism, Native Son because it put the death penalty in dispute and the Bible preaches "an eye for an eye," Wrinkle in Time, Understood Alice and others by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret,  The House of Spirits, Slaughterhouse-Five and Lord of the Flies. 

But banned books were far from her only concern.  As the Chicago Tribute wrote:

Mrs. Krug worked directly with librarians across the country who were engaged in censorship battles. She enlisted allies from fields that are affected by 1st Amendment attacks such as publishers and journalists, said Robert Doyle, executive director of the Illinois Library Association.
"She was concerned about the gamut of expression, so that people could go to the library and encounter the full marketplace of ideas," Doyle said.

Beyond books was her opposition to filters on library computers and her less-noticed championing of free expression in video games.  A Game Politics piece includes this:

Judith was instrumental in the fight against video game censorship. She was a forceful advocate for Media Coalition amicus briefs in the Indianapolis, St. Louis, Illinois, Minnesota, and California video game cases. It would have been easy for the librarians to say, "That's not our battle," but thankfully that wasn't Judith's temperament.

Judith was a fierce believer in the importance of freedom of expression to our culture and our society and was zealous defender of the First Amendment. We all have truly benefited from her passion.

Judy died on April 11th.  She leaves a family who will miss her, I'm sure.  But she leaves a legacy for the rest of us too, one for which we should be grateful.  Anyone who loves to read, who wants to be able to ask a librarian for a special book for a quirky kid, who wants to use the library computer to do research or read off-the-wall news stories, or who just loves to wander in the stacks or online looking for something that never occurred to them, or a special idea or book or website -- we'll miss her too.