May 17, 2012 Arts & Culture Live on Air By Jessica Gross Radio journalism is having some trouble with self-definition right now. Every art form always is, of course, but radio’s growing pains are under particular public scrutiny. In January, This American Life broadcast part of a monologue by Mike Daisey, who had visited factories in China that make Apple products; it turned out he’d invented pieces of the narrative based on reports he’d heard, not seen, about labor conditions in other factories. This American Life retracted the episode, and a thousand questions bloomed. What does this mean for the industry as a whole? Is journalism even about facts anymore? Are larger truths ever more important, or is that a false dichotomy? Is storytelling different from journalism? Where do documentary-style shows like This American Life fall on the spectrum, and to what standards must they adhere? Good questions, all, and vital ones. May I sidestep them? If the spotlight is on fact versus fiction, the refracted light falls somewhere else: on the reason this episode matters so much to us. The original Mike Daisey program was the most popular in This American Life’s sixteen-year history. Listeners cared about Daisey’s character and about the ones he described: his translator; a thirteen-year-old laborer; a man with a mangled hand. All, save for Daisey, were invented, in the pure sense of the word, but visceral. This is the point: we can’t care about information until we can feel, and we can’t feel until we know people. We can’t learn until we empathize. This American Life may be the go-to example of character-driven radio journalism, but it’s a pervasive practice right now. Radiolab, StoryCorps, The Moth, Radio Diaries—name a radio program and I will show you its protagonists. It’s impossible to say, for certain, where a form of expression begins. But I offer that this concept—that we need characters in order to understand pretty much anything—was first put into practice in radio by Edward R. Murrow, during World War II. Read More
May 16, 2012 Arts & Culture Malcolm Cowley, Life Coach By Rebecca Davis O'Brien In the fall of 1946, my grandfather was twenty years old and back home in Pittsburgh, having completed his English degree at Purdue and a tour with the navy. Though he was expected to join the family diamond business, Richard Max Davis dreamed of becoming a writer—he just wasn’t sure how to do it. So he wrote a letter to Malcolm Cowley. And Malcolm Cowley wrote back. Read More
May 15, 2012 Arts & Culture Watch This: Telling Tales By Sadie Stein Here in New York, it’s dreary and gray. What better weather to enjoy a little Poe? No, not John Cusack. We were thinking more of this terrific 1954 animated version of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” narrated by the incomparable James Mason. (Thanks, Page-Turner!)
May 14, 2012 Arts & Culture Literary Paint Chips: Gallery 3 By Leanne Shapton and Ben Schott Paint Samples, suitable for the home, sourced from colors in literature. As seen in our two-hundredth issue. Fox Stain Graham Greene Iteration Pudding Hood Fence Skipper’s Whiff Pizza Noise White Martyr’s Tongue League Funeral Suit Dead Sea Doze Dishwater Blonde Stupid Blue Dorsal Bible Black Lo’s Socks Poop Poop American Autumn Damned Spot Spit Black Georgie’s Pins Oatmeal Tweed Treasure Blue Nimbus Card Felon Yellow Wine-dark
May 10, 2012 Arts & Culture Alice Munro’s First Story, Rediscovered By Sadie Stein Miss Abelhart came out of the church alone. Her feet made quick, sharp, certain sounds on the cement steps—not the light tapping sounds pumps make, but harder, heavier claps. Miss Abelhart was wearing oxfords. She wore also a light tweed coat, a straight ugly coat, and an absurd little black hat. Most of her clothes were chosen for their ugliness or absurdity, and she wore them with a certain defiance, as though she proudly recognized in them a drabness closely akin to her own. She was not ugly or absurd, in herself, only a little dried and hollowed, with straw hair tightly and tastelessly curled, and skin somewhat roughened, as if she had been for a long time facing a harsh wind. There was no blood in her cheeks, and something like dust lay over her face. People who looked at her knew that she was old, and had been old always. She was thirty-three. Read More
May 7, 2012 Arts & Culture Stillspotting By Jillian Steinhauer I’m sitting in an apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. It’s a nice apartment, with decidedly un-Ikea furniture and mild-mannered art on the walls. It feels well kept but welcoming, gently used. The room I’m in is a classic New York living/dining-room combo, its zones delineated by, on the one hand, a multicolored wood table and, on the other, a sleek white couch. The couch looks surprisingly comfortable, but I have no idea if it is; I’m sitting back-to-back with it, on a triangular block of foam. There’s a semicircle of these foam stools filling the room’s neutral territory and six people sitting with me. As we wait in awkward and anticipatory silence, I notice the sunlight streaming in from the windows. It glosses the shiny floors, which stay that way, I assume, because everyone who enters this apartment has been told to remove her shoes, just like in my home growing up. I don’t know who lives here. According to a map the Guggenheim has given me, this is “Erin’s House.” Erin is nowhere to be found, but she has generously loaned out her living/dining room for a few weekends in April and May, for a project called Stillspotting. As its name implies, the project is a search for still spots—quiet spaces, moments of respite, refuge from chaos—in New York. Read More