New Yorker Comment

Dialing it down: Readers respond to James Wolcott on Adam Gopnik

2014-07-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

Not all, it seems, were happy to be implicated in the gang-thrashing of Adam Gopnik. There have been murmurs of demurral among some of The New Yorker faithful.

"You have made a powerful enemy today."

Emdashes makes clear that her linking to Wolcott's screed was not a tacit seconding of his opinions, although she "reveres Wolcott as a critic and likes him tremendously as a person"—something akin to what Gopnik himself must now be feeling. (She gives her final word on the matter here.)

Kia from Gall and Gumption voices unease at the attention Wolcott's linking to her has brought. Sure, she's got reservations about Gopnik's writing, but she takes pains to separate the words from the man, a distinction Wolcott giddily ignored.

But, so far, NY-based Canadian freelancer Jeff MacIntyre has had the sharpest, truest response:

"I've always found Gopnik precious, but he's got a great many talents that make him seem more a peacock for their unfashionable and rare status, such as the breadth and promiscuity of his interests.

The piece was ridiculously narrowminded, as much fun as it is to read Wolcott on a tear, particularly because Gopnik does not really espouse some unified theory of smug disregard for his reader or peers. With him I get a very real sense he's being himself, which is no big whoop nor any crime. I think for a writer to come in for that kind of hating, he has to be offending on some higher level than that."

Read: Wolcott's 2007 screed,
and my initial response
to the "curbing"

So who is James Wolcott? "The King James Version," a New York Magazine piece from 2001, sketches in some background on our assailant célèbre. The piece begins:

"James Wolcott knows about envy. He's spent the past seventeen years holding two of the most sought-after writing gigs in America: Vanity Fair, of course, but also a four-and-a-half-year stint at Tina Brown's New Yorker. His salary is one of the highest in the business (as high as $400,000, according to Inside.com). And everyone pretty much agrees that he's got the most powerful pen in popular culture
It doesn't help matters, at least in the enmity-and-envy department, that Wolcott uses his pulpit—Vanity Fair as well as lengthy pieces in The New Republic and The London Review of Books—to deliver mordant, personal attacks. His columns aren't just critical reviews or clever commentary, they're laced with humiliating zingers.

Media heavies are favorite prey, but, for some reason, he's hardest on fellow writers. Gloria Steinem has "the nun-glow of a strict forehead"; Martin Amis was "the scowl of a new generation" who made writing look "insolently easy"; David Denby is "the boy who cried wolf. Easily excitable and always concerned." Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis write a "ticker tape of dropped names." On Richard Ford's taste for hunting: "Well, now we know who killed Bambi's mother. It was Richard Ford on one of his death strolls."

I may be missing the subtext of the put-downs, but none seems particularly glittering to me. I'll try one of my own: Wolcott is a "cheese-tray-hovering mouthbreather" whose "sublimated schoolgirl pique" has made his writing "a bile-ejaculation derby." Unremarkable, as I'm sure you agree. The hole of the Internet is deep, and, thankfully, such sentiments have weight. For insults, I like Roald Dahl.

More interesting than insults is what David Denby and Tina Brown have to say about James Wolcott. (Denby is one of the magazine's film critics; Brown was the editor from 1992 to 1998—a tenure during which, according to Salon, she was "either her generation's most adroit zeitgeist surfer or the lead zombie in a highbrow remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.")

David Denby

"I don't think there's anyone smarter than Jim reviewing for the last twenty years. He can see the contradiction in things in a way that can be quite breathtaking."

"I admire him, he's a phenomenal autodidact. He's learned from literature and journalism directly rather than from professors, which left him without any sense of false piety—and he developed a very vigorous style that turns the surface of things into metaphor. He can describe a performance or a personality and gather it up into a superb visual caricature.

But there's a problem with that: he stays on the surface. He doesn't seem to me to make the next step. There is no cultural value to defend. The only terrible thing for him is to be boring. That's a pop aesthetic. He's got nothing to fall back on."

Tina Brown

"I think he felt jostled at the New Yorker. He felt outclassed by Anthony Lane, Adam Gopnik, and David Remnick. At Vanity Fair, there's no one else to muscle in on his territory."

Ah, the male anxiety and territoriality... They're the reasons (along with, of course, sexual frustration) Camille Paglia says there's never been a great female lead guitarist in a rock band. Unfortunately, some of us take up writing.

Anyway, I've got to catch up on Wolcott. I know he's bodyslammed Gopnik and Denby, and now, tantalizingly, I've learned he's taken on Christopher Hitchens, too. Has he tried Lane, Remnick, or anyone else now at the magazine?

Has Wolcott ever got his?

(Extra: Elizabeth Kolbert on Tina Brown, circa 1993: "How Tina Brown Moves Magazines.")

Gopnik gets curbed

2014-07-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

Adam Gopnik | McGill University Press

I've been thinking about this entry since last night, when I made a surprising discovery: most New Yorker bloggers have a grudge against Adam Gopnik.

Initiating incident: James Wolcott (left), "the reigning monarch of the literary put-down," delivers a maiming review of "Through the Children's Gate," a collection of Gopnik's essays about New York City.

"Finally," caws Gawker. "The Adam Gopnik takedown we've all been waiting for."

Here are Gopnik's primary flaws, in Wolcott's view. He:

was put on this earth to annoy;
is a careerist with delicate antennae who wants to be encouraged, petted, praised, promoted, and congratulated;
is forever soliciting the reader's approval with an array of cloying ploys that become gimmicky and self-conscious;
and his friends are yuppie triumphalists who take pride and pleasure in their exalted taste buds and their little geniuses reflecting flatteringly on their own achievements.

One of the few available photographs of James Wolcott
the Internet coughs up. Undated, it appears in
interviewmagazine.com

It's hard to get out of the way of Wolcott's critique—it rolls up, up, up off the beach and you find yourself looking for a palm branch or balcony railing to hang on to. I felt short of breath reading it, more so because the piece is frighteningly well written. (Wolcott, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, is gentler in the afterglow, however. He blogs his postscript here.)
Okay, fine: fratricide among the New York literati can't be new. But the shocking part was the response of bloggers, the ostensible fans: Yeah, he had it coming.

Hate, always quick to respond, finds one lonely dad sticking up for Gopnik. The others? Some avert their eyes. Most lap it up.

Emdashes: "Wolcott makes an omelette with some familiar eggs."
Penguins: "This is hilarious."
The Elegant Variation: "Lord, James Wolcott entertains us."
Biffles: "Gopnik filters the entire world through his upper-middle-class colored preciousness."
Jewcy: "Why is there a market for Gopnik's extravagant whimsicality?"
Gall and Gumption: "Gopnik manages somehow to distill experience down to pure vanity."

It all seems a touch cruel to me. I haven't read "Children's Gate," but I loved one of its pieces that ended up in the magazine, "Death of a Goldfish," Gopnik's rumination on meaning and existence. Wolcott claims to hear tinned laughter behind this, the essay's opening passage.

"When our five-year-old daughter Olivia's goldfish, Bluie, died the other week, we were confronted with a crisis larger, or at least more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet. Bluie's life and his passing came to involve so many larger elements—including the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchcock's Vertigo—that it left us all bleary-eyed and a little shaken.

"Let's try this," Martha said. "Let's tell her that, though Bluie did die, this Bluie [a replacement fish, a ringer for the original] is kind of Bluie reborn.

"I thought she might have something, and in the next fifteen minutes, we did a quick, instinctive tour of the world's religions. We made up a risen-from-the-grave Christian story: the Passion of the Bluie. We considered a Buddhist story: Bluie goes round and round. We even played with a Jewish story: Bluie couldn't be kept alive by the doctors, but what a lovely bowl he left for his family!"

More to come on this. Did he really have it coming?

* Republished, for no particular reason, on July 4, 2014. Actually, there was a reason: I'd just had a too-clever-by-half conversation about Gopnik's latest piece in the magazine, about cooking and memory and his eccentric mother, and remembered the cruelty of James Wolcott's takedown in 2007, and wondered whether it was as unfairly vituperative as I'd thought.

The Binaries of Adam Gopnik

2014-07-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

As Adam Gopnik tours the Internet with Never-Betters and Better-Nevers, one has to ask, Does the binary make the writer, or the writer make the binary?

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It's been two and a half years since my last blog entry. In that time I've done not much important. There was a venal thing about a website, mortal exchanges with a girl or two, and an unholy amount of commuting to Vancouver's eastern quarters by bus and train. My ignorance remains intact – unassailable, even.

And as that last sentence shows, I've betrayed the em dash for her sister, en. My new girl pines for the spotlight less. A case of preferring Jan to Marcia, maybe, but once you get past the honey-coloured hair and deliciously long neck, Marcia's charms run cruelly thin. And so it is with the em. What was thrilling became gratuitous. Nothing gold can stay.

Adam Gopnik pulls this Feb. 2011 Internet
rumination out of the fire after opening with breezy
dismissal and a glib Nazi put-down.

Adam Gopnik won me back in the course of his recent survey of digital technologies and their impact on our lives, "How the Internet Gets Inside Us" (February 14th). The piece sketches out the essential responses of three groups of thinkers on the subject:

The Never-Betters, like Clay Shirky, who believe that we're on the crest of an ever-surging wave of democratized information, and that advances in technology are making humans ever freer.

The Better-Nevers, like Nicholas Carr, who are pessimistic about the Internet; they worry that by radically fracturing our attention and keeping us busy it breaks down our capacity for reflective thought.

And then the Ever-Wasers, who claim that a sense of vertiginous overload has always been central to our experience of modernity – that we might not be fully human if we weren't whining about the malign effects of clay pots, or television, or the Internet.

I say won me back because the article started slight. The clanking came early, in the writer's breezy dismissal of Shirky and Co.'s (admittedly thin) sketch of technological history. While mostly conceding Shirky's thesis – that greater information freedom eventually leads to greater personal freedom – Gopnik takes pains to remind us that It Wasn't Easy. Before that freedom arrived, he says, a lot of bad shit went down: book burnings, Martin Luther's "newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism," and "100 years of religious warfare." While you're savouring that liberty omelette, Mr. Shirky, forget not the broken eggs.

One of Gopnik's kicks at Nicolas Carr also feels less than fully gracious. Martin Heidegger's clairvoyant claim that "new technologies would break the meditational space on which Western wisdoms depend" is meaningless, he says, because, well, Heidegger later walked into the arms of the Nazis.

Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882)

This was where I got to squinting and Billy Idoling a lip on the #22 bus. Does the one disqualify the other? Is the wagon not big enough for two ideas – that Heidegger was an asshole and had a profound observation of technology?

But I'm not sure "both/and" much works for Adam Gopnik. The literary binary, pivoting on "either/or," is his hammer, nails, and sawhorse. Take from this article our mirrored Never-Betters and Better-Nevers. Or look back to my favourite Gopnik piece, an examination of the life and legacy of Charles Darwin that attempts to reconcile another dyad – deep (geologic) time and quick (momentary) time.

"The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much. There isn't a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows.

The human challenge that Darwin felt, and that his work still presents, is to see both times truly – not to attempt to humanize deep time, or to dismiss quick time, but to make enough of both without overlooking either."

Gopnik's binaries, if they were clunky or facile, would be as repellent George Bush's "With us or against us." But they're tightly sewn, and crucially move past thesis/antithesis toward synthesis. The binary is often deployed to to effect a burst of clarity or recognition, but not here. Gopnik's interested in a deeper question.

And sometimes the question happens to be beautiful. Again from "How the Internet Gets Inside Us":

Everything once inside [you] is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet...has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.

Goodnight cruel moon!

2014-03-16T16:02:00.000-07:00

The strain of doing such fine reporting on global warming may be showing on Elizabeth Kolbert.

I suppose there's only so much Bush Administration dormancy and mendacity you can absorb before your assignment editor asks you to review a classic children's book and you, um, turn it into a nihilistic meditation on death.

Her ultimate paragraph in "Goodnight Mush," from the December 12 issue:

"Time moves forward, and the little bunny doesn’t stand a chance. Parent and child are, in this way, brought together, on tragic terms. You don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want to die. But we both have to."

Reaction from the blogosphere:

Lance Mannion: "I've read Goodnight Moon a thousand times, in a myriad of moods, and not once, not once, did I come away with an interpretation as dark as this."

Three Dot: "I thought I had a knack for reading disturbing messages into children's books, but I doff my hat to Ms. Kolbert."

Elf Sternberg: "Whoa. Heavy."

Play Library: "Ms. Kolbert’s piece is bizarre to say the least as well as overly analytical with a bitter taste."

Is the death fable a philosophical statement for Kolbert? She's gotta be an existentialist—the unfathomable universe, the human reponsibility, the slow, sweet march to a permanent void.

Consider the tone of her article beside the last paragraphs of Albert Camus's "Irony," his 1937 reflection on youth and death.

"None of this fits together? How very true! A woman you abandon to go to the cinema, an old man to whom you have stopped listening, a death which redeems nothing, and then, on other hand, the whole radiance of the world.

"What difference does it make if you accept everything? What you have here are three destinies which are different and yet alike. Death for us all, but his own death to each. After all, the sun still warms our bones for us."

And on that note, time for Multiplatform.

Originally published on Jan 18, 2007

On the Road

2014-03-15T22:35:00.000-07:00

Cup of mint tea at my left hand and waiting for my diphenhydramine hydrochloride to kick in. Just finished Louis Menand's look back at Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." His piece ends with this lovely little Kerouackian riff:

It's fairly high above sea level there, in the lower ranges of the Berkshires, and I would stand at the pump in the dark looking at the stars in the cold clear sky as the semis roared past and with the wind in my hair, and I liked to imagine that I was a character in Kerouac's novel, lost to everyone I knew and to everyone who knew me, somewhere in America, on the road.

Then I would get in the car, and, bent over the wheel, while the trucks beat on past me, and the radio crackled, the sound going in and out, with oldies from the seventies, I began the long drop down to the lights of Boston, late in the night, late in my life, alone.

Nice, isn't it? Reminds me of when writing was easier, less an exercise of form and structure and grammar than of sustaining an impulse and going back to fix up the egregious errors later.
According to Menand, the book isn't about hipsters looking for kicks, or about subversives and nonconformists—rebels without a cause who point the way for the radicals of the nineteen-sixties. And it's not an anti-intellectual celebration of spontaneity. It's a sad and self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity, and failure, which I think he captures lovelily in the last line.

It's also, as he says, a story about guys who want to be with other guys. I didn't get the homosexual bent (no pun) of "On the Road" at first, and I remember being shocked when I heard the theory propounded by a kind middleaged American backpacker woman, on a ferry chugging toward Gili Trawangan, in Indonesia. I was 22, reading the book at the time, and momentarily embarrassed for being enthusiastic about it.

Props also to Menand for working one of my favorite albums—Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely—into his lede. Anyone know where I can download it? I lost my cassette years ago.

(Click Jack's photo to see him reading from "On the Road" and here for a silent film of he and Ginsberg loafing around NYC, circa 1959.)

Originally published Oct. 1, 2007

Describing: Paulo Coelho

2014-03-15T16:22:00.000-07:00

"Coelho is almost sixty. His name, bestowed upon a suite at the Hotel Ambasciatori in Rome and a hot-chocolate drink at Le Bristol hotel in Paris, is pronounced CO-el-you. He is solid and short, with the capable, roughened look of someone who makes his living out-of-doors, and he dresses in black cowboy boots, black jeans, and black T-shirts.

"His hair is white and shaved short, except for a little ponytail that sprouts from the back of his head. On his left forearm is a crude tattoo of a butterfly, which he and his wife...got in 1980, as a "wedding ring."

—Dana Goodyear, in "The Magus" (May 7), a profile of the Brazilian novelist who has sold almost 100 million books

* * *

Goodyear does a good job here. She never condescends to her subject, although, amusingly, she includes this quote by Mario Maestri, "one of the few Brazilian critics who does not reflexively dismiss Coelho" (italics mine):

In spite of belonging to different genres, Coelho's narratives and self-help books have the same fundamental effect: of anesthetizing the alienated consciousness through the consoling reaffirmation of conventions and prevailing prejudices. Fascinated by his discoveries, the Coelhist reader explores the familiar, breaks down doors already open, and gets mired in sentimental, tranquilizing, self-centred, conformist, and spellbinding visions of the world that imprisons him. When he finishes a book, he wants another one that will be different but absolutely the same.

I have a new favorite Brazilian literary critic.

The subject aside, my only criticism is the second sentence of the article. I kept getting lost—and still do, now a dozen times in—in the syntactical chasm between 'story' and 'of.' Give it a try.

"It is a story, told in 'A Thousand and One Nights' and in Rumi's 'Masnavi' and later adapted by Jorge Luis Borges—the version that Coelho, who is Brazilian, first read—of a man who dreams that he must leave home to find a treasure, and upon arriving at his destination, discovers that the treasure is in fact buried in his native land."

Hmmm...easier to follow with the wide margins, but as exposition a trifle impatient.

Originally published on May 3, 2007

Platform agnosticism

2014-03-15T07:12:00.000-07:00

A new piece of nomenclature that—like "backstory," perhaps—will rise from obscurity to common use in two weeks flat: "platform agnostic."

I first saw the term in David Denby's January 8th article on the future of Hollywood films. He uses it to refer to the viewing habits of kids, who will "look at movies on any screen at all, large or small."

(Photo: Thomas Huxley [1825-95], a great defender of Darwin, who coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his belief that it cannot be known whether or not god exists. The word comes from the Greek—'a' [not] 'gnosis' [knowledge].)

Denby, like most cinephiles (and old people), is not a platform agnostic. He doesn't like how the iPod rides up and down on his stomach when he's watching a movie. And holding it away from his body makes his arm tired. And his eyes hurt to focus. Besides, he's got better options.

"At the house of my friend Harry Pearson, I watched movies on what must be close to the ultimate home-theatre system, a setup priced at two hundred thousand dollars."

So, Mr. Denby, when I start my internship, I'm going to be polite at first. I'll swing by your office and be, like, yeah, no frigging way can we dispense with the Western canon. Nothing about Anthony Lane being funnier. But then...I'm going to get a little more insistent.

Let me put it out there right now: I'll watch whatever you guys are watching. I'll be really quiet. And I will bring the Stroh's.

Talk of platform agnosticism at journalism school is appropriate: the newspaper god is ailing, and journalists have begun to hedge their bets. We take something called Multiplatform Journalism (the 'multi' means print, audio, video, and online), which will help me a tonne when I give up on slackjawed Joe Public and go into advertising.

Dorky Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who carries a stuffed toy moose around, also describes himself as a platform agnostic.

Still working on the link between the two.

Originally published on Jan 22, 2007

New do for summer

2014-03-13T19:52:00.000-07:00

Is that hairline getting a little high on the sides? No—can't be.

That's me with Aeisha, my Iraqi barberess. Her shop on 4th Ave. (not a salon, as you can see by the Barbasol receptacle at bottom right) is one of the few places in Vancouver where you can still get the hot-shaving-cream-and-straight-razor treatment, although, to be honest, you can do better in five minutes with your Sensor and some intention. She says some guys make jokes about Iraq while she's scraping their throats with the razor. Reckless, say I.

The reason for the grooming is my temporary leap up the blogging food chain. Today I—drum roll set off in em dashes, please—started a summer internship at Emdashes, which is, as I explained to my family, the Internet's première site about The New Yorker. In no time, I'm sure, Mom will be telling everyone at work that I got a job at the magazine, an elision we should discourage.

I'm working from Vancouver, so the haircut isn't strictly necessary—Emdashes is based in NYC—but with a Kerouackian huzzah and a fit of '20s optimism I decided to make an offering of sideburns to the writing gods. You'll be the first to know how it goes. God, 'Kerouackian' has got to be my favorite name-based adjective.

I spent way too long labouring over my introduction, which, it's not hard to see, comes over as a weak slider for a ball. Give me time, though; it's a comfort zone thing.

Extra listening
Now that we're on the subject, Jack Kerouac reading from "On the Road," in a way both cool and strangely not—your call.

Harry Crosby reading John Updike's "On the Sidewalk," a spot-on Kerouac spoof first published, I believe, in The New Yorker. (I've got it in "Fierce Pajamas" a humor anthology edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder.)

Originally published on May 10, 2007

Into the chalk

2014-03-13T13:09:00.000-07:00

John McPhee, who inadvertently screwed up Tom's writing career, returns this week in an absorbing wander through the Cretaceous chalk of England, France, and the Netherlands: "Season on the Chalk" (March 12).

McPhee is considered one of the pioneers of 'creative non-fiction,' a genre Wikipedia defines, flatly, as "using literary skills in the writing of non-fiction." I haven't known about McPhee for a long time, but the magazines containing his stories about river barges and coal trains were some of the few possessions that made it back from Asia with me.

The first paragraph of "Season":

The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of Northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and—from Erith Reach to Gravesend—under fifteen miles of the lower Thames. My grandson Tommaso appears out of somewhere and picks up a cobble from the bottom of the Thames. The tide is out. The flats are broad between the bank and the water. Small boats, canted, are at rest on the riverbed. Others, farther out on the wide river, are moored afloat—skiffs, sloops, a yawl or two. Tommaso is ten. The rock in his hand is large but light. He breaks it against the revetment bordering the Gordon Promenade, in the Riverside Leisure Area, with benches and lawns under oaks and chestnuts, prams and children, picnics under way, newspapers spread like sails, and, far up the bank, a stall selling ice cream. He cracks the cobble into jagged pieces, which are whiter than snow. Chalked graffiti line the revetment have attracted the attention of Tomasso, who now starts his own with the letter "R."

McPhee is one of the few writers who can take three delicious pages to describe a chef making a hamburger. I know what Tom means, though: You get sucked into a McPhee article, and, bright with admiration, you start affecting his style. But you lack his skill, his ability to fashion a garment from the pretty weave of detail and character. First your editors denounce you, then your readers leave you. And then you're not a writer anymore.

I had a similar brush with J. P. Donleavy a few years ago. All about dropped pronouns.

Enter the McPheeniacs:

Knight Science: "The profligately verbose John McPhee brings his usual, distinctive, mesmerising goulash of facts, asides, rambles, sketches, and odd rhythmic use of science jargon to a fixating tour of Europe’s Cretaceous chalk.

Branner: "I don’t know who else could mingle geology and terroir, geography and genealogy, the personal and the historic, all the while namedropping geologic time periods and stages like they’re a-list celebrities arriving at the Oscars."

NewMexiKen: This week’s New Yorker has an article by McPhee. What’s it about? you ask. Who cares? It’s by John McPhee.

Say 'profligately' three times fast. It's impossible.

Feel free to have a run at his first graf, too. I'd love to hear some dissenting voices.

Originally published on Mar 13, 2007

Dept. of Telecommuting

2014-03-13T11:42:00.000-07:00

The astute among you will recognize that 'telecommuting' is a misnomer. I'm not at home here, but, instead, at UBC, which is empty save for me, the iMac upon which I took this picture, and the second-year guy who's taking the summer to write his thesis because that's the way his scholarship works.

My expression is intended to convey the pain of telecommuting, as least for me, an ENTP terribly suited to working in boxers, next to an open window, checking e-mail every ninety seconds, with a fridge of food downstairs and a million uninvestigated Web nodes spread out before him.

What's your Myers-Briggs type? I don't know. Why don't you take the online test?

Originally published on Jun 5, 2007

Invitation: JJB's Leaving Party, 8 November 2011

2011-11-01T20:39:00.002-07:00

Lucretius and the Ideal, Epicurean Life

2011-10-03T11:37:00.001-07:00

I can't think of a better world view.

– from "The Answer Man," Stephen Greenblatt's September 2011 article examining the legacy of Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things."

The John Doe: A Drink Recipe

2011-10-03T09:28:00.020-07:00

How to make the John Doe, a rum and tequila cocktail of distinction. How you drink it is your own business.

Everything you could want to know about a Caribbean-inspired alcoholic drink, with an ever-growing list of FAQs.

The tools.

The John Doe recipe
– 1.5 oz. El Jimador Reposado tequila (straw yellow in colour)
– 1 oz. Sailor Jerry spiced rum
– 3/4 oz. fresh lime juice
– 4 shakes Angostura aromatic bitters
– ginger ale
– orange rind (for garnish)

How do I make a John Doe?
Fill one third of an oversized wine glass with ice. Add tequila, rum, and lime. Shake bitters over the mixture, savouring the slow commingling of red with other colours. Fill glass with cold ginger ale. Lightly stir. Warm slice of orange rind with a flame. Folding the rind, spritz oil through the flame and over the mouth. Sweep the rim and deposit rind in the glass. Serve.

How did you come by this John Doe drink?
A bartender in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood made it for me as a "bartender's choice." It was the summer of 2011.
"Mmmm," I said. "What's it called?"
"It has no name," said he – and disappeared.

Why did you name the drink John Doe?
For weeks it had no name. During that time, police linked it to thirteen unidentifiable corpses. Sometimes a drink names itself.

For a larger group, they're a pain to make individually. Do you have a batch John Doe recipe?

I do. In a large pitcher or punchbowl, combine:

– 2 standard bottles El Jimador Reposado (1.5 L)

– 1 large bottle Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum (1.14 L)

– 750 mL lime juice (at this quantity, use store-bought lime juice)

From here, prepare each drink individually. Stir the rum, tequila, and lime before pouring or ladling it into a glass, over ice. Shake in bitters, fill with ginger ale, garnish with flaming orange.

How to Speak Poetry, by Leonard Cohen

2011-08-11T08:28:00.003-07:00

Leonard Cohen, speaking poetry.

Take the word butterfly. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be in love, or to be in love with butterflies. The word butterfly is not a real butterfly. There is the word and there is the butterfly. If you confuse these two items people have the right to laugh at you. Do not make so much of the word. Are you trying to suggest that you love butterflies more perfectly than anyone else, or understand their nature? The word butterfly is merely data. It is not an opportunity for you to hover, soar, befriend flowers, symbolize beauty or frailty, or in any way impersonate a butterfly. Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. If you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. If ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material.

What is the expression that the age demands? The age demands no expression whatever. We have seen photographs of bereaved Asian mothers. We are not interested in the agony of your fumbled organs. There is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. Do not even try. You will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. We have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. Everyone knows you are eating well and are even being paid to stand up there. You are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. This should make you very quiet. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Everyone knows you are in pain. You cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. Step aside and they will know what you know because you know it already. You have nothing to teach them. You are not more beautiful than they are. You are not wiser. Do not shout at them. Do not force a dry entry. That is bad sex. If you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise.

And remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. What is our need? To be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. Do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life to this very moment. The bombs, flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and the villages. They have also destroyed the stage. Did you think that your profession would escape the general destruction? There is no more stage. There are no more footlights. You are among the people. Then be modest. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Be by yourself. Be in your own room. Do not put yourself on.

This is an interior landscape. It is inside. It is private. Respect the privacy of the material. These pieces were written in silence. The courage of the play is to speak them. The discipline of the play is not to violate them. Let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. Be good whores. The poem is not a slogan. It cannot advertise you. It cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. You are not a stud. You are not a killer lady. All this junk about the gangsters of love. You are students of discipline. Do not act out the words. The words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition.

Speak the words with the exact precision with which you would check out a laundry list. Do not become emotional about the lace blouse. Do not get a hard-on when you say panties. Do not get all shivery just because of the towel. The sheets should not provoke a dreamy expression about the eyes. There is no need to weep into the handkerchief. The socks are not there to remind you of strange and distant voyages. It is just your laundry. It is just your clothes. Don't peep through them. Just wear them.

The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not art.

They are a report. You are speaking before a meeting of the Explorer's Club of the National Geographic Society. These people know all the risks of mountain climbing. They honour you by taking this for granted. If you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. Tell them about the height of the mountain, the equipment you used, be specific about the surfaces and the time it took to scale it. Do not work the audience for gasps and sighs. If you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. It will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of air with your hands. It will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence.

Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you're tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty.

English Is a Disease: Catch It!

2011-07-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

From a previous life. Intended for ESL students. Part one of a trilogy.

Remember SARS? From one apartment block in Hong Kong with dirty water slopping floor to floor, a killer disease spread around Asia and the world. It was in the newspapers every day, and everyone talked about it all the time.

English Corner at Taipei City Hall's Department of Information is that apartment building in Hong Kong. But it's clean. And there's no dirty water or sickness here—just great English. At English Corner, we speak great English, listen to great English, and write great English. English is the disease, and we're giving it to people every day.

Think about it. Diseases are bad—they make you tired, unhappy, and dead. But English is good. It makes you smart and interesting, and it can't kill you. Languages and diseases spread the same way: from person to person. Someone with a cold coughs on you, you catch a cold. Someone with good English speaks to you, you catch that, too. Lucky!

It will start slowly, but everyone in Taipei will catch the English. First, a few visitors to English Corner will catch the English. They'll talk with each other, and their English will get stronger. Then, those people will take the English back to their departments at City Hall. Without knowing it, they will pass it to their colleagues. And in all those offices, the English will begin to grow.

Soon, every part of Taipei City Hall will have caught the English. We'll be giving it to thousands of new people every day. The newspapers will take note: "Hey, City Hall's got the English—where did they get it?" The high school teachers will perk up: "City Hall's got the English—we want it, too." People all over—in Kaohsiung, Tokyo, and Seoul—will be looking at Taipei, asking, "How can we catch the English?"

Every day you pass by English Corner you can grab a new piece of English. The place is like a barbecue with all its delicious verbs and nouns sizzling and smoking. Pick one up and pop it in your mouth. Better yet, pick one up and pop it in your friend's mouth.

English Is a Shirt: Iron It!

2011-07-07T12:18:00.009-07:00

From a previous life. Intended for ESL students. Part two of a trilogy.

We all know the world is getting warmer and warmer. We drive in cars, we eat tasty hamburgers, we go to Julia Roberts movies. All the while, the big pieces of ice that cover the North and South Poles are getting smaller and smaller. They are melting.

Global warming will give us some problems. Every time you turn on the TV, Bangladeshis will be crying. The oceans will get higher, and we will have more floods and heat waves, typhoons and hurricanes. While this is happening, remember one important thing—you need a clean and wrinkle-free shirt.

The English language is that shirt. Think about it: when you are ironing it, you can whistle a happy tune. Everything is right in the world. English is the same: when you are learning it, your worry about other things flies away.

Ironing shirts is complicated, and English is complicated, too. On a shirt, you have to be careful around the buttons. They require skill. English grammar is just like that. Once, at a party, I tried to use the simple past (I ate a pickle) but instead used the future perfect progressive (I will have been eating a pickle). What a mistake! Everyone looked at me with hard eyes. But when they did, all they saw was my great-looking shirt—and they smiled.

Global warming is beyond your control. Can you reduce how much garbage you produce or pollution you create? No one can. Instead, worry about the things you can improve: your shirt and your English. The United Nations will do the rest.

English Is a Rock: Skip It!

2011-05-18T08:35:00.009-07:00

From a previous life. Intended for ESL students. Part three of a trilogy.

You walk along a river, whistling. A seagull flies overhead, screeching. A green rock lies in the shallow water, glistening. You think to yourself, The rock looks like jade, but only because it is wet. What will it look like when it is dry? This is a natural question. Go ahead.

English is that river rock. Think about it: There are millions of languages, but only one true language. You have searched your whole life, and now you have found it: the perfect skipping stone. When you pick it up and send it skimming across the clear water—plip, plip, plip—everything is right in the world. Clouds rack through the sky and airplanes fly to faraway places. Children take naps and teenagers sing pop songs on buses. Businessmen get massages. Trees breathe their hot breath.

Sometimes, in England, schoolgirls sing on the playground:

Are bicycles there to be ridden? Yes.

Are presents there to be given? Yes.

Are secrets there to be hidden? Yes.

River rocks are meant to be skipped.

And English is meant to be spoken. The language is like a potato: hard, and popular in Ireland. So speak it! Speak it like it is a nickel in your mouth. Feel it warming up and clacking on your teeth. Spit it out in your hand. Take a look. This is the real thing, the real English. Pop it back in your mouth. Run your tongue along the smooth edge.

Have you ever been married? I was married once. I learned something: if you look at your wife’s cell phone while she is in the shower, you may find a message from "Marvin." But you don’t know a Marvin. The message might say, “You’re so cute. You left your socks here.” Hire a private detective.

Marketing and Sales on Civilization

2011-03-18T14:01:00.004-07:00

Some things shouldn't be told slant.

E. B. White on Imitation in Writing

2011-03-03T05:52:00.004-08:00

"The imitative life continues long after the writer is secure in the language, for it is almost impossible to avoid imitating what one admires. Never imitate consciously, but do not worry about being an imitator; take pains instead to admire what is good."

– E. B. White, in "An Approach to Style," which first appeared in the second edition (1959) of "The Elements of Style"

Describing: John Galliano

2011-03-02T16:38:00.007-08:00

John Galliano. Image: Richard Avedon, 2003

Galliano’s personal hair-and-makeup team had been briefed in advance on the look he wanted to achieve, which was inspired by the evolution of dance. “I am feeling very Spanish tango dirty creepy with oily black hair,” he said. His stylist got the message: he glued a stringy goatee onto Galliano’s chin and trimmed it to a neat triangle; after that, he spent half an hour curling Galliano’s hair and then applied a thick coat of mascara to the lashes beneath his dark-brown eyes.

Galliano wore hoop earrings. His muscles were oiled, then covered by a layer of grime – so that he would look like a toreador when he took his victory lap. (Most designers simply dart onto the runway at the end of a show; a few take a quick stroll in the company of the models. Galliano struts the catwalk all by himself, and he does it with the hauteur of Naomi Campbell.)

– Michael Specter, in "The Fantasist," a profile of fashion designer John Galliano in the September 22, 2003, issue.

Galliano, of course, is watching his professional life implode. His slurred anti-Semitic slurs in a Paris bar provoked Christian Dior, the fashion house that employed him, to terminate their 14-year relationship. It appears he'll also face charges for "anti-Semitic and abusive behaviour." Oh, and Natalie Portman is pissed. No word on Ashton Kutcher.

Specter today blogged an interesting update to his eight-year-old profile. While Galliano "deserves all the blame and ignominy that befall him," he says, he's amazed at people's expressions of outrage. "Galliano’s act of self destruction was about as shocking as the widespread discovery, also this week, that Charlie Sheen is a vulgar fool."

I disagree with the cheap kick at Sheen – the slack-jawed television public seems committed to extracting a confession he has no obligation to give – but we can save the debate for our next drink. Say what you want about the guy, but "droopy-eyed, armless children" is genius.

UPDATE: More on the still-burning Galliano situation from Richard Brody, who is, appropriately, a New Yorker cinema editor. (It's possible he also does background work on period films about naturalists.) Galliano will be charged with injure raciale ("racial injury"), which is commoner in France than you'd think. Conviction would carry a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment and a fine of €22,500.

Describing: Scientology Spokesman Tommy Davis

2011-03-02T09:53:00.002-08:00

Tommy Davis with wife Jessica Feshbach. Image: i50.tinypic.com

I flew to Los Angeles and waited for him to call. On Sunday at three o’clock, Davis appeared at my hotel, with Feshbach. We sat at a table on the patio. Davis has his mother’s sleepy eyes. His thick black hair was combed forward, with a lock falling boyishly onto his forehead. He wore a wheat-colored suit with a blue shirt. Feshbach, a slender, attractive woman, anxiously twirled her hair.

– Lawrence Wright, in "The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology," in the February 14th issue

Describing: Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL

2011-02-28T20:26:00.003-08:00

During his visit to Dulles, Virginia, a thousand AOL staffers crowded into a tent to hear from their new C.E.O. He walked onstage with his jacket unbuttoned and the knot of his yellow tie not quite pulled up to his shirt collar. He stands six feet four, and has a full head of wavy black hair, high cheekbones, and large front teeth. Although he limped slightly from an old hip injury, he exuded a sense of command. "Are you guys committed to putting America back online?" he bellowed.

– Ken Auletta, in "You've Got News," a profile of AOL's new CEO, Tim Armstrong, in the January 24th issue

Gopnik and Gladwell on Canada: Nation or Notion?

2008-07-31T08:31:00.022-07:00

I know, I know: this debate between Malcolm Gladwell (l) and Adam Gopnik happened a while ago. But they played it on CBC's Ideas last night in its entirety, and I listened to it and drank, sitting in my green chair, two glasses of Cono Sur merlot, on sale this week for $10.47 a bottle at the LCB.

By their applause, the crowd voted Gopnik the winner, I think because he was 35 per cent funnier. Both were powerfully interesting, though, and, I have to admit, a touch whinier than I'd have hoped. Below are the two primary arguments; judge for yourself.

(In his intro of the two writers, Maclean's national editor Andrew Coyne used a qualifier in front of "unique." Yikes.)

Friday Miscellany

2008-07-25T11:10:00.019-07:00

Go ahead, try to find the link between Chinese propaganda, the Theory of Everything, dark thoughts about Peter Hessler, and the subtle virtues of pannioli.

I still read the magazine. These long absences as a sign not of a slackening regard for you, dear reader, but of a daunting work schedule. I know, I know: how long does it take to blog?

Anyway, the others are in a sales meeting right now—on the invitation I was listed as "optional"—and so I've stolen a few moments, in the now wonderfully deserted digital media bullpen, to give you a few recent thoughts about New Yorker articles that come to mind.

—The one about CTGZ, the Chinese propagandist (above) with piles of books all over his dorm room ("Angry youth," by Evan Osnos; July 28th):

1) Why isn't Peter Hessler (one of my favorites, and a writer for whom I could work up [okay, already feel] a dark mixture of envy and admiration for) covering this story?

2) His video sucked; Osnos's description of it does it way too much poetic justice. It looks exactly like something you'd produce on Windows Movie Maker in a half hour's patriotic arousal—which isn't to say it fails as propaganda. I watched it with a Mainland Chinese colleague, who, as it ran its six minutes, more and more got a sheen of "See?" and indignation about her, even as I snorted at the amateurishness and paranoia, crescendoing drums and strings.

—The one about the surfer dude who may have cracked the Theory of Everything ("Surfing the universe," by Benjamin Wallace-Wells; July 21st):

1) Everybody loves the idea of the rogue intellectual who comes in from the hinterland and solves the unsolvable problem. I'd never given a full thought to the idea that, within an academic discipline, proponents of the ascendant theory—in the particle-physics case, string theory—hold sway and make things miserable for dissenters like Garrett Lisi, this article's central character. I have a friend in linguistics who says it's this way with Chomskians (Chomskiites?) and Universal Grammar at the moment. That debate harks back, of course, to John Colapinto's fantastic (top ten, easily) article about the Piraha, who live in the Amazon rain forest

2) The dude has a novel way of consoling himself: "When Lisi encounters a physicist of his own age whose skill he envies, he reminds himself that he is a better surfer. When he comes across a better surfer, he thinks, I’m much better at equations." And I suppose if he comes across an older, better physicist and surfer, he thinks, "I'm younger and hotter." Or if it's a younger, hotter better physicist and surfer, he thinks, "I am distinguished in my carriage."

We all play this handicapping game in our minds, though, no? What do you say to yourself? (Ashamed as I am to admit it, one of mine once had to do with proficiency at golf. Now it's all gerunds and how well I hold my liquor.)

—The one in which Paul Simms shows, once again, that he's far and away the funniest bastard doing Shouts & Murmurs ("Stump speech," July 28th), with occasional competition from Jack Handey:

"I’m talking about the young man—a boy, really; he couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve years old—whom I met in an online game of Halo, who said to me, 'Headshot! Suck it! Pwned! Be less gay!,' after he had killed me by camping a respawn point, which really should be illegal.

"I’m thinking and talking about a man I met in New Carsmell, Vermont, before my campaign even began. He had inherited from his step-uncle, after much legal wrangling, the family diner. I remember as if it were yesterday asking this man for a ham-and-cheese sandwich. And he made me one. But, before he served it to me, he smooshed it down in this hot-presser thing that sort of looked like a copy machine. So, when it was done, the sandwich was like a flattened-out grilled cheese with ham, which the man claimed was an Italian delicacy. That thing was delicious. I can’t remember right now what it’s called, but more and more places are starting to serve them, so, if you ever get the chance to have one, definitely try it. I think it might have been called a 'pannioli' or something. Something Italian-sounding."

Okay, back to work. I hope you're well.

For Roland

2008-06-17T14:06:00.005-07:00

Barry Calhoun Photography