The Liter’y Life (with respect and apologies to George Frazier)

After college I decamped to grad school and got a M.S. in journalism at BU (trust me: that was the first and only time the words “master of science” were ever linked to my name). As a journalism student, I read the Globe and the Herald American, plus various weeklies, notably the Phoenix. The papers were competitive and lively as befitting a major city. I’d have killed for a job at any one of them (‘twas not to be, but I got lucky and landed at the New York Daily News, where I really learned how to be a reporter and editor—and had a good time for 13 years before heading west in ’88).
Sorry, I’m getting off track here, like one of those pathetic grandfatherly figures wandering off at the zoo in those dementia commercials on the nightly news. My point is that in the academic year ’73-’74, I fell under the spell of the Globe’s elegant, contrarian, feisty, irascible columnist George Frazier (1911-1974). Frasier, in the words of Alden Whitman, the New York Times’s legendary obit writer, was “a prose stylist of wit, pungency and elegance” (not unlike Whitman’s own prose style). Frazier had a varied career, working at Life, writing highly respected jazz criticism (he even co-wrote the lyrics to Count Basie’s “Harvard Blues”). A stylish man who wore a carnation in his lapel, Frazier was a kind of Lucius Beebe (Google if interested and credit blogger Richard Carreno with the Beebe comparison). Frazier also wrote a column on style for Esquire, and he liked the word “duende” (of Andalusian-Spanish origin), by which he defined something or someone with class (Nantucket had duende, Martha’s Vineyard did not—go figure). Frazier was an original (he once wrote an entire column about a baseball game in perfect Latin), and I particularly enjoyed his Saturday column entitled “The Lit’ry Life.” In it, Frazier would review the latest magazines and specific articles therein. His comments were often more interesting than the stories he critiqued.
These days, of course, the Internet allows people to link to anything they think is worthy of reading or looking at. A site like Arts&Letters Daily does an excellent job of making users aware of an enormous array of essays, articles, and reviews.
So here’s where I come in as I rip-off George Frazier’s wonderful idea from years ago. I read a lot: two daily newspapers (the NYT and the WSJ) and numerous websites. I also subscribe to 20 magazines. Do I read every word? Of course not, but I do come across stuff I think might be worth reading for others. So every now and then, I’ll be writing a blog entry called “The Liter’y Life” (I’ve changed the spelling from Frazier’s column since for all I know the original title is under copyright by the Globe or its parent company, the NYT). I’m often a week or two behind, so forgive me in advance. Much of what I’ll recommend should be available on the web. If not, you could always consider subscribing to a print publication. God knows magazines could use the bucks.
So away we go:
The Paris Review (Spring)
The Art of Fiction interview with Ray Bradbury
Bradbury turns 90 in August—and he’s still writing. I’ve always been a fan (yes, still have those yellowing, tattered paperbacks from the middle of another century). My favorite Bradbury has always been “The Martian Chronicles,” a series of stories set on the Red Planet. No one wanted to publish the stories until an editor at Doubleday suggested he loosely link them and name the book “The Martian Chronicles.” He did, inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” This is a lovely interview with a lovely man. Even the late Thomas M. Disch, who was tough on Bradbury for getting sentimental at times, would approve, I think.
The Nation. (March 25, 2010)
Brilliant Drew Friedman cover showing Glenn Beck as the Mad Hatter, along with Sarah Palin as the Red Queen and Rush Limbaugh as the Cheshire Cat. I don’t have the issue with me, so I can’t credit the author of the cover story, which discusses the Cloward-Piven strategy. Familiar with this? Let me explain by cribbing from Wikipedia: “The Cloward-Piven strategy 'is a political strategy outlined by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, then both sociologists and political activists at the Columbia University School of Social Work, in a 1966 article in The Nation entitled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."[1] The two argued that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would create a political crisis that would force U.S. politicians, particularly the Democratic Party, to enact legislation ‘establishing a guaranteed national income.’"
If you’ve ever watched Glenn Beck go nuts on his blackboard, the Cloward-Piven strategy is often at the center of Beck’s insane conspiracy theory of the left’s decades-old plan to destroy the land of majestic, purple mountains, amber waves of grain and fruited plains (fruited plains, indeed). I kid you not. Excellent story.
Harper’s (May)
For Whom The Cell Tolls
By Nathaniel Rich
Really scary story, clearly and expertly told. Basically, we don’t know yet, but cell phone usage may lead to explosions of brain tumors in 20 or 30 years. If you don’t start using a headset after reading this, well, thank God Obama got that health care reform passed.
See you at the newsstand.

Jules Feiffer

Flashback: early 1963. I walk into Jack’s candy store in the shadow of the Auburndale Long Island Rail Road station (that’s between the Broadway and Bayside stations on the Port Washington line, for those who care). There are no new comics on display, and the digest-size mystery and sci-fi magazines (Ellery Queen, Galaxy, Fantasy and Science Fiction) fail to tantalize. So I head to the back of the shop where the paperbacks luridly reside, their sexy, violent covers starting to awaken certain eleven-year-old hormones.
One book stands out from the Erskine Caldwells and the Mickey Spillanes and the Ian Flemings: “Sick Sick Sick,” a collection of drawings by Jules Feiffer, published by Signet Books (“Complete and Unabridged”). The image on the cover shows two bespectacled people—a man and woman—sitting at a small table with coffee cups between them. The man looks away, eyes downcast, obviously depressed. The woman seems to want to know what his problem is.
By age eleven, I am aware that there are people who actually make their livelihood by cartooning. What a great way to make a buck, I think. There were the strips in the daily newspapers: Chester Gould with “Dick Tracy," Leonard Starr’s “Mary Perkins,” George Wunder (who’d taken over from the great Milton Caniff on “Terry and the Pirates”), Charles Schultz (especially Charles Schultz) and many more. I could even recognize some of the artists who contributed to The New Yorker, which my aunt and uncle had subscribed to for decades, but were slow to actually read. When I visited them in Park Slope, I’d grab a few issues from the totem-pole size pile of the magazine, skipping the articles but reading the cartoons. Peter Arno, Whitney Darrow Jr., Charles Addams, William Steig (whose work mystified me) had distinct styles (and distinct signatures), and were artists I remembered from issue to issue. Then there was the “usual gang of idiots” at Mad, including the great Jack Davis and Wally Wood.
As I slip “Sick Sick Sick” from a squeaking metal book rack, I ask myself, “Who’s this guy Feiffer?”
The answer was on the back cover, which declared that Feiffer drew his strip for the Village Voice and some 40 papers in syndication (at eleven, I didn’t read the Village Voice, nor the other places his work appeared: Playboy (which with its clever, titillating covers was beginning to catch my soon-to-be adolescent eyes), the New Republic, the Paris Herald-Tribune and the London Observer. He’d illustrated a children’s book, which meant little to me because even as a child I disliked children’s books (with the exception of the Hardy Boys). He’d won an Oscar for a cartoon short called “Munro.”Hadn’t seen it. I was about to return the book to the rack when I cracked it open and read the first panel, which showed a young boy, saying: “Eleven years old and I can’t play baseball.” Now I could play baseball in an adequate if unspectacular manner (good field, sporadic bat), but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the kid in the cartoon was eleven—my age! I forked over 50 cents and brought the book home, thinking it was going to be about an eleven-year-old kid, kind of like “Peanuts.” I dove into the book, and soon discovered my mistake. But I wasn’t disappointed; “Sick Sick Sick” was the first really adult book I’d read, (let’s be honest: the James Bond novels didn’t count), a book in which the failings and craziness and meanness of grown-ups were prominently on display—failings and craziness and meanness I suspected existed but had no real proof . . . yet. Why an Irish Catholic kid from Queens was so interested in the neuroses and hypocrisies of so-called mature people remains a mystery, but I’m grateful to Feiffer for that early education. I certainly wasn’t getting it from the Sisters of Mercy.
In 1965, my admiration for Feiffer grew when he compiled, introduced and annotated “The Great Comic Book Heroes,” a spectacular collection of classic comics reproduced in full color. As is my wont, both Feiffer books remain on my bookshelves all these many years later. Like Charlton Heston and his rifles, they’ll have to pry each volume from my cold dead hands.
Now comes Jules Feiffer’s memoir, “Backing Into Forward.” Who knew that Feiffer, now 81, was related to the lizardly Roy Cohn (talk about different worlds)? The book is quite wonderful, relating his youth in the Bronx (Feiffer was definitely that kid from the strip who couldn’t play baseball), his parents and siblings (a difficult mother, to put it mildly), his early gift for art, adolescent struggles, apprenticeship working with the legendary Will Eisner, nutty Army duty. Feiffer’s description of New York in the 50s and 60s is as evocative as the best writing on the era (which includes fine books by Anatole Broyard, Dan Wakefield, Victor Navasky, Frank Conroy, and others). Feiffer’s world in these years is one of smoky cocktail parties crowded with writers and artists and journalists and actors (Mailer, Murray Kempton, Nichols and May, the Partisan Review and Commentary crowds, the Voice founders and early contributors, William Styron--even Marlene Dietrich--make appearances). Feiffer would go on to win a Pulitzer, an Obie for his play “Little Murders,” and author a variety of works, including the screenplay for “Carnal Knowledge.”
For me, what has always anchored Feiffer’s work is its humanness. We are far, far from perfect, Feiffer says. And there are bad people out there, a point he would make often in his barbs at politicians and the military industrial complex. But lots of us, lost and befuddled as we may be, keep going, beating those damn boats against the current. And sometimes just laughing at our foibles helps a hell of a lot.
“Backing Into Forward” is generously illustrated with Feiffer’s work. And I know just where the memoir is going: right between “Sick Sick Sick” and “The Great Comic Book Heroes,” acquired more than 45 years ago. Proof that Fitzgerald was right: we are "borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
There are worse places to be these days.

“Dead Snow”: Nazi Zombies!

Director: Tommy Wirkola 2009
The great Pauline Kael once wrote facetiously that “Night of the Living Dead” was the “best movie ever made in Pittsburgh” (she also added that it was “one of the most terrifying movies ever made”). So in the spirit of the late Kael, (who had an immense influence on the way I view movies), I hereby declare “Dead Snow” as the best Nazi zombie flick ever made in Norway.
Confession: I love zombie movies, and have ever since seeing George Romero’s original, followed by his classic follow-up, “Dawn of the Dead.” The latter movie is the one where hordes of zombies instinctively invade a local shopping mall because that’s what they did when they were alive—an obvious but hilarious comment on American consumerism. Romero has made several more zombie movies, some with great moments, but really after “Night” and ”Dawn” what’s left to say? Plenty, if you dig zombie films made by other writers and directors (like Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” and Danny Boyle’s “28 Days After”).
“Dead Snow” is an original, although it clearly pays homage to horror experts like Romero, Raimi, etc. But it’s also an original that plays with certain zombie conventions. The plot: a group of medical students and friends take off to a snowy area of Norway to stay at a remote cabin and frolic. The place is so remote that they have to trek miles by foot, and cell service doesn’t work. What they don’t know is that a battalion of Nazi zombies has been hanging around since World War ll (how they became zombies is never made clear—who cares?). The carnage gets grosser and grosser in really inventive ways (my favorite scene is a literal cliffhanger with one hero dangling by the entrails of one of the zombies). The movie’s fun at the right moments, and terrifying throughout. Beautiful cinematography, director Wirkola has a gifted eye, and the cast is just right.
If you dig zombie movies this is a crazy enterprise, perhaps, but something of a horror classic. Highly recommended for aficionados of the undead.

Spring Is Here

Berkeley is particularly beautiful this time of year (yes, I’m a Berkeley booster; for all its flaws the city remains the most interesting place I’ve lived over the last 58 years (yikes). My wife Chris is a gifted gardener (as well as a gifted writer, gifted musician, gifted singer and overall gifted lady), and I’ve taken a few pictures of the backyard, including a shot of the first rose of the season, and another of Roxie the Lab, the ever-present tennis ball at her paws.
This entry has zero to do with movies or books, but hey, it’s my blog and sometimes a little diversion can be a welcome thing.