Anthony Minghella, 54, Director, Dies (the New York Times)

Note to the Capture: Jude Law, right, with Mr. Minghella on the set of the 2006 film "Breaking and Entering." The director worked with Mr. Law on three films. Photo: Laurie Sparham/Weinstein Company
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March 19, 2008
Obituaries
Anthony Minghella, 54, Director, Dies
By DAVID CARR

Anthony Minghella, the British filmmaker who won an Academy Award for his direction of “The English Patient,” died Tuesday morning in London. He was 54.

The cause was complications of surgery he had a week ago to treat tonsil cancer, said Leslee Dart, his publicist.

The son of parents who made ice cream on the Isle of Wight, off the coast of England, Mr. Minghella used expansive tastes in literature and a deep visual vocabulary to make lush films with complicated themes that found both audiences and accolades. Mr. Minghella’s films, which also included “Breaking and Entering” (2006), “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999) and “Cold Mountain” (2003), used a careful eye for cultural and historical detail to explore ways in which the dynamics of class often pushed people into corners that they had to fight or scheme their way out of.

His gift for building fully realized worlds within worlds also found expression in opera. Mr. Minghella directed an acclaimed staging of “Madama Butterfly” in 2006, and he was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to direct and write the libretto for a new work by the composer Osvaldo Golijov that was scheduled for the 2011-12 season.

Mr. Minghella recently completed work on “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency,” an adaptation of an Alexander McCall Smith novel, which was filmed in Botswana, in southern Africa, for HBO and the BBC as the pilot of a series.

He worked as a writer and a director in both theater and television. Samuel Beckett was a particular fascination; Mr. Minghella organized a star-studded tribute to Beckett in 2006.

After his movie-directing debut in “Truly Madly Deeply,” a made-for-television production that was released theatrically in 1990, Mr. Minghella went on to adapt a number of novels for a series of well-reviewed films. In addition to winning the directing Oscar in 1997 for “The English Patient” — which garnered a total of nine Oscars, including best picture — Mr. Minghella also received an adapted-screenplay nomination. In 2000 his screenplay for “The Talented Mr. Ripley” was nominated as well.

That same year Mr. Minghella joined a fellow director, Sydney Pollack, to form Mirage, an independent production company that concluded a three-year first-look deal with the Weinstein Company earlier this month. They collaborated as producers on a number of films and worked on each other’s films as well.

“He was interested in the magic,” Mr. Pollack said. “Not fake magic, like hiding the ball under the cup, but real magic, the kind that occurs between people. Nowadays, everybody making movies wants to get the clothes off fast and the guns out quick, he was just the opposite. He was interested in the poetry, lavishing the viewer with story, and scope and richness. Look at what you got for your $12 ticket with Anthony.”

“There was a real authenticity to his work,” Mr. Pollack added. “He made movies about the world that we live in, where stuff happened that no one could have anticipated.”

Mr. Minghella recently stepped down from his position as chairman of the British Film Institute, an organization that promotes making films in Britain.

Anthony Minghella was born on Jan. 6, 1954, and grew up on the Isle of Wight, where his parents, immigrants from Italy, ran an ice cream factory. An outsider even in his native land, Mr. Minghella took on large historical issues in his work, like the human consequences of epic warfare in “Cold Mountain,” about a soldier’s journey across an American landscape battered by the Civil War. Closer to home, his film “Breaking and Entering” examined the interlocking lives of thieves and their victims in today’s London, a place where he believed immigrants are less assimilated than tolerated.

“But while we share the geographical space, we don’t share much else,” he said to The New York Times in 2006 in talking about the film, which was based on his first original screenplay since “Truly Madly Deeply.” “We’re not particularly well integrated. One of the curiosities can be the differences, rather than the similarities, between people walking down the street — differences in expectation and privilege, in wealth and opportunity. It’s not tension or aggression, but a kind of guarded indifference. We coexist rather than create communities.”

Mr. Minghella’s concern with seeing beyond roles assigned by hierarchy or education extended to the work itself.

“Anthony was the opposite of the prissy, hysterical director,” said Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. “He was calm and intelligent and persuasive, whether he was talking to a board member or a member of the stage crew.”

In what was viewed as a risky move at the time, Mr. Gelb chose Mr. Minghella to direct “Madama Butterfly,” which opened the Met’s 2006 season. Although Mr. Minghella was a trained pianist, he was an opera neophyte before the “Butterfly” production, which originated at the English National Opera in London.

“Everyone here had every reason to be suspicious of him because they knew his opera credentials were limited,” Mr. Gelb said. ”But he set the tone at the first rehearsal — he told the people in the production that he wanted them to read the text to him before they sang a note. The message was clear, that they were not only opera singers, but actors as well.”

The subsequent production, which included blended cinematic elements (a series of movable screens) along with creative stagecraft (Cio-Cio-San’s son was rendered as a puppet) pleased critics and audiences alike.

Mr. Minghella is survived by his wife, Carolyn Choa, who choreographed the “Butterfly” production; his son, Max; his daughter, Hannah; his parents, Eddie and Gloria Minghella; his brother, Dominic; and three sisters: Gioia, Loretta and Edana.

With a large, bald head, and a thick frame, Mr. Minghella had the physical affect of dockworker, but when he opened his mouth, it was clear he was an omnivorously literate person.

“I can’t think of a conversation that I had in the last five years that didn’t include a reference about what book he was reading,” said Scott Rudin, who produced a number of films with both Mr. Minghella and Mr. Pollack. “He was the first person to pick up the phone and talk about some amazing play he had seen in North London, and a few days later there would be a script on my desk.”

Mr. Pollack said the history of successful production collaborations between directors was so short as not worth measuring, but said that while he and Mr. Minghella often disagreed about particulars — “We fought plenty” — they had values in common.

“We both know what was junk and what was good,” Mr. Pollack said. “There were a lot of movies that we planned together and are now not going to be able to do. It’s sad for me, but it’s also too bad that people won’t see those movies.”

Just the Facts, Ma’Am (by Jill Lepore, the New Yorker)

Note to the Illustration:
Modern history arose when the novel did, but novelists had their truths to claim.
illustration by Barry Blitt.

A Critic at Large
Just the Facts, Ma’Am
Fake memoirs, factual fictions, and the history of history.
by Jill Lepore March 24, 2008

What makes a book a history? In the eighteenth century, novelists called their books “histories,” smack on the title page. No one was more brash about this than Henry Fielding, who, in his 1749 “History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,” included a chapter called “Of Those Who Lawfully May, and of Those Who May Not Write Such Histories as This.” Fielding insisted that what flowed from his pen was “true history”; fiction was what historians wrote.

“I shall not look on myself as accountable to any Court of Critical Jurisdiction whatever: For as I am, in reality, the Founder of a new Province of Writing,” Fielding explained. Tom Jones’s claim to truth is different from Margaret Jones’s. Earlier this month, Jones, also known as Margaret Seltzer, tried to pass off a gangland bildungsroman as the story of her life. Pulped days after it was published, the book, titled “Love and Consequences,” is a fraud; “Tom Jones” is not. Fielding was playing; Seltzer was just lying.

But Fielding meant it when he said that “Tom Jones” was true, and there’s a sense in which he was right. History matters, but the best novels boast a kind of truth that even the best history books can never claim. And when history books are wrong they can be miserably, badly, ridiculously wrong, a point that wasn’t lost on Jane Austen, who, in 1791, when she was sixteen, wrote a brilliant parody of Oliver Goldsmith’s four-volume, march-of-the-monarchs “History of England, from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II.” (Goldsmith, the author of the novel “The Vicar of Wakefield,” wrote history to keep out of debtors’ prison.) Austen called her parody “The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st, by a Partial, Prejudiced & Ignorant Historian.” It consisted of thirteen perfectly dunderheaded character sketches of crowned heads of England. Of Henry V, she wrote, “During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for.” Of the Duke of Somerset: “He was beheaded, of which he might with reason have been proud, had he known that such was the death of Mary Queen of Scotland; but as it was impossible that he should be conscious of what had never happened, it does not appear that he felt particularly delighted with the manner of it.” Of the allegation that Lady Jane Grey, Edward VI’s cousin, read Greek: “Whether she really understood that language or whether such a study proceeded only from an excess of vanity for which I believe she was always rather remarkable, is uncertain.” Once in a great while, Austen happened to bump into a fact or two, for which she apologized: “Truth being I think very excusable in an Historian.”

Historians and novelists are kin, in other words, but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes. The literary genre that became known as “the novel” was born in the eighteenth century. History, the empirical sort based on archival research and practiced in universities, anyway, was born at much the same time. Its novelty is not as often remembered, though, not least because it wasn’t called “novel.” In a way, history is the anti-novel, the novel’s twin, though which is Cain and which is Abel depends on your point of view.

Among the ancients, history was a literary art, as John Burrow illustrates in his fascinating compendium “A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century” (Knopf; $35). Invention was a hallmark of ancient history, which was filled with long, often purely fictitious speeches of great men. It was animated by rhetoric, not by evidence. Even well into the eighteenth century, not a few historians continued to understand themselves as artists, with license to invent. Eager not to be confused with antiquarians and mere chroniclers, even budding empiricists confessed a certain lack of fussiness about facts. In “Letters on the Study and Use of History” (1752), Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke condemned those who “store their minds with crude unruminated facts and sentences; and hope to supply, by bare memory, the want of imagination and judgment.”

The transformation of history into an empirical science began as early as the sixteenth century and became entrenched only in the nineteenth century. By the time the American Historical Association was founded, in 1884, the “cult of the fact” (as the intellectual historian Peter Novick has called it) had achieved ascendancy. Ever since, generations of historians have defined themselves by a set of standards that rest on the distinction between truth and invention, even when that has meant scorning everyone who came before them. Between 1834 and 1874, the American statesman and historian George Bancroft, much influenced by Sir Walter Scott, produced a ten-volume “History of the United States.” It is romantic and opinionated; it has a gritty voice and a passionate point of view. It’s a little . . . novel-ish. In the eighteen-seventies, one Young Turk suggested that a better title for it would be “The Psychological Autobiography of George Bancroft, As Illustrated by Incidents and Characters in the Annals of the United States.” A generation later, Bancroft’s monumental accomplishment looked even worse: now it was, as the Yale historian Charles McLean Andrews put it, “nothing less than a crime against historical truth.”

But is “historical truth” truer than fictional truth? The difference between history and poetry, Aristotle argued, is that “the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen. And in fact that is why the writing of poetry is a more philosophical activity, and one to be taken more seriously, than the writing of history.” Historians have turned this thinking on its head. History, not literature, is the serious stuff.

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, many historians worried that the seriousness of history, its very integrity as a discipline, was in danger of being destroyed by literary theorists who insisted on the constructedness, the fictionality, of all historical writing—who suggested that the past is nothing more than a story we tell about it. The field seemed to be tottering on the edge of an epistemological abyss: If history is fiction, if history is not true, what’s the use? (The panic has since died down, but it hasn’t died out. Donald Kagan, in his 2005 Jefferson lecture, “In Defense of History,” grumbled about the perils of “pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo.”) In 1990, Sir Geoffrey Elton called postmodern literary theory “the intellectual equivalent of crack.” The next year, the eminent American historian Gordon Wood, writing in The New York Review of Books, warned that if things were to keep on this way historians would soon “put themselves out of business.” Reviewing Simon Schama’s “Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)”—a history book in which Schama indulged in flights of fancy, fully disclosed as such—Wood wrote, “His violation of the conventions of history writing actually puts the integrity of the discipline of history at risk.” That review, along with twenty more (including one of a book of mine), appears in Wood’s new book, “The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History” (Penguin Press; $25.95); each review has an afterword, and in an introduction the author catalogues the failings of “unhistorical historians.”

Revisiting his review of “Dead Certainties,” Wood takes the trouble to reproach Schama again for having “forgotten that he was not Walter Scott or E. L. Doctorow,” and for ignoring “both the epistemological climate of the early 1990s and the devastating effects such a work by such a distinguished historian could have on the conventions of the discipline.” As Wood sees it, these conventions need protecting because their novelty—“They are scarcely more than a century old”—makes them fragile. But they’re sturdier than he thinks. Margaret Jones is accountable to a court of jurisdiction in a way that Tom Jones was not. Historians and critics, readers and writers, haven’t given up on truth. And postmodernism turns out to be a bit of a bugbear. It’s premodernism that’s got all the teeth.

In the eighteenth century, the boundary between history and fiction was different from what it is now. For one thing, plenty of people wrote both history books and novels, including Voltaire, Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, Daniel Defoe, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Charles Brockden Brown. The century’s most influential historians, David Hume and Edward Gibbon, happen to have been particular fans of Fielding’s novels (and Fielding considered reading history essential preparation for writing novels). History books and novels alike aimed at seducing readers through plot and even suspense. “History, like tragedy, requires an exposition, a central action, and a dénouement,” Voltaire wrote in 1752. “My secret is to force the reader to wonder: Will Philip V ascend the throne?”

Eighteenth-century novels also pretended that they were true. Not only did they call themselves “histories”; they also often took the form of counterfeit historical documents, usually letters or journals—a form that was itself a parody of the conventions of historical writing. In the preface to “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” (1719), Daniel Defoe insisted, “The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.” But of course Defoe was not the editor of a journal kept by a man named Crusoe; there was no journal. Defoe made it up. What Defoe meant by this imposture, one critic wrote, “I know not; unless you would have us think, that the Manner of your telling a Lie will make it a Truth.”

It’s easy to think that Defoe was joking, as if Robinson Crusoe’s journal were as much a gimmick as Esquire’s “diary” of Heath Ledger, but Defoe, like Fielding, was making a (mostly) straight-faced epistemological argument. And less playful novelists did the same thing. Samuel Richardson insisted that he was merely the editor of Pamela’s letters, first published in England in 1740 as “Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded” (and published by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia two years later). This was a lie, but not a hoax; Richardson wanted his novels to be read with “Historical Faith,” since they contained, he believed, the truth of the possible, the truth of human nature. The first American novels weren’t published until the seventeen-eighties and nineties, but they cluttered their title pages with the same claims: “FOUNDED ON FACT”; “A Tale of Truth.”

What this implies is nicely illustrated by David Hume (who, in his lifetime, was better known as a historian than as a philosopher). In “Of the Study of History” (1741), Hume told a story about how the same book can be read as both history and fiction. A “young beauty” asked Hume to send her some novels; instead, he sent her some history books—Plutarch’s Lives—but told her they were novels, assuring her “that there was not a word of truth in them from beginning to end.” She read them avidly, at least “ ’till she came to the lives of ALEXANDER and CAESAR, whose names she had heard of by accident; and then returned me the book, with many reproaches for deceiving her.” As fiction, Plutarch’s Lives was delightful; as history, it was unbearable. Hume toyed with the opposite idea in “A Treatise of Human Nature” (1739-40): two books, one a history, and one a novel, might contain the same truth. “If one person sits down to read a book as a romance, and another as a true history,” he wrote, “they plainly receive the same ideas, and in the same order; nor does the incredulity of the one, and the belief of the other hinder them from putting the very same sense upon their author. His words produce the same ideas in both.”

If a history book can be read as if it were a novel, and if a reader can find the same truth in a history book and a novel, what, finally, is the difference between them? This is a difficult question, Hume admitted. Maybe it just feels different—more profound—to read what we believe to be true (an idea assented to) than what we believe to be false (a fancy): “An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us.”

But there’s more between them. A novel, as Defoe put it, is a “private History,” a history of private life. “I will tell you in three words what the book is,” Laurence Sterne wrote in “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,” published beginning in 1759. He was talking about Locke’s account of how the mind worked and, by extension, his own. “It is a history.—A history! of who? what? where? when? Don’t hurry yourself. —It is a history-book, Sir, (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s own mind.” Fielding went farther. He called his writing “true history.” It is “our Business to relate Facts as they are,” Fielding told his reader, classing himself among historical writers who draw their materials not from records but from “the vast authentic Doomsday-Book of Nature.”

For Fielding, there are two kinds of historical writing: history based in fact (whose truth is founded in documentary evidence), and history based in fiction (whose truth is founded in human nature). Maybe—to take some license with Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (1813)—these two manners of writing bear the same relationship to one another as Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham: “One has got all the truth, and the other all the appearance of it.” The question is: which is which?

“Dismiss me from the falsehood and impossibility of history, and deliver me over to the reality of romance,” the English writer William Godwin pleaded in “Of History and Romance,” in 1797. (Not for nothing had Godwin called his novel, written a few years earlier, “Things As They Are.”) There is not and never can be any such thing as true history, Godwin insisted: “Nothing is more uncertain, more contradictory, more unsatisfactory than the evidence of facts.” Every history is incomplete; every historian has a point of view; every historian relies on what is unreliable—documents written by people who were not under oath and cannot be cross-examined. (That is to say, even the best historian has a good deal in common with Jane Austen’s “Partial, Prejudiced & Ignorant Historian.”) Before his imperfect sources, the historian is powerless: “He must take what they choose to tell, the broken fragments, and the scattered ruins of evidence.” He could decide merely to reproduce his sources, to offer a list of facts: “But this is in reality no history. He that knows only on what day the Bastille was taken and on what spot Louis XVI perished, knows nothing.”

Fortunately, there is yet another kind of history, Godwin argued, “the noblest and most excellent species of history”: the novel, or romance. The novelist is the better historian—and especially better than the empirical historian—because he admits that he is partial, prejudiced, and ignorant, and because he has not forsaken passion: “The writer of romance is to be considered as the writer of real history; while he who was formerly called the historian, must be contented to step down into the place of his rival, with this disadvantage, that he is a romance writer, without the arduous, the enthusiastic and the sublime licence of imagination that belong to that species of composition.”

Godwin’s essay wasn’t published until the twentieth century, which makes it all the more remarkable that the Philadelphian Charles Brockden Brown put forth a look-alike argument in “The Difference Between History and Romance,” an essay published in The Monthly Magazine and American Review in April, 1800. (To be sure, Brown was very much influenced by Godwin. Carl Van Doren once wrote, “His novels all bear the marks of haste, immaturity, and Godwin.”) “History and romance are terms that have never been very clearly distinguished from each other,” Brown began. “It should seem that one dealt in fiction, and the other in truth; that one is a picture of the probable and certain, and the other a tissue of untruths; that one describes what might have happened, and what has actually happened, and the other what never had existence.” Yet these distinctions are not as helpful as they at first appear: history concerns facts, but, because these have to be arranged and explained, the historian “is a dealer, not in certainties, but probabilities, and is therefore a romancer.”

In an 1806 essay called “Historical Characters Are False Representations of Nature,” Brown suggested that the historian’s grossest deception is promoting the idea that only the great are good: “Popular prejudice assists the illusion, and because we are accustomed to behold public characters occupy a situation in life that few can experience, we are induced to believe that their capacities are more enlarged, their passions more refined, and, in a word, that nature has bestowed on them faculties denied to obscurer men.” But great characters are not superior to obscure men, who are, alas, condemned to obscurity by history itself. “If it were possible to read the histories of those who are doomed to have no historian, and to glance into domestic journals as well as into national archives,” Brown speculated, “we should then perceive the unjust prodigality of our sympathy to those few names, which eloquence has adorned with all the seduction of her graces.”

Fiction, in other words, can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people. The eighteenth century’s fictive history (not to be confused with what we call “historical fiction”) is the history of private life; the history of what passes in a man’s own mind; true to the Book of Nature; and written in plain, simple style, exhibiting both judgment and invention. And it is the history of obscure men. Who are these obscure men? Well, a lot of them are women.

For every Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe, there were a dozen Clarissas, Pamelas, and Charlotte Temples. If eighteenth-century novels are history, they’re women’s history. And they were adored, above all, by women readers. “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity” was the revealing title of an essay published in England in 1797 and in Boston five years later. Everyone from preachers to politicians damned novels as corrupting of both public and private virtue and, above all, of women’s virtue. “Novels not only pollute the imaginations of young women,” one American magazine writer insisted in 1798; they give them “false ideas of life.”

What, pray, was the remedy for this grave social ill? Reading history. “There is nothing which I would recommend more earnestly to my female readers than the study of history,” Hume wrote in “Of the Study of History” (which is why he gave his lady friend Plutarch’s Lives, and told her it was a novel). But, on the whole, women were not particularly interested in reading history. Hume attributed this to the fair sex’s “aversion to matter of fact” and its “appetite for falsehood.” Men “allow us Poetry, Plays, and Romances,” Mary Astell wrote in 1705, “and when they would express a particular Esteem for a Woman’s Sense, they recommend History.” But why read it? “For tho’ it may be of Use to Men who govern Affairs, to know how their Fore-fathers Acted, yet what is this to us?” Much as writers of history tried to woo women readers, they made very little headway. Near the end of the century, Mary Wollstonecraft was left to ask of women: “Is it surprising that they find the reading of history a very dry task?” (After publishing her “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” in 1792, Wollstonecraft started writing a novel, “Maria; or, the Wrongs of Women,” to make sure that her arguments would reach women readers. Her husband, William Godwin, had it published in 1798, after she died, in childbirth.)

Women were not only not interested in history; they didn’t trust it. In “Northanger Abbey” (completed by 1803), Jane Austen’s comic heroine, who adores novels, confesses that she finds history both boring and impossible to credit: “It tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” Austen saw fit to echo this exchange in “Persuasion” (1818). “All histories are against you,” Captain Harville insists, when Austen’s levelheaded heroine, Anne Elliot, argues that women are more constant than men. “But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men,” Harville guesses, and Anne agrees. “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” she observes, saying, “I will not allow books to prove any thing.”

By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, too. And most historians, along with their readers, were men. As the discipline of history, the anti-novel, emerged, and especially as it professionalized, it defined itself as the domain of men. (Women might write biography, or dabble in genealogy.) Eighteenth-century observers, in other words, understood the distinction between history and fiction not merely and maybe not even predominantly as a distinction between truth and invention but as a distinction between stories by, about, and of interest to men and stories by, about, and of interest to women. Women read novels, women wrote novels, women were the heroines of novels. Men read history, men wrote history, men were the heroes of history. (When men wrote novels, Godwin suggested, this was regarded as “a symptom of effeminacy.”)

As Burrow’s “A History of Histories” and Wood’s “Purpose of the Past” make clear, however, much of what distinguished eighteenth-century fiction from eighteenth-century history is now part of how academic historians write history. Most of the popular history books you’ll find in Barnes & Noble celebrate the public lives of famous men, but the history books that many academics have been writing for the past half century concern the private lives of ordinary people. (Memoirs constitute a related but distinct genre, chronicling the lives of both the famous and the not so famous, and borrowing from the conventions of history and of fiction. Fake memoirs, like Margaret Jones’s or Misha Defonesca’s, borrow from those genres, but without achieving the legitimacy of either.) “By the 1970s,” Wood writes, “this new social history of hitherto forgotten people had come to dominate academic history writing.” Maybe the topics that have seized professional historians’ attention—family history, social history, women’s history, cultural history, “microhistory”—constitute nothing more than an attempt to take back territory they forfeited to novelists in the eighteenth century. If so, historians have reclaimed from novelists nearly everything except the license to invent . . . and women readers. Today, publishers figure that men buy the great majority of popular history books; most fiction buyers are women.

Is “history at risk”? If women barely read it at all, and if men mostly read books with titles like “Guts and Guns,” it just might be. “A History of Histories” and “The Purpose of the Past” offer a useful reminder that history is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else. But, as for telling stories, maybe historians still have a few things to learn from novelists. Reading Jane Austen being I think very excusable in an Historian. ♦

My Invitation Isn't in the Mail (by Cathy Horyn, the New York Times)

Notes to the caption: ENVELOPE PLEASE Fashion writers must be invited to a runway show.Dima Gavrysh/Associated Press

March 13, 2008
Critic’s Notebook
My Invitation Isn’t in the Mail
By CATHY HORYN

GIORGIO ARMANI does not want me at his fashion shows.

In a letter to my editor earlier this month, he cites my “unnecessarily sarcastic comments” about his friends and family in a review of his last couture show and notes that I have “rarely found positive remarks” to make about his ready-to-wear collections, and then surmises that I have “an embedded preconception.” He concludes: “Going forward therefore, I see no real merit in inviting Cathy Horyn to my women’s shows.”

The subject of banning journalists from fashion shows seems as quaint as the practice itself, neither a commendation to the industry nor a badge of honor to the critic. Indeed, fashion is the only creative field that attempts to bar the news media.

Drama and film critics are often baited and pressured by producers. When Frank Rich was the chief drama critic of The Times, the producer David Merrick tried, and failed, to place a pair of ads in the paper inviting pyromaniacs to the Times building. But those critics can always buy a ticket to a play or movie. A fashion writer must be invited to a runway show.

But of course that sounds ridiculous, as though I am wearing white gloves and a girdle to type on my I.B.M. ThinkPad. This is 2008. Two hours after a hot show like Prada or Balenciaga anyone, not just reporters, can pull up images on the Internet and post their opinions on blogs around the world. The wonder to me is not why a designer like Mr. Armani bans a journalist. Rather it is why he doesn’t use the power of digital technology to take his message directly to the public, effectively knocking out journalists who complain that his clothes are out of touch.

What being banned tells me is that fashion has entered a borderland between the old and the new. Practiced mainly by older designers, whose careers took flight in the 1980s, banning seems a reflexive action against a perceived threat to their power. After Hadley Freeman, the deputy fashion editor of The Guardian in London, gave an unflattering description of a Jean Paul Gaultier fur cape with flying carcass heads, in July 2006, she was informed by his press representative that she would be “banned for life.”

The ’80s was a creative period in fashion, the decade of nouveau-riche dressing and the invasion of the Japanese designers in Paris, but it was also an uncritical one. In the United States, except for a handful of writers, notably Kennedy Fraser of The New Yorker, there wasn’t much critical discussion of fashion. Women’s Wear Daily could be tough on designers, extracting loyalty and punishment with the glee of a small boy pulling the wings off a fly, and there was the paper’s famous feud with Geoffrey Beene.

More recently, Suzy Menkes, the fashion editor of The International Herald Tribune, has been temporarily banned by some houses (as was her predecessor, Hebe Dorsey, who took the matter lightly: She had her hair done and then wrote about it).

Until I got to The Times, in late 1998, I had written some fairly critical reviews and profiles of designers but had never been excluded from a show. The first designer to ban me was Helmut Lang — a perplexing turn, I felt, since one of Mr. Lang’s reasons for adopting New York as his home was that it is the news media center of the world. Later, there were bans from Carolina Herrera (recently lifted) and Dolce & Gabbana (still imposed).

I have no doubt, as Lynn Tesoro, a seasoned fashion publicist, says, that designers who take their works seriously also take harsh reviews personally. Yet it is clear to her that some designers don’t fully understand the different roles of the media — the magazine editors looking for beautiful clothes to photograph (and, with luck, an advertiser to satisfy in the process), the newspaper critic examining a creative change, and increasingly the amateur blogger. During the recent shows, Ms. Tesoro said, a client of hers complained about reader comments on a fashion blog, demanding to know how they could be controlled or excised.

Many consumers find Mr. Armani’s clothes very appealing, and certainly no one would bother denying that he had a huge impact on the way men and women looked in the ’80s and early ’90s. I loved attending his shows then. The half-lit beige amphitheater in his Milan palazzo, the knowing sense of taste, the glide of the models.

And if fashion writers might be suspect in appraising his influence, given the furriness of the prose and the amount he spends on advertising in magazines, there have been plenty of culture critics to explain it, not least the late Herbert Muschamp. In a dazzling review in this paper of the Armani exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2000, he identified an imaginative power that was equal to Cecil Beaton’s in the Ascot scene in “My Fair Lady.” But, as Muschamp pointed out, institutions like the Guggenheim, which was criticized for accepting perhaps as much as $15 million in donations from Mr. Armani, don’t do well when they import fashion-world values, like cronyism, delusion and sycophancy, into their decision-making process.

Well, fashion houses don’t do well with these values, either. On Feb. 17, when I learned in Milan that Mr. Armani was not inviting me to his fall 2008 women’s show, I ran into a number of my fashion sisters who darkly commiserated with me, as if we shared a secret. But just when did attending a fashion show cease to be a pleasure and become instead a chore? Or is the show and our almost compulsory attendance really about something else, about preserving distinct power bases in the face of their rapid erosion?

The system of inviting editors to see a new collection has been in place for decades and, despite the public access created by the Internet, has encouraged a kind of rigid caste system, with front-row chiefs, art directors, top photographers and, farther back, the stylists, junior editors and now bloggers.

It is not unusual to hear journalists complain that their seat assignment does not reflect their rank, or to hear a house publicist fret about it. Ms. Freeman of The Guardian said she and other British editors received a letter from Chanel apologizing that their seats at the recent show in Paris did not reflect the “hierarchical order” of the British contingent, which was apparently moved back a row or two to make room for some Chanel V.I.P.’s.

The pompous-sounding letter made Ms. Freeman laugh. “Aren’t we there to look at the clothes?” she asked rhetorically.

Yes — and no. If writers were there just to look at clothes and collect their thoughts for reviews and future articles, there would be no finicky emphasis on placement, as though we were guests at a private dinner party. And without the cozening emphasis on rank there would be no threat of demotion or outright banishment from the group. (Anyone who complains that fashion is like high school is quite correct.)

“The reason we go to fashion shows is to see other people and to see where they are in the industry based on where they are sitting,” Ms. Freeman said. “For shows that are so redolent of the ’80s, the only strength a designer has is his seating assignments.”

Marko Jenko, an art history student in Slovenia who is a regular on my blog, recently pointed out that perceptions are a form of public space, like the airwaves, and that designers can’t control them. Besides, Mr. Jenko said, Mr. Armani already profits handsomely from having his name blazed on television, billboards, in magazines, on scores of self-named products.

If the power of digital technology makes obsolete the practice of banning journalists, what remains of the old system but an empty seat? I can’t say yet whether I will write about Mr. Armani’s clothes by viewing them online. Frankly, I would be much more excited if he unburdened himself of the whole system, closed down the shows, stopped with the backstage stroking sessions, and went directly over the Internet to the public.

And if fashion writers don’t know what to do with themselves, if such a day ever comes, then that’s their problem.

Who Is Grady Harp? (by Garth Risk Hallberg, the Slate.com)

culturebox
Who Is Grady Harp?
Amazon's Top Reviewers and the fate of the literary amateur.
By Garth Risk Hallberg
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 7:33 AM ET


Full disclosure: It was late at night, in a fit of furtive self-Googling, that I discovered the first Amazon customer review of my debut book of fiction. "Superb," wrote Grady Harp of Los Angeles. "Fascinating ... addictive." Not to mention "profound." Such extravagance should have aroused suspicion, but I was too busy basking in the glow of a five-star rave to worry about the finer points of Harp's style. Sure, he'd spelled my name wrong, but hadn't he also judged me "a sensitive observer of human foibles"? Only when I noticed the "Top 10 Reviewer" tag did I wonder whether Grady Harp was more than just a satisfied customer. After a brief e-mail exchange, my publicist confirmed that she'd solicited Grady Harp's review.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I had imagined Amazon's customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: "an intelligent and articulate conversation ... conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits," as James Marcus, a former editor at the company, wrote in his memoir, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. Indeed, with customers unseating salaried employees like Marcus as the company's leading content producers, Amazon had been hailed as a harbinger of "Web 2.0"—an ideal realm where user-generated consensus trumps the bankrupt pieties of experts. As I explored the murky understory of Amazon's reviewer rankings, however, I came to see the real Web 2.0 as a tangle of hidden agendas—one in which the disinterested amateur may be an endangered species.

On the surface, Grady Harp seems just the sort of enlightened consumer who might lead us out of Web 1.0's darkness. A 66-year-old gallerist, retired surgeon, and poet, he has reviewed over 3,500 books, CDs, and movies for Amazon. In turn, he has attained a kind of celebrity: a No. 7 ranking; a prominent profile on the Web site; and, apparently, a following. In the week after his endorsement of my work appeared, more than 100 readers clicked on a button that said, "I found this review helpful." His stated mission is to remain "ever on the lookout for the new and promising geniuses of tomorrow." At present, Dr. Harp's vigil runs to about 500,000 words—a critical corpus to rival Dr. Johnson's—and his reviews are clearly the product of a single, effusive sensibility. Jose Saramago's Blindness is "A Searing, Mesmerizing Journey" (five stars); The Queer Men's Erotic Art Workshop's Dirty Little Drawings, "A Surprisingly Rich Treasure Trove" (five stars).

Such efforts have led a quorum of enthusiasts to hail Harp as a standard-bearer for literary amateurism. "Keep your pen hot, Grady!" one comments. Yet an equally energetic chorus of detractors carps that Harp's Amazon reviews are more self-interested than they might appear. The comment threads accompanying Harp postings devolve into litanies of accusation: GH engages in back-scratching; GH is unduly influenced by publishers; GH has failed to read the book under review.

My own research suggests that GH is no more or less credible than Amazon's other "celebrity reviewers." Harriet Klausner, No. 1 since the inception of the ranking system in 2000, has averaged 45 book reviews per week over the last five years—a pace that seems hard to credit, even from a professed speed-reader. Reviewer No. 3, Donald Mitchell, ceaselessly promotes "the 400 Year Project," which his profile identifies only as "a pro bono, noncommercial project to help the world make improvements at 20 times the normal rate." John "Gunny" Matlock, ranked No. 6 this spring, took a holiday from Amazon, according to Vick Mickunas of the Dayton Daily News, after allegations that 27 different writers had helped generate his reviews.

Absent the institutional standards that govern (however notionally) professional journalists, Web 2.0 stakes its credibility on the transparency of users' motives and their freedom from top-down interference. Amazon, for example, describes its Top Reviewers as "clear-eyed critics [who] provide their fellow shoppers with helpful, honest, tell-it-like-it-is product information." But beneath the just-us-folks rhetoric lurks an unresolved tension between transparency and opacity; in this respect, Amazon exemplifies the ambiguities of Web 2.0. The Top 10 List promises interactivity—"How do I become a Top Reviewer?"—yet Amazon guards its rankings algorithms closely. A spokeswoman for the company would explain only that a reviewer's standing is based on the number of votes labeling a review "helpful," rather than on the raw number of books reviewed by any one person. The Top Reviewers are those who give "the most trusted feedback," she told me, echoing the copy on the Web site.

As in any numbers game (tax returns, elections) opacity abets manipulation. Amazon's rankings establish a formal, public competition for power—or its online equivalent, recognition—wherein each competitor follows his own private sense of fair play. Or not. On the tongue-in-cheek Harriet Klausner Appreciation Society blog, I found allegations that Grady Harp's 92,000 "helpful votes" are the product of collusion—that Amazon reviewers often strike e-mail bargains to "yes" one another's reviews. Klausner herself told the New York Times in 2004 of a conspiracy to unseat her. Though Amazon officials assured me that they do their best to "weed out" loyalty votes when calculating the reviewer standings, recent software innovations seem to come down on the side of the weeds. A social-networking feature allows a reviewer to identify hundreds of other reviewers as "friends"; an RSS option lets them track his feedback in real-time. Certainly, Harp has been generous to his Amazon "friends," among whom are authors he has reviewed and others for whose self-published books he has provided jacket copy. ("A book that is well worth the attention of our weary state in America today."—Grady Harp, Amazon.com.) The watchdogs of HKAS point to Harp's staggering vote total—a tally surpassed only by Klausner's—as evidence that this generosity has been repaid.

Given Amazon's lack of greater transparency, it's hard to judge the merits of the vote-swapping claims. What is clear is the corruptibility of democracy, Web 2.0-style. Then again, from a shareholder's perspective, the fact that anyone cares may indicate the rankings' success. Qualitative research affirms that "books with more and better reviews sell better," according to Cornell sociologists Shay David and Dr. Trevor Pinch, co-authors of a 2006 analysis of online recommendation systems. To the extent that competitive energies drive Top Reviewers and their nemeses to generate content, and to spend time on and publicize Amazon.com, the chief beneficiary of misuse of Amazon's rankings system is Amazon itself.

This is not to say that a Top 10 ranking doesn't come with some sub rosa incentives for the reviewer. Free books, first and foremost; in an e-mail, Grady Harp told me he was "inundated with books from new writers and from publishers who know I love to read first works." This fall, when it invited select Top Reviewers to join its Vine program—an initiative, still in beta-testing, to generate content about new and prerelease products—Amazon extended the range of perks. "Vine Voices" like Mitchell and Harp can elect to receive items ranging from electronics to appliances to laundry soap. As long as they keep reviewing the products, Amazon's suppliers will keep sending them.

However, by refashioning Web 2.0 as a proprietary marketplace, Amazon's reviewer rankings subject enthusiasts like Grady Harp to the same pressures that confront the professionals they were supposed to replace. To keep writing, lest another reviewer usurp one's spot. To say something nice, in hopes that someone will say something nice about you. And to read for work, rather than for pleasure. "I have a tall stack of books staring at me," Harp wrote, in a wistful moment.

"At times this sense of obligation prevents me from having time to read the things I personally want to read—the works of McEwan, Toibin, Crace, White, Bolaño, Sebald ..."

Like celebrity bloggers and Wikipedia "Gnomes," then, the Top Amazon Reviewer heralds the arrival of a curious hybrid: part customer, part employee. This feels like a loss. But perhaps it means that in the coming age, every writer will be a salesman: up past dark, sifting through the data stream for evidence that somewhere, some honest soul is buying.

Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family. He blogs, amateurishly, at The Millions.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2182002/

Two International Affairs directors dismissed - News

Two International Affairs directors dismissed - News

A Patience to Listen, Alive and Well (by Anthony Tommasini, the New York Times)

Illustrator: Koren Shadmi

Classical Music
A Patience to Listen, Alive and Well
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: December 30, 2007

REPORTS about the diminishing relevance of classical music to new generations of Americans addled by pop culture keep coming. Yet in my experience classical music seems in the midst of an unmistakable rebound. Most of the concerts and operas I attended this year drew large, eager and appreciative audiences.

Consider this: On Dec. 15 the Metropolitan Opera’s first high-definition broadcast of the season, a Saturday matinee of Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette,” played on more than 600 movie screens around the world to 97,000 people, a new record for attendance in this bold Met venture. O.K., the total doesn’t match the millions who watch rock videos. For all her popularity, Anna Netrebko, who sang Juliette, is not Mariah Carey. But classical music always was and always will be of interest to relatively modest numbers of people.

In recent years a spate of articles and books have lamented classical music’s tenuous hold on the popular imagination and defended its richness, complexity and communicative power. I’m thinking especially of the book “Why Classical Music Still Matters” (University of California Press, 2007) by Lawrence Kramer, a professor of English and music at Fordham University.

Just this month classical music emerged as pivotal to international relations. With the blessing of the State Department, the New York Philharmonic announced that it would present a concert in North Korea during its Asian tour in February. Some consider this plan an outrage that will allow a totalitarian regime to use the Philharmonic musicians as puppets for propaganda. Others see it as at least a chance to pry open a door and share Western culture with a closed society, which is pretty much my view.

Either way, implicit in this plan is the idea that classical music matters. It’s not a sports team or pop group that has been enlisted to begin a thaw with the government in Pyongyang. It’s the musicians of a premier American orchestra.

What effect might this concert have on an audience in a repressive society? To Professor Kramer, as he recently told The New York Times, classical music by definition “is addressed to someone who has a certain independence of mind.” It “almost posits for its audience a certain degree of Western identity, which includes that sense of individual capacity to think, to sense, to imagine.”

Classical music invites listeners to focus, to take in, to follow what is almost a narrative that unfolds over a relatively long period of time. Length itself is one of the genre’s defining elements. I do not contend that classical music is weightier than other types of music. Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony is no more profound than “Eleanor Rigby.” But it’s a whole lot longer.

Even a 10-minute Chopin ballade for piano, let alone Messiaen’s 75-minute “Turangalila Symphony,” tries to grapple with, activate and organize a relatively substantial span of time. Once you accept this element of classical music, the reasons for other aspects of the art form — the complexity of its musical language, the protocols of concertgoing — become self-evident.

Structure in classical music is the easiest element to describe yet the hardest to perceive. Too often writers of program notes take the easy way and simply lay out the road map of a piece: first this happens, then that happens, then the first thing returns in a modified form and so on. But perceiving these structures as a listener is another matter.

When I was around 13 and enthralled by Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, I didn’t have the vaguest notion of how sonata form worked or what a rondo was. That I grew so familiar with these big pieces, though, does not mean I grasped how they were organized. Still, I intuitively sensed that they were monumental in some way, for the great classical works seemed to have an inexplicable and inexorable sweep.

Years later, when I was an assistant professor at Emerson College in Boston, I inherited from my predecessor a music appreciation course called “Listening to Music.” Teaching that class was like missionary work. I tried to help students hear what seemed to me astounding similarities between, say, a song-and-dance from Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” and “America” from Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” I broke down symphony movements by Beethoven and Shostakovich into constituent parts. Quite a few students were openly resistant, others mildly curious; some were surprisingly engaged.

Once in a while someone would come back from a concert having had an epiphany, like one awestruck woman who had attended her first live symphonic concert: the New England Conservatory Orchestra at the acoustically splendid Jordan Hall playing Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.” She had no idea that such viscerally powerful sounds existed.

More often than not, though, these epiphanies did not turn the students into devotees of classical music. Why not? My guess is that the pieces played were simply too long. Taking in a concert involves a major time commitment. You sit in silence for extended periods and pay attention to live performances that, however viscerally involving and sonically impressive, are visually unremarkable. Operas, of course, tend to be even longer. But opera is a total-immersion experience, with characters and costumes, like going to the theater.

In an essay in The New York Times in June, Professor Kramer called for classical music presenters to follow the lead of enterprising art museums, which have had much success in presenting new and old art in interactive, stimulating and demystifying ways. The museum experience encourages visitors to relax, to take in things at their own pace. You feel emboldened to follow your instincts, to move on from a painting that bores you, or linger at some intriguing, baffling work.

As Professor Kramer acknowledged, the analogy is limited. You cannot set your own pace while listening to a Schubert string quartet. A concert can offer pre-

performance talks, interactive video displays in the lobby and spoken comments by the performers onstage. But at some point the talking stops, the performance begins, and the audience is asked — expected really — to be quiet and pay attention.

Even so, the act of communal listening need not be reverential. And classical music has its “wow” factors too. What could be more entertaining than a dynamic performance of Prokofiev’s shamelessly theatrical Third Piano Concerto, with its monstrously difficult piano part? And if your mind wanders during “La Mer,” by Debussy, and you start focusing on the kinetic playing style of an attractive young violinist in the orchestra, then, as Professor Kramer suggests, just go with it.

Concert protocol demands that you stay put for the duration. Yet entering into that receptive state of mind can actually foster excitement over the music. Most young people in today’s interactive, amplified, high-tech world may not instinctively be enticed by the idea of sitting quietly and contemplating a long musical work in a natural acoustical setting. Yet I’ve taken young friends and other classical music neophytes to concerts over the years and been routinely struck by how absorbed they become during, say, a blazing account of Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” even while all around us older, restless concertgoers are fiddling in their seats and rustling the pages of their programs.

Creating an atmosphere conducive to listening does not mean that concert halls have to be stuffy. Dress codes of any kind should disappear. Go ahead and replace some rows of seats at Avery Fisher Hall with rugs and pillows to recline on, if it helps.

Much less drastic innovations have proved effective. Lincoln Center’s series A Little Night Music, at the intimate Kaplan Penthouse, for example, presents 60-minute programs beginning at 10:30 p.m. Only about 160 people can be accommodated. Patrons share small round cocktail tables and have free glasses of wine. In one program last summer the bookish British pianist Paul Lewis played a probing performance of Beethoven’s stormy, mystical Opus 111 Piano Sonata, followed by the exciting young cellist Alisa Weilerstein delivering an intense account of Kodaly’s brooding and volatile Sonata for Solo Cello. Here were two elusive and demanding works. And the audience was transfixed. I don’t recall a single throat-clearing.

But to claim a listener’s attention, a substantial classical piece must entice the dimension of human perception that responds to large structures and long metaphorical narratives. This, more than anything lofty about the music, accounts for the greater complexity, typically, of classical works in comparison with more popular styles of music.

Beethoven was a master musical architect. When his “Eroica” Symphony appeared in 1804, it was the longest work yet written in which virtually every phrase and rhythmic figure was derived from a small group of musical motifs. Beethoven made this colossal symphony, in four quite varied movements, seem organic and whole. Most listeners may discern this only subliminally. But they do.

One reason “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” stunned my generation at its 1967 release was that this Beatles album was not just a collection of songs but a whole composition. I remember sitting in my freshman dorm room with friends, listening to the entire album in silence. That was a new experience in rock. “Sgt. Pepper” pointed the way to longer total-

concept albums like Radiohead’s “In Rainbows,” the big news in pop music today.

For the most part, though, rock and pop songs are relatively short lyrical statements. The classical genre that has most in common with the pop concert is the song recital. It makes no difference that the revered classical song repertory, from Schubert to Mahler, is rich with musically complex, often dark works. Because songs tend to be short, we perceive them as more approachable. This explains why, in a program at Weill Recital Hall three years ago, an appealing young baritone, Nathaniel Webster, segued so easily to an American group including songs by Purcell, Schumann and Wolf to American songs by Gershwin and Rufus Wainwright.

No one was better than Leonard Bernstein at drawing new listeners to classical music. When he presented his Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, he didn’t have music videos or PowerPoint, and didn’t need them. It was just our amazing Uncle Lenny explaining the content of a piece, conveying its character and revealing its secrets.

But when the explanations were over, Bernstein would turn to his young listeners and say, “Are you ready?” The time had come to settle down and focus as the orchestra performed the piece in question. Instilling audiences of all ages with the ability — and patience — to listen to something long was crucial to an appreciation of classical music. It still is.

My Time in the Indexing Trade (by Enid Stubin, moreintelligentlife.com)

Hans Dekker/Flickr

MY TIME IN THE INDEXING TRADE
MEMORIES OF AN ANCIENT KINGDOM | December 19th 2007

The Sydney Wolfe Cohen index was a thing of beauty, crafted in a warren of rooms on lower Fifth Avenue. Enid Stubin joined this small colony of publishing souls in purgatory. She recalls her toils in Bartlebyland ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Somewhere between copy-editing and serving drinks at corporate Christmas parties lies my stint at Sydney Wolfe Cohen Associates, the pre-eminent indexing service in New York City. I take a certain pride in the excellence of SWC: of the making of books there is much chazzerai, but when Knopf or Cambridge or Simon and Schuster wanted to flog one in particular—shuttling the author onto "The Today Show" or Charlie Rose—the index was always contracted out to SWC.

Printed on 25-pound bond, tapped into crisp alignment, jacketed in heavyweight cardboard. The disk, neatly labelled, enveloped and centred, four extra-heavy rubber bands gartering the stack. There you have the Sydney Wolfe Cohen index. It is a thing of beauty.

Sydney himself was a dapper, beautifully-spoken man in his seventies, who looked like a more soigné version of the character actor Jack Gilford. Sydney bought his jackets at Paul Stuart and held avuncular court in a warren of rooms in an office building on lower Fifth Avenue. (Ben Katchor might have immortalised the site as the "Vutsdepoint".) Upon entering the hush of this small colony the first time, I recognised that I'd ambled into Bartlebyland, replete with airshaft-faced windows. But quiet was the point at SWC Associates: tones were muted and tempers tamped. This was true whether you worked in the library, where we toiled at a big square table surrounded by reference works (the internet seemed so tacky and unreliable then); the computer room, where "imputers" typed out the actual indexes (double-spaced, Courier font); the front room, where the bella figura ethos reigned; or the sanctum sanctorum, Sydney's office, where he rarely sat.

Sometimes, during a tricky job, Sydney would take one of us into his lair, set us up at a narrow console table, and spend a long morning and even longer afternoon in debate over an entry. Authors had things to say, sure, but we determined how easily a reader could navigate them in a 600-page biography: Henry Kissinger's dog Blackie was hand-fed hamburger and string beans by Kissinger's mother (pet, diet of, 113). We worked under constraints: 1,100 lines was a sizable index; 780 lines meant we'd have to slash away. Balance, too, was a concern: a half-column on the mistress and only four entries for the missus? Maybe not. (Prudence, exercising of, 243)

I never dreamed of becoming an indexer. Such skills belonged to Randy and Grady, outwardly placid but impish fellows of a puckish disposition. David and Fred were more serious, arriving about once a fortnight carrying several 1,000-count cartons of 4 x 6-inch index cards (their original function), or to pick up blank ones. More rarely we steeled ourselves for the arrival of L., the son of someone famous, who was a crack indexer and an amiable fellow, but who'd gotten into some trouble for making obscene phone calls and spent some time on Rikers. (Employees, abilities of, 63; criminal records of, 66)

Most specialised were the abilities of Laura, whose cookbook indices were masterpieces of anatomy. If you were paying $35 for a regional Italian cookbook and wished to whip up a zucchini, tomato and Swiss chard frittata, you'd find your recipe under "vegetables", "zucchini", "tomato", "Swiss chard", "eggs", and "buffet dishes." I understand that computer programs do that sort of thing now, but in the early 1990s, Laura did it. She was one of the reasons Marcella Hazan, Rick Bayless and Maida Heatter sold so many books: her indices led you to where you needed to be. Around the office, Laura used vanilla as her signature scent and looked fierce—I was careful not to antagonise her. She alone of the associates had a key and could come and go as she pleased. (Favouritism, evidence of, 34)

A day or two after an index was typed up, I'd be asked to proofread and proofcheck—to verify spelling and to confirm our accuracy against the book galleys. One could handily absorb an entire book in the process, which Sydney knew and hated. If you were reading, you weren't doing something more important to ensure the quality and elegance of his product. (Drudgery, enforcement of, 78)

Worse, should you have the temerity to look up, say, "tapenade" in an encyclopaedic Barbara Kafka tome (in search of a chic and inexpensive dinner-party appetizer, say), and get caught at the photocopy machine cannibalising from an SWC galley, Sydney would look pained. (Manuscripts, potential exploitation of, 43)

Everyone guzzled coffee, so anxieties about spills and stains loomed. And while associates could bring their lunch to work, one needed to abide by a set of unspoken rules. You learned them by indirection: for reasons of sensibility, tuna was verboten (a shame, as the version cranked out by the Fifth Avenue Epicure down the block was tasty), while chicken salad passed muster. Mustard was okay, but not ketchup; rosemary was well-regarded while garlic—ah, garlic was a problem. Of course, you could obviate these regulations by offering to fetch Sydney "something" from downstairs: if he accepted a half-pound of, say, roasted potatoes with garlic and rosemary, you could bring in a leftover lamb navarin and he wouldn't say a word. (Food, ambivalence toward, 138)

It was my unofficial job to tempt the boss with something fragrant enough to give everyone clemency for a mid-afternoon slice of pizza. I wasn't half-bad at convincing Sydney that ratatouille was not only nutrient-dense and low-caloric, but would also clear his system of cholesterol. Twice a year, when he was due for a physical check-up, he foreswore dairy and fats, and we all paid the price. Cranky and yearning, he'd follow you around with his eyes, his chin tilted up to catch a whiff of hummus on the air. "Hmm, that smells...nice," he'd intone wistfully. I genuinely feared for Grady's tomato and cucumber on whole-wheat pita. (Sandwiches of others, desire for, 139)

We all liked each other, or at least got along. If Sydney overheard us making plans to get together after work, he'd intervene. An impromptu date for Friday evening drinks turned into dinner at Portfolio, with Sydney presiding over the long table and none of us too sure about what to order, as he'd be picking up the tab. In this way he was much like Fezziwig: genial and generous, but nothing could happen without him. (Centrality, possible insistence on: amiable, 256)

I never thought of Sydney as lonely. In fact, my one effort to fix him up—with the mother of my old high-school flame, a beautiful, smart, funny and accomplished woman of roughly Sydney's age—went badly. "He looks exactly like Jack Gilford!" she exulted. The trouble may have been that she knew Jack Gilford—and that she played the violin in chamber groups, and was a practising therapist, and had portrayed Hedda Gabler in a Brooklyn College showcase production, among other things. "She's done everything I ever wanted to do," he said mournfully after their first date. He never called her again. (Women, attracted to, 119; attractiveness to, 116-18)

Sydney was the best in the business—if he knew it, who could blame him? Like another ne plus ultra, he referred to his professional nemesis as "Moriarty." I never learned whether such a figure existed or was merely a cardboard cut-out of Sydney's, the yin to his yang, the Eisenhower to his Stevenson. Talk of Sydney retiring, all of it from Sydney, sounded like so much static to me.

But attentive to the rush of the Reichenbach Falls, Beth contemplated a move: "What if we bought Sydney out? We'd have his name and the business; we could keep all the people here and maybe even get health insurance." I was dazzled by her ambition and brio, the visionary gleam of her plans. But then Beth finished her doctorate and moved west for a tenure-track job; Grady became the first curator of The Museum of Sex; Fred, freelancing, indexed Beth's book on Virginia Woolf. Neither gifted in the heavy-duty skills that editing demanded nor possessed of the patience for Sydney's mandarin gamesmanship, I was phased out. (Employees, relationship with: guarded, 141-42)

Perhaps a year later I got a phone call from Sydney asking if I was available to "do some work" on a new Wordsworth biography. Expecting a nostalgic welcome, I arrived to find instead a slender Barnard graduate student seated alongside him. Down the table sat a stack of proofs with a dog-eared index atop: Naomi Wolf's version of Weltanschauung. Wasn't I working on the Wordsworth? "Oh," Sydney sighed, slyly, "there's always another Wordsworth..." The sylph smiled too, a Gioconda smirk. Stung, I laboured for two grinding days on the postmodernofeminist manifesto and swore never to return. (Bait, switching of, 387)

I heard that Sydney retired to Chappaqua just before the Clintons showed up, a fact that must have pleased him not a little. I should really dress up and invite him to lunch at one of the Murray Hill Italian places he liked or somewhere posh in Grand Central. (Growing up, as revenge: best, 247) We could talk about the old days.

(Enid Stubin is assistant professor of English at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, and writes a New York diary for The Reader magazine.)

A DRINKER'S GUIDE TO EASTERN EUROPE (by Edward Lucas, Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE)

A DRINKER'S GUIDE TO EASTERN EUROPE
RULE ONE: AVOID THE FOOD | November 30th 2007

Bottle-scarred Economist correspondent Edward Lucas breakfasts on plum brandy, lunches on balsams and dines on bison-grass vodka, but draws the line at a side-dish of Hungarian lung stew ...

The ex-communist world has a deserved reputation as a culinary wasteland (see box, below right), but the drinks are something else. Travellers to Prague find that the "real" Budweiser from Ceske Budejovice (no relation to its rice-based American counterpart) makes even the national dish of dumplings in gravy go down without protest. Winemaking has been transformed since the Soviet era—when bottles had to be inspected for wasps and snails, the former merely a nuisance, the latter stomach-turning (at least for foreigners).

But the real treat is the hard stuff. Every country from the Baltic to the Black sea has a national tipple, usually served in both industrialised and home-made versions. In Romania, tuica (also spelled tzuika, tsuika, tsuica, or tzuica) is the traditional start to any meal. It is made with plums, and bears a startling resemblence to the sljivovica of neighbouring Serbia. Both drinks are part of a delightful family of fruit brandies popular from the far corners of the Balkans up to modern Poland (an area that bears a coincidental resemblance to the Ottoman empire in Europe at its height). For the adventurous, visnjevaca (sour cherry) dunjevaca (quince) and smokvovaca (fig) are well worth a try. You may find these in shops, but you are better off finding a peasant farmer somewhere in what used to be Yugoslavia.

Westerners may think that hard liquor is for after dinner, but these drinks are usually apertifs. To help you digest, the best drink in the region is Unicum. Anyone who likes Italy's Fernet Branca, or German's Underberg, will feel that they have graduated into elysium when they try it. The flavours are an intense mix of liquorice, ginger, coriander and cinnamon (that's guesswork: the recipe is secret). It brings tranquility to even the most overburdened stomach. Latvia's balsams is a close rival—and a neck ahead for those who like its flexibility. It has a stronger tinge of burnt oranges; Latvians put it in their coffee or in fruit salad. With Champagne (or any old sparkling wine) it creates a terrific cocktail.

Any offer of absinthe in eastern Europe, by contrast, should be shunned as firmly as any suggestion of a return to the planned economy or the one-party state.

Having accustomed your liver to the demands of life in "new Europe", it is time to move north. Poland and Russia tussle for the right to be the "real" home of vodka (an argument that the Swedes and Finns regard with bemused disdain: how can anybody take these Slavic squabbles seriously?). Having sorted out the national question, the serious drinker has to decide between vodkas made with different feedstuffs (barley, rye, wheat and so forth). The nasty stuff produced in western Europe is made from farm surplus products, disgracefully subsidised by the taxpayer. The cheapest of all is synthetic alcohol, produced in factories by a chemical process. If you think all vodka tastes the same, just try drinking a cheap one.

If your palate finds little difference amid the clear vodkas, you can ring the changes with the flavoured kind (for example with chili peppers, ginger, fruit, vanilla, chocolate or cinnamon). Best of all-in your correspondent's view-is Zubrowka, a Polish (or Belarussian) rye vodka flavoured with bison grass, a stalk of which can be found in the bottle.

Sadly, the scent of newly mown hay that makes Zubrowka so seductive comes from the presence (in tiny quantities) of coumarin, a toxin that can be legally used in perfumes, but is prohibited for use in foodstuffs in America. The version sold in America now is coumarin-free.

On the whole, though, the names of vodkas vary more than the contents. Lithuania used to have one called "Dar po viena" (roughly "Let's have another one"). Romania, astonishingly, has a vodka called "Stalinskaya"; Russia's favourite Stolichnaya (Capital) brand, disgracefully, uses Soviet kitsch in its advertisements, including pictures of the murderous founder of Soviet communism, Vladimir Lenin, who is described as a "visionary". That is something to discuss over a Zubrowka or six.

(Edward Lucas is deputy international editor, and correspondent for central and eastern Europe, at The Economist. His book, "The New Cold War—How the Kremlin menaces both Russia and the West", will be published in February 2008 by Bloomsbury in Britain, and Palgrave in America.)

Without a Writer, Is a Joke Still Funny? (by Alessandra Stanley, the New York Times)

Note to the Capture: Carson Daly broadcasting on Monday on his late-night show on NBC.

The TV Watch

Without a Writer, Is a Joke Still Funny?

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: December 5, 2007

The problem is not that Carson Daly defied the writers’ strike and resumed taping his late-night show on NBC. It’s that Monday night’s show might as well have been a rerun.

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