Reading John Leonard's Life

John Leonard's posthumously published collection is a remarkable exercise in criticism as biography. The essays in Reading for My Life span fifty years from 1958 to 2008, when Leonard, a critic for Harper's and The New York Times Book Review, among others, died of lung cancer. Reading the fifty pieces compiled in this one volume, I learned just as much about Leonard as I did about his subjects.

One obvious reason that Leonard's biography comes across is because his essays span his entire reviewing career. We see him grow as America grows. In an essay about the Beat Generation, we see him dropping out of Harvard and heading to the West Coast like so many others who came of age in the late 1950s. In another essay, we see Leonard safely within the New York intelligentsia from where he critiques Tom Wolfe's narrow portrayal of New Yorkers in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Leonard's subjects map the tumultuous American-century. Whether discussing the sexual revolution (through the lens of Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife) or Israeli-Palestinian relations (through the lens of an interview with David Grossman), his essays exclaim "I was there."

But the most revealing thing in these essays is Leonard's frankness about his own life. He injects himself into his book reviews as frequently as possible. Though one could mistake this for self-indulgence, Leonard presents himself as a common observer. When condemning Richard Nixon's campaign memoir, Six Crises, Leonard adopts the view of the every day American as opposed to the entrenched intelligentsia. He warns the reader, "Let me make it clear at the outset that I am not going to be objective." Not because he has some secret liberal agenda, but merely because he is "fascinated by the flower of rot, and because ...more interesting and instructive than Richard Nixon the success is Richard Nixon the failure."

Besides, Leonard's disdain for some writers is balanced out by his honest, lavish praise for others. He doesn't have enough good things to say about Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, finally going out on "She has done her job, and what a staggering one it is." Later, he dubs The Satanic Verses "infinitely more interesting than those hundreds of neat little novels we have to read between Rushdies." Through these essays, we learn that un-selfconscious praise can be delightful.

We also learn that Leonard was a colorblind feminist before those terms were invented. As one of the first to write about women novelists without condescension, Leonard made bold, unqualified statements about the women he admired. On Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: "It is fierce intelligence, all sinew, prowling among the emotions." Quite a masculine description indeed. We can't blame Leonard for occasionally taking a victory lap for his prescient admiration for women writers by scolding his fellow critics for not recognizing their talents earlier.

One of the most affecting pieces--and the longest--is an essay on television. Leonard was as much a TV critic as he was a book critic. In "Family Values, Like the House of Atreus" Leonard charts a half century of television, demonstrating how the medium simultaneously shapes and reflects American values. The epidemic of single dads on TV in the 1980s could be attributed to our society's reluctance to accept the fact that 89% of single-parent households were headed by women. Leonard surmises why thirtysomething was so popular at a time when "I could leave the house, and go to the corner, and find an overmuch of such people in my own yupscale neighborhood: sun dried as if in extra-virgin olive oil, crouched to consume their minimalist bistro meals of cilantro leaves, medallions of goat cheese, and half a scallop on a bed of money." Perhaps it reflected yuppie navel-gazing at its worst.

Reading for My Life is an absolute must read for any aspiring critic. In a world of cold, academic criticism, Leonard shows us what it means to have a personal connection with culture.

Death of a Salesman

The Mike Nichols production of Death of a Salesman is the best Broadway play I expect to see during my time in law school. After waiting for two hours, I successfully rushed a pair of thirty dollar student tickets this past Friday.

I had heard good things about the production, but didn't expect to connect to the material in a very meaningful way since I am a Miller novice. After seeing the terribly staged mid-century play, Look Back Jin Anger, a couple days ago, I was worried that I was in store for athree our snoozefest. sitting down in a partial view box seat with my friend as the curtain went up, I was also skeptical of the casting. Though I love Philip Seymour Hoffman, isnt he a bit too young to play Willy Loman, the sixty year old salesman drifting into senility? His sons, Biff and Happy, the inheritors of his hopes and dreams, are portrayed by the too-young looking Andrew Garfield and Finn Wittrock.

But ten minutes on, I was hooked. Philip Seymour Hoffman carries his heft around convincingly as a man who has eaten unhealthily for thirty five years as a traveling salesman. He first enters the stage, muttering "boy oh boy" quietly, after returning early from a failed sales trip. There's no sense that he's aware of an audience, but rather is just inside his own head. When his wife, Linda (Linda Emond) hears him shuffling around, she comes and persuades him to go to bed in the manner of the lifelong partner who just wants to make things easier for her husband near the end.

As a first time viewer of any production of the play, I was also drawn in by the writing and the plot. set in the 1940s, Miller's story is eerily resonant today. People of Willy Loman's age were the most susceptible to losing their jobs during the recent recession, no matter how loyal they were to the firm for the past thirty five years. I know many Biffs today--though generally from more affluent families--whom, having been raised by the school of self esteem, now find themselves unable to do anything. But the story is both general and specific.

Despite the global issues it addresses, Death of Salesman focuses on one specific family. Though everyone can relate to Willy's tendency to ask what could have been had he taken a different road, his plight is unique. We see Willy's life and motives through the hallucinated conversations he has with his brother (John Glover), a man who had gone to Alaska to make his fortune off the land. Now Willy, overweight and tied to the trappings of a middle class existence--- nice house in Brooklyn, a refrigerator, and other appliances--he wonders if should have gone the way of the other Loman and inhabited a new frontier.

The play's success must ultimately be attributed to the Mike Nichols, the director. Though I'm new to Miller, there were several scenes that were conducive to melodrama. Many scenes where people could be yelling at each other are toned down to reveal several notes of both disappointment and anger. The only person who overacts at times is Andrew Garfield, who shakes his head in anger a few too many times in the final twenty minutes of the play.

Death of a Salesman is a must see show. My only regret is that I hadn't seen other productions to compare it to.

Why is Everyone Mad at Mike Daisey?

Mike Daisey has been pilloried in the press lately for making false statements on This American Life recently. Daisy, a monologist, wrote and starred in the immensely popular The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which debuted at the Woolly Mammoth in DC last year and went on to achieve great success at the Public Theater in New York. The Agony and Ecstasy is a one-man show about the factory workers at the Chinese Apple supplier, Foxconn. Daisey tells his story in the first person relaying things that he supposedly saw first hand when he went to ShenZhen, China. Some of this show was excerpted in This American Life in January.

But last week, This American Life aired an hour-long retraction of Mike Daisey's segment. Apparently, Daisey hadn't experienced many of the things he said he had, including meeting many under aged workers, workers who had been poisoned by n-hexane, nearly driving off an incomplete bridge with his translator, and even going into the factory dorms with his translator.

When This American's Life retraction episode went live, the mainstream media's judgment came swiftly and harshly. Far too harsh, in my opinion. Most of the criticism focuses on Daisey's representation that he was telling the literal truth both onstage and off. Ira Glass really hands it to Daisy in the retraction episode, asking him why he "lied." The New York Times' theater critic, Charles Isherwood wrote "I certainly believed that the stories Mr. Daisey told — of seeing guards with guns at the Foxconn factory, of interviewing a 13-year-old girl who worked at the factory, of talking to an elderly former Foxconn worker whose hand had been destroyed — were true."

I'm not surprised that the media has been so critical. After all, they are all journalists and editors. The part former (current?) aspiring journalist part of me does think what Daisey did failed to meet journalistic standards. I couldn't imagine telling an editor "Yes, I saw this," or "Yes, he said this," if I indeed hadn't seen those things first hand. I also agree with the Slate Culture Gabfest that it's pretty reprehensible of Daisey to "play fast and loose" with the lives of Chinese workers--the exact people he says he's trying to help.

But is what Mike Daisey did so bad when seen from the audience's perspective? I don't think so. As Isherwood admits himself, we don't expect documentarians with an agenda to take an evenhanded approach. I saw Daisey's monologue in the same way. He clearly has an agenda to criticize Apple's standards for factory conditions. The monologue also starts with a guilt-tripping segment about him being the world's biggest Apple fan. Who in Twenty-First Century America can't relate to that? Indeed, whenever I turn on This American Life and they have people like Mike Birbiglia telling stories based on their own lives, I assume some of the dialogue to be made up or exaggerated. Even when reading John Jeremiah Sullivan's recent collection, Pulphead, I took some if his exact quotes from interesting characters he meets in his essays with a grain of salt. The point is to get at a larger truth rather than retain the accuracy of specific details. As consumers, we also rely on the marketplace of ideas for different views. For a Chinese perspective on factory workers, see the documentary, Last Train Home.

What makes this issue particular interesting to me right now is that I'm also seeing it from a legal perspective. My media law class has me thinking about what the WBEZ/This American Life legal counsel must think about Mike Daisey's misrepresentations. In general, media outlets are liable for defamation in American courts only if the statement is defamatory, false and done with malice for a public figure. For a private figure, the plaintiff must show that the statement is false and defamatory only. In this case, we certainly have a public figure in both Foxconn and Apple. The representations about the factory workers are hardly facts directly about Apple. In other words, despite being riddled with lies, it would be difficult for someone to bring a defamation suit here. (This does highlight an interesting question of whether journalistic standards are higher than legal standards, and whether they should be, but we'll save that for another time.)

If it makes a good story for the audience, and doesn't really seem to be that damaging from a legal perspective, why is everyone so mad at Mike Daisey? Because Daisey hits two nerves at once. First, he seems incredibly lazy, and ended up hurting his cause. Second, he raises the question of what our standards for creative non fiction in an age where many journalists have a tendency to bring themselves into their stories. Daisey is lazy because he wanted a good story, but didn't dig around enough for the story. He probably could have found some underage workers if he tried to. And now his controversy is overshadowing the original story.

But what is really irking people, I suspect, is that it highlights the agony and ecstasy of creative non fiction. What exactly is "truth" when it comes to creative non fiction? Should we even care? This is a huge issue now when more writers are inserting themselves in their works, blurring the line between opinion and fact. The other anxiety-causing thing is that anyone these days can practice "journalism" on a blog. They aren't investing millions of dollars into fact checking everything. The large media companies are the ones who have the most to lose if the floodgates open to allow everyone to exaggerate facts. They would rather readers not expose themselves to ideas in the marketplace, and instead just go to them for having a monopoly on "the truth."

This whole debacle hasn't really changed my mind about Mike Daisey, This American Life, or theater. But I'll worry about artists sacrificing truth for fact in the future.

Interning this Fall

I've been busy finding legal jobs the past month or so. The other--more interesting--thing I've been doing is interning at Slate magazine. This, along with 2L year has been keeping me busy. I know I've always been delinquent with this blog, but now I have a more reasonable excuse. On the bright side, I will be writing stuff for Slate's Brow Beat blog every so often. First post just went up on Friday here.

Avant-Garde Opera at NYCO

Trying to be more sophisticated this year, my friends and I have taken advantage of the Metropolitan Opera's terrific student program to see some universally lauded works like Carmen and Tosca. Feeling adventurous, I went to the Met's next door neighbor, New York City Opera this week. It turns out that seeing Carmen at the Met is about as sophisticated as seeing The Lion King on Broadway when compared to New York City Opera's productions. If opera can be described at avant-garde, such opera is most likely to be found at NYCO. Originally founded in 1948 as "the people's opera" with an aim of making opera more affordable to a wider audience, it seems to be a home for displaying a wide range of opera these days. Its current season features old classics by famous composers (Donizetti's Elixir of Love and Strauss's Intermezzo), unknown operas by beloved American composers (Bernstein's A Quiet Place and Schwartz's Seance on a Wet Afternoon), and unconventional operas that are more performance art than anything else. Monodramas, in the latter category, is what I saw this week.

According to a recent Harper's article about the triumphs and tribulations of the NYCO, the organization has adamantly supported its unique mission in the face of economic decline. Even though it had to close for a year following Wall Street's collapse in 2008, the company chose to open its 2009-2010 season with the unknown Esther rather than a more conventional piece. Though that season also included Don Giovanni and Madama Butterfly, they were balanced by a baroque opera and a "rarely performed" French opera. The Harper's article also describes the effects of being cash-strapped on the company. People seem to be more careful with props and there is little full rehearsal time before opening. After all, orchestras are expensive. New York City Opera has also had to "sell out" to David Koch, the conservative billionaire after whom the theatre is now named.

Is the end result worth it? After sitting through two hours of something I barely understood, I'd still venture a "yes." Everyone has described Monodramas as vastly different from any conception of "opera' you've ever had before. Consisting of three different short pieces, Monodramas is more like a staged classical vocal Twentieth Century concert with occasional dance components than a traditional opera. The first piece, "La Machine de L'Etre" by John Zorn (2009), is the shortest, weirdest, and most recent. The stage opens onto what looks like many people dressed in hijabs. Two people dressed in suits go around an undress a few of the hijabs to reveal people in more modern clothing. One (Anu Komsi) begins to sing to a very contemporary, jarring score. Two wooden thought bubbles arise, which start to show projected images of random things from canons to people. Are these the woman's thoughts? Do they upset her? We don't know because the entire piece is wordless, only narrated by the woman's haunting scales.

The second piece, "Erwartung" by Arnold Schoenberg, is the most accessible and narrative. It's about a woman (Kara Shay Thompson) who goes searching for her lover only to find that he is either dead, or in her imagination. She narrates the whole time as she travels through woods. Rose petals float down for the entire 30 minutes, bathing the stage in a sea of red that starts to resemble blood. I enjoyed the use of the ensemble. They truly accompany the soloist by dancing without overshadowing her.

Finally, the last act, "Neither" by Morton Feldman, brought out the alleged theme of the entire production: the fuzzy boundary of self and unself (whatever that means). Feldman writes music for a Beckett monologue. The text speaks for itself: to and fro in shadow from inner to out shadow/from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither, etc. At first, this piece gives off the sense of being at a parody of a performance art piece in Brooklyn. The stage is covered in a shiny metallic material. Shiny boxes rotate down from the ceiling like fifty disco balls. The two suits from the beginning of the performance are walking around, as if they are indeed at a museum. A wooden figure in the center of the stage (Cyndia Seiden) comes to life to sing Beckett's words. Feldman's score puts the soloist in her upper range for the entire piece so even though the words are in English, they would have been impossible to understand without supertitles. But after a few minutes, I became entranced by the performance. No, I wasn't reaching into the dark recesses of my mind to contemplate self versus unself, but I was thinking that I liked this dramatization of the song. This work would probably never have been performed in concert. Though there are lyrics, so many wordless expanses would have left the soloist with nothing to do in a concert. Here, dancing nicely fills the space. As bodies move around the mirrored boxes on stage, a sense of disorientation is created, achieving the precise effect that Feldman wanted to have on mid-Twentieth Century audiences.