Titmuss, The Darkness, and the darkness of Sendak

In today's Sunday Times Culture, I write about the casting of Abi Titmuss in Lady MacBeth. She made me toast, with raspberry jam, which was nice of her. I interviewed her in Lowestoft, which is, incidentally, both the most easterly point of Britain, and the home of ersatz 70s rock outfit, The Darkness.

Which leads me to another piece in Culture, Bryan Appleyard's compelling discussion of darkness and orphans in children's literature and cinema. I like "airless" as a description of Maurice Sendak's cartoons. I had a recurring nightmare when I was little about the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Every night for about a year, he was on the hunt for me. It didn't matter what precautions I put in place, he was always too wily. I normally woke up just as he was about to pounce, but the lingering sensation of airlessness, or suffocation, remained.

Congo, Gleeson, Cameron, Predator Drones, Bushfires

I've been in the Congo, hence the silence. Did anyone notice? Possibly not. It's probable I'm talking in a void here, but I like that. My wife reads my infrequent posts, when she has the time.

Anyway, while I was gone, the Times almost failed to webtify this interview with Brendan Gleeson, which ran in the Sunday Times Magazine on 1 November. The New Yorker, meanwhile, provided me with considerable solace on my travels with the Congolese bandits, by producing their crackerjack Oct 26th edition. Three interesting pieces: one on the CIA's Predator Drone programme, one on the Australian bushfires (subscribers only), and one on the blowhard director James Cameron.

The crucial things I learnt from this trifecta are as follows:

1) Private ontractors fly predator drones remotely from offices in suburban America, thereby allowing them to obliterate Taliban leaders and any innocent civilians who happen to be standing nearby, and be home in time for dinner.

2) Seriously hot bushfires create their own weather. Very hot ones make their own lightning.

3) You should never, ever, call James Cameron "Jimmy". He also doesn't like to be touched by strangers.

Dexter Filkins' Long War

Dexter Filkins is an outstanding reporter and feature writer for the New York Times, who has filed dispatches from such holiday destinations as Fallujah (Second Siege of), the tribal badlands of Waziristan, and almost anywhere in the Middle East where bombs go off. His book, The Forever War - a collection of novelistic reportage from his various assignments over the past decade - was among the best nonfiction I have ever read. He has the keenest eye for detail.

Anyway, he frequently writes long features for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and his latest, Stanley McChrystal's Long War, is an epic. It tells the story of the ascetic warrior-bibliophile at the heart of America's campaign to turn Afghanistan around: his challenges, strategy, and likely prospects of success.

Required reading.

New Yorker on a hot streak

This piece about the gang-ruled favelas of Rio is breathtaking both for the cast-iron balls of its writer - Jon Lee Anderson - and its insights. It confirms what I've thought for a while: the New Yorker is on a hot streak.

It also got me wondering. Why didn't Chicago and Madrid simply print a copy of the article for every IOC member? Rio wouldn't have made it past the first vote.

Exploding computer and the death penalty

I have been a bad blogger - although, I suspect only my wife will have noticed. My computer exploded. It is now being nursed back to health.

Anyway, for my handful of fanatics, here is a piece you ought to read. David Grann explores the case against Cameron Todd Willingham, a man executed for killing his children in a house fire in Texas.

The piece is long, even for the New Yorker. Added to that, you know the outcome. So why is it so compelling? Great reporting. Fact built on fact. Details rendered minutely. The story given permission to develop. This story is the best argument for long-form journalism I have come across in a while.

The Paris Review has an interview with Gay Talese, the journalist who wrote Frank Sinatra Has a Cold - the quintessential New Journalism story. The interview is here, and well worth reading. One of the nuggets that emerges is that Talese writes his notes on shirt boards. The plan for Frank Sinatra Has A Cold (written on a shirt board) is below.

Mountbatten, The Falling Man etc...

Yesterday, I reviewed Timothy Knatchbull's memoir in the Sunday Times. He was 14 years old when the IRA planted a bomb on his family's boat in Ireland, injuring himself, his mother and father, and killing his twin brother, his grandmother, his grandfather - Lord Mountbatten - and an Irish teenager called Paul Maxwell. He writes well.

Talking to Colum McCann on Saturday - who has written a novel called Let the Great World Spin, which I will be writing about on Sunday - he reminded me of a wonderful piece in American Esquire shortly after 9/11 called The Falling Man worth 20 minutes of your time.

Sedaris

I took a copy of David Sedaris' When We Are Engulfed in Flames to Tehran in April. I remember reading it in cafes, waiting for my translator to turn up, giggling. Crybaby - a story about sitting next to a grieving hulk on a transatlantic flight - never fails to make me feel better. When a strange man from the secret service phoned my hotel room in the middle of the night, I took out Crybaby, read it again, and went back to sleep like - well - a baby.

There are many remarkable things about the way Sedaris writes. He is so poised, for a funny writer, a little like Alan Coren in the way that he squeezes so much joy from the mundane.

Anyway, he has a new piece, about Australia, in the New Yorker, which is not his best, and still very much better than almost anything else you will have read this weekend.

The Brazilian Joyce

In tomorrow's Sunday Times I have a piece about Clarice Lispector, a writer considered to be the Brazilian James Joyce, and a stone-cold fox to boot.

The unlovely ES Magazine

The unlovely ES magazine - home to lengthy features about the sons and daughters of people who used to be famous, and purveyor of the world's most baffling standfirsts - published an oustanding interview with the bonkers Heather Mills on Friday. My old pal Hermione Eyre did the work. It was so funny, coffee came out of my nose.

I particularly enjoyed this:

Heather fancies herself a plain talker, no airs, definitely no graces. There's a sign in her loo that says: 'If any items apart from toilet paper get dropped in here, the bog monster will reach out and grab your dick or punani!' 'You need to be real,' she says, enlarging on why she has never had trouble attracting men. 'Down-to-earth, not fussy, not pretentious. I'll carry boxes, I'll clean toilets. I peeled 260 potatoes the other Sunday. That's why my nails are gone.'

Kindle and the future of reading

Loved this piece by Nicholas Baker on Kindle, and its greyness.

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization.

You just don't get that kind of conversation in London anymore.

Sunday Times Magazine

I have a piece in the Sunday Times Magazine about Torquay, and the British seaside holiday. See it here with lovely photographs by Leo Maguire.

Build The Wall

This piece about the future of high-end journalism, by the great Simon, is interesting. Wrong, in parts - particularly that NYT and WaPo should charge for everything on their site. That would rule out any possibility that someone might follow a link to the NYT or WaPo out of interest, and then subscribe. Self-defeating. Anyway, I have no time for this now, I have more dead trees to publish.

Gladwell on overconfidence

This week's New Yorker carries a Malcolm Gladwell piece about overconfidence - how it contributed to the collapse of Wall Street and everything else. So, the bankers were overconfident? No kidding. In another writer's hands, this might have been an investigation into ursine defecation patterns, but MG handles his topic with typical elegance. I liked this:

Of course, one reason that over-confidence is so difficult to eradicate from expert fields like finance is that, at least some of the time, it’s useful to be overconfident—or, more precisely, sometimes the only way to get out of the problems caused by overconfidence is to be even more overconfident.
From an individual perspective, it is hard to distinguish between the times when excessive optimism is good and the times when it isn’t. All that we can say unequivocally is that overconfidence is, as Wrangham puts it, “globally maladaptive.” When one opponent bluffs, he can score an easy victory. But when everyone bluffs, Wrangham writes, rivals end up “escalating conflicts that only one can win and suffering higher costs than they should if assessment were accurate.” The British didn’t just think the Turks would lose in Gallipoli; they thought that Belgium would prove to be an obstacle to Germany’s advance, and that the Russians would crush the Germans in the east. The French, for their part, planned to be at the Rhine within six weeks of the start of the war, while the Germans predicted that by that point they would be on the outskirts of Paris. Every side in the First World War was bluffing, with the resolve and skill that only the deluded are capable of, and the results, of course, were catastrophic.


Still, not classic Gladwell, and certainly not the wonderful underdog story from earlier in the year.

New Stuff

Towards the back of today's Culture section you will see a short review of a bad book.

Cartoon Despot

One man who takes a significant chunk of Newhouse's payroll is Michael Lewis (I read somewhere that he signed to Vanity Fair on a two-pieces-a-year contract worth six figures, which is decent work if you can get it). On the evidence of this month's Vanity Fair, he may be worth the money. His disturbing piece about the extraordinary risks taken on by AIG in the lead-up to the financial collapse introduces a new villain into our understanding of the apocalypse, a toy-throwing bully named Joe Cassano.

I particularly liked this section:

According to traders, Cassano was one of those people whose insecurities manifested themselves in a need for obedience and total control. “One day he came in and saw that someone had left the weights on the Smith machine, in the gym,” says a source in Connecticut. “He was literally walking around looking for people who looked buff, trying to find the guy who did it. He was screaming, ‘Who left the fucking weight on the fucking Smith machine? Who left the fucking weight on the fucking Smith machine?’” If that rings a bell it may be because you read The Caine Mutiny and recall Captain Queeg scouring the ship to find out who had stolen the strawberries. Even by the standards of Wall Street villains, whose character flaws wind up being exaggerated to fit the crime, Cassano was a cartoon despot.

Si Newhouse and the Conde Nasties

I missed this lovely piece by Steve Fishman, about Si Newhouse, head honcho at Conde Nast, and the future for his magazines. The whole thing's worth reading, but two money quotes:

"Si loves being surrounded by divas and egomaniacs," says one former editor. When one editor called another a "fucking bitch", Newhouse didn't mind. "Yes, but she's our bitch," he said.

And another, about David Remnick:

As we walk to a nearby diner in New York's West Village, Remnick checks in with his wife, greeting her in Russian - he won a Pulitzer for his book on the fall of the Soviet empire. Remnick is charming but wary, a working journalist who prefers the role of interviewer to interviewed. He reviews for me the differences between off-the-record and background conversations, and then we order salads. ("That's pretty gay," says Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, and patently not a salad eater, when I mention my meeting with Remnick.) Remnick salts his conversation with references, and they are all over the place, proudly high and low - JD Salinger; the baseball legend Mel Stottlemyre, Perry White, Clark Kent's editor at the Daily Planet, and Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher in the 6th century BC. Much like in his magazine, there's showy, apparently effortless cultural fluency, though part of the message seems to be: Can you keep up?

New stuff

Yesterday, in the Sunday Times, I interviewed the staggeringly-gifted Eleanor Catton and reviewed Buzz Aldrin's Magnificent Defecation.

Five Easy Pieces

This blog is about the dying art of the magazine feature.

I don't mean "at home with" interviews in Hello!, as wonderful as they are. I mean in-depth feature reporting, as practised most notably by several American magazines, such as Harper's, Esquire, GQ, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Vanity Fair, and also by my employer, the Sunday Times Magazine. It's the kind of journalism accountants don't like.

Here are five features I love. Read them, then we'll talk.

First, the original new journalism masterpiece, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. Gay Talese wrote it for American Esquire in 1966, after a proposed interview had gone tits-up.

Then, go up and down on Nick Paumgarten's epic New Yorker piece about elevators.

Admire Sebastian Junger's cojones in Blood Oil, a profile of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which he wrote for Vanity Fair in 2007.

Watch Jennifer Senior bring Graydon Carter to a park bench in 2000, for New York Magazine.

And know hope, with Barack Obama and Larissa MacFarquhar, in the New Yorker.