See, the second installment of her year-long book proposal about "the challenges and satisfactions of raising a puppy" is entitled "Chewing Toward Bethlehem". It's about chewing and how much puppies like to do it. Let's compare and contrast!

For Didion, who was writing a skeptical piece about the supposedly utopian counterculture taking hold in San Francisco in 1967, her title referenced the last line of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" in which he imagined that everything in the world was turning rotten.

The title "Chewing Toward Bethlehem," on the other hand, makes no sense. Eh, who cares as long as it hits the NYT's Most Emailed List.

The writer of the article in question is Virginia Heffernan, noted hater of Sarah Vowell and blog commenters. Heffernan started her piece, the subject of which was people who carry out affairs on the internet, with a story about her recent lunch with a friend.

A friend met me for lunch not long ago and laid a BlackBerry on the table. Throughout the meal, the friend kept a hand on it and shot it furtive glances, like a mobster watching a door. Reading upside down, I saw e-mail messages, all from the same sender, stacking up. "Do you need to look at those?" I asked.

"Nah," was the effortfully offhand response; later, as we were leaving, I saw my friend gazing deeply into the screen.

At last I caught on. "Hey, you're having an affair!" My friend tried to look serious and rueful but seemed frankly giggly. "Yes."

That's all cool, right? Virginia Heffernan just outed one of her Blackberry-using lunch friends for having an affair, but whatever, it's all good, right? Oh, well, then Heffernan made the mistake of picking up her friend's Blackberry.

I was happy to see my friend's shiny eyes, but I didn't like holding the device. It felt hot and even damp, as if it had been inside a human body. Lots of erotic energy was going into that thing.

Um, yeah. Thanks for the smartphone/sex toy imagery, Virginia. Thanks a lot.

One last thing—Reading this piece reminded us of a Joan Didion quote:

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate, that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

The reason we bring up the quote is because it sure seem to us as if Virginia Heffernan might have just screwed over, or sold out if you will, one of her friends. She never revealed the person's gender, but still—Couldn't Heffernan's introductory anecdote possibly out her cheating friend? Perhaps even worse, pity anyone whose Blackberry-using spouse is friendly with Virginia Heffernan. We'd be willing to bet that more than one person read Heffernan's piece today and felt slightly overcome with "is my spouse cheating on me?" anxiety.

Then again, Virginia Heffernan co-wrote The Underminer, so maybe her friends just expect such things.

Love, Virtually [New York Times]
Pic via

Since one of the tests had length restrictions, we took only the first four paragraphs of Bush's essay and plugged them into two online writing analysis tests, Writing Tester and Blue Centauri. Here's the exact writing sample:

I've lived with being "George Bush's son" all my life. Growing up, I probably didn't want to be like him. Today it's ironic that much of my career parallels his. He went to Yale. I went to Yale. He was a Navy pilot. I flew F-102s in the Texas Air National Guard. Now that I'm in political life, I like to say I've inherited half of his friends all of his enemies. Of course, there will be some who will prejudge me, but that's OK: I don't expect to get all of the votes anyway. Being George Bush's son is a tremendous plus.

The greatest gift that my dad has given me has been unconditional love. He loves me when times are good and he loves me when times are bad. He loves me when I've been successful and he loves me when I've failed. Take the 1994 campaign for governor, which no one thought I could win. I fought an uphill battle, but I had such a sense of security due to love that I was willing to take the risk. Because I feared neither failure nor success.

That love and confidence has always been there. (Even though, as the first of five kids, I tested my parents' patience more than once.) Growing up in Midland, Texas, I can remember clearly my dad saying, "Son, I can play catch with you now and throw the ball as hard as I can and you can catch it." There was a certain rite of passage when I could catch with my dad and he didn't have to hold back.

Dad loves the outdoors. He often took me fishing when I was a kid. We'd go fishing for bluefish off the coast of Maine. I learned the skills of fishing from listening to him, and the joy of fishing from watching him. Dad's a good hunter, too, and one Christmas he gave me a shotgun, a .410. I would go with him to Louisiana to shoot ducks. Those are fond memories.

So Writing Tester graded the above writing sample at a 4th grade level, while Blue Centauri graded it at a 3.5 grade level. Not quite a fourth grader, but more advanced than a third.

Now to be fair, we put an excerpt from Joan Didion's essay, "Why I Write," though the same tests to compare. Here is the exact excerpt:

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas—I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in "The Portrait of a Lady" as well as the next person, "imagery" being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention—but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of "Paradise Lost," to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific's City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in "Paradise Lost," the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco's dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn't think. All I knew then was what I couldn't do. All I knew was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

Writing Tester graded Didion's writing at an 8th grade level, while Blue Centauri graded it at a 9.3 grade level.

I guess all of this only serves to prove that George W. Bush is no Joan Didion, but then again, we all probably knew that already, didn't we?

And oh yeah, Happy Birthday to George H. W. Bush! Your humble editor had no idea he was a fellow Gemini!

Happy Birthday, Dad [Daily Beast]

Director of The Human Stain Robert Benton is currently penciled in as the film's director. His last movie, 2007's Charles Baxter adaptation Feast of Love was the most depressing movie since Atom Egoyan killed a bus full of schoolchildren in The Sweet Hereafter, so he'll be able to deal with the sadder aspects of Graham's life. Before she died in 2001, Graham weathered a turbulent relationship with her bipolar philandering husband, and her decades in the newspaper business brought the Washington Post to heights it had never before experienced.

This will be the first return to scripted drama for Didion since she collaborated with her since-deceased husband John Gregory Dunne on 1996's Up Close and Personal. Having struggled with several losses in recent years (chronicled in The Year of Magical Thinking) this look at the life of Graham (pictured with Truman Capote at right) should make for an unbelievable film, although it surely won't perk up the author's overall spirit about our country's future. Now if we can just get Entourage to stop torturing the nation's young people, we'd be getting somewhere, HBO.

At the Puck Building last night, then, the crowd was comprised of a rather jaw-dropping list of names—the writers and their patrons both—as well as the anonymous rich, the women identifiable only by their Chanel suits and the men by their horn-rimmed glasses. One tended to overhear conversations that began: "When [so-and-so] was on the board of the New York Public Library..."

At a table in the corner, Mayor Michael Bloomberg chatted with Norman Mailer. Salman Rushdie put on a brave, Padma Lakshmi-less face. Paris Review editor and New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch mingled, as did his wife, New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar. A frail-looking Joan Didion was surrounded protectively by a shifting coterie of women, as if she might break in two or melt away. Former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld looked none the worse for wear after his embarrassing aborted attempt at running for the governorship of New York. A jeans-clad Dana Vachon spoke to men twice, perhaps three times, his age, presumably about the follies and foibles of The Street. Nathaniel Rich (son of Frank, brother of Simon) is an editor at the magazine, which has a very small masthead. "You've met practically one-third of us," he remarked, in conversation with this reporter and one of the Review's interns. Another reporter was covering the party for the Harvard alumni magazine 02138, on account of so many of the magazine's editors and affiliates having gone to that institution. The Review's late, great founder, George Plimpton, was of course a Harvard man himself, though one can only assume that he, like so many of his fellow Crimson, modestly told people he went to school "in Boston."

Midway through the cocktail hour, Mr. Gourevitch (Cornell, 1986) took the podium to try to quiet down the crowd so the Mayor could say a few words about Norman Mailer, the evening's honoree. "We have a lot in common," the Mayor said, referring to himself and Mr. Mailer. "We're both from middle-class Jewish families. We both attended Harvard—he went to the College, I went to the Business School—and we're both distinsguished authors." Laughter. "And we've both run mayoral campaigns." The Mayor said that Mr. Mailer had had two buttons when he campaigned. One said "I would sleep better if Norman Mailer were mayor." The other said "No more bullshit." Then the Mayor said he had used his senior citizens' Metrocard to get to the affair, and as such, it had only cost him $1. "I suggest that everyone become a senior citizen," he remarked. Much of the crowd, it appeared, already had. A long line of Town Cars idled outside however.

We were not invited to stay for dinner, so on our way out we peeked into one of the gift bags arrayed neatly on a table by the entrance. In a Paris Review tote bag were the Spring issue of the magazine (perhaps partygoers had not yet gotten around to reading it?); a copy one of Mr. Mailer's novels, Harlot's Ghost, which is about the CIA; a Paris Review T-shirt (American Apparel, size large); and various other promotional items (a nip of whiskey, a calendar, etc.). The tote would be perfect to bring along to Nantucket this summer. —Doree

The Paris Review Revel Gallery

Submitted by lenore, Mar 27, 2007 13:13

I tried plowing through the excerpt that was in the New York Times Magazine when it came out and, unfortunately, found the piece unreadable in its unrelenting detail. "I thought the EMT's came in 15 minutes, but I look back and see they took 17.3 minutes..."

So dull! I feel bad for her loss — whou wouldn't? — but I, too, was surprised that this woman whose work shook me to the core in college was now sounding like anyone else recalling a personal event: I.e, unable to see what might be utterly fascinating to oneself does is not necessarily relevant to the general public.

Anyway — i work at the sun, too, but didn't know how to contact you and just wanted to say how much this piece reverberated for me! - Lenore

Felt the same way! [NYS]

• There's a lot of backbiting and infighting at the Los Angeles Times, which is completely unusual behavior at a major newspaper. [NYT]
  
• Kurt Eichenwald's "checkbook journalism" controversy may keep him out of the first issue of Portfolio, which should give him plenty of free time to file that lawsuit he keeps talking about. [WWD]
  
• Quick recap of the action in the first week of Conrad Black's fraud trial. [ToTheCenter]
  
• At this point we don't care who buys Tribune, we just want to see an end to this fucking story. Now Ron Burkle and Eli Broad have popped up again. [NYT]
  

• Donald Rumsfeld was asked to guest-edit the LAT's Current section after producer Brian Grazer. Say sources at the paper, "We wanted to find someone responsible for a bigger disaster than Cinderella Man." [DHD]
  
• Those American Media numbers: not so good. [WWD]
  
• Dana Vachon: not a fuckup. Dana Vachon's audience: Easily influenced. [NYM]
  
• Former Voice editor David Blum returns to his old stomping grounds to bemoan the lack of critics willing to take on Joan Didion. There's a lot of unpacking to do on this one. [NYS]
  
• The album is dying. Articles about the death of the album, however, seem to have a healthy future. [NYT]
  
• Esquire EIC David Granger's in-laws promise that he's still pure Tennessee. So sweet! [Thomas P.M. Barnett]

What They Were Magically Thinking [NYM]
[Photo: Brigitte Lacombe]