by Lillian Ross
1995
THE TIMES EMBARKS ON NEW WAYS TO GET OUT THE GRAY — Hendrik Hertzberg
THE New York Times is—as many a grizzled editor has told many a cub reporter, by way of explaining why some gamy detail or barnyard epithet or double-entendre had to be blue-pencilled—a family newspaper. And, in the case of the Times, the phrase is more than just another way of saying that the news must be fit to print. For hundreds of thousands of veteran readers, the paper is like a member of the family. You never really chose it, it’s just there—always has been, always will be. You may love it or resent it, you may find its crotchets endearing or annoying, it may bore you one day and enthrall you the next, but the idea of living without it (though the two of you may occasionally take separate vacations) never comes up. The Times is reassuringly familiar. And you spend a lot of time with your consciousness focussed on it. Let’s say, conservatively, that a typical reader gives the paper half an hour on weekdays, an hour on Sundays. That adds up to more than two hundred hours a year. Over a sixty-year lifetime of Times reading, the total exceeds four years’ worth of eight-hour days. How many of us will ever devote tht kind of time to gazing into the eyes of a loved one?
It stands to reason, therefore, that when the appearance of the Times changes discombobulation results, as if one had looked in the mirror and found oneself with an unexpected nose job. That’s why the newspaper of record thinks twice, and then twice more, before it administers autorhinoplasty. The modifications that are discombobulating readers the length and breadth of the metropolitan area this week may not be all that big, but their arguable modesty does not mean that it has not required considerable effort—to wit, ten years, two high-level task forces with pulp-novel names (the Futures Group and the Mohonk Team), the building of two enormous new printing factories (one, in faraway Edison, New Jersey, opened in 1992, and the other, in exotic College Point, Queens, opened eight months ago), and the spending of more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to bring them about.
Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the dapper ex-reporter, ex-ad salesman, and full-time scion who has been the Times’ publisher since 1992, explained all this and more one afternoon last week, in the course of briefing The Talk of the Town on the upheaval to come. The Edison plant, he said, has enabled the Times to use color in its preprinted Sunday sections, such as Travel, Arts & Leisure, and the Book Review; College Point enables it to do the same in the daily paper. Starting on September 15th, the Times will be a five-section paper on Mondays: main news, metro, arts, sports, and business. For the rest of the week, it’ll have all or the above plus one of the below: Science Times; Dining In, Dining Out (a revamped Living section); House & Home (the Home section redux); and, on Fridays, a two-part Weekend section. And now that the Times has a separately printed Northeast edition (plus a national edition, produced in eight plants around the country from pages downloaded by satellite), the New York edition can go to press later. “By not having to truck papers to Boston and Washington, we get a huge gain in terms of deadlines,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “Before, the Times spoke to its readers at nine o’clock in the evening. Now we can speak to them at eleven-thirty at night.”
With a flourish, Mr. Sulzberger plopped a stack of prototypes on a coffee table in his cozy office. We inspected them carefully for signs of the impending collapse of Western civilization. We detected none. The color photographs and graphics on the front pages looked surprisingly ungarish. Their tones were muted and earthy, and they brought out the crispness of the paper’s classy typography. It’s not quite Rembrandt, but Rembrandt never had to wrap fish.
1997
SON OF EST: THE TERMINATOR OF SELF-DOUBT — Kurt Andersen
I NEVER took an est seminar, but I’ve always thought that Werner Erhard’s human-potential scheme was way ahead of the curve: by squishy seventies standards, est was unsentimental in both form (you got yelled at; you had to pay close attention) and in substance (you are responsible for making yourself happy; there is no divine secret of life). Erhard was on his way to becoming the baby boomers’ Dale Carnegie, but then, during the first few months of 1991, it all went phffft: “60 Minutes” aired an exposé of Erhard and est; he sold the business to some employees; the I.R.S. came after him; and he went into exile.
But, once again, Erhardism, like disco and marijuana, is ascendant. Erhard’s former associates, reconstituted as the Landmark Education Corporation, have morphed est into something called the Landmark Forum. Landmark hasn’t received much press attention. This is partly because there is no high-profile charismatic leader like Erhard. There is also Landmark’s three-year-old lawsuit against the Cult Awareness Network. But Landmark is evidently becoming very popular, like est before it, among the semi-stylish upper-middle class. More than a hundred thousand people a year attend the forum and the programs it is associated with, and, since graduates are strongly encouraged to recruit family and friends, the growth may be approaching some exponential tipping point.
The forum takes place over a long weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, for fifteen hours each day), plus a Tuesday-night wrap-up session. In New York, the cost is three hundred and fifty dollars, or about seven dollars an hour— pricier than a movie (with less comfortable seats), cheaper than private-school tuition (more comfortable seats), about the same as an Off-Off Broadway show (equal seat comfort).
When I called to register, I had to give a credit-card number, describe an “issue” I wanted to resolve, and listen for half an hour as the Landmark order taker recited boilerplate—medical caveats, psychological warnings, legal indemnities. I shouldn’t come, she said, if I were “unwilling to encounter enthusiasm . . . fear, empathy, sadness, or regret” in myself or others, or if coming to grips “with what it means to be human” might prove too “difficult and unsettling.” I had to tell her whether my wife approved of my attending the forum. I had to confess whether I had ever quit therapy against a therapist’s recommendation. Finally, regarding “any issue or claim” I might subsequently wish to file against Landmark, I had to be prepared to agree to “freely giving up my right to a jury or court trial.”
EACH forum consists of between a hundred and a hundred and fifty people and is conducted in New York every two weeks in a big, tatty third-floor room off Fifth Avenue. It’s like a marathon version of certain first-year law- or business-school classes—a lecture course where the teachers are gregarious dictators and classroom participation is expected. Sometimes it’s a matter of anonymously shouting answers to the leaders’ fill-in-the-blank exegeses (“You get annoyed with your parents because you want . . . what?”), but people also stand, give their names, and “share” relevant personal anecdotes, “Oprah”style. There are short breaks every two or three hours, during which the leaders are available to answer questions privately.
Jerry, the more electric of my two forum leaders—imagine Martin Short doing Stuart Smalley live—gave us a capsule history, naming Erhard as the organization’s founder. Jerry also said that he had “been doing this since 1975,” suggesting a certain unashamed continuity between est and Landmark. Yet when a young woman went to one of the microphones to declare her qualms about Erhard and her fear that the forum was “a con game,” Jerry replied, “Who conned you when you were young? This is about that.” When Jerry explained a point to the group, he habitually said “Capeesh?” He also repeatedly mentioned that he was a former professional dancer and that he had recently fathered a darling son.
A central forum idea is that people cling unnecessarily to dissatisfactions in order to make themselves feel morally superior—what the forum calls “running rackets.” The leaders spoke constantly of “causing possibility” and of “being your own life’s cause.” A piece of paper taped to a table reminded the staff that its goal was to make us all “audacious, self-expressed leaders.” The words “sharing” and “listening” were nouns. Everyone used “empower” a lot. The goal was not happiness, exactly, but something more sci-fi neutral: “the result,” which inv
olves a kind of existential “completion.”
It’s easy to make fun of any freeze-dried patois, but this clunky new language is the means by which Landmark purports to reëngineer its followers’ lives. Landmark employs “a language structure that creates possibility,” Jerry said. “You make the interpretations. Rewrite them.” There is a Landmark graduate seminar that is actually called “Inventing Oneself.” The basic idea is that if you accept Landmark’s epistemological conventions—scrupulously distinguishing, for instance, between facts (e.g., “She didn’t call”) and invidious interpretations of facts (e.g., “She didn’t call because she hates me”)—and then start using its particular tough-love vocabulary, your life will improve. It’s as if an Up with People troupe had forsaken Scripture in favor of Derrida: deconstruction as an American applied science of cheerfulness—happy and unhappy are mere linguistic constructs, and it’s up to you to assert control.
But even though Jerry was slightly terrifying and ridiculous, even though I reflexively loathe almost everything about the Landmark Forum (the jargon, the big classrooms with fluorescent lights, the one-size-fits-all feel-good doctrines, the talking to strangers about my inner life), and even though I dropped out after the first day, I found that I mostly agree with its precepts: that contentment lies within oneself; that the glass is half full; that it’s pointless to belabor the past; that whining is bad. “We just made this up,” Jerry told us when someone wanted religious certainty. “This is not the truth.” Brian, our other leader, added, with a note of irony, “There are places you can go for truth.” If I were going to start my own cult (and I am in no way implying that the Landmark Education Corporation or any of its employees constitute a “cult”), it would probably be a lot like this. But I don’t think I’d hire Jerry.
1997
DO THE ROOKIES KNOW HOW WILLIE MAYS PLAYED? — Roger Angell
BASEBALL reopens this week, with the fresh schedule reviving hopes everywhere—well, maybe not in Montreal—but the icon season is over. Once again, the spring-training camps in Florida and Arizona featured the customary assortment of aching arms and bulked-up pectorals, and the reappearance on the field of some of the pastime’s most august figures and uniform numbers: leathery Hall of Famers and legends, back in the sun as invitees for a brief tour as spring coaches. Fan dads leaning on the chain-link fences at the Cardinals’ new complex, in Jupiter, Florida, could point out Lou Brock to their kids, right over there, talking to Red Schoendienst and—is that No. 45 . . . yes!—Bob Gibson. On a back field at Port St. Lucie, coach Mookie Wilson (a thousand kittens were named Mookie in the summer of 1986, when the Mets were driving for their pennant) smiled engagingly, pointing to his knees and his hips as he demonstrated leadoffs from first base to a handful of Mets rookies; one of them was his son, Preston Wilson, who might just turn into a legend himself a few springs down the line.
Out at the Giants’ Scottsdale Stadium, in Arizona, Vida Blue sat cross-legged in his familiar camp chair, just in front of the stands, now and then extending a hand back over his shoulder to accept an unseen fan’s pen and program; and the man indoors, sitting at the same southeast corner of the same clubhouse table, was Willie Mays. He is sixty-six now, and his seamed, heavy face hasn’t much say hey left in it, but he is never without company. Visiting writers and sportscasters, stopping by to pay their respects in the morning, have found that they share a wish to grab some of the youngest and newest Giants, chattering over there in front of their lockers, and say, “Do you have any idea how this man played?”
Mays, in self-protection, has developed a selective memory, and conversational openers from his visitors about his celebrated overhead catch against Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series or the four-homer game in 1961 no longer light up the Proustian hot stove. Nor do knowing references to any of the other lifetime six hundred and sixty dingers bring much response—not the homer that beat Warren Spahn, 1–0, in the fifteenth inning (eyeroll, with incomprehensible murmur), or the monster blow against the Astros’ Claude Raymond after Mays had fouled off thirteen consecutive fastballs (“Grmpf. How’d you know about that?”). This year, though, a visiting senior writer from back East got lucky when he brought up an early Maysian catch and throw against the Dodgers—the Billy Cox play.
“Damn!” Mays cried excitedly. “You saw that? You were there?”
Yes, the writer had been there—as a fan at the Polo Grounds. “August, 1951,” he said. “Cox was the base runner at third. You caught the ball running full tilt toward right, turned in midair, and threw him out at the plate. You threw before you could get turned around—let the ball go with your back to the plate. The throw went to the catcher on the fly—it must have been Westrum—and he tagged Cox out, sliding.”
“You got it!” Mays said. “I’ve been sayin’ this for a long time, and nobody here believes me.” He was kidding, of course, but his voice had come up at last: almost the old, high Willie piping. “Now, tell ’em how it was.”
I told it again—it was easy because I’d never seen such a play, before or since—and, as I did, it seemed to me that Willie Mays and I could still see the long, curving flight of the white ball through the afternoon light, bang into the big mitt, and the slide and the amazing out, and together remember the expanding moment when the staring players on the field and those just emerging from the dugouts, and the shouting fans, and maybe even the startled twenty-year-old rookie center fielder himself, now retrieving his fallen cap from the grass, understood that something new and electric had just begun to happen to baseball.
1998
AL HIRSCHFELD BLOWS OUT HIS CANDLES — Philip Hamburger
I REALIZE that any minute now my dear friend Al Hirschfeld will be ninety-five. I pick up the phone for a celebratory chat. Al is in his studio, on East Ninety-fifth Street, in his antique barber chair, drawing. Always drawing. “I feel wonderful,” he says. “Absolutely wonderful.” I suggest that work plays a part in his miraculous vitality. I hear a full-throated snort. “It isn’t work, kid. It’s luxury. Pure luxury. I don’t call it work. I haven’t a clue how one would retire.” Al uses the word “retire” the way some people pronounce “Richard Nixon.” “What’s a man to do? Sit around some sun-soaked beach all day? Watching the waves? Or playing golf? Golf!”—same tone as “retire.” “Human beings fascinate me. People,” he says. “I used to love just sitting in the window of the Howard Johnson’s at Forty-sixth and Broadway, drawing the constant parade of people passing by.” Does he still make notes in his pocket during a show, in the dark? “Just for reminders,” he says. “I’ll draw a bow tie, or a cane, or jot down one word or make a sketch that brings back an entire scene.”
I remind Al that he once said, “It would never occur to me to do a drawing of the Grand Canyon. It is just a decayed molar under a very dramatic light.” Now Al says, “Still feel the same way. Nature is there. What are you going to do? It’s movement that interests me. Movement in my drawing gives me total freedom. I can go where I want. I can take the line anywhere. I’m not governed by gravity.” I venture that his line is stronger today than when he was a stripling of seventy-five. “It’s the freedom,” he says. “The exhilarating freedom.” We talk a bit about kindness. In a mean world, there is never any meanness in a Hirschfeld drawing. “Nothing funny about a big nose, or a grotesque face, or making people look like an image in some Coney Island fun-house mirror,” he says. “I once did a drawing of Jimmy Durante, and I left the nose out.”
I remind him of the joyous weekly lunches we used to have at the old Lobster restaurant, on Forty-fifth Street, with S. J. Perelman, Joseph Mitchell, Brooks Atkinson, Harvey Orkin, Albert Hackett. “I’d like to start those all over again,” he says. “Why don’t we think about it?” He goes on, “Something has happened to humor. Out of fashion—I don’t understand it. Jokes aren’t humor. Something to do with economics and people incapable of satirizing the times in which they live.” He’s thinking back now. “I miss the great Miguel Covarrubias. Tremendous
influence on me. I’d like to think I had some effect on him.
“But the fuss over this birthday! Hard to believe. Photographers all over the house, in every corner but the sandbox. We have a rabbi lives across the street, and I step outside the other day and there are six photographers on the rabbi’s roof, snapping pictures of me. On the big day, Louise and I will go to her family in Larchmont for a barbecue. So long, kid. Much love to all at your place.” Click.
1998
THE WORLD WAS INVITED TO NOAM CHOMSKY’S VIRTUAL BIRTHDAY PARTY — Rebecca Mead
IN recent months, friends of Noam Chomsky, the linguist and social critic, were wondering how to mark his seventieth birthday, which fell on December 7th. The usual academic tribute, a Festschrift, didn’t seem quite sufficient. “You have to think, who shall we invite to contribute,” Jay Keyser, a retired M.I.T. linguist, explained a few weeks before Chomsky’s big day. “With someone of Noam’s stature, it would turn into the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
So Keyser and a colleague from CUNY, Janet Fodor, came up with an alternative: a tribute Web site. “You want a vehicle that is infinitely expandable, and that is what the Internet is,” Keyser said. The Celebration Project, established earlier this year at http://mitpress.mit.edu/celebration, invited all comers to contribute essays and salutations. “My view was that this would be just the way Noam would like it,” Keyser said. “You don’t go to an élite group—you open it up to anybody who would care to say anything.”
The organizers initially decided not to alert Chomsky’s obvious peers and acolytes to the existence of the Web site, hoping that potential contributors would simply browse their way into its precincts. The openness of the project made for some entries that probably would not have passed muster in a more conventional academic publication. From Israel came a linguistic analysis of Robert Frost’s poem “The Birches,” arguing that it “extolls the virtue of enticing young virgins to sexual activity.” (“The Germanic word BiRCH sounds somewhat like the Latin word ViRGin,” the writer explained, helpfully.) One Chomsky fan admitted that posting a greeting “kinda made me feel like a groupie sending a card to his or her favorite rock-and-roll star,” while another, from Slovenia, gushed, “It is the greatness of that man and the brightness of his brain and the baldness of his ideas and the fruitness of his domain that make us admire him.”