Posts From Author: Month: June 2014
Curtain Call: Falling For Perfection
How far we’ve come. The House of SpeakEasy opened its doors on a snowy January night with a guest list including Uma Thurman, Andy Borowitz and Susan Orlean. Since then, we’ve featured some thirty of the best and brightest writers in the literary firmament. Tonight, two days after the summer solstice, and with temperatures firmly lodged in the eighties, we’re delighted to feature a super-cool guest list for our season finale. The Daily Show‘s Elliott Kalan, the New Yorker‘s Bob Mankoff, maestro Christopher Mason, poet Jeffrey McDaniel, polymath playwright and novelist Adam Rapp, Barnard College president and writer Debora Spar, and novelist Emma Straub will all take the mic to tackle the pleasures and pitfalls of Falling For Perfection. We’re delighted to introduce them to you… Elliott Kalan has been the head writer at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart since he took over from Tim Carvell in January. “Writing for Jon Stewart… is the number-one job in the world,” he says, and it’s easy to see why. In this presentation sponsored by the Eagleton Institute of Politics, Elliott analyses the use of humour in politics: Bob Mankoff is the cartoon editor at the New Yorker. He recently published an excellent memoir, How About Never — Is Never Good For You?: My Life […]
Read MoreElliott Kalan Has To Be Funny Every Day
Do you watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? We watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Do you know who Elliott Kalan is? If not, listen up, hotshot, because Elliott is the head writer on The Daily Show! Jealous? Well, as he told Splitsider.com, “to be completely clear, objectively nothing is cooler than what I’m doing right now”. So you’re right to be. Elliott’s been in the chair since January this year, when he took over from Tim Carvell, who’d gone off to run John Oliver’s new show, Last Week Tonight (a weeklier version of the nightly news, as the ads say). He’s been working on The Daily Show for over a decade, starting as an intern in 2003. (That’s right, fellas: there’s hope! Read this great interview with Co.Create to find out Elliott’s tips for your meteoric rise…) He later became a production assistant, a segment producer, a writer… and now, head writer. Which, by and large, means that he has to be funny every day. And, presumably exponentially more difficult, make sure everyone else is funny every day. No mean feat. On the side, he’s one third of the movie-reviewing trio The Flop House (“a great listen for movie fans“, according to the New York […]
Read MoreInadvertent Joys: The Poetry of Jeffrey McDaniel
In the last twenty years Jeffrey McDaniel has published five collections of poetry: The Endarkenment, The Splinter Factory, The Forgiveness Parade, Alibi School, and his most recent, Chapel of Inadvertent Joy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). This latest is a rich, fast-paced, helter-skelter set of licks on subjects including ageing, infidelity and Winona Ryder’s eyebrows (“safety pins / holding her face together”). It’s laughter in the dark at times, but there are enough moments of romance and sensuousness to prevent the whole enterprise from disappearing into a rabbithole of midnight angst. Chapel is divided into three sections: “Little Soldier of Love”, “Reflections of a Cuckold and Other Blasphemies”, and “Return to El Mundo Perdido“. The first is probably the most free-ranging, with an eclectic guest list including Eliot Spitzer, Kate Winslet, the Marquis de Sade, and “Satan Exulting Over Eve”. McDaniel’s range is exhibited marvellously here. Take the back-to-back poems “The Barbecued Man” and “Pity Party”. The first begins thus: Orange flashes through the hole where the windshield used to be. A splatter of volcanic splotches, like drops of scorched milk, sears into the Pompei of his cheeks. It’s an extraordinarily intense tableau, gruesome in its similes and metaphors, almost onomatopoeic in its consonance and […]
Read MoreWonder Women: Debora Spar on Feminism, Perfection, and Where To Next
Instead of seizing upon the liberation that had been handed to us, we twisted it somehow into a charge: because we could do anything, we felt as if we had to do everything. And by following unwittingly along this path, we have condemned ourselves, if not to failure, then at least to the constantly nagging sense that something is wrong. That we are imposters. That we have failed. — Debora Spar Debora Spar, the current president of the women-only Barnard College, has written a probing-damning-optimistic report card on the state of feminism in the twenty-first century. Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) is in some ways a two-hundred-and-fifty-page sigh of regret. Spar’s generation is one step removed from the women who read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and asked themselves, “Is this all?” Growing up in the 1970s against a backdrop of increased sexual freedom, Charlie’s Angels, and a huge shift in favour of women in the workplace, it was disarmingly easy for Spar’s generation to distance themselves from the widely reported extremities of the women’s movement — Ti-Grace Atkinson insisting that marriage means rape, say, or Shulamith Firestone’s assertion that “pregnancy is barbaric”. The net result for Spar […]
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Adam Rapp: “I don’t think parents take too well to my books…”
Adam Rapp is one of those polymaths you read about. A playwright, novelist, musician, screenwriter, director, basketball player… He’s written a couple dozen plays, including Pulitzer Prize finalist Red Light Winter (2006); The Metal Children (2010), which starred Billy Crudup in its New York premiere; and Nocturne (2001), an icy portrait of grief which prompted Variety to label Rapp one to watch “with keen interest”. His books fall into both the young adult and adult-adult categories. They include The Year of Endless Sorrows (2006); 33 Snowfish, a tale of sexual abuse that the American Library Association chose as one of its 2004 highlights; and Under the Wolf, Under the Dog (2004), which was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and winner of the Schneider Family Book Award. The Children and the Wolves, published in 2012, is a particularly intense brew. The writing is by turns visceral and tender. Take Wiggins, who emerges as the central character: Sometimes I imagine myself in a pickle jar, floating in science juice. Barely alive with see-through skin. My heart like a little white raisin. But later: I imagine a soul is a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest. Somewhere deeper than […]
Read MoreBreak On Through (with Greil Marcus)
When I was seventeen I went through a massive Doors phase. I loved the music, of course. But no doubt it was also partly an attraction to the grotesque, doomy romanticism of Jim Morrison, “his ideal of following in the footsteps of Rimbaud replaced by an image of Marat dead in his bathtub”. About a year ago I went through a second, more intense Doors phase. (Still there, actually.) And judging from the experience of Greil Marcus, just quoted, whose excellent book on the Doors is subtitled A Lifetime Listening to Five Mean Years (PublicAffairs, 2011), I’m going to spend the rest of my life returning to them again and again and again and… Jim Morrison’s shamanic aura is at the heart of the Doors’ music. The band made an indelible mark on late ’60s US culture with their six top ten studio albums; astonishing, meandering live shows; and the notoriety occasioned by Morrison’s infamous exposure onstage in Miami in 1969. They even appear in a short vignette in Joan Didion’s kaleidoscopic essay “The White Album“, a literary affirmation of their cultural centrality. But what sustains the myth of the Doors is their eerie prescience, the spooky sensation that in their music […]
Read MoreOn Holiday with Emma Straub
Escaping the “melting concrete armpit” of Manhattan is what many New Yorkers will be dreaming of in the infernal months ahead. When the tarmac starts to gleam and descending to the subway becomes a Dantean prospect, a couple of weeks in a Mallorcan villa sounds like just the ticket. You’re in luck! Open Emma Straub’s The Vacationers (Riverhead Books, 2014), and that’s exactly where you’ll find yourself. As elder son Bobby observes, “The Posts were masters of self-delusion, all of them”. But in Straub’s second novel it is the fate of the Post family to have their eyes comprehensively de-wooled. The Mallorca trip was supposed to be a celebration of Jim and Franny’s thirty-five years of marriage, but in the wake of a seismic indiscretion on Jim’s part, that notion has come to seem like “a joke with a terrible punch line”. His career at a men’s lifestyle magazine called Gallant has recently come to an ignominious close after the revelation of an affair with a twenty-three-year-old editorial assistant called Madison. Franny, herself a successful journalist and writer, is devastated. In addition to the prospect of losing her husband, her younger child, Sylvia, is set to depart for college in […]
Read MoreStay Silent and Soon Amazon Will Be Telling the World What It Can Read
In this article, originally published in The Sunday Times in the UK, House of SpeakEasy co-founder Amanda Foreman outlines the ongoing battle between online retailer Amazon and book publishers, led by Hachette Book Group. One of the greatest monopolies in history was the medieval Catholic Church. Its religious and temporal power was absolute until confronted by an even more potent rival: the printed book. Today, print is once more at the centre of a cultural revolution. Only this time it is not the challenger to a global monopoly but its most successful weapon. Amazon, founded and controlled by Jeff Bezos, used the humble book to leverage itself into becoming the world’s largest online retailer. It took 20 years for Amazon to emerge as a monopolistic power. Last week, by creating an effective blacklist of authors for use as a bargaining tool against Hachette Book Group, the company showed us how far it would go in its abuse of that power. The public has only recently become aware of the long shadow war between Amazon and the publishing industry. In February Amazon began quietly “disappearing” certain authors in an attempt to force Hachette into giving larger discounts on its books. What […]
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