Posts From Author: the new yorker
Are You For Sale?
Where might you find French resistance fighters, E.E. Cummings, a Broadway critic with a freewheeling approach to life, Bessie Smith singing the blues, and a Wimpy Kid with a passion for Brazilian TV? Only at the House of SpeakEasy… Susan Cheever was first up this month, answering the evening’s main question right off the bat: “E.E. Cummings was certainly for sale!” Now acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Cummings wasn’t beneath hawking his poetry round the publishing houses back in the twenties and thirties, even dedicating one poetry collection (No Thanks) to the fourteen publishers who’d turned him down. Last month Cheever published E.E. Cummings: A Life (Pantheon), and it was from this that she took her tale for the night. Cummings had one child, Nancy, from his first marriage, to Elaine Orr. “Everything went well until Elaine fell in love with someone else — a real son of a bitch called Frank McDermott,” as Cheever recalled. Elaine annulled her marriage to Cummings and took the baby with her to Ireland to live with McDermott. “Finally, Cummings didn’t see Nancy any more. And Nancy led a kind of expat princess life, knowing absolutely nothing about her past.” Two decades later, through a series […]
Read MoreSusan Orlean Does Her Own Stunts
Over the last three weeks it’s been my pleasure to introduce you to the line-up for the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala: comedian and host Andy Borowitz; Hollywood superstar Uma Thurman, who will host literary quiz “The Tip of My Tongue”; writer Adam Gopnik; historian Simon Winchester; singer-songwriter Dar Williams; and finally, the author Susan Orlean. Susan Orlean hails from Ohio and is typically direct and witty in her assessment of the Buckeye State in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (ed. Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey; Ecco, 2008). “The flatness, it turns out, is a myth,” she begins, before going on to dispel other such preconceptions: The vast cornfields are also a myth […] The hard, nasal, cawing accent is mostly a myth, though now and again, as you roam through Ohio, you will certainly hear words shaped without any roundness or melody […] Even the Midwesternness of Ohio is a myth. She finds in the character of Ohio “a certain regularness, a lack of wild distinction, a muting of idiosyncratic extreme”, and feels the need to make it sound livelier. At summer camp as a child: I boasted that Sam Sheppard, the osteopath who murdered his wife in […]
Read MoreFirestarters: Adam Gopnik on Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin
If, like me, you tend to want to know more than you can possibly read about, a sudden urge to learn about, say, Abraham Lincoln or Charles Darwin can be an occasion for despair. The literature on such seminal figures is vast and expanding, like an Everest that’s getting bigger. Or the universe. In short: intimidating. So to come across a book like Adam Gopnik‘s Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life is a bit like finding that the Himalayan authorities have installed a ski lift just for you. We’re super lucky to have Adam Gopnik joining us for the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala at City Winery NYC on January 27. A long-time New Yorker contributor and three-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays, he has that forensic gift of the great essayist, the uncanny ability to see Aquarius where others see just stars. In Angels and Ages, recognising that his choice of subjects prohibits definitive coverage, he unspools his elegant premise from a single (but fertile) line of inquiry: the debate over what Edwin Stanton said at Lincoln’s deathbed. Stanton was Lincoln’s secretary of war and as close to the president as any man. It was natural that those […]
Read More