"She called The New Yorker 'School' and treated it as such. She studied hard, reading back issues and writing notes to her boyfriends, a trio of married writers..."

"... she nicknamed Europe, Mr. Normalcy and Personality Plus, who all wrote back to her. This made her a less-than-attentive receptionist... Inevitably, she was fired. At home in her apartment, she began to write. At first she played amanuensis to [George W. S. Trow, the acerbic cultural critic best known for his essay 'Within the Context of No-Context'] in a pairing encouraged by Charles McGrath, then an editor at The New Yorker.... 'Yield to it,' Mr. McGrath told her, referring to Mr. Trow’s mind. 'Let it wash over you.' Together, she and Mr. Trow produced Talk of the Town pieces, the short... slice-of-life stories that helped define the magazine. He told her, 'Glimpse genuine joy, in a way, in the middle of world horror.' (She was on her way to interview a dog groomer.)... It was Tina Brown... who encouraged Ms. Rose to write about her romantic life. 'How I Became a Single Woman,' an elliptical coming-of-age tale, appeared in April 1996. (One of its more memorable lines: 'The truth is, it can be a form of actual day-to-day social torture to pretend not to notice the little dishes of poison that married people offer you all the time.') The piece caused a minor ruckus at School. Despite their nicknames, the married men were easily identifiable...."

From "Alison Rose, The New Yorker’s Femme Fatale, Dies at 81/She started as the magazine’s glamorous receptionist and became one of its more singular writers. In one of her last articles, she memorialized her time (and lovers) there" (NYT).

ADDED: Now, I'm reading "How I Became a Single Woman." Excerpt:

"In 'Seven Days in May,' a popular novel from the early nineteen-sixties that became a movie, a cabal of military officers conspire to overthrow the President of the United States..."

"... whom they regard as unduly sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The story, along with such other Cold War fantasies as 'Fail Safe' and 'Dr. Strangelove,' belongs to a genre that shares certain assumptions and plot points. The President is a reasonable fellow, doing his best to insure the survival of the planet, and the villains are the defenders of the permanent bureaucracy, usually the military. Things don’t always end well in these sagas—to wit, the destruction of New York City, in 'Fail Safe,' and of civilization, in 'Strangelove'—but the underlying message is that the President always has the interests of the American people at heart. The genre received a nonfiction update last week, when Andrew McCabe published 'The Threat"... [about] eight days in May of 2017.... McCabe’s tale is like a photo negative of the Cold War stories. Now the contest pits a despotic and, at times, seemingly deranged President against shocked and horrified bureaucrats scrambling to safeguard the basic principles of our democracy."

Writes Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker.

I don't think Toobin meant to imply that "The Threat" is a work of fiction — and a cheesy one at that — a mere "popular novel," in the genre of "Cold War fantasies."

4th of July movie watched last night.

On Turner Classic Movies.



Some nice lines in there about following or not following the law, and I'd quote them here if I could copy and paste them from the text of the original play (by George Bernard Shaw), but I can't, even though — searching for "law" in text — I discovered that the play is much more about law than the movie.

Anyway, the movie unleashes 3 actors — Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Laurence Olivier — to emote against each other on the subject of revolution. And there's one woman — Janette Scott — whose task is to decide not whether to join the revolution but which hunky male she likes best. Spoiler alert: Initially her husband Burt leaves her cold and the devilish Kirk Douglas turns her on, but later when Kirk gets virtuous and Burt joins the revolution — and changes from clerical garb into a buckskin jacket — she goes running to Burt who hoists her up on his big horse.

The movie is "The Devil's Disciple," and here's the full text of the Shaw play. I'd like to see the stage play, and I think the movie could be remade. There's a lot of potential to redo the big fight scene in which the Burt Lancaster character single-handedly takes on a bunch of British officers in a room. With no weapons on him, he uses what he can, including a big flaming log he grabs out of the fireplace. How can he hold a flaming log? He swathes the metaphor in a metaphor — his black priestly coat — the one that had previously insulated him from what his smoldering wife had to give.

Ah! I see there is a version of the play with Patrick Stewart and Ian Richardson, available on Amazon Prime. That's a 1987 TV film, so... it's not likely to include a more convincing and exciting wielding of the flaming log. A quick search of the text of the play, however, makes me doubt that glaring phallic symbol was Shaw's idea.

"I'm a very special human being. Noble. And splendid."

Says Burt Lancaster to Joan Rivers in "The Swimmer."



The movie came out 50 years ago — in May 1968. I saw it at the time, when I was 17 and interested in figuring out what the adults viewed as high-class film art.

And I DVR'd it when I saw that it was on Turner Classic Movies this week, and Meade and I ended up watching it straight through last night.

We laughed at it a lot — the Marvin Hamlisch music, the nature photography, the endless observation of the torso of Lancaster, the taking seriously of a type of man no one today takes seriously — but we've been talking about it seriously for a long time this morning, and I took the trouble to read the 1964 John Cheever story and a contemporaneous Roger Ebert review:

As "the swimmer" has a drink with his friends, it occurs to him that a string of other backyard pools reaches all the way across the valley to his own home. Why not swim every one -- swim all the way home, as it were?....

The movement of the film is from morning to dusk, from sunshine to rain, from youth to age and from fantasy to truth. It would also appear that the swimmer's experiences are not meant to represent a single day, but a man's life.

What we really have here, then, is a sophisticated retelling of the oldest literary form of all: the epic. A hero sets off on a journey. He has many strange adventures along the way, during which he learns the tragic nature of life. At last he arrives at his goal, older and wiser and with many a tale to tell. The journey Cheever's swimmer makes has been made before in other times and lands by Ulysses, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Augie March.

Joan Rivers has only a very small part, and this was her first acting role. She wrote in her autobiography:

"Frank [the director, Frank Perry] wanted a happy girl who then got hurt. Lancaster was going to be Mr. Wonderful who came up against a mean bitch, and was right not to go off with her. Trying to please both men, I was going back and forth between line readings, and nothing made sense."

That's quoted in Wikipedia, which also says:

After the film's restoration and re-release by Grindhouse Releasing in 2014, Brian Orndorf of Blu-ray.com gave the Blu-ray release five stars, commenting that "It's a strange picture, but engrossingly so, taking the viewer on a journey of self-delusion and nostalgia that gradually exposes a richly tortured main character as he attempts to immerse himself in a life that's no longer available to him", commenting that Lancaster gives a "deeply felt, gut-rot performance ... and communicates every emotional beat with perfection". Commenting on the same release, Ain't It Cool News reviewer Harry Knowles commented "This is also Burt Lancaster's journey to ... The Twilight Zone ... it is friggin brilliant! ... It is fascinating! Spectacular film!”

The aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 100%, based on 22 critic reviews.

Amazing really, because it seems just as likely that everyone could say it's a ludicrous, terrible mess. Where's the line between reality and fantasy? It's never revealed. You'll have to puzzle over it, and reading the original story won't hand you the answer.

I am still working on the theory that "the swimmer" was a sperm cell (or salmon swimming upstream to mate). Don't you think a sperm cell — if it could think — would think, "I'm a very special human being. Noble. And splendid"?

Back in the 60s, it was understood that literary fiction revealed the complexities of the mind of wealthy suburban males. We the theater audience spent 2 hours gazing at the near-naked and naked body of a 54-year-old man. Nowadays, Harvey Weinstein/Louis C.K. begs an audience of one to please look at him naked, and the theater audience is captivated by a swimmer who isn't a very special human being. He's not a human being at all.



Noble and splendid!