Craig Taylor's Magnificent Oral History of a City in "Londoners"

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In his new book “Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now--As Told By Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long For It”(Ecco, $29.99, 448pp), the Canadian journalist and playwright Craig Taylor has written a scintillating oral history of his adopted city. Taylor went both high and low, speaking with cops, a cyclist, a city planner and a dominatrix among many others, exploring the social fabric and varied cultures of a vibrant city.

Taylor met a wide spectrum of Londoners, from a recent immigrant from Iran to a driving instructor, a street photographer and a singer who become a plumber. Using long-form interviews, Taylor captured the personality of Raymond Lum, a formally homeless ex-convict who tells how he moved to London to make a new start. Transsexual squatter Sarah took Taylor Dumpster diving for his supper. In roughly 90 interviews, Taylor asked his subjects to soul search on what it means to be a modern Londoner, while creating an impressive oral history in the tradition of Studs Terkel.

Taylor, 35, spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from London.

Q. What drew you to writing an oral history of London?

A. I had been doing interviews for The Guardian. A lot of my writing was very condensed and the interview subjects would get these brief little bursts. I knew there was more to be said, but I had no idea it would take five years.

Q. How did you approach people for interviews?

A. I downloaded a list of the verbs in the English language and pulled out the ones that applied to London--earning one’s keep, feeding the city, keeping the peace. I started using these as a framework, looking for people who enacted these verbs. I could approach people, saying “I’m doing this project. You seem to be embody this verb.” It was easier that saying, “Could you tell me about your hopes and dreams?”

Q. You are Canadian. Did you benefit by being an outsider to London society?

A. It was helpful, I was allowed to ask seemingly stupid questions and I could dodge the normal things people do when they meet--where did they go to school, how they define each other.

Q. One of the great characters in the book is Smartie, a working-class ex-financial worker, ex-d.j. and present London cab driver. He’s a Rosetta Stone for London. Were his stories true?

A. The book wasn’t really about the “true facts” of London, but how people perceived the city. Smartie is like many of us, who may embroider parts of their story. The fact that he’s touched on so many levels of British life was fascinating to me. He spoke well and had a great knowledge of many parts of the city. Instead of saying something hackneyed about soccer hooligans, Smartie was able to talk about hooligans and how fashion worked in other groups.

Q. You had to cut the interviews down from 200 to about 90 in the final book, but kept the long interviews. Why?

A. The length was pretty organic. We wanted to allow the people to talk, not just about a focused part of their life, but to revel in their language, their cadence. I wanted some sections to be quite long, like a short story.

Q. What were your influences on your oral history?

A. My influences developed by reading the people who had done these histories--Ronald Blythe, Studs Terkel. Then there was a certain approach to journalism, like (New Yorker writer) Joseph Mitchell, who let people speak at length. I am less and less comfortable with the editorializing I see in journalism, the judgments that journalists make when they profile people. Class is such a tricky thing in England. It is better to have people introduce themselves. You can figure out who they are in a way that is more interesting.

(This interview ran in the Newark Star-Ledger in February 2012

Joseph Epstein Explores the World Behind Our Backs in "Gossip: the Untrivial Pursuit"

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In his witty new book of essays “Gossip: the Untrivial Pursuit”(Houghton Mifflin, $25, 242 pp.), Joseph Epstein gleefully tackles the taboo subject of what we say behind other people’s backs.

Epstein explores the social and even biological benefits of gossip and writes about the great gossips of history—the vicious Louis de Rouvroy in the 18^th century court of King Louis XIV, the all-powerful columnist Walter Winchell and even the editor Tina Brown. Epstein examines how Tom Wolfe destroyed the composer Leonard Bernstern’s public image by making him look like a buffoon, how the media consciously mixes gossip and news with putrid results and how the Internet is “a vanity press for the demented.” For Epstein, the joy in gossip is exposing individuals’ crude contradictions and pummeling false pieties, though gossip trashes marriages and cuts down social rebels. He quotes one ruthless trafficker in gossip as saying hypocrisy “is the only modern sin.” Epstein’s gossip runs thick, but the book’s insights are penetrating and diverting.

Epstein, 73, was the editor of The American Scholar. He spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Evanston, Illinois.

Q. You admit to enjoying gossip, as well as receiving and transmitting gossip. Why did you want to write about it?

A. Writers are always looking for good subjects. I came to this book because I was asked to give a talk on celebrity at the University of Virginia. I realized that without gossip, celebrity almost doesn’t exist. More of the world is now gossip. More of journalism is now gossip. There has been a shift in decorum. People now give details they wouldn’t give before.

Q. You note that there are intense social benefits from gossip. What kind of gossip do you enjoy?

A. Vicious gossip doesn’t interest me. There is gossip that details people’s foibles, hypocrises and pretentions. That to me is the most delicious gossip. I don’t know if I’ve committed any vicious gossip in this book. I did not write this book saying, “I’m going to get that S.O.B.”

Q. Where does the viciousness of academic gossip come from?

A. There is that famous quote, “Why are academic arguments carried out with such intensity? Because the stakes are so low.” When I worked at Northwestern, I noticed the petty rivalries. In academics, the pretention rates are very high. There is a high degree of disappointment among these characters. They were so good at school.  They thought they would create great books and become inspiring teachers, then neither happened.

 

Q. You hammer a recent past president of the National Endowment for the Arts as a power-grabbing, middling poet. Why?

A. I don’t hate him. What I was doing was skewering his pretentions.  I met him for lunch when he was up for the job. “I have this Jeffersonian sense of public service,” he said. Complete bull.  He was really saying, “I want this job for it will give me power and advance my career.” I would have had much greater regard for him if he had said that, instead of putting Jefferson on his side.

Q. You also take the New Yorker writer Lillian Ross apart for exposing her five-decade affair with the married editor William Shawn. Do you think Ross’s motivations were revenge?

A. I think she was morally clueless, especially with Shawn’s wife and children still being alive. It’s “Look at me, I’m still alive. Look at who I’ve been bonking with gusto.” This goes back to decorum. Fifty years earlier, her book would not have been published. Her book was the betrayal of all betrayals, for Shawn was a great editor who specialized in not being known. The nature about what we gossip about has changed greatly.

Q. With gossip flooding into the mainstream media, do you think that modern journalism has been irreparably corrupted?

A. I don’t think it is irreparably corrupted, but it is widely corrupted.

Ayun Haliday on the Horror of Odd Jobs

The Denver Post

No more odd jobs for Ayun Halliday

July 10, 2005



By Dylan Foley

Special to The Denver Post Ayun Halliday proves that being a slacker doesn't end at 25. In her new memoir, "Job Hopper," the actor and writer details some of the dozens of jobs she had in a 10-year period in Chicago, from nude model to failed cocktail waitress and illegal massage therapist.

Halliday's tale is no sob story. Halliday makes merciless observations on her bosses and herself as a rebellious employee. As a waitress, she eats the forbidden tiramisu at an Italian restaurant and in her essay, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," she details her work at a costume shop and how she borrows the owner's pride and joy, the wedding dress from "Brigadoon." All the while, Halliday pursues her dream of becoming a big name in the small alternative theater scene in Chicago.

"I had made the grand decision at one point to drop out from being an actor to pursue a more lucrative career as a poet. I auditioned for the Neo-Futurists (an alternative theater company) one dark and stormy night in 1988, and that was why I continued acting."

Halliday, 40, is a columnist for Bust magazine and author of two previous comic memoirs.

After quitting a job, Halliday would take her dreams to the classifieds. "The thing that all my jobs had in common was I found them through the classified ads," she said. "I would open up the ads in The Chicago Reader and would think, 'I'm going to get something great this time.' Now at 40, I still read the classified ads and I think, 'These jobs are bad."'

Despite rarely making more than $6 an hour in 1990s Chicago, Halliday's dreams of becoming a big actress seemed ironclad. "I was clinging so hard to the Neo-Futurists," she said. "We had had a certain kind of success. We had packed houses. I didn't want to be a movie star, anyway. I wanted to be a famous downtown Chicago actress."

Despite being the eternal short-term employee, Halliday still yearned for community. In one moment of high comedy, she winds up with a bunch of office workers who are obsessed with the cartoon character Garfield.

"Temping was my attempt to go straight, to buckle down and to make serious money," she said. "It turned out that I don't fit in with people who get a big bang out of Garfield. There was nothing wrong with it, but I felt like a Martian dropped into their midst. Here I was, an actress and I couldn't even successfully fake it. When I left the office, one of the women said to me, 'I know I'll see your name in lights one day, Pam."'

Many of the bosses depicted by Halliday are absurd, but she often knocks the stuffing out of herself as a subversive employee, even feigning illness for personal gain.

"I wasn't so much motivated by the idea of sticking it to the man, but sometimes it was like, 'Gee, they have all these office supplies. I need these,"' Halliday explained somewhat sheepishly. "Often these jobs weren't stimulating enough. If something came along, like going to a Grateful Dead concert with a friend's boyfriend, I would suddenly dislocate my knee. Then I'd feel guilty afterwards, so I'd wear a knee brace for days."

In the end, Halliday is saved from a life of human bondage to low-paying jobs when her husband, Greg Kotis, wrote the unlikely smash-hit anti-musical "Urinetown."

"It felt like grabbing the brass ring when you didn't mean to," said Halliday. "Then it's like, 'You better lay another golden egg, my friend.' People ask, 'Aren't you going to buy an apartment?" I say, 'No, we spent it all buying take-out sushi."'

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer from Brooklyn, NY.

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Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-Market Dilettante

By Ayun Halliday

Seal Press, 256 pages, $15