Henry Alford's Witty Take on Modern Manners in "Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?"

 The Newark Star-Ledger

Sunday, January 08, 2012, 7:23 AM

In his wry and witty new book, “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide to Manners” (Twelve, 244 pp., $24.99), the investigative humorist Henry Alford travels from Japan to the awkward New York party scene, exploring the meaning of modern etiquette in an era of constantly chirping BlackBerries and semi-literate e-mails.

Alford sets out to convert the masses to observing good manners, one rude person at a time. He trains his sly guns on catty e-mails and Facebook-friending quandaries, but below the humor is a quest for basic decency in these overstimulated, stressed-out times. Comic chaos breaks out when Alford sets himself up as an etiquette counselor without credentials, then later gives tours to foreigners, instructing them on truly brutal New York manners.

Alford, 49, spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley at a café in Manhattan.

Q. What was the “a-ha” moment that made you write about manners?

A. The book started five blocks from here at the Gourmet Garage on 7th Avenue. The girl at the register dropped my apple on the floor, said nothing and put it in my bag. I was irritated. I said, “I’m sorry.” She said nothing. I said, “No, I didn’t mean for you to drop my apple like that.” I went home, I cogitated and I thought, “I’m going to keep doing this because it makes me feel all warm inside.” I wrote an op-ed piece about it, then got a book deal out of it. Every book has a creation myth, but this is not a myth.

Q. Doesn’t reverse politeness, when you correct another person’s bad manners, take too much energy?

A. It does take too much energy. You get nothing. I’m slightly ashamed of it. I still do it all the time. It’s a defense mechanism and possibly a form of therapy. It’s largely about me because people don’t usually get the joke.

Q. Why is there such a dearth of good conversation at parties nowadays and an unwillingness by most people to communicate in social settings?

A. Whenever I try to chat someone up at a party, I am always made to feel like I am hitting on them. I think people’s reluctance to talk at parties happens because we are just not a culture that understands that the point of going to a gathering is to talk to people you don’t know.

Q. Do you think that your intense interest in manners is related to age?

A. I hope not. I bristle at the idea, only because it seems like a form of conservatism. Maybe I am being naive, but I think the issue of decorum and decency is as important to an 18-year-old as it is a 50-year-old man. I think that manners can be a kind of generosity.

Q. In one hysterical chapter, you set yourself up as an etiquette counselor, even though you aren’t licensed to practice. Why did you do this?

A. I think that (“Miss Manners” columnist) Judith Martin does an admirable job, but I don’t think writing a manners column is that difficult. There is no accountability. Columnists rattle off their advice, we never hear how the situation ends, then onto next week’s column. I felt if I was going to make these assertions about manners columnists, I had to walk the walk. I tried to give manners advice where there was actual accountability.

Q. What was your advice scenario to your friend Tom?

A. My friend Tom had a one-night stand with a man named Jess who was still in the closet. Tom continued to chase Jess. The etiquette issue here was to not do anything that would cause emotional havoc for this closeted guy. Tom was totally deluded. He wanted to go to the restaurant where the guy worked. My victory was to make sure Tom warned Jess he was coming to his workplace.

Art critic Robert Hughes on His Personal History of 'Rome'

Newark Star-Ledger
Sunday, November 13, 2011, 7:10 AM

In 1959, the Australian art critic Robert Hughes was a 21-year-old student on his first visit to Rome. The city blew him away, from the Spanish Steps to the Coliseum, where gladiators fought each other to death 2,000 years ago.
Fifty-two years later, Hughes has written “Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History” (Knopf, 500 pp., $35), in which he gives readers a fluid look at the Eternal City — from the founding myth of Romulus and Remus to the bloodthirsty Roman Empire, the medieval period, the Renaissance and present-day Rome. In Hughes’ intensely intimate view of the city, he delights in Julius Caesar being the biggest slave trafficker in Rome and the church murals of saints being tortured to death. Hughes muses on the relic hysteria of the Middle Ages, when every church had to have a drop of Jesus’ blood and the foot of a saint, and Michelangelo’s brutal journey to finishing the Sistine Chapel.
The 73-year-old Hughes was Time Magazine’s art critic from 1970 to 2001. He spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Manhattan.

Q. Imperial Rome was incredibly filthy, with garbage and excrement piled up on the street, as well as dead horses. How did the residents dispose of their chamber pots?
A. They would throw the coarse terra cotta pots out the window. There was a law saying that if you brained a passer-by with a night urn, you’d have to pay for their medical fees and lost work time.
Q. Santo Stefano Rotondo is a church famous for its murals showing how ancient saints were sliced, diced and broiled on their way to martyrdom. How did these murals affect you?
A. Being a once-practicing Catholic and suddenly being immersed in this Roman iconography, this stuff was very upfront, showing the hopes and fears of the church. They were much more vehement than the Catholic representations that I knew in Australia.
The murals were meant to be gory, to provoke pity and terror. I’ve thought of it as a Sistine Chapel for sentimental sadists. There is flogging, drowning and even cooking saints in boiling oil, like a Trastevere artichoke. Santo Stefano isn’t one of my favorite churches because I never really liked the art.
Q. If you were taking a nephew to Rome for the first time, what would you insist that he see?
A. I’d insist that any nephew should come with me to the important Baroque monuments. I’d definitely start him off with Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 17th century masterworks, including the Barcaccia Fountain and the Cornaro Chapel. Rome is truly a Berninian city, par excellence. What Bernini is attempting to do is to ramp you up into a state of wonder, saying, “If this can’t do it, nothing can.”
Q. Can you tell me about the physical and emotional toll that the painting of the Sistine Chapel had on the great artist Michelangelo?
A. He wrote a poem where he said, “I’ve grown a goiter at this drudgery.” Michelangelo experienced fatigue, frustration and inspiration while painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Q. At the end of the book, you go on a rant, comparing the Rome you first saw in 1959 to the Rome of 2011. Now, the museums and churches are swamped with tourists. How can you view art in Rome now?
A. Well, the historical sites are almost inaccessible, but by going repeatedly to them, you can have meaningful visits. The only way you can really appreciate a work of art is in relative silence. I don’t mean there should be an enforced silence, but the artwork should have an opportunity to talk directly to you. You can get this only by going to the same sites multiple times.

Mark Vonnegut on Coping with Mental Illness

In 1971, Mark Vonnegut published his memoir “Eden Express,” a blistering account of his three mental breakdowns in the late 1960s, set against the backdrop of social unrest and hippie communes. The son of Kurt Vonnegut, America’s great cynical novelist, Mark Vonnegut recovered and became a beloved doctor outside of Boston.

Four decades later, Dr. Vonnegut has published “Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So”(Delacorte, $24), a memoir dealing with his bipolar disorder diagnosis, his work and his turbulent relationship with his famous father, who would matter-of-factly mention to his children that he might kill himself. In the 1980s, Vonnegut had his last mental breakdown and found himself restrained in the same Massachusetts hospital were he taught medicine. Vonnegut’s account of his recovery, his family and maintaining his mental health is a humane look at his own situation, as well as the patients he treats with compassion.

Vonnegut, 63, is a practicing pediatrician, and spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Milton, Mass.

Q. After four decades of swearing off another book, why did you write this one?

A. I wrote the introduction to my father’s book of essays “Armageddon in Retrospect” and liked it. I realized, “I can write pretty well.” My wife and friends have been telling me for years that I should write another book.

Q. How do you compare your experience with a crewcut Harvard psychiatrist in the late 1960s and managed care today?

A. When my psychiatrist and I were in charge of my care, each appointment cost $100. He didn’t have to verify my insurance. There was not a quality-improvement criteria like there is now. He did not have to assign a diagnosis. I am faced with this in my own practice. My true diagnosis for a kid may be “School is not his thing.” I can’t say that. It has to be “attention-deficit disorder with or without hyperactivity.” I cannot get paid unless I give him a diagnosis.

Q. How did your medical colleagues handle your fourth breakdown in the 1980s?

A. There were several sessions between my nervous partners and my psychiatrist. My partners would take me out to lunch, then for grand rounds at the hospital, making sure I was okay.
Q. How does society handle mental illness now, compared to when “Eden Express” came out?

A. It is still stigmatizing. People who can pass for normal do. The thing that is different now, and that will help us deal with mental illness better, is the fact that the mentally ill are no longer warehoused. We now have a day-to-day awareness that mental illness exists.

Q. How was it growing up with Kurt Vonnegut as your father?

A. It was both inspiring and terrifying to have him around, to have him talking to himself, banging on the typewriter and sometimes swearing. He was a big guy, 200 lbs. and six-foot-three inches, who could sometimes be very nice and sometimes be furious because he couldn’t write.

There was a point when I was 15 or 16 that I realized that my father wanted me to be a loner. I decided, “It’s okay to be an introvert, but I don’t want to be a loner. I want a few other people in my life.”

I came across these photos of my father as a teenager. He was smiling boy, always with his arm around a girl. I’ve come to see him as a sweet nice kid who went to war. He was beaten by Nazi guards, he almost starved to death. In Dresden, he pulled dead bodies out of bomb shelters. I think he had post-traumatic stress disorder. It was after the war that he became able to write with depth. It became easy to forgive him, but also he’s not around to pick on anymore.

Please check out my interview with Charles Shields' on his fascinating and tortured portrait of Kurt Vonnegut:

http://dylanmfoley.blogspot.com/2011/12/charles-shields-on-complex-and-tortured.html

Chang-Rae Lee Skewers American Overconsumption in "Aloft"

 

 

 I dedicate this interview to "Black Friday" and the fistfights at Target and Walmart. As a nation, we are swimming in junk.


The Denver Post
March 28, 2004 By Dylan Foley


Chang-rae Lee may be the patron saint of literary novelists who write about emotionally shut-down men. In his acclaimed 1995 debut novel, "Native Speaker," Lee created a Korean-American corporate spy struggling with his ethnic identity and his place in the world. In "A Gesture Life," Lee explored an elderly man trying to forget the war crimes of his youth.

In his third novel, "Aloft," Lee follows Jerry Battle, a semiretired Italian-American landscaping contractor living on Long Island. On the surface, Jerry has everything he needs, from his material wealth to the plane that he uses to fly above the suburbs that are his home. But the cracks quickly show in his facade, with his inability to communicate with all the people he loves - his elderly father, his two adult children and his ex-girlfriend Rita.

"People have asked me about this," chuckled Lee as he discussed his emotionally blocked narrators in his publisher's office in New York City. "I feel it is dramatic the way people like Jerry Battle or Henry Park (of "Native Speaker") go through the world, always mitigated by their inability to express themselves. For me, there is something absolutely dramatic about someone who wants to feel and does, but somehow can't do the things that allows himself to communicate."

As the novel progresses, Jerry is faced with several crises, from the financial ruin of his son, Jack, to the potentially fatal medical condition of his daughter, Theresa. Underlying the present worries is the memory of the tragic drowning of Jerry's Korean wife, Daisy, 20 years before. In "Aloft," Lee has crafted a beautiful novel that is both tragic and humorous, examining a modern family in suburban America.

"Part of Jerry's problem is he's quite self-absorbed," said Lee. "It is his extreme lazy-heartedness. His heart is there, it's beating and he wants to feel vital, but everything has to come to him. He can't initiate the action. Somehow life has to shake him. He needs an intensity, a sharpness."

At 38, Lee is aging gracefully from his role as literary wunderkind, who, at age 29, wrote the mature, finely crafted "Native Speaker," into a respectable academic. He wore a tweed jacket and wool slacks to the interview. He teaches creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues include novelists Toni Morrison, Edmund White and Joyce Carol Oates. He lives in Princeton, N.J., with his wife and two daughters.

As "Aloft" evolves, it becomes a modern version of Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons." Three generations of the Battle men can't relate. Jerry's father, Hank, looks down on Jerry because he didn't work as hard as he could in the family business. And Jerry was never enough of a role model for his son, Jack.

Lee made Jerry a man on the cusp of 60 for specific reasons. "Many of my friends' parents are Jerry's age, around 60," he said. "In the society we live in, it is the new middle age. They are thinking about retiring, but they have so many choices. They have enough health to pursue second lives."

Today's 60-year-olds are wedged between elderly parents and immature adult children. "They have grown kids who aren't as grown as the previous generation," said Lee. "Because of medical advances, they have elderly parents who are ailing. It seemed to me that this is the time of life for a guy like Jerry Battle, where everything should be coming together, but he has never had more responsibility. Everyone is pulling and prodding him. In terms of a figure in our culture, that is a guy I haven't heard about yet."

For Jerry, flying is a great means of escaping intimacy. "His hobby of flying was the perfect activity for him," said Lee, "both metaphorically and literally. It spoke so neatly to how he wanted to be in the world, but outside of it, too."

Lee was born in Korea and raised in the Westchester suburbs. He decided, however, to set the book in America's first suburbs of Long Island, the ultimate destination for working-class strivers from overcrowded New York City.

"They are the classic suburbs, engineered and planned that way," Lee said. "They are based on privacy and cloistered neighborhoods, so that there is not the kind of commonality, interaction or any of those things we associate with communities. The lots are big enough in that upper-middle-class way that you don't see your neighbors. That's the site of the American dream, as a postwar dream."

It may have been the isolation of the suburbs that helped destabilize Daisy, Jerry's dead wife.

"The suburbs are the worst place if you are an isolated immigrant," Lee said. "The suburbs give no comfort to people who aren't comfortable with themselves. There's no place to meet people. With Daisy, for me her tragedy is not her mental illness or her ethnicity, it is her isolation. That isolation is shared by a lot of women in the suburbs. Women who didn't grow up in the suburbs but who live there have a lot of problems."

Through Jerry's monologues, Lee explores how the overconsumption of the American suburbs has infiltrated all of American society. His son Jack's 6,500-square-foot house makes for a prime target.

"People are making as much money as they can and getting as much space as they can so they can shut everyone else out," he said. "In Jack's house, he has a kitchenette in the master bedroom because it is too far to walk downstairs. Our tastes are getting overrefined. There is a breakdown to the limits of what we own, find comfortable and necessary. Each generation is more invested in 'stuff.'

"If I have any grand idea about this book that is not spoken yet, it is that the suburban life is now our life," he explained. "It is even in the city. If you walk down Fifth Avenue (in New York City), it is just a big outdoor mall."

Despite the gloomy predictions, both novelist and interviewer found themselves laughing uproariously about $1,800 faucets for the home and how all classes seem to crave granite kitchens. "We are starting to reach a point of saturation, where individual consciousness is defined by Nike and bottled water," Lee said.


(ALOFT By Chang-rae Lee, Riverhead, 352 pages, $24.95)