We broke our no-television-news resolve to watch the PBS NewsHour tonight. Nearly the entire broadcast was devoted to remembering Gwen Ifill. If you missed it, you can watch at PBS.
Monday, November 14, 2016
Gwen Ifill (1955–2016)
The news that Gwen Ifill has died is a terrible shock. As host and moderator of Washington Week and co-anchor of the PBS NewsHour (with Judy Woodruff), Ifill was unbeatable. Here she is in 2013, speaking about the NewsHour to a New York Times interviewer (quoted in the NPR story I’ve linked to):
“When I was a little girl watching programs like this — because that’s the kind of nerdy family we were — I would look up and not see anyone who looked like me in any way. No women. No people of color,” she said. “I’m very keen about the fact that a little girl now, watching the news, when they see me and Judy sitting side by side, it will occur to them that that’s perfectly normal — that it won’t seem like any big breakthrough at all.”I will miss Gwen Ifill’s intelligence and exuberance. Watching her, I always had the feeling that we were all in this (that is, current events, of whatever sort) together.
Salinger and Tewksbury
In The New Yorker , Jill Lepore writes about J. D. Salinger and Peter Tewksbury (the director of Father Knows Best , among other things) and a never-realized film adaptation of “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor”: “The Film J. D. Salinger Nearly Made.”
Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)
[Orange Crate Art is a Father Knows Best -friendly zone. The show is much better than you might think. For instance. And for instance. And for instance.]
“The safest shelter”
Stefan Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam , trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Viking, 1934).
Zweig knew this feeling. I think many people in November 2016 know it too.
Other Zweig posts
Destiny, out of one’s hands : Erasmus ekphrasis : Fanaticism and reason : Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : School v. city : “A tremendous desire for order” : Urban pastoral, with stationery : Zweig’s last address book
Nell Irvin Painter on the election
Nell Irvin Painter in The New York Times on whiteness in the Trump era:
Conveniently, for most white Americans, being white has meant not having a racial identity. It means being and living and experiencing the world as an individual and not having to think about your race. . . . The Trump campaign has disrupted that easy freedom.[No arguments here, please. I’m sharing this link because I think it’s good food for thought.]
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Leon Russell (1941–2016)
The musician and songwriter Leon Russell has died. The New York Times has an obituary.
Leon Russell was only occasionally on my radar. But many years ago, I held a microphone up to the television set and recorded this performance on a cassette, Furry Lewis and Russell and company performing “Furry’s Blues.” Watch the way Russell and the rest of the band adapt to Lewis’s flexible sense of time.
The whole show is at YouTube too.
Mark Shields on the election
From his syndicated column:
A friendly suggestion to Democrats: This blame-the-customer explanation is self-defeating. We basically have two political parties; if you demonize the people who support the other party’s candidate as moral lepers and ethical eunuchs, you’re probably not going to win either their goodwill or their votes.I always like seeing Mark Shields on the PBS NewsHour , but I haven’t watched a minute of television news since Tuesday night. I’m reading instead — Shields’s column among other things.
[No arguments here, please. I’m sharing this link because I think it’s good food for thought.]
Naomi Klein on the election
“Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left”: in The Guardian , Naomi Klein writes about neoliberalism and the Democratic party.
[No arguments here, please. I’m sharing this link because I think it’s good food for thought.]
Local color
[For fashionistas and fashionistos only.]
Here’s Elaine Fine, wearing the dress she made from fabric designed by our friend Jean Petree. It’s a dropped-waist Laura Ashley-like dress, from a mid-90s pattern.
*
5:20 p.m.: Washing softened and shrank the fabric. The dress fits perfectly.
[We didn’t realize until after the fact that, like Homer’s Penelope, Elaine is standing next to a column. But unlike Penelope, she is smiling.]
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