Week in Pieces

José Saramago watches Blindness

It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally a novelist approves of the film adaptation of his or her book. It happened at a recent screening, when the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer José Saramago watched Fernando Meirelle’s Blindness (based on Saramago’s acclaimed novel) for the first time. Watch what happened here.

It’s good that Saramago likes the film because no one else seems to. Early reviews of Blindness, which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival, have been almost entirely bad. According to Variety’s Justin Chang, Saramago ‘long resisted the idea of having his 1995 masterwork adapted for the bigscreen. Meirelles has proven the Portuguese writer’s instincts to be sadly correct’.

The New York Review of Magazines

Victor Navasky, a former editor and publisher of the Nation, teaches a popular course at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Every year his students write, edit, copyedit, proofread and publish The New York Review of Magazines, which is, as Navasky puts it, ‘a magazine about magazines’.

The best pieces in the 2008 issue include Evan Lerner’s lively survey of the websites of well-known print magazines. Lerner, who interns at the New Yorker.com, informs us that ‘a bit of code … drops a random New Yorker cartoon into each article page’ and ‘all Conde Naste magazines share the same content management system’. Lerner details the tension between old and new forms of media within The New Yorker, and how the magazine has managed to balance the two. He writes, ‘The New Yorker does want to use the rapid pace and wide reach of the web, and so it has a handful of blogs written by some of its regular contributors, such as George Packer and Hendrik Hertzberg. But unlike most blogs, The New Yorker’s are often edited and fact-checked before being put online. These kinds of risk/reward decisions are the product of serving two masters, one wanting the fluidity of the web and the other wanting the solidity of print.’

In ‘Politics in Vogue’, Mengly Taing scrutinizes Hillary Clinton’s decision to cancel a Vogue photo shoot in February 2008 (Clinton’s campaign considered the pages of Vogue too ‘elitist’ and ‘glamorous’) and instead agree to a goofy profile in the popular tabloid Us Weekly, the sales of which far outstrip Vogue. Taing admires the Clinton team’s strategic decision: ‘It became apparent as her campaign progressed that she enjoyed much support from lower-income, less-educated women who are more interested in reading about their favorite reality-show personalities than obsessing over Parisian couture.’

Taing does not mention that this may have been yet another miscalculation by the Clinton team. By February, Clinton already had the working-class white vote – it was the Vogue-reading young professionals who would desert Clinton for Obama en masse.

Detailing the evolution of Esquire, in ‘Reporting with style’, Matt Miller proves himself an enviable stylist. He writes, ‘Leafing through the fashion spreads in current issues of Esquire, it seems that the modern, well-dressed man has three things on his mind: the acquisition of vast fortunes, the seduction of slender women and a sense of superiority based on his casual outlook and ability to purchase a whole host of consumer goods. In these pursuits, though, he is bitterly at odds with the members of his grandfather’s generation, the well-dressed gents of yesteryear, who, as depicted in much older editions of Esquire, wore tweeds with deliberation, silks with panache and didn’t seem so concerned about such contemporary piffle as the exotic surnames of fancy designers.’

We look forward to the next edition of The New York Review of Magazines.

Markus Dohle to head Random House

Markus Dohle has been chosen to replace Peter W. Olson as chief executive of Random House. The thirty-nine-year-old Dohle is described as an ‘outsider to the publishing industry’. His appointment, according to Motoko Rich in The New York Times, ‘is likely to rattle insiders at Random House and comes at a time when both Random house and the wider publishing industry are suffering from a slowdown’. See our previous post on Olson.

Worth Noting

Granta contributor Ruth Franklin has an article in the current New Yorker on ‘Chinua Achebe and the great African novel’. Franklin also mentions ‘How to write about Africa’, Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay from Granta 92, which can be read here.

PEN/Studzinski Literary Awards

HSBC’s three-year agreement to fund Africa’s HSBC/PEN Literary Awards has come to an end but a new award has been announced to replace it. The PEN/Studzinski award for original short stories written in English by African writers under forty is named after American investment banker and philanthropist John Studzinski (formerly of HSBC), who has donated the prize money. The final judge of the prize will be South African novelist and Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee, who is an honorary member of PEN SA.

For back posts click here.