Nancy Rommelmann

Please Send Ice

It's 105 degrees

Unthinkable *

I received an email this morning alerting me to the murder of Lily Burk, 17. I thought, Lily, Greg's daughter? No, no...

Yes. I am not going to detail it. I am going to say that I got in the shower and wept. I was not very close with Greg, but he was on staff at the LA Weekly, where I was writing, and we interacted. I also saw him or his wife, who I never saw not smiling, nearly every weekday morning for five years, because our daughters were schoolmates in Hollywood. Lily was two years younger than my daughter, petite, a smiler like her mother, with waist-length hair and a bouncy step.

I wrote an email this morning to a dear friend, a mutual friend of Greg's and mine, and said, it's as though we -- LA journos with kids the same age -- are part of the same fishnet, and this has come along and ripped out part of it, irrevocably. It's wrecked people's lives, and the rest of us look at what's happened in horror, but there's nothing we can do to fix it, we can only say how sorry we are and also, that Lily is remembered.

*An arrest has been made

Janet Malcolm on Journalists

The opening and close of The Journalist and the Murderer (which I realize is twenty years old, but I just read it yesterday):

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse... on reading the article or book in question, he [the subject] has to face the fact that the journalist--who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully,  remarkably attuned to his vision of things--never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own."

“What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self-absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists… human nature guarantees that willing subjects will never be in short supply. Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses—the days of the interviews—are over. And still they yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.”

To which I must say, yes; what she says is true. The only defense I can muster is also true: I nearly always walk into a story with no or very little set opinion about the subject, and so can say, when I am talking with him, interviewing him, hoping he will trust me with his story, I am in empathy with him; I am trying to see it his way, because thus far, it's the only view I am getting. I do not lie and say, to the murderer, "Oh, yes; I'd have done the same thing," but I can often in truth say, I see why you did it and why it made sense to you. It is later, I think, once you have finished the interviews, once you start to look around at the parts he has not told you, when you start to breathe life into the piece, that the betrayal, and I think that is the right word, can and often does begin.

From what I've read, when Malcolm published this (first in the New Yorker, then as a book), other journalists went ape-shit, saying they would never act in the way she claims. More honest writers, however, knew just what she meant, amongst them Susan Orlean, who "endorsed Malcolm's thesis as a necessary evil." Yes.

Summer 2009

So far!

My beautiful mom and me, on the house porch, Menemsha

Din: Can we brush our hair first?
Nancy: Smile!

With my best friend from college, Liz Robbins, in Harvard Square

With me in Harvard Square, not looking as happy as with Liz

Necklace in Cambridge I really, really wanted, and went back to try on, twice, and tried to justify buying, several times, but at $1500... could not. [Note for all you jewelry makers out there: smoky quartz, with a chain of silver alloy with green gold plating. I'll pay you to make it!]

Walter Cronkite, Grammarian

Reading Walter Cronkite's obituary in today's NY Times, I was delighted to learn that, amongst his many accomplishments, was his unwillingness to put up with bad grammar:

In 1954, when CBS challenged NBC’s popular morning program “Today” with the short-lived “Morning Show,” it tapped Mr. Cronkite to be the host. Early on he riled the sponsor, the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, by grammatically correcting its well-known advertising slogan, declaring, “Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.”

As someone driven to distraction by the mangling of grammar (mis- and creative spellings, I am OK with; language, after all, is labile. But "it's" for "its"? No), I adore this.

I can't say I have the sorts of memories of Cronkite that I am hearing recalled today; I was too young to see him broadcast Kennedy's death, and though I remember Martin Luther King's, what I most see is my mother crying, and earlier, watching the race riots on TV, fire hoses being turned on young black people in the streets (of Alabama, I think) at night, the force pinning them to a building, and my thinking, how is this possible? How can they do this? I remember RFK being assassinated, and the moon landings, and Kent State, and Woodstock, and the Nixon/Humphrey election, all of which happened before I was ten years old. And of course the Viet Nam War, from which my uncle, a 22-year-old Marine, came home without his legs and eight of his fingers. This is a lot of news in a few years.

I see I have detoured from the title of this post. But I have been thinking how, Cronkite was the person who delivered all this news, even if I don't recall the moments he told it, I do recall him always being there. He was the man who told you what was happening. Very steady. I don't think our children have this, unless it's Jon Stewart, and then we're not really talking about the same thing, are we.

A New Low in Twitter Viral Advertising

An online sex-dating site called xxxblackbook.com is spam-posting to people's Twitter feeds, with the message, "Facebook me to see my notes on the police timeline in the Amanda Stott-Smith case," and then giving a link not to this timeline, but the Portland branch of their site, with explicit come-ons for adult dating.

I realize some people lose all sense of propriety on the Internet; that, because they are too niggardly to devote real thought to their comments, or because they are cowards, they hide behind the scrim of anonymity and throw their little doody-packs. I have more than once challenged these people to stand by what they write, in the full light of day. They never do. Further, I realize that people will lie to make a buck, to promote their service, whether it's carpet cleaning or a blow job.

Is it because I have written and continue to write about Stott-Smith and her forcing her children off the Sellwood Bridge in the middle of the night, resulting in the death of her four-year-old son Eldon, that I find xxxblackbook's tactics so appalling? Or is this an Internet-meets-free market line that people are willing to see crossed? I can't decide whether I want to find the perpetrator and destroy him, or just stare, to try to glean the way such a person reasons.

Or maybe it's a bot?

Adam Arnold, Grilled Cheese and Me

My lunch with so very nice, funny and talented clothing designer Adam Arnold published today. A clip:

MIX: How long have you been sewing and did you know it would lead to a career? 

AA: I started sewing 20 years ago. I grew up in Vancouver; I was living in my parents' basement and I would go out every night dancing. I'd get up in the morning and think who I wanted to be that night. This was the early '90s, lots of glitter and disco. People would see what I was wearing and say, "Wow, you should be a clothing designer!"

MIX: The clothes you design for men and women are pretty far from disco. The lines are so clean, so functional. They look expensive and yet they do not shout, ever.

AA: Good design is something that fits into your life. It doesn't draw attention to itself, except that it's made well and it fits you. How's your turkey sandwich?

MIX: It's good. I especially like that the French dressing on the salad is the orange kind. You so rarely see that anymore. And what are you doing with your fries?

AA: Well, I put stripes of mustard on the ketchup, and then I roll the French fry lengthwise. [He holds up a red-and-yellow striped fry.]

In other news, I am back in Portland since Monday night, drinking French wine for Bastille Day at Carafe, with Troy MacLarty and his pal Shannon, who is making Portland's best pomme frites bar none over at Laurelhurst Market. And then, last night, sitting in the beautiful, peaceful Southeast Portland yard of our great friends Josh and Heather. He grilled some steak and jalapenos, the latter of which let us just say caused a good deal of crying and coughing all around, an apoplexy only a few shots of good rum could fix. Then we sleep like babies and wake up in the sunshine. This entire summer feels, to me, like a gimme, as though I have been afforded this beautiful time as a gift.

We have two trips planned. First up: Panama in January. All suggestions welcome, and yes Brom, we will be seeing you xx

Happy 4th, and, Later!

Enjoy and prize Independence Day, my friends. I'm on deadline and so, inside. But tonight, we get on a plane and fly away, nine blessed days in Martha's Vineyard. No blogging, no tweeting, no She Writes, no Facebook. If you want to reach me, I'll be sitting on the porch at the Chilmark Store.