Nancy Rommelmann

Evening's Empire

My review of Zachary Lazar's memoir, Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder, appears in the Sunday Oregonian. It's about vice and real estate, the awakening to the rot that was the early 60s, about getting away with murder. Lazar had to have a steady hand to still what he needed to long enough to get it down on paper, to wit:

Beneath it all runs the blood that brought Lazar to his task, blood and purpose exposed as he recalls watching his mother the moment she is told her husband's body has been found:

"(S)he was sitting on the couch, bowing and rising like a marionette, or as though someone was shoving her from behind, only to yank her back upright with her blouse in his fist. When she looked at me, she screamed, her face distorted. The scream was angry, personal, insane."

The Cost of Running Away

Early last year, my editor at the LA Weekly emailed one night to ask whether I was interested in reviewing Debra Gwartney's Live Through This, a memoir of her teenage daughters' running away. By the time my editor logged on the following morning, he had three emails from me, including one to his Facebook account, saying, "YES!"

It was a privilege to spend time with Debra and her girls. As I was leaving her apartment in Eugene, part of me wanted to say, "But can I stay the weekend so we can keep talking? I can sleep on the couch." Instead, I came home and wrote about Debra and her girls and the devastation that running away can bring.

Last month, I received an email from a friend about a local girl who was presumed missing. Without going into detail, I thought, I should write an Opinion piece about this for the Oregonian. But I dragged my feet. I was busy; I had the flu. My family had the flu.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times ran a series on teen runaways, focusing on kids in Oregon. I sent a link to the story to Debra, with the note that I was probably the 609th person to do so. In fact, she wrote back, I was the first, and when the heck were we going to get coffee, anyway?

I stopped dragging my feet earlier this week, and asked my editor at the Opinion pages whether he wanted a short piece from me about a runaway. This, though I realized I was probably a little late to the game, what with the NYT piece having run...

"Actually, your timing is perfect," he said, and that what I wrote would run as a companion piece to a long piece running this week, by a woman whose daughters had run away. I said, I bet I know who. Ah, he said, and did I know Debra's book is a finalist for the Oregon Book Award?

Debra's piece is "Good Guys, bad guys and running away." Mine is "Letter to a Teenage Runaway." Honored to be in such company.

Secrets of Adulthood

My friend Gretchen Rubin's new book, The Happiness Project, is available for pre-order. I haven't spent a lot of time on her Happiness Project website, but each time I do, I either nod my head; think what a wonderful thing she's doing; cry, recommit to what it is I'm trying to do, or all of the above. It all seems so simple, doesn't it?

Gretchen likes lists. So do I. One of hers, below.

Here are my Secrets of Adulthood. Although these items may not seem particularly profound, each one was a revelation when I finally figured it out:

The days are long, but the years are short.

Someplace, keep an empty shelf.

Turning the computer on and off a few times often fixes a glitch.

It's okay to ask for help.

You can choose what you do; you can't choose what you LIKE to do.

Happiness doesn't always make you feel happy.

What you do EVERY DAY matters more than what you do ONCE IN A WHILE.

You don't have to be good at everything.

Soap and water removes most stains.

It's important to be nice to EVERYONE.

You know as much as most people.

Over-the-counter medicines are very effective.

Eat better, eat less, exercise more.

What's fun for other people may not be fun for you -- and vice versa.

People actually prefer that you buy wedding gifts off their registry.

Houseplants and photo albums are a lot of trouble.

If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough.

No deposit, no return.

Goodbye to All That [*updated, unfortunately]

The future of journalism has, as we all know, been on the wall for several years. In that time, I have seen one of my editors at the LA Weekly (Joe Donnelly) let go, followed several months ago by the paper's editor-in-chief, Laurie Ochoa. Many of the Weekly's columnists were also axed. Some of this can be chocked up to the paper and indeed all of Village Voice Media (which also owns the Village Voice) having been bought by New Times; the rivalry between the two companies is legendary, and there's always a let-go of old regime when a new regime tromps in. And I still have dear friends and editors the Weekly, where I am still a contributor, thus giving me the illusion that the place I have done my best work for is, if not thriving, then at least ambling along.

Earlier this year, I also saw the firing of both my editors from Portland Monthly. Last month, my editor at City Arts left under her own steam, though the sense was, the door was being held open for her. The day Gourmet magazine was shut down, I was emailed the termination memo from a friend at Bob Appetit, saying, "I had to read this three times to see whether I still had a job." I have seen dear friends, the best in the biz at what they do--Anne Thompson; the deeply brilliant Virginia Postrel--have their jobs eliminated or their contributor's contracts curtailed. Yesterday, my editor at Wired, a very nice guy and a really crack editor, was let go.

This is not to say, many of these people have not gone on to find jobs in new media. My pal Richard Rushfield was delighted to leave the LA Times and is now at Gawker; Anne Thompson continues to blog like a demon (and is, now and always, a top entertainment journalist to whom places like New Yorker go for quotes), and Virginia, in addition to contributing to the Atlantic and a gazillion other publications, co-runs the brilliant blog Deep Glamour.

And astoundingly, I am not out of work. Every time one editor leaves--because you really do write for your editors--another contacts me. After a year of not writing for Portland Monthly, I have just contributed a feature to the December issue. I've made new inroads with fabulous and smart folks at the Oregonian and have the opportunity to write for them solid local stories, and earlier this year I had a feature for Reason, an event I was so delighted by, I am blushing even now.

And yet: at least once a week, I thank my husband, profusely, for creating a business that can support us, because let me tell you: while I made a living for a dozen years as a freelancer, that ship has sailed. I watch as my friend InaraVerzemnieks, who I think the best narrative journalist at the Oregonian, takes the buy-out. I read that the New York Times is cutting another hundred jobs. Yesterday, a report commissioned by the Graduate School of Journalism concluded:

“The days of a kind of news media paternalism or patronage that produced journalism in the public interest, whether or not it contributed to the bottom line, are largely gone. American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting independent news reporting in this new environment….”

I'm not crying, and certainly, I have as much access to new writing outlets as the next journalist; I currently contribute to three sites (in addition to my own, much ignored blog). I have assignments. I am working on a book. Tonight, I will drink wine with Inara and discuss an arts and lecture series I'd like to get off the ground. It's all good.

And yet, I am wistful. I love being a journalist, a long-form journalist who goes off, sometimes for weeks, months, looking for and bringing back the stories.

Virginia told me, "Luckily, books are not dependent on advertising." Books it is.

*Within three hours of posting this, Bon Appetit announced, it was laying off six

On Being Middlebrow

As someone who is coming late to reading many of the classics, I enjoyed W.A. Pannapacker's essay, "Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor," in which he quotes Virginia Woolf:

"If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me 'middlebrow,'" wrote Virginia Woolf in an unsent letter to the editor of The New Statesman, "I will take my pen and stab him, dead."

Woolf and her ilk, Pannapacker goes on to say, professed great love for the lowbrow, so long as they did not get anywhere near her sparkling little pocket of the ether. Others rolled their eyes.

As the Harper's Magazine editor Russell Lynes argued in his 1949 essay "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow," the ideal world for Woolf is a caste system in which billions of bovine proles produce the raw materials for a coterie of sensitive, highbrow ectomorphs who spring fully formed from the head of Sir Leslie Stephen. At the very least, lowbrows with upward aspirations should have the courtesy to keep themselves out of sight until they complete their passage through the awkward age of the middlebrow.

I think I probably am middlebrow, not in my mannerisms, but in the fact that, yes, I strive--and fail--and strive again for knowledge. There is, after all, no such thing as an intellectual caste system, no matter how comfortable others might be in trying to erect one.

The most comprehensive recent analysis of the cultural turn is Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008). In one chapter, Jacoby remembers the 1950s as a brief moment of intellectual aspiration among many Americans: "I look back on the middlebrow with affection, gratitude, and regret rather than condescension," she writes, "not because the Book-of-the-Month Club brought works of genius into my life, but because the monthly pronouncements of its reviewers encouraged me to seek a wider world."

The Great Books—along with all those Time-Life series—were often "purchased on the installment plan by parents who had never owned a book but were willing to sacrifice to provide their children with information about the world that had been absent from their own upbringing," Jacoby writes. They represented an old American belief—now endangered—that "anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better himself."

High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed

I always listen to books on tape in the car, always nonfiction, often tough stuff, death and brutality and plague. But I admit to being as shocked at what I am currently listening to, Michael Kodas's excellent High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed, as any murder tale.

Imagine, if you will: stealing climbers crampons, and stoves, and sleeping bags, and supplies, so that when they descend from their climb, exhausted and freezing and oxygen starved, they find nothing to keep them alive, and so must go begging, and as often as not are turned away. Imagine descending to find your ropes have been cut, and so you must ice-ax your way down, and when you slide, which you will, and break your ankle, you plead with fifty other people descending for help to get you down, people who step over you. Imagine lying about your climbing credentials; accepting $65,000 to lead someone up Everest, and then leaving him to die, and not mentioning his death to anyone.

Certainly, there are still moments of sacrifice here, and heroic efforts. But in Kodas's telling, the human elements on Everest have become more dangerous than the mountain itself.

Cheerful Money

My review of Tad Friend's new memoir, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, appears in this Sunday's Oregonian. 

A snip:

Friend is very funny, as when he notes that one of his talents, as befitting a good Wasp male, is "the rarely called-for ability to carve a watermelon into the shape of a whale." But he also is sad, sometimes angry, and in an effort to understand why his family withheld and bequeathed affection, hauls us with him over the emotional shoals.

"Wasp parental love continues to feel conditional upon conduct -- namely biddable behavior that brings credit to the family and that requires no undue head-scratching to figure out what's going on with little Johnny," he writes. "[B]ut then Wasps believe in behavior, not motivations. ... And if this condemned us each to be an island of seeming cheer in an archipelago of sorrow, so be it."

Hubble Telescope Images

Am listening to Christopher Hitchens' "God is Not Great," read by the author. It's simply smashing, and really, who better to deliver it?

I do not believe in God, at all, not even one tiny little bit. Nor do I believe in some greater unnamed deity who's somehow responsible for organizing the universe. I do, however, stand in wonder and awe of the universe, and agree with Hitchens: why would you turn to God for comfort, when you have this? Isn't this enough? Isn't this more than enough? And here's more.

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.

Debra Gwartney's "Live Through This"

I had the great pleasure earlier in the year to meet author Debra Gwartney, author of Live Through This, a memoir of the years when her young teenage daughters ran away from home. I also got to meet the daughters (that's them on the cover), now grown, and to write about them. The piece, "Surviving with Two Runaway Daughters," appears this week in the LA Weekly. A clip:

The struggle over whether to keep reaching for children who repeatedly reject her (about which [Gwartney's husband Barry] Lopez, who met Gwartney in 1990, says, “She did not share or complain”), or to let them go (Gwartney’s Idahoan father tells her, “Just cut your losses; you got two to take care of”) lets us know, in a new and horrifying way, why parents freak out when confronted with a daughter’s adolescence; that we are afraid not (only) of what some man or men might do to her, but we are afraid of her, of the awesome unhappiness and unfixable rage that inhabits her body like a toxin, until she finds herself cutting (as Gwartney’s oldest daughter did) to get it out, and which properly or perhaps improperly harnessed becomes a cannonball that blows holes in the entirety of existence, as it does when Gwartney watches, in real time, the decision of her second daughter to follow her older sister, who she has just learned is not coming home:

“Stephanie sank back, away from me, all angles and stiffness, and I saw a plan flit across her face that was unmistakable ... she’d go where Amanda was. As soon as she could. I reached for her again, terrified now and planning to squeeze the desire to leave me from her skinny body ... neither of us admitting to the other what was already set in motion, both of us frightened — she would not be without her sister, and I would not lose another child.”

Summer Books Bonanza and that Kindle Piece

Like books? You are going to love love love love love this section, with authors aplenty telling you what books they love, which ones they're sorry they finished, which ones they've never finished. Plus this year's great beach reads; literary pull quotes, books on the horizon and those authors you really, really should be reading. Plus my take on Kindle, all courtesy of City Arts Magazine (which puts out three editions, Seattle, Tacoma and Eastside, so pick on up, will ya?)

Joseph O'Neill on Flannery O'Connor

One of my favorite novels of the past year was Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. It took me a little while, nearly 100 pages actually, before I fell into it, and then, to my surprise, just kept falling and falling. Most successful novels (successful in the sense that, I like them) do not gather ferocious speed at the three-quarter mark, but this one did, throwing me into the abyss where you could only fall and watch, fall and watch. Not a lot of writers can do this sort of controlled madness -- the first I recall reading was Jane Bowles, who just let the whole thing spool out until you were, sometimes and unfortunately, untethered from the story. Anyway, I wound up loving Netherland, whose end had me holding my breath and then crying from the realness of it all. The last book to do that was Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, which I cannot recommend strongly enough, and which, I've just realized, also threw me at the beginning, though in that case, only for the first page or two.

O'Neill writes, in the Atlantic, about Flannery O'Connor, one of the very greatest of twentieth century fiction writers. She writes with a controlled, even cold savagery, writing which O'Neill describes as:

[A]lmost unfairly good:

She lay her head back and as he watched, gradually her eyes closed and her mouth fell open to show a few long scattered teeth, some gold and some darker than her face; she began to whistle and blow like a musical skeleton."

Or (upon the arrival of refugee Poles at a farm):

She began to imagine a war of words, to see the Polish words and the English words coming at each other, stalking forward, not sentences, just words, gabble gabble gabble, flung out high and shrill and stalking forward and then grappling with each other. She saw the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty. She saw them all piled up in a room, all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up like the naked bodies in the newsreel. God save me, she cried silently, from the stinking power of Satan!

The narrating third person hovers in an almost miraculous fusion of proximity and comic distance. With O’Connor, there never seems to be space between the words and their creator’s sensibility. You almost never catch a whiff of authorial self-consciousness. About how many writers can this be said?

You can read the rest, which includes a review of Brad Gooch's new biography Flannery, here.

A note on why so little blogging: I am writing, and I am also often on Twitter, posting what would have gone here. Why? It's fast. Join me? http://twitter.com/NancyRomm

The Dissidents' War: Michael Totten Interviews Tom Ricks

One thing I love about being in Portland is meeting all the writers that pass through on book tour. Amongst my pals Michael Totten, Joel Millman (staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal) and myself, one of us is sure to know or have communicated with or write in the same arena as or want to meet so badly the writer says, "Sure!", and we all wind up having drinks, before or after their readings at Powell's.

Such was the case last week, when Tom Ricks was in town. Ricks, formerly with the Washington Post, is the author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, and most recently, The Gamble. We sat in a bar near Powell's for 90 minutes before he read, talking mostly about the Middle East, but also a little about ancient Rome, the history of which Ricks' has been reading as a reward to himself for finishing the book, but the length of which is driving his editor batty.

"I think," said Ricks, "he'd rather see me writing."

Michael had a chance to interview Ricks, said interview of which appears here.