Good afternoon. Here are ten links to pieces of various lengths that I thought you might like. Reader: I wrote the first two. The third – a 12,500-word tale released yesterday in Graydon Carter’s Air Mail – tells an extraordinary tale. Hopefully something here might intrigue. Let’s get to it.
1—“There are 1,500 writers behind me. So I can do anything I want.”
I enjoyed sitting down with Andrew Wylie, the famed agent who presides over literary New York (and London) from a skyscraper two blocks from Central Park. We talked about Rushdie, Amis, Rooney, Roth, Ginsberg, the irrelevance of bestsellers, his errant path to the top, and the “divine rat race”. He’s entertaining. At 75 he won’t sell the Wylie Agency, which represents canonical literary estates, some of the world’s best writers, and many British journalists. “What’s the advantage? I get a cheque, and then I’m unemployed.”
Don’t call him the Jackal. “The Jackal thing doesn’t interest me,” he had told another interviewer, and I didn’t want to bore him. Andrew Wylie, 75, is the agent around whom the New York literary world has had to orient itself for four decades now. His pugnacious reputation as the man who holds publishers to ransom and snatches prized authors from other agents precedes him. Talk to him and you will soon realise he values two qualities in people: how much they have read, and whether they are amusing.
Books are the thing. This “fascination with and addiction to reading”, as he put it. Politics is secondary for Wylie, and all other art forms trail behind. He does quite like paintings, he said, and proceeded to tell me a typical Wylie story. “Allen Ginsberg [a client] was dying. And he had this small painting of an incredible sky, like a Vermeer, above his bed. Although he was dying, I was engaging him in conversation: where did you get that? Condo, he whispered. Condo. And that was my introduction to George Condo. He became a friend.”
2—“Lewis has not written a prosecution. He has written a defence.”
How Michael Lewis (the king! the champ!) blew the financial story of our age. I reviewed his deeply misguided and surprisingly dull book on Sam Bankman-Fried in The Times last weekend. I first read Lewis when I was 12 – I didn’t read much at the time but I did read Moneyball, and I’ve read most of his books since. But does every writer eventually run out of fuel? Even Tom Wolfe, the savant, ended his career attacking Darwin.
Going Infinite should perhaps have been subtitled “how to become a billionaire while being the world’s biggest brat”. Early on Lewis gleefully describes how Bankman-Fried took a call with Anna Wintour while playing a video game (she wanted him to pay for the Met Gala). When people spoke, Bankman-Fried would just say “yuuuuuuuuup”. He disappointed them later. “He didn’t mean to be rude,” Lewis writes, forgivingly. “He didn’t mean to create chaos in other people’s lives. He was just moving through the world in the only way he knew how. The cost this implied for others simply never entered his calculations.”
A truly wild story made all the wilder if you have met the character at its core.
“Why should I tell YOU the truth? Who are you, Bertrand Russell?” Talese was 31 (my age!) when he wrote this famous profile of Peter O’Toole, also 31 at the time, which is unnerving me. This piece exemplifies something Tina Brown says in her Vanity Fair Diaries: you can’t teach a journalist what to notice (that detail of the priest smoking with a pair of wire tweezers so as not to “touch tobacco with fingers that would later hold the Sacrament”, among others). Which actor today would be as frank as O’Toole is here, or let you get near enough to hear them say any of it?
That's why I love the theatre. It's the Art of the Moment. I'm in love with ephemera and I hate permanence. Acting is making words into flesh, and I love classical acting because you need the vocal range of an opera singer, the movement of a ballet dancer. It's turning your whole body into a musical instrument on which you yourself play. It's more than behaviorism, which is what you get in the movies. Chrissake, what are movies anyway? Just fucking moving photographs, that's all. But the theatre! Ah, there you have the impermanence that I love. It's a reflection of life somehow. It’s like building a statue of snow.
How Jake Sullivan took over the White House (and runs point on US support for the invasion of Ukraine). “Jake has always been very conscious, like frankly any good Washington staffer, of never getting afoul of his principal [that’d be Joe Biden], and he never does.”
“As the magazine grew fatter and glossier, there was only one problem: the typeface on my essays became increasingly hard to find between the Jimmy Choo ads. When I’d ask a friend to read a piece he would say he couldn’t find it… The days of sneaking in serious writing, whether reportorial or inward-looking, under the guise of selling perfume are gone.” On the death of women’s magazines, by a long-time writer of them. I would like to read the sorts of pieces she describes. I’m not sure where they exist now.
Errol Morris skewers Janet Malcolm (from January). In short: Malcolm doesn’t believe in objective truth except when it comes to her own exculpatory acts. Quite fun. Morris just gave a dreadful interview to the NY Times’ David Marchese. Quite mad.
Read this by Conor Friedersdorf on the new diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) guidance being imposed on educators at California’s community colleges:
The guidelines urge, for example, that a professor be deemed competent only if he or she:
- Promotes and incorporates DEI and anti-racist pedagogy.
- Advocates for and advances DEI and anti-racist goals and initiatives.
- Articulates the importance and impact of DEI and anti-racism as part of the institution’s greater mission.
If you’re a progressive, imagine Governor Ron DeSantis passing a law requiring Florida college professors to be evaluated for hiring and tenure based on whether they promote, advocate for, and articulate the importance of color blindness and the positive impact of anti-communism. That leftists are pushing California’s rules does not make them less authoritarian.
Munira Mirza wrote a good piece for us in the NS on the Hamas attacks: “It is as if they believe the religious fanaticism they condemn in Iran transmogrifies into something authentic and benign once it reaches the borders of Gaza.”
Icymi: try Will Lloyd masterful 4,800-word on-the-road profile of Rory Stewart, the most unduly praised man in British public life; along with Charlotte Stroud’s inevitably controversial take on the new, dominant strain in British novels: the “cool girl novelist” – or should it be sad girl novelist? They have become one and the same, she argues. A generation of Very Online millennial authors has taken to writing in a common tone: clipped, downbeat and adolescent.
Thanks for reading. Catch you next time. Have a good week.