Salon.com > David Rakoff

The craft that consumed me

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:30:00 +0000

It's rare that I'm not at work on some sort of craft project. I've often enthused about the need to make things; how it employs a unique set of muscles -- physical, intellectual, spiritual -- that I can attain a state of flow when making something that I almost never can when writing. Much like those of an athletic bent who are constantly succumbing to, or having to resist, the impulse to turn everything into a ball (or so I assume. I have never been moved to use a ball even as a ball), if you make things, all objects house the potential to be turned into something else. They fairly beg to be turned into something else.

The eggs were something of a departure, given their utter uselessness. Actually, strike that. That insistence on functionality over aesthetics is something of a lie I tell myself, possibly homophobic in nature, or else it's a penitential inoculation against my getting too big for my britches. If I stress utility, I will be less tempted to think of the visual stuff I make as "art," and consequently of myself as a you-know-what, a label really only rightly conferred by others. I've certainly lost myself in making purely ornamental things before -- lino cuts, paper cuts, snow globes, etc. -- but I do get an extra lift if the finished product is practical to boot.

Why “Br

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:20:00 +0000

Even without a television, one could not avoid the ubiquity of the "Brüno" promotional machine. The months of planted news stories (like the fashion show disrupted by our Velcro-clad hero who stumbled onto the runway from backstage, dozens of pricey outfits stuck to him), his name with its saucy umlaut spray-painted everywhere, all pointing to the same thing: that "Brüno" would be a hilarious cultural corrective. Just like his predecessor, Borat, who exposed America's vulgarity, ignorance and, more darkly, its entrenched anti-Semitism, Brüno would shine the light of truth on the last acceptable bigotry: homophobia. "Brüno" would be bracing and minty and somehow good for the gays for a variety of reasons.

Whatsizface

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 12:41:00 +0000

I am not a handsome man. All that means is that my face has never been my fortune. Luckily for me, it hasn't been my punch line, either. I have some pretty eyes and, like everyone, I have my moments. I may even be thought attractive by those who love me, but that is emphatically not the same as the irrefutable mathematics of plane and placement that make for true beauty.

As a teenager reading "Death in Venice," I understood the world to be divided between the Aschenbachs and the Tadzios. There are those who gaze, and those who are gazed upon. I am not talking about the natural inequity of attention that the old bestow upon the young -- we are all hardwired to respond to babies, for example, but it would take the rare and deeply odd child to singsong to a grown-up, "Who's got a cute receding hairline? Oh yes it is." I am talking about within one's own cohort: some are destined to promenade the Lido in Venice, blooming like flowers under the heat of appreciative stares, while the rest of us are born to watch, sweating through our grimy collars and eating our musty strawberries while the plague rolls in.

The love that dare not squeak its name

Tue, 21 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Had E.B. White written his children's classic "Stuart Little" today, he would have a hard time portraying Stuart, the second child of Mrs. Frederick C. Little of New York City -- a child who was "not much bigger than a mouse" and who also "looked very much like a mouse in every way" -- as anything other than some freakish monster. That's precisely why the current film adaptation shows Stuart being adopted, rather than being born. In this post-"Alien" age, examining too closely how a boy like Stuart might be made by human parents immediately brings to mind images of a tiny, hairless rodent slithering horribly from his mother's loins with a viscous plop.

But White wrote "Stuart Little" in 1945, when the biological process was shrouded in anaesthetized mystery. For those who were neither obstetricians nor women, childbirth must have seemed little more than checking into the hospital and, after three weeks of bed rest, emerging with offspring.

And Stuart is certainly no monster in White's vision. He is very much the Littles' flesh and blood -- ultimately a human child, albeit one with "the pleasant shy manner of a mouse." But, phenotype will out, and we are told that "before he was many days old he was not only looking like a mouse but acting like one, too -- wearing a gray hat and carrying a small cane."

The Writer's Life

Tue, 09 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Behold the Writer on Writing. Oh, how that very question -- How does the writer write? -- rings in my ears, unasked but clearly etched across the eager faces of the steady stream of hopeful young acolytes who make the long trip up here to my little outpost in the country. "Please," they seem to beseech, "what alchemy, what ethereal fire transforms our wordy soup of glottals and fricatives into language and that language into writing ... your writing, Mr. Rakoff?" Why even attempt an answer when so few truly agree what constitutes writing? Surely, the act is not merely confined to those moments, all too rare sadly, when pen is taken in hand, digit raps against typewriter key or, in my case, when I speak into this cunning little recorder or dictate aloud to Caitlin, amanuensis in excelsis extraordinaria, whom I plucked lo these many years ago from that fiction colloquium at the New School. [CAITLIN: REMIND REMIND REMIND ME ABOUT THE BLURB FOR TOBY WOLFF. DO NOT LEAVE THE HOUSE THIS EVENING WITHOUT MAKING ME COME UP WITH SOMETHING!]

Glorious Gwyneth

Thu, 01 Apr 1999 22:28:00 +0000

Gwyneth Paltrow, the current backlash queen, is worthy of every scintilla of positive hype conferred upon her. Or rather, every bit of hype about her acting. (Once, watching a segment devoted to her on the mind-numbing E! channel, grinning yahoo Steve Kmetko turned to his co-host and said, with genuine wonder in his voice, "Could she be any prettier?" Well, yes, she could be, actually. She's far too thin -- alarmingly so at the Oscars -- and she certainly blows the lid off the whole rabbi's granddaughter stereotype, but it's not as if she was Grace Kelly, for God's sake. From certain angles, she might even be considered a jolie laide.)

That said, I still think she is an enchanting, light-absorbing star. In the interest of full disclosure, I have only seen her in about three films, and I left the Oscar party I was at immediately after Elia Kazan's appearance, so I also missed her much-maligned tearful speech. But there's precious little she could have said -- an assertion that slavery is a "state's rights issue," or a public tribute to Charlton Heston, perhaps -- that could make me feel otherwise.

Chekhov, Marx and synergy

Mon, 27 Jul 1998 17:10:00 +0000

Tina Brown is leaving the New Yorker to go to Miramax where, according to the New York Times, her mandate will be "inventing a magazine ... to dig up the kind of articles that might be turned into movies and television specials that Miramax, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, would have the capacity to help package, circulate and promote."

Many enterprising publishers, in a similar spirit of vertical integration, are looking to their own backlists, fiction and nonfiction alike, and, with minor adjustments, increasing the works' synergistic potential. Below, some of their efforts:

Three Sisters and a Baby

By Anton Chekhov

Scribbler's, $11

The Prozorov house. Olga, wearing a dark-blue high school teacher's dress, stands and walks about, distractedly. Masha, in black, sits reading. Irina is lost in thought at the window in a white dress.

OLGA: It's a year ago today that Father died, May fifth, on your birthday, Irina. It was very cold and it snowed.

IRINA: I don't want to think about it ...

OLGA: And it's almost 11 years exactly since we left Moscow.

(A knock is heard.)

MASHA: If only we could return. Sell this house, and return to Moscow. I'm sick of it!

Media Circus: What's Up, Dike?

Tue, 12 Aug 1997 19:00:00 +0000

"Dear Amazon.com customer," it begins. "Many of you know John Updike as the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and the author of great American novels such as 'The Witches of Eastwick' and 'Rabbit at Rest.' This summer, get to know him as the author whose words open our Greatest Tale Ever Told, the first-ever collaborative story written by Amazon.com customers."

Who could resist the invitation? No one, it seems.

Begun by John Updike:

Miss Tasso Polk at ten-ten alighted from the elevator onto the olive tiles of the nineteenth floor only lightly nagged by a sense of something wrong. The Magazine's crest, that great black M, the thing masculine that had most profoundly penetrated her life, echoed from its inlaid security the thoughtful humming in her mind: "m."

Dr. Seuss:

The Wizards of Id

Fri, 13 Jun 1997 17:28:00 +0000

lifestyle features have heralded the Return of the Swinger and the End of Moderation for the better part of two years now. Apparently, collectively weary from decades of having to watch what we eat, smoke, drink and most especially say, "we" are returning to a simpler time of boomerang coffee tables and pupu platters. A time when, at worst, "Mad Cow" was a frothy drink for the ladies. A time when chicks knew how to shut up and cats "swung." Think back to the old "What kind of man reads Playboy?" ads; high fidelity systems, scotch, Sulka dressing gowns, the work of Leroy Niemann, etc.

Restaurants featuring smoking areas with cute, retro names like the Havana Room -- I'm still waiting for the Missiles of October Lounge -- are springing up like mushrooms, or rather, metastatic tumors. Even my formerly staid neighborhood, once the elegant home to Washington Irving, New York's only private park and the charmingly prim National Arts Club, is rank with the smell of the Death of Restraint: prime rib, Bombay Sapphire, Ketel One, tobacco and, of course, the unfortunate result of all of these at the end of a long evening, vomit.

The Kiss Up

Mon, 17 Mar 1997 20:00:00 +0000

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3 March

Greg:

thanks for the proposal for the next book -- read it over the weekend. Don't hate me, but I think it's time to mine a little deeper. I'm not trying to denigrate or minimize your life experience. You clearly feel it deeply, as we all do, and it informs your writing with a real sweetness. But perhaps too sweet? Tolstoy got it almost completely wrong: All happy families are not alike because most families aren't really all that happy, are they?

In that vein, have you read "The Kiss" by Kathryn Harrison? Amazing memoir of her long-time incestuous affair with her father. Talk about lemons into lemonade; the advanced reading copy is gorgeous with a fabulous quote from Toby Wolff. Saw her eating at Michael's the other day. This is going to be very, very big for her.

Anyway, think of what I've said and take it in the spirit in which it's offered. Call me with any and all thoughts. I am your agent, after all.

Dorothy

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March 6th