Comment on this article
Object Lesson
Richard Benson on the Gutenberg Bible
January/February 2004
Richard Benson, dean of the School of Art, is a photographer and printer who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1986 for his work in photographic printing.
I sometimes take my introductory photography students to the mezzanine of the Beinecke to see the Gutenberg Bible. Most of them don’t have any idea of its significance. They think it’s the first printed book; actually, it’s the first book printed from movable type, as far as we can tell. But what most people don’t know is that it’s one of the best books ever made, without question, on almost every level. It has absolutely glorious ink, beautiful, dense, black ink, as good as any ink ever made. It has better paper than any book ever made, and the press work is as good as in any book ever made.
And it has what I think is the best type ever designed. The font has all sorts of variations on individual letterforms, depending on what precedes each letter and what follows it. If a line of lettering is written by hand, and if the hand is that of a good scribe, then any given letter will vary in form. For example, the letter s followed by a t will not look the same as an s followed by an m. The Gutenberg letterforms also vary in width to permit justification of the narrow columns. There are more than 200 different variations in the font used for the Bible.
But this differentiation requires an enormous effort, and as soon as movable type started to become common, it was immediately dropped. Type design became all about having a single a and a single b and a single c. The irony of it is that, now that computers have come along, we could easily accommodate multiple letterforms. But by this time we’re so used to looking at standardized letters that nobody wants to do that. We’ve come full circle: we have the tool to make the exquisitely refined type we started with, but we no longer want it. That’s the wonder of technological change—that it occurs so that a job can be done more efficiently, but when mature, this new technology turns out to have a strength that is radically innovative in its own right, and the earlier goal is often forgotten.
From Understudy to Diva
by Sheila Anne Feeney
Sheila Anne Feeney is a freelance writer based in New York City.
Watching a preview of the Broadway play The Violet Hour from the balcony on October 23, Robin Miles '86, '94MFA, could tell something was amiss. The lead actress was in distress, flubbing lines, missing cues, and drifting out of character. At intermission, Miles—under-study to the lead—sped through corridors and down staircases to the dressing rooms in the restored Biltmore Theatre, where a swat team of wardrobe, wig, and makeup mavens waited to prep her for taking over the part in Act II.
The lead actress, Jasmine Guy, resigned from the play that intermission, citing medical problems. And Miles was catapulted into the role of Jessie Brewster, a louche and ambitious African American jazz diva in a play about race, fate, time, and loyalty by Richard Greenberg '85MFA. Miles hadn’t had a single rehearsal. She had only watched the show seven times. But she was ready. “I’m a type-a personality and don’t like feeling caught out. I like being prepared,” Miles explains. Since being hired as understudy October 8, she had worked with a tape recorder to meet a personal goal to “be off book by previews.”
“She was great,” says Evan Yionoulis '82, '85MFA, the director and an associate professor at the School of Drama. Jessie, Yionoulis says, “has to be powerful and glorious and have a sense of humor. She has to be a magnificent woman. [Robin] brought all that in. She had a great understanding of the rhythms of the text.” And because of her performance, Yionoulis adds, Miles now joins “the list of leading ladies.”
In her role as a worldly singer seeking immortality, Miles uses every sexual, feminine, and intellectual wile to persuade a publisher to print her memoirs. Though the New York Times thought Miles too young for the part, Newsday pronounced her “formidably erotic,” and CurtainUp.com lauded her for seizing the role “with considerable warmth and flair.”
Before The Violet Hour, Miles, who lives in a first-floor Harlem apartment with her husband, composer Brian DuFord '93MM, had left the stage to do voice-overs and recorded books. Misfortune seemed to visit every time she acted in the theater; each role seemed to occur in tandem with the death of a friend, director, colleague, relative, or pet. She also missed at least one big opportunity. In 1996, she declined an invitation for work on a musical under development, because she couldn’t afford it. It paid $250 a week; she went to Syracuse instead, to play Olivia in Twelfth Night, for $525. The musical? Rent—which became one of the biggest hits on Broadway.
Miles is reconsidering sticking with this acting thing. She is now interviewing agents. But her hopes are tempered by exigency, including the need, one day, to send her one-year-old daughter to college. “I know [the role of Jessie] has the greatest magnitude of potential,” Miles says, “but I’m still a working mom who spends 50 percent of her income on child care. I have to get more television and film work. That’s where most of the work is for black Americans right now.”
And then there is the matter of paying off all those student loans to you-know-where. “I owe $50,000 to this day,” sighs Miles.
Lonely in L.A.
The Mayor of the Sunset Strip
Written and directed by George Hickenlooper ’86
Distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films
Opens in theaters on March 26
Reviewed by Joe Levy ’86
Joe Levy is the music editor of Rolling Stone.
One day in the mid-sixties a mother drops off her 15-year-old son at the house of actress Connie Stevens in Hollywood, where he hopes to get an autograph. He is a lonely boy, a child of divorce, and what joy there is in his life comes from music and movies. But Connie Stevens is not home, and his mother never returns. He does not see her again for more than five years. Instead, he wanders over to the Sunset Strip, where he finds a new kind of family, one that includes Cher, Nancy Sinatra, and Brooke Shields. He becomes part of a dream—the dream of rock and roll, of celebrity, of youth—and then he becomes trapped in his own dream.
The man in question is Rodney Bingenheimer, a Los Angeles scenester and radio DJ who is the subject of George Hickenlooper’s improbably moving documentary The Mayor of the Sunset Strip. Bingenheimer has been an institution in the world of L.A. rock and roll ever since he became a body double for Davy Jones of the Monkees in 1965. His fame is exactly as minor and as odd as that sounds, but for four decades he has hung on. Along the way, he has helped establish the American career of David Bowie, run a club where even Led Zeppelin came to meet women, and broken new acts as a DJ on America’s most important rock radio station, KROQ.
Hickenlooper begins with a headlong rush of rock stars and fun, “the pop fizz to keep the spirit going,” as Bingenheimer calls it. Interviews with the strange characters who have filled Bingenheimer’s life help tell the story. And in historical footage, we see Bingenheimer everywhere—at tv appearances by The Mamas and the Papas, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Four Seasons (always clapping off the beat); in photos with Elvis and the Beatles; at the studio as Sonny and Cher cut their first hits. At first, the idea of Bingenheimer as a rock-and-roll Zelig is hilarious—his hair seems to change to mirror that of every star he meets—and then quickly it becomes unbearably poignant. The only life he has is a reflection of the stars he worships.
Hickenlooper, whose directing credits include the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness and the 2001 drama The Man from Elysian Fields, shot his interviews on digital video over the space of six years, and his portrait unfolds with great tenderness like a well-paced novel, sliding back through a very unhappy childhood that makes Bingenheimer’s deep-seated need for all that pop fizz seem sadder than you can possibly imagine. And here is where Mayor becomes much more than a documentary about a major fan who became a minor celebrity. It becomes a story about a lonely boy with an empty spot in his life nothing can fill, and it is packed with more human drama than you are likely to find in any Hollywood film this year.
Memories of Korea
Notes from the Divided Country
Suji Kwock Kim ’89
Louisiana State University Press, $22.95
Reviewed by Jennifer L. Holley
Poet Jennifer L. Holley teaches writing at Southern Connecticut State University.
The term “postmemory” was coined by Marianne Hirsch to explain how one generation’s experiences are inscribed in the memories of another. She applied it to children of Holocaust survivors who “remember,” through stories, an event they never experienced.
In Notes from the Divided Country, which won the 2002 Walt Whitman Award, Suji Kwock Kim explores ramifications of postmemory to show that there is no such thing as a life story. Rather, each individual is a tangled mass of life stories inseparable from larger issues of family, community, and nation. She connects to a historical event as significant as the Korean War by telling the story of her father as he tried to flee south with his brothers in 1951: the young men “knelt like beggars before the blasts, / using the dead as shields.”
The poems are a messy, haunting, and incredibly rich work, at times so fierce that the reader is nearly forced to look away from the page. In “Generation,” Kim recounts her involvement in a violent history even before she was born. She writes about being a fetus:
meanwhile my face soldered on, hardening like a mask of molten steel,
meanwhile my blood churning like a furnace of wanting,
meanwhile my heart ticking like a bomb—is-was, is-was.
The is-was heart keeps ticking throughout the book. The speaker is an individual, yet also a living testament to experiences that have indelibly shaped her family. The present and past are inseparable in one life.
The question Kim asks is: Out of a painful past, how to create a future? The poet walks the streets of Seoul on Buddha’s birthday, when the city is ablaze with neon lanterns. The city was a site of death and destruction half a century before, and even on this joyous day, when the speaker looks at some older men, she writes,
every breath seems to say
after things turned to their worst, we began again,
but may you never see what we saw,
may you never do what we’ve done,
may you never remember and may you never forget.
The title of the book, Notes from the Divided Country, certainly refers to Korea. But on another level, the title speaks to the role of the writer who tells stories so painful that she is divided between what to conceal and what to reveal.
Yet the poet suggests that writing itself may have power to transform. She concludes on a note of promise in “The Korean Community Garden in Queens.” The plants in the garden thrive, somehow, “in loam / pocked with rust-flints, splinters of rodent-skull—/ a ground so mixed, so various that everything / seems born of what it’s not.” From an unlikely source, life flows. Kim asks, “Who wouldn’t want / to flower like this?”
Briefly Embedded
Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq
Karl Zinsmeister ’82
Truman Talley Books/St. Martin’s Press, $24.95
Reviewed by Jacques Leslie ’68
Jacques Leslie wrote The Mark: A War Correspondent’s Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia. His upcoming book on dams, Deep Water, won the 2002 J. Anthony Lukas work-in-progress award for exceptional nonfiction.
Ever since I heard of “embedded journalism,” during the Iraq War warm-ups, my impression has not been positive. The phrase carries the notion of envelopment, in the way embedded crystals are encased in rock. Instead of its usual tactic, exclusion, the Pentagon hoped to control journalists by swallowing them up.
As a Vietnam War correspondent, I got spoiled. I covered the war there and in Cambodia for two years, with so much enthusiasm that the South Vietnamese government expelled me for my stories—the most direct form of exclusion. Until then, I could “embed” myself into an American or South Vietnamese army unit for a few hours if necessary, or I could talk to politicians, diplomats, refugees, beggars. Once I walked into a hospital room and discovered 13 Vietnamese men, all with entirely atrophied legs—the result of being labeled recalcitrant political prisoners and shackled for at least five years. I even walked into Viet Cong territory and ended up talking with local Viet Cong officials about their views of the war.
Beginning with Grenada, all that changed. The U.S. military increasingly restricted journalists' movements, until the only available source for much military information was the Pentagon itself.
But then came embedding, which defuses journalistic antagonism by offering unprecedented access. The 600 journalists who became Iraq War “embeds” hung out not just with troops but in command posts, where they observed officers making life-and-death decisions on the fly. At least in the beginning of the war, television networks won high ratings with hours of live footage from journalists accompanying American units. Never mind that most of the coverage was tepid, involving speculation about when some action might or might not occur, and amounted to cheerleading for the military—the mere scent of expended weaponry boosted ratings.
For their part, the country’s biggest newspapers flooded the war zone with correspondents. Depending on their embeds for mere slices of the story, they showed off their capacity for trenchant reportage and breadth of coverage.
Almost everybody won. The most notable exceptions were the “unilaterals,” the journalists who declined the American military’s embrace, even though that put them at much greater risk. Instead, they stationed themselves in places where the conflict was likely to be most intense, such as Baghdad, and endured mortal threats from all directions. Yet given a choice between Baghdad and embedding, I’d have ensconced myself in the capital, just as some unilaterals did. They provided the war’s most absorbing and nuanced reporting precisely because they had access to more than one dimension of the conflict. What surrounded reporters in Baghdad was not the U.S. military, but the story itself.
In the end, I suppose, good writers can make even embedding work: after all, George Orwell embedded himself in the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War and wrote Homage to Catalonia.
Karl Zinsmeister, the editor of a conservative magazine called The American Enterprise, is one of the first of the embedded journalists to have returned home to publish an account of the campaign. Illustrated with the author’s photographs, some taken in the midst of a firefight, Boots on the Ground intermittently offers a grunt’s perspective of the Iraq War.
“Nearby, booms and machine gun bursts can be heard as adjoining squads encounter fire,” writes Zinsmeister. “At one point there is a loud exchange of automatic fire and grenades very close by. The soldier carrying the platoon’s shotgun sidles up to me, holding it in an outstretched hand, his M-4 hanging by his side. ‘Do you know how to use this?’
“‘Uh-huh.’
“‘Well, if this … gets any hotter I’m gonna give it you. You just look for me, pal.’”
It’s an interesting moment, but Zinsmeister passes up the chance to consider its implications. Alas, that’s typical of this one-dimensional book, for it is much more pro-war polemic than memoir. A book about personal experience must turn on strong powers of observation, but Zinsmeister thinks he’s seen it all already. Saddam is always “dastardly,” and Baath Party members are always “gangsters” or “mafia"; even Iraqi dogs are “mangy curs” and “infernal hounds.” On the other hand, the GIs around Zinsmeister are “superlative fighting men” who “wrap goodness and aggressiveness in the very same uniform.” At one point, Zinsmeister offers the assurance that the American postwar occupation will cost a mere $10 billion through the end of 2003.
Zinsmeister’s closest brush with danger ends ludicrously. One night, Iraqi troops fired a rocket-propelled grenade that exploded near the truck he was riding into town. Panicked, he leapt from the truck bed, but snagged his backpack on a stake and dangled seven feet off the ground “like a fish flopping in the air.” He fell and tore a thigh muscle. Burdened with his wound but otherwise undaunted, he declared, “I had a great story, which I knew I needed to rush home to the American public.” He left Iraq the next day, six days before the Americans took Baghdad.
Sixty-odd years ago, while covering an American military campaign with vastly more justification than our latest one, A. J. Liebling wrote a line that seems uncanny in its application to the writer of a war memoir only 213 pages long. “There is an old proverb,” he said, “that a girl may sleep with one man without being a trollop, but let a man cover one little war and he’s a war correspondent.”
In Print
The Road to Armageddon
Larry Collins ’51
New Millennium Press, $27.95
In Collins’s new thriller, Iran has purchased nuclear weapons but lacks the tiny electronic switches to make them operative. A disgraced and widowed ex-cia agent undertakes a harrowing mission to prevent global destruction.
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
Steven Hahn ’79PhD
Belknap/Harvard University Press, $35
In a bold and sweeping study, Hahn describes how African Americans, even as slaves, conducted politics and engaged in political struggle in a society that tried to refuse them that opportunity.
The Taking
J. D. Landis ’64
Ballantine Books, $24.95
In a gothic novel of sexual awakening, loss, and thwarted love, Sarianna Renway arrives in a 1930s Massachusetts town—soon to be drowned by the creation of a reservoir—and becomes enmeshed in the mysterious lives of the remaining families.
To the Desert and Back: The Story of One of the Most Dramatic Business Transformations on Record
Philip Mirvis '73, Karen Ayas, and George Roth
Jossey-Bass/Wiley, $26.95
Unilever owns Ben & Jerry's, Pond's, and other brands, but in 1995 its food business was near collapse. The authors chronicle how division chair Tex Gunning brought “a really different way of thinking and working” to his firm and, ultimately, double-digit growth.
Great Americans: Famous Names, Real People
K. K. Ottesen ’00MBA
Bloomsbury, $24.95
What is it like to bear the name of a national icon? Ottesen crisscrossed the country to interview and photograph Amelia Earhart, Marilyn Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, and others about the experience. Elvis lives—and coaches Little League in Houston.
Girl: How I Saved Myself by Becoming an EMT
Jane Stern ’71MFA
Crown/Random House, $23
Almost paralyzed by panic attacks, depression, and hypochondria five years ago, food writer Stern tells a funny and inspiring story about overcoming her angst by learning how to provide emergency medical care.
|
