1. ABC Australia’s “The Book Show” recently interviewed Jason Anthony about his eight years in Antarctica. Jason wrote about his time there in “The Heartless Immensity,” featured in our current issue.

2. VFH Radio commissioned a brief feature about Binh Dahn and Robert Schultz’s paired chlorophyl photographs and poems, which were published in our winter issue. Their collaborative work honors the victims of the Khmer Rouge through an unusual method of printing their portraits. You can listen here:

3. NPR’s Chana Joffe-Walt says poets don’t mind the recession, what with already being poor. Neither do the folks running small poetry presses, since their books are money losers, no matter the economy. I have to suspect this comes as cold comfort to poets.

4. Farrar, Straus & Giroux VP Elisabeth Sifton isn’t sure that books as we know them can survive the book trade’s poor decisions and competition from the web:

I want only to stress that the loss of so many book-review pages nationwide is crippling all aspects of our literary life. And I mean all. Book news and criticism were fundamental to the old model of book publishing and to the education of writers; Internet coverage of books, much of it witty and interesting, does not begin to compensate for their loss.

5. Julien Bousac has depicted the Palestinian territories as a nation of islands by rendering Israeli territory as water, as featured on the always-excellent Strange Maps. Bousac emphasizes that “[t]he map is not about ‘drowning’ or ‘flooding’ the Israeli population, nor dividing territories along ethnic lines, even less a suggestion of how to resolve the conflict.” We’ll have more on this topic in our summer issue, which comes out July 1.

6. Royal Dutch Shell is on trial for the execution of a Nigerian critic, in addition to paying Nigerian troops to commit human rights abuses on Shell’s behalf. The trial begins in New York next week. John Ghazvinian wrote about the clash between Nigerians and multinational oil companies in “The Curse of Oil,” in our Winter 2007 issue.

I know it’s silly and not realistic and more than a little soap opera-ish, but I’ll admit it: I’m kind of addicted to Grey’s Anatomy.

The show started during my first year of medical school, and I could measure the progress of my medical education by how many flaws I could identify in each episode. For starters, no one looks that good in scrubs (turns out each actor has a custom-made pair); no one goes into the OR without wearing eye protection; and there’s no such thing as a board-certified OB-GYN who also happens to do pediatric surgery. Not to mention what goes on in those call rooms. I’ve slept in them and trust me, sleep is the only thing that crosses anyone’s mind in the middle of the night during a 36-hour call. But of course it’s the escapism that makes the show worth watching—we like our glamorous physicians with their oh-so-not-real lives and loves. After all, if Meredith and Derek ever manage to work out their issues, will there even be a show?

Doctors with perfect hair might make for great television, but when the setting is a hospital, even a fictional one, I think there are times when accuracy might count for more than entertainment. The medical subplots of even the most frivolous television shows revolve around issues that are very real for a great many people. Communication studies have shown that public attitudes about disease and decisions about screening tests like mammograms can be influenced by watching medical dramas. In the case of breast cancer awareness, this phenomenon of edutainment can work for the public good. When information about an issue of critical importance is not entirely accurate, problems arise.

I finally had the time to watch the Grey’s Anatomy series finale online this weekend, and there’s one bit I can’t get out of my head. In the frantic moments at the end of the episode, one of the main characters goes into cardiac arrest following a risky neurosurgery for invasive cancer. Prior to the surgery and fully aware of her dismal prognosis, this character had signed a “do not resuscitate order,” or DNR, the medicolegal document that makes known a patient’s wish not to undergo resuscitation in the event of cardiopulmonary arrest. And yet in the drama of the moment, the chief of the hospital decides to overrule this patient’s clearly stated wishes and instructs the medical team to begin CPR. “Screw the DNR!” he proclaims, as the music crescendos and the final minutes of the episode slip away into a cliffhanger to be continued when the next season starts in the fall.

Signing a DNR order is a big deal. Many of the most difficult conversations in the wards of any hospital center around a patient’s “code status.” The decision to become DNR reflects a patient’s wishes about death; there are few more personal and poignant decisions. As a member of the medical team, I also know that we spend a lot of time with patients and families talking about code status. When a DNR order is signed by a competent person, physicians absolutely do not have the right to revoke it.

Although most people have the impression from television and movies that a code almost always results in a good outcome, the reality is far different. Most people don’t just wake up and become themselves again—there’s unavoidable violence of cracking ribs and blood and tubes everywhere in that last-ditch effort to keep the heart pumping.

I realize that I am happily oblivious to the shortcuts portrayed in TV or films about any profession other than medicine, but I think the entertainment industry has an obligation to be accurate in matters of life and death.

Medicine happens to be what I know, and I know that real physicians don’t “screw the DNR.” Does that shortcut help make Grey’s Anatomy a great TV drama? Definitely. But is it an accurate representation of an enormously complex ethical question? I don’t think so.

To every situation there is an appropriate Shakespearean phrase. Star-crossed lovers can compare each other to summer’s days. David Foster Wallace, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Vladimir Nabokov all mined Shakespeare for book titles. And even those who can’t tell “Et tu, Brute” from the Ides of March can understand what it means to fight fire with fire or to be in a pickle. Shakespeare gave us salad days, night owls, wild goose chases, sea changes, foul play, strange bedfellows, and good riddance. In these days of excessive credit card fees and imminent financial regulation, one of the most bandied about (and misused) Shakespearean phrases is “a pound of flesh.”

The phrase comes from “The Merchant of Venice.” Early in the play, a Jewish money lender named Shylock requests an “equal pound of your fair flesh” as collateral for the three thousand ducats he lends to Antonio, a fellow money-lender and semi-reformed anti-Semite. The politics of the play have been debated for centuries. But the meaning of the phrase “a pound of flesh” is indisputable. According to the American Heritage Dictionary it means “a debt harshly insisted upon.” The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy expands slightly on this definition: “Creditors who insist on having their ‘pound of flesh’ are those who cruelly demand the repayment of a debt, no matter how much suffering it will cost the debtor.” Despite this very clear and relatively narrow definition, journalists, editors, and Wall Street executives have recently been playing fast and loose with the phrase. This is a sorry sight.

The lede of Randall Forsyth’s May 9 piece in Barron’s, “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain with Washington,” uses the phrase as if it is synonymous with “getting a piece of the pie”:

Critics of the Obama administration have claimed it has been too easy on Wall Street by providing billions in bailouts following the financial meltdown. Now, however, the Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking its pound of flesh in the form of civil suits against participants in two sectors caught up in last year’s near-meltdown, credit-default swaps and money-market funds.

It could be argued that because the SEC is part of the federal government, which lent money to many of the participants “caught up in last year’s near-meltdown,” the usage is correct. The lawsuits, however, have nothing to do with the repayment of said debt.

New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse concludes a December 2008 think piece on the potential of auto industry bankruptcy with a quote that makes “a pound of flesh” seem like fair punishment:

But Mr. Barbera warned against overconfidence, saying that Treasury officials thought they would carefully exact only a pound of flesh from Wall Street by letting Lehman fail, helping teach other investment banks not to take excessive risks. ‘But,’ he said, ‘it turned out not to be a pound of flesh that was taken. It was a ton.’

Perhaps the only thing more ridiculous than Wall Street types quoting Shakespeare is credit card executives complaining about unfair new rules. In a recent Politico article about new credit card legislation, Jeanne Cummings quotes “one weary industry insider” as saying “[w]e just have to be OK with people getting their pound of flesh out of us.” This quote is just too absurd to unpack. As Antonio says to his friend Bassanio: “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

For a movie with a relatively small budget of $20 million, the big-screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road has had an exceedingly long life in post-production. Originally scheduled to be released in November 2008, the latest of several release dates has the movie pegged for an opening of October 16, 2009.

Although McCarthy has had bestsellers before and two prominent film adaptations in All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, which won several Oscars, The Road eclipses them all for its massive Oprah-fueled sales and the book’s place in McCarthy’s career. When compared against the Biblically drawn, ultraviolent epic of Blood Meridian, The Road is a small, austere horror-fable, although the irony is that the latter’s straightforward narrative derives from an undescribed worldwide cataclysm, something that imparted far more violence than anything found in his previous works. The task for the novel, then, is to evoke the incomprehensible loss of this armageddon in the small totem of a nameless father and son, wandering through the savage wastes of a post-apocalyptic land. And McCarthy did so exceedingly well, earning occasionally hysterical praise that may have been, in some cases, an overreaction to the writer’s former status as an overlooked American master—a condition that McCarthy, despite rarely giving interviews and living quietly in New Mexico, has clearly overcome.

A film production is a large, ungainly endeavor, and even the most successful movies owe their greatness to the collaboration of many people, yet rarely does anyone beyond a writer, director, the principle stars, and the occasional cinematographer receive much recognition. And so it is unreasonable to have particular expectations for the movie The Road, despite its fine source material, and even if its casting of Viggo Mortensen and use of director of John Hillcoat (who directed the acclaimed Australian western The Proposition) do seem promising. The cast listing on IMDB also indicates the presence of two other excellent actors: Guy Pearce as a character named The Veteran and Robert Duvall as Old Man.

As the trailer embedded below shows, the film may end up being far different than the novel, or the film may simply be marketed rather conventionally: via promises of explosions, endangered children, gunplay, and gory death scenes. In the trailer, the boy’s mother, played by Charlize Theron, features prominently, whereas she hardly appeared in the book. We also are allowed an image of apocalypse in action, in the form of an encyclopedic array of natural disasters played out over a TV newsreel, echoing The Day After Tomorrow or a dozen other end-of-the-world flicks. Esquire contributor Tom Chiarella, who has seen the film, writes that, despite its trailer, The Road contains no scenes depicting worldwide armageddon; the implication is that, in choosing this trailer, film executive Bob Weinstein sees the visions of environmental catastrophe as useful for marketing purposes.

In Esquire’s June issue, Chiarella discusses The Road’s supposed “burden” of being labeled “The Most Important Movie of the Year.” In the end, he says, it is “a brilliantly directed adaptation of a beloved novel, a delicate and anachronistically loving look at the immodest and brutish end of us all.” That all sounds promising (save the oblique phrase “anachronistically loving”), as does Chiarella’s claim that the movie is a good story. I’m not sure where the movie’s incipient greatness is supposed to come from or who labeled it The Most Important Movie of the Year. The headline may in fact be the work of an exuberant editor, rather than Chiarella, or it may stem from the tremendous praise heaped upon the novel and the 2007 adaptation of No Country for Old Men. Even so, such hype is now a pathetically common form of Oscar-baiting. We saw it last year with the ridiculous The Reader, which shares with The Road the involvement of the Weinstein brothers.

If this movie lives up to any of the glory prematurely ascribed to it, fans and filmmakers alike should be pleased. But we would be better off tempering expectations and considering the book and the film (that almost no one has seen) as entirely separate entities. Densely wrought, recondite, soaring language works well in McCarthy’s novels; it’s far less compelling when the same aesthetic is applied to discussing the films his books inspire. Indeed, with the forthcoming adaptations of Blood Meridian and Cities of the Plain, more bloviated talk of McCarthy-derived filmic grandeur is sure to follow, no matter how good these movies end up being.

1. Regular VQR contributor Chris Ware has created an animated work for This American Life, entitled “Quimby the Mouse.”

2. Artist Robert Irwin was recently named UVA’s 2009 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medalist in Architecture, and came here to give an hour-long talk about his work.

Ren Weschler profiled Robert Irwin in our Spring 2008 issue.

3. Contributing Online Editor Jacob Silverman recently wrote a response to VQR contributor Tom Bissell’s remembrance of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech in the New York Times, taking issue with the publisher of the speech-as-book, who Bissell explained had excised a reference to suicide in the speech. In a correction, the Times clarifies that only a single sentence was omitted, one that doesn’t change the meaning of the passage.

4. Harvard researchers have made some genuine progress into determining what makes for a good life, Joshua Wolf Shenk writes in a really brilliant article in the June 2009 Atlantic. A 72-year-long longitudinal study of 268 men has found that the strength and warmth of personal relationships is strongly correlated with happiness and well-being as one ages.

With the running of the 134th Preakness Stakes at Baltimore’s famed Pimlico racetrack this past weekend, the world of thoroughbred racing (and perhaps the general public) seems to have fallen in love with a new heroine. On Saturday, Rachel Alexandra became the first filly in 85 years to beat the boys and win the Preakness, one of the most famous horse races in the world and the middle leg of the elusive Triple Crown. As speculation builds about a possible rematch in the Belmont Stakes between Rachel Alexandra and Mine That Bird, the Kentucky Derby winner she outran down the stretch, sports journalists everywhere have seized on the opportunity to capitalize on public fascination with the world of million dollar horses and the people who own, train, and ride them.

I must confess that I saw the race on YouTube Saturday night, and if Rachel Alexandra does run in the Belmont I might even watch the race live. Yet as remarkable as it is to see a horse race in real time, it is the story behind those few seconds of racing glory that is more remarkable still. And perhaps no one has told that story better than Laura Hildebrand in her remarkable chronicle of a horse no one thought would ever amount to anything: Seabiscuit.

Hildebrand’s book of the same title was published several years ago and spent time at the top of the New York Times bestseller list before leading to an award-winning film adaptation. But even though the book is not new, the story Hildebrand tells is timeless. The drama surrounding the Triple Crown races every year reminds us of just how much is required of the rare horse with the speed, stamina, and personality to win at this most elite of levels. Part of what makes Hildebrand’s work so compelling is that she doesn’t simply tell the tale of a horse who could run, even if his stride wasn’t quite straight. Instead, in riveting prose that is part sports writing, part biography, and part history, she reminds us that Seabiscuit raced during the Great Depression, a time when the world was changing in ways no one could fully understand and when the daily news was often dominated by doom and gloom.

Some seventy-odd years after Seabiscuit’s day, the world is once again in a time of change and uncertainty, and the story of a horse that could win, even when she wasn’t supposed to, has captured the eye and perhaps the heart of the public. Rachel Alexandra is no Seabiscuit, at least not yet, but there are three weeks to go until the running of the Belmont Stakes, which is plenty of time to pick up a copy of Seabiscuit. Sometimes it’s not the just-published new releases that are the best way to start the summer.

Utne Reader has selected VQR as the winner of the top prize in their 2009 Independent Press Awards, the General Excellence award. They were kind enough to write this glowing citation:

In 2008 every issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review found its way into our thoughts, our discussions, our issue-planning sessions, and, in the case of the salient, heartbreaking story of a soldier returning from Iraq, “The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce,” onto our pages. VQR’s stories are deeply reported, exquisitely written, and elegantly edited—the sort of articles that make readers want to become writers. The magazine’s graceful design and sumptuous photographs bring the stories and voices to life.

The mere fact that VQR provides space for these tales, some of which stretch to 20 pages, sets it apart. Long-form narrative journalism is all but extinct these days, yet VQR has claimed the genre as its mantle. The Summer 2008 issue, “No Way Home: Outsiders and Outcasts,” hosts thoughtful essays on the people, places, and stories we miss in an ever shorter and faster news cycle, including J. Malcolm Garcia’s stunning profile of Jena, Louisiana, a place that fell off the radar once the mainstream media’s short-lived Jena 6 hysteria had subsided; David Enders’ piece on Iraq’s Palestinian refugees, an already-marginalized population before the war; and Natasha Trethewey’s meditative return to her hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina.

Virginia Quarterly Review gets our general excellence award because we know that intelligent, curious people are starving for these stories, longing for this brand of storytelling. And no one is doing it with more heart or soul.

We were up against Bidoun, Bitch, High Country News, Meatpaper, The Nation, New Statesman, and Orion, all of which were plucked from among 1,500 publications. We were also nominated for the International Coverage and Best Writing awards, which were won by, respectively, England’s New Statesman and Canada’s The Walrus. We’re grateful to Utne, the dozens of writers whose work composed our 2008 issues, and, of course, our readers.

President Obama still has the political clout to appoint anyone he wants to the post of Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and on Wednesday he selected a cowboy, of sorts. Rocco Landesman, big-time theater producer, who is known more for his showy eccentricities (er, racehorse gambling?) than his administrative abilities, will assume the job most recently held by poet Dana Gioia. Landesman has been at the production helm of some of the biggest shows on Broadway in the last ten years; among them “Angels in America,” “Jersey Boys,” and “The Producers.” Infamous for slapping a $400 price on tickets for “The Producers” to deter scalpers, he’s said that he believes in a “free market system where the market ultimately sets the price for buyers.”

What does the choice of this free-market-favoring maverick producer mean for the future of non-profit arts funding? Gioia, who stepped down on inauguration day this year, was a part-time poet and a full-time businessman. He came to the NEA as an executive from General Foods and never quite shed his corporate ways. During his five-year tenure, he used his business savvy to sell the NEA to Congress in a way it hadn’t been before, through constituent-based touring initiatives like American Masterpieces and the easy-to-digest literary programs, The Big Read and Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

But this is what Gioia was always meant to do. Funding for the NEA steadily increased over the past five years, recently settling at $155 million, $20 million short of its 1992 peak. Those hyperbolic e-mail forwards begging me to save the NEA from annihilation by the political right appeared less and less in my inbox. Friends of a certain generation forgot the culture wars in the face of the war on terror. The NEA stayed alive by staying safe. But just because nothing is in danger of dying doesn’t mean nothing is at stake.

While Gioia came from General Foods, he also came from the old school of literature and poetry. When I worked at the NEA, the staff book club read The Odyssey at his recommendation, rather than the work of living, breathing (and often young) writers that exist on the pages of literary journals and are regularly funded by the agency’s creative writing fellowships. He relentlessly quoted Shakespeare at board meetings and I could tell that teleconferencing Ray Bradbury into a book club event was as contemporary and edgy as he was willing to go.

So while we can examine what President Obama meant by choosing a Manhattan mover and shaker to lead the country’s most important arts funding body, perhaps it is more important to examine what it can or should mean. The agency is no longer, as Gioia said when he found it, “demoralized, defensive, and unconfident.” Then this is the perfect moment for Landesman to step in and get risky. Maybe, instead of using The Big Read to get communities to engage with The Great Gatsby and Grapes of Wrath (however economically prescient those may be now) the NEA could get them to devour the likes of work by Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri. Maybe the NEA could revisit the definition and semantic impact of the term “American Masterpiece.” Maybe Chairman Landesman can use his own brand of business savvy, however conservative, to further support the living, breathing artists he worked with on a daily basis on Broadway.

We shouldn’t expect recklessness. The NEA creative writing fellowships are the only individual fellowships left over after the Mapplethorpe scandal decimated arts funding in the 1990s. Those fellowships have served my community of young, struggling writers well, providing over $1,000,000 to poets this year alone. But perhaps it’s time to do more than fund their survival. Perhaps getting risky means it’s finally time to start treating living artists as the reason for funding from Congress, instead of a quiet afterthought. Perhaps if that happens, they will become the new American masters.

After reading Ted Genoways’s manifestos on the future of university presses and journals, I was roused to put together a link roundup in praise of the grand old UP, and lit mags of all sorts. Here are a few further examples of why UPs and lit mags are necessary, beautiful, and vital:

• Harvard University Press continues to regale us with Walter Benjaminalia. Noah Isenberg’s recent essay on Benjamin’s ever-growing posthumous reputation recognizes the indispensable role that Harvard UP has played in cementing his place on the Mount Rushmore of literary criticism and cultural studies.
• Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire, recently published by Yale University Press, pretty much rewrites the history of empire and colonialism in North America. In this compelling book, Hämäläinen chronicles the until-now unrecognized rise of the Comanche Indians, an indigenous empire that “eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence.”
• Tag team edited by Bradford Morrow and Brian Evenson, the Spring 2009 issue of Conjunctions is a compilation of fiction “betwixt and between.” Like the highly influential (to this writer at least) New Wave Fabulists issue of Conjunctions, “Betwixt the Between” is more than an issue of a literary magazine, it is an articulation of a new literary aesthetic.
• Anyone who thinks that literary magazines cannot survive in the digital age has not seen Triple Canopy. Nominated for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence Online, canopycanopycanopy.com bends design and content like an object approaching the speed of light.
• And for all you fiction writers out there, Laura van den Berg has a new piece in The Review Review on the virtues of submitting to literary magazines, no matter what the result. As she writes: “The massive amount of rejections I garnered early on taught me not only that rejection was something I needed to get used to, but also the importance of separating my artistic ambitions from my professional ones.”

Inside Higher Ed is reporting that New England Review is now on the chopping block. The Middlebury College Budget Oversight Committee initially announced “that effective June 30, 2009, the College will end its relationship with the New England Review (NER) and wind down operations. The winding down of operations will allow for the redeployment of staff and the fulfillment of existing contracts.” That recommendation was amended to: “The New England Review will have until December 31, 2011, to eliminate its current operating deficit. If it cannot, the College will end its relationship with the Review.”

This is shocking news. Middlebury College is primarily known as a haven for language and literature. In addition to NER, it is home to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the School of English, the Environmental Journalism fellowships, and the Robert Frost Writer-in-Residence fellowship. (The college also contributes to the maintenance of the nearby cabin where Robert Frost lived during the summers when he was teaching at the Writers’ Conference and School of English.) All of these entities support the outstanding undergraduate program in creative writing and Middlebury’s English faculty—including Julia Alvarez, David Haward Bain, Robert Cohen, Kathryn Kramer, Jay Parini, Don Mitchell, and Christopher Shaw. And yet, the Writers’ Conference and School of English are also being asked to “find ways to maintain balanced budgets” and “increase revenue.”

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