Grim Reader, Nov. 12, 2010: Jill Clayburgh, Jule Sugarman and Shirley Verret
by Michael Schaffer
NOVEMBER 12, 2010 TAGS:
“Has any actor’s career ever been more powerfully affected by a prefix?” So asks Janet Maslin in her New York Times appreciation for Jill Clayburgh. Maslin’s piece isn’t a formal obit, but it nonetheless sets the tone for the Obitosphere’s coverage of the actress, best known for her work as feminist characters in 1970s-era films such as An Unmarried Woman. “It was the ‘un’ in ‘Unmarried’ that established Ms. Clayburgh’s creative power,” Maslin explains.
Sure enough, the other obits cast her as an icon of first-wave feminism. “Jill Clayburgh, whose portrayals of strong women in such movies as ‘An Unmarried Woman’ and ‘Starting Over’ reflected the feminist movement, has died,” says the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog. “She was regarded as one of the first film figures to bring depth and subtlety to roles that reflected the sensibilities and attitudes of the growing women’s movement,” explains the Washington Post’s obit. (Unfortunately, that piece’s headline — “Actress gave full picture of modern woman's life” — undercuts that notion: If there’s any sensibility the modern women’s movement agreed upon, it’s that no single individual could give said “full picture.”)
When American obit-writers (and essayists like Gail Sheehey, who writes in the Huffington Post that “Clayburgh’s life so closely paralleled mine, I feel as though a part of me lived a little through her”) reduce someone to a historical cultural archetype, it’s always interesting to see what they’re saying in a different cultural mileu. Across the Atlantic, the Guardian’s obit spends much less time on Clayburgh’s social-history significance and a lot more on her varied acting career. The obit also lingers on just how drecky some of her movies were, though it doesn’t come across as Clayburgh’s fault. Even her best-known role is hailed less for its cultural significance than for her acting chops. “She overcame many of the superficial aspects of the script thanks to her ability to show both strength and vulnerability,” the obit says, calling Clayburgh “an independent-minded, intelligent performer who refused to be pigeonholed.” The result reads a lot more like a feminist triumph than do many of the stateside encomia for Clayburgh.
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The obits for Jack Levine, “a social realist artist who skewered the rich and powerful,” according to the Associated Press, mainly lead with his left-wing politics. “Favourite subjects included balding power brokers and their wives, corrupt policemen, mobsters, fleshy showgirls, red-faced industrialists smoking fat cigars – the great and not so good exposed in all their venality and frailty,” explains the Telegraph. One famous Levine portrait, of a gluttonous general, got the artist denounced by President Eisenhower and hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Levine’s hometown Boston Globe, though, is among the smaller number of outlets to focus on his art, where his “radical politics” coexisted with “conservative aesthetics.” With his “savage caricatures” hearkening back a century, Levine “could be as vehement in his denunciations of avant-garde artists as he was of right-wing politicians,” the piece notes. Sadly, no examples of reciprocal sniping make it into the obits.
There are great obits in the New York Times and the Telegraph for Geoffrey Crawley, a scientific journalist who exposed one of the longest-running photographic hoaxes in history, the tale of the Cottingsley Fairies. The hoax began in 1917, when a pair of schoolgirls, as a prank, cut pictures of pixies from a book and posed with them. Their families were skeptical, but when the pictures went public an array of powerful people championed them because they appeared to prove the existence of a spiritual realm. The propagandists included one Arthur Conan Doyle, whom the New York Times piece notes should have known better since he “created the single most rational figure in Western literature and was a skilled amateur photographer.” It wasn’t until 1983 that Crawley, then editor of a photo magazine, went back and meticulously tested the cameras’ technical specs and demonstrated that the photos were fake. The girls, by then old women, admitted to the ruse.
The Washington Post’s obituary for Jule Sugarman calls him “an architect of Head Start,” Lyndon Johnson’s landmark program to help prepare poor kids for school. But the coverage in both the Post and the New York Times is more focused on Sugarman’s bureaucratic genius than his work on pedagogy. Where scholars counseled LBJ to move slowly with the program, moving it from idea to beloved nationwide institution in seven months — on the logic that, once it was established, no Congress would dare destroy it -- Sugarman was the bureaucrat who made that happen. Grim Reader can’t help wondering whether the Obitosphere’s focus on the wonders of fast-moving institution-building wouldn’t have been different if the current ambitious Democratic president weren’t facing a Congress out to undo his still very much unbuilt signature program.
This week in bad guys: “Perhaps no other leader of Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 was more reviled than Emilio Massera,” says the Guardian. Massera presided over the innocuous-sounding Navy Mechanical School, where thousands of political prisoners were tortured, drugged, and murdered. “The most sinister character in our history,” a historian quoted in the New York Times calls him. … SS prison guard Michael Seifert, aka “the Beast of Bolzano,” died in an Italian prison, where he landed in 2008 after living quietly in Canada since shortly after World War II. While guarding prisoners in 1944, his crimes included disembowelment and eye-gouging, among other things, according to a suitably gruesome National Post obit. … And Adrian Paunescu became Romania’s most famous poet by writing “flattering poems” about strongman Nicolae Ceaucescu “that critics said contributed to the dictator’s personality cult,” according to the Associated Press. Nonetheless, he remains popular for his melancholy non-political work. Grim Reader wishes the obits had examples of each.
Jo Myong Rok may well have been a bad guy, too. But you wouldn’t know from reading the Associated Press obit, which focuses almost entirely on the North Korean general’s visit to Washington as part of an abortive effort to thaw relations. That’s not necessarily the wire service’s fault, as the Stalinist dictatorship remains so unknowable that speculation as to whether Jo was a moderating influence or an extremist member of Kim Jong Il’s inner circle is no more than speculation. Don’t believe Grim Reader? Check out the obit in the official Korea Central News Agency: “He energetically worked to thoroughly implement the Juche-oriented military line of the WPK and firmly guarantee the building of a thriving nation and the victory of the revolutionary cause of Juche with matchless military power,” the obit reads, referring to the country’s official Juche ideology of self-reliance.
Department of corrections: A big fan of baseball history, Grim Reader was drawn to the online New York Times headline over an obit for Negro Leagues baseball star Artie Wilson: “Artie Wilson, Shortstop Who Was Mentor to Mays, Dies at 90.” The story, though, contained no mention of Willie Mays, the star Wilson supposedly mentored. Well, not until the appended correction: The obit “referred incorrectly to his association with Willie Mays,” it says. “…While Wilson and Mays were former teammates on the Birmingham Black Barons, they did not play for the Giants at the same time.”
Also in the Obitosphere this week, opera singer Shirley Verret is remembered as “the black Callas,” the nickname given the New Orleans-reared soprano by Milanese critics. … Folksy columnist and TV pundit Charles McDowell gets a possibly inadvertent posthumous tribute in the Washington Post, where his own self-description is the most memorable line: He was the “designated provincial” on PBS’s “Washington Week” gabfest, he once said. ... And Eugenie Blanchard, believed to be the world’s oldest person, died at 114 in the geriatric ward of a hospital on her native St. Bart’s. She’d lived in the ward, an Associated Press report says, since 1980. Those skimming the Boston Globe wouldn’t know of her superlative status, though: The paper runs her obit under the uninspiring headline, “Eugenie Blanchard, Nun.”
Finally, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal both have nice obits for Anna Prieto Sandoval, who brought casinos to her California Indian tribe, the Sycuan, in the 1970s, making the once penurious population among the country’s richest Indian groups — and helping set the stage for reservation casinos from coast to coast. How thoroughly have legalized casinos taken root? Consider the language in the Los Angeles Times piece, which labels her “a pioneer of the Indian gaming movement,” using the industry-favored weasel-word for what happens at casinos. The Journal, to its credit, sticks with a more accurate, if murky-sounding, word: “gambling.”
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
Sure enough, the other obits cast her as an icon of first-wave feminism. “Jill Clayburgh, whose portrayals of strong women in such movies as ‘An Unmarried Woman’ and ‘Starting Over’ reflected the feminist movement, has died,” says the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog. “She was regarded as one of the first film figures to bring depth and subtlety to roles that reflected the sensibilities and attitudes of the growing women’s movement,” explains the Washington Post’s obit. (Unfortunately, that piece’s headline — “Actress gave full picture of modern woman's life” — undercuts that notion: If there’s any sensibility the modern women’s movement agreed upon, it’s that no single individual could give said “full picture.”)When American obit-writers (and essayists like Gail Sheehey, who writes in the Huffington Post that “Clayburgh’s life so closely paralleled mine, I feel as though a part of me lived a little through her”) reduce someone to a historical cultural archetype, it’s always interesting to see what they’re saying in a different cultural mileu. Across the Atlantic, the Guardian’s obit spends much less time on Clayburgh’s social-history significance and a lot more on her varied acting career. The obit also lingers on just how drecky some of her movies were, though it doesn’t come across as Clayburgh’s fault. Even her best-known role is hailed less for its cultural significance than for her acting chops. “She overcame many of the superficial aspects of the script thanks to her ability to show both strength and vulnerability,” the obit says, calling Clayburgh “an independent-minded, intelligent performer who refused to be pigeonholed.” The result reads a lot more like a feminist triumph than do many of the stateside encomia for Clayburgh.
--
The obits for Jack Levine, “a social realist artist who skewered the rich and powerful,” according to the Associated Press, mainly lead with his left-wing politics. “Favourite subjects included balding power brokers and their wives, corrupt policemen, mobsters, fleshy showgirls, red-faced industrialists smoking fat cigars – the great and not so good exposed in all their venality and frailty,” explains the Telegraph. One famous Levine portrait, of a gluttonous general, got the artist denounced by President Eisenhower and hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Levine’s hometown Boston Globe, though, is among the smaller number of outlets to focus on his art, where his “radical politics” coexisted with “conservative aesthetics.” With his “savage caricatures” hearkening back a century, Levine “could be as vehement in his denunciations of avant-garde artists as he was of right-wing politicians,” the piece notes. Sadly, no examples of reciprocal sniping make it into the obits.
There are great obits in the New York Times and the Telegraph for Geoffrey Crawley, a scientific journalist who exposed one of the longest-running photographic hoaxes in history, the tale of the Cottingsley Fairies. The hoax began in 1917, when a pair of schoolgirls, as a prank, cut pictures of pixies from a book and posed with them. Their families were skeptical, but when the pictures went public an array of powerful people championed them because they appeared to prove the existence of a spiritual realm. The propagandists included one Arthur Conan Doyle, whom the New York Times piece notes should have known better since he “created the single most rational figure in Western literature and was a skilled amateur photographer.” It wasn’t until 1983 that Crawley, then editor of a photo magazine, went back and meticulously tested the cameras’ technical specs and demonstrated that the photos were fake. The girls, by then old women, admitted to the ruse.
The Washington Post’s obituary for Jule Sugarman calls him “an architect of Head Start,” Lyndon Johnson’s landmark program to help prepare poor kids for school. But the coverage in both the Post and the New York Times is more focused on Sugarman’s bureaucratic genius than his work on pedagogy. Where scholars counseled LBJ to move slowly with the program, moving it from idea to beloved nationwide institution in seven months — on the logic that, once it was established, no Congress would dare destroy it -- Sugarman was the bureaucrat who made that happen. Grim Reader can’t help wondering whether the Obitosphere’s focus on the wonders of fast-moving institution-building wouldn’t have been different if the current ambitious Democratic president weren’t facing a Congress out to undo his still very much unbuilt signature program.
This week in bad guys: “Perhaps no other leader of Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 was more reviled than Emilio Massera,” says the Guardian. Massera presided over the innocuous-sounding Navy Mechanical School, where thousands of political prisoners were tortured, drugged, and murdered. “The most sinister character in our history,” a historian quoted in the New York Times calls him. … SS prison guard Michael Seifert, aka “the Beast of Bolzano,” died in an Italian prison, where he landed in 2008 after living quietly in Canada since shortly after World War II. While guarding prisoners in 1944, his crimes included disembowelment and eye-gouging, among other things, according to a suitably gruesome National Post obit. … And Adrian Paunescu became Romania’s most famous poet by writing “flattering poems” about strongman Nicolae Ceaucescu “that critics said contributed to the dictator’s personality cult,” according to the Associated Press. Nonetheless, he remains popular for his melancholy non-political work. Grim Reader wishes the obits had examples of each.
Jo Myong Rok may well have been a bad guy, too. But you wouldn’t know from reading the Associated Press obit, which focuses almost entirely on the North Korean general’s visit to Washington as part of an abortive effort to thaw relations. That’s not necessarily the wire service’s fault, as the Stalinist dictatorship remains so unknowable that speculation as to whether Jo was a moderating influence or an extremist member of Kim Jong Il’s inner circle is no more than speculation. Don’t believe Grim Reader? Check out the obit in the official Korea Central News Agency: “He energetically worked to thoroughly implement the Juche-oriented military line of the WPK and firmly guarantee the building of a thriving nation and the victory of the revolutionary cause of Juche with matchless military power,” the obit reads, referring to the country’s official Juche ideology of self-reliance. Department of corrections: A big fan of baseball history, Grim Reader was drawn to the online New York Times headline over an obit for Negro Leagues baseball star Artie Wilson: “Artie Wilson, Shortstop Who Was Mentor to Mays, Dies at 90.” The story, though, contained no mention of Willie Mays, the star Wilson supposedly mentored. Well, not until the appended correction: The obit “referred incorrectly to his association with Willie Mays,” it says. “…While Wilson and Mays were former teammates on the Birmingham Black Barons, they did not play for the Giants at the same time.”
Also in the Obitosphere this week, opera singer Shirley Verret is remembered as “the black Callas,” the nickname given the New Orleans-reared soprano by Milanese critics. … Folksy columnist and TV pundit Charles McDowell gets a possibly inadvertent posthumous tribute in the Washington Post, where his own self-description is the most memorable line: He was the “designated provincial” on PBS’s “Washington Week” gabfest, he once said. ... And Eugenie Blanchard, believed to be the world’s oldest person, died at 114 in the geriatric ward of a hospital on her native St. Bart’s. She’d lived in the ward, an Associated Press report says, since 1980. Those skimming the Boston Globe wouldn’t know of her superlative status, though: The paper runs her obit under the uninspiring headline, “Eugenie Blanchard, Nun.”
Finally, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal both have nice obits for Anna Prieto Sandoval, who brought casinos to her California Indian tribe, the Sycuan, in the 1970s, making the once penurious population among the country’s richest Indian groups — and helping set the stage for reservation casinos from coast to coast. How thoroughly have legalized casinos taken root? Consider the language in the Los Angeles Times piece, which labels her “a pioneer of the Indian gaming movement,” using the industry-favored weasel-word for what happens at casinos. The Journal, to its credit, sticks with a more accurate, if murky-sounding, word: “gambling.”
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
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