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When Nine Stories appeared in the spring of 1953, J.D. Salinger had been the nationally reknowned author of The Catcher in the Rye for two years. But the collection was, in some sense, his debut. Its stories, most of which first ran in The New Yorker, largely predate the novel, and they served as templates for a lot of what he wrote in the ensuing years. Although the book was not nearly the public coup Catcher had been—the New York Times politely lauded it as "so interesting, and so powerful"—it heralded a crucial transition in postwar fiction. Nine Stories was a bellwether of the era in which general-interest magazines turned literary.
Today, the existence of literary fiction in respectable glossy magazines is often taken for granted (or bemoaned in its absence). But in the late '20s and '30s, when Salinger was a student of the form, these quality standards had not entirely been set. Several general-interest magazines ran stories—often several per issue—but few, if any, sought out what would today be recognized as worthy fiction. Vignette and genre entertainment was the taste of the day: The Saturday Evening Post commissioned a great run of hastily composed F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, most of which read like imitations of his better work; The New Yorker, under Harold Ross, went in for prose skits and "casuals," putting a jaunty frame around prosaic life. There were, of course, great talents trying to navigate these expectations. But great talent itself was not the point. American glossy-magazine fiction between the wars was predominantly popular fiction. Its chief goal was to entertain until the next issue arrived.
This was the landscape Salinger was entering when his first story—a vignette he had written for a class—appeared in print in 1940. Over the next few years, he went to war and slowly grew into a favorite of The New Yorker's fiction department. The shorts that eventually became Nine Stories are today known both for their inimitable Salinger purfling (the wise-child protagonists, the lambent madness) and as the archetype of '40s "New Yorker fiction" (clipped, urbane prose with lengthy conversation pieces; sharp, deus-ex-machina endings). Their brilliance was to have it both ways.
What's striking on rereading these nine stories, in fact, is how distinctly they are written into snappy '30s form. Two begin with phone calls, one with a wedding invitation, another with highball cocktails, another with tennis: A reader encountering these openings for the first time would have no reason to anticipate anything besides boilerplate casuals. The overtures, of course, are misleading. "Teddy," which finishes the collection, begins on a cruise ship with a jaunty quote and ends with a child dying in an empty swimming pool. Throughout the book, haunting backstories billow behind Salinger's natty prose like gossamer; a story like "The Laughing Man" (from 1949) is as intricate and contrapuntal as anything Borges composed. Today it seems clear that Nine Stories is a book about war trauma, but in its setting, storylines, and style, it is the most oblique war narrative imaginable. Salinger captured the personal refractions of a national crisis and placed them into the hollowed-out shell of domestic narrative. This was, in many ways, the genesis of the postwar short story.
The hybrid form also shaped Salinger's writing itself. There almost is no Salinger style; his gift for mimicry was so sharp it is easy to forget how totally he owned his prose. (William Maxwell, one of his New Yorker editors, once got chewed out for adding a grammatically correct comma in the press version of a story.) He was a student of Hemingway's elliptical approach and channeled the buoyant, lucid tone prized by magazines like The New Yorker to play a smoke-and-mirrors game with daring subjects. He did not avoid the breezy surface appeal of popular shorts. Instead, he carved spaces for depth and nuance in its interstices. Precocious child protagonists walked among the two-dimensional grown-ups he'd imported from light vignette fiction, giving the stories stakes—and, in some cases, horrors—in geometries an actual vignette could never conjure.
It is easy to cast the magazines Salinger wrote for as the dupes in this game. But the truth is that writers and editors grew together. The '40s and '50s were a period of stiffening ambitions for The New Yorker's fiction department, largely under the influence of Katherine White and Maxwell; stories got longer, more complex, and, in the best instances, canonical. By the '60s, Donald Barthelme had secured the magazine's benediction. Nine Stories may have been a hinge that opened the door to this new generation of short fiction—but it was also, and maybe more crucially, a collection that helped prime the market to get those stories read.
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To write about Michael Jackson is to write about so many things at once: race, gender, sex, fame, money, music, dance, childhood, child abuse, aging, the media, the law. America, really. Maybe that’s why his death has prompted such an outburst of good writing. Tomorrow will mark one week since Jackson’s death; by the pitiless clock of the news cycle, we should be done thinking about him already. But a lot of smart people are just getting started.
Some of the best stuff I’ve seen on Jackson has appeared in the most unexpected places. Of course you’re going to turn to Robert Christgau on Michael Jackson, or Ann Powers, or Greg Tate, or Slate’s own Jody Rosen (as well you should; all four have written powerfully on the Jackson enigma). But who would have expected to find James Wolcott recounting his attempts to learn the moonwalk? (“My heel caught on a cat toy […] and I found myself reeling backward like Martin Balsam on the staircase in Psycho.”) Roger Ebert, on his indispensable Chicago Sun-Times blog (it's not just about movies, and the man responds to reader comments with the promptness and energy of a 24-year-old blogger with nothing else to do), relates the experiences of his wife, who as a young dancer once opened for the Jackson 5. Joe Posnanski, a sportswriter for the Kansas City Star, interrupted his vacation to write a fantastic blog post about the inescapability of Jackson’s music in the early 80s. And a guy named Bob Rossney, who maintains a seldom-updated blog called “Koax! Koax! Koax!,” wrote perhaps the best thing I’ve read on the unfathomable sadness of Jackson’s personal life.
David Gates’ remembrance in Newsweek contains one image I can’t shake; recalling the wraithlike backup- dancing zombies in the “Thriller” video, he writes: “When you watch it today, it appears to be a whole stage full of Michael Jacksons, the real one now the least familiar-looking, the most unreal of all.” (Newsweek’s photo spread opens with a shot of the Jeff Koons sculpture of Michael and his pet chimp Bubbles, which now looks like the Pietà of the 1980s.) And (I swear this isn’t just logrolling for a colleague and friend) the first piece of Jackson writing to make me cry was Stephen Metcalf’s trenchant and stunningly written reflection on this blog.
Then there’s the experience of coming across things written long before Jackson’s death that, if they were creepy before, seem positively frightening now. In 1983, a 24-year-old Jackson granted a rare interview to the Guardian (insisting, as he often did, that all questions be filtered through his then-teenage sister, Janet), in which he gushed about his love for children: “I feel I'm Peter Pan as well as Methuselah, and a child. ... Thank God for children. They save me every time!” Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, then writing for Salon, reported on Jackson’s 2005 child-molestation trial in chilling detail. Seth Stevenson’s dispatches from that same trial are a glimpse of the macabre spectacle Jackson’s late life had become. (In ’06, Seth also compiled a video roundup of red-flag moments from early Jackson videos.)
Brow Beat readers, what are your favorite pieces of writing (or tributes in other media) that you’ve seen about MJ? Send links to SlateBrowBeat@gmail.com. (And thanks to the Twitter followers who responded to my call by suggesting some of the great links above.)
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Forgive me if I don’t linger on the man’s music.
Thriller was released on November 30, 1982, but it was an album of 1983. The label led with the single “This Girl Is Mine” before releasing “Billie Jean” on January 3. “Billie Jean” was an instant hit for Jackson, but full beatification and canonization was yet to come.
On March 25, 1983, NBC aired “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever,” featuring a reunion of the Jackson 5, a group the Peacock’s audience no doubt remembered fondly from AM radio play, variety hours, and Saturday morning cartoons. As their medley wound down, volume came up on the predatory beat of Billie Jean; and something new and else began to throb through both Jackson and the audience.
An astonished Fred Astaire was in the home audience of 47 million—the most ever to watch a TV music special—and he was moved to phone up Jackson the next day. The two have similar body types: sylph-like elongations for limbs, responsive to every unlikely command. Astaire had seen what everyone had seen. The fedora, the spangled jacket, the slink, the moonwalk—in sum, the rebirth of the total superstar—but he also saw something else. “You’re an angry dancer,” he reportedly told Jackson over the phone.
The moment I heard he died I watched the Motown appearance on my iPhone. It is thrilling. It belongs to eternity. But it also belongs to something else. It belongs to 1983, an annus mirabilis, in its way, in American life; a year of economic recovery that, in addition to prosperity and the King of Pop, brought us Madonna, Oprah, Jay McInerney, Tom Cruise, Michael Milken, Vanity Fair, and the resurrection of Andy Warhol, downtown impresario behind the Limelight nightclub. Thus Jackson was a central figure in the re-creation of a viable American mainstream, a mainstream dominated by the larger-than-life, if you’re being polite—or credulous. I prefer the noun form of “grotesque.”
What Jackson made of himself must form part of any honest eulogy. Defendants wish to be found innocent of the charges. Jackson was no usual suspect. He wanted to be found innocent, through and through. Innocent of guile, of all bodily dross and urge. Innocent of adult experience. Instead he found himself, as he sequestered with the bones of the Elephant Man, merged physiognomy with Diana Ross, and bedded down with little boys, at some weird four corners of his own making, where the innocent and the sinister, the icon and the freak, all come together.
The falsetto speaking voice, the licorice eyes, hair steam ironed and Zambonied until it was straight. The skin—what? We still don’t know. Bleached? Blanched? Poached? The barely suppressed facial hair. Effacement, defacement, refacement, unfacement. What word could do justice to the creation, out of a perfectly normal human countenance, of the dilapidated faerie mask that MJ’s eventually became? It was as if the slightest concession to the normal human horizon would let in a besieging pain. To substitute for the childhood he never had, he picked, with uncanny accuracy, exactly those things that don’t substitute for an actual childhood. Amusement parks and toys—the placatory devices of the bad parent.
A genius; an angry dancer; a grotesque among grotesques. What to make of Jacksonian America, now that the King himself is dead? An immense and spectacular frenzy; an urgent celebration; the affect of triumph; at its center a derangement; beneath that, in all likelihood, nothing.
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When Michael Jackson introduced the moonwalk in 1983, people freaked—and then immediately began imitating him. We haven't stopped. Slate V has collected video footage of our best attempts to top the King of Pop in this great video.
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As saddened as I am by Michael Jackson's death, I'm equally shocked that it didn't happen sooner. A few years back when I covered M.J.'s trial and sat a few feet from him on a daily basis, I found myself constantly marveling at his frailty. Jackson wore his suits tailored tight, with fitted jackets and stovepipe trousers, yet still the fabric billowed around his bird-boned frame. He was always limping down the courtroom aisle, clutching at his ribs, taking shallow breaths. He showed up late to court one day looking on the verge of a violent retching attack. The consensus within the trial's press corps held that Jackson spent his days in a haze of Jesus juice.
Now that he's gone, obsessive Jackson watchers will wonder what hidden truths might at last emerge. Some theorized that Jackson had been paying off his ex-wife Debbie Rowe and perhaps others in an effort to conceal the actual biological provenance of his children. Will anyone come forward now and clear up the origins of Prince, Paris, and little Blanket?
Jackson's many creditors will no doubt lament the death of his ability to tour and to rack up new revenue. They'll squabble over his valuable song catalogs and his less valuable tacky home furnishings.
And then there are the rest of Michael's fans, the millions who loved the music but were unsure what to think of the man. I've always been agnostic on the question of Michael's guilt or innocence and felt that he was, at heart, an 8-year-old boy with the equivalent excitability and moral sophistication. And so I'm mainly sad that the gloved one won't get a chance to bask in his inevitable cultural reappreciation. M.J. was due, somewhere down the line, for a Johnny Cash-style re-emergence. An Elvis-in-black-leather moment. It would have been tinged, of course, with the lingering memory of M.J.'s alleged transgressions. But never underestimate people's thirst for a comeback. Michael would have lit up like a small child at the opportunity to make one more moonwalk across the world's stage.
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Directed by John Landis, specially effected by Rick Baker, and choreographed by the step-designer of Broadway's Dreamgirls in collaboration with the moonwalker himself, the "Thriller" video, of course, earns its accolades as the greatest music video of all time. This is not just a matter of its lavish detail or its loving grandiosity. Nor does its distinction owe simply to its self-reflexive wit as a riddle within a video within a film—"the Chinese-box humor," as Robert Christgau once said, worth regarding as "Michael's most effective anti-star move." (Contrary to popular belief, or at least Wikipedia, "Thriller" is not a spoof of zombie flicks but an inside-out horror film connecting R&B lust with the erotics of fear and proposing a superstar as an extrahuman.)
But all that is just the payoff. What mattered was the giddiness of the buildup to the video's MTV debut on Dec. 2, 1983. For the generation that came of age, or thought it was coming of age, in the first half of the 1980s, that afternoon was its "Who Shot J.R.?" moment, a Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan societal spectacle. Maybe its only companion piece was the wedding, two years earlier, of Jackson's pal Diana Spencer. We were gathered around the TV set with everybody after school, practically trying to stick our heads in the cathode-ray tube, and it was the tension of the anticipation that made us jump, as a unit, at that first flick of creepy yellow peppers. Our eyes weren't yet jaundiced, and the hype was the thrill.
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The Big Money Editor James Ledbetter offers this remembrance of Charlie's Angels icon Farrah Fawcett, who died today of cancer at age 62:
It must be next to impossible for anyone under the age of 30 to understand that there was a time when Farrah Fawcett Majors was actually cool. Looking now at that iconic mid-’70s poster, anyone can see the surface attractions that propelled her to fame: perfectly feathered hair, impossibly confident smile, and—particularly if you were a seventh-grade boy like me, staring for too long at that red bathing suit image masking-taped to the wall—the unabashed alert nipples.
Yet there was a whole other layer to her mystique that eludes today’s eye (to say nothing of the fact that her subsequent crises buried the real person along with the persona). Tits-and-ass primetime programming reached a kind of apogee in the mid-'70s, and while our parents rolled their eyes and tried to switch the dial to PBS, my friends and I devoured it with a pre-adolescent mixture of innocence and titillation. No matter what anyone might try and claim today, Charlie’s Angels was an abysmal way to kill an hour. The inevitable scene in which one or more Angels would get wet could barely justify the ludicrous plots, ritual explosions, and truly crappy acting. Even then, I knew it was bad.
The show, though, wasn’t the point. (At least that, I suspect, today’s youth would understand.) Watching Charlie’s Angels, having the FFM poster on your wall, clipping magazine pictures of the Angels in their bikinis and hanging them on the inside of your locker—these were more like badges, a way of participating in pop culture with as much sexual knowing as you could muster. Actually, as best I can recall, it wasn’t just a boy thing. I would not go so far as to say that the Angels were pillars of feminism, but girls watched the show. Charlie’s Angels was our version of a croquet match in an Edith Wharton novel—a way for almost-men and almost-women to play together politely, pretending to talk about one thing when actually you were checking one another out.
You were supposed to have a favorite Angel—some debased version, perhaps, of once having to have a favorite Beatle. (Kate Jackson was the smart one, but I can’t remember what the distinguishing factor between FFM and Jaclyn Smith was supposed to be, nor did it matter.) In truth, there was no competition—it was Farrah, always Farrah. Why? Blonde prejudice, for some, perhaps. But for me and, I suspect, most of my peers, it was for the most innocent reason of all: She was married to Lee Majors, the "Six Million-Dollar Man," the bionic hero whose cred had been established way before hers, or at least two ABC seasons before. And so I think FFM functioned as a kind of transitional crush, from the young boy’s fascination with physical strength and cyborg powers to the preteen’s need to branch out into a social exploration of sexuality.
When she left the show after the first season, I don’t remember any of my friends watching it any more, and by the time she and Majors split in 1979, the girls I wanted to spend time with had more dimensions than that poster. I imagine for her, the poster was something she wanted desperately to transcend, but for millions of American boys, it was itself a kind of transcendence.
—James Ledbetter