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Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

the breakfast table
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from: Timothy Noah

That's Not My Department, Says Werner von Braun

Posted Thursday, July 23, 1998, at 12:51 PM ET

Dear Marjorie,

Good old Alan Shepard. (You misspelled his name.) We take for our text this morning Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, chapter ten, where we join Shepard as he's strapped in and waiting to become the first American launched into space:

As for Shepard, what was going through his mind at that moment, and through much of his body, from his brain to his pelvic saddle, was a steadily increasing desire to urinate. It was no joke.... [T]here was nothing to urinate into. Since the flight would last only fifteen minutes, it had never occurred to anybody to include a urine receptacle.... He said he wanted to relieve his bladder. Finally they told him to go ahead and "do it in the suit." And he did.... The flood set off a suit thermometer, and the freon flow jumped from 30 to 45. On swept the flood until it hit his left lower chest sensor, which was being used to record his electrocardiogram, and it knocked that sensor out partially, and the doctors were nonplused. The news of the flood rushed through the world of the Life Science specialists and the suit technicians, like the destruction of Krakatoa, west of Java. There was no stopping it now. The wave rolled on, over rubber, wire, rib, flesh, and ten thousand baffled nerve endings, finally pooling in the valley up the middle of Shepard's back.

Now that's what I call journalism. Perhaps because Wolfe defined Shepard to his readers not as the first American in space, but as the guy who peed in his flight suit, Shepard didn't much like The Right Stuff, his obit says.

Marjorie, I'm so pleased girl mice can clone themselves, and guy mice can't. I didn't want to clone myself anyway.

It's day two of the Condé Nast disaster story, and Times Square is still a ghost town. Some elaborate nylon netting is being constructed to wrap around the deadly elevator tower, which apparently still has a few pieces it would like to drop on unsuspecting pedestrians. The Washington Post still isn't covering this, hence is missing a major schadenfreude opportunity. (The Times story, however, isn't without schadenfreude; Condé Nast represents a significant status rival to the Times, but this accident would seem to eliminate any possibility that Times Square will be renamed Newhouse Square.) The Times's front-page piece, by David W. Dunlap, is very nicely written. Dunlap shares with readers details of his ride up the elevator tower last month, which "conjured nothing so much as a ride in the gondola of a hot-air balloon rising slowly." Dunlap also writes that he noticed at the time that when the hoist stopped to pick up workers, it "seemed as if the whole tower was swaying ever so slightly." This passage underscores the perils of using pretty writing to substitute for old-fashioned hack reporting. Uh, David, why didn't you tell us about this swaying business before? More to the point: Why didn't you ask the nice man who gave you a ride up why the elevator tower was swaying, and what he planned to do about it, and then put his answer in the New York Times?

More news on the Ulysses front: Slate editor Mike Kinsley has stepped forth to admit he hasn't read Ulysses, and that he will donate his unread copy to our contest. Jake Weisberg, now a culture columnist for Slate, hinted (but would not confirm) in an e-mail to me last night that he, too, has not read Ulysses. Previously, James Fallows, former editor of U.S. News, admitted that he hasn't read Ulysses. So has Connie Casey, who formerly was an editor on the staffs of the Washington Post and San Jose Mercury News book sections.

But the embarrassment these journalists face, while profound, isn't sufficient to win a free copy of Joyce's masterwork. (It would be especially silly to award Kinsley with his own copy.) The hunt for bigger game continues. Hey Ann Godoff, big cheese at Random House: Have you ever read Ulysses? No fibbing, now...

Staying Away From Times Square,

Tim


the breakfast table
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from: Timothy Noah

That's Not My Department, Says Werner von Braun

Posted Thursday, July 23, 1998, at 12:51 PM ET
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Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Marjorie Williams is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
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