Ba bump, bump, bump

Time editor and talking head Fareed Zakaria plagiarized a New Yorker article about gun control. Zakaria's apology in part: "I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault."

The "girl" at the front desk

Janet Groth's memoir THE RECEPTIONIST is getting a lot of attention for the potential of gossip from and about her longtime employer, the "New Yorker," and in that respect it’s something of a disappointment. Through her years of manning one of the magazine’s front desks, Groth knew and squirreled away everyone’s secrets, but most of those she relates here are her own.

For its portrait of a working environment in which the social bled into the day-to-day, THE RECEPTIONIST is a time capsule of a different age. Luck got Groth her initial interview (she was working for a friend of E.B. White’s) but the job she and everyone else would be a short sojourn before marriage became an enduring fixture in her life.

A major reason for that: the changing workplace climate, even to our modern eyes it may not seem changed enough, allowing her to stay single . It wasn’t always that fun; Groth was routinely pestered for dates by whoever came in to see one of the writers, even the married men, and found herself dreading the job for a while after her cartoonist boyfriend was fired. Her account of her time at the “New Yorker” suggests that the major difference between that workplace and others was that the men who asked her on dates, at least those worthy of mention here, were not intimidated by her intellectual pursuits. That in itself is a victory, as well as the fact that most of the time Groth was behind the desk she was chipping away at graduate school at NYU. Like many of the never-marrieds I know, her romantic history is a patchwork of a few serious relationships and some “good story” dates.

The question of why Groth never progressed beyond the receptionist's desk in her time at the “New Yorker” is one even she finds herself unable to answer. She pointedly told E.B. White in her interview that she didn't want to be placed in the typing pool, with the implication that doing so meant choosing a dead-end career as one in a large body of largely replaceable women (who, one assumes, would quit as soon as they got married), landing her at the reception desk. Yet she never wrote for the magazine, and finds herself unable to articulate why. As the magazine went through some growing pains in the ‘80s with the suggestion that it systematically discriminated against its women, Groth asks of these policies, "Was I a victim? Or a beneficiary?" reasoning that the same job security that kept her safely ensconced prevented her from moving up.

THE RECEPTIONIST wasn't a standout memoir to me – at one point she has a revelation on vacation that doesn’t go anywhere, and the chapter about the things Groth learned from her African-American roommate is particularly winceworthy -- but it would have been nice to get her perspective into such an august body that at the time leaned heavily on old white dudes to set its tone. Maybe that makes this book necessary after all.

A Canadian litmag is reporting that David Rakoff, "This American Life" contributor and all-around funny writer, passed away yesterday.

Feel on the verge of going mad -- then it's time to punch the clock

Meet Publishers Weekly's 6 Authors Who Never Quit Their Day Jobs, fully half of whom are or were in medical fields (counting psychologist Tomas Transtromer). Next time I can't get a doctor's appointment because the office is only open from 10:30 to 11:45 and 2:30 to 4, I'll know what the score is. In a larger philosophical sense, though, has this economy not made Melvilles of us all?

Rock Hudson FTW

Bret Easton Ellis' Twitter rant about why no openly gay or gay-acting
actor can play Christian Grey in the dreadfully inevitable 50 SHADES
screen adaptation is:

A. Homophobic
B. Ignorant
C. Hilariously presumptuous
D. Just the type of insane provocation which makes it hard not to
engage with because of its sheer wrongheadedness
E. Still less crazy than Ellis' top movies of the year so far a
F. Both A and B
G. Both D and E
H. All of the above
I. For the love! It's acting! That's what it means! (He did indicate
he understood this, with a "but..." indicating he completely missed
the point.)
J. Injurious to the openly gay actor Ellis held out as an example, who
got dragged into this because of some casting rumor or other (and
whose name I only omit because he did get dragged into it).
K. NOT injurious to that openly gay actor, because he may not even
want or be up for that part anyway, because there's nothing to hide
about him being out, and because of IMPERIAL BEDROOMS.
L. Seriously, it is 2012, are we really arguing about this?

NYC: Bookswappers' Club tomorrow night, Brooklyn

This is such a genius idea. $4 beers! The books of strangers! Why oh why do I have to be in midtown at this hour?

Warner Brothers has moved "The Great Gatsby" to summer 2013, for who cares what reason this is terrible.

Poor Yunior.

Salcedense (noun) Person or native of the region of Salcedo; since the construction in question is Spanish, the region is likely to be either the city of Salcedo in the Dominican Republic or a territory in Ecuador. (Pronounced: sahl-seh-DEN-say.) 

As used in the new Junot Diaz short story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love" (New Yorker, 7/23/12 issue). The subject described as a salcedense (the narrator's ex-girlfriend) is assumed to be Dominican in this case from context provided by this later passage:

In general, any Spanish word ending in -dense denotes origin or nationality, hence the little used but grammatically Estadounidense, resident of the Estados Unidos (United States).

(And while we're here, clavo saca clavo means roughly "one worry replaces another"; literally, one nail takes out another.)

"In the research pile there are books about advertising, De Beers, Paris, marriage and F.D.R."
--Whatever J. Courtney Sullivan's next project is (according to this New York Times description), I'm on board. 

How To Assign Yourself Summer Reading As A Grown-up

1. Sometime in mid-April, realize that the lines you are doodling on your legal pad at work are stacking themselves into the weeks and months of summer.
2. Request your vacation days, squeezing each for maximal sunshine and minimal expense.
3. Unearth the box of your summer clothes with a heavy puff.
4. Survey your bookshelves and wonder about how your summer will be.
5. Add one book that's almost too heavy to carry around by itself, your summer anchor, the kind of thing you can use to hold a corner of a towel down at the beach, the book that could set the tone for the whole summer -- at least you hope so.
6. Pile on three or four books about who you want to be, something bigger than your commute and your vacation plans.
7. Unearth the gifts you opened months ago, still dusty with good feelings.
8. And oh, how about those discoveries you made at bookstores in Houston and Portland, recycling someone else's hard labors into your own.
9. Top them all with something new that you have been looking forward to the symbolic event of buying, just to carry it out of the store in a paper envelope like a prize.
10. Stack them all precariously on your floor so when you hop out of bed every morning, to roll out your yoga mat on the beach or stand in a meadow in western Massachusetts with two economists and a composer, there they are.
11. Realize at the top of August that there's no way you could possibly finish all of those books. Take delight in that. Realize in a way that was the point. Wish anyway that summer would never end.

(Three books down, 7 to go this year.)

Just when you thought it was safe to turn off your e-book reader...

Harper Perennial is reprising its 99-cent e-book sale from last year. Got my eye on: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WALK IN THE WORLD, THE LONDON TRAIN, THE GREAT LOVER.

Olympian Ryan Hall for Audiobooks

Just in time for London, here's Ryan Hall listening to THE ODYSSEY on his "short run." Surprising that the famously religious Hall (he lists God as his coach wouldn't get a plug in there for his favorite long book, the Bible. Hall will compete in the marathon on August 12.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is offering refunds to people who bought Jonah Lehrer's IMAGINE, after the former New Yorker writer admitted to fabricating some Bob Dylan quotations in it.

12 for 7: Best Books I've Read in 2012 So Far

Come on, did you think I'd really forgotten?

Published in 2012 
Gillian Flynn, GONE GIRL
Heidi Julavits, THE VANISHERS
Katharine Boo, BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS
Jeanette Winterson, WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU CAN BE NORMAL?
Richard Ford, CANADA
Adam Levin, HOT PINK

Published previously 
Dana Spiotta, STONE ARABIA 
Richard Ford, THE LAY OF THE LAND
Martin Amis, THE INFORMATION
Chris Lear, RUNNING WITH THE BUFFALOES
Lionel Shriver, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN
Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, I WANT MY MTV

RIP Gore Vidal, giant of American letters, one-time Kerouac bed buddy and (most important to our purposes) member of the Modern Library editorial board.