In my personal Hell, I am forced to watch a woman on a fast-moving vehicle apply eyeliner, while a waiter repeatedly explains the phrase “small plates” to me.
Here’s half of that scenario, from yesterday’s New York Times.
“Enjoy.”
So, the two big pre-publication reviews that a book is likely to get are those from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. I’ve just received a review from the latter, for my book about manners that will come out in January. The funny thing about Kirkus reviews is that they always close with a single sentence, pulled out from the preceding paragraph, that is what I call the blammo sentence. Meaning that, if the preceding 300 word-long review is marked by simmering disappointment, then the blammo sentence will be an outright dismissal, a cannon volley, a thunderclap.
So you can imagine my relief when, after a couple of hundred words bearing phrases like “highly idiosyncratic” and “highly subjective”, the blammo sentence below was actually a nice blammo—a dollop of whipped cream, a bit of tongue.
KIRKUS REVIEW: Alford (How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth), 2009, etc.) embarks on an idiosyncratic excursion into the land of civility. Manners became of interest to the author when he came across a comment by Edmund Burke that manners were more important than laws, and realized how true that was for him. Each day, his life had “been far more affected by the small indignities, or the tiny acts of grace, than by any piece of governmental legislation.” A book project was born: “I decided to study these tiny-but-huge things: to read about them, and travel in their name…to hold up a magnifying glass to unattractive habits that I stumble upon, be they my own or others’.” In his highly subjective, modestly twisted, rudeness-barely-checked way, Alford engages random aspects of manners. He commiserates with readers over choosing the right greeting—hug, kiss, handshake, fist bump, shoulder grab—and tuning into the error of excessive self-deprecation or the slippery slope of formal, hierarchical protocols: “highly arbitrary, difficult to parse, and subject to change without notice.” His focus can be broad, as suggesting that tone trumps action (or, paraphrasing Noel Coward, “it’s all a matter of lighting”), but often as not he screws down tight on small example from his life—as a tour guide or online manners coach for instance, when he shows himself to be a discreet, keen observer rippling with bad-boy humor.
Alford is a razory-wicked, fun guy to be around, and each of his stories are like those “tiny acts of grace” brightening your day.
UPDATE: And here’s the Publisher’s Weekly review.
One of the unanticipated mysteries of our society’s switch to online communications is the unanswered e-mail. While many people would say that we’ve always had unanswered communications–be they smoke signals or letters or telegrams or faxes–I think the remove of the internet, compounded by how its instaneousness breeds impatience in us all, makes the ethersphere an even more likely breeding grounds for communications-based sloth. It’s easy not to respond to a friend or colleague’s e-mail because I get so much practice not responding to spam.
Yesterday the Times ran my article about the phenomenon (it is here), along with illustrations by the great Ross MacDonald, and comments from John Leguizamo, Erin McKean, PM Forni and others.
How has having published this article yesterday changed my life? By making all my communications today seem very, very fraught.
Have you wowed any fellow party goers recently with your ability to converse about something other than your thoughts on the crudité? Been taken on a tour of your friend’s newly installed wine cellar and been able to offer a non-menacing response rather than drop-kick a bottle of Brunello? According to Henry, you owe Facebook a big “Thank You.”
In a special supplement in the August issue of Vanity Fair, Henry celebrates the societal gains the oft-criticized social networking site has already produced and predicts what future fruits we are still to harvest. Here’s hoping that someday we’ll live in a world where we are free to yell out in a crowded place how many episodes of True Blood we watched in bed that day.
And if you need any further proof of Henry’s Facebook acuity, you can review his analysis of The Six Most Common Personality Types on Facebook on VanityFair.com.
It’s entirely possible that I will never again be the cause of a headline quite as grabby as the one that ran atop Charlotte Cowles’s article on New York magazine’s blog recently: “Henry Alford Wore ‘Very Exciting Underpants,’ Wound Up With A Court Summons.” No, I imagine that from here on in, it’ll be a lot of weak tea and digestive biscuits for me. I’ll be in the nursery, folks, cross-indexing my Victorian etiquette guides and petting a small dog into submission…
(Oh, and: the incident in question.)
If my writing seems a little different in this post, it’s because I recently lost 10.2 pounds. I’m writing thinner, my friends. Like this sentence right here: just a wisp of a thing! A recent study by scientists at Carnegie Mellon helped me lose the weight: the repeated imagining of a certain kind of food can quash cravings for that food. Goodbye, cheesecake. I test-drove the study in yesterday’s New York Times–join the abstinence party here.
Henry makes spanikopita with 30 Rock creator, producer, writer, star and soon-to-be-memoirist Tina Fey in the April issue of InStyle, on newsstands now.
In between all the spinach-sautee-ing and dough brushing, the Bossypants author talks about what she does to stay in control of a career moving at break-neck speeds, while her friends Rachel Dratch (SNL) and Jack McBrayer (30 Rock) explain the “velvet glove” that is Tina’s managerial style.
Both CNN.com and People.com have now mentioned the InStyle interview as evidence that Tina “feels Gwyneth Paltrow’s pain.” I won’t give anything away, but here’s a hint: it has nothing to do with post-Glee dance number soreness.
What are independent-minded older folk eating these days? My article, “My Unhealthy Diet? It Got Me This Far,” from yesterday’s New York Times.
UPDATE: The reviews are in:
“Tongue-in-cheek” (Boston Globe)
“Thoroughly delightful” (Epicurious)
“Filthy” (Slate)
Because my mother is the de facto protagonist of my book How to Live, some have asked how Ann is doing. Swimmingly. More specifically, though, people wonder how she is shouldering the burden of having been called by Oprah magazine, in their review of How to Live, ”a role model for the ages.” Well, it’s been all muu-muu-wearing and elevated diction from Ann ever since; don’t expect to be granted an audience unless you are bearing a tape recorder or honorarium. If you do happen upon her in the environs of a certain North Carolina retirement community or the local Costco, and you’re unsure of the appropriate tone to take, consider hushed awe.
I have a new column in Vanity Fair: I’ll be writing the campaign diaries of one Krysti McCandless, a supposed superstar of the Tea Party. Here is the first one. Lock ‘n load, people!
