Thanks a lot, Caroline Kennedy
Caroline Kennedy vs. Giant Russian Bell: similar, but not quite the same.
They still ran their "guerilla piece," as "Ms. Kennedy Regrets." Meanwhile, the bells are still giant Russian bells (they haven’t withdrawn), so when will their turn come? Last week, I asked my editor. He started paging through the schedule. "Hm… don’t see it here…" (pause) "Haven’t found it yet…" (long pause) "Aha, here’s California Driving School, near the end of March, actually before the Russian bells… oh, well now I see they’ve put California Driving School and Russian bells in the same issue—now that’s a bit of poor planning."
For people who haven’t been following my eventful career at The New Yorker, I wrote two pieces for them in 2006 (which you can read here). Then I spent a year finishing my dissertation. I turned in my next piece for them, about comedy traffic school, in September 2007. That was 17 months ago, and they’re still waiting for a good time to publish it. Now, when I hear that the bells are in the same issue with comedy traffic school… well, I just can’t help thinking it’s going to be the special Hell Freezes Over Issue that they’re going to put out to commemorate the end of global warming.
Meanwhile, here is the problem with the world: it keeps changing! When I wrote the bells piece, for example, not only was Alexei II still alive, but those bells were still in the US. Three months later, the bells were returned to Russia, and my piece still hadn’t been published. So we changed a couple of sentences to the past tense. Problem solved, kind of, except that when the other editors read the piece, they were like, "WTF—the whole piece is about what a big deal it is that the bells are going back… then the bells go back, and there’s like one sentence about it." To make a long story short, now I have to describe the return, so it doesn’t sound anticlimactic, even though I wasn’t there, because nobody thought it was worth sending me to Russia to see it.
The other thing with the passage of time is that it makes people forget things, so you can imagine how fun it is to have an article you wrote 7 months ago go through fact-checking. Half the Russian web sites disappeared. The former US undersecretary of agriculture no longer remembers having told me that the soy protein dinner served to him by the monks of the Danilov monastery was "very inventive but quite bland" (even though I have it right here in my notes, "v. inventive but quite bland)."
The bell-ringer from the Kremlin, a really nice guy who talked to me for two hours at a cocktail party, has completely forgotten that he ever met me. His explanation to the fact-checker was that bell-ringing puts him in a spiritual frame of mind and he doesn’t remember things that happen to him then.
The spiritual bell-ringer found much to object to in my description of bell-ringing, including this sentence: "Unlike Western church bells, which move when they are rung, Russian bells remain stationary, and are rung by means of ropes attached to the clappers." His objection was that Russian bells don’t remain completely stationary when they’re rung: if they were really stationary, they would explode! I told the fact-checker that I meant "stationary" in the less absolute, everyday sense, as in the phrase "stationary bicycle," which is what I sometimes feel like I am riding in my journalistic career…
Tags: current events, dissertation, fact-checking, hope, non-publications, politics, publications, religion, Russia, Tolstoy
February 11th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
So i followed the link and took the opportunity to read your old New Yorker pieces, and was absolutely delighted to read:
I remembered a Turkish expression, “The bear knows forty stories, but all of them are about pears [SIC]”
SIC&LOL!
February 11th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
(PS – there’s also a “ducking”/”clucking” mistranscription in the Ice Palace story.)
February 12th, 2009 at 12:02 am
Hi Jake! Thanks for catching the clucking typo!—it’s certainly true that on p3 of Ice Palace it should say “clucking like a chicken,” not “ducking like a chicken.” I’m also happy that you were entertained by the bears, but there isn’t really anything SIC about them… it’s a real Turkish expression, Ayının kırk hikayesi varmış, hepsi ahlat üstünde. Ahlat is a kind of wild pear.
February 13th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
But THAT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE. Doesn’t the bear know at least one other story? Maybe about shitting in the woods? Why pears? Pears and bears don’t rhyme in Turkish, right? Is the the mysterious and esoteric wisdom of the Orient???
February 13th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Aha sorry, I forgot to complete that thought—I meant to say, ahlat is a kind of wild pear, believed to be especially beloved by (Turkish) bears. So, the bear knows 40 stories but all 40 of them are about his favorite thing, i.e., delicious delicious pears. I think there’s a variant of the expression, like, “The hunter knows 40 stories, but they’re all about hunting.” I prefer the bear version though, because I’m also quite fond of pears.
February 14th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Sounds like a variant on the Archilochean fox-hedgehog riff, from which I. Berlin famously started out in an essay. Maybe somebody will do likewise here. I have no such intention. My mission rather is to impart to you that In Romanian pears (pere) rhyme with apples (mere), pleasure (placere), and beer (bere) but not with bears (ursi). ‘When the poplar trees bear pears’ means in that tongue ‘never’, ‘in your dreams’.
February 15th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Thanks, SW Foska! I guess another possible placement for comedy traffic school + Russian bells would be the “Pear-Growing Poplars” issue commemorating the final triumph of genetic horticulture. You’re right about the hedgehog and the fox BTW, I hadn’t thought of this.
June 9th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Thank you for the article on the bells and for mentioning on your website who assisted with the research. I am thinking of writing a novel that involve Russian church bells as major characters and appreciate all the information to be found in one, easly available location. Any other hints or links or suggestions or guidelines will be greatly appreciated as well!