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Hillary Clinton's Exit, Lorrie Moore's Return

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Today's New York mag roundup of guest star obits for the Hillary Clinton campaign is bizarre! (It is reminiscent of, although nowhere near as toxic as, their group package on the characters of the Martha Stewart trial, which included this nutso defense of Peter Bacanovic and this wonderful piece on Stewart's best gal-pal and assistant.) For Clinton this week, they got the homosexual (Andrew Holleran) and the French intellectual (BHL!) and a lady history professor—and the somewhat reclusive and largely non-productive fiction star (Lorrie Moore), who actually filed something very wonderful and strange. Moore is 51 and has not had a new book in ten years.

Most notably:

I had reached the necklace stage in my campaign viewing: tonight a gold choker, though I had noticed that the turquoise she wore often seemed to be a signature victory trinket. When a viewer reaches the jewelry-recognition point, the viewer has been watching too much. I'd been advised by friends to take a long trip to some faraway resort. "When she opens her mouth and eyes wildly wide and points at people in the crowd, do you think she really knows them or is just pretending?" I took to asking people.

"Mexico," they said. "There's a nice place in Mexico."

Few truer things have been written about this Democratic primary. After my 20th or so Clinton speech, I mostly came to notice her adornments. The process by which a lady candidate is dressed is most certainly calculated and most definitely opaque; one of the few things we would never know is, Why those earrings and not any other? Were the earrings calculated? Or a sentimental personal choice? Were they A Message? With the exhaustion of examining and failing to understand larger questions—why did she run?—mostly now we are left with the meaningless questions—why did she run in those particular heels?

Do you suppose Obama's watch has to have batteries, or does he have one of those deals where he has to constantly go around shaking his wrist?

Posted by: KarenUhOh on June 16, 2008 12:39 PM

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