Customer Reviews

Character Studies: Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed

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This is Singers collection of profiles previously published in the New Yorker over the years. Each person or group has an obsession. The Pancho Villa people in Texas, The farm produce people in S. Calif., Donald Trump, Ricky Jay the illusionist, the National Tom Mix Festival people, Sara the new-age modern mommy and Martin Scorsese the film director. It was interesting.
You'll like it.

I was especially interested in the first two accounts: obsessed Ricky Jay, illusionist extraordinaire, and "The Donald" (Trump, of course!) A real inside look at these interesting men. And the author is related by marriage to the culinary expert Alice Waters. I always enjoy broadening my horizons by reading well-written essays.

These nine 'character studies' are about people (quirky, unusual) Mark Singer has sought out, interviewing them for his articles in the 'New Yorker' magazine, and spending time with them to learn their idiosyncrasies "just for the fun of it." They're not people he'd choose to have as friends, but fodder for a national magazine to poke fun at their 'out-of-the-ordinary' fixations. Some might be classified as 'oddballs,' but he describes them as "curiously obsessed." Obsession is a compulsive, often unreasonable idea or emotion; a preoccupation with a fixed idea. His conviction is that 'character is destiny' but the 'character' in these stories come through as if they were a character in a play.

Sara's the mom who used a nanny to program her children's lives while she had an important job as an architect. Even before the first child was born, house rules were made for the chores being divided fifty-fifty. Dad would be a 'New Man,' and Mom a 'Fulfilled Woman." I know such a couple; even though 'Mom' didn't become an actual 'real' Mom for ten years, my son even had to cook some evenings, always shared the household work and held a full-time, stressful job. After their one child was born, she was too overwhelmed to do any grocery shopping or laundry, and he still had to do all that plus his usual share of the rest. He always went to bed exhausted, frustrated, and unhappy, driven to the point of near collapse. Sera lived with her husband, Tom, in the same house Tom grew up in and their four children attended the same public schools he had. This was in the same town where Mr. Singer lived in 1996 in New Jersey, when this article appeared in 'New Yorker.' Tom's a publishing executive.

The nanny's job was to keep an hour-by-hour timeline, follow instructions and fill in the blanks. Sera ran the house like a business; "the nanny followed a printed menu of activities that Sera had prescribed to stimulate visual, motor and auditory progress. The regimen would change as the children grew older, when she would devise more elaborate charts and daily-activity requirements." She was quite the dictator.

He even parodies a co-worker, Joe Mitchell, who died in 1996, writing a strange memorial remembrance of a man who'd been a reporter more than two decades before Singer was born. He'd been on the staff since 1938, almost sixty years, at the 'New Yorker' where he could write in a style no one previously had; he had a 'graveyard fixation' with a "virtuoso of graveyard humor." Comparing him to James Joyce, he chose lost souls, impostors and freaks to write about, among other strange New Yorkers.

Mr. Singer tried to be a detached observer as he describes the living conditions, the way they're dressed, and their odd fixations; his judgment of these people as 'obsessed' is obvious. He tries to appear impartial, but the way he portrayed the highly-educated Richard Seiverling, the quintessential cowboy wannabe, was condescending. Just because the elderly educator (M.A. and doctorate in education at Penn State) who had started as a hobby, the National Tom Mix Festival as a "labor of love," Singer described the "Cowboy Corner" thusly. It was packed full of Tom Mix memorbilia, "a telephone-booth-size niche complete with many photographs of the star of western movies. Whoever heard of an "L-shaped" phone booth, as he had earlier called this 'mini' museum there in Hershey, Pennsylvania, near the family home in DuBois. Singer, originally from northeast Oklahoma, where the main Tom Mix museum was located at Dewey, starts out: "My plan was to tour the second floor of Dr. Seiverling's house, where he had installed a private museum -- a collection of artifacts documenting his life and its intertwining with the life of Tom Mix."

The first ten National Tom Mix Festivals had been under the chairmanship of the esteemed Dr. Seiverling in Hershey, but the eleventh (1991) would take place in Las Vegas where the "Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino had added to its collection of antique automobiles the 1937 Cord 812 Phaeton Coupe that Mix was driving at the time of his fatal accident. The car had been carefully restored after the accident...and regarded as an important fixture of the collection right up there with Hitler's Mercedes and the Alfa Romeo that Mussolini gave his mistress."

Best known for the B-Western, 'Riders of the Purple Sage," Mix also starred in 'Destry Rides Again' and 'The Rider of Death Valley.' Mark Singer attended the four-day festival for his 'New Yorker' article and parlayed the big man as a braggard. In Knoxville, our cowboy wannabe hosts a Saturday matinee showing the old westerns on the local public television station, called 'Riders of the Silver Screen' and somehow always mentions 'Riders of the Purple Sage' as an examplary motion picture of that genre. Marshall Andy is an Eddy Arnold "aficionado."

In his tribute to Martin Scorsese, "the man who forgets nothing," Singer digresses quite a bit to appear knowledgable about the repetorie of his mainly unconventional films. Some Scorsese fans consider him "America's greatest living film director." He feels he was put on earth to bring Mel Gibson's "The Last Temptation of Christ" to the screen, with his "evangelical earnestness. "Across many months, I had many conversations with Scorsese" and was in awe of his ability to recall details from every movie he'd ever watched, "along with five-plus decades of personal history, sensory memory, family mythology, music heard, books read, all of it instantly retrievable. Instinctively, he'd engraved facts and images and feelings that he'd been able to draw upon throughout his creative life."

Mark Singer has out other books including SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA, CITIZEN K, MR. PERSONALITY and FUNNY MONEY.

In this book, Singer dismisses evidence that Pancho Villa's head was stolen by the Skull & Bones Society in 1926. He fails to deal with the evidence provided by Let the Tail Go with the Hide: The Story of Ben F. Williams, that provides solid proof that in 1926 the Yale Skull & Bones Society acquired Pancho Villa's head for $25,000. Williams confirmed this fact from the mouth of the grave-robber himself. He also confirmed independently that $5,000 was directly paid by Frank Brophy, of the Brophy banking family, prominent in Arizona Republican financial life since the early part of the twentieth century.

Ben Williams, the narrator of the book, recounts how one night he helped spring a soldier of fortune, Emil Holmdahl, from a Mexican jail by practicing some type of scholarly legerdemain upon the mind of a poor Mexican police chief. Holmdahl was being held on suspicion of having stolen Pancho Villa's head from the rest of his assassinated body. He denied it to Williams, who vouched for his character, got him a razor and a basin of hot water, and pulled him out of a Mexican jail by dint of his superior gringo intellect. There is abundant independent documentation that Holmdahl was an officer under General John J. "Blackjack" Pershing, who prosecuted war against Villa, and that Holmdahl had even worked for Villa. A likelier grave-robber would be hard to find.

Six weeks later, Williams ran into Holmdahl at the El Paso Club on the top floor of the Hussmann Hotel in El Paso, New Mexico. Holmdahl admitted that he had in fact stolen Villa's head for $25,000, and offered him half the take for getting him out of jail. Williams rejected the dirty money, and never saw Holmdahl again. Years later Williams was hobnobbing with Frank Brophy in his office and noticed his Skull & Bones credentials on the wall. When Williams remarked on the fact, Brophy told him that successive classes of Bonesmen rival each other to gain skull trophies. His class had secured its place in Bones history by getting that of Pancho Villa, the great revolutionist of Northern Mexico, who had thought to retire peacefully, but died in a hail of lead years after he thought he'd made peace. I found Williams' account entirely believable. Singer dismisses the account without a fair hearing. Singer is a lightweight. I'll go with Williams' account of the provenance and disposition of Pancho Villa's skull over Singer's.