wednesday, july 28, 2010
BOOK WORLD Whimsy spiced
with mystery Alexander McCall Smith’s latest, set in contemporary London, features a cast of charming eccentrics with Dickensian names. C4
Style ABCDE C S
RELIABLE SOURCE Erin Andrews’s
BACKSTAGE
firsthand testimony The ESPN sportscaster, victim of a peephole videotape stalker, pleaded for tougher anti-stalking laws. C2
“
At Pepco, the power
by Monica Hesse
The crisis control center of Pepco this week is a repurposed conference room, which smells like ambiguous takeout. Anybody who is in charge of anything has spent the past several days around a giant table at the corpo- ration’s downtown headquarters, strategizing how to restore electricity to the thousands of homes that lost it during Sunday’s storm. A whiteboard keeps a tally of the powerless: 122,749, as of 1 p.m. Tuesday. Throughout the building meander the Blue Shirts, the media specialists who all wear cerulean Pepco button- downs in case they are asked to give interviews.
“Do you need a bottle of water?” one Blue Shirt asks another. “I need a lobotomy.” Tucked away in a nearby cubicle is Andre Francis. Blue Shirt Numero Uno. The first line of defense. He is in charge of monitoring the company’s social networking sites. If, at any point this week, you have been com- pelled to log onto Twitter and rant in the general direction of Pepco, the person you are yelling at is Francis. He is 25. This is his third day on the
job. How much would you say, Andre,
that Twitter activity has gone up this week?
“I would say,” Francis says, “it has
gone up ridiculously.” Take, for example, this one Twitter
user, who goes by “brad_stonegate.” “He’s written a few times,” Francis says, pointing toward his computer screen, which is currently open to the social media browser TweetDeck. Brad_stonegate has, in fact, written
seven Tweets describing how “totally clueless” and “completely incompe- tent” Pepco is for failing to fix the power in his Silver Spring neighbor- hood. Francis pauses, fingers poised over
his keyboard, trying to craft a helpful response that will not enrage Mr. Sto- negate even further.
“I totally understand your frustra-
tion,” he finally writes, as PepcoCon- nect. “If you could send me a link to your listserv I can get it over to Cus- tomer Care.” To another user, upset about a fallen tree, he provides Pep- co’s complaint hotline. They’re not perfect responses. He knows that. The only perfect response is, “I have magically fixed your power myself, using Scotch tape, paper clips and the powder of one finely ground unicorn horn.” What Francis provides aren’t solu- tions so much as pressure release valves, preventing the public from boiling over with anger.
francis continued on C3 JULIEN PACAUD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Mr. Dystopia
Satiric vision of a post-literate future skewers a sex- and youth-obsessed world gone wild
by Ron Charles
trend lines past Twitter and Face- book addiction to a post-literate, consumption-crazed America that abhors books, newspapers and even conversation. “In other words,” Shteyngart notes, “next Tuesday.” This zany Russian immigrant loops the comedy of Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” through the grim insights of George Orwell’s “1984” to produce a “Super Sad True Love Story” that exposes the moral bankruptcy of our techno-lust. I hope the e-book version contains a vi- rus that melts your iPad. A funny excerpt of it appeared last month in the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” issue, and it’s the sort of
G
ary Shteyngart has seen the future, and it has no room for him — or any of us. His new novel, a slit-your-wrist satire illumi- nated by the author’s absurd wit, follows today’s most ominous
SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY By Gary Shteyngart
Random House. 334 pp. $26
riff-based novel that does particularly well in bite- size pieces. Indeed, some of the funnier parts read like the magazine’s “Shouts & Murmurs” column — perfect for our Internet-shrunk attention spans. We meet the main character, Lenny Abramov, through his diary entries. He’s a death-obsessed, 39- year-old Jew with “a so-so body in a world where only an incredible one will do.” Raised and educated in the obso- lete literate society, he now works as a Life Lovers Outreach Coordi- nator for a multinational corpo- ration that sells immortality to High Net Worth Individuals. His
70-year-old boss, a rabid advocate of dechron- ification and fish oil, gets younger every week, and everyone’s neurotic preoccupation with physical health, in a society that’s spiritually dead, is only one of the novel’s clever themes. But what pulls on our affections and keeps the sat-
book world continued on C4 BOOK WORLD
to relate Andre Francis works the Web, trying to amp down customer complaints
I said when I started this that it’s just going
to be like a therapy session
every day.” — Aaron Reeder on Studio 2ndStage’s “Passing Strange.” C3
3LIVE TODAY @
washingtonpost.com/discussions Gossip with The Reliable Source’s Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts Noon • The Web Hostess with Monica Hesse 2 p.m. APPRECIATION
Drawing lightness
by Gene Weingarten On Saturday, John Callahan died at
59. He was among the most brilliant and original cartoonists who ever lived. If you never heard of him, it is be- cause he assured his semi-obscurity by venturing into some of the most un- nerving, taboo areas imaginable, in a fearless pursuit of humor. A blind man is plummeting off a
cliff. In front of him, on a leash, also falling, is a small animal. The blind man is thinking, “Why did I buy a see- ing-eye lemming?”
Callahan was a quadriplegic; he
drew with two spastic hands, held to- gether as if in prayer, each giving the other just enough support to fashion a semi-straight line, a line just squirrelly enough to give the drawing a slightly lunatic feel. As it happens, “slightly lu- natic” was perfect.
from dark Cartoonist John Callahan distilled humor from the macabre and taboo
THE OREGONIAN VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
John Callahan (in 1999) pushed boundaries with his art. He died Saturday.
A man is selling puppies on the
street. The grim reaper has walked up to him, accompanied by her three little grim reaper children. They are excited- ly bouncing around, saying, “Mommy! Mommy! Can we kill the puppies?” In the late 1980s, when we were edi- tors of the Sunday magazine of the Mi- ami Herald, Tom Shroder and I first saw a Callahan cartoon in a small weekly newspaper in Oregon — the only sort of paper at the time that would run his stuff. This was it: Two horseflies are sitting on a couch. The male fly is putting the moves on the female fly. On the floor, in front of them, are some little round objects. The female fly is saying: “Darling! Not in front of the maggots!” A few weeks later, Tom and I began running Callahan’s work every week in our magazine, Tropic. I believe we gave Callahan his first big break in the mainstream media, and it began a long
appreciation continued on C6
MARV BONDAROWICZ/
2 Music review: Bluesy Black Keys. Page C2
Video games:
Boost for classical music? Page C101
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