Poet Robert Hass, who won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Awards last year from the Academy of American Poets, was one of 14 people interviewed for the January/February 2015 issue of Esquire about their 2014.

Among the many interesting things Hass had to say was this.

My younger brother once said to my mother, “I don’t know why Bob writes poetry. Nobody reads it.” And my mother said to him, “Yes, but they don’t read it for a long time.”

Here’s hoping we all have readers who don’t read us for a long time. Or something like that.

Mothers always put these things in perspective, don’t they?

I was just reading the latest issue of Esquire, which is a better magazine than you probably give it credit for. In his editorial, Editor-in-Chief David Granger recounted a trip to his father-in-law’s memorial service, and how Bill Dodson’s eldest son, Dick, praised his father by comparing his traits to those listed in the Boy Scout Law.

Granger then included a condensed version of those suggested behaviors, which I share with you here.

As I read through the list of attributes to which we should all aspire, I kept thinking to myself, “Yep, yep, trying to do that, and that, too”—until I got to one which instead had me thinking, “No way!”

Do you know me well enough to be able to tell which of the rules rubbed me the wrong way?

Let’s see!

The December 2009 issue of Esquire includes an interview with Jason Reitman (director of Thank You for Smoking and Juno), the son of Ivan Reitman (director of Stripes and Ghostbusters).

It was a short interview, no more than a few hundred words, and in it, Reitman the younger attempted to explain how his father’s films and his own differ, as follows:

The difference between my father’s movies and mine is this: If you imagine my father and I each as musicians, my father wants to take your favorite song and play it better than you’ve ever heard it. I want to take a song that you hate and play it so well that you learn to like it.

At first I thought, oh, what an interesting metaphor. But then I thought, what’s with all this liking? I already complained to you about that type of thing earlier this week.

Tell me you want to move me to laugh, cry, dance, or sing along … but don’t just tell me you want me to like you.

Liking is overrated.

Oh, not where you and I as human beings are concerned. But when we’re talking about art in any form, “like” is far too neutral a word. Sort of the way the word “nice” is when applied to people. If I ask you about your friend, and all you can tell me is that he or she is nice, you’ve told me far more than you really meant to.

So a truce, universe, OK?

Don’t let me read any more this week about people who want their stories, movies, songs, or restaurants to be liked, and I’ll try to be … well … nicer.

Stephen King’s new story “Morality” was just published in the July issue of Esquire. A few sentences of that story appeared on the front cover in a manner which cannot be matched by a Kindle.

I recommend the piece, which is quite dark, reminding me a bit of the film Crimes and Misdemeanors. Not in any aspect of the plot, but rather in its bleak outlook.

The cover, however, was neither dark nor bleak … nor did its design have anything to do with the story itself.

You can find out more about the creation of the cover here.

Contrary to what the cover blurbs would have you believe, those sentences printed on model Bar Refaeli are not the opening sentences of the story, which confused me a bit when I tried to read them as such and then continue on inside.

I’m not sure why after having gone to all that trouble they let stand what appears to be a crossed-out typo just above her knee. But perhaps you were too distracted to notice.

When the May issue of Esquire arrived in the mail today, I found George Clooney staring up at me. I’m not yet sure what project he’s plugging, as I’ve only just begun skimming through it. Maybe he’s only there to tell us “How to Be a Man,” which is the theme for the issue.

Here he is.

As I paged through the issue, however, I noticed that not only did it feel stiffer than usual in my hands, but there were two perforated lines running horizontally across the middle of the cover, one above and one below Clooney’s nose. Small type at the far right of the narrow strip in the middle suggested that I “lift and separate.” So I did, and here’s what I found. (more…)

The December 2008 issue of Esquire also includes an article by writer Tom Junod on scientist Mark Roth that brought back unpleasant memories of Chris Crawford, the speaker at the 1998 Sante Fe Nebula Awards Weekend who emptied the room with his insistence that there was a great divide, nearly impossible to cross, between science and the arts.

He raised hackles by going on and on (and on and on and on) about how scientists could never understand creativity, and creative types couldn’t understand scientists.

All of this in front of an audience filled with professional science-fiction writers who were also working scientists … or vice versa.

Anyway, the following statement in the Esquire profile reminded of that uncomfortable moment:

It’s a weird thing about scientists—you would think that they would love science fiction. But they don’t. To admit that you get your ideas from science fiction, if you’re a scientist, that’s, like, career-threatening, man …

I don’t know whether this is something Junod overheard Roth actually say, or if it’s only something that Junod is intuiting from his lengthy interviews, but … what the—? This passage goes against everything I’ve ever heard.

I’m trying to decide whom to blame for this bizarre statement, Junod or Roth. But at least one of them is way off.

As part of the celebration of Esquire‘s 75th anniversary year, the 75th page of the December 2008 issue of the magazine contains brief quotes from what the staff considers to be the seven greatest stories they’ve ever published, with a link pointing to the complete stories.

In addition to Tom Wolfe’s “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson, Yes!” (which I’d read over over again in the collection The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby back in college when I thought I was going to follow in Wolfe’s footsteps) and Norman Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” (which is not about the superhero, but rather the Kennedy/Nixon debate), they’ve posted the full text of Gay Talese’s classic personality piece from the April 1966 issue, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

For those of you who’ve never read the piece and don’t understand why you should care, well, aside from the fact that it’s wonderfully written, it also includes a cameo by Harlan Ellison, who went head-to-head with the Chairman of the Board and lived to tell the tale. (more…)

In the September issue of Esquire, the editors tossed together Werner Herzog (director of such films as Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo, and Aguirre, the Wrath of God) with Philippe Petit (the performer best known for his illegal high-wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center back in 1974).

Unexpectedly, as they bantered, I discovered that Philippe Petit already knows one of the main reasons that I write.

Here’s how their dialogue ended:

Werner Herzog: What I do is for spectators. Whether Philippe’s walk between the Twin Towers was witnessed by anyone down in the street really didn’t matter. Philippe once secretly put a cable across a 2,400-foot ravine and walked across it and danced on the rope. Only a farmer who was driving his cattle at sunrise realized that someone was there. He rushed into the village to wake a policeman. And when they came back on a motorcycle, there was no Philippe, there was no wire left.

Philippe Petit: But the cows remember.

I, too, do it for the cows.

Check out this full-page advertisement for Silver Patron tequila which appears in the new (July 2008) issue of Esquire magazine.

It’s one in the company’s current series of ads which raises issues worthy of debate (i.e., a day at the beach vs. all day in bed, rich vs. happy, one more hand vs. quit while you’re ahead, etc.), only to posit that the quality of its own product is beyond debate.

Note that the ad references science fiction, mysteries, historicals, and so on. Amazing, none of the genres are being dissed.

At least, I don’t think they are.

Nick Flynn just published an interesting article titled “The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Torture” in the February 2008 issue of Esquire. On the one hand, the piece is exactly what the subhead describes it as, a story about the author’s trip to Istanbul to listen to accounts of torture from former prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But the essay does its job is a very rambling way, offering poetic asides about memories, perceptions, families, and dreams.

In one section, Flynn describes his meditation retreat with a Vietnamese Zen master:

Thich Nhat Hahn says it is a mistake to say, “The rain is falling,” to say, “The wind is blowing.” What is rain if it is not falling? he asks. What is wind if it is not blowing? The falling is the rain, the blowing is the wind.

This passage had nothing to do with writing; it was meant to speak to the impermanence of our existence. But it also gave me a little “Aha!” moment. Have I been guilty of writing a sentence in which the wind blew? Did I ever say that the rain was falling? Was there really a need to say so? What else would they be doing? Wind blows. Rain falls. And words can be redundant.

It reminded me of the need to prune my prose. Not something I always do wisely here … but you know what I mean.

Perhaps that’s an inconsequential and insulting moral to take from such a horrifying essay, but I’m a writer. I commit such crimes all the time.