I only thought I’d typed my last words about Lost for The Washington Post. This morning, post-finale, it turned out we really needed someone to make the case for purgatory, amid all the other theories we were posting, either by Liz Kelly and Jen Chaney (our in-house “Lost” PhD’s), or from lots of devoted readers. Here’s what I wrote, which is getting me lots of argumentative e-mail in return. It’s online only. (We’ve decided that we’ve killed enough trees trying to elucidate Lost.)

IT WAS PURGATORY, PEOPLE

By Hank Stuever / (c) The Washington Post / posted on May 24, 2010 (updated version)

In the fall of 2004, when “Lost” was amassing what turned out to be its incredibly dedicated audience, there were viewers (I was among them) who said: Maybe the island is just purgatory. Maybe everyone on Oceanic 815 is really dead (killed in a plane crash, obviously) and they are trapped somewhere between a dark place and a heavenly afterlife. This theory made the most sense, and it didn’t lessen the show’s best qualities one bit.

But the more-involved fans hated the purgatory theory. No, no, no, they said. It’s a real place — and look, see? It was a science experiment. There was a hatch and a series of numbers being entered into a computer! If it’s purgatory, then how come people actually die? There are “Other” inhabitants. This story goes way back to Egypt, dude!

But can’t that all be purga—

No! See? The flash-forwards? The six survivors who go back to the real world?

But what if that world is also purga—

No! Because look, they set off a bomb that split everything into two realities, one on the island and one in an alternate sideways world!

But maybe that’s because it’s purga—

No!

I don’t know what the rest of you 13 million people were watching Sunday night, but in the last five minutes of “Lost’s” insanely overlong finale, I realized that the purgatory camp had been right all along, that Occam’s razor (the simplest solution is usually the correct one) had worked. “Lost” was a story about purgatory.

Yes, the show’s creators vehemently denied all along that the island was purgatory. Fans, being fans, took them at their word — which, by the way, one should never do. Snap out of your Comicon-style “ ‘Lost’ community” daze and realize that this is showbiz and the customer base must be sustained and strung along. “Lost” frequently abused its viewers’ time and patience and, masochistically, its core viewers stuck around and asked for more. What is purgatory, after all, but a series of torture devices?

Maybe the word “purgatory” is the problem. What about limbo? (It’s been too long since Catholic school for me to fully recall how purgatory is different from limbo. We used to pray for the souls of dead babies in limbo, whom we felt sorry for, because they didn’t have television. Maybe saying the word “purgatory,” for “Lost” diehards, feels too much like finding Bobby Ewing in the shower (“Dallas”) or listening to Dorothy babble about Oz after her barnyard concussion. One thing people despise is an “it was all an illusion” ending, but tell that to “The Twilight Zone” or Ambrose Bierce. This much I know: ABC is counting on us to argue about this forever, so they can somehow show us even more commercials than the ungodly number they showed Sunday night.

Now let’s broaden the definition of limbo or purgatory, to allow that the all of the people who came and went from “Lost’s” island were technically corporeal — alive. They hungered, fell ill, needed shelter, had sex. You could die on this limbo island, which only makes it worse for your soul. This allows the island to be sorta-real. Some people in “our” world know it exists and seek to get there, to unlock or exploit its energy. Others just wash up there. Everyone who is there belongs there. Maybe for a while, maybe forever.

Jack Shephard and his fellow travelers were unwittingly brought there to resolve a number of problems between heaven and hell. They were fresh souls, there to address a few too many anomalies and broken-machinery issues in some sort of working universal order.
During their time in purgatory, the Oceanic people (helped by other lost souls, such as Juliet and Desmond and Faraday) brought parallels together and eventually they prevented the devil’s meddling attempt to return to heaven and destroy creation. They blew up the Dharma Initiative in the 1970s, because it also threatened the island’s energy. They killed the Smoke monster. They altered time/space without killing the rest of us. Big jobs.

This limbo followed them backwards and forwards and sideways into a tangle of past, present and alternate future. The characters finally fixed it. Their reward was the hereafter.

People in “Lost” died multiple times in a lot of ways. Jack’s exit in the final minutes of “Lost” was the death that got him to heaven, but the 815 crash was the death that got him busy on what he was meant to do. That’s why the finale takes Jack back to that same bamboo field — where he snapped awake in 2004 (dead, but not technically) and where, now that he is fully cognizant of all that has happened (and un-happened), he lays down and experiences a final peace. His work is done.

I know some hardcore fans don’t want to believe it was purgatory all along, perhaps because they worked so hard to decipher “Lost’s” layers of pointless mythology and whatnot. This is not an “it was all a dream” ending. It was about another realm that is like a dream, which explains why everything had to be so frustrating, complicated — like a dream where you can’t solve a problem.

But not a dream. An actual place — a purgatory. Or for people who hate that word, an in-between. You don’t go there simply because your soul is stuck. You go there because you’re needed.

Here’s something I wrote for the paper about the end of (perhaps meaning of) Lost. More important, here’s the Owen Freeman illo that went with it. Only, when it came time to run the essay, the powers that be decided to run it on A1 on Friday, where we would just never ever run an illustration. (Then again, who would have ever thought deepish essays about TV would ever be on the front page of the Washington Post, either?) So, Owen’s art went with a “Lost”-releated story by Jen Chaney on Saturday’s Style front instead. The best laid plans, etc. — I’m glad it saw print.

But now I’m bringing my piece and the art back together the way that we intended.

"Lost" illustration (c) Owen Freeman for The Washington Post

‘Lost’ or not, we’re still at loose ends

By Hank Stuever
The Washington Post / Friday, May 21, 2010

“Lost” exhausts. It was a vacation in hell, our own wonderful hell, a “Gilligan’s Island” getaway for our nervous, crisscross-wired culture. A bunch of fictional characters clad in grimy gray Gap T-shirts tromped all over the hills and jungles of an illusory, magical isle — a place that represented about a thousand different metaphors. America, it’s so obvious: Millions of you loved “Lost” because you feel lost.

It’s been a long six years of goose chases and mash-up mythologies. It was filled with ultimately irrelevant numerology and hieroglyphics that mostly turned out to be set decor. It was tall pirate ships and utopian VW buses; literary references to everything from 19th-century philosophy to “The Empire Strikes Back” to Holy Communion wine.

As it lugubriously ends Sunday night on ABC, “Lost” leaves us more or less where it all began, but also with a spooky idea of the 21st century thus far. It was the perfect show for our frustrated ’00s era, in which no one had to answer for anything much — not for the real estate and Wall Street busts, the levee floods, the bad war intelligence.

While we fought elusive enemies in distant lands; while we vanished down our personal, broadband rabbit holes; while we doubted our elected officials; while we spent ourselves into impossible debts, “Lost” was along for the ride, with its unsolvable puzzles and its exhilarating but dorky extremes of fandom culture.

Though ratings steadily declined since “Lost’s” debut in 2004, the show held a firm grasp on some 10 million viewers (roughly half of the average viewership of the two most popular shows on TV, “American Idol” and “Dancing With the Stars”). Like anything these days, it survived on the passion of its niche audience, which skewed young and tech-savvy.

” ‘Lost’ is in a class by itself,” ABC’s programming chief, Jeff Bader, said this week. “It is the most successful cult show ever.”

But enough now. Enough with the instanalyses blogged and updated and tweeted late at night — or, more fittingly, during the next afternoon in cubicles all across the so-called American workplace. This is not one of those “Lost” farewells that goes over it and over it one more time. No charts, no diagrams, no last-minute theories.

Instead it’s a farewell to a feeling.

Read the rest here!

At long last, the greatest hits of Gene Weingarten. Coming in July.

I got into newspapers in high school because I liked the way they look. In college, I chose writing and editing over design, but two decades later I keep wondering if I made the right choice.

We’ve been attempting a bit of visual branding with some of my longer reviews/essays about television in the Style section. This means deeper thoughts (haha) and most of all, Better Art. I’ve been loving these illos that we hired graphic artist Owen Freeman to do for Treme, Betty White, and my piece on mockumentaries. They give off a bit of an Alex Ross graphic novel realism …

What do you think? I think they’re sharp and nicely distant, almost spooky. Anything is better than canned art from wires and network publicity depts. Freeman is 5,000 x better.

This is one of the great benefits of the print product. For a variety of technical issues (and excuses) and freelancer legalese (I think?), these illos don’t ever make it online. I know the iPad age is upon us, so I hope to actually live to see the day when the Washington Post website (or app) is anywhere near as elegant to look at as the newspaper is.

When casting about helplessly on my own articles (or just putting off the inevitable), I like to randomly, briefly cruise through The Post archives and see what was up 10, 20, 45 years ago in the paper.

Just now I came across this appreciation that Jura Koncius and Martha Sherrill wrote when Nina Hyde, the Post’s fashion editor, died of cancer 20 years ago. I try to never post things in their entirety from the archives, but this is so old and it was never online, and I think it’s a great read.

What strikes me now is not only the way Nina Hyde worked, (New York fashion shoots? For the Washington Post?), but how she really didn’t care for things and fashion so much as personal style, and what that meant, in a world before a gazillion fashion blogs, before the celebrity/fashion nexus grew into the beast it now is. This is about a real sense of journalism. I didn’t know her. I loved learning from this that she just constantly stopped people in malls and on the street, and asked them about what they had on. That’s fashion reporting. (It lives on, a little bit.)

Appreciation: In Her Own Inimitable Fashion / (c) The Washington Post [p. F1, May 6, 1990]

By Jura Koncius and Martha Sherrill / Washington Post Staff Writers

The Style of Nina Hyde. She didn’t own high heels. She wore a Swatch Watch for years that she’d picked up at the airport. She didn’t put on much makeup, and she taught a couple of us to bite our nails. When she found a favorite outfit, she’d often wear it three times a week. She kept a pair of silver earrings — cone-shaped snail shells — in the top drawer of her desk for TV interviews. Usually they were the only jewelry she wore besides her wedding ring.

She was a city girl. She was handsome, beautiful. She spoke with an old-line voice from the Upper East Side where she was raised. Nina, who died Friday night after a long battle with cancer, had style but taught us all about substance instead.

She would always drag us out, her assistants past and present, to lunches at the O’Mei Restaurant — around the corner from The Post — to celebrate anything. And before long, we’d become each other’s friends, each other’s bridesmaids. We’d throw baby showers for each other and we would laugh hard when we told The Nina Stories.

We would mythologize. Nina, The Fashion Editor With a Social Conscience. Nina, The Queen of the Cleveland Park Yard Sales. Nina, The Impossible. Several assistants hadn’t lasted long. One, more fragile than the rest — we always reminded Nina — had a nervous breakdown after a strenuous fashion shoot in New York and was never heard from again.

The shoots provided the most material. We’d go on about models wearing fur coats in 100-degree weather. About staying up half the night with Michael Borden — Nina’s New York stylist and The Funniest Man Alive — taping the soles of new shoes so they wouldn’t scuff. About how we’d put on cocktail hats with veils and gotten stuck in clothes sometimes two sizes too small. About hitting Studio 54, or Xenon or the Palladium, with Nina. About how she’d interview people there as though she were Margaret Mead on an expedition.

Nina never was as frivolous as the subject she covered. She lived like a Yankee. She cared nothing for china or linens, silver or decorating or status cars. She cared nothing, really, for things. If you admired something, she might give it to you. She’d lend anything she owned. She had a homemade black taffeta skirt at least 15 different women have worn, and which Patsy Rogers in the Home section still has in her closet because Nina told her to keep it. And when you gave Nina a present, she’d often give it away to somebody else. There was a polished antique leather box that her former assistant Kathleen Stanley gave her one year, and that Nina confessed months later that she’d handed over to Ralph Lauren as a house gift.

She shared her gossip, her thoughts, her contacts, her bran muffins. She smuggled us into parties. She showed us her mail. She bragged about us to her friends. She wanted us to meet Bill Blass, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein. When Diana Vreeland called, Nina would whisper: “You want to hear her voice? Pick up your extension — go ahead, listen in.”

And she shared her courage; watching her in action made us feel stronger. She could pull out a note pad even at the most awkward moments, and ask the tough questions. We watched her try on wigs when her hair fell out, and buy a cane when it got hard to walk. She even gave fashion tips to nurses while she got chemotherapy. She stood before hundreds of people and talked about her terminal cancer. Until several months ago, she was flying around giving speeches, appearing on television. She came into work just a few weeks ago and wrote her last Fashion Notes column.

Sunday Fashion Notes. It was like a running journal of Nina’s life. Since 1976, she wrote every week. She called in columns, when she was dog-tired and depressed, from the shows in Milan and London and Paris. She called in from Beijing when there weren’t supposed to be telephones there. She called from India, from Tibet, from Africa, from Australia, from Grenada and from a spa in Baja, Mexico.

She adored her job — both as fashion editor of The Washington Post, and as a freelancer on far-flung assignments for National Geographic. “I have the greatest job in the world,” she’d always say, which might be why she was never not working. This could drive you crazy. She got to work two hours before anyone else — and turned the lights on in the Style section every morning. At restaurants and shopping malls, you’d find her cornering somebody — like a woman in a yellow suede miniskirt — for a quote. An outfit she’d seen as she was walking to lunch would become something for her Wednesday shopper column, originally called Cheap Frills and Glad Rags, then just Cheap Frills, then Capital Assets and then Try It!

She knew fashion — the business, the trends, the designers, the dirt — but she didn’t always buy it. She’d say: “It isn’t fashion until somebody wears it.” And to Nina, her job wasn’t just reporting The Important Sweater that was chic in Paris, or where you could find a Chanel knockoff bag for under $25. She believed in what she saw around her. She believed in shopping discount stores. She believed in wearing what you had in your closet. Her favorite story she’d written for the paper was called “Black Style,” which ran in 1980. “To be brought up Black and clothes-conscious in urban America is virtually redundant” was Nina’s lead.

“Nina’s People.” That’s what Ben Bradlee used to call the hordes of wannabes who lined up on Wednesday mornings for 10 minutes of Nina’s frank fashion advice. They came with batik ties, leather ponchos, denim furs. The jewelry was usually hard to look at. But for those with a sign of talent, Nina was generous with encouragement.

There were other Nina People. You came to know them. You became one. She had a universe of loyal friends. And a galaxy of people she helped along the way. She loved them, they worshiped her. Some were la-di-da Washington cave dwellers and French aristocrats. There were good ol’ boys at National Geographic and international photographers. There were no-nonsense housewives she’d met along the road — parents of her daughters’ friends. There were gay men, fashion types, and old battle-ax garmentos from Seventh Avenue. Designer Issey Miyake would call from Tokyo. The Maharani of Jaipur from India. Bill Blass from his country house with a joke he’d heard — or his meatloaf recipe. For years, Geoffrey Beene sent postcards from around the world.

She was motherly without meddling. After she found out one assistant, who was new to town, lived down the street from Bob Woodward — then unattached — she wangled an invitation to the Metro section Christmas party because it was being held at his house. She later introduced them so many times that Woodward had to say, finally: “Nina, we’ve met.”

She seemed almost shy sometimes. She never wanted to talk about herself, she wanted to know about you. And, as she had with her daughters, Nina encouraged her assistants to be independent. To travel. To see new things. To rely on ourselves, not our husbands or boyfriends.

And she stood by us. She encouraged us to move on at the newspaper — to write or edit — even when it meant losing someone she valued and having to train a new assistant. She wrote us letters of recommendation. She helped us get jobs, then threw parties for us when we got them. She gave us rides home. She would have had us to dinner every night, if she could. And she believed in us, it seemed, when nobody else did.

Her friends would flock faithfully to every Nina Event — her lecture series at the Smithsonian, her fashion symposiums at Constitution Hall, the designer lectures at The Washington Post, and the many parties honoring her, which for the last 4 1/2 years that Nina struggled with breast cancer seemed almost like a monthly affair.

And they’d even turn up at her yard sales, an annual ritual. Her assistants and friends would gather at dawn with their wares, in her Cleveland Park back yard. First we’d eat doughnuts. Then we’d begin dealing with the people who showed up — sometimes before 7 a.m. Nina’s items never sold too well. And they were not what you’d expect from some glitzy fashion editor. A broken movie projector. Ugly vases from all the flowers she’d gotten. Dusty napkins and greeting cards from a party store that she and Lloyd, her husband, owned when they first came to Washington. Nina was famous for haggling with customers. There’d be old paperbacks she was selling for 25 cents each, and when one was finally purchased for 10 cents, she’d throw it into a glossy shopping bag from, say, Jean-Paul Gaultier in Paris.

We’d do anything for her. We’d bring guest towels to her parties. Our husbands mowed her lawn. When Nina needed her suede jacket cleaned, our job became finding the best leather cleaner in Washington, and then Nina would write a Fashion Note about it.

We transcribed totally incomprehensible interviews she’d had — half in French or Italian — with The Fashion Greats. We’d hear wine glasses clinking in the background. We heard Yves Saint Laurent’s bulldog, Mougique, breathing heavily under the table. Once, we even transcribed a reading of Nina’s tarot cards, a copy of which remained in her file drawer for 10 years under the heading: Spooky Tunes.

And we’d do anything to make her laugh. We fooled her with fake phone calls — “Would you hold for Halston, please?” asked an assistant calling from the Post cafeteria. We put on outrageous clothes. And in 1986, during the weekend of “The Nina Hyde Tribute” when hundreds of big-name designers and store presidents and celebrities flew in from around the world to honor her 25 years as a fashion editor … we roasted her. We Xeroxed pictures of Nina and stuck them around the walls: a young Nina in Paris sitting reverently at the bedside of Madame Vionnet. Nina in her “penguin dress.” Nina and Karl Lagerfeld’s ponytail. Nina joking around with Calvin.

We told The Nina Stories. We called it “A Tribute to Anita Heinz.” We gave her a cake with her portrait in chocolate frosting.

On her last birthday in September — her 57th — a few friends gathered at the home of Betty Ann Ottinger, one of her closest friends. Her daughters, Jennifer and Andrea, came, her brother, Howard, her husband, Lloyd. And there were several former assistants, and the current one, Julie Bresnick. The next day, Nina sent one of us this message in the computer:

“I know this sounds nuts, but last week was one of the worst weeks in my life, and my birthday was one of the best.”

What a week, what a week. I think I’ve done just about everything I can do for Tinsel. (Can you think of anything else I could have done? Short of breaking into Oprah’s house and threatening her at gunpoint?) I’m ready (almost ready) to let go, and come to an end, at last, of a project that took four years to do. But first, a very long blog post. We must beat the horse to make certain it is dead.

On Monday, I took the train to New York and back to read at the Half King bar in Chelsea, and was glad I did. (It cost me $175 to go, but I tried to drink it back at the bar. Maybe all my readings should have been in bars?) I got there early to have drinks and dinner with Amazing Andrea Schulz, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editor in chief who helped me so much with the final drafts of the manuscript. We were busily sending pages back and forth this time last year; how time flies. Andrea has given me so much time and attention, even now, when I should be the last thing on her mind. I hope I get to keep talking and laughing with her, occasionally, even if there’s no new project on the immediate horizon.

Andrea brought me a hilarious little Christmas bag filled with “lumps of coal” (chocolate, actually) and some sobering but expected (and almost encouraging, certainly not discouraging) news about sales. But more on that some other day in the future.

As Andrea and I talked and I was getting antsy about reading to strangers in a strange bar, the room filled up with familiar faces: Jenny Strasburg, Rob Landry, Ray Schroth, David Carr, Rebecca Dana, Adriane Quinlan, David Segal, Robert Lanham, and others. And my sister, Ann South, and her husband Glenn, who took three trains to get there, and once again have been true Tinsel champs. If I keep typing about this I’ll get verhklempt. It was wonderful to see everyone and I barely had time to make it worth their while. Being on book tour has been a little like being on a neverending wedding reception — never enough time to talk to all your friends who actually show up!

My luck with good and decent friends continued Tuesday afternoon, in D.C., reading at the monthly book salon at Dezenhall Resources, thanks to my friend, the book writer and public relations guru Eric Dezenhall. You know what Eric does (among the many things Eric does)? Invites an author once a month to speak to a select gathering of his staff, business associates, friends, whoever. And get this: Everyone gets a copy of the book, thanks to Eric. I mean, who does that anymore? There’s always good food (Buca di Beppo!) and good questions. It made me feel okay about the book’s central appeal once more — people love to talk about the suburbs, the economy, and the holidays. Thanks to Eric and his trusty assistant, Malinda Waughthal.

Next, day it was off to L.A., with a layover in Houston.

(I was going to write an entire blog item calling BS on the world’s gripes about airlines and air travel in the post 9-11 era, which I am so sick of hearing. In the past month I have flown about 15,000 miles on American, Alaska, United, and Continental, with checked-on bags, through several connecting cities, across the country and back and then across and back again, and I have not been late, delayed, poked, prodded, or missed a single piece of luggage. Not once. And so what if I had? I would have survived. I still find it all to be an absurd miracle — flight. Getting from Dallas to Seattle in four hours. Think of the Donner Party, for Christ’s sake. People can run half-marathons but they are such babies in airports, expecting the worst, and getting the worst. It’s no big deal, so long as you get to the airport the way I do: I expect to die. Every single time, I figure I am partaking in my last few hours of life. Anything better than that is a bonus.)

Got to L.A., early of course, just in time to sit in traffic in a cab. Spent the night at the Palomar hotel, courtesy of CBS, so that I could do this on Thursday. (UPDATE, May 2010: It recently came to my self-Googling attention that the clip of me on the Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson on 12/17/09 has vanished from YouTube, for now, but try this link instead)

Awright, already, I’ll tell you all about  it. Bascially, I spent 16 hours in my hotel room being nervous and trying to decide some things, such as what to wear, and whether or not to shave off my entirely unsexy two-week facescruff. (Did it! I did the whole exfoliating, steamy shower, carefully against-the-grain, Kiehl’s shave balm thing.)

I took a walk around supersunny L.A. on Thursday morning. Later, the producer, Lisa, called to go over everything we had already talked about, but to really go over a few more times all the far too many potential subjects that might come up during a five-to-seven minute segment; which is an act of futility, because Craig Ferguson hardly ever follows any set of questions or plan. But it does wonders for calming down the jumpy author-guest, I must say. My basic approach to doing this show is that anything besides throwing up on Craig’s desk (or tripping on the two steps up to the guest’s chair, or forgetting that you don’t stand up until they’ve gone to commercial) is SUCCESS.

Come to think of it, this is the same exact approach I have to airports and flying — if you aren’t killed, everything else is a plus.

Howard the very pleasant Town Car driver came and got me about 3:30 and took me to Television City, over by The Grove. (I’ve been here a couple times before — once to do a profile of Craig Ferguson, in fact, in 2005; another time to profile Bob Barker and watch a taping of The Price is Right, in 2007.) An assistant met me at the door and away we went into the bowels of CBS. Yes, I got a dressing room with my name on it. Yes, I met Sigourney Weaver and told her how much Ripley means to me. (”I do that a lot,” Weaver said. “I ask myself: What Would Ripley Do?”) I saw Betty White walk by, wearing a Santa suit for a sketch they were taping for a later show. She waved hello. A nice man named Trent did my makeup and hair. The producer above Lisa came in and shook my hand and looked at me and asked that I change my tie; I was originally wearing a Hickey-Freeman red plaid tie. Apparently there’s some sort of strangeness going on with discouraging guests from bringing up Scotland or things Scottish — even though Craig talks about it all the time, you’re not supposed to. I honestly hadn’t thought “Scotland” when I picked the red plaid, and true, it might be a rival clan or something. Lucky for all: I brought four ties. And a sweater. And a different jacket. Or no jacket. Oh, the ways I could’ve gone!

Craig was extremely nice (he remembered, or claimed to, my Post story about him) and jouncy and frantic and I tried to keep up. If I have any advice for anyone who has to do a late-night talk show (or any show where you have to come out, wave, macho-hug the host, make your way to a chair, sit and be smart and jovial) it would be this: Don’t try to be funny. Just riff right along with whatever’s happening. Keep eye contact. Pretend it’s not happening. Smile. Laugh. Really pretend it’s not happening. Say thanks. Wave. Sit still through the applause until the host gets up. You’re done!

And boy, are you done. You will then be lead through a phalanx of show staffers all wearing headsets who say you did grreeeeat, rillly grreeat. You will want to get out of there as soon as possible, and they will want you to leave very quick-like as well, but do say thank you to everyone and do have Trent wipe all your makeup off. This was a busy night at the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson — on Thursday they usually shoot both Thursday and Friday’s shows, so they were getting ready to do it all over again, with Paris Hilton (she arrived with all sorts of entourage) and chef Jose Andres. They were also shooting comedy bits for shows that will air this week. There’s a guy on the set whose job is to make sure Craig changes into the right tie, depending on what night they’re shooting at the moment. It’s all a big in-joke to the audience, who are supposed to pretend right along with Craig that it’s Tuesday, not Thursday.

I would happily do the show again and totally understand that I probably never will get asked to. Did we have a scintillating conversation about the essence and meaning of my book? No, sir, we did not. Did it go over well? Was it fun? Was it watchable? (I cannot say. Although I have the clip and have kindly embedded it for you here and for posterity’s sake, I myself have not and will not be able to watch it for many weeks or months, for reasons only Jenny Craig and a leading maxillofacial surgeon could truly understand.)

You know what part was the best, I thought? Right before I went out, watching Craig fondle my book and do a riff on book-reading in the Twitter age. That was rillly grrreat. I don’t think it moved a stone, sales-wise, but so what? You can’t beat this sort of loving attention:

So, a million thanks to the people at the Late Late Show. I got out of there a little after 6 and had Howard the Town Car driver take me immediately to Lucques, my favorite L.A. restaurant, where I met the one and only Janet Duckworth for great wine and excellent comfort food. I crashed that night on Janet’s couch, without a thought to turning on the TV and watching the show itself. Some of the best nights of sleep I’ve ever had have been on this couch — there’s something about waking up in her living room on that sumptuous sofa under a big comforter, with the windows open and the birds chirping and the cool L.A. air and light coming in. It’s a zen I’ve only ever achieved on a campout or two. Nancy Rommelmann has crashed on this couch before; she knows.

Flew back to Washington on Friday, just a couple hours ahead of this:

Michael shot this from our bedroom balcony Saturday evening, after a foot or so of snow fell on Washington, and I think you have to be one of his Facebook friends to get it to play, but chances are, you are.

What a pleasant, calming gift this storm was — at least, to those of us who live right across the street from a Safeway and within boot-stomping distance to everything we could possibly need in life. Saturday was also Michael’s birthday (he’s 36 — all grows up). Our original plan, a small dinner party, fell through (guests couldn’t get here) so we went out to dinner at Rosa Mexicano, just the two of us, and stuffed ourselves silly. My present to him this year is really to both of us: a new bed. King size this time. Mattress-testing expeditions (and trips to buy all new bedding) will commence in the new year.

Bryan Burrough: Boooo

My tranquil weekend was briefly interrupted by this rather nasty review of Tinsel in The Washington Post, by Bryan Burrough, a book writer and Vanity Fair reporter and, it turns out, what the kids today might call a douchebag.

You say: The Washington Post? But don’t you work there? Is there some sort of pent-up animosity toward you?

Not really. That’s how it goes. Our book review section remains clandestine and independent from the rest of the newsroom, in order to avoid just this very sort of fuss. I have no control over whether the book is reviewed at all, or who is assigned to review it, or if it’s a good review. I did see a Book World editor in passing last Friday who grimly volunteered that it’s “not an enthusiastic review,” and I said, oh, pish-posh, who cares, I’m just glad it’s being reviewed a’tall. But I didn’t know it would be this bad.

Look, it’s fine, but I will now type a couple paragraphs (and perhaps delete them, perhaps not) indicating that it is NOT fine. People are totally allowed to not like my book, and there’s nothing Bryan Burrough brings up here that I didn’t worry about while writing Tinsel. (Is the story boring? Is the book too predictable?). I have a stack of clips now where the reviewers really seemed to get it and enjoy it, all the balm I’ll ever need.

What does bother me is what an egotistical jerk Burrough is being here — deliberately dense, dismissive, and dinging me for being “condescending” to flyover country while making a “he’s from Oklahoma” joke at the same time. (Very Texan of him, no? Texans are the only people I know who think making fun of other people’s states of origin is perennially hilarious, while everyone else goes “hunh?”)

Like him, I also could criticize Scroogenomics and You Better Not Cry (for completely other reasons, and not nearly so brutally) but what seems to have happened here is that a writer (who doesn’t need the freelance pittance) took a shit all over three books for no reason other than to make himself chortle. That he has a decade or so as a Wall Street Journal reporter under his belt only hews to a certain theme from my 2009, wherein I find it difficult to get a point across to people who might have once worked at the WSJ.

Finally, I have to accept my whuppin’ here. I’m a critic myself, and I’m sure I’ve soured a few people’s mornings in TV-land with my reviews. What I don’t accept is the way the review was assigned. In my opinion, Christmas does not automatically link these three books. I would have preferred a standalone review, or at least a combo review by someone inclined to consider the material with less snark and a closer reading — or to admit that he has nothing constructive to add here and pass on the assignment. But that’s how it goes. Saying “bite me, Bryan Burrough,” is I guess just another way of saying: Merry Christmas!

Come back later this week. I promise to end all this on a good note! We’ll gather round, sing some carols by the fireplace, and say farewell to Tinsel!

All these books-of-the-year and books-of-the-decade lists are out now. I’m too far behind on ‘09 to make any sort of guess about what book I liked most. But I can feel some coalescence about the decade by just looking around my study. If a book stuck around from my circa-2000 apartment and made it here to my 140 square-foot retreat in 2005, and is still here today, it must’ve meant I thought it was a pretty freakin’ good read. Here are faves from the ’00s, I think. I’m sure I’ve left something out, likely because I gave my copy away to someone else to read. There has to be more to this list, and I’ll realize later “Oh, no, I left off [blank]!” but I also like the pop-quiz nature of this blog post, on which I’ll spend no more than 15 minutes throwing together a list. No particular order…

FICTION:

• “Harbor,” by Lorraine Adams. Best 9/11-era novel, in my opinion, and really gripping. Also, if you’ll notice (which you shouldn’t), fantastically researched and reported.

• “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” by Michael Chabon. More like this, please, and less of Chabon mucking around on collaborative comic books, children mysteries, unfilmed screenplays and essays about fatherhood. Get to work, genius.

• “Gilligan’s Wake,” by Tom Carson. The 20th century as reimagined through the prism of TV’s castaways. I am a freak about this book. I think it is amazing and re-read it every couple years.

• “American Wife,” by Curtis Sittenfeld. I know, I know — enough with the Hank/Curtis lovefest, but I think this is a brilliant, towering novel by a writer who is really going to last. (“Prep,” too!)

• “Everything is Illuminated,” by Jonathan Safran Foer. Hard to not be jealous of this one.

• “Home Land,” by Sam Lipsyte.

• “Pastoralia,” by George Saunders.

• “March,” by Geraldine Brooks. Still gobsmacked by how good this one was. (Also her “Year of Wonders.”)

• “The Blind Assassin,” by Margaret Atwood.

• “Dear American Airlines,” by Jonathan Miles. Heartbreaking and hilarious. Made even better by the fact I read it on a nice vacation.

• “Lying Awake,” by Mark Salzman. Gorgeously spare novel about cloistered nuns. Amazing. I still laugh about the sin of “wasting Joy.”

• “Shopgirl,” by Steve Martin. The movie was kinda meh, but the first time I read this, I thought it was so beautiful. I still do.

• “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy. On the afternoon I finished it, I just stared at the ceiling for an hour and mourned for a world that was not yet technically gone, but felt gone. That’s what I call good.

NON-FICTION:

• “Nickel and Dimed,” by Barbara Ehrenreich, a shining example of two things, I think: morally conscious journalism and hilariously illuminating feature writing.

• “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” by Marjorie Williams, someone who has been dead almost five years and whose work I still hear about (or think about) all the time.

• “Where I Was From,” by Joan Didion. She finally became household-namous in 2005 by writing about her husband’s death (“The Year of Magical Thinking”), but I think this book, two years earlier, was better — it’s about the death of her California notions and ideas.

• “The Whole Equation” by David Thomson (and also his “Nicole Kidman”). I’m late to the game when it comes to savoring Thomson’s film writing, but I really do.

• “Pictures at a Revolution,” by Mark Harris. Loved this book, which was well-assembled and fascinating and not only explains a lot about our movie culture, but scintillates the ’60s as well. (The actual ‘6os, and not “the Sixties,” if you know what I mean.)

• “The Beatles,” by Bob Spitz. I read someplace that the original draft of this book was twice as long as the 800 pages that were published. I would have happily kept going. It’s still amazing, after all these decades, to have the story of the Beatles told in a linear way.

• “Heat,” by Bill Buford. You don’t have to care about cooking or Italy. This is just an amazing work of reporting and synthesis and good writing.

• “Dog Man,” by Martha Sherrill. Made me cry. Such a strangely inviting and determined little book about living and aging in a faraway place.

• “The Fabulous Sylvester” by Joshua Gamson. I think this book has one of the most amazing opening chapters I’ve ever read. And I’ve never read such a compelling biography of such a marginalized celebrity. An excellent book made possible by deep, deep reporting from primary sources.

Reached a Yuletide peace in Seattle. The book is out there and doing whatever it’ll do. The flights have all been on time. The hotels have offered solitude and quiet and high threadcounts. The morning TV anchors at Seattle’s Q13 were perky and interested for exactly four minutes, which in their world is lavish attention. The public radio station hosts are always so deft with their questions. The December sky is beautiful; the temps dropped below 30. I queued up my Czars playlist on the drive down to Seattle from Bellingham on Sunday afternoon. Discovered that Seattle does a nice Christmas vibe, with lots of street bustle, lights, pedestrian-shopping. The very thing exurbanites crave this time of year, so long as it doesn’t get too … edgy. Anyhow, enjoy some Czars, and keep reading:

My friend Dan Savage – the syndicated and world-renowned sex-advice columnist, book author, and Xacto-sharp cultural pundit – had me over to dinner (lovely salmon, buttered carrots, delish cookie bars with ice cream) at his house Sunday night, with Terry and The Kid. They’d just put up their tall, aromatic Christmas tree, which Dan trimmed into perfect symmetry, and which Terry very intricately swathed in a multitude of clear mini lights; furthermore Terry insists the tree be adorned with only top-quality glass ornaments. Tammie Parnell would give him a grade of “absolutely phenomenal.” (I showed up with junky ornaments from Bellingham’s Xmas store — absolutely unphenomenal.) It’s interesting to watch what I call “PhD-level homosexuals” in their natural habitat of householdedness: longtime partnered, with an actual child that they raise, living in well-appointed, still-in-progress property refurbishment; add a tiny deaf dog with one eye and chenille-soft fur, and give the whole scene clarity and a sense of absurd purpose. And yet they are still utterly hip and plugged into the world at large. The Kid is a tween now and uses a steely glare to leaven the household snark, such as when both Dads excitedly explain their idea for a rather gay iPhone app; The Kid also hates it when the grownup talk goes down to a whisper. Boy oh boy, do I ever hope he writes a memoir someday! Don’t you?

From his Grand Poobah day job at The Stranger, Dan wrote a nice blog item about me on Monday, trying to get people to come to my reading. He referred back to some of the essays I’d dashed off for The Stranger’s annual, counter-programmed gay pride issues in the last decade or so. I’d forgotten how much fun I had writing those.

Alas, the low temperatures combined with a Monday night ennui combined with my chronic failure to become famous and beloved all o’er the land meant Monday night’s reading remained low-key, but pleasant:

About 15-20 people were there, and they turned out to be a perfect audience. I’ve reached a zazen point with these things. I’m thrilled when anybody shows up and I make it work and I don’t fret about it one bit — no, really I don’t. At this reading, I tried doing the Cookie the Elf scene from Chapter 12, and might do it again in St. Louis, if the situation calls for it. There were lots of good questions afterward.

The fate of the Elliott Bay Book Company is in flux, or so I’ve read, and I wish them well. Frankly, Mr. Shankly, it wouldn’t hurt the store to get out of that neighborhood – historical though it may be, among pretty 19th-century buildings, old-fashioned streets and all. That neighborhood gets slummier and crackier (heroin-ier?) every time I visit Seattle. And that basement off the café, where Elliott Bay stages their readings, a sacred literary space that they are so proud of? Yeah, not so much for me. The upstairs is so much nicer. The bookstore in Bellingham does the same thing – welcome to tonight’s author reading/signing … in the dreary basement! And Powell’s puts you up on the top floor, awash in fluorescence and gray concrete and safely away from, you know, the customers.

So far, I give ambience awards to the brand new Legacy Books, the indie store in Plano; with a close runner-up being Full Circle Books in OKC.

**UPDATE, 12/9: Breaking news: Elliott Bay is moving to Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Kim Voynar, a film writer whom I knew in 5^th grade and 9^th grade (it’s complicated; she transferred schools a lot), came to the reading and we went out to dinner. Twenty-five years is just about the maximum amount of time that can pass before a person simply has too much tell you to bring you up to speed; it’s on the precipice of being strangers. So in a way, Kim, it’s nice to finally meet you! She’s having some pretty scary surgery on Wednesday; I’ll be thinking of her.

I think we’re pretty much caught up on Tinsel press, and arn’cha relieved? Hold on, hold on:

• There’s an excerpt in Wednesday’s Washington Post – nice front display from my Style peeps: Thanks, Lynn Medford — and HJ and Cavna and Padget.

• And there was a delightful 20 minutes spent on New Hampshire public radio’s “Word of Mouth” on Monday afternoon, if you want to have a lis’sen.

* * *

MEANWHILE, THERE’S a whole world going on out there that has nothing to do with me. Imagine.

I have been so bad about keeping up with my news diet, but did anyone read this riveting, cannot-put-it-down dreck in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday? Who’d wanna be married to either of the people in this story? Show of hands.

I have seen this marriage – not this specific one, but I’ve seen its many analogues. Two self-reflective quasi-hipsters meet and marry. The husband comes standard-bundled with some all-consuming passion that must be treated as lifestyle, not mere hobby, and preoccupy the entire household. (In this article it’s gourmet cooking, but it could be anything: building a “sanctuary” shed out back, from scratch with reclaimed wood. Carpentry. Rebuilding vintage autmobiles. Growing all your own food. Brewing your own beer. Playing lead guitar in a band. Starting a record label. And the worst: getting a book contract.) The wife plays along until the baby (babies) are born and then she goes understandably batshit on his stunted ass. The grandbaby-obsessed in-laws (her parents, usually) encroach. The blog posts and freelance articles become increasingly personal. Suddenly all this crap ain’t so funny anymore and before you know you it, you are building an entire NYT Magazine cover story around the clever idea of getting your husband to go into all sorts of marital therapy with you. Oh, those straight-n-married white people problems: the NYT will never tire of them, will they? Let’s hope not. Two dollars a word! (Right? More? Less? How would I know.)

Gays, besides the $2-a-word-to-write-about-our-emotional-travails (which the NYT doesn’t buy so much), are we sure this is what we want? Or should we be paying more attention to George Michael, who said this week that he smokes seven joints a day and that he gets casual, outside-of-his-relationship sex twice a week?

Freedom!

Over at the Story Surgeons blog, my friend Tom Shroder has filed an interesting little dissection of Tinsel and what he thinks makes it tick, with a short excerpt. Tom is known to some as Weingarten’s beloved and alternately loathed “Tom the Butcher.” So many of us had the pleasure (seriously, a pleasure, even in tense moments) of being edited by Tom. He conceived of and edited my “Question Celebrity” column in the Washington Post Magazine from 2004-07, and the only thing I miss about that column was getting to gab for a few minutes with Tom once a week as we tried to make sense of, say, Britney’s and Lindsay’s va-jay-jay/limo incidents.

Now beaming with The Glow of recent newspaper retiree, Tom offers his services and advice over on his blog. Check it out — if you have a manuscript or half-written feature (of any length) and want someone to have a professional whack at it, Tom the Butcher will do it, and at very affordable rates. Great editor and also a great writer. And you can read his blog — with musings on the craft — free of charge, since everything in the world now is free of charge.

Also, he filed a funny addendum to his Tinsel post. I remember this lunch! The same sort of thing happened the other day when Dan Zak, Monica Hesse, and I were having a chat about The List (the in/out list; more on that soon) at the Corner Bakery over lunch. The woman next to us couldn’t help interjecting …

>>An add to my post on Stuever’s ability to turn the minutiae of contemporary culture into fascinating repartee. One time Stuever and I had lunch in one of those $18-a-salad restaurants. We had some business to discuss, but I don’t remember what. What I remember is that we very quickly fell into what I always considered the real business of lunch with Hank: a far-ranging discussion of movies, books, celebrity cults, political pretensions, cubicle culture, whatever. About halfway through the entree, a woman dining at the next table leaned over and said: “I’ve never been so entertained by an overheard conversation. I need new friends.”

To answer the question all my journo friends have been asking me for the last three days: Yes, I saw the whole thing (the verbal and then physical fray Friday night, right on deadline, between an editor and writer in the Style section) and yes, I have many thoughts about it, and no, I won’t share a whole lot of them. (The story I’ve linked to, the second dispatch from Erik Wemple in as many days, is the most accurate telling of the event.)

The story has circled the globe — NPR, The Guardian UK, blogs galore. But, as I’ve told the media reporters who’ve called me (I have a bit of a reputation as a helpfully on-the-record Post employee to media critics in need of a quote), this is one I’m trying to stay mum on, because it feels like family.

Henry Allen was my editor for nine wonderful years. (I switched editors when I was made the TV critic in August.) There is not a day when he’s in the office that I don’t learn something from him. Henry, who is 68, had already decided to leave The Post. He took the buyout in 2003, and to my great benefit, has worked about eight or so months a year, on contract, ever since. As I’ve said many times, Henry’s already written every story I would want to do, and did it 8,000 times better, and has been a strong, generous editor and champion advocate of my work. Also he’s my friend and inspiration.

People love him; readers love him, still, and rejoice when he files, even though his byline appears a few times a year (since he is principally an editor). By this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a bronze Henry Southworth Allen statue being erected as we speak — maybe in front of the Newseum, except that Henry quite publicly holds the Newseum (the idea of a news-eum, the fakey word news-eum, even) in characteristically low regard.

The fight embroiders his legend, and if that’s the narrative people outside the newsroom desire here (brilliant elder writer and editor fights for the last shred of quality in the middle of the newspaper’s identity crisis), then I can understand that. Henry was angry for one very right reason: It’s about the work.

But everything else was wrong. What happened on Friday night was scary and sad; it was not enthralling and it did not have a Front Page, golden-era quality of glory. To think so is like believing that old cliche that all journos used to have booze in their desk drawers. Please do regard Henry as one of the greatest newspaper feature writers who ever lived and please do think of him as a tough-as-nails, thoroughly passionate editor who does not suffer fools. Please do allow this event to be a fantastic flourish to one of the greatest careers at the Post, as a stand-in for your own despair about the business. But also, dear journos? Get a grip.

My only other angle to the story is this: What made Henry snap was that a writer called him a naughty word, an epithet that rhymes with “coughstucker” and is playfully or spitefully reserved as a way to insult a man, by implying he’s gay.

Being an enthusiastic coughstucker myself, I would someday like to ask Henry if it was the insulting delivery of the word, or the subtext of gayness that the word implies that angered him most? Seeing as how our department is gleefully R-rated in much of its casual discourse, it’s hard to know. (The worst thing about all this? The possibility that we could all get hauled into a sensitivity seminar. Not Henry, of course, he’s outta there, but the rest of us. To which I say FUCK THAT, oops, I mean, aw hell, no.)

Back to my question: Was it about the person who said it? The way he said it? Or that it was said at all? If another person in Style called me a coughstucker, I’d just have to shrug and use the Popeye retort: I am what I am.