Latest news with #Slavitt
Boston Globe
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
David R. Slavitt, poet and critic with a side gig in soft pornography, dies at 90
The writer protested. He said he had a 'serious' novel, 'Rochelle, or, Virtue Rewarded,' coming out later that year, and didn't want to undermine it with something much lighter. Plus, he said, he was a highbrow author and translator of classical poetry, not a paperback hack. Advertisement But the chance to try a new genre was too tempting. He hit on a solution: writing under a pseudonym, Henry Sutton. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The result, 'The Exhibitionist,' about an actress and her rich father, appeared in 1967. Tame by today's standards, it was decried as near pornography. And it sold 4 million copies. 'It was every English major's dream,' Slavitt told The Boston Globe in 2006. 'I put my children through college and could continue to write poems and translate Ausonius, whom nobody has ever heard of.' Mr. Slavitt, who died on May 17 at his home in Cambridge, was never one to be bound by genre or expectations -- a valuable instinct for someone as prodigious as he was, with more than 130 works, including books of poetry and fiction, plays, and translations. He also, in 2004, ran for the state Legislature as a Republican in the Democratic bastion of East Cambridge/Somerville. Advertisement His wife, Janet Abrahm, confirmed his death. The bulk of Mr. Slavitt's work occupied the loftiest reaches of high culture. He translated Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca, among many others. His poetry exhibited a mastery of traditional forms, though in a contemporary voice packed with wit and erudition. 'Though his stanza forms are often intricate, they never prevent, or even impede, the explorations of a mind that takes suggestions as they come, weaving them into the pattern,' wrote critic Henry Taylor in his book 'Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets' (1992). Mr. Slavitt wrote the libretto for an opera about the welfare system, based on a film by documentarian Frederick Wiseman, a close friend, and a play, 'King Saul,' which debuted off-Broadway in 1967. And he wrote several other novels, including the comic 'Anagrams' (1970), about a poet invited to speak at a literary festival where no one has read his work -- a dig at what he called the 'quality lit biz,' which he was both part of and felt slighted by, in its frequent ignorance of his work. But the call of pulp fiction persisted. He wrote seven more novels as Henry Sutton, among them 'The Proposal' (1980), about swinger culture. More books followed under more pseudonyms -- he even borrowed the name of his first wife, Lynn Meyer, for a mystery novel, 'Paperback Thriller' (1975). 'The theory was that it would be nice to make some kind of distinction between the two kinds of work, and the two kinds of audiences,' he said in an interview with Terry Gross in 1978. Advertisement As he told the Globe: 'When General Motors makes a cheap car they call it a Chevy, and when they make a good car, they call it a Cadillac. `The Exhibitionist' is not a book I would read had I not written it.' Under his own name, he wrote a memoir of his unsuccessful 2004 run for the Massachusetts House of Representatives, 'Blue State Blues: How a Cranky Conservative Launched a Campaign and Found Himself the Liberal Candidate (and Still Lost)' (2006). Not even death precludes more of Mr. Slavitt's titles from appearing, at least for now: His final book of poetry, 'Last Words,' is slated for publication in 2028. 'I do what entertains me,' he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996, adding that he was able to write so widely because 'I have an absolute absence of any kind of fear.' David Rytman Slavitt was born on March 23, 1935, in White Plains, N.Y., the son of Samuel Slavitt, a lawyer, and Adele (Rytman) Slavitt, her husband's longtime secretary. He was among the few Jewish students admitted at the time to Phillips Academy in Andover. He went on to study literature at Yale under the tutelage of another wide-ranging man of letters, Robert Penn Warren, and graduated in 1956. The same year, he married Meyer; they divorced in 1977. He married Abrahm, a palliative care specialist, in 1978. Along with her, he leaves three children from his first marriage, Evan Slavitt, Sarah Bryce, and Joshua Slavitt; nine grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. He taught occasionally at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland, Rutgers University, and the University of Pennsylvania, among other schools. Advertisement His run in 2004 for the Massachusetts State House was quixotic, if not quite poetic. Mr. Slavitt tilted his run at incumbent Democrat Timothy Toomey in the then-still working class district straddling East Cambridge and Somerville. Mr. Slavitt ran as a 'Schwarzenegger Republican without the groping,' he told the Globe's Alex Beam. When it was noted that the Globe had ignored his campaign memoir, he cheerfully replied, 'Well, they ignored the last 85 books as well.' Material from Globe staff was included in this obituary.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
No One Cares When Presidential Advisers Want Bigger Government
Elon Musk's unclear position on the federal government's organization chart continues to generate controversy and legal problems for the Trump administration. Despite being the seemingly powerful, very public face of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with the full backing of President Donald Trump, the administration's lawyers claim in various court filings that Musk has no official role in either of the White House units bearing the DOGE label. Instead, as Reason's Jacob Sullum explained yesterday, they say that Musk is officially just a senior adviser to Trump within the White House office. Opponents of DOGE have seized on Musk's unclear White House role to file lawsuits challenging DOGE's authority to access government data, shrink federal staff, and reorganize federal departments. A collection of Democratic attorney generals even filed a lawsuit claiming that Musk's role within the federal government is unconstitutional, as his vast apparent powers show him to be not an adviser but a principal officer who needs Senate confirmation. DOGE critics in the media have claimed that Musk has appointed himself as a "dictator" and that he's currently staging a coup within the federal government. Yet, Musk is hardly the first White House adviser to have great influence over government policy. His advisory role is only causing problems because DOGE's mission involves telling government workers what to do instead of bossing around private citizens and companies. Contrast the uproar about Musk's position within the government to the appointment of Andy Slavitt as a senior White House adviser on President Joe Biden's COVID-19 response task force. Slavitt, somewhat ironically, initially entered government as part of the Obama administration team fixing the rollout of That effort spawned the U.S. Digital Service, which has since been converted into the U.S. DOGE Service under Trump. Slavitt's return to government as a non-Senate confirmed adviser proved totally uncontroversial and remained so throughout his six-month tenure. That's to be expected. Everyone understood then that presidents can appoint advisers who can influence policy and even take the lead on announcing government policy changes to the public. Slavitt did just that. He frequently led press conferences relaying new Biden policy initiatives like using the Defense Production Act to increase vaccine and test production or increasing the prices Medicare and Medicaid would pay for vaccine doses. His leading public-facing role on the administration's vaccine drive proved uncontroversial even though that "whole of government effort" dominated the first months of Biden's term and involved spending a lot of taxpayer money, imposing mandatory vaccine data reporting requirements on private providers, and eventually vaccine mandates on private healthcare workers and employees of large companies. (Those latter mandates were issued after Slavitt left the White House.) Granted, Slavitt did not generate any intra-agency confusion or anger government employee unions by sending out mass emails asking federal workers what they did that week. The private companies that received his emails demanding they censor the speech of private citizens were crystal clear about his authority and role in the White House. As detailed in a Congressional investigation released in May 2024 by House Republicans, Slavitt was one of the primary Biden administration officials responsible for "jawboning" Facebook and Amazon to censor anti-vaccine and COVID-related content. In emails and "furious" calls to Facebook's Nick Clegg, Slavitt expressed the administration's displeasure that the company hadn't removed anti-vaccine memes and even seemed to threaten policy retaliation if it didn't adopt stricter moderation policies. Slavitt was also one of the administration officials who pressured Amazon to remove anti-vaccine books from its online store and criticized the company's policy of attaching Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine information to listings of anti-vaccine books as "not a great solution." Both companies went to great lengths to placate Slavitt's censorship demands. The Trump administration has certainly been vague about DOGE's precise powers and personnel. This has arguably undermined its drive to slash the federal bureaucracy and root out wasteful spending. When DOGE teams have demanded access to government record systems or when emails go out offering federal employees severance pay in exchange for resigning, government workers have been able to stymie these efforts by pointing to the unclear authority behind them. In contrast, the Biden administration was generally a lot better about crossing 't's and dotting 'i's on its various executive initiatives. That made its advisers' job of unconstitutionally censoring the speech of ordinary Americans a lot more effective. But it's the target of executive actions, and not internal procedure and clarity, that matter. It's much more concerning when a White House senior adviser demands that individual Facebook posts come down than when another White House senior adviser demands individual emails be sent, even though the latter's adviser's precise role is a little hazier. 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