At least once in a while. From time to time David Remnick breaks his vow not to let The New Yorker become a tomb o’ Tilleys and allows something related to the magazine’s history into, for example, the events listings:

THE TALK OF THE TOWN
The Peccadillo Theatre Company’s brisk and clever play about the wits who gathered at the Algonquin Round Table in the twenties, featuring well-crafted period-style songs by Ginny Redington and Tom Dawes, plays every Monday night this summer in the hotel’s Oak Room. (59 W. 44th St. 212-840-6800.)

I’d like to see this, although the Dorothy Parker Society’s Kevin Fitzpatrick regrets that writers Ginny Redington and Tom Dawes commit heinous crimes of inaccuracy. Parker and Benchley hot to butter each other’s crumpets—come again? As Fitzpatrick said at his Algonquin tour recently (I paraphrase, since I left my notebook at The New Haven Advocate), everyone knows Parker was into young studs and Benchley preferred chorus girls who were not, shall we say, horticulturalists. Still, if someone wants to give me a ticket, I’ll review it. At emdashes, there’s no shame about bribery, although I can’t promise a positive report. Everyone who’s ever read one of my reviews knows, however, that there’s nearly always something cheerful to say (about, say, a book’s cover design, or an actor’s euphonious name), so that should be incentive enough.

As for Benchley, he may not be wowing hoofers with regularity anymore, at least as far as we know, but he’s still zinging the strings of sportswriters’ hearts—at least this one, a lovely argument for having readers (like Karen Crouse here) cover sports:

[The Spurs’ Robert] Horry is five victories from a sixth NBA championship ring that would tie him with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the most bejeweled basketball players since the Celtics teams of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

The only other Robert we can think of who so unexpectedly found himself in such esteemed company was a writer named Benchley, who hung out at the Algonquin Round Table in New York with Dorothy Parker.

Like Benchley, Horry’s credentials are impeccable. He wasn’t just along for the rings in Houston and L.A. and it’s more of the same thing in San Antonio. In 13 NBA seasons, Horry’s teams always have advanced past the first round of the playoffs.

How to get things done, indeed! Horry’s no stranger to good books (and good works), either.

Goings on About Town: The Theatre [New Yorker]
Algonquin Wits Return to the Algonquin as Downtown Hit Talk of the Town Moves to the Oak Room [Playbill]
Commentary: Horry gives great teams that special something [Palm Beach Post]

There’s a lot to love about the Wilsey story. (Yes, this has something to do with The New Yorker.) If you’re just joining us, this Voice piece by Chris Tamarri might be a good place to start:

After four years away, Sean Wilsey returned from Italy and ate lunch with his father. He had spent that time in a sort of emotional deprogramming center called Amity, the latest in a series of last resorts his parents hoped would dissuade him from a life of drug use and disillusionment. Oh the Glory of It All is, among other things, a travelogue of wasted youth and attempts at reclamation. First was prep school at St. Mark’s, where academics were a footnote to drinking, and the exploded bag of discarded beer cans on the seniors-only quad was an “allegorical tableau.” Inevitable expulsion led to another school, Woodhall, and a collection of castaways indifferent to the school’s philosophy of “mak[ing] up educational lacunae.” Amity is the one that sticks, though; Wilsey claims to “have never experienced emotions so powerfully, mysteriously, unwillingly, and eventually, gratefully.”

They ate Italian, naturally, father and son, and Al Wilsey delighted in making his son speak to the waiter… You’ve got to finish this.

I’m out of town, emdashers (think Dickinson, Post, Bronte, Carr, Pankhurst, H. W. Fowler, and a haberdashers’ convention in a very unconventional arrangement), so if you want me, look under your bootsoles or, more hygienically, through the archives. If I have time, I’ll blog somewhere waiting for you.

Family Guise: Emotional rescue—The adventures of a not-so-fortunate son [VV]
From “Song of Myself” [Favorite Poem Project]

Me in the company of this godforsaken Cartier ad, in the middle of my screen while I’m trying to read The New Yorker online (I’m traveling) for you nice people. The worst part about it, even worse than the fact that it’s all in my face, following me everywhere I go like the eyes of the Mona Lisa, is the gratuitous number and clashing array of typefaces it uses: bold, italic, “fancy-pants.” (When I’ve read more of my stunning Print magazine, I’ll know what to call these things.) Cartier, we’re breaking up. I have a breakfast date somewhere else.

Read all about it here.

Also, I found this story about the scholarly/waitressing/boxing career of New Yorker staffer (or something—it doesn’t really say) Suzie Guillette mesmerizing and uneasy-making; it raises a whole passel of questions I don’t really feel like writing about. I present some of it—originally printed in her hometown paper, the Attleboro Sun Chronicle—for your deep thoughts:

NEW YORK — The pretty young woman hits, cuffs and clutches a 68-year-old man while another man shouts at her to do more of it, and better.

A group of tough-looking men, boys and several women, encircle, wait, smile, shout or stare — all waiting to follow her.

Into the ring.

Suzie Guillette, 28, Attleboro High School Class of 1994, is sparring in a Bronx gym with an ex-New York Golden Gloves champion named Willie Soto who is old enough — and kind enough — to be her grandfather.
…
Elbow to elbow with this slice of rugged humanity stands Attleboro’s Guillette.

Blond, blue-eyed, slender and academic, Guillette will spar, box, skip rope, and then write about all of these memorable encounters by April.

She studies boxers by becoming one. It’s her master’s thesis.

Guillette, who majored in philosophy at George Washington University, is a second-year graduate student now at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers.

Four to five days a week, she takes the 20-minute drive from her idyllic ivy-covered campus to two large, concrete and fluorescent-lighted rooms smattered with old fight posters and dried blood.

It is a repository of tattooed dreams, swollen lips and bloodied ambition.

And Guillette couldn’t be happier.
…
When she returned to Sarah Lawrence [from the Czech Republic] for the second year of her master’s program, she still entertained thoughts of immersing herself in Rwanda.

Then, after a bizarre meeting in a laundry with a neighborhood man who was looking for women to model his line of underwear for black and Latino women — “His wife and daughter were right there,” Guillette said — she thought, perhaps, she should write about the colorful people who inhabit the Bronx.

By September’s end, however, she had found the Morris Park Gym and had begun renewing her love affair with boxing.

“I realized it was perfect for my thesis, a very manageable idea,” Guillette said. “It was really fun, and the other part of me had really enjoyed boxing in Prague. So, I said I might as well do something that I love, two hours a day, four days a week.”

Her thesis adviser agreed, and encouraged her new pursuit.

As Guillette developed her jab and her cross, she also developed her hook — five essays that will serve as chapters in her planned 100-plus page thesis.

“There will be four or five essays in totally different styles,” Guillette said.
…
A third piece will be on dishing out and receiving punishment, itself, gleaned from the denizens of Morris Park.

“It’s a survey piece on how it feels to be hit,” Guillette said. “There are so many different people, so many different levels. How do you feel to be hit and then hitting someone?”
…
Boxing has gotten into her blood like ink did when she did a stint at The New Yorker magazine; when she was writing proposals; when she studied writing abroad.
…
She plans to modify her pieces with hopes of getting them published in The New Yorker or as stand-alone essays.

She is writing sample chapters and seeking a literary agent. If she returns to Europe, she will work on a book.
…
Down the road, she is entertaining the idea of applying for a license to train young girls how to box.

What’s there to say, really, except make cracks about how you better learn to get comfortable being hit and then hitting someone if you’re going to make it in the word game? I can’t even say anything about interdisciplinary studies at Sarah Lawrence, seeing as I almost went there. This is so obviously going to be a book, and why not? It’s been done well before. Maybe she’ll get a chapter into the magazine; hey, I’ve had plenty of boxing fantasies myself, though I don’t like getting blows to the head. Damage to the aqualine nose aside, though, I hope she gets signed sooner rather than later—better to have a million-dollar contract than be a million dollar baby.

Bard of the Rings [Attleboro, Mass., Sun Chronicle]
Embracing the Housewife Within [Guillette, Sexing the Political]

From the Guardian, Seymour Hersh (yes, I could call him Sy, but don’t you think it’s sort of silly to call journalists you don’t know by their cute nicknames? Not to mention members of the Cabinet. I mean, I don’t have a great deal of respect for Condoleezza Rice, but she has a last name—what is this, women’s tennis?—and it’s not Condi. At least it’s not Condi to me; Bush, that’s another story) on the unknown unknowns of the Abu Ghraib scandal:

It’s been over a year since I published a series of articles in the New Yorker outlining the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There have been at least 10 official military investigations since then—none of which has challenged the official Bush administration line that there was no high-level policy condoning or overlooking such abuse. The buck always stops with the handful of enlisted army reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company whose images fill the iconic Abu Ghraib photos with their inappropriate smiles and sadistic posing of the prisoners.

It’s a dreary pattern. The reports and the subsequent Senate proceedings are sometimes criticised on editorial pages. There are calls for a truly independent investigation by the Senate or House. Then, as months pass with no official action, the issue withers away, until the next set of revelations revives it.

There is much more to be learned. What do I know? A few things stand out. I know of the continuing practice of American operatives seizing suspected terrorists and taking them, without any meaningful legal review, to interrogation centres in south-east Asia and elsewhere. I know of the young special forces officer whose subordinates were confronted with charges of prisoner abuse and torture at a secret hearing after one of them emailed explicit photos back home. The officer testified that, yes, his men had done what the photos depicted, but they—and everybody in the command—understood such treatment was condoned by higher-ups…. What else do I know?
Keep reading.

Categories: Hersh, NYer