From the Post-Intelligencer: “Sean Wilsey is the memoirist of the moment…”
Wilsey discusses Oh the Glory of It All at 7:30 tonight at The Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St.; 206-624-6600; http://www.elliotbaybook.com.
I was just at Elliot Bay, damnit. Oh well, I can’t have everything.
I can’t say I’m tickled with this week’s choices, but that’s not because I’m sore that my own executive-surfer caption wasn’t picked for the team. (It was something like “Sorry I’m late, but tell the wave I’m stoked!” or possibly “Tell the West Coast I’m ready for the telecon”—next time I’ll copy it for posterity.) No, my beef is with big winner Miriam Steinberg’s caption for bedraggled-man-and-shouting-lady: “Neither the time nor the place, Doug!” It’s not that it’s terrible. It’s just that it seems like such a schoolmarmish thing to say in anger, especially since the lady in question looks sort of like a schoolmarm; this is partly the joke, I guess, but it seems hollow to me, unless of course (as I noted earlier) Ms. Anger Management and Wretched Doug are playing out a kinky little game in public, which would be pretty funny. OK, I’ll choose to take it that way.
The other thing I find slightly odd is the new cartoon’s startlingly close resemblance to another recent one, from the May 16 issue and by Bob Mankoff himself: A man, working the complaint desk at a department store, says to the peeved woman first in line, “Look, I’m not denying the validity of your grievances. I just think they’d be better addressed at home, Helen.” It’s a funnier cartoon overall—it’s absurd and yet somehow plausible, and Mr. Complaint Desk is Thurberishly whipped rather than Kathleen Turnerishly psycho—but look at how alike the two gags are. The wit rests on juxtaposing formal disapproval (“Neither the time nor the place” and “I’m not denying the validity of your grievances”) at the beginning of the sentence, the familiarity/first-name address at the end (“Doug” and “at home, Helen”). Both disapprovers work under official signs (Complaint, Emergency Hotline); in both scenes three or four others are looking on. And so on. Anyway, not to belabor this, but it is peculiar. In any case, if you put the new winning Ziegler/Steinberg cartoon next to Mankoff’s and decide that Doug and Helen actually star in both cartoons and regularly show up at each other’s workplaces in a state, then it all seems much sillier and I can more than live with it.
As for the striped-suit surfer, the captions—by Eric Slade of Portland, Mary L. Tabor (whose name sounds familiar but I’m not up to googling it tonight) of D.C., and Lee Radsch of Summit, N.J.—are fine. Slade’s is “Tell my one-thirty things got way gnarly”; Tabor’s is “Hold my calls, cancel my appointments, and find my Speedo!”; Radsch’s is “Gotta reschedule. Water-main break on Seventh!” I know Slade is from Portland and they have an ocean out there, but “way gnarly” feels off to me, and what’s the fun of the exec’s coming back from surfing, rather than being about to succumb to surfing lust? Tabor’s doesn’t do it—too wordy (it barely fits, and why do you need both kinds of cancellation?), and I don’t want to think about Speedos. I’ll have to go with Radsch, since the caption has made me smile a couple of times now. It’s goofy and fun, it gives New Yorkers a nice break from worrying that every routine city mess signifies the End Times, and I like that the guy is talking to his secretary/assistant/colleague/boss in a friendly, cool way, not in a grandiose imperative. Go now, and vote.
Finally, here’s the new drawing, of a startled woman (and her admirably perky breasts) waking up next to a guy (remember, don’t assume anything, especially after Desperate Housewives—he could be her husband, he could be the Eagle Scouts leader, he could be a Tupperware-party host, he could be Christian Slater) only to realize…what? I know they get kazillions of entries, because the cartoonists I recently tormented with questions said so. I know you, emdashes reader, can outdo these good but unsatisfactory efforts. Remember, it’s not about who moved your cheese, but about how much more cheese you want, and how jealous the other mice will be that your entry was published, and the revenge you can ultimately win by outdoing whoever it was who did move your cheese, by writing the best caption ever.
Hooray! Perhaps my enthusiasm is crass, loud, and imperialist, like most things American—or is that Bulgarian?—but I’m delighted that The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World, by Todd Pruzan—who’s also the author of the New Yorker piece recently voted Best in Issue, by me—is now available on Amazon for a mere $13.57 (US$). Yo, Bloomsbury: Where’s the excerpt? Pruzan is also reading soon at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble, 6th Ave. at 22nd St., at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, June 15. Let’s show up and do a raucous, ungainly Wave whenever something from the book makes us laugh, which will be frequently—Mrs. Mortimer would be horrified, and that would be good.
How come? Well, the book has been described (by Pruzan) as “a cranky, caustic, funny and unsettling collection of nasty writing about geography for Victorian children, written by Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer and originally published between 1849 and 1854.” Here’s one of the first blurbs, by my pal Lisa Levy in her Voice dish on the big summer reads: “Mrs. Mortimer—armchair traveler and author of such proclamations as ‘The Spaniards are not only idle, they are very cruel’—makes a persuasive and hilarious case for staying put.” Another on-the-ball review (the pub date’s not till June 6th) by the contextually minded Ken, from Baker Books’ Pick of the Literate (like that name!):
Forget ethnic pride, folks — it seems we’re all descended from useless fools. Such was the considered opinion of Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, a Victorian writer of children’s books, Christian novelist, and general misanthrope. You don’t have to be a seasoned world traveler to enjoy this collection, after all, Mrs. Mortimer herself only left England on two occasions. A fascination for the Victorian era and life in the British Empire at its peak isn’t necessary, either, but it helps. In The Clumsiest People in Europe, Pruzan has collected Mrs. Mortimer’s cruel geography lessons for our horror and amusement.
No one is spared Mrs. Mortimer’s scathing assessments — the French “like being smart, but are not very clean,” the Portuguese are “clumsy and awkward with their hands,” even the English (the author’s own nationality) “are not very pleasant in company, because they do not like strangers, nor taking much trouble.” Although these hilariously rude pronouncements seem like the creative hoax of a clever contemporary writer, they are indeed real. Mrs. Mortimer was as successful a children’s writer in her day as J.K. Rowling is in ours. One has to wonder if the rabidly xenophobic adults of the World War One era were partly made so by reading her books as children.
If you’re in Chicago on June 13, cheer yourself up after the Cubs game with Pruzan on the radio (yes, my domestic partner Google is helping me; I can’t always be psychic), specifically 720 WGN. Just look at this lineup and tell me you won’t be streaming the audio from your little white box:
Monday, June 13
4:30pm John Williams: John chats with comedian Robert Klein about his memoir, The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue: A Child of the Fifties Looks Back.
6:30pm Cubs Central Pregame with David Kaplan.
7:05pm Chicago Cubs Baseball: Cubs vs. Florida Marlins with Pat Hughes and Ron Santo.
Following a 7:05pm Cubs game (approximately 10:20pm) Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg: Tonight, after the game, Extension 720 welcomes Todd Pruzan, editor of the new book The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World.
People have sense in Chicago. I’ve always said so.
Update: Since a book’s not a book till the Times has reviewed it, or so Barnes & Noble may have printed on the company hankerchiefs, it’s good to see Clumsiest People is on Henry Alford’s summer reading list, right at the top. He likes it:
The Spanish grow olives, ”but the taste is so bitter, I am sure you would not like it.” In China, ”it is a common thing to stumble over the bodies of dead babies in the streets.” The Irish, ”if affronted, are filled with rage.” These withering pronouncements come from a Victorian writer named Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, perhaps the most uncharitable person ever to have emerged from the country that also brought us Simon Cowell and Jack the Ripper. In THE CLUMSIEST PEOPLE IN EUROPE: Or, Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World (Bloomsbury, $19.95), the present-day writer and editor Todd Pruzan collects entries from three volumes of Mrs. Mortimer’s wonderfully odious, travel-based misanthropy. Pruzan also provides some telling biographical details about Mortimer — most notably that she left England only twice. Moreover, despite being a successful children’s author whose Bible primer aimed at 4-year-olds sold a million copies, Mortimer led a life of utter misery. Her first great romantic attachment (to Henry Manning, who became Cardinal Manning) was unrequited; she later married a violent, cruel man from whom she often hid. To the modern eye, Mortimer’s work — by turns unsettling and hilarious — is nothing short of a revolution in guidebook writing: here, at last, is irritable-bowel-syndrome-as-travelogue.
The Henry Manning story is gripping unto itself, actually. It could make an excellent novel premise for those inclined.
Do ever feel a little depressed, even amid the hoopla and spangles, that books get center stage only in the summer? Where are the winter-reading lists? The Valentine’s Day curatives? The New Year’s resolution suggestions, starting with the swellest book ever? The Stegner excerpts for Arbor Day? The Inauguration Day blues poems? The Daylight Savings mysteries? The Columbus Day ship’s logs and anticolonial retorts? Good-Bye to All That or Reporting Vietnam for Memorial Day? Or Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger for April Fool’s? People don’t really have summers off anymore; why not stretch out summer reading to a monthly fanfare? Like, Whee! What shall we read this weekend? Yes, I know that’s a silly idea; people have cable to attend to. I think chapters from hot new books, on the radio and podcasted, might be the only way to save the printed word.
Well, finally! From today’s Times, the revelation of both the item I crave even more than a Shuffle and shepherds Edward Klaris and Pamela Maffei McCarthy, figures as covert and crucial as Deep Throat:
The New Yorker, the weekly magazine that started as “a hectic book of gossip, cartoons and facetiae,” as Louis Menand once wrote, and has evolved into a citadel of narrative nonfiction and investigative reporting, will publish its entire 80-year archives on searchable computer discs this fall.
The collection, titled “The Complete New Yorker,” will consist of eight DVD’s containing high-resolution digital images of every page of the 4,109 issues of the magazine from February 1925 through the 80th anniversary issue, published last February. Included on the discs will be “every cover, every piece of writing, every drawing, listing, newsbreak, poem and advertisement,” David Remnick, editor of the magazine, has written in an introduction to the collection.
The collection, which will also include a 123-page book containing Mr. Remnick’s essay, a New Yorker timeline and highlights of selected pages from the magazine, is being published by the magazine and will be distributed to stores by Random House. It will have a cover price of $100, although it is likely to be sold in many bookstores and online for considerably less. The magazine also plans to issue annual updates to the disc collection, and it expects a first printing of 200,000 copies.
While innumerable neurotic New Yorker fanatics have saved piles of the magazine in closets or basements, the few easily accessible archives of the magazine’s contents have been on microfilm or in bound volumes in public libraries. But those media hold little attraction for younger readers, Mr. Remnick said, and too frequently go unused. “Students who rely on Google as a turbo-charged Library of Alexandria feel no more eager to use microfilm than they do to pick up a protractor and a needle-nosed compass,” Mr. Remnick states in his introduction.
The project is an amalgam of technology, stealth, insurance considerations and economics that was first discussed more than seven years ago. It was overseen, and long kept secret, by Edward Klaris, general counsel for the magazine, and Pamela Maffei McCarthy, its deputy editor. In early 2004, two staff members drove two copies of each issue of the magazine to Kansas City in a rented truck to have them digitally scanned.
The magazine’s card catalog, which over time has come to include more than 1.5 million index cards containing citations and cross-references to articles and which forms the backbone of the search function on the discs, was scanned at the magazine’s office in Manhattan after discussions with the publication’s insurance company found the catalog to be “irreplaceable and beyond value,” Mr. Remnick said.
It was only recently that digital technologies evolved to allow for the high-resolution reproduction of small type, making the project feasible, Mr. Klaris said. Digital videodiscs were used rather than CD’s, he said, because much more information can be stored on each DVD. The DVD’s are for use only in a computer drive, however, and will not work on a television DVD player.
A user of the disc is presented with each page of the magazine, which can be displayed singularly or in pairs, and the viewer can flip from page to page through each issue. Alternatively, a user can search on any disc for an author, artist, title or subject or by key words, and then move to the appropriate disc to view the material. Copies of the cover images can also be viewed in close-up detail or in thumbnail collections.
The collection also has one other important feature, which allows a reader to page through each magazine by flipping directly to the cartoons. As Mr. Remnick admits, “Ninety percent of our subscribers say they read the cartoons first, and the rest would be lying.”
Go see the photo of the quite nice design of the DVD package, too. The link for the enlarged photo isn’t working on the NYT site, but so far it looks a bit like one of those old LP boxed sets that teaches you to be a connoisseur. Appropriate.
80 Years of The New Yorker to Be Offered in Disc Form [Edward Wyatt, NYT]
You need this writing advice from M. Tweaks, who models disorienting and agonizing conditions for an ideal state of composition as suggested by globetrotting novelist John Burdett:
I am writing today’s entry from our basement. It is dark down here; in fact, I can barely see the keyboard. My padded chair has been replaced with a hard, unstable stool. Instead of black tea with milk I am drinking Mountain Dew from a dirty glass. I haven’t showered for days. My skin itches. I am listening to the radio — the best of the 80s, 90s, and today. My pants are a size too small. I have been subsisting entirely off of bologna and Cheeze-Its. Whenever I worry that I might be getting too comfortable I poke myself in the leg with a tack I keep nearby just for this purpose. I think it’s working. It’s hard to tell because I’m not wearing my glasses (helps with disorientation) so I can’t actually read what I’ve written so far. But I’m willing to bet it’s pretty darn good.
Which brings me to the stern yet loving letter written by Thomas Jefferson to his daughter in 1790, which I saw quoted in the Seattle Museum’s supercool exhibit of fancy samplers by industrious 6- to 12-year-olds in the 18th century (yes, yes, there were also rockin’ modernists, glass sculptures, fascinating multimedia stuff by and about native Salish people, Renaissance devotional paintings, the Hammering Man, etc.). I also had to take out a contact for a little while and looked at the Impresssionists with the blurry eye to see what it was like (blurry). Here’s the letter:
How are you occupied? Write me a letter… and answer me all these questions… How many pages a day you read in Don Quixot? How far are you advanced in him? Whether you repeat a Grammar lesson every day? What else you read? How many hours a day you sew? Whether you have an opportunity of continuing your music? Whether you know how to make a pudding yet, to cut out a beef stake [sic], to sow spinach, or to set a hen?
Well, what are you waiting for? I’m hastening back to Don Quixot and hen-setting myself now that I’m done with my flickr Russia pix. Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.
Special report from the Seattle and Chicago airports:
From today’s Times, a nice obituary for Herbert Warren Wind, a New Yorker and Sports Illustrated legend and the “dean of American golf writers.”
Mr. Wind was a short, slender, serious man who wore a tweed jacket, shirt, tie and cap on the golf course, even in the hottest weather. A graduate of Yale with a master’s degree from Cambridge, he wrote with an elegant but straightforward style that showed respect for his subject, whether it was golf, his first love, or other sports like tennis and baseball.
“Every time you read him, you get a history lesson, a golf lesson and a life lesson,” the professional golfer Ben Crenshaw said.
Mr. Wind’s narrative powers were displayed in a profile of Arnold Palmer for The Sporting Scene in The New Yorker of June 9, 1962.
“Let us say he is a stroke behind, with the holes running out, as he mounts the tee to play a long par 4,” Mr. Wind wrote. “The fairway is lined by some 10,000 straining spectators – Arnold’s Army, as the sportswriters have chosen to call them – and a shrill cry goes up as he cuts loose a long drive, practically lifting himself off his feet in his effort to release every last ounce of power at the moment of impact. He moves down the fairway toward the ball in long, eager strides, a cigarette in his hand, his eyes on the distant green as he considers every aspect of his coming approach shot. They are eyes with warmth and humor in them as well as determination, for this is a mild and pleasant man. Palmer’s chief attraction, for all that, is his dashing style of play. He is always attacking the course, being temperamentally incapable of paying it safe instead of shooting directly at the flag.”
Mr. Wind was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1947 to 1954. He left to write for the new magazine Sports Illustrated. In 1962, he returned to The New Yorker and stayed there until he retired.
His first writing in The New Yorker was a poem in 1941 and his last was a review of the 1989 United States Open tennis championship. Of the 141 articles he wrote for the magazine, 132 were for the section called The Sporting Scene. Although those reports appeared well after a competition ended, they were eagerly awaited by the participants, fans and colleagues in the news media.
…
The author John Updike was Mr. Wind’s colleague at The New Yorker.“He really gave you a heaping measure of his love of the game,” Mr. Updike said. “He was so knowing, so perceptive. He could play, too. About a decade ago, I took him to the Myopia course in Hamilton, Mass. He walked with me when I played a few holes, but I couldn’t get him to hit the ball. I suspect he didn’t think he could do it as well as he once did.”
Mr. Wind’s love affair with golf and the Masters never waned. At age 84, more than 10 years removed from his last trip to the Masters, he asked another golf writer, “Tell me, is Augusta still beautiful?”
I’m going to see if I can get hold of that poem. Wind also wrote the foreword for P.G. Wodehouse’s The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922). One review says, “Herbert Warren Wind’s Foreword is a sparkling biography of Wodehouse and a splendid way to start the book. Wind did a profile of Wodehouse for The New Yorker magazine and spent a good deal of time with him while researching his essay. It was later published in book form in England under the title, The World of P.G. Wodehouse.”
Update: More memories of Wind, with new interviews and content, in the Enterprise (which covers his hometown of Brockton, MA):
“He was not a loud talker for himself but for the sport that he loved,” said his brother, Jack Wind, from his home on Rock Meadow Drive…. Wind, 85, said when his brother would arrive at a prestigious golf tournament, including the Masters and U.S. Open, people “just crowded around him for information.”
And in the Augusta Chronicle (annoying signup process):
Wind was one of the most famous golf writers and he covered the sport for The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated. He covered every important golfer from Gene Sarazen to Ben Hogan to Jack Nicklaus before retiring in 1990.
“Herbert Warren Wind was one of the greatest golf writers that ever lived,” Augusta National and Masters Tournament chairman Hootie Johnson said. “For many years he wrote wonderful stories about the Masters and the players that competed in the tournament.”
In the April 21, 1958, edition of Sports Illustrated, Wind used the phrase Amen Corner to describe the action from that year’s Masters. He got the name from a jazz recording titled Shouting at Amen Corner from a band directed by Milton Mezzrow.
There’s another obituary in Cybergolf: “Wind was on a first-name basis with the legends of the game: Bobby Jones, Sam Snead, Gene Sarazen, Jack Nicklaus and Ben Hogan. ‘He was a great historian of the game and a terrific writer,’ Nicklaus said Tuesday. ‘You look back on how golf has been written over the years and there have been three or four guys who really stood above the rest. He was certainly one of them.’ “
Golf Writer Herbert Warren Wind, 88, Dies [NYT]
The Fateful Corner: A reflective look-back at the Masters confirms history’s affinity for the 12th and 13th [Wind, Sports Illustrated, April 21, 1958]
Books by Herbert Warren Wind [Alibris]