Pronounced the way those wry, mildly sorrowful WNYC guys always say it, like “You can click that little white trackwheel all night long, but we, your old friends whose tender voices have soothed you through the day for so many years, are still here in the studio with our chairs and microphones and cups of ordinary joe, patiently waiting, like calm-eyed golden retrievers, for you to remember that we’re still coming into work every day just like always, and when you get tired of your fancy music box, you can just turn on your radio again and we’ll be on that radio, tireless and loyal, and even, often, live.” So pop music critic and ace photogger Sasha Frere-Jones, who did such a kick-ass job with his recent Diplo and Marlboro piece, just talked to Stylus’ Mike Powell, and the esteemed Brooklyn Vegan links to it. You can listen right now; it’s a “podcast.”

From Blake Morrison’s very interesting Guardian piece about whether editing is going to the dogs:

Perhaps I’ve been unusually lucky, but in my experience, editors, far from coercing and squashing writers, do exactly the opposite, elucidating them and drawing them out, or, when they’re exhausted and on the point of giving up (like marathon runners hitting the wall), coaxing them to go the extra mile. And yet this myth of the destructive editor—the dolt with the blue pencil—is pervasive, not least in academe. Perhaps the antipathy stems from the perceived difference between the publisher and the scholar: for whereas a scholarly editor, appearing late in the day and with the wisdom of hindsight, seeks to restore a classic, the publisher’s editor is the idiot who ruined it in the first place.

A good illustration of this antipathy is the Cambridge edition of DH Lawrence. “Here at last is Sons and Lovers in full: uncut and uncensored,” the editors of the 1992 Cambridge edition crow triumphantly. Their introduction goes on to allege that in being reduced by 10%, the text was “mangled”; that the editor Edward Garnett’s censorship was “coy and intrusive”; that Lawrence “reacted to Garnett’s decision to cut the novel with ‘sadness and grief’, but was powerless to resist”; and that when Garnett told him further cuts were to be made, Lawrence “exploded” with rage.

Read Lawrence’s letters and you get a rather different impression. “All right,” he tells Garnett, “take out what you think necessary,” and gives him licence to do as he sees fit: “I don’t mind what you squash out … I feel always so deep in your debt.” Lawrence was short of money, it’s true, and had his mind on other things, having recently eloped with Frieda. Even so, when he writes that “the thought of you pedgilling away at the novel frets me” (pedgilling, a nice coinage, a cross between pencilling and abridging), the fret isn’t what Garnett will do to the text, it’s that the task is an unfair imposition: “Why can’t I do those things?” And when Lawrence is finally sent proofs, he’s not unhappy. “You did the pruning jolly well,” he tells Garnett, and dedicates the book to him: “I wish I weren’t so profuse – or prolix, or whatever it is.”

It’s true that, just as some writers write too much, some editors edit too much. As the New Yorker writer Renata Adler acerbically puts it, there are those who “cannot leave a text intact, eating through it leaf and branch, like tent caterpillars, leaving everywhere their mark”. When he edited the magazine Granta, Bill Buford was sometimes accused of being overbearingly interventionist—in his spare time he hung out with football hooligans, and it was said he brought the same thuggishness to editing, though personally I never found him brutal in the least. At the other extreme are the quiet, nurturing sorts, the editors who ease you through so gently that when they do tamper with the text you barely notice and can kid yourself they did no work at all. Frank O’Connor compared his editor William Maxwell to “a good teacher who does not say ‘Imitate me’ but ‘This is what I think you are trying to say’.”

This brings to mind that pleasantly esoteric controversy about whether Gordon Lish did too much for Raymond Carver. Fiction editing does seem to be in some distress lately, at least within the high-literary blockbusters we’re invited to read at extended-dance-remix length. Could someone kindly remind these lads about cutting? No, not the bad kind with a razor in the girls’ bathroom, the good kind that makes your novel better. Also, assorted forms of weirdness and questionable behavior aside, Renata Adler is a hell of a fiction writer. If you haven’t read Pitch Dark, I envy you the experience of finding out for the first time how frightening and lovely it is.

Black Day for the Blue Pencil [Guardian]
The Continuing Dissent of Renata Adler [Moby Lives]

Like many warmhearted Americans, I’ve come to love Martha Stewart, and this is the month to buy a single share of Martha Stewart Omnimedia from One Share for that multitasking lady in your life, or perhaps for your small child (My First Stock: “Our gift of stock was the perfect catalyst for the future of our daughter.” —Sarah from California). MSO is the Share of the Month, and that means it’s 10% off.

As incentive, the cheerful people at One Share write: “After serving hard time, Martha Stewart is ready for prime time. Her new talk show is in production, along with a highly anticipated Apprentice spinoff!” They also suggest: “Nothing beats a kitchen decorated with a framed share of Martha Stewart stock to inspire your cooking! The Martha Stewart Stock Certificate features yellow scroll work on one side, and the unique company’s logo at top center. Now, housewives can boast to their husbands that they are Martha Stewart stock shareholders.” You can choose from one of a number of witty wooden plaques other customers have designed (see above), or write your own. The possibilities are endless.

The stock: $26. The frame: $44. The transfer fee: $39. Share of the Month discount: $10. Grand subtotal: $99. A bargain, when you think about it.

A Talk of the Town from July, 1951 (in an issue containing a gigantic full-color illustration suggesting you try Guinness with your lobster—”The heartening flavor of Guinness Stout seems to make the lobster taste even better”—Ella Fitzergald and the Weavers at Café Society; Strangers on a Train at the Warner and also reviewed: “The pictorial legerdemain finally winds up in a rooty-tooty fashion, with our two young gentlemen engaged in a death grapple on a runaway carousel”; Guys and Dolls at the 46th Street Theatre; a short and sad obituary for Sam Cobean; Genêt’s Letter From Rome, barbed editorials within the listings—for El Morocco, “Selected species of local and West Coast fauna, staring in rapture at people they haven’t seen since lunch”—places to dine while out motoring, Rocky Marciano vs. Rex Layne at the Garden; and J.D. Salinger’s “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” as the lead article):

The most encouraging word we have so far had about television came from a grade-school principal we encountered the other afternoon. “They say it’s going to bring back vaudeville,” he said, “but I think it’s going to bring back the book.” Before television, he told us, his pupils never read; that is, they knew how to read and could do it in school, but their reading ended there. Their entertainment was predominantly pictorial and auditory—movies, comic books, radio. Now, the principal said, news summaries are typed out and displayed on the screen to the accompaniment of soothing music, the opening pages of dramatized novels are shown, words are written on blackboards in quiz and panel programs, commercials are spelled out in letters made up of dancing cigarettes, and even the packages of cleansers and breakfast foods that the announcers exhibit for identification bear printed messages. It’s only a question of time, our principal felt, before the new literacy of the television audience reaches a point where whole books can be held up to the screen and their pages slowly turned.

The virtue of the dancing cigarettes (pictured in a Spot) could, perhaps, be questioned in retrospect. Edmund Wilson notes in his review of bug books:

It is the opinion of Mr. Vladimir Nabokov, who is a distinguished lepidopterist as well as a novelist and a poet, that the markings of moths and butterflies, so amazing for the complex detail by which they achive protective mimicry, have been carried to a point that in some cases overshoots the aim or actually defeats it, a point that suggests, on the butterfly’s part, a gratuitious aesthetic effort. One wishes that our own human species, if it must drop to an instinctual level, would get going on this tack.

The Talk is unsigned, of course, and my first question about the forthcoming DVD archive will be whether it reveals, as with a Yes & Know pen, the identities of decades of clever devils. I think it does, but I’ll let you know. Here’s a bewitching poem by Louise Bogan:

Train Tune

Back through clouds
Back through clearing
Back through distance
Back through silence

Back through groves
Back through garlands
Back by rivers
Back below mountains

Back through lightning
Back through cities
Back through stars
Back through hours

Back through plains
Back through flowers
Back through birds
Back through rain

Back through smoke
Back through noon
Back along love
Back through midnight

That’s worth memorizing, I think. Finally, a message from the American Viscose Corporation (“America’s largest producer of rayon”) about men’s brave struggle for emancipation through textiles:

Now—a single standard of comfort!

Time was when women had a monopoly on comfort. Men struggled through seething summers clad in heavy fabrics…squirmed through steam heated winters dressed for the old open fireplace days.

But not your present modern-minded gentlemen. He demands equal rights to comfort—and dresses to suit his surroundings—in rayon.

Yes, away with the double standard! Given that his rayon-admiring Miss Modern is probably being smooshed all kinds of ways by assorted foundation garments, however, I’m not so sure the gentleman hasn’t come out ahead.

I’m not the only one missing the August 8th issue, says Customer Service over there at Subscriptions in Boone, Iowa. They are lovely people and they are sending me a copy forthwith. By the way, Boone has nothing to do with the word “boondocks”; says wordorigins.org:

Boondocks is a relic of American colonialism. British English imported lots of words from its far-flung colonial possessions, but American colonial aspirations mainly produced words derived from Spanish and adopted with the settling of the West. This one, however, is an exception. It derives from the Tagalog word bundok, meaning “mountain.” It was adopted into the language by occupying American soldiers in the Philippines as a word meaning any remote and wild place. By 1909, only some ten years after the American conquest of the islands, the word had caught on enough to rate an entry in that year’s Webster’s New International Dictionary. Despite this, however, it remained primarily a military slang term, especially among Marines, until the 1960s, when, probably because of the Vietnam War, it gained wider, civilian usage.

Categories: NYer, Issue, &c.