Monthly Archives: November 2005

(12.05.05 issue) Solitary play

Incredible Franz Wright spread of a long poem, “East Boston, 1996,” on pp. 78-79 of the current issue. “Walking home, for a moment/you almost believe you could start again./And an intense love rushes to your heart,/and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.”

Is Lane in their league?

Anthony Lane is no Milk Dud for the blog Cinematical, which awards Anthony “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington” Lane the #2 spot (after Ebert) in its list of seven great movie critics. I cannot agree with the entirety of the praise (I think Denby is the better writer), nor with the complete absence of Stuart Klawans or Jonathan Rosenbaum. I do, however, agree that Stephanie Zacharek (whom I know) is superb and underrated and well deserves mentions, awards, and a lifetime supply of red lipstick from France. Here she is on Walk the Line. Speaking of ladies: Hey, guys, what happened to fostering women film critics at The New Yorker, even in the short listings in Goings On? I haven’t seen many of them lately. Zacharek is a jewel in Salon‘s still-considerable crown, but there’s an obvious move to be made here.

Tomorrow’s Jonathan news today

OK, yesterday’s. But anyone who knows me can tell you that time is a somewhat flexible thing for me. It’s still news, damnit, unless you’ve already picked up The Gotham Gazette. Today/yesterday, they interview/ed Jonathan Lethem, my favorite of the Jonathans, although others are close behind. Not all, but others. It’s not a competition, though! No, nothing that has to do with New York writers is about competition! We are above it. We are a mutually supportive collective of artists and breathe in as one, yogically, through one nostril at a time, and breathe out in harmony, often with cigarette-coffee-garlic hummus breath. Yuck.

Mankoff’s monster mash

From tomorrow’s Times:

At this moment, give or take a coffee break, researchers at the University of Michigan are working against time, or at least budget, to figure out how and why that most delightful of adaptive responses, laughter, took its place in the evolutionary pantheon alongside the appendix, opposable thumbs and lip gloss.

And if you think splitting the atom was hard, try cracking a joke and then isolating it into discrete psycholinguistic components. After all, levity, not gravity, holds it together, a reality Robert Mankoff is only too aware of. Mr. Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker (its annual cartoon issue is on the newsstands now), fled a doctoral program in psychology in 1977 to become a cartoonist. Now he is an adviser to the Michigan study, which is scrutinizing minute facets of people’s reactions to the magazine’s cartoons from the last 79 years.

As befits his profoundly comic, comically profound mind-set, Mr. Mankoff has on his desk a statue of comedic inspiration. It is not a plaster bust of Groucho Marx or Shecky Greene but a plastic 12-inch likeness of that evergreen king of comedy, Godzilla. “He reminds me that I’m silly,” Mr. Mankoff said.

“The essence of humor is incongruity,” he said. That explains why Godzilla looks funny rampaging over the papers on his desk; and why Godzilla is so funny rampaging through a pitifully modeled Tokyo in myriad English-dubbed Japanese films with special effects that are barely a patch on the first monster movie: the 1925 dino-epic “The Lost World.” Even the fleeing hordes look like they are laughing.

“Sometimes I put him down on the street just to see how he looks,” Mr. Mankoff said. “Right now I am looking at a Harvard personality test to give to the cartoonists, but I was giving it to Godzilla. Like, No. 25: I have a clear set of goals and work toward them in an orderly fashion. Would he strongly agree or disagree? I think he’d agree. Or No. 36: I often get angry at the way people treat me. I’d say yes.” Continued.

My protegée reports

My parallel-universe undergraduate counterpart, Emily Gordon of the Cornell Daily Sun—whose career I’m watching closely, as I’m hoping to snag her for an unpaid internship as soon as she graduates—writes today about Tucker Max:

What do you think it would feel like to live like a college student for the rest of your life and make a decent salary off of it? Tucker Max, a popular blog-writer, “makes six figures a year doing nothing more than drinking and fucking and writing about it,” he said, and imparted his wisdom on how to achieve life goals to an over-flowing Kaufmann Auditorium Friday.

His visit came as part of the James Norris Oliphant Fellowship series sponsored by the Sigma Phi Society.

His first official public appearance, Max began his speech by clearing up the image some people have of him.

“Judging by most of the emails I get … [people think] that I’d be out with a pitcher of Tucker Death Mix in one hand, a breathalyzer in the other, passed out on a table, vomiting on myself, screaming obscenities at fat girls. And I mean, I’ve had those nights … but that’s just not who I am.”

Max confessed that he was not sure exactly what he wanted to talk about. However, he decided to address a common question he continuously faced from his fans: “How do I become you?” To this, he replied, “You cannot ever be me.” Clarifying, he said “really what you should take from my stories is that you should be inspired by my approach to life.”

Hooray for free speech! Gordon notes that “His 30-minute speech was followed by a question and answer session of equal length,” which seems pleasantly suggestive under the circumstances.

Since even college newspapers are interactive now, the people are demanding to be heard:

I hope no one actually paid this guy to speak here. What a waste of time…

A parent reader

Parent, you are an idiot and clearly don’t know of what you speak.

John Q. Cornell

Flanagan, and again, and again

In which a snarling conservative is surprised to enjoy a New Yorker writer. It would be this one. Sally C. Pipes (of the Pacific Research Institute) writes in theOneRepublic:

On the other hand, as we have recently observed, radical feminists can no longer expect special treatment from critics simply because of their gender and politics. Consider Peggy Drexler Ph. D., a “gender scholar” at Cornell University. Drexler’s new book, Raising Boys Without Men, argues that boys raised by women without men are better off than boys raised by mothers and fathers. As New Yorker staff writer Caitlin Flanagan states in the November Atlantic Monthly, Raising Boys Without Men is a chronicle of bad dads that compares men to “wounded rhinos.” This book, writes Flanagan, is “as much a work of advocacy as objective research.” It also holds consequences for personal responsibility and civil society. As Flanagan puts it, if you “[b]elittle men’s responsibilities to their families [and] raise boys to believe that fatherhood is not a worthy aspiration….the people who will suffer are women and children.” That strikes me as a fair assessment, and it does me good to see Caitlin Flanagan, without the slightest hesitation or embarrassment, demolish what she describes as a “preposterous book.”

Literature, like ideas, has consequences. Nobel Prizes and good reviews should be handed out on the basis of merit, not politics or gender.

As for me, I am often embarrassed by what Caitlin Flanagan chooses to either extol or demolish. I haven’t read Drexel’s book, nor, yet, Flanagan’s whole piece. (I’m waiting for my Atlantic online access to kick in.) Although some of the nicest people I know were raised without men, it would surely be folly to make fatherhood an even more remote idea than it already is for most befuddled chaps. That said, I don’t like agreeing with Flanagan, but I suppose it has to happen from time to time. Actually, I’d like to agree with her all the time, or rather, for her to agree with me. But that means she’ll really have to stop writing about Hawaiian luxury vacations. For instance.