Monthly Archives: February 2006

Gourevitch on Journalism and Social Change, 2/28 at Hunter College

From the press release:

PHILIP GOUREVITCH WILL DISCUSS JOURNALISTS’ ROLE AS AGENTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE AT HUNTER COLLEGE DISTINGUISHED WRITERS SERIES

Gourevitch, editor of the The Paris Review, former New Yorker political reporter and author to appear at Hunter College, Tuesday, February 28, at 7:00 PM.

NEW YORK – The Paris Review editor and author Philip Gourevitch will discuss his most recent book, Political Power and Corporate Control: The New Global Politics of Corporate Governance (co-authored with James Shinn), and the role of journalists as agents of social change, Tuesday, February 28, 7:00 PM, at the Hunter College’s Ida K. Lang Recital Hall, located on the fourth floor, Hunter North Building, entrance is on the 69th Street between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue. To reserve seats, please call the Hunter College Special Events Office at 212.772.4007 or email the office at spevents@hunter.cuny.edu.

The editor of The Paris Review, Gourevitch is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, where he covered the 2004 presidential campaign. He is the author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and A Cold Case. He is the recipient of National Book Critics’ Circle Awards, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and a Guardian First Book Award.

Gourevitch will be appearing as part of The 2006 Hunter College Distinguished Writers Series, presented by Hunter President Jennifer J. Raab and the MFA Program in Creative Writing, directed by Peter Carey, the MFA’s program’s director.

Also appearing in the series will be novelist authors Junot Diaz (March 13), Eva Hoffman (March 21) and Jonathan Franzen (April 4). The Series will conclude with a Poetry Blast on May 4, featuring Tom Sleigh, Sharon Olds, C.K. Williams, Robert Pinsky and others.

We’re Aghast: “Impacted” in Talk!

An attentive friend writes:

Could you please do a post about the shocking, outrageous, and downright unacceptable use of “impacted” in last Monday’s Talk section? I’ve just got around to reading it, and it has upset me gravely:

[Link to “Moneyman,” by John Cassidy; “Greenspan himself, in a research paper that he co-wrote last year at the Fed, has pointed out how the proliferation of home-equity loans, which allow people to cash out some of the rising value of their homes, has impacted the economy.”]

And that’s not all. I myself saw an improper “hopefully” somewhere in the back of the book within the past six months. There are so rarely mistakes or syntactical errors of judgment in the magazine that when they do appear, they jump out like zombies in the dark countryside—looming, lurching, and impossible to explain.

Let’s consult our old friends William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, who had definite views about this: “Noun used as verb. Many nouns have lately been pressed into service as verbs. Not all are bad, but all are suspect.” I quote from the newest edition of The Elements of Style, gorgeously illustrated by Maira Kalman. According to a longtime copy editor I know, the Kalman edition contains several errors. This I must see for myself, I said, so I bought it, and so far all I’ve seen are Strunk and White’s lilting sentences and a loving, mildly peevish introduction by Roger Angell. (White’s 1979 needless-word-less introduction is also here.) But I haven’t read every page; when I do, you’ll know.

Needless-word-less—hyphens, en dash, or close up? Needless-wordless? That has the wrong flavor, I think.

Snack at the Link Deli


Things I’ve gotten word of recently:

1) This Macalester College student objects to Caitlin Flanagan’s characterization of hip-hop in her recent Atlantic piece about teenage girls and oral sex. That’s right, people googling “teenage girls oral sex,” this is the destination for all your honorable research needs. Writes the student columnist, Tinbete Ermyas: “Flanagan notes that it is this rap culture that has helped to disrupt and saturate ‘poor and middle class’ culture in America through a ‘prison-yard’ genre that helps ‘brutalize’ young girls in America…. Wow, those are fightin’ words.”

2) In a story about our, uh, constitutional right to free speech: “The ejection of two women from the U.S. Capitol for wearing message T-shirts during President Bush’s State of the Union speech this week was the latest incident in a growing trend of stifling dissent…. Silencing dissent isn’t unique to the national government. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani once ordered city buses to remove an ad for the New Yorker magazine that made fun of him.”

Clarification! A friend writes:

Re: your blog this morning–you should add an addendum that the Mercury News got just about everything wrong in its citation of the Giuliani episode with New York magazine (as opposed to the New Yorker, as they said. Can you imagine the New Yorker putting ads on the fronts–not the sides–of buses? Ads that make fun of Guiliani?) Of course, they’re also wrong that Giuliani got the ads off the buses. He didn’t. He tried in the courts, and failed. So “ordering” the buses to remove the ads isn’t technically accurate either. Oh, poor, poor Mercury News!

The New York mag campaign, from 1997 or 1998, was by DeVito-Verdi, and the tagline was “Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn’t taken credit for.” Big whoop, right? Shows how thin-skinned Guiliani is.

3) Speaking of Manchester United, the multitalented David Beckham liked both cash and girls at 16.

4) New Sparrow anthology! “It’s high time that Sparrow, the poet, journalist and ‘prose-provocateur,’ was dragged into the harsh commercial light of day. This way we can pick over the refuse of his political and cultural commentary and say that he was better back in the 1970s when he wrote for a Manhattan weekly, and in the early days of the Unbearables Assembling Magazine, the Literary Supplement of the Revolutionary Poultry Overview (pro-Poland) and the New Yorker (after browbeating, protesting and generally badgering poetry editor Alice Quinn).”

5) An AlwaysOn discussion heading reads: “Love, Sponsorship, Magazines, and Jazz: Variations on a theme of advertising stimulated by an interesting talk by Jim Morris on Advertising given on Coyote Hill Roard last week plus the pay-for-spam developments of this.” Commenter Mark Plakias writes:

Jim Morris, currently Dean of Carnegie Mellon West…gave one of the Thursday afternoon talk[s] at PARC last week. The topic was advertising, and the title, Advertising as Flirtation…. Showing the first magazine with advertising – for those of you who said Benjamin Franklin take an extra cookie – Morris argued that the heyday of the medium was in the 1950’s.
…
Now, a short digression. You want to talk about magazines, how about arguably the most famous one of all – the New Yorker. Yup, I’m one of those people that bought the entire corpus on 8 DVDs (great packaging I might add). Download the reader, fire up the search tool, enter “Coltrane.” Bang, you’re into a Whitney Balliet (whom I never did like) review of a live Town Hall concert in ’57, not just Trane but Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and Art Blakey – and it’s clear that Balliet can describe what’s happening in very clear prose, even if it is totally orthogonal to his aesthetics. And I sort of soften a bit to the late tres trad jazz reviewer of the New Yorker (ahem, D. Remick [sic], who would that person be now? isn’t the ‘stuff it in the listings’ paucity of jazz coverage in the magazine a bit of a scandal?).

6) Not a link, but a loss: just as David Remnick and the other framers of the DVD archive (and then reviewers) predicted we all would, I have surrendered my collection of 2003-05 New Yorkers to the recycling wing of the Sanitation Department. All that’s left is what’s arrived in ’06, a few vintage beauties (Salinger, “Professor Sea Gull”), and, of course, my eight archive discs, shiny and flat as retro-futurist money and full of possibility. I feel good, yet empty. I will execute whimsical screen grabs till I feel better. Farewell, sweet print!

Ricky Gervais Episode 10: Karl’s Journal

Ricky Gervais Show, episode 10

Two left to go, or, as Gervais and co. have been hinting, quite a few more left to go, which is good news. There are ads on this one (for comedy on Channel Four), but Karl Pilkington does them, so who’s complaining? There’s also a marriage proposal. Pilkington’s farcically uneventful diary, which Stephen Merchant read aloud this week, is reminiscent of Jim’s Journal, Onion founder Scott Dikkers’ diary-like anti-cartoon, which I reviewed many moons ago in Salon. ‘Course, that’s the link above.

Meanwhile, the trio asks high-profile DJs to work on “I Could Eat a Knob at Night.” If they do, and they will, they can add their remixes to the versions of the insanely popular mashup that I’ve been compiling. And it occurs to me, this podcast, that as convinced as Ricky says he is that Karl is not a man but a shaved monkey, it’s Ricky who emanates the ape-like screeches that punctuate the show. In fact, it was the sly, good-natured, and undermentioned Merchant who prompted one of the piercingest shrieks this time around. Who’s the monkey? Perhaps it’s not the inspired Karl, who, invented persona or not, has a sang-froid most of us would surely do well to borrow.

Gervais’ fans are, clearly, insane for comedy that’s part Beckett, part bollocks, all improv chemistry, and quintessentially British. This is why, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be sad when Gervais takes a break, but I couldn’t live without the Comedy 365 podcasts to which I’ve become irreversibly addicted. Big Squeeze, starring the profane and sparkly Georgina Sowerby and Brian Luff, Chris Skinner’s “celebrity interviews” on Simulacrum (Paris Hilton! Prince William! King Henry VIII! Dr. Dre!), and John Dredge’s Killer Comedy (if you think Pilkington is dry…) are rocking my world nearly every day these days, and I hope more people discover this gold mine of hilarious, more or less X-rated inanities. Also, Skinner is always ready to talk about honey badgers, which I now agree are the meanest, most symbiotic, best animals ever.

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Your Friday Order of Misc.

1) David Remnick’s interview with Philip Seymour Hoffman, originally in BlackBook;

2) Audio: Tad Friend talks to On the Media’s Xeni Jardin about fast cars, and not the Tracey Chapman kind;

3) Only tangentially related to The New Yorker (although, as I try to prove daily, everything is, really): this funny response from “coyotelibrarian” to a Chronicle of Higher Education story about the sinister side of the website Rate My Professors:

Fun with RMP

Rate My Professor (RMP) has needlessly become a source of anxiety for many instructors. If you’re unhappy with your RMP ratings, then make up some of your own!

After all, a disgruntled student could load your profile with multiple bad reviews, so it’s clearly unfair to have anything important depend on these ratings. Rather than worry about RMP, have some fun with it.

Of course, if you’re not comfortable making up comments out of thin air, borrow some from colleagues at other schools substituting your name for theirs. Thus:

“Prof. [Your Name Here] is a legend. It was an honor to have her as an instructor” [Borrowed from Joyce Carol Oates’ RMP profile]

“If you miss Prof. [YNH’s] class, you’d do well to open a vein. There’s no one on earth who shoots straighter, digs deeper, and years later, I still feel her influence daily. Get your act together, and take her courses.” [Borrowed from Camille Paglia’s profile]

“Prof. [YNH’s] seminar is an experience more than a class. It’s intense and relatively easy if you remember to agree with him. Worth taking just to be in the presence of such a large intellect (and ego).” [Borrowed from Harold Bloom’s profile]

So reward yourself — you deserve it! (and if you don’t deserve it, you probably need it more than those who do.)

More from the NYer’s Growly Dog Issue

Aside from Gladwell’s pit bulls and the ferocious Spot, there are a few more tough dogs in the February 6 issue. For instance, on p. 49, in John Cassidy’s “The Red Devil: An American in Manchester”:

Then [the Glazer brothers] ate dinner in a corporate suite in one of the stands overlooking the [Manchester United] playing field. Outside, the protesters were loudly threatening to murder their father: “How we’ll kill him, we don’t know; cut him up from head to toe. All we know is Glazer’s gonna die.” Eventually, riot police arrived with nightsticks and German shepherds and secured the area under one of the stands, around a tunnel designed to give emergency vehicles access to the field.

At about ten-thirty, two vans carrying the brothers emerged from the tunnel. The protesters pounded on the vehicles’ roofs and sides and threw stones and bottles. Several were injured as the police, using their dogs and batons, tried to clear a path through the crowd. Finally, the vans sped away….

Perhaps we should start trying to identify potential football-club defenders in a crowd as well as bad dogs and smugglers. When Man U fans get mad…

Aside from the fluffy, presumably nice dog on p. 32 in the Jack Ziegler (him again!) cartoon, any other dogs in the issue? If you spot some, send them in. Muzzled, if absolutely necessary.

“They Were Ass”: A Sensitive Critique of Steve Martin’s Recent Film Choices

Please forgive me, Frank Harrell of Why My Blog Is Better. I must quote your entire post, because I love it so. Links are links to things I’ve posted about Martin before. In all fairness, I think we should note that despite questionable thespian decisions, Martin has achieved excellence on the banjo and gave lots of dough to the Huntington Library.

Steve Martin: Intervention

Stevie, listen carefully. This is for your own good.

In the past ten years, Bill Murray has made the following movies: Broken Flowers. The Life Aquatic. Lost in Translation. The Royal Tenenbaums. Rushmore.

In the past ten years, YOU, Steve Martin, have made the following movies: Cheaper by the Dozen. Cheaper by the Dozen 2. Shopgirl. Bringing Down the House. Bowfinger. The Out of Towners. Your upcoming movie, The Pink Panther, has had its release date postponed twice in the past nine months. Even worse, it co-stars Beyonce.

Seriously Stevie, and I’m not kidding here: what the fuck is wrong with you??? Why so many atrocious movies, one after the next? Are you using the same agent as Colin Farrell and Jude Law? Are you and Robert De Niro secretly plotting to fuck with us by taking every single role offered to you, and playing a variation on the same character in EACH MOVIE? Your stint as host of the Oscars several years ago stands out as the best thing you’ve done in 10-15 years. That basically makes you just like Billy Crystal, a far less superior comic talent.

I have not seen the Cheaper by the Dozen disasters. Thank God. However, I think it’s safe to say that between the God-awful reviews, the appearance in both movies of Hillary Duff, and (apparently, from what I hear) the fact the funniest scene in either movie involves a wheelchair-bound man losing control of said wheelchair and falling into the ocean, you could probably do a bit better in choosing your scripts. Shopgirl? Was a great movie — for Claire Danes. You, Steve Martin, played the Woody Allen role of a slightly pervy, emotionally detached, completely unlikable older man who dates girls in their early 20s. There is no trace of humor in your character, a big misstep for an actor whose greatest strength is his off-kilter sense of humor. Bringing Down the House was funny in that “isn’t Queen Latifah sassy? Oh, how I love stereotyped black women on screen” sort of way, but you, Steve Martin, had all of your scenes stolen by Eugene Levy. I’m not even going to comment on your other movies of the past 10 years. Because they were ass. And no one saw them.

I complain only because I am a BIG fan of your previous work. L.A. Story is a perfect comedic movie and one of my favorite movies. I’d even go out on a limb and say you are a better actor than Bill Murray, who has usurped your position as “older comedic actor with dark emotional undercurrents” while you were busy taking really shitty roles. Steve — take a supporting role in a quirky, off-beat independent film. You are not above that. It will probably do your career a world of good. Hell, even blow Wes Anderson if you have to, but just stop making crappy product. And don’t listen to De Niro. He’d play the monkey in a live-action version of Curious George if they paid him his $15 million fee. That is all.

Fictoids: Ziegler Feels Like a Nut, Pt. II


Speaking of Jack Ziegler, he also illustrated this not long ago:

Fictoids? They are, writes Dutcher in Fictoids: Short Fiction … Very Short ($12 in hardcover from Dutcher & Co. Inc.), “a bit of fictional history, making a statement or telling a story in one sentence. A typical fictoid tells who did what, when and where. A fictoid may even be partially true, but is never entirely true, or it would be a factoid. In fact, a fictoid is just a fictional factoid.”

Dutcher’s Web site (www.fictoids.com) explains that he got the idea in the late ’90s watching CNN and its fascination with factoids…. No more wading through a long story to get to the stupid ending. The stupid ending is contained in the first sentence!

The invention of fictoids is also the story of a self-publisher. As Dutcher writes on his site, “In 2003, encouraged by family and friends, I decided to put my favorites into a self-published book. This led to a long period of negotiating with myself over which fictoids should be in the book. By this time, I had written hundreds of fictoids, but my inner-editor felt some of the fictoids were too easy, too abstract or just not funny enough to justify being in the book. There was also the issue of how many fictoids should be in the book.

“Once it was decided that the book should be around 200 pages, the editing continued, but each time I would write a new fictoid I would delete an old one.” Dutcher goes on to say how he picked the illustrator, New Yorker cartoonist Jack Ziegler. Turns out you can go on the New Yorker Web site and pretty much hire their cartoonists. So he did.
…
In the meantime, to the fictoids…. “In 1928, Fannie Footloose, a highfalutin flip flapper who loved to shimmy and Charleston, shocked Newport’s high society when she suddenly fled the social scene and sailed off for Paris with foppish fashion photographer F. Stop Fitzgerald.” More; sample fictoids.

(Emph. mine.) Here’s more from Bill Dutcher’s blog post about how he and Ziegler joined forces:

I also decided the book needed some illustrations. Whenever I think of cartoons, I think of the The New Yorker magazine. So I went to their website and discovered they had set up a Cartoon Bank, where you can license the use of New Yorker cartoons, or hire cartoonists to draw new ones. After reviewing the online samples of several cartoonists they recommended, I hired Jack Ziegler as our illustrator last fall.

We selected thirteen fictoids to be illustrated, and Jack came up with the idea for the cover illustration and drew it as well. I felt that his work was so good, it raised the bar for the quality of the writing. This led to another round of editing….

Memo to James Frey’s New Agent

No need to scrap the movie version! Haven’t the Warner brass seen Tristram Shandy? Of course aMilLitPee should still be a movie—about Frey’s constantly interfering fantasy life, Giant Superego Oprah (played, with FX, by herself), the actor playing Frey, Frey himself in lots of cameos (American Splendor), angry critics and publishers played by better-looking actors, lots of swirly drug moments with a good indie-rock soundtrack, and, sure, rehab. Shattered Glass meets Zelig meets Play It Again, Sam meets Prozac Nation meets Eternal Sunshine meets Donnie Darko, and it can’t fail.