For the popularity of birding. With an Inaccessible Island Rail‘s wingspan of help from Pale Male, Jonathan Franzen, Annie Dillard, James Wolcott, Garry Trudeau, et al.; it takes a village to raise a binocular!
(The Rail is pictured above. Don’t go trying to find it, though! Didn’t you take its name to heart? I now have the perfect location for my autumn birthday voyage.)
OK, Sasha Frere-Jones may already have this on his blog somewhere (it’s from April, National Feel Uneasy Because Poetry Might Make You Feel Things Month), but I can’t resist finally posting something from YouTube: an episode of The Million Poems Show, in which Sasha expresses a tuneful appreciation for the Million Poems, or at least some of them. Jordan Davis, my college classmate, is the host of the show, and seems (in his impresario mode) to be channeling Paul Simon during the Concert in Central Park: “Well, it’s great to do a neighborhood concert!” (This is just from my initial foray into New Yorker life on YouTube; more finds, like this tiny clip of Bjork talking about celebrity gossip at the New Yorker Festival, TK.)
In case you were wondering, there was a sentence missing from Sasha’s new Radiohead review. Meanwhile, there was a funny Nerve animation months ago (now on YouTube, too) that featured The New Yorker (and Mad!), vividly. Should I NC-17ize my site, or should I make you hunt it down for your naughty selves?
As I enjoyed a few nostalgic internet moments of actual surfing, I happened on two things I skipped last year but shouldn’t have: Liesl Schillinger on the disappointments of Turkish Delight, and, related, the British Narnia rap. Scones outdo even Magnolia in their starchy glory.
The New York Blade‘s Jonathon Warman reviews the show at the Algonquin:
While “Talk†includes generous helpings of the quips and barbs the group was known for, I was surprised to find that at heart it’s really an exploration of the profound friendship between Parker (Kristin Maloney) and Benchley (Chris Weikel). Maloney is quite good at modulating between Parker’s public brittleness and her private vulnerability—the magnetic poles that made her such a good writer.
Plus, it’s a great pleasure to see Weikel—who has cut a figure on the gay theater scene as a very visible playwright and actor in the TOSOS II troupe—playing such a plum role (essentially the male lead) in such an “uptown†setting. He displays all the effervescence and comic timing I’ve know him for and also proves himself every bit Maloney’s equal in delving into his character’s more tender side.
I may review this myself at some point. You can buy tickets for the show here. The Algonquin still hasn’t brought back its extremely good, and inexplicably absent, steak sandwich, but oh, those coconut martinis. Trust me, really.
When the much-loved New Yorker golf writer Herbert Warren Wind passed away last June, I noted a line from the Times obituary—”His first writing in The New Yorker was a poem in 1941″—and hoped aloud that I’d be able to find the poem. Recently, the writer Bill Scheft, Wind’s nephew and the author of The Ringer (one of whose characters is based on Wind), was kind enough to send it to me:
UpbringingThe elevator man’s son counts:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, and so on.And sometimes mezzanine.The porter’s son counts by fives:5, 10, 15, and carry one, 15, 20, 25, and carry two. OrBy tens should speed require.The agent’s son counts by fractions:1 1/10, 2 1/10, 3 1/10, and so on.He does it in his bean.The golfer’s son counts:1, 2, 3, fore, 5, 6, 7. And balksAt counting any higher.
Fantastic. (You can see all its splendid ’41 context on the archive DVD, and it’s also in Herbert Warren Wind’s Golf Book). In Scheft’s own tribute to Wind in Sports Illustrated, he calls his uncle “three parts Tacitus and equal parts Izaak Walton and Roger Angell.” I love this anecdote:
Thirty-three years ago, my uncle, Herbert Warren Wind, came to our house in Beverly, Massachusetts, for his annual summer visit. He loved spending time with my parents, both accomplished golfers (he once described my mother, the former Gitty Wind, as “a woman who is giving the world a couple of strokesâ€), and cheerfully tolerated their six children, especially the second youngest, who dared to aspire to the life of a sportswriter.
One night, Herb and I were playing Strat-O-Matic [link], a cultishly popular pre-Bill James, pre-Rotisserie League, pre-steroid baseball reenactment game in which each Major League player was represented by his own computer-generated data card. The card condensed the player’s previous year’s statistics into three columns. Hitters had columns number 1-3, pitchers 4-6. When it was your team’s inning to bat, you rolled three dice, one white and two red. Whatever combination of numbers came up dictated which card you consulted.
By the bottom of the fourth, my 1971 Red Sox were thrashing Uncle Herb’s 1971 Yankees, 12-0 (not unlike a recent Saturday in the Bronx). As his third relief pitcher gave up consecutive home runs, Herb began to furiously rummage through the contents of the Strat-O-Matic board game box. “What are you looking for, Uncle Herb?†I asked. He put his hand to the side of his mouth and whispered, “I’m trying to find the dice for rain.â€
If I write until I’m a thousand, I’ll never come up with a line that good. And if I did, my ego is too big to just share it with one person. Let alone some 15-year-old.
Good news from Lauren Cerand: Starting Wednesday, June 21, there’s a new series at the Union Square B&N, in which Katherine Lanpher interviews writers and musicians who’ll also perform. (Free!) The best thing about this so far, for me, is the presence of Elizabeth Gilbert, whose book Pilgrims hooked me way back in ’97; Stern Men, from ’00, has permanently (though not fatally) cracked my carapace. Here’s the New Yorker review of Eat, Pray, Love. More (some links mine):
“Upstairs at the Square†kicks off on Wednesday, June 21, at 7PM with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia and singer-songwriter Jen Chapin, whose new album, Ready, will be released next month as a follow-up to Linger, which National Public Radio called “a brilliant debut album.â€
…
Katherine Lanpher is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist. Springboard Press will publish her first book, Leap Days: Chronicle of a Midlife Move, this October.The next two events in “Upstairs at the Square†will be held at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on Wednesday, July 19, at 7PM, and Wednesday, August 16, also at 7PM.
Audio downloads of all three events will be available on Barnes & Noble.com (bn.com/writers).
Two pieces about gay marriage: Hendrik Hertzberg’s Talk, and a pro-gay-marriage editorial by a Brigham Young University instructor who was fired for writing it:
“I believe opposing gay marriage and seeking a constitutional amendment against it is immoral,†Jeffrey Nielsen wrote in the June 4 Salt Lake Tribune. “Currently the preponderance of scientific research strongly suggests that same-sex attraction is biologically based. Therefore, it is as natural as a heterosexual orientation, even if rare…. [L]egalizing gay marriage reinforces the importance of committed relationships and would strengthen the institution of marriage.â€
Brigham Young is affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which provides most of the university’s funding. Leaders of the Mormon church have spoken out recently against gay marriage and have encouraged members to speak to their U.S. Senators about passing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
Nielsen, a practicing Mormon, has taught one to three courses per term at BYU for the past five years, including a philosophy course this spring. He learned he would not be allowed to fulfill his summer teaching obligation in a letter from Daniel Graham, chair of the philosophy department, that arrived shortly after the op-ed piece ran. Carri Jenkins, a BYU spokeswoman, said the choice not to rehire Nielsen came from the department, which has the authority to make personnel decisions on part-time faculty.
“The department made the decision because of the opinion piece that had been written, and based on the fact that Mr. Nielsen publicly contradicted and opposed an official statement by top church leaders,†Jenkins said.
Nielsen said he had long supported the idea of same-sex marriage but never spoke out publicly. He figured the piece would cause a stir, but he maintains he was making a political statement, not attacking church theology. “I thought they’d talk to me about the issues,†Nielsen said in an interview Wednesday. “I didn’t think they would let me go. They have every right to do that, but I think it was the wrong decision. It will breed a culture of fear and uncertainty. Academic institutions shouldn’t restrict honest opinion and the pursuit of truth.â€
Read the rest of this galling Inside Higher Education story. Then alleviate some of your rage with comedian Eugene Mirman’s diabolical phone prank on some unsuspecting zealots.
Remember the Team Quinn/Team Vendler ribbons I provided for you back in April, ready for printing and lapel-affixing during this, the World Cup of Poetry Affiliations? Time to break them out again: New Yorker contributor (Nancy Drew, etc.) Meghan O’Rourke tells us, in the words of the Slate bulletin, why you should read Elizabeth Bishop’s rough drafts.
An agreeably zany Shouts this week by Larry Doyle. I liked this, after a long list of Sleeperesque medical diagnoses:
First, the good news. Your husband’s portfolio looks great; I can’t believe he got into Apple at 12—pre-split 12. I’d say the prognosis for your long-term financial health is excellent. However, last month your husband dumped seventy-eight thousand dollars’ worth of Clo-Pet, the pet-cloning outfit, two days before it was revealed that Dr. Kalabi was not in fact cloning clients’ beloved companions but instead was creating look-alikes using plastic surgery and transplanting pieces from other pets. Yesterday, the S.E.C. and the I.R.S. swooped in and froze all your husband’s accounts—which may explain his abdominal pain—and then, talk about bad luck, this morning the C.E.O. of your health-insurance carrier fled to Argentina with a transgender dominatrix, owing me literally millions of dollars.
How odd to read this just as I finished the last chapter (which isn’t 11, I’m glad to say) of David Denby’s American Sucker, and just before that, Arrowsmith, which also concerns snake-oil promoters and their overhurried, underprepared medical researchers. I like Denby’s book a lot. At times it’s a little on the obsessively numerical side for me, but since his subject is the tech-stock bubble and squeak of 2000-02 and the trap he set for himself inside the bubble, it’s perfectly appropriate. I focused on the philosophy, false-hero portraits, and the zigzags of Denby’s recorded emotions—if mapped, they’d probably look something like the early-’00s stock market—and learned satisfying facts about the physical workings of the internet, which was a nice surprise.
Denby also makes us feel the agony of selling a many-roomed Upper West Side apartment—he gives us wrenching mini-tours of dear rooms and objects, soon to be lost—a bit more acutely than does Nora Ephron in her own losing-my-apartment story (not online; see Curbed link to gawp at the building you will never live in). At jury duty a few days ago, I was reading aloud Ephron’s account of the “key money” and rent that her frantic fellow Apthorpians paid to get and stay in the building; she lists the figures hilariously, with appropriate horror. My co-jurors laughed and laughed, and thought Ephron and all her neighbors were completely insane.
Actually, though, I thought her piece was outrageous, real, and just enough out of control; besides, it’s way fun to experience raging apartment/lifestyle envy and schadenfreude simultaneously. In any case, Denby makes the loss of his and Cathleen Schine’s apartment an occasion for serious and believable grief, since it was the final big symbol of the end of their marriage. I was in that apartment once (I interviewed Schine in the ’90s sometime; I’m a fan), and met Denby for a few minutes. Oh, those big Upper West Side apartments. The loss of a former life for a number of us.
Can you play golf without leaving New York, and not the silly CEO-on-the-carpet kind, either? Longtime New Yorker great David Owen says you can, in Golf Digest. Owen, as I’ve said before, is grievously underrated, and I’ll keep saying it till the situation improves. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel interviews David Remnick:
“I haven’t written a proper book-length book since I started editing the magazine,” he says. “(Writing) is what I can do given time. Mostly what interests me – and not incidentally the capacity to have a greater impact – is the magazine. And I cannot let (my) writing detract from the magazine one iota. If I’m thinking of writing something for the magazine and another writer comes along with another idea, I bail out.”
…
He doesn’t plan to monkey with the magazine’s current mix. Despite the technology-driven changes in reading habits, he believes readers remain thirsty for The New Yorker‘s signature 3,000-word or longer pieces, and he owns up to taking them home to edit in the quiet of late evenings. He’ll gallop on so happily about his job and the magazine – “a gift”- that you begin to think: Oh, my, he needs to sit around downing margaritas some days.But Remnick protests he has a life. He’s become ruthlessly efficient as he’s gotten older, he says. He watches mindless TV but he also does not forget his priorities: “I only do three things. Devoted father and husband. The New Yorker. And once in a while I write these pieces.”
And from Media Buyer Planner:
HBO will be the sole sponsor of the June 16 issue of The Week, Mediapost reports. All the ads will be part of a single photo spread featuring the stars of HBO’s drama Deadwood, which kicked off its third season of 12 episodes yesterday. The move will probably renew the branded editorial content debate raised when The New Yorker devoted all the advertising in its Aug. 22, 2004 edition to retail marketer Target. Cont’d.
As you know, I thought the controversy was absurd, though I prefer many-sponsored issues from an aesthetic point of view. Also, renegade reporters/substancers and sudden celebrities Iraq reporters Jeff Neumann and Ray LeMoine have been making friends: “‘These people put it in perspective that Jeff and I were unique characters over there,’ LeMoine said of the encounter with, among others, John Lee Anderson [no h in Jon, though], a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. ‘Somebody else just realized that our story was one of the best stories to come out of Iraq.’ “
