Monthly Archives: August 2006

Algonquin Bartender Turns 90

“He has mixed martinis for Marilyn Monroe and Charles Bronson, poured Scotch for John Lennon and served a tipple to Henry Kissinger. In his nearly six decades of tending bar, Hoy Wong has shaken and stirred with the best of ’em – and he has no plans to stop anytime soon….” He’ll be celebrating at the hotel on August 22. Here’s the whole excellent story.

McLemee on George Scialabba’s “Divided Mind”

Just up: The always thoughtful and committed Scott McLemee has written one of his satisfyingly uncategorizable essay-interviews about the critic and scholar’s new collection of essays (whose publisher is inexplicably without a website, Scott points out). As usual, his piece is so deeply focused and intricately patterned that it’s hard to scoop out the spoonful of Skippy that makes quick-admiration posts like this easier, but I liked this section quite a lot:

We sometimes say that a dog “worries” a bone, meaning he chews it with persistent attention; and in that sense, Divided Mind is a worried book, gnawing with a passion on the “moral/political” problems that go with holding an egalitarian outlook. Scialabba is a man of the left. If you can imagine a blend of Richard Rorty’s skeptical pragmatism and Noam Chomsky’s geopolitical worldview — and it’s a bit of a stretch to reconcile them, though somehow he does this — then you have a reasonable sense of Scialabba’s own politics. In short, it is the belief that life would be better, both in the United States and elsewhere, with more economic equality, a stronger sense of the common good, and the end of that narcissistic entitlement fostered by the American military-industrial complex.

A certain amount of gloominess goes with holding these principles without believing that History is on the long march to their fulfillment. But there is another complicating element in Divided Mind…. Continued.

Scialabba and Scott have both won the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing (Scott’s acceptance speech will slay you). As for me, let’s see, I do own a volume of Virgina Woolf essays written in by Nona Balakian, in confident pencil. I’ve also been acquainted with her poet nephew, whose memoir Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past is unforgettable. The mind writes and writes and lives by writing; praise to them who can concentrate long and honestly enough to bring sound thoughts into being! It is necessary to go through dark and deeper thought and not to turn. I’ve been paraphrasing. And liking the gerunds!

Speaking of thinking, you may be wondering (is this a Roches song?), what about the Nicholas Lemann piece that’s gotten everybody itching like a man in a fuzzy tree? I have links (here’s one I haven’t read yet), I have thinks, all will come in due time.

Related in McLemee updates:
“The Cultural Equivalent of E-Mail Spam”
Taking Our Galbraith Away
There Is Nothing Like a Dame Helen
Things One and Two, Worth Noting
Plagiarizing? At Least Know the Literature

Sergei Dovlatov Revisited

Glimpsed while looking up something else: a short biography of Sergei Dovlatov (1941-1990), the émigré writer and editor, on Russia-InfoCentre, an English-language site about Russian culture, history, &c. Here’s an excerpt, with some mysterious punctuation made logical (feel free to correct me if you know the text), which includes an interesting letter from Kurt Vonnegut; there’s a photo of Dovlatov and Vonnegut on the site.

From the late 1960s Dovlatov was published in samizdat, and in 1976 some of his stories were issued in the Western journals Continent and Time and We that brought about his expulsion from the Union of Journalists of the USSR. Fleeing from persecutions of authorities Dovlatov immigrated to Vienna in 1978 and then moved to New York, where he issued the daring liberal newspaper The New American.

By the mid 1980s he gained success with the public and was published in the prestigious The New Yorker journal.

“Dear Sergey Dovlatov! I love you too, but you have broken my heart. I was born in this country and fearlessly served it during the war, but I still haven’t managed to sell a single story of mine to New Yorker journal. And now you come, and—bang!—your story is published at once…. I expect much from you and your work. You’ve got talent which you are ready to give away to this mad country. We are happy you are here,” Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to Dovlatov reads.

Within twelve years of living in the States Dovlatov issued his twelve books, published in the USA and Europe. In the USSR he was known only by samizdat and the author’s program on radio Svoboda (Freedom). Later on his numerous collections of stories were published in Russia, including the Collected Works.

“I want to live to see the days when our dishonoured fatherland turned into scarecrow of the world, is revived; and these will be the days of rebirth of our long-suffering literature,” Sergey Dovlatov wrote in his essay in 1982.

Update: For readers with the Complete New Yorker or a thorough and unmolested library, here’s a complete list of Dovlatov’s short stories in the magazine:

  • “The Jubilee Boy” (trans. Anne Frydman), June 9, 1980
  • “Somebody’s Death” (trans. Katherine T. O’Connor and Diana L. Burgin), October 19, 1981
  • “Straight Ahead” (trans. Jack Dennison and Anne Frydman), January 25, 1982
  • “My First Cousin” (trans. Anne Frydman), December 5, 1983
  • “The Colonel Says I Love You” (trans. Anne Frydman), May 5, 1986
  • “Uncle Aron” (trans. Anne Frydman), October 20, 1986
  • “Uncle Leopold” (trans. Anne Frydman), July 13, 1987
  • “Father” (trans. Anne Frydman), November 30, 1987
  • “The Photo Album” (trans. Antonina W. Bouis), March 27, 1989
  • “Driving Gloves” (trans. Antonina W. Bouis), May 8, 1989

Thanks to J.M. for looking this up; if I’ve made any typing errors, they’re entirely mine.

A Beam of Energy Can Always Be Diverted


Via William Bragg, posting in a Radosh comment: They’re planning a remake of Tron. I’m speechless. From co-screenwriter Lee Sternthal: “In a lot of ways, [‘Tron’] was a movie about a man venturing into hell. Our job will be to keep the humanity as he ventures into an unreal world.” Here’s the script so we can compare the remake with the original, line by line. I’m not this sort of geek, usually. But for Tron! Yes.

Cartoon Caption Contest: “There may be some lingering resentment”

Continuing in the tradition of interviewing caption contest winners (to which I’ve contributed toot toot), the Des Moines Register interviews recent contest winner Tim McDaniel of Alta, Iowa, whose angry-fish caption for P.C. Vey’s cartoon is genuinely, classically funny, a candidate for the “best of the New Yorker caption contest cartoons” anthology that may, for all I know, be forthcoming. Or even for a regular anthology. I approve.

The headline for Ken Fuson’s story is one of the best I’ve seen, and fits so well into the Vey-McDaniel theme: “Iowan thinks, types, wins! And stirs jealousy.”

Related: All the cartoon caption contest coverage you could ever dream of.

Is It Real or Is It Remnorex?

I’ve trawled around YouTube a little for New Yorker-related videos, but there aren’t many that I could find (though there was Sasha singing). There are, however, a fair number of David Remnick clips on Google Video, which I already much prefer because it’s so big ‘n’ fancy. Not that I’m not all for video democracy and OK Go dance contests, I assure you. Anyway, the videos are of Remnick and Gladwell and Angell and Gopnik and the like, often with Charlie Rose, and they’re worth watching.