The monthly Speakeasy Poetry Series continues with Farrah Field, Gail Segal, Yvette Siegert, and Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo:
Sunday, November 5 @ 5:00 PM
The Bitter End, 147 Bleecker Street (btw. Thompson and LaGuardia)
Directions and more: www.speakeasynyc.com
Free to the public
About Chelsea: Since 1958, Chelsea has been a leading international literary magazine emphasizing translations and the work of emerging writers. Among those who found a place at Chelsea before they were established authors are W. S. Merwin, Sylvia Plath, A. R. Ammons, and Paul Auster.
FARRAH FIELD’s work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Harpur Palate, and Pool, among others, and is forthcoming in Margie. She teaches high school English in Manhattan.
GAIL SEGAL’s first manuscript of poems, In Gravity’s Pull, was published in 2002. Her poems have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Marlboro Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. Her most recent essay, “A Praise of Doubt,” is collected in a book of essays, Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts.
ANNABELLE YEESEUL YOO is a poet and classically trained pianist.
To submit work or check out Speakeasy’s online offerings, visit www.speakeasynyc.com.
Monthly Archives: October 2006
Lorrie Moore on Jonathan Franzen
From “Bedside Reading,” a friendly little collection (with Amazon links!) of some New Yorker contributors’ literary discoveries, and one reject. The other book-recommenders are Sasha Frere-Jones, Malcolm Gladwell, Jill Lepore, Mary Ellen Mark, Paul Muldoon (glad the poet isn’t last), Nick Paumgarten, and David Sipress.
Despite the hoopla surrounding Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,†I was unprepared for two aspects of it that no one had mentioned to me: how funny it was, and how feminist. (The ending, in which the widowed mother, shed of her marriage, is now ready to make a better life for herself at the age of seventy-five, is like a stiletto of ice slipping neatly into, and then between, the ribs.) On my bedside table now is Franzen’s “The Discomfort Zone,†a wondrous book of lively, intelligent, intimate—and funny—narrative essays, which has received in the Times two of the most bewildering reviews I’ve ever read. Franzen is never the hero of his own anecdotes, and he observes the world (and himself) the way the baby of a family often does: with a kind of ruthless, custodial affection. He is able to see how three different centuries have converged upon Americans and how disorienting that can be. Even the cover charms: on the jacket is a Victorian “Map of a Man’s Heart,†reprinted from McCall’s and looking like some jokey geography thought up by Lewis Carroll, with its “Broad Range of Interests,†its “Province of Deep Thought,†its “Memory of Mother Moat†and “Ravine of the Limited Take-Home.†There are few ways in, though the “Tunnel of Fetch and Carry†will get one across the memory of mom. It all makes me think that people do not have the wit and humor that they used to.
I like you more all the time, Lorrie Moore.
A Painting Made From New Yorker Magazines
It’s abstract. The painter writes:
I started this piece in May or June of this year, first constructing the collage components, then picked it back up around early September to start painting, and finally came back to it last week to finish it up. I still need to trim the rope on the sides (you can see they aren’t painted), but I think it’s otherwise completed.
No title; oil on canvas, rope, torn up pieces of a New Yorker article on Iraq and a picture from a New Yorker article about redneck comedy.
Just before I started Emdashes, my sister Kate gave over a page of one of her famed collage calendars to New Yorker images.
1991 Pauline Kael Interview From KCRW Archive
A terrific find from We’re Going to the Pictures:
Michael Silverblatt and a young Los Angeles writer, Chuck Wilson, talk with revered film critic Pauline Kael in a 1991 interview about her book, Movie Love (the 11th and final collection of the film reviews she wrote for The New Yorker) on KCRW Radio in Santa Monica from the bookworm archives. A real treat.
Echoed from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.
Earlier on Emdashes: A Goldmine of Pauline Kael Reviews
Happy Birthday, David Remnick (and Other News)
He was born on this day in 1958. There’s a charming interview with Remnick in the Independent (sadly, the piece seems to have just been archived) about his childhood in New Jersey, life at Princeton, and an early job teaching English in Japan where he was forbidden to date his students, so he “must have read a book or two a day for six months.” (My poet friend Richard Matthews, who taught in Korea, had much the same experience; I remember him saying he’d reread all of Joyce pretty recently, but had just reread it.) Some of the same territory of Remnick’s growing up and career is in this extensive Booknotes transcript from 1993. Remnick’s interview tone was jauntier then, but the details about the writing of Lenin’s Tomb (which I’ve been reading lately) and his time in Russia are fascinating. This his how he answers Brian Lamb’s question “Why did you pick The New Yorker?”
I picked The New Yorker because I was raised to think that that was where nirvana was. More than a daily newspaper reporter, I fancied myself a writer of longer things — not better, just different. Happily at the Washington Post they had room and found room for longer things in the “Style” section and even foreign. There’s a very innovative foreign editor there, Michael Getler, who really does like to open up the section quite a bit. But in the end of ends, a daily newspaper is a daily newspaper and to buck that is folly. The New Yorker is where New Yorker pieces should be, not the Washington Post.
If you liked Hilton Als’s Profile of Susan-Lori Parks as much as I did, you’ll be pleased to see that 365 Days/365 Plays begins in November with participating theaters in New York. The Public Theater has the full schedule with a list of all the theaters.
Someone’s started a whole blog just to publish her letter to The New Yorker about Atul Gawande’s October 9 story, “The Score: How Childbirth Went Industrial.” The letter writer, Faith Gibson—”a mother of three, grandmother of two, former ER and L&D nurse, birth educator, web wife and presently a professional midwife with a small private practice on the San Francisco peninsula”—has written a long response to Gawande’s piece as well and encourages a public dialogue on the subject.
Alarming news: Nadine Gordimer was attacked in her house in South Africa during a burglary. She wasn’t seriously injured, and refused to give up her wedding ring, but she was locked in a storeroom for a while. Scary.
Friday is Feast Day
Or whatever you want to call a motley stew of simmering links about upcoming events (3), no-longer-missing critics (1), cartoonists (4 or 5, if we count the cover artist), poets (2 or 3, if we count Alice Quinn, who I figure must be a poet herself; anyone know?), Seattle bands (1), and sobering movies (1). Here goes:
Roz Chast feels nervous about Halloween, so do something much more fun with her next week and see her at Symphony Space talking about her big, glimmering new collection, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006.
On Monday at the Barnes & Noble Union Square’s Upstairs at the Square, Nell Freudenberger and Howard Fishman (who debuted at the Algonquin once upon a time, and has been known to play Pete’s Candy Store) chat with Katherine Lanpher, 7 p.m. This is going to be a crazy night—man, I love Fishman’s music, haven’t read Freudenberger’s novel yet—so get there early. The last one was packed and not a little giddy.
Here’s Stephen Holden’s Times review of The Bridge, the documentary about Golden Gate Bridge suicide jumpers that has its roots in Tad Friend’s 2003 story “Jumpers.” As I’m sure you remember, Sleater-Kinney were also inspired by Friend’s piece.
Speaking of Tad Friend, I’m overjoyed to report that Nancy Franklin is just fine, and was just taking a well-deserved vacation. She’ll be back on TV (reviewing it, that is) shortly. That is great news. Again, no disrespect to Friend, whose writing I admire and enjoy. But there would have been riots if Franklin had left for some reason, and I would be at the head of them, brandishing old TV antennae and a large banner with two sad drama faces on it. That’s how ugly it could get, so thank goodness we don’t have to see anything like that, or be jailed for obstruction of editorial administration. (I’ve been in jail once before, so I could take it if I had to, but those plastic handcuffs are chafey.)
Alice Quinn talks to one of my favorite poets and teachers, Galway Kinnell, and they both talk to Philip Levine (with whom I didn’t study), in an interview that appears only on the New Yorker website. There’s even audio of a Phil and Galway reading. I get to say “Phil and Galway” because I paid NYU quite a few dollars for the pleasure of their company for three years. And well worth it, too.
The family of classic New Yorker cartoonist Whitney Darrow Jr. just donated more than 1,000 of his original drawings to Princeton, which I just visited for the first time last weekend. Now I’d better go back and see both those archives and the Virginia Snedeker show, which is up till November 26, so we can all go.
More about this later, but remember that funny Talk by Ben McGrath about The Corduroy Appreciation Club? There’s a corduroy-appreciating party coming up in New York on November 11, 11/11 being “the date which most closely resembles corduroy.” Stay tuned for more.
Finally, comedian and newly anointed New Yorker cartoonist Pete Holmes was recently interviewed on Gothamist. Here’s an excerpt:
I read on your site that you’ve been submitting cartoons to The New Yorker. What other places have you been submitting to or been featured in?
I just sold a couple holiday cartoons to Cosmo Girl, which is such a different audience. I think the average New Yorker is a person with a beyond college education, and now I’m looking at readers that are either not beyond junior high or creepy forty-year-olds reading Cosmo Girl. It gave me confidence in cartooning because that was my first real magazine sale. But, this past Thursday, The New Yorker bought my first cartoon, which is a huge milestone.
You were submitting to the New Yorker in person, but I imagine that most of their submissions are unsolicited.
My friend Matt Diffee, who’s a cartoonist over there, told me people send in blind submissions. So there’s some guy in Wyoming sending in cartoons. I can’t say this with any authority, but I think that that submission has less of a chance of getting in. There’s a huge advantage to living in New York and being able to go in face to face with the editor. It allows you to get feedback and, I don’t do this, but maybe you could push more for him to reconsider something that he doesn’t like. Thirty years ago you couldn’t walk into the New Yorker. That’s a huge privilege and it’s certainly helped me along my way. Every week I got guidance, art lessons, and critiques from some of the best cartoonists in the world.
What sort of feedback would they give?
With me, it was, “We like the jokes, it just looks like you drew it with your foot.” They had a hard time with my drawing. It got to the point where, every week, I’d come in with a different style. It’s like stand up comedy: they don’t want anybody to force anything. They want your voice to be true and they want your drawing style to match your joke style.
How long have you been drawing cartoons in general?
I loved drawing as a kid, but never considered it as a profession until I got into college. In college, it’s the most accessible foray into comedy. You can be at home, you draw, it’s supposed to be funny, and you give it to the newspaper. It’s a safe way to start. When I got into stand up and Improv, I became more interested in the immediate, risky, and exciting world of live comedy. When I met Matt Diffee at a show at UCB, I figured, “Why not try and get back into it.” It meshes well with the stand up lifestyle. If you have a show at ten o’clock on a Friday, that’s all you have to do. You work from ten to eleven, so why not sit around the rest of the day thinking of something absurd and draw it?
Fatal Accident for Algonquin Staffer
Pedro Rodriguez, a 54-year-old Algonquin staffer who had cleaned rooms at the hotel for more than 30 years, was hit by a truck and killed in front of the hotel yesterday, the New York Post reports. It’s been a sad year as well as a celebratory one for the hotel staff; last May a waiter named Ismael Kurkculer was murdered in Jersey City. If anyone knows whether that crime was ever solved, please let me know.
I Say It’s Wednesday, and I Say the Hell With It
Ed Sorel reviews the new Charles Addams bio by Linda H. Davis (for the New York Observer), and what do you know, so do I (for Newsday). It’s called Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life, and the illustrations alone are worth the price. Later: Janet Maslin is getting in on the action and reviewing it, too (for the NYT, natch).
Film Forum now has a podcast.
I would never bash a Canadian if I could avoid it, but this CBC commentator must have been living on Mars since 1925 to write these words:
I opened a recent New Yorker, a men’s magazine whose front section is annoyingly insular and almost hick and whose back half has some good reporting. Staring at me was Steven Spielberg, a 59-year-old man in a baseball cap, who makes movies for the child in every adult. He was shilling for the Gap. “Gap is collaborating with (Product) Red® and the world’s most iconic brands to help eliminate AIDS in Africa.”
Readers were told that if they bought a “Gap (Product) Red® item, half the profits will go directly” to the AIDS fight. Then came 28 Gap ads in a 97-page magazine with slogans including “Can a T-shirt top change the world?”
Also, it really says “T-shirt top”? That seems unlikely.
Cover Boys, and What These Categories Mean
Barry Blitt’s “Deluged” cover (Sept. 19, 2005) won best cover of the year, and Mark Ulriksen’s Brokeback Cheney (Feb. 27, 2006) best news cover, in the new annual contest run by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Magazine Publishers of America. (Seth got second place in the fashion category for “The Skinny on Fashion,” March 20, 2006). I saw and cheered the news yesterday, but balked at the thought of finding and formatting the images in the middle of my own mag’s close, so hooray for the Times (typing that despite my rage at last Sunday’s book review), since they have a nice collage with two of the New Yorker covers and an article and so forth.
Why is this under “Seal Barks,” by the way? This category is for everything related to artwork in the magazine—spots, cartoons, covers, and other illustrations. If you click on the category names on the green bar above, you can trawl the archives for other items about artwork, or about the magazine’s editors-in-chief so far (“Eds.“). My and other contributors’ reviews of things related to but outside the magazine itself go under “Looked Into,” and for a veritable Katz’s Deli of links in further pursuit of the details in a New Yorker story go to “Eustace Google” (I love that illustration). I play favorites from the previous week’s magazine in “Pick of the Issue.”
“Ask the Librarians,” of course, is the deep research and sharp insight of the New Yorker librarians Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, who answer the best questions sent in by Emdashes readers (here’s the email address to use) about the components (big and small) and personalities (famous and forgotten) of the magazine (past and present). “Headline Shooter,” which is also the name of a movie in which Robert Benchley played a radio announcer in 1933, is a quickie without commentary. In “On the Spot” either I or a trusted delegate (applications welcome) go to something New Yorker-related, like a reading, a talk, a gallery opening, a musical event, a play, &c., and report back. I also use “On the Spot” for announcing events I can’t go to, because they’re in Alaska or something. At parties I tend not to feel like taking notes, so you’ll have to rely on others for that sort of scuttlebutt.
The “Jonathans Are Illuminated” category concerns all Jonathans of letters, the ones you know well and the ones who have yet to leap into Bright Young Jonathanness; “X-Rea” tracks sightings (mine and yours!) of and inquiries into the famous typeface and the other work of original New Yorker team member Rea Irvin, whose name, as you can deduce from the category title, is pronounced Ray as in Sugar, not Ree as in readerly. In “Letters and Challenges” I provide challenges (with prizes!) and print your letters, but only the ones you’ve explicitly given me permission to print, since I don’t use mail without permission. I’m happy to print things anonymously, and often do, since many writers and critics who otherwise dream of being ubiquitously and inescapably in print would rather not be named on a blog, even if their letter concerns nothing scandalous or bridge-burning. And that’s OK with me. Finally, “Hit Parade” collects the posts that, for whatever reason, got people all whirled up like soft-serve ice cream.
Later, almost forgot: Here’s all my coverage (still ongoing, can you believe it?) of this year’s New Yorker Festival, and in Personal, you can read my Innermost Thoughts, or at least the ones I choose to share with The World. It’s where I get to be a blogeuse.
October 23 Issue: Grandees
Best Talk: “Nuke Rebuke,” Steve Coll. Of course, the Picasso story shouldn’t be missed.
Best entertaining thing before “The Critics”: Lauren Collins’s “Mink Inc.”
Best frightening thing before “The Critics”: Michael Specter’s incredible “The Last Drop.”
Best thing in “The Critics”: John Lahr, when he writes, tends to win this category.
Best poem: Let’s make a pact, fellow sonneteers and others (that means you) in need of metrical sustenance: Read first, then judge. I liked Brad Leithauser’s “Son.” Why aren’t the poems ever online? I’ve asked this before.
Best cartoon: discussed here.
Best Critic’s Notebook: You don’t read these too regularly, I sense that, and that’s a crying shame. Excerpt from Sasha Frere-Jones’s “Brut Force”: “Eddie Argos, the leader of the London band Art Brut, likes to get right to the point. In a song about a brand-new girlfriend, he sings, ‘Got myself a brand-new girlfriend, so many messages to send, got myself a brand-new girlfriend.’ Another song, about forming his band, leaves equally little room for interpretation: ‘We formed a band, we formed a band, look at us, we formed a band.'” I like all the critics at this length; they get to do something fun in the space, and it’s often just what you wanted to know.
Best note in GOAT (that’s Goings On About Town): “Some guitarists are bent on cramming together as many notes as possible.” Tied with: “Walking underneath it prompts a nice pleasure-fear frisson.”
Best ad: Much as I genuinely love advertorials, and I’ll be revisiting those in the magazine in months to come (there’s a new writer for the Hawaii ad-icles, did you notice?), I must say the mirthful mummies in the Queen Mary 2 ads freak me out and hold me captive. Vaguely Tilley-ish type on those. I’d like to know what face that is—gotta befriend this Gert Wiescher guy. Actually, I’m going to write him and see if he’ll give me an interview. Won’t that be fun?
Hey ho, looks like the intrepid Matt Dellinger and his hearty crew have done something new on newyorker.com: linky bios for the current issue. Nice idea. Aw, poets too!