James Wolcott writes:
Kenji Fujishima on Infamous, which he finds more texturey and inquisitive than last year’s Capote. I haven’t seen Infamous yet, only read Doug McGrath’s tart script, but this meditation and Armond White’s make me keen to go.
Earlier on Emdashes, another point of view on the new Capote movie.
We’ll miss you. Keep a look out for grandmothers in wolves’ clothing, too-heavy baskets, woodsmen, forests, and stomachache. Which means nothing except remember your roots and may this bring you lots of happiness.
Don’t forget that you can see videos of a bunch of events from the festival on the New Yorker website, namely, these:
Islam and the West
The second annual New Yorker Town Hall Meeting, with Omar Ahmad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mahmood Mamdani, Azar Nafisi, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, and Lawrence Wright. George Packer, moderator.
Comic Turns
Steve Martin interviews Roz Chast.Fiction Night
Gary Shteyngart and George Saunders read from their work.Justice for All
The Honorable Stephen G. Breyer interviewed by Jeffrey Toobin.
This video will be posted Monday, October 16.The Case Against Secrets
A talk by Malcolm Gladwell.
This video will be posted Wednesday, October 18.
I’m glad the Shteyngart and Saunders evening is one of the events on video, because that’s the one I reluctantly ducked out of in order to have the mind-blowing experience of having Tony sing me (in tune) Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play,” and watching him kiss women’s hands as the fired-up crowd greeted their star and, nearly, friend. Michael Apted, who also introduced the film, seemed a lot nicer in person than I thought he would be given his slightly sour and flat commentary on 42 Up, and that was reassuring.
Also unrelated to the festival, I just saw the hysteria that was the Union Square B & N crowd for the final Lemony Snicket book, and here is a little New York Observer interview with Stephin Merritt (whose CD with Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Snicket, a person of whom I have long been fond, is also just out), in which Sasha Frere-Jones is mentioned.
But that doesn’t mean David Remnick’s not a good writer fella. Jon Friedman went to a panel on Bob Dylan’s “Modern Times” at KGB and found that Remnick (who was there too) was a sport and a brick and a peach and all kinds of other incongruous nouns, none of which he actually uses. Friedman also asked Remnick about his Bill Clinton Profile: “When I asked Remnick if he came away liking his subject, he said bluntly: ‘It’s not a date. It’s not my job as a reporter to like or dislike somebody.’ Clinton, he concluded, ‘is a force of nature.’ ”
I wonder if he felt that supernatural glow everyone I’ve ever met who’s met Clinton or even been in the same room as him has reported? A former colleague at PEN told me she didn’t know they were at the same event, and suddenly became conscious of an intense heat radiating toward her back. She turned around: Bill, as she lived and breathed. I once met Jesse Jackson, and had the same sense of a twinkly nimbus around a powerful, magnetic personality. Maybe Clinton is more twinkle than nimbus. I’m not sure.
By the way, doesn’t it bother you slightly that a “New York Times executive” told Friedman that reading the Clinton Profiile was “the single biggest commitment I made to ANYTHING since I married my husband”? That’s worrisome in anyone, much less a senior member of a newpaper staff, don’t you think? Even if she’s joking, it’s too weird.
Meanwhile, I just returned from the Art Directors Club dinner honoring various inductees into their hall of fame, including Art Spiegelman. I wrote down some things he said and will transcribe them, but meanwhile I must report that Francoise Mouly looked like a million Euros, and that’s even more than dollars, and didn’t the cute young Canadian advertising hotshots at my table gawp admiringly! Mouly was also funny and impressive and all, but holy brioches, that pale satin dress was the hornet’s coronet.
Finally, the martyred Spencer Morgan and associates at the Observer (which I can’t type without hearing young John from Michael Apted’s 7 Up: “I read the Observer AND the Times“) record memories from still more New Yorker Festival events, involving Robin Williams, Zadie Smith, Sasha Frere-Jones, and one of the original inspirations for Emdashes, the majestic Donald Antrim.
It’s Guy Maddin’s Top 10 Criterion DVDs.
In other news, David Remnick is speaking at Princeton, his alma mater, next Wednesday the 18th on campus.
Our friends at The Millions have two great posts about New Yorker news: one on that Joyce Carol Oates hubbub, and another on Matt Diffee and co.’s (including Newyorkette) new book, The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker. I’ve read it, and I can honestly say it’s pretty damn funny, especially the full-page questionnairs Diffee had the cartoonists fill out about themselves. Being cartoonists, they often veer outside the lines, and being jokesters, they often defy the question or just draw a silly picture instead.
But don’t use spaces around them, at least in my opinion (and in Chicago‘s!). There’s a debate going on at Typophile about just this question. The consensus is “There is NO consensus,” but I like this tidy summary by contributor Michael Lewis (a seminarian, not surprisingly, given his reflexive and reflective turn to the canon):
AP style is to “put a space on both sides of a dash in all uses except the start of a paragraph [their version of a bulleted list] and sports agate summaries.” See “Punctuation” chapter.
Chicago style is not as explicit, but all the examples in the 15th ed. do not contain preceding or following spaces (e.g.: “It was a revival of the most potent image in modern democracy—the revolutionary idea.”). See sec. 6.87ff.
Strunk & White are not explicit either, but also do not include spaces (e.g.: “The rear axle began to make a noise—a grinding, chattering, teeth-gritting rasp.”). See sec. I.8.
Bringhurst recommends using en dashes set off with spaces: “Used as a phrase marker – thus – the en dash is set with a normal word space either side.” See sec. 5.2ff.
I don’t have MLA or APA style guides handy, but I’ll hunt around for ‘em — er, (bad) pun intended.
Also on Typophile, this discussion of whether cursive handwriting is going out the window. Do you still use it? Do kids still learn it? Whither cursive? (There’s a Nation cover hed for you; still got it!)
Yes, the irony of having this right after (well, now before) Hitchens, and so on. Jordan Lite writes in the Daiy News:
Bartenders breathe easier when patrons aren’t allowed to light up, says a Scottish study that found a dramatic improvement in employees’ lung health within months of a smoking ban.
…
New York’s bartenders can vouch for the change.
“I feel better, much better,” said John Zhang, who’s manned the Algonquin Hotel’s bars for 15 years. “Right away, I could feel it.”
This still doesn’t explain the awesome longevity of Algonquin colleague Hoy Wong, but it can’t have hurt, either.
Those were some amusing, and quite affectionate, nicknames at The Nation in my time there (1994-98) for Alexander Cockburn (whose column is called “Beat the Devil,” after the 1953 film) and Christopher Hitchens. I’m only three-quarters through the fascinating piece in The New Yorker, and although I have a few things to add, I’m going to wait till I finish. In the meantime, Cockburn (whose name is pronounced co-burn, for those who are still mispronouncing it) reprints what he says is his entire exchange with reporter Ian Parker on his website, Counterpunch.
I haven’t read it yet, so I’m not endorsing anything, although I’ll gladly say that Parker’s prose style is like a pitcher full of fresh lemonade after Malcolm Gladwell’s very interesting but not particularly sparkling story (must everyone be characterized by how much and what color hair he has?). I’ll also add—from my vantage point midway through the piece, so don’t jump on me if I’m wrong—that the history of The Nation in the ’80s and ’90s, thorough and necessarily subjective, lives in great part in the brain of former editor JoAnn Wypijewski, and I was surprised she wasn’t quoted as well; nor was Katha Pollitt, who’s had her own intellectual conflicts with the Hitch over the past few decades. Anyway, I look forward to finishing Parker’s story and checking back in about it then.
Completely trivially, I laughed when I read that Hitchens’ father had counseled him “Don’t let them see you with just your socks on,” because the sight of Cockburn’s wet, muddy, enormous boots on the center Nation library table after a rainstorm is one I will never forget. I thought they were rude and outrageous and kind of cool, but the newspapers were getting wet.
Newcity Chicago‘s Ray Pride really doesn’t like the new Capote-in-Kansas movie, Infamous:
What a rotten, rotten movie, with the even more rotten fortune to follow the austere fictionalization of Truman Capote’s research of “In Cold Blood” that was Bennett Miller, Dan Futterman and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s “Capote.” “Infamous” reeks of curdled cosmopolitanism, with the co-writer of “Bullets over Broadway” taking a succession of potshots at his protagonist. [Douglas] McGrath’s got a callous, jaded eye, a patrician disdain for the motley on display. This is a sustained sneer of a picture. (Call it “Bullets over Holcomb.”)
…
McGrath takes a page from the form of his biographical source, George Plimpton’s paragraphese, cut-and-paste style as a drama-sapping device, with “Reds”-like witnesses shot against a studio-setting skyline…. McGrath’s screenplay moves almost in lockstep with Futterman’s, hitting many of the same incidents, figures and notes. (The two films were produced almost simultaneously.) “Infamous” zips blithely forward as if performed by a road company where the theater manager is a secret sot.
Pride adds, referring to the harrumphs about Capote‘s depiction of William Shawn: “McGrath embroiders elsewhere, substituting the fiction of publisher Bennett Cerf accompanying Capote to the execution for Miller’s fiction of New Yorker editor William Shawn coming along to witness the deaths.”
And because sometimes I don’t have it in me to start a new post, a sort of related article: Peter Carlson in The Washington Post on the state of The Paris Review under semi-recently appointed editor (and mensch, in case anyone’s making lists) Philip Gourevitch. Wonder how long this story has been sitting around waiting for someone else’s missed deadline? I’m not certain I’d assign a piece on The Paris Review to someone who’d write that “Most literary mags have the life span of fruit flies, perhaps because most literary magazines are about as interesting as fruit flies,” but perhaps I’m too sensitive.
Not that I’m done with my own tidbits or anything, but I have lots and lots of other things to do this week as well as finish up my festival reporting, so in the meantime here are some other terrific accounts. The Amateur Gourmet, who possibly sold most of his organs to the festival organizers on the installment plan to get Calvin Trillin walking-tour tickets, summarizes the heck out of his magical experience, and has promised an exclusive to Emdashes as well, because there are some other questions still left to be explored. Emdashes friend and benefactor Ron Hogan at Galleycat typed up his excellent account too. Everyone in the world wrote about the Jon Stewart and David Remnick talk, so I’ll let you be your own Eustace Googles on that one. There’s a good wire report on the Pedro Almodovar interview, and Carrie Alison at the U2 fansite Interference went to the P.J. Harvey/Hilton Als evening:
Some tidbits that came out of Als’ gentle if not meandering interviewing style touched on her earlier days and “characters” in her records. At 20 or 21 Harvey put her first band together (a folk band in Dorset that performed Irish tunes) and her goal was “to do musically” what she “wanted to see in art.” And the “art” of it all was her course of study at university where she was an adept and unique sculptor who enjoyed casting her face and hands, and sticking them “on flying machinery.†Of Harvey’s individual records, Als posited that “each record is a character study,” and that “after ‘Dry’ each record was about different people in different societies.” Harvey didn’t seem to agree with this assessment, but did offer that as she gets older, she has “felt more comfortable” allowing her lyrics to be more biographical, as opposed to when she was younger, she “tried to shield herself with distance.” She also later noted that as she gets on in years, she is getting better at expressing herself in her personal life.
Speaking of music, ever since I heard the New Pornographers play live on Saturday after their interview with Jim Surowiecki (in which the band members were alternately as sweetly fidgety as the high school band and as elliptical and arch-Dada as Dylan or the Beatles in a press conference, but mostly just reticent in a harmless Canadian way), I love them even more, especially “Mass Romantic,” which they really knocked the stuffing out of.
Oh, and eCanada Now (I’m sure it’s a wire story, or possibly yet another subset of Ask.com) quotes two of the eight hundred-odd funny lines from the Robin Williams and Lillian Ross event, after noting George Clooney’s recent remark, “I couldn’t run for office. I’ve slept with far too many women”:
Robin Williams, a reformed alcoholic and drug addict, also admits he colourful past automatically rules him out.
He revealed at the New Yorker Festival: “I would never run for office — because I make Bill Clinton look Amish.â€
However, Williams thinks Jack Nicholson should go into politics because he would be happy to be open about his past.
Impersonating ‘The Departed’ star’s voice, he said: “Jack would say, ‘Sex scandals? What do you want? I’ve done ‘em all. Twice. And I have it on tape!’â€
A LiveJournalist went to the Jonathan Safran Foer/Edward P. Jones reading and took some brief, good notes; this guy enjoyed the festinis at the Steve Coogan and George Saunders talk. Anonymette from Movie News and Views wrote a detailed blow-by-blow of the Milos Forman and David Denby conversation (minus Forman’s incredible, elastic, tragicomic face).
Another blogger was at the Donald Antrim and Tobias Wolff evening, my first event of the festival, after which I was honestly prepared to go home and call it a day, happy as I can be. (Of course, a mere two hours later I was chatting with Tony from 49 Up, in person, which was…almost as incredible as talking to Antrim. A toast to you, Tony!)
It looks like Gabe Roth and I were at a few of the same events as well:
Other interesting factoids from the New Yorker Festival
New Yorker staffers who, at separate events, made gratuitous references to the Gnarls Barkley song “Crazy”: star reporter Malcolm Gladwell and features editor Daniel Zalewski.
How Roger Angell pronounces the last name of the late Donald Barthelme: BARL-mee.
How Zadie Smith pronounces it: BARTH-elm.
He was at the New Pornographers show too, and did a bit of eavesdropping on top of his laudably detailed reporting—want a job without any pay, Gabe? I like the way your mind works! Here are some New Pornographers photos, including a fetching one of Jim S. and Neko Case (who, it’s rumored, indulged in some serious karaoke afterward). Funny line from aforementioned roundup: “Suroweicki won me over immediately by being less good-looking than the photo on the jacket of his book, which is to say he’s only very good-looking, as opposed to intolerably good-looking.”
