Monthly Archives: November 2006

This Probably Bodes Well for the New Yorker Website

I’ve heard that having to have everything OK’d through CondéNet is a bothersome process for writers and editors at the magazine, and I assume this means the newyorker.com redesign can proceed faster and better than it would have otherwise. On, Dellinger! On, Eskin! On, Flash folks and interns! Lucia Moses writes for MediaWeek:

Condé Nast has transferred operations and maintenance of its individual magazine Web sites from its interactive unit, CondéNet, a change that will give those titles’ editors more flexibility in developing their sites, a corporate spokeswoman confirmed.
 
The 27 individual Web sites (not including the soon-to-launch Portfolio) for such titles as Glamour, Jane, and Vanity Fair, will now report to John Bellando, chief operating officer of Condé Nast. CondéNet will continue to run the commercial, or destination sites, like Concierge.com and Epicurious.com. Online ad sales functions will continue to be handled by CondéNet, with involvement by the Condé Nast Media Group and the individual magazine publishers.
 
The new reporting structure is a response to the growing development of Condé Nast’s individual magazine sites, many of which have been relaunched in the past year. The change will let the magazine editors move faster in developing their sites. Editors had been frustrated with the time it took to make changes to their Web sites, and felt that the prior reporting structure held back traffic growth of their sites.
 
“The magazine Web sites are under the auspices of their editors in chief for content, and having them closely aligned will be better for their development,” said Maurie Perl, senior vp, chief communications officer at Condé Nast. The change also will allow CondéNet to better focus on the commercial sites, she said.

The Strangest Response to the Chris Ware Covers I’ve Seen

From The Opinionated Marketers:

Singled Out: The New Yorker’s Cover Switcheroo
 
No, I am not going to give up my New Yorker subscription because of it, but the November 27th edition (last week’s mag) had an odd bit of something-or-other surrounding their cover. As everyone knows, the New Yorker covers are works of art unto themselves. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has a framed cover or two around, and I’ve certainly been in plenty of bathrooms that had a cover on the wall. (The guest bathroom at one college friend’s house was papered in NY covers.)
 
If the November 27th edition had shown up with no comment on the cover, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. It wouldn’t have been my all time favorite, or the all time worst. Just kind of middlin’ blah. But on the inside, the editors reveal that there were four different covers for the week. I just happened to luck into the kind-of-boring one that was the most like a traditional NY cover, but not as interesting as the ones that someone, somewhere got.
Even that wouldn’t have irked me until… Read and be amazed.

The December 4 Issue Is Scaring Me

It is just so good. So good, in fact, that it threatens to be a CGI—a Completely Good Issue, from GOAT to reviews (I’ll leave out the Caption Contest since there’s an element of randomness and bafflement to that)—and there’s been more than one CGI in the past few months. What’s more, there’s a pleasing plethora of women contributors to this issue, and between Elizabeth Kolbert’s transcendent picture-book review (with a kicker that will squeeze your heart like a fistful of Play-Doh) and Margaret Talbot’s Bratz story, there appears to be some kind of writerly celebration going on. A gleeful Munchkin song on the departure of the Wicked Witch of the West? Whatever it is, it’s music to my ears. All that’s missing is Nancy Franklin—as the DJ says in Valley Girl, “Like, come back soon, y’know?”

My Interview With Roz Chast for Newsday

New Yorker Cartoonist: These Days, She’s Changing Her Toon
By Emily Gordon
Special to Newsday
November 26, 2006
For a public humorist, Roz Chast is admirably discreet. She laughs often and may occasionally say, “La la la la la,” as the people in her New Yorker cartoons do, but her humor is also decidedly ironic. The New York Times has described her as “small, blond, bespectacled and self-deprecating—equal parts Mia Farrow and Woody Allen.” In person, whether she’s onstage reading her cartoons to a fanatically attentive audience, casing the umbrella rack at an upscale drugstore or considering the oddness of eyebrows, she’s an appealingly diplomatic personage.
Racing through the 400 pages of her newest and biggest collection, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006 (Bloomsbury, 400 pp., $45), Chast fans will see her irony in all its dimensions, as well as her sympathy with many (though not all) of her fellow humans—especially put-upon children and parents. Theories of Everything, which documents the best of Chast’s creations over nearly three decades, demonstrates that her range far exceeds the surreal living-room drama and the ominous doily. “For a while I was doing more domestic-type cartoons, when my kids were younger,” she says. “I still do them, but not as much.”
One of the persistent delights in Theories of Everything is Chast’s precise—if not precisely accurate—documentation of peculiar objects. Outer space and amoebas make many appearances in this book, too (Chast also contributes drawings to science magazines), as well as pointed political cartoons. Mortality and melancholy often loom, as does a cheerfully narrated sense of foreboding.
Chast was born in Brooklyn in 1954. In an unusually personal cartoon, she recounts how the kids in her neighborhood would explore only as far as a certain street; she’s more or less the same way now when driving in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband, humor writer Bill Franzen. When she needs directions, she says, she takes a map in which every street is labeled and enlarges it: “Ideally, I’d like to enlarge it so that each street was exactly the same size as the real street, and so you could follow along. One mile equals one mile!” In the stories of her drawings, “Writing is always patching together stuff that happened, stuff that never happened, stuff you wish happened, stuff you would dread happening, somebody you knew that lived in your building, somebody you’ve never met.”
After growing up as the best artist in the class, she became one of many such artists at the Rhode Island School of Design. It was at the Art Students League in New York that, she says, she learned more of her technique. Cartooning seems to have been in her blood from her early years, when she worshipped the work of Charles Addams (her parents subscribed to The New Yorker) and devoured “Krazy Kat” and “Nancy.” She still lives pretty close to the page: “I love the medium [of drawing] because it’s so simple, in a way; it’s just pen and paper,” she says.
She has mastered the elaborately painted Ukrainian Easter eggs known as pysanky, and loves their controllable scale: “When you look at books of pysanky decoration, they all work with geometry.” Many of her cartoons, and her preoccupations, similarly end up being about (slightly awry) organization. She loves the crammed surfaces and spaces of New York City, and recalls one Upper East Side coffee shop: “I loved how everything looked behind the counter. Everything was just crammed in—a turkey roasting on a spit, cereal boxes, pickles and then the water glasses. Every square inch was used, and I just loved it.”
When Chast draws, the light from the bulb illuminating the drawing at hand is almost all she can see; cartoon figures emerge with their own ideas and hilariously formless wardrobes. She relishes talking about the key moments in the cartoons—the tidy, complete worlds they make on a panel or a page—more than chatting about her actual life. When ABC Family animated some of her work not long ago, she was delighted to see one of the classic Chast ladies “walking” across the screen. Ultimately, though, the involvement of a slew of executives and committees took too much of the fun out of the world she had created. In the end, “It’s just about telling the story—and it sounds so cheesy to say it, but communicating a very specific feeling or thought, hopefully a funny one.”
Some of the standout cartoons in Theories of Everything are multi-page, autobiographical tales that she drew first for DoubleTake magazine. They involved adventurous traveling, and she’d love to take more trips, but still has a teenage daughter at home, “so I have to be really careful with projects so that I don’t take on more things.” (She also has a son in college.) Meanwhile, she and Steve Martin have collaborated on a children’s alphabet book to be published in 2007. If some of Chast’s life has to be lived outside the bright circle of her pen, it’s a safe bet that hers is the life to have.
Note: This version varies slightly from the published story.

Reader Tips Make Me Happy: Mouly, Spiegelman, &c. at Rocketship

Google Alerts or no Google Alerts, I can’t keep up with every New Yorker-related event in the city/world. That’s why it’s so great when people send in tips like this:

Just wanted to give you a heads-up that Rocketship, a comic book store in Brooklyn, will be hosting a “Big Fat Little Lit” reception/signing with Art Spiegelman, Francoise Mouly, Kim Deitch & David Mazzucchelli this Friday at 8. There will be an open wine/beer bar.
 
Rocketship is located at 208 Smith Street, near the Bergen Street stop (F or G).

“Best” Justly Slammed by New York Times

Vindication at last. Lola Ogunnaike writes:

Mr. Troutwine is not alone in thinking that an e-mail sender who writes “Best,” then a name, is offering something close to a brush-off. He said he chooses his own business sign-offs in a descending order of cordiality, from “Warmest regards” to “All the best” to a curt “Sincerely.”
 
When Kim Bondy, a former CNN executive, e-mailed a suitor after a dinner date, she used one of her preferred closings: “Chat soon.” It was her way of saying, “The date went well, let’s do it again,” she said.
 
She may have been the only one who thought that. The return message closed with the dreaded “Best.” It left her feeling as though she had misread the evening. “I felt like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of formal. I don’t think he liked me,’ ” she said, laughing. “A chill came with the ‘Best.’ ” They have not gone out since.
 
“Best” does have its fans, especially in the workplace, where it can be an all-purpose step up in warmth from messages that end with no sign-off at all, just the sender coolly appending his or her name.
 
“I use ‘Best’ for all of my professional e-mails,” said Kelly Brady, a perky publicist in New York. “It’s friendly, quick and to the point.”

“Perky publicist”! That’s catty for the NYT, but it speaks volumes. (It’s the perky and the alliteration, publicist friends, not the publicist alone.) I do use “Best” myself, by the way. If you see it (with work-related exceptions), or the even more dreaded blank subject line, it is not an ambiguous sign.

George S. Kaufman Site Launches

Welcome! More, from Baltimore Broadway World (or something like that—it’s always so hard to ferret out the title on sites like this):

On November 16th, on what would have been his 117th birthday, the first official website for America’s greatest comic dramatist, George S. Kaufman, was launched.
 
The site – www.georgeskaufman.com – contains a wealth of information, graphics, and links about Kaufman, his life, and the Broadway classics he created with, among others, Moss Hart, Edna Ferber, and the Gershwins, such as You Can’t Take It With You, Dinner at Eight, and Of Thee I Sing. Included, of course, are some of his immortal witticisms, such as his comment on the much-altered film of his play Stage Door: “They should have renamed it Screen Door.” The website should be essential to theater scholars, students, fans of Broadway history, and anyone interested in a good laugh.
 
The George S. Kaufman website has been edited and written by Laurence Maslon, Associate Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and editor of the Library of America edition, Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies. The Boston Phoenix called that 2004 volume “the best collection of plays that anyone’s put out in years” and it was enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Times by Woody Allen. The nine plays in that volume are highlighted on the website with full plot synopses, commentary, cast breakdowns, dialogue selections and links for each comedy: The Royal Family, Animal Crackers, June Moon, Once in a Lifetime, Of Thee I Sing, Dinner at Eight, Stage Door, You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. In addition, another fifteen plays and musicals are profiled in section named “Critics’ Choice,” along with an extended catalogue of Kaufman’s lesser known works. The website is supplemented with a full biography, filmography, and archive section, which contains more than a dozen articles by Maslon, glossaries, and biographies of collaborators, all suitable for downloads. The web design is by Pink Rat, LLC.
 
Anne Kaufman Schneider, the playwright’s daughter and executrix of his estate commented, “I’m thrilled that my father and his collaborators are going to reach new generations of theatergoers and admirers of great comedy through the Internet. Not that my father would have known the difference between the Internet and a hair net, but I’m sure he’d have been thrilled, too.”
 
If Eugene O’Neill represents the tragic mask of American drama, George S. Kaufman can lay claim to its smiling counterpart. No other comic dramatist in America has enjoyed more popular success and perennial influence or has been more fortunate in his choice of collaborators. His particular brand of sharp comedy and satire produced forty-five Broadway comedies and musicals; also renowned as a humorist and wit, he was a charter member of the famed Algonquin Round Table. Kaufman was also the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for drama, including the first Pulitzer ever awarded to a musical.
 
Kaufman once remarked that “Satire is what closes on Saturday night,” but, ironically, there has not been a Saturday night since 1925 when a George S. Kaufman comedy hasn’t been playing somewhere in America.

Caitlin Flanagan and the News We Knew

Flanagan will no longer be contributing to The New Yorker, a well-substantiated report heard around these parts some months ago. As you know, I’m not in the business of rumor-mongering, hence the non-mongering of said rumor. But I’m quietly, not meanly, glad. Flanagan’s not an idiot, but she doesn’t belong in The New Yorker. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Some days later: I think the official word is that she’s no longer on staff, but will still be contributing occasionally. I stand by my first post! And to the reader who wrote asking why I’d refrained from mongering, maybe I should address that in a separate post. Aren’t there enough media gossip sites? Not a rhetorical question, necessarily—I really want to know.

The Squib Report: The Best American Complete New Yorker

Martin Schneider, the man behind the admirably focused and semi-extant Between the Squibs, has kindly agreed to contribute an occasional column, in which he’ll spelunk into the Complete New Yorker archives and tell us what he’s uncovered. Here’s the column’s debut. Martin filed this yonks and yonks ago (as Georgina and Brian would say), but I got all busy and distracted, so I’m just posting it now; mea culpa! I’m sure you’ll agree it’s well worth the wait.
 
Recently I started Between the Squibs, a blog about the New Yorker DVD set. And then ever so slightly more recently I abandoned said blog. Fortunately, some months later, Emily has kindly granted me a little space here in her demesne. Some friends of mine and also some kind blog-commenters let me know what a shame it was that I’d given up “BtS,” and I found it hard to explain why I found it hard to write to a public consisting of the purchasers of a DVD set, hard to write about content that has a $60 price of entry and is not easily duplicated.
 
And then in September, long after “BtS” had gone dark, right about when I started here, I began cultivating some inklings about hidden utility, hidden Emdashes utility, in the “Best American” series. You know, those Houghton Mifflin books, The Best American Essays, The Best American Travel Writing, The Best American Short Stories…there are others. Those books, you see, almost exactly fulfilled the mandate that I had originally laid out for “BtS”: to act as a sensible and independent (in the sense of existing outside of my head) guide to genuine highlights to be found in the Complete New Yorker DVDs. At least for recent years.
 
Because—and surely this will not come as a surprise—The New Yorker really does dominate those books. It’s the rare volume that doesn’t have three New Yorker articles reprinted in full and another dozen listed in the appendix. I know, because I went to my local library and copied down all the New Yorker titles in every “Best American” book I could find—specifically the Travel, Essay, and Story ones. Right now I have 19 “Best Travel” articles pinned to my CNY’s reading-list panel, 133 “Best Essays,” and 93 “Best Stories.” “Best Science”? I’ve only got 15 of those so far. And all of those lists are far from complete.
 
“BtS,” your days always were numbered. But I’ve had a ball dipping into those volumes, and you’ll be hearing about some of my discoveries in the weeks to come. In fact, maybe I’ll even release the spellbook to the apprentice wizards reading this and just, doggone it, compile a list of the New Yorker pieces that have been cited in those books as a resource, and then Emily can post it here so that you all don’t have to swarm actual, physical libraries and even, heaven forfend, pester actual physical librarians for the treasures. Stay tuned for that.
 
I’ll leave you with this: the first significant discovery to emanate from my Mifflin Hunt was David Schickler. I didn’t have the vaguest idea that he was this good. He may be a little showy, but I prefer to see it as “originality” and “verve” just now, thank you. “Jamaica” is definitely the best story I have ever read that combines the hobbies of archery and book clubs—and “Wes Amerigo’s Giant Fear” is even better. Go read.

Radio Silence

Strange when you don’t post and the world doesn’t explode; you get kind of used to not using the web as a Tron-like shield to fight with the minute hand, or something like that. Nevertheless, I have links, links, and more links, and also, more important, a brand-new edition of Martin Schneider’s incomparable column The Squib Report, which you will definitely want to read, believe me. Onward with online encouragement and dissemination of extreme magazine allegiance! (Truly sorry, G.O. Just sometimes, maybe when I’m getting back into the swing of things, I need multisyllables.)