Monthly Archives: December 2006

Love in the Time of Bird Flu

Ryan: Whatever, you’re in love with her and so you’re trying to sabotage me.
Xander: In love? What are you, a Shakespeare play? People from now say “you wanna hit that.”
—The Burg (which seems to be better written and plotted suddenly; I’ve missed a bunch of episodes because sometimes, or even often, I find this show unwatchable, since I suspect it is to a number of Williamsburg residents what Rent was to a number of East Village residents, but I always seem to come back anyway. That’s how the soaps getcha! Suddenly, though, I’m liking these people more. Something’s up.)

Four on George W.S. Trow

Scott McLemee writes in his Inside Higher Ed column: “Nobody was smarter than George Trow about the bad faith that comes with being ‘plugged in’ to streams of randomized data. He once defined a TV program as ‘a little span of time made friendly by repetition.’ (Friendly, the way a con man is friendly.) That was long before most of us started spending ever more of our lives in front of another kind of screen.”
 
In The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg writes a moving tribute. “His impact on the magazine was as noticeable as it was, at first, anonymous. His unsigned Talk of the Town stories—chronicling popular music, the remnants of Edith Wharton-era “society,” Harlem flash, and the new culture of marketing and strobelike celebrity—broke the mold of fusty “visits” and facty catalogues. The pieces were jazzy, telegraphic, emphatic.” As noted earlier, selections from “In the Context of No-Context” and other Trow pieces, including a report (with Hertzberg) from an animated conversation about a Bob Dylan concert, are online. (And while you’re there, listen to the vintage WBAI Bob Fass and Dylan extravaganza. It will blow your mind.)
Mark Feeney wrote Trow’s obituary for The New York Observer: “Mandarin prose and mandarin pose often coincide, of course. What’s rare is their sharing the page with an abiding sense of civic virtue. That idea of patriotic engagement sets him apart from Henry James, with whom one might think Trow would neatly align. James often seemed slightly pained at being American. Trow would have fit right in as a James character, except that he would have terrified James.”
 
And Greg Bottoms wrote about Trow in the September 2005 Believer: “He’s a cranky conservative in a way, a modernist at heart, some kind of neo-New Critic trafficking in the language and outré fragmented and self-conscious structures of ‘literary postmodernism,’ especially its accent on how narrative and meaning are constructed, in an effort to take grand swings at the mores and effects of postmodern culture, as if it were a smiley-face piñata.”

Further Banned Words and Phrases

Actually, just one today, and it’s not really a word or a phrase. It’s this: all lowercase everything all the time. You’re off the hook, E.L., a writer I know—I just decide to forgive him, because his plea for understanding of the lowercasing is a signature to all his emails, which indicates forethought and genuine regret. PK, you too can breathe easy as far as I’m concerned, since you had a well-researched esoteric-typographer rationale (remind me what/who it was so I can link to it). IMs—they call for lowercase; speed is paramount, so spare your precious bodily shift key. The occasional quickie email. Of course! Of course, me too. But real emails, which are, after all, letters, deserve real capitalization. Especially proper names. It’s all we have in the end, after all. You don’t want your headstone all lowercase, do you? I thought not.
 
I know this is a sensitive subject, and I expect abuse. Nevertheless, I think if you’re going to observe the conventions of sentence-writing at all, you should also use the proper capitalization that those poor elementary-school teachers ground into you till they were themselves ground down to little bits of chalk and Cheetoh dust. And if it’s a business email or an email to anyone you like even remotely, and might even want to bowl over, and you’re over the age of 17, for the love of Fowler please use apostrophes where they’re needed. You’re probably not a whimsical Modernist poet or a pioneer black feminist or so self-effacingly humble you can’t even cap “I” or a Rodeo Drive blonde on a Sidekick who doesn’t know any better (ground-down educators notwithstanding). So…enough lowercasing everything. Especially names. Just do that much for me.

SF Event: Mixing Babies and Drinks With Lisa Brown

From that medley of scamps at McSweeney’s:

San Francisco: This Wednesday, December 6th, Candystore will be hosting a reading, signing, and various slide-show projections with Evany Thomas (The Secret Language of Sleep) and Lisa Brown (the Baby Be of Use series). There will be Baby Mix Me a Drink-inspired cocktails, snacks of all kinds, store discounts, and other merriment.
 
SAN FRANCISCO
Wednesday, December 6
7-9pm
Candystore
3153 16th Street (at Valencia)
San Francisco, CA
www.candystore-sf.com

Carl Gable of Norcross, Georgia, Please Get in Touch

It’s time to revive the Cartoon Caption Contest interviews! (Like this one, or this, or this.) As our comrade at Blog About Town has pointed out, and as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has loyally reported (Newsweek, too), Mr. Gable not only won a previous caption contest—think of the odds! Especially since the winning caption was, in fact, funny!—but is now a finalist in another. If anything merits bringing back the interviews (which several readers have been asking about, in any case), this is it. I googled you, Carl Gable, but I find this method is often easier. Can’t wait to hear from a legend in the making! I see you’re also a graphic designer, so we can chat about that, too. Three cheers whether you win or not; seriously, you’re clearly some kind of super-evolved caption-man, destined to outwrite and, indeed, eclipse us all. Except, of course, for Roz Chast.
 
Update: Look for some Gable goodness later this week. And I see I’ve mentioned him before, after his abominably good first win. This’ll be fun.

Honoring Politkovskaya, Gladwell’s Secret Admirer, and Keillor’s Command

Via Small Spiral Notebook, there’s an important PEN event this Wednesday:

The Writer’s Conscience: Remembering Anna Politkovskaya & Russia’s Forgotten War
 
When: Wednesday, December 6 @ 7pm
 
Where: Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center: 365 Fifth Ave., NYC
 
“An evening of reading from Anna Politkovskaya’s work and a conversation about the costs of an ongoing but forgotten war.”

Musa Klebnikob, Kati Marton, Dana Priest, David Remnick, among others will feature in the night’s event. I am itching for the opportunity to hear Remnick speak on the subject. He was the Washington Post correspondent in Moscow in the final years of the Soviet Union. The New York Review of Books features a review of his Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker. It is an outstanding overview of the book’s contents as well as Remnick’s approach to reporting and attitude toward his subjects. [NYRB:] “A Far-Flung Correspondent.”

In other news, a blogger hearts Malcolm Gladwell (“the work’s gone all sparkly”) and has gotten terribly behind on reading the magazine (“the blasted things just keep coming and coming, and i keep picking them up out of the mail pile and stashing them at the bottom of the magazine pile because i’m determined to fight my way through the whole wretched mess without cheating or skimping or missing anything”). Meanwhile, ex-New Yorkerite Garrison Keillor hearts Christmas.

Review: James Ellroy’s “My Dark Places”

If you liked The Black Dahlia, you’ll love (possibly) my review of James Ellroy’s My Dark Places, published in The Nation in 1996. This is my first attempt at uploading a PDF, which seems like an easier way of dealing with clips when I don’t have them in text form. Let’s try it! Hey, that’s handy—at least in this browser, it just comes right up on screen.
(Note from 2011: R.I.P. John Leonard, who assigned me that piece, and farewell to Elaine’s, where John took me to meet Ellroy. What a great memory that is.)

Brian Sholis on Gopnik on Proust

Brian has made it to more events like this in recent months than I have.
By the way, I know super-short posts like this look kinda funny in my new design. I usually try to fill them out so they look nicer, but I can’t always do that. Use them as an opportunity to enjoy Jesse Ewing’s gorgeous illustrations unmuddied by yards of distracting text. Speaking of Jesse, he sent in an excellent X-Rea contribution the other day, which I will post. (Yours, too, other recent X-Rea tipsters!)

Haunted Pencils at the Old New Yorker Office

I just remembered today that I had a few dozen unpublished posts on the old Blogspot site, which I all but abandoned when I moved over here. I think I’m just going to put them up this week, without comment. So if you notice that a few of my news items seem to have a little dust on them, good! Time hooks are overrated, I’ve always thought. Here’s the first one.
From the Amazon reader comments for Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker, the Ved Mehta memoir:

I never subscribed to the New Yorker during William Shawn’s time as editor. But, a few years ago I snuck into the old offices on 43rd Street. The writers cubicles were gone but, there outlines were still on the floor. There were odd pieces here and there of the writers who once filled the spaces were scattered about. A pencil here, an old wooden easel there, an old office chair, notes and drawings scribbled on a wall. Mehta fills in the space and one can almost here the clacking of typewriters and muffled conversations as writers work in a unique environment of a unique magazine.