Monthly Archives: February 2007

New Yorker Practically Tops GOOD List of Best Magazines; Also, Deadly Spiders

From the GOOD story (note that #1 is the 1961–1973 Esquire, i.e., not in print; that said, I’m not alone in thinking the current Esquire is damn fine reading):

2. The New Yorker

A rare cultural touchstone both relevant and revered nearly a century after its inception in 1925, The New Yorker has remained a beacon of intellectual clarity and incisive reporting to over-educated bourgeoisie far beyond the borders of Manhattan. With a design that has changed only imperceptibly over the decades (except for earth-shattering changes under mid-1990s editor Tina Brown,who allowed—gasp!—color and—the horror!—photographs), all that’s different at the magazine are the stories it covers. The New Yorker today is just as willing to publish a barely illustrated, three-part, 30,000-word jeremiad on climate change as founding editor Harold Ross was happy to devote an entire issue to one article on the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. This is not to mention the fiction, humor, poetry, criticism, and cartoons—all parts of a consistently brilliant editorial vision.

Thanks to Lisa Levy for the link! (By the way, what does “over-educated” mean? The world’s great scientists, leaders, philosophers, &c., and your average cabin boy or housewife of many an era, would surely consider most of us disconcertingly under-educated.)

Also, in case this week’s Burkhard Bilger story about venomous spiders is concerning you for any reason, here is the USA Spider Identification Chart, with suitably frightening illustrations; these are the spiders from which you, Ms. Muffet-like, should definitely run. The page includes an offer for a free spider identification poster of your own, and these good people will email you—as quickly as you may, unfortunately, need it—”Spider Bite FIRST AID information.” Godspeed!

A Reader Asks: Why Leave Out Dawn Powell?

Europhile Bailey Alexander writes:
Cherie Emily,
My name is Bailey Alexander and my husband and I live in Paris with a second home in Malta, but still manage a business in Seattle, albeit long distance. I rarely go back to the States, but I love reading the blogs, like Wolcott’s, your own, Glenn Greenwald, and Daily Kos.
My point? Well, I’ve always been a fan of The New Yorker as well as Dorothy Parker, certo, but why the conspicuous absence of our/America’s greatest comedic writer, Dawn Powell? She was the real deal, where Dorothy was more of an “It” personality. Dorothy could do the quip, the perfect short story every now and then, but Dawn did the novel. The novel.
Gore Vidal and Hemingway always acknowledged her as our finest satire queen and give/gave her the due she deserves, but why don’t you? Your site could prove the perfect position to launch Powell from cult status to religion, n’est pas?
She was not celebrated by the publishers of her time because she didn’t write about the war, but rather chose to focus on women and men on the make in New York, mostly from the Midwest, basically, most of those that made New York happen, culturally. She was the original doyenne of Greenwich Village; her satire is unmatched by or rather only equaled by Evelyn Waugh, etc.
Just curious.
A fan.
Bailey Alexander
Send letters for publication to letters@emdashes.com. If you’d prefer to remain anonymous, please let me know. Emails to my personal account are never published without permission.

Grafs: Chris Ware, Cartoons on iTunes, How The New Yorker Keeps Itself Together

Ms. Pac-Man isn’t the only new addition to the iTunes Store this week. The New Yorker magazine, in cooperation with RingTales, has released animated versions of some of its cartoons (iTunes link) as free downloads. The cartoons are about twenty seconds long; you can watch them via the iTunes Store or download them to your iPod. According to the description, new cartoons will appear three times a week. —MacUser

The staple on the top is from the Times mag. (You can tell because of the word “mixtapes.”) The staple on the bottom is from the New Yorker. Note how the David Remnick-approved fastener does what a staple is supposed to do. The two pointy ends fold down onto the crease, forming precious little crescent moons that keep the center-spread firmly in place. In stark contrast, the ends of the Times‘ staples stick out, ramrod-straight, just waiting to impale a misplaced fingertip…. —”Why Your ‘New York Times’ Mag Always Falls Apart,” Gawker [Still, the cover of The New Yorker tends to get mutilated quickly, especially if you carry it around for a solid eight or nine days; can’t have everything, though. Unless someone wants to invent a cover to slip the magazine into every week—I’d buy that, if it didn’t look too ridiculous.]

Chris Ware, sometimes described as an “alternative cartoonist” because his works are not quite comic books and not the normal graphic novels, opened a new exhibition, Chris Ware, with a talk and reception on February 16 at Sheldon. More than 350 attended, overflowing the auditorium…. To view and hear Chris Ware’s talk at Sheldon on February 16 click here: Chris Ware Talk. —”Exhibitions: Chris Ware,” Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery [Thanks, B.K.!]

Declaring that “the impact of slavery and segregation reaches into every facet of modern life,” administrators at Brown University announced on Saturday a number of new institutional projects, including programs to assist local public schools and a possible new research center on slavery and its legacies.
—David Glenn, “Brown U. Announces Projects in Response to Report on Its Role in the Slave Trade,” The Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription only; also see “Peculiar Institutions,” by Frances FitzGerald, in the September 12, 2005, New Yorker]

In addition to his New Yorker covers, [Arthur Getz] did hundreds of pen and ink spot illustrations for the magazine, as well as illustrations for Esquire, Fortune, The Nation and other publications. He also created murals for public spaces, including one for the 1939 World’s Fair. He was also a well-respected instructor at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, the University of Connecticut and other schools…. Feeling his name as an illustrator would interfere with his gallery work, he exhibited his gallery paintings for many years under the pseudonym of his middle name, “Kimmig.” —Charley Parker, “Arthur Getz,” Lines and Colors

Slate Magazine announced today that noted critic Ron Rosenbaum will write a bi-weekly culture column for the online magazine beginning Feb. 26…. Rosenbaum, described by David Remnick as “one of the most original journalists and writers of our time,” most recently wrote a culture column called “The Edgy Enthusiast” for the New York Observer. Many of his pieces have been collected in four volumes, the last titled “The Secret Parts of Fortune.” —”Ron Rosenbaum to Join Slate Magazine,” Business Wire

David Remnick Demonstrates the Correct Usage of “Hopefully”

In his Comment this week about Al Gore, global warming, &c.:

Even the national pastime was in danger. “But,” Gore added hopefully, “I have faith in baseball commissioner George W. Bush when he says, ‘We will find the steroid users if we have to tap every phone in America!’ ”

There you have it. That’s how to employ “hopefully”; it means “with hope.” My mother taught me to say “with any luck” when the world’s bad influences whisper phrases like “Hopefully, I will win the Nobel Prize in Literature.” I pass that along to you, hopefully. If anyone is getting ready to recite that the English language is always evolving, I will globally warm them.

NYC Reading: Tomaž Šalamun, Aleš Debeljak, Andrew Zawacki, and Brian Henry

This just in. It should be a terrific evening!
Tomaž Šalamun, Aleš Debeljak, Andrew Zawacki, and Brian Henry
Sunday, March 4 @ 5:00 PM
The Bitter End, NYC
*Free*
147 Bleecker Street (btw. Thompson & LaGuardia)
For directions and info: www.speakeasynyc.com
Tomaž Šalamun has published thirty collections of poetry in Slovenian. His books of poems in English translation include Poker; The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun; The Shepherd, the Hunter; The Four Questions of Melancholy; and Feast.
Aleš Debeljak has published six books of poems in Slovenian. His books of poems in English translation include Anxious Moments; Dictionary of Silence; The City and the Child; and the forthcoming Unended (translated with Andrew Zawacki). Debeljak is also a prolific editor, critic, and translator (of John Ashbery, among others).
Andrew Zawacki is the author of two books of poetry––Anabranch and By Reason of Breakings––as well as editor of the anthology Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 and co-editor of Verse.
Brian Henry is the author of four books of poetry––Astronaut, American Incident, Graft, and Quarantine––and co-editor of Verse.

Paging Nicholson Baker

If you live in Victoria, British Columbia, you can scoop up a whole bunch of vintage magazines for a song, including many ’30s and ’40s New Yorkers, because the public library there is dumping all its messy old paper onto the bargain table. “A separate table will be reserved for the oldest magazines, which will be sold by silent auction.” Indeed.
David Remnick will quite rightly be winning The Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year Award from the National Press Foundation.
Leaves You Wanting Less calls David Rakoff’s writeup of his Woody Allen binge “positively Kael-worthy.”
As for Zbigniew: I naturally assumed the parents in question were poets (who are often drunk), and the name was a tribute to the great Zbigniew Herbert, whose deathless “Mr. Cogito” poems were introduced to me by Phillis Levin, who has herself been in The New Yorker not a few times.

Investigation: Bruce McCall’s Wheel of Article Ideas

Happy 82nd birthday, New Yorker! (The magazine debuted on Feb. 17, 1925, with the Feb. 21 issue.) I asked Martin Schneider, Emdashes Squib Report bureau chief, to do a little sleuthing into a corner of Bruce McCall cartoon on pp. 168-69 of this week’s anniversary issue.
As Emdashes’s resident archival expert, I found McCall’s cartoon of the first-ever guided tour of The New Yorker‘s offices highly irresistible. My favorite invention is the “Wheel of Article Ideas,” which pokes fun at the identifiably New Yorker blend of subjects—often fascinating, often arcane, sometimes too trendy, sometimes too dusty, but never, ever straightforwardly or unselfconsciously au courant. (After all, any magazine can be merely up to date; only a special magazine asks what in going on in J.Lo.’s brain.)
Does there lurk in this inscrutable amalgam a hidden code, each item pointing to a different era or major leitmotif of The New Yorker? Were I better versed in New Yorker lore, would it be within my grasp to crack that code and watch the different shards of the enigma interlock into a grander pattern? (The other possibility is that it’s just a cartoon.)
Anyway, let’s get to it. Did McCall include any topics that The New Yorker has already handled? Armed with the bottomless Complete New Yorker, I decided to find out.
LOGS
In the 2/13/1984 issue, The New Yorker ran a poem by Karl Shapiro called “The Sawdust Logs.” Quoth Shapiro, “Why shouldn’t sawdust have its day?”
NAPS
In the 5/31/1941 issue is a cute little TOTT about two young women who are prepared for their suburban journey out of Grand Central. They produce an alarm clock and nap right up to one minute before their train arrives in Scarsdale. Then they scamper off the train.
OXEN
In the 8/24/1946 issue, Berton Roueche reports on a day in the company of Percy Peck Beardsley, breeder of Devon oxen, who plies his weary trade in the bleak and pitiless plains of…Connecticut. In my opinion, this is a dig at the Shawn era, what with its E.J. Kahn “Staff of Life” treatises on wheat and the like.
BALLET DESIGN
Joan Acocella’s 5/28/2001 review of a Jerome Robbins bio cites “Balanchine’s grand, unfolding design.” Arlene Croce’s 11/17/1997 showcase on Merrill Ashley refers to “the design of classical dancing.” I suppose any ballet production has set and costume designers, and the corps may have designs on the prima ballerina’s primo position, but I take “design” here to mean something closer to an engineering term. Essentially an absurd juxtaposition.
J.LO I.Q.
Astoundingly, The New Yorker has never devoted any significant space to the question of Ms. Lopez’s intellectual gifts. In the 10/2/2000 issue, however, Christopher Buckley did float the idea of someday replacing future VP Dick Cheney with J.Lo. So back off, hatas! If “Oxen” is the kind of profile Shawn would have run, here we surely hark back to the Tina Brown era.
MAMBO
This seems to be a dig at the uneasy fit that such a steamy, sultry subject would be in the pages of The New Yorker, and McCall certainly has a point: The New Yorker has never produced much copy on the subject. There’s a TOTT from 4/18/1988 about an uptick in dance-course enrollments in the wake of Dirty Dancing. There was also that 2000 Oscar Hijuelos book The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which got some coverage too.
IRAN’S BILLBOARD CRISIS
No such thing. I take this somewhat absurd reference to be essentially a compliment. The implication is that The New Yorker has a knack for producing fresh coverage—perhaps at times perversely—even on hot spots that have already received plenty of exposure. Who can forget that 2002 look at trampoline fetishism in Karbala?
FERNANDO PÓO
What a marvelously supple reference. Fernando Póo, Fernando Pó, and Fernão do Pó refer to both a person and a place. He was a Portuguese explorer who in 1472 discovered an island off the west coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea that for centuries was named after him. In 1979 it assumed the name Bioko after some sort of revolution. His name was also applied to certain places in Cameroon, which he also explored, this fact leading to the only mention I could find in The New Yorker—a 2/18/1961 TOTT about “Cameroun.” Other Fernandos mentioned in The New Yorker include Meirelles, Luis Mattos da Matta, Scianna, Medina, Collor, Henrique, Ferrer, Ochoa, Valenzuela, and Nottebohm. The Fernandos created by ABBA and Billy Crystal have apparently escaped The New Yorker‘s notice.
JAM
Oh, could we get any more quaint and cozy? Why not just choose the tea cosy, for that matter? As it happens, jam figures prominently in the searing 9/10/1966 TOTT on the National Fancy Food and Confection Show. So there.
MILLARD FILLMORE
Ah, our most risible president. Does anyone even know whether he was any good or not? His amusingness seems a priori. Alas, the world awaits the definitive New Yorker treatment of the subject. In the meantime, Morton Hunt’s 11/3/1956 account of the presidential race of 1856 will have to do.
Can anybody read that last one? “Zoo”? I await further clarification (shout? murmur?) from Mr. McCall.

Extra! New Yorker Cartoons Talk!

Roz Chast said recently that it took so much effort to get her characters to walk across a screen she wondered if she’d stop having fun with them, cool though the technology was. Art Spiegelman once said in jest that he’d agree to make Maus into a movie only if he could use real mice. (Then, I’ve heard, that wag Errol Morris called up to say he’d be happy to work on the project, since he’s good with rodents.) For some reason, the only people who know about this seem to be a couple of podcast directories. But you’re going to be excited about it: New Yorker cartoonists are making animated short-shorts, available as a video podcast from RingTales, and the RSS feed is here. I’ve already watched a fetching Charles Barsotti scenario in which a receptionist has an unusual suggestion for a caller on hold. I’m going to watch more now. The animations seem to be already existing cartoons slightly expanded for the shorts; remember Eric Lewis’s cartoon “I should have bought more crap”? Here it is in motion. Besides Lewis, other contributors so far include Danny Shanahan, Sam Gross, Frank Cotham, Tom Cheney, Peter Steiner, Christopher Weyant, cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, and, a nice surprise, Chast too. If this is the direction newyorker.com 2.0 will be taking within a few weeks (the website’s being completely redesigned as we speak), I’m enthusiastically for it. You think I’m enthusiastically for everything? Ah, there’s where you’re wrong.
If readers get to vote, or something YouTubey like that, on which cartoons will be sprinkled with pixie dust and come alive like the Nutcracker toys, my pick this week would be Drew Dernavich’s nutty, funny fish ladies, who would wiggle most entertainingly. Still, movement isn’t everything. All the cartoons in this issue, especially this fantastic George Booth drawing and this ridiculous J.C. Duffy concoction, are perfect just as their two-dimensional, stationary selves.
Update: There’s now a press release with details: “Subscribers to the free advertiser-supported podcast will receive three new animations of The New Yorker “RingTales” each week.”

Remembering the Name of the Weschler One Sees

Emdashes reader Tom McDonald notes:
I was tickled to see a piece in praise of Lawrence Weschler’s 1982 book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin, in The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly. Maybe it was just a slow week for the Seattle art scene, I don’t know. My own copy of the book has a folded-up copy of the mid-to-late 1990s New Yorker “follow-up” article by LW on RI.

“24” Hour Party Patriots

From yesterday’s Rush Limbaugh Show transcript. Limbaugh responds to a caller (link to the Jane Mayer story in original; there’s a video of Mayer talking about her story, with clips from 24, on newyorker.com):

You talk about credibility. Why does Bush have no credibility? It goes beyond Bush having no credibility. The great danger here is that the military doesn’t have credibility. As an institution, it is in the process of being destroyed by the left, by the Democrats, and by the Drive-By Media. Even to this day… There was an article in New Yorker magazine by Jane Mayer, and I spoke to Jane Mayer for this story because I was asked to. It’s a story about torture in the TV show “24”. There are a whole bunch of different approaches that Jane Mayer takes, but basically she went out and she found people in the US military who are saying, “’24’, stop the torture, because you’re making US soldiers think it’s okay to do!” I could not believe this when I read this stuff. As an aside, I told my friends at “24”, “Don’t do this. This is a woman that tried to destroy Clarence Thomas with Jill Abramson, who’s the DC bureau chief of the New York Times,” but it was too late.
 
We’ve gotten to the point now where a television show is being used to destroy the US military, folks! A television show! We’ve had Abu Ghraib. We’ve had Club Gitmo. There is an all-out assault on the US military. Forget the president. We now are living in a world where I don’t know what percentage of the population of this country thinks the US military is indeed the focus of evil in the modern world. Now, many of the American left have always thought that and they’ve despised the military, and they have done everything they can to discredit it over the years, but it has just gotten magnified and worse — and now the US military is nothing but a bunch of rapists, predators, murderers!