Monthly Archives: April 2007

Tonight, Tonight, You’ll See Gaiman, Wilsey, Ames, &c. Tonight

Take the cultural advice of The New York Times for once and do two New Yorker-y things tonight. From the Times‘s email newsletter UrbanEye:

Park yourself at 37 Arts, a gleaming new West Side performance complex, for a literary evening tonight. First up: the cartoonist Neal Gaiman, the African children’s book author Marguerite Abouet and Sean Wilsey, the author of “Oh the Glory of it All,” the poor-little-rich-boy memoir that Michiko Kakatuani called “by turns heartfelt, absurd, self-indulgent, self-abasing, silly and genuinely moving.” Then Mr. Gaiman joins Jonathan Ames, Pico Iyer and Edgar Oliver, the Poe of the East Village, to tell tales of home and travel for the Moth storytelling series. Just by staying in your seat you’ll seem erudite.

Sean Wilsey talk, 6 p.m, and the Moth readings, 8 p.m., 37 Arts, 450 West 37th Street, Clinton, (212) 560-8912; $15 and $30.

You Will Now Vote for The New Yorker to Win the Webby for Best Copy/Writing

Do it! Here’s how. True, you have to sign up, but it takes two seconds and it’s an adorable interface. Vote for a bunch of other things, too, of your choosing—or, if you prefer, of my choosing: various NPR and Guardian sites and podcasts, Threadless, Design Observer, Kinetic, The Office, The Museum of Kitschy Stitches, the Shortbus site, COLOURlovers, Beliefnet, Flickr, The School of Visual Arts, The Colbert Report, Salon, Moleskine, The Library of Congress, We Feel Fine, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, the Poetry Foundation, &c. But this one isn’t optional! That’s how it’ll look when you’re done, after the jump (click to enlarge). Vote now; winners announced Tuesday, May 1, the same day as the National Magazine Awards—it’s a big, big day all around.
Update: Voting is now closed, but prayer, voodoo, and OCD tricks are certainly worth a try!

Continue reading →

Video: Remnick Remembers Yeltsin

David Remnick speaks energetically and eloquently to a silent, invisible NBC News interviewer about the late Boris Yeltsin; Remnick pronounces “Chechnya” just like a Russian (as far as I can tell), and Eustace Tilley provides quality control from his shoulder like either a stern angel or an impudent devil. If you leave the MSN site running after the Yeltsin segment but switch windows on your browser, as I did, you may be startled by some disgruntled snuffling; that’s the next segment, in which “for the first time ever, the rare and elusive Borneo rhino is seen on video in the wild”; its nostrils are impressive.

NYC 4/25: Jane Kramer Moderates “At Home in Europe”

An event co-sponsored by PEN and the NYU Creative Writing Program:

April 25 | At Home in Europe
With Marguerite Abouet, Geert Mak, Zafer Åženocak, Janne Teller, Ilija Trojanow; moderated by Jane Kramer of The New Yorker
When: Wednesday, April 25
Where: Hemmerdinger Hall at NYU: 100 Washington Square East
What time: 3–4:30 p.m.
Over the last decade, Europe has undergone some of the most radical changes in its recent history. These writers take a look at the impact of multiculturalism, migration, and economic and other social shifts, and discuss their implications for the stability of individual countries and the creation of a broader European identity. Ilija Trojanow has undertaken a reverse migration of sorts, leaving Europe to settle in various places in sub-Saharan Africa and then chronicling many of these far-flung corners of the world. Geert Mak is a journalist, historian, and author of the forthcoming In Europe: A Journey Through the Twentieth Century. While working as a macroeconomist for the United Nations, Janne Teller lived in Dar-es-Salaam, Maputo, Brussels, and New York and much of her writing focuses on European and multicultural identity. Zafer Åženocak has written widely on the issues of diversity in Germany, the Turkish diaspora, and the short distances and large fears of a globalizing Europe. Marguerite Abouet left Abidjan, Ivory Coast at the age of 12 to study in France. Her graphic novel Aya details the promising, prosperous period of the 1970s in Ivory Coast.

As always, if anyone can go (I’ll be at work) and can write up a quick review of the event, I’ll be delighted. Also, you’ll want to read my friend Kazim Ali’s galling account of a recent episode on his university campus in this free society of ours.

Hans Koning, 1921-2007

From the Times obituary:

Hans Koning, whose outpouring of more than 40 fiction and nonfiction books ranged from exotic travel to erotic trauma to a withering indictment of Christopher Columbus, died on Friday at his home in Easton, Conn. He was 85.
His daughter Christina Koning confirmed the death, but declined to give a cause.
Mr. Koning wrote novels, plays, screenplays, travel books, young adult books and many magazine articles, particularly for The New Yorker. He also did translations. His stated goal was to reflect on injustice and the essential state of being human “in a hidden way.” But his strongly leftist politics were seldom camouflaged. Cont’d.

One Thing I Haven’t Seen Mentioned in the Virginia Tech Coverage

The local cell-phone networks were jammed throughout the day. Students couldn’t call each other, administrators couldn’t call faculty, parents couldn’t call kids. Even if the university had set up an emergency text-messaging system, it might not have been functional. Hasn’t the technology evolved at all since Sept. 11? How many years have they had to address this?
If you can stand the sadness of hearing some pretty beautiful singing by one of those people killed with a readily available gun (“He didn’t look fidgety,” explained the gun store owner about the killer), listen to some songs, like a wittily acoustic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” performed by one: the clearly talented Daniel O’Neil, a graduate student and songwriter.

Those Illustrated Ads in the Current Issue: Jill Calder Explains It All to You

If you’re anything like me (and you are—at least a little, little bit), you’re wondering what’s going on with that series of ads for Mass Mutual Financial Group in this week’s New Yorker, the ones in which a red-headed woman is overwhelmed by insurance. From iSpot‘s blog:

Jill Calder’s whimsical artwork takes over the April 16, 2007 issue of the New Yorker magazine with a narrative series of ads for Mass Mutual Financial Group. The New Yorker selected about 40 illustrators for Mass Mutual and their ad agency, Mullen, to choose from, which eventually whittled down to Jill; her job was to bring their concept to life.
…
[Jill Calder:] I started by creating a character, whom I named Stella (rather than “the Mass Mutual woman”!) – female, 30’s, capable, confident and busy, but sometimes too busy to tend to her insurance needs. I also created a colour palette which would keep the look of the ads consistent but give me flexibility and a generous range, as I love colour. The Mass Mutual corporate blue was one of the colours, which gave the ads a strong, if subliminal, branding…. I had to show Stella in all manner of situations, some quite surreal and others quite lifelike, that were basically “barriers” preventing Stella from getting her financial needs sorted out. The first full page image was of Stella surrounded by an extreme amount of paperwork, teetering piles of it, which described her misconception that applying for insurance would be complicated and involve too much paperwork. In the next image, Stella decides she has no spare time to deal with insurance – this again is illustrated in a dreamlike fashion: she appears in an hourglass, trapped but still moving forward. Cont’d.

Imus Getting Fired in the Morning

Actually, I’m not writing about that (and I’m happy not to be), but I do like a good musical hed. This post is really about the David Sedaris plausibility debate, which, as far as I can tell, is a tempest in a Tinkerbell-sized thimble. Thoughts? The best outcome of this pointless peeping, for me, has been a link (in one of the comments on the New Republic piece that started it all) to Mark Twain’s gloriously absurd anecdo-tale “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper Once.” Let’s all cook up more stories like this!
Speaking of brilliant story-spinners, there’s a great Kurt Vonnegut recording from 1970—years before Breakfast of Champions was even a book—on the 92nd St. Y’s blog. R.I.P., K.V.

NYC: Art Spiegelman Event at Columbia, Monday 4/9

I spent a late night recently rereading the two books of Maus, drawn in by Spiegelman’s painstaking work and narrative craft, revolted by the cruelty represented and evoked there, and humbled by his parents’ resourcefulness and luck in their survival of the war. The books are part, but not all, of his histories and points of view, and you’ll want to make sure you get to this:

Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novelist Art Spiegelman is in residence at the Heyman Center for the Humanities for the Spring 2007 Semester. He will speak about “Comics–Marching into the Canon” on Monday, April 9 at 7pm.
This event, which is free and open to the general public, will take place in the Rotunda of Low Memorial Library. (Click here for a map.) [Columbia University, Broadway at 116th St. on the 1 train.)

Maus and other factual accounts of the Holocaust seem almost the only response to stories like that of Binjamin Wilkomirski, a faker whose compelling/appalling story is recounted by Blake Eskin in his eloquent examination of the tale (and tales) of Wilkomirski, who, for a while, appeared to be Eskin’s family’s long-lost relative. The book is called A Life in Pieces, and it stays with you; it’s another facet of the last century’s particular madness as well as another testament to the necessity and heroism of setting the record straight.

In Case You Were Wondering

I’m on vacation! You’ll have to spend a few more days with Newyorkette (Carolita Johnson, New Yorker cartoonist and pal), Blog About Town (everything you need to look at and remember, all in one place), I Hate The New Yorker (rumored to be moving closer to the apple that sleeps between about 2:30 and 5 a.m.—ZP, care to comment?), Silence of the City (rejected, terrific Talks of the Town), and New Yorker Comment (a young journalist to watch, there). Also, this is something you should know: The majestic New Yorker historian Ben Yagoda has a new book out. It’s When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better And/Or Worse, and it’s got a killer cover design (who’s the designer? I’d like to know, please). That’s what I know about it so far, but we’re talking about the guy who wrote The Sound on the Page here. I’ll report again when I’ve read it. You’ll know the moment I have by the dramatic improvement in my points, coms, semis, parens, dols, quos, hyphs, quirks, and slams.