Monthly Archives: December 2007

The Last Links of the Year, and Possibly the Best

It’s practically champagne (OK, OK, Champagne): Jesse Thorn interviewing George Saunders with a live audience. It’s fizzy! Check out The Sound of Young America‘s dramatization (featuring a sparkling cast with great legs: Andy Daly, Jen Kirkman, Jonathan Coulton, James Adomian, John Hodgman, Maria Bamford, Jonathan Katz, Dan Klein, and Xeni Jardin) of Saunders’s “Ask the Optimist.” At its best, Gawker’s snarly, goofy “The Unethicist” has something of its flavor.
Speaking of New Year’s, the stylish Rea Irvin shows us how to celebrate it in style—1867- and 1917-style, that is—in two contrasting cartoons. Thanks to ABCs of Art for the excellent link! Who says there’s nothing on the web this week? (Like this positive review of the William Steig show at the Jewish Museum, complete with illicit but tender photos.)
I dug this City Room sampling of hundred-year-old Times stories: “And readers who think they remember this newspaper as the Old Gray Lady might want to recall some of the fairy tale yarns that made the front pages at New Year’s 1908.” Seriously, they’re great. Now, add links!
Frank Bruni enthuses today about a new book I also heartily recommend:

The book I was happiest to find in my mail was “Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink,” which was just published. It’s edited by David Remnick, the magazine’s editor. It’s chewy: more than 575 pages of nonfiction and fiction writing that appeared in the New Yorker over many decades.
And you couldn’t ask for a more diverse, dazzling collection of writers, some of whom wrote or write primarily about food, others of whom dabble or dabbled in culinary musings only occasionally. In these pages you’ll find M.F.K Fisher, Joseph Wechsberg, A.J. Liebling, John McPhee, Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Nora Ephron, Janet Malcolm, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Julian Barnes, Steve Martin, Malcolm Gladwell. I could go on and on, and I plan to dip into this book for a good long time to come. By which I mean: forever.

I did give it as a Christmas present, by the way. Stay tuned for the recipients’ reviews!

Here’s a caption contest finalist that Texans are cheering for, and some spirited reminiscences of Bill Buford’s Granta on the occasion of the magazine’s hundredth issue.

In the final hours of 2007, take a moment of silence for the Cincinnati Post. And another for Robert “Buck” Brown, the cartoonist who passed away this year. Here’s an obituary from BlackAmericaWeb’s list of “the Black Icons, Known and Unknown, Who Passed in ‘07.” I like that, icons known and unknown.

Robert “Buck” Brown, 71, one of the first “crossover” African-American cartoonists, whose work appeared in Playboy magazine over four decades, died July 7. Playboy printed more than 600 of Brown’s cartoons, including one that appeared in the magazine’s August issue. His daughter, Tracy Hill, told the Associated Press that Brown sold thousands more to other publications. Brown’s work also appeared in Ebony, Jet, the New Yorker, Esquire and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Mike Lynch has a more detailed post that includes a link to a longer bio of Brown at the site The History Makers.

Happy new year, everyone! And happy third birthday to us again! It’s our once-a-year day, and everyone’s entitled to be wild, be a child, be a goof, raise the roof, once a year! And for success, love, health, and, of course, wealth in 2008, you need look no further than this story by George Singleton in the Oxford American: “How to Write Stories…And Lose Weight, Clean up the Environment, and Make a Million Dollars.” Can’t wait!

Happy Birthday to Us!

Today, Emdashes is three. Three cheers for three years of whatever it is we’ve been doing and will do here, God bless it. As Harold Ross might say, but he died long before the age of blogs, at which he might have looked askance. On the other hand, he might have been all for them. It’s hard to say. He’d probably blanch at Facebook. Have you read Genius in Disguise? I’m just finishing it up, and it’s a treat, whatever your level of interest in The New Yorker and the whirlwind it made. I’m simultaneously reading Victor Navasky’s funny and instructive memoir, A Matter of Opinion, and I’m proud to have worked with one of these noble men of magazines and upholders of honest journalism. That’s not to slight the women. To paraphrase Norman Mailer, every editor is a culture, and you enter deep into another culture, one that’s not your own, and you learn an awful lot from it. So three cheers for my own wise captain, too.

In Which Kottke Beats Me to the Punch

Leopard-quick (is anyone really “lightning-fast”?) Jason Kottke alerts the entire Internet to this swell profile of Benazir Bhutto by Mary Anne Weaver that appeared in The New Yorker in 1993.
If only Emdashes had someone tasked with pointing out gems from The New Yorker‘s past … ah well, we can dream.
Praise be to newyorker.com staff for (presumably) taking this out from behind the archive wall with such alacrity, despite it being the holidays and all.
I’m blaming the holidays! —Martin Schneider

Oscar Peterson, 1925-2007

Oscar Peterson is dead. (He was the age of The New Yorker, which, fortunately, is invincible.) I wish I were listening to Jonathan Schwartz talking about it on the radio. I hope he’ll be talking about it next weekend and playing hours of songs. I bet he will. I heard once, from another lindy-hopper, that Peterson wasn’t very keen on modern swing dancers. Is this true? Either way, I plan to be dancing to his music till the end of my days.

Caption Contest Winner Lewis Gatlin of Elizabeth City, N.C…

Please get in touch! As you recall, you won Cartoon Caption Contest #2, the Leo Cullum drawing, with “This is my stop. Phil, you’ll be C.E.O. till Sixty-third Street.” We’re sad that we hadn’t yet started doing detailed interviews with caption winners, and we’d (specifically, a writer we just persuaded to do an interview, and who picked you specifically as an interview subject) love to talk to you in a friendly and nonthreatening manner. Alternately, if you work at the Cartoon Bank and have Lewis Gatlin’s email address, or if you’re Leo Cullum and you’d like to chat with us as well, we’d love that, too!

Whale Watch: Japan to Do a Little Less Damage (For Now)

Anyone who enjoyed Raffi Khatchadourian’s story on wild whaling crusader Paul Watson—read it online if you missed it, it’s worth it—will be interested in this story in the Times today. It begins:

Japan is dropping its plan to kill humpback whales in the seas off Antarctica, the country’s top government spokesman said Friday.
Japan decided to suspend humpback hunts at the request of the United States, which is currently chair of the International Whaling Commission, according to Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura.
”The government has decided to suspend hunts of humpback whales while talks to normalize IWC is taking place,” Machimura said. ”But there will no changes to our stance on our research whaling itself.”

In other news, here’s an intriguing post on the illustration and cartooning blog Drawn!:

This is not a new project, but it’s definitely worth mentioning. Richard Rutter is adapting principles in the classic design book, The Elements of Typographic Style to the web. The site is an ongoing project; Rutter is adding to the site in the order presented in Bringhurst’s book, “one principle at a time.”

Read on, and thanks to Carolita for the tip. Speaking of cartoonists, today’s Google Alerts led me to this mini-archive of stories about cartoon editor Bob Mankoff; here’s our coverage so far of the man behind “Is never good for you?”

Everyone Knows Your Caption’s a Clip-On: Behind the Scenes of the Contest

As promised, today Daniel Radosh presents the results of Matt “Rejection Collection” Diffee’s caption-contest investigation: What were the original captions before they were stripped to make way for America’s merry endeavors? Drew Dernavich (who chatted with the contest winner about the “Everyone knows your parrot’s a clip-on” drawing for Emdashes) contributes two, and Tom Cheney and Frank Cotham have one each. I especially like the amusing juxtaposition of the winning, Radosh Anti-Caption Contest, and original captions.
Also in humor today, the latest edition of thoroughly lovable comedian Mike Birbiglia’s “My Secret Public Journal” has a sharp election-season observation:

Rudy Giuliani kind of scares me. I kind of feel like Rudy thinks 9/11 is his birthday. He gets that excited look on his face and buys himself a cake and lights two candles and watches them burn down. And then he looks around and says, “What do I get?” And his advisors are like “$15 million in speaking fees!” and he’s like, “That’s even better than last 9/11!”

And in the Wall St. Journal, there’s a review of William F. Buckley’s book Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription that parades some New Yorker cliches so sleepy they’re unfit to operate heavy machinery. If you say only three things about the magazine, say these three! It’s a surefire crowd-pleaser.

New Yorker Presents Sharp (If Not Quite Sharpie) Political Commentary

Don’t look now, but The New Yorker is figuring out this Internet thing. The blogs are not only multiplying but also nicely finding their groove, the podcasts are rapidly becoming the bona fide aural equivalent of the magazine (which is really saying something), and the website has just uncorked a major treat for political junkies. It’s called “The Naked Campaign,” a series of brief videos in which cartoonist Steve Brodner muses—with pen in hand—about the 2008 presidential candidates.
I am so poor at drawing that any decent display of draughtsmanship (you don’t seriously want me to put an F in that, do you?) renders me slackjawed. I could watch Brodner doodle, erase, adjust on his whiteboard at 4x speed all the livelong day, consumed with awe. I love it.
As befits the “sketch” nature of the concept, the videos are hit or miss, but that’s part of the fun, really, and there’s way more “hit” than “miss” here. Brodner’s a sharp cookie, so even when the visuals are mostly found footage of Rudy Giuliani wandering around a garden-supply store, Brodner manages to make you see something about Rudy you had never noticed.
And hey, where else are you going to see Hillary Clinton depicted as John Lennon, Mike Huckabee as the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Barack Obama as Woody Allen? —Martin Schneider

Is Calvin Trillin Behind the Green Cart Program?

Probably not, but the proposed New York initiative to sell fresh fruits and veggies through vending carts in poorer neighborhoods does sound like a step toward the ideal Trillin imagined at the end of his not-online rhapsody on Singaporean street food: a movable market full of delicious, unmysterious (except in the good way) eats for all New Yorkers. But let’s not put the cart before the hors d’oeuvres. On a more serious note, will the carts take food stamps?
WARNING: FAMILY MEMBERS, PLEASE STOP READING HERE. SERIOUSLY. I MEAN IT. ALSO RESTAURATEUR [YES, THAT WORD IS SPELLED CORRECTLY] FRIENDS. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
This seems like a swell place to mention that the new anthology Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick (with help from young man of books Leo Carey) and just out from Random House, is a pip, exceeding even my expectations, and you know that’s saying something, right?
In fact, with sheepish apologies to A. J. Liebling, I can report that the book is in fact better than food. Come on, have some excerpts. Then go back for seconds—the book will last months and months and people will steal it from your house when they stay over. Although it’s pretty heavy and it might make their luggage suspiciously bulky.
Fun fact: The anthology’s working title was I Say the Hell With It. I objected to the change when I learned of it, but now I think the final title is properly celebratory of culinary pleasures familiar and foreign; our young leafy-green-loathing friend has a dismissive attitude less fitting for such a world-embracing, gleefully descriptive cornucopia. More New Yorker-themed book gift suggestions to follow; add your own in the comments!

A Reader Writes: Why No Byline on the Raymond Carver Intro?

So asks Emdashes reader Bill Amstutz; Dean Olsher noticed it, too. Ah, but what is “authorship,” really, anyway? As Olsher speculates:

The decision to write anonymously here seems especially freighted, less a mere throwback to the Shawn years and having something more to do with the nature of Lish’s initially invisible and essential influence.

On the other hand, maybe everyone was just anxious to get out the door for the holiday, and the crucial line was dropped. As if that would ever happen. Here’s the piece in question, and don’t forget the nifty slide show and a very illuminating demonstration of the lishian pen, not to mention the strikethrough tag (or “strike-through,” in the New Yorker stylebook), which is finally put to good use here.

I wonder if Art Winslow, who is what I think about when I think about Lish (well, also those poems that Lish failed to accept for the Quarterly when I was an undergraduate, but I bear him no ill will; they were utterly [there’s a joke for you Columbians] wrong for the magazine), will be weighing in on the latest Carver carve-up at the Huffington Post. Art?