Monthly Archives: December 2007

We Want Bread and Irvin, Too

Back in August—my, how time flies—our friend and illustrator Jesse Ewing wrote in with a Rea Irvin type sighting for the Emdashes column devoted to this activity:

Hi Emily,
Not sure if you’re still doing your X-Rea category, but I’ve got an entry that kind of blew my mind.
See attached picture. In our defense, we had to get white bread to make proper BLTs.
Jesse (and wife Chelsea)

whitebread.jpg

I’d like a BLT right now, actually. Anyway, Gwyneth Dyer, writer for the communications design agency Larsen, has just noted this sliced Rea-lette on her marketing blog, mentioning (thanks!) our slow but steady X-Rea machine. She notes:

I’m wondering if this was a purposeful decision — to align a bakery brand with a sophisticated weekly magazine of literature, current affairs, and humor. Perhaps the brand manager’s thinking went like this: Customer needs to pick up some bread. Customer is overwhelmed by choices on grocery shelf. Customer spots a bread that seems somehow familiar, almost classic, possibly a bit more erudite than the other white breads….

She goes on to ask, “What’s your opinion? Is this typeface off limits? Is using it unfairly capitalizing on The New Yorker brand?”

I’d like to toast Jesse, Chelsea, and Dwyer for this excellent find. Pictured is Jesse’s own photograph of the spongy bread; Dyer has a close-up on her site, too. Please email in your own Irvin-esque type sightings, and if you’ve got a photo, screen grab, or scan, all the better!

Elizabeth Hardwick in The New Yorker

Does anyone remember Minnie Minoso? I do, barely. Minoso was a supremely talented outfielder who started in the Negro Leagues, moved on to the major leagues in 1949 after Jackie Robinson broke the color line, and played his last game in 1980. He was the first player to play in five different decades (1940s-1980s), even though his career was “only” 31 years long. (He played two token games in 1980 to qualify for the distinction.)
Elizabeth Hardwick was kind of like that with The New Yorker. Or at least The Complete New Yorker. See, the DVDs in the set are divided up by years. Her first piece in the magazine was a short story called “A Season’s Romance,” in the March 10, 1956 issue. Her last piece was a TOTT in the December 21, 1998 issue. 1956 is the last year of Disc 6, and 1998 is the first year of Disc 1 (the set is numbered in reverse order), so her time spent as a contributor to The New Yorker spans six discs. (I won’t tell, if you won’t, that she doesn’t appear on Disc 4 at all.)
Over nearly the entire Shawn tenure (Shawn took over as editor in 1951), she wrote only fiction in The New Yorker, six stories over twenty-five years. After Tina Brown arrived, Hardwick started off with a short story and then moved to nonfiction—a review of an Edmund Wilson biography, a teeny thing on grits soufflé, and that last TOTT, on Christmas records, for David Remnick.
Hilton Als wrote a very entertaining article about her in the July 13, 1998 issue. Definitely worth a read. There’s a very nice photo of her in the original piece, by Max Vadukul, but it’s quite distorted in the CNY. Best to seek out the print version for that.
By the bye, I will send anyone who can produce a photograph of this “Elizabeth Hardwick Loves Me” T-shirt at Amazon a free copy of any book on this list.
Let’s end on this observation by Als:

Until someone has the temerity to write a biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, we will have to rely on her work for its powerful evocation of the life of the mind, and on hearsay from friends and acquaintances for the details of the life itself. And until someone has the wit to compile an “Elizabeth Hardwick Reader,” we will have to rely on past issues of magazines and periodicals and the largesse of secondhand bookstores.

No “Reader” yet, although New York Review Books has at least put two of her books back into print since Als wrote that. Thank goodness for that. —Martin Schneider
Update: Don’t miss this lovely reminiscence on Als’s New Yorker blog. —MCS

Ben Yagoda Uses Steve Martin to Disprove Truism

Emily has posted a couple of times on Steve Martin’s new book, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, and I thought I wouldn’t let that stop me from directing you to Ben Yagoda’s fine review of the book in Slate. Heck, let’s flood the zone!
It’s a truism that positive reviews are difficult to write, but you sure wouldn’t know it reading this one. Indeed, Yagoda’s artful review not only persuades that the book has the qualities he attributes to it—many reviews accomplish that—but also has made me, once unsure, entirely eager to read it, a far meaner feat.
Yagoda cites some interesting demographic data to prove that huge numbers of Americans haven’t any conception whatsoever of Martin as a standup comedian. I was born in 1970, so I was about ten years old when he was peaking. I vividly remember his fame as a standup without having had the slightest notion what it was all about. I remember “King Tut” and “two wild and crazy guys,” but for the most part he amused people far older than myself. “My” Steve Martin was just a touch later than that, the one who appeared in The Man with Two Brains and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.
The sharp folks at fwis also explain why the book’s cover is so effective. I’m not sure if they are aware that the designer of Martin’s 1978 LP A Wild and Crazy Guy might deserve the lion’s share of the credit. —Martin Schneider

Elizabeth Hardwick, 1916-2007

The Times obituary. Every day, someone important to us will expire, and all those people will also be born, we know. But how can we be sure they’ll be capable of soothing that place made sore by so many losses? How can we prepare for the certainty of the names that will appear in tomorrow’s paper and in the paper (or flexible digital scroll) of our own old age, should we reach it in time?

Steinberg Appropriation Hunt! (Reader Participation Alert)

Our friend Jennie, owner of one terrific Saul Steinberg homage, writes,

Have you seen the Brooklyn version of the famous view? It’s more a view of than from, but it’s on display at Prints Charming in Park Slope, on 4th Street just east of 5th Avenue. It’s by Warren Linn, if I’m reading my notes correctly.

Since Park Slope is a little bit out of our way, we’ve decided to ask our enterprising readers to verify this bit of Steinberg-spotting.
So listen up: Anyone (not just the first person) who sends a gif or jpg file of this poster to martin at the above domain will receive a handsome selection of stickers featuring obscure players from the German Bundesliga.
If you do choose to visit Prints Charming, by all means be polite and maybe purchase a small item for their trouble. Not that we expect anything less from our readership. —Martin Schneider

How Were the Contest Cartoons Captioned Before the Winners Captioned Them?

As usual, Daniel Radosh is on the cutting edge of this question. For Radosh’s site, which provides (thanks to his admirably perverse readers) parallel-universe captions from the smutty to the surreal and everywhere in between, cartoonist and Rejection Collection editor Matt Diffee will be surveying his comrades-in-art and finding out what handwritten line of whimsy went with the original drawing submission that then, later, became a caption-contest challenge. I do know the original caption to Drew Dernavich’s lifeguard cartoon, but I’ll let Radosh do the honors. Speaking of the contest, I just discovered this site full of suggested captions and contest information (Michael Shaw, is this yours? I can’t figure it out!). Speaking of cartoonists, you’ll want to listen to Gahan Wilson and Bob Mankoff chatting about Wilson’s unmonstrous but excellent adventures in life and monster-drawing at the New Yorker website. Speaking of New Yorker cartoons in general, here’s a useful mini-collection of resources about the submission process. And speaking of wit writ large and small, I can’t believe the central Onion HQ is moving to Chicago; I read the paper faithfully in its fledgling years in Madison, my proud and good-humored hometown.