Monthly Archives: January 2008

You Can Vote for Alex Ross, But Only If You Do It Today

The Rest Is Noise is nominated for a Bloggie for Best Weblog About Music. “Voting will close at 10:00 PM EST on Thursday, January 31.” So do it now and, if you haven’t had your primary yet, get your voting fingers limber!
Speaking of contests, here’s another Eustace Tilley (and some links to more news on the contest that, to be frank, I’m including here so I don’t lose them); not at all speaking of contests, here’s an endearing and informative page at the Folk Music Archives, featuring a bunch of questions and answers about Bob Dylan (yes!), hamburgers, Ice Cider Jubilee, Harry Belafonte, and other folkie subjects. Also more or less unrelated, although you could make some connections on the socialism side: my friend Scott McLemee’s latest piece for Inside Higher Education, about Bob Avakian, Tom Cruise, and Chairman Mao, not necessarily in that order.

Will the Winners of the Tilley Contest Also Appear in the Magazine?

I dunno, but this post by Len at the Jawbone Radio Show in Cleveland, who’s been notified that one of his entries has been selected as a winner of the Eustace Tilley competition (congratulations!), makes me curious. Len writes: “The art will be published on Monday on the New Yorker.com and there is a slight chance that I may make it into the print edition as well. I’ll be sure to publish more info as soon as I know it.” A little gallery in the print edition would be a treat, but even if the winners’ circle is online-only, it’s been a great contest for all involved. I’m sure Rea Irvin would have been thoroughly amused.
In case you were wondering, or, as the wise Cary Tennis would say, Since You Asked, I only repeat conjectures I hear from outside the magazine and Condé Nast generally, specifically those already reported elsewhere. That is, I ignore most of them, but I make note of the ones I think dedicated readers of The New Yorker will find interesting. As Jean Hagen once said in her corrosive platinum, “What do they think I am, dumb or something?” More to the point, don’t we have enough of a gossip culture as it is?

People Like Winners

That’s why we should be writing about John Edwards now. We had something to learn from the fairly extensive coverage of Rudy Giuliani‘s disastrous campaign, and now we have something to gain from looking back at the results of Edwards’ approach and the details of his inconveniently mellow-harshing story and concerns. I want to hear about what he’ll do next. Don’t discount him just because we love a bullfight.
Does God exist? Tonight Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach are debating it at the 92nd St. Y. I’ll be there. Potential highlights include God, appearing Marshall McLuhan-style, strolling onstage to declare to Hitchens, Boteach, the audience, or some combination of the above, “You know nothing of my work.” (Afterward: While that didn’t happen, exactly, there were certainly insults a-flyin’.)
At least we can be confident that Eustace Tilley exists, as did his creator, Rea Irvin; as Jason Kottke reports, the winners of the Tilley retooling contest have been notified. I’ve been enjoying the discussions on the contest’s various Flickr threads; entrants commune, commiserate, and praise with Threadless-like generosity and swap ideas for drawings that coulda been. Dan Savage has gotten involved, too. This contest has clearly been a hit—what’s next in user-generated interactoolery, do you suppose?
Finally, my carnivorous friend Paul Lukas has updated Joseph Mitchell’s juicy, tender, and well-done ode to the beefsteak (as Paul explains, “The term refers not to a cut of meat but to a raucous all-you-can-eat-and-drink banquet”)—which you can reread in Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink—with a sizzling, bacon-wrapped Times story (with video!) on how we beefsteak now. Sorry, cows of the world (and environment, etc.); I apologize from the bottom of my ostensible soul, and I’m saving you for special occasions these days, but in the list of things that are sacred, I’m going to have to include the occasional indulgence in just this sort of ritual.

Out, Out, Brief News Candle!

In Susan Morrison, Jane Kramer, and Elizabeth Kolbert news: an NPR segment about the new book Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary, edited by Morrison; the link to the show includes an excerpt from the book. Guests: Morrison, Dahlia Lithwick, and Robin Givhan. There’s a very interesting discussion in the comments of this Leonard Lopate forum on Clinton (and Clintons) in general.
In Orhan Pamuk news: two stories by my friend Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times, one about Article 301, the law under which Pamuk was prosecuted, and another about the arrest of Veli Kucuk, who is said to have been plotting to kill the writer.
In David “Law & Order” Remnick news: I missed a story (and accompanying audio interview) in the San Francisco Chronicle about Remnick when it was first published in 2006, so I’m glad I happened on it now. Remnick discusses, among other things, his “very bad Bob Dylan jones” (I hear ya, comrade), the digital future, and the mistaken perception that The New Yorker was ever “pro-war” on Iraq.
In cartoonist news: I hope you’re keeping up with Mick Stevens’s posts on the new cartoonists’ blog.
That’s all; I’m going to hear Franz Wright read at the 92nd St. Y. If I don’t post for days, it’ll be because I’m too stunned by those bittersweet and startling creations to type.

Best of the 1.28.08 Issue: Nudie Pix

In which the editor picks out a few choice cuts from the previous week’s New Yorker.
There have been only a few instances that I can remember where I’ve blushed (hey, I’m a half-Canadian part-Midwestern Yankee Puritan) and turned the page rather than let my fellow squished subway-row-seatmate see the page of the New Yorker I’m reading. That was the case with Joan Acocella’s review of the Playboy centerfold book a year or so ago (some Playmates appeared, small but round, in the accompanying photo collage), and generally happens whenever I have a public-transportation encounter with a full-page, artfully composed photo of a gaggle of vamping dancers wearing only their sinews. I love those, by the way, especially when male nudity is equally represented (I said I was half a Canadian-Midwestern Puritan).
But the latest instance, and my pick of this issue, was Calvin Tomkins’s terrifically observed Profile of the painter John Currin (not online; buy the issue if you don’t subscribe). I loved it. This is a portrait of modern, bold, intelligent people at work and play—Currin, his wife, their children, Tomkins himself. By the way, the painting in question is unabashedly hot—inclusive and tender and, as such, fundamentally unrelated to mainstream pornography, not to mention amusing for reasons that Tompkins helps illuminate. (In a class with the brilliant Johanna Drucker at Columbia, I realized how hysterically funny a painting can be—specifically, Grant Wood’s Parson Weems’ Fable.)
Also superlative: the typically excellent essay by Jill Lepore on Benjamin Franklin’s naughty side (so much naughtiness in this issue, including romantic rule-breaking at a mental hospital! Not to mention naughty yet possibly groundbreaking medical philanthropy!). Lepore is a superb writer who’s always going down some riveting road or other. More Lepore, por favor. And although all I’ve read, here and there, about Les Murray led me to believe I wouldn’t like his poems much, I liked “Science Fiction” very much. So shame on me for having preconceived notions.
Because I expect this is going to be a theme till November, I’d just like to get it out of the way now and say that the coverage of the presidential election so far has been very good, and I appreciate the thoroughness and scope of the pieces, Talks and longer stories, on the candidates. A few more stories on specific voters and the scene at campaign headquarters in various states (and explorations of the candidates’ appeal beyond the PR blitzes, as in that revelatory 2004 piece about George Bush’s speech patterns by Philip Gourevitch) might be good to round things out, but George Packer, Hendrik Hertzberg, Ryan Lizza, and the rest are all reporting and writing extremely well. Moments like this, in Packer’s “The Choice” from the week in question, make the coverage here that much more superior to the boring and/or breathless crap that’s serving as analysis of the election in many other media sources:

Obama spoke for only twenty-five minutes and took no questions; he had figured out how to leave an audience at the peak of its emotion, craving more. As he was ending, I walked outside and found five hundred people standing on the sidewalk and the front steps of the opera house, listening to his last words in silence, as if news of victory in the Pacific were coming over the loudspeakers. Within minutes, I couldn’t recall a single thing that he had said, and the speech dissolved into pure feeling, which stayed with me for days.

This kind of frankness, a sense of the actual scene on the actual campaign trail, from the actual mind of the smart, trustworthy person who was there at the time, will keep the New Yorker reports from this unbearably endless election season actually fun to read, not to mention as rich with actual detail and perspective as the magazine’s coverage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I applaud both series.

I liked John Kenney’s Shouts & Murmurs about the patient trying to end his therapy, too—it’s funny as a parody of adult conversation in general—and the illustration by The Heads of State in GOAT is powerfully symbolic and beautiful at once, like a Christoph Niemann drawing that simultaneously distills an idea and amplifies it, or, hmm, a Soviet poster.

After Heath Ledger’s Death, Watching Reporting Happen Live

I thought L.A. Times writer David Sarno, writing on Web Scout, had a good point about the finger-pointing that happened after various online writers got various details of Heath Ledger’s death wrong in their rapid-response blogging:

If you watched the story of Heath Ledger’s death explode chaotically across the Internet, with facts, errors, inconsistencies and confusions flying every which way, you may have concluded that in the new digital media’s race to break stories in minutes, accuracy has been left in the dust.
…
But here’s the problem: Stories have never arrived to the world fully formed or vetted. Journalists have generally had hours — not minutes or seconds — to craft a story from the blast wave of facts and factoids that comes in the wake of a bombshell.
What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.

Briefly, some other (unrelated) links you’ll like: Bridget Collins, one of the chefs profiled in that very good New Yorker story about school lunches a year or two ago (find me the link and I’ll send you a copy of Sweet Valley High from 1983), has been hired to do her magic in Medford, Mass.; the Observer talks to George Packer, whose play Betrayed opens Feb. 6; and the National Catholic Reporter has a piece on the end of reading that responds to Caleb Crain’s recent story, among others. Caleb has been writing some very interesting blog posts that follow up on his piece, too, like “Is Reading Online Worse Than Reading Print?” and “Are Americans Spending Less on Reading?” Stop reading this blog, read his instead, then go buy a book! Then read it, in the bathtub—it’s nice, if you haven’t done it in a while.

NCR writer and Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth includes some prescriptions for university teaching that will no doubt be controversial, and others — “Every four years a teacher should have a reduced course load to participate in a faculty seminar to read, for example, the new translation of War and Peace or eight books on Iraq” — that sound pretty reasonable to me. Especially since professors aren’t guaranteed summers off anymore, committees multiply like Gremlins, and adjuncts have to wait tables and tutor in their spare time, so all that academic leisure in people’s imaginations is slipping away faster than you can say “Tenure? Dream on.”

Premature Valentines

After my own heart I: Font & Order, derived from author Grace Dobush’s admiration for and preoccupation with the Law & Order typeface, Friz Quadrata. Thanks to HOW, my home magazine’s sister magazine, for the tip.
If you like Law & Order, by the way, you might just like David Remnick; if you like typography, you might have a Rea Irvin-like font spotting to send me. The world is full of things to uncover, then share with like-minded souls. About those un-like-minded souls—why are you thinking about those people anyway? What good has that ever done you?
After my own heart II: This Week in Milford. To understand, read a few days’ worth of The Comics Curmudgeon. Not that it’s possible to read only a few days of that site, which is far and away my favorite thing on the internet.
After my own heart III, possibly, if I knew what it was: this mysterious magazine writing blog. The mysterious creator has
ingeniously combined Joan Didion and the Gideon Bible, which seems like as good an idea as any.
Let those who say I have a narrow-niche subject take note! Later: Then there’s Behind the Approval Matrix, which decodes the New York magazine feature for the curious. I sometimes wish I got fewer references like that, actually, but I’m always tickled by it. (Thanks to the indispensable Manhattan User’s Guide for that one.)

What’s a Dandy, Anyway?

As the Eustace Tilley contest continues (the deadline is January 24; hope you’re quick on the draw!), Mental Floss asks for a dandy definition. Commenters are happy to provide, and have good taste in icons, too. Take a deep breath before looking through some of the Flick images entered into the competition so far, including, for instance, this one, inspired by the “Bodies” exhibit. OK, I admit I kind of like it, though I was grossed out by idea of the exhibit itself. And this Simpsons Tilley is funny, too.
Also, I keep meaning to mention that there’s a very interesting-looking New Yorker discussion group in Washington, D.C., called TalkTNY. Here’s the club’s website, where you can learn more, including:

Based in the Washington, DC area, TalkTNY, the New Yorker magazine reading group, gathers at a cafe or coffee shop to talk about recent articles and cartoons in the magazine. We usually have between 4 to 8 articles chosen to be read in advance, along with discussion questions.
Meetings are held every other week, usually on Saturdays.

Memories of Bobby Fischer; Interviews with Nell Freudenberger and Tom Wolfe

Jason Kottke has a nice roundup of pieces about the late Bobby Fischer, including a 1957 Talk and a 2004 book review from The New Yorker. A few months ago, Emdashes’ own Martin Schneider wrote a detailed post about all things Fischer and The New Yorker—check it out. Then read my favorite novel, The Queen’s Gambit, by Walter Tevis, and go even deeper into the bright and dark mental checkerboards of troubled chess prodigies.
Here’s Nell Freudenberger, interviewed by Lynn Carey for Inside Bay Area, which seems to be the online hub for several Bay Area newspapers, including the Oakland Tribune.
And here’s Tom Wolfe, interviewed by Tim Adams for the Guardian. It reminds me of another Guardian piece I’d been meaning to mention, in which Wolfe seems to misquote Dorothy Parker—who’s said to have given the answer, in a parlor-game challenge to use “horticulture” in a sentence, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think”—and then not attribute the (mis)quotation. Or perhaps he’s riffing on Parker’s bon mot (or else the reporter misheard Wolfe); what do you think?