Monthly Archives: April 2008

New Yorker Circulation Update

I had to go buy two pristine copies of the magazine this morning for something I’m working on, and at the newsstand around the corner (on Madison and 30th, should you be stalking me), there were two copies left. “You’re lucky I have two!” said the proprietor of the small magazine shop. (Not to be confused with the little-magazine shop, Niko’s on Sixth Ave. at Eleventh St., where, years ago, a young Russian employee responded to the news that I was leaving The Nation for Newsday with the booming review, “From the socialists to the technocrats!”)
Are people buying magazines and newspapers these days? Yes, he said, but not as many, and definitely fewer newspapers. “Even the porn magazines, the foreign magazines, the tattoo magazines?” I asked, looking around the inventory. Yep, he’s selling fewer of all of the above. “But The New Yorker sells out?” “Every week, every copy.” So, you see, the news isn’t all bleak.

Of Course, the Lonely Planet Scandal Makes Me Think of Favell Lee Mortimer

…the Victorian maker-upper who wrote numerous guides to world travel, all of them questionable, since she’d hardly ever left England. Mortimer is now immortal thanks to my friend Todd Pruzan, who presents selections from her highly biased, nay, often offensive oevre in the endlessly funny The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World.
Before I even knew Todd, I was praising his piece about her in The New Yorker. (NPR ran some choice excerpts from the book.) For real kicks, don’t bother rushing to read some kid’s faux Lonely Planet entries—just see what a very, very opinionated lady has to say about your friends and relatives. She was herself often disappointed, one surmises, but she certainly won’t disappoint you.

Adam Gopnik Brings the Magic

Martin Schneider writes:
Catching up on some of The New Yorker‘s online-only stuff here. In a podcast interview conducted by Matt Dellinger, Adam Gopnik does an exceptional job of explaining the substance of “The Real Work,” his article about Jamy Swiss and the art of performing magic.
It’s not online, but if you have the March 17 issue lying around, it is worth your while. So listen and read!

Of Gentle Soul, to Human Race a (Tad) Friend

It’s Tad Friend’s turn on Mediabistro’s running interview feature; Julie Haire does the honors. I like this quote, among others: “Some people write by polishing each sentence as they go, like a jeweler. I tend to spend lots of time painstakingly making an outline that I realize, a dozen paragraphs in, makes no sense, and then I put my head down and type nouns and verbs and quotes in a kind of grumpy blur, hammering out an extremely rough, totally un-publishable draft that I then go over and over and over before I hand it in.” Some of his observations about research and reporting techniques sound a lot like Susan Orlean’s in the terrific recording An Evening with Ira Glass and the New Kings of Nonfiction, which is most definitely worth buying.

Hey, it looks like Friend and I might have lived in Buffalo at the same time. (He wouldn’t have been quite old enough to babysit me.) I was going to cite something about blizzards, one of which I certainly remember, but found this great pro-Buffalo-weather propaganda instead. I passed through the city recently, for the first time since my family moved away in the mid-’70s, and had dinner at a lively microbrew restaurant whose name I can’t remember, where college kids danced to a rooftop DJ; the cab driver who took me to my long-ago street (and to the zoo, and the park, and the museum—it was the kind of nostalgia joyride you see in the movies) told stories about white flight and floundering department stores as we glided past the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and pockets of prosperity. I’m of the opinion that you should go home again, given the shortness of things.

Maybe We’ll Witness Tony and Tina’s Wedding After All

Martin Schneider writes:
So they want to turn Tina Brown’s biography of Princess Diana into a musical. Over at Gawker, readers are busy casting the musical—mostly with people who never stray from film or TV. (I love that “NOOOO!” department.) It would be the first time a New Yorker editor has inspired a musical since Andrew Lloyd Webber’s legendary flop Ross!
I think the only rational response is to think up silly song titles. I came up with a few to get us started:
“Royal Love Train”
“Balmoral Hazard”
“Shy Di”
“Squidgygate”
“Raine, Raine, Go Away”
“The War of the Waleses” (medley)
“The 42 Longs”
“I’m Just Looking For a Guy with a Gulfstream”
“Hasnat Khan a Lovely Smile?”
“The Royal Oui”
“Mama and Paparazzi”
“That’s an Awful Lot of Flowers”
“The People’s Princess”
Got any to add to the list? (And just kidding about Ross!)

Translations from the British

The latest installment of our column about New Yorker fiction, past and present, by writer and editor Benjamin Chambers.
In her review of Ha Jin’s story “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry,” which appeared in the April 7 issue of The New Yorker (TNY), Sarah of the blog Sarah Writes says that the story, although written in English, “successfully captures the inflections of translation, and replicates translators’ reliance on stock expressions to replace untranslatable idioms.”
She finds this aspect of the story “distracting,” but that’s neither here nor there, as her comments immediately brought to mind a different language problem that’s been on mind lately as I read each week’s story in TNY: translations from the British.
Anyone who grew up on a hefty diet of P.G. Wodehouse and English detective fiction would have no trouble with Tessa Hadley’s “Friendly Fire,” for example, which appeared in the February 4 issue of TNY. When Hadley’s characters take “a fag break” while talking on their “mobiles,” put their “kit in the boot” of their cars, run around like “mad things,” or own homes on what used to be a “council estate,” you know what’s meant.
Less often, however, does one happen by the old family hearth in a story to find characters sitting by “the Aga,” or stove, as in John Burnside’s “The Bell Ringer,” which appeared in the March 17 issue, or discover a woman contemplating—along with flower arranging and foreign language classes—joining The Women’s Institute (a voluntary organization that helps educate and mobilize women on political issues) or Toc H. (Even Burnside’s protagonist wasn’t sure what Toc H was. Turns out it’s a Christian service club “committed to building a fairer society.” No mention of whether it approves of clootie dumpling.)
If you’re unhip, as I am, phrases in Hari Kunzru’s “Raj, Bohemian,” from the March 10 issue of TNY, might throw you completely. Kunzru’s narrator sneers at the “trendies—fashion kids who tried too hard, perennially hoping to get hosed down by the paps or interviewed about their hair.”
Hosed down by the—eh? Come again? I finally figured out this was just a cute way of saying they wanted their picture taken by paparazzi. That usage may not be peculiarly British, but no matter: half a page later, I found the genuine article. When the narrator is asked to an exclusive party, his friends and acquaintances want him to get them in the door, but he turns them down. Why? “It was a rule, an unofficial rule: no liggers and no hangers-on.”
”Liggers”? Huh? It took a little bit of digging, but I finally discovered that in Brit usage, a “ligger” is someone who crashes a party. Who knew?
And if you were wondering about those “two Traveller kids” racing buggies out near the airport in Roddy Doyle’s “The Dog,” in the November 5, 2007, issue, your curiosity might be somewhat allayed when you learn that the Travellers are a roving people, known in the vernacular as Gypsies.
All this British vocabulary might make some American readers feel a bit like outsiders. Not to worry—apparently, that feeling is a national characteristic. Check out this gem from Burnside’s “The Bell-Ringer,” so perfectly keyed to skewer American readers of TNY that I half-wondered if he inserted it after his story was accepted: “Harley was always polite with her, in the way that Americans are: doggedly courteous and, at the same time, utterly remote, like the landing party in an old episode of ‘Star Trek,’ curious and well-meaning and occasionally bewildered, but sworn not to interfere in the everyday life of their hosts.”
No need for a translation there, I shouldn’t think, wot?

I Love New York in May: At the Y, Trillin, Remnick, Coll, and Borowitz, and Y Not?

It’s curious—or a sign that we’re all getting out more and thinking about things—that we have so many On the Spot and Looked Into items lately, but we’ll get around to the other stuff in good time. I happen to know Benjamin is plotting a new Katharine Wheel column as we speak, although he has plenty else going on; he’s a busy man.
Not to say that he’s “exhausted”—I’m adding “exhausted” to my crotchety list of Banned Words and Phrases. You’ve just given birth, you work in a coal mine, you edited your first feature film in the nick of time: You’re probably exhausted. Otherwise, the thesaurus, Shakespeare, Damon Runyon, Rabelais, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mary Worth, etc., are full of apt phrases for whatever it is you are. Next time you find your mouth about to form the word “exhausted” after a long day of protein shakes and Scrabulous, see if you can come up with something a little more apropos. But on to the events! These are both at the 92nd Street Y, a reliable source of stuff worth the Emdashes seal of approval:

Thu, May 15, 8:15 pm, $26
STEVE COLL WITH DAVID REMNICK: THE BIN LADENS
As Steve Coll explains in The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (Penguin Press, 2008), Osama bin Laden is one of 54 children born to Mohamed bin Laden, who started as an illiterate bricklayer and became a wealthy and powerful businessman. Learn about the extensive bin Laden family, their international and American connections, their ties to the royal house of Saud and how all these factors affected Osama. Coll is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden. He talks with New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick.

Speaking of Remnick, he and a few other editors recently answered the Observer‘s question “Where Will Magazines Be Ten Years From Now?” Quick excerpt: “‘I don’t pretend to be alone in the world in running long pieces, which are things that require long periods of reporting and very considered writing,’ said Mr. Remnick. ‘As long as I’ll be here, and long after that, it’ll be central to our understanding of ourselves. That’s a promise.’”
Speaking of Andy Borowitz, who’ll appear in the following event, last night I finally went to see The Moth, and what took me so long? I loved it. A friend from the lindy scene, birdwatching soothsayer Tom Weiser (whom I’ve lost track of, so I’m counting on your having a live Google Alert, Tom!), told stories there for years and is probably still telling them, and when he’d invite me I always had other things to do (because I was so exhausted), and years later, here I am. So thanks, Jeff Simmermon, for helping make it happen at long last.
On to Andy and Trillin’s evening:

Wed, May 13, 8 pm, $26
COUNTDOWN TO THE ELECTION: ANDY BOROWITZ, JONATHAN ALTER, SUSIE ESSMAN, CALVIN TRILLIN
If you missed Andy Borowitz’s sold-out event at the 92nd Street Y last fall, dry your tears; he’s coming back to the Y with his wry, absurd perspective on this year’s wild political scene. Borowitz is an award-winning satirist who writes for The New Yorker and on his blog, The Borowitz Report. Joining him are the acid-tongued and hilarious Susie Essman, incisive Newsweek columnist and Huffington Post blogger Jonathan Alter and Calvin Trillin, who mixes earnest concern for American politics and liberties with a strong sense of the absurd – see his Obliviously on He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme. Take a break from the intensity of the presidential campaign and remind yourself that there’s humor to be found everywhere in the political landscape.

You’ll See the Honor We Have Gained By the Wearing of the Webby

Emdashes is a Webby Honoree! I hereby blow kisses to the whole scrappy gang: designers/programmers Patric King and Su at House of Pretty and illustrator Jesse Ewing at Inkleaf, of whom I am in awe; writers Martin Schneider and Benjamin Chambers, gentlemen and scholars who donate their righteous labor for the cause; and everyone else, including readers, guest contributors, and New Yorkerites, who makes this go. I owe you guys an Old Fashioned, and more. And congratulations to Webby nominees Design Observer, SVA, and Dwell! (You can vote, too.)

Algonquin + Cartoonists + Alcohol = April 30

From our friend (that’s the implied author-reader we) Kevin Fitzpatrick at the Dorothy Parker Society, the usual good news of high-spirited gatherings and mixed drinks, or, chiastically, a gathering of spirits. From the club’s April newsletter (some links are mine):

Wednesday, April 30 — How much do you love the cartoons in The New Yorker? Want to meet the cartoonists? The Dorothy Parker Society is hosting an event at the Algonquin Hotel that will draw seven notable cartoonists to celebrate the publication of Sex and Sensibility: Ten Women Examine the Lunacy of Modern Love…in 200 Cartoons. Liza Donnelly, who has been a cartoonist at The New Yorker since 1982, edits the book. The party is Wednesday, April 30, 6:30-8:30 p.m. on the second floor of the hotel. In addition to Donnelly, the other cartoonists who will be in attendance are Barbara Smaller, Carolita Johnson, Victoria Roberts, Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Signe Wilkinson, and Julia Suits. Most of them have appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. To attend, please RSVP to kevin@dorothyparker.com by April 25. There will be a cash bar (and bring cash, the hotel does not take credit cards). The book will be available for purchase ($23). This is a perfect place for the party, as the magazine was cooked up in the same place we will be celebrating, and the wallpaper of the hallways is all classic New Yorker cartoons. If you can’t make the party, the book will be in stores this week. Info here.

Last week I made my first trip to San Francisco’s fine Cartoon Art Museum, which was featuring a stylish exhibition of cartoons from Donnelly’s book alongside plenty of artwork from the museum’s permanent collection; standing that close to original drawings by Walt Kelly, Otto Soglow, William Steig, Winsor McCay, and other geniuses is a thrill, and I’m not even a Comics Person. (I think I might be turning into one.)

A few days later, I went to Donnelly’s book party at the Museum of Sex here in New York, and many of the cartoonists (as well as other New Yorker, cartoonland, and publishing folks) were present, including all these people. It was a genuinely hot (and warm), thoroughly fun party, and I don’t know if it was the climate or the cartoons, but everyone was in extra-attractive mode. I stayed until the very end talking about drawing, podcasting (Victoria Roberts is awesomely tech-savvy), the shiny, rainbow-colored sex toys on display, and New Yorker history with all and sundry. You haven’t lived till you’ve discussed personal massager design with great political minds, believe me.

Also, from The Comics Journal‘s Journalista!, a further Sex and Sensibility event:

April 13 (Red Hook, NY): Cartoonist Liza Donnelly, editor of the new collection Sex and Sensibility: Ten Women Examine the Lunacy of Modern Love… in 200 Cartoons, will discuss the book at Merritt Bookstores on Broadway, beginning at 11AM. Details here.