Monthly Archives: December 2008

Mitchell on Beefsteaks: The Awesomest Article I’ve Read in Ages

Thank you thank you thank you Ben Miller at the “Internet Food Association”:http://internetfoodassociation.wordpress.com for writing a “post”:http://internetfoodassociation.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/bring-me-a-beefsteak/ about the _awesome_ local tradition of “beefsteaks” that mentions this marvelous _New York Times_ “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/dining/30beef.html by Paul Lukas from nearly a year ago, which cites “All You Can Hold for Five Bucks,” by Joseph Mitchell, which appeared in _The New Yorker_ in 1939. If you have a “subscription”:http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1939-04-15#folio=040 or access to _The Complete New Yorker,_ I highly recommend that you go check it out. It just oozes awesomeness.
The heyday of the beefsteak tradition stretched from about the Civil War until Prohibition. The idea was that men (and only men) would gather in a saloon or a hall and consume meat (specifically, slices of grilled steak) and beer until the act of ingestion was no longer conceivable. They would sit on crates, with sawdust on the floor, and silverware was prohibited.
I think that covers the essentials. Needless to say, Mitchell was able to paint quite a picture on that subject. (I’d love to see Trillin or McPhee try to improve on it.)
I’ll end this with three awesome quotations from the article; the first two are spoken by people who appear in the story:

“The foundation of a good beefsteak is an overflowing amount of meat and beer.”
“When you go to a beefsteak, you got to figure on eating until it comes out of your ears. Otherwise it would be bad manners.”
“Women do not esteem a glutton.”

And there’s a lot more where that came from.
The best part? The tradition “still survives,”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/dining/30beef.html in New Jersey.
_Update:_ The article is also available in Mitchell’s renowned collection _Up in the Old Hotel._
_Second Update:_ Not surprisingly, Emily was “on this whole thing”:http://emdashes.com/2008/01/people-like-winners.php when the Lukas article first appeared last year.

The Editor Chimes In: Observations and Queries

Been busy at the Alpine hacienda the last week or so, and I’ve been remiss in posting lately. Schemes “gang agley”:http://www.electricscotland.com/burns/mouse.html and all that. So here’s one of those omnibus posts everyone likes.
Wonderful to “see”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/roger-angells-greetings-friend.php so “much”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/banned-words-and-phrases-holid.php of “Emily”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/more-good-news-because-we-need.php the last day or two! -Thx- Thanks for that unmistakable verve!
As Emily “reported,”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/hooray-a-new-david-remnick-boo.php David Remnick will write a book on Barack Obama. It will be his first book that isn’t a compilation or an edited work since he took over as _New Yorker_ editor in 1998. _That_ is a big deal. And, of course, good news!
How very nice to see an abstract cover on the magazine’s big year-ender.
David Fincher’s newest movie, _The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,_ based on an unlikely F. Scott Fitzgerald story, appears to be a stunner. On the subject of making movies of Fitzgerald stories, has anyone considered adapting “The Jelly-Bean”? On a road trip many, many years ago, I listened to “Dylan Baker”:http://www.amazon.com/Stories-F-Scott-Fitzgerald/dp/0694524468 marvelously reproduce the lazy Southern rhythms of the story (it’s set in Georgia), and I think it might work on the big screen. It’s nothing like _The Great Gatsby,_ which apparently is also true of _Button._ Anyone agree or disagree, or have other candidates?
Oh, and how do people feel about the new adaptation of Richard Yates’s novel _Revolutionary Road_? I don’t think I could bring myself to watch such depressing material, honestly. I had the same problem with Zoë Heller’s _Notes on a Scandal_; the book was excellent, but I was not able to finish the movie.
I wanted to mention a swell new blog, “Daily Routines,” an ongoing compilation of passages from writers discussing their daily routines. It cites _The New Yorker_ about as much as any other source. I am a sucker for this sort of thing, interviews with artists, honest discourse on the process….
Sigh. I suspect (fear) that “The Transition” podcast is so named because they’ll be putting the “Campaign Trail” in hiatus until there is an actual, you know, campaign under way. I trust that Ryan Lizza will be able to find plenty to occupy him in Obama’s first year.
I’ve recently taken up cooking. (Until now I have always been strictly a microwave chef.) So when is _The New Yorker_ going to come out with a cookbook, anyway?

Roger Angell’s “Greetings, Friends!” Is Back, and Cheers for Francoise Mouly

Emily can’t stop writing, so she writes:
Dwight Garner (hi, Dwight!) has a lovely, and appropriately detailed, story about Roger Angell’s famous holiday poem, a tradition we’d been missing. I love that Angell edited Ogden Nash and now keeps the art of absurd partial rhymes from being entirely unjustly marginalized. I also like this quote from Paul Muldoon: “I myself make no distinction between ‘light’ verse and — what? — heavy verse.”
Elsewhere in noble production, the impossibly soignée Françoise Mouly is also, as you may know, a publisher of gorgeous and educational comics for children; Publishers Weekly praises her; and on Bookreporter.com, she blogs.

Banned Words and Phrases: Holiday Gratitude Edition

Emily writes (once again):
As longtime readers will know, I sometimes ban words and phrases. Though I find many non-standard uses of the language to be useful, lyrical, fascinating, or all three, others are just irksome. Here’s one that’s on the rise, and at the top of my current list of irritants (aside from the economy, short-sighted capitalists generally, and the futile war against our brute natures): abbreviations of the short, concise, one-syllable word “thanks.”
I’m used to (but that doesn’t mean I accept) the sign-off “thx.” To me, it conveys a lack of complete thanks, a partial, lackadaisical hiss. The sound it makes in my mind is the insincere, singsong “thinkssss” that workmates we’ve all known like to say with a scrunched-up smirk and bad intentions. I have a feeling that the brilliant David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, whose book Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better I read recently and loved, would not approve of “thx.”
Now I’m seeing “thnx.” “Thanks” has only six letters. Even the silliest abbreviations are fine with me in instant messaging; that’s a fun puzzle of a medium, time is of the essence, and within it I require neither punctuation nor official spelling. But in email, especially business email, seriously, spell out “thanks.” Thanks!

Leaping Lepidopterists! Nabokov on Lo, Plain Lo, and Lit


Here’s the master, reading the amazing opening of Lolita in French and Russian; talking a little about a book he’s writing “about the texture of time” that will eventually become Ada; playing speed chess with his dithering wife, Vera; and walking into dinner in Montreux with Vera and his son, Dimitri.
Oh, yeah: even though the clip is under 7 minutes long, Nabokov also manages to dis Mann, Pasternak, and Proust; and read, snorting, from a list of things he hates (example: “humility”). It’s narrated in French, but Nabokov speaks in English, so if French isn’t your thing, you won’t miss much. (Thanks to Martin and kottke.org for the link.)
I’d never seen Nabokov on video or heard his voice before, but he was almost exactly what I would’ve expected. I was going to make a crack here about how he would’ve been a terrible talk show guest, but then I ran across a clip of him on a talk show with Lionel Trilling, and had to eat my unspoken words:

(Go here for part 2.)
The show itself is strikingly dated (Nabokov answers the interviewer’s first question by reading from prepared notecards, and more than once during part 2, the interviewer blocks the camera’s view of Trilling simply by leaning forward to get something from the coffee table). Still, it’s worth watching if you’re interested in what Nabokov wanted people to think he thought about Lolita, and because he gets off a great zinger: “I don’t wish to touch hearts, and I don’t even want to affect minds, very much,” he says, and then adds, “I leave the field of ideas to Dr. Schweitzer and Dr. Zhivago….”
It’s fascinating to watch Nabokov claim, with apparent sincerity, that “the good reader” will know that he and Humbert Humbert are not one and the same because Humbert Humbert confuses hummingbirds with another creature. “Now, I would never do that,” Nabokov says, “being an entomologist.”
It’s hard to know if he seriously expects us to find that convincing (after all, he’s presuming that all of his “good readers” will know that he’s an entomologist), or if he’s being deeply ironical. Before seeing him on tape, I would’ve said the latter, given his capacity for games within games, but now I wonder.
In any case, that’s not the end of the Nabokoviana I’ve got in store for you today. First, there’s this delightful photo of Nabokov and his wife hunting butterflies, courtesy of Life magazine and Martin; next, there’s Christopher Plummer’s eerie recreation of Nabokov lecturing a class at Cornell on Kafka, taken from a 30-minute film made in 1989; and then a fascinating piece about Nabokov’s gay younger brother, Sergei, who died in a concentration camp in 1945.
Lastly, we come to Nabokov’s review of his own memoir, Speak, Memory. The review appeared posthumously, in the December 28, 1998 issue of The New Yorker. I’m not certain why it wasn’t published during his lifetime, but I’d like to think that Nabokov knew the piece didn’t work.
Though the fictitious reviewer is supposedly reviewing “Speak Memory” along with another book (which is as fictitious as the reviewer), he devotes all his time to Nabokov’s memoir and never says anything about the other book, beyond a few lines of glancing praise. In part, Nabokov was making a point about how little there was to say about cliched, sentimental books, but of course, his own book turns out to be the only thing worth talking about, and so the whole piece, rather than being a delightful riff on authenticity, ends up feeling like an early case of astroturfing.
Nevertheless, it’s enlightening; yet another view of the trickster behind the scenes.