Monthly Archives: October 2009

It’s New Yorker Festival Week! October 16-18: Will You Be There?

Emily Gordon writes:
It’s the best week of the year at Emdashes HQ (a many-sided residence featuring pristine Austrian mountains, the tearoom at the La Brea Tar Pits, a deck in leafy Brooklyn, a Windy City aerie, and a desk in an undisclosed location). This year it’s the New Yorker Festival‘s tenth anniversary, which makes us wish we had been at all ten Festivals. Alas, though our allegiance is long, our blog is but five, so we look up to the Festival with all due awe and continue to paddle along after it like quick and fuzzy ducklings.
As we’ve mentioned, for the fourth year running, Emdashes will be there, and this year, for the first time, we’re proud to be importing our Los Angeles wunderkind of word and picture, Pollux, whose voice will join Martin’s and mine in Festival-mad reportage. We’ll be providing satisfying commentary, photos, reviews, thrilling glimpses of we don’t even know what yet, observations on audience reactions, and Zeitgeisty sight-bites from a man who actually speaks German (Martin; Paul speaks the mainly-on-the-plain kind of Spanish). Forgive the internal rhymes; this week always gives us dizzy spells.
Quick links: The New Yorker‘s in-house Festival blog, the @newyorkerfest Twitter feed you should already be following (I have it on good authority that it’s going to be hopping this year), and, of course, the main Festival page.
Having just come from Memphis, where I was live-tweeting for @printmag as quickly as my little TweetDeck for iPhone could muster, I feel secure in saying that where there’s wi-fi, there will be @Emdashes updates. So follow us too, won’t you? And whether you’re attending the Festival or watching from elsewhere, check back here many times daily later this week by clicking on the shiny red banner to your right, or, if you prefer, the lovely Festival portrait of me by Carolita Johnson.
If you write a real-time or post-game Festival report that you long to see in pixelated print, e-mail it to us straightaway, and you may become one of this year’s guest contributors. And if you see us–possibly wearing t-shirts from our humble store–please identify yourselves! We’re even nicer in person.

What’s in This Week’s New Yorker: 10.19.09

Martin Schneider writes:
A new issue of The New Yorker comes out today. A preview of its contents, adapted from the magazine’s press release:
In “Offensive Play,” Malcolm Gladwell wonders if the football fans who have recently been horrified by the quarterback Michael Vick’s involvement in dogfighting are overlooking the more troubling aspects of their own sport. “Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport,” Gladwell writes. Yet scientists have recently found evidence that the violence inherent in football can result in serious brain degeneration for players, long after their playing days are over.
In “The Secret Keeper,” William Finnegan explores how Jules Kroll pioneered the corporate-intelligence industry, growing his business from a side job, investigating kickbacks in his father’s printing business, to Kroll, Inc., “the world’s preëminent detective agency, with three thousand employees, countless subcontractors, and offices in sixty cities in more than thirty-five countries.”
In “The Gossip Mill,” Rebecca Mead writes about Alloy Entertainment, the company behind Gossip Girl, The A-List, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and examines the process by which the company produces young-adult novels and spins them off into television shows and feature films.
In Comment, Hendrik Hertzberg on Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.
In The Financial Page, James Surowiecki examines why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s stance on climate-change legislation is bad for business.
Calvin Tomkins profiles the artist Urs Fischer.
In Shouts & Murmurs, Ellis Weiner imagines a downsized, digitized marketing plan for a forthcoming book.
Adam Gopnik looks back on Irving Penn’s life and legacy.
Joan Acocella reads Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall.
Daniel Zalewski asks why the kids are in charge in today’s picture books.
James Wood contemplates Lydia Davis’s “very, very short stories.”
John Lahr reviews Jude Law’s turn as Hamlet.
Alex Ross notes the changes at the New York Philharmonic since Alan Gilbert’s appointment as director.
David Denby reviews Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are and An Education.
There is a short story by Julian Barnes.

Sempé Fi: On the Catwalk

Gurbuz_OnTheEdge_10-5-09.JPG
_Pollux writes_:
Not too long ago, when I opened my little mail-box, which lately has been crammed with catalogues from Halloween costume clearance houses, I was greeted by a little Sphinx-like cat on the cover of _The New Yorker_. Her death-defying stunt provided a dash of daring in an otherwise humdrum pile of mail. The cat was not just on the edge but over it.
The October 5, 2009 cover for _The New Yorker_ is called “On the Edge.” It was created by Turkish artist “Gürbüz DoÄŸan EkÅŸioÄŸlu”:http://www.gurbuz-de.com/, who signs as _Gürbüz_ or _Gurbuz_.
This is Gürbüz’s sixth cover for the magazine. Three of his previous _New Yorker_ covers have featured mysterious cats. His January 6, 1992 “cover”:http://www.cartoonbank.com/1992/New-Yorker-Cover-161992/invt/124845 featured a cat in a coffee cup.
Gürbüz’s March 22, 1993 “cover”:http://www.cartoonbank.com/1993/New-Yorker-Cover-3221993/invt/124869 featured a black-and-white cat whose tail metamorphoses into an enormous black-and-white ball of yarn, while his January 3, 2005 “cover”:http://www.cartoonbank.com/2005/New-Yorker-Cover-132005/invt/128388 featured a cat whose tail becomes a maze surrounded by mice. None of the mice, wisely enough, dares to enter.
Gürbüz’s new cover with a cat is just as enigmatic as his previous ones, and his new cat bears the same inscrutable expression. Like his previous cats, Gürbüz’s new creature finds herself in a surreal dilemma that may or may not be self-imposed. The eyes of his striped cat are unblinking, and lie beneath a strangely parted hairstyle that evokes that of a woman.
Despite the strange situations in which these “ineffable effable” cats -to quote one of T.S. Eliot’s verses on Practical Cats– find themselves, Gürbüz’s kittens maintain their feline dignity. They look at us, as cats do. What are they thinking?
Gürbüz’s cat challenges the viewer, almost taunting him or her. Gürbüz’s cats perhaps have names that, like Eliot’s cats, “no human research can discover– / But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.”
Did Gürbüz’s 2005 cat purposely make his tail into a labyrinth? Did this cat suddenly decide to walk out from a precipice on his own tail?
At the bottom of the cliffside is a very harsh, desert landscape. It’ll be a hard, painful fall if the cat falls, but this doesn’t seem to disturb her.
This Turkish artist celebrates and embraces the irrational, the surreal, and a video compendium of Gürbüz’s surrealistic work can be seen “here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snt6k-i13Cs.
His work is haunting. Suspending things in thin air is taking a page from the playbook of Magritte, who suspended tubas, tables, and people in cloud-covered skyscapes in his paintings, to disturbing effect.
Is Gürbüz’s cat defying gravity, sanity, and normal feline behavior just because she can? Or is it for our sake? Perhaps there is a purpose in showing us that sometimes we need to defy the logical, and embrace the irrationality of life in order to survive it.
Should we, then, walk out on our own tails, so to speak, and answer the riddles in our own lives?
Either blind faith or extreme confidence allows the cat not to fall.
Sometimes, the cover “On the Edge” seems to say, we need to make a leap in order to surprise the world, defying convention and embracing action.

Prescient Post Brings New Nobelist Müller Essay Today

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Not long after waking up and learning that Herta Müller had won the Literature Nobel, I noticed in my Google Reader that Signandsight.com, hours before the announcement, had published a translation of a recent piece by her about the lingering power of Romania’s former Securitate, from Germany’s Die Zeit.

Suddenly I found my file, too, under the name of Cristina. Three volumes, 914 pages. It was allegedly opened on 8 March, 1983 – although it contains documents from earlier years. The reason given for opening the file: “Tendentious distortions of realities in the country, particularly in the village environment” in my book “Nadirs”. Textual analysis by spies corroborate this. And the fact that I belong to a “circle of German-language poets”, which is “renowned for its hostile works”.