Monthly Archives: November 2009

RIP Claude Lévi-Strauss

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died at 100.
Updating: John Updike praised The Origin of Table Manners in 1979, though he found missed any sense of “the arthropoid breath” in CLS’s “science of mythology”: “It is beautiful like a clock, and cool like a clock—a strangely elegant heirloom from the torture-prone, fear-ridden jungles and plains. Its orderly revolutions and transpositions have the inverted function of not marking but arresting time, and making a haven, for their passionate analyst, from the torsion and heat of the modern age.”

Against Em Dashes, With Exceptions

“The Em Dash: Friend or Foe?” That’s the title of a blog post by the wonderfully named writer Elizabeth Ditty. She’s doing NaNoWriMo and has some opinions on “that dastardly punctuation mark,” which she also calls “the troublesome turncoat of the punctuation world.” While we cannot agree that our favorite dash is dastardly, we do love rereading the rules (the AP variety, in this case), which provide comfort even in the most turbulent times. And, after all, she adds, “So, as you can see, there really are plenty of instances where the em dash acts as a true friend.” Feeling dashed? Don’t–just read her post. –E.G.

Nibbles From a Bass: More New Yorker Festival Highlights We Dug

Emily Gordon writes:
We (that’s the collective and the particular we) very much enjoyed our friend Ben Bass’s writeup of the recent New Yorker Festival, an event he enjoys even more than we do–that’s a fact, because while it was our fourth Festival, it was his sixth (consecutive). In fact, it was at the Festival two years ago that we first met him, and coaxed him to post about the people he met on line. Not online, but on line! More things should be conducted in person, and his post proved it.
Although Ben teased us that we might get a in-depth Emdashes post to supplement his review, and we hope that’s true, we’re enjoying reading the quickie version. Some highlights from his favorite events (links mine):

• “New Math,” a panel discussion featuring baseball guru Bill James, FiveThirtyEight.com creator Nate Silver, Columbia University economist and Gang Leader for a Day author Sudhir Venkatesh, and University of Missouri statistics professor Nancy Flournoy. Moderator Ben McGrath, whose work I love in the magazine, was quietly hilarious and did a fine job. The discussion was surprisingly funny, occasionally thought-provoking, cordially informative and well worth attending. [For more about “New Math,” read Emdashes editor Martin Schneider’s wonderfully thoughtful and detailed review of the event.]
…
• “Master Class: Cartooning” with cartoon editor Bob Mankoff. I’m no cartoonist, much less one worthy of attending a master class, but I was all over the chance to hear an exemplar talk shop. Mankoff is not just the New Yorker‘s cartoon editor but one of the best cartoonists in the magazine. Those who suspect self-nepotism should know that of his over 900 New Yorker cartoons, many more of them appeared before he was named cartoon editor than since. For that matter, his cartoons are excellent, so who cares? Having seen Bob speak a few times before, I knew him also to be hilarious in person. He did not disappoint, drawing loud laughs from the capacity crowd in the Condé Nast Auditorium.
…
• “Master Class: Copy Editing” with Ann Goldstein, Mary Norris and Elizabeth Pearson-Griffiths, three New Yorker copy editors with nearly a century of experience among them. To the collected authors, editors, reporters, bloggers, English majors, and, yes, New Yorker staff writers in the room, it was pure catnip. Learning from some of the best in the business how they edit copy at the highest level of the publishing industry was a privilege and a joy. On the macro level, they took us through the Byzantine layers of the editing process, still governed by a superannuated, typewritten flowchart. As for the micro, they rattled off examples of New Yorker style, cited umpteen entries from its 2400-entry word list and invited us collectively to take the editing quiz that all prospective new hires must tackle. Undaunted, the audience passed with flying colors.

But you should read it all. Meanwhile, we’re also awed and envious about Ben’s recent and transcendent Steve Martin experience. Thermoses all around, ye enthusiastic and passionate men.

Monday Morning Link Roundup: Aldo Buzzi, Alvin Levin, the Philosophy of Fiction, ‘Life’ Magazine’s Bourdieu, and a Brooklyn ‘New Yorker’ Bookshelf

Jonathan Taylor writes:
A few overdue links to start the week—you’re catching up already!
Aldo Buzzi, who was a longtime friend and collaborator of Saul Steinberg, died October 9. He was 99. “I was born just in time to see the Russia of Chekhov,” he wrote in “Cheknov in Sondrio” (The New Yorker, September 14, 1992), a Sebaldian wandering through time, literature, and the names of things.
New Directions in October published Love Is Like Park Avenue, a resurrection of the writings of Alvin Levin, unsuccessfully “courted” by The New Yorker. He published stories in a number of little magazines, and then in the 1942 New Directions anthology. According to the editor of the new book, poet James Reidel, Levin then “received a note from William Maxwell of The New Yorker in November asking him to submit some of his stories….Levin enjoyed the attention, but he also preferred to putter about his apartment and personal life.”
Kalbir Sohi, a philisophy graduate student in Britain, comments on New Yorker fiction in his blog—often informed by his philosophical interest in “trying to describe what goes on in people’s minds when they are using a particular kind of expression.”
Via Crooked Timber, a chart of the High, Middle (Upper and Lower) and Low brows depicts The New Yorker in the Upper Middle bracket, along with Theater, Rocquefort and charades, a.k.a. “The Game.” (The Google Books archive of Life is a goldmine.)
The well-articulated wall of New York City–related books at Freebird Books, on Columbia Street in Brooklyn, includes two shelves labeled “New Yorker Writers.” Like the rest of the collection, it spans an impressive number of decades, and right now includes Another Ho Hum: More Newsbreaks from the New Yorker, from 1932, I believe, and, with condition issues, a good deal at $25, if I remember correctly. (Speaking of reporter reliability issues, a gratuitous leafing through Renata Adler’s Gone at Freebird informed me about the scandal over Alastair Reid’s 1984 disclosure of the fictionalizations in his New Yorker fact reporting. That puts a little extra spin on the remarks of his that I reported from the recent “Art of Reportage” event!)