Author Archives: Jonathan

Funny Money: Rothstein on the Morgan Cartoon Show

Jonathan Taylor writes:
The Times‘s Edward Rothstein had a nice review of the Morgan Library exhibit of New Yorker cartoons about money that Martin wrote about recently. For those who can’t go to it, the many word-pictures and punch lines cited by Rothstein are entertaining enough, because, as he writes,

Their characters are types; their relationships archetypes. It is by eliminating reality’s detail—information about particular individuals, their histories and their desires, information that might stir sympathy or resentment—that the show’s images focus complete attention on how powerful and how precarious a thing money is.

Among the funny ones:

One of the exhibition’s final cartoons shows greedily gloating tycoons celebrating their apparent mastery.

“Well, we’ve licked taxes,” one thunders. “That just leaves death” (Lee Lorenz, 2002).

John Updike, 1932-2009

Alfred A. Knopf has announced that John Updike died of lung cancer today at age 76. More words to come (including yours in the comments).

  • The Times obit by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.
  • Updike’s 855 author search results on the New Yorker website, as well as reminiscinces and other posts on the newyorker.com blogs Book Bench and Goings On. (This comment thread is open for readers’ memories of the author.)
  • An archive of Emdashes posts on Updike.
  • The New York Review of Books‘ Updike archive (unfortunately, almost all subscription-only)
  • From Vanity Fair, James Wolcott—noted here just the other day for his all-embracing take on The Widows of Eastwick—with a tribute and a recommendation of a “book that captures Updike’s writerly public persona best.”
  • The London Review of Books‘ homepage showcases 21 essays on Updike from its archives—by 17 men, I might add, including Frank Kermode, the Woods James and Michael, and the Jameses Atlas and Wolcott aforementioned. The Times Literary Supplement unsheaths its 1996 review by Gore Vidal of In the Beauty of the Lilies (and “the failings of its author”), which at 10,000 words is “the longest review ever printed in the TLS.”

“Sundry Sorts of Dry Goods”: The New Yorker & Early Newspapers

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Apropos of Jill Lepore’s new Critic at Large piece on early American newspapers, this topic was of particular interest to the New Yorker in its early days. One of the first instances of the once-frequent “That Was New York” department, in 1929, was about the New-York Gazette, founded in 1725 and “the first New York newspaper.” (I put this in quotes advisedly; who knows what revisions might have come to the historical record? “That Was New York” retailed a colorful story, since shown to be a fable, about why Staten Island is part of New York City and not New Jersey.)
Back to colonial newspapers: Later in 1929, a four-part series ran under the “That Was New York” banner, collecting “items from the press” from the Revolutionary period, replete with florid, character-assailing advertisements. However, these “clippings,” signed David Boehm, give no citations, and I confess to feeling completely uncertain as to whether they are a collection of real items, or the driest of parodies by Mr. Boehm. (Who, by the way, has no other New Yorker bylines; is he the same David Boehm who cowrote the 1931 opera-parody Broadway play “Sing High, Sing Low” with The New Yorker‘s Murdock Pemberton—perhaps also the David Boehm who collaborated on the screenplay of “Gold Diggers of 1933”?)

James Wolcott: He Could Type the 1978 Manhattan Phone Book, And I’d Read It

No, I didn’t want to read another review of John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick, either—until I saw that the London Review of Books‘ critique is by James Wolcott, who’s perennially on fire like one of those burning coal mines (and, thank God, is “working on a memoir about 1970s Manhattan”). Wolcott has a winning way of accentuating the positive by taking for granted the negative, dispensing justice that is elegant in its balance of cheery severity and generosity.—Jonathan Taylor

Teens Hate Vegetables, Even at 73

The New Yorker‘s Bruce McCall is interviewed about his haunt, Cafe Luxembourg, in this week’s Time Out New York food section. His thoughts on food aren’t too appetizing, but his words about writing are no doubt good for you: “As a writer I find that if I get out of the house, I get a much clearer vision of what I’m writing.”—Jonathan Taylor

Best of the 12.22-29.08 Issue: It’s Funny Because It’s Fact

Jonathan writes:
I believe Benjamin Chambers will be here soon with an authoritative Katharine Wheel survey of the year-end Fiction Issue. (I’d say, if you haven’t yet managed to read any Roberto Bolaño, his “Meeting With Enrique Lihn” is online; as they say, the first one’s free.)
My other personal pick is Zadie Smith’s nimble Personal History piece, “Dead Man Laughing.” I think it means something that the word “humor” appears much less frequently than “funny,” “joke,” or “comedy.” Humor can be mistaken for undemanding bonhomie (what’s more depressing than the Humor section of a bookstore?), but the latter connote the concrete, intellectual and absurd aspects of the comic that thrive on the edge of the abyss. Such was the sensibility expounded with dour glee by Smith’s father, Harvey; and she doesn’t just recall it, she shows us what life looks like seen through it. (Must look for that “Fawlty Towers” DVD-extra interview of Prunella Scales.)

Stamp of Good Greeting: Trebay Hails the Snail

Jonathan writes:
Since I first moved to the vanished city where I picked up–nay, purchased–a Village Voice each week to read his column, Times fashion hound and sometime Talk contributor Guy Trebay’s words have accompanied me along the borderlands between two New Yorks, the one I know and the one I don’t yet.
Still braced by Emily’s encyclical on the care that can add grace to regular communication at little cost, I was happy to see Trebay’s declaration of faith in physical Christmas cards, be they inspired divinely (from a holiday fair at Brick Church on the Upper East Side), or Divinely (by John Waters). Trebay is one of six writers in the Times identifying “The One Luxury I Won’t Do Without” this year (illustrated warmly by Greg Clarke, who has done at least one lovely New Yorker cover that I know of).

Two New Yorker Storytellers, on a BBC Podcast

Jonathan Taylor writes:
There’s plenty of Malcolm Gladwell to go around these days, so I might not have singled out a recent BBC Radio 3 Night Waves podcast (mp3 here. Update: Not anymore, although it seems still possible to get the episode by subscribing to the podcast) with an interview of him, if it didn’t have another segment of New Yorker interest: a really perceptive discussion of Saul Steinberg by British illustrator Quentin Blake, best known to many for his gleeful collaborations with Roald Dahl. The occasion is a Steinberg exhibition going on at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery.

The Chicagoan: “No Obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs Elysees”

Jonathan Taylor writes:
I only just happened on this New York Times Book Review piece from a couple weeks ago, about The Chicagoan, a short-lived magazine launched in 1926 in ardent imitation of The New Yorker. (The article is by Matt Weiland, late of that Chicago institution The Baffler–or still of it? What is up with The Baffler, anyway?)
The University of Chicago Press is putting out a hefty coffee table book about the magazine, which was seemingly forgotten until some issues were unearthed by historian Neil Harris at the university’s Regenstein Library. Harris notes that The Chicagoan was “an effort to counter the city’s negative reputation” as “a place of raw commerce and crime–brawny, philistine, vulgar, and violent.”
A gallery of Deco-mad covers and other images, PDFs from the book, including a lot more interior pages of the mag, and an interview with Harris, are at the publisher’s site. It’s all just too much to digest here. The attractions are clear: Be off, and be back to discuss!