Author Archives: Martin

Festival: The Sluggish Shall Inherit the Held-Back Tix

Sara Nelson over at Publishers Weekly has some juicy Festival information in her essential industry column:

So, what to make of the news that the New Yorker Festival, coming in October, has become so popular with “regular folk” that its organizers have decided not to make all the tickets available to readers of the magazine in advance; for the first time, the festival will hold back 10 percent of the seats to all events so that visitors can buy them on the fly on October 5, the day the festival begins. And this for a program that is literary by anybody’s lights: Norman Mailer, Martin Amis, Miranda July, and Orhan Pamuk are among the participants. So is Steve Martin, whose memoir, Born Standing Up, will appear later in the fall. And, yes, in a nod to so-called popular culture, there will also be an appearance by David Byrne; a panel on graphic superheroes (featuring fan Jonathan Lethem); and a screening of The Kite Runner, based on the Riverhead blockbuster. [Boldface and link mine, obviously.]

Ten percent! So even if that event you simply have to see is all sold out, you may still be able to get in if you are willing to get there early and wait. But please, no trampling! OK, if you insist on trampling, we hear the place to do it will be the Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues). Zap that data into your iPhone—apparently, it’s good with maps.

Whee, the fall events are finally heating up! We at Emdashes love the cultural thrills that only September and October can offer. In fact, we love them so much that we’ve been working overtime to populate our brand-new Google Calendar for events we think Emdashes readers would like to know about. It is seriously chock-full of fantastic readings. It’s our hope that you will rely on it to track Calvin Trillin’s movements more assiduously, but not in a stalkery way, of course. We would not advocate that.

If you’re hosting an event here in New York or elsewhere, or if your local bookstore or library is sponsoring a reading by a New Yorker contributor or other relevant writer in the near future, by all means email us! To join the calendar, just click below. —Martin Schneider

View of the World From the Stephansdom

It was the evening of August 13, my only night in Vienna. I had just consumed a tasty slice of chocolate cake (not too sweet, in the Viennese style) at the Salzamt, in the city’s cobblestoned Bermuda Dreieck district. It was late, and the shops were all closed. I walked by one named Galerie Image, selling paintings and prints. Something oddly familiar caught my eye:

P1100230b.JPG

I don’t know who the artist is, but the drawing’s not bad. It’s a little difficult to read the text from my photo, but I’m pretty sure it goes like this, from top (that is, most incomprehensibly remote) to bottom:
ANTARKTIK
INDISCHER OZEAN ATLANTIK
Capetown
SIMBABWE
St. Helena
UHURU
Djibouti Timbuktu
MITTEL MEER
WIENER BERG WIENER WALD
GÜRTEL
RING
STEPHANSPLATZ
—Martin Schneider

And They Were Never Heard From Again

One of the pleasures of the Complete New Yorker is stumbling on a figure mentioned in one context who would later become much better known in a completely different context. Two intriguing examples from the early 1980s follow.
In a September 21, 1981, look at Hope, Arkansas (how prescient!), writer Berton Roueche, curious about the town’s (county’s? state’s?) continued reliance on laws prohibiting the consumption of alcohol, solicited the views of a local realtor. “I’m a Presbyterian,” the man said. “I believe in taking a drink…. But I don’t have to go all the way down to Texarkana unless I happen to feel like taking a drive. All I got to do is pick up that phone over there and dial a certain number. And I’m not talking about moonshine.”
The name of that realtor? Vincent W. Foster.
A November 24, 1980, TOTT by Elizabeth Hawes (in a strategy that would anticipate Harper’s) is almost entirely a reproduction of a very long list compiled by a Connecticut woman charged with catering a “light buffet supper” at the Fall Antiques Show. The list includes such entries as:
20 pounds butter
1,200 chive biscuits
42 white sailor hats
2 bushels decorative gourds
9 bales hay
…and so on. The list really must be seen in its entirety.
The name of that caterer? Martha Stewart.
—Martin Schneider

8.20.07 Issue: The Crumple Factor

In which various Emdashers review the issue you may just be getting to.
For me, this issue felt a bit like August scraps tied in an unwieldy bundle. David Owen (“The Dark Side,” about the disappearing night sky) is always terrific, but the truffle in this issue was Burkhard Bilger’s vivid, manly-in-a-good way “The Mushroom Hunters.” Alex Ross’s Mostly Mozart meditation was top-notch, and should be considered seriously as an award submission. I also want to single out Adam Gopnik’s review-essay about Philip K. Dick, which may be the best book review of Gopnik’s I’ve seen. It had a touch of melancholy about it, too; hope everything’s OK. And speaking of melancholy, “Driving Home” has it and much more. So there were a lot of good things in the issue. I take it back. —Emily Gordon
A little boy, a band of nature enthusiasts, a shark—so many things coming into fatal contact with an unyielding surface!
I really liked Michael Schulman’s dizzy TOTT on the tween adulation directed at Zac Efron. It’s a wonderful example of how Talks can take you anywhere in the city.
It’s wonderful to see Paul Simms’s recurring byline in the magazine—for my money, sitcoms come no finer than NewsRadio, and Conchords isn’t far behind (high praise). I expect nothing less than brilliance from Simms, and “My Near-Death Experience” was just that. I love the idea of “incidents of air rage.”
I didn’t quite buy Peter Boyer’s thesis, to wit, that Rudy Giuliani’s character flaws make him a formidable candidate in the general election—but I thoroughly enjoyed his fine, serious Political Scene entry nonetheless. One of the rewards of election years is the certainty of precisely such Lemann-esque articles, and “Mayberry Man” is an honorable addition to that canon. I can’t get enough of them.
T Cooper’s powerful story about Cambodia, “Swimming,” worked for me on a number of levels. There was a nice economy in the way Cooper earned the various emotional payoffs in the story. Good fiction, that.
I’ve recently become a twitcher, so I was particularly taken with Filip Pagowski‘s evocative, near-ambiguous, smeary spot illustrations in this issue. —Martin Schneider

The Effect of Tacos on Man-in-the-Moon Magazines

Kevin Drum poses a question of vital importance. To start with, he quotes the following passage from Herman Wouk’s 1950s novel Youngblood Hawke:

Soon the lawyer sat in the living room in his shirtsleeves at Jeanne’s insistence, his tie off, eating tacos from a tray. He needed a shave, and his hair was unkempt. Hawke noticed that the bristles on his face were reddish rather than blond. He looked more tired than Hawke had ever seen him, but the food and the beer brought him to quickly. “Why, these things are marvellous! What do you call them, Jeanne, tacos? I’ve never eaten anything like this. Delicious! Is there a restaurant in town where I can order these?”
She said, pleased, “Well, if you can find a lowbrow enough Mexican joint they’ll probably have tacos, but I wouldn’t endorse the contents, Gus. Better ask me, when you feel like having them again. They’re easy to make.”

Kevin, a Californian to the core, then asks: “Really? In New York City, circa 1952, tacos were so uncommon as to be practically unknown? Who knew?”

I’m far too young to have any real insights into this question, but I immediately thought of the Complete New Yorker. The results turned out to be pretty interesting. According to the CNY, the earliest mention of the word “taco” was in 1974. There are actually two hits from 1974. In the later of the two, a cartoon by Barney Tobey (July 15, 1974), the gag turns on the “exotic” nature of the taco, although the context implies that the term was at least somewhat known to New Yorker readers.

More interesting is the first hit, two months earlier (May 13, 1974). It’s a TOTT by Anthony Hiss about something called the “Taco Trolley.” The first paragraph supplies the telltale tone:

The taco is a tasty, crispy tortilla filled with beef, lettuce, shredded cheese, and special sauce. It is a wildly popular fast-food item in California and places like that. In fact, the taco is one of the reasons people visit California.

Ha! I love it—”places like that.” Difficult to see anyone getting away with that today. And that dryly dismissive third sentence seems a precursor to Woody Allen’s joke from Annie Hall that “the only cultural advantage” that Los Angeles can claim is that “you can make a right turn on a red light.”

I think it’s safe to assume that, July cartoon or no July cartoon, the New Yorker editors thought it wiser to explain exactly what a taco is and where it comes from. So it wasn’t exactly everyday lingo.

(The comment thread to Kevin’s post is fascinating, constituting a kind of thumbnail cultural history of the taco in the United States. It’s truly the blogosphere at its finest. My findings here merely confirm the observations of many of the commenters there.)
—Martin Schneider

“That Was in The New Yorker?!”

I propose a new category: works of fiction that originally appeared in The New Yorker that later took on a life of their own apart from the magazine. Criteria for inclusion in the group would include authentic fame, to the point that people uninterested in or unacquainted with the magazine would still have heard of it or might have some well-defined attitude towards it. Revelation that the item originally appeared in The New Yorker might come as a mild surprise.
A relevant anecdote: when I was in college (this was in about 1990), I was chatting with a friend of mine, a decidedly unliterary type, a poli-sci major who later went into finance. He was telling me about this great sci-fi story he had once read, about this contraption that could insert people into novels. About halfway through his account, my face took on a look of bemused recognition. Once he was done, I said, “You know who wrote that story? Woody Allen.” I can still hear his delighted hoot of astonishment in my mind.
This sort of thing represents a tremendous accomplishment for a work of fiction, I think. Indeed, it’s arguably close to the highest “social” accomplishment that a work of fiction can attain, that it nevertheless affects people who don’t even care about books that much. You can be sure that you’ve entered the social network at large when your song is converted into Muzak form for consumption in supermarkets, you know?
For the same reason, I think the list of such works is very, very short. There’s a danger here of “merely” listing very often anthologized works, but suffice to say there’ll be some overlap. The two criteria, “taking on a life of its own” and “people would be surprised by New Yorker origins,” are not at all the same thing, so some may qualify on one but not the other.
Here’s my list in progress, in chronological order:
James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” March 18, 1939
James Thurber, “The Catbird Seat,” November 14, 1942
J.D. Salinger, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” January 31, 1948
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery,” June 26, 1948
John Updike, “A&P,” July 22, 1961
Woody Allen, “The Kugelmass Episode,” May 2, 1977
Philip Roth, “The Ghost Writer,” June 25, 1979
Raymond Carver, “Where I’m Calling From,” July 19, 1982
Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain,” October 13, 1997
Almost all of Salinger’s stories have become part of the culture at large, even as any informed reader knows where they first appeared. Updike’s story is much anthologized, but I don’t know how much ordinary readers care about it—I think it’s a legitimate criticism of Updike’s outsize reputation (obviously quite deserved) that he has never created a fictional character with half the popular currency of, say, Portnoy. (Rabbit? Maybe. But Rabbit is not a creature of The New Yorker, alas.)
Can you think of any others? I can’t, but I’m sure there are plenty of good candidates I haven’t listed so far. Did any of Nabokov’s stories acquire its own fame at large? Irwin Shaw? John Cheever? John O’Hara? What stories have taken flight, like Charlotte’s baby spiders, far away from The New Yorker?
—Martin Schneider

A Charlie Is a Charlie Is a Charlie

What’s that? You say you wouldn’t be able to pick David Denby out of a police lineup? Don’t know what Peter Schjeldahl looks like either? Friend, I hear you.
How fortunate that the Charlie Rose program, which is probably the closest thing to The New Yorker on television (nothing closer comes to mind), has suddenly decided to slap most of its past shows onto its website. There’s so much great stuff! (I love Charlie, but he does talk too much. Still, what mainstream show can boast such a high standard of discourse?)
See, in living color, audio tracks in full synchronization with the moving image, full of sound and fury, passion and reason, the following notable personages (many of them several times):
Roger Angell
Tina Brown
David Remnick
Malcolm Gladwell (Bonus: you can watch his hair expand with the years)
Adam Gopnik
Hendrik Hertzberg
Nicholas Lemann
Anthony Lane
David Denby
Jerome Groopman
Jeffrey Toobin
Atul Gawande
Seymour Hersh
John Seabrook
Nancy Franklin
John Lahr
Steve Martin
Dave Eggers
Peter Schjeldahl
Calvin Tomkins
John Updike
Brendan Gill
Calvin Trillin
Philip Gourevitch
Lawrence Wright
… as well as countless other writers and artists with a relationship to the magazine (e.g., Annie Proulx, Ian McEwan, Annie Leibovitz).
—Martin Schneider
Note: When I first posted this, I did not realize that on the show’s website itself, the user is apparently constricted in terms of screen size and also the ability to zip forward and backward (you can pause). The show’s partner in this archival effort is Google Video, where you can see the shows at a more normal size, can fast-forward, and so on. —MCS

Register: Titled Newsbreaks, 4Q83

In which Martin, who’s now abroad and provoking envy among his colleagues here at Emdashes, combines his fondness for newsbreaks—those witty clippings at the end of the occasional New Yorker column—his voracity for research and documentation, and his nimble fingers with the Complete New Yorker DVDs (from which, as Martin points out, newsbreaks are absent). A math student of whom it was once said “She has somehow arrived at the correct solutions, yet does not appear to know how to graph the trigonometric functions we studied this term,” I’m still somewhat fuzzy about what all the figures mean (though I know at least one of them is a fiscal quarter), but I know that you, sage readers, actually made it to Calculus and won’t have any trouble. —EG
ANTICLIMAX DEPARTMENT 11/28 55, 12/5 208
BLOCK THAT METAPHOR! 10/17 49, 10/24 157, 11/21 138, 11/28 147, 12/5 152
BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPARTMENT 10/24 103, 11/28 190
CLEAR DAYS ON THE EDUCATIONAL SCENE 12/5 177
CONSTABULARY NOTES FROM ALL OVER 11/14 168, 12/19 131
DEPARTMENT OF DELICACY 11/21 49
DEPT. OF HIGHER EDUCATION 12/12 167
DEPT. OF UTTER CONFUSION 10/17 167
DON’T GIVE IT A SECOND THOUGHT DEPARTMENT 12/19 127
FAMOUS “WHAT IF”S OF HISTORY 11/21 213
FULLER EXPLANATION DEPT. 12/26 53
HIGHER MATHEMATICS DEPT. 10/17 192
HOW’S THAT AGAIN? DEPARTMENT 10/10 123, 10/17 56, 10/31 133, 11/14 187, 11/21 164, 11/28 104, 12/19 142
IT’S ABOUT TIME DEPARTMENT 12/26 68
LIFE IN CALIFORNIA 11/28 51, 12/19 47
LIFE IN THE FAST LANE 12/26 39
LIFE IN TORONTO 10/17 92
LYRICAL PROSE DEPARTMENT 12/19 121
NEATEST TRICK OF THE WEEK 10/24 48, 10/31 139, 11/14 209, 11/28 167, 12/5 183
NO COMMENT DEPARTMENT 11/7 152, 12/12 188
PERISH THE THOUGHT DEPT. 10/10 153
RAISED EYEBROWS DEPARTMENT 11/7 112, 12/12 148
SENTENCES WE HATED TO COME TO THE END OF 11/28 177
SOCIAL NOTES FROM ALL OVER 10/3 103, 10/10 161, 10/31 144, 11/21 219, 12/12 154, 12/26 43
THAT’S TOO BAD DEPARTMENT 10/17 177
THE MYSTERIOUS EAST 12/19 123
THE OMNIPOTENT WHOM 11/7 47
THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND 10/3 132, 12/12 159, 12/26 57
THESE CHANGING TIMES 10/24 53
UH-HUH DEPARTMENT 10/31 125
WE DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT DEPARTMENT 10/3 108
WORDS OF ONE SYLLABLE DEPT. 11/14 139, 11/28 168, 12/12 74
* Fascinating, sprawling Robert Penn Warren poem in 11/14 issue. I dare someone to tackle it.
* Brilliant Al Ross cartoon about literary snobbery in 11/21 issue.
* Engrossing profile on five brothers who are all New York City building superintendents, in 10/24 issue. No other magazine does this sort of thing so well.
* Janet Malcolm on Jeffrey Masson pops up in this quarter. Uh-oh.
* George Steiner on George Orwell looks interesting, 12/12 issue.

7.02.07 Issue: Subtexting, “Sicko,” and a Dandy Handey

Each week, the Emdashes staff dons a big foam hand to identify those aspects of last week’s issue that most closely resemble a walk-off home run. Happy Fourth!
The spot illustration, by Rachel Domm, for John Lahr’s review of Sarah Ruhl’s production of Eurydice was remarkable. It reminded me a bit of the work of Tara McPherson, only without that artist’s painful Goth overtones. —MCS
To me, “George Packer” means stern, lucid commentary on war and politics. This weekend, though, he pricked me with humor, and three times on a shuddering ferry to Vancouver Island I laughed out loud at this depiction of what a powerful New York contingent (Clinton, Giuliani, and Bloomberg) might mean for the next Presidential election.

“[It] would so thoroughly explode the Sun Belt’s lock on the White House that an entirely new kind of politics might be possible, in which evolution is not an issue, no one has to pretend to like pork rinds, and the past tense of “drag” is “dragged.”

Also: a few chuckles from Jack Handey’s delightfully cruel nature documentary: “The monkey is shot by a poacher and falls from giraffe.” Golden. —JB

There’s so much pressure to like monkey-themed Shouts, but I did anyway. I haven’t enjoyed nature documentaries the way I used to ever since I read a powerful essay somewhere about how these blithe, leafy programs lull us into a dangerously cheerful stupor, in which we forget that the earth is already a goner, because look, an antelope, a toucan, and an ibiza! I think it was a Harper’s Reading; I keep trying to cite it, so I’ll have to look at their archive. On the other hand, if it weren’t for nature documentaries, etc., would we care about that godforsaken polar bear in An Inconvenient Truth in the first place?

Anyway, some of my favorite stories: I liked seeing Ken Auletta throw caution to the wind and just write the heck out of a piece on Rupert Murdoch. To accompany it, there’s an absorbing and fun interview with Auletta by Blake Eskin for the new “New Yorker Out Loud” podcast; it’s nice to hear the Nextbook veteran interviewing again. At least in my experience, it’s faster and easier to subscribe to this and the other (fiction, New Yorker Conference, etc.) podcasts directly through iTunes, but my computer’s been wonky lately, so it might just be me.

Also notably top-notch: Margaret Talbot on lie-detecting machines; Maxim Biller’s sad, beautiful, and beautifully short story “The Mahogany Elephant” (would that I could have read it a decade ago and avoided a heap of foolishness, but that’s how it crumbles, cookie-wise); Joan Acocella proving once again how good her book reviewing can be; Joyce Carol Oates writing intelligently and well about Stephen L. Carter; John Updike on a revisionist history of the Depression—the book section is uniformly good this week. The cover is also a subtle, satisfying event. Where does one buy those bulbs? I’ll mail one to the first person to tell me. —EG

Ian McEwan Is Everywhere

Within a day of purchasing it, I scarfed down Ian McEwan’s newest novel (novella is possibly more apt), On Chesil Beach. I would explain that it’s about inexperienced British newlyweds thrusting and parrying on their 1962 wedding night, but then devoted New Yorker readers already know this. (Here’s a swell PDF version of the New Yorker excerpt; here’s hoping you have the required fonts.)
I’d quite forgotten that the first chapter of McEwan’s Enduring Love also appeared in The New Yorker, but the Complete New Yorker confirms (May 19, 1997). In his enthusiastic review of Chesil, Emdashes fave Jonathan Lethem proposes sending McEwan’s opening chapters, “like Albert Pujols’s bats,” to the literary equivalent of Cooperstown; I’d wager it’s Enduring Love he is thinking of first and foremost. Point being, The New Yorker has offered first-rate McEwan before. As for Chesil, I’d aver that you have to go back to his also-possibly-novella Black Dogs to find its gemlike equal in McEwan’s oeuvre.
McEwan also pops up in D.T. Max’s fine “Letter from Austin” about the Ransom Archive. Apparently TPTB in Texas slot working writers into various levels akin to blue-chip stocks: we’re told that McEwan is rated as a worthier investment than Martin Amis, David Foster Wallace, and—gasp—J.D. Salinger! (Surely Chesil shores that status up, but have these arbiters read Saturday?)
In any case, last Friday, I caught McNally Robinson‘s presentation of Doug Biro’s movie about On Chesil Beach (talk about innovative cross-promotion) at the Two Boots theater. The event started with a dramatic reading of a scene from the book by talented actors Darrell Glasgow and Jessica Grant, a rare treat. After the quite skillful movie, National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman led a rousing discussion about McEwan and Chesil Beach with director Biro and novelists Colum McCann and Kathryn Harrison (New Yorker contributors both).
If you missed that event, you can always go to the screening at Labyrinth Books on Wednesday, June 19. It should be good fun!
Note: For anyone eager for insights into On Chesil Beach, the June 3 edition of the New York Times Book Review podcast features a lively chat with McEwan, in which the author discusses the new book and his (very very) early fondness for the Rolling Stones.
—Martin Schneider