There’s so much to celebrate this week! May I have the envelopes, please?

This year’s winners of the E.B. White Read Aloud Award, presented by the Association of Booksellers for Children: Judy Sierra and Marc Brown.

Wild About Books (Knopf) by Judy Sierra and illustrated by Marc Brown, famous for his Arthur the aardvark series, is the second recipient of the award, which honors books that reflect the “universal read-aloud standards” created by White, the author of Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan.

In Wild About Books, Molly the librarian introduces animals at the zoo to reading—and then finds the perfect book for each animal. For example, giraffes get tall books and hyenas get joke books.

Equally impressive is Una Huang of Maine for her silver medal in the national essay contest Letters About Literature, beating out more than 700 other students:

Una Huang from Readfield received second place for grades 4 through 6 for her letter to E.B. White about The Trumpet of the Swan. A timeless classic, The Trumpet of the Swan portrays the eventful life of Louis, a voiceless trumpeter swan, with humor, beauty and the strength of the human spirit. In her letter, Una expresses her connection with the main character and the inspiration that Louis has provided to faces life’s challenges and develop self-confidence.

If only White were around to answer it! I once knew someone who had a framed letter from him hanging in her bathroom; it was the house’s treasure, quite rightly.

Oh yes, and The New Yorker, for kicking ass at the National Magazine Awards. From the Times:

But the big victor of the day was The New Yorker, which won the most awards—five—including the prize for general excellence among magazines with circulations of one million to two million. It also won in reporting, for an article by Samantha Power, Dying in Darfur; in profile writing, for an article by Ian Parker about a man determined to donate his kidney; in reviews and criticism, for three articles by Adam Gopnik [Times Regained, March 22; The Big One, August 23; Will Power, September 13] on subjects including Times Square; and in public interest, for three articles by Seymour M. Hersh, including “Torture at Abu Ghraib.”

David Remnick, editor at The New Yorker, noted that investigative journalism like that practiced by Mr. Hersh is lonely work. “Sy is the loneliest of the wolves,” he added.

The New Yorker has won 44 National Magazine Awards in the competition’s 40 years, the most of any magazine.

Well, of course it has. Hersh has been getting some heat lately (to be covered in due time), but there’s little question that a side effect of his noble task is a state that out-lonely-guys Steve Martin in The Lonely Guy. Back in February when the New York Post reported on Jeff Goldberg’s appointment as Washington correspondent, there was this offhand note: “Seymour Hersh will keep his dusty old office by himself in a separate location.” I called then for an Aeron chair and some Pledge, but in light of Remnick’s triumph I respectfully suggest, for all the winners, a Swiffer.

One last winner: Print, which won for General Excellence in the Under 100,000 Circulation category, and which keeps new New Yorker writer Todd Pruzan in dollar signs. May you all have offices free of dust. That goes for Una, too. Let’s hope she keeps on reading White and friends till she’s old enough to win an Ellie for herself.

Book answers Passover questions [Pittsburgh Tribune-Review]
Local Students Receive Maine Humanities Council Letters About Literature Awards [Keep ME Current]
Winners and Finalists [ASME]
New Yorker Wins Awards, and Martha Stewart Wins Applause [NYT]
‘New Yorker’ Staff Gobbles Up National Magazine Awards [Gawker]

No David Sedaris movie just now, but he is on a national lecture tour. Get tickets while you can, but don’t bring your children unless you want them to hear…vulgarities!

First, the bad news.

The Wayne Wang film based on David Sedaris’ stories is a dead deal.

“I got out of it,” Sedaris says from his Paris home last week while packing for the tour that brings him to Gainesville Saturday.

“I’ve never written a movie, and I’ve never wanted to. So (Wang) was going to get someone else to write it, and then I just started thinking. Basically what I did was tell somebody: ‘Oh, fine, you take my family and do whatever you want. And you have the address to send the check, right?’ I felt awful.”
…
OK, now the good news.

When Sedaris pulls up to the podium Saturday night at the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, he’ll read old and new material, perhaps even a new story so raunchy it may never end up in print. “It’s too dirty for The New Yorker, and it can’t be on the radio. And it’s not like I can sell it to a sex magazine because it makes sex look repellent,” he explains.
…
“It’s just filthy,” he says with a sigh. “I mean just filthy. Not just filthy words, I mean the whole idea of it. It gives you a stomach ache … And I have no idea how that’s going to work—at all. I would be interested in it if somebody read it out loud, but you never know with people.”

The true story opens with a finely dressed American couple on a plane casually spewing vulgarities as if they were Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne. The story finds its way into a cab and then, Sedaris adds, “it’s just right down the toilet.”

“I think it’s funny, but I have no idea,” he says. Either way, he maintains, this will be no place for children.

Author David Sedaris is talking pretty [Gainesville Sun]
Our Perfect Summer [Sedaris, New Yorker]
Old Faithful [Sedaris, New Yorker]
Fans’ Reports From the Road [Travis Paddock]
Sarah Vowell on David Sedaris [Journal News]

From the smart cookies at Beatrice, an essay by guest author Meg Wolitzer about chick-lit novels, which she (winningly) calls Pink Ladies:

The Pink Ladies are completely apolitical. Yet beneath their manicured, high-gloss surfaces is a depiction of a certain kind of urban female life at this point in time. If these books were placed in a time capsule and opened up at a much later date, people would get to see what these post-post-post-feminist women were like. They’d see how sexual freedom played a big part in their lives, as big a part as, say, finding the right handbag or the right man to marry. Marriage certainly has a big role in these books, but it isn’t contradictory to autonomy. In fact, autonomy here is about choosing the right man, and not settling for the dullish Lord or Viscount or advertising executive waiting in the wings. It’s not groundbreaking or powerful, but it speaks to many women, even, weirdly, a woman like me, a long-married feminist and novelist. Chick lit is a damning term, one that brings to mind tight skirts and empty heads. But there’s an irony and self-awareness at work in some of these books, hiding inside a blaze of pink.

Sure, why not? I never liked the term “chick lit” and its segregation from the rest of popular fiction. Like Wolitzer, I like Marian Keyes and the original Bridget Jones, as well as other novels that get promoted into the bad-pastel-cover ghetto. Even Cathleen Schine—who, despite the oprahtic film made from The Love Letter, can’t be accused of tailoring her stuff to the mass market—got chicklitized with She Is Me, whose lowercase letters and coy design got her placed on that loathsomely perky B&N rack near the front of the store, but undoubtedly kept serious readers away from discovering the book.

Wolitzer herself has done a comfortably swerving walk along the line between mainstream and hard-to-place; her early novels Sleepwalking and This Is My Life are about women and girls, and they’re dark as hell. Though I like the 1992 movie Nora Ephron made of the latter (starring Julie Kavner, and see it before you roll your eyes), it’s more of the same—all the really hard stuff is gone, leaving mostly laughs and flapjacks, with the exception of the best virginity-losing scene on film I know.

There’s plenty of light (more likely, deceptively light) reading out there that doesn’t get smooshed into a category, and besides, I’m sure there are dozens of absolute treasures buried in the African-American popular fiction section, say, or the gay-fiction shelf. Have you read Joe Keenan (who also wrote a lot of Frasier) or Stephen McCauley? If not, you’re really missing out. I hate to think who else is hiding behind some idiot superstore’s idea of a genre. Come out, come out, wherever you are, and let the Pink Ladies and the T-Birds—and all combinations therein—get it on.

In Praise of Pink Ladies [Beatrice]
Why Grease? [Zulkey]

Categories: Books, Movies

Morgan Freeman and Jamie Foxx are no martyrs. After all, they’re rich and famous, and they just won Oscars for their acting in movies that indicate that everything has not been as it should for black people in America. Still, the recent triumphs for African-Americans in the industry bring to mind Murray Kempton’s remark in his great essay “The Dry Bones”: “For it is not the least of a martyr’s scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.”

Technically, Hilary Swank speaks almost throughout Million Dollar Baby, but most of her performance involves jabbing and sweating. That’s all right; as long as we’re righting balances, we might as well study and enjoy women hitting each other in the face, as movies have permitted us to do with men for a century. Or, in the correct idiom, let women join in the liquid ballet of clenched fist and breath that is boxing at its best. A report from a Houston gym that gladly trains women:

On appearances, the gym is no place for a lady. But if a woman can go to war, fly a jet or run an international corporation, she can also throw—and take—a punch. So the boxing gym has been forced, grudgingly, to adapt. “What she (Swank) went through was very believable, very accurate,” [promising female boxer Akondaye] Fountain contends. “The men not wanting to train her, giving her a hard time, not respecting her boxing skills, that’s what we get a lot of.”
…
Fountain hopes to land five fights this year, maybe the last one for a championship. Her aspirations are no different from those of the 21-year-old sensation Diaz or any of the other men around her at the gym. When Freeman’s Scrap Iron speaks in Million Dollar Baby about why fighters fight, his words cut straight to Akondaye’s heart.

“If there’s magic in boxing,” he says, “it’s the magic of fighting battles beyond endurance, beyond cracked ribs, ruptured kidneys and detached retinas. It’s the magic of risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you.”

It often does seem to require a fierce grandmother, a relentless opponent, or a more abstract shock to teach us to stand up straight, shoulders back, and act like we have some sense; to assume inclusion and demand respect. Too bad everyone can’t just take that for granted.

The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby, Hotel Rwanda [New Yorker]
Ray and Birth [New Yorker]
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [New Yorker]
Majority of Americans Already Know Jamie Foxx’s Oscar Speech by Heart [Borowitz Report]
Blacks in American Film [African Americans]
Female pugilists battle as much for respect and acceptance as they do for titles [Houston Chronicle]
Introducing ‘Dirty Harry,’ via Video Game, to a New Generation [NY Times]
Hertzberg gets the Kempton Treatment [Decembrist]

Sylvester Stallone, noted for his presidential preference against serving in Vietnam, has cited Leonardo Da Vinci as his personal hero. Indeed, he has many strings to his bow. Aside from his thespian and directorial achievements, he writes, paints in oils (Julian Schnabel was said by critic Robert Hughes to be the “Sylvester Stallone of painting,” which could overshadow Stallone’s own career in fine arts), collects the work of others, parents, keeps in shape, expresses support for the war in Iraq, hosted Saturday Night Live (1997), golfs, and appears to read the Tarot. As Hendrik Hertzberg reported in the New Yorker issue of Sept. 29, 2003:

On October 8, 1993—a day short of exactly ten years before the originally scheduled date of California’s recall election—one of Sylvester Stallone’s better movies opened wide at area theatres. In “Demolition Man,” Stallone played a Los Angeles cop, cryogenically frozen around the turn of the century as punishment for a bum rap, who is thawed out in the year 2032 to give chase to his similarly thawed-out criminal nemesis. He teams up with Sandra Bullock, a new-style nicey-nice police officer. As she is showing him around the L.A. of the future—where everything is tidy, corporate, and bland—he does a double take when she mentions the “Schwarzenegger Presidential Library.” Decades before, Bullock explains perkily, Arnold Schwarzenegger became so popular that the American people waived the technicalities and made him their maximum leader…. This was satire, not prognostication. Either way, though, it appears, at the moment, to be right on schedule.

Now Stallone is a magazine publisher, too. The cover of the premiere issue looks strange and unfinished; it’s self-consciously boyish, like a vintage Atari bulletin for health-shake-drinking NASCAR fans. The content is old-spicey, too—piping-hot updates on, for instance, Jackie Collins, Kim Basinger, and the founder of Sam Adams (not to mention Rocky IV). Still, the actual magazine isn’t as retro as this witty reworking by Panopticist of Sly‘s cover. The typography and frightening face shininess are not to be missed.

On the real cover, fittingly, the gaze of Jenna Jameson’s cleavage is pointed directly at Sly’s abs, which is what we have come to. From the fight veteran’s lead pectorial:

Pay attention to the really important things in life. Be the guy who tells the joke, not the recipient of the punch line. Be the predator, not the food source. Gorge yourself at that banquet of life until the only thing left on the table are crumbs. In other words, you’re an army of one. So, it’s up to you to either lead the charge with conquest on your mind … or sound the trumpets of retreat. If you’re reading this magazine, you’re already hitting the ground running.

But perhaps an entire magazine isn’t necessary to convey one’s personal philosophy. All it really takes is the right embroidery, as reported in a 1998 Cigar Aficionado profile (in which Stallone reflects that he would have liked to have played in The Lion in Winter and A Streetcar Named Desire, among others):

In his den, a dark, wood-paneled room filled with leather-bound books, leather chairs and rare Bedouin rifles hanging high on the walls, there is a small, homespun knit pillow inscribed with what truly must be Stallone’s words to live by: “He lived life on his own terms. He fought his wars. He lost a few. But he never quit.”

Strongman: Arnold Schwarzenegger and California’s recall race [New Yorker]
Sly magazine: March 2005: Premiere Issue [GetBig, via Panopticist]
The Surprisingly Retro Design of Sylvester Stallone’s New Magazine [Panopticist]
The Chickenhawk Database [New Hampshire Gazette, via Birdman]
The Patron Saint of Paint: Score one for brush strokes: Julian Schnabel, aging bad boy of American art, takes over Frankfurt [Time Europe]
Stallone II: After Years of Muscling His Way Across the Screen, Sylvester Stallone Seeks a Different Label: Serious Actor [Cigar Aficionado]
Rocky [print, Krugerstars]

So Yogi Berra is suing Turner Broadcasting System for $10 million for a generous compliment:

This is what made Yogi cry foul: The [offending Sex in the City] ad centers on a promiscuous character in the show named Samantha, played by Kim Cattrall. It asks readers to choose the correct definition of “yogasm” from these choices: a) a type of yo-yo trick; b) sex with Yogi Berra; c) what Samantha has with a guy from yoga class. The answer is (c).

The editorialist, George McEvoy, goes on to note that Berra’s fame is based on a fair bit of legend, including his ageless quips (I had a pencil with “It ain’t the heat; it’s the humility” printed on it in my childhood):

But one of the most famous Yogi quotes — “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded” — I know for a fact he did not originate. The first time I heard it was in Tim Costello’s pub on New York’s Third Avenue years before. A writer named John O’Brien just had returned from a long stay writing for movies in Hollywood. He said he got off the train and hailed a cab. It was lunchtime, and when he suggested they go to Leon and Eddie’s restaurant, the cabbie replied: “Ahh, nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Mr. O’Brien later used the line in a story for The New Yorker magazine.

Even Yogi has admitted, “I didn’t really say everything I said.”

…

But aside from the malaprops, whether his or someone else’s attributed to him, Yogi’s language always has been clean. From the day he began playing baseball, nobody ever heard him use vulgar language in the presence of youngsters.

He always has been aware of the influence his image can have on kids. That’s why this sleazy TV ad campaign got him so angry.

Get me the checking department! This is the sort of (as Berra would say) wrong mistake that can drastically set back the happiness of the human race. There’s nothing vulgar about orgasms, Yogi-style or otherwise, and it’s about time all us puritans learned it.

A New Yorker-inspired baseball book is also in the news: Last Time Out: Big-League Farewells of Baseball’s Greatest, by former sportswriter John Nogowski. From a graceful profile:

Nogowski conceived “Last Time Out” in 2000 after meeting novelist John Updike at a writing workshop at Florida State. Among other things, the author discussed his famous 1960 New Yorker magazine essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” about the last game of Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams—in which Williams clubbed a home run in his final at-bat.

Good to know some players exit on a heroic note.

With All the Yogi-isms, “Yogasm” Doesn’t Fit [Palm Beach Post]

Nogowski takes a crack at great players’ last at-bats [Tallahassee Democrat]

Last Time Out [publisher]