1. The Daily Iowan talks to Sasha Frere-Jones, who’s been traveling.

2. The Morning News has a spirited conversation with Jonathan Lethem, who notes, for instance, “First of all, I think my so-called originality—which is just as often called my ‘surrealism’ or my ‘postmodernism’ or what have you—tends to be overstated, at the expense of how deeply traditional my work is.” An expressive Labrador occasionally interjects. This was good:

It’s not about reading. That’s the problem. It really is about—I’m repeating myself—class anxiety. Once you have an eye for this you spot it in odd places. I read a review in Book Forum where a critic, quite incidentally, in attacking Michel Houellebecq, said in an aside, “But then again, the French regard Hitchcock as art.” Well, now, wait a minute! These battles were fought and won. These victories were decisive ones, fifty years ago. There’s no rolling that back. Hitchcock is art. So if you pin Hitchcock’s scalp to your belt: “Not only have I seen through Michel Houellebecq, the charlatan, but in fact I’m going to tell you that the auturists were wrong and Hitchcock is lowbrow and unsavory,” you’ve discredited yourself so absolutely that you deserve to read nothing but Trollope for the rest of your life.

Hold on, I like Trollope! Although nothing but Trollope would be hard.

3. Tom Bartlett of Minor Tweaks interrogates Tom Bartlett of Elvis imitation. “The last place you want to be is in a room full of Elvises. They can get very catty.”

For some reason Lethem’s riff on Hitchcock reminds me of a Frere-Jones line from this week. If you’re not reading the minuscule Critic’s Notebooks and Pop Notes at the front of the book, you might want to give them a glance next week. Many of the critics benefit from this extremely short form, which pushes them to amp up the adjectives and make stronger statements than they might at more length. Frere-Jones says, in a review of the new Franz Ferdinand album, “Dismiss them only if you are already dancing or never bored.” I—being an enthusiast about a few things, which as they diminish in number increase in belovedness—can get behind that kind of definite praise.

Later, more Lethem:

All I care about is what’s on the page. I care about the book and I also feel a compulsion—it’s not a responsibility toward anyone except toward myself—a compulsion to ensure that any given text is an absolute self-enclosing, self-describing system, that needs absolutely no apparatus or information brought to it for it to function. It should be a machine like a perfect space probe, one capable of being self-sustaining in a vacuum, forever. But, having committed to making the text function that way—and I always do—it would be a kind of bogus naiveté to pretend that innumerable readers would not be encountering this work alongside at least some hint, some whisper that I grew up in Brooklyn, that I went to public schools, etcetera.

As it happens, Frere-Jones and New Yorker person Meghan O’Rourke did a Slate Book Club about The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s other books, Brooklyn, etc., in 2003. It seems like a sincere, focused conversation, but I haven’t read the novel yet, so I can’t jump in. Besides, I have various degrees of acquaintance with these people, so no real editor would let me review any such thing—an excellent policy. Since I’m a blogger, I guess I can say I’m looking forward to the book, whereupon I’ll return to SFJ and MOR’s dialogue and comment. Actually, you know what? I won’t. Whatever I’m doing here, I’m definitely not either moderating or starting publishing-world tempests in a teaspot (as Pogo, eluder of Schjeldahl, would say). I like reading them from time to time, but there’s no need for my participation, knows God.

In any case, these Slate exchanges can be great, but the casual-formal-critical-chatty format can also make for a stilted end result. It also underscores how many ostensibly civilized people close their letters with “Best,” which—outside the workplace form letter—is the signatory equivalent of the blank email subject line. Which, in turn, is the skull and crossbones of cybercorrespondence. Imagine if you wrote your loved ones paper letters (as I overheard one of my freshman-comp students say, with understandable awe) and the outside of the envelope had no return address, was scrawled with your left hand in thick black Sharpie, smelled odd, and was smudged with unidentifiable grit. That, to me, is the blank subject line. If I get it, I panic. If I use it, beware.

The ASME list of the best magazine covers from the past 40 years includes a bunch of New Yorker covers, including Saul Steinberg’s “View of the World From Ninth Avenue” (March 29, 1976)—which I’ve written about before—and Art Spiegelman’s World Trade Center outline (Sept. 24, 2001). Agree with the picks? Others you liked better?

Link via Read Ions.

Two parodies I liked this week: Responding to the news in the Times that “the Bible Society in Australia launched its translation of all 31,173 verses of the Bible in the language of text messages,” Minor Tweaks, one of my favorite cheese enthusiasts and Ikea-bot correspondents, posts a sensitive, reverent version of the dialogue between God and Abraham. And The New Yorker‘s own Sasha Frere-Jones adds his own newly unearthed letters to the world’s general amusement/fear about Harriet Miers.

Back-and-forthing in Slate some years ago, in a dialogue about capitalism’s agenda, free speech, the Bush administration, and the illusions of language that suddenly intensifies with the changing dates (September 10 to 13, 2001).

At noon:

Celebrating the Artistic Culture of the Bayou

Leonard Lopate hosts an hour-long special featuring selections from “Parting the Waters,” The New Yorker magazine’s September 24th benefit for Hurricane Katrina Relief. The benefit is a celebration of the artistic culture of the Bayou, with musicians, actors and writers from the Gulf Coast region. Guests include: David Byrne and Les Miserables Brass Band, The ReBirth Brass Band, Buckwheat Zydeco, Calvin Trillin, Kevin Kline, David Byrne, Patricia Clarkson, and Richard Ford.

Read all about it here. Please have $50 in essential hurricane-relief funds ready, since the hand of Lopate will reach out from your radio to take it from you. Well, it won’t. But you could write a check.

See the handsome young fellow in the white shirt and cap on the left there, outside Town Hall for the Humor Revue and conveniently marked by a pylon? That’s my talented cuz Nick Lawson, who is also a fan of the magazine and has lately been gobbling down Just Enough Liebling. He’s a fine actor as well, so casting directors, take heed!

I have a quote-a-riffic quiz of festival-performer tidbits over at Beatrice. My favorite line is one of the Baryshnikov reflections—what an ardent humanitarian.

Categories: NYer, Festival

That’s “Very Long Wait” for Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee. But why? You’re Oz, Netflix! You can get everything! Can’t you? What do you have against Canadians? What did they ever do to you? I mean, besides burn down the White House in the War of 1812 and produce superior comedy and maple products?

Categories: Movies

The (print) reviews of the festival are ambling in, including this interview with poker champ Doyle Brunson, star of a Friday night event I didn’t dare even try to crash, because it was at a steakhouse, and I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on my hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners reporting because of all the distracting steak. Also, the $200 tickets.

Categories: NYer, Festival

Try some bitterness with your listings! From a spirited roundup of this week’s highlights in The Pitch:

Wednesday, September 28

New Yorker readers know David Denby as one of the magazine’s film critics. We, however, like to think of him as the grinch who stole college. See, when we were at Columbia University, experiencing what the school calls the “Core Curriculum,” Denby had just published Great Books, his account of retaking the core’s signature classes—30 years later. Denby enrolled in Literature Humanities (which starts with Homer and ends with Virginia Woolf) and Contemporary Civilization (which includes all the philosophy and theory biggies). He attended classes, did all the reading and even wrote a few papers. Our feelings about this experience, which he romanticizes—while mocking his younger classmates—can be summarized as follows: Of course you had time to savor all these books, Mr. Film Critic. The rest of us? We were busy taking the classes for the first time, reading the books for the first time and—oh, yeah—juggling a full course load. So we felt some schadenfreude when Denby published American Sucker, an account of his attempt to make money during the booming ’90s. Denby writes about making $900,000 and losing it all—along with, we think, his dignity, by admitting to an obsession with online porn and ownership of an Audi A6. What, working at the New Yorker isn’t enough? Denby signs books at the University of Kansas’ Oread Bookstore at 4:30 p.m. and speaks on “Reading Great Books in a Modern World” at 7 p.m. in Woodruff Auditorium, both in the Kansas Union (1301 Jayhawk Boulevard in Lawrence), for KU’s Sixty Years of Western Civ celebration. We’ll be the ones with the “Great Books Suck” signs.

Aw, they’ve got a bit of a point about the savoring, though I half-wish now that I could take more of the Columbia Core (I was across the street, reading at large and being nurtured) just for the Hegel of it. Luckily, from the warp-speed mind of Johanna Drucker—who taught Art Hum in those days—I got a whole keg o’ knowledge that I’m still tipsy on.

For more on required reading and the problems of canonization and decanonization, take a look at my friend Michael Broder’s thoughtful post about lyric poetry, a mini-review of Helen Vendler’s Poets Thinking:

In the intro, Vendler points out that “Great Books” courses generally pass lyric poetry over in silence, preferring to talk about epic, dramatic, and other narrative forms of poetry (and of course prose) that are more amenable to discussion in terms of “thought” as commonly conceived. Consequently, the average well educated student who takes Literature Humanities (or whatever they’re calling it now) as an undergraduate freshman at Columbia University or Core Studies 1 (Classical Origins of Western Culture, the course I’m teaching now) at Brooklyn College has a satisfactory conception of how thoughts and ideas are conveyed in epic and dramatic poetry (like the Iliad, Odyssey, Greek tragedy and comedy, Shakespeare’s plays) and of course of how thoughts and ideas are conveyed in philosophical works (Plato’s Republic or Symposium, essays of Montaigne, etc) and novels (Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, perhaps)…

…BUT MAY HAVE LITTLE OR NO CONCEPTION OF HOW THOUGHTS AND IDEAS ARE CONVEYED IN LYRIC POETRY, OR EVEN OF WHAT LYRIC POETRY IS. And of course, while many of us (poets) include narrative elements in our work, to a very great extent the contemporary practice of poetry is a practice of lyric poetry–in some form or other. As Vendler notes, this omission tends to result in a situation where intelligent readers from a variety of disciplines tend to read lyric poetry with a view towards abstracting its paraphrasable meaning, and then evaluating the work based on the perceived truth, validity, or value of this paraphrase.

Needless to say, I think she has a very good point here…. More Mike.

And I should know. I wonder why, mid-deadline, it often takes seeing one’s own byline to remind one (me, that is) that one does, in fact, often write? Well, here’s the byline, a review in tomorrow’s Newsday of David Rakoff’s spiffy new essay collection, Don’t Get Too Comfortable. Yes, he’s right, don’t! Why couldn’t I have done something more sensible with my life, like…Po Bronson, help me out here. I think the corny, true answer is: I like writing. As Dorothy Parker said, I love having written. There you are. You might as well live.