New feature! Books, new and not, by New Yorker authors. Today, what excommunication was like for one unlucky literary soul:

It was probably inevitable that James Atlas, a well-known writer, would present himself in his memoirs as a wretched loser. These days, even big-time executives complain that “the system” has done them wrong, and wealthy athletes whine about a few harsh words from coaches or sports writers. So why shouldn’t James Atlas make My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale (HarperCollins), which might have been written as a chronicle of success, into a 220-page lament for his ego? He’s learned how to transform defeat into something grand and theatrical.
…
A few years ago, something tragic happened to Atlas: In middle age he was fired from his job. A staff writer on The New Yorker, he had been hired in the Tina Brown era and apparently never adjusted to the requirements of her successor, David Remnick. He wasn’t turning out what Remnick wanted. So Remnick fired him, explaining that the money he was paying Atlas would go to a more productive writer.

Something like this has happened to most of us. It is never nice. Keep going…

The mind of the self-mad man [National Post, Canada]

I don’t check The New Yorker Near You often enough either, so I’m posting these listings as I see them. Of course, confirm dates and times with the venues.

Sponsored by Foolproof, New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff appears at Town Hall to discuss the publication’s nearly 69,000 cartoons, and how he culled the best of them for a massive new compilation. 1119 Eighth Ave., 206-325-3554. $15. 7:30 p.m. Tues., April 19.

Also in the listings: Tony Kushner, Shakti Butler, Lars Vilks, Sister Helen Prejean, Miriam Rajkumar, Noam Chomsky, and Welcome the Whales Day! Seattle has its priorities straight.

Update: Sasha Frere-Jones is moderating a panel at the EMP Pop Conference tomorrow:

Eric Lott et al., “Love and Theft Revisited” (Liquid Lounge, 7:15 p.m. Thursday). Lott’s highly regarded minstrelsy study, Love and Theft, provided Bob Dylan with the title of his 2001 album. It also gives a focus to this panel, moderated by EMP’s Eric Weisbard and featuring The New Yorker‘s Sasha Frere-Jones, Stagolee Shot Billy author Cecil Brown, Princeton’s Daphne Brooks, and Songs in the Key of Black Life author Mark Anthony Neal, among others.

Brain City: Very Picky This Week [Seattle Weekly]
A Pop Conference Top 10 [Seattle Weekly]

Coming up: My first, but by no means my last, review of life and love (of steak) at the Algonquin Hotel. Plus, a celebrity encounter! No, not Donald Antrim, but read his short story from last week anyway. “But I never read the fiction!” Whatever you say, but read this one for me. A week later it’s still hovering just outside my thoughts, occasionally knocking lightly at the door, asking if it can come in. And I always say yes. You’ll see.
Note from the future: The celebrity, who was staying at the hotel and told me about his surrealistic new play, was Dominique Pinon. Remember him from Amélie?

Here are this week’s contents. Links to come later—if you’re in Manhattan and you don’t have a Ziggy doom cloud over your head, you’ll see these very articles on the printed page in no time! I like the look of this one—oh, I see, it’s the travel issue. Good timing! I’m about to travel a long way myself and I’ll need it for the plane. What already oodles my noodle:

Tad Friend (twice!), David Sedaris (speak of the devil), Lawrence Osborne, Ian Parker on Sebastiao Salgado (I worked on a book of his photos, and he is quite amazing; hey, there’s an online-only slide show!), John McPhee, the “Are We There Yet?” quartet (includes one of the Jonathan Mafia, but you have to look to see which), Steven Shapin, Alex Ross, David Denby on Fever Pitch (which I saw and was tickled by last night), Seamus Heaney. In cartoons, another Roz Chast “Back Page”! Can’t wait to get my hands on these: Gahan Wilson, Charles Barsotti, Bruce Eric Kaplan, and Edward Koren. As Rufus Wainwright would say, my phone’s on vibrate for you.

JOURNEYS
Goings on About Town
Talk of the Town

COMMENT: WASTED ENERGY
Elizabeth Kolbert on the fight over drilling in Alaska.

DEPT. OF MERGERS: WINNERS
Rebecca Mead reports from Mr. and Mrs. Jack Welch’s book party, at the Four Seasons.

DEPT. OF NOISEMAKING: THE ANGRY INVESTOR
Ben McGrath on Daniel Loeb and what complaint letters will get you.

LEGACIES: THE NUT LADY RETURNS
Tad Friend on a showdown in the Nutmeg State.

THE FINANCIAL PAGE: IN YUAN WE TRUST
James Surowiecki on where America’s currency is headed.

OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS: Tad Friend
The Parachute Artist: How Lonely Planet changed travel.

REFLECTIONS: David Sedaris
Keeping Up: Why does he always lose me?

THE SPORTING SCENE: Nick Paumgarten
Dangerous Game: The hazardous allure of backcountry skiing.

LETTER FROM NEW GUINEA: Lawrence Osborne
Strangers in the Forest: A guided tour to an isolated tribe.

PROFILES: Ian Parker
A Cold Light: Sebastiao Salgado sails to Antarctica.

ANNALS OF TRANSPORT: John McPhee
Out in the Sort: UPS and the art of moving everything.

FICTION: Ludmila Ulitskaya, “The Orlov-Sokolovs”

ARE WE THERE YET?
Nicole Krauss—My Summer in Poland
Jonathan Franzen—Countdown
Jane Smiley—Cold Front
Mary Gordon—Pilgrimage

THE CRITICS/BOOKS
Joan Acocella—Sybille Bedford’s travels.
Steven Shapin—Doping and sports.
Briefly Noted

THE THEATRE: Hilton Als
Jane Alexander plays Djuna Barnes.

MUSICAL EVENTS: Alex Ross
Harry Partch’s “Oedipus.”

THE CURRENT CINEMA: David Denby
“Kontroll,” “Fever Pitch.”

POEMS
Seamus Heaney—“In Iowa”
Franz Wright—“Four Poems of Youth”
Dana Goodyear—“The Above-the-Sea World of Jacques Cousteau”

THE BACK PAGE: Roz Chast, “Travelogue”

COVER: Bruce McCall, “Joys of Travel”

DRAWINGS: Lee Lorenz, Frank Cotham, David Sipress, Robert Weber, Alex Gregory, Barbara Smaller, Leo Cullum, Jack Ziegler, Mike Twohy, Carolita Johnson, Eric Lewis, Drew Dernavich, William Hamilton, Danny Shanahan, Victoria Roberts, Gahan Wilson, P. C. Vey, Charles Barsotti, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Edward Koren, Robert Mankoff, Jason Patterson, Matthew Diffee

SPOTS: Joost Swarte

Categories: NYer, Issue

Catching up with Editor and Punisher, I see they did a funny potty-mouthed (such an enduringly weird expression) “translation” of Amy Davidson’s questions for Margaret Talbot from an online-only interview about her recent Antonin Scalia profile.

Davidson’s line of questioning is essentially a series of permutations of the aforementioned big question:

Davidson: Why is he such a polarizing figure?
Translation: Why do so many people think Scalia is such an asshole?

Davidson: Is it even clear that he believes in the separation of church and state?
Translation: Is it possible that’s he just a stupid shithead?
…
To her credit, Talbot maintains her equanimity, offering fair responses to rather tendentious questions…

And lots more along those lines, with commentary. If you suspect that I have some kind of aversion to cursing because I haven’t given you the more sailorish sections of the above post, not so. If you could get the inside of my head as an iTunes radio station, you’d hear some swearing you wouldn’t soon forget. Luckily for all of us, you can’t.

For fun, here’s another Editor and Punisher report on New Yorker history, Louis Menand on Eustace Tilley, and what E&P will do “if anyone ever describes us as ‘cultivated observers of life’s small beauties.’ ” Read “Of Monocle-Shattering Importance”—you know you want to.

Q. & A.: The Scalia Court [New Yorker, online only]
Supreme Asshole [Editor and Punisher]

I am definitely going to buy Sean Wilsey’s book when it comes out in June. As soon as I learned (from “Peace Is a Beautiful Thing,” if you lost the midsection of this week’s magazine through some hot-yoga mishap) that he’s a third-generation memoirist, that was already enough delicious trauma to get me hooked. I’m still only partway though the excerpt—I’m savoring it—but I’m thoroughly convinced the entire book will be this disas-tactular. Wilsey’s writing is a treat; throw in a confused Pope, joint custody, a pillow needlepointed “You can never be too thin or too rich,” Tab, divine visions, the music of the spheres, and a poison-pen columnist…it’s just great.

In an inspired but doomed Google search for an image of a pillow like the one described above, I found this useful note from a debunker of the origins of famous phrases:

Consider “You can never be too rich or too thin.” This maxim is associated with any number of wealthy, skinny women. It has been attributed to Rose Kennedy, Diana Vreeland, the Duchess of Windsor and Babe Paley. (The last two most often.) In the early 1970s the Duchess of Windsor, had it inscribed on a throw pillow. No matter how rich and thin she may have been, the Duchess was not particularly clever and is unlikely to have coined this phrase. Babe Paley is a more promising candidate. The comely wife of CBS founder William Paley was known for her tart tongue. But no credible evidence exists that she coined this remark. The most likely candidate of all is one to whom the maxim is seldom attributed: Truman Capote. According to quote maven Alec Lewis, Capote said he observed you can’t be too rich or thin on “The David Susskind Show” in the late 1950s (probably 1959). Since kinescopes of Susskind’s shows are tied up in litigation, this cannot be confirmed. Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke told me he has no evidence that the writer originated this phrase, but that he very well might have. Capote was close to Babe Paley and could have fed her the line.

By the way, I’m reading some poems at 2:30 this afternoon in Shafer Hall and Rachael Rakes’ famed Frequency series at the Four-Faced Liar, where anybody who doesn’t know your name will shortly. Like poetry? Marianne Moore didn’t either! So come and have an ale, pale or less so.

Nice Guys Finish Seventh: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations [Ralph Keyes]

Categories: NYer, Wilsey, Poetry, &c.

There’s a new New Yorker afoot, a non-bittersweet bundle of not-any-misery, and his name is Graham. Though not yet a day old, he seems destined to take the city by storm, and have excellent taste into the bargain. If his mentor and tutor have anything to say about it, he’ll be guest-blogging in no time. Kid, you’re hired!

“I had to be what movie people call the continuity girl; he expected me to read the text closely so that he could have someone to talk to as he worked on finishing it, to opine, query, schmooze, then query again,” writes Elisabeth Sifton in Slate about working with Saul Bellow at Viking, which sounds like a great time even for those who didn’t care for him personally. One editor who felt that way thrust a heavily bellowed proof at Sifton and gave up: “Look at this…. Just read that,” he repeated. “Read it! He took a perfect sentence, the bastard, and he made it even better.” I wonder what Miss Gould (who, by all accounts, did that more than once) thought of him? Sifton continues:

In the same way, he revised the shorter text of To Jerusalem and Back, his first nonfiction book and the occasion of his first publication in The New Yorker. Saul was still smarting about the magazine’s treatment of his books over the decades; they’d never taken any of his stories, either. He’d recite by heart passages from reviews whose faint praise suggested, he thought, anti-Semitic condescension: “They think it’s remarkable that I write as I do seeing as how it isn’t my native language. That’s the implication. Their idea of a Jewish writer is Isaac Singer—shtetls, exotic Polish ambience, magic, curious folkways. Believe me, I know whereof I speak. They never wanted stuff of mine.” He was being paranoid, I told him, but privately I thought he was right.

William Shawn’s having accepted this big piece on Bellow’s trip to Jerusalem was a big deal, therefore, and it pleased him. But he was on guard, especially whilst his text was submitted to The New Yorker‘s elaborate editorial and fact-checking procedures, and I remember the glee with which he trumped them. For example, he had written that his first publisher-editor at Viking—the much-loved, revered Romanian Jewish Pascal Covici—had started out life in America as a grapefruit salesman in Florida. The fact-checkers asked three different people to verify this implausible statement; all three said that the only living person who would know that detail was Saul Bellow. We talked about verifiability, about the meaning of factual truth, about trusting the writer, about seeing trees and not understanding forests, especially when the landscape was Israeli.

Sifton also awards Bellow a posthumous presidential fitness patch to add to his many other laurels. “We know that stamina and persistence are essential ingredients of great art, don’t we? Saul was in fighting trim. That gorgeous prose, with its sinewy elegant hilarity and syncopated rhythmic intensity—you don’t think it was composed by a slob with poor muscle tone, do you?” I’m sure the Observer could do a devastating chart to see if this ratio holds true. Poets, beware the calipers!

In Chiasmus in the New Yorker, part of Mardy Grothe’s fabulous project (which I’ve written about) devoted to the topsy-turvy rhetorical device, there’s an apt example from James Atlas’ “The Uses of Misery” (1998). It’s a fitting tribute now: “Bellow’s life trajectory is cyclical; out of misery, triumph; out of triumph, misery—an exhausting but exalted dialectic.” Not a bad description of editing, either.

Editing Saul Bellow [Slate]
A Silver Dish [Bellow, New Yorker archive: “What do you do about death—in this case, the death of an old father?”]
Rereading Saul Bellow [Philip Roth, New Yorker archive: “The transformation of the novelist who published ‘Dangling Man’ in 1944 and ‘The Victim’ in 1947 into the novelist who published ‘The Adventures of Augie March’ in ’53 is revolutionary.”]

A dishy note by San Francisco’s P.J. Corkery on the magazine’s excerpt from Sean Wilsey’s new memoir:

In the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, that lovely hostelry that’s sheltered many an editor and writer, I learn that apparently everyone in San Francisco is talking about the current issue of The New Yorker, which contains a memoir by Sean Wilsey, the son of Pat Montandon and the late Al Wilsey. Pat and her husband and son may have been somewhat witless (though Sean’s piece contains some brave reporting), but they have been the occasions of wit. … Sitting here at the Algonquin’s famous round table, I remember that Pat Montandon once gave a lunch for San Francisco ladies in which each woman was asked to describe the most awful moment she had ever lived through. Round the round table they went, discoursing on divorce, mayhem, humiliations great and puny. When they reached the last woman, she said, “The most awful moment I’ve ever lived through? Well, that would be this one right now.” And she got up and left. …

By the way, I just noticed that Todd Pruzan, this issue’s star reporter (not to be confused with Flash ace Brenda Starr—whose sassy creator, Dale Messick, is remembered in a hilarious Times obit today), contributed to those holy grails for McSweeney’s fans, issues #1 and #2. He also acted as deputy editor. Along with Wilsey, that makes for a notable eggersian presence in the current issue; this is bound to happen pretty often from now on. With results like these, I’m not complaining.

‘I happen to like New York’ [SF Examiner]
Dale Messick: A Comic Strip Life [Animation World]

Seymour Hersh, David Ignatius, Bernard Kalb, and John Burns went to Georgetown on Tuesday for their Weintal Prizes in diplomatic reporting:

The New York Times‘ respected John Burns opened the award ceremonies with optimism: “By early this year, many of us had come to gloomy conclusions about where it all was going,” he said, “but Jan. 30 and the elections changed our assumptions.

“We stayed off the streets for the first few hours. We sent out our Iraqi scouts, and they called us on mobile phones. Suddenly, they were saying, ‘There are people going to the polls!’ We went out and found something quite impossible, and we began to wonder whether we had pulled back too far in our reporting: They were right and we were wrong.

“In that day, we found increasingly that the people of Iraq turned out overwhelmingly—because on that day, they amounted to something. The fact is that something remarkable has happened—the Iraqis are talking in conclaves of issues that have not been addressed for 50 years.”

Seymour Hersh, another honoree who has done outstanding work in The New Yorker about the underside of the war, disagreed. “I think it’s going to be a disaster,” he told the audience brought together by the diplomacy and foreign service schools of the university. “Abu Ghraib was attacked twice last week. The people I talk to are very skeptical. Sure, the Shiites and the Kurds voted … But we’re still fighting the people we started fighting. And everything I know says we know little about the resistance.”

About halfway through the evening, the talk among the four awardees—the other two were David Ignatius of The Washington Post and Bernard Kalb, formerly of CBS News—turned to the media, in the context of the Iraqi experience. Here the attitudes reflected not only the difficulties of working with this administration, but also a kind of new atmosphere in the country.

“I have never seen a time when what we write has such little effect on what the government does,” Hersh said at one point. “This is not like Nixon and Johnson and Vietnam—this group in the White House has an agenda, and it won’t stop.”

Leading Journalists Share Perceptions About State of War [Yahoo! News]

Categories: Hersh