Martin Schneider writes:
Here’s the lede from “The Death of the Slush Pile,” by Katherine Rosman, in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1991, a book editor at Random House pulled from the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts a novel about a murder that roils a Baltimore suburb. Written by a first-time author and mother-to-be named Mary Cahill, “Carpool” was published to fanfare. Ms. Cahill was interviewed on the “Today” show. “Carpool” was a best seller.
That was the last time Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., remembers publishing anything found in a slush pile. Today, Random House and most of its major counterparts refuse to accept unsolicited material.

What I love about this is that the name of the company is Random House.
(After I wrote the above, it occurred to me that I should find out how Random House got its name. According to Wikipedia, “Random House was founded in 1927 by Americans Bennett Cerf, Christopher Coombes and Donald Klopfer, two years after they acquired the Modern Library imprint. Cerf is quoted as saying, ‘We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random,’ which suggested the name Random House.”)

Martin Schneider writes:
A couple of weeks ago I caught the final show in John Waters’ Christmas Tour, which ended at B.B. King’s. He was vastly entertaining. Afterwards, he made his way to the bar area and greeted a few of the diehards who opted to hang around (it was after midnight), of which I was one. A fun experience.
In connection with this event, I was talking to my young companions (a good fifteen years younger, as it happens) about the concept of Camp, and mentioned Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay. Not very surprisingly, neither of my friends had ever heard of it, a circumstance for which mere youth is not the full explanation. Now, in 2010, it suddenly popped into my head to give it a look. Now that was a terrific idea.
The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this…. etc.
1. It’s the best-written thing I’ve read in months. Months.
2. The astonishing variety of references in the essay are a clue to a problem that was never much of a problem anyway. That is, since Sontag later became a symbol of a certain kind of highly refined left-wing thinker and aesthete (nothing of the kind ever really happened to Pauline Kael, for instance, despite her quasi-apocryphal “Nixon” remark), to what extent was Sontag occupying a necessary role in society, one that someone else might just as well have occupied, and to what extent was she an original?
It’s safe to say that Sontag was really very original indeed. The references show the wide range of her intellect, curiosity, and perhaps most important, pleasures, and that sort of thing is not readily reproducable. Sontag forged a path that led to a place only she could have reached.
3. Is there anything that any hipster has ever done, anywhere, that would have surprised Sontag? I doubt it. This is the reason there is no “Notes on Hipsterism.” There isn’t any point, Sontag had already gotten there.
4. This doesn’t make her infallible. I think punk might have perplexed her a bit, or even maybe Devo or Kraftwerk. The article coincides with the arrival of the Stones and the Beatles, so she could not have ventured any thoughts on rock or used rock bands as examples (jazz seems to occupy that slot in her cosmology). Does anyone know if she ever had any serious “take” on rock music?
5. Sontag seems to have been the first and possibly most perfect example of a type that is relatively common nowadays, the intellectual who enjoys high and low culture with equal avidity. Sontag is more “perfect” because her choices include opera, high art, and the entire gamut of high modernism. Her latterday incarnations are far, far less likely to know Richard Strauss and Jean Genet, although they probably enjoy Jane Austen and chop-socky movies about equally.
6. The essay has not dated in any material way.

Martin Schneider writes:
Oh boy, my favorite parlor game…. also called “How Emdashes generates posts.”
1. Last night I saw Jason Reitman’s movie Up in the Air, and I enjoyed it very much. It certainly did seem like a movie that teed up its subject perfectly and then whacked it, which I’m not sure is quite the same thing as being a great movie, but … I’m quibbling, it was very good. I’ve spent a lot of time in airports recently, so I had to see it before all that useless knowledge wore off.
Connection: The movie was based on a book by Walter Kirn, who had a story published in The New Yorker in 1997.
2. Lou Reed and Ben Syverson designed and programmed an iPhone app called Lou Zoom. I installed it on my iPod Touch. What does it do, you ask? Why, it takes your Contacts list and renders it in much larger type. This accomplishment does rank below revolutionizing American avant-garde rock and roll, but not many things are as monumental as that. Plus it has to be the coolest way ever to tell the world, “I’m OLD! I can’t read this small type anymore!” (And you know, I think the app is very good. I do prefer looking at it to the default Contacts app.)
Connection: The New Yorker published excerpts from Lou Reed’s tour diary in 1996.
3. Oh man, is this picture great:

Connection: The New Yorker hardly ever misuses apostrophes, making this sign the anti-New Yorker.

Martin Schneider writes:
It was quite a spree.
My involvement with Emdashes recently has been minimal, but purely for logistical reasons. I’ve been traveling a tremendous amount and also was not getting the physical magazine shipped to me, and under such circumstances it becomes increasingly difficult to stay engaged with the magazine and feel as if one has anything worthwhile to say. Fortunately, the first problem (constant movement) is now solved, and the second (delivery of magazine) is being remedied even as I write this. I expect to be more engaged in the near future.
I did, however, want to take a moment to lavish praise on Platon’s recent gallery of world leaders. I saw it linked at Jason Kottke’s glorious weblog, and—well, I was really blown away by it. I can’t say that I’ve seen any work of Platon’s that struck me as anything less than excellent, but I don’t think I realized just how good the man is until I clicked on all forty-nine snapshots and listened to all forty-nine of his individual comments. If you haven’t done so, I urge you to spend a quarter-hour looking at the pictures with some care. The results are fairly astonishing.
The comments are about what you would expect—he generally praises everyone and then makes an observation about each subject’s personality and/or physiognomy and sometimes reflects on the circumstances of the meeting or the technical approach he chose for the subject. Most of the pictures are black-and-white facial portraits, but some are in color and some feature the subject’s body to some degree. I must say I found it quite impossible to question his judgment in almost any of the cases. They all seemed rather remarkably well done to me.
If Platon is the new Richard Avedon—am I the last person to figure this out?—then I must say The New Yorker made an excellent choice. I have made the transition from sympathetic observer to fan.

Martin Schneider writes:
The setting for the arresting first scene of the entire series, in which the as yet unidentified Don Draper quizzes a black restaurant peon about his brand of cigarettes, is the Lenox Lounge, according to Matthew Weiner in the DVD commentary to the series opener. Still in operation today, the Harlem landmark is located at 288 Lenox Avenue, just off Malcolm X Boulevard at 125th St., although that stretch of Sixth Avenue obviously didn’t bear that name in 1960—just another sign of how things change, a central theme of the show.
It seems a bit implausible that Don Draper would spend that evening alone in Harlem, perhaps 75 blocks north of his office and at least 110 blocks north of Midge’s apartment, his eventual destination. Then again, as we later learn, Don is a devotee of Ingmar Bergman’s movies and Frank O’Hara’s poetry, so he does have the capacity to surprise in this regard; the Lenox Lounge is a legendary jazz club, so he might be there to catch Lady Day deliver a memorable rendition of “I Cover the Waterfront.” (By the by, it is just me or have they blunted this side of Don in Season 3?)
I’ve been to the Lenox Lounge before, and I’m a little confused as to how seriously we’re meant to take Weiner’s information—it’s one thing for Draper himself to want to go there, quite another for it to be crammed with white office workers as a matter of course. Does anyone know the general demographic characteristics of the place during that period? It didn’t look like that (demographically speaking) in 2000 or so, when I was there.
I was hoping for a little insight on this question from The New Yorker, but no such luck: the references to the Lenox Lounge are all recent, the finest among them being an interesting photograph of the club’s interior, in a Portfolio by Robert Polidori, text by Kurt Andersen.

Martin Schneider writes:
The New Yorker Festival has augmented its bounty by adding a new Saturday event. The endearingly plummy character actor (and native of Westchester County, which I did not know until I checked it on Wikipedia just now) has been an indelible presence in countless movies and should make for an excellent subject.
Saturday, October 17, 1 p.m. Acura at Stage37, at 508 West 37th Street. The price is $27.