Martin Schneider writes:
Zadie Smith is teaching a weekly fiction seminar at Columbia University this semester under the title “Sense and Sensibility.”
A local bookstore called Book Culture, which I believe for years was called Labyrinth, has posted 10 of the 15 books that Smith is assigning her charges. Here they are:
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
Catholics, Brian Moore
The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
Crash, J.G. Ballard
An Experiment in Love, Hilary Mantel
Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, David Lodge
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
My Loose Thread, Dennis Cooper
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
The Loser, Thomas Bernhard
The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow
A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
Reader’s Block, David Markson
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
The Quiet American, Graham Greene
Pretty good list! I see she hit favorites of Benjamin (Spark), Jonathan (Bernhard), and myself (Wallace). I wonder what the other five are? If you’re taking the course and happen to see this, drop us a line!
Addendum: Book Culture has now come through with the full list. Thanks very much!

Martin Schneider writes:
Last night, I was pondering something Emdashes-related with a TV on nearby and was suddenly confronted with the visage of James Surowiecki on The Colbert Report (start 8:25, end 11:17).
It’s wonderful to hear the Keynesian Surowiecki of recent “Financial Page” columns and “Balance Sheet” posts get an airing on national TV. (Unsurprisingly, it takes a comedy show to put a guy like Surowiecki on.) Note that Colbert plays fair: nary a syllable of derision in naming his employer—regrettably rare! The joke involves him being knowledgeable, not “hoity-toity.”
Surowiecki advocates dropping money from a helicopter (not as a preference to Obama’s agenda) and leasing Yellowstone Park to the Canadians and all-around makes a great impression. Congratulations, James!

Martin Schneider writes:
Obama’s nomination for HHS Secretary, Tom Daschle, is withdrawing his name from consideration. Not good news for supporters of comprehensive health care reform. But who will replace him? The name of Howard Dean, a medical doctor, has been mentioned. Ezra Klein is supporting Atul Gawande. I’d support that too. I’m totally starting that rumor, based on no information at all.
Not for nothing, but a few years ago, I reviewed Gawande’s book Better in Publishers Weekly, and I wrote that “one suspects that once we cure the ills of the health care system, we’ll look back and see that Gawande’s writings were part of the story.” And nothing would make that prediction more likely than his joining the Obama administration.

Martin Schneider writes:
I just noticed something weird: You can get hits from old New Yorker articles on Google.
It may not be immediately apparent how significant this is. Since The New Yorker began steadily—aggressively, even—increasing its electronic profile in 2000, one of the natural consequences has been that you can access the materials by searching on them.
But there have always been arbitrary constraints: Anything since 2000 is likelier to be searchable because the magazine was putting a lot of its content on its website—logical. Before that, and you might be out of luck. The Complete New Yorker DVD set came out in 2005, which vastly increased the user’s ability to search on The New Yorker‘s past. But the search was a keyword search that also (I think; I’ve never quite gotten a handle on this) folded in The New Yorker‘s own internal abstracts and possibly some other text—but never full-text searches or anything close to it. The Digital Edition, unveiled a mere three months ago, also doesn’t incorporate full text. (The Digital Edition lives at http://archives.newyorker.com/, which will become relevant shortly.)
So here’s what happened. You know the “site:” tag in Google? You use it if you want to limit a search to a single website. I was fiddling around, searching for the term “Ramones” on newyorker.com—and I realized that my hits weren’t limited to www.newyorker.com; you also get stuff from archives.newyorker.com. Here are the results from that search:

site:newyorker.com ramones

Google’s gotten subtle and variable enough that different people might get slightly different results, but on my machine, it returns 198 hits. Scrolling down, the first (counting….) twenty-six hits are from www.newyorker.com, and just about all of them appear to be recent, that is, since 2000. That material was posted to the magazine’s website.
But the twenty-seventh hit is not from www.newyorker.com. It’s from archives.newyorker.com. And it dates from 1991. The title reads, “The New Yorker Digital Reader : Jan 07, 1991.” I don’t know for sure, but it looks like every hit after that might be from archives.newyorker.com. (I guess this is a good moment to observe that you have to be a subscriber of the magazine to benefit from this quirk. In case you don’t know, I’ll reiterate that any print subscriber automatically receives free access of all old issues on the Digital Reader.)
And yes, if you’re wondering, these results are completely different from the hits you would get from the other New Yorker resources. On the CNY DVD set, a search for “Ramones” returns 6 results (I only have one update installed on my version, FYI.) On the website, the same search returns 162 hits, but a great many of them are for “Ramon” and have nothing to do with our beloved Forest Hills punk gods.
Most of these hits for the Ramones seem to be listings, which makes some sense. Readers tend to forget the sheer volume of verbiage that each week’s listings section represents. Those would provide a huge amount of content that is nowhere else accessible. Now you can document Jerry Orbach’s storied career as a Broadway crooner! Among other things.
I don’t actually think these results are coming from a proper full-text archive. I think these are OCR (optical character recognition) results. I worked extensively with OCR in the late 1990s, so I kind of know it when I see it. One of the hits in Google provides the following preview:

he Ramones-who are, after Patti Smith, per haps the most successful act to pass through these … \\rho have all taken Ramone clS their stage name,

“\\rho” is obviously “who,” and “clS” is obviously “as.” That’s OCR output, right there. So I guess the results will be imperfect. Good, but imperfect. (It stands to reason that if The New Yorker had their archives OCR’d, then it would capture advertisement content as well. Basically the nature of magazine layout would make this very hairy—but you’d stlll get some decent results, as the Ramones search shows.)
You can search on those archives hits exclusively by doing this:

site:archives.newyorker.com ramones

Okay, that’s enough on this subject for now. Please do write in if you discover anything interesting about this!

_Martin Schneider writes:_
I like this “list”:http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/22/influential-media-obama-oped-cx_tv_ee_hra_0122liberal.html of the 25 most influential liberals in America than the one Tunku Varadarajan, Elisabeth Eaves, and Hana R. Alberts turned out this week for the _Forbes_ website. (Quibbles aside, of course.)
Hendrik Hertzberg finishes at number 17, a couple of spots behind questionably liberal writers Maureen Dowd and Christopher Hitchens. The spot description runs: “Foremost among a tribe of opinion writers that waged a form of moral war against the Bush administration, he has the purest voice in the choir of the East Coast liberal ‘high church.'” But is that really true? (Come to think of it: that role might be taken by Frank Rich, who curiously goes unmentioned.) Anyway, I’d’ve emphasized the unusual grace of his writing style instead—hey, is scrupulous scribbling a path to power?
As I indicated, the list is hard to question, by and large, especially the top pick. But I subscribe to the notion that influence accrues to the regime’s opponents: Rush Limbaugh rises in the Clinton years; Jon Stewart under Bush. Overall, this group is in for some rough years.

In this installment (see this “post”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/random-profiler-liebling-on-ch.php for an introduction to the “series”:http://emdashes.com/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=2&tag=Random%20Profiler&limit=20), the roulette wheel landed on Winthrop Sargeant’s 1978 “Profile”:http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1978/06/26/1978_06_26_047_TNY_CARDS_000326739 on Glynn Ross. This was very much the sort of Profile that I was hoping for when I started this project: an interesting subject previously unknown to me.
Ross was the director of the Seattle Opera starting in the 1960s, and he did a lot to popularize the form in the northwestern metropolis by using unconventional promotional techniques and generally being smart about his task. It was his policy to perform all operas in the original language and in English, an idea that shouldn’t be as rare as it apparently is. He was also very shrewd about attracting established stars to remote and (then) unfashionable Washington State for single productions. On this, Sargeant quotes Ross: “An artist wants four things: one, a chance to do something that requires the best of his abilities; two, the opportunity to grow by singing different roles; three, prestige; and four, a paycheck.”
Ross staged the first American production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle that didn’t take place at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, a production that helped establish Seattle as a major center of Wagner interest. He used colorful slogans directed at the new wave of youthful customers, such as “La Bohème: Six old-time hippies in Paris,” “Roméo et Juliette: Two kids in trouble, real trouble, with their families,” and (cue bad-pun grimace) “Get Ahead with Salome.” In 1971, just a couple years after it was written, the Seattle Opera was the first reputable opera house to stage The Who’s _Tommy,_ with Bette Midler in a leading role, a detail the magazine omits. (In a perfect world, we’d have some YouTube footage of that production!) In baseball, the analogous figure would be “Bill Veeck,”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Veeck roughly.
Sargeant’s work here is a reminder of how conservative the form can sometimes be, which is not a criticism. The Profile starts by establishing the subject’s Profile-worthiness and then segues to the subject’s background, relying a good deal on lengthy quotation from the subject. It’s not “exciting,” but it does the job.
Reading the Profile, it’s difficult not to think of Peter Gelb, general manager of the Met since 2006 and a New Yorker Conference “attendee”:http://emdashes.com/2008/05/the-new-yorker-conference-is-q.php in 2008. Gelb has been phenomenally successful in finding new audiences for Met productions, and his main weapons have been the appearance of filmed versions of current productions in our nation’s multiplexes and fresh thinking on the nature of those productions, both in their selection and in the emphasis on accessability. A quick search at Google suggests that not too many people have suggested the parallels between Ross and Gelb, but they seem pretty obvious to me (not that I’d be aware of any other similar figures).

Isn’t it time for another Malcolm Gladwell post? A few weeks ago Tina Roth Eisenberg at my favorite design blog, “Swissmiss,”:swissmiss.typepad.com/ linked to this swell “video”:http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/video-gain-2008-gladwell of Gladwell discussing Fleetwood Mac and David Galenson’s ideas about creativity at AIGA’s GAIN Conference in October, the same month that the _The New Yorker_ ran Gladwell’s “article”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell about him.
Galenson is an economist who developed a theory of creativity that states that artistic innovators mostly come in two packages, of which the exemplars are Picasso and Cézanne. Picasso made his mark as a young man, and his pictorial brilliance seemed to come quite naturally; Cézanne’s success came much later in life, and his breakthroughs seemed the result of a great deal of sustained effort and slow experimentation. As far as I can tell, neither Galenson nor Fleetwood Mac is mentioned in “Outliers,”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0316017922/ref=sib_dp_srch_pop?v=search-inside&keywords=hedgehog&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Go at least according to a search on Amazon’s OnlineReader (I have not obtained my own copy of the book yet), this even though the subject seems to fit in perfectly well with the book’s themes.
Then you have the interesting fact that, as Jason Kottke “pointed out”:http://www.kottke.org/08/08/old-masters-and-young-geniuses several months ago, this Galenson article was, according to _The New York Times,_ actually “rejected”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/business/15leonhardt.html?pagewanted=all by _The New Yorker_ in 2006, the first Gladwell pitch to receive the heave-ho. David Leonhardt’s article quotes Gladwell’s “editor” pooh-poohing Galenson’s spiel and asking Gladwell whether he is “crazy.” (What editor could this be? Surely not David Remnick?)
Galenson’s division of artists into blazing young “conceptual innovators” and older “experimental innovators” reminds me a bit of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox Isaiah Berlin’s famous appropriation of the ancient Greek poet Archilochus (admit it, you knew that this blog would eventually work Archilochus in somehow). Archilochus wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”; Berlin’s idea was that Dostoevsky was a hedgehog and Tolstoy a fox who wished that he were a hedgehog. Somehow the conceptual innovators seem like hedgehogs to me, and experimental innovators like foxes. Galenson, by the way, does cite the hedgehog/fox pairing in his book “Old Masters and Young Geniuses”:http://books.google.com/books?id=aj43lvAIJIcC&pg=PA181&lpg=PA181&dq=galenson+hedgehog&source=web&ots=gEl9FVxIgR&sig=KP92wQybfyltDF-XeBMalDexxhg&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPA181,M1.
There aren’t that many bands whose career arc is that similar to Fleetwood Mac, in my opinion (rock is a young person’s game), but it happens that my favorite band in the world, the “Wrens,”:http://www.wrens.com/ fits Galenson’s schema to a T. Their masterpiece, The Meadowlands, was four years in the making and came fully nine years after their debut. And it matches up with Galenson’s “experimental innovators”—the band tinkered so extensively with the tracks that the band forced themselves to destroy the master tapes as a way of committing to a truly final cut.
Another one that comes to mind is Pulp. Pulp’s breakout album was “His ‘N’ Hers,”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_%27n%27_Hers which came out in 1994; their first album came out in 1983, eleven years earlier. That’s quite an incubation. All of their good albums came after their tenth year in the business.
By the way: A few days before Christmas, Gladwell appeared on _The Charlie Rose Show,_ and the resultant “segment”:http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9855 features both Gladwell and Rose at their best. I also love the show’s new—I think—black website, which seems to reference the show’s trademark table-immersed-in-blackness aesthetic.

About a year ago I toyed with the idea of reading every single Profile that ever appeared in _The New Yorker,_ a project surely to be measured in decades rather than years. I didn’t get very far with that one. (I did read a few of the very first Profiles, mainly because they’re super short.)
As 2008 wanes and 2009 commences, I’ve downsized to a more manageable project. With the aid of a “random number generator,”:http://www.random.org/ I intend to read a randomly selected Profile every now and then. There are few undertakings that can’t be improved by the I Ching, I reckon, not that I’ve ever had occasion to use it.
I took the system out for a test drive last night, and it worked like a charm. The random number generator steered me to “1952” (represented by year “28” out of 84) and then to the number “1” Profile of that year (out of 19), which happens to be a three-parter by A. J. Liebling, dated January 5 to 19, on the immensely promising subject of Chicago.
It’s a complete disgrace.
I’m not familiar with the city at all, but a few times in my life I’ve encountered the trademark Chicago Boast, which I find only mildly irritating and mostly charming. Liebling seems to find in that tic an occasion for an all-out attack on the city. New York has its rivalries, with Chicago, with Boston, with Washington, with Los Angeles…. but frankly, this does not seem an outgrowth of any such dynamic, it seems purely personal—to wit, Liebling himself just powerfully disliked Chicago (where he lived for a year or so before writing the Profile).
Liebling relies strongly on the injudicious use of personal anecdote, most of which are chosen to point up the provincialism, insularity, paranoia, corruption etc. etc. that he finds so typical of the city. Liebling writes well, and he keeps it moving, but the articles feel like piling on. Right from the very first page, the exercise feels lazy.
A comparison with Christopher Rand’s 1966 “Profile”:http://emdashes.com/2008/07/the-405-and-the-bqe-both-mean.php of Los Angeles, published a mere fourteen years later, would, I think, serve as an object lesson of the maturity of the magazine during these years, primarily attributable, I would imagine, to the magazine’s editor starting in 1952, William Shawn. (Of course, it’s possible that the culture at large was maturing in certain ways as well.) On the other hand, Harold Ross had died in December; perhaps the issues that appeared over the next few weeks aren’t the best measure of anyone’s abilities.
So far, so good. We’ll see what randomness brings us next time.