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Penguin Check; Alvarez on Plath, Hughes, &c.; Rebecca Mead and Bridal Madness

Filed under: Headline Shooter Tagged: Adam Gopnik, books, cartoons, events, feminism, Glen Le Lievre, James Wolcott, Philip Roth, Rebecca Mead, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes

James Wolcott, who always speaks his mind and does it in such sublime sentences, makes an omelette with some familiar eggs, in particular Adam Gopnik, whose book Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York he's reviewing. (From The New Republic, signup required.)

A bird-minded blogger wonders: Is there an avian misidentification in this week's Glen Le Lievre cartoon?

The Ham & High (that's the Hampstead and Highgate Express) has a winsome, chummy profile of Al Alvarez. Who? Read on, philistine (sorry about the ellipsis points; it's a long story):

In fact, the poet, novelist and critic is pretty good-natured about most things, inclined to seek out the amusing, quirky side of life in his lengthy essays for the New Yorker, the New York Review and other publications.... A collection of his favourite articles, entitled Risky Business, is published this month.... They cover Alvarez's well-documented passions for poker, mountaineering and flying - and articles on writers from Philip Roth to Sylvia Plath that remind you how rare it is to find beautifully written, lively, perceptive journalism.... But then Alvarez is several classes above most hacks. As influential poetry editor of the Observer in the 1950s and 60s, he championed the work of Plath, Thom Gunn, Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes.... He reminisces fondly of the days when The Observer devoted pages to work by unknown poets and the New Yorker would commission a 50,000-word article that consumed the magazine over two issues.

Keep reading, it's fascinating.

Meanwhile, mark your calendars for May 24: Rebecca Mead has an event at the New York Public Library, and it sounds like a pip. It's inspired by her forthcoming book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding (out on May 10): "A conversation with Rebecca Mead where she will discuss why the American wedding has become an outlandishly extravagant, egregiously expensive, and overwhelmingly demanding production." In that vein, if you don't mind being sickened by pinkness, check out this truly hideous site devoted to Cinderella bridal accessories that I discovered the other day after reading Peggy Orenstein's terrific Times magazine piece on the marketing of princess mania.

1 comments

Comments

Hehehe. I love it when we slip one past the fact-checkers! Yeeha, Glen!

carolitaFebruary 02, 2007

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Emdashes, founded December 2004, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.

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