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Monday Morning Link Roundup: Aldo Buzzi, Alvin Levin, the Philosophy of Fiction, 'Life' Magazine's Bourdieu, and a Brooklyn 'New Yorker' Bookshelf
Filed under: Looked Into Tagged: Alastair Reid, Aldo Buzzi, Alvin Levin, Freebird Books, James Reidel, Jonathan Taylor, Kalbir Sohi, Life magazine, newsbreaks
Jonathan Taylor writes:
A few overdue links to start the week—you're catching up already!
Aldo Buzzi, who was a longtime friend and collaborator of Saul Steinberg, died October 9. He was 99. "I was born just in time to see the Russia of Chekhov," he wrote in "Cheknov in Sondrio" (The New Yorker, September 14, 1992), a Sebaldian wandering through time, literature, and the names of things.
New Directions in October published Love Is Like Park Avenue, a resurrection of the writings of Alvin Levin, unsuccessfully "courted" by The New Yorker. He published stories in a number of little magazines, and then in the 1942 New Directions anthology. According to the editor of the new book, poet James Reidel, Levin then "received a note from William Maxwell of The New Yorker in November asking him to submit some of his stories....Levin enjoyed the attention, but he also preferred to putter about his apartment and personal life."
Kalbir Sohi, a philisophy graduate student in Britain, comments on New Yorker fiction in his blog—often informed by his philosophical interest in "trying to describe what goes on in people's minds when they are using a particular kind of expression."
Via Crooked Timber, a chart of the High, Middle (Upper and Lower) and Low brows depicts The New Yorker in the Upper Middle bracket, along with Theater, Rocquefort and charades, a.k.a. "The Game." (The Google Books archive of Life is a goldmine.)
The well-articulated wall of New York City–related books at Freebird Books, on Columbia Street in Brooklyn, includes two shelves labeled "New Yorker Writers." Like the rest of the collection, it spans an impressive number of decades, and right now includes Another Ho Hum: More Newsbreaks from the New Yorker, from 1932, I believe, and, with condition issues, a good deal at $25, if I remember correctly. (Speaking of reporter reliability issues, a gratuitous leafing through Renata Adler's Gone at Freebird informed me about the scandal over Alastair Reid's 1984 disclosure of the fictionalizations in his New Yorker fact reporting. That puts a little extra spin on the remarks of his that I reported from the recent "Art of Reportage" event!)
Comments
Jonathan, if you go back there, ask them to hold that Another Ho Hum for me; I must have it!
I am sorry to hear of Aldo Buzzi’s passing. His ingenious little book, “Journey to the Land of Flies,†is one of my favorites. It contains the New Yorker piece you refer to – “Chekov in Sondrio†– which appeared in the magazine’s September 14, 1992 issue. It also includes a set of “Notes†sourcing the many beautiful Russian quotations that Buzzi artfully incorporates into his essay. Something the New Yorker version has, which the book doesn’t, is an interesting black-and-white illustration of a Russian postcard, presumably of the type mentioned by Saul Steinberg in his letter to Buzzi, which Buzzi quotes at the beginning of “Chekov in Sondria.†Curiously, The New Yorker archives Buzzi’s piece under “Fiction.†Grant it, it’s not really a “fact piece,†either. It’s a unique piece of writing, and a lasting achievement.