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Jonathan Taylor writes:
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died at 100.
Updating: John Updike praised The Origin of Table Manners in 1979, though he found missed any sense of "the arthropoid breath" in CLS's "science of mythology": "It is beautiful like a clock, and cool like a clock—a strangely elegant heirloom from the torture-prone, fear-ridden jungles and plains. Its orderly revolutions and transpositions have the inverted function of not marking but arresting time, and making a haven, for their passionate analyst, from the torsion and heat of the modern age."
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Hello! We're a small band of culture writers, editors, and artists based in New York and Los Angeles. Emdashes, which spent its formative years as a New Yorker fan blog, is our collection of conversations—mostly civilized—about magazines, movies, design, punctuation, and other things that stir us.
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Dashes, some say, “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like an em dash itself—provides a thoughtful pause amid the hubbub.
Emdashes, founded in 2004, is written and drawn by Emily Gordon, Martin Schneider, Pollux, Jonathan Taylor, and Benjamin Chambers, as well as occasional guest contributors. All posts before October 2008 are by Emily Gordon.
The site was designed by House of Pretty with illustrations by Jesse R. Ewing.
Additional drawings are by Carolita Johnson and Pollux (author of our web comic, "The Wavy Rule"). The Emdashes pencil logo is by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.
Other writing by Emily Gordon
- Reviews: theater writing (for Time Out Chicago)
- Profile: Valerie Casey, Designers Accord founder, is spearheading the design of sustainability (for SXSW World)
- Feature: Rea Irvin: visionary art director, bon vivant, New Yorker founding father (for Print)
- Slide show: the Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for NYCgo.com)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
- Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Homage: Celebrating lindy-hop legend Frankie Manning (for NYCgo.com)
- Inquiry: Does a New Republic redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
- Interviews: four up-and-coming designers under 30 (for Print)
- Profile: novelist and dance critic Laura Jacobs (for Newsday)
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Comments
I remember reading Updike’s review of Lévi-Strauss’s “The Origin of Table Manners” when it appeared in the magazine (“A Feast of Reason,” July 30, 1979) and enjoying its audacity immensely. I say “audacity,” because even though Updike was a layman when it came to things anthropological, he did not flinch from pointing out what appeared to him to be a nonsensical element in Lévi-Strauss’s vast system of thought. To illustrate his point, Updike picked out a vivid example, namely, Lévi-Strauss’s analogy between honey and menstrual blood. I’ll not go into detail here. Suffice it to say, Updike persuasively shows Lévi-Strauss’s analysis to be “less a pragmatic servicing of reality than the execution of a fiendishly difficult, self-imposed intelligence test.” The review – one of the best I’ve ever read - is included in Updike’s great 1983 collection, “Hugging The Shore.”