Arts editor Liesl Schillinger’s name may be only slightly less well known than that of fellow ex-checker Jay McInerney, but she’s been taking the Times Book Review by storm. She has a piece today about homeopathy and the flu.
Update: The American Council on Science and Health feels chills alternating with fevers, plus a runny nose, after reading Schillinger’s piece.
Here’s New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee with one of his inexplicably rejected cartoons, from last week’s supercalifragilistic Rejection Show (which Diffee co-founded, along with cheerfully deadpan host Jon Friedman). I strongly suggest you go next month—I laughed very, very, very much. I also saw drawings by aforementioned nice guy Eric Lewis and their genial colleague Drew Dernavich, and just about every cartoon was wicked funny (if I said every cartoon was, you wouldn’t believe me, would you?). Thanks to Tim Siglin for the excellent photo! Click on it to travel to the land of Flickr and see it at a proper size. Here’s another good one—of Friedman pimping Combino the terrifying new Rejection Show mascot, with whom I would be afraid to slow-dance even for a prize, but a brave fellow held him close for nigh upon three minutes. He’s a better man than I.
Also representing graceful non-success were the hilariously bitter Mike Albo of Underminer fame—who read the most absurd dump email from a three-night stand I’ve ever heard—and Andrea Rosen, who is always awesome, and who got rejected from the reality show she created and had to suffer the further indignity of seeing her then-boyfriend, a bartender at Galapagos, be made producer. Anne Altman’s cat-toilet-training documentary, not schadenfreudistic enough for America’s Funniest Home Videos, prompted something wildly pre-human in all of us, and that was good. I also dug, and ogled, handsome devil Nick Stevens, who almost became the new Marv Albert (without the little problems) via ESPN’s Dream Job. Unfortunately, he drove all the judges out of their minds without intending to, since ESPN insisted on running a promo twenty times a day featuring Nick crowing “Ramalama ham-jam!” It got on their nerves, for some reason. But he triumphed anyway, by telling the story so excellently. Really, it’s an evening that can’t miss. The best part is that you feel so supremely exultant in non-rejectedness, since there’s nothing like being part of a giddy, laughing crowd to realize you’re the successes and those visionless suits (and hipster bartenders) are the losers.
All right, Wilseyists, I promised, and I try not break promises, especially to you. Here’s Sean Wilsey’s book tour schedule. Just promise me in return that you won’t creep him out with any excessive stalking, OK? Gifts of whimsically packaged Jelly Bellys, good; lurking in his shrubbery paparazzi-style, bad. Jot this down on a notecard if you’re afraid you might mix them up.
For this show, ‘Rejection’ leads to success [Daily News]
Cartoonist speaks about modern life through quirky drawings [Nice profile of Matthew Diffee and his cartooning process and also the NYer’s rejection process, Fort Worth Star-Telegram]
I’m honored to be Normblog’s Friday profile today. This is a good place to develop your dossier about me. I tried to keep my answers shortish so Norm wouldn’t have to cross the Atlantic to pelt me with old scones, so there were people I ended up leaving off my lists of intellectual and cultural heroes (particularly the latter). They keep coming back to me, like one of those recurring dreams that you didn’t turn in that 15-page undergraduate paper about Kim Novak as auteur—oh wait, that’s true. Tim Clinton, I put you on my list of intellectual heroes because you taught me so much about film, and I swear I’ll finish it if you’ll let me.
Fun as it’s been, even the pie was nothing compared to the churning outrage over Anthony Lane’s review of Star Wars—Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. In brief, he doesn’t care for it. Yoda should be ground up in a blender. Natalie Portman’s football helmet makes no sense. “Nobody ingests or excretes. Language remains unblue.” (Not so Lane’s, which I found rather jarring.) The film “is a zoo of rampant storyboards.” Others disagree, however, so Anakins are gonna roll:
Everyone’s talking about Anthony Lane’s review of Revenge of the Sith in this week’s New Yorker. With its mix of death-defying vivisectional logic (“how Padmé got pregnant is anybody’s guess, although I’m prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes“), and low-blow stand-up comedy (“Sith. What kind of a word is that? … It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other”), this is the battlecry we’ve been waiting for…. Jump into the controversy! (Ewok Babes is just crying out for an Andrew Hearst cover.)
By the way, emdashers, it’s come to my attention (through studying my own RSS feed, after a pleasant email exchange with Renaissance man Matt Shobe of both FeedBurner and a recent cartoon caption contest) that my—horrors!—em dashes don’t always come through as such, but as alphanumerical soup. Please, for the love of all that is typographical, tell me if your browser or feed can’t read a character I’ve used. I know you have the same gentle forgiving nature as me (OK, me on a good day), so it’s hard for you to bring yourself to criticize, but it’s so much worse not to know. Think of bad HTML as spinach in my teeth, and tell me as a friend. That’s what the email link is for. And although I say this on my profile (thataway==>), it’s worth repeating for the skittery-jittery types among you that I never, ever quote anything without permission. Letters are private; interviews are interviews. I may not have gone to j-school (if I had, I’d be in even more debt than I already am from p-school), but I know how to mind my t’s and k’s.
Tomorrow: some pain-easing methadone for all of you Sean Wilsey addicts, who need more and more about him every day to calm the shakes. I understand, and I’m here to help.
Space Case [Anthony Lane, New Yorker]
Anthony Lane and the Sith Backlash [Cinematical]
Top 99 Actual Star Wars Lines You Might Hear In A Porno [Keepers of Lists, via Cinematical. Why do men say “porno” and women say “porn movie”? Take-home exam is due in 48 hours under my office door.]
Metaphysics of a Magazine [NY Observer on Radar, as fresh out of the oven as Kogepan!]
From introspective Dr. Mouse contest winner Roy Futterman (“More important, however, is what I learned about myself”):
I’m not the Criticas magazine guy. I’m some psychologist guy. The only other notice I’ve gotten is some old lady who took the time to find my home address and write to me to tell me that I’m not funny. That’s the first “the price of fame†chapter of my future E! True Hollywood Story.
When asked for his caption-contest wisdom, Roy humbly demurred: “You should just let the world know that if they become finalists, they will get insulting email from the elderly.”
I can’t think of a better reason to enter. This week, there’s a drawing of a surfboard executive with your name on it. The New Yorker cartoonists are even psyched about having their work in the spotlight—this according to the sweet Eric Lewis, who has a cartoon in the magazine this week, makes incredible sculptures, and who was kind enough to let me ask him a millon questions last night. Well, psyched except for the (non-present) artist who reportedly quipped, “Hey, let’s ask David Remnick if we can have a contest where readers can write in the last paragraph of his article!” You knew it wasn’t all unicorns in the garden over there all the time, didn’t you? Be all you can be—vote for Jennifer Cain’s roaming minutes, give Vice President Jeff Spicoli something to say, and wait for the abusive snail mail to start pouring in. From the little old lady in Dubuque, most likely.
Because I, a person so concerned with the suffering of others that I routinely save spiders and flies from the certain death or, at the very least, reduced standard of living that would result from their being trapped indoors, cannot bear to think of you experiencing the gooberosity that I have begun, masochistically, to invite into my otherwise socially fruitful life by waltzing into various tangentially magazine-related scenarios (like this one), declaring myself a New Yorker bloggist, and turning into a media-circus freak before my very eyes. Trust me, you don’t want the agony. I’ll bear it for you, as though it were a hairshirt made of itchy pencils and tiny, biting Gopniks. You can have faith that when next you think of me, I’ll be writhing in a bar somewhere attempting to speak full English sentences to people who, before this mad experiment, would not have reduced me to gibberish. Reporting is pain, by Jove, and I want more of it!
I have no doubt my new pals at the Dorothy Parker Society will get on this and mobilize the martini militia:
The Academy of American Poets, which promotes the virtues of American verse in schools, libraries and on the internet, has come up with a novel way of raising funds: it wants its users to adopt a poet. A single poet costs $30, $50 bags you a pair, $70 gets you three and $100 secures you five, a real bargain. However, you don’t actually get to meet the writer (which is just as well, as many of them are dead) but your name, city and state will be listed on your chosen poet’s page. Emily Dickinson, for example, has so far attracted 21 admirers yet Dorothy Parker has, at the time of writing, not one supporter. Anyone who can compose the following, however, gets my vote: “Three be the things I shall never attain: / Envy; content; and sufficient champagne.” Further details can be found at www.poets.org.
They should really add some cheaper poets, like my friends and me. If 100 unknown poets get sponsored at a buck a throw, they bring in as much as the faculty of a well-regarded MFA program! The Academy could run photos of the tears welling up in the big eyes of a forgotten language poet, in the style of ads by Feed the Children and co. that shame the viewer by comparing the price of a cup of coffee (and that’s plain deli coffee, not your caramel macchiato frivolity) to the worth of a human life. Adopt Parker (who donated every dime to the NAACP when she died, by the way) and a dozen of your favorite Frequency readers, and you’ll feel really good and thrifty, too, what with all that nasty expensive coffee you didn’t drink. Also, in the case of the sub-minor poets, you would be free to meet us. We are not, at press time, dead.
Literary Life [Telegraph; see on the same page a truly chilling note on a Scottish bookseller who’s been burning his surplus. Ugh.]
Here’s a cheerful Gothamist post about the Betsy-Tacy Society. When you’re done reading, go buy the reissues of the books—I plan to. This arbitrary division between children’s, young adult, and adult literature is pretty meaningless, don’t you think? Not to say that Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and Linda Lovelace’s Ordeal shouldn’t be kept away from the average ten-year-old, since the experience (not my parents’ fault, I should add) was, at least for me, rather jarring.
The thirteen Betsy-Tacy books [summaries courtesy of a B-T fan page, which is rather pretty in pink and not in the mod Duckie way, but nice descriptions if you’ve never read the books or haven’t in a long, long time]
…till I have my magazine. Inevitable that they should cover the high silliness/seriousness over at the Flux Factory, or rather cover Ben McGrath’s Talk of the Town about it:
The New Yorker’s always enterprising Ben McGrath made the harrowing, God-awful trek to Queens last week to visit Flux Factory, an alleged “artist’s collective.†He appears to have survived the ordeal to the “living installation†called “NOVEL†without vomiting once.* (New Yorker writers have a higher tolerance for pretentiousness than us, naturally.) He even observed a little live blogging(!) from writer/resident blogger Laurie Stone:
Laurie Stone didn’t respond to a couple of knocks on her wall. She appeared to be napping.
Very impressive. We’re still at the stage where we just close our eyes and bang the keyboard. -KEW
Fly away on the link jet to see Laurie Stone’s blog. I remember copyediting her years ago at The Nation, but I don’t remember anymore what punny nickname we gave her. This is what happens to you if you work at a magazine where, shall we say, recreation occurs.
The New Yorker Unlocks Secret to Blogging [Gawker]
Excerpt from the NYT piece about the Flux Factory shenanigans [LICNYC; Times piece is already archived, which I think is insane. Thanks to Eric for tipping me off to the story as it actually happened, though I was set on Slow and didn’t jump to it as, obviously, our boy Ben did. I suspect this may mark the difference between people who are paid to respond to news as springily as firemen and those who haven’t even set up their Amazon Affiliate program yet, which is said to bring bloggers as much as $25.00 a month!]
Napping on the Job [Laurie Stone]
Because it’s Tuesday and there is no issue in my mailbox. This is the issue (Specter, Rudnick, McGrath, Bass, Tomkins, Franzen, Thurman, Marshall, Franklin, Lane, Moore, Tanning, Blitt, Smaller, Kane, O’Brien, Vey, Lewis, Gregory, Kaplan, Crawford, Chast, Sipress, Sempé, Koren, Cotham, Cullum, Dernavich, Mariscalto…) to which I refer, but I do not have it in my hungry hands. Why, circulation dept., why? I thought we were friends, or had at least reached a détente.
To console myself, I plan to read Maureen Thorson’s fabulous monster poem, which I heard her read last night at Pete’s Big Salmon just before a performance by the irresistable Paul Muldoon. If you too live in one of the pariah boroughs and are suffering from empty-mailbox syndrome, I suggest you read it too. It will help. Here’s a wee taste:
We also learn that all the earth’s monsters
Have been collected and put onto one island.
The monsters will fight for you, if you’ve got
Cash. You and your buddies can relieve yourselves
Of whatever assumptions of complexity and just
Go in pounding each other with monsters. “Arggh!
You will pay dearly,” yell the monsters when
They lose. Their monster teammates yell back,
“Arggh!” Go on…