Monthly Archives: May 2005

Something wild

I’ve always been scrupulous about reading every word of the books I review, so my heart is lighter now that I’ve actually read Judy Sierra and Marc Brown’s Wild About Books—whose big award I casually raved about last month. And I’m glad to say it’s colorful, clever, literary, and winsome. It takes about ten minutes to read if you’re standing in Spoonbill & Sugartown as I was, half-listening to the tipsy art-world conversations of the post-book-party staff and petting the store’s pendulous striped cat. If you were reading the book aloud, though, it might take as many as three years to really exhaust its entertainment value.

Optic Nerve: 30 Postcards by Adrian Tomine

Also, received: Optic Nerve: 30 Postcards by Adrian Tomine, which includes some of his New Yorker work. It’s so good I can’t stand it.

(5.16.05 issue) And you may ask yourself

Is emdashes actually reading the new issue? Yes, I am. I’m timing it to see how long (in minutes and, if possible, seconds) it takes to read a single issue in its entirely without skipping around, including most of the non-boring ads and many of the Goings on About Towns. It may, in fact, take a week. Check back. In the meantime, a very rough approximation of the current table of contents, whose formatting makes even more sense on the magazine’s website—which you should bookmark anyway so you can read those Online Only pieces you know you forgot even existed. I never used to read them either, but that was before I was saved.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

THE TALK OF THE TOWN
George Packer on the new Iraq; girl in an Arbus photograph; the musician business.
George Packer, Lauren Collins, Rebecca Mead, Ben McGrath

THE FINANCIAL PAGE
Hello, Cleveland
James Surowiecki

THE POLITICAL SCENE
The Upstart: Has Manhattan’s D.A. met his match?
Jeffrey Toobin

SHOUTS & MURMURS
Try These Fun Hoaxes
Andy Borowitz

ANNALS OF RELIGION
Annals of Religion: A Hard Faith: Pope Benedict XVI confronts America.
Peter J. Boyer

PROFILES
The Mummy Doctor: What a scientist learns from ancient bodies.
Kevin Krajick

FICTION
The Room
William Trevor

THE CRITICS

A CRITIC AT LARGE
Tallulah Bankhead’s wild life.
Robert Gottlieb

BOOKS
Briefly Noted
Pop culture and intelligence.
Malcolm Gladwell

POP MUSIC
The Mountain Goats and the Hold Steady.
Sasha Frere-Jones

THE THEATRE
August Wilson’s “Radio Golf.”
John Lahr

THE CURRENT CINEMA
“Kings and Queen,” “Monster-in-Law.”
David Denby

POEMS
“Joe Heller,” Kurt Vonnegut [my link; note that poem is in Talk so that, like something by Sparrow, it’s marked as No Way Would We Publish This For Real]

“Clouds,” Charles Simic

“Dad, You Returned To Me This Morning,” Deborah Garrison

COVER
“On Her Way,” Carter Goodrich

DRAWINGS
Jack Ziegler, Robert Mankoff, Charles Barsotti, Danny Shanahan, Tom Cheney, Lee Lorenz, Mick Stevens, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Gahan Wilson, Michael Maslin, Matthew Diffee, David Sipress

SPOTS
Philippe Petit-Roulet

The tipping…two points!

You know Malcolm Gladwell has become fully tippy, or should I say pointy, when Sports Illustrated is tossing off references to him as if they were so many dodgeballs. In a piece about Shaquille O’Neal and how he’s “single-handedly changed the culture of the franchise” (as a carrier, as it were, ha), Chris Ballad muses:

Call it the Shaq Effect, or, in honor of author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, the Shaq-ing Point—that precise point in time at which a decent NBA player becomes a good one, perhaps identifiable as the first moment when O’Neal draws a double team that creates an eight-foot halo of wide open space for his teammates.

The Shaq Effect [Sports Illustrated]
Can You Buy an NBA Championship? [Gladwell, Slate]
Q. & A.: The Ming Dynasty [Ben Greenman and Peter Hessler on the Houston Rockets’ Yao Ming, New Yorker]
Sports Dept.: The Floor Moved [Ben McGrath on Madison Squ. Garden moving to Radio City during the Republican Convention, New Yorker]
Women in sports: New Yorker cartoon sends wrong message [Stephanie Salter, ASNE]

(5.16.05 issue) Fast Company at Heller High

I like it when magazines about the sweet slurp of capitalism tsk-tsk conspicuous consumption. From a Fast Company blog entry by Ryan Underwood:

What Billionaires Don’t Have

This week’s New Yorker magazine—a staff favorite minus one vocal holdout—contains a snappy little elegy by Kurt Vonnegut about the writer Jospeh Heller, author of the classic book Catch-22 and who died in 1999. I’m normally not a big poetry fan, but sitting on a city bus this morning, surrounded by stretch limos and chauffeured Mercedes’ [sic] hauling their respective masters of the universe off for another day of obscene money making, I got a kick out of these lines (which I’m reproducing in whole, much to the nail-biting chagrin, I’m sure, of our hardworking legal department):

JOE HELLER

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!

Which brings to mind Steve Martin once again. From the Chippewa Herald (that’s in Wisconsin, for the Midwest-ignorant):

Remember back in the 1970s when a new comic named Steve Martin had a routine offering advice on how to be a millionaire and never pay taxes?

“First, get a million dollars,” Martin deadpanned. Then when the IRS comes and asks why you haven’t paid taxes, just say, “I forgot!” The routine set up Martin’s “excuuuuuuuse me!” catch phrase.

It seemed funnier back then, but we have to credit former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski with a revival of sorts. His testimony in his trial on charges that he bilked his company out of millions was truly laughable.

Kozlowski has a lot to answer for. He admits his compensation was pretty over-the-top, but claims it was approved by a now-deceased company director. Federal prosecutors accuse him of stealing more than $150 million – money Kozlowski says was agreed to, but apparently was never disclosed to shareholders.

Last week, a prosecutor pressed Kozlowski on a $25 million “bonus” not reported on his 1999 tax return.

“You did not notice that the $25 million was missing from your W-2?” a prosecutor asked, according to reports of his testimony.

“That is absolutely correct,” he replied. “I did not notice that.”

What Billionaires Don’t Have [Fast Company Now]
Editorials From Wisconsin Newspapers [Chippewa Herald, via Duluth News Tribune]
Current issue contents [Left Business Observer]

My Dinner With Navin

”It is deeply satisfying to win a prize in front of a lot of people,” wrote E.B. White in Charlotte’s Web. Today’s Times reports that two New Yorker types did just that (the first hed seems to have wandered over from Highlights for Children):

Just for Fun

Steve Martin was named yesterday to receive this year’s Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Mr. Martin walked away from a successful career as a comic in the late 1970’s to broaden his repertory. Since then, he has written plays and films and starred in offbeat movies like “Pennies From Heaven,” “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” and “The Man with Two Brains,” as well as box-office successes like “Parenthood” and “Father of the Bride” (and its sequel). Mr. Martin, 59, has also published two novellas and a collection of comic pieces. The center said that Mr. Martin, learning that he had won the prize, which will be awarded on Oct. 23, responded, “I think Mark Twain is a great guy, and I can’t wait to meet him.” JOHN FILES

PEN Drama Awards

The playwrights Wallace Shawn and Dael Orlandersmith have been named winners of 2005 PEN Literary Awards. Mr. Shawn, the author of “Aunt Dan and Lemon” and “The Designated Mourner,” and Ms. Orlandersmith, whose works include “Yellowman” and “Monster,” are recipients of the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama, which honor a master American dramatist (Mr. Shawn) and an American playwright in midcareer (Ms. Orlandersmith).

Arts, Briefly [NYT]

Dirty laundry, self-loathing, zap!

Howard Hampton’s review in the Voice of The R. Crumb Handbook, which I for one am dying to get my hands on:

The first reaction to The R. Crumb Handbook, a rich and densely compacted anthology cum memoir cum mulch-heap scrapbook: finally, Huck Finn’s voraciously dysfunctional answer to The Boy Scout Handbook. If, that is, Huck had been a four-eyed antiquarian Catholic schoolboy geek adrift in 1950s suburbia, randomly sopping up the works of Harvey Kurtzman, Carl Barks, and Walt Kelly. Hey, kids, learn to draw dirty pictures—”It’s so simple even a child can do it”—and become an international cargo-cult treasure… Keep on readin’.

I’ve been storing up a lot of Crumb goodies for some imaginary Crumb post to end all Crumb posts, which I think is biting off more than I can chew. So I’ll just toss them out like…oh, well, crumbs, now and then hereafter. By the way, ever since the film, I always think of the magazine Leg Show (link safe for work—it wasn’t easy) when I think of Crumb, since there’s a scene in which he watches a photo shoot there. Leg Show! Aren’t humans weird? I like that about humans—even when I think I hate them as a group, I have to love that they’re so susceptible to their own perverse creations. And I love that Crumb has never been afraid to shine the big flashlight right on that weakness. It makes me like people more, not less, when I see his drawings. That’s art I can respect.

One more yummy snack: From this superb 1980 piece about Roz Chast by Don Shewey, which I somehow missed in my Chast hosanna, this very relevant fact:

Chast’s style of humor is not, needless to say, the house brand at the New Yorker, home of Charles Addams’ macabre sight gags, George Booth’s shiftless hound dogs and Edward Koren’s psychobabbling fuzzy-wuzzies. Compared to the New Yorker‘s typically representational, punchline-oriented cartoonists (lovable old friends or stodgy old farts, depending on your point of view), Chast is a downright radical.
…
Roz Chast is from Brooklyn, where her parents (a high school teacher and assistant principal, both retired) still live. She started cartooning when she was very young—”I used to draw this strip called ‘Jacky and Blacky’ that was, God, really dumb”—but her first big influence was, not surprisingly, R. Crumb. Crumb definitely stylized the visual imagination of ’60s youth, particularly the ones who helped make marijuana a multimillion dollar industry, and he spawned a whole school of slavish imitators. Some of Crumb’s stoned humor creeps into Chast’s work, although she claims to drawn under the influence of nothing stronger than rapidograph fumes; her signature—”R. Chast”—is perhaps an unconscious hommage to Crumb.

I’d like to see a show with their drawings intermingled. I’ve already claimed that Chast is sexier than people often think, and Crumb more romantic. I am the demographic for that show. Though I’m a poet and tend to believe I might be a solo speck in the universe without company or solace, surely I’m not alone on this one.

Naked Lunchbox [VV]
Detail of R. Crumb’s Sept. 28, 1998 New Yorker cartoon mentioning Tensegrity [Sustained Action]
Robert Crumb [great interview transcript, Guardian, UK]
R. Crumb at the New York Public Library [Boing Boing; funny excerpt from the book]
Crumb Products [official R. Crumb website; sells stuff incl. “Belly Button Comix” by Sophie Crumb]
Household is a Roz Chast Word [Soho News, via Don Shewey. Fun quote: “Any wild stories about the New Yorker? Roz Chast’s Secret Life with John Updike? “Hey, Updike, Salinger—Salinger and I were like that.” She holds up two fingers together. “Thurber! I knew Thurber before he died.” She holds up two fingers apart. “We were more like that.”]

Jonathans Are Illuminated: Have you met Miss Jones?

Mother Jones lets Jonathan Safran Foer do the talking. Here’s the interview.

And a lucky coincidence: Also new, a very nicely written Jonathan Lethem profile from the Bangor Daily News. (Why Bangor? Lethem has a significant Maine connection, explained in the piece.) Just a taste:

“I’ve always preferred dark horses and underrated things,” said Lethem, who will return to Bennington College in Vermont, his almost alma mater, in June for the ultimate drop-out vindication – he’s giving the commencement address. “I’ve been fascinated by lesser writers. It helps you know the writing world, not just the peaks. I thought I’d always be the dark horse. I thought I’d be reprinted out of neglect. When ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ found its place in the world, I couldn’t occupy that stance anymore. I wasn’t underrated or neglected. I was kind of in fashion and had an unexpected, pleasurable amount of operating room. I learned there wasn’t much to cherish about neglect and struggle. I wondered instead what kind of work lesser-known writers would have done had they been better cared for.”

Lethem has long been my personal hero for helping get The Queen’s Gambit, unquestionably my favorite novel, back into print. It’s by the late Walter Tevis, who also wrote The Hustler and The Color of Money—those were novels first, you know. Lethem wrote this for the new paperback of Gambit, which is the electrifying story of Beth Harmon, a (fictional) chess champion who’s an orphan with a penchant for pills: “Beth Harmon is an unforgettable creation—and The Queen’s Gambit is Walter Tevis’s most consummate and heartbreaking work.” Michael Ondaatje has written, “The Queen’s Gambit is sheer entertainment. It is a book I reread every few years—for the pure pleasure and skill of it.” There’s a short excerpt here. I’m jealous of anyone who hasn’t heard of it; I may have to spotless-mind myself someday so I can read it afresh again. There’s only one screenplay I’d want to write, and it’d be this one. Lethem, of course, would have to help.

Speaking of The Color of Money (the movie), check out these comments from an Easter Egg site. They’re responding to this juicy bit of trivia: “Just after Eddie (Paul Newman) wins his first round match at the climactic 9-ball tournament, he walks by the grandstand and shakes hands with a man who congratulates him. The man he shakes hands with is the real Fast Eddie Felson.”

magnumbadass writes:
I met the real Fast Eddie at a pool clinic about nine years ago. His last name is not Felson, and says that only about 30% of the movie the Hustler is actually true. He also said that he was on both of the sets as a technical director. He did the famous “everybody’s doin’ it” trick where Tom Cruise shoots in the eight ball without looking. A nice guy — and the clinic was free. Whether or not this is the same gentleman that took a polygraph, I do not know, the fast Eddie that I met said that he used many different names in different cities that he toured during his “hustling” days.

Retro Boy writes:
Bollocks.

Fast Eddie Parker writes:
This is a fraudulent “egg”. Whomever wrote this “egg” does not know what he or she is talking about! His or her “story” is completely fiction. The REAL Fast Eddie was not in either of the movies written by Walter Tevis: “The Hustler” and “The Color of Money”. The REAL, ORIGINAL, Fast Eddie has taken AND PASSED two polygraph (lie detector) tests to PROVE that he is the REAL AND ORIGINAL Fast Eddie. One of the two polygraph tests was published in the billiard publication “The American Cueist”. No other human being has ever been willing to take a polygraph test in that regard, because NO OTHER HUMAN BEING WOULD PASS THAT TEST! The REAL Fast Eddie is still alive and performing pool shooting exhibitions throughout the world.

Jon writes:
that’s great

I’ll say!

Categories:

Sean Wilsey NOT Oedipus

One of several randomly generated tips on the San Francisco Chronicle search results page:

To find articles about the singer Madonna, try typing Madonna NOT Holy. Using NOT (all caps) helps weed out articles about Jesus’ mother.

Too-unspecific search for “Sean Wilsey” [SF Gate]
Oh For The Gossip Of It All [SFist; post is worth its own entry. “Our New Yorker finally made the arduous trek from the Conde Nast building and across the high Sierra mountains to our little hinterlands mailbox, exhausted. We opened it up, and to our shock, it featured our little burg in an article!…Anyways, the articles are pretty entertaining (though not entirely in the good way), and worth a read. Though Sean — geez, love your mom much? Paging Mr. Oedipus Rex, extension 333, paging Mr. Oedipus Rex.”]

Categories: ,

Events: Menand in Oregon, 5/10 & 5/12

From the Eugene Register-Guard:

Pulitzer Prize winner on campus Tuesday

Louis Menand, the author of “The Metaphysical Club,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that explores American pragmatism, will speak at 8 p.m. Tuesday, in 182 Lillis Hall, 955 E. 13th Ave. Admission is free. Menand is the 2004-05 Kritikos Professor in the Humanities.

A professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University, Menand also is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a contributing editor for the New York Review of Books. “The Metaphysical Club” won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2002.

In his Kritikos lecture, Menand will trace the history of American universities, with a special focus on humanities departments. He will examine current pressures and “threats” affecting the liberal arts and the humanities, and will speculate on their future.

Menand also will speak in Portland on Thursday, this time on “The Story of the Soup Cans.” He will discuss why Andy Warhol’s 1962 exhibit of paintings of Campbell’s soup cans was an important event in the intellectual history of the Cold War. The Portland lecture is at 8 p.m. in the Mayfair Ballroom of the Benson Hotel, 309 S.W. Broadway.

The Kritikos professorship was created through a private gift, matched by state and National Endowment for the Humanities funds, to bring speakers to Oregon who share “a commitment to intellectual honesty and freedom” and “a recognition of the worth of open and honest civic discussion and critical analysis of differing viewpoints and values.”

For more information, call the Oregon Humanities Center, 346-3934.

Pulitzer Prize Winner on Campus Tuesday [Register-Guard]

At least the question should be ethical

Two notes on yesterday’s Ethicist, in which Anonymous, New Jersey, writes:

I stumbled upon my college-age daughter’s online journal. I have always regarded diaries as off limits to outsiders and have scrupulously avoided even casual glimpses of my children’s personal writings. Now, however, my daughter is offering her daily postings to the world. I imagine that the idea of her father’s reading her innermost thoughts would lead to self-censorship, and I don’t want to spoil a writing venue she enjoys. Is it ethical for me to read her journal without telling her?

1) “Stumbled upon” means Anonymous was either googling his daughter, digging for something to take offense at, or googling himself, which Anon. must do on such a regular basis that this caused him to sit up and take note. It’s very unlikely you’d be reading up on the WTO or tulip bulbs and mysteriously happen upon your college-age daughter’s blog, which is as likely as not about apple bongs. Cough up the whole story, Mister—there’s more to your ethics query than meets the eye. What you really want to ask is, “Is it violating my daughter’s privacy to google her every five days? Am I being a good parent or do I just have abandonment issues?”

2) Our friend Anonymous has obviously already read the blog in full, including archives, and followed every link to its shameful end. Clearly, this empty-nest dad needs his own blog to keep busy till Ashley gets home for summer break. By then she’ll be posting camera-phone photos of her family’s hideously embarrassing lawn furniture, so before further damage is done to family trust and serenity, starting anonymousinnewjersey.blogspot.com can start the healing.

Randy Cohen, the Ethicist [Gothamist]
The Ethicist [Steve Martin, New Yorker; via The Compleat Steve]