Author Archives: Emdashes

New Yorker Stories That Haunt My Dreams

Emily Gordon momentarily surfaces to write:
The briefest list, representing a much longer longer one spanning roughly 1981 to the present. I’ll add links later when I’m not hiring an art director for Print. Yes, you may still send your resume if you get it to me in the next couple of days.
Anyway, the beginning of that list of free-floating-anxiety-provoking, lingering-question-leaving, and dream-haunting stories (“the universe is expanding!”):

  • An elderly lady in a nursing home in, possibly, Florida, was starving to death because of the bureaucracy of Medicare, or something like that. Is she being nourished properly now, if she’s still with us?
  • The dangerous case of the dissolving pterapods. Has Obama appointed a Pterapod Czar?
  • The mothers, the nurses, and the kids in Katherine Boo’s piece about Louisiana programs that pair nurses and teenage mothers. Is it still being funded? How are the mothers? How are the kids? Are they still reeling crayfish from the back yard for dinner? I’ve eaten crayfish; is there really enough meat on them for dinner, or are they bigger in Louisiana?
  • The bees—about which Elizabeth Kolbert wrote (and gestured) so compellingly. I know they’re still not doing well as a group, because I keep hearing distressed British beekeepers on the BBC talking about the apian health crisis and the perilous honey business. I am a friend of the bee and a honey appreciator. How can I help?
  • Pretty much everyone from Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s series on the South Bronx, which later became Random Family, which I finished reading a few months ago and am still reeling from. How are you, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc? What are you writing about and when can we read it, preferably in The New Yorker? Are you still in touch with your friends and subjects from the various neighborhoods you covered so intensely well? Has anyone broken out of the cycle of poverty and pregnancy and gone to college or gotten a decent job? Is the economy eroding any gains they’ve made? Although it may be voyeuristic or simply none of my business to ask, I literally can’t stop thinking about them.
  • Not to mention Florence, Crystal, and Daquan, part of whose stories Susan Sheehan told in the series that became Life for Me Ain’t Been No Crystal Stair.
  • Roger Angell and Lillian Ross. I know they’re getting on. But I hope they’re all right.

To be continued as long as I read The New Yorker and worry, that is, as long as I live. And you? What’s haunting you from the past 1 to 84 years of The New Yorker?

Native New Yorker: Calvin Trillin Saw You Coming

Martin Schneider writes:
As I’ve mentioned many times by now, I’ve been monitoring a Twitter search feed lately. Of course there are plenty of tweets that are irrelevant, referring to someone behaving “like a New Yorker” or some such. Which is fine. But there’s a restaurant based in Phoenix, Arizona, called the Native New Yorker that specializes in buffalo chicken wings and has taken to Twitter promotion in a big way, which means that I periodically get tweets like this:

NativeNY_HQ HOW MANY WINGS CAN YOU EAT? WWW.BATTLEOFTHEBONE.COM Native New Yorker’s 2nd annual chicken wing eating contest starts 3/11 in TEMPE

I must say, I’m halfway tempted to go over and check that out. I know Calvin Trillin would be intrigued, which is why I sent them a little tweet linking them to Trillin’s classic article on buffalo chicken wings.

What’s the Word on the Tweet? Starring “the New Yorker Guy”

Martin Schneider writes:
Perhaps you remember Johnny O’Connor, Phil Hartman’s showbiz character from Saturday Night Live who kept insisting that that his agent give him the straight, unvarnished bad news (“Don’t mince words!”):
Harry (Jon Lovitz): You’re through, do you hear me, through! You’ll never work in this town again! … I think you’re the worst actor I’ve ever seen, and I get five hundred letters a day telling me the same!
Johnny O’Connor: What’s the word on the street?
Well, the word on the “tweet” is that lots of people read The New Yorker all the time, care about it a lot, and say so on Twitter frequently. They say nice things, and some not so nice things too, but we pay less attention to those. Here are a few messages that caught our fancy.
tculkin Reading Roger Angell’s story about Joe Torre in the New Yorker. Wow!
ksouth Finishing a New Yorker makes me sad.
sugarblum wants to borrow or buy your feb. 9 -16 copy of the New Yorker (with the New Yorker guy on the cover)
spants You know you have a migraine when you can read the New Yorker IN THE DARK.
emjones wondering where my New Yorker is… does my postman heart DFW as much as me?
stamos perfect night: clean carpets, a great ep of bones, new issue of the new yorker, and a delish crumb cake straight from jersey (dessert)
barbiedesoto i’m tempted to check out every robert benchley book at the salt lake library. but i won’t read them all. i never do.
jonathansegura reading the new yorker on my kindle. ha. also: drinking a martini. how classy am i? answer: very.
miss_print My house is now a New Yorker Magazine free zone! It took two years but my backlog is gone (partly because my subscription lapsed but still)!
kimberlya heard @sashafrerejones talk about lily allen on the new yorker podcast today; didn’t know sfj has such a low voice. lovely.
fakebook A terrible day redeemed by the arrival of the latest New Yorker.
dmellecker Convinced New Yorker cartoon caption contest rigged. My submissions are way better
That’s all for now! Maybe we’ll try this again sometime.

Syllabus: Columbia University, Writing R6212, Spring 2009 (Prof. Zadie Smith)

Martin Schneider writes:
Zadie Smith is teaching a weekly fiction seminar at Columbia University this semester under the title “Sense and Sensibility.”
A local bookstore called Book Culture, which I believe for years was called Labyrinth, has posted 10 of the 15 books that Smith is assigning her charges. Here they are:
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
Catholics, Brian Moore
The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
Crash, J.G. Ballard
An Experiment in Love, Hilary Mantel
Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, David Lodge
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
My Loose Thread, Dennis Cooper
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
The Loser, Thomas Bernhard
The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow
A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
Reader’s Block, David Markson
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
The Quiet American, Graham Greene
Pretty good list! I see she hit favorites of Benjamin (Spark), Jonathan (Bernhard), and myself (Wallace). I wonder what the other five are? If you’re taking the course and happen to see this, drop us a line!
Addendum: Book Culture has now come through with the full list. Thanks very much!

We Like David Foster Wallace Because of … Evolutionary Psychology?

Benjamin Chambers writes:
A spate of actual work has kept me from commenting on the recent Steven Millhauser and Italo Calvino stories in The New Yorker, let alone the new excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel that appears in the March 9, 2009 issue. But it hasn’t stopped me from running across this breathless announcement that Wallace’s novel will be published next year, along with the surprising (and not entirely reliable) announcement that his first novel, Infinite Jest, is among the 10 longest novels ever written. (Here’s the complete list.)
Why do we humans like narrative, anyway? Professor William Flesch tackled this question in his 2008 book, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components in Fiction, which was apparently one of James Wood’s favorite books of 2008. According to Flesch, his book uses “ideas of evolutionary psychology and particularly evolutionary game theory to explain why narratives work.”
Wallace, I suspect, would’ve been intrigued.

Watchmen Indulges in Alternate History, So Can New Yorker Covers

Martin Schneider writes:
I noted earlier that, to judge from the Twitter posts I’m seeing, Watchmen fans are none too pleased with The New Yorker right now, and boy oh boy does that continue to be true. But really, Watchmen fans should remember The New Yorker‘s guts in being the first national magazine to put Dr. Manhattan on its cover, way back in 1985.

Video Gem: Updike and Cheever on Cavett, 1981

Martin Schneider writes:
I have it running on my computer even as I post this, in my haste to alert you to it, but Dick Cavett, on the space The New York Times allots to him, has posted the full telecast of the October 14, 1981, program of his show, which featured two of America’s finest writers, John Updike and John Cheever, in conversation together. Watch and be enthralled. (Here’s the prior post, which led to this one.)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Updike on TV before. I find him very appealing; it’s a shame he wasn’t on television more during the 1990s. A commenter on the page notes that they discuss the New Yorker submission process, but I can’t vouch for it. I look forward to the day that Jimmy Fallon invites Cormac McCarthy and Marilynne Robinson on for a chat. Until then, Cavett remains the undisputed champion! And even if he weren’t, the decision to unite a purple jacket and a green shirt would make him champ anyway.
Addendum: The question pertaining to The New Yorker is in the very last minute—well worth a peek!

“Campaign Trail” Junkies Rejoice as Plaudits Descend

Martin Schneider writes:
Emily and I have written about our obsessive and undying devotion to The New Yorker‘s stellar political broadcast “The Campaign Trail,” which provided us with comfort, solace, and delight from Iowa all the way to Chicago’s Grant Park and beyond. (I even saw the main recurring members in concert! Sort of.)
According to FishbowlNY, the MPA Digital Awards has named as “Best Podcast Series” of 2008 The New Yorker‘s “The Campaign Trail”! We’d like to congratulate (this is off the top of my head) John Cassidy, Elizabeth Kolbert, David Remnick, Jane Mayer, Jeffrey Toobin, George Packer, Hendrik Hertzberg, Ryan Lizza, and above all, the podcast’s cheerful, focused, and curious moderator, Dorothy Wickenden, for this distinction. I regret if I left anyone out. The year of amusing and insightful talk was a joy to behold.