Author Archives: Emdashes

Best of the 01.05.09 Issue: The Next Number in the Series is 13

I was a decent SAT student (and have even been known to lead a Kaplan test-prep session or two), hence explaining my dorky post title.
After a two-week layoff, a fascinating first issue of 2009 to ponder. Interesting subjects, interestingly pursued. I know that my cohorts have plenty of impressions to impart (as, surely, you do too, reader). This post will magically alter as they weigh in. Stay tuned.
—Martin Schneider
From Benjamin Chambers:
My absolute favorite? The Robert Leighton cartoon on p. 44, in which Santa tells the couple that he made “quite a nuisance of himself” the previous night.
The Menand piece on the Village Voice felt as provincial, in its way, as the three-part Liebling profile of Chicago (here, here, and here) that -you- Martin posted about recently. Menand’s lengthy celebration of the Voice, with the full-page illustration from Jules Feiffer, seemed written for those who’ve lived in the Village. I really like Menand, so I was surprised to find myself wishing he’d be more concise.
I thought for a while my pick would be “Lives of the Saints,” by Jonathan Harr, about the humanitarian disasters in Chad and Darfur and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.) providing services there. But Harr seemed a little easily impressed, and unsure which details mattered.
In Julian Barnes’s story, “The Limner,” a deaf, itinerant painter gets the best of the bully whose portrait he is painting. Smoothly written, the story was enjoyable, but not stellar. I don’t associate Barnes with historical fiction (despite Arthur & George, his massive book on Arthur Conan Doyle), and it’s not common for The New Yorker either, so the setting of the story was a pleasant surprise.
All in all, I liked Patricia Marx’s “Kosher Takeout” best, in which she describes the work of two Rabbis who travel China ensuring that factories making kosher food meet the necessary standards. She plays it for laughs, which I enjoyed, though unlike the Menand and Harr pieces, which should’ve been shorter, I felt her piece should’ve been longer and more detailed.
From Jonathan Taylor:
Of course it’s been noted elsewhere, but it gave me a real little thrill to read Alex Ross’s restrained, to-the-point reply to Tom Wolfe’s letter objecting to Ross’s characterization of Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.” There is, indeed, as Wolfe himself says, “a difference between hysteria and hysterically funny”; I would ask New York magazine exactly whose reaction makes him look like a “weenie“?
Benjamin called Louis Menand’s Voice piece lengthy, but I mostly feel its gaps, and their odd timing. The subtext is the ongoing demise of the Voice—or, at least it was hard not to take it that way, in a week that saw the canning of jazz and civil rights columnist Nat Hentoff and fashion reporter Lynn Yaeger—but I find it a little creepy that this is never overtly acknowledged by Menand’s article, even as it’s cast almost entirely in the past tense. I know it’s about the seminal example set by the founding generation; but it’s still weird that after some thin allusions to later decades, a sentence in the last paragraph is practically the only clue that the Voice is still published at all. I admit it’s partly my bias, due to when I started reading the by-then very different paper in the 1980s; but if the Voice as a recognizable descendant of Mailer’s paper is disappearing, it remains for someone to consider its whole glorious life. Maybe Menand can expand into a book, just to please me.

Random Profiler: Winthrop Sargeant on Glynn Ross, 1978

In this installment (see this “post”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/random-profiler-liebling-on-ch.php for an introduction to the “series”:http://emdashes.com/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=2&tag=Random%20Profiler&limit=20), the roulette wheel landed on Winthrop Sargeant’s 1978 “Profile”:http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1978/06/26/1978_06_26_047_TNY_CARDS_000326739 on Glynn Ross. This was very much the sort of Profile that I was hoping for when I started this project: an interesting subject previously unknown to me.
Ross was the director of the Seattle Opera starting in the 1960s, and he did a lot to popularize the form in the northwestern metropolis by using unconventional promotional techniques and generally being smart about his task. It was his policy to perform all operas in the original language and in English, an idea that shouldn’t be as rare as it apparently is. He was also very shrewd about attracting established stars to remote and (then) unfashionable Washington State for single productions. On this, Sargeant quotes Ross: “An artist wants four things: one, a chance to do something that requires the best of his abilities; two, the opportunity to grow by singing different roles; three, prestige; and four, a paycheck.”
Ross staged the first American production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle that didn’t take place at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, a production that helped establish Seattle as a major center of Wagner interest. He used colorful slogans directed at the new wave of youthful customers, such as “La Bohème: Six old-time hippies in Paris,” “Roméo et Juliette: Two kids in trouble, real trouble, with their families,” and (cue bad-pun grimace) “Get Ahead with Salome.” In 1971, just a couple years after it was written, the Seattle Opera was the first reputable opera house to stage The Who’s _Tommy,_ with Bette Midler in a leading role, a detail the magazine omits. (In a perfect world, we’d have some YouTube footage of that production!) In baseball, the analogous figure would be “Bill Veeck,”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Veeck roughly.
Sargeant’s work here is a reminder of how conservative the form can sometimes be, which is not a criticism. The Profile starts by establishing the subject’s Profile-worthiness and then segues to the subject’s background, relying a good deal on lengthy quotation from the subject. It’s not “exciting,” but it does the job.
Reading the Profile, it’s difficult not to think of Peter Gelb, general manager of the Met since 2006 and a New Yorker Conference “attendee”:http://emdashes.com/2008/05/the-new-yorker-conference-is-q.php in 2008. Gelb has been phenomenally successful in finding new audiences for Met productions, and his main weapons have been the appearance of filmed versions of current productions in our nation’s multiplexes and fresh thinking on the nature of those productions, both in their selection and in the emphasis on accessability. A quick search at Google suggests that not too many people have suggested the parallels between Ross and Gelb, but they seem pretty obvious to me (not that I’d be aware of any other similar figures).

The Unlikeliest Gladwell Article: Thoughts on David Galenson

Isn’t it time for another Malcolm Gladwell post? A few weeks ago Tina Roth Eisenberg at my favorite design blog, “Swissmiss,”:swissmiss.typepad.com/ linked to this swell “video”:http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/video-gain-2008-gladwell of Gladwell discussing Fleetwood Mac and David Galenson’s ideas about creativity at AIGA’s GAIN Conference in October, the same month that the _The New Yorker_ ran Gladwell’s “article”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell about him.
Galenson is an economist who developed a theory of creativity that states that artistic innovators mostly come in two packages, of which the exemplars are Picasso and Cézanne. Picasso made his mark as a young man, and his pictorial brilliance seemed to come quite naturally; Cézanne’s success came much later in life, and his breakthroughs seemed the result of a great deal of sustained effort and slow experimentation. As far as I can tell, neither Galenson nor Fleetwood Mac is mentioned in “Outliers,”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0316017922/ref=sib_dp_srch_pop?v=search-inside&keywords=hedgehog&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Go at least according to a search on Amazon’s OnlineReader (I have not obtained my own copy of the book yet), this even though the subject seems to fit in perfectly well with the book’s themes.
Then you have the interesting fact that, as Jason Kottke “pointed out”:http://www.kottke.org/08/08/old-masters-and-young-geniuses several months ago, this Galenson article was, according to _The New York Times,_ actually “rejected”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/business/15leonhardt.html?pagewanted=all by _The New Yorker_ in 2006, the first Gladwell pitch to receive the heave-ho. David Leonhardt’s article quotes Gladwell’s “editor” pooh-poohing Galenson’s spiel and asking Gladwell whether he is “crazy.” (What editor could this be? Surely not David Remnick?)
Galenson’s division of artists into blazing young “conceptual innovators” and older “experimental innovators” reminds me a bit of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox Isaiah Berlin’s famous appropriation of the ancient Greek poet Archilochus (admit it, you knew that this blog would eventually work Archilochus in somehow). Archilochus wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”; Berlin’s idea was that Dostoevsky was a hedgehog and Tolstoy a fox who wished that he were a hedgehog. Somehow the conceptual innovators seem like hedgehogs to me, and experimental innovators like foxes. Galenson, by the way, does cite the hedgehog/fox pairing in his book “Old Masters and Young Geniuses”:http://books.google.com/books?id=aj43lvAIJIcC&pg=PA181&lpg=PA181&dq=galenson+hedgehog&source=web&ots=gEl9FVxIgR&sig=KP92wQybfyltDF-XeBMalDexxhg&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPA181,M1.
There aren’t that many bands whose career arc is that similar to Fleetwood Mac, in my opinion (rock is a young person’s game), but it happens that my favorite band in the world, the “Wrens,”:http://www.wrens.com/ fits Galenson’s schema to a T. Their masterpiece, The Meadowlands, was four years in the making and came fully nine years after their debut. And it matches up with Galenson’s “experimental innovators”—the band tinkered so extensively with the tracks that the band forced themselves to destroy the master tapes as a way of committing to a truly final cut.
Another one that comes to mind is Pulp. Pulp’s breakout album was “His ‘N’ Hers,”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_%27n%27_Hers which came out in 1994; their first album came out in 1983, eleven years earlier. That’s quite an incubation. All of their good albums came after their tenth year in the business.
By the way: A few days before Christmas, Gladwell appeared on _The Charlie Rose Show,_ and the resultant “segment”:http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9855 features both Gladwell and Rose at their best. I also love the show’s new—I think—black website, which seems to reference the show’s trademark table-immersed-in-blackness aesthetic.

J.D. Salinger Turns 90 Today

Benjamin Chambers writes:
Charles McGrath has an excellent article in The New York Times on J.D. Salinger’s last published piece, “Hapworth 16, 1924“. The 25,000-word novella appeared in the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker, and never anywhere else. Thanks to the magic of the Digital Edition, it’s more accessible now than ever before. (Many of Salinger’s other classic works first appeared in the magazine too, although you’d search in vain for Catcher in the Rye because, as Louis Menand pointed out in a 2001 retrospective, the magazine rejected it.)
McGrath has some perceptive things to say about the charm of Salinger’s writing, and why it remains influential. He also hits the nail on the head when he talks about the chief drawback of Salinger’s chronicles about his fictional family, the Glasses:

The very thing that makes the Glasses, and Seymour especially, so appealing to Mr. Salinger— that they’re too sensitive and exceptional for this world— is also what came to make them irritating to so many readers.

Nevertheless, I’d like to wish this great American writer a very happy birthday.

Emdashes Turns Four!

Founder and frequently meddling publisher Emily Gordon writes:
In blog years, we’re very mature: Emdashes turns four today. I began it in a red-floored Chelsea loft as a labor of love, an antidepressant, and a scratch for my irrepressible itch to sample new technology. Happily, these days, Emdashes reflects the hard work and enthusiasm of many others besides me. Since my first post (about Donald Antrim’s monumental essay “I Bought a Bed”) on December 31, 2004, Emdashes has grown and progressed in innumerable ways. The site looks the way it does because of my collaboration with House of Pretty, about whose whip-smart and big-hearted proprietors, Patric King and Su, I can’t say enough. Every week, you also see the elegant creations of Inkleaf Studio’s Jesse Ewing, chic cartoonist Carolita Johnson, our own Pollux, and my best pal, designer Jennifer Hadley, who adapted a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad into the Emdashes logo you see there above (referred to in-house as “pencil girl”).
What’s more, we now have a genuine staff of editors and regular contributors—including, though not limited to, current editor and total mensch Martin Schneider, ace literary columnist Benjamin Chambers, my scholarly old friend Jonathan Taylor, and my humblingly humble, multitalented new friend Paul Morris, a.k.a. Pollux (whom you can credit for the drawing of me as a prehistoric proto-blogger at right).
I’ve loved editing, and getting to know, the kind, witty, and meticulous New Yorker librarians, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, who write the indispensable column “Ask the Librarians.” (Look forward to a fresh installment soon!) The virtual and real-life conversations that the blog has inspired have enhanced my life immeasurably. I’ve soaked up more of the New Yorker Festival and New Yorker Conference, and more readings, lectures, gallery shows, conversations, softball games, histories, anthologies, and other things New Yorker, than I’d ever imagined experiencing (even in my previously acute state of preoccupation). Last year, the site won the coveted distinction of being a Webby Awards official honoree. Four years later, my personal affinity for The New Yorker, and the sometimes cryptic ways in which I try to express it, is only a part of the picture.
This isn’t a blog that had any model, particularly. It’s driven by the collective bees in our bonnets, who are erratic drivers. We write about pigeons. (A lot.) We do whatever we can to make Rea Irvin a household name. I’ve banned a number of words and phrases and pontificated on punctuation. We were entertained and pleased by a large number of submissions to our rename the upside-down question mark contest. We explore the “Best American” series like there’s no tomorrow. We’ve had crazy spikes we couldn’t have predicted—at one time, this site has been the #1 world resource on both the Ricky Gervais cult sensation “I Could Eat a Knob at Night” dance remix and iPod security, not to mention a surprising magnet of commentary on Knocked Up, tacos, and Brandenn Bremmer—while equally spirited analyses are met with baffled silence. We don’t mind a bit. We’ve had fascinating comments from friends and relatives of departed New Yorker writers and artists, all of whom we try to recognize when they pass away.
And we’ve had so much fun. Here’s to the next year—is that five or ten in blog years?—whatever it may bring! Happy new year, dear readers. And to Jasmin Chua and Ashby Jones, you were there when the twinkle met the eye. Thank you.