Author Archives: Emdashes

New Yorker Festival: Matthew Klam, Elmore Leonard, and Joyce Carol Oates

A little bit to my surprise, the “Discussion Among Writers” dedicated to “The Devil Within,” featuring Elmore Leonard, Joyce Carol Oates, and Matthew Klam and moderated by Daniel Zalewski, was a light, lively, and amusing affair, quite in contrast to the stated subject. The taciturn Leonard, who would have looked entirely at home whittling a garter snake out of a twig, was flanked by the admiring Oates and Klam—yes, the admiration flowed freely on this night.
Without ever dwelling on it or even stating it explicitly, all three panelists acknowledged to the desirability of complexity as well as the enduring power of the thriller genre. All three either disavowed the reality of “evil” or described it as yet another mundane by-product of human existence. Of his famous baddies, Leonard mused that he’ll think of one he’s creating “as a kid. He’s a bully, he’s a cheater. He doesn’t get along with very many people. And then I let him grow up.”
Happiest when his readers squirm, Klam offered, by way of Shalom Auslander, that “Light and Dark are buddies, and they hang out after work.” For her part, Oates, astonished at Klam’s glowing words about her book _Do With Me What You Will,_ insisted that she is more accustomed to the critical reception of her cat, who has shown little interest in her works.
Leonard showed the same kind of word-stingy pith he does in his books, observing that he doesn’t like to know too much about his characters, “just enough to make them talk.” I don’t remember if this was before or after Klam demanded that Zalewski fess up to drop-kicking puppies.
It was a session so loose, you’d have thought alcohol had helped it along.
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Matthew Klam, Elmore Leonard, Joyce Carol Oates and Daniel Zalewski
(photo credit: Alex Oliveira/startraksphoto.com)

Let Buck Henry Usher You into Democracy!

I had not noticed that _The New Yorker_ is using the Festival as a platform to perform an important civic duty. On Saturday and Sunday, a rotating slate of well-known people and _New Yorker_ luminaries will be on hand to register any eligible citizen to vote. If you are a recalcitrant politico-phobe or know one you suspect might respond to the extra inducement of meeting a famous person, it’s all at the Festival HQ at at Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street (between Sixth and Seventh Avenues). Here’s the schedule.
**Saturday, October 4**
10 a.m., Raúl Esparza
10:30 a.m., Judith Thurman
11 a.m., Edie Falco and Susan Sarandon
11:30 a.m., Wes Craven
12 noon, Sherman Alexie
12:30 p.m., Alex Castellanos
2:30 p.m., Alex Ross
3 p.m., Senator Chuck Hagel
3:30 p.m., Susan Orlean
4 p.m., Sasha Frere-Jones
**Sunday, October 5**
10:30 a.m., Nick Paumgarten
11 a.m., Reverend Al Sharpton
11:30 a.m., Mark Singer
12:30 p.m., Art Spiegelman
1 p.m., Larissa MacFarquhar
1:30 p.m., Michael Specter
2 p.m., Lynda Barry
2:30 p.m., Steve Brodner
3 p.m., Tad Friend
3:30 p.m., Buck Henry
4 p.m., Karen O
I confess I’m considering having the Rev. Sharpton register me even though I’m already registered. But I won’t, because it’s probably illegal.

The Wavy Rule, a Daily Comic by Paul Morris: High Heeled Debate

Gwen Ifill asked Sarah Palin last night: “The conventional wisdom, Governor Palin, with you, is that your Achilles’ heel is that you lack experience… What is it really for you, Gov. Palin?” She did not answer the question with what she felt was her weakness. Instead, she gave one of her many pre-fabricated ra-ra, you-betcha responses (one of about six), while Biden actually answered the question. All throughout the debate, she gave variations on a term paper called “What America Means to Me”. What it lacked in substance and depth of knowledge, it made up for stage directions like “Smile here, wink there, etc. etc.”
A failure to answer a question regarding one’s failures or weaknesses is a failure in and of itself. It indicates either smugness or ignorance, or both. Do I feel that Biden would make a better Vice President? You’re darn tootin’!
Click on the cartoon to enlarge it!
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Festival Preview: A Divine Weekend, Sans Sarah Palin!

Well, she did fine, I thought. Biden was better. She won’t lose the race for McCain. Next subject.
Next subject? That’s the New Yorker Festival! Which is this weekend! Emily and I will gallivant (that verb wears the simple present tense oddly) to as many events as we are able, and we will be writing up our reports over the weekend and well into the week after.
In addition we’ll be twittering away from our cellphones as we move from event to event, so be sure to check out the Emdashes Twitter feed plus “twemes.com/nyfest”:www.twemes.com/nyfest. If you want to add your comments to the latter feed, send your “tweets” to **40404** and add **#nyfest** to the start of your message. The more the merrier!
Note that a limited number of tickets to ALL events will be on sale at the Festival Headquarters at Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street during the weekend. Here’s the “schedule”:http://www.festival.newyorker.com/schedule.cfm. If you have gotten shut out of your must-see event, be sure to try your luck there.
It should be a great weekend: Stephen Colbert, Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Elmore Leonard, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mary-Louise Parker, Elizabeth Edwards, Joe Trippi, Martha Plimpton, Paul Rudd, Dawn Upshaw, Guillermo del Toro, and Chuck Hagel are a few of the featured guests, and _New Yorker_ stalwarts like Adam Gopnik, James Surowiecki, Rebecca Mead, Michael Specter, Ian Frazier, David Denby, Dorothy Wickenden, Jeffrey Toobin, Paul Muldoon, and the redoubtable David Remnick will collude to make it three days to cherish.
If you spot Emily or myself, be sure to say hello!

The New Yorker Endorses Barack Obama

Yep! Just got the news via the magazine’s Twitter. Here’s the link. It opens:

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching–that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has–at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity–undermined the country and its ideals? Read on.

Fourth Annual Passport to the Arts: Tickets Go on Sale Tomorrow

Martin Schneider writes:
Always welcome, a press release from the Mother Ship, reproduced below:
The New Yorker’s Fourth Annual Passport to the Arts Event
A Benefit for Friends of the High Line
October 2, 2008–On Saturday, November 8, 2008, the New Yorker Promotion Department will host its fourth annual Passport to the Arts event, featuring a self-guided tour of twenty-eight leading Chelsea galleries, an evening cocktail reception, and a silent auction benefitting Friends of the High Line. Tickets are $45 and will go on sale, tomorrow, October 3, 2008, at www.ticketweb.com.
On Saturday, November 8th, participants will pick up a program guide, a map, and an official passport at la.venue at the Terminal Stores Building, West 28th Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. The self-guided tour of the twenty-eight participating galleries goes until 6 p.m. At each gallery, passports will be stamped with a replica of the featured work of art. From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., participants are invited to a cocktail reception at la.venue, featuring a silent auction of works by Marina Adams, Julio Bittencourt, Geoffrey Chadsey, Matt Keegan, Joseph Kosuth, Keith Mayerson, Beatríz Milhazes, Aleksandra Mir, Santi Moix, Matthew Ritchie, Mia Westerlund Roosen, Joshua Smith, Mickalene Thomas, and other artists.
All funds raised by the silent auction and a portion of the proceeds of ticket sales will benefit Friends of the High Line. Friends of the High Line is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and reuse of the High Line, a 1.5-mile elevated railway that runs along the West Side of Manhattan. For more information on Friends of the High Line, please visit www.thehighline.org.
The New Yorker’s Passport to the Arts event is presented by Embassy Suites Hotels. It is sponsored by Barclays Capital, Land Rover, and MasterCard World Card, and supported by Kenneth Cole Awearness, LU Biscuits, and the Mexico Tourism Board.
For more information, including a full list of participating galleries and artists, visit www.PassporttotheArtsNYC.com. Tickets are $45 and will be available via TicketWeb at www.ticketweb.com or by phone at 866-468-7610 on October 3rd.

Say Goodbye to Chuck (and Bucks): Merrill Lynch in the New Yorker Archive

Jonathan Taylor, who previously revisited John McPhee on New York City’s greenmarkets and strongly suggested that the city install skybridges, writes:
If it’s really the end of an era for Wall Street, it will also be the end of a perennial New Yorker trope.
Recently subsumed brokerage Merrill Lynch, a metonym for Wall Street (itself a metonym!), was for decades an absurdly frequent subject of New Yorker Talk pieces and cartoons, which exhibited an inexhaustible fascination with the length and euphony of its name in its various iterations, particularly “Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fenner & Beane.”
Should that not be “Merrill, Lynch, Pierce….”? It should not, and an amusing December 27, 1947, Talk piece, “Fine Point,” settled it. The erroneous placement of a comma where it didn’t belong had led to a “warm discussion” among magazine proofreaders. (Most likely it was in a September 13, 1947, cartoon, in which a woman asks her investment counselor, “When you say Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Beane recommend a certain stock, do you mean it’s unanimous or just a simple majority?”)
“The situation set us to worrying,” wrote Talk, “and since, with us, to worry is to act, we sent a man downtown to investigate.” This man soon enough got co-founder (or “lead-off man,” as it was put) Charles Merrill on the horn. Merrill told him that when he and Edmund Lynch founded Merrill Lynch & Co. in 1914, they simply took after the ethereal example of J.P. Morgan affiliates (Morgan Grenfell, Drexel Morgan & Co.) that had no need for the workaday comma.
And in the discreet banking world, it seems that it can be wiser not to tip one’s hand punctuationally. “Fine Point” goes on to explain that when Merrill Lynch & Co. merged with another firm in 1940, there was a New York law forbidding a partnership from including a dead person in its name. This was initially thought to mean that the new company could not retain Lynch, who had died in 1938, in its name. But another law did permit the name of a firm to be a component of a name of a partnership; some syntactically wise lawyers surmised that, without a comma, “Merrill Lynch” could be construed as the name of a firm, rather than simply the names of two partners. “Otherwise, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane would be called something else today, maybe Chuck,” the mag quipped.
The next name change, to Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, prompted another investigation, in the February 15, 1958, issue. It was a small loss to the culture: “The explosive, easily rhymed climax provided by ‘Beane’ has long been a boon to writers of songs and gags.” A year later a 1959 piece titled “& Beane?” looked in on the departed partner, Alph Beane, who had co-founded a new firm, J.R. Williston & Beane Inc.
I wondered if Beane had perhaps shown superhuman prudence in bailing out of Merrill Lynch a whole half century before Merrill’s demise. But his 1994 Times obit notes, “In the fall of 1963, Williston & Beane began to have financial difficulties when it failed to meet capital requirements at the New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange after the bankruptcy of a client, the Allied Crude Vegetable Oil and Refining Company, which was unable to meet margin calls on soybean and cottonseed futures clients”; it was absorbed by another brokerage.