Author Archives: Emdashes

War and Peace and Everything Nice

For some reason, this little unsigned entry in the April 29, 1920 issue of Life magazine (which I just received after a successful eBay auction—I win all my auctions because no one else is ever bidding on what I want) reminded me of James Wood’s piece last week on the new translation of War and Peace.

The Constant and the Inconstant

The characters that one knows in books are more real and unchanging than those one knows in real life. Indeed, those one knows in real life are so unreal that a comparison of them with the ones in books is quite startling. The best friend you have had suddenly develops some quality that you have never suspected, and thenceforth he is quite a different person from what you deemed him. You yourself are often quite dissimilar from what you thought you were yesterday. You survived an unexpected test which you would never have believed possible or you yielded in a manner so absurd that you can scarcely credit it.

But David Copperfield is always the same. Elizabeth Bennet, Lear, Faust, Père Goriot, Ulysses—it makes no difference where you range—they are constant ones.

This is also a very good time to revisit David Remnick’s memorably fine essay on translation from 2005, in which Remnick conducts a thorough investigation into several of the translators Wood mentions, including Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Anyway, I have other Picks of this Issue, to be added to this post soon, for anyone who checks in several times a day. (Confidential to those people: I love you.)

Thanksgiving of the Unexpected

My old buddy Tom Gogola (whose awesomely loud and witty band, Blown Woofer, is playing twice this weekend in New York, at Union Hall on the 24th and Mercury Lounge on the 25th—now that’s gravy) asked me to contribute to his paper’s Thanksgiving thanks-bonanza, and I did. Have a nice holiday, safe travels to Martin who’s on his way back over the sea, and see you in a few days.
Later: Hey, the results of Leonard Lopate’s Thanksgiving cartoon contest are now up on the WNYC website, complete with video of Lopate and Bob Mankoff chatting and throwing around a cartoon idea that includes the phrase “totally plucked.” Reads one plaintive comment, “congratz to the winners..really. But does anyone else feel like charlie brown for losing?” Cheer up—you’ve still got a chance in the traditional arena. And this week’s edition has Cartoon Issue-themed red in it; if you win it, you’re certainly no turkey.

O Princeton, Do Say You Made a Recording of This Remnick Event

From the Daily Princetonian, a report on David Remnick’s recent talk:

Remnick, a Pulitzer Prize winner, also reflected on his time at the University and discussed topics ranging from the state of American and Russian affairs to managing The New Yorker. During the event, formatted as an hour-long discussion with English professor Michael Wood, Remnick answered questions about his experiences as a University student and his path to The New Yorker. Continued.

Among the good tidbits: Michael Bloomberg claims he’s submitted six captions to the caption contest. As Emdashes readers know from reading our Q. & A.s with the winners, the mayor needs to work a little harder!

Also, Remnick again invokes—with some wariness—a hypothetical, parallel existence as a fiction writer. The first instance I was thinking of was in an old interview with Orville Schell at Berkeley; the page is now broken, but you can read the illuminating transcript at the trusty Wayback Machine. In the Berkeley interview, there’s an exchange so great that, as I read it, I wrote it down as a motto:

Schell: Have you ever written any fiction?
Remnick: Not that I liked.
Schell: But you’ve written some?
Remnick: Yes, not that’s any good. Honestly. But you know life is short, but not five seconds. So we’ll see.

Sounds like there’s a novel possibility in there somewhere, or perhaps some modern-Chekhovian short stories. We’ll be receptive.

The Elegant Joshua Henkin

There’s a bit of mystery in Mark Sarvas’s literary blog, The Elegant Variation; its “about” information is mainly a long quotation from Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and I’m never certain whether it’s the product of one person or ten. Sometimes, novelists like David Leavitt contribute.
On November 12, TEV gave center stage to Joshua Henkin, a writer formerly unknown to me, who’s promoting his new novel Matrimony for Pantheon. Henkin responded with a whopping twenty-five posts, many of them quite long, on the related subjects of writing fiction, teaching students to write fiction, and promoting works of fiction. It’s not often that one encounters such thoughtful prose, much less so much of it posted in a single day.
Simply put, the posts are wonderful. If you are interested in the process of writing fiction, I urge you to check them out. Meanwhile, I look forward to reading Matrimony. Good luck to you, Joshua Henkin! —Martin Schneider

“Best American” Short Stories Update

Exciting news! Our handy page of the best stories in The New Yorker (according to Houghton Mifflin, anyway) has been greatly expanded. Today I discovered this rather remarkable website, overseen by one William G. Contento, which lists the contents of a great many fiction anthologies, Houghton Mifflin included.
Most of the years between 1939 and 1976 are now represented. (Either the anthologies did not publish a “Notable” list or Mr. Contento chose not to include them. I suspect the latter—I wouldn’t want to type all that stuff in, either.) This explains why the new batch of lists looks rather skimpy alongside the more recent lists. If you go only by the stories that were actually included in the anthologies, there has been little change since 1939. Four was about the most you could expect in the 1940s, and it’s about the most you can expect now.
The new lists are very interesting, I think. Irwin Shaw comes up a lot. Some names are conspicuously missing, notably J.D. Salinger and Vladimir Nabokov, although it’s possible they were chosen in years that are still missing. John Cheever and John Updike are represented. Matthew Yglesias‘s grandfather makes the list.
The most intriguing name on the list, in my opinion, is Mary Lavin. I had not heard of her until today, but she must have been a very impressive woman indeed, overseeing a farm and raising three daughters on her own during the time her stories were written. A mere glance at the lists will disclose that she was very, very esteemed. Consider this: Over a period of eighteen years, she wrote just fifteen stories for The New Yorker—and yet only Updike, Alice Munro, and Louise Erdrich were able to have more of their New Yorker stories selected, in the years for which we have data.
In any case, decades have elapsed. It’s up to you to decide whether such resonant names as St. Clair McKelway, Hortense Calisher, Lyll Becerra de Jenkins, Carlos Bulosan, and Louis Bromfield have been forgotten justly or criminally. —Martin Schneider

Tina Brown on The New Yorker: “I Would Probably Redesign It Again”

Here’s Brown, interviewed by the Indian Express:

As a long-time editor, how would you say media could gauge the requirements of the time?
I think one of the things that’s really difficult now, and journalists have to keep on is, just when you think you know everything, you don’t know anything at all. There are two kinds of stories. One is a complete news story that you find and break, which is immensely valuable and probably the first thing you should be trying to do. But the other kind of story is also very valuable, where you go back to a story where everybody thinks they know what happened. I mean, I still have not read the definitive piece about Musharraf’s coup, a blow-by-blow tick-tock as we call it of the decision, the hows and whys. I’ll still read this piece at Christmas because it takes time to plan and tease it out of people. I’m a big fan of the depth and the context, which is almost all you can provide in the age of the Internet. Even at the New Yorker in 1997 it became a nightmare trying to protect our news. Then when I went to Talk, one reason why I couldn’t stand it there, it was a monthly. News had so accelerated that it made me nuts that even with a very deep, contextual piece, you began to feel that it had been nibbled at by so many mice.

But you also came in for some criticism at the New Yorker for making it too newsy, too current.
I saw myself as providing two strands of journalism there. I thought it was very important to have a news element to provide what I used to think of as a threshold piece. To bring people into the tent you have to have a piece about whatever it was that week, this piece that couldn’t wait. Then you could go, in the middle of the magazine, to the big tent piece, the piece that had taken 12,000 words and six months to do. I saw it always as a two-horse stream. And I felt committed to the notion that people would have to read it that week. It can still happen, in an upmarket magazine, people say, “oh, it’s a great magazine, I haven’t got to it yet, but it’s terrific, the last three issues are piled up by my bed.” And I would think, that’s not a compliment. That means, I failed.

Ten years later, what would you do at The New Yorker?
I would probably redesign it again. I might make a shorter front of the book section. I’m an admirer of the Spectator magazine in London. It does a very good job of a front that’s interesting, voices that you come to every week.

Thanks to Sans Serif for the link. In other news, David Remnick will be speaking at Princeton on November 20:

In “A Conversation With David Remnick,” he will participate in a discussion with Michael Wood, the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, on topics ranging from Russian politics to the U.S. presidential race to famed journalist A.J. Liebling.

Infamous (Almost) and the Ransom Note Approach

I saw Infamous, the “other” movie about Capote, tonight, and I must say I liked it. I happened to get a gander at the movie poster and got a snootful of faux Irvin font! So close, close, close. It’s clearly not quite Irvin—and equally clearly, intended to evoke same.
T’other day I linked to a 2003 post on Maud Newton’s sharp media blog; if you look at her masthead image, you’ll see some authentic Irvin font peeking back at you. —Martin Schneider

Fondly Remembered Army Man Is Newly Coveted

It is unfortunate that circumstances have forced the Writers Guild of America to go on strike, but one beneficial by-product has been the unforeseeable outpouring of approbation for David Owen’s March 13, 2000, profile of George Meyer. (Witness the requisite evidence that said outpouring has occurred.) And not only that, but this outpouring has spawned a kind of sub-outpouring directed at New Yorker mainstay Ian Frazier, whose September 2004 interview in The Believer is cited in most of the same places. I’m not sure, but I think the comedy blog Dead Frog started it all.
So what’s it all about? Army Man, man.
Long story short, the WGA went on strike in 1988, and George Meyer happened to have a little zine going, called Army Man, and it was really funny. He ended up being a very important writer at The Simpsons. Check out the links above for the mining of strike-relevant meaning, it’s all stimulating stuff.
The two things that stuck in my mind from when I first read that Meyer profile in 2000 were the story about the arm and the sandwich and Meyer’s spiel about Country Crock. I think two salient, entirely intact bits after seven years is pretty darn good, David Owen.
To a semipro scrutinizer of The New Yorker like me, it’s not every day that I stumble upon such a phenomenon: people, unprovably regular people out there, cherishing a New Yorker profile with such ardency. Check out the start of Ed Page’s post over at Maud Newton lo these four years ago:

I’ve read this New Yorker Profile of George Meyer about a gazillion times. I love it so much I cuddle with it at night. When I’m feeling blue, I sing to it. Sometimes, when no one is looking, I lick it.

Now that’s some approbation! As well as a nice rebuke to the whole stupid “New Yorker appeals only to snobbish monocle wearers” contingent. —Martin Schneider

Help Me Out, Alex Ross (Or Anybody Else)

My mom is from Austria. I lived in Vienna for three years after college. I’m more than tolerably familiar with the Wiener Werkstätte, used to go to the MAK all the time, been to Otto Wagner’s famous Kirche am Steinhof several times (I call it the “Narrenkirche”—Narr means “fool,” the church is located in a mental health facility).
All of which helps explain why the cover of Alex Ross’s new book The Rest is Noise was so deeply familiar to me. I grew up with images just like this around the house. I “knew” exactly what work that referenced. I also “knew” that I’d be able to Google the referent in a couple of minutes, at most.


Well, I was wrong about that. I never was able to track down the original, and it wasn’t for lack of effort.
So I am reduced to this: Alex (or anybody else): where have I seen the cover of your book before? First person to supply the answer will receive a handsome selection of stickers featuring utterly obscure Austrian soccer players (I am so not kidding about this). —Martin Schneider