Author Archives: Emdashes

It’s Not TMI When Somebody Asks For It

From my Gmail inbox (which, mainly because of Emdashes-related alerts and correspondence, contains more messages than you can probably absorb without an abacus):

Dear New Yorker Compass Member,
The New Yorker Compass wants to learn more about your personal relationship with the magazine. We invite you to share your thoughts and opinions.
Please take a few moments to complete this survey. In thanks for your participation, your name will be entered into a drawing for the chance to win a copy of The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw and Never Will See in The New Yorker. The book, edited by New Yorker contributor Matthew Diffee, is a hilarious look at the lost gems that have never seen the light of day. Thirty winners will be chosen at random and notified a few weeks after the survey has been completed.

One of the questions: “How interested would you be in receiving a digital edition of The New Yorker magazine? This would be a digital version that looks exactly like your printed issue, but you could access it online.” A mind-blowing concept. I know some Californians and Canadians (not to mention Austrians) who will find this especially appealing! But will they sacrifice their print copy? And: “How much would you be willing to pay on top of the regular subscription price for full access to The Complete New Yorker?” Now this is going to sell.

I’ve filled out these surveys before (they combine two of my favorite things, questionnaires and The New Yorker), but so far have never won any prizes. That’s all right, because I already own The Rejection Collection. But did you know there’s a second book of rejected cartoons coming out this fall? Yes: The Rejection Collection Vol. II: The Cream of the Crap. I’ve seen an early portion of the book, and it’s ripe, all right! It has all the satisfying offensiveness of the previous edition, with even more amusingly ridiculous cartoonist questionnaires, plus the incomparable Roz Chast, who refuses to answer many of the questions. This is a series I can live with.

Meanwhile, unrelated: I liked Leon Wieseltier’s column on the Times’ giddy “glorification of the grotesquely rich” and the latter-day Walter Benjamins of commerce, who so treasure their book collections that they even bring them on vacation: “Another CEO ‘has stocked his cabin in the woods with the collected works of Aristotle,’ which is very nice for Aristotle, especially in the summer.” Shades of Woody Allen’s zingiest prose. Best bit:

No doubt this latest bath of pluto-porn at the Times will be partly justified as an interest in the philanthropic consequences of the new fortunes; and while it is true that the generosity of some of the new rich is extraordinary, it is also true that charity is not economic justice. (It is the absence of economic justice that makes charity necessary.)

Breaking: Ghost Orchid, Co-Star of Orlean Book and Jonze Film, Blooming Again

From the Tampa Bay blog at the St. Petersburg Times:

A rare ghost orchid, first spotted in July in Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, is blooming again, the Miami Herald reports. The plant is believed to grow naturally only in Cuba, the Bahamas and Southwest Florida. The blossom is white and has thin, spindly stems that virtually disappear against the dark backdrop of the swamps in which it thrives, giving it the appearance of being suspended in midair.
The plant is a central character in Susan Orlean’s celebrated The Orchid Thief [link mine], a 1998 book about a rogue plant dealer in Southwest Florida who is arrested for taking the rare orchid and other species from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve southwest of Naples.
In a 1995 article in The New Yorker magazine that was the basis for the book, Orlean described plant dealer John Laroche as “a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all of his front teeth.” Orlean’s book tells Laroche’s story as an orchid enthusiast who hatches a plan with the cooperation of the Seminole tribe to build a nursery and orchid greenhouse.
…
A 2002 film, Adaptation, was based more or less on Orlean’s book but was really more about adapting a book to a screenplay than it was about the Orlean book.

For more about Adaptation, check out a mini-blog that Jason Kottke kept about the movie at Susan Orlean’s site, which he developed. (Click around; it’s a nice site.)

Also, California olive-oil producers, chuffed by the Tom Mueller exposé, “Slippery Business,” are declaring their oil squeaky clean.

Letter From Saalfelden: The Phoenix

Emdashes contributing editor and Squib Reporter Martin Schneider files a welcome post from afar.
Emily has been careful to signal my absence from our weekly Pick of the Issue posts due to my spending a few weeks in a rural Alpine outpost in Austria. Unsurprisingly, its remoteness precludes any possibility of receiving new issues of The New Yorker, so the last issue I received before leaving was the issue of July 9/16. I return on August 17.
That’s about six weeks altogether (the dates don’t match up, but trust me, it is)—a long stretch to be separated from the grist for this particular mill, but I had resigned myself to it. My connectivity combines extreme slowness and great expense, making proper perusal of even the online contents impractical; with a pang, I’ve watched the Picks of the Issue come and go.
Then a friend passed through for the weekend, a journalist in Vienna who’s a voracious consumer of fine American periodicals. On Sunday, he placed a small pile of printed matter on my table, indicating that I could take them or consign them to the Kachelofen.
In that pile were the two most recent issues of The New Yorker: July 28 and August 6.
And I can testify that absence really does make the heart grow fonder. —Martin Schneider

If You’re Going to Target, Be Sure to Put Some Caption Contest Games in Your Cart

I’ve been pelted with emails about this today. I still haven’t played the game, but whenever Emdashes contributing editor Martin, the mysterious but ever-closer ZP Alabasium, David Marc Fischer, and newyorkette want to get together for a bottle of wine and a round of caption-mangling, I’m ready. From the L.A. Times:

In the latest expansion of its brand name into the retail market, the board game version of the New Yorker’s weekly cartoon caption contest has just gone on sale at Target stores nationwide.
And although it may seem like an incongruous match between the discount store’s unapologetically mass appeal and the magazine’s upscale cachet, the people involved don’t find it strange at all.
When the New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, talks about the deal, he sounds more like an MBA candidate than an editorial staffer at the august literary weekly.
“These cartoons are accessible to people, and they’re an exportable part of the magazine for its brand identity,” Mankoff said.
…
As for the sale of the cartoon game at Target, Remnick was unruffled.
“With all due respect to the New York Times and the Washington Post, the last time I looked I could get a coffee mug, all kinds of doodads ancillary to those newspapers, and I don’t think it compromises their news columns,” he said.
“Once we had a great cover dividing New York into faux Yiddish and Afghani neighborhoods,” [David] Remnick said. “It became a shower curtain and a poster, and it brought in a lot of money. . . . I don’t think it undermined Western civilization, much less the standards of the New Yorker.”
…
Mankoff imagined Eustace Tilley sitting behind an information desk at a Target store, pointing to the Target motto and dryly advising a shopper: “If you’d like to expect more, and pay less for sophisticated laughs, I’d recommend the New Yorker cartoon caption game.”

Dorothy Parker the Cat and Bonobo the Sexy Monkey

A few nights ago, I stopped by the Algonquin for Matilda the hotel cat’s kind sponsorship of a North Shore Animal League benefit. Hairless cats! Cunning costumes! Drinks! Pistachio cake! My favorite waiter! The place was packed, and I took some really blurry pictures with my phone, but Kevin Fitzpatrick, fearless leader of the Dorothy Parker Society, took far better ones, so take a look (Elvis has not left the building). Two Dorothy Parker Society members even adopted a cat, which they named…can you guess?
In other news, there is some debate among those with the opposable thumbs, tools, religion, and/or blogs to conduct it, about Ian Parker’s look at the myth of the bisexual, benevolent bonobo. You say alliteration isn’t evolved? It’s primal, man.
Some fuzzy but affectionately snapped cell-phone photos of the Algonquin bash follow. Kevin’s, again, are far better, especially of Matilda; by the time I got around to my arbitrary photo session, she had retreated behind her mini-door. I’m compensating by throwing in a picture of my own furry pal, who does not live in a hotel, but seems pretty contented, but I can’t say for sure since I’m never home.

Rediscovering Robert Rice (Or: Sahl Long, I’ve Had You Fame)

James Wolcott awards a Tip of the Hat (not a Wag of the Finger) for background information on his recent column on Mort Sahl to “a now mostly forgotten New Yorker writer named Robert Rice” for his July 30, 1960, profile of Sahl. Wolcott, who calls the piece “fascinating,” notes that Rice also wrote a profile on Nichols and May; I would only add that he did others on Dave Brubeck, Leonard Bernstein, and Branch Rickey, as well as a whole slew of enthralling-sounding NYC-related profiles (or rather, Profiles) and stuff in other departments.
Is anyone out there familiar with Rice? We’d love to hear about it. Perhaps he was the Calvin Tomkins or Lawrence Weschler of his day! —Martin Schneider

Jeffrey Frank’s Playlist, a Police Cloud, and Magazine Pests

Today at Largehearted Boy, Jeffrey Frank, New Yorker senior editor and author of the new novel Trudy Hopedale, picks a bunch of tracks his characters—”Trudy herself–a woman of a certain age who loves giving parties and has local talk show–and Donald FrizzÃ©, a young historian whoâ€™s probably best known for appearing on television rather than for anything heâ€™s actually written”—might have as their soundtrack. Frank has a little riff on each choice, from Elvis Costello to Sam Cooke to the great Alison Krauss. If this were a podcast, I’d download it—for now, I’m reading the book. Here’s the David Sedaris blurb: “Another triumph from one of Americaâ€™s most reliable and inventive comic novelists. Trudy Hopedale is understated, cunning and relentlessly funny.â€
More reviews: The Imperfect Parent considers the beautiful new children’s book by Christoph Niemann, The Police Cloud. At the Chicago Tribune, Christy Lemire has a welcome meditation on the movies coming out this summer by women directors, and why there still aren’t enough of either.
Finally, in his Bakersfield, California, newspaper column, Herb Benham takes a new switch to the old “New Yorkers are infesting my house” horse. Someone could assemble a tiresome anthology of identical postwar, post-Wolfe pieces twitting the magazine’s insular elitism (I’d like to see Katherine Boo’s report on Louisiana mothers or George Packer’s investigation into the dangerous lives of Iraqi translators in a magazine matching the world Benham sketches: “Pour me a Boodles and tonic and open up my place at the Hamptons”), even as the frazzled subscriber curses his habit. Volume two would be devoted to the irony-impaired.
You’re never going to win me over comparing The New Yorker to a cockroach, even if the little bugger is “as much a fashion accessory as it is a literary magazine, suggesting that the subscriber might be a person of sophistication and breeding,” as Benham writes of the magazine. After decades of family conditioning and fearsome resistance, I’ve seen the light, and know no one should keep stacks of magazines in their house; organizing manuals advise clipping the pages you want and recycling the rest. (This is also one of the many arguments for getting hold of The Complete New Yorker.) Meanwhile, it’s just not that hard to keep up with the gist of each issue at the very least; time on public transportation helps, but Benham probably has to drive a lot. May I recommend the audio version?

Breaking: James Wood to Join New Yorker Staff

This just in, from the Times: “James Wood, a senior editor at The New Republic, where he has been the literary critic for the past 12 years, is leaving to become a staff writer at The New Yorker…. At The New Yorker, he will be one of several staffers who write about books.” Congratulations, New Yorker—Wood is a gentleman and a scholar. I had the pleasure of working with him (and his wife, the talented Claire Messud) when I was an editor at the Newsday book section. First Ryan Lizza leaves TNR, now Wood; is this like an NBA trade, and next thing we hear two New Yorker staffers will be moving to Washington?

8.6.07 Issue: Death Bee Not Proud

In which various Emdashes contributors note what we liked in last week’s issue.
New department alert! Never before has an issue of The New Yorker boasted a Dept. of Entomology—until now. I think Elizabeth Kolbert’s blend of the personal and the scientific is a model of the genre. Also, if you’re looking at Michael Specter’s spam damnation and wondering who or what Nanospore LLC might be, here’s your answer. I can never recall whether Nanospore’s debut illustration was under Shawn or Ross.
I noticed in Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the Sara and Gerald Murphy show that the vaunted department is referred to as a “Profile”—that capital P surprised me; has it been uppercase for long? Librarians? (I guess it was always u.c. Maybe it just looked weird because they had it as “1962 New Yorker Profile” where it made it seem that the final word just had to be l.c. File under “Things only a copy editor would ponder.”) Paul Goldberger’s review of the Times‘ gleaming new digs makes me want to take a tour of the premises—and Bloomberg HQ, too. —Martin Schneider

New Blogs at The New Yorker: Hertzberg, Goodyear, & More

As Chicago once sang, it’s getting bloggier every day: newyorker.com has added blogs by Dana Goodyear (“Postcard From Los Angeles”) and Hendrik Hertzberg. The latter, which so far lacks a catchy name—will it be a regular feature? perhaps we can look forward to short stints from other regulars?—is so far a zippy, multi-day report from YearlyKos.
They join George Packer’s blog, “Interesting Times“; Steve Brodner’s art and observations at “Person of the Day“; Andy Borowitz’s Onion-esque The Borowitz Report; Sasha Frere-Jones’s impressionistic photo blog; Alex’s Ross’s “The Rest Is Noise“; and, of course, Gladwell.com.
Though Dan Baum’s (and Margaret L. Knox’s) New Orleans Journal is now defunct, I’m glad it’s still online at the site for people to read through and respond to. Meanwhile, some of the new features have their own blogrolls; glasnost!