The best of last week.
As previously noted, this issue further establishes The New Yorker as the primate-ary reporter of Monkey News after the Ricky Gervais podcast and, of course, Baboon Update. (With some competition from Gorilla Gazette, Lemur News, Primate Eye, and The Simian, perhaps.)
Aside from that, I particularly liked Peter Schjeldahl on Courbet; Ben McGrath on the new prosthesis technology we’ll be needing more and more of the longer we stay in Iraq; Glyn Maxwell’s “Element It Has”; Lizzie Widdicombe on a steam-pipe-explosion evacuation procedure at Grand Central; the BEK, Mick Stevens, and Bob Mankoff cartoons I mean drawings (and several others—it was tough picking favorites this time); and the provocative cover by Anita Kunz, which isn’t quite in Spiegelman shock territory but was certainly being talked about. I know—I heard it with my very ears! —EG
Author Archives: Emdashes
Minneapolis Bridge Collapse: Again, Non-Working Cell Phones
From the Times coverage: “Cellphones in the area were disrupted after the collapse, possibly because antennas were overloaded with calls.” As I’ve asked before, how long have we had since September 2001 to address this problem again?
You Might as Well Sue 3: Dorothy Parker Trial’s Dramatic Conclusion (For Now)
You’ve got to read Kevin Fitzpatrick’s wrap-up of the Dorothy Parker copyright trial, in which experts and cranks take the stand to argue the definitions of poems, “non-poems,” letters, free verse, unfree verse, triolets, doggerel, “little exercises,” wisecrackery, squibs, and pedestrian prose, and who did what illegal thing to whom. Not to mention a bizarre Lillian Hellman rumor that Kevin calls “the craziest tale I’ve ever come across in my nine years of running this Web site” (for the Dorothy Parker Society of New York). Sample dialogue:
Also for a second day, girls with glasses will be happy to know that “News Item†[link mine] was read in court again. This time by Dannay, who rushed through it to ask what Silverstein thought of it: “it could go either way,†Silverstein said, “as a poem or not.†Danay asked him if “News Item†– probably Parker’s most famous piece — was a poem or not. Silverstein said “News Item†“is a wisecrack, not a poem.”
And:
This was the beginning of one of my favorite parts of the trial, reading Dorothy Parker’s own words into the court record. The first instance of this was a slam-bang selection, taken from one of the brightest spots of her career, when she was Constant Reader for The New Yorker. Silverstein, in a monotone, was asked to read from the January 7, 1928 issue. Part of what Parker wrote:
“There is poetry, and there is not,†Parker wrote. “You can’t use the words good or bad, about it. You must know for yourself. Poetry is so intensely, so terribly, personal. A wise man, a very wise man – well, Hendrik Willem Van Loom, if you must have names – once said to me that if you have any doubt about a poem, then it isn’t a poem. Poetry is for you, for you alone. If, for you, it’s poetry, it will deluge your mind, drain your heart, crinkle your spine. It doesn’t matter whose it is.â€
It’s an Alice in Wonderland postmodern circus! Quite the opposite of Not Much Fun.
Meanwhile, C. Max Magee finds himself distressed by a missing New Yorker (“Being the best magazine in the world, the New Yorker is guaranteed to provide me with at least one transcendent reading experience per month…”), then finds himself not missing it as much as he thought he would (“I sometimes fantasize about the day I’ll decide not to renew”). Don’t leave the clan, C.M.—we need you!
Your Happiness Needs Emily Flake
Happy 30th birthday, Baltimore City Paper, which is also home to Emily Flake—about whom I am unreservedly enthusiastic (and there are fewer things in that category than you might imagine)—as well as Tim Kreider, whose comic has a fantastic title that I like to invoke almost daily: The Pain—When Will It End?
So Emily Flake has an event coming up on August 9 to celebrate her new book, These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves: A Love/Hate/Love/Hate/Love Letter to a Very Bad Habit. You’d do well to go. Here are the details:
Happy Ending (upstairs lounge)
302 Broome St. (bet. Forsythe & Eldridge)
Look for the pink awning that says “Health Club”
happyendinglounge.com
August 9th, 7-9 PM
These Are the Cartoons in My Family—How About Yours?
Who can explain the mysterious alchemy by which this or that New Yorker cartoon becomes an inside family joke, an axiom, so much so that the punchline alone conjures the entire conceit? There’s an old gag about the two superannuated friends who tell each other the same jokes so often that they’ve numbered them—one can say “Number 42!” and be sure of the reply, “That’s a good one.”
We told these cartoons to each other, too many times perhaps, as a way of accentuating our familyhood. And occasionally we told them to outsiders, too. Some are generally famous; others aren’t. Some are remembered from the original magazine issue; some developed their staying power long after publication, through bound collections from decades ago. Here are the ones for my family. What are yours?
• “Gently, sir. It’s Mother’s Day.†(George Price)
• “Sometimes we sell them, lady, but only to other teams.†(Peter Arno)
• “If he’s not a Frenchman he’s certainly an awful snob.†(Saul Steinberg)
• “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.†(Carl Rose)
• “Watch out, Fred! Here it comes again!†(George Price)
—Martin Schneider
NYC: Lore Segal Reads Tomorrow For Big BOMB Extravaganza
6:30 p.m., Tompkins Square Park. Here’s an outdoor, summery way to meet a book I think you shouldn’t skip—Shakespeare’s Kitchen, a new short-story collection by longtime New Yorker writer Lore Segal—and applaud a magazine (I’ve been known to step out with other magazines from time to time) that deserves applause. From the Chicago Tribune review of Shakespeare’s Kitchen: “On every page the words snap together like bright and brand-new Lego blocks. The whole is clever, original, precise. It is frankly flabbergasting.”
Here’s the event info for tomorrow.
BOMB Magazine
Wednesday, August 1, 6:30 pm, Tompkins Square Park
Featuring readings by ED PARK, LORE SEGAL, and LYNNE TILLMAN
Join the Editors of BOMB Magazine as they celebrate 26 years of publishing original poetry and fiction with a reading from their special 100th issue (can you believe it?!). With free magazine giveaways, subscription raffles, and other hijinx, you’re sure to get something out of it. Contributors include:
Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer and the former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. His first novel, Personal Days, will be published by Random House in 2008.
Winner of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and the Carl Sandburg Award for Fiction, Lore Segal is the author of the novels Other People’s Houses and Her First American (both available from The New Press), and several books for children. She lives in New York City.
Lynne Tillman is the author of four novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and two nonfiction books. Tillman’s novel, No Lease on Life, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novel, American Genius: A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press last year.
BOMB Magazine is a not-for-profit quarterly, currently celebrating 26 years of legendary interviews between artists, writers, architects, directors, and musicians, and 32 pages of original fiction and poetry in each issue. Visit bombsite.com for interviews and essays about the arts by the people who make the arts, and to listen to recordings of BOMBLive! events.
DIRECTIONS: Take the F to 2nd Ave. Enter the park at Seventh Street between A & B. The reading will take place in the central area of the park.
Love and Death
Congratulations on your marriage, Anne Stringfield and Steve Martin! To paraphrase a lucky man we all know, things are going to start happening to you now.
Everyone should consider renting Smiles of a Summer Night this week to honor the great Ingmar Bergman, who has just died. R.I.P. Update: And now Antonioni too, the same night as Bergman. Who’s next? Don’t answer that. Woody Allen must be feeling melancholy this week.
Who Still Reads Magazines?
“Just about everybody,” reports AdAge.
7.23.07 Issue: I Declare the Dawn of a New Fiction Era
The best of last week.
I think Antonya Nelson’s “Shauntrelle” should be shortlisted for Best American Short Stories. Something’s been going on with the New Yorker fiction in the past several months, and it’s even fresher than Fanny Mann’s facelift. Keep on doing what you’re doing, fiction faction! Also, you may not realize that there’s now a fiction podcast on the website; do not miss Donald Antrim reading Donald Barthelme’s 1974 story “I Bought a Little City,” or, for that matter, Edwidge Danticat discussing Junot Diaz’s 1995 “The Dating Game.” (Diaz reads this one himself.) Pleasant discovery: Fiction editor Deborah Treisman, who did an appealingly subtle job introducing Lorrie Moore and Chang-Rae Lee at last year’s New Yorker Festival, also has a very nice voice for radio.
Other standouts: Nick Paumgarten on Mort Zuckerman, the latest in the Let Us Now Parse Famous Men series (I’d love to read Paumgarten, Ken Auletta, &c. on some of these powermongers); Rachel Hadas’s “The Cold Hill Side”; Hilton Als improbably and convincingly praising Xanadu; my friend Caleb Crain writing lightly and beautifully about the heavy subject of whaling; Oliver Sacks on the Piano Man; and, of course, David Denby on those movies.
—EG
Like a Track Star…
Happy 50th column, Sasha Frere-Jones.
By the way, there have been a lot of primates in the magazine lately. Here’s SFJ:
The opera, perhaps to the relief of those encountering sung exposition for the first time, begins with images. On a thin scrim in front of the stage, the Chinese ideogram for “monkey†appears, followed by a series of crisp animations by Hewlett that echo the opening sequence of the Japanese television series: a stone egg perched on top of a mountain lights up, wobbles with pending life, and rolls down a hill, where it breaks open, revealing the monkey king, who emerges with a loud “Eeeeeeeeeee!†Then the scrim lifts to show Monkey, played by the Chinese singer and acrobat Fei Yang, surrounded by his subjects, also monkeys (and acrobats), who scamper up green bamboo poles.
What with the bonobos in the same number and at least two other bits of monkey business in recent issues—this BEK cartoon and Jack Handey’s hilariously cruel nature documentary—it’s a veritable barrel full of ’em, and hey, I approve. Martin, how about a brief departure from The Pigeon Files to do a quick monkey memo from the archives?
Update: More monkeys, in Ben McGrath’s “Muscle Memory.” (The bionic prosthesis technology is being tried out on them: “We have video of monkeys, actually controlling arms, working in 3-D space,” [said Colonel Geoffrey Ling].) Monkeys, shine.