Martin Schneider writes:
I was on chat with a friend when suddenly he typed at me,
SquibFriend [not his real handle]: I love Nutella
Sigh. Yet another subject where my best information is New Yorker-derived:
Squib [not my real handle]: LOL. in italy it’s a very big deal
SquibFriend: I should move there
SquibFriend: it’s brilliant!
Squib: they have like nutella political parties and stuff
One-minute pause.
Squib: did you just have some?
SquibFriend: in the process
SquibFriend: spooning it, baby
Squib: spooning it!
Squib: how naughty!
SquibFriend: don’t need no fucking bread
SquibFriend: just gimme the jar and the spoon!
SquibFriend: yargh!
According to The New Yorker, Nutella “is made to be spread on bread but more often ends up being eaten in hasty spoonfuls, straight from the jar.” So true, so true!
Squib: please don’t tell me you will consume a whole jar tonight
SquibFriend: 13 oz.
SquibFriend: is that bad?
Squib: mmmm, not recommended
SquibFriend: uh, then no…
SquibFriend: no I, uh, won’t
Squib: LOL
Squib: excellent liar
Five-minute pause.
SquibFriend: how’s 1/2 a jar?
My friend, fiend for hazelnut goo, would no doubt have been shocked to learn that in 1994, Silvio Berlusconi’s political party sponsored an “Il Primo Nutella Party,” where guests spread Nutella “over their partners and licked it off”! It’s difficult to imagine our political elite engaging publicly in such activities (except maybe at Bohemian Grove).
In 1993, a writer for Italy’s La Stampa got out the purple pen, calling Nutella’s more engaging properties “a devouring passion. Uncontrollable. It has struck heads of state, bewitched artists, seduced poets. The love for Nutella is inexplicable, it just is…. More than a food, it is a category of spirit, a state of superior perception.” (The charms of peanut butter are decidedly more mundane.)
All Nutella facts and quotations in this post are derived from a delightful and informative 3/6/95 TOTT (by Andrea Lee, who is, I now learn, the author of the 2006 novel Lost Hearts in Italy, which may or may not feature a diverting Nutella-related subplot).

Martin Schneider follows up on my mention earlier this week of a ’30s animation goody starring Otto Soglow’s Little King.
Vladimir Nabokov really liked the work of Otto Soglow. We know this because in the 1967 foreword to his memoir Speak, Memory, he draws attention to a little wordplay he made involving the cartoonist’s name.
Let’s look at the passage:

Reviewers read the first version more carelessly than they will this new edition: only one of them noticed my “vicious snap” at Freud in the first paragraph of Chapter Eight, section 2 and none discovered the name of a great cartoonist and a tribute to him in the last sentence of section 2, Chapter Eleven. It is most embarrassing for a writer to have to point out such things himself.

No kidding! Is it me or does Nabokov come off a touch vainglorious and snippy here? Still, I daresay we can find some empathy for a great author in his twilight years uncertain of his legacy.
A USC student named Chuck Kinbote—just kidding, his name is actually Alexander Zholkovsky (A. Zh.)—supplies some helpful glosses:

Reviewers read the first version more carelessly than they will this new edition: only one of them noticed my “vicious snap” at Freud in the first paragraph of Chapter Eight, section 2 [i.e. the “Sigismond Lejoyeux” bilingual pun, p. 156, —A. Zh.] and none discovered the name of a great cartoonist and a tribute to him in the last sentence of section 2, Chapter Eleven [219; according to commentators, the reference is to Otto Soglow, 1900-1975; the rather desperate pun is in the words ”so glowing” —A. Zh.]. It is most embarrassing for a writer to have to point out such things himself” (15).

So the “rather desperate” pun here is limited to so glowing—it’s fascinating to me that he expected his readers (reviewers) to “solve” this puzzle based on such a mundane combination of words. If he’d contrived it to read “a grotto so glowing”—a Nabokovian turn of phrase, potentially—I would better understand his dismay.
So far I haven’t used The Complete New Yorker at all. I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to see if Soglow’s cartoons ever appeared embedded in Nabokov’s prose?
It turns out that it happened exactly once.
Nabokov’s first ever New Yorker item appeared in the 4/11/42 issue, an odd semi-cannibalistic poem called “Literary Dinner.” It appears on page 18; a Soglow appears on page 20.
Close.
In the 6/23/45 issue appears a highly Nabokovian TOTT about a doppelganger. (He wouldn’t write another TOTT for nearly 31 years! A record, surely? Perhaps the good librarians can tell us at a later date.) It is not the kind of piece that would ever appear as a TOTT today; Nabokovians may find in the piece some echo of his novel Despair (also about a doppelganger).
Bingo: The piece covers six pages, on the second of which is a Soglow.
Just the one time. Did the name strike him as potentially punny already in 1945?

Boing Boing and Kottke, among others, have enthusiastically linked to Simon Rich’s marvelous expression of childish/childhood perception, “The Wisdom of Children.” It’s comforting to know that even though it’s not a humor magazine per se these days, from time to time The New Yorker can come up with a gem on the level of The Onion.
What’s the funniest thing you’ve ever read in The New Yorker? I nominate two very recent ones by Jack Handey, “This Is No Game” (1/9/06) and “What I’d Say to the Martians” (8/8/05).
—Martin Schneider

Political blogger Matthew Yglesias and some of his commenters confirm Jeffrey Goldberg‘s observation in his March 19 TOTT that Washington, D.C., has some pretty awful Chinese food. Anyone care to confirm? As he notes, “bad Chinese food” is a subset of Chinese food, and some of it can be quite good—New York has plenty. The problem is that D.C.’s bad Chinese food is Atrocious. According to Yglesias, this is an example of what makes The New Yorker so good. It’s the observational reporting, stupid.
(Any typos in this post should be considered my humble hommage to Ylgesias.)
—Martin Schneider