Author Archives: Emdashes

John O’Hara to Harold Ross: “I Have Decided to Reject Your Rejection”

From his January 1939 letter to Ross, just added to the brand-new and already much appreciated Today in Letters, a blog begun recently by Brian Sholis. Sholis, who just contributed a piece to PRINT and whose keen New Yorker event reporting I’ve called attention to before, calls his new enterprise “a ‘this day in history’ for literary correspondence and diaries.” The entries so far include a letter from Baudelaire to his mother from 1856; a 1928 Isak Dinesen dispatch; a 1937 letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Marianne Moore; and a 1661 Pepys diary entry. What a great idea! It’s going to be fun to see what he chooses. I’ve kept The Faber Book of Diaries and The Faber Book of Letters on my bedside table for years, since they’re so damn entertaining.

Waiting for a post you’ve been looking forward to on Emdashes? All in good time; intern applications now being accepted. Benefits: invitation to fix my defunct Complete New Yorker, all the popcorn you can eat, iTunes aplenty, and friendly smiles.

Do Reporters at Large Have Personal Histories?

Easily checkable fact: Katherine Boo is a kick-ass reporter, as is demonstrated in her searing (search the blog and my clips; I defy you to find me using that word carelessly) story about teen mothers in Louisiana, published in February (here she talks to Matt Dellinger about reporting it); and, this week, in “Expectations,” Boo’s dispatch from an endangered public school in Denver. Her reportorial insight is astounding; her prose is a course in style and structure.
Menwhile, this issue (January 15) has the potential to be a C.G.I., or Completely Good Issue, which always thrills me, though it’s not easy to achieve. So far, I also love Shalom Auslander‘s “Playoffs,” which shouldn’t even be described, just read. It’s such good writing, it’s so funny and irreligious and perfect, it made me choke up and grin and want to give him caramels; this rabbi agrees.
 
Meanwhile, I’ve spent weeks in an aphasic cocoon, trying to find the words to praise another recent Personal History. You know the one, or you’d better: Tad Friend’s wistfully confrontational portrait of his mother, from (I think) this past December. It was so good it made me angry, and I couldn’t calm down for hours. I thought: Goddamn it, Tad Friend, why have you been writing nonchalantly jokey TV reviews when you could have been forging transcendent pieces like this? Get back to work on the book this is surely destined to become, and quit fooling around! I was furious with admiration as I read it. Why spend this sensibility on the toga-partiers of HBO? Popular-media criticism takes finesse and heart; it’s not for the casual visitor. Save your strength!
I also dug Julian Barnes’s memoir “The Past Conditional.” And a slew of others, almost all, if not all, by men. I’ve been reading The New Yorker especially closely for the past two years, and I can hardly remember any first-person stories by ladies besides Caitlin Flanagan. Am I wrong? I entreat you to correct me. I want to be corrected. I repeat, I’m an open-armed appreciator of Ian Frazier, Nick Paumgarten, Calvin Trillin (of course), Donald Antrim (double of course), John Lahr (ditto), Orhan Pamuk, David Owen (more David Owen!), John le Carré, David Sedaris, Roger Angell, Bill Buford, Sean Wilsey (who I trust will be appearing in the magazine again this year), Ben Bradlee, Adam Gopnik, and so on. It’s not a question. I look forward to them and I relish them.
 
I’m also wondering, don’t Nancy Franklin, Susan Orlean, Elizabeth Kolbert, Joan Acocella, Jane Kramer, Stacy Schiff, Rebecca Mead, Lauren Collins, Meghan O’Rourke, Larissa MacFarquhar, Jill Lepore, Jane Mayer, Margaret Talbot, Katha Pollitt (a friend who’s written excellent first-person essays for the magazine, but not recently), Connie Bruck, Judith Thurman, Susan Sheehan, Cynthia Zarin, Lillian Ross, Claudia Roth Pierpont, Elsa Walsh, etc., have funny, meditative, idiosyncratic reminiscences they’d like to develop into gleaming, tenderly calibrated personal essays? Because I’d really like to read them, please.
 
Not everyone can write memoirs, of course, or wants to, but it’s always pleasing to see nimble writers stretch. I know how many editors at the magazine are women, and how many writers (even if they don’t appear as often as I’d like), and protest horns have already been sounded in that arena. For now, I’m hoping that in 2007 we’ll witness more of these New Yorker writers wielding the capital letter “I.” No magazine is perfect, but there are ways for this one to inch ever closer.

5001 Banned Words and Phrases

15. The word “phenomena” is plural. One phenomenon, two phenomena, red phenomenon, blue phenomenon. A fishy school of phenomena.
16. The word “criteria” is, too. One criterion, two criteria, one Criterion Collection, several (I think) Criterion Cinemas. That’s the one in New Haven, which is a good one.
17. “Are we still on?” An understandably common phrase in the city of plan-canceling (aided by generally handy cell phones), but as I wrote earlier this year, echoing a great Times editorial by Bob Morris at about this time last year, we’ve really got to stop doing that.
18. What is “advanced notice”? It’s “advance notice.” “Advanced notice” makes no sense. Also, “advanced tickets”?
Visit banned words and phrases 12-14, 7-11, 4-6, and 1-3, and by all means, send in your own!

Bud Y? Because Trillin’s Speaking at the 92nd St. Y This Weekend

And even sooner at 192 Books, namely, tomorrow at 7 p.m. You may need to reserve your seat; give them a call just in case.
 
Meanwhile, here’s where to buy tickets for the Y event, which I’m really excited about:

Mark Singer, interviewer
 
Calvin Trillin became the “deadline poet” at The Nation in 1990. He has written verses on current events for The New Yorker, The New York Times and National Public Radio. His books on eating—American Fried; Alice, Let’s Eat; and Third Helpings—are considered classics. He is also known for his nonfiction books, such as Remembering Denny, Killings and, most recently, About Alice. His comic novels and commentary works include Tepper Isn’t Going Out, Obliviously on He Sails and A Heckuva Job.
 
Mark Singer is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
 
Date & Time: Sun, Jan 14, 2007, 7:30 pm
Location: Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street Directions
Venue: Kaufmann Concert Hall Seating Chart
Code: T-LC5CA05-01
Price: $25.00 All Sections

Meanwhile, unrelated to events, I agree, come back, Drunken Volcano New Yorker haiku! The precocious, engaging Jacob Thomas talks about art and covers. Blogger, football follower, and fact-checker Paul Smalera thinks there are factual errors (unnecessary roughness?) in Adam Gopnik’s football story, “The Unbeautiful Game,” from last week (not online). Finally, the unassailable Nancy Franklin talks to the cheeky Patricia Marx in a web-only Q. & A.

Gladwell Ruckus, Brunetti Fever: A Friday Afternoon Guest Post

By Martin Schneider, whose terrific Squib Report is now a regular Emdashes feature. Over to you, Martin!
 
On his blog, Malcolm Gladwell has followed up his contrarian New Yorker article on Enron with an intriguing request. He wants someone to explain, in three sentences or less, what the legal case against Jeff Skilling actually was. The thread of comments that ensued has been highly contentious (and entertaining). Full disclosure: I’m the jackass who brought up Terrell Owens.
Meanwhile, comix aficionados are excited about this week’s cover by Ivan Brunetti; witness Eric Reynolds’s blog at Fantagraphics, called FLOG!. Brunetti is one of the true champs of the current scene: his recent comix anthology by Yale U. Press has received kudos from nearly all quarters. If you want to see some single-panel comix offensive enough to have sent Harold Ross instantly into a coma, check out his Hee! and Haw! mini-books.

Gratuitous Bags of Popcorn

Tony Scott (Emdashes rule of thumb: you only get to call them by their nickname if you can say it to their face) writes in the Times today, regarding Frank O’Hara, kids (in particular, his own lucky moviegoing snappers), and the moving pictures (link mine—think the Times would go around linking to a story in The New Yorker for easy reference?):

According to this vision, children are leading the slow exodus from the theaters. From an essay in the current issue of The New Yorker, for example [“Big Pictures“], one learns that, when it comes to visual entertainment, kids these days are “platform agnostic,” perfectly happy to consume moving pictures wherever they pop up — in the living room, on the laptop, in the car, on the cellphone — without assigning priority among the various forms. David Denby, the author of the article and one of The New Yorker’s film critics, is an unapologetic adherent to the old-time religion, as am I, and his survey of the current technological landscape is colored by nostalgia for the old downtown movie palaces and the studio system that fed them.
 
Of course, as Mr. Denby acknowledges, children have hardly disappeared from the movie audience. On the contrary, adolescents and their younger siblings are the most sought-after segments of the demographically segmented universe of potential viewers. The movies that make the most money, and therefore those on which the most production and advertising money is spent, are the ones that simultaneously reach down into the primary grades and up into the ranks of young adults. Cont’d.

Here’s O’Hara’s poem “Ave Maria” (from Plagiarist.com), should you want to read it, which you do.

David Rakoff on the Woody Allen Retrospective

I’ve been going to as many of the Woody Allen movies at Film Forum as I can, which isn’t nearly enough; David Rakoff has been seeing all of them, from the looks of his posts at Nextbook (thanks, MUG!). These are tender reviews, thoughtful and personal, as Allen fans’ relationships to the movies tend to be. Here’s a sample, from the entry for Wild Man Blues:

But it is when he is playing that I am overwhelmed by a rush of what can accurately be described as love for Woody Allen. To see the effort and concentration of his playing, the pulsing of his jaw and temples as if there were umbrella staves pushing up from under his skin, or the attentive humility with which he sits and listens to banjo player Eddie Davis play “Rock of Ages.” As he himself says, there is no cerebral element to it, it’s sheer feeling and the reverence he displays is so real and so touching.

Really good stuff, throughout, and well worth reading.

San Francisco Event: Rejection Collection Show at the Cartoon Art Museum

From the SF Chronicle:

A current exhibition at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco affirms that something good can, indeed, come from rejection. “The Rejection Collection: Not in the New Yorker Cartoons,” which runs through mid-March, features 30 single-panel cartoons that got no bites when submitted to the magazine.
 
A cartoon graveyard of sorts, the exhibition showcases those cast-aside gems that “never see the light of day,” says Matthew Diffee, 36, the show’s curator and a prolific contributor to the magazine.
…
For each weekly issue, the New Yorker receives at least 500 cartoons but can accept only about 20. That means every year, thousands of cartoons are cast aside, many deemed too risque, silly or just plain weird for a mainstream publication. Read on.

Now We Are Two

And we plan to be terribly enthusiastic. Except when we’re irked, as, sometimes, regrettably, we are. I say “we” because the 2007 Emdashes is not the 2006 Emdashes, or the 2005 Emdashes (which, inexplicably, had a lower-case “e”) either. It is—emphatically!—plural, it has categories, and it contains no unsightly grammar or offensive punctuation, or your money back. (Exceptions include colloquial episodes and the quotation of other news and opinion sources, not all of which offer this guarantee.) Clichés, meanwhile, require judgment on at least one end. If you think a cliché has occurred on Emdashes, please report it to me and, if I think you’re right, I will publish a couplet containing your name and either the cliché in question or a quotation from my favorite novel. Scansion probable; I have a degree. Puns sí! Clichés no!
Meanwhile, here are some of my favorite books of 2006. This week, look forward to the fourth edition of Ask the Librarians, the endlessly illuminating column by New Yorker librarians Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, plus a festive presentation of virtual gifts for the new year to The New Yorker from some of Emdashes’s star readers. In case you were wondering, my New Year’s resolution is to be the Josh Fruhlinger of New Yorker appreciator-critics. Who needs tired speculations about the Olsen twins when you can inspire YouTube tributes to Mary Worth‘s tragically departed Aldo? If some kind of Y2K+7 blunder stripped down the entire internet to just the Comics Curmudgeon, Google, and greatestfilms.org (whose only flaw is that it needs to move past the popups), it would still be a delicious existence. Since the web seems to be in fine fettle for now, though, did you know that newyorker.com has a slide-show gallery of every single cover from 2006? Yes! It does. But what’s the difference between “Next” and “Continue”? Who cares—it’s fantastic!