Author Archives: Emdashes

Clumsiness Is Next to Godliness; filmed in Pruzanvision

The Clumsiest People in Europe (Bloomsbury, June '05)
Hooray! Perhaps my enthusiasm is crass, loud, and imperialist, like most things American—or is that Bulgarian?—but I’m delighted that The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World, by Todd Pruzan—who’s also the author of the New Yorker piece recently voted Best in Issue, by me—is now available on Amazon for a mere $13.57 (US$). Yo, Bloomsbury: Where’s the excerpt? Pruzan is also reading soon at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble, 6th Ave. at 22nd St., at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, June 15. Let’s show up and do a raucous, ungainly Wave whenever something from the book makes us laugh, which will be frequently—Mrs. Mortimer would be horrified, and that would be good.

How come? Well, the book has been described (by Pruzan) as “a cranky, caustic, funny and unsettling collection of nasty writing about geography for Victorian children, written by Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer and originally published between 1849 and 1854.” Here’s one of the first blurbs, by my pal Lisa Levy in her Voice dish on the big summer reads: “Mrs. Mortimer—armchair traveler and author of such proclamations as ‘The Spaniards are not only idle, they are very cruel’—makes a persuasive and hilarious case for staying put.” Another on-the-ball review (the pub date’s not till June 6th) by the contextually minded Ken, from Baker Books’ Pick of the Literate (like that name!):

Forget ethnic pride, folks — it seems we’re all descended from useless fools. Such was the considered opinion of Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, a Victorian writer of children’s books, Christian novelist, and general misanthrope. You don’t have to be a seasoned world traveler to enjoy this collection, after all, Mrs. Mortimer herself only left England on two occasions. A fascination for the Victorian era and life in the British Empire at its peak isn’t necessary, either, but it helps. In The Clumsiest People in Europe, Pruzan has collected Mrs. Mortimer’s cruel geography lessons for our horror and amusement.

No one is spared Mrs. Mortimer’s scathing assessments — the French “like being smart, but are not very clean,” the Portuguese are “clumsy and awkward with their hands,” even the English (the author’s own nationality) “are not very pleasant in company, because they do not like strangers, nor taking much trouble.” Although these hilariously rude pronouncements seem like the creative hoax of a clever contemporary writer, they are indeed real. Mrs. Mortimer was as successful a children’s writer in her day as J.K. Rowling is in ours. One has to wonder if the rabidly xenophobic adults of the World War One era were partly made so by reading her books as children.

If you’re in Chicago on June 13, cheer yourself up after the Cubs game with Pruzan on the radio (yes, my domestic partner Google is helping me; I can’t always be psychic), specifically 720 WGN. Just look at this lineup and tell me you won’t be streaming the audio from your little white box:

Monday, June 13

4:30pm John Williams: John chats with comedian Robert Klein about his memoir, The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue: A Child of the Fifties Looks Back.

6:30pm Cubs Central Pregame with David Kaplan.

7:05pm Chicago Cubs Baseball: Cubs vs. Florida Marlins with Pat Hughes and Ron Santo.

Following a 7:05pm Cubs game (approximately 10:20pm) Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg: Tonight, after the game, Extension 720 welcomes Todd Pruzan, editor of the new book The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World.

People have sense in Chicago. I’ve always said so.

Update: Since a book’s not a book till the Times has reviewed it, or so Barnes & Noble may have printed on the company hankerchiefs, it’s good to see Clumsiest People is on Henry Alford’s summer reading list, right at the top. He likes it:

The Spanish grow olives, ”but the taste is so bitter, I am sure you would not like it.” In China, ”it is a common thing to stumble over the bodies of dead babies in the streets.” The Irish, ”if affronted, are filled with rage.” These withering pronouncements come from a Victorian writer named Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, perhaps the most uncharitable person ever to have emerged from the country that also brought us Simon Cowell and Jack the Ripper. In THE CLUMSIEST PEOPLE IN EUROPE: Or, Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World (Bloomsbury, $19.95), the present-day writer and editor Todd Pruzan collects entries from three volumes of Mrs. Mortimer’s wonderfully odious, travel-based misanthropy. Pruzan also provides some telling biographical details about Mortimer — most notably that she left England only twice. Moreover, despite being a successful children’s author whose Bible primer aimed at 4-year-olds sold a million copies, Mortimer led a life of utter misery. Her first great romantic attachment (to Henry Manning, who became Cardinal Manning) was unrequited; she later married a violent, cruel man from whom she often hid. To the modern eye, Mortimer’s work — by turns unsettling and hilarious — is nothing short of a revolution in guidebook writing: here, at last, is irritable-bowel-syndrome-as-travelogue.

The Henry Manning story is gripping unto itself, actually. It could make an excellent novel premise for those inclined.

Do ever feel a little depressed, even amid the hoopla and spangles, that books get center stage only in the summer? Where are the winter-reading lists? The Valentine’s Day curatives? The New Year’s resolution suggestions, starting with the swellest book ever? The Stegner excerpts for Arbor Day? The Inauguration Day blues poems? The Daylight Savings mysteries? The Columbus Day ship’s logs and anticolonial retorts? Good-Bye to All That or Reporting Vietnam for Memorial Day? Or Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger for April Fool’s? People don’t really have summers off anymore; why not stretch out summer reading to a monthly fanfare? Like, Whee! What shall we read this weekend? Yes, I know that’s a silly idea; people have cable to attend to. I think chapters from hot new books, on the radio and podcasted, might be the only way to save the printed word.

At last, my needle-nosed compass has come along

Well, finally! From today’s Times, the revelation of both the item I crave even more than a Shuffle and shepherds Edward Klaris and Pamela Maffei McCarthy, figures as covert and crucial as Deep Throat:

The New Yorker, the weekly magazine that started as “a hectic book of gossip, cartoons and facetiae,” as Louis Menand once wrote, and has evolved into a citadel of narrative nonfiction and investigative reporting, will publish its entire 80-year archives on searchable computer discs this fall.

The collection, titled “The Complete New Yorker,” will consist of eight DVD’s containing high-resolution digital images of every page of the 4,109 issues of the magazine from February 1925 through the 80th anniversary issue, published last February. Included on the discs will be “every cover, every piece of writing, every drawing, listing, newsbreak, poem and advertisement,” David Remnick, editor of the magazine, has written in an introduction to the collection.

The collection, which will also include a 123-page book containing Mr. Remnick’s essay, a New Yorker timeline and highlights of selected pages from the magazine, is being published by the magazine and will be distributed to stores by Random House. It will have a cover price of $100, although it is likely to be sold in many bookstores and online for considerably less. The magazine also plans to issue annual updates to the disc collection, and it expects a first printing of 200,000 copies.

While innumerable neurotic New Yorker fanatics have saved piles of the magazine in closets or basements, the few easily accessible archives of the magazine’s contents have been on microfilm or in bound volumes in public libraries. But those media hold little attraction for younger readers, Mr. Remnick said, and too frequently go unused. “Students who rely on Google as a turbo-charged Library of Alexandria feel no more eager to use microfilm than they do to pick up a protractor and a needle-nosed compass,” Mr. Remnick states in his introduction.

The project is an amalgam of technology, stealth, insurance considerations and economics that was first discussed more than seven years ago. It was overseen, and long kept secret, by Edward Klaris, general counsel for the magazine, and Pamela Maffei McCarthy, its deputy editor. In early 2004, two staff members drove two copies of each issue of the magazine to Kansas City in a rented truck to have them digitally scanned.

The magazine’s card catalog, which over time has come to include more than 1.5 million index cards containing citations and cross-references to articles and which forms the backbone of the search function on the discs, was scanned at the magazine’s office in Manhattan after discussions with the publication’s insurance company found the catalog to be “irreplaceable and beyond value,” Mr. Remnick said.

It was only recently that digital technologies evolved to allow for the high-resolution reproduction of small type, making the project feasible, Mr. Klaris said. Digital videodiscs were used rather than CD’s, he said, because much more information can be stored on each DVD. The DVD’s are for use only in a computer drive, however, and will not work on a television DVD player.

A user of the disc is presented with each page of the magazine, which can be displayed singularly or in pairs, and the viewer can flip from page to page through each issue. Alternatively, a user can search on any disc for an author, artist, title or subject or by key words, and then move to the appropriate disc to view the material. Copies of the cover images can also be viewed in close-up detail or in thumbnail collections.

The collection also has one other important feature, which allows a reader to page through each magazine by flipping directly to the cartoons. As Mr. Remnick admits, “Ninety percent of our subscribers say they read the cartoons first, and the rest would be lying.”

Go see the photo of the quite nice design of the DVD package, too. The link for the enlarged photo isn’t working on the NYT site, but so far it looks a bit like one of those old LP boxed sets that teaches you to be a connoisseur. Appropriate.

80 Years of The New Yorker to Be Offered in Disc Form [Edward Wyatt, NYT]

In stitches

You need this writing advice from M. Tweaks, who models disorienting and agonizing conditions for an ideal state of composition as suggested by globetrotting novelist John Burdett:

I am writing today’s entry from our basement. It is dark down here; in fact, I can barely see the keyboard. My padded chair has been replaced with a hard, unstable stool. Instead of black tea with milk I am drinking Mountain Dew from a dirty glass. I haven’t showered for days. My skin itches. I am listening to the radio — the best of the 80s, 90s, and today. My pants are a size too small. I have been subsisting entirely off of bologna and Cheeze-Its. Whenever I worry that I might be getting too comfortable I poke myself in the leg with a tack I keep nearby just for this purpose. I think it’s working. It’s hard to tell because I’m not wearing my glasses (helps with disorientation) so I can’t actually read what I’ve written so far. But I’m willing to bet it’s pretty darn good.

Which brings me to the stern yet loving letter written by Thomas Jefferson to his daughter in 1790, which I saw quoted in the Seattle Museum’s supercool exhibit of fancy samplers by industrious 6- to 12-year-olds in the 18th century (yes, yes, there were also rockin’ modernists, glass sculptures, fascinating multimedia stuff by and about native Salish people, Renaissance devotional paintings, the Hammering Man, etc.). I also had to take out a contact for a little while and looked at the Impresssionists with the blurry eye to see what it was like (blurry). Here’s the letter:

How are you occupied? Write me a letter… and answer me all these questions… How many pages a day you read in Don Quixot? How far are you advanced in him? Whether you repeat a Grammar lesson every day? What else you read? How many hours a day you sew? Whether you have an opportunity of continuing your music? Whether you know how to make a pudding yet, to cut out a beef stake [sic], to sow spinach, or to set a hen?

Well, what are you waiting for? I’m hastening back to Don Quixot and hen-setting myself now that I’m done with my flickr Russia pix. Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.

R.I.P., Herbert Warren Wind

Special report from the Seattle and Chicago airports:

From today’s Times, a nice obituary for Herbert Warren Wind, a New Yorker and Sports Illustrated legend and the “dean of American golf writers.”

Mr. Wind was a short, slender, serious man who wore a tweed jacket, shirt, tie and cap on the golf course, even in the hottest weather. A graduate of Yale with a master’s degree from Cambridge, he wrote with an elegant but straightforward style that showed respect for his subject, whether it was golf, his first love, or other sports like tennis and baseball.

“Every time you read him, you get a history lesson, a golf lesson and a life lesson,” the professional golfer Ben Crenshaw said.

Mr. Wind’s narrative powers were displayed in a profile of Arnold Palmer for The Sporting Scene in The New Yorker of June 9, 1962.

“Let us say he is a stroke behind, with the holes running out, as he mounts the tee to play a long par 4,” Mr. Wind wrote. “The fairway is lined by some 10,000 straining spectators – Arnold’s Army, as the sportswriters have chosen to call them – and a shrill cry goes up as he cuts loose a long drive, practically lifting himself off his feet in his effort to release every last ounce of power at the moment of impact. He moves down the fairway toward the ball in long, eager strides, a cigarette in his hand, his eyes on the distant green as he considers every aspect of his coming approach shot. They are eyes with warmth and humor in them as well as determination, for this is a mild and pleasant man. Palmer’s chief attraction, for all that, is his dashing style of play. He is always attacking the course, being temperamentally incapable of paying it safe instead of shooting directly at the flag.”

Mr. Wind was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1947 to 1954. He left to write for the new magazine Sports Illustrated. In 1962, he returned to The New Yorker and stayed there until he retired.

His first writing in The New Yorker was a poem in 1941 and his last was a review of the 1989 United States Open tennis championship. Of the 141 articles he wrote for the magazine, 132 were for the section called The Sporting Scene. Although those reports appeared well after a competition ended, they were eagerly awaited by the participants, fans and colleagues in the news media.
…
The author John Updike was Mr. Wind’s colleague at The New Yorker.

“He really gave you a heaping measure of his love of the game,” Mr. Updike said. “He was so knowing, so perceptive. He could play, too. About a decade ago, I took him to the Myopia course in Hamilton, Mass. He walked with me when I played a few holes, but I couldn’t get him to hit the ball. I suspect he didn’t think he could do it as well as he once did.”

Mr. Wind’s love affair with golf and the Masters never waned. At age 84, more than 10 years removed from his last trip to the Masters, he asked another golf writer, “Tell me, is Augusta still beautiful?”

I’m going to see if I can get hold of that poem. Wind also wrote the foreword for P.G. Wodehouse’s The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922). One review says, “Herbert Warren Wind’s Foreword is a sparkling biography of Wodehouse and a splendid way to start the book. Wind did a profile of Wodehouse for The New Yorker magazine and spent a good deal of time with him while researching his essay. It was later published in book form in England under the title, The World of P.G. Wodehouse.”

Update: More memories of Wind, with new interviews and content, in the Enterprise (which covers his hometown of Brockton, MA):

“He was not a loud talker for himself but for the sport that he loved,” said his brother, Jack Wind, from his home on Rock Meadow Drive…. Wind, 85, said when his brother would arrive at a prestigious golf tournament, including the Masters and U.S. Open, people “just crowded around him for information.”

And in the Augusta Chronicle (annoying signup process):

Wind was one of the most famous golf writers and he covered the sport for The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated. He covered every important golfer from Gene Sarazen to Ben Hogan to Jack Nicklaus before retiring in 1990.

“Herbert Warren Wind was one of the greatest golf writers that ever lived,” Augusta National and Masters Tournament chairman Hootie Johnson said. “For many years he wrote wonderful stories about the Masters and the players that competed in the tournament.”

In the April 21, 1958, edition of Sports Illustrated, Wind used the phrase Amen Corner to describe the action from that year’s Masters. He got the name from a jazz recording titled Shouting at Amen Corner from a band directed by Milton Mezzrow.

There’s another obituary in Cybergolf: “Wind was on a first-name basis with the legends of the game: Bobby Jones, Sam Snead, Gene Sarazen, Jack Nicklaus and Ben Hogan. ‘He was a great historian of the game and a terrific writer,’ Nicklaus said Tuesday. ‘You look back on how golf has been written over the years and there have been three or four guys who really stood above the rest. He was certainly one of them.’ “

Golf Writer Herbert Warren Wind, 88, Dies [NYT]
The Fateful Corner: A reflective look-back at the Masters confirms history’s affinity for the 12th and 13th [Wind, Sports Illustrated, April 21, 1958]
Books by Herbert Warren Wind [Alibris]

(5.16.05 issue) That’s no lady, that’s my mummy

Cheesy as Lindsay Robertson says it is to mention your own traffic, it’s worth noting that tons of people have been googling profilee and “mummy doctor” Art Aufderheide since the piece (by Kevin Krajick) appeared on May 16. Predictably and happily, one of his local papers followed up:

Aufderheide has answered lots of questions lately, beginning with an article—”The Mummy Doctor”—that appeared in the May 16 issue of the New Yorker magazine.

“I turned them down twice,” Aufderheide said. “I’m a shy person.”

Aufderheide said he has learned the hard way, as many scientists sooner or later do, that the popular press often gets complicated science wrong.

But what about the thrill of seeing himself profiled in one of the nation’s most prestigious magazines?

“I’m a few months shy of 83,” Aufderheide said. “I’m not trying to expand my resume.”

The New Yorker article is a splendid outline of Aufderheide’s life work, but omits an important fact: He’s a really nice guy.

“He’s Minnesota good,” said Lorentz Wittmers Jr., an associate professor in the Department of Physiology at UMD, who has collaborated with Aufderheide.
…
Aufderheide said he’s pulled back from field work recently, but has no plans to retire from teaching.

“Being around young people is such a stimulus,” Aufderheide said. “They’re so excited about life.”

I have to confess with paleolithic egg on my face that I haven’t yet finished the New Yorker piece—though I was liking it—since I have my mother’s keen interest in things anthropological and archaeological but always not her stomach for them, at least during lunchtime. I intend to try the dessicated body parts again, with Emetrol.

Mummy Doctor’ pioneered study of ancient remains [St. Paul Pioneer Press]

You might as well live in the past

At least once in a while. From time to time David Remnick breaks his vow not to let The New Yorker become a tomb o’ Tilleys and allows something related to the magazine’s history into, for example, the events listings:

THE TALK OF THE TOWN
The Peccadillo Theatre Company’s brisk and clever play about the wits who gathered at the Algonquin Round Table in the twenties, featuring well-crafted period-style songs by Ginny Redington and Tom Dawes, plays every Monday night this summer in the hotel’s Oak Room. (59 W. 44th St. 212-840-6800.)

I’d like to see this, although the Dorothy Parker Society’s Kevin Fitzpatrick regrets that writers Ginny Redington and Tom Dawes commit heinous crimes of inaccuracy. Parker and Benchley hot to butter each other’s crumpets—come again? As Fitzpatrick said at his Algonquin tour recently (I paraphrase, since I left my notebook at The New Haven Advocate), everyone knows Parker was into young studs and Benchley preferred chorus girls who were not, shall we say, horticulturalists. Still, if someone wants to give me a ticket, I’ll review it. At emdashes, there’s no shame about bribery, although I can’t promise a positive report. Everyone who’s ever read one of my reviews knows, however, that there’s nearly always something cheerful to say (about, say, a book’s cover design, or an actor’s euphonious name), so that should be incentive enough.

As for Benchley, he may not be wowing hoofers with regularity anymore, at least as far as we know, but he’s still zinging the strings of sportswriters’ hearts—at least this one, a lovely argument for having readers (like Karen Crouse here) cover sports:

[The Spurs’ Robert] Horry is five victories from a sixth NBA championship ring that would tie him with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the most bejeweled basketball players since the Celtics teams of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

The only other Robert we can think of who so unexpectedly found himself in such esteemed company was a writer named Benchley, who hung out at the Algonquin Round Table in New York with Dorothy Parker.

Like Benchley, Horry’s credentials are impeccable. He wasn’t just along for the rings in Houston and L.A. and it’s more of the same thing in San Antonio. In 13 NBA seasons, Horry’s teams always have advanced past the first round of the playoffs.

How to get things done, indeed! Horry’s no stranger to good books (and good works), either.

Goings on About Town: The Theatre [New Yorker]
Algonquin Wits Return to the Algonquin as Downtown Hit Talk of the Town Moves to the Oak Room [Playbill]
Commentary: Horry gives great teams that special something [Palm Beach Post]

Seahorses in Seattle

TK. (Or here.)

And if it’s summertime, it must be the season for my favorite Newsday book feature, Recommended Reading! Here’s a little story about Woody Allen books by me, from this past Sunday.

Newsday logo

Recommended reading: Woody’s Menagerie

Woody Allen has said and done a lot by now, but I like to think of him as the muddled, sex-crazed romantic hoisting a giant celery stalk in “Sleeper.” It’s not that I don’t like him serious, but there’s something so delicious—juicy and crunchy, much like celery—about his early work that I turn to it whenever life seems particularly ridiculous. Case in point: two books of his comic writing, “Getting Even” (1972) and “Without Feathers” (1976). Like his admirer Steve Martin, Allen is at least as much a writer as he is anything else.

“Without Feathers” (Ballantine, $6.99) is, as Liza Minnelli said of her early adulthood, like the inside of a diamond; it’s nearly perfect, especially the private-eye-meets-Brandeis-girl satire “The Whore of Mensa” and, of course, the famous “Death (A Play).” I think “Getting Even” (Vintage, $9) is particularly forgotten these days, so when I found a used copy I couldn’t wait to guzzle it. One of its high points is “Spring Bulletin,” a guide to imaginary college courses such as Economic Theory (“Inflation and Depression—how to dress for each”) and Yeats and Hygiene, A Comparative Study. In Philosophy I, “Manyness and oneness are studied as they relate to otherness. (Students achieving oneness move ahead to twoness.)”

Throughout the 17 short pieces, from “The Schmeed Memoirs” to “Yes, but Can the Steam Engine Do This?” to “Count Dracula,” Allen ribs philosophy, history, God, sex and reading with easy charm and minimal snarl. The style is easy-breezy, the voice nonchalantly smartypants; the jokes as honed as stand-up zingers. There are dated details, of course (this being 1972), but that makes it all the more rich in Woodyness, as though one were walking on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and eating saltwater taffy with Alvy Singer. In any case, can you imagine, say, David Sedaris opening his essays with any of the following: “Finnegans Wake,” a Jungian veterinarian, Hemingway, Kew Gardens, Napoleon, Hitler, or “a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak”? Of course not. That’s obviously Allen’s menagerie, and that’s why these books are necessary for all his true fans.

Special report: Seattle is nice

I might do this today, among many other things (coffee, salmon).

This just in: a swell poem by my friend Damian Fallon, who just happens to have written about my favorite subject (no, not marzipan, Donald Antrim, or the still-nonexistent Hipster Express, which would run 24/7 from Bedford to Smith to 7th Ave. to Long Island City to Dumbo to Astoria to [fill in the blanks], not necessarily in that order; DJ changes nightly).

—

Merely a line,
a clip of an hypotenuse,
a snippet of the horizon.
A fallen l,
a tired I,
dash, emdash—
for being the width of m;
a symbol to indicate a break
in thought or sentence structure.
Or used to mark
absence, what is there
when something is not
there, as in “G—dammit,”
implying that God is there
when God isn’t there at all.
Or to symbolize time passing,
to stand in for your life,
the year of your birth holding
it out like a plank.
How it waits for you,
offering its hand,
knowing
it will be complete—

So tell me, why do I live in New York again?

Just Enough Wilsey

There’s a lot to love about the Wilsey story. (Yes, this has something to do with The New Yorker.) If you’re just joining us, this Voice piece by Chris Tamarri might be a good place to start:

After four years away, Sean Wilsey returned from Italy and ate lunch with his father. He had spent that time in a sort of emotional deprogramming center called Amity, the latest in a series of last resorts his parents hoped would dissuade him from a life of drug use and disillusionment. Oh the Glory of It All is, among other things, a travelogue of wasted youth and attempts at reclamation. First was prep school at St. Mark’s, where academics were a footnote to drinking, and the exploded bag of discarded beer cans on the seniors-only quad was an “allegorical tableau.” Inevitable expulsion led to another school, Woodhall, and a collection of castaways indifferent to the school’s philosophy of “mak[ing] up educational lacunae.” Amity is the one that sticks, though; Wilsey claims to “have never experienced emotions so powerfully, mysteriously, unwillingly, and eventually, gratefully.”

They ate Italian, naturally, father and son, and Al Wilsey delighted in making his son speak to the waiter… You’ve got to finish this.

I’m out of town, emdashers (think Dickinson, Post, Bronte, Carr, Pankhurst, H. W. Fowler, and a haberdashers’ convention in a very unconventional arrangement), so if you want me, look under your bootsoles or, more hygienically, through the archives. If I have time, I’ll blog somewhere waiting for you.

Family Guise: Emotional rescue—The adventures of a not-so-fortunate son [VV]
From “Song of Myself” [Favorite Poem Project]