Author Archives: Emdashes

Reminder: Enter our Olivia Gentile Giveaway — Two Days Left!

Martin Schneider writes:
If you happened to miss Tuesday’s announcement of our giveaway of Olivia Gentile’s new book, you have two days to go! We’ve gotten an impressive response to our first post, which pleases us no end, but you shouldn’t let that dissuade you from entering—you gotta be in it to win it, some great bard once sang.
Send us an email, subject line “BLACKBURNIAN WARBLER,” and include your name and full mailing address. We won’t accept anything after 8:00 pm EST on Sunday, April 19, so don’t dilly-dally (we also advise you not to shilly-shally).
Good luck!

Introducing the Jeff Spicoli Amendment: Our Unserious Media

Martin Schneider writes:
This week was dominated by two news stories that our national commentators apparently could not cover without breaking into a gale of snickers: I refer to the problem of maritime raiders interfering with the merchant vessels of various nations (“pirates”) and the nationwide grassroots protests over the unfairness of the Obama administration’s tax policy and recent financial bailouts (“teabagging”).
Now we see how any political organization, be it the White House, Congress, the Republicans, the Democrats, can avoid scrutiny over a touchy subject that it wants to introduce into the public discourse: link it to some amusing word that reduces every commentator to a twelve-year-old. We’ll have the Cheech and Chong Estate Tax Legislation and the Pauly Shore Pollution Amplification Program (Pollux, there might be a cartoon in this theme for you).
Meanwhile, the G20 economic summit reminded me of another pet peeve. Our newscasters have given up the pretense that other countries, cultures, and particularly languages exist. How many times did CNN and its competitors refer to a president of France named sar-KOZE-ee? As far as I know there is no such person, his name is sar-ko-ZEE. Did anyone even try to suggest, in the prounciation of his name, that he wasn’t raised in Bayonne? I may have missed it. It wasn’t so much the butchering of his name that bothered me as the lack of awareness that it was happening.
It reminded me of circa 2006, when hardly a day would pass without some TV commentator pronouncing the name of the prominent Iranian anti-Semite thus: “Ach-men-whatever his name is.” Like my quasi-countryman Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ahmedinejad’s name (not difficult to master if you spend more than 15 seconds in the attempt) became the butt of the joke. Only this time it wasn’t the moviegoer in the street who was proudly claiming the mantle of ignorant provincialism; it was the very people who claim to bring us the world. And that’s a damn disgrace.

New Yorker Blog Roundup: 04.17.09

(This content is taken directly from the left nav bar on the magazine’s website.)
James Surowiecki imagines the billboard of the future.
George Packer traces Irving Kristol’s intellectual decline.
Evan Osnos learns more about Gairsville.
Hendrik Hertzberg praises another state for embracing the National Popular Vote.
Sasha Frere-Jones produces another memo from the Prince archives.
Paul Goldberger explains why Peter Zumthor deserves the Pritzker.
Steve Coll gives a spoonful of medicine.
The Front Row: Michel Piccoli.
News Desk: Jeffrey Toobin goes through the newest round of “torture memos.”
The Book Bench: Deborah Digges.
The Cartoon Lounge: Forget sexbots, let’s get taxbots!
Goings On: What has Bob Dylan been reading?

Bad Markets, Good Art? A Bracing Debate at the NYPL

Jonathan Taylor writes:
On Tuesday I caught a panel discussion called “The Death of Boom Culture?” at the New York Public Library, that I think is worth watching or listening to online once it becomes available. It was a conversation that, precisely in the way the guests were talking past each other, was a fascinating gloss on its topic, or its occasion: this essay by Walter Benn Michaels in the January/February Bookforum. Benn suggests that over the last three decades of rising inequality, literary fiction and other arts have predominantly flattered the prevailing world-view of the economically ascendant, embroidering on safe historical topics (Toni Morrison stood in for this phenomenon) while obscuring the structures of contemporary injustice.
The animated exchanges with David Simon (of “The Wire”), Dale Peck and, especially, Susan Straight, demonstrated how everything Benn Michaels said could be totally right, as far as it went, yet be achingly incomplete. Between his dead-on assessment of the phantom “boom,” and the viewpoint of artists who affirm its devastating realities, there was an interesting obstacle to communication. When Simon or Straight referred to the specific experience they draw on in making art that does do for American society what Michaels wants it to do, he was quick to roll his eyes (he said at one point, “I’m rolling my eyes”) at what he saw as appeals to personal identity. Simon’s gestures to genre narrative, and an audience questioner’s reference to hip-hop culture, pointed to a less narrow view of actually consumed culture that could fit in with Benn Michaels’s polemic—if only he considered it.
That there was no ready set of common terms for talking unflinchingly about an unjust system that all the participants are a part of, is something of a fulfillment of Benn’s critique. But I left more interested in cracking a book of Straight’s to read about “the actual structure of American society.”

The Wavy Rule, a Daily Comic by Pollux: Garbage Patch Kids

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John Colapinto’s _New Yorker_ “article “:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/06/090406fa_fact_colapinto?changecurrentdate on the Plastiki Expedition headed by David de Rothschild is a must-read! The Plastiki plans to sail across the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is exactly what it sounds: a large patch of garbage in the Pacific.
Click on the cartoon to enlarge it!
Read “The Wavy Rule” archive.

Book Giveaway: Olivia Gentile’s “Life List”

Martin Schneider writes:
Emdashes is pleased to be hosting giving away three copies of Life List, a biography of Phoebe Snetsinger by Olivia Gentile that was released just a few days ago. The term “life list” signifies a list of the birds a person has seen in the wild, as all birders are aware. (Here is my life list, for instance.) The book is about a very unusual twitcher (birders’ term for a birdwatcher who is perhaps unduly concerned with adding new birds to his or her life list), and it sounds marvelous. I can’t wait to read it.
Here are favorable notices the book has received from two well-known people:

Except for one thing, this book would rate as a great adventure novel and fictional psychological portrait, about a woman’s obsession with bird-watching, its effect on her relationships with her husband and her four children, and the horrifying mishaps that she survived on each continent—until the last mishap. But the book isn’t that great novel, because instead it’s a great true story: the biography of Phoebe Snetsinger, who set the world record for bird species seen, after growing up in an era when American women weren’t supposed to be competitive or have careers. Whether or not you pretend that it’s a novel, you’ll enjoy this powerful, moving story.

—Jared Diamond

Gentile’s tale of a desperate but determined housewife with a passion for birds and adventure is engrossing, sharp, and affecting—a touching portrait and great read.

—Susan Orlean

If you have not seen the author’s entertaining and striking website, you should.
Here are the rules: Drop us an email, subject line “BLACKBURNIAN WARBLER,” and please include your name and full mailing address. We’ll take all entries until 8:00 pm EST on Sunday, April 19, and then the Random Number Generator will intervene with its trademark dispassion. Good luck to all entrants!