Jason Kottke has a nice roundup of pieces about the late Bobby Fischer, including a 1957 Talk and a 2004 book review from The New Yorker. A few months ago, Emdashes’ own Martin Schneider wrote a detailed post about all things Fischer and The New Yorker—check it out. Then read my favorite novel, The Queen’s Gambit, by Walter Tevis, and go even deeper into the bright and dark mental checkerboards of troubled chess prodigies.
Here’s Nell Freudenberger, interviewed by Lynn Carey for Inside Bay Area, which seems to be the online hub for several Bay Area newspapers, including the Oakland Tribune.
And here’s Tom Wolfe, interviewed by Tim Adams for the Guardian. It reminds me of another Guardian piece I’d been meaning to mention, in which Wolfe seems to misquote Dorothy Parker—who’s said to have given the answer, in a parlor-game challenge to use “horticulture” in a sentence, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think”—and then not attribute the (mis)quotation. Or perhaps he’s riffing on Parker’s bon mot (or else the reporter misheard Wolfe); what do you think?

Wal-Mart is junking The New Yorker, along with more than a thousand other publications no longer suitable for the refined tastes of the discriminatory, abusive retail chain.
Clive Thompson comes up with an ingenious way to test a Sasha Frere-Jones hypothesis.
Classic New Yorker artist Virginia Snedeker has a major retrospective at New Jersey’s Morris Museum.
Happy weekend!

My former boss Laurie Muchnick has a detailed report on this year’s nominees for Bloomberg. Here’s the quick list of nominees from the end of her piece, with some boldface emphasis from me, and here’s the official site of the NBCC (of which I am a voting member):

Autobiography: Joshua Clark, “Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone” (Free Press); Edwidge Danticat, “Brother, I’m Dying” (Knopf); Joyce Carol Oates, “The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982” (Ecco); Sara Paretsky, “Writing in an Age of Silence” (Verso); Anna Politkovskaya, “A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia” (Random House).

Nonfiction: Philip F. Gura, “American Transcendentalism: A History” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Daniel Walker Howe, “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848” (Oxford University Press); Harriet A. Washington, “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” (Doubleday); Tim Weiner, “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” (Doubleday); Alan Weisman, “The World Without Us” (Thomas Dunne Book/St. Martin’s Press).

Fiction: Vikram Chandra, “Sacred Games” (HarperCollins); Junot Diaz, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Riverhead); Hisham Matar, “In the Country of Men” (Dial); Joyce Carol Oates, “The Gravedigger’s Daughter” (HarperCollins); Marianne Wiggins, “The Shadow Catcher” (Simon & Schuster).

Biography: Tim Jeal, “Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer” (Yale University Press); Hermione Lee, “Edith Wharton” (Knopf); Arnold Rampersad, “Ralph Ellison” (Knopf); John Richardson, “A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932” (Knopf); Claire Tomalin, “Thomas Hardy” (Penguin Press).

Poetry: Mary Jo Bang, “Elegy” (Graywolf); Matthea Harvey, “Modern Life” (Graywolf); Michael O’Brien, “Sleeping and Waking” (Flood); Tom Pickard, “ Ballad of Jamie Allan” (Flood); Tadeusz Rozewicz, “New Poems” (Archipelago).

Criticism: Joan Acocella, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” (Pantheon); Julia Alvarez, “Once Upon a Quinceanera” (Viking); Susan Faludi, “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America” (Metropolitan); Ben Ratliff, “Coltrane: The Story of a Sound” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Alex Ross, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

My boldfacing here is on the quick, arbitrary side; of course, others on this list have published pieces, poems, or stories in The New Yorker over the years.

NPR has the story. From their web summary:

In 1981, Knopf published a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver called What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The book was a critical success. Reviewers praised its minimalism and Carver’s spare style. It was, perhaps, more spare than Carver intended.

Carver’s editor was Gordon Lish, and since the author’s death in 1988 at the age of 50, scholars have discovered that Lish edited Carver’s stories heavily — some would say drastically. Lish cut description. He changed story endings. And in many cases, he eliminated more than half of what Carver had written.

Now Carver’s widow wants his readers to see the original stories. She’s pushing to have What We Talk About When We Talk About Love republished. [The] New Yorker magazine has printed one of those stories in its annual fiction issue. Knopf says it owns the rights — but to what?

I had a letter today from a young Carver fan who’s been feeling a little conflicted about his fandom now that he knows about Lish’s interventions. With his permission, I’ll add it to this post. Update: Here it is. This letter is from Matthew Wright, who discovered Carver as a teenager in a small town about three hours away from Yakima, Washington, a central Carver site.

I’m a 21-year-old who loved reading Carver in high school, which was only about 3.5 years ago. I bought two of his short story collections, “What We Talk About” and “Cathedral” and now, yesterday, in Life and Letters, I read “Rough Crossings, The Cutting of Raymond Carver,” and I don’t know what to think. Is this just now coming out? Did people know about this? Know that at first Carver wanted Lish to edit the fiction, but when he did (cut it by forty per cent), Carver said no way, don’t publish it? And then it was published anyway, into the story we now know as “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” It’s practically as much Lish’s story as is is Carver’s. Did you know about this? Did anyone? I feel cheated.

As for me, when I read “Beginners,” I was enormously relieved: I liked it, and I still liked Lish’s version. I’ve known a few celebrated writers whose grace, eloquence, and relevance can be credited almost entirely to their editors, but it’s clear to me that Carver isn’t one of them.

NPR’s David Gura interviewed David Remnick for the story, and it seems as though we have the answer to the question of who wrote the introduction to the Carver-Lish section. (Gura: “David Remnick, who edits The New Yorker, wrote an introduction to the piece.” Later: But read this post’s comments; the author/s may still be unrevealed. If you know one way or the other, won’t you write in? As you know, I won’t quote or name you without your permission.)

In the interview, Remnick says, “Writers are not Frankenstein monsters. They’re not idiot savants. Writing is really, really hard. And what Carver risked in every story is for everyone to see and to read and to feel.” He adds a bit later: “It’s my feeling that Carver learned something from Lish, and internalized something from Lish’s edits, and it helped him develop this aesthetic that we know as Raymond Carver’s style, which may be fuller and lusher in later stories and more spare and laconic in the middle stories, but nevertheless is a recognizable voice from beginning to end.”

Speaking of debates, I’m digging the lively, diverse discussion at City Room about the MetroCard’s needlessly flat design, a topic I’ve considered as well (on the stylish design-essay website A Brief Message). One of the card’s early promoters posts a clarifying comment, and it’s a rousing conversation all around.

An admirably self-effacing friend and neighbor of Emdashes sent us at least one of the links below way back in 2007, but it is only in ’08 that this post manifests itself. So it sometimes goes with a blog of little staff. You already know that I’m nearly a lifelong appreciator of Otto Soglow, and will no doubt recall the enchanting animation of the Little King from a few months ago (scroll down through the rhyming couplets; you’ll find it).
Anyway, here’s a wonderfully detailed, gorgeously illustrated post about Soglow by Austin Kleon (classy site design, by the way); it even includes Soglow’s New Yorker obituary, from 1975. He links to an excerpt from “Otto Soglow and The Ambassador,” an essay by Jared Gardner, in The Comics Journal. There is a lot here about Soglow’s work for The New Yorker; it’s really engrossing. Read it! Eddie Campbell followed up the latter with a worthy entry of his own.
Speaking of in-depth inquiries, Richard Eder, one of the kindest and most intelligent writers I’ve known, wrote a review in the Times of the second volume of those famously elaborate Paris Review interviews. A snippet in which you’ll be especially interested, I’d wager:

Interviews run the risk, particularly when long and literary, of declining into monologue. A mirror is held up; writers, who for so long have been their own mirrors, gaze into it…. The interviews that shine get away from this. Performing — the word again — informs better than informing does. Concealing reveals more than revealing. Where the otherwise brilliant Robert Lowell and William Gaddis dutifully stand still to be questioned, others take questions as things not to be answered but launched from.

James Thurber flaps off, like a partridge diverting from her eggs, to talk about bloodhounds. Then he recounts how, when a friend once told him he’d forgotten an argument, Thurber was able to repeat it for him: “It’s strange to reach a position where your friends have to be supplied with their own memories.”

That could be one of his well-known cartoons for The New Yorker; say, the man introducing a woman crouched naked on all fours on top of a bookcase as “the first Mrs. Harris.” Which leads to Harold Ross, the magazine’s editor, calling Thurber, demanding whether she was supposed to be alive, stuffed or dead, and Thurber claiming to have consulted his taxidermist and doctor to conclude that she was alive. Then to writing, eventually, and Henry James’s reminding him of a bulldog who carried around a fence rail that kept jamming against the gate post.

“I had that feeling in some of the James novels: that he was trying to get that rail through a gate not wide enough for it,” Thurber says.

This same self-effacing neighbor who provided some of the Soglow links said semi-seriously that David Byrne, who here visits Ikea, should try a Shouts & Murmurs. Why not? Celebrities should be encouraged in their witty, writerly pursuits; it might prevent some of them from making asses of themselves. Not that Byrne is in any danger of that; indeed, his “How New Yorkers Ride Bikes” event at this past year’s New Yorker Festival was one of the biggest hits of the program. It’s not online (for some reason, I thought it was), but some of the other highlights are. I especially recommend the Seymour Hersh, Judd Apatow, and Steve Martin videos. If you listen closely, you’ll hear me laughing (and/or quietly panicking at the dire state of the world) in the audience.

This seems as good a place as any to say that I still haven’t gotten over the sweetness and poignancy of Rosanne Cash playing and singing at her festival event, not to mention talking and flirting, endearingly, with Hendrik Hertzberg. She slayed everyone in the room with her generosity, wit, and beauty, and it was all just before she had brain surgery, too. I continue to be spellbound. I know that’s a lot of adjectives, but she deserves them.

Finally, via the AP, it’s the Lake Superior State University Banished Words List for 2007. It’s perhaps not as galling a collection as our own Banned Words and Phrases, but it’s got “authored,” “webinar,” and “waterboarding” on it, among others. Waterboarding really is as stupid a word as it is a reprehensible practice; surely we can come up with something that makes it sound as bad as it is.

Anyone who enjoyed Raffi Khatchadourian’s story on wild whaling crusader Paul Watson—read it online if you missed it, it’s worth it—will be interested in this story in the Times today. It begins:

Japan is dropping its plan to kill humpback whales in the seas off Antarctica, the country’s top government spokesman said Friday.
Japan decided to suspend humpback hunts at the request of the United States, which is currently chair of the International Whaling Commission, according to Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura.
”The government has decided to suspend hunts of humpback whales while talks to normalize IWC is taking place,” Machimura said. ”But there will no changes to our stance on our research whaling itself.”

In other news, here’s an intriguing post on the illustration and cartooning blog Drawn!:

This is not a new project, but it’s definitely worth mentioning. Richard Rutter is adapting principles in the classic design book, The Elements of Typographic Style to the web. The site is an ongoing project; Rutter is adding to the site in the order presented in Bringhurst’s book, “one principle at a time.”

Read on, and thanks to Carolita for the tip. Speaking of cartoonists, today’s Google Alerts led me to this mini-archive of stories about cartoon editor Bob Mankoff; here’s our coverage so far of the man behind “Is never good for you?”

Probably not, but the proposed New York initiative to sell fresh fruits and veggies through vending carts in poorer neighborhoods does sound like a step toward the ideal Trillin imagined at the end of his not-online rhapsody on Singaporean street food: a movable market full of delicious, unmysterious (except in the good way) eats for all New Yorkers. But let’s not put the cart before the hors d’oeuvres. On a more serious note, will the carts take food stamps?
WARNING: FAMILY MEMBERS, PLEASE STOP READING HERE. SERIOUSLY. I MEAN IT. ALSO RESTAURATEUR [YES, THAT WORD IS SPELLED CORRECTLY] FRIENDS. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
This seems like a swell place to mention that the new anthology Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick (with help from young man of books Leo Carey) and just out from Random House, is a pip, exceeding even my expectations, and you know that’s saying something, right?
In fact, with sheepish apologies to A. J. Liebling, I can report that the book is in fact better than food. Come on, have some excerpts. Then go back for seconds—the book will last months and months and people will steal it from your house when they stay over. Although it’s pretty heavy and it might make their luggage suspiciously bulky.
Fun fact: The anthology’s working title was I Say the Hell With It. I objected to the change when I learned of it, but now I think the final title is properly celebratory of culinary pleasures familiar and foreign; our young leafy-green-loathing friend has a dismissive attitude less fitting for such a world-embracing, gleefully descriptive cornucopia. More New Yorker-themed book gift suggestions to follow; add your own in the comments!

If you hadn’t noticed, Hilton Als is now blogging at newyorker.com; the blog is cleverly called “Et Als.” (As the magazine adds more blogs, there will be many more naming opportunities, I’m jubilant to note. Our commenters came up with a few alternates for Hendrik Hertzberg’s blog title, I recall. One’s mind whirrs. “Splendor in the McGrath” … “A Drop of Mead” … “Angell in the Outfield” … “Penny Lane” … “Denby the Riverside” … “Lean and Orlean” … “In-Specter” … “Lead Singer” … “Auletta Man Have His Say” … “Go Pack Go” … “Master Bilger” … “Schamanism” … “Thurman Country” … “Surowieckipedia” … “Man’s Best Friend” [or “Menand’s Best Friend,” a collaboration] … “Chon Day & Gawande” [ditto, from beyond the grave] … “Collect McCall” … “YouToobin” … “Franklin, My Dear” … “Owen in the Wind” … “My, He’s Lahr” … “Focus Groopman” … “I Never Promised You a Paumgarten” … “Frazier” … well, you see how it goes, unfortunately.)

Als writes in his inaugural post:

Blogs are a matter of trust. The reader reads them hoping not just to pick up some form of retail inspiration—“This is the album I’m listening to; maybe you’d like to listen to it, too!”—but also to learn something about the landscape of the writer’s mind, his way of being.

He recently posted a tender reminiscence about Elizabeth Hardwick, and his latest entry is about Julian Schnabel’s film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

I like this blog very much, but I am dismayed to see that Als uses the term “females” in place of “women” in his Schnabel post. I know he’s being complimentary here, but I can’t read or hear “females” without thinking of the study of animals in the wild (“The males are docile, but the females will tear off your eyebrows if you’re not careful”), or possibly a grisly police report (“The disfigured bodies of two females were discovered in the alley following the Gordon Lightfoot concert”).

It’s a common online-dating term, certainly, but I would hope that anyone seeking love would avoid any profile in which a man claims to be seeking a “female” of any description. Don’t you find it a somewhat clinical term? Or am I alone in this?