From the Time piece, by Richard Corliss, about Steve Martin’s new memoir, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (of which I really must get a copy):

In recalling the ’60s and ’70s, Martin writes revealingly of his sex life (busy) and his drug life (not so much). But the most poignant passages touch on his estrangement from his father and their reconciliation at the elder man’s deathbed. “When I published that part in the New Yorker,” Martin says, “I got a great letter from a woman. She said, ‘I read your article about your father, and I gave it to my husband, and he read it and didn’t say anything. And then he said to me, What’s our son’s phone number?'” For a moment over lunch, Martin clutches his chest–a dramatic display of emotion for this very inward man who may, at heart, be the kid who stayed all day at Disneyland rather than pedal home to spend time with his dad.

Martin reads from his book in an audio feature at newyorker.com, and he also talked with editor Susan Morrison at this year’s New Yorker Festival. He had a lariat, and he knew how to use it.

An unexpected response to Robert Polidori’s After the Flood.

Geoff Dyer reviews Alex Ross’s new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. (The illustrations accompanying the review are notably stunning, too; not surprisingly, they’re by Christoph Niemann.)
I saw somewhere that Ross is reading from the book tonight at the National Arts Club, which sounds like fun. I don’t have a copy of the book yet, just the elegant pamphlet that FSG put out for the BEA, but I’m looking forward to reading it; I think Ross’s critical writing is tops.

Grand news.
Also, briefly: a New Yorker cartoon rejection (by an artist who did a sort of proto-Rejection Collection for Details).
Speaking of comics, here’s a review of R. Crumb and David Zane Marowitz’s take on Franz Kafka.
Obsessed with the umlaut over certain vowels in The New Yorker? Know first that it’s not an umlaut.

Some weeks all one is capable of, blog-wise, as Jack Lemmon would say, is short, be-linked bursts. This is one of those weeks, my friend.
A beautiful design for a New Yorker party.
Goody! Jesse Thorn at The Sound of Young America—the eerily gifted young radio host who’s been taking WNYC by storm—has interviewed George Saunders again.
Marisa Acocella Marchetto interviewed. Have you read her book Cancer Vixen yet? It’s astonishingly powerful, and funny, too.
Who will save the Saul Steinberg boat mural? I repeat: who?
Some wonderful old-cartoon tidbits, courtesy of Mike Lynch.
If you’re still bobbing for Dylans after I’m Not There, dig Theme Time Radio Hour, the best show anywhere. Thanks, Bill, for this WaPo story about the sandpaper-smooth DJ with a nose for goofy trivia and a weakness for women’s names.
Is text-messaging the solution for administrations dealing with crises like the one at Virginia Tech? It might be.
Just because, the His Girl Friday screenplay.
“Interesting mention of TNY’s fiction,” writes Carolita, and she’s right.
Speaking of writers for the magazine, I reviewed Paul Hoffman’s new book about lives spent puzzling out heady and confounding strategies in chess games and in families (for Newsday); it’s called King’s Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World’s Most Dangerous Game.

Congratulations, Edward Koren, on earning the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts! Here’s more. And good news—Bruce Eric Kaplan has a graphic novel out, Edmund and Rosemary Go to Hell, which I would love to see.
Noted earlier, but the magazine is “quietly” building up its YouTube account. Subscribe today; I did! And watch Dan Baum’s New Orleans videos. The musical ones will make you want to dance.
Ted Genoways at VQR notes that Paul Muldoon can be added to the list of non-American poetry editors in America.
ZP at I Hate The New Yorker (a witty title, considering), whom I was delighted to finally meet last week, has views on the Style and Food issues.
In case you missed it yesterday, Garry Kasparov will be a candidate for the 2008 Russian presidential election. Don’t miss David Remnick’s audio interview with Kasparov! I enjoy reading Remnick on Russia—the subject seems so keenly dear to him, which is understandable, since he lived there as the Washington Post‘s correspondent. I wonder if he had the Russia bug before he moved; I seem to remember from Lenin’s Tomb that because his wife’s family was originally from there, it was already an interest, but this could be wrong. I got Russia fever the moment I got on the Aeroflot to Moscow two years ago. (There’s a new jet in town, by the way.) The country seems to become an altered state of mind for some people, a romantic virus, a pair of glasses you can never take off, and I can’t wait to go back there.
And if you see some posts in coming weeks that look kinda grizzled to you, they are! They’re drafts I never published over the past three years, but I wanted to share them with you regardless of “timeliness” (a dubious criterion in this enterprise, don’t you think?). Look for the grizzlies, and don’t play dead or scramble up a tree—embrace them.

Just kidding. I’ll send one of Muldoon’s books to any reader who writes in to challenge the fundamental truth of the necessity of poetry (and reading poetry, for you philistines) in civilization, especially a civilization whose mantle, as last night’s dinner companion suggested, is thinner and closer to barbarism than we might have supposed.
Anyway, here are some responses to the recent news.
Dean Olsher (“The Next Big Thing”): “Can it be a coincidence that her departure comes on the heels of the magazine’s decision to publish this poem by Joni Mitchell?”
Joseph Campana for the Kenyon Review: “Quinn presided over the magazine’s controversially uncontroversial slate of poems often referred to as ‘New Yorker poems,’ which espoused less an aesthetic school than a cult of personality.”
Eyewear: “He’s the Auden of his generation (with perhaps some different habits) in terms of precocious ability, verbal style, intellectual vigour, and expatriated address. Hopefully he will get the magazine to publish more poems and more poetry reviews.”
Paul Muldoon, quoted in the Guardian: “I sincerely hope that every poem I publish there will have it in it to make a profound change in the reader,” he said. “That’s certainly my aim.”
New York magazine’s Vulture: “In other news, Paul Muldoon doesn’t want to publish your sestina, either.”
I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
(Also, unrelated: Here’s a brief Q. & A. with Seymour Hersh in the Jewish Journal.)

Alice Quinn is stepping down to work on a further Elizabeth Bishop volume, and Muldoon is taking the post. Here’s the Times story.

Mr. Muldoon quickly emerged as the leading candidate after Ms. Quinn announced her intentions.
“It’s not just a matter of picking the best poet you can think of,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. “It’s also somebody who would know how to be in touch with an enormous range of poets, and that narrows it down a little bit more. And also somebody who’s not in Alaska.”
…
Mr. Muldoon said he had no particular agenda for the job, which is a part-time post. “One would want to be absolutely open to the poem that one simply did not expect to have made its way into the world and somehow suddenly falls on one’s desk,” he said.

As Brian Sholis adds, it’s really Muldoon’s week:

Not only will Paul Muldoon succeed Alice Quinn as poetry editor at The New Yorker, but yesterday it was announced that Muldoon has hired novelist Jeffrey Eugenides at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University, where he serves as chair. Muldoon was quoted as saying, “‘We’re thrilled to have Jeffrey Eugenides join our permanent faculty. He’s quite simply the finest writer of his generation and we look forward to allowing Princeton students to be the beneficiaries of his extraordinary talent as a teacher.”

The image I cherish of Muldoon is that of him reading and playing music at Williamsburg’s old Pete’s Big Salmon series a couple of years ago, whooping it up with writers of several generations; as Shanna Compton wrote at the time, “Paul Muldoon was mellifiluous and changed into the tee shirt Maureen made him that said ‘i am famous in japan’ to play with his band and that’s probably true.” He’s like the best-loved camp counselor you ever knew who can also write a bang-up poem.

In other masthead news, managing editor Jacob Lewis is leaving the magazine to join Portfolio.

Here’s a useful take on Hendrik Hertzberg’s sound Comment about the Larry Craig debacle (debacle of misappropriated police resources and legislative energy, that is); if you’ve seen any good takes on Hertzberg’s piece, please post them in the comments.
I just started reading How Starbucks Saved My Life, so I’ll write about it when I’m done. For context, here’s today’s New York Times profile, with a photo slide show, of Michael Gates Gill, the self-sufficient and contented man, well-respected barista at a Starbucks store, son of Brendan Gill, and former ad executive, in approximately that order. As a rule, I don’t like Starbucks that much, but I’m touched.
Christopher Hayes praises my friend Katha Pollitt’s new book, Learning to Drive: “A few of the personal essays in this book appeared in the New Yorker, but there’s some wonderful new stuff as well, including an absolutely spot-on hilarious chapter about a Marxist study group she used to belong to. As always, Pollitt writes like a dream.”
I’m reading it now, and I’m planning to buy it for half a dozen others. It should be required reading for every humanist, capitalist, true lover, skeptic, feminist, deep thinker, and humor appreciator this side of the exosphere. You’ll remember the New Yorker essays “Webstalker” and “Learning to Drive”; they’re in there, all right, and so are a whole bunch of other pieces you’ll be delighted to discover.
Cartoon news: This blogger has some caption-contest suggestions; cartoon editor Bob Mankoff comments on a cartoon controversy.
A nice reflection on what makes good readings so good; the writer recalls readings by John Hodgman, Marisha Pessl, and Sean Wilsey, among others.
This piece about ideas of privacy includes this story: “In another well-known case, The New Yorker magazine was sued by a hermit whose privacy was shattered when a James Thurber story disclosed that many years before he had been a famous child prodigy.”
Finally, remember the Talk of the Town by Lauren Collins about Barbara Hillary, the 75-year-old woman who wanted to be the first African-American woman to reach the North Pole? She did it!