The Paddle writes with approval:

I can’t help it. The Shouts & Murmurs pages of the New Yorker is standing on the pinnacle of sly humor these days. After last issue’s take on crushes (all of which I’ve experienced), and this issue’s review of another aspect of my life, there is no way to make it any better in the next issue. This particular section of the magazine has always been hit-and-miss with me – I’m often into it for just one paragraph before moving on – but they’ve now laid purchase to at least three solid, future months of my reading time. Genius.

Beattie’s Book Blog loves this Harry Bliss cover. How’s your thumb, Harry?

Speaking of cartoonists, I’m extremely glad to report that three cartoonists from The New Yorker are nominated for the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award for Gag Cartoons: Drew Dernavich, Mick Stevens, and P.C. Vey. I might have my preference, but whichever way this one goes, it’s pretty much in the bag for the magazine. Winners will be announced May 26, so place your bets, you crazy gamblers.

Also, I’m pleased that someone has assembled this bunch of video clips from the ’20s, which will help set the mood for the next party with the Dorothy Parker Society, which is coming up on June 4 and will be fizzy fun. Go! Here are the details, direct from Parker Society impresario Kevin Fitzpatrick:

The 40th anniversary of Dorothy Parker’s death is June 7. On June 4 the DPS is having an event to mark the anniversary is true Parker style: with a party at a Communist bookstore. It is Monday, June 4, at Revolution Books, 9 West 19th St, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. …. There will be talks, readings, and of course, drinking. It is FREE and open to the public. Why a Communist bookstore? Just listen when I read from Mrs. Parker’s FBI file!

So Adam Moss is many things, but the new David Remnick? What does that even mean? New York is like Spy‘s beautifully designed new website along with some Vanity Fair, New York Observer, and various beloved periodicals of New York’s past stirred into a bright smoothie, and it’s loads of fun. I read and use it often, if not faithfully. But would anyone want a DVD of the entire contents of the present-day New York, to cherish, cite, and reread? That’s not what it’s for, and that’s all well and good. But it’s an absurd comparison and I won’t countenance it. Thank you, but the current David Remnick suits us very well.

Speaking of much-missed publications, won’t someone please bring back those weekly single-page photocopied listings of movies and poetry readings that you used to be able to buy at newsstands for something like a quarter and pick up at good bookstores, respectively? The web and the barely tolerable Moviefone and Fandango still can’t satisfy the city’s critical need for both. When you’re walking down the street, you don’t want to press buttons through endless menus—you just want to know what’s playing kinda near here pretty soon, or who’s reading this week. Perhaps the newsletters could be digital holograms for the 21st century, hovering at will till you dismiss them and head for your cinematic or poetical fix.

Actually, I’m not writing about that (and I’m happy not to be), but I do like a good musical hed. This post is really about the David Sedaris plausibility debate, which, as far as I can tell, is a tempest in a Tinkerbell-sized thimble. Thoughts? The best outcome of this pointless peeping, for me, has been a link (in one of the comments on the New Republic piece that started it all) to Mark Twain’s gloriously absurd anecdo-tale “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper Once.” Let’s all cook up more stories like this!
Speaking of brilliant story-spinners, there’s a great Kurt Vonnegut recording from 1970—years before Breakfast of Champions was even a book—on the 92nd St. Y’s blog. R.I.P., K.V.

In today’s Times:

An essay on March 11 about poetry in The New Yorker magazine referred imprecisely to the poet W. S. Merwin. While he was indeed a special Bicentennial consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress for 1999-2000, a position some consider tantamount to that of a poet laureate, he has not been United States poet laureate.

The essay also misspelled the surname of another poet at one point. He is J. D. McClatchy, not McLatchy. (Go to Article)

Aside to Regret the Error: “at one point”? And “The essay … misspelled”? As Charlton Heston likes to say, essays don’t misspell people, people misspell people. Is this the paper o’ record or a high school Hamlet paper?

Oh yes, and The New Yorker too! All for General Excellence (in different circulation categories). Three cheers for us (plus esteemed previous PRINT men Todd Pruzan and Jeremy Lehrer) and everyone who shares the honor! As ASME notes, “The New Yorker leads the list of 125 finalists, with a total of nine nominations.” Here’s the full list. The sparkling PRINT issues under consideration are March/April, July/August, and September/October 2006; at newyorker.com there’s a list of all the stories and categories they’ve been nominated for. I’m also very happy to see that Stuart Klawans, my old Nation colleague and one of my favorite film critics of all time, is nominated for three of his reviews. He deserves the recognition—truly a gentleman and a scholar.

A physicist has more than a quark’s worth of interesting stuff to add to Susan Orlean’s profile of the folding chair.
The Times ran a story in part about Rebecca Mead’s book on the wedding industry; the piece itself is styled just like chick lit, which probably means few men have read it. That’s a shame; this is riveting stuff, especially the Disney wedding business, with which I am fascinated. Fantasy is good. Childlike play is good. But letting Disney define your adult romantic vision, with the same tools it uses to hook five-year-old girls on pink princess culture—that is very strange to me.
A New Republic debate on Giuliani’s chances, begun by Mike Tomasky and Fred Siegel.
Marshall Brickman has a caustic, comic letter to the editor in The San Francisco Chronicle (via Scratchings).
Michael Specter on video!
This guy’s friend is a finalist in the caption contest.
Poets are talkin’ about that provocative Poetry Foundation piece by Dana Goodyear.
From the Voice:

Whitney Balliett’s synesthetic metaphors and similes defied imitation (I learned the hard way), but not parody: In Donald Barthelme’s “The King of Jazz”—a 1977 short story that I doubt I was the only person to read as one New Yorker lifer’s inside joke on another—a character likens a trombone’s roar to “polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans,” “a herd of musk ox in full flight,” “male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea,” and on and on for a few paragraphs. Along with Nat Hentoff and Martin Williams, Balliett—who died from cancer on February 1—reinvented jazz journalism starting in the 1950s. Hentoff introduced a sociopolitical element, whereas Williams brought to the subject an analytical rigor borrowed from Edmund Wilson and the New Critics. Balliett’s contribution was his shapely prose style, his concern for poetic image and cadence. When he and Pauline Kael happened to appear in the same issue of The New Yorker, the magazine’s back pages whistled with tension. In Kael’s case, the tension was between the magazine’s genteel sense of itself and its readership on the one hand, and the unruliness of the movies she championed and her perceptions about them on the other. Balliett on jazz was as perfect a match for the magazine’s sensibility as Herbert Warren Wind on golf—but as with Roger Angellon baseball, the tension resulted from taking such a mannerly (and mannered) approach to a music born on the wrong side of the tracks. Even so, coming out from under the influence of Balliett’s exquisite word-pictures of a typical (or maybe just idealized) Ben Webster or Doc Cheatham solo has been a rite of passage for all of us forced to write about music impressionistically, from a layman’s perspective. And those of us also hoping to detail musicians’ lives have no better model than his flinty profiles. In his own way, he was as imposing and grand as Coleman Hawkins or Art Tatum, as peculiar and sui generis as his beloved Mabel Mercer and Pee Wee Russell.

Ms. Pac-Man isn’t the only new addition to the iTunes Store this week. The New Yorker magazine, in cooperation with RingTales, has released animated versions of some of its cartoons (iTunes link) as free downloads. The cartoons are about twenty seconds long; you can watch them via the iTunes Store or download them to your iPod. According to the description, new cartoons will appear three times a week. —MacUser

The staple on the top is from the Times mag. (You can tell because of the word “mixtapes.”) The staple on the bottom is from the New Yorker. Note how the David Remnick-approved fastener does what a staple is supposed to do. The two pointy ends fold down onto the crease, forming precious little crescent moons that keep the center-spread firmly in place. In stark contrast, the ends of the Times‘ staples stick out, ramrod-straight, just waiting to impale a misplaced fingertip…. —”Why Your ‘New York Times’ Mag Always Falls Apart,” Gawker [Still, the cover of The New Yorker tends to get mutilated quickly, especially if you carry it around for a solid eight or nine days; can’t have everything, though. Unless someone wants to invent a cover to slip the magazine into every week—I’d buy that, if it didn’t look too ridiculous.]

Chris Ware, sometimes described as an “alternative cartoonist” because his works are not quite comic books and not the normal graphic novels, opened a new exhibition, Chris Ware, with a talk and reception on February 16 at Sheldon. More than 350 attended, overflowing the auditorium…. To view and hear Chris Ware’s talk at Sheldon on February 16 click here: Chris Ware Talk. —”Exhibitions: Chris Ware,” Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery [Thanks, B.K.!]

Declaring that “the impact of slavery and segregation reaches into every facet of modern life,” administrators at Brown University announced on Saturday a number of new institutional projects, including programs to assist local public schools and a possible new research center on slavery and its legacies.
—David Glenn, “Brown U. Announces Projects in Response to Report on Its Role in the Slave Trade,” The Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription only; also see “Peculiar Institutions,” by Frances FitzGerald, in the September 12, 2005, New Yorker]

In addition to his New Yorker covers, [Arthur Getz] did hundreds of pen and ink spot illustrations for the magazine, as well as illustrations for Esquire, Fortune, The Nation and other publications. He also created murals for public spaces, including one for the 1939 World’s Fair. He was also a well-respected instructor at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, the University of Connecticut and other schools…. Feeling his name as an illustrator would interfere with his gallery work, he exhibited his gallery paintings for many years under the pseudonym of his middle name, “Kimmig.” —Charley Parker, “Arthur Getz,” Lines and Colors

Slate Magazine announced today that noted critic Ron Rosenbaum will write a bi-weekly culture column for the online magazine beginning Feb. 26…. Rosenbaum, described by David Remnick as “one of the most original journalists and writers of our time,” most recently wrote a culture column called “The Edgy Enthusiast” for the New York Observer. Many of his pieces have been collected in four volumes, the last titled “The Secret Parts of Fortune.” —”Ron Rosenbaum to Join Slate Magazine,” Business Wire

From yesterday’s Rush Limbaugh Show transcript. Limbaugh responds to a caller (link to the Jane Mayer story in original; there’s a video of Mayer talking about her story, with clips from 24, on newyorker.com):

You talk about credibility. Why does Bush have no credibility? It goes beyond Bush having no credibility. The great danger here is that the military doesn’t have credibility. As an institution, it is in the process of being destroyed by the left, by the Democrats, and by the Drive-By Media. Even to this day… There was an article in New Yorker magazine by Jane Mayer, and I spoke to Jane Mayer for this story because I was asked to. It’s a story about torture in the TV show “24”. There are a whole bunch of different approaches that Jane Mayer takes, but basically she went out and she found people in the US military who are saying, “’24’, stop the torture, because you’re making US soldiers think it’s okay to do!” I could not believe this when I read this stuff. As an aside, I told my friends at “24”, “Don’t do this. This is a woman that tried to destroy Clarence Thomas with Jill Abramson, who’s the DC bureau chief of the New York Times,” but it was too late.
 
We’ve gotten to the point now where a television show is being used to destroy the US military, folks! A television show! We’ve had Abu Ghraib. We’ve had Club Gitmo. There is an all-out assault on the US military. Forget the president. We now are living in a world where I don’t know what percentage of the population of this country thinks the US military is indeed the focus of evil in the modern world. Now, many of the American left have always thought that and they’ve despised the military, and they have done everything they can to discredit it over the years, but it has just gotten magnified and worse — and now the US military is nothing but a bunch of rapists, predators, murderers!