Just up: The always thoughtful and committed Scott McLemee has written one of his satisfyingly uncategorizable essay-interviews about the critic and scholar’s new collection of essays (whose publisher is inexplicably without a website, Scott points out). As usual, his piece is so deeply focused and intricately patterned that it’s hard to scoop out the spoonful of Skippy that makes quick-admiration posts like this easier, but I liked this section quite a lot:

We sometimes say that a dog “worries” a bone, meaning he chews it with persistent attention; and in that sense, Divided Mind is a worried book, gnawing with a passion on the “moral/political” problems that go with holding an egalitarian outlook. Scialabba is a man of the left. If you can imagine a blend of Richard Rorty’s skeptical pragmatism and Noam Chomsky’s geopolitical worldview — and it’s a bit of a stretch to reconcile them, though somehow he does this — then you have a reasonable sense of Scialabba’s own politics. In short, it is the belief that life would be better, both in the United States and elsewhere, with more economic equality, a stronger sense of the common good, and the end of that narcissistic entitlement fostered by the American military-industrial complex.

A certain amount of gloominess goes with holding these principles without believing that History is on the long march to their fulfillment. But there is another complicating element in Divided Mind…. Continued.

Scialabba and Scott have both won the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing (Scott’s acceptance speech will slay you). As for me, let’s see, I do own a volume of Virgina Woolf essays written in by Nona Balakian, in confident pencil. I’ve also been acquainted with her poet nephew, whose memoir Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past is unforgettable. The mind writes and writes and lives by writing; praise to them who can concentrate long and honestly enough to bring sound thoughts into being! It is necessary to go through dark and deeper thought and not to turn. I’ve been paraphrasing. And liking the gerunds!

Speaking of thinking, you may be wondering (is this a Roches song?), what about the Nicholas Lemann piece that’s gotten everybody itching like a man in a fuzzy tree? I have links (here’s one I haven’t read yet), I have thinks, all will come in due time.

Related in McLemee updates:
“The Cultural Equivalent of E-Mail Spam”
Taking Our Galbraith Away
There Is Nothing Like a Dame Helen
Things One and Two, Worth Noting
Plagiarizing? At Least Know the Literature

Via William Bragg, posting in a Radosh comment: They’re planning a remake of Tron. I’m speechless. From co-screenwriter Lee Sternthal: “In a lot of ways, [‘Tron’] was a movie about a man venturing into hell. Our job will be to keep the humanity as he ventures into an unreal world.” Here’s the script so we can compare the remake with the original, line by line. I’m not this sort of geek, usually. But for Tron! Yes.

From Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.

Related on Emdashes:
The Bishop Wars: Choose a Side With Style!
Quinn Gave a Loaf to Every Sparrow
There Is Nothing Like a Dame Helen
Kansas City Event: Now and Denby

I’ve trawled around YouTube a little for New Yorker-related videos, but there aren’t many that I could find (though there was Sasha singing). There are, however, a fair number of David Remnick clips on Google Video, which I already much prefer because it’s so big ‘n’ fancy. Not that I’m not all for video democracy and OK Go dance contests, I assure you. Anyway, the videos are of Remnick and Gladwell and Angell and Gopnik and the like, often with Charlie Rose, and they’re worth watching.

it’s this classic chiasmus from Leon Wieseltier:

“Mad Max is making Max mad, and Murray, and Irving, and Mort, and Marty, and Abe.”

Spoken (or something) to Maureen Dowd. The whole thing is nearly a prose poem (note the internal rhyme of Murray and Irving, and the Biblical and/or nursery-rhyme intonation of “Mort, and Marty, and Abe”); there are Iowa graduates who can’t build a sentence like this.

Meanwhile, the wise and droll Cary Tennis theorizes that Mel should have shown a bit more fighting spirit, apprehended-perp-style: “As anyone with experience in such matters could have told him, the proper way to attempt a drunken escape from an arresting officer is: Just bolt. Run. Do not say anything. Certainly do not say anything as pedestrian as ‘I’m not going to get into your car.’ That is inane.” He suggests a more creative dash from the fuzz, which of course recalls the zany high-speed chasers in that Tad Friend piece about escape-car-driving as an L.A. spectator sport. If I’m not mistaken, Tennis is a recovered alcoholic himself, so the humor has an unmistakeable and extra-potent bite.

Chiasmus in The New Yorker [Mardy Grothe]

Indiewire interviews Laura Poitras, director of the forthcoming documentary My Country, My Country, which airs on PBS October 25 (and opens in limited release in theaters this Friday, August 4). Today in Salon, Andrew O’Hehir calls it “a keenly constructed and tragic film, probably the best documentary so far to depict the Iraqi side of the current conflict.” Here’s PBS’s description of the film:

Working alone in Iraq over eight months, filmmaker Laura Poitras creates an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. Her principal focus is Dr. Riyadh, an Iraqi medical doctor, father of six and Sunni political candidate. An outspoken critic of the occupation, he is equally passionate about the need to establish democracy in Iraq, arguing that Sunni participation in the January 2005 elections is essential. Yet all around him, Dr. Riyadh sees only chaos, as his waiting room fills each day with patients suffering the physical and mental effects of ever-increasing violence.

And here’s the Indiewire excerpt:

How/where did the initial ideas for “My Country, My Country” come from?

[Poitras:] In November 2003 I read an article by George Packer in the New Yorker (“War After the War” [link to the piece]), about the first months of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. It was one of those very long New Yorker article that take days to read. By the time I finished it, I knew I was making a documentary in Iraq. I was motivated by a sense of despair about the war, and a desire to reveal what was happening in Iraq through the stories of people on the ground. Continued.

Paul Goldberger is interviewed briefly in this Marketplace story about the fate of the World Trade Center site.

From Christopher Tindall in the Guardian:

Mystery of fictional Fleet Street editor solved

New Yorker’s William Shawn named as model for character in Frayn classic

He was the shadowy, elusive editor who preferred his staff to persecute those he wanted out of the door rather than sack them face to face in the quintessential Fleet Street novel.

But the inspiration behind the “short, rather fat man in a shapeless raincoat and a shapeless trilby hat” in Michael Frayn’s 1967 classic Towards the End of the Morning has remained as mysterious as the man whose only form of communication with the world during office hours was pushing typed notes to his secretary through a serving hatch.

Now, almost 40 years after writing what is still revered as one of the funniest portrayals of the dying days of Fleet Street – before Rupert Murdoch’s flit to Wapping and the scattering of newspaper offices that followed – the author has revealed who he based his editor on. And his inspiration could hardly have lived further away from the narrow lanes and grimy offices that once bore witness to the activities of many legendary journalists.

“It’s based on a real editor, which I can reveal now that he is dead. It was William Shawn, the famous editor of the New Yorker,” Frayn says. “He was somewhat more eccentric than the fictitious version. He was a great and wonderful editor, but he was a very, very strange man.”

Strange, but infinitely courteous and unpresumptuous, according to his New York Times obituary. Shawn was described by JD Salinger as the “most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors”. Continued.

Thanks to Ron Hogan for the swell tip!

First the secret to cartooning, now this. Jordan at Equanimity posts this intriguing utterance:

Sina points to a summary by Mary Burger of of the emotional conditions of New Yorker fiction and non-fiction.

Also, just ’cause I can: Happy birthday, Mom, the coolest woman I know.

An interview with Katha Pollitt on Salon. Which reminds me: Congratulations, Katha and Steven!