Remember the Team Quinn/Team Vendler ribbons I provided for you back in April, ready for printing and lapel-affixing during this, the World Cup of Poetry Affiliations? Time to break them out again: New Yorker contributor (Nancy Drew, etc.) Meghan O’Rourke tells us, in the words of the Slate bulletin, why you should read Elizabeth Bishop’s rough drafts.

An agreeably zany Shouts this week by Larry Doyle. I liked this, after a long list of Sleeperesque medical diagnoses:

First, the good news. Your husband’s portfolio looks great; I can’t believe he got into Apple at 12—pre-split 12. I’d say the prognosis for your long-term financial health is excellent. However, last month your husband dumped seventy-eight thousand dollars’ worth of Clo-Pet, the pet-cloning outfit, two days before it was revealed that Dr. Kalabi was not in fact cloning clients’ beloved companions but instead was creating look-alikes using plastic surgery and transplanting pieces from other pets. Yesterday, the S.E.C. and the I.R.S. swooped in and froze all your husband’s accounts—which may explain his abdominal pain—and then, talk about bad luck, this morning the C.E.O. of your health-insurance carrier fled to Argentina with a transgender dominatrix, owing me literally millions of dollars.

How odd to read this just as I finished the last chapter (which isn’t 11, I’m glad to say) of David Denby’s American Sucker, and just before that, Arrowsmith, which also concerns snake-oil promoters and their overhurried, underprepared medical researchers. I like Denby’s book a lot. At times it’s a little on the obsessively numerical side for me, but since his subject is the tech-stock bubble and squeak of 2000-02 and the trap he set for himself inside the bubble, it’s perfectly appropriate. I focused on the philosophy, false-hero portraits, and the zigzags of Denby’s recorded emotions—if mapped, they’d probably look something like the early-’00s stock market—and learned satisfying facts about the physical workings of the internet, which was a nice surprise.

Denby also makes us feel the agony of selling a many-roomed Upper West Side apartment—he gives us wrenching mini-tours of dear rooms and objects, soon to be lost—a bit more acutely than does Nora Ephron in her own losing-my-apartment story (not online; see Curbed link to gawp at the building you will never live in). At jury duty a few days ago, I was reading aloud Ephron’s account of the “key money” and rent that her frantic fellow Apthorpians paid to get and stay in the building; she lists the figures hilariously, with appropriate horror. My co-jurors laughed and laughed, and thought Ephron and all her neighbors were completely insane.

Actually, though, I thought her piece was outrageous, real, and just enough out of control; besides, it’s way fun to experience raging apartment/lifestyle envy and schadenfreude simultaneously. In any case, Denby makes the loss of his and Cathleen Schine’s apartment an occasion for serious and believable grief, since it was the final big symbol of the end of their marriage. I was in that apartment once (I interviewed Schine in the ’90s sometime; I’m a fan), and met Denby for a few minutes. Oh, those big Upper West Side apartments. The loss of a former life for a number of us.

In New York Metro, Amy Benfer asks Remnick some questions. It’s nice when he gets a lot of space and time to express his opinions. Here are several:

You have a degree of intimacy with your subjects — you follow them to their homes, you meet their family. How do you decide what is fair game?

These are experienced people. They know very well how to say this is on or off the record. I make those agreements all the time and keep to them. Obviously, there are things people probably wish they didn’t say. Lillian Ross, who also wrote a book called “Reporting,” has said she believes in writing profiles only about people she admires. There are plenty of people in here that I admire, but I don’t think you can write about politics and public life and only write about people you admire.

Would you profile Bush?

I’d be thrilled to do a profile of Bush, but I don’t think Bush allows that kind of thing. I don’t find that heads of state give the most interesting interviews, especially while they’re still heads of state. I’ve interviewed, for example, Gorbechev many times. The least interesting interviews he gave were while he was in office. The much more revealing things were said afterwards. Look at rock ’n’ roll. Who’s more interesting to read about? The next young thing who’s got one album or Bob Dylan or James Brown? People are a little bit like cooking. There’s a reason things taste better when they simmer.

Besides politicians, you seem to have an obsession with boxers.

I’m not proud of my interest in boxing. It’s not a guilty pleasure, it’s a very guilty pleasure, because almost every boxer you can imagine who stays in it for awhile — male or female — they end up a mess. So if it disappeared tomorrow, or even today, I wouldn’t shed a tear. The interesting thing about boxing is we live in this age in which athletes make so much money that they really don’t need reporters. They don’t deal with reporters in an easy way and they armor themselves with cliche and deflection. As a writer, that’s uninteresting. Derek Jeter doesn’t need you. Remember that scene in “Bull Durham”? Kevin Costner tells Tim Robbins how to talk to the press. He teaches him to talk in cliches. Boxers are different. If you know them, after a while, they will tell you their innermost secrets. In talking to Tyson, it’s like some sort of combination of reading Freud and Dostoyevsky.

I’m looking forward to the book Remnick’s out promoting. I’m still thinking about that piece he wrote about the Russian translators back in November; there’s quite an extensive discussion of it here. Read it for the riveting linguistic spats: “Compared to French the Russian verb is a paragon of logic and efficiency.”

And speaking of Russian, if you haven’t seen Funny Ha Ha, a tiny American movie, do; then watch the special features for the most unusual DVD extra I’ve ever seen, a “commentary from an outside Russian scholar,” presumably a grad-student friend of filmmaker Andrew Bujalski. From the anonymous scholar’s stinging rejection of American first names as inadequate to tragedy, to her remarks that despite her love for the film its characters’ mute unrequited agonies wouldn’t even be considered relationships in Russia—where love is all and worth dying for!—to her dissection of a scene in which there are no books and extrapolation to the bookshelves in Eugene Onegin, to her confessed inability to read the semiotics of t-shirts, it’s a tour de force. More or less in time to the plot, she constructs dreamily complex sentences into which Existentialists and Tartofsky stroll without fanfare. It’s pure passion for books and movies and the impossibility of relating to other humans, which the movie is all about, if not in so many words. Rent it, then listen. Thanks to N.W. for the life-brightening tip.

to cite at such generous length one of my favorite books of last year, The Clumsiest People in Europe, but I still think they should have mentioned its eagle-eyed architect, Todd Pruzan. The book’s out in paperback in June (perfect for taking along on the road), and the co-author—the living one, that is—is now my swell colleague. From the piece:

THIS SUMMER, as an antidote to all those books rhapsodising about the Tuscan sun, you could dip into The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World, which may qualify as the most intolerant travel guide ever published. Driving over lemons? Mrs Mortimer would rather drive over foreigners.

Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer, an Englishwoman who started out as a children’s author, published three volumes of travel writing between 1849 and 1854, covering the globe from Asia to Africa to the Americas. She was even-handed, in a back-handed way: she despised just about everyone and everything.

The Portuguese, as well as being “the clumsiest people in Europe”, are “indolent, just like the Spaniards”. The Welsh are “not very clean”; the Zulus: “A miserable race of people”; the Greeks: “Do not bear their troubles well; when they are unhappy, they scream like babies”; Armenians “live in holes in the ground . . . because they hope the Kurds may not find out where they are.” Buddhists, Hindus, Mohammedans: all received a thrashing from the aggressively Protestant Mrs Mortimer.

Lao-Tzu, the father of Taoism, is dismissed as “an awful liar”. Roman Catholicism comes off little better: “A kind of Christian religion, but a very bad one.” Oddly, however, she professes a soft spot for Nubians: “A fine race . . . of a bright copper colour”.

Mrs Mortimer’s guide (which comes out in paperback next month) provides a strange glimpse into the blinkered mind of a middle-class, middle-aged bigot in Middle England in the middle of the 19th century. Her sweepingly negative generalisations and racial stereotyping seem even more remarkable for the fact that this doughty world traveller didn’t go to the places she described and disparaged. The sum total of her foreign travel was one childhood trip to Paris and Brussels. Her knowledge of Taoism was exactly zero. She had never set eyes on a Nubian. She amassed her pungent prejudices sitting in her English drawing room.

Continued. This will be I Embarrass Todd Incident #244, I think (rough estimate).

So he told the Boston Herald. But we already knew that. More reassuring news:

HERALD [Jesse Noyes]: A lot of veteran journalists will tell young people looking to get into the business don’t do it, find a different career, it’s not worth it. Are you one of those people?

REMNICK: No, I would never do that. I think it’s very hard, and we’re in the midst of a lot of systemic and technological change that’s causing a lot of people to get – let’s not be polite about it – fired or retired before their time. And I think that’s what they’re saying, that it’s a tough business. But I think if you are, if you have a hunger to do this work and maybe have a little talent, and you have drive, which is even more important, I couldn’t think of anything better. I’ve had a – you know, I’ve been very lucky. I totally admit that, but I’ve just had enormous fun. It’s been a great life. So how could I ever just talk anybody out of it?

Question mark at the end added by me, because why wouldn’t there be a question mark there? It’s a question! People with no hope left, sunk by cynicism, or possibly some Russians, ask questions ending in periods. Not Remnick, especially since he’s being so optimistic here.

David Remnick promotes his new book, Reporting: Writings From The New Yorker; in his TNR blog, Lee Siegel has some stern words for Malcolm Gladwell.

The New Yorker website just now (I believe) posted this 2003 profile (by Dana Goodyear) of Kunitz, who died on Sunday.

I’ve been thinking about those rainforest appeals that warn, “Every five minutes, another animal becomes extinct.” Everyone beloved is the last of his or her species gone from the earth. Stanley was a notably rare, exalted, humble animal unto himself, and with him extinct, the air seems thinner, the whole project sadder and less certain.

Scott McLemee declares Death to Da Vinci!

Terrible pun; sorry about that, and no disrespect to the memory of the late John Kenneth Galbraith. Anyway, don’t miss my boundlessly intelligent friend Scott McLemee’s essay about, among other things, Galbraith’s pseudonymous 1963 collection The McLandress Dimension and, to add to the satirical capers, the star economist’s co-alter ego’s review of the Leonard Lewin/Victor Navasky concoction Report From Iron Mountain. Scott begins (links are his):

The wedding announcements in The New York Times are, as all amateur sociologists know, a valuable source of raw data concerning prestige-display behavior among the American elite. But they do not provide the best index of any individual’s social status. Much more reliable in that respect are the obituaries, which provide an estimate of the deceased party’s total accumulated social capital. They may also venture a guess, between the lines, about posterity’s likely verdict on the person.

In the case of John Kenneth Galbraith, who died last week, the Times obituary could scarcely fail to register the man’s prominence. He was an economist, diplomat, Harvard professor, and advisor to JFK. Royalties on his book The Affluent Society (1958) guaranteed that — as a joke of the day had it — he was a full member. But the notice also made a point of emphasizing that his reputation was in decline. Venturing with uncertain steps into a characterization of his economic thought, the obituary treated Galbraith as kind of fossil from some distant era, back when Keynsian liberals still roamed the earth.

He was patrician in manner, but an acid-tongued critic of what he once called “the sophisticated and derivative world of the Eastern seaboard.” He was convinced that for a society to be not merely affluent but livable (an important distinction now all but lost) it had to put more political and economic power in the hands of people who exercised very little of it.

Read the rest. Speaking of the Times wedding announcements, I enjoyed Troy Patterson’s piece in Slate about the “appalling” new Times online wedding videos (which, Patterson notes, are all of straight couples so far):

I just love wedding announcements, and nothing satisfies my passion like the New York Times. This gloriously ridiculous section of the paper of record is a vestige of an earlier, more nakedly hierarchical, time. As Slate‘s Timothy Noah put it four years ago, “The wedding pages remain because a very small aristocracy demands that they remain.” He wrote that in derision; I cite it in celebration.

Week after week, these dispatches (a species of open letter: public honeymoon post cards that just happen to announce the partners’ pedigree, schooling, and profession) offer an unmatchable voyeuristic delight. Is there a more entertaining way for young members of the Northeastern professional class to size themselves up against their peers? How better to indulge in status-gawking and idle matrimonial fantasies? What fun!

Back to Galbraith for a moment—my grandfather, who knew him, wrote some nice lines about Galbraith’s legacy in an email a few days ago, and I’m going to see if he’ll let me reprint them.

Unrelated: Art School Confidential, which I saw tonight, is full of laughs, but not very deep or lasting ones. John Malkovich is hilarious in it, though, and Steve Buscemi got a bit hurrah from the audience just by walking on. That’s absolutely right.

A friend with a baby writes:

I wish to report a great New Yorker-reader success story. A rare moment of service journalism. Do you remember a couple years ago [actually Sept. ’05], there was a Talk of the Town about the Car Seat Lady, who helps hapless New York parents install their car seats? After several months of unease about [the baby’s] car seat and its precarious wobbling, much arguing among ourselves, and an unsuccessful visit to our precinct—the diabolical seat stumped their Highway Safety expert—I sought her out, and immediately found her at thecarseatlady.com. She was brilliant. [Baby] now rides very, very safely. We also met her apprentice—a Car Seat Lady in training!