Although it’s a rare Talk I don’t enjoy, I could do with fewer “society” pieces like this week’s report, by Lauren Collins, on the making of a saucy short film (to promote the novel The Manny) by a gaggle of fun-loving wealthy types, who hired actors and comedians to play various parts in the book. I last had this mildly uncomfortable feeling when I read Rebecca Mead’s dishy Talk about a party hosted by Cindy Adams. TOTT, as most readers know, began as a frothy, cheerful sort of section, which didn’t take itself too seriously and often made references only a handful of amused insiders would get. It’s grown up a bit since then, and it’s a treat to read precisely because of pieces like—off the top of my head—Michael Schulman on a cooper from Colonial Williamsburg on a visit to hipster-colonized Williamsburg, Mead on Workman’s workingman naps, my friend Tom Bartlett on cardboard box haiku, or Ben McGrath on pretty much anything (with a smattering of borderline cases).
Of course, there’s a place in the magazine for reporting on exclusive parties and functions, awards dinners, benefits, and so on, especially when there’s something notable, funny, or quirky about them. But anecdotes about things like the Manny shoot, which seems more TMZ than Metropolitan in any event, make me slightly itchy; don’t we read about Tinsley Mortimer enough in Gawker as it is, and isn’t that fact enough to prevent her appearance in TOTT? Filmmakers who consider the addition of a dwarf to their cast instant hilarity should probably not be dignified with mentions, either.
There are plenty of ways to be local, timely, and urbane, and The New Yorker has already mastered them—I’ll read Collins’s exemplary and impishly detailed reporting about subjects like the furrier to the hip-hop celebrity world anytime—but events like this seem at once too prepackaged and too slight for coverage in a section (or even, as Harold Ross first imagined it, almost a magazine within a magazine) that thrives on telling jewels of stories, so nearly overlooked, sparklingly well.

Whatever the topic at hand, Scott McLemee can be relied on to smarten up the conversation, and here he delivers once again:

Half a century before “The Sopranos” hit its stride, the Caribbean historian and theorist C.L.R. James recorded some penetrating thoughts on the gangster — or, more precisely, the gangster film — as symbol and proxy for the deepest tensions in American society. His insights are worth revising now, while saying farewell to one of the richest works of popular culture ever created.
…
James treats the cinematic gangsters of yesteryear as radical individualists – their crimes, however violent, being a kind of Romantic refusal of social authority. But the extraordinary power of “The Sopranos” has often come from its portrayal of an almost seamless continuum between normality and monstrosity. Perhaps the most emblematic moment in this regard came in the episode entitled “College,” early in show’s first year. We watch Tony, the proud and loving father, take his firstborn, Meadow, off to spend a day at the campus of one of her prospective colleges. Along the way, he notices a mobster who had informed to the government and gone into the witness protection program. Tony tracks the man down and strangles him to death.
At the college he sees an inscription from Hawthorne that reads, “No man … can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true.” Earlier, we have seen Tony answer Meadow’s question about whether he is a member of the Mafia by admitting that, well, he does make a little money from illegal gambling, but no, he isn’t a gangster. So the quotation from Hawthorne points to one source of Tony’s constant anxiety. But it also underscores part of the audience’s experience – an ambivalence that only grows more intense as “The Sopranos” unfolds. Cont’d.

From today’s Crimson, a look at the legal beagle as a Cambridge pup and his evolution into today’s New Yorker contributor. An excerpt (what’s with the single-sentence grafs, by the way?):

Toobin’s parents may have scared their son away from the profession.
His mother, Marlene Sanders, covered the Vietnam War and was a pioneering woman in television reporting. His father, Jerome Toobin, a producer for Bill Moyers, was at the vanguard of public broadcasting.
According to Toobin’s wife, his mother warned her son against going into journalism.
“Don’t touch it,” she said, “because success and failure are so randomly distributed.”
…
[Years later,] “He was very frustrated with the job at the moment,” current New Yorker editor David Remnick says. It was 1993, and Tina Brown had recently become editor of the eminent weekly.
Remnick had just joined the magazine as a staff writer. He and Toobin met at a dive bar. Over a drink, Remnick suggested Toobin meet with Brown.
“I basically changed careers over a weekend,” Toobin says.
Talk of the Town, the storied house built by E.B. White and James Thurber, needed another layer of paint, and Brown wanted Toobin to add a newsier finish.
Remnick says that Toobin’s experience made him a natural hire.
“He was coming at this a little on the late side, but he had knowledge about an area of life. Jeff had been out in the world,” Remnick says.
“He wasn’t just a graduate of an unfortunate University in the suburbs of Boston,” Remnick—who was rejected from Harvard—says.

You know you can read the full-text archives of (at least in theory) everyone who’s ever written for the Crim, right? For instance, the early reporting of Hendrik Hertzberg, the heartthrob of Barnard Hall. (According to my mother.) As you’ll see if you visit the archive search page, the staffers have some name-variation and other kinks to work out, and the archive is still far from complete. Still, here, for example, is Toobin on Tom Lehrer, of “Masochism Tango” and “The Elements” fame (and here’s a very clever animation of the latter). Catch up with your favorite graduates! By the way, my hed there is kind of a chiasmus, in case you’re keeping track.

Unrelated but breaking (at least by my definition): Here’s an engaging profile (from the Louisville Courier-Journal) of the likably eccentric Fairleigh Brooks, who won the caption contest with his Tarzan “McKenzie” quip.

The typographically complex but clearly sensible Dark Party Review has a nice interview with Dorothy Parker Society impresario Kevin Fitzatrick today.

DP: Next month is the 40th anniversary of Parker’s death and your organization is holding “A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York” on June 4. What exactly was Parker’s New York?

Kevin: That is what makes Dorothy Parker timeless. Her New York still exists: cocktail lounges, hotel lobbies, jazz clubs, magazine offices, crowded subway cars, long taxicab rides at night. Almost all the places she lived 40, 60, 80 years ago are still standing. You don’t have to go too far in Manhattan to find the milieu that she lived in. However, since the mayor’s smoking ban, the cigarette smoke has been removed from the picture.
…
DP: Is Parker still an important literary figure in 2007? If so, why?

Kevin: The fact is Dorothy Parker has never gone out of print. Work that she created before World War I is still on bookshelves. There are not that many American writers, male or female, who are in that company; certainly not a writer such as Parker, who had a limited output.
I’ve often said that the reason Dorothy Parker is still read today, and remains popular while others of her era have been forgotten, is because she wrote about the human condition. Getting your heart smashed into a million pieces feels the same in 2007 as it did in 1927. Read the whole interview.

If you’re digging Lauren Collins’s story on Banksy this week (plus the slide show), you’ll also like this tale of a westward journey in pursuit of Banksy, by my colleague James Gaddy. Who and what did he find? A few more images from the elusive trickster are within. We’ve had a recent run of Beatles heds.

Lost in the hoopla and media coverage was serious consideration of the graphic power of Banksy’s work. His early images showcased drawing and stencil-cutting prowess with an added edge: his seemingly effortless wit. Using an engaging trompe l’oeil technique, he created a range of visual puns—rats taking photos of pedestrians, policemen kissing, the Mona Lisa with a rocket launcher—and expanded on the stencil-graffiti syntax established by Blek Le Rat, softening the hard edge of the stencil with clever takes on clichéd images of war, government, religion, and art.

His vandalism also interacted with the city’s urban furniture on a visceral level: Rats spilled toxic fluid off the wall and into the street, policemen spray-painted their own graffiti on the walls, a diver appeared from a public fountain holding a drain plug. The style reflects its environment, says Tristan Manco, the Bristol-based author of the book Stencil Graffiti, by blending elements of official signage with those of punk bands like Crass, who used stencils to make their logo. The pranks were a natural outgrowth of his sense of humor as well: A mixture of meta-graffiti and wry social commentary, they were a pie in the face of stuffy elitism. Read on.

From a Princess Cruises (I think) radio ad this morning, a loose paraphrase: “Cancel your flight to your vacation spot and take our boat! No waiting, no cancellations, no fuss! Get to the Caribbean the nicer way!”

So steamship travel is back—excellent—but surely cruise lines have security procedures, too? Oh well, I’m ready for my David Foster Wallace sensory overstimulation anytime. If obsequiousness bugs you (and it does me, too), just remember that after hours the cruise-line staff are debauching it up and making the Dirty Dancing set look like Mouseketeers. If you’re adventurous, you can seek them out and sing bawdy show tunes till dawn. Maybe not on the QE2, though, a solemn experience ostensibly promoted by the preppy (not to say tiny) mummies who appear in the ship’s New Yorker ads; after hours, the crew and passengers alike are safely stowed in their golden caskets. In the alternate QE2 ad strategy, regular folks have secret lives as onboard royalty. Indeed, the nautical romance of the neurotic has been well documented in psychoanalytic literature. That said, the boat looks absolutely fantastic, and I’m packed to sail. Luff up the tender!

Via Dear Author, this Dorothy Parker news:

Starting July 17, 2007, Penguin will be in court to defend itself from allegations of copyright infringement by Stuart Silverstein. For anyone not familiar with how slowly the wheels of justice churn, Silverstein’s case is illlustrative. The story begins in 1994 when Silverstein shopped around a compilation of 122 Dorothy Parker poems, many of which had never been included in book form.

He brought the collection to Penguin and was offered $2,000 for an advance. Silverstein declined and eventually published the collection, NOT MUCH FUN: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker through Scribner. In 1999, Penguin released, Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems in 1999, which was essentially a “comma by comma” copy of Silverstein’s work. The Penguin editor admitted that she copied Silverstein’s book and cut and pasted the poems into Complete Poems.

…

Silverstein filed suit and it has gone round and round (all the way to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal) and is now set for trial. The basis of the dispute is whether the compilation by Silverstein contains enough creativity to deserve a copyright.

When I’m less sleepy, I will see what Kevin Fitzpatrick at the Dorothy Parker Society has to say about this. (Their site’s looking really nice these days. If you live in or are visiting New York and haven’t taken Fitzpatrick’s Algonquin Round Table walking tour—do!) Anyone else know more?

And it’s not even April yet. Is Ruth Lilly behind even this somehow? Anyway, like most nattering nabobs of negative capability, I could go on about Dana Goodyear v. David Orr for hours (and have been in email exchanges yesterday and today, and in my head as I read blog entries like this, this, this, this, and this), but I think I’ll just ask: Hey, David (I get to call you that because we met at a Gawker party), what did you mean here?

In an especially confusing decision, [Goodyear] includes a cutting remark by the writer Joel Brouwer about the marketing of poetry, and claims the comment was “an obvious … reference” to the Poetry Foundation. But Brouwer, as he confirmed by e-mail, wasn’t talking about the foundation at all. Which makes sense, of course, since Brouwer is a regular contributor to Poetry, a detail Goodyear’s readers wouldn’t know.

We wouldn’t? How can you be so sure, omniscient narrat-Orr? All the people linked to above read Poetry, The New Yorker, and the NYT, and so do I. Sometimes it means tackling some very long articles, certainly, but we seem to be up to it.

Controversies are so often short-lived, but if you’re still following the annals of Essjay, here’s Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in PC World on the whole mess Wikipedia’s in; Essjay (Ryan Jordan) has since resigned his position there at Wales’s request.

From the GOOD story (note that #1 is the 1961–1973 Esquire, i.e., not in print; that said, I’m not alone in thinking the current Esquire is damn fine reading):

2. The New Yorker

A rare cultural touchstone both relevant and revered nearly a century after its inception in 1925, The New Yorker has remained a beacon of intellectual clarity and incisive reporting to over-educated bourgeoisie far beyond the borders of Manhattan. With a design that has changed only imperceptibly over the decades (except for earth-shattering changes under mid-1990s editor Tina Brown,who allowed—gasp!—color and—the horror!—photographs), all that’s different at the magazine are the stories it covers. The New Yorker today is just as willing to publish a barely illustrated, three-part, 30,000-word jeremiad on climate change as founding editor Harold Ross was happy to devote an entire issue to one article on the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. This is not to mention the fiction, humor, poetry, criticism, and cartoons—all parts of a consistently brilliant editorial vision.

Thanks to Lisa Levy for the link! (By the way, what does “over-educated” mean? The world’s great scientists, leaders, philosophers, &c., and your average cabin boy or housewife of many an era, would surely consider most of us disconcertingly under-educated.)

Also, in case this week’s Burkhard Bilger story about venomous spiders is concerning you for any reason, here is the USA Spider Identification Chart, with suitably frightening illustrations; these are the spiders from which you, Ms. Muffet-like, should definitely run. The page includes an offer for a free spider identification poster of your own, and these good people will email you—as quickly as you may, unfortunately, need it—”Spider Bite FIRST AID information.” Godspeed!

Wallpaper* star Tyler Brûlé may be starting something called Monocle (“a new, global, European-based media brand…delivering the most original coverage in global affairs, business, culture and design”), though at press time monocle.com was not live, but in my mind the real Monocle will be the wittily designed, unusually shaped, and culturally astute humor periodical of the ’50s and ’60s, edited by Victor Navasky, Richard Lingeman, et al. From a workshop in which Navasky participated (when?) at the New School, “On The Nation and the Historical Role of the Journal of Opinion”:

VN: The relevance of Monocle to this discussion today is that it taught me that all of the assumptions in the magazine business in the United States of America are dictated by business interests, rather than political, reader or writer interests.
For example, I made a joke about the fact that we were a “leisurely quarterly,” coming out twice a year — and yet the question remains, why should magazines come out every week, or by moon cycles, or every month, or every quarter? Why shouldn’t they come out when they have something to say? The reason they come out this way in this country — and in other countries there are other reasons — is that you can’t get second class mailing privileges from the United States Post Office unless you come out on a regular schedule, and you have to pay a lot more to mail it if you don’t have second class mailing privileges.
The second theory we had at Monocle was: Why should a magazine cost the same every week? One week we have two dollars and fifty-cents worth to say, and the next week we may have 25 cents’ worth to say. They next week we might have five dollars worth to say. So why don’t we charge what it’s worth, rather than the same price every week? Well, the retailer will get confused. It’s a business decision you make not to charge what it’s worth, as you would with books.
Why should a magazine be in the same shape every week, on the same paper? Monocle was long and thin for much of the time, and we called it “as tall as Time and as wide as Reader’s Digest.” We thought that we could sell ads that way, but we didn’t sell any ads.

Later: I just noticed that Steve Heller has a nice long post about this at Design Observer. Read it!