Now here’s a man with a good project:

Several months ago, I decided to read every issue of The New Yorker in search of chiastic observations and insights. This project will take many years to complete, but what an exhilarating time I’ve had already! I’m getting a whole new education, as I read articles I would’ve never glanced at before. Some wise person, whose name I can’t recall, once said that when you study one thing deeply, you tap into a vein of knowledge that extends infinitely beyond your original scope of interest. That has happened again and again over the past ten years, and will surely continue as my quest continues. As I find chiastic quotes in The New Yorker, I’ll post them here.

I didn’t know the word either (it’s pronounced ky-AZ-mus), but we all know the trick: a reversal in the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases, as in this one by Malcolm Gladwell (on Herta Herzog): “She wouldn’t ask about hair-color products in order to find out about you…she would ask about you in order to learn out about hair-color products.” Ah, I see! It stands to reason that all such phrases would be collected on one website, and indeed many are. This is the gift of psychologist and word sleuth Dr. Mardy Grothe, whose mission (according to his bio) is to bring the yin-yangy word

out of the closet of obscurity and into the world of popular usage. If there’s a precedent for what he’s trying to do, it’s oxymoron, a once-obscure word that is now known by almost all literate English speakers. Grothe stumbled upon the word chiasmus nearly ten years ago and has spent the greater part of the past decade in the grip of this fascinating literary and rhetorical device.

Gripped by a device for devising quips, Grothe discovered lethal pits in pithy ledes by James Atlas, Nancy Franklin, Joe Klein, Jane Kramer, Daphne Merkin, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Rosen, Alex Ross, Andrew Solomon, and more. He wants us to send more in to him, and to refrain would indicate a want of sense. Say it along with me once more: ky-AZ-mus. We learn to blog, we blog to learn.

Chiasmus in The New Yorker [Chiasmus]
Oxymorons [Oxymorons]

“Madison has its own reasons not to feel warm and fuzzy where The New Yorker is concerned,” writes Doug Moe of our mutual hometown (and Lorrie Moore’s adopted one). Like many Midwesterners I know, Madison has a quiet countenance and a long memory, and Mad Town has endured more slights to its good name than Oconomowoc has syllables. Moe describes a wound as deep as a chainsaw cut through ice:

In the fall of 2001, just weeks after the terrorist attacks in New York City, another New Yorker writer, Mark Singer, came to Madison after hearing the city was in an uproar involving the School Board and the Pledge of Allegiance, which eventually resulted in the ultimately unsuccessful effort to recall School Board member Bill Keys.

I spoke to Singer while he was preparing his piece, and he was full of good will toward Madison. “I have never been in a place where people were more willing to talk,” he said. “It’s a fascinating story. You’re lucky. Madison is a great place.”

Then Singer’s article came out, and for much of it he gave a well-written analysis of both sides of the contentious pledge debate, only to change course in the last paragraph and savage us for unseemly self-indulgence:

“Underlying the rhetoric about what a valuable civics lesson Madison has witnessed,” Singer concluded, “there’s a less noble quality, a failure to acknowledge the self-indulgence implicit in all the carping. The semiotics of the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem and the schoolhouse are abstractions that one has the luxury to dwell upon when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and dense concentrations of grieving survivors happen to be several hundred miles away. ‘Democracy’ is one way to define the dialectic. Other terms apply as well.”

That was nasty, as well as wrong-headed. As a letter writer to the magazine noted of our pledge debate: “At a time when political discourse is dominated by almost menacing calls for ideological unity, it is hard to imagine an issue more timely.”

Well, that was almost four years ago now. I hate to break ranks with Jimmy Breslin [who called the mag pretentious after it teased him in the ’60s] in on anything, but my feeling is that we should forgive and remember, to quote Lee Dreyfus.

Which would be exactly in character for a town that’s repeatedly sunk the Statue of Liberty in Lake Mendota, but not all the way. Moe encourages his fellow citizens to go see Hertzberg, Chast, Gladwell, Borowitz, and the gang on the New Yorker College Tour’s March 8-10 Madison stop, since “it really is a great magazine, and worth supporting.” In the phrase of Wisconsin Hamlet, a character invented by my childhood friend Diane Schoff, “Ta be…er no?” In Madison—voted one of Utne Reader‘s Ten Most Enlightened Cities and Outside magazine’s Dream Town—it’s always Ta be.

New Yorker, talk of our town [Capital Times]
Lady Liberty on Lake Mendota [Museum of Hoaxes]
Madison, Wisconsin [Runner’s World]
Oh, Madison [Nipposkiss]
Another Round [Jimmy Breslin review of Joseph Mitchell books, NYT]

Welcome to the human heart! Isn’t it knottier and more slippery than you expected, with so many more than four chambers that you’ve had to stop counting? There are enough Snoopy valentines for the whole class, but the ones I cut and glued myself are for

Donald Antrim, whose essays about his fabric-wild mother and bed-mad self have made life both easier and harder to bear, and who is welcome to visit the kissing booth when I am working it; and for

Lorrie Moore, whose stories in the magazine and elsewhere have made all of us stop breathing as Billie Holiday did for the 5 SPOT listeners in Frank O’Hara’s poem, and who is always surprising us again with her bravery (“The Juniper Tree” being only the most recent example). Her stories are news, and not because they remind us of who’s richest and most popular in the fiction game, but because they affect things—the way art is said to, but sometimes doesn’t. I like this anecdote:

“You’re Ugly, Too” was the first of many of her stories to be published in The New Yorker (and then to be reprinted, with regularity, in annuals such as The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories), but, in 1989, it was a controversial piece for the magazine. “All through the editing process, they said, ‘Oooh, we’re breaking so many rules with this.’ ” Robert Gottlieb had taken over as the editor, but the turgidity of his predecessor, William Shawn, still gripped the institution. “I could not say ‘yellow light,’ I had to say ‘amber light,’ ” Moore remembers. “And that was the least of the vulgarities I’d committed.”

A candy heart of lust and admiration to Steve Martin—with whom I fell in love at a birthday party in 1984 on first sighting of his silver hair and wistful-seducer eyes in All of Me—for giving a million bucks to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, one of the prettiest places I’ve ever been and beloved by scholars. Martin (who, fittingly, designated the money for the American art collection) says, “The Huntington is clearly interested in … bringing significant works of American art to light, contextualizing them, and helping visitors become better acquainted with the artists, the techniques and the significance of the pieces.” It’s not enough that this man made all those movies that make us happy—he writes fiction, Shouts & Murmurs, and plays, and throws money to art into the bargain. Steve, you’re great. And even more handsome than you were, somehow.

Two more hearts wrapped in wrist tape for Edwin Pope and William Nack, who just won A.J. Liebling Awards (to be presented on May 6) for excellence in boxing journalism. Maybe they could do double duty as film critics during this trying time, when Clint Eastwood has duped an entire nation into believing, among other unlikely things, that a gorgeous young waitress who boxes in all her free time would never have the slightest temptation to try out some of her fellow trainees. I’m just sayin’. Movie man Gene Seymour agrees with me, and he’s no mollycoddle in the critical ring.

And to you, reader, who ask so charmingly for more and make me want to give it to you. You know who you are. Thank you.

About Lorrie Moore: A Profile [Ploughshares]
Moore’s Better Blues [Dwight Garner interview, Salon]
Steve Martin donates $1M to support U.S. art [CBC]
A.J. Liebling Awards [East Side Boxing]
The Edwin Pope Collection [Amazon]
My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money, and the Sporting Life [William Nack, Powell’s]

Categories: Antrim, Moore, Martin, Movies

In the Financial Page this week, Jim Surowiecki muses on the seemingly unstoppable power of Wal-Mart and the futility of companies like Gillette and Procter & Gamble’s trying to gang up on the price-cutting behemoth:

It’s certainly true that manufacturers have a lot less pull in the marketplace than they used to. But they haven’t lost it to Wal-Mart and Target. They’ve lost it to you and me…. In a sense, Wal-Mart is the elected representative of tens of millions of hard-bargaining shoppers, and, like any representative, it serves only at their pleasure.

It seems only fair to point out that Wal-Mart routinely declines to serve the cost-conscious shoppers closest to it—its own employees, who are denied adequate health care, proper wages, and the opportunity to advance for those who happen to be women (the company’s aggressively saccharine ads notwithstanding). Any attempts by those people—many of whom started working at Wal-Mart for precisely the reasons Surowiecki describes, as reported in my friend Liza Featherstone’s must-read book Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart—to actually choose a representative for their interests (a.k.a. a union) are promptly squashed hard. Yes, workers are consumers too. But they can’t consume much at minimum wages; Henry Ford figured this out in the ’20s, when he decided he had to pay his workers enough money to buy his cars. Wal-Mart’s done a brilliant job of imitating Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, handing out dollar bills to the panicked masses when the bank goes bad. Trouble is, we’re all living in Pottersville. (The FBI’s COMPIC investigation ruled Capra’s movie communistic for seeking to “discredit bankers” and “deliberately malign the upper class.”) When the likes of P&G look like meek David eyeing a slavering Goliath, you know we’re in trouble.

Down and Out in Discount America [The Nation]
Wal-Mart: The Facts [NOW]
Our Committment to People [Wal-Mart]
Film Industry Surveillance FBI Files [Paperless Archives]
All Hail Pottersville! [Salon]

Categories: Surowiecki,, Wal-Mart,, Movies

The line is long today at the Complaint Desk. Up first, a man standing by his friend and fellow artist. (Update: This is now, of course, squeaking forth from the letters section of the Valentine’s Day issue.)

Owen Wilson has lashed out at a New York film critic, for lambasting his movie pal Ben Stiller “tiresome” screen presence and for being the “crudest, version of the urban Jewish male on the make.”

New Yorker magazine reporter David Denby wrote a scathing review of Stiller’s latest film Meet The Fockers last month, saying: “Stiller is not a natural comic. He’s not effortlessly funny. There’s nothing wrong with the features, but they don’t quite go together.”

In response to Denby’s critique, American gossip site PageSix.com reports Wilson has leapt to the defence of his Zoolander and The Royal Tenenbaums co-star.

Owen writes: “I read David Denby’s piece on Ben Stiller with great interest. Not because it was good or fair toward my friend, but exactly because it wasn’t.

“I’ve acted in 237 buddy movies and, with that experience, I’ve developed an almost preternatural feel for the beats that any good buddy movie must have.

“And maybe the most crucial audience-rewarding beat is where one buddy comes to the aid of the other guy to help defeat a villain. Or bully. Or jerk. Someone the audience can really root against. How could an audience not be dying for a real ‘Billy Jack’ moment of reckoning for Denby after he dismisses or diminishes or just plain insults practically everything Stiller has ever worked on?

“And not letting it rest there, in true bully fashion Denby moves on to take some shots at the way Ben looks and even his Jewish-ness, describing him as the ‘latest, and crudest, version of the urban Jewish male on the make.’

“The audience is practically howling for blood! I really wish I could deliver for them—but that’s Jackie Chan’s role.”

Would it not be fair to say that a film critic has some business making notes about actors’ looks? As for Jewishness, Denby’s interest is in the movies’ shaping of that urban Jewish male on the make, and Stiller’s willing part in it. If Wilson is really interested in knocking down stereotypes, he’ll do his best to take out Denby himself, and see who’s the real drunken master. After all, Wilson may have acted in 237 buddy movies (or 13, by my count), but I have a funny feeling Denby may have seen even more.

Wilson isn’t the only actor-comedian whose tummy is in a knot about critical injustice:

American comic Rob Schneider has furiously labeled movie critic Patrick Goldstein “unfunny” and “pompous” for his attack on his contribution to cinema. The former Saturday Night Live star has taken out a full-page advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter attacking Goldstein’s article on January 26, in which he blasted movie studios for making lackluster sequels like Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo…. Schneider writes of Goldstein, “Most of the world (has) no idea of your existence. Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for ‘Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter.’ I can honestly say that if I sat with your colleagues at a luncheon, afterwards they’d say, ‘You know, that Rob Schneider is a pretty intelligent guy’ … whereas, if you sat with my colleagues, after lunch, you would just be beaten beyond recognition.” On gossip website Pagesix.com, Goldstein responds, “I haven’t received so many congratulatory phone calls since Billy Crystal wrote a letter to the editor comparing me to Roy Cohn.”

In both cases, it seems more effective (and cheaper) to do a better movie and make Denby and Goldstein eat their words. No doubt a little more focused concern could also accomplish more than a blow to the thorax. In The Joy of Worry, occasional New Yorker writer Ellis Weiner endorses, as a reviewer puts it, unleashing the full power of all your misgivings:

“To harness this powerful force, the student of worrying must learn to worry deliberately, consciously, and in a targeted and direct manner,” [Weiner] writes. “Free-floating anxiety, spontaneous hand-wringing, general and uncontrolled not-knowing-what-to-do—these are for the unenlightened.”

With help from cartoonist Roz Chast, Weiner puts readers on a path to angst mastery. He reveals the secrets of worrying to lose weight, to parent effectively, to survive in traffic (become “The Road Worrier”) and to travel well.

“The more we worry and pay attention to it,” says Weiner, “the more self-realized we become.”

The paparazzi have cleared and the Complaint Desk clerk is tired, but someone else is upset about something. Seymour Hersh again—when will he stop grousing? He has a clip from his recent talk in Salt Lake City with him:

My parents came from the old country, and they came to America to get away from that stuff. In America, the same values we hold so dearly in our families—honor, trust, respect—we don’t ask that of our leadership…. We’re just sort of at the mercy, we in the press, of these people running a war…. You’re cut off if you disagree. You either drink the Kool-Aid or you don’t get to go to the meetings.

Those in question might reply with the tagline from Bottle Rocket: They’re not really criminals, but everybody’s got to have a dream.

Ben’s Co-Star Takes on Critic [Yahoo!]
Schneider Blasts “Pompous” Movie Critic [IMDb]
Jackie Chan’s top fights [Fightingmaster]
Discover the humor in worry, facts of life [Indystar]
Hersh harps on Bush policies [Salt Lake Tribune]

Categories: NYer, Denby, Movies, Books, Weiner, Hersh

It’s good to see Hurlyburly—David Rabe’s 1984 play recently revived at the Acorn by Scott Elliott, with Wallace Shawn as Artie—provoking thoughtful commentary. I liked much of the New York Observer interview with Ethan Hawke and Bobby Cannavale (the current stars) about postfeminist male rage and peer pressure, especially Hawke’s blunt comment about exactly what it is about us that makes men angry—I’d never thought about it quite that way before, and it’s very useful. And John Heilpern’s review the same week (both pieces are front-page news—God save the Observer!) is first-rate vivid, thoughtful theater criticism. What’s more, it starts “At three and a quarter hours, Hurlyburly is longylongy.” Ha! Dorothy Parker (“Tonstant Weader frowed up”) would certainly grin. Heilpern on Shawn:

And there’s the older cheeseball producer, Artie, who’s Wallace Shawn in a ludicrous wig. I felt tempted to call out, “Come on out of there, Wally! Come out from under that wig—we know it’s you!” But at first I didn’t recognize him in his sunglasses, and when I did, he made me laugh at terrible things.

Artie enters with a lost teen waif named Donna (Halley Wegryn Gross) whom he found in an elevator. “You want her?” he asks his friends, explaining that he figured he would drop her by and they could keep her, like a care package.

What a cad! Well, it’s reassuring to know that Shawn is a mensch in real life, at least as evidenced by my running into him at the Quad Cinema on my fourth viewing of Lost in Translation. We were in separate lines; I looked at him, he smiled modestly, and I asked “What are you here to see?” (more sharply than I intended). “I’m here for American Splendor,” he said pleasantly, with the requisite ironic garnish. “What about you?” “Oh, I’m seeing Lost in Translation again,” I said. “How many times have you seen it so far?” he said, already looking concerned. Realizing the theness of it all, I mutely held up three fingers, like a sloshed Jack Lemmon. He gave me a not unkind “takes all kinds” nod and half-smile, and we proceeded into our theaters.

Are Boys Still Beasts? [Hawke and Cannavale interview, NY Observer]

John Heilpern review [NY Observer]

John Simon review [New York magazine]

One take on LIT [Cynthia Rockwell]

I haven’t been the same since Lewis Menand’s review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation—or rather, his review of its author, Lynn Truss, who seems like a sweet lady who’s outed herself doing what we all do furtively: fix bad punctuation in public. Typos and grammatical errors in a stern (in a Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins sort of way) treatise about punctuation and grammar are not quite the thing, I agree. The publisher ought to have corrected them. But why truss up this good woman so? Menand’s snarling seems out of proportion to its cause, and in this piece—in contrast to, say, his meandering but lucid review of Hollywood histories in the current issue—he entangles himself in sentences that would have Lynn Truss herself sighing and prescribing a spoonful of sugar with his Tums.

But all that has passed; the cut man patched her up, and Truss prevailed. What lingers is the problem of the semicolon. Nation copy editor Judith Long, an expert in most things, is generally against them, but I have always argued for their elegance, their sonic and spacial ambiguity, their polymorphous perversity. (See Nicholson Baker’s hilarious essay “The History of Punctuation” in The Size of Thoughts for archaic combinations in which semis play a part.) But Judy continued to say no. That made me doubt. And then, Menand:

“I am not a grammarian,” Truss says. No quarrel there. Although she has dug up information about things like the history of the colon, Truss is so uninterested in the actual rules of punctuation that she even names the ones she flouts—for example, the rule that semicolons cannot be used to set off dependent clauses. (Unless you are using it to disambiguate items in a list, a semicolon should be used only between independent clauses—that is, clauses that can stand as complete sentences on their own.) That is the rule, she explains, but she violates it frequently. She thinks this makes her sound like Virginia Woolf.

The Virginia Woolf bit is over the top—it appears to be as much a dig at Woolf as it is at Truss—but that aside, is he right? Ever since, I have been backing away from semicolons in nearly all situations, and the keyboard key looks anxious, as though I will never return. I used one (Menand-endorsed) above, and it looks just fine. But it wonders if I will someday turn it into a dash, or just a Puritan period. At my next seance, I’ll consult the Woolf crew and report back with their analysis. In any case, Menand undermines his own argument with this:

The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces.

Come now, that’s not criticism! Does this mean Americans can’t write about Channel-swimming, or bull-running, or guiltless sexual abandon, since we’re not generally known for it? I beg to differ.

Bad Comma: Lynne Truss’s strange grammar [New Yorker]
The war of the commas: Eats, Shoots & Leaves is selling like hot cakes in the US and one eminent New York critic is not happy [Guardian]
New Yorker Lynne Truss review [Transblawg]
There Are Many Reasons to Love Louis Menand [Beatrice]
Shoots, Leaves & Eats: Irresistible Food from Plot to Plate [Amazon UK]
Eats, Shites & Leaves: Crap English and How to Use It [Amazon UK]

Categories: NYer, Issue, Menand, Magazines