Category Archives: New Yorker

“Poetry’s a Little Swervier Now”: An Interview With Alice Quinn

There’s a short, good interview with Alice Quinn on the Poets & Writers website, in which she talks about her twenty years as The New Yorker‘s poetry editor, what she’ll do next, and her successor, Paul Muldoon. An excerpt (thanks to Ron Silliman for the link):

How did you feel about the appointment of Paul Muldoon as poetry editor?
It was really my dream to have him succeed me. David [Remnick] asked, “What would you think about Paul Muldoon?” and honestly, I almost did a jig. You lay a foundation and then you see that somebody you adore and admire is going to come and shore it up and further it, and that’s great.

Who do you perceive to be the audience for the New Yorker‘s poems?
I feel that New Yorker readers are people who were profoundly connected to poetry in childhood, adolescence, or college, who want to touch base with it and want to feel that they still can read poetry. The New Yorker gives poets access to an international audience of literarily eager people who are sampling poetry.

Also, R.I.P. Milt Dunnell, sports columnist for the Toronto Star, who won an A.J. Liebling Award from the Boxing Writers’ Association of America in 1997. He passed away last week at the age of 102. From the collegial and eloquent obituary in the Star:

The 1975 fight between Ali and Frazier in Manila – the Thrilla in Manila – was his all-time favourite sporting event. At the time, he began his column this way:

“Not since the big guns of nearby Corregidor, now rotting in the tropical sun, has there been such cannonading in this corner of the Pacific.”

It was the greatest fight he covered and Ali was the greatest athlete of the century in Dunnell’s view.

“In my opinion,” he once said, “Ali was one of the greatest salesmen and public relations personalities in the world.”

“After a training session, Ali would sit on the corner of the ring and talk for an hour. Most of it was b.s., but he would talk about world politics, fighting, about blacks in society … all those things … and he described himself as the world’s best-known citizen.”

But he didn’t know everything. If Dunnell was nearby and Ali didn’t have a stock answer for a technical or historical question, he would say, “I don’t know about that. Why don’t you ask Milt here?”

…

On one occasion, Stephen Brunt, a sports columnist for the Globe and Mail, recalled seeing Dunnell in action at a heavyweight fight between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks in 1986.

“The bout ended quickly, but still it was past midnight and in the confusion at ringside there was shoving and jostling as the spectators pushed toward the ring and as the reporters tried to push their way out to the post-fight press conference.

“And somewhere, in the middle of it all, was Dunnell (only about 80 then), climbing over a table, fighting his way through the mob, to get the quote, to get the story, to get it back to his readers, to make the event real the next morning over somebody’s breakfast in Scarborough.

“Athletes aren’t the only heroes in sport,” concluded Brunt.

New Year’s New Yorker Short Story Resolution: Installment I

Readers may recall that I resolved to read all of the short stories in a certain three-volume anthology of New Yorker stories. Here’s the first batch:
Dorothy Parker, “Arrangement in Black and White,” October 9, 1927
Plot: A silly socialite is cluelessly racist to a black jazz musician at a party.
Noah Webster alert: A “grass widow” is a divorcée.
Marc Connelly, “Barmecide’s Feast,” December 24, 1927
Plot: A wealthy couple make the rounds on Christmas Eve but lack a certain something.
Worthy of note: The word “phoned” has an apostrophe in front of it.
Noah Webster alert: “Kelly pool” is a type of pocket billiards as well as the source of the phrase “behind the eight ball.”
Joel Sayre, “Love in the Snow,” January 9, 1932
Plot: A teenage boy at a winter resort finds that love cannot conquer all.
Hot quotation: “George Bush got very embarrassed, and, although they teased and coaxed him a long time, he kept insisting that he didn’t have any girl and finally got sore and told Bill Preston to shut up before he got a rap on the jaw.”
Noah Webster alert: a “one-step dance” is, er, a kind of dance.
Dated reference: Charlie Jewtraw

Edwin Corle, “The Great Manta,” May 5, 1934
Plot: A doorman at a movie palace is unruffled by the arrival of marine competition across the street.
Hot quotation: “Sixth Avenue is an ambiguous street.”
St. Clair McKelway, “Ping-Pong,” September 12, 1936
Plot: After a game of ping-pong at a resort, a shallow fellow tells a virtual stranger about his son’s suicide.
Worthy of note: Long monologues—no longer fashionable. Elaboration of the pain lurking behind a man’s bland façade would not work today; readers would assume as a matter of course that a bland person was hiding pain.
Best story: “Love in the Snow”
—Martin Schneider

The Last Links of the Year, and Possibly the Best

It’s practically champagne (OK, OK, Champagne): Jesse Thorn interviewing George Saunders with a live audience. It’s fizzy! Check out The Sound of Young America‘s dramatization (featuring a sparkling cast with great legs: Andy Daly, Jen Kirkman, Jonathan Coulton, James Adomian, John Hodgman, Maria Bamford, Jonathan Katz, Dan Klein, and Xeni Jardin) of Saunders’s “Ask the Optimist.” At its best, Gawker’s snarly, goofy “The Unethicist” has something of its flavor.
Speaking of New Year’s, the stylish Rea Irvin shows us how to celebrate it in style—1867- and 1917-style, that is—in two contrasting cartoons. Thanks to ABCs of Art for the excellent link! Who says there’s nothing on the web this week? (Like this positive review of the William Steig show at the Jewish Museum, complete with illicit but tender photos.)
I dug this City Room sampling of hundred-year-old Times stories: “And readers who think they remember this newspaper as the Old Gray Lady might want to recall some of the fairy tale yarns that made the front pages at New Year’s 1908.” Seriously, they’re great. Now, add links!
Frank Bruni enthuses today about a new book I also heartily recommend:

The book I was happiest to find in my mail was “Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink,” which was just published. It’s edited by David Remnick, the magazine’s editor. It’s chewy: more than 575 pages of nonfiction and fiction writing that appeared in the New Yorker over many decades.
And you couldn’t ask for a more diverse, dazzling collection of writers, some of whom wrote or write primarily about food, others of whom dabble or dabbled in culinary musings only occasionally. In these pages you’ll find M.F.K Fisher, Joseph Wechsberg, A.J. Liebling, John McPhee, Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Nora Ephron, Janet Malcolm, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Julian Barnes, Steve Martin, Malcolm Gladwell. I could go on and on, and I plan to dip into this book for a good long time to come. By which I mean: forever.

I did give it as a Christmas present, by the way. Stay tuned for the recipients’ reviews!

Here’s a caption contest finalist that Texans are cheering for, and some spirited reminiscences of Bill Buford’s Granta on the occasion of the magazine’s hundredth issue.

In the final hours of 2007, take a moment of silence for the Cincinnati Post. And another for Robert “Buck” Brown, the cartoonist who passed away this year. Here’s an obituary from BlackAmericaWeb’s list of “the Black Icons, Known and Unknown, Who Passed in ‘07.” I like that, icons known and unknown.

Robert “Buck” Brown, 71, one of the first “crossover” African-American cartoonists, whose work appeared in Playboy magazine over four decades, died July 7. Playboy printed more than 600 of Brown’s cartoons, including one that appeared in the magazine’s August issue. His daughter, Tracy Hill, told the Associated Press that Brown sold thousands more to other publications. Brown’s work also appeared in Ebony, Jet, the New Yorker, Esquire and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Mike Lynch has a more detailed post that includes a link to a longer bio of Brown at the site The History Makers.

Happy new year, everyone! And happy third birthday to us again! It’s our once-a-year day, and everyone’s entitled to be wild, be a child, be a goof, raise the roof, once a year! And for success, love, health, and, of course, wealth in 2008, you need look no further than this story by George Singleton in the Oxford American: “How to Write Stories…And Lose Weight, Clean up the Environment, and Make a Million Dollars.” Can’t wait!

Happy Birthday to Us!

Today, Emdashes is three. Three cheers for three years of whatever it is we’ve been doing and will do here, God bless it. As Harold Ross might say, but he died long before the age of blogs, at which he might have looked askance. On the other hand, he might have been all for them. It’s hard to say. He’d probably blanch at Facebook. Have you read Genius in Disguise? I’m just finishing it up, and it’s a treat, whatever your level of interest in The New Yorker and the whirlwind it made. I’m simultaneously reading Victor Navasky’s funny and instructive memoir, A Matter of Opinion, and I’m proud to have worked with one of these noble men of magazines and upholders of honest journalism. That’s not to slight the women. To paraphrase Norman Mailer, every editor is a culture, and you enter deep into another culture, one that’s not your own, and you learn an awful lot from it. So three cheers for my own wise captain, too.

A Reader Writes: Why No Byline on the Raymond Carver Intro?

So asks Emdashes reader Bill Amstutz; Dean Olsher noticed it, too. Ah, but what is “authorship,” really, anyway? As Olsher speculates:

The decision to write anonymously here seems especially freighted, less a mere throwback to the Shawn years and having something more to do with the nature of Lish’s initially invisible and essential influence.

On the other hand, maybe everyone was just anxious to get out the door for the holiday, and the crucial line was dropped. As if that would ever happen. Here’s the piece in question, and don’t forget the nifty slide show and a very illuminating demonstration of the lishian pen, not to mention the strikethrough tag (or “strike-through,” in the New Yorker stylebook), which is finally put to good use here.

I wonder if Art Winslow, who is what I think about when I think about Lish (well, also those poems that Lish failed to accept for the Quarterly when I was an undergraduate, but I bear him no ill will; they were utterly [there’s a joke for you Columbians] wrong for the magazine), will be weighing in on the latest Carver carve-up at the Huffington Post. Art?

And Speaking of Cartoons, a Voice From the Past

…my past, that is: I’m not sure how I missed this, but recently for the Voice, the veteran (by which I don’t mean old, just savvy) arts and sports writer Brian Parks compiled a humor batting-average chart for the “fall season” of New Yorker cartooning and ranked them by “humor success percentage,” which soars as high as .556. I’d like to know more about his criteria; Brian, give us some insight into your rankings! Brian is not only a friend from that long-ago millennium of which I so rarely speak, but the author of two of the funniest plays known to modern American drama, Vomit & Roses and Wolverine Dream, known in tandem as Americana Absurdum. So the guy knows funny when he sees it, but my question is, where did he see it?

There’s a Reason These Cartoons Weren’t in The New Yorker

Or is that multiple reasons? Sometimes it’s hilariously obvious; other times, it’s so ineffable and multilayered you could write a dissertation on it. Someone probably is, and I hope that chlorophyll-deprived Ph.D. student will send it to me as soon as he or she has handed it in and fainted away from lack of sleep and sustenance. Anyway, there were Gawker folks at last night’s extremely fun, if nonswimming, pool party for The Rejection Collection Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap (“More cartoons you’ve never seen, and never will see, in The New Yorker“), and they have nice digital cameras, so I don’t know how much point there is in boldface names. But it was warm (and not just in temperature terms, though it was that, too) and crowded and high-energy and, dare I say it, kind of hip. Nobody there looked a bit rejected.
I recommend both Rejection Collection books, which have—alongside those ineffably or effably rejected cartoons—photos of and highly whimsical, illustrated interviews with the cartoonists you know only from their cryptic signatures, and there’s also a chance to have your copy/ies signed this Wednesday, 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble on 6th Avenue. Whiz kid and pigeon enthusiast Matt Diffee will be there with cartoonist and moonlighting impresario David Sipress; they’re both funny and friendly guys. Swimsuits encouraged. Transgressions are the order of the day!

Infamous (Almost) and the Ransom Note Approach

I saw Infamous, the “other” movie about Capote, tonight, and I must say I liked it. I happened to get a gander at the movie poster and got a snootful of faux Irvin font! So close, close, close. It’s clearly not quite Irvin—and equally clearly, intended to evoke same.
T’other day I linked to a 2003 post on Maud Newton’s sharp media blog; if you look at her masthead image, you’ll see some authentic Irvin font peeking back at you. —Martin Schneider

Norman Mailer, 1923-2007

On the New Yorker website, Louis Menand reflects on the late Norman Mailer’s life and career. Mailer himself rarely contributed to The New Yorker, though. Until Tina Brown’s tenure, Mailer had published only two short poems in the magazine, both in 1961. There are just five bylines in all. As one of America’s most important postwar writers and a frequent object of public attention, he was far more often written about; a search on his name in The Complete New Yorker yields more than 100 hits.
Indeed, it would appear that Mailer had little interest in writing for the magazine. Perhaps he considered that a New Yorker byline would be incidental to his various projects—to remake American literature, to upend the battle of the sexes, to provide a channel whereby citizens could regain authenticity. Nevertheless, he’s enough of an icon to have served as the subject of a New Yorker cartoon—eight times. This 1997 Lee Lorenz drawing is apropos.
Mailer’s reputation doesn’t rest primarily on his novels (although I still plan to read The Naked and the Dead). Provocateur, mayoral candidate, co-founder of The Village Voice, journalist of genius, he did not squander his tenure on this planet. —Martin Schneider

Bite-Sized New Yorker Bits at Brijit

Surely I’m not the only person who thinks that “Pick of the Issue” describes not only one of Emdashes’s more debate-worthy features but also the entirety of Brijit‘s business plan?
Don’t mistake that for a dis. Brijit (keep wanting to slip a d in there) certainly looks like a competent stab at the concept, and we wish it luck. I’m for any website that pays handsomely for reading and then writing about the experience. (That sector is having a hard time.) The concept, which the site describes as “great content in 100 words or less,” er, fewer (sue me, I’m an editor), reminds me of two other wonderfully terse sites, 75 or Less and A Brief Message. Brijit may be especially useful for me—an occupational hazard of mine is occasionally forgetting that there are magazines aside from The New Yorker! (Emily doesn’t exactly have this problem.)
I like the elegant way the three dots in Brijit’s name are spun out to the three points of the rating system. Of the hundreds of New Yorker articles rated on the site, I could only find two that garnered three dots (“exceptional, a must-read, not to be missed”), neither of which appeared as a Pick of the Issue, as it happens. We too sometimes skip the obvious praise for David Remnick or Oliver Sacks in favor of other accolades, so it’s not as though we disagree. To be fair, it does seem like an awful lot of New Yorker articles get two stars, which means they’re “special, worth making time for.”
Here’s hoping that Birjit doesn’t go the way of Plastic.com. (Oh wait, Plastic still exists.) —Martin Schneider