Monthly Archives: July 2005

(7.25.05 issue) Don’t miss

Tobias Wolff’s short story “Awaiting Orders.” But I always skip the fiction! you say. What? I can’t hear you! The fiction’s so good this time my ears are buzzing and I have melodies in my head! “Awaiting Orders” says everything about masculinity and warfare that ,Cormac McCarthy apparently—judging, at least, from the admirably civil James Wood’s essay about the bad-blood-in-the-West-without-apostrophes novelist, which is all I think I need to read, and I had really been feeling wrong for not having tried him, till today&#8212cannot. Actually, I liked one passage of McCarthy’s that Wood picks out, very much, in which a character refers to cows being led to slaughter as “beeves.” That’s funny! As for Mark Ulriksen’s illustration of a head-tilting, competently craggy (see Talk) McCarthy con cactus, it’s a little suggestively botanerotic (please supply correct term, fetishists), don’t you think? So he comes and claims the West for his macho fantasies, and the West…what? Might prick him with an aggressive arm right where it counts? Unclear, but I must say, he does seem to be asking for it. Unless it’s the usual stand-in…no, that I won’t stand for. Well, I do reluctantly note the aptly placed boulders near the base of the neighboring (spindlier) cactus. And yet the rock formation (don’t get enough nature to be able to name it) nearby is noticeably stumpy. Perhaps the semiotic elves will solve this for me in my sleep.

And lots more to say about Hilary Mantel, but I can’t wait to read those books. I remember being excited when The Giant, O’Brien came out, but I had no idea how much more was on the shelf of grit and grisliness. Wow! ,Joan Acocella—who, by the way, has two reviews (three, really, or more if you count all the novels) back-to-back in this issue—does with Hilary Mantel what Margaret Talbot could not figure out how to do with Roald Dahl. This is real New Yorker writing, and much as I like James Wood, I would have been glad to see a page of his piece awarded to Acocella, who’s really cooking here. But back to “Awaiting Orders” and its uneasy protagonist:

Moore had spent twenty of his thirty-nine years in the Army. He was not one of those who claimed to love it, but he belonged to it as to a tribe, bound to those around him by lines of unrefusable obligation, love being finally beside the point. He was a soldier, no longer able to imagine himself as a civilian—the formlessness of that life, the endless petty choices to be made.

Wolff lets us watch the story, transparent and labyrinthine as a water molecule, exactly as long as he needs to, leaving us with a pang as he gently pushes away the microscope. That it could also be the thoughts of a gay officer who doesn’t overtly question either the war or the system—and Wolff never says “gay”; he doesn’t have to—is freaking brilliant.

Speaking of the 7/25 issue, three cheers for Greg, who posted a “This Week in The New Yorker” for it. The large archive of his New Yorker TOCs is right here.

Soon: in honor of the martyred medicinal leeches who win our hearts by sucking so much, at least one new emdashes feature. Stay tuned.

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Appearing Nitely (Including a Poem About The New Yorker)

On a double bill today, my summer-reading Newsday profile of Cosmopolitan editors-in-chief Kate White (U.S.) and Sam Baker (U.K), who both just published detective novels set in the magazine world; and Simon Houpt’s lively and thoughtful tale in the Toronto Globe and Mail of the New Yorker archive, the clever devils who made it happen, and the fans (me included) who’ll devour it. Here are the snippets of Houpt’s Globe and Mail piece with yours truly in them:

Every cover, advertisement, cartoon, Talk of the Town, humour “casual,” short story, profile, poem and piece of investigative journalism will be there, stored on a slim set of eight DVD disks yielding high-resolution images that can be viewed on a computer in single- or double-page-spread formats. Users will be able to browse issues through thumbnail images of the covers, or search for specific editorial content via keywords, departments, the name of the author or artist, or year of publication. Showing a shameless populist touch, the disks also provide a method of skipping straight to each issue’s cartoons. After decades of phone calls and letters from flummoxed readers trying to trace articles they thought they recalled seeing in the magazine, The New Yorker‘s librarians will finally be able to push them toward a user-friendly alternative to the clunky and barely accessible microfilm files at public libraries.

“This is going to be an amazing resource,” enthuses Emily Gordon, a 33-year-old Brooklyn-based writer who maintains a blog (at emdashes.com) that dissects the minutiae of the magazine from week to week. “Instead of the conversations we’re used to having, like, ‘Jonathan Schell put that so well in that piece, when was that?’ you’ll be able to call it up and read it out loud to the other person, just as we all do with our current issues of The New Yorker.”
…
With a unique combination of whimsy, erudition and bold reportage, The New Yorker has become an irreplaceable object of passion in people’s lives. “The magazine feels personal,” says Gordon, who spent many of her childhood summers at her grandparents’ home outside Beebe, Que., where she graduated from the simple joys of the 25th-anniversary cartoon anthology to the more adult delights of the magazine’s celebrated journalists. “It doesn’t feel like a magazine. It feels like, by reading it, you’re choosing a way of living, a way of seeing the world, a way of thinking.

“This DVD project isn’t just a two-dimensional searchable reference,” she adds. “It has all these memories and times of where, you know, you saw that particular New Yorker cover, lying on a kitchen table in your summer house.”

My poem about all that ran as a sidebar to the piece.

My Mother Saved Copies of The New Yorker

Of course she kept New Yorkers.
Everybody did. In our case the issues,
stacked in piles like inventory, turned
stiff with the glue of basement dank
and cat piss. She saved some from the crypt
to paper the sunroom with their sad
or funny covers: the troika Koren,
Chast and Steig assuring us
from their perches in the sunless room
that we were not done for. Without heat
or prospects this was our insulation:
Kael’s initials, a dispatch from Elizabeth Drew,
the tiny ad that guaranteed replacement
of the silver service’s ghostly fork.
Who was to say Thurber, Parker, Addams
mattered less than food and work,
that men lasted longer than magazines?
The dog hoarse with barking, the cats in heat,
we waited for the mail, far from New York.

Back to other magazines, and crime. In our interview, Kate White, whose reading taste ranges from John Guare to variations of Phaedra, said about her Bailey Weggins series: “In a lot of mysteries the protagonist is a little bit conservative and not especially hip; she might be a private eye, or a cop, or a reporter, and isn’t in an particularly modern environment. I really wanted to do the classic whodunit, where there are lots of red herrings and clues. Part of the fun for me was balancing—make it the classic puzzle, but in a very contemporary setting.”

Once more to the lake


I’m off to Canada for a few days, land of cool nights (hooray!), wry humor (ha!), and beaver tails (yum). If anyone who normally reaches me by my Verizon email address would like to correspond, I’ll be checking gmail sporadically in between dips in the lake, above. Back to our regularly scheduled New Yorker gluttony. Oh, and speaking of Canada, I’m interviewed in the Toronto Globe and Mail this Saturday, most likely, about the digital archive. Very honored, too, I mean honoured.

They covers the waterfront

Earlier this week WBUR Boston had a show about the traveling New Yorker covers exhibit, with guests Lee Lorenz (former art and cartoon editor and author of The Art of The New Yorker: 1925-1995, Francoise Mouly, current art editor, and superstar Maira Kalman. Listen!

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“The Civil War of Animation”

From “The Disney Strike of 1941: How It Changed Animation & Comics,” by Tom Sito:

As Walt Disney turned his fashionable Packard roadster onto Buena Vista Blvd. he found the entrance to his studio ringed with a mob of 300 picketers and reporters. The protesters were his own cartoonists. Every couple of feet one stood on a soapbox and made angry speeches to passing picketers. Under the clear blue skies colorfully handpainted signs bobbed: DISNEY UNFAIR!, ONE GENIUS vs. 600 GUINEA PIGS, WE HAD NO SCABS AT SCHLESINGER’S, LEONARDO, MICHELANGELO and TITIAN WERE UNION MEN, and a picture of Pluto with the title, I’D RATHER BE A DOG THAN A SCAB!

No single incident had a greater impact upon the history of Hollywood animation than the Great Walt Disney Cartoonists Strike of 1941. The Disney Strike spawned new studios, new creative styles, new characters and changed animation forever. To the people who were there, it was a defining moment in their careers. New friendships were cemented and old ones broken. Many carried their anger for the rest of their lives.

It was the Civil War of Animation.
…
Assistant animator Hank Ketcham was a striker. He said, “Although I was young, single and with no heavy commitments it was obvious that the Kansas City Mouseketeer had to loosen his purse strings or perish.” Meanwhile his roommate, Dick Kinney, was for Walt because Kinney’s brother, Jack, was a supervising director. Driving his old Mercury convertible, Kinney would drop Hank off a block from the studio and proceed through the jeering strikers’ line while Hank would check in with the organizers and shoulder his picket sign.

But after a while Ketcham was put off by the strike leaders increasingly militant tone. Stories about the violent strikes at General Motors and other industrial debacles. He felt had nothing to do with him as an artist. He crossed the line and went back to work. For this he was labeled by his buddies, “The King of Finks.”

After the strike Ketcham went into the Navy Reserve and served as a photographic retoucher. In his spare time he started to sell some comic panels. After his discharge he drifted to New York City to try his hand doing spot cartoons for the New Yorker, where his former Disney strikers Sam Cobean and Claude Smith had become top artists. He had a son named Dennis who liked to smear his room with the contents of his loaded diaper. His wife exclaimed to him, “Your son is a menace!” This gave him an idea. He created the character Dennis the Menace in 1947 and the strip appeared in newspapers in 1951.

Walt Kelly was an animator and story artist on Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi. He was fired by Disney after the 90-day federal period was over. He went home to Connecticut and found work as a political cartoonist for the New York Sun, which soon went under. He got work for Western Publishing drawing for several comicbooks including some Walt Disney comicbooks.

In 1943 Kelly created Bumbazine and Albert the Alligator, which appeared in issue number one of Animal Comics. Its story, called “Albert Takes the Cake,” started “Once there was a big old alligator named Albert who loved chocolate cake…” This was the basis of Pogo. Pogo went mainstream in 1950 and became one of America’s most beloved comics. He married another striker named Margaret Selby Daley who became Selby Kelly. Will be that was.

The Disney Strike of 1941: How It Changed Animation & Comics [Mickey News via Animation World]

Cartoon caption contest: On the road again

Therefore posts will be sporadic this week, but I’m happy to report that I spoke to current caption-contest champ and all-around peach Jan Richardson in Ridgeland, Miss., about clown dating, Victoria Roberts, and the varied (but mostly good) reactions to her killer caption, “He’s the cutest little thing, and when you get tired of him you just flush him down the toilet.” Watch for the mini-interview here in coming days. In the meantime, get to the movies—nobody can be expected to do anything else in this weather.

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Jonathans and agua

Edward Champion reports from the front lines of the merry Jonathan Ames reading last night in SF, at which acupuncture, crabs and audiobooks were discussed alongside Ames’ devilish Wake Up, Sir!:

Shortly after suggesting that he was “the gayest straight writer in America,” Ames then let loose three hairy calls. These sounds permeated the depths of the Booksmith. Ames had had some practice with these, having resorted to hairy calls as a child when threatened by normal children.

Unrelated but important: Happy birthday to the Man From Watershed, who, if you didn’t know, is chronicling the changing nature and uncertain fate of H20, which is as vital to human life as the internet. No, more! He wrote recently:

As I’ve been developing a feel for what kind of stories would fit well on Watershed, I keep thinking I should narrow my focus even more. I should just research and post science and policy informaiton exclusively. But when I take that to the natural conclusion, I would end up only posting about dams, utilities, and drought. Which, like any narrow focus, would ignore all the joy and purpose people take out of water, or any other topic. If I’m writing about water, and I can’t write about, say, fishing or diving or beaches, then where’s the fun?

It wld mean I wouldn’t post pointers to excellent pieces of trivia like this AP story about Hungary’s long-standing fascination with the sport of water polo…. Glub.

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(7.25.05 issue) Derivative in a good way

My Dog is Tom Cruise, Noah Baumbach’s frisky Shouts & Murmurs, of Merrill Markoe’s dog’s-eye-view essay on Letterman many eons ago, which was also published in the Letterman book I scored while babysitting, circa 1991. I wonder if David Letterman will start writing for The New Yorker when he retires? Call me snowbrow, or even glowbrow, but look at the evidence: Woody Allen, Steve Martin, Paul Simms (a former Letterman writer), Garrison Keillor, etc. Some were early contributors, some mid-career, some late. I rest my case. For me, it would certainly unite past and present obsessions neatly; I mentioned Letterman in several of my college application essays. And I got in, too.

Letterman on his Belgian Airhead, Bob [TV Acres]
When, if ever, did Letterman jump the shark? [Jump the Shark]

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He’s on fire

Twenty-first-century role model Hugo posts an engaging interview with Bruce Springsteen in the Guardian, in which interviewer Nick Hornby writes:

A Long Way Down was fuelled by coffee, Silk Cuts and Bruce (specifically, a 1978 live bootleg recording of ‘Prove it all Night’, which I listened to a lot on the walk to my office as I was finishing the book). And Springsteen is one of the people who made me want to write in the first place, and one of the people who has, through words and deeds, helped me to think about the career I have had since that initial impulse. It seems to me that his ability to keep his working life fresh and compelling while working within the mainstream is an object lesson to just about anyone whose work has any sort of popular audience.

I can’t imagine this piece running in an American newspaper. Why is that?

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