eustace tilley, lost at sea

I was watching the movie Lifeboat and one of the opening shots is a copy of The New Yorker magazine, with a Eustace Tilley cover. The magazine is floating amid other debris from the torpedoed ship that had carried the rag-tag crew that would eventually find themselves in the aforementioned lifeboat. Cute.

i love the NYRB

If you find yourself with time to read the Nov 19th issue of the New York Review of Books cover to cover, go for it!

More 1930s realism; Jonathan Raban on 2 Dorothea Lange bios. Critical in the right ways.

And a bit on Irving Penn. Smart enough.

The Gaia Hypothesis. Weird, brilliant and very British.

The Glorious Revolution. Not so British, after all.

American education: history, theory and practice. Excellent.

Peter Brooks on the history of the Louvre. Elegant.

And Dan Chiasson reminded me of all the reasons I love Wallace Stevens. Before I got (as usual) bored.

let's pretend it's the week of sept 21

We've all just gotten a new issue of TNY and we're mulling things over. These things might be:

Crain on the culture of the Great Depression, and Depression-era "holidays." This Dickstein book is something I'd like to read. I love 1930s realism.

Denby on Campion's Bright Star.

Campion makes only one serious mistake: when Whishaw recites the lines “Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast, / To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,” he actually rests his head on Cornish’s chest. The literalness borders on the laughable . . .

This made me smile. I had the same reaction during a recent episode of "Mad Men," when Don is confronted by his father's ghost. I think, time-wise, Denby wrote this before I yelled at the TV "No, don't look at your hands!" I give up. We have a deep, spiritual bond, Denby and I.

Though, immediately afterwards, I think he's wrong. The sentence continues . . . and you wonder, disconcertingly, how these two relieve what look like unbearable states of arousal. Maybe Campion is making the joke that you are laughing at Denby? Did you ever think of that? She makes lots of great visual sexual jokes. She's like that. Then again, so do the MM writers.

Paul Simms' "Shouts and Murmurs." A hilarity that exists somewhere between houseguests and colonization.

And Ben Yagoda's letter about Rose Wilder Lane. She is "in fact, the first ghostwriter in history." Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin and Art Smith, "Boy Aviator" owe her.

Thank god my wait at the doctor's office did not allow me to read all of "The Eight Days of the Financial Crisis." I don't even think I made it through day one. But I was impressed with what one might call the (pardon me) "economy" of the writing. Not a lot of superfluous detail. Stewart sets the scene and gets to business. Everything he tells you means something, and soon. I wish more New Yorker pieces were this controlled.

I also laughed out loud at more than one of the cartoons. Including the contests in the back. Fellow patients stared at me in wonderment.

Block that Metaphor!

Hollywood Manipulated The New Yorker

And lots of nasty names were exchanged. Read all the way to the end.

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On their game.

Martin Schneider, of Emdashes. Takes The New Yorker to task for hedging about a man's sexuality with the word "partner" - "You know, either bring it up, or don't. But avoid this in-between."

And Sasha Frere-Jones, at his New Yorker blog, "I’m only tweaking the faithful because there are so many to tweak and I’m a terrible person."

my two favorite things: sleep + The New Yorker Magazine

Christoph Nieman on insomnia. In the NYT. Doing battle with the mosquitoes. With TNY.

the overpopulation of the moral high ground

I enjoyed Elizabeth Kolbert on "eco-stunts" in a paper copy of last week's magazine that I bought in a local news shop. I read her book review immediately upon waking up, so this is through a happy, groggy Labor Day Weekend haze.

The first thing that I thought was that Kolbert was, literally, calling the author "No Impact Man" because he had no real impact, politically. Or, really environmentally either. I only realized slowly that that was the actual title of his book. In any case, it was a good weekend read simply because she put so well things that I feel: personal extremism is silly and doesn't make for real, lasting change; change needs to be structural, large-scale, social and political; these stunt-ers taking the moral high ground are dull and annoying and yet another example of the self-indulgence of late capitalist nincompoops. So, not the most informative article for me, but satisfying in a small way that allows me to take the moral high ground and thus the cycle of life continues . . . etc, etc.

I love the ending: What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

Ah, there's the pun.

But there was something about the cloth diapers and cloth napkins and the reusable food storage and the one-car/no-car family that really seemed familiar, do-able and appealing. What if Americans all did just live like it was the 1970s? Could we run the statistics on that? If Americans just created as much landfill waste and used as much electricity and emitted as much carbon as they did (per capita) in the 1970s? And maybe recycled as much as they did during WWII? What would that look like in terms of large-scale change? Can we legislate that?

I also learned a few things about Thoreau that I did not know before.