Dept of Lights and Bushels

The New Yorker is nominated for a Webby. No one's handing out prizes for the web re-design (at least, not that I've read). It's for Best Copy/Writing.

One Seth Roberts (well-read dieter) chides the magazine for it's modesty and aptly describes where the link to vote is hidden, on the magazine's home page. It's under Awards in the left sidebar.

Or you can just go to the Webby Awards site, register and vote your mind.

messy like a crime scene

John Colapinto's history of the Everetts' study of Pirahã language, "A Reporter At Large, The Interpreter," was all kinds of conflicted. Quotes that told against one another, outright lies, personal vendettas come to light, small bits and pieces of the material world that the characters in this story are fascinated with and take as evidence of one thing or another. Missionaries, Anthropologists and Tourists.

Case in point, quote from Dan Everett, "This is a culture that's invisible to the naked eye, but that is incredibly powerful, the most powerful culture of the Amazon." (124) Invisible. Complete with photos.

Even worse, the "abstract" of aforementioned article.

To Nancy Franklin

Regarding "This American Life." One need not feel so reluctant. Here, one is among friends.

(Dolphins discussing wishes.)

“If I could do only one thing before I died, it would be to swim with a middle-aged couple from Connecticut.”

New website, animated cartoons*, and now, this!

Written descriptions of the cartoon images. These things crack me up and seriously appeal to me. They've had the quote below the image for awhile, but they didn't always have these descriptions, did they?

(At the same moment, it seems, though, that I can no longer easily save and copy and post the cartoon images. But it may just be me and my browser and so on . . . )

One of the major ways in which one experiences New Yorker cartoons, after all, is in their physical, visual absence. Like when my father described the above cartoon, over the phone, upon learning about our upcoming relocation to New Haven.

And I love how succinct the descriptions are.

*Eh. If cinema is all about the pregnant moment, then so are cartoons. The animated ones don't always get that.

longest, most detailed Gawker post ever!

Or so they say. And it's on The New Yorker. Thanks, everyone, for calling my attention to Gawker on Brown, Remnick, etc.

The post notes this, and I think it's funny, that the presence of "photographs" often defines, or stands in for a definition of, Brown's New Yorker. One might, instead, find a kind of continuity in the older caricature portraits (similar things still appear in Talk, for instance) and the bw photographic portraits that accompany profiles now.

And I don't know if Brown really introduced the other use of photos in TNY - those color-exotic-journalistic-photos that accompany some of the more sensational current events writing?

3 thoughts on Mayo

I had but two consolations to sustain me.

First, a Mayonnaise of chicken of my own making on the luncheon-table, which, as a work of Art, was simply adorable - I say no more. Secondly, my green silk dress, trimmed with my mother's famous lace - another work of Art, equally adorable with the first. Whether I looked at the luncheon-table, or whether I looked in the glass, I could feel that I worthily asserted my nation; I could say to myself, Even in this remote corner of the earth, the pilgrim of civilisation searching for the elegant luxuries of life, looks and sees - France supreme!

(Madame Pratolungo in Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch, 189) Click to enlarge photo and see such a work of Art.

The sauce was invented as a new sensation for jaded palates at court by the duc de Richelieu, at first known as mahonnaise after Mahon, the chief port of Mincorca, the scene of the duc's dubious 'victory' in 1756 over the illfated Admiral Byng. Basically Louis's drug dealer and pimp, Richelieu, known for opium recipes to fit all occasions, is also credited with the introduction of into France of the cantharides, or Spanish fly. [...] What might this aphrodisiac have in common with the mayonnaise? That the beetles must be gathered and killed by exposing them to vinegar fumes suggests an emphasis on living or recently living creatures - the egg yolks perhaps regarded as a conscious entity - cooks will speak of whipping, beating, binding, penetration, submission, surrender. There is an undoubtedly Sadean aspect to the mayonnaise. No getting past that.

(Pleiade Lafrisee in Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 545)

I also, recently, made James Beard's excellent crepe recipe - 3 eggs: 1 c milk: 1 scant c flour.