Tuesday, October 20, 2009

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.

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Sunday, October 11, 2009

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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