Friday, December 03, 2010

solipsistic and desultory reading of TNY

As opposed to what? Keywords: Linzertorte, Kanye, Hathaway, Ballet, Groundhog

1. You know I love linzertorte. Long story short, A. Goodman?

Don't used blanched nuts, hazelnuts are traditional, almonds are fine.
Don't neglect to mix plenty of lemon or alcohol in the jam.
Don't strain the seeds and don't sweat the lattice.

But the correct proportion of jam to crust is crucial, and highly subjective. And the illustration is insulting.

2. I can't believe Sasha Frere-Jones didn't mention the Kanye tweets as cartoon captions thing. He asks, instead, "Which Kanye did you follow this year? The newcomer to Twitter, who liked to talk about expensive chairs and Mark Rothko, and sometimes tags his tweets “Greatesttweetofalltime”?"

Bob Mankoff commented on the whole thing awhile back, but (am I in an extra-ornery mood?) he's wrong. The mix of Kanye Tweets and New Yorker cartoons are NOT really incongruous, nor do you need to know that Kanye penned the caption to find the squirrel image+paparazzi caption funny.

3. Strange but true, I fully enjoyed Denby on Black Swan and Love and Other Drugs. Indeed, I spent the whole of my Thanksgiving holidays praising the "vivid and generously expressive" Anne Hathaway and surveying the uneasy marriage of media found in "ballet films."

4. On Jon [oops!] Stewart, David Sedaris told us that he wanted to include a groundhog story in his collection of animal tales, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, but his editor wouldn't let him because "we have no preconceived notions of groundhogs," or some such. Benj and I were saddened by this, because we always think of them as bureaucratic, and behind on their paperwork, and we had hoped that someday a famous comic author would confirm this for us. But now we'll never know. In any case, the stories in the collection are also strange, but true.