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.

Famous Scrota in Literature, a brief intro

"Keep your eye on the rats. You better have the lead in your lap, handy."

So she dropped the lump into my lap just at that moment, and I clapped my legs together on it and she went on talking. But only about a minute. Then she took off the hank and looked me straight in the face, and very pleasant, and says:

"Come, now, what's your real name?"

"Wh -- what, mum?"

"What's your real name? Is it Bill, or Tom, or Bob? -- or what is it?"

I reckon I shook like a leaf, and I didn't know hardly what to do.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 11.

Another book, arguably for young people (and famous for its use of another word) doesn't use the word scrotum. I'd love it if Madame Librarian posted on the Newberry Award winning children's book that does, but Electric Warrior does a fine job. NYT coverage here.

Actually, as far as I can tell, the plot of The Higher Power of Lucky is a quest for the definition of the word scrotum, which is a great plot for a children's book - all about what's said and not said. In the 19th century, it might have been a quest for the definition of appendix.

Illustration by E.W. Kemble, I think. PS. It was Benj who drew the literary comparison here.

it's like a petition.

Written by James Wolcott and signed, with tough-love, by so many of us. "Smugged by Reality," a biting review of Adam Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate in The New Republic.

Do a Google search for Wolcott Gopnik and you'll find a fair number of bloggers and comment-ers who were so tired of Gopnik's kitsch and would ask him to tone it down, just a bit.

At Gawker. The Nation was quick to the punch, though Hansen jabbed lightly.

Most bloggers just link merrily and move on. There's nothing to add, really. Linkers of various stripes:

Roth Brothers, Diary of a Rat, Biffles at the Bijou, Clive Davis, Christopher Hayes, dcat, lowebrow, Rising Hegemon, The Elegant Variation, Penguins on the Equator, Jewcy, gall and gumption, the stood, All Intensive Purposes (notes the Auster, oh yes), Books are my only friends, The Huffington Post, Bruce Feiler, and, tried and true, Madame Emdashes . . .

And how modest and self-effacing is our hero? The groundswell takes Wolcott by surprise, over at his VF blog.

One lonely Dad comes to Gopnik's defense. If you see more, let me know.

ever so slightly funnier than usual

The Jan 15 issue.

Paul Rudnick's "Shouts and Murmers, First Love" on the literal mindedness of the Bush girls was a little funnier than usual. And, in the dialog, The President and Mrs. Bush really did sound like the clueless parents of two trashy and privileged darlings.

Strangely enough, my thoughts on Sarah's perfect cashew brittle - "Light and crisp and full of tiny bubbles but so rich it tastes like bacon, if you know what I mean." - at Food and Paper inspired her to, quite literally, make Peanut Bacon Brittle! With bacon in it, if you know what I mean. Sarah, however is nothing like the Bush girls; she is, rather, wickedly elegant and thoughtful.

I also read Katherine Boo on Manual High School, who, I thought, managed to be quite critical by showing not telling (or rather, by dropping hints now and then and letting the reader put it all together) - a very light touch, but meticulous. The New Yorker is following Denver's Hickenlooper administration rather closely?

Shalom Auslander had lovely comic timing in "Playoffs."

Rebecca Mead, with the help of Ronald Lauder, managed to construct a latter day overpriced Viennese-Freudian Disneyland. Now that I think of it, is there any other kind? This too was a kind of follow-up . . . I think, even earlier, Dana Goodyear covered the paintings travels from Austria to LA.

Oh, and "The Starting Game" on the Democratic Party front-runners was tidy.

items from the nov 27 issue

I liked the more serious Sedaris in "Reflections, Road Trips, Vehicular Propositions."

I liked the "Guide to City Birds" and the "Cartoon IQ Test." I also liked the gift from my little brother, The New Yorker Book of Cartoon Puzzles and Games. I think they are getting progressively more challenging. I like seeing the older cartoons playing so nicely with the more recent ones.

I thought Menand on Against the Day was just bitter that he has to write history about America at the turn of the last century while TP gets to write flights of fiction. And I'm reading Against the Day, hope against hope, that it will have, somewhere deep in its heart, a tidy little mystery plot. Maybe Menand just missed it? I guess that's not very likely.

The thing about Pynchon, for me, is not just that he doesn't have real narrative structure, it's that he uses all the little lingusitic turns of phrase and so on that would imply a tight narrative structure. Like, it's just one "meanwhile" after the next. Tease. If I wanted to read plotless ramblings across the American mid-West 1890-1930 I'd read Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Geez, now that I think of it, she probably does have an actual mystery buried in that novel, if I can ever read far enough to find it.

kids lit and the reality effects of occupation

I haven't read Elizabeth Kolbert's article on kids' lit in the Dec 4 New Yorker. But please check in with two other readers and writers of diverse natures, Electric Warrior, An Actual Native of Pittsburgh (though now removed to points North), who read it and enjoyed it, and Our Friend Madame Librarian, who posted on the article at her very own Brookeshelf.

As for whether or no reading to children is a form of control, well, I'd say it is clearly a question of Discipline. And the Electric Warrior, like so many of us, seems to have been "properly disciplined," as it were, as evidenced by her feelings for Shakespeare and Dahl and Andrew Lloyd Weber. I myself have been watching a lot of well-meaning-middle-brow TV (NYer withdrawl symptom, I guess), including:

CNN's "Autism is a World" This was good, and much better than the title suggests. The program, rather, argues that autism exists within, as part of, intimately bound with The World and is not, or at least need not be, A World unto itself in which lost souls may not be found. Note she's looking wistfully out the window. Oh my God, stop it. Honestly, it's not that bad a piece.

A PBS POV documentary titled My Country My Country inspired by The New Yorker and made by Laura Poitras. Again, it was a bit plaintive. But what was really interesting about this (follows rampant speculation) is alright, so the filmmaker probably set out to make a film critical of "US, I mean, coalition" (everyone in the film says it this way) occupation.

But as she is assembling her footage of US troops being instructed and contractors and Kurds and Iraqis and Baghdad residents and The Good Doctor she finds that the language that US occupation uses to describe the upcoming (as were) elections emphasizes the word "show." In the many senses of the word: the elections will show this or show that, or this is a "showstopper," the show must go on, etc, etc and then, finally, one of the men being trained as the Iraqi police force for the elections calls his instructor on it - "What do you mean show?"

And then this, um, linguistic tic is paired with constant visual presence of television screens (even when they are off, which is rare) within the frame, as everybody watches the war on television. At first, watching the war seemed like the kind of news watching (or radio listening) many people have been represented as doing during times of war and election, but with the emphasis on the "show," well, you're back to thinking about how and why we watch and what we're being shown and why. Maybe it's just a reality effect of a slick documentary (well, not slick, but very well made) but even if Poitras went in there thinking the election was a big show, I doubt that she expected the symptoms of occupation to show themselves so readily in the language she captured. I could probably figure out how this theme developed so very literally (so to speak) by spending much time at linked website.

This whole idea of symptoms, well, if it's a little slight here, I'm under the influence of a paper I wrote years ago and just found when I was tidying up my computer on the symptoms of occupation as, you know, indexes of its unease/disease.