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.

Double Takes

In the November 19th issue. Lauren Collins (twice), Richard Brody, Larry Doyle and, of course, David Denby (twice).

Best line in the whole magazine, in "Why We Strike" - "Management is currently offering us adjusted bubkes of what they are making off Internet sell-through, streaming, ringtones, Webisodes, cellisodes, iPodisodes, celebrity-narrated colonoscosodes, or the psychotic episodes they've been beaming into your brain, brought to you by Clozaril." (51)

My emphasis. When I regained my breath, I realized that that's how you spell bubkes.

I liked Lauren Collins on the restaurant Taim. Not gushing and a little ironic, "You get the feeling she spends a lot of time at the Container Store," but positive. And she nicely manages the contrast between the attempt to "make gourmet food 'street'" and the yummier ambition, to "take street food, and make it gourmet." She sets it up and doesn't belabor it. And maybe it helps that I'd actually like to eat the food she's describing. (19) Or maybe that's the intended effect of a good review.

Apparently Ethan Hawke is playing a "not very bright kid brother" in a Sidney Lumet caper. Excellent. (26) Thank you, David Denby!

Richard Brody says some smart things about Griffith, Murnau and Eisenstein. Except that thing about Eisenstein as the cinema's "first modernist" . . . that's a bit much. (30)

Lauren Collins' "No Seconds" on the famous last meal thing is, fortunately, in extremely bad taste, since it appears while there is a moratorium on executions in the US. And dull into the bargain. And, just for the record, I would never, EVER buy Secret Ingredients, The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink which is advertised, oh-so-conveniently, on the next page.

Skipped Jon Lee Anderson's latest installment in the adventure serial he's working on.

I valiantly read pages and pages of Pierpont's essay on Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier. My favorite part was "Oliver then insures that the film is too unnaturally beautiful ever to be confused with reality."(72) That's Henry V (1944).

John Lahr doesn't love Mel Brooks' Broadway adaptation of "Young Frankenstein" and admits, "These are hard words to write." Really? (88)

But the biggest surprise of the issue has got to be this: Brian De Palma's new film Redacted, set in midst of the violence of the Iraq war, is actually about film critic David Denby's media habits. Check it out.

gawande in rare form

"Comment," the top slot in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town," is almost always a good read and Atul Gawande proves himself master of the short and pithy, in "Sick and Twisted." I'd only read his longer things before, but his comment is a call for health care reform, and a warning about the difficulties of this in the US. He organizes the essay around Michael Moore's film, and the possibilities of outrage.

But I think my favorite line was not exactly about health care at all.

"We have never corrected failure in something so deeply embedded in people’s lives and in the economy without the pressure of an outright crisis. The welfare reforms of 1996 made changes that profoundly affected people’s lives, but only those of the poor, which was why voters supported the experiment."

Note, Gawande only gets top billing in the print edition of TNY. The online version of this week's "Talk of the Town" leads with the waitress in the bikini.

that was Pauline Kael, on Steel Magnolias

The thing about the chalk and the blackboard. From 1989. Or, really, I'm not sure the capsule appeared until 1990. I remembered it all these years, and looked it up for accuracy in my CTNY.

Simon Rich, funny enough to make me smile, in The New Yorker. And, New Yorker related, but NOT funny enough to make me smile, at McSweeney's. Funnier than the "Shouts and Murmurs" - the comments on this Matthew Yglesias post about Simon Rich's homeroom antics.

Oh, wait, nevermind. It's kinda funny for someone who I imagined was much older. Graduated college in '07 ??!! Young people should be funnier than this and their frame of reference should be slightly different.

*****

"Chalk scraping across a blackboard for two hours." Name that film. Or that reviewer.

Somewhere, in the exciting discussion of TNY design that I engaged in at Emdashes (that somewhere along the line became a discussion of movie reviews and capsules), Emily wondered if TNY had ever given stars for actual theater or film recommendations. Interesting question.

Me, I don't see the stars idea working, at least for the films. The film capsules (more or less) seem, to me, to work through reference and analogy (maybe a legacy of Kael, maybe not) - a film is like this or that movement or style or director or sensory experience. If that's your thing, you go, if not, then not. Or maybe they just work that way for me, since I'm skeptical about their evaluations to begin with.

No, honestly. I think they don't and won't (for awhile) have stars - not even one - because you're supposed to know. The listings are supposed to be informative (with a bit of evaluation built into what's listed and what's not) and you're supposed to have the frame of reference (perhaps to recent issues of TNY) to know what you'd like. It's part of the snob appeal. Like a cookbook.

That said, the film capsule (above, and that's the whole capsule) that has inspired me low these many years is quite evaluative. As in, "I give it 3 sticks of chalk scraping across a blackboard!"

And I do think Goings On About Town appeals, maybe even primarily, to out-of-towners. I've always been one and I've always read Goings On and only recently has it occurred to me that I could use it as an actual (and not virtual) guide.

The Case of the Curious Hedge Fund, and Other Tales

So I read about Trillin's insular Canadians before I read about Tina+Diana. I might read the whole book someday.

The Taguba article was awful news, to be sure, but I had a hard time following it and I'm not sure whether Hersh needed more editing, or less.

And Alex Ross was a pleasure to read, though I wished he'd taken it a little more slowly too. Kind of a breathless pace for an orchestral road trip, rather than a contemplative one.

I have to say, I kind of liked Acocella's historical turn in her reviews of recent Romeo+Juliet and Swan Lake productions.

All in the June 25 New Yorker.

But the real surprise in my recent reading was John Cassidy and The Case of the Curious Hedge Fund. From, I think, the July 2 issue. Fascinating. The thing I loved most was that while I was reading I gained a pretty clear understanding of how the hedge fund simulator worked, though what a hedge fund was or how it worked remained shrouded in darkness. As it should be.

The story begins with a Dutch economist, blindfolded and thrown in the back of a speeding limo:

"Kat, a forty-three-year-old Dutch economist, had recently left a high-paying job at the London office of Bank of America to pursue a career in academe. He didn’t know much about hedge funds, but he agreed to be interviewed by an executive at the firm. Hedge funds are privately owned financial companies that raise cash from very wealthy individuals and institutional investors, such as pension funds and charitable endowments. Unlike banks and brokerage firms, hedge funds are largely unregulated, which gives them considerable latitude in investing their clients’ money."

He's heard the rumors, seen the heavies on the street:

"Hedge funds go to great lengths to maintain their mystique: Simons and other managers rarely grant interviews, and the mostly young analysts and traders who make up the funds’ staffs sign confidentiality agreements barring them from discussing their work. The public, denied information about the industry’s methods, has focussed instead on the conspicuous spending it has enabled, seeing in the life styles of the funds’ managers proof of their ingenuity. Steven Cohen, the founder of SAC Capital Advisors, lives in a thirty-two-thousand-square-foot house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and last year reportedly paid $143.5 million for a painting by Willem de Kooning."

He barely makes his escape, to plot revenge (with his trusty technologically savvy side-kick) from the groves of academe:

"Kat, realizing that it would be nearly impossible to determine the trading strategies of individual hedge funds—the companies would never agree to divulge them—decided to study their results instead. Hedge funds aren’t required to file quarterly reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, so it isn’t easy to get accurate information about their earnings. However, several financial-publishing companies now collate data on monthly returns which hedge funds supply to them voluntarily, presumably in order to impress potential investors. The databases that these publishers have assembled are neither complete nor entirely reliable, but they include information on thousands of funds, some of it dating back to the nineteen-eighties."

The rest you have to read for yourself. I wouldn't want to spoil the suspense.

I vote Bloomberg.

No, not really. But George Packer's "Talk of the Town, Comment, Mr. Independent" in the July 2 issue really wowed me. As long as we're picking favorites this morning.

I liked the serious insights - on the history of independent candidates, on "the power of faux symbols in our political life," on Bloomberg's money as "a profoundly undemocratic force in public life." And I think I laughed aloud and with glee at the possibility of the demise of the Sun Belt attitude, "no one from the Northeast has a chance to win, or should even be considered American."

This was a nice mix of serious and funny, too: "Last week, Bloomberg ended his affiliation with the Republican Party, as he did seven years ago with the Democratic Party (thereby changing his political registration as many times as Hillary Clinton has had a geographical makeover and Rudolph Giuliani has torn up his marriage license)."

It got me to thinking about the glorious (now, in all seriousness) instability of our current or future representatives - Giuliani cannot represent "family values," Hillary (what with her cosmopolitan globetrotting, from New York State to Illinois, etc) cannot represent "home" and Bloomberg cannot toe a party line. Oh yeah, and Obama's "race" and "religion" are all vexed and vexing too. Hooray!

a belated father's day issue

The July 2 issue has Shalom Auslander on Life with Alcoholic Orthodox Father, or, what happens in your head when 1/2 of the center of your moral universe drinks and swears and builds things. I didn't like the timing so much in this one, but the pain was pitch perfect.

Then Joan Acocella explores a series of father-son relationships via the life, work and drinking habits of the Waughs. I really don't care about the Waughs as writers (Chaucer? Really?), but the family stuff is neat.

I'm planning to read Auletta on the Wall Street Journal, but not Talbot on brain scans.

Oooo, and I just found my June 25 issue. First up, Lady Di. Taguba will just have to wait.

Letter from Beijing.

I've been spending all my spare minutes reading "Letter from Beijing. Enemy of the State. The complicated life of an idealist." By Jianying Zha. Definitely my favorite New Yorker article in long while.

Now that I look at it, the letter is now almost a month old, but it's very long and I haven't very many spare minutes lately.

Wouldn't you know?

The New Yorker gets shut out of the National Magzine Awards and I get all huffy. New York Magazine indeed. Now that's a magazine so lame it doesn't even have it's own loyal-critical blog! (In all honesty I have not checked.)

good story well told

From a Gawker spy, "He [Gore Vidal] got a collective muted gasp when he said 'The New Yorker was a good magazine when Tina Brown was heading it...' But then went on to say 'And now (insert incredibly long pregnant pause) it's even better.'"

Ha! And the Gawker spy does a nice job recreating a spoken joke.

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.

Dancing About Architecture

I'm all for it.

But there are, it would seem, at least 2 documentary films currently in circulation about Klimt and the twists of fate and history that befell the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. You remember Schjeldahl's essay. And my strange fantasy.

Anyway, the films are Klimt ou le Testament d'Adèle, by Michel Vuillermet, and Stealing Klimt, by Jane Chablani, and you can read more info about the films through the links in the GreenCine Daily review. But I have to say, the descriptions there don't make me want to see the films. It may be the author's interest in the story, but it sounds like both of the films are all history, no art.

Is this so, and if so, why?

brilliant commentary on the style issue

Or, Notes on Marx from the Park Cities People Blog.

First, the initial response.

Then, a double take. Includes the following, "And lookie there! Bingo. Right on! Woo!" You'll want to read these, even if you skipped most of Patricia Marx, "Dressin' Texas" in the March 19 issue.

Park Cities, it would seem, is a well-to-do suburb in Dallas.

you listen here

MP3 readings of assorted New Yorker articles, 1993-2005 or thereabouts. I'm having some sound-related technical difficulties - and I'm too busy to futz - so I can't listen to these myself right now. But let me know what you think.

low-tech history at TNY

Harold Ross and E.B. White on "nauseating verbs." And the office bulletin board. So funny, at Today in Letters, from Feb 25.

I guess some of the credit goes to Thomas Kunkel, for editing Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross. But I'm not wild about that photo of Ross on the book. It's too pat. Not Ross, but that photo as a thing is too pat. Confusing, I know, but . . .

And, what's this? Both Emdashes and Today in Letters mention Ms. Dawn Powell.

A Town Without Contraception

A "university" town, mind you. Benjamin Greenfields would like to call your attention to Peter Boyer's "Annals of Religion, The Deliverer, A pizza mogul funds a moral crusade." It's not online, but there's this from Media Transparency. The print article itself surrounds that rather disturbing ad with Scarlett Johansson dressed as Cinderella. So you can flip right to it in that doozy of a Feb double issue.

As it turns out, it's currently illegal to try and outlaw contraception on a town by town basis.

Vampire Bats, Schjeldahl in the First Person, Poor Miss Shawn

Feb 12 issue.

I wouldn't want to miss Darwin Day. Does The New Yorker know about this holiday? And is that why they - oh so contrarian - published that excellent essay on Darwin's double, who "combines both halves of the debate over the meaning of evolution, cooling articulating the materialist mechanisms by which the simplest organisms morphed into human beings while arguing that our existence offers evidence of divine agency." (76)

Read all about Alfred Russel Wallace.

Carolita Johnson is right, that line about the beetles is outstanding.

I also liked that Rosen said of his subject, that he learned "the best defense against vampire bats" but did not tell us what that defense was! I'm dying to know.

But isn't every day Darwin Day at The New Yorker? Is there any other magazine that so responsibly covers the history of science?

Schjeldahl on Tintoretto is less easily quoted. But Carolita is right, again, there should have been more, and more appropriate pictures. I could hardly read the whole thing because I so badly wanted to pick up my computer and find the paintings. "So vast as to be essentially unseeable" (86) is one thing, but give it a chance, at least.

Schjeldahl's essays doesn't take to excerpts though, because the thing, from start to finish is an experience itself. I love the first person throughout and here, at the very end, the second person to - Schjeldahl asks, ""Who is Tintoretto's viewer?" [...] It might as well be you or me as some cinquecento ingrate, and, if we happen to think of people we know who might be interested, the artist encourages us to contact them without delay." (87)

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Gopnik on total war is strong and in any other issue, it's the piece I'd be posting on and praising. The fancy footwork that opens the article is right on, military history is experiencing a critical renaissance. Or something like that. I think it's due to an increased interest in the history of technology, but that's just me.

My least favorite moment has got to be, though, in the short review of Allen Shawn's book, "... Shawn, the son of a former editor of this magazine, analyzes the impact of coping with an autistic twin sister, who was institutionalized at the age of eight. He also lovingly and honestly traces phobic tendencies in his parents, who glossed over their daughter's condition and adopted "an across the board policy of secrecy" in front of their remaining children." (85)

Remaining? I would have chosen another turn of phrase, no matter how wordy it might have been.