newyorkette

^{Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)}

The article of the week for me was Jonah Lehrer’s (not online, unfortunately) “Eureka Hunt.” It re-awakened memories of a puzzle that had been given to me years ago as I fled Paris to Madrid, broke. Stuck in Madrid, separated from the strange mathemetician who had given me the puzzle (and with whom I’d suddenly, naturally, fallen in love with just before leaving), I diverted all my spare neurotic energy (of which I had plenty to spare) to its solution. To be exact, he didn’t give me the puzzle (he never gave me a thing, the sweet poor slob), but rather gave me instructions for the making of the puzzle, which, in my spare time between discovering the beauty and oddity of the world and bewailing the impetuousness that had led me to leave Paris, I duly constructed. It turns out this puzzle is known as the “yoke puzzle,” and is as old as the hills.

Well, you’d think that having constructed the puzzle myself, I’d have been in a superb position to solve it, too. But no. I could not figure it out. The object was to move one bead from it’s position on one side of the puzzle, to the other side, next to the other bead, on the same string. I wracked my poor brain over the puzzle (and it was a poor brain at the time, having been addled by five years of modelling, which turned it to mush, basically) for weeks, then months… The puzzle became the metaphor for the state of my love life. Finally, the mysterious mathemetician who had given me the puzzle advised me (in the course of a surreptitious telephone call made on someone else’s dime, or peseta) to “drink a few glasses of wine and try it again.”

I did as instructed, and lo and behold, I had my eureka moment!

And therein, I’m sure, lies many a tale of alcoholism and genius. (Not on my part, unfortunately! I remained on the wagon, and not quite a genius, alas!)

(image: carolita johnson)

Regarding Silent Minds, by Jerome Groopman, if I’m ever in a coma or vegetative state (and I don’t mean New Jersey, which is the Garden State, silly!), please, no matter what you think, just pull my plug. I’ve had a great life, and am not greedy about staying alive at all costs. That said, till science can really tell whether I’m truly not consciously listening to whatever you say, kindly be gracious about it. Just in case.

(image: carolita johnson)

You know what? I didn’t think I was going to like Jane Kramer’s article on Elizabeth Lecompte, “Experimental Journey” (not online) but I did! My favorite lines are right at the very end, where they tumble down head over heels to the bottom of the column:

You know what I want? I want a dog. A dog who’s out hunting all day, and he comes home, pant, pant, and I know he loves me. How do you define pleasure? Sometimes I just want to stare at the sky, to sit in a beautiful space and stare at the sky through trees. Am I just lazy? I’m guilty even feeling that way. Well, not so much guilty but anxious. And now – all the work I’m doing–I’m not even anxious, because I know I could walk away. I see my friend Alex Katz, painting, painting–probably he’ll die painting. “Oh, move over here,’ I say. ‘Tell me your secret.’

I read it after managing to tear my eyes off that photo of Rudolf Nureyev, adorning Joan Acocella’s, “Wild thing,” reviewing Julie Kavanagh’s new bio. I saw Rudolf perform several times when I was a child. I remember taking the 7 from Flushing, Main Street with my mother into Manhattan to go see him. I was too young to be drooling over him, but looking at him made me understand what all the drooling would one day be about. I don’t care if his biographer didn’t like him. What’s to like? Some people are made to be adored, not liked.

“Married love,” by Tessa Hadley confirmed my expectations of the homeliness to come of the comical, idealistic marriage between Lottie and the old guy. But all my cynicism was erased with the last line (not a spoiler, don’t worry):

(...) Lottie followed the ordinary kitchen music–the crescendo of the kettle, the chatter of crockery, the punctuation of cupboard doors, the chiming of the spoon in the cup–as if she might hear in it something that was meant for her.

And snip, snip! Definitely read The Shadow Act (not online), Hilton Als on Kara Walker. Here’s a slide show.

“The insufferable gaucho,” by Roberto Bolaño has a little of everything: it’s a western (of the Pampas variety), it’s got a rather Monty Pythonesque rabbit moment, it’s got Borges wandering around in the shadows, it’s got a Marquezian dilapidation of society, a sort of devolution of humanity. Go ahead—don’t be afraid of what Stephen King says about short stories.

That was enough for me this week. Besides, someone stole my magazine before I could finish reading it.

(image: carolita johnson)

There are things, ugly desires, dark, simmering rages, festering hatreds, repulsive beliefs, and just plain embarrasing mediocrities jostling alongside all the good and boring things one values within even the most docile of parents. Sometimes they come out in a humiliating (for you, but perhaps beautiful for the involved parties) affair with someone younger than your sister/brother or daughter/son, sometimes they come out in a public toilet (Hertzberg on Craig), and sometimes they come out in the form of “Mr. Bones”, which I read mostly on my cell phone going downtown and then back uptown to finally find my copy of TNY in my letterbox. Paul Theroux’s Mr. Bones is part Minotaur, part Mr. Magoo.

Aptly, Crawford’s cartoon is my pick of the week: Is this your first time…?

Larry Doyle’s “Portrait in Evil,” makes evil, and Karl Rove, funny again.

But “Crybabies,” by Jerome Groopman made me shake my own hand in congratulations for not having any babies, thereby neatly preventing the evil which is the colicky baby. There is nothing you can do about a screaming, colicky baby. NOTHING. Read my lips: NOTHING. It is nothing more than a test of your own capacity for evil. So, good luck. And the article isn’t online, either. But if you want to know what you’re missing, click here.

(Eat up!)

In France, one tends to “savor,” “breakfast,” “lunch,” “dine,” “snack,” or “nibble” (a favorite word, “grignoter“). What’s more, it’s all about doing so with someone, which could even mean you, yourself, in a self-centering moment. When I returned to New York, I was often struck by the simple “eating” that got done here. Asked if I needed to “go get some food,” I took it to mean: stuff something into my “pie-hole” to make the stomach stop its grumbling. The “Food Issue” reveals that while it really is all about “food” here, depending where we’re from, the meaning behind all this ingesting and digesting shines out of different places in our psyches.

Which reminds me: never mind that awful “shimmering” thing in Judith Thurman’s “Fast Lane” (not online, but here’s the abstract). If you ever want to experience a subtle joy, pay for your boyfriend’s colonic irrigation. Especially if he is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and you are convinced he’s full of “it.”

For me, the stars of this “Food Issue” were “Luda and Milena,” the heroines of Lara Vapnyar’s fiction piece. Wherein it is confirmed that all is fair in love and war, even when the arms race inventory includes cheese puffs and cabbage pies.

Was it the homonym that made this the perfect issue in which to feature an article about Manu Chao (pronounced, at least by anglophones, as “chow”) ? Don’t tell me you didn’t notice! Travelling Man: Manu Chao’s polyglot pop, by Sasha Frere-Jones.

“Real Food,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie features this compliment that I will be actively seeking to use at every opportunity:

“Auntie, this is soup that you washed your hands well before cooking.”

I worry about Adam Gopnik putting hits on chickens in “New York Local: Eating the fruits of the five boroughs.” I was hoping he’d render an account of how, before the awed eyes of his children, he actually wrings the neck of a chicken he raised himself. (No, not really! But putting a price on the head of a New York chicken does raise questions of just how far one can go in one’s mission to eat local…)

Gary Shteyngart nearly made me cry at the end of Sixty-nine cents, but personally, I’d have taken the beet salad: I used to wish I were dead every time my parents announced we were going to MacDonald’s.

David Remnick sobers us up with a digestive expresso in the form of “The Lobby,” on the bitter subject of the “Isreal Lobby.”

And for dessert? Make your own Orange and Almond cake! Only seven simple ingredients (two of which are almonds and oranges), and online only: Claudia Roden’s recipes.

Favorite food-related cartoon (besides mine): Crawford’s “You can stop the pain, Marcel…,” based, he tells me, on a true story.

(image: carolita johnson)

In “The Human Bomb” Adam Gopnik observes what many French people take unashamed comfort in:

The French police are not known for their gentle touch with psychos.

And the comparison of Nicolas Sarkozy to Brigitte Bardot is particularly insightful and apt, love-handles (poignées d’amour?) notwithstanding. Gopnik’s little twist of transfering the “Human Bomb” epithet from the actual Human Bomb to Sarkozy is also very French, rhetorically speaking. Très bien!

Luckily I read Gopnik’s piece before reading Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “Nawabdin Electrician,” because that one piece of fiction was enough to sustain me for the whole week. If I’ve been waiting for another fiction piece to fall in love with, it was worth the wait. The suspense at the end, where we wonder if mercy will turn this piece into something else altogether, is acute. Is mercy a good thing of itself? Or is it a luxury? Does it really make one morally superior? Questions are raised.

(image: carolita johnson)

Paul Simms’s “My Near-Death Experience” is so so true. Live every moment like it’s your last. Or watch your life pass before your eyes someday and be bored to death.

I don’t understand “Mayberry Man.” Because as well-written as the piece was, halfway through it I realized that everything I was reading therein classified as TMI. I mean, the only reason I can possibly imagine needing all this information about Rudy Giuliani is if there actually is a good chance he’ll be our next president. Is this what Peter J. Boyer is trying to tell us? If this is so, then please excuse me while I prepare for my assisted suicide.

Fiction this week was the opposite of last week’s heavily estrogen-spritzed, lusty lady piece, with a surprisingly heavy intravenous dose of bitter, hairy-chested testosterone, in T. Cooper’s “Swimming.” There’s a cockroach in it, too, up a kid’s nose. Total boy stuff.

“Parallel Play” (not online), by Tim Page, about living with Asperger’s Syndrome awoke some old memories as well as some old bugaboos. My dad was diagnosed as an “Aspie” recently. Before that, he was often diagnosed as a jerk. Most people don’t get people with Asperger’s. The thing about “Aspies,” which I remembered as I read Page’s piece, is that even when they talk about how hard it is for them, they do seem to take pride in it. Maybe a bit too much pride for comfort. I’m not usually one to deny anyone a bit of self-satisfaction. Why? Because I’m often guilty of that sin myself, and sometimes wonder if it’s a tic I’ve inherited from my Aspie father. Which naturally leads to questions of free will, and all sorts of other worries.

While I worry, here’s the abstract of the piece, but you’ll have to get the paper version for the full article.

Is it my imagination, or was this issue very manly? (Note: I have no problem with manly. Me like manly. Manly good. Me just asking!)

(image: carolita johnson)

Nancy Franklin’s “Women’s Work,” begins her review of Lifetime’s new season of female-oriented shows with an observation that confirms what I thought I might possibly have been imagining: Lifetime is all about reinforcing the fears that discourage women from being as free as they think they are. The killer always turns out to be the boyfriend or husband, and the boyfriend/husband turns out to be the killer or swindler. Women, barricade yourselves, put on your virtual burkas. Men are Bluebeard, or the big, bad wolf in every story. The message is: can’t live with them (because you might be killed or bamboozled big time), can’t live without them (as Maureen Dowd may well know). Now I know why I never liked Lifetime. Is the idea is to use fear to unite women, the easier to suppress them? That would be so old-fashioned that it would nearly be quaint. No, more likely the easier to sell to them. Beware of this kind of “television for women.” It doesn’t have women’s best interests at heart.

Herbert Spencer, a “Man with a plan,” would probably concur, if he were a TV-watcher, which he probably wouldn’t have been had he lived in our times. He observed that:

women manifested “a worship of power under all its forms; and hence a relative conservatism.” Enfranchised women would tend to vote for authoritarian figures, and so obstruct the natural law of progress toward an egalitarian society.

Sound relevant to our times?

Shapin’s exploration of Spencer yields so many contradictory yet sense-making details that you could easily use this piece to answer all the questions in a Keirsey Temperament Sorter. (Spencer would have been an INFJ, if I’m not mistaken). This is a purely gratuitous comment, though, and one and all are welcome to pshaw me. It’s perhaps just a passing thought. In any case, even if you don’t care how Spencer’s evolutionary theory differs from Darwin’s, you’ll realize how much more interesting Spencer was as a personality, and, moreover, be glad you never had to deal with him yourself. Especially if you’re a woman with a big nose, and in love with him.

Say what you will about my fortitude (or lack thereof), but An Error in the Code, by Richard Preston, was much too painful to read. My fingers hurt just thinking about it. I have nothing but compassion for anyone having to live with the compulsive self-destruction discussed in this article. But don’t ask me to read it. Here is an online abstract of the piece, which is not online itself.

In the Fiction, you have to love Hari Kunzru’s “Magda Mandela,” no matter how many times she tells you to “Go now. Go away. Fuck off. Go. I love you. Go.” She likes “a old man.” Oh yes, she does. The f-word makes seven appearances on one page, all very necessary to the plot.

Sasha Frere-Jones has no idea what I’d do without my inner Grinch, but if you want to lose yours, here’s how to do it: Great Danes.

And another great Christophe Niemann illo. Have a look and guess what James Surowiecki’s article is about before you read it.

(image: carolita johnson)

Emdashes proves herself to be the master of the a propos header with “Let me take you to Monkeytown!” I’ve been humming the reference song all week. Thought it was out of my system, but now it’s been reactivated.

Speaking of music, why pick on Prince? He was very nice at the Paris “Bains-Douches” (yes, I did dance next to him, but he didn’t recognize me—and yet, he didn’t act too uppity either), surprisingly petite and sexy. I’d gladly pay sixty thousand dollars to have brunch with him. If I was the kind of person that does things like that, I mean.

This week’s TNY was very informative. Everything you always wanted to know about spam, in Michael Specter’s “Damn Spam,” which I’m tempted to send out as link in a huge mass mailing, to see if the tautological effect could make the world explode.

I’d love to meet somebody who thinks Elizabeth Kolbert is a big time downer. I mean, the prospect of the end of the world as we know it need not be so depressing, right? Well, it kind of is. But maybe she’ll start putting more jokes in her pieces, to lighten things up. Did you hear the one about the entire honeybee population disappearing? You know the punch line. “Stung” (or, “everything you never knew about honeybees and never even thought to ask about which then made you feel a sense of impending hopelessness when you got the answers”) is not online, but certainly absorbing enough to make you miss your subway stop, in both directions. Which I did. UPDATE: “Stung” is now online, here.

I haven’t finished “An Unsolved Killing: The murder of an Assistant U.S. Attorney” by Jeffrey Toobin yet, but it’s boding ill. I’m not really sure, but in spite of the writing, which drew me in well enough to find myself reading it on the elliptical, I think I won’t like the end of this story. (UPDATE: I didn’t. Even more depressing and ill-auguring than the bees.)

My favorite line of “So it is in life,” a series of short fictional texts by Daniil Kharms:

I was very curious as to what sort of scholarly works these were. But that remained unknown. Marina said that he had been born with a pen in his hand, but didn’t divulge any more details of his scholarly activities. I began to suss it out and, finally, I learned that he was in the cobbler’s line of work.

I know many people like that.

And cartoon of the week goes to Crawford, of “I have people coming.”

And I’m sure the only reason this story didn’t become a GOAT item, is because it only happened last night: submarine surrenders in Brooklyn.

(image: carolita johnson)

As Emdashes noted, this week’s TNY was a barrel of monkeys, what with Ian Parker’s fascinating swingin’ bonobo story, featuring a beautiful portrait of a “peace-loving” bonobo, and a bit of bonobo porn (that photo is not online, only in the paper version, where people can see it while you read on the subway).

Sasha Frere-Jones’ simeo-sino-coolbrit opera story comes complete with “Eeeeeeeeeee!”, and Ben McGrath’s “Muscle Memory” (not online, unfortunately), seriously and delightfully (to me, a Bionic Woman fan) conjures up visions of bionic women and bionic monkeys.

In the non-monkey section, the fiction, A.L. Kennedy’s “Wasps,” will hopefully inspire malcontent housewives to pack their TNY in a suitcase and leave, for chrissakes! Or at least call an exterminator.

And let’s hear it for that cover by Anita Kunz, “Girls will be girls.” The three images of women that scare me the most, united.

Now, for my favorite monkey song! (From Disney’s “Jungle Book”) Shoobedeeboo!

(image: carolita johnson)

I was in Junior High School, and the train station was part of the shortcut home. My panties were wedged deeply into my crotch after walking a mile homewards, and something had gone wrong with the configuration of my fleshy parts in that region: it was unbearable. In desperation, I’d thought, here comes the express train—it’s going by so fast, nobody will see…

This was years before I became a commuter on express trains passing people on platforms: needless to say I’ll never forget the first time I was on an express train and noticed that the people on the platform we passed might as well have been moving in slow motion. That was the day I blushed to remember that time long ago when I’d thought I’d cleverly taken advantage of a passing train to unwedge my panties from my crotch and rearrange my labia more comfortably, having reached under my skirt and tunneled past the elastic of my panties with no reserve whatsoever. It brings to mind the poster I saw in the Hallmark shop’s window the other day that went something like, “Sing like nobody’s listening.” Anyway, this was the day I imagined the conversation on the passing train must have been going something like “Hey, look,” by Simon Rich.

Oh, dear.

Well! Denby surely jests when he implies that he’d rather have seen Julie Andrews play Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady”—this “idiocy” in casting is mentioned in the context of John Travolta’s cross-dressing role in “Hairspray.” But preferring Julie to Audrey in this review hasn’t made us forget his last review, of “Knocked up,” which is still raising questions and musings about irresponsible schlubs mating with boring beauties, on Emdashes.

And how about Christophe Mann’s clever illo accompanying James Surowiecki’s “Fuel for Thought”? Almost dispenses with the need to read.

PS - My advice: if you’re going to sing like nobody’s listening, do make sure nobody is listening!

(image: carolita johnson)

The best line in the magazine this week,

He screams (BB pellet) with joy.

is in Jack Handey’s “My Nature Documentary.”

Although,

Alexander reports that Auberon always defended corporal punishment in schools, or at least in Catholic schools, where, he argued, it relieved the monks of the strains of celibacy. A beating, he said, was “a small sacrifice for a boy and a great treat for a monk.”

is not bad either. (“Waugh stories,” by Joan Acocella)

But my pick of the issue is the cover, “Bright Idea,” by Staake.

(image: carolita johnson)

Okay, we all know why Emdashes managed to read it all in about five minutes—because she’s fast, that’s why!—but I’ll tell you why I finished reading so quickly: the “summer movies” segments interspersed between stories and articles bugged the bejeezus out of me. I started reading the first one, and then thought, “This is gonna turn out to be an ad for American Express at the end, or something.” They all seemed like advertorials. Or advermemories? And each one seemed more so than the previous one, so I skipped them all. It could just be a mood I’m in, since I’m readying up to present my Apeface series at the Rejection Show again—when you’re full of your own memories, it’s hard to have patience for anyone else’s. So, read those summer movies is you will, and do let me know what I missed.

Also, bravo to the photo editor (Elisabeth Biondi) for managing to wrangle two pages of photographs to go with the fiction pieces instead of the usual one.

For me, the most pertinent and subjectively interesting piece of fiction was Junot Díaz’s “Wildwood.” (Sorry, not online!) Minus the poverty and the heavy housework, and okay, and minus the punk haircut (I was very under the radar as a teenager), I totally identified with the mother-daughter ordeal. It was almost a relief to see that others have a similar experience to mine, pyschologically speaking. (Now I know why I’ll never let my mom catch up to me!)

Next favorite was the story set in the Paris garrets, David Hoon Kim’s “Sweetheart Sorrow,” depressing as it was, it also depicted a convergence of lives that typically happens in Paris between the elderly, domestics, and foreign students that don’t even look or feel their nationality. Again, I could totally relate: but my elderly benefactor was a 98-year old whose main activity was to sleep while I did all my laundry in her bathtub and/or washed my hair in her bathroom sink while I was supposed to be watching over her during her keeper’s afternoons off. Madame Guggenheim rented me a garret for about a hundred dollars a month, the only condition being that I’d take care of her on Saturday afternoons, and never complain about the lack of heat, hot water, bathroom, phone, toilet, nor about the crazy old lady next door to me (known locally only as “la Serbe,” who everyone was terrified of, and who would stand outside my door and bellow that I was an “American whore!”) Anyway, that’s my story, read Kim’s, it’s much more poignant and melancholy.

And how about Adrian Tomine’s beautiful cover, and Christoph Niemann’s worth-at-least-500-words illo?

BTW - I learned the identity of “La Serbe” in my last few months of living there (and in Mme Guggenheim’s last few months of living): Nada Popovic. Hi, Nada! Ever get the smell of basil from my homemade pesto attempt out of your hair?

I get my TNY by subscription as a reward for my contribution to WNYC, which I support in spite of my occasional objections to Leonard Lopate (his gospel hours, his embarrassing adoration of Patricia T. O’Conner), a heck of a lot of religious content, and Jonathan Schwartz’s strange insistance on sharing his love affair with the insane-sounding “Carousel Waltz”. My contribution is ten dollars a week, forever, or until my credit card dies. All I asked for in return: my reward and a mailbox free of WNYC requests for contributions.

Anyway, never mind my grumpy nature: the thing is, even though my contribution is ongoing, my reward apparently isn’t! They have not coordinated their gift-giving to synch with their gift-receiving. That means that I will spend the next month not getting my TNY in the mail. The E.T.A. of my next issue is apparently May 7th. Get it together WNYC!

Being too cheap and stubborn to go out and buy my own (alas, here we go with my grumpy nature again!), I have been reading The New Yorker on my cell phone instead. Thus, the illustration above in honor of my stalwart efforts to read TNY come hell or highwater, or not.

But it’s not just in my honor, because how am I able I do this? I found that Opera, a web browser recommended to me by my high-tech medievalist friend Maria in Berlin, does a “mini” version, aptly called “Opera Mini.” It’s free, just like the computer-based version. I downloaded it onto my cell phone, and found that the magazine was quite readable, even on my inch and a quarter by inch and six-eighths screen. I was even able to view my own cartoon this week on the site. Very satisfying.

Yesterday, I spent my lunch break reading Atul Gawande’s “The way we age now” on my cell phone in the “Go Sushi” downstairs from my next fitting client, and was quite pleased about it, however horrified I was by the prospect of my future and inevitable calcification.

Calcification may be in the future for us all, but so is reading magazines on our cell phones! Try it! Don’t be an old fart!

PS - in case anyone has tried to post a comment lately and not succeeded, it seems my anti-spamming measures have been nuking perfectly acceptable comments before I even see them… Sorry about that! Please keep trying, and let me know if you’re still not getting through.

(image: carolita johnson)

This is my first TNY weekend reader since the new online version of TNY. Have you seen it? It’s elegant, inviting, and spacious. And it’s got pictures, lots of pictures. Reading on the old version was a bit like stepping into an old fashioned phone booth, which was why it didn’t really matter whether I was reading it online on my 17-inch computer screen, or on my 2×1.5-inch cell phone screen. Now it does matter. (Now, it doesn’t look so good on my cell phone! Too many interruptions in the middle of articles, with things like “see more cartoons”, weirdly.) I’m sure the glitches will be figured out. So, welcome, new online TNY! (newyorker.com/magazine)

Speaking of pictures, I’ve realized that I’ve been silently admiring the work of James Surowiecki’s usual illustrator, Christoph Niemann, who also did this week’s cover, “T-Day.” Niemann is especially adroit with images that I call “charade” images—I look at them before I read the article (and if possible, before reading the title of the article), and try to figure out what the article’s going to be about. This week’s image is particularly eloquent: the snake of temptation, the indigestible house stuck in its gut. It’s about sub-prime mortgages and the devastation they’ve wrought, of course.

I’ll remember to mention Niemann’s illos more often, since they’re always just right.

(image: carolita johnson)

Jane Mayer’s piece, “Whatever it takes,” about the television series (which I love), “24” and its rather twisted creator, Joel Surnow, addresses the suspected effects of the show on the American public, but fails to address the possibility that people who allow a fictional (verging on action comics) television show to influence their convictions on the subject of torture and human rights are in need of psychological observation, and certainly not fit to govern or work in the military:

Laura Ingraham, the talk-radio host, has cited the show’s popularity as proof that Americans favor brutality. “They love Jack Bauer,” she noted on Fox News. “In my mind, that’s as close to a national referendum that it’s O.K. to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.”

Let’s hope addled minds like Laura Ingraham are not common in Washington. Because my appreciaton of the show is proof that I like a good suspense thriller on a Monday night, and not of any belief that torture is an effective means of extracting truth from a terrorist. If only it were.

Richard Brody’s title to his review of the Robert Mitchum DVD collection should get an award of some kind: “The Credible Hulk.”

Kate Julian quotes “The Third Man” on Switzerland’s contribution to the world in her Tables for Two on the Swiss eatery “Trestle on Tenth,” which seems a cruel generalization. So here’s another, positive one: I think the Swiss compensate for their dull history with the most considerate and consistently pleasant lovers, as generally agreed amongst the people who have experienced them. And the country itself inspires such amusing theses as my friend, Juan, once presented, proving that Geneva does not actually exist.

Tessa Hadley’s “The Swan” is a nice variation on the spouse-gone-awry template, injected with with a feeling of senselessness that for some reason reminded me of “Straw Dogs,” although there was no violent gang in it. It was as if the gang had been internalized, somehow. See if you agree.

Meanwhile, David Sedaris continues to force himself to do odd things in order to write humorously and without perjuring himself about them: this time, using yellow water from a flower vase to make his coffee, and possibly using chicken broth to shave, and champagne to flush the toilet, in “The way we are.” I believe this is a cry for help from darkest Normandy. The best part of the story is the blast from the past, leading to the reflections on sexuality and traditional roles.

(image: carolita johnson, varmint, God.)

The best line in the whole magazine, and the most pertinent for me this week came from Jonathan Rosen’s critical piece, “Missing Link,” about the renewed interest in the story of Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s less lucky, less wiley (and, notably, less unwilling to endure the slings and arrows of a public unwilling to believe their uncle was a monkey) contemporary:

“(...)when a later British biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, was pressed by a clergyman on the nature of God, he reportedly said, “He has an inordinate fondness for beetles.’”

Alfred Russel Wallace was a much more interesting character than Darwin, bolder, poorer—a self-made man, all the things we like our heros to be. Maybe he’s just the thing the evolutionists need, now that Darwin’s integrity has been called to question. Me, personally, I think there is strong evidence to to support the belief in an annoying prankster God, the more I see of the world.

For example, the reason the above quote was so pertinent is because I recently had the opportunity to admire the evolutionary accomplishment of New York’s most common beetle: the German cockroach. One made a spectacular entrance into my life yesterday, when I opened the hall closet door and noticed a strangely slow-falling, unidentified small object trace a straight, blurry brownish line in the air from the top of the door to the floor. I bent over to see what had fallen, and lo and hehold, it was one of God’s favorite creatures. Just think: that closet door was its proportional equivalent of one of the Twin Towers, and that cockroach simply landed gently. Never mind what kind of guts it must have taken for it to decide to make that kind of a jump. Cockroaches are like mini-Supermen.

But perhaps they also have hubris. I believe that cockroach was congratulating itself, patting itself on the back, feeling all fired up with adrenaline, thinking, “Yeehaaaa! That was invigorating!” Perhaps it was even feeling rather good, or even a little too smug, about how physically superior, proportionally, it was than myself. Because it remained there for a second too long before taking the few steps that got my own adrenaline flowing. I had a narrow box in my hand that contained a heavy ballast for my bathroom light fixture, and instinctively brought it down with a big CLACK on this amazing little daredevil.

(image: carolita johnson)

Running behind because I went away for the weekend, but no doubt I’m not the only one behind in my reading.

Beware of “Good People,” they’re a mess. By David Foster Wallace.

Ryszard Kapuscinski’s personal history piece, “The Open World,” in the be-careful-what-you-wish-for department, is beautiful, and the translation sparkles.

Peter Schjeldahl’s “Different Strokes,” about Gayford’s new book about Paul Gauguin’s sojourn with Van Gogh in Arles (“The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles” (Little, Brown; $24.99) which is as exciting as any gossip you’ll read in The Post, but much more refined.

(image: carolita johnson)

I like David Sedaris, but I have heard from those birds (The Birds), who say yes, there was a window-pecking incident, but nowhere near as escalated as he depicts it. They watched him fill a couple of windows with record albums and terrorist mug shots, and then saw him get down to writing about their so-called “attack” with a bowl of ice cream and the TV on.

“Pure exaggeration, and furthermore, we’re titmice, not chaffinches. Gah.”

When I asked the birds why they were pecking at his window for so long, they said, “We have our reasons, and we don’t need to share them with anyone.” The fact is, they’re just too embarrassed to admit the true reason for their apparently irrational behavior. And they should be. Wouldn’t you?

Needless to say, when you know why they do it, you know why I doubt Sedaris’ story. If the birds were pecking at their own reflection, it means they couldn’t possibly have seen the record albums behind the reflection. If anything, the record albums placed behind the window would produce an even more effective mirror effect. The images would only have had an effect if placed on the outside of the window, eliminating the reflection. Nice try, David.