newyorkette

(image: carolita johnson)

Anyone read “Vegetable Love,” or did you, like me, spend a lot more time ogling the breasts on Eve in the illustration by Exem Story? She looks like Tintin’s stripper sister. And I sincerely mean it when I say: those breasts are magnificent. (Notice, while you’re looking at boobs, that Adam looks like he’s wondering why he has no nipples at all. ) But what do exquisite double-D breasts have to do with vegetarianism, you may well wonder. Who cares!

For the record, I have eaten black pudding in Scotland, and enjoyed it immensely. I couldn’t do that if I was a Pythagorian: Steven Shapin explains everything you need to know about the moral, practical, mathematical, and religious implications of vegetarianism throughout the history of mankind.

Ian Parker’s “Digging for Dodos,” not online, contains one heart-wrenching line in it, written by a Dutchman in the 1500’s: “Because there were no inhabitants living there who made them afraid, so nor were they afraid of us, but just remained sitting, allowing us to beat them to death.” And so begins the end of the “dodoarsen” (“fat-ass”), or Dodo Bird.

Amos Oz’s “Heirs” left me agog. Which isn’t a bad thing. Shades of Kafka and Camus. Self-sufficient as a story, with or without explanation, but if you know what went down in that story, feel free to let me know. My paranoid literary criticism skills (which require placing myself in the author’s head, a very disagreeable sensation after years and years of it) are on strike these days, allowing me to enjoy a story or not, as the case may be.

“Azzam the American,” by Raffi Khatchadourian left me agog in the bad way, though. A brilliant reportage on a young American turned terrorist, extremely insightful, but somehow leaving one feel even more helpless to understand at the end.

(image: carolita johnson)

Who’s read their New Yorker “Winter Fiction Issue” cover to cover yet? If you’re like me, you started last week and then the holidays descended upon you like a plague of locusts, and your TNY is languishing under a pile of wrapping paper, or stuck behind a car seat. I finally spotted mine rolling its eyes at me in exasperation from the sofa, picked it up, set it on my lap, smoothed out the wrinkles, and let it tell me a few stories.

This week’s fiction features an unusual love story (is that possible? is there really anything new, love-wise, under the sun? maybe): “Demolition,” by Louise Erdrich. There’s something about it that reminds me of Hardy. Not the part where the heroine is a guy, though. Watch out for those bees. Not online. Read it on the train to Grandma’s house.

On Chesil Beach has the saddest, most hilarious sexual misunderstanding I’ve ever seen represented in words. The key moment, when the bride is beginning to gag on her completely oblivious bridegroom’s tongue:

(...) and now she really did think that she was going to be sick.
When he heard her moan, Edward knew that his happiness was almost complete.

Marguerite Duras’ rather existentialist love story, The Bible, deals with another misunderstanding. Someone once told me that all love was based on misunderstandings, “beautiful misunderstandings.” He, too, was French. But let’s not generalize! Discover her iconoclastic compatriot, Boris Vian, Parisian royalty if ever there was one—and not the dorky Prince Charles kind—in “Prince of St-Germain.”

I tried to read Julian Barne’s “Personal History,” but perhaps it was too personal (some personal histories are best reserved for inter-family reading) and it did not engage me. Orhan Pamuk’s “My father’s suitcase,” was unbearable—all I kept thinking was “I hope his father isn’t alive to read this,” and mercy only came with the very last words. I also had no idea he was such a snob! But since most literary snobs are the result of great suffering, I forgive him.

My advice is, stick to tragi-comedy of the fiction. It’s all your poor little hungover head will be able to handle.

(image: carolita johnson)

Tad Friend’s portrait of his mother, not online, is as touching as it should be, but long (that’s what took me so long to get to this): “The Playhouse.” Odd that the byline in the contents says, “The house a mother built.” A mother? I think “my mother,” or “Mother” would have been more apt.

George Saunders’ “Shouts & Murmurs” piece, “Ask the Optimist,” is also on the long side, but devilishly cruel fantasies are almost never too long for me.

Nadine Gordimer’s “The First Sense,” subtly insightful and poignantly musical, has you thinking we’re talking about aural sex for a while.

And “The Good Book Business,” by Daniel Radosh, is a good update on the Bible’s reach and appeal if, like me, you only got to know the Bible in Latin and Ancient French in adulthood (I openly cheated my way to being “Christian Endeavor Youth Group leader,” and my “Confirmation” in my teens, in a bid to get myself kicked out, to no avail). And it’s probably better if you didn’t have the chance to translate the Bible for yourself and left it to surfers and ice-skaters!

(image: carolita johnson)

Emily Gordon remarked that this was an exceptionally good issue and I agree. Only the fiction got me down, but then, perhaps it’s good that TNY doesn’t assume we’re all sophisticated enough to dispense with identifying with the unfortunate yet. Empathy is the emotion of this century, and it makes ordinarily careless people act like good, caring people, instead of selfish overgrown children. Ever notice that in the movies the important, self-involved person with power becomes a hero when something happens to one of his loved ones and he suddenly realizes he should be more compassionate and create a new, helpful law or foundation? Tragedy must hit home before some people “get it,” and change. So, read “A river in Egypt,” and feel awful identifying with this hapless father of a stricken child: it’s probably better for all of us if you do!

Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Goodnight Mush” was very satisfying in that I agreed with most of her criticisms (negative and positive) of children’s books. She covers a number of different titles, vintage (re-issued) as well as new. The only thing that rang weirdly was the ending of her piece: “You don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want to die. But we both have to. ” (My dad used to say things of this ilk, and my answer was along the lines of, “What do you want? A medal or a monument?”)

Also venturing into the world of those little creatures we like to romanticize and burden with the obligation to be wonderful, “kids” they’re called, Margaret Talbot discusses the difference between Barbie (and her competitors—I notice my favorite, Dinah-Mite, wasn’t mentioned!), and “Bratz” dolls in “Little Hotties.” Not online.

(image: carolita johnson)

Ben McGrath had the privilege of hearing both sides of the New York City bicycle question this week in “Holy Rollers”. I stand by two points of view of my own, arrived at through personal experience. Three accidents (slamming into car doors opened by awake but seemingly unconscious car passengers), have caused me to resolve never again to ride the streets of New York on two wheels. On the other hand, three weeks in Berlin, navigating the city on the specially designated and traffic-lit bicycle lanes have me rallying for similar infrastructures to be implemented in our fair city. Reader, it was heaven. The bicyclists obeyed the bicycle streetlights and signs, and I never felt safer. Read and decide for yourself. Perhaps we’re just too much of a bunch of jerks in New York to ever get it right, either way!

Ian Frazier’s “Downpaging,” in Shouts actually had me going for a little while, and I’ll tell you why. I have been known to bankrupt myself through overbuying books. For me, it really was a question of cutting back. I’ve spent thousands on books, as it’s always been second nature for me to see a book, pick it up, think about it, then buy it. All without hesitation, or the least question as to necessity. Several international moves caused me to give them all away, or settle for pennies on the dollar (or centimes on the franc) whenever I had to jettison them. If my parents said no to everything else, they’d always buy me a book. So, Ian, I don’t really see what’s so friggin’ hilarious here. It could very well happen. If only it happened more often!

Packer’s “The Megacity,” is shocking, and inspiring. And dirty in the bad, sewage overflow way. Scary in a Mad Max way. Read it and thank your lucky stars you only live in New York. (Those of you who live in smaller cities and have something to complain about, don’t make me laugh.) I thought I was tough for a New Yorker, but I wouldn’t stand a chance in Lagos. I’d cry in despair and fear till I evaporated into the polluted sky. (But don’t fuck with me in New York. I’ll mess you up.) It’s not online, but Matt Dellinger interviews Samantha Appleton on making films in Nigeria, in “Seeing Action.”

Helen Simpson’s “Greensleeves” provides a great photo of a mean looking squirrel. I think it’s the very same one I caught last year in a “humane” trap on my fire escape on 156th Street and Broadway, but had to let go when it proved too angry—did I say angry? more like it went ballistic!—to transport to Battery Park, where it would have had to take three trains to come back. (But he learned his lesson and left my morning glories alone.) As for the story, well, it seems all marriages lead to adultery! It’s short, and the squirrel gets the last laugh.

Janet Malcolm’s “Stranger than Paradise” makes you realize just what an annoying character Alice B. Toklas was, and how lucky. If it’s an ordinary person’s right to have an annoying husband or wife, well, then! Gertrude Stein’s will be all the more remarkably problematic, wouldn’t you think? Not online.

(image: carolita johnson)

Jack Handy reports in “My first day in Hell,” that:

The food here turns out to be surprisingly good. The trouble is, just about all of it is poisoned. So a few minutes after you finish eating you’re doubled over in agony. The weird thing is, as soon as you recover you’re ready to dig in all over again.

Good to know, since I plan on doing Hell rather than Heaven. I am a New Yorker, after all. Heaven would bore me, so I’ll leave it to all the good Californians, and wish a bon voyage to the various other aspirants (including the Jehovah’s Witnesses whose departure thereto I magnanimously offered to expediate last weekend when they woke me up at the ungodly hour of 10 a.m.)

In the fiction section we have, “Republica and Grau,” by Daniel Alarcon. On first glance I was afraid it was going to depress me, but it turns out it’s my favorite kind of children’s story for adults: the kind where the kid goes bad, in the good way. I spent the whole time reading it from inside the mind of Maico, wondering how we were going to give the slip to the adults in whose hands our fate rested. The ending left me pretty impressed at our chutzpah, and I was imbued with a sense of mean, fiery optimism that made my subway ride seem more of an adventure again.

The transcript of David Remnick’s interview of Senator Barack Obama at the American Magazine Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, “Testing the waters,” is available online, as is the downloadable audio recording. You’ll be glad to know that our esteemed editor-in-chief bares his prickly side now and then (but only to those who can take it in good stride):

Reminick: Let’s go back to my President Bush question. Obviously, you want to answer it in quite the—
Obama: [to the audience] He’s a troublemaker, you notice? He sounds so much nicer in his columns.
Remnick: Yeah. Sorry to disabuse you of that.
Obama: [to the audience] He turns out to be kind of a prickly guy.

And Michael Schulman used to be afraid to play softball, but lo and behold, he overcame and got good enough at it that I won’t be dressing up as a softball and trick or treating at his door. (He’s a fiercer right field presence than I am, I’ll add.) He brings us the five-borough wide Halloween “haunted house” extravaganza based on a survey of each borough’s most popular (or most dire) fears in “Worst Nightmare.”

Last, but not least, Georgina Bloomberg has followed in her father’s footsteps in the philanthropy department, bringing joy and jodpurs to impoverished equestrians: Gift Horse. Very inspiring. In fact, I have many “one size fits all” flesh-colored thongs which I plan to offer to needy models.

(image: carolita johnson)

Gopnik’s piece on Darwin, “Rewriting nature,“ (not online) compares “Darwin’s Delay” to Hamlet’s own sitting on the fence problem. The usual seesaw of oxymorons and frolicky comparisons to popular and iconic characters and situations follows, and the word “fun” is even applied to the activity of reading (leading me to suspect he plans on testing his own dear children on the piece later), but it’s an informative piece, and well worth reading, if only to wonder what if the Inquisition had been in place in Britain, or what if TS Eliot or Trollope were biologists, or imagine Darwin and Huxley as a good-cop, bad-cop team. (Or perhaps, the atheistically ambiguous duo?)

You’ll never leave the water running while you brush your teeth again (at least I hope you won’t!), after reading Michael Specter’s “The Last Drop.“ It’s not online, but Amy Davidson interviews Specter in her Q & A piece, “Not a drop to drink,” online only. The link isn’t hooked up properly on the contents page, so click on my link above for the goods till it’s fixed.

If you do click on the bad link, you’ll get something good anyway: “The voice of the morning,” to listen to Renán Almendárez Coello, who I’d describe as an activist hispanic radio DJ to the people who do all our grunt work. And whom Dan Baum writes about in “Arriba!” My only hesitation about this wonderful, inspiring piece is that Dan has him saying “Aye!” as if he were a pirate and not a Hispanic, who would spell his exclamatory thus: “ay!” As in ¡Ay, caramba! This amused me to no end, aye, it did, arr, arr! Read the rest of this entry »

(image: carolita johnson)

Having moved to a new apartment, I haven’t received my last two issues of The New Yorker (and have duly notified the proper authorities).

As a consequence of this gap in my service, I began the week by reading half of Atul Gawande’s “The Score” on my cell phone on my way downtown. I read the other half (on the same cell phone) on the ride back uptown (it’s a long ride!), and by the time I reached my new address in Hamilton Heights, I was congratulating myself on having successfully avoided pregnancy all these years. (Horrifying!) See Emdashes for a “Letter From a Pregnant Person on Atul Gawande,” and while you’re at it, check out her “Pick of the Issue.”

The next piece I read on my cell phone (and I’d like to point out that the screen is exactly one and a quarter inches by one and five eighths small), was Joyce Carol Oates’ “Landfill.” Those who pay tens of thousands of dollars—or more!— to enter university sometimes prove they are worth the investment, but sometimes they don’t and they end up in the landfill along with all that moola, metaphorically speaking, usually. But, in this case, a real landfill is where we meet the hapless, sadly incompetent but dearly paid-for remains of Hector Campos, Jr.

Next, Ian Frazier speaks to us about his tragic eating disorder, in “Thin Enough.” His irony veils his pain. Yes, in fact, it blankets it, like a layer of melted american cheese over a huge tuna salad on rye. Mmmm.

I would have liked to read Milan Kundera’s “What is a novelist?” But I’ll have to wait till I nick a copy of the magazine from someone, because it’s not online. Same goes for Mark Singer’s “Escaped,” although the inspiration for the story is the star of the video you can see online only, in “Runaway.” See escaped killer Richard McNair give a cop two different names (Robert Jones, and then Jimmy Jones) within 10 minutes, and still get away with his blessing. Slick.

Lastly, as is usually the case for sports, Matt Dellinger (also our well-loved TNY softball coach) interviews Roger Angell, in “The Veteran.” Here you’ll learn what makes Dellinger feel nostalgic. Also, what Angell thinks of the chances of a Subway Series this year, and what makes a good fiction editor. He should know.

(image: carolita johnson) I only wore the above Manolos once! They hurt like the Dickens!

Okay, I have to admit, after fashion week I’ve had it up to here (imagine my finger posed horizontally across the top of my forehead) with fashion. So no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring myself to read “The Huntress“ by the very stylish Larissa MacFarquhar, about Diane Von Furstenburg, or Andrea Lee’s doubtlessly pithy “Bag Lady,” about the meteoric rise in importance this millennium of the handbag. (A quick peek did yield an intriguing turn of phrase: “bag porn,” which may yet reel me into a complete reading this weekend.) Neither article is online, so this week your must have accessory is the paper version of TNY’s “Style Issue.”

When I was in junior high school, I obstinately refused to wear anything but flannel shirts, carpenter jeans or overalls, and high school windbreakers with no logo at all on the back, all bought very thriftily at Modell’s, which at the time wasn’t so much a sports store as only one step above the Army Surplus or Salvation Army. So you can see why I can’t imagine spending any money to clothe any junior high school student, as described in the not-online-either “Cool enough for school,” by Patricia Marx, who, being from the business, can. (I, for one, believe offspring who don’t cook or clean should have nice cheap crap until they can buy their own fancy stuff when they get jobs.)

What I did read was “Freight,” and on my cell phone, no less! Too cheap to buy the magazine when it’s late arriving in my mailbox, I download articles onto my cell phone and read them on my subway ride midtown. “Freight” is just part of a two thousand-page, unedited manuscript by Henry Roth. It’s remarkably limpid during the first two thirds as the hitchhiking meanders into a freight train ride with a crotchety road rat and, later, joined by a stranger with a knife. Then we digress into the (as ever!) traumatizingly oppressive Jewish boyhood that led to this wayward wandering, which makes you want to look out the window yourself. Until that moment, the reading is gemlike in its lucidity. But it comes back just in time to end on an interesting quiver.

A fascinating read is Judith Thurman’s piece on Marie Antoinette and her various biographers (Caroline Weber, with “Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution,” and Sofia Coppola, with her new film, “Marie Antoinette,” which was booed at it’s opening). Marie was more complex than you know. She never said, “Let them eat cake,” the snotty little ditty uttered by a future personality whom time has forgotten, the words better suiting the collective conscience’s image of Marie Antoinette. She was a teenage queen, and her husband, the king, had an odd sexual technique that ensured for seven years that she would not conceive (nor take any pleasure in the sex!). Read about it in “Dressed for excess.”

I will definitely be doing a future Tables for One on this week’s Tables for Two, Ushiwakamaru. Here, Lauren Collins says that a fellow customer found it comparable to the Japanese experience, and so I’ll have to be the judge of that, having lived in Tokyo for two months at a time twice, and having had a Kabuki actor friend to show me around! Sounds delicious, so if you go there first, let me know!

PS - anyone interested in my only-worn-once size 9 and a half Manolos? See below.

(image: carolita johnson)

With a name like “Friend,” how could he not like Katie Couric? I don’t, but if you’re curious about how Katie took Channel 2, or how we took Katie, read Tad Friend’s “Her Début.” I personally think that Katie could use a serious make-under (a lot less eye make-up, and a more natural look would be more attractive than the glum face she’s recently been trying on in an effort to look more serious and less hair-flippy), and a voice coach to help her lower her voice by at least half an octave. Yes, I’m one of those people who don’t like “perky.”

For a more manly take on things more manly, read David Remnick’s “The Wanderer,” a rather blunt, naked view of Bill Clinton, flattering here, rather unflattering there. All in all, if I were Bill, I couldn’t complain. He’s a nearly Molièresque character, Bill is, and his flaws are not unattractive, if not fascinating. It’s not online right now, but there’s the Online Only Q & A interview of David Remnick by Blake Eskin, to either give you a taste of it, or complement your paper version reading.

If you liked “Closer,” and “Paris, Texas,” you’ll like that they seem to make cameo appearances in Miranda July’s “Something That Needs Nothing.” It’s also not online. Read it on the subway in it’s paper version, and be careful not to miss your stop when the narrator deflowers herself.

I’ve only begun reading Ian Buruma’s review of Günter Grass’ memoir, “Peeling the Onion,” in War and Remembrance, but the opening paragraph, which includes a quote from Grass’ recent novel is promising:

“History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet,” the narrator in Günter Grass s most recent novel, “Crabwalk,” says. “ We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.” Now the author, a Nobel laureate widely regarded as “the conscience of Germany”—a man who has regularly sermonized against the forces of reaction and the corruptions of power—is up to his neck in it himself.

David Sedaris learns never to say “d’accord” when you don’t know what you’re agreeing to in France. (Actually, I’m not sure he learned a thing from this experience, and imagine he’ll wind up in trouble again and again. In France, it’s wiser to be difficult. Luckily for him, he hasn’t learned to use the even shorter version of “je suis d’accord avec vous,” which is simply, “d’ac!” ): In the waiting room.

(image: carolita johnson)

In TNY’s Fiction this week, Cate Kennedy’s “Black Ice,” contains jabbering trees, out of body experiences, a wild young thing that’s not so wild, but not too civilised either, and ends with a genuine rabbit trick.

Peter Schjeldahl covers MoMA’s lastest “contemporary-art installation,” called “Out of Time,” in “New and Old,“ which anyone visiting or living in New York may want to peruse in order to get that “mixed bag of works from the past four decades” into focus before attending in person. After years of spending all my time in museums (including a semi-homeless period spent using the Louvre as my office and getting grumpy with tourists who loitered too long in “my” space), I’ve developed a museum-going indolence that’s hard to overcome. Particularly when descriptions like this (see below) are so well-rendered that I feel fully sated:

(...) Pipilotti Rist’s “Ever Is Over All” (1997). In this intoxicating video installation, with a gentle rock score, panning shots of flowers accompany the sight of a young woman, in a blue summer dress and ruby pumps, traipsing down a city street, now and then merrily smashing car windows with a long-stemmed flower. A police officer slowly approaches. It is a policewoman, who, coming abreast, smiles benevolently and walks on. Anarchy has never been so honey-sweet.

Josh Hersh has his Talk of the Town debut this week, with “Pipe Cleaner,” about Anthony Meloni, pipe cleaner extraordinaire since taking on the restoration of the 9/11 dust-encrusted (and dust-eaten—the dust apparently has the chemical make-up of Drano according to some dust experts) pipes of lower Broadway’s Trinity Church pipe organ. The organ had to all effects been ditched in favor of a fancy shmancy digital organ (with electronic bells and whistles) in 2002, after much futile haggling with insurance companies. Welcome back (someday soon, we hope), pipe organ! And welcome to Hersh!

Jane Mayer’s “Junior” is something of a “You, me, and Dupree” of the war on terror, starring the FBI, a hapless horny terrorist named Fadl, and the taxpayers of America. My father no doubt would be outraged to know what his tax dollars are paying for, but Fadl sings for his dinner, and provides an incredulous chuckle.

And now, in honor of Cate’s rabbit trick, here’s my own mad wabbit.

(image: carolita johnson)

Malcom Gladwell’s “No Mercy” shows us the dangers of letting students off easy who have been caught trying to poison their tutor by spiking their apple with “noxious chemicals”: they go on to split the atom and poison the entire planet with the consequent nuclear proliferation, giving new meaning to the word “occident.” (Actually, that’s not how Gladwell put it. That’s just how I put it.)

In “Bob on Bob,” Louis Menand loosely quotes Terence (Terentius for some) with:

“Dylan nil a me alienum puto,” as Terence put it (or would have put it, if he had lived long enough): nothing having to do with Dylan can be alien to me.”

For those of us who haven’t taken Latin, here is the original quote and a translation:

Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.

I am a human being; I consider nothing human alien to me.

Menand gives us a great sum-up of everything we need to know about Dylan and his interviews (and interviewers) before we take the plunge ourselves, by reading “Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews.” I watched the Dylan documentary on PBS, directed by Martin Scorsese, which I recommend. The documentary was wonderful for the musical footage, but the interview with the cadaverous Charlie Rose and the grizzled and piliferous Scorsese that came on afterwards was rather unsettling after gazing at Dylan’s fresh, idealistic face in the archival footage. I’d like to read the book just to purge my memory of that lasting image.

Michael Crawford’s cartoon this week, “World’s best…” surely rings true to many an apartment house dweller. And Koren’s “Proud parents…” cartoon is a good counterpoint to Leonard Lopate’s NPR special on “hothouse kids,” called “Preparation Anxiety.”

(Disclaimer: Crawford is my best friend this side of the Atlantic, so yes, I’m a little biased. On the other hand, I don’t know Koren at all. So, perhaps I’m not biased.)

Burkhard Bilger’s “The Lunchroom Rebellion” (not online) reminds me that I was rather thin as a child because I was a “hot lunch kid.” The food was disgusting. I ate only what I needed to eat in order to no longer be hungry. And that’s a very healthy regimen for a creature that sits on its ass in a classroom for much of the day, then goes home to watch TV for a few hours before doing homework. I guess I’m just old fashioned!

Antonya Nelson’s “Kansas” is a sort of inside-out Wizard of Oz without the Wizard, and without the shlocky ending. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Wizard of Oz. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with “Kansas.”

*Per ardua ad astra.
Translation by Carolita Johnson: “Work your ass off, and you’ll be a star someday.”

(image: carolita johnson)

Ever wonder what happens to the DVDs you sent back to Netflix? Read about the Netflix fairies in Susan Sheehan’s Talk of the Town piece, “Tear, Slap, Clack.” If you ever wondered what happened to Gigi, aka Leslie Caron, Kate Taylor’s got the goods on her upcoming appearance in Law and Order: Gigi in Jersey. And Adam Gopnik thinks we should all read at least as much as the President of the United States does. Which may explain his “compulsory reading list for us all” at the end of “Read it and Weep.”

In one of those wonderful instances where a picture is worth 912 words, the illustration by Christoph Niemann that accompanies James Surowiecki’s “Private Lies“ pretty much says it all, but I read the piece anyway, just to confirm what I’d surmised about that two-headed dragon.

Read how Walter Reuther’s vision of broadly collectivized risk, rejected in the 1940’s, may finally be coming back home to roost: Gladwell’s “The Risk Pool.” (My cartoon appears amongst those pages, page 34 to be exact!).

I’m glad I didn’t read John Lahr’s “Petrified: the horrors of stagefright” (not online) before my appearance in The Rejection Show, Tuesday! Reading it on the subway yesterday, I had vague memories of sensations that correspond perfectly to the symptoms described. Luckily I was too busy trying to get through it all to stop and become a pillar of salt. I’m the kind of person to fall apart afterwards. Which didn’t happen because my friends were there to buy me a miniburger and a drink. (Thanks Em!)

If a model can read and then summarize Gödel’s Proof in 1990 on a sunny veranda in Mallorca in order to impress her Lacanian psychoanalyst/mathemetician boyfriend (me, I’m talking about me, who proved that love makes all things possible), there’s no reason for any non-mathemetician not to become engrossed in Sylvia Nasar’s and David Gruber’s “Manifold Destiny” (not online) about just who solved the Poincaré conjecture. It’s worth reading just to learn a little about topology, my favorite “area of mathematics.” It’s like playing with modelling clay, but in your head. I call it vitamin T, because topology’s good for your brain. No need to take it very far, the basics and a little Möbius-gazing will do you just fine.

“How was it to be dead?,” an excerpt from Richard Ford’s third Frank Bascombe novel, puzzled me for while. But when I finished it, I understood exactly why Sally did what she did. Frank, her second husband, and the narrator, was definitely due for a come-uppance. What was his crime? Thinking he had it all figured out, basically. Never do that! Amusingly enough, something about his whole discourse also seems to translate the opening strains of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana into, “O FATE! You’re like the moon! Ever waxing, ever waning! You asshole!” For more about Frank, read Deborah Treisman’s Q & A with Ford, Online Only.

(image: carolita johnson)

If you’re too poor to go dally in Martha’s Vineyard, thank your blessings! Talk of the Town explores the “Vineyard Fracture“, the latest thing to plague the idle rich. (The last plague I remember before my 15-year hiatus from New York’s idle rich is the horrible, nose-addling Giorgio of Beverly Hills Plague). Apparently rich klutzes are fracturing their metatarsals left and right, and according to Lauren Collins:

Memorable methods include stepping back while taking photographs, engaging in jumping sports, walking on uneven streets, wearing clogs or sandals, playing soccer after a few beers, slipping on grass, riding a bike after several years’ hiatus, and trying to stop your boat from hitting the dock with the edge of your foot.

The punch line of this piece is when we find out that this injury actually resolves itself on its own most of the time, and doesn’t really require medical attention. Which means that all those Martha’s Vineyarders stumping around in their unwieldy, single orthopedic medical boots are just a bunch of whiners, driving health insurance premiums up for us all. You’ll be glad to know, though, that till it does heal, it hurts like the dickens.

To indulge in some more schadenfreude, turn to Shouts & Murmurs, where Christopher Buckley’s “Stations of the Mel,” with a little illustration by Michael Crawford will make you cackle with delight. It’s very very funny. But is it funny enough for me not to point out that there is a rather cavalier misuse of the nominative declension, “thou,” of the Middle English second person singular pronoun where the accusative “thee” is called for?

Mel Is Dropped by Disney. Disney cryeth out, “Why did we bankroll thou to make a movie about Guatemalans dipped in flour?”

Yes, it is funny enough! And yet I must point it out, as I spent years studying my declensions and must leap upon every opportunity to do so.

An article I never thought I’d even begin to read was William Finnegan’s “Blank Monday,” not online, about Gordon “Grubby” Clark’s surfboard innovations with foam. “Grubby” changed the surfing world, just in time for the Beach Boys to propel surfing into a culture of its own. I had heretofore been possessed of no interest in surfing other than the opening credits of “Hawaii Five-O,” and yet I couldn’t stop reading till I found out how the shock of Grubby’s brusque—somehow awe-inspiring—departure (taking with him many of his valuable secrets) would be absorbed by the world of surf.

Finally, and for something a little more lighthearted, if you’re too tired or lazy to read, Matt Dellinger interviews the charming TNY cartoonist Roz Chast, in his video-interview “Wish you were here,” online only.

(image: carolita johnson)

This week’s weekend reader is a quickie, since it’s also last week’s weekend reader: the last issue of The New Yorker being a double issue. So if you just received your issue (I know a few subscribers who get their issues quite late!), or if you haven’t started it yet (maybe you’re saving all your TNY’s in a pile for your next vacation?), have a look at last week’s weekend reader. If not, there’s plenty waiting for you, both online and off:

I didn’t get to the piece on Beckett till this week. I’m pretty certain that someone I know told me a story of having actually met Beckett in Paris, but have not been able to remember who, and all the likely candidates deny any such luck. Ah, well. So much for the inside scoop. But “Sam I Am,” by Benjamin Kunkel, (who mentions that he picked up “Beckett and Zen” as a “nineteen-year-old trekker in Kathmandu”—I’d assume he picked it up at the Kathmandu Barnes & Noble and read it on the floor while slurping a Starbucks cappucino, if time travel were possible— gives you some of what a chance meeting would yield. Brief, curious, leaving you wanting more, wondering if you really understood—probably what it would be like to meet Beckett.

A few good selections are reprinted, starting with the first line of the piece, which one can imagine pronounced in many different ways (incredulous, fearful, doubtful):

“We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?

And my personal favorite ending with:

Perhaps she too was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. Perhaps she held hers tight in her hand, on purpose to avoid it.

Which seems to be a clue as to just how intimate you can be with someone, and still not know—or doubt that you know—them. Do you know Beckett? Even if you knew for a fact that he had testicles, and even saw them with your own eyes, could you really say you knew him?

There are a few others, which, if you haven’t read Beckett yet (and I’ve only seen the plays—alas, making me only typical, according to Kunkel), would lead you to wonder if he weren’t the forerunner of Monty Python. Such as when Kunkel refers to the “Unnamable”’s story “of a household laid wasted by a tin of ‘fatal corned-beef,’ contaminated with botulism,” or Beckett’s claim that he had “memories of being trapped inside the womb, ‘crying to be let out, but no one could hear.’” Such surreal tidbits make me wonder if Beckett weren’t actually even funnier than I thought. Not that I haven’t been laughing my ass off during his plays.

This is for those of you only getting to your issue of The New Yorker now, either because it just arrived in the mail or because it’s been waiting patiently for you in your briefcase or online all week. (image: carolita johnson)

Once you get past the first few rather dense paragraphs about Edward W. Said’s late work, “On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, Updike’s Late Works shifts gears into Shakespeare’s last works, in which is perceived “a slackening, as if something had snapped.” It sounds eerily like the kind of post-mortem speculation that follows a suicide, or a bad end. This sets the tone for the rest of the authors speculated upon, on how their last works reflect how they fizzled out, burned up and crashed (in the fashion of a geriatric scooter speeding out of control at 15 miles an hour), skipped away, or simply lost their marbles, at the end of their lives. From this point on, the pleasure in reading is partly in being reminded of Edward Gorey’s macabre alphabet, “The Gashlycrumb Tinies.”

To sum it up:
S is for Shakespeare, who favored Spectacle (“the least of tragedy’s necessary parts” according to Aristotle, Updike reminds us) over “Plot, Character, Diction, and Thought,” in his later, pre-mortem works.
M is for Melville, who whittled down his style, but wrote with no less “bumptious bombast” than his previous works.
H is for Hawthorne, who smouldered till he smouldered no more.
G is for Graham Greene, who published his dreams.

Other writers in the alphabet include Henry James and Iris Murdoch, with Beethoven thrown in for good measure. Updike seems to feel whimsical and merciless at the same time, noting Melville’s slightly “arthritic and desiccated” sentences, while Henry James’ later style in”The Outcry” is described as a “cumbersome though finely painted charabanc (...) pulled swaying along by a frisky pony of a plot.” Being on the older side himself seems to give Updike a certain license (like the Jewish-convert dentist telling Jewish jokes in one famous Seinfeld episode) to write thus about the various aspects of old fartiness, and he doesn’t hold back, feeling free to say: “we feel on our faces (...) the breeze of the senile sublime, a creativity liberated from its usual, anxiety-producing ambitions.” And I felt like I was being gently poked in the ribs when he wrote about Melville’s “bumptious bombast.”

Now, back to the living!

The Shouts & Murmers “Bush Quiz,” also online, begins with a question whose answer seems to be Bush’s best Edward G. Robinson impersonation:

“That’s why I’m having this press conference, see?”

He’s a funny guy. You get the feeling you could go out and drink a beer with him, don’t you?

“Bad Neighbors“, by Edward P. Jones, in Fiction, is a hometown piece about some people in a neighborhood thinking they’re better—or striving to be better—than other people in their neighborhood, a human flaw so universal that the phrase, “there goes the neighborhood” shouldn’t surprise us no matter who says it. The line of fate that runs through it, unifying all the good and bad neighbors, brings to mind many other works about prejudice and destiny, like To Kill a Mockingbird, and Crash.

Online only, in Online Only, is Blake Eskin’s Q & A: Blueprints for disaster, in which he interviews Steve Coll as a follow-up (I like to see these Q&A’s as Cliff Notes) to the magazine’s “Atomic Emporium,” which is not online. I like these Q&A’s, and though they should be read after reading the article they follow up, they stand alone perfectly well, and are not bad for when you just want to know what the article is about before reading it, or not.

Now, get outside and enjoy this spectacularly reasonable weather!

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

Stacy Schiff’s “Know it all,” is everything you ever wanted to know about Wikipedia, but were afraid to ask Wikipedia themselves about because you weren’t really sure how far you could trust them. I have been known, when needing a reference to point to, to use Wikipedia in order to avoid using other more commercial sources, but have often wondered if I did well. Schiff brings Wikipedia’s birth amongst the dusty encyclopedias and encyclopedists under scrutiny, with points of view from Encyclopedia Brittanica (who Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales would consider a competitor, “except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within five years.” The article also affords a revealing glimpse into the origin of the first European encyclopedias, which I’ve heard had some very strife-filled moments no less earnest than today’s struggles.

For good measure, read Wikipedia’s history of the encyclopedia up to Wikipedia’s times here.
UPDATE as of 8/4/06: just heard from Ken Berard at The Atlantic, who kindly sent me this link for your further enrichment on the subject , while assuring me that “the article is supplemented with several interesting sidebars and Wikipedia links.” And indeed it is. Enjoy! For Wikimania, see this, via Emdashes and her great pun: Oh, Wiki, you’re so fine.

In Shouts & Murmurs: Paul Simms’ Ambien Cookbook for you hungry somnambulists, features the Licorice Surprise, among others. Here’s my favorite part of the recipe which calls only for a couple of ambien and a plugged-in black extension cord:

Roll out of bed, wake up on floor.
See extension cord, think, What a big delicious licorice rope that is!
Chew on essentially flavorless cord until you get to the metallic center, where the surprise is.

Alec Wilkinson’s fish story, The Lobsterman, about a fisherman who turned “oral history into science,” isn’t online, but an interview with Wilkinson by Blake Eskin is available in the Online Only section of TNY in “Q & A: At Sea.” If you read it, you will want to read the article it spins off from. It’s not Pirates of the Caribbean, but it’s salty. (And I’m sorry, but it did make me want a nice piece of fried cod and chips.)

Alberto Mendez’s “First Defeat” (1939), translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, is an exercise in surrender, and not the good, Harlequin Romance kind. If you know any Spanish, you’ll know from the start that the main character, a Franco soldier who surrenders to the Popular Front as soon as he hears that their surrender to Franco is imminent, is named after Joy, or Happiness. It is the story of the whittling down of the act of war, particularly civil war (but if you think about it, all wars on the Earth are civil wars between earthlings), to the one sad fact that wars begin with an ideal and end with only one objective, which is to kill the enemy. Here is a scene from Alegría’s courtmartialling:

“When asked what our objective was, if not to win the Glorious Crusade, the accused replied, ‘To kill them.’ ”

I’ve always thought that if instead of celebrating wartime victories , we’d mourn all those who died in order that we might win (including the enemy’s dead, because we did regrettably have to kill them, didn’t we?), we might be less inclined to go to war and work things out in more peaceful ways. As Alegría says,

“All wars cost human lives, of course, but this war has become a form of usury. We will have to choose between winning the war and conquering a cemetery.”

There’s a reason mannequins have no heads. I don’t know why, perhaps a neurologist or a brainologist could tell me more, but day after day of being a model (it doesn’t often happen) leaves me completely disconnected from my wit and intelligence (there have been scattered reports of their existence). I’ve been working as a “fit model” quite a lot more than usual these days, and while my bank account is recovering from previous dearths due to honesty in tax-paying, my brain is mush. The week has been a blur of flesh colored bras, thongs, various necessary bodily functions, and people so stressed out about their dresses hemlines and minimum requirements that they develop dandruff and cold sores before my very eyes….

So, this week’s TNY weekend reader is DIY (Do It Yourself). I know you can do it. You can even feel free to tell me about what you think I should read in TNY this week. I’m currently reading the Hollywood Ending piecce by Ken Auletta, on the subway ride home, if I’m able to refrain from falling asleep (from sleeplessness, no fault of Auletta’s).

The above is a rejected “back page” submission, from the days there was a back page! I reject it myself, it’s not exactly what I wanted it to be—I was experimenting with water colors, and it came out a little “hallmark card-y” for me. But I still love the concept, and plan to re-do this one in something a little closer to my original vision.

^{There’s a more online in TNY this week than last week, because it was a double-issue. (image: carolita johnson)}

This week’s The New Yorker is last week’s The New Yorker. But it’s not exactly the same online—there are a few more articles online than there were last week. I know this thanks to Blake Eskin, who told me why on the way to the after-softball pizza and beer event. (We beat the NYTimes Magazine!) Why, then? Well, because it was a double issue, so they had to spread the joy over two weeks. A little last week to whet your appetite, and a little more this week to keep you happy till the next issue comes out, perfectly logical.

Of course if you had the paper magazine in hand, you may have read it all by now. Perhaps you haven’t and it’s all in tatters from bopping around half-read in your handbag or briefcase. In either case you still have the online, alternate personality of The New Yorker. I recommend it, even if it’s a little hard to navigate the archives as of yet (reforms are coming, never fear).

If you missed last week’s Weekend Reader, or still haven’t started last week’s magazine, I recommend everything I recommended last week. Plus, if you’re an online reader and didn’t know that Ben MacGrath’s “Where Hip-Hop Lives: Hot 97 is in the building” is now online, click here for the Gravy.

In the Online Only section, Amy Davidson interviews Lawrence Wright about his (not online) piece, The Agent, which profiles F.B.I. agent Ali Soufan as the man who “had the best chance of foiling the 9/11 plot” but who was thwarted by the C.I.A., in Q & A: Missed Opportunities. Compare the interview format to the essay in the paper magazine. Sometimes it’s an interesting complement to the essay, and sometimes it’s almost like reading the Cliff Notes the right way (ie. after reading the source material, rather than instead of). See how you like your bread buttered. I’d love some feedback. I’m curious to know who reads paper and who reads pixels and why.

For all of you who have read everything and still want more New Yorker, check out The New Yorker Near You, which lists New Yorker-related readings, appearances and events.

^{There’s a lot online in TNY this week. But it’s also in the paper magazine, so get outside and read it on the grass or the sand! I recommend a bit of both formats. Just because when you get to the Great Lawn it’s wiser to sit on your magazine than on your computer, once you’ve read it all. (image: carolita johnson)}

(Actually, I don’t have a MySpace profile, but you probably do!)

Anyway, check out this week’s Talk of the Town, online.
For one thing, I saw Charlotte Rampling’s naked thighs in my friend Jonathan Nossiter’s “Signs and Wonders,” when she climbs onto her lover looking more fit in her almost-60’s than I’ve ever looked. So if she’s talking about sexuality, I want to read about it. Read what she has to say in Judith Thurman’s “Ready, Set, Rample.”

Then read David Remnick’s “Nattering Nabobs,” so that you can see what Em is referring to in her post, Fly Continental. Apparently Scott Johnson at the Free-Market News Network and Hugh Hewitt from Town Hall didn’t like it, and Em shows us why. Me, I liked it, and I’m no “liberal hysteric.” I’m a socialist with an assassinated South American dictator in the family.

Ben McGrath’s piece is called “Where Hip-Hop Lives: Hot 97 is in the building.” But it’s not online. All I want to know is: why on earth not? I’ll bet Gravy, the rap artist featured in it (part of his claim to fame is having been shot in the buttocks in front of the Hot 97 building) would like to know, too. (UPDATE as of July 11th: the article has been put online in the week following this post! The reason it wasn’t online was because of the double issue, Blake Eskin tells me, and the need to spread material availability out over two weeks instead of just one. It can be found here). There are quite a few gems in it. My peronally favorite line, just because I know Ben from the softball team, is “Gravy and I were sitting in a spacious thirty-second-floor office,” because I could just imagine it.

But other memorable lines included Gravy’s delicate observation that:

If I died, or if I had to go through a shit bag—you know, where you get shot in the stomach and you can’t shit regular, got to wear the bag—they’d be playing me like crazy(...). You have to damn near die to be famous these days?”

And:

“If Your Honor may or may not be aware, as part of the culture of the artists, they travel with a great number of people who are called ‘posses.”

As well as Jay-Z’s reaction to the tepid reaction of the managing director of Cristal Champagne to all the free publicity his booze has been getting from him:

“Cristal is done—finished,” Jay-Z said, calling for a boycott. “How’s that for a slap in the face?... I know I bought about fifty-thousand cases in my lifetime, personally.”

The cherry on top is, of course, the last line, where Gravy asks:

“New Yorker? How many people see that shits? (...) Damn. Who needs Hot 97? I got New Yorker and MySpace.”

(Which brings me back to the first question: why wasn’t this article online?)

In the Fiction section (online as well as on your coffee table or on the subway), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Phone Call” reads a bit like a cross between Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana,” mixed with a bit of Gogol’s sad but loving take on humanity and it’s frailties.

Our main character is trying to rev himself up to denounce a military plot to the American Embassy, and is searching for a telephone booth. We see that no matter how frightened and paranoid a man can get, he never misses an opportunity to notice an attractive girl:

Innokentii walked on, erect and no longer hurrying. A girl eyed him as he passed.
And another one. Very pretty, too. Wish yourself well out of it!
How big the world is, and how full of opportunities!

Once he’s got the American Embassy on the phone, he’s managed to blurt out his purpose, only to encounter disbelief and a communication barrier which starts out as a language problem, and then turns into a technical difficulty:

“The atomic bomb?” he repeated dubiously. “But who are you? Tell me your name.”
There was a muffled click and then dead silence, unbroken by rustling or buzzing.
They had been cut off.

Which brings us, cinematic split-screen style to the other side of that moment. In the telephone surveillance office, we flip to a pathetic little man with a possibly gangrenous leg who is manning the tape recorder in the moments just before Innokentii’s call comes in. He’s been well instructed in his duties as a functionary/spy, and:

If you followed these instructions, mistakes would be impossible.
But such is the fatal incompatibility of officialdom’s perfectionism with man’s pitiful imperfection (...)

Kuleshov removed the tight headphones, which pressed on his ears, moved to a spot in the light, rolled up the left leg of his trousers and his long underwear, and began cautiously feeling and picking at the edges of the scabs. (...) So he did not immediately notice the bobbins start noiselessly spinning as the tape recorder automatically switched itself on.

Speaking of legs and the odd things that can happen because of them, Joan Acocella’s piece on American Ballet Theatre at the Met, “Secrets,” reviews Diana Vishneva’s reinterpretation of Giselle. Her review offers this line, about Vishneva’s fancy footwork, which for some reason I found funny:

This year, that working leg was clearly beckoning him: “Come to me, come up my leg.”

And Hilton Al’s review of Liev Schreiber’s Macbeth, “Unsexed“, features an interpretation of Lady Macbeth’s “Unsex me here” soliloquy that I had not run across or thought of before, not even in my most exaggerated attempts to shock my professors:

The blood that will stain her husband’s hands is less offensive to her than her own menstrual blood—the symbol of her femininity.

I don’t know, but I guess Hilton would be working on the (mostly correct) assumption that most women would prefer anyone else’s blood to their own period! His review certainly led me to believe that Schreiber (whose acting style seems a pefect fit for Shakespearean drama, from all I’ve seen, particularly in The Manchurian Candidate) had honed in on exactly what every Macbeth should express: “the whimper behind the swagger.” Perfect.

Happy Reading!