Bookworm

The New Yorker, June 11 & 18, 2007 (#5)

I really don't "get" the Dana Goodyear poem entitled "The Bowerbirds".  I'm not always a gifted poetry interpreter and this one isn't clicking with me. (I must add, in passing, that the New Yorker seems to have a lot more content available online for free than in the past.  It's wonderful to be able to link to things.)

The issue includes one page nonfiction essays on the topic of Summer Movies.  Marisa Silver's is quite good.  Dave Eggers' didn't resonate with me. 

James Surowiecki's essay "Be Our Guest," about the Senate's immigration-reform bill, usefully provides some historical context to the debate.  He believes: ". . . the program's costs to American workers are negligible, the gains for the guest workers are enormous, and the U.S. economy will benefit.  This is that rare option which is both sensible and politically possible.  Congress should take it."

Yesterday I read the Junot Diaz short story called "Wildwood".  It's written in second person point of view: "You dread conversation with your mother.  These one-sided dressing-downs.  You figure that she had called you in to give you another earful about your diet."

Diaz writes in a vibrant style, mixing in Spanish words that an English-speaking reader must define by context (not unlike the experience of a non-native speaker picking up English, one presumes). I just looked up bruja which is used multiple times -- it is Spanish for witch.

Another blogger gives his opinion of the story here.  He believes the ending doesn't quite deliver. . . and I agree with him.  In a story that doesn't lack for verbosity, the author chose to leave the ending a big ambiguous.  He doesn't quite believe the transformation that takes place with the protagonist when she is sent to live in Santo Domingo.  I have to say that I did find it believable.  I believe that she adopted her earlier persona as a punker because she was attempting to take charge of creating an identity for herself (instead of accepting the identity forced on her by schoolmates, the neighborhood, her mother).  Once she was in a totally new environment, she was free to figure out who she wanted to be without having to be in reaction to something or someone else.

The New Yorker, June 11 & 18, 2007 (#4)

Still reading the Final Destination article.  [N.B.  I'm pretty much only reading this magazine on my half hour lunch breaks and I'm usually checking email as well.  Hence the slow progress.  And a reminder to me that I really shouldn't sign up for a subscription again, much as I want to!]

Don DeLillo:

“I was a semiconscious writer in the beginning,” he writes. “Just sat and wrote something, or read the newspaper, or went to the movies. Over time I began to understand, one, that I was lucky to be doing this work, and, two, that the only way I’d get better at it was to be more serious, to understand the rigors of novel-writing and to make it central to my life, not a variation on some related career choice, like sportswriting or playwriting. The novel is different. . . . We die indoors, and alone, and I don’t mean to sound overdramatic but you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, all of this happened over time, until eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It’s not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there’s no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that’s all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood.” (p. 68, print edition)

I think one of the reasons this quote struck me is that it emphasizes the growth of an artist over time.  I'm hitting a significant birthday soon and realizing that I am almost in the middle of my statistically projected lifespan.  If I want to be fit and create things and take pictures and read great books and make scrapbooks to preserve memories and be present, I really need to make sure I'm not putting things off for someday.  I guess Barbara Crafton's post this morning emphasized this line of thought as well:

"Death comes when we haven't anything else to do, we sincerely hope. But sometimes it comes smack in the middle of everything, clearing our calendars for us, and we leave our half-finished tasks to others. They either complete them or they do not, depending on how important they were to anybody but us. This fact should help with the triage: which of your unfinished tasks do you definitely not want still hanging around when the funeral casseroles start arriving? If it's something everyone cares about, someone else will do it. But if it's only your pet passion, not particularly admired or even understood by anyone else, you'd better do it yourself, while you still can."

The New Yorker, June 11 & 18, 2007 (#3)

"Many New York City residences contain stacks of old newspapers, but most of these papers do not include reports on the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic, or the death of King George VI, as did those (from 1865, 1912, and 1952) found piled in the living room of a West Village town house that was recently put up for sale." [The New Yorker]
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Fascinating article, entitled Final Destination, describes the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, its head Tom Staley, and its marvelous, unimaginable collection of literary treasures.  I was interested to read this reference to one of my favorite books, A.S. Byatt's Possession:

"Perhaps disingenuously, Staley asserts that the Ransom Center’s success is not primarily about money. “You know what matters most to writers?” Staley said. “It’s the care we expend on their manuscripts. That’s the most flattering thing. They just love it.” Staley bears more than a passing resemblance to Mortimer Cropper, the “sinewy” American curator in A. S. Byatt’s novel “Possession” (1990). Cropper, who works at a land-grant university in New Mexico, gleefully despoils England of its literary patrimony, promising writers to preserve their manuscripts with fetishistic care. As Cropper puts it, “They would join their fellows in perfect conditions—air pressure, humidity, light—our conditions of keeping and viewing are the best in the world.”" [pg. 60, print edition]

Oh, and how interesting (probably just to me, I know): I own and have read a book that was researched at the Ransom, Diane Wood Middlebrook's biography of poet Anne Sexton.
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And in passing, I must note the following copy in a tourism ad in the magazine: ""Let's talk getting away.  Let's talk unique.  Let's talk Colorado."  Good grief, let's talk illiteracy!  Is that copy really a good match for the New Yorker crowd?

The New Yorker, June 11 & 18, 2007 (#2)

Another Talk of the Town topic this week is the supposed resemblance of the monk in
Duccio's Madonna and Child to Rudolph Giuliani.  Alas, even the enlarged image on the Met's website isn't large enough to confirm or deny this.  But serendipitously, while Googling for the painting, I came across this excellent 2005 post by well-known blogger Jason Kottke talking about the painting.

Addendum, 6/22/07: Oops!  The article does mention the above-referenced painting, but it is a Crivelli painting of St. Dominic, the patron saint of astronomers, that the Met's docent thinks looks like Giuliani.

The New Yorker, June 11 & 18, 2007 (#1)

I used to subscribe to The New Yorker, but frequently, even pre-parenthood, found myself with stacks of them.  It's a deceptively thin magazine -- the prose is almost always well-written and requires thought to digest, so you can't really skim.  I will admit to flipping through to look at the cartoons first thing.

I picked up the Summer Fiction issue over the weekend.  The Talk of the Town section this week begins with an essay juxtaposing a new play called Frost/Nixon (and its theme of how history will remember famous figures) with George W. Bush's legacy.  According to the author, George Packer, the President did four good things last week (including strengthening "sanctions against Sudanese companies and officials in response to the ongoing massacres in Darfur" pg. 45), but "[n]obody will remember it."  Packer believes that "popular memory flattens out the facts" and doesn't retain many details about presidencies.  Bush and close allies such as Condoleeza Rice are holding out hope that perhaps this Bush presidency will not be judged solely on the Iraq war and the administration's responses and policies post-9/11, but might be expanded to encompass a turning tide in the Middle East.  Packer writes,

"This exercise in justification by faith posits a visionary President with the courage to ignore temporary bad news.  By this light, Bush's habit of declaring A to be B--for example, claiming that the surge reflects the public's desire for a change in war policy, or interpreting increased violence in Iraq as a token of the enemy's frustration with American success--becomes a sign of clarity and resolve, not delusional thinking. . . [T]he current President will repeat the same sunny falsehoods and sententious illusions about the war until he leaves office, and then he will go on repeating them in retirement.  And that will be his legacy: the war, and the shallow, unreflective character that made it." (46)

Free Downloadable Issue of Sci-Fi Mag

"Amazon women on the Moon. Brains suspended in jars. The heat death of the universe.

It’s all here, as a free pdf download, in Subterranean #4, guest edited by Campbell Award Winner John Scalzi (The Android’s Dream, Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades)." [Subterranean Press]

The New Yorker

"Readers of The New Yorker are characteristically a literary and durable bunch. It requires endurance to tackle the magazine's long fiction and investigative journalism. This isn't to suggest John Updike, Susan Orlean or Seymour Hersh should slash their word counts. It's just the longer pieces are one reason New Yorkers tend to pile up; most people haven't accrued enough vacation time to finish some issues. . . Given the magazine's imposing depth, it's no wonder many readers first flip to the cartoons. They want their dessert before the meal."  [Baltimoresun.com]

Amen and Amen.  I love the New Yorker.  I love the cover art, I love the cartoons, I love the cultural commentary, I love the snarky movie reviews, I love the in-depth articles.  However, it's not a rapidly browsable magazine.  Last year I struggled with whether or not to renew my subscription.  I had a good year's worth of unread or partially read issues stacked up and a new baby.  What were the chances I'd have time to read it?  So, I didn't renew.  I do miss it.  The old ones are interesting --  I'm working my way through the backlog, skimming, tearing out short stories, poems, articles to read "sometime" -- but I miss getting a fresh new issue every week in the mail.  I decided that if I can get through the backlog in time, I'll subscribe again as a birthday gift to myself.

The magazine has recently begun running cartoon caption contests on a regular basis.  Check here to submit your own caption, vote for finalists, or see winning captions from earlier iterations.

"Why There's No Escaping the Blog"

Fortune writers David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth write:

". . it's difficult to take the phenomenon seriously when most blogs involve kids talking about their dates, people posting pictures of their cats, or lefties raging about the right (and vice versa). . . " [Article link]

Mr. Kirkpatrick, Mr. Roth, if you took the time to scratch the surface, you'd find a lot of extremely well-educated, intelligent people contributing their thoughts and talents to the WWW of conversation.  Just like Fortune magazine, if the writing is good, it will be read.  It's just too bad if that "makes it harder for corporations and other institutions to control and dictate their message." (Kirkpatrick & Roth)

Vote Kerry/Edwards: Post #14

The New Yorker magazine has endorsed John Kerry for President, the first time in its history that the magazine's editors have endorsed a Presidential candidate. They write:

"The Bush Administration has had success in carrying out its policies and implementing its intentions, aided by majorities—political and, apparently, ideological—in both Houses of Congress. Substantively, however, its record has been one of failure, arrogance, and—strikingly for a team that prided itself on crisp professionalism—incompetence. . . In January, 2001, just after Bush’s inauguration, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published its budget outlook for the coming decade. It showed a cumulative surplus of more than five trillion dollars. . . Last year’s federal deficit was three hundred and seventy-five billion dollars; this year’s will top four hundred billion. According to the C.B.O., which came out with its latest projection in September, the period from 2005 to 2014 will see a cumulative shortfall of $2.3 trillion. . . Bush will likely be the first chief executive since Hoover to preside over a net loss of American jobs. . . . Bush signalled his approach toward the environment a few weeks into his term, when he reneged on a campaign pledge to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions, the primary cause of global warming. His record since then has been dictated, sometimes literally, by the industries affected." [The New Yorker; emphasis mine] Read the entire article, seriously.

Harper's has a new website

Harper's Magazine has a new website. I like the look of it -- very bloglike. For some insight into its creation and design, read Paul Ford's article here.

I've subscribed to this magazine in the past, once or twice, but have ended up cancelling the subscription because I never have time to read all the magazines I get. (Of course, cancelling a monthly just puts a tiny dent in the influx!) The two towers of Time and the New Yorker beside my bed are testament to this (not to mention Shape, Better Homes & Gardens, plus People & Entertainment Weekly which my sister shares with me). But heaven forfend I should just toss the unread magazines without so much as creasing the cover. No, no! One must at least browse each magazine for cartoon gems, poems, short stories, interesting articles that should be ripped out and stacked up, awaiting filing, in the den.