Herodotus

Several pit players use the long stretch between 'Getting to Know You' and the end of Act I to pull out books or magazines. Primis said, "When I played South Pacific, I read Herodotus."

- Henry Alford, in The New Yorker 

Of course

Of course, you end up becoming yourself, even when you’re a journalist.

- Rebecca Mead, in The New Yorker

'Instead of just saying the word "no"...

she was quick to reply 'Not at all, as the fish said,' or just 'As the fish said,' or simply 'Fish,' to summarize this saying: 'Not at all, as the fish said when asked how he'd like to be cooked, in the oven or the fryer.'

- Alejandro Zambra, via James Wood, in The New Yorker

Found in books - GUEST ENTRY

I have discovered a truly marvellous proof... which this margin is too narrow to contain.

- Pierre de Fermat, in his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica (as reported in The New Yorker)

On Teju Cole

Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York” (O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers, determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill, despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”

- James Wood, The New Yorker

Teacher/critic/judge

In all the years I read these writers, as I went through high school and then college and grad school, it never occurred to me that they were trying to persuade me to actually see this or that performance, buy this or that volume, or take in this or that movie; nor did I imagine that I was being bullied or condescended to, or that I wasn’t allowed to disagree with them. I thought of these writers above all as teachers, and like all good teachers they taught by example; the example that they set, week after week,* was to recreate on the page the drama of how they had arrived at their judgments. (The word critic, as I learned much later, comes from the Greek word for “judge.”)

- Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker

--
* in a time, obviously, when one was encouraged to write more than 450 words about things.

'Norman Mailer'

Is it not somehow supremely fitting that, in this New Yorker article on the egomaniacal Norman Mailer, the only keywords offered are... 'Norman Mailer'?

Mae West vs Mailer (damnit, just read the whole article!)

For many years, the filthiest word in English was “fuck.” Even the dauntless Partridge had to use “f*ck.” (In Norman Mailer’s 1948 war novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” the G.I.s use “fug.” In what may be an apocryphal story, Mae West, meeting Mailer at a party, said, “Oh, you’re the guy who can’t spell ‘fuck’!”)

- Joan Acocella, New Yorker

Classic lingo-nerd-fest on English and its uses, Bosniak smack-talk, and one use of 'conciseness' where it ought to have been 'concision'.

Too good

As for the proposition that, if something was good enough for Dr. Johnson, it should be good enough for us, would we like to live with the dentistry, or the penal codes, or the views on race of Johnson’s time?

- Joan Acocella, New Yorker

Shakespeare and I

This 'morning' (c.2pm), in a bleary moment, I used the phrase '[my brother] and I' when I - of course - meant 'me'. This afternoon ('...' = 11pm), I read that

Usages frowned on today were once common. (Dr. Johnson split infinitives; Shakespeare wrote “between you and I,” and just about anything else he wanted.)

- Joan Acocella, New Yorker

Which just goes to show that Shakespeare had bleary moments, too.

St James'ses

James Wood's use of the possessive in 'David Shields's recent manifesto "Reality Hunger"' (here, final para) is just plain ugly. But 'Roland Barthes's prosecutorial ruthlessness' (three lines later) is a real mind-warper.

Either it counts as doubly hideous - implying, as it may, that we think 'Barthes' is actually pronounced 'Barths' or 'Bart(h)ez' - and/or a mutant result of obsessive adherence to 'house style'; or it demonstrates an assumption that every New Yorker-reader knows full well that you don't pronounce the 'es' on the end of 'Barthes'.

Anyone fancy odds?*

--
*French-speakers do not apply.

Ye

The fact-checker on the piece, fortunately, spoke Mandarin...

or - Why the New Yorker is the best publication in the world.

Not-so-tough talk

Perhaps we can argue that art is stronger than the censor, and perhaps it often is. Artists, however, are vulnerable.

- Salman Rushdie, New Yorker

'Understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur'

Teju Cole, on the German Chatwin (albeit with no reference to the billion typos in the HB edition).

Two classic comments on (the writings of) Helen DeWitt

Joe has found that if you want to sleep with a woman you have to spend a lot of time talking to her about her interests.

- Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

As any million-dollar litigation lawyer or two-cent literary critic will tell you, the devil is in the details. 

- Jennifer Szalai, New York Times Sunday Book Review

On the two types of story (superb!)

the hectic experimentalism of the so-called McSweeney's short story (reflexive, impertinent, typographically playful, slightly annoying)... emerged around the turn of the millennium to challenge the dominance of the so-called New Yorker short story (calm, humane, sparse, slightly dull).

- Robert Macfarlane, Sunday Times

Hip-hop as poetry?

Jay-Z = Heaney. Discuss.

I like

the New Yorker's style guide for diphthongs like coöpting, naïve and deëmphasize.* Full marks for clarity - even if it does look a little weird.

* in't that one brilliant?