Editor David Remnick will engage in story-stretching

Earlier, we reported on a disturbing trend in which New Yorker writers take their (usually quite interesting) article and streeeeetch it like pizza dough to become book-length so that they (and an agent and publisher) can make more money off it.

Apparently, New Yorker Editor David Remnick is sensitive to the accusation, but not so sensitive that it’ll stop him from doing the same thing.

Yesterday’s New York Times books section has a teeny piece by Dave Itzkoff revealing:

Mr. Remnick said that the biography, “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” would not be simply a “pumped up” version of a 12,000-word article about the Obama campaign that he wrote for the November 2008 issue of The New Yorker. Mr. Remnick, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Lenin’s Tomb,” said the biography would include considerable material about the president that was not in the article,

Why wasn’t it in there?  Because it was unnecessary?!

We hope the book will stay just as short as Dave Itzkoff’s writeup.  (By the way, where is Itzkoff’s own book-length version of his New York Mag memoir? That might actually be worth reading.)

Worst NEW YORKER comma lapse to date!!

The New Yorker is back and so are we!  And so much to talk about, too.

This week’s worst sentence — and one of the worst comma problems to date — comes in the beginning of a “Talk of the Town” piece by the normally lucid Ian Frazier. Since Frazier is indeed normally lucid, we wonder if he just got a bad editor this week, or he normally has a very GOOD editor who cleans up his commas, and this week she was away sunning in Bali.

Here goes nothing:

On a Saturday morning so cold that the coffee spills on the sidewalks of Rogers Avenue, in Flatbush, were glistening light-brown rinks, and the ice in the gutters had turned to grit-covered iron, and the wind whistled through the intersection where Rogers and Church Avenues meet, the West Indian-American Day Carnival Association held a solidarity and prayer march called Haiti We Love You.

What?!  This reads like literary Jabberwocky.  What editor in his/her right mind — no less, an editor at a magazine that considers itself of high literary quality — would allow that many phrases at the beginning of a sentence?  There are so many that you forget what in hell he is talking about by the time he gets to the subject of the sentence (the Carnival Association).

By the way, even the tense shifted and should have been fixed by an editor:

On a Saturday morning so cold that the coffee spills on the sidewalks of Rogers Avenue … and the wind whistled through the intersection….

Atrocious.

Let’s look at another one that’s not as bad, but still not great.  This happens to be the “Talk” piece directly preceding Ian’s.  This is by Frances FitzGerald:

Back in the nineteen-sixties and the early nineteen-seventies, when American tourists were traveling halfway around the world to see the great temples of Cambodia and Burma, and rubbings from the friezes of Angkor were turning up in the rooms of college and grad students, Vietnam was considered simply a war zone.

How about we merge them and make an even more turgid sentence!

On a Saturday morning so cold that the coffee spills on the sidewalks of Rogers Avenue, and the wind whistled through the intersection where Rogers and Church Avenues meet, when American tourists were traveling halfway around the world to see the great temples of Cambodia and Burma, and rubbings from the friezes of Angkor were turning up in the rooms of college and grad students, the West Indian-American Day Carnival Association held a solidarity and prayer march called Haiti We Love You, and Vietnam was considered simply a war zone.

Makes just as much sense.

In other New Yorker notes this week:

Oh God!  Yes!  YES!!  YESSSS!  OH GOD, YESSS!  Keith Gessen, the literary heartthrob who founded n+1 magazine, which is soooo different than the work of the “Believer”/Dave Eggers crew, when the sidewalks were glistening light-brown rinks…

But seriously, Keith Gessen is writing for the New Yorker! Praise the Lord!  He’s writing about the Ukraine (what else?) to where he has apparently decamped.

Why is the stodgy New Yorker letting him in?  Sure, he has the literary creds, but don’t they know he is (or was) dating Emily Overshare?  (We think that is her real last name!  It was Uberscher in the olde country.)

Share your comments (and other awful sentences in this week’s New Yorker, March 1, 2010 issue), below.

Dude, where’s my New Yorker?

It was a double issue last week, doncha ‘member? So things are slow here. Nothing to pick on until next week.

Hey, why not comment on the site? Maybe your comment will bring it back to life. Like clapping for Tinkerbell.

Out, out, damned comma!

An example from this week’s New Yorker shows how their poor comma choices completely throw off a reader’s comprehension.

From a “Talk of the Town” piece about a sailor, page 48:

After the boat righted itself, exactly as it was designed to do when he began building it, in the late seventies, he realized that a rogue wave had rolled it more than ninety degrees, judging by the rice and lentils decorating the ceiling of the gallery.

What happened in the late seventies? The boat righted itself in the late seventies? No.  What writer Mark Singer MEANT was that he began building the boat in the late seventies.  The near-capsizing occurred in the last few years, which is when this story takes place.

If the comma between “building it” and “in the late seventies” is removed, the sentence makes perfect sense without requiring readers to read it 4-5 times, as we did.  Go back and try it.  See how easy it is?

Not every prepositional phrase needs (or wants) a comma!  You guys are supposed to be the arbiters of good grammar.  Look at how Eustace Tilley admires his own reflection.  So, get, with, it, comma abusers.

The New Yorker is in love with itself

This week’s double issue (Feb. 15 & Feb. 22) in honor of its 85th anniversary has a cover and a foldout of the cover.  Each of those two pages contains a comic strip, and each strip basically reflects the sentiment of the magazine as a whole: I am so busy staring at my beautiful reflection that I’ve lost perspective. I’m in love with myself!

The cartoons were boring and pretentious, so in other words, they were spot on.  The word “priapic” even appears. Egads!

Lillian Ross on J.D. Salinger

Some choice parts of Lillian Ross (she’s still alive, did you know that?) on J.D. Salinger in this week’s New Yorker:

He never gave an inch to anything that came to him with what he called a “smell.”  The older and crankier he got, the more convinced he was that in the end all writers get pretty much what’s coming to them:  The destructive praise and flattery, the killing attention and appreciation.

Yeah.   Serves ‘em right!

When I adopted my son, Erik, Jerry was almost as exuberant as I was.  Unbelievable, stupendous, he said of one picture I sent:  ”He’s roaring with laughter.  Oh, if he can only hold onto it!”

Thank you, Debbie Downer.  Clearly J.D. would have benefited from Lexapro.  Alas, he was too late.  We know it would have helped (this week’s Newsweek cover notwithstanding.)

He liked living in New Hampshire, but he often found fun and relief by coming down to New York to have supper with me and Bill Shawn, this magazine’s editor for many years.

…and in a funny, innocent coincidence that Jerry enjoyed, Shawn and I would often end up at the same restaurant together!

Bridgette Bardot once wanted to buy the rights to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and he said that it was uplifting news.  ”I mean it,” he told me.  ”She’s a cute, talented, lost enfante, and I’m tempted to accommodate her, pour le sport.”

“Accommodate” her, huh?  What size Trojans would you use for that?

“God, how I still love private readers,” he wrote.  ”It’s what we all used to be.”

Yes, if only he lived in a world where no one talked about or promoted Catcher in the Rye! Then Salinger would have to interact with people to make money, like many of us do.

Perhaps he holed up because he knew he was just as carnal as the rest of us, and wanted to train himself not to be – or keep us from knowing those parts of him.

New Yorker authors pretend to know J.D. Salinger

As we expected, the passing of J.D. Salinger unleashed some memoirs by writers who at some point brushed shoulders with him and are now compelled to give us the tiniest crumbs of crummy insight they had.  Since this IS Salinger, we actually could use every bit of understanding about this man that we can get — and yet, the memoirs often tell exactly what he’d want us to know:  Nothing much.

In this week’s New Yorker, we get a college friend of Matthew Salinger writing about how he and his girlfriend visited Matt’s dad in New Hampshire and spent the night.  The young lad expected J.D.’s approval that he wanted to sleep in the same bed as his sweetheart, which he failed to receive.  Hey, kid, this is a guy who’s into INNOCENCE.  (Except when he was lying beside 19-year-old Joyce Maynard, that is.)

Still, the essay is fun to read, much more than the writer for another magazine who wrote a long piece about finding Salinger’s house and then bugging his wife with an unannounced visit.

Another piece in the magazine, by Adam Gopnik, has more insight:

The isolation of his later decades should not be allowed to obscure his essential gift for joy.  The message of his writing was always the same:  that, amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unselfconscious innocence that still surround us.

Finally:  Lillian Ross’s piece will get a bit more analysis.  She actually knew Salinger for decades and culled some telling memories.  So, on to that next.