The Master Writer of the City

There's a new biography of Joseph Mitchell by Thomas Kunkel called "Man in Profile:  Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker."  It's reviewed by Janet Malcolm in the April 23rd issue of the New York Review of Books.  I had a copy of Mitchell's "Up in the Old Hotel" which I kept for years- such an eerie tale of old New York, before the Brooklyn Bridge was built. 
I didn't know Mitchell, but I saw him fairly often.  He liked to come to the 11 o'clock service at Grace Church, and lurk in the back by the narthex (that's foyer to the uninitiated).  He didn't discriminate between Morning Prayer and Communion, never approached the altar rail.  The Rev. Fleming Rutledge, the assistant at the time, told the congregation that Mitchell came for the sermon.   
I never felt like Mitchell was approachable, so I left him alone.  Never asked him about his writer's block, or about the New Yorker's glory days.  He was a man who wanted to be left alone.   And I was a young writer who didn't want to upset an old man. 

Llamas on the Attack!

One night before rehearsal, my friend Cotton Wright made the mistake of telling me that her sister had witnessed attack llamas, that is llamas who act like guard dogs at various properties in the southwest.  This image of half of a pushmepullyou behaving like Jimmy Carter's attack rabbit has stayed with me. 
In the November 10th issue of the New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson wrote a feature called "Modern Farmer, and the Back to the Land Movement," in which he interviewed the former (as of yesterday) editor of Modern Farmer magazine (who knew there was such a thing?), An Marie Gardner, and a farmer, David Munson, Jr.  Munson had a few things to say about his llamas, which he keeps to guard his goats:  "Llamas don't like dogs, they don't like coyotes, they don't really like people-  they put up with them because they bring them food.  Some are more protective than others.  Mine were raised [on his farm north of Dallas] as pet llamas, I think, and they just didn't go after the bad guys.  They would walk ff and leave the goats.  The predators often kill for fun.  You have all these goats that are torn up ... It's a combat situation... I replaced the llamas with guard dogs."
   

Lebowitz Nails It!

In the June 18th issue of the New Yorker, there's a Talk of the Town piece about Mayor Bloomberg's war on Big Gulp sodas (Vice Dept.:  Fluid Ounces) by Lizzie Widdicombe.  At the end of it, she wisely interviews Fran Lebowitz, who is spot-on.

Lebowitz says:  "These are class issues...  Soda is the recreation- the summer house- of the poor.  It's an indulgence, and something they can indulge in.    [The Mayor] has eleven houses.  That's the self-indulgence of a billionaire.  He's one of a generation of Jewish men who feel if they didn't become a doctor they are a failure.  Now he's trying to become a doctor."

Prosopagnosia

I've read plenty of Oliver Sacks, both his books and articles in The New Yorker. I saw Peter Brooks' theatre piece based on "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat"; I've even seen Sacks himself, at the French Roast on the Upper West Side.
But his latest New Yorker article ( A Neurologist's Notebook: Face-Blind- The Perils of Prosopagnosia) struck me in a different way. It's about people who have a difficult time recognizing faces; from those who have difficulty recognizing them out of context, to those who can't recognize family members or every day landmarks. In extreme cases, this behavior manifests itself as brain lesions. Sacks outs himself as having a lesser but still significant form of it, developmental (or congenital) prosopagnosia. The rumors that swirled around Sacks for years because of his behavior in public (he has Aspergers, he has social anxiety, etc.) are not true. It's the difficulty he has in processing visual information (something the rest of us take for granted) that makes him appear to have these problems.
The further Sacks delved into the variations of face-blind-ness (it has its flip side: Sacks believes his father had the opposite condition, that he was a "super recognizer), the more it seemed very familiar to me. I have always had problems recognizing people by their faces if they are out of their usual context; I remember this at least as far back as high school. I always ascribed that to poor memory or too much self-involvement on my part. It never happens with close friends or family, and it never happens if the setting is appropriate. But it's happened to me twice this summer, seeing people I work with in setting where I didn't expect them.
Last week, I read an interview with Edward Albee where he described how his characters take shape in his mind, and he mentioned that he can't see their faces. I got to think that while I'm writing, I can see the characters three-dimensionally, seeing them moving through space (either in an environment or on a stage), hear their voices and know their thoughts, I can never see their faces. They are a blurred-out gray, like a wash on newsprint.
The link above is to an abstract of Sacks' article.

Phyllis Diller

Phyllis Diller is very much alive, though 92. She is the subject of an item in the January 11th issue in the Talk of the Town in The New Yorker. Since The Gong Show, she's taken up painting in acrylics.
I'm kind of stunned she's still with us, as it were.

The Canterbury Tales

I have been thinking about The Canterbury Tales a lot lately. First, I saw "A Canterbury Tale" a few weeks ago, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's updated (ca. 1944) take on some wartime Canterbury pilgrims. There's a few soldiers, people who live in the town and a Land Girl, all thrown together by circumstance. It's beautifully shot, but pretty sentimental.
Over Christmas, I read Joan Acocella's All England: 'The Canterbury Tales' Retold in the December 21 and 28 issue of The New Yorker. I'm not sure I've looked at it much since high school (we had to memorize the prologue). It did teach me more than I knew about Chaucer; like the fact that he's buried in Westminster Abbey has nothing to do with his art, but the fact that he was an administrator there (a sad commentary)! Acocella's description of Peter Ackroyd's version (The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling) made want to skip it, but she makes Vincent Hopper's pony of it sound great.

Cheaper by the Dozen

About a month ago, Jill Lepore reviewed Matthew Stewart's new book, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong. Fredrick Winslow Taylor was the so-called Father of Scientific Management, and worked as the first management consultant with corporations. Among his disciples were Louis D. Brandeis, the reform-minded attorney who went on to serve on the US Supreme Court, and Frank and Lillian Moller Gilbreth, the parents of the family immortalized in Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes.
Stewart's book starts out by claiming that Taylor fudged his numbers, so that scientific management wasn't so scientific after all. His stabs at efficiency (having workmen take fewer steps and make fewer moves in completing a task) was called Taylorizing. While Stewart's book addresses the foibles of management consulting, I was drawn to the article because much of it is about the Gilbreths. I spent many hours reading, over and over again, Ernestine Gilbreth Carey and Frank Gilbreth, Jr.'s two books about their family. I also saw the 1950 movie, though in retrospect the casting seems very strange. Clifton Web as a father of 13 (one child died of diptheria)? I can buy Myrna Loy having a PhD from Brown, but as the mother of all those kids, all of whom were breast-fed? The real Gilbreths used motion study to improve work efficiency, and used a movie camera (quite revolutionary in the 1910s) to measure it. Frank Gilbreth died in 1924, but Lillian Moller Gilbreth carried on their work, initially as a consultant and then on the faculty at Purdue University. Lepore says: "If you have an island in your kitchen, or a rolling cart, or if you think about a work triangle, you've got Lillian Gilbreth to thank." Dr. Gilbreth died in 1972, at the age of 93. Their photos are from Wikipedia.

The Early 1950s

I am nearly done with the current phase of my research for a new musical that I'm writing the book for. This has involved skimming back issues of the New Yorker, via The Complete New Yorker on cds. The magazine is in some ways remarkably similar to how it is now, and in other ways, not so much.
In the 50s, the shopping feature (On the Avenue) was much more common. They also had semi-regular columns about horse-racing, boxing, and tennis (even court tennis). There were two or three pieces of fiction in every issue. (And, yes, S.J. Perelman is still funny!) Douglas Watt, who died recently, was the music critic.
I also discovered a wonderful feature writer named Joseph Wechsberg. A native of the Czech part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Wechsberg served in World War II. He mainly writes about that part of the world- Berlin after the partition, the German-Czech border after 1948, a ride on the Orient Express- but also wrote a wonderful "Letter from Lebanon." Wechsberg died in Vienna in 1983. His website (www.josephwechsberg.com) is mostly in German, but there are some of his magazine and newspaper articles for English-language publications. Wechsberg was one of those feature writers (as was the recently deceased Nan Robertson for the New York Times) who while not at all chummy, really opens a window onto a different world for his readers. You feel like you're there with him, and it's a fascinating place to be.

Hart Island

In last week's New Yorker, there was a Talk of the Town piece by David Owen about City Island (City Island Postcard: At Sea). It mentions its proximity to Hart Island, where the City's potter's field is. I knew that Hart Island was somewhere in the East River, but I didn't know where. Nor did I know exactly what's buried there: "still-born infants, unclaimed and indigent people of all ages, and amputated limbs." The gravediggers are prisoners from Rikers.
What I did not realize is that buried among the indigent is the novelist Dawn Powell. I knew that she didn't die well off, but I didn't realize it was quite so bad as all that. One gets to Hart Island on a ferry from City Island. It served as a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War. When I was a child, our family visited an island in Lake Erie (near Sandusky) that served as a Civil War prisoner-of-war camp. So many grave markers- they went on and on. I had dreams about it for years. The graves, and the causeway from the mainland that was so narrow two cars couldn't pass each other.

Snakes

I don't like serpents. They're right up there with rodents in my personal bestiary of horrors. Don't get to use "bestiary" much, do you? So I've had two encounters with snakes-on-the-page lately. First, I spent many Sundays in church as a child. These masses usually but not always contained readings from the Hebrew Bible. But the Catholic lectionary is pretty limited; it tends to be the same passages read over and over again. The Episcopal Church has a much wider selection, so I;m often running up again Hebrew Bible stories that I don't know. So a couple of weeks ago, I'm listening to this reading from Numbers (21:4-9, for the more Bible literate), and the Israelites are journeying to the land of milk and honey, and some of them are complaining that they're thirsty because there's no water. And what does God do? He send "poisonous serpents" that bite people so they die. What? I don't remember any serpents after Joseph turns the Pharoah's staff into one. This really blew my mind.
So this week I'm reading the New Yorker and there's an article by Burkhard Bilger ("The Natural World: Swamp Things," link above) about exotic animals in Florida that have escaped from pet stores or homes, and are living in the wild there, many in the Everglades. The most troubling of these animals (to me) are the Burmese pythons. There are a lot of them already, and they're breeding. At one point he mentions that there are so many that if you account for a hundred years of global warming, the pythons could be living in New York City by 2100. This is so freaked me out I had insomnia.