God, I love the New Yorker. The magazine came today and I fell in love all over again — I fall in love with it once a week. I love the feel of it. I love the look of it — the typeface and the cartoons and the covers. I just love it.
I already read two articles. One was about James Joyce. I am interested in the novel in English because, as some of you know, I labored for a PhD in the English novel centuries ago — it sure seems like that. Joseph Conrad was my guy, still is. I do not like Joyce at all, except for his short stories, but he interests me in a way. And this article was lovely and fascinating.
And then I read a piece by John McPhee about his experiences as a young writer at the New Yorker. It is so clever and thoughtful and it’s about, to a certain extent, trying to get curse words into that august publication. That’s right up my alley — I write for a family publication and can’t get curse words in, although I grew up, thankfully, in a world using that colorful vocabulary. Brooklyn was good for something.
McPhee speaks about wanting to be a writer and how to become a writer, and I thought back to when I started and how much I wanted it — as much as Melky Cabrera wants to be a good hitter. Thursday night, I drove back from the Warriors draft, drove back with Grant who attended with me as my guest expert, and as we neared home, I said something corny. “I was put on this Earth to write columns,” I said. He nodded.
I meant I think in 800 words. I am fast and concise and vivid — when I’m good, not often enough — and I love the feeling of touching these keys I am touching right now and seeing words magically appear on a screen and then sentences and then paragraphs and then the full 800. What joy!
If I were a poet, I would write sonnets, a quick 14 lines, in and out just like that, the point being made. I write prose sonnets. And I never want to stop until someone tells me I have to.
That’s what John McPhee and The New Yorker made me think about this Friday night.
Stan
For some reason this reminds me of…using Google Earth to look at every home I ever lived in,or school I went to. None seemed to have the TLC we gave them. Still,with Google I could stand in front of a home hundreds of miles away and visit the past. Things have changed..and for Lowell and the New Yorker its still good. Glad to hear it.
June 29th, 2012 8:11 pm
Frank in Minnesota
This is what i love about this column…you can talk about Joseph Conrad as well as write about sports…makes it all interesting and so worthwhile to come in and read! Many times your guests here write incredibly insightful comments,too…now i want to pick up that New Yorker!
June 29th, 2012 8:30 pm
chris
wowa this is strange…….first off, regarding Stan checking out google to see places he’s lived in the past, I was doing the exact same thing yesterday to see the 3 houses I lived at in college 30 years ago…..they haven’t changed a bit…..and Lowell, as far as the New yorker goes, my 83 year old mother reads it every week……….she once gave me a copy with an article about Rickey Henderson…….and then back in the 1950′s, she was teaching 4 years olds at a private school called Dalton in New York, and a few of the kids were William Shawns, who was an editor at the New Yorker.
June 29th, 2012 9:29 pm
CohnZohn
Chris, William Shawn was THE editor at the New Yorker.
June 29th, 2012 9:53 pm
Jack Orion
You missed the William Finnegan article on Guadalajara. That was the best piece in the issue. Finnegan and David Grann are great writers and good reasons to read the NYer, but it’s mostly a been a bore since Remnick took over. Vanity Fair, at least while Hitchens was alive, topped it.
Now I read the back half of The New Republic. And the CohnZohn.
June 30th, 2012 7:22 am
Peter
My father went to school with McPhee and played a little basketball (did they lace up the ball?). Dad introduced me to the book A Sense Of Where You Are, a fine read about Bill Bradley’s keen basketball smarts.
June 30th, 2012 8:45 am
Mark M
love it!
June 30th, 2012 10:55 am
Pat
I’ve been reading the New Yorker since I was at Cal in the ’60s and a subscriber since the ’70s. Nothing brightens my day more than to open the mail box and find the latest edition. It’s better than opening Christmas presents!
June 30th, 2012 12:22 pm
lameduck
Oddly, I feel similarly about watching Star Trek reruns. I am a fan of the original, pre prime directive, where Kirk could change a world if he didn’t think they conformed to his values. It’s like eating comfort food without the calories.
From that, I pursued technology as a career and love it.
May you live long and prosper, Lowell.
June 30th, 2012 12:54 pm
Sean Nolan
Have you tried writing a sonnet? It’s a demanding form, not a quick 14 lines. Better to stick to haikus. You’re a passionate writer, but you don’t write prose sonnets, whatever that is.
I understand your aversion to later Joyce, beyond the short stories of the Dubliners. Joyce mastered the short story in record time, then tried something very different. Ulysses is a buffet where you don’t have to eat everything, and Finnegan’s Wake remains incomprehensible to me.
June 30th, 2012 8:04 pm
CohnZohn
Sean, Thanks for your wise comment. I guess I don’t write prose sonnets. I probably just write columns. I appreciate what you say about Ulysses, about it being a buffet where you don’t have to eat everything. In my concept of a great novel, you do have to eat everything. It all leads somewhere and that applies to every great novelist who wrote in English — Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Mark Twain, Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, etc etc. Maybe Joyce really isn’t a novelist. He’s another thing that disagrees with my digestion.
June 30th, 2012 9:38 pm
CohnZohn
Jack Orion, I just read the Finnegan article. Wow.
June 30th, 2012 9:43 pm
Sean Nolan
“In my concept of a great novel, you do have to eat everything.”
That’s fair enough.
July 1st, 2012 1:45 am
santa clara jay
Funny, I’m re-reading “Assembling California” right now. John Mc Phee is so talented that he can write about what you’d think would be an inherently uninteresting topic (to shallow me admittedly), such as long distance tanker trucks, and make it something you can’t put down.
I liked Lowell’s recent writing about RDAs, thinking about him, I checked out “The Secret Agent” yesterday.
July 1st, 2012 10:55 am
CohnZohn
santa clara jay, I hope you like The Secret Agent. It was a real departure for Conrad, and it was an early — maybe the first — “black comedy.”
July 1st, 2012 12:10 pm
Jack Orion
Glad you liked that Guadalajara piece. Finnegan has a great collection of journalism called “Cold New World” that might be of interest to your students.
July 1st, 2012 5:24 pm
CohnZohn
Jack, Thank you.
July 1st, 2012 5:55 pm
mendozaline
Speaking of authors, there is an interesting article about Faulkner in today’s NY Times magazine:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/how-william-faulkner-tackled-race-and-freed-the-south-from-itself.html?ref=magazine
July 1st, 2012 8:37 pm
mendozaline
2 more things.
You can get a set of DVDs that contain every issue of The New Yorker from the start in 1925 through February 2005 for around $10:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/1400064740/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&condition=new
There is a new book out by a former receptionist (for 21 years)
at The New Yorker. It sounds interesting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/fashion/janet-groth-describes-her-life-at-the-new-yorker.html?pagewanted=all
July 1st, 2012 8:49 pm
Brady
mendozaline – thanks for linking that article. I spent a good 6 weeks fall semester studying Faulkner and “Go Down, Moses” and wow, what an author. Thanks for passing that on!
July 1st, 2012 8:53 pm