Theory of Relativity
The following are excerpts from "The Royal We" by Steve Olson, which was published in the May 2002 issue of The Atlantic Monthly and, more recently, in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003. It can be read in its entirety here.

The idea that virtually anyone with a European ancestor descends from English royalty seems bizarre, but it accords perfectly with some recent research done by Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale University. The mathematics of our ancestry is exceedingly complex, because the number of our ancestors increases exponentially, not linearly. These numbers are manageable in the first few generations—two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents—but they quickly spiral out of control. Go back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived.

In a 1999 paper titled "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals," Chang showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such abstractions as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can readily be applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang's model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today.

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Chang's model has even more dramatic implications. Because people are always migrating from continent to continent, networks of descent quickly interconnect. This means that the most recent common ancestor of all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of thousand years ago. And not long before that the majority of the people on the planet were the direct ancestors of everyone alive today. Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone's ancestors.

Toward the end of our conversation Humphrys pointed out something I hadn't considered. The same process works going forward in time; in essence every one of us who has children and whose line does not go extinct is suspended at the center of an immense genetic hourglass. Just as we are descended from most of the people alive on the planet a few thousand years ago, several thousand years hence each of us will be an ancestor of the entire human race—or of no one at all.

Shocks, Breaks, and Gags
The following is an excerpt from this Atlantic Unbound interview with Ian Frazier.

Your writing career began at The New Yorker. How did you get started there?

When I was just graduating from college, in 1973, I didn't know what I wanted to do -- I was just going to go back to Ohio and kick back -- and I looked in The New Yorker and there was a profile of Jonathan Winters, my favorite comedian. I thought, If that's in The New Yorker, maybe I can write for them. That piece was by Bill Whitworth [later The Atlantic's editor]. He did many great profiles, and I admired them enormously. Everything else in The New Yorker was on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks or something, and I didn't know anything about that at twenty-two years old. I had been on The Lampoon at Harvard, and I'd written a lot of humor pieces for them, so I just sent a whole package of stuff down to William Shawn. Then I met with the personnel director, and he said that he thought there were too many people from Harvard there. That really cut me to the quick, because I felt like I was never even really present at Harvard; I felt like a complete outsider. I thought of myself as a Midwesterner. So I went to Chicago and worked for Oui, a spinoff of Playboy, writing captions. It was not the most glorious thing I ever did in my life. Oui published what they considered sophisticated, French-type pictorials that were just extremely cheesy. It was naked guys and women at some resort in Mexico -- very wild and sybaritic. It took all my creativity. It's one of those things you think anybody could do. But anybody can't do that; it's really hard. It was just completely wrong for me, and so I split after about six weeks. But when I came back to The New Yorker, which I did the next year, and said I had been working at Playboy, that kind of surprised them. At my first meeting with Mr. Shawn he said, "So what were you writing for this magazine?" And I said, "Oh, they mainly had me doing the S&M stuff, the leather, the whips." Which wasn't even true -- I don't know why I said it, I guess I was trying to shock him. He was this extremely polite guy and said, "Oh my God!" Then they gave me a job as a "Talk of the Town" reporter, and I was there for twenty years in various capacities. I resigned in 1995. It was a great place for a long time, but it became impossible for me to stay when Tina Brown was there.

Many of your humorous essays start with some quirky thing that you've read -- a magazine mention of satanism and university presidents turns into a commencement speech gone very wrong, for instance. In general, what sorts of things spark ideas, and how do you spin the ideas out into a piece?

I just like anything that's fun to play with. Some really ridiculous thing that somebody says, or a voice that's really exciting, a voice I had never really thought of before. In Coyote v. Acme I poke fun, for instance, at Bob Hope's voice. I have every book that Bob Hope ever "wrote" -- and his voice just really got under my skin. It's such a Cold War voice -- it's like the American winner, the winner of World War Two talks like this. I loved that voice, so it was fun to do. And that's a lot of what goes into a humor piece, finding a voice that I like. The problem is, I've never found a voice that I can sustain for longer than about 2,000 words without getting sick of it. That's why I admire something like Charles Portis's True Grit -- or Huckleberry Finn -- because it is a voice all the way through, but it doesn't get tiring.

Dorothy Parker once said about humor writers, "There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind. There must be a magnificent disregard for your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it." Do you agree with her assessment? How do you think about the reader as you're writing?

I don't have a disregard for my reader in humor pieces. What I like about humor pieces is that it's such a win or lose situation. You can't say, "Well it's a wonderful piece, but I didn't laugh." If you didn't laugh, it's not a humor piece. That kind of damning criticism is not really available to the reader of a short story. They can say, "I didn't get it, I thought it was pretentious." But they can't give you that one kick in the shins that ruins everything. I think it's great that there's a kind of writing that can be destroyed with a single sentence. I just think it's more fun to do.

Nobody will really pay you to do humor pieces at any length. In my case, I don't get that many ideas in a year, so I could never really support myself at it. It's extremely perishable; many, many humor pieces depend on references that are only of the moment. Most humor has that "you had to be there" quality. Publishers don't particularly like to do collections of humor pieces, unless you're a national columnist or someone who already has a following. It approaches being the least cost-effective thing to do with your time as a writer. But I'm addicted to doing it; I just keep trying. A friend of mine said, "to write something on a piece of paper and put it in a mailbox and to have it appear in a magazine, and to have a person you don't know read the magazine and laugh until he cries -- that's a great achievement." To me that's like getting the space probe to Mars and getting it to tell us exactly what's happening. It's a hard thing to do, and yet it can't look hard, it has to look like you just tossed it off. I love to do it, but I also like to do really long and serious and painful kinds of things.

Allen's Alley
The following Woody Allen quote is from On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy by Eric Lax, which was published in 1975.

"The more I was introduced to Perelman and Robert Benchley, I got crazy about them. I think those two are the great comedy writers. I think the most you can say about many of the others is that some of them are sporadically funny. Perelman and Benchley have a much bigger armory of tricks.... Benchley and Perelman are masters of all kinds of absurdities and non sequiturs. There's a certain funniness that Perelman and Benchley have, funny in a critical, hilarious way that Jonathan Winters is. They see life differently and have more funny ideas than Thurber or Lardner or any of those people.

"Perelman is so utterly unique and complex," Woody says. "You can't be influenced a little by him. You have to go so deeply that it shows all over the place. You can't write something that's a little Perelmanesque, just like you can't play a little like Errol Garner. There are so many points that are recognizable. It's interesting in a peripheral way that I'm trying to do names more like Benchley; they have a distinctive style and are hilarious but they are less descriptive than Perelman's."

Sandy: Berger



The following is from an Ian Frazier article called "Terminal Ice," which was originally published in the October 2002 issue of Outside magazine. The article can be read in its entirety here. "Terminal Ice" is in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003, which I got for Christmas. (Thanks, Santa!)

Icebergs are pieces of freshwater ice of a certain size floating in the ocean or (rarely) a lake. They come from glaciers and other ice masses. Because of the physics of ice when it piles up on land, it spreads and flows, and as it does its advancing edge often meets a body of water. When the ice continues to flow out over the water, chunks of it break off in a process called calving. Some of the faster-moving glaciers in Greenland calve an average of two or three times a day during the warmer months. Icebergs are not the same as sea ice. Sea ice is frozen saltwater, and when natural forces break it into pieces, the larger ones are called not icebergs but ice floes. Icebergs are denser and harder than sea ice. When icebergs are driven by wind or current, sea ice parts before them them like turkey before an electric carving knife. In former times, sailing ships that got stuck in sea ice sometimes used to tie themselves to an iceberg and let it pull them through.

A piece of floating freshwater ice must be at least 50 feet long to qualify as an iceberg, according to authorities on the subject. If it's smaller -- say, about the size of a grand piano -- it's called a growler. If it's about the size of a cottage, it's a bergy bit. Crushed-up pieces of ice that result when parts of melting icebergs disintegrate and come falling down are called "slob ice" by mariners. Students of icebergs have divided them by shape into six categories: blocky, wedge, tabular, dome, pinnacle, and dry-dock. The last of these refers to icebergs with columnar sections flanking a water-level area in the middle, like high-rise apartment buildings around a swimming pool.

At the edges of Antarctica, where plains of ice spread across the ocean and float on it before breaking off, most of the icebergs are tabular -- flat on top, horizontal in configuration. In the Northern Hemisphere, because of the thickness of glacial ice and the way it calves, most icebergs are of the more dramatically shaped kinds. Tabular icebergs tend to be stable in the water, and scientists sometimes land in helicopters on the bigger ones to study them. Northern Hemisphere icebergs, with their smaller size and gothic, irregular shapes, often grow frozen seawater on the bottom, lose above-water ice structure to melting, and suddenly capsize and roll. Venturing onto such icebergs is a terrible idea.

Antarctica has about 90 percent of all the ice in the world; most of the rest of it is in Greenland. Those two places produce most of the world's icebergs -- about 100,000 a year from the first, about 10,000 to 15,000 from the other. Glaciers in Norway, Russia, and Alaska produce icebergs, too. The Exxon Valdez went aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound partly because it had changed course to avoid icebergs. Scientists have not been observing icebergs long enough to say if there are substantially more of them today. They know that the total mass of ice in Greenland has decreased at an accelerated rate in recent years. In Antarctica, because of its size and other factors, scientists still don't know whether the continent as a whole is losing ice or not.

Black, Irish
In the September 2003 issue of Interview magazine, Jack Black interviewed Conan O'Brien. You can read the interview here.

An excerpt:

JACK BLACK: Hello?

CONAN O'BRIEN: Two great comedy minds, finally together.

JB: Head to head. Clash of the titans, as it were.

CO: Superman and Aquaman.

JB: Who's Aquaman?

CO: I'm afraid you are.

JB: [laughs] Okay. Let me start off by apologizing. You've probably been waiting by the phone for me to call.

CO: I've been staring at my pink princess phone waiting for my nails to dry, wishing you would call. And I have a photograph of you, and it's in a heart-shaped frame by the side of my bed.

JB: [laughs] Well, let me explain. I got scared and did some last-minute cramming. I had to approach this like a hard journalist. Now. I want to ask you some things I've prepared. Awesome questions.

CO: Are these the kind like "if I lift a tree that's heavy, that means I made it?" Wait, that makes no sense. I fell apart for a second, but now I'm back.

JB: [laughs] Which brings me to my first hard-hitting question, actually. It seems to me that you are the master of self-effacement. You might even be the king. The undisputed king. But the truth is, you've got the funniest show on television [Late Night With Conan O'Brien], and I'm not just blowing smoke up your ass.

CO: Well, there is smoke up my ass, so did that come from you?

JB: Yeah, it was me. But there's also other stuff up there.

CO: There's a 1934 Lincoln penny, which is very rare.

JB: What's up with that? Why do you--

CO: --Make fun of myself? I have a theory, which is that your core sense of humor and what you think is funny is formed early on. And my sense of humor was formed when I was a mediocre athlete, not that popular with the girls, coming from a big family, just this guy who was funny with my friends. Self-effacement was actually a survival tool. So if people want me to start saying "Check this guy out!" or "Wanna see something funny? Just watch the old Cona-rama!" you'd need to get in a time machine and go back to 1978 and make me an amazing athlete and a hit with the ladies.

JB: You said you come from a big family. Do you have brothers and sisters?

CO: Yeah. Five.

JB: Were you competitive with each other?

CO: I think we were competitive about being funny. And about who could throw the spear the farthest. [Black laughs] That was something my father made us do. He was a tribal chief. I read something once that Bill Murray said, that so much of his comedy education happened at the dinner table with his brothers, and that certainly is the truth with me, too. We were sitting around and someone said something funny and it made our mother and father laugh, then someone else tried to say something funnier.

JB: I remember really wanting to be funny, and not being funny for most of my youth.

CO: Really? That's interesting because I don't think people would guess that [about you]. When did you feel like, Hey, okay, people think I'm funny now?

JB: [silence]

CO: Never did, huh? [both laugh]

Click here to read the rest.

Dead C. Scrolls



According to the new issue of The New Yorker, a collection of Graham Chapman's writing, called Back to the Trees, will be published in England next fall. This week's "Shouts and Murmurs" piece -- "An Appendectomy on the Bakerloo Line" -- is from Back to the Trees. In addition to being a pipe-smoking Python, Chapman was a fully accredited medical doctor. He died in 1989.

Here's the first part of "An Appendectomy on the Bakerloo Line":

Dear Sirs,

I’ve had letter after letter after letter since you published one particular query that asked, “What should I do about my appendix on the Bakerloo Line?” Well, “Miss N.,” I can only assume you’re talking about an acutely inflamed vermiform appendix. The answer is simply: Take it out! I’ve no wish to give glib advice. I know, there are bound to be difficulties for the inexperienced layman or -woman contemplating auto-appendectomy. One tiny hint here: have a good rummage through your handbag and make sure your Lane’s forceps are not caked with biscuit crumbs, bits of fluff, old bus tickets, etc. It could save an awful lot of fuss later on. I have set out some details that may help you in this sometimes irksome chore.

First, find yourself a Tube Map, issued free by London Transport, or go to your nearest Underground station and ask for one. Remember, the stations marked with an “O” are interchange stations. Stations marked with a star are closed on Sundays, and also remember to pick up a plastic bucket for the guts.

Click here to continue reading.

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Here's Michael Palin's tribute to Chapman.

Pen-y Lane
In this Telegraph article, New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane talks about his writing life. (Via Bookslut.)

An excerpt:

I tend to send my copy in on deadline, which by New Yorker standards is tacky. It has to go through three or four proofs. The fact-checkers proof; the grammarians proof. And it is amazing. Someone does go to see the film, to make sure I'm not lying. If I'm reviewing a Tim Burton film and I say that Ewan McGregor's wearing a bright blue shirt, they'll say to me, 'It's more like bright turquoise'. But you should get it right, especially if you're going to have some fun with it. Otherwise it's cheating. The New Yorker is the only place in the world where you can pull a piece to change a comma to a semi-colon. It's a haven for the pedant. I love it.

Uncle Sam and Auntie Science
The following is an excerpt from Richard Dawkins' introduction to The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003. Dawkins is the author of The Selfish Gene, and is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

For a non-American to be invited by a leading American publisher to anthologize American writings about science is an honor, the more so because American science is, by almost any index one could conjure, preeminent in the world. Whether we measure the money spent on research or count the numbers of active scientists working, or books and journal articles published, or of major prizes won, the United States leads the rest of the world by a convincing margin. My admiration for American science is so enthusiastic, so downright grateful, that I hope I may not be thought presumptuous if I sound a note of discordant warning. American science leads the world, but so does American anti-science. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in my own field of evolution.

Evolution is one of the most securely established facts in all science. The knowledge that we are cousins to apes, kangaroos, and bacteria is beyond all educated doubt: as certain as our (once doubted) knowledge that the planets orbit the sun, and that South America was once joined to Africa, and India distant from Asia. Particularly secure is the fact that life's evolution began a matter of billions of years ago. And yet, if polls are to be believed, approximately 45 percent of the population of the United States firmly believes, to the contrary, an elementary falsehood: all species separately owe their existence to "intelligent design" less than ten thousand years ago. Worse, the nature of American democratic institutions is such that this perversely ignorant half of the population (which does not, I hasten to add, include leading churchmen or leading scholars in any discipline) is in many districts strongly placed to influence local educational policy. I have met biology teachers in various states who feel physically intimidated from teaching the central theorem of their subject. Even reputable publishers have felt sufficiently threatened to censor school textbooks of biology.

That 45 percent figure really is something of a national educational disgrace. You'd have to travel right past Europe to the theocratic societies around the Middle East before you hit a comparable level of antiscientific miseducation. It is bafflingly paradoxical that the United States is by far the world's leading scientific nation while simultaneously housing the most scientifically illiterate populace outside the Third World.

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Here you can listen to Dawkins on The Connection.

Here's a Scientific American article about how creationists are influencing state educational standards.

This Scientific American article is called "Fifteen Answers to Creationist Nonsense."

The answer to almost any question concerning evolution can be found here.

The Soul of Wit
In this Fresh Air interview, Mike Nichols discusses the making of Wit, an HBO film he directed starring Emma Thompson as a woman dying of ovarian cancer. He also talks about his work as half of the comedy dyad Nichols and May, and about his films, which include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate.

On this episode of Comedy College, you can listen to many classic Nichols and May sketches. (My favorite is the one with the surgeon who's in love with his nurse.) This look at Nichols and May is hosted by Steve Martin.

Speaking of Steve Martin, here's a Comedy College sampling of Martin's hilarious standup comedy.

Other episodes of Comedy College feature such people as Jack Benny, Lenny Bruce, and Bob Newhart.

Idle Reading
With 2004 looming before us like a fat moose, now is the perfect time to take a look at Python Eric Idle's "Books of the Year -- 1998":

My book of the year is

Barney's Version
Mordecai Richler
Totally hysterical. That rare bird - the really funny novel. I completely recommend it to everyone. Wonderfully honest and incorrect. Great.

My second favorite was

Peter Cook
A biography by Harry Thompson
A hilarious account of the life of the funniest man in the world. If you are at all a Peter Cook fan get it now. Not published in the States.

Here are some others I enjoyed.

The Grave of Alice B. Toklas
Otto Friedrich
Magnificent essays by the consummate master of historical writing. I just adore him and sadly learned he has died. From Mozart to the last emperor of Rome (a woman), his essays are never less than enthralling and informative.

Truman Capote
George Plimpton (editor)
An odd shape for a book - rather like a TV documentary, all talking heads, but a nevertheless revealing look at this odd but wonderful writer. Some people are bitchy and more revealing about themselves, notably Mailer and Gore Vidal, but still the sense of shock when all his New York friends dumped him, and his inability to realise it was predictable, make it both sad and interesting. What a talent he had.

Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
The movie sent me back to the book and "O" level English days. I can re-read Dickens for ever. This is surprisingly wittily written. I had forgotten how funny he is in his narrator voice. Brilliant. Classic.

The Royals
Kitty Kelley
Much more interesting than I had expected. Particularly fascinating about the young wives. Fergie comes out as a nightmare. It will probably be the last unvarnished portrait of Diana for a while. What a manipulative person. Good to remember how she preyed on other people's husbands (Will Carling etc).

Before the Deluge
Otto Friedrich
A portrait of Berlin in the 1920's. Magnificent, chilling, account of the rise of Nazism. How insignificant they were. How free Berlin was. How quickly power vacuum and deflationary economics can lead to fascism. Chilling. Brilliant. He is a great historian.

Philippe, Duc D'Orleans
Christine Pevitt
A fascinating history of the Regent of France, the nephew of Louis XIV. I had never really read the history of the Regency before (since A level). John Law and his attempt to create money. All the fabulous intrigues of the Court at Versailles, the amazing attempts at poisoning and so on. I really liked Philippe, and got an excellent picture of him from this book. Very interesting and highly readable.

The End of the World
Otto Friedrich
Re-reading bits of this excellent history of the times when people believed the world was going to end. Usually millenniums... germane for 1999 and all the millennial bullshit we can expect.

Cities of the Plain
Cormac McCarthy
And then comes the occasional book that make it all worth while. The book you dread will end because you know you won't find another that is like it for this year or many a year. This is the final act of the border trilogy. The final inexorably tragic story of the love affair of a young Texan cowboy for a Mexican whore, that has, you know it, to end tragically. But the nobility of the writing and the way he plays it out. Ah yes, the writer de nos jours. Some of these pages take your breath away, and will continue to do so long after we are dust.

Becoming Human
Ian Tattersall
Fascinating book on the evolution and human uniqueness that takes its point of departure the arrival of the extraordinarily different homo sapiens Cro-Magnon, in Europe 25 kyr's ago. Written by a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and primate behaviourist, this is not an easy read but a great and worthwhile study of our origins and our place in nature.

The Demon-Haunted World
Carl Sagan
The alas late semi-great Carl. A wonderful populariser of science, here attacking the assholes of new age beliefs and stupid twaddle. He really does demolish a lot of the unconventional wisdom which passes for the Gospel according to Shirley Maclaine.

Click here to read the rest of the list.

Book Sellers
When a biography of Peter Sellers -- Mr. Strangelove by Ed Sikov -- was published last year, Python Michael Palin reviewed it for the New York Times.

Here are all the paragraphs of the review, in order:

''How many of us really did know Peter?'' David Niven asked in his eulogy at Sellers's memorial service in 1980. Quite a challenge for would-be biographers, and though Ed Sikov's book is not the first to rise to it, the aptly titled ''Mr. Strangelove'' is the most comprehensive account of Sellers's life I've read.

I didn't know Peter Sellers well enough to be able to say that I never really knew him. Our paths crossed only once, in a television studio, when he emerged from a dressing room door as I was walking past. To my eternal embarrassment I went involuntarily into the voice of Eccles from ''The Goon Show'' -- not even one of his characters. Sellers smiled tolerantly, disappeared round the corner, and that was that. Much later I described our brief meeting to Spike Milligan. ''I met Sellers once. I passed him in a studio in North London.''

Spike winced. ''That must have been painful.''

From the age of 9 or 10, when I first became aware that the funniest voices on the radio all belonged to the same man, Peter Sellers became one of the best reasons to be young and living in England. ''The Goon Show,'' in which he and Milligan teamed up with Harry Secombe, was to comedy what Elvis Presley was to pop music -- a quantum leap forward, a permanent and irreparable rupture with a staid and conventional past and, more personally, a discovery of my own that could not be shared with anyone of an older generation. The wireless set on which I first heard the Goons was the same one on which we listened to royal funerals and Oxford and Cambridge boat races. When my father first heard the quivering voices of Minnie Bannister and Henry Crun, the shrill complaints of Bluebottle and the cathartic roars of Major Bloodnok as he dealt with the aftereffects of another strong curry, he assumed there must be something wrong with the speakers. When he discovered it was meant to sound like that, he just shook his head and left me alone.

Milligan and Sellers became my friends, or rather their characters did. They were silly and idiotic but somehow real, and I was pleased to read that Sellers felt the same thing too. ''To all of us, they absolutely lived,'' Sikov quotes him as saying. Milligan, looking back on the rich gallery of Sellers's characters, called them ''the boiler house of his talent.''

This talent took many forms, the greatest of which, for me, was his ability to invest dignity in even the most outlandish characters. Sikov uses as an example an outrageously camp character called Sir Jervis Fruit. Sellers, he writes, ''believes in Fruit. There's no contempt or derision.''

People talk with awe of the way Sellers was taken over by the characters he played. Even on the radio, Sikov writes, he physically changed as he did the different voices. This transcended mere imitation. ''You'd be in a taxi with Peter,'' one of the scriptwriters on ''The Goon Show,'' Eric Sykes, says, ''and when he would get out, he would be the taxi driver. But not only in words and voice. His whole metabolism would have changed.''

Sellers was also a master of understatement. As much as any comic actor I know, with the possible exception of John Cleese, Sellers realized how much funnier comedy can be if played not only straight but with gravity and conviction. As Sikov writes, ''He remains to this day the master of playing men who have no idea how ridiculous they are.'' He was blessed with an inexhaustible gift for mimicry, what Sikov calls his ''omnidextrous voice.'' The only accent that defeated him, apparently, was Texan.

Throughout my teens I never missed a Sellers film. His performances in ''The Ladykillers'' (1955) and ''I'm All Right, Jack'' (1959) defined good comic acting, and I had a gut feeling that whatever Sellers was doing was what I wanted to do.

I was pleased to learn that I was not the only one to be dazzled. Woody Allen, whom Sellers apparently treated highhandedly during the filming of ''What's New, Pussycat?,'' thought he had ''the funniness of genius.'' The G-word is also used by Liza Minnelli and many others. The director Peter Hall thought Sellers as good an actor as Alec Guinness or Laurence Olivier, who had confidence enough in Sellers to ask him to take on King Lear. He turned it down, not thinking himself good enough.

Yet even as Sikov examines Sellers's qualities, clues to his darker side emerge. The reason he could so completely and convincingly inhabit a character was that he felt much more comfortable in someone else's world than in his own. ''I'm like a mike -- I have no set sound of my own,'' he once said. ''I pick it up from my surroundings.'' His prodigious output of 67 films in less than 30 years is interpreted by Sikov as a desperate attempt to avoid playing the one part that terrified him, Peter Sellers.

Sikov offers various reasons for Sellers's self-loathing. His father was weak and frequently absent (Milligan called him ''the original man who never was''); his mother, who at one time ate bananas underwater in a show called ''Splash Me!,'' was dominating and controlling. From Sellers's birth in 1925, she smothered him with affection, while expecting him to spend much of his childhood cooped up in dressing rooms while she pursued her stage career. He hated his appearance and once told an interviewer that ''I writhe when I see myself on the screen. . . . Some fat awkward thing dredged up from some third-rate drama company.''

His mother gave him everything except a sense of proportion. As she spoiled him, so he in turn spoiled himself, buying and selling recklessly. If he wanted it, he had to have it, and he had to have it right away. There was no sense of restraint. Interests became manias. The same compulsive intensity that led him to the heart of the characters he played drove his private life. Gadgets, photography, women, fast cars were picked up and cast aside with equal enthusiasm. Sikov quotes Sellers's friend Jimmy Grafton as saying that all comedians are manic-depressives to some degree, but nothing in the book fully explains the flip side of Sellers's genius -- the violence and abuse directed toward his four wives and three children, the tantrums, the lashing out at good friends, the manipulative deviousness, the unreliability and the sublime selfishness that grew with his wealth and recognition.

Sikov, the author of books on Billy Wilder and American film comedy, takes care to balance the horror stories with testimony from those who loved Sellers and loved working with him, and a book that could have been sensational is fair and thorough. A few stones are left half-turned. Maurice Woodruff, the phony clairvoyant whom Sellers consulted on a daily basis for many years, seems to drop out of the story without explanation, and the account of the split-up with Liza Minnelli is tantalizingly brusque. (While I'm in quibble mode, the restaurant where the Goons and friends used to meet is spelled Tratoo, not Tratou.)

''Mr. Strangelove,'' with all its unhappy revelations, does not, for me, reduce the delight of watching and listening to Sellers's work. That it draws attention to his bad behavior is at best a clue to his talent, and at worst the price you pay for being interesting. Sikov has pulled off the difficult trick of producing both an authoritative biography and a compulsive page turner. He is careful to let his sources do most of the talking, interjecting his own pithy and relevant judgments here and there to keep the whole thing on course. That the course is a slow, remorseless slide into a brick wall is the fault of the subject rather than the author.

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Click here to listen to Sellers recite the lyrics of A Hard Day's Night in the style of Olivier's Richard the Third.

Click here to listen to Sellers in a sketch called "A Right Bird." (From here.)

C.K. One
Louis C.K. is the mayor of Chuckletown. He's written for Conan O'Brien, David Letterman, Chris Rock, and Dana Carvey; he's one of the best standups in the business; and he makes hilarious films. His film Tomorrow Night is one of the funniest movies ever made. Unfortunately, it isn't available for rental or purchase in any form; Mr. C.K. says he might make a DVD of it and sell it on his website, though. I was lucky to see Tomorrow Night at a film festival.

From this page on Mr. C.K.'s website:

Back in 1998 I made my first feature film. "Tomorrow Night". This was a black and white independant film that I made myself for about 180K dollars. It was an incredibly great experience and I'll always be happy that I made at least one film completely without any interference, even though it sent me into gigantic debt. Tomorrow Night went to Sundance and many other festivals and got some very good reviews but I have not gotten a distributor thus far. I am going to try to make a DVD of Tomorrow Night to sell here myself, but we'll see. Below are some links to reviews and other Press regarding "Tomorrow Night".

My friend Claire Zulkey recently interviewed Mr. C.K. You can read the interview here.

Here's Mr. C.K.'s bio from the liner notes of his CD:

Louis C.K. is best known as a stand-up comedian and filmmaker. Most people don't know that he is accomplished in many other fields as well. For instance, Louis won a gold medal at the 1996 Olympics for "Not throwing darts at seniors". Also, in the nineteen eighties, Louis was personally responsible for "All the hooplah". Perhaps Louis' greatest accomplishment was when he "Went over to that area and talked to that guy for a while" a feat that forever altered the face of something. Perhaps Louis will never be fully recognized for all he has done, but one thing is for sure.

Here's Mr. C.K.'s guide to appendix removal.

An excerpt:

2. THE HOLE: The hole is something that must be made in the body of the patient in order to gain access to the appendix. The hole may be created in one of many ways. The simplest way is to pierce the skin with a sharp or hot object, and then cut or slice away an area of skin, approximately the size of a miniature pumpkin. The skin that has been cut away can either be discarded, used to make a stylish hat or saved in a coke can to be replaced after the appendix is removed. NOTE: UPON MAKING THE HOLE, ONE MAY FIND THAT MUCH BLOOD WILL POUR FROM THE BODY. IF MORE THAN FIVE PINTS OF THIS BLOOD ESCAPES, THE PATIENT MAY BECOME “TIRED” OR “NOT ALIVE ANY LONGER”.

The Man Who Came to Dinner
The following is an excerpt from a letter S.J. Perelman wrote to his friend Leila Hadley. The letter is dated June 17, 1955.

Tonight, I'm scheduled to have dinner with Harvey Orkin, whom you may recall, and Cary Grant, whom I'm sure you do, to discuss a project for involving the latter in a TV production of Westward Ha! There isn't even the proverbial Chinaman's chance of its going through, but wild-eyed agents have set it up and I've gone too far into it to back out. I will, therefore, break off here and continue when I next get back to these unlovely precincts.

... [Cary Grant] turned out to be a very agreeable surprise, in that he was not only full of charm -- which we expected -- but was most receptive to the idea advanced by my companions. Nothing immediate, to be sure; it'll be two years before he could possibly do it, but he did tell them that if they'd show him three scripts based on Westward Ha!, satisfactory to himself, he'd throw in his lot with us. It appears he has been a loyal reader of mine for quite a while, and was as complimentary as anyone could have asked. All this is balmy for the ego but unfortunately of no emollient value to the pocket.

World Domination
Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson is the world's leading authority on ants. His book The Ants (which he wrote with Bert Hölldobler) is number twenty-seven on Modern Library's list of the hundred best nonfiction books of the twentieth century. The following is from Wilson's essay collection In Search of Nature.

At present there are about 9,500 described species of ants; this is the number so far given a scientific name. I'd venture a guess that there are in actual existence two or three times that many, and there is immense diversity within this group of hymenopterous insects. A colony of the world's smallest ant could dwell comfortably inside the braincase of the world's largest ant. One genus of ants that I've been studying, Pheidole, contains 285 named species from the New World alone. In the collection at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology I have about 600 species; in other words, some 315 are new to science. More pour in from collectors every few months.

Ants are the dominant little-sized organisms of the planet -- that is, intermediate in size between bacteria and elephants. My rough estimate is that at any given moment there are about 10¹⁵, or a million billion, ants in the world. In terms of overall biomass, measured as dry weight, they are truly formidable. For example, in forests near Manaus, in the central Brazilian Amazon, ants and termites together make up more than one-quarter of the biomass -- which includes everything from very small worms and other invertebrates to the largest mammals. Ants alone weigh four times as much as the birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals combined. This proportion of ants is approached or exceeded in most other major types of land habitat around the world. When we consider insect biomass alone, we find that the ants and termites, the most highly social of all organisms, plus the social wasps and social bees, which rival them in colonial organization, make up about 80 percent of the biomass. These insects dominate the insect world from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania. In fact, ants are the principal predators of small animals roughly their own size. They are the "cemetery squad," scavenging and removing the corpses of more than 90 percent of the small animals. They are movers and enrichers of the earth, more so than the earthworms. Indeed, although the social insects as a group make up only 2 percent of all of the known described species of insects in the world, they probably make up most of the biomass.

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The truth is that we need invertebrates but they don't need us. If human beings were to disappear tomorrow, the world would go on with little change. Gaia, the totality of life on Earth, would set about healing itself and return to the rich environmental states of 100,000 years ago. But if invertebrates were to disappear, it is unlikely that the human species could last more than a few months. Most of the fishes, amphibians, birds, and mammals would crash to extinction about the same time. Next would go the bulk of the flowering plants and with them the physical structure of the majority of the forests and other terrestrial habitats of the world. The soil would rot. As dead vegetation piled up and dried out, narrowing and closing the channels of the nutrient cycles, other complex forms of vegetation would die off, and with them the last remnants of the vertebrates. The remaining fungi, after enjoying a population explosion of stupendous proportions, would also perish. Within a few decades the world would return to the state of a billion years ago, composed primarily of bacteria, algae, and a few other very simple multicellular plants.

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Here's how ants find food.

Laughter of the Gods
One day in 1964, Kenneth Tynan went out to lunch with Groucho Marx and S.J. Perelman. He wrote an article about it, which was published in the Observer on June 14, 1964. The following is an excerpt from that article.

I asked him [Groucho] to name the people who have made him laugh. "The funniest talkers," he says, "the funniest men around a dinnertable would be George Jessel and George Burns. The fastest men with one-line gags would be Oscar Levant and George S. Kaufman. On stage, I would pick W.C. Fields, Willie Howard, Ed Wynn, Bobby Clark and Bert Lahr. But it's hard to laugh at comedians if you're a comedian, especially if they're getting laughs." Perelman's list of great comics is the same, except that it includes Groucho.

Pass Over
Here's a vintage NBC-era Letterman Top Ten List:

Top Ten Words Used Least in the Bible

10. Perky

9. Fudge-a-licious

8. Rootin'-tootin'

7. Buttinsky

6. Schweppervescence

5. Mall Bunny

4. Gas-guzzling

3. Yankee fan

2. Boinnnng!

1. Slap-happy

History Lesson
The following is from Louis Menand's introduction to his book American Studies. Menand is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His book The Metaphysical Club won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in history. He teaches at Harvard.

The only reliable lesson the past teaches us is how locked we are in the present. People ask, Where are the great Hollywood movies, the great pop songs, the great television newsmen, the great Democratic presidents, the great public intellectuals, the Great Books?, as though these were all eternally available types. They are not. Their availability is a myth.

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The impulse to hold on to the past is very strong, and it is often hard to understand why things that worked once can't continue to work. A lot of energy and imagination are consumed trying to fit old systems to new settings, though the pegs keep getting squarer and the holes keep getting rounder. In the end, the only way to make the past usable is to misinterpret it, which means, strictly speaking, to lose it.

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We look backward for clues because, the future being the other side of a closed door, we have no place else to look. But even in America, where people are supposed to have no sense of history, there is a persistent reluctance to play with the cards that are on the table. We want to play with yesterday's cards, but yesterday has already unraveled past reconstructing. Today is the only day we have.

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Here's Menand's hilarious review of the new edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

In this interview, Menand discusses The Metaphysical Club. (The interview is available in three formats: print, audio, and video.)

Here you can listen to Menand discuss The Metaphysical Club on The Connection.

Speaking Engagement
The BBC audio archive has some wonderful interview clips, featuring such people as Noël Coward, Vladimir Nabokov, Roald Dahl, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Speer, Mohandas Gandhi, Alfred Hitchcock, Ansel Adams, Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, e.e. cummings, Joseph Heller, Ogden Nash, and many others.

Stick-to-itiveness
George S. Kaufman wrote the following, which was published in the February 22, 1958, issue of The New Yorker.

When Your Honey's on the Telephone

Well, now, that's a nice sentimental title, isn't it? So -- are we all ready for a glowing story about this darling girl, and how she calls you up on the telephone, and an hour later, dripping darlingness, you hang up in a blaze of glucose, and your whole day is made, and everything is absolutely wonderful from then on?

All right. Now, do you want the facts? The facts are that I am very fond of honey, and I have it for breakfast now and then, and the telephone often rings while I'm eating it -- my number is quite a lot like that of Mt. Sinai Hospital, and a voice generally says, "Give me the maternity ward" -- and while I am taking the phone off the cradle, the wire dangles over the honey saucer just close enough to pick up the merest daub of honey, and from then on everything is not exactly wonderful at all. In fact, it's plain hell.

What follows is not wasteful so far as honey is concerned, because a microscopic amount of honey is enough to do it all. Once a speck of honey gets on the telephone wire, it does the work of a whole bevy of bees, if bees and bevies go together.

One morning in my early and innocent days, I made a quick effort to wipe the honey off the wire, but that was a great mistake. An infinitesimal amount of honey -- hardly any, mind you -- having thus got on my fingers, it quickly transferred itself to the telephone instrument, and from then on there was no way out. Dialling a number a few minutes later, I managed to get just the merest bit of honey -- almost none at all, really -- into most of those little dial holes, thus rendering the telephone useless for the next eight to ten years, or until they invent something to supersede the dial. Then, taking up a fork to finish my eggs, I transferred the merest molecule of honey to the fork. Picking up my coffee cup, I got a very little bit on the cup handle. At this point, I went into the bathroom and washed my hands, first getting just the smallest speck of honey on the bathroom doorknob. When I came back and took up the fork again, there was the honey, on my fingers. I now had the whole breakfast tray taken away and a new breakfast prepared, with new forks and coffee cups and everything. Then I washed my hands and started all over. But the telephone rang again -- they wanted Rupert's Brewery this time -- and I took up the receiver and there was still just the smallest amount of honey on it, and so I got it on the fork again, and when I started to drink my coffee it got on the cup handle again, so I decided there was no use eating breakfast at all that morning. So I began to get dressed, and just the smallest amount of honey got on my trouser belt, so I undressed and took a bath, and when I came out, all clean, I closed the door of the bathroom after me, and there was just this little bit of honey on the doorknob ...

Well, you get the idea. There was only one thing to do. I had the telephone taken out, and I moved to a new apartment. So nowadays, if I have honey for breakfast, I save time by just moving to a new apartment right away.

Old Rags
The following was written by Terry Teachout, of About Last Night. It's from an article he wrote in 1994 called "Profile of a Profiler," about Michael Rozek and the magazine he created.

Magazines aren't what they used to be. Most things aren't, of course, but the slow demise of the general-interest magazine is one of the saddest episodes in the decline and fall of American culture. Time was when the American magazine was a liberal-arts education all by itself--when subscriptions to a half-dozen carefully chosen publications could open a thousand magic casements of the mind. Consider, say, the list of writers who contributed regularly to the New Yorker between 1940 and 1960: James Thurber, H.L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, John O'Hara, J.D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, E.B. White, A.J. Liebling, Truman Capote, Joseph Mitchell, Whitney Balliett. . . . I could go on, but you get the idea.

Nor was the New Yorker a lone, glittering exception to the general rule. Popular magazines used to take their readers seriously, not on special occasions but as a matter of course. They sought out good writers and gave them room to talk about things that mattered. Forty-six years ago this March, Time put theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on its cover and assigned Whittaker Chambers to write the story. Today's popular magazines, by contrast, specialize in bite-sized stories about "cutting-edge" ephemera. Instant celebrities are their preferred subject matter. (One prominent New York editor recently announced his intention of hunting down "the zeitgeist of the week.") And skepticism--the corrosive kind, not the healthy kind--is the order of the day, every day. If Time and the New Yorker were the quintessential magazines of the 1940s, surely People and Vanity Fair are their contemporary counterparts.

In order to get a clearer understanding of the decadent magazine culture of the 1990s, try to imagine a publication that is the exact opposite of the "dot books" that crowd today's newsstands. What would it look like? What would it contain? To begin with, it would be plain as a post: no flashy graphics, no glossy ads, no ultramodern typefaces. It would run long articles. It would emphasize personalities but shun celebrities. It would be written in a strong yet self-effacing style that focuses attention on the subject, not the writer. It would be about values, not attitudes.

To put it another way, it would be a publication very much like Rozek's.

Click here to keep reading.

Yellow Fever
Matt Groening was on Fresh Air today.

Re: Marx



Click here to listen to Groucho's March 25, 1970, appearance on The Dick Cavett Show.

Here you'll find many other audio files featuring Groucho, including segments of Groucho and Chico's radio show Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel (originally broadcast in 1933, the year of their best movie, Duck Soup). There are also Groucho interviews conducted by Bill Cosby, Steve Allen, and David Steinberg.

Here you'll find some great magazine articles (with photos) about the Marx Brothers, including a couple by Groucho himself.

The following is Robert Benchley's review of the Marx Brothers' first Broadway show, I'll Say She Is. This review was originally published in the June 5, 1924, issue of Charles Dana Gibson's Life magazine.

We are happy to announce that the laughing apparatus of this department, long suspected of being out of date and useless, is in perfect running order and can be heard any evening at the Casino Theatre during those magnificent moments when the Marx Brothers are participating in "I'll Say She Is." Not since sin laid its heavy hand on our spirit have we laughed so loud and so offensively. And as we picked ourself out of the aisle following each convulsion, there rang through our soul the joyful paean: "Grandpa can laugh again! Grandpa can laugh again!"

"I'll Say She Is" is probably one of the worst revues ever staged, from the point of view of artistic merit and general deportment. And yet when the Marx Brothers appear, it becomes one of the best. Certainly we have never enjoyed one so thoroughly since the lamented Cohan Revues, and we will go before any court and swear that two of the four Marxes are two of the funniest men in the world.

We may be doing them a disservice by boiling over about them like this, but we can't help it if we feel it, can we? Certainly the nifties of Mr. Julius Marx will bear the most captious examination, and even if one in ten is found to be phony, the other nine are worth the slight wince involved at the bad one. It is certainly worth hearing him, as Napoleon, refer to the "Marseillaise" as the "Mayonnaise," if the next second he will tell Josephine that she is as true as a three-dollar cornet. The cornet line is one of the more rational of the assortment. Many of them are quite mad and consequently much funnier to hear but impossible to retail.

There is no wincing possible at the pantomime of Mr. Arthur Marx. It is 110-proof artistry. To watch him during the deluge of knives and forks from his coat sleeve, or in the poker game (where he wets one thumb and picks the card off with the other), or -- oh, well, at any moment during the show, is to feel a glow at being alive in the same generation. We hate to be like this, for it is inevitable that we are prejudicing readers against the Marx boys by our enthusiasm, but there must be thousands of you who have seen them in vaudeville (where almost everything that is funny on our legitimate stage seems to originate) and who know that we are right.

It is too bad that with such a wealth of good material of their own our heroes should have stooped to using Walt Kuhn's "Lillies of the Field" ballet without credit. The steal is palpable and inexcusable, and all the more mysterious in view of the gigantic inventive powers of the Marxes themselves. It is as if Edison were to steal an idea for a lamp. It may turn out that the Marxes have been doing this for years, like Will Morrissey and his delightfully funny Treasurer's Report, but Mr. Kuhn certainly did it better.

One word of commendation to offset the above. In Nat Martin's jazz orchestra which enlivens the finale to "I'll Say She Is" there is no saxophone comedian. The members of the orchestra simply play the notes as written, a grateful innovation in these days when each jazz band has at least one saxophonist whose friends have evidently told him that he ought to be on the stage.

Here's Alexander Woollcott's review of I'll Say She Is.

Periodical Laffs
The following is from the New York Post. (Via Maud Newton.)

December 17, 2003 -- Graydon "Smokestack" Carter and Kurt Andersen have snagged a seven-figure deal to write about their glory days as the co-founders of Spy magazine. George Kalogerakis, who was the deputy editor at Spy at its launch, is also involved in the deal.

The book is to be called "Spy: The Funny Years," and to be published in 2005. A preemptive deal with Miramax Books was inked for what one source said was $1 million - which has to be split four ways.

The fourth "person" is the Spy estate, controlled by John (Jo) Colman, who owned Spy when it shut down in 1998.

The book will include material from the magazine's glory days, such as the hilarious "Separated at Birth" column and "The Industry," which made Spy one of the first publications to routinely pillory the bigwigs in the media and entertainment world.

Carter and Andersen first hatched the idea of the humor magazine when they were working at Time Inc. in the early 1980s.

Carter, now the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, recently signed a book deal with Farrar Straus and Giroux to pen some musings on the current political climate.

Andersen is a novelist and the host of public radio's "Studio 360" show. He recently signed up to become the editor of Colors magazine, published quarterly by fashion house Benetton.

Said Jonathan Burnham, the editor-in-chief of Miramax Books: "Spy is the funniest magazine in living memory, still hugely influential and much missed."

He said Andersen, Carter and Kalogerakis are expected to tell many of the never-before-told stories about the magazine's launch.

Prime Numbers
Here are three Letterman Top Ten Lists from back in the days when he was on NBC.

Top Ten Least Popular Supermarket Chains

10. Pick 'n' Lick

9. Larva Town

8. Food Crypt

7. Risky's

6. Price Hiker

5. Rex Reed's Grocery Rodeo

4. The Expiration Date Grab Bag

3. I'm-Not-Wearing-Pantry

2. Hitler's

1. Bag This!

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Top Ten Least Exciting Superpowers for Comic Book Superheroes

10. Super spelling

9. Lightning-fast mood swings

8. Really bendy thumb

7. Unusually natural smile when posing for photographs

6. Ability to calm jittery squirrels

5. Power to shake exactly two aspirin out of a bottle

4. Ability to get tickets to Goodwill Games

3. Power to score with other superheroes' wives

2. Ability to communicate with corn

1. Magnetic colon

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Top Ten Rejected Names for Kentucky Fried Chicken

10. Lifeless Bird Lumps

9. KFC and CPR

8. Hot Oily Hens

7. Greaseland

6. The You're-a-Little-Too-Late Petting Zoo

5. Heart Attack Helper

4. Jiffy Lube (already taken)

3. Home of the Soggy, Grease-Stained Bucket o' Fun

2. Food, Folks, and Fat

1. Artery Busters

Humor Risk
The following was written by E.B. White. It was published in the September 27, 1952, issue of The New Yorker.

Adlai Stevenson has been reprimanded by General Eisenhower for indulging in humor and wit, and Mr. Stevenson has very properly been warned of the consequences by his own party leaders, who are worried. Their fears are well grounded. We have had long experience with humor in the literary world, and we add our warning to the other warnings. Nothing is so suspect as humor, nothing so surely brands a work of art or politics as second-rate. It has been our sad duty on several occasions in the past to issue admonitory statements concerning the familiar American paradox that governs humor: every American, to the last man, lays claim to a "sense" of humor and guards it as his most significant spiritual trait, yet rejects humor as a contaminating element wherever found. America is a nation of comics and comedians; nevertheless, humor has no stature and is accepted only after the death of the perpetrator. Almost the only first-string American statesman who managed to combine high office with humor was Lincoln, and he was murdered finally. Churchill is, in our opinion, a man of humor, but he lives in England, where it doesn't count.

The New Yorker subscribes to a press-clipping bureau, and over the years we have examined thousands of clippings from many sources, in praise of one thing or another that has appeared in the magazine. Almost invariably, the praise begins with a qualifying remark, pointing out that the magazine is non-serious in nature and indicating that it takes a superior intelligence (the writer's) to detect truth or merit in such unlikely surroundings. If it's any comfort to Stevenson, we can assure him that in this matter of humor we have been in the same boat with him for a long time, and that the sea has been rough.

King, David
The following is from the September 7, 1998, issue of The New Yorker:

The novelist David Foster Wallace, who has taught "Carrie" and "The Stand" to undergraduates at Illinois State, applauds the stylistic clarity of the early King books. "He's one of the first people to talk about real Americans and how they live, to capture real American dialogue in all its, like, foulmouthed grandeur," Wallace says. "He has a deadly ear for the way people speak, and for the nasty little domestic shit they pull on each other. Students come to me and a lot of them have been led to believe that there's good stuff and bad stuff, literary books and popular books, stuff that's redemptive and commercial shit -- with a sharp line drawn between the two categories. It's good to show them that there's a certain amount of blurring. Surface-wise, King's work is a bit televisual, but there's really a lot going on."

Papa Christmas
The following is from the December 24, 1927, issue of The New Yorker. I found it here. Here's a Christmas story by John Cheever. And here's one by John Updike.

A Visit from Saint Nicholas
(In the Ernest Hemingway Manner)

by James Thurber

It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren't even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them.

The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn't move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.

"Father," the children said.

There was no answer. He's there, all right, they thought.

"Father," they said, and banged on their beds.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"We have visions of sugarplums," the children said.

"Go to sleep," said mamma.

"We can't sleep," said the children. They stopped talking, but I could hear them moving. They made sounds.

"Can you sleep?" asked the children.

"No," I said.

"You ought to sleep."

"I know. I ought to sleep."

"Can we have some sugarplums?"

"You can't have any sugarplums," said mamma.

"We just asked you."

There was a long silence. I could hear the children moving again.

"Is Saint Nicholas asleep?" asked the children.

"No," mamma said. "Be quiet."

"What the hell would he be asleep tonight for?" I asked.

"He might be," the children said.

"He isn't," I said.

"Let's try to sleep," said mamma.

The house became quiet once more. I could hear the rustling noises the children made when they moved in their beds.

Out on the lawn a clatter arose. I got out of bed and went to the window. I opened the shutters; then I threw up the sash. The moon shone on the snow. The moon gave the lustre of mid-day to objects in the snow. There was a miniature sleigh in the snow, and eight tiny reindeer. A little man was driving them. He was lively and quick. He whistled and shouted at the reindeer and called them by their names. Their names were Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen.

He told them to dash away to the top of the porch, and then he told them to dash away to the top of the wall. They did. The sleigh was full of toys.

"Who is it?" mamma asked.

"Some guy," I said. "A little guy."

I pulled my head in out of the window and listened. I heard the reindeer on the roof. I could hear their hoofs pawing and prancing on the roof. "Shut the window," said mamma. I stood still and listened.

"What do you hear?"

"Reindeer," I said. I shut the window and walked about. It was cold. Mamma sat up in the bed and looked at me.

"How would they get on the roof?" mamma asked.

"They fly."

"Get into bed. You'll catch cold."

Mamma lay down in bed. I didn't get into bed. I kept walking around.

"What do you mean, they fly?" asked mamma.

"Just fly is all."

Mamma turned away toward the wall. She didn't say anything.

I went out into the room where the chimney was. The little man came down the chimney and stepped into the room. He was dressed all in fur. His clothes were covered with ashes and soot from the chimney. On his back was a pack like a peddler's pack. There were toys in it. His cheeks and nose were red and he had dimples. His eyes twinkled. His mouth was little, like a bow, and his beard was very white. Between his teeth was a stumpy pipe. The smoke from the pipe encircled his head in a wreath. He laughed and his belly shook. It shook like a bowl of red jelly. I laughed. He winked his eye, then he gave a twist to his head. He didn't say anything.

He turned to the chimney and filled the stockings and turned away from the chimney. Laying his finger aside his nose, he gave a nod. Then he went up the chimney. I went to the chimney and looked up. I saw him get into his sleigh. He whistled at his team and the team flew away. The team flew as lightly as thistledown. The driver called out, "Merry Christmas and good night." I went back to bed.

"What was it?" asked mamma. "Saint Nicholas?" She smiled.

"Yeah," I said.

She sighed and turned in the bed.

"I saw him," I said.

"Sure."

"I did see him."

"Sure you saw him." She turned farther toward the wall.

"Father," said the children.

"There you go," mamma said. "You and your flying reindeer."

"Go to sleep," I said.

"Can we see Saint Nicholas when he comes?" the children asked.

"You got to be asleep," I said. "You got to be asleep when he comes. You can't see him unless you're unconscious."

"Father knows," mamma said.

I pulled the covers over my mouth. It was warm under the covers. As I went to sleep I wondered if mamma was right.

Forecasting Aspersions
The following was written by E.B. White. It was published in the February 25, 1950, issue of The New Yorker.

The most startling news in the paper on February 13th was the weather forecast. It was "Rainy and dismal." When we read the word "dismal" in the Times, we knew that the era of pure science was drawing to a close and the day of philosophical science was at hand. (Probably in the nick of time.) Consider what had happened! A meteorologist, whose job was simply to examine the instruments in his observatory, had done a quick switch and had examined the entrails of birds. In his fumbling way he had attempted to predict the impact of the elements on the human spirit. His was a poor attempt, as it turned out, but it was an attempt. There are, of course, no evil days in nature, no dies mali, and the forecast plainly showed that the weatherman had been spending his time indoors. To the intimates of rain, no day is dismal, and a dull sky is as plausible as any other. Nevertheless, the forecast indicated that the connection had been reëstablished between nature and scientific man. Now all we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of weather who walks bent over on wet days.

School of Art Knocks
The following is an excerpt from a John Updike essay called "Lost Art," which was originally published in The New Yorker. It was included in The Best American Essays 1998.

A 1950 issue of the soon defunct magazine Flair contained, in its eccentric format, a booklet about the Harvard Lampoon, including photographs of the young, crew-cut editors, the curious mock-Flemish building, and some sample cartoons. Somewhere in the concatenation of aspirations and inadvertences that got me to Harvard, this story played a crucial part. Early in my freshman year, I carried a batch of my cartoons down to the Lampoon building, there where Mount Auburn Street meets Bow at an acute angle, an ornate little brick flatiron fronted by a tower with a sort of cartoon face and, on its hat of roof tiles, a much stolen copper ibis. In due course, some of my drawings were printed in the magazine, and I was accepted for membership. The Lampoon, I was too ignorant an outsider to realize, was a social club, with a strong flavor of Boston Brahminism and alcoholic intake; to me it was a magazine for which I wanted to work. This I was allowed to do, especially as the upperclassmen year by year graduated and the various editorial offices fell to me. Though Harvard did little to attract cartoonists, in fact there were four on the Lampoon in 1950 -- Fred Gwynne, Lew Gifford, Doug Bunce, and Charlie Robinson -- who seemed to me much my betters in skill and sophistication. Fred Gwynne, a multitalented giant who went on to become an actor, best known for Car 54, Where Are You? and The Munsters, drew with a Renaissance chiaroscuro and mastery of anatomy; Bunce had a fine line, and Gifford, who made his career in television animation, a carefree, flowing brush stroke years ahead of its time. I tried to measure up to their examples, and cartooned abundantly for the Lampoon -- over half the artwork in some of the issues was mine -- but the budding cartoonist in me, exposed to what I felt were superior talents, suffered a blight; my light verse and supposedly humorous prose felt more viable. By graduation, I had pretty well given up on becoming a cartoonist. It took too many ideas, and one walked in too many footsteps. Writing seemed, in my innocence of it, a relatively untrafficked terrain.

Comedy, Genius
Here you can listen to an interview with Paula Poundstone, and an interview with Fred Kaplan, who talks about his new biography of Mark Twain.

Frantasia
According to "Page Six," the fellow who made the movie The Kid Stays in the Picture, about producer Robert Evans, has decided to make a documentary about Fran Lebowitz. (Via Maud Newton.)

Here are Lebowitz's answers to Playboy's twenty questions, from 1984. (Via Maud Newton.)

An excerpt:

PLAYBOY: Which writers do you admire?

LEBOWITZ: Well, I prefer dead writers, because I don't see them at parties. Oscar Wilde, he's one of my favorites. I like Hawthorne very much. Enjoy Hawthorne even. Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Jane Austen, Henry James I admire very much. Twain I love. Twain I really love. I know he's very highly regarded, but I don't think he's taken very seriously. He wrote humorous things, and humorous writers are never taken seriously enough. In fact, they are always the most serious writers and the most serious people.

Cheever, John O'Hara -- O'Hara is really an underrated American writer. He is a much better writer than Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby is a very adolescent book. In fact, I consider that book to be full of the basest sort of longing. And it's a lie. Hemingway I do not like. I'm not interested in that kind of butch statement. Faulkner I have never been able to read. And actually, I consider that a criticism of a writer, because if I can't read him, who can?

The Incomparable Maxwell
William Maxwell, who died on July 31, 2000, at the age of 91, was a fiction editor at The New Yorker for forty years. He was regarded as the best editor of short fiction in the business. He edited Vladimir Nabokov, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and many other great writers. He was also a deeply respected writer himself. Alec Wilkinson, of The New Yorker, once said, "As remarkable as his stature as an editor is, I think he's a much better writer." His 1980 novel So Long, See You Tomorrow won the American Book Award (now called the National Book Award). The following is from an article Alec Wilkinson wrote about Maxwell called "An American Original." It was published in the Dec. 27, 1999 & Jan. 3, 2000 double issue of The New Yorker.

In presenting to Maxwell in 1995 the Gold Medal for Fiction of the American Academy of Arts and Letters -- the body's highest award, which is given only every six years -- Joseph Mitchell said, "William Maxwell's principal theme, like James Joyce's, is the sadness that often exists at the heart of a family.... He is as aware as any novelist who ever lived of what human beings are capable of." Maxwell's prose is precise and understated. His stories and novels are meticulously crafted; sentences, he says, are moved around until they stick. Even so, the finished work is without any self-consciousness or sign of effort. He never strives for effect. He never performs what he used to describe scornfully to me as pirouettes on the page. Mitchell also said, "Nevertheless, in his pages one often reads with surprise descriptions and observations that seem truer and more revealing and more powerful and more memorable and more shocking than the deliberately shocking scenes and observations found in the pages of many of his contemporaries."

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As for how other writers regarded his opinion, when J.D. Salinger finished writing "Catcher in the Rye," he drove to the Maxwells' house in the country and in the course of an afternoon and evening read it to them on their porch.

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The following essay was originally published in 1997 in The New York Times Magazine. It was included in The Best American Essays 1998.

Nearing Ninety

by William Maxwell

Out of the corner of my eye I see my ninetieth birthday approaching. It is one year and six months away. How long after that will I be the person I am now?

I don't yet need a cane, but I have a feeling that my table manners have deteriorated. My posture is what you would expect of someone addicted to sitting in front of a typewriter, but it was always that way. "Stand up straight," my father would say to me. "You're all bent over like an old man." It didn't bother me then and it doesn't now, though I agree that an erect carriage is a pleasure to see, in someone of any age.

I have regrets but there are not very many of them and, fortunately, I forget what they are. I forget names, too, but it is not yet serious. What I am trying to remember and can't, quite often my wife will remember. And vice versa. She is in and out during the day, but I know she will be home when evening comes, and so I am never lonely. Long ago, a neighbor in the country, looking at our flower garden, said, "Children and roses reflect their care." This is true of the very old as well.

Though there have been a great many changes in the world since I came into it on August 16, 1908, I try not to deplore. It is not constructive and there is no point in discouraging the young by invidious comparisons with the way things used to be.

I am not -- I think I am not -- afraid of dying. When I was seventeen I worked on a farm in southern Wisconsin, near Portage. It was no ordinary farm and not much serious farming was done there, but it had the look of a place that had been lived in, and loved, for a good long time. I was no more energetic than most adolescents, but the family forgave my failures and shortcomings and simply took me in, let me be one of them. The farm had come down in the family through several generations, from the man who had pioneered it to a woman who was so alive that everything and everybody seemed to revolve around her personality. She lived well into her nineties and then one day told her oldest daughter that she didn't want to live anymore, that she was tired. Though I was not present but only heard about it in a letter, this remark reconciled me to my own inevitable extinction. I could believe that enough is enough. One must also, if possible, reconcile oneself to life. To horrors (the number of legless peasants in Cambodia) that if you allowed yourself to think about them more than briefly would turn your heart to stone.

Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke. One might as well be --

Before I am ready to call it quits, I would like to reread every book I have ever deeply enjoyed, beginning with Jane Austen and Isaac Babel and Sybille Bedford's The Sudden View and going through shelf after shelf of bookcases until I arrive at the autobiographies of William Butler Yeats. As it is, I read a great deal of the time. I am harder to please, though. I see flaws in masterpieces. Conrad indulging in rhetoric when he would do better to get on with it. I would read all day long and well into the night if there were no other claims on my time. Appointments with doctors, with the dentist. The monthly bank statement. Income tax returns. And because I don't want to turn into a monster, people. Afternoon tea with X, dinner with the Y's. Our social life would be a good deal more active than it is if more than half of those I care about hadn't passed over to the other side. However, I remember them. I remember them more, and more vividly, the older I get.

I did not wholly escape the amnesia that overtakes children around the age of six, but I carried along with me more of my childhood than, I think, most people do. Once, after dinner, my father hitched up the horse and took my mother and me for a sleigh ride. The winter stars were very bright. The sleigh bells made a lovely sound. I was bundled up to the nose, between my father and mother, where nothing, not even the cold, could get at me. The very perfection of happiness.

At something like the same age, I went for a ride, again with my father and mother, on a riverboat at Havana, Illinois. It was a sidewheeler and the decks were screened, I suppose as protection against the mosquitoes. Across eight decades the name of the steamboat comes back to me -- the Eastland -- bringing with it the context of disaster. A year later, at the dock in Chicago, too many of the passengers crowded on one side of the boat, waving goodbye, and it rolled over and sank. Trapped by the screens everywhere, a great many people lost their lives. The fact that I had been on this very steamboat, that I had escaped from a watery grave, I continued to remember all through my childhood.

I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living. But now it is different, I have to be careful. I can ruin a night's sleep by suddenly, in the dark, thinking about some particular time in my life. Before I can stop myself, it is as if I had driven a mineshaft down through layers and layers of the past and must explore, relive, remember, reconsider, until daylight delivers me.

I have not forgotten the pleasure, when our children were very young, of hoisting them onto my shoulders when their legs gave out. Of reading to them at bedtime. Of studying their beautiful faces. Of feeling responsible for their physical safety. But that was more than thirty years ago. I admire the way that, as adults, they have taken hold of life, and I am glad that they are not materialistic, but there is little or nothing I can do for them at this point, except write a little fable to put in their Christmas stocking. Our grandchild is too young to respond to any beguiling but his mother and father's. It will be touch and go whether I live long enough for us to enjoy being in each other's company.

"Are you writing?" people ask -- out of politeness, undoubtedly. And I say, "Nothing very much." The truth but not the whole truth -- which is that I seem to have lost touch with the place that stories and novels come from. I have no idea why.

I still like making sentences.

Every now and then, in my waking moments, and especially when I am in the country, I stand and look hard at everything.

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This Fresh Air interview with Alec Wilkinson begins with a 1995 interview with Maxwell.

Two fables by Maxwell:

Newton's Law

The Education of Her Majesty the Queen

Hodgmania!
Here's a New York Observer article about the great John Hodgman. (Via Mike Gerber.)

An excerpt:

"He speaks in perfect sentences, and he had the dry, mature, man-in-a-smoking-jacket wit of an 80-year-old Oxford don when he was 25," said novelist Elizabeth Gilbert. "John pretends sometimes to be a cranky and grumpy person when he is actually compassionate and optimistic."

"John's events feature many of the same performers as from the hipster literary scene, but there's a much homier, warmer, more communal vibe," said writer Neal Pollack. "John is the real draw: He's a perfect host and a perfect gentleman."

"I was born at the age of about 45," Mr. Hodgman said. The only child of a businessman and a nurse in Brookline, Mass., young John had asthma and liked to watch Mary Tyler Moore and read Tintin books. "I was ruthlessly responsible and well-liked by all adults, which allowed me opportunity for subversion," he said. At Brookline High, he carried around a briefcase and co-edited a humor magazine that featured short stories about self-mutilation and X-rated comics.

At Yale, he took a class with literary critic Harold Bloom.

"As we all know, the man is a maniac," he said. "He has perhaps the largest brain on the planet.... It was really Bloom who taught me to be a comedian."

In the mid-1990's, Mr. Hodgman worked his way up to becoming a literary agent at Writers House. In 1997, George Plimpton edited a story of his for The Paris Review ("one of those life-altering moments"). In 2000, he turned most of his attention to writing, including a 13-part advice column on the McSweeney's Web site called "Ask the Former Professional Literary Agent."

Now he writes regularly for Men's Journal about booze and food, and occasionally for The New York Times Magazine. He recently sold a book, The Areas of My Expertise, which will be filled with "amazing historical true facts" (e.g., U.S. Presidents who had hooks for hands). "I would say the amount of true material is roughly zero," he added.

Here's an interview with the great man.

Here's a monologue that Mr. Hodgman presented at one of his Little Gray Book lectures.

World History



The following is from John McPhee's 1980 book Basin and Range. (Basin and Range was later republished as the first part of Annals of the Former World, for which McPhee won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999.)

Geologists will sometimes use the calendar year as a unit to represent the time scale, and in such terms the Precambrian runs from New Year's Day until well after Halloween. Dinosaurs appear in the middle of December and are gone the day after Christmas. The last ice sheet melts on December 31st at one minute before midnight, and the Roman Empire lasts five seconds. With your arms spread wide again to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history. Geologists live with the geologic scale. Individually, they may or may not be alarmed by the rate of exploitation of the things they discover, but, like the environmentalists, they use these repetitive analogies to place the human record in perspective -- to see the Age of Reflection, the last few thousand years, as a small bright sparkle at the end of time.

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The human consciousness may have begun to leap and boil some sunny day in the Pleistocene, but the race by and large has retained the essence of its animal sense of time. People think in five generations -- two ahead, two behind -- with heavy concentration on the one in the middle. Possibly that is tragic, and possibly there is no choice. The human mind may not have evolved enough to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it. At least, that is what geologists wonder sometimes, and they have imparted the questions to me. They wonder to what extent they truly sense the passage of millions of years. They wonder to what extent it is possible to absorb a set of facts and move with them, in a sensory manner, beyond the recording intellect and into the abyssal eons. Primordial inhibition may stand in the way. On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information. Geologists, dealing always with deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways. They see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s into the sky. They see the thin band in which are the all but indiscernible stratifications of Cro-Magnon, Moses, Leonardo, and now. Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death.

Heart Wrenching



The following is from the first chapter of Sherwin Nuland's book How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter.

The first time in my professional career that I saw death's remorseless eyes, they were fixed on a fifty-two-year-old man, lying in seeming comfort between the crisp sheets of a freshly made-up bed, in a private room at a large university teaching hospital. I had just begun my third year of medical school, and it was my unsettling lot to encounter death and my very first patient at the same hour.

James McCarty was a powerfully built construction executive whose business success had seduced him into patterns of living that we now know are suicidal. But the events of his illness took place almost forty years ago, when we understood a great deal less about the dangers of the good life -- when smoking, red meat, and great slabs of bacon, butter, and belly were thought to be the risk-free rewards of achievement. He had let himself become flabby, and sedentary as well. Whereas he had once directed on-site the crews of his thriving construction company, he was now content to lead imperiously from behind a desk. McCarty delivered his pronouncements most of the day from a comfortable swivel chair that provided him an unobstructed view of the New Haven Green and the Quinnipiack Club, his favorite grillroom for midday executive gluttony.

The events of McCarty's hospitalization are easily recalled, because the startling staccato with which they burst forth instantly and permanently imprinted them in my mind. I have never forgotten what I saw, and did, that night.

McCarty arrived in the hospital's emergency room at about 8:00 p.m. on a hot and humid evening in early September, complaining of a constricting pressure behind his breastbone that seemed to radiate up into his throat and down his left arm. The pressure had begun an hour earlier, after his usual heavy dinner, a few Camels, and an upsetting phone call from the youngest of his three children, an indulged young woman who had just started her freshman year at a fashionable woman's college.

The intern who saw McCarty in the emergency room noted that he looked ashen and sweaty and had an irregular pulse. In the ten minutes it took to wheel the electrocardiogram machine down the hall and connect it to the patient, he had begun to look better and his unsteady cardiac rhythm had reverted to normal. The electrocardiographic tracing nonetheless revealed that an infarction had occurred, meaning that a small area of the wall of the heart had been damaged. His condition seemed stable, and preparations were made to transfer him to a bed upstairs -- there were no coronary intensive care units in the 1950s. His private physician came in to see McCarty and reassured himself that his patient was now comfortable and seemed to be out of danger.

McCarty reached the medical floor at 11:00 p.m., and I arrived with him. Not being on duty that evening, I had gone to the rush party that my student fraternity held to inveigle entering freshmen into joining. A glass of beer and a lot of conviviality had made me feel especially self-confident, and I decided to visit the care division to which I had been assigned only that morning, the first of my clinical rotations on the Internal Medicine service. Third-year medical students, who are just starting out in their initial experience with patients, tend to be eager to the point of zealousness, and I was no different than most. I came up to the division to trail after the intern, hoping to see an interesting emergency, and to make myself helpful in any way I could. If there was an imminent ward procedure, like a spinal tap or the placement of a chest tube, I wanted to be there to do it.

As I walked onto the division, the intern, Dave Bascom, took my arm as though he was relieved to see me. "Help me out, will you? Joe [the student on duty] and I are tied up down the hall with a bulbar polio that's going bad, and I need you to do the admission workup on this new coronary that's just going into 507 -- okay?"

Okay? Sure it was okay! It was more than okay; it was wonderful, exactly the reason I had returned to the division. Medical students of forty years ago were given much more autonomy than they are allowed today, and I knew that if I did the admission routines well, I would be granted plenty of work on the details of McCarty's recovery. I waited eagerly for a few minutes until one of the two nurses on duty had transferred my new patient comfortably from the gurney onto his bed. When she went scurrying down to the far end of the hall to help with the polio emergency, I slipped into McCarty's room and closed the door behind me. I didn't want to run the risk that Dave might come back and take over.

McCarty greeted me with a thin, forced smile, but he couldn't have found my presence reassuring. I have often wondered over the years what must have gone through the mind of that high-pressure boss of large, tough men when he saw my boyish (I was then twenty-two) face and heard me say that I had come to take his history and examine him. Whatever it was, he didn't get much chance to mull it over. As I sat down at his bedside, he suddenly threw his head back and bellowed out a wordless roar that seemed to rise up out of his throat from somewhere deep within his stricken heart. He hit his balled fists with startling force up against the front of his chest in a single synchronous thump, just as his face and neck, in the flash of an instant, turned swollen and purple. His eyes seemed to have pushed themselves forward in one bulging thrust, as though they were trying to leap out of his head. He took one immensely long, gurgling breath, and died.

I shouted out his name, and then I shouted for Dave, but I knew no one could hear me in the hectic polio room all the way down the corridor. I could have run down the hallway and tried to get help, but that would have meant the loss of precious seconds. My fingers felt for the carotid artery in McCarty's neck, but it was pulseless and still. For reasons I cannot explain to this day, I was strangely calm. I decided to act on my own. The possibility of getting into trouble for what I was about to attempt seemed a great deal less risky than letting a man die without at least trying to save him. There was no choice.

In those days, every room housing a coronary patient was supplied with a large muslin-wrapped package that contained a thoracotomy kit -- a set of instruments with which the chest could be opened in the event of cardiac arrest. Closed-chest cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, had not yet been invented, and the standard technique in this situation was to attempt to massage the heart directly, by holding it in the hand and applying a long series of rhythmic squeezes.

I tore open the kit's sterile wrapping and grabbed the scalpel placed for ready access in a separate envelope on top. What I did next seemed absolutely automatic, even though I had never done it, or seen it done, before. With one surprisingly smooth sweep of my hand, I made a long incision starting just below the left nipple, from McCarty's breastbone around as far back as I could without moving him from his half-upright position. Only a little dark ooze leaked out of the arteries and veins I cut through, but no real flow of blood. Had I needed confirmation of the fact of death by cardiac arrest, this was it. Another long cut through the bloodless muscle, and I was in the chest cavity. I reached over to grab the double-armed steel instrument called a self-retaining retractor, slipped it in between the ribs, and turned its ratchet just far enough to allow my hand to squeeze inside and grasp what I expected to be McCarty's silent heart.

As I touched the fibrous sack called the pericardium, I realized that the heart contained within was wriggling. Under my fingertips could be felt an uncoordinated, irregular squirming that I recognized from its textbook description as the terminal condition called ventricular fibrillation, the agonal act of a heart that is becoming reconciled to its eternal rest. With unsterile bare hands, I grabbed a pair of scissors and cut the pericardium wide open. I took up Mr. McCarty's poor twitching heart as gently as I could and began the series of firm, steady, syncopated compressions that is called cardiac massage, intended to maintain a flow of blood to the brain until an electrical apparatus can be brought in to shock the fibrillating heart muscle back into good behavior.

I had read that the sensation imparted by a fibrillating heart is like holding in one's palm a wet, jellylike bagful of hyperactive worms, and that is exactly the way it was. I could tell by its rapidly decreasing resistance to the pressure of my squeezes that the heart was not filling with blood, and so my efforts to force something out of it were useless, especially since the lungs were not being oxygenated. But still I kept at it. And suddenly, something stupefying in its horror took place -- the dead McCarty, whose soul was by that time totally departed, threw back his head once more and, staring upward at the ceiling with the glassy, unseeing gaze of open dead eyes, roared out to the distant heavens a dreadful rasping whoop that sounded like the hounds of hell were barking. Only later did I realize that what I had heard was McCarty's version of the death rattle, a sound made by spasm in the muscles of the voice box, caused by the increased acidity in the blood of a newly dead man. It was his way, it seemed, of telling me to desist -- my efforts to bring him back to life could only be in vain.

Alone in that room with a corpse, I looked into its glazed eyes and saw something I should have noticed earlier -- McCarty's pupils were fixed in the position of wide black dilatation that signifies brain death, and obviously would never respond to light again. I stepped back from the disordered carnage on that bed and only then realized that I was soaking wet. Sweat was pouring down my face, and my hands and my short white medical student's coat were drenched with the dark lifeless blood that had oozed out of McCarty's chest incision. I was crying, in great shaking sobs. I realized, too, that I had been shouting at McCarty, demanding that he live, screaming his name into his left ear as though he could hear me, and weeping all the time with the frustration and sorrow of my failure, and his.

The door swung open and Dave rushed into the room. With one glance he took in the entire scene, and understood it. My shoulders were heaving, and my weeping was by then out of control. He strode around to my side of the bed, and then, as if we were actors in an old World War II movie, he put his arm around my shoulders and said very quietly, "It's okay, buddy -- it's okay. You did everything you could." He sat me down in that death-strewn place and began patiently, tenderly, to tell me all the clinical and biological events that made James McCarty's death inevitably beyond my control. But all I can remember of what he said, with that gentle softness in his voice, was: "Shep, now you know what it's like to be a doctor."

Dictation
Here you can listen to New Yorker staff writers Philip Gourevitch and George Packer talk about Saddam's capture and what it means.

Ice Pack
The new Winter Fiction Issue of The New Yorker features short nonfiction stories about winter by Maile Meloy, David Sedaris, Ian Frazier, Mary Robison, and Louise Erdrich. (There's also one by Roger Angell, but it isn't available online.)

Here's Maile Meloy's story:

Hot or Cold

My earliest memory of winter is of being left in a van, in the snow somewhere in Montana, while my parents, out cross-country skiing, were chased by a bear.

It sounds suspect to me, too, like a half-remembered dream. I was four, and my brother was two. The van was my parents' red Volkswagen bus, with flowered curtains and the back converted into a bed. There was a babysitter, a pretty teen-age girl I called Ann Amouski -- not her name but my approximation. She was nice, but I was bored. She hid hard candies for me, and then told me if I was hot or cold. Behind the seats? Cold. In the glove compartment? Getting warmer. Near the gas pedal? Burning up. Under the clutch! There it was -- a smooth round butterscotch candy in a yellow cellophane wrapper, the kind of thing my parents would never buy except on a trip like this.

We played outside in our snowsuits, and then the sitter turned on the engine and the heat. We sat near the vents, drinking hot chocolate from a thermos lid. The windows were frosted from our breathing.

Out there in the snow, where we couldn't see, my parents glided along, still married to each other. My mother was younger than I am now. They wore wool pants and sweaters and hats, and it was only from a distance that their progress looked effortless and unimpeded. Up close, the gliding through fresh snow made them sweat, and my father's glasses steamed up. Their noses and cheeks were red, and they were laughing at a joke he'd made. The high clear air smelled like Douglas fir and snow.

Then they saw the bear. They had taken it by surprise, startling it up out of a snowbank where it was digging for roots, and it blocked their way back to the road. It stood on its hind legs, nearsighted, and sniffed to see what they were.

The standoff went on for what seemed like minutes, and then the bear dropped back to its forelegs to keep digging. My father, unsure what to do, started on a detour, a wide semicircle around the bear.

When they were safely past, my mother looked back to see the bear following them, in the tracks their skis had made in the snow. She had chicken sandwiches in her backpack, and she called to my father, who turned to look.

"Ski faster," he said. "But not too fast. And sing."

They started to sing "The Bear Went Over the Mountain," but it had no effect on the real bear, which ambled along in their tracks. Like the bear in the song, this one had nowhere pressing to go. It would go wherever they flattened a trail for it, to see what it could see. They were leading it right back to the bus, to where the kids might be playing in the snow, but they couldn't stop.

"Let's spread out," my father said after a while. "So we don't make such a wide path."

They did, out of breath now, each breaking a separate trail. The bear paused when it reached the fork, and then followed my mother. It didn't seem to mind the single set of tracks.

"Now what?" she said, starting to panic.

"Keep skiing," he said.

When the Volkswagen was in sight, they waved, trying to signal that we should stay in the bus. Then they watched, horrified, as we all piled out to greet them, my brother in the babysitter's arms, a perfect snack.

From the bus, I heard my father shout, "Get back in the car!" Then I saw the bear. The sitter hustled my brother in, and I watched as they all bore down on us, my parents skiing ten feet apart, the bear lumbering inexorably behind.

Finally the bear saw or smelled the Volkswagen, and stopped. I was lifted inside by my armpits. My parents arrived breathless, and struggled out of their skis while the bear watched, deliberating. The doors slammed closed, and we drove away. Being eaten by a bear wasn't our fate; life had granted us all a reprieve.

I called my father to find out what I'd got right about the story, and he said, "What? You're dreaming that. There was a mama moose that chased us once, but it was summer." Summer and a moose -- all I'd been sure of was snow and bear.

"Bears hibernate in the winter," he said, and then he suggested three other run-ins with grizzlies that I might be thinking of. None was my pre-divorce winter scene, but mine still feels right: the bus, the sitter, the snow. My parents separating to avoid the thing that threatened us, the thing bearing down on us anyway, and then the family rescue at the last minute, disaster left outside in the cold.

Upward Mobility
Have you ever wanted to fly like a bird? Now you can!

H.R. Puf 'n' CHiPs

A Doug's Life
Stephen Fry wrote the following in May 2001, after his friend Douglas Adams died at age 49. (From here.)

To his friends Douglas Adams will be remembered as a giant of a man with a kindness to match. But to his fans I think he will be seen as someone who brought wit into science fiction. With the greatest respect to Gene Roddenberry and others, that had not been done before.

He had almost a Wodehousian style and some of his phrases and jokes entered our language. He changed the way people spoke. You still hear some of his jokes from the Hitchhiker's books being told in pubs.

I think he would like to be remembered as someone who created a complete other world through his work. But he was also a bridge between science and popular culture. He was absolutely passionate about science and nature and his work made rather arcane things become quite accessible.

He was always angry that some people saw scientists as arrogant. He never did. He saw science as about exploration, discovery and wonder. He would say that arrogant people were people who thought they were certain about something. He did not think science was about that. He could connect science to everyday people's experiences. The image of Arthur Dent in his dressing gown wandering around next to these huge spaceships and time machines was part of that.

His death is a great loss. It is a total bummer to say the least. But I think, to paraphrase one of his phrases, at least one of the headlines on his death should say, 'So long and thanks for all the books'.

The Family Tree
The following is from Genome by Matt Ridley:

Apart from the fusion of chromosome 2, visible differences between chimp and human chromosomes are few and tiny. In thirteen chromosomes no visible differences of any kind exist. If you select at random any 'paragraph' in the chimp genome and compare it with the comparable 'paragraph' in the human genome, you will find very few 'letters' are different: on average, less than two in every hundred. We are, to a ninety-eight per cent approximation, chimpanzees, and they are, with ninety-eight per cent confidence limits, human beings. If that does not dent your self-esteem, consider that chimpanzees are only ninety-seven per cent gorillas; and humans are also ninety-seven per cent gorillas. In other words we are more chimpanzee-like than gorillas are.

How can this be? The differences between me and a chimp are immense. It is hairier, it has a different shaped head, a different shaped body, different limbs, makes different noises. There is nothing about chimpanzees that looks ninety-eight per cent like me. Oh really? Compared with what? If you took two Plasticene models of a mouse and tried to turn one into a chimpanzee, the other into a human being, most of the changes you would make would be the same. If you took two Plasticene amoebae and turned one into a chimpanzee, the other into a human being, almost all the changes you would make would be the same. Both would need thirty-two teeth, five fingers, two eyes, four limbs and a liver. Both would need hair, dry skin, a spinal column and three little bones in the middle ear. From the perspective of an amoeba, or for that matter a fertilised egg, chimps and human beings are ninety-eight per cent the same. There is no bone in the chimpanzee body that I do not share. There is no known chemical in the chimpanzee brain that cannot be found in the human brain. There is no known part of the immune system, the digestive system, the vascular system, the lymph system or the nervous system that we have and chimpanzees do not, or vice versa.

There is not even a brain lobe in the chimpanzee brain that we do not share. In a last, desperate defence of his species against the theory of descent from the apes, the Victorian anatomist Sir Richard Owen once claimed that the hippocampus minor was a brain lobe unique to human brains, so it must be the seat of the soul and the proof of divine creation. He could not find the hippocampus minor in the freshly pickled brains of gorillas brought back from the Congo by the adventurer Paul du Chaillu. Thomas Henry Huxley furiously responded that the hippocampus minor was there in ape brains. 'No, it wasn't', said Owen. 'Was, too', said Huxley. Briefly, in 1861, the 'hippocampus question' was all the rage in Victorian London and found itself satirised in Punch and Charles Kingsley's novel The water babies. Huxley's point -- of which there are loud modern echoes -- was more than just anatomy: 'It is not I who seek to base Man's dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor. On the contrary, I have done my best to sweep away this vanity.' Huxley, by the way, was right.

After all, it is less than 300,000 human generations since the common ancestor of both species lived in central Africa. If you held hands with your mother, and she held hands with hers, and she with hers, the line would stretch only from New York to Washington before you were holding hands with the 'missing link' -- the common ancestor with chimpanzees. Five million years is a long time, but evolution works not in years but in generations. Bacteria can pack in that many generations in just twenty-five years.

In this interview, Ridley discusses Genome.

Comedy Genius
Albert Einstein explains wireless communication:

The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.

Juicy Details



John McPhee's 1967 book Oranges is fascinating.

Some excerpts:

The taste and aroma of oranges differ by type, season, country, state, and country, and even as a result of the position of the individual orange in the framework of the tree on which it grew. Ground fruit -- the orange that one can reach and pick from the ground -- is not as sweet as fruit that grows high on the tree. Outside fruit is sweeter than inside fruit. Oranges grown on the south side of a tree are sweeter than oranges grown on the east or west sides, and oranges grown on the north side are the least sweet of the lot. The quantity of juice in an orange, and even the amount of Vitamin C it contains, will follow the same pattern of variation. Beyond this, there are differentiations of quality inside a single orange. Individual segments vary from one to another in their content of acid and sugar. But that is cutting it pretty fine. Orange men, the ones who actually work in the groves, don't discriminate to that extent. When they eat an orange, they snap out the long, thin blades of their fruit knives and peel it down, halfway, from the blossom end, which is always sweeter and juicier than the stem end. They eat the blossom half and throw the rest of the orange away.

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The color of an orange has no absolute correlation with the maturity of the flesh and juice inside. An orange can be as sweet and ripe as it will ever be and still glisten like an emerald in the tree. Cold -- coolness, rather -- is what makes an orange orange. In some parts of the world, the weather never gets cold enough to change the color; in Thailand, for example, an orange is a green fruit, and traveling Thais often blink with wonder at the sight of oranges the color of flame. The ideal nighttime temperature in an orange grove is forty degrees. Some of the most beautiful oranges in the world are grown in Bermuda, where the temperature, night after night, falls consistently to that level. Andrew Marvell's poem wherein the "remote Bermudas ride in the ocean's bosom unespied" was written in the sixteen-fifties, and contains a description, from hearsay, of Bermuda's remarkable oranges, set against their dark foliage like "golden lamps in a green night."

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Some oranges that become orange while they are still unripe may turn green again as they ripen. When cool nights finally come to Florida, around the first of the year, the Valencia crop is fully developed in size and shape, but it is still three months away from ripeness. Sliced through the middle at that time, a Valencia looks something like a partitioned cupful of rice, and its taste is overpoweringly acid. But in the winter coolness, the exterior surface turns to bright orange, and the Valencia appears to be perfect for picking. Warm nights return, however, during the time of the Valencia harvest. On the trees in late spring, the Valencias turn green again, growing sweeter each day and greener each night.

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Oranges and orange blossoms have long been symbols of love. Boccoccio's Decameron, written in the fourteenth century, is redolent with the scent of oranges and orange blossoms, with lovers who wash in orange-flower water, a courtesan who sprinkles her sheets with orange perfume, and the mournful Isabella, who cuts off the head of her dead lover, buries it in an ample pot, plants sweet basil above it, and irrigates the herbs exclusively with rosewater, orange-flower water, and tears. In the fifteenth century, the Countess Mathilda of Württemberg received from her impassioned admirer, Dr. Heinrich Steinbowel, a declaration of love in the form of a gift of two dozen oranges. Before long, titled German girls were throwing oranges down from their balconies in the way that girls in Italy or Spain were dropping handkerchiefs. After Francis I dramatically saved Marseilles from a Spanish siege, a great feast was held for him at the city's harborside, and Marseillaise ladies, in token of their love and gratitude, pelted him with oranges. Even Nostradamus was sufficiently impressed with the sensual power of oranges to publish, in 1556, a book on how to prepare various cosmetics from oranges and orange blossoms. Limes were also used cosmetically, by ladies of the French court in the seventeenth century, who kept them on their persons and bit into them from time to time in order to redden their lips. In the nineteenth century, orange blossoms were regularly shipped to Paris in salted barrels from Provence, for no French bride wanted to be married without wearing or holding them.

Paradoxically, many societies have believed that the worst thing that could happen to an orange tree was the touch of a woman. If a woman were even to go near one, some thought, the foliage would wilt and fall away, the fruit would drop, and the tree would die. A Spanish Moor of the twelfth century, whose name was Abu Zakariya Yahya Ibn el-Awwam, wrote a basic text called The Book of Agriculture, which contained material on citriculture that was remarkably accurate and complete, until he brought up the matter of women. "Women should not be allowed to come near citrus trees," he wrote, "unless they are in a state of absolute purity and unimpaired health." According to the same writer, however, the woman stood to gain much from the very tree she was capable of destroying. "If a woman eats an orange," he added, "it will banish all evil thoughts from her mind."

Super Dave
The following is David Letterman's foreward to the second collection of Top Ten Lists, published in 1991.

You'll get a kick out of this. The other night after dinner, I'm watching television, trying to relax at the end of a long, hard day. They're showing this program starring that very popular blond actress who plays a curvaceous college coed with a great deal of sex appeal who lives with six football players, all of whom have a romantic interest in her. The only reason the landlord lets these guys live there is because he believes they are actually mental patients -- you know, insane -- and she is their nurse or something. But of course it's all just pretend so they can stay there for really cheap rent. It's very comical. Anyway, I'm enjoying this program and all of a sudden my wife, Linda, says, "You pay more attention to that television actress than you do to me." Well now, frankly, this is old news. And that's exactly what I tell Linda. I say, "Linda, it's old news." And then I add the scorcher. I say, "You know, Linda, we've been to the moon." Because by now, this is also old news. Well, then Linda's mother starts in on me. Please don't get me wrong, I love the old gal. But, frankly, if, God forbid, she died tomorrow, St. Peter would really have his hands full with the yak, yak, yak! So anyway, she says, "I didn't raise my daughter just so you could make smart remarks about her." And without thinking, I shoot back, "Well, I didn't buy that couch so an overweight relative could flatten the cushions out of shape by sitting on it all day." Well, I think you get the picture of how things are going at my house.

So anyway, Tuesday, I gotta fly to Detroit. Now God bless the airlines, they do a marvelous job, but come on, why are they always late? The last time I flew we were supposed to take off at 4:10 P.M. Now at 4:30 we still had not left the gate. I said to the stewdardess, "Honey, what's the deal?" She shoots back kind of smart-alecky, "The pilot is waiting for some violent thunderstorm activity to clear the area." Violent thunderstorms? I say to myself, "She's a regular Willard Scott." So what can you do? Life is crazy and if I live to be 100 I'll never figure it out. Like those wackos in Washington. Or should I say, our distinguished Congress. I tell people, "You want to see a comedy show, put some cameras in Congress. Then you'll see some comedy." And now I see where these geniuses voted themselves a raise. Hey, didn't they just get a raise? But I'll tell you one thing in all seriousness. If that Berlin Wall hadn't come down, there could have been real trouble. So I think President Bush did a marvelous job on that one.

Let me just say one thing about Madonna and all her Truth or Dare stuff. Truth or Dare? The truth is, who cares? Have you seen this? Now they have these Madonna Wannabees. That's great! Just what we need!

I have the worst luck. The other day my wife and I are in the market and I pick out a can of soup. Just my luck, it's the only can of soup in the whole place that doesn't have a price on it. So what happens? The checkout kid gets on the P.A. and says, "Price check on a can of soup." Great! Now the whole market knows I'm buying soup. Just what I need. Well, like I said, that's the kind of luck I have. I don't think the kid meant any harm or anything. I don't think he even knew what he was doing really. When we got home, Linda and I had a pretty good laugh about it, but at the time, I'll be honest with you, I was steamed.

Do you have any stories like this? If you do, we'd love to read them. And, if we print one of your stories we'll send you fifty dollars. That's right, fifty dollars. Well, good luck and get going.

Funny Business



In his interview in The Paris Review, S.J. Perelman was asked about the decline of literary humor and his reply seems as true today as it was when he said it, back in 1963. Here's the exchange:

Interviewer: Mrs. [Dorothy] Parker has said that there aren't any humorists any more ... except for Perelman. She went on to say, "There's no need for them. Perelman must be very lonely." Are there humorists? Is there a need for them, and are you lonely?

Perelman: Well, it must be thoroughly apparent how many more people wrote humor for the printed page in the twenties. The form seems to be passing, and there aren't many practitioners left. The only magazine nowadays that carries any humor worthy of the name, in my estimation, is The New Yorker. Thirty years ago, on the other hand, there were Judge, Life, Vanity Fair, College Humor, and one or two others. I think the explanation for the paucity of written humor is simply that very few fledgling writers deign to bother with it. If someone has a flair for comedy, he usually goes into television or what remains of motion pictures. There's far more loot in those fields, and while it's ignominious to be an anonymous gagman, perhaps, eleven hundred dollars a week can be very emollient to the ego. The life of the free-lance writer of humor is highly speculative and not to be recommended as a vocation. In the technical sense, the comic writer is a cat on a hot tin roof. His invitation to perform is liable to wear out at any moment; he must quickly and constantly amuse in a short span, and the first smothered yawn is a signal to get lost. The fiction writer, in contrast, has much more latitude. He's allowed to side-slip into exposition, to wander off into interminable byways and browse around endlessly in his characters' heads. The development of a comic idea has to be swift and economical; consequently, the pieces are shorter than conventional fiction and fetch a much smaller stipend.

Billions and Billions
The following is from the fourteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

It is important to bear in mind that in British usage a billion is equal to a million million, not a thousand million as in American usage. When writing about British sums for American readers, it may therefore be preferable to use the term thousand million or million million, whichever fits the case, instead of billion, or else to remind the reader, perhaps in a note, of the difference.

Wilde Man
Stephen Fry wrote the following. It's from an article called "Playing Oscar," which was published in the June 16, 1997, issue of The New Yorker.

And what of Wilde the man? He stood for Art. He stood for nothing less all his life. His doctrine of Art was so high that most people thought he was joking. The English, who to this day believe themselves quite mistakenly to be possessed of a higher sense of humor than any other nation on earth, have never understood that a thing expressed with wit is more, not less, likely to be true than a thing intoned gravely as solemn fact. We British, who pride ourselves on our superior sense of irony, have never fully grasped the idea of fiction -- of ironism. Plain old sarcasm is about our mark. When Wilde made an epigram, it was, at best, "clever." Clever, like funny, is an English insult of the deepest kind.

Heller High Water
David Remnick wrote the following, which was published in the Dec. 27, 1999 & Jan. 3, 2000 double issue of The New Yorker.

The Other Heller

The obituaries marking the death of Joseph Heller last week rightly spent acres of space on his masterpiece, "Catch-22," but few of them noted with any emphasis that he was the author of another extraordinary book, "Something Happened." After publishing "Catch-22," in 1961, and after absorbing the blows of dismissive reviews and (initially) modest sales, Heller wasn't at all sure that he would ever write another novel. He had a wife and two small children. He spent his days writing advertising and promotional copy. And he had no ideas for another book. One night, Heller sat out on the deck of a house on Fire Island, terribly worried. But then that magical thing happened. Just as he had "received" the opening lines of "Catch-22" while lying in bed in a West Side apartment ("It was love at first sight..."), new lines came to him: "In the office in which I work, there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps)."

Heller had read Céline's "Journey to the End of the Night" to help fuel the writing of "Catch-22." For the new book, he leaned on the Beckett trilogy "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnameable." But the real process of writing it was far more complicated -- something Heller later talked about as an ineffable combination of listening and experience, followed by years of intense labor. "Something Happened," which was published in 1974, is far darker than the dark comedy of "Catch-22." It is narrated by Bob Slocum, a man in his forties who has lost interest, who sees no way out of his responsibilities, his job, his loveless life. In later years, Heller's public image lightened, partly because he broadened the comedy in his writing, and partly because he didn't take himself terribly seriously. (His best interview was conducted by his friend Mel Brooks.) And yet Heller left behind something unmistakably serious and permanent: two novels -- one of war, one domestic -- unlike any others. He even did what poets do. He added words to the language: Catch-22.

Here's an excerpt from Something Happened:

When friends, relatives, and business acquaintances are stricken with heart attacks now, I never call the hospital or hospital room to find out how they are, because there's always the danger I might find out they are dead. I try not to talk to their wives and children until I've first checked with somebody else who has talked to them and can give me the assurance I want that everything is no worse than before. This sometimes strains relationships (even with my wife, who is always asking everybody how they are and running to hospitals with gifts to visit people who are there), but I don't care. I just don't want to talk to people whose husband or father or wife or mother or child may be dying, even though the dying person himself might be someone I feel deeply attached to. I never want to find out that anybody I know is dead.

One time, though (ha, ha), after someone I knew did die, I braced myself, screwed up my valor, and, feigning ignorance, telephoned the hospital that same day to inquire about his condition. I was curious: I wanted to see what it would feel like to hear the hospital tell me that someone I knew was dead. I wondered how it was done; I was preoccupied and even titillated by this problem of technique. Would they decide he had died, passed away, succumbed, was deceased, or perhaps even had expired? (Like a magazine subscription or an old library card?) The woman on the telephone at the hospital surprised me. She said:

"Mr. _______ is no longer listed as a patient."

It took nerve to make that telephone call, it took all my nerve. And I was trembling like a leaf when I hung up. Certainly, my heart was pounding with great joy and excitement at my narrow escape, for I had fancied from my very first syllable, from the first digit I dialed, that the woman at the hospital knew exactly what I was up to -- that she could see me right through the telephone connection and could see right into my mind -- and would say so. She didn't. She just said what she was instructed to say and let me escape scot-free. (Was it a recorded announcement?) And I have never forgotten that tactful procedure:

"Mr. _______ is no longer listed as a patient."

Mr. _______ was dead. He was no longer among the living. Mr. _______ was no longer listed as a patient, and I had to go to his funeral three days later.

Little John
On this episode of The Connection, John Updike talks about, and reads (aloud) from, his early short stories.

Cataclysm
Franz Wright wrote the following poem, which appears in the current issue of The New Yorker.

On the Death of a Cat

In life, death
was nothing
to you: I am

willing to wager
my soul that it
simply never occurred

to your nightmareless
mind, while sleep
was everything

(see it raised
to an infinite
power and perfection) -- no death

in you then, so now
how even less. Dear stealth
of innocence

licked polished
to an evil
lustre, little

milk fang, whiskered
night
friend --

go.

Foreign Correspondent
Here's a poem by James Tate, from his 1967 collection The Lost Pilot.

Miss Cho Composes in the Cafeteria

You are so small, I
am not even sure
that you are at all.

To you, I know I
am not here: you are
rapt in writing a

syllabic poem
about gigantic,
gaudy Christmas trees.

You will send it home
to China, and they
will worry about

you alone amid
such strange customs. You
count on your tiny

bamboo fingers; one,
two, three -- up to five,
and, oh, you have one

syllable too much.
You shake your head in
dismay, look back up

to the tree to see
if, perhaps, there might
exist another

word that would describe
the horror of this
towering, tinselled

symbol. And ... now
you've got it! You jot
it down, jump up, look

at me and giggle.

Frantastic!
The following is from the New York Post's "Page Six." (Via Maud Newton.)

December 11, 2003 -- Fran Lebowitz still hasn't fully recovered from her 23-year-old case of writer's block. Lebowitz - whose last major work was 1981's "Social Studies" - was supposed to put out a new tome, "Progress," with Knopf this fall, but the release has been postponed by at least six months. A Knopf spokesman says she handed in a manuscript but is still poring over new material: "It's a contemporary look at the world, so there's a lot of material she's looking at right now and working into the book." He assures us, "It's fabulous, funny, classic Fran Lebowitz."

Call of the Wilde
Here are some Oscar Wilde quotes:

From "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young":

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

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The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

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Only the shallow know themselves.

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The only way to atone for being occasionally a little overdressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.

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A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

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The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.

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From An Ideal Husband:

Mrs Cheveley. Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.

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Lord Goring. Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.

Spirit Fingers



Anne Fadiman is the editor of The American Scholar. She's written two books: Ex Libris and The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. Both are brilliant.

Here are some excerpts from the latter book:

If a Hmong couple failed to produce children, they could call in a txiv neeb, a shaman who was believed to have the ability to enter a trance, summon a posse of helpful familiars, ride a winged horse over the twelve mountains between the earth and the sky, cross an ocean inhabited by dragons, and (starting with bribes of food and money and, if necessary, working up to a necromantic sword) negotiate for his patients' health with the spirits who lived in the realm of the unseen. A txiv neeb might be able to cure infertility by asking the couple to sacrifice a dog, a cat, a chicken, or a sheep. After the animal's throat was cut, the txiv neeb would string a rope bridge from the doorpost to the marriage bed, over which the soul of the couple's future baby, which had been detained by a malevolent spirit called a dab, could now freely travel to earth. One could also take certain precautions to avoid becoming infertile in the first place. For example, no Hmong woman of childbearing age would ever think of setting foot inside a cave, because a particularly unpleasant kind of dab sometimes lived there who liked to eat flesh and drink blood and could make his victim sterile by having sexual intercourse with her.

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In the Hmong language, the word for placenta means "jacket." It is considered one's first and finest garment. When a Hmong dies, his or her soul must travel back from place to place, retracing the path of its life geography, until it reaches the burial place of its placental jacket, and puts it on. Only after the soul is properly dressed in the clothing in which it was born can it continue its dangerous journey, past murderous dabs and giant poisonous caterpillars, around man-eating rocks and impassable oceans, to the place beyond the sky where it is reunited with its ancestors and from which it will someday be sent to be reborn as the soul of a new baby. If the soul cannot find its jacket, it is condemned to an eternity of wandering, naked and alone.

Because the Lees are among the 150,000 Hmong who have fled Laos since their country fell to communist forces in 1975, they do not know if their house is still standing, or if the five male and seven female placentas that Nao Kao buried under the dirt floor are still there. They believe that half of the placentas have already been put to their final use, since four of their sons and two of their daughters died of various causes before the Lees came to the United States. The Lees believe that someday the souls of most of the rest of their family will have a long way to travel, since they will have to retrace their steps from Merced, California, where the family has spent fifteen of its seventeen years in this country; to Portland, Oregon, where they lived before Merced; to Honolulu, Hawaii, where their airplane from Thailand first landed; to two Thai refugee camps; and finally back to their home village in Laos.

The Lees' thirteenth child, Mai, was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. Her placenta was buried under their hut. Their fourteenth child, Lia, was born in the Merced Community Medical Center, a modern public hospital that serves an agricultural county in California's Central Valley, where many Hmong refugees have resettled. Lia's placenta was incinerated. Some Hmong women have asked the doctors at MCMC, as the hospital is commonly called, if they could take their babies' placentas home. Several of the doctors have acquiesced, packing the placentas in plastic bags or take-out containers from the hospital cafeteria; most have refused, in some cases because they have assumed that the women planned to eat the placentas, and have found that idea disgusting, and in some cases because they have feared the possible spread of hepatitis B, which is carried by at least fifteen percent of the Hmong refugees in the United States. Foua never thought to ask, since she speaks no English, and when she delivered Lia, no one present spoke Hmong. In any case, the Lees' apartment had a wooden floor covered with wall-to-wall carpeting, so burying the placenta would have been a difficult proposition.

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It took the Lee family about a month to save enough money from their welfare checks, and from gifts from their relatives' welfare checks, to finance a soul-calling party for Lia.

Although the Hmong believe that illness can be caused by a variety of sources -- including eating the wrong food, drinking contaminated water, being affected by a change in the weather, failing to ejaculate completely during sexual intercourse, neglecting to make offerings to one's ancestors, being punished for one's ancestors' transgressions, being cursed, being hit by a whirlwind, having a stone implanted in one's body by an evil spirit master, having one's blood sucked by a dab, bumping into a dab who lives in a tree or a stream, digging a well in a dab's living place, catching sight of a dwarf female dab who eats earthworms, having a dab sit on one's chest while one is sleeping, doing one's laundry in a lake inhabited by a dragon, pointing one's finger at the full moon, touching a newborn mouse, killing a large snake, urinating on a rock that looks like a tiger, urinating on or kicking a benevolent house spirit, or having bird droppings fall on one's head -- by far the most common cause of illness is soul loss. Although the Hmong do not agree on just how many souls people have (estimates range from one to thirty-two; the Lees believe there is just one), there is a general consensus that whatever the number, it is the life-soul, whose presence is necessary for health and happiness, that tends to get lost. A life-soul can become separated from its body through anger, grief, fear, curiosity, or wanderlust. The life-souls of newborn babies are especially prone to disappearance, since they are so small, so vulnerable, and so precariously poised between the realm of the unseen, from which they have just traveled, and the realm of the living. Babies' souls may wander away, drawn by bright colors, sweet sounds, or fragrant smells; they may leave if a baby is sad, lonely, or insufficiently loved by its parents; they may be frightened away by a sudden loud noise; or they may be stolen by a dab. Some Hmong are careful never to say aloud that a baby is pretty, lest a dab be listening. Hmong babies are often dressed in intricately embroidered hats (Foua made several for Lia) which, when seen from a heavenly perspective, might fool a predatory dab into thinking the child was a flower. They spend much of their time swaddled against their mothers' backs in cloth carriers called nyias (Foua made Lia several of these too) that have been embroidered with soul-retaining motifs, such as the pigpen, which symbolizes enclosure. They may wear silver necklaces fastened with soul-shackling locks. When babies or small children go on an outing, their parents may call loudly to their souls before the family returns home, to make sure that none remain behind. Hmong families in Merced can sometimes be heard doing this when they leave local parks after a picnic. None of these ploys can work, however, unless a soul-calling ritual has already been properly observed.

Click here to read more.

Atul Shed



Atul Gawande writes about medicine. He is himself a surgeon. He graduated from Harvard Medical School. He also holds degrees from Stanford and Oxford. He was a Rhodes scholar. Basically, he's smart as hell. (And he's fairly young, too: he's 38.) One of the great things about his writing, though, is that his big brain never leads him to leave the reader behind. In a way, he's too smart for that. His writing is as thrilling as any bestseller. For instance, when he describes a mistake that he himself made in the ER concerning a woman's blocked airway, a mistake that nearly killed the woman, he writes about it -- moment to moment -- in a way that is so immediate, so harrowing, you almost can't breathe yourself. But each vivid, fascinating account is never an end in itself. He uses these stories to illuminate difficult ethical questions inherent to his profession, questions that are relevant to all of us. The result is eloquent, profound, and wise. His book Complications is a collection of pieces, most of which first appeared in The New Yorker. Here's more information about Gawande and an interview with him. And here's a review of Complications by my pal Claire Zulkey.

The following is an excerpt from a Gawande essay, about gastric-bypass surgery, called "The Man Who Couldn't Stop Eating." (The essay is also available as a PDF.)

Apparently, how heavy one becomes is determined, in part, by how the hypothalamus and the brain stem adjudicate the conflicting signals from the mouth and the gut. Some people feel full quite early in a meal; others, like Vincent Caselli [the man to whom the title of the article refers], experience the appetizer effect for much longer. In the past several years, much has been discovered about the mechanisms of this control. We now know, for instance, that hormones, like leptin and neuropeptide Y, rise and fall with fat levels and adjust the appetite accordingly. But our knowledge of these mechanisms is still crude at best.

Consider a 1998 report concerning two men, "BR" and "RH," who suffered from profound amnesia. Like the protagonist in the movie "Memento," they could carry on a coherent conversation with you, but, once they had been distracted, they recalled nothing from as recently as a minute before, not even that they were talking to you. (BR had had a bout of viral encephalitis; RH had had a severe seizure disorder for twenty years.) Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, thought of using them in an experiment that would explore the relationship between memory and eating. On three consecutive days, he and his team brought each subject his typical lunch (BR got meat loaf, barley soup, tomatoes, potatoes, beans, bread, butter, peaches, and tea; RH got veal parmigiana with pasta, string beans, juice, and apple crumb cake). Each day, BR ate all his lunch, and RH could not quite finish. Their plates were then taken away. Ten to thirty minutes later, the researchers would reappear with the same meal. "Here's lunch," they would announce. The men ate just as much as before. Another ten to thirty minutes later, the researchers again appeared with the same meal. "Here's lunch," they would say, and again the men would eat. On a couple of occasions, the researchers even offered RH a fourth lunch. Only then did he decline, saying that his "stomach was a little tight." Stomach stretch receptors weren't completely ineffectual. Yet, in the absence of a memory of having eaten, social context alone -- someone walking in with lunch -- was enough to re-create appetite.

You can imagine forces in the brain vying to make you feel hungry or full. You have mouth receptors, smell receptors, visions of tiramisu pushing one way and gut receptors another. You have leptins and neuropeptides saying you have either too much fat stored or too little. And you have your own social and personal sense of whether eating more is a good idea. If one mechanism is thrown out of whack, there's trouble.

Here you can listen to Al Roker talk about his gastric-bypass surgery and its effect on his life.

The Write Stuff
The following Stephen Fry essay was originally published in the New York Times.

Forget Ideas, Mr Author. What Kind of Pen Do You Use?

By Stephen Fry

Here is a truth to which all writers can attest: Readers are more interested in process than in product.
Authors know this for certain, because authors undergo Trial By Event, "event" being publisher-speak for anything from a chilly book signing in a half-empty general store with one paperback carousel next to the soda cabinet to a grand festival colloquium held before an audience of readers so literary that you just know they have terriers called Scott and Zelda and a parrot called Trilling.

No matter how well read the audience may be, when it comes to the Q&A, it is always the same. After a few polite interrogatory skirmishes for form's sake come the only questions that matter to the reader.

"Do you write in longhand or on a computer?"

If longhand: "Pencil, ballpoint or old-fashioned ink pen?"

If computer: "PC or Mac? Which font do you prefer?"

No doubt if you were to reveal that you dictated your work, there would come a fresh slew of questions. "Into a machine or to a secretary?" "Sony or Panasonic?'` "Male or female?"

As it happens I have never heard an author say that he did use dictation; this seems to be a method of the Erle Stanley Gardner generation that has fallen into desuetude. Perhaps the rise of computer speech recognition will change this. But if I did happen to be sharing a festival stage with a literary dictator, I would be fascinated by his answer. You see, writers (perhaps especially writers) want to know how to write, too.

Musicians tend not to face these questions because it is not generally held that everyone has a symphony in him somewhere. Language however belongs to us all. Is there a hint of resentment in readers? "We all speak English. We all write e-mails and letters every day. What's your secret? Just give us enough detail, and we can be inducted into the coterie, too." It is almost as if some people feel that they were off sick or at the dentist's the day the rest of the class was told how to write a book, and that it isn't fair of authors to keep the mystery to themselves.

I exaggerate for effect. Not every reader wants to be a writer, and literary festival audiences are hardly the most reliable sample group from which to extrapolate.

I once shared a stage with Gore Vidal in Manchester, England, which was a very great honor indeed, although he did not appear to appreciate it. No, but, tush. Mr. Vidal was asked if he felt there had ever been an age in recent history that could boast so few good writers as the present. "There are as many good writers as ever there were," he replied, and I wish I could reproduce on the page the trademark patrician Gore-drawl that transforms his lightest remark into a marmoreal epigram. "The problem is that there are so few good readers."

The rise of digital cameras and desktop editing software is starting to create the same effect with filmmaking, by the way. A director is now as likely to be asked by a film fan, "Do you prefer anamorphic or super-35?" or "Do you favor the bleach bypass process?" as once he would be asked, "What's Robert Redford really like?" or "Does Clint do his own stunts?'`

A loss of innocence or a thrilling indication that soon we will all be artists? I don't know. I do know that, as I suggested earlier, writers are just as interested as readers in the trivial detail of another writer's day.

For example, I read somewhere that Graham Greene used to leave his last sentence of the writing day unfinished. In this way he always had something straightforward to do the next morning. I have copied this idea and find that something as simple as completing a sentence works very well as a way of priming the pump at the start of the day. Such a technique doesn't transform one into a literary master any more than growling bad-temperedly, beetling your brows and using an ear trumpet will enable you to write great symphonies, but every little helps.

My latest novel, "Revenge," caused me a very specific hair-raising and sleep-depriving problem. I had planned it out in my head, which is about as much planning as I ever do, not being an index-card, scenario or flow-chart sort of a person. It was to be a story of wrongful imprisonment and subsequent vengeance. As I thought the narrative through, a little voice started whispering wicked thoughts into my ear.

"This isn't very original," it would say. "I've heard it before."

At first I didn't pay much attention. When did any of us last read an original story? Original writing is the issue. Treatment is all. But then one night I sat bolt upright in bed and screamed in horror. The truth had suddenly exploded into my consciousness.

The story, the plot I had been working out with such pleasure, was not just unoriginal, it was a straight steal, virtually identical in all but period and style to Alexandre Dumas's "Count of Monte Cristo."

What does a writer do on such occasions? Abandon his narrative and embark upon another? I was already three chapters in, and those authorial juices that take so long to summon up were flowing nicely. Should I rely on the fact that "The Count of Monte Cristo" is one of those novels that few (myself included at that point) have actually read? I was in one heck of a pickle, let me tell you.

I arose early next day and drove into the medieval university town of Cambridge, where there are more bookshops than people, and bought every copy of the Dumas original I could find, for now a new, more benign voice was whispering in my ear.

"I bet Dumas pinched the story, too."

And sure enough, in an introduction to one of the editions I found came the welcome news that the story of a wrongly imprisoned sailor who escapes the Chateau d'If was, in Dumas's day, a kind of urban legend that he had gratefully lifted.

If we're talking process incidentally, Dumas's publishers paid him by the line. Can you imagine anything so foolish? This is why his work is crammed with dialogue.

"Pass the mustard."

"Eh?"

"I said, 'Pass the mustard.'"

"You want some custard?"

"No, mustard."

"Oh."

Each carriage return a happy ring on the cash register.

Anyway, once I was assured in my own mind that the outline of the story was not original to Dumas, I continued with the book, deciding that a "literary reworking" or "homage" was perfectly acceptable, and that I could not in all seriousness be charged with that most unforgivable of literary crimes, plagiarism.

As a further safeguard I changed the names of my protagonists to anagrams of the originals. Thus Edmond Dantès, who reinvents himself as Monte Cristo, becomes in my story Ned Maddstone, who reinvents himself as Simon Cotter. Baron Danglars is turned into Barson-Garland and so on. Edmond's affianced Mercedes transforms herself (in an unforgivable example of automobile paronomasia) into Portia.

Interestingly, and I had not meant in any way to trap or test, my French translators were the only people to pick up on the story's similarity to Monte Cristo. Since then, in new editions, including the current American one, we have proudly announced the book's connection to Dumas. No one, however, has noticed the jeu d'esprit of anagrams and awful puns. All that work for nothing. If you have an hour or so to kill, you might like to pick up a copy (you can read it on a bookshop sofa, far be it from me vulgarly to hawk for business) and see how many you can spot.

Oh, I use a Mac, by the way. Times Roman, 14 point. Very traditional.

Stephen Hero
Here's an old New Zealand Herald article about my personal god, Stephen Fry.

Some Fry quotes from the article:

"It takes a long time in our culture if you're 'successful' to understand why you're not happy because we so associate happiness with acquisition and achievement."

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"It did take a bit of time for me to realise that it's all right to be unhappy ... It was quite a stunning revelation, as the most obvious things are. So now I am happy because I realise I can be unhappy."

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Fry's at his hilarious best in the television program A Bit of Fry and Laurie. A Bit of Fry and Laurie is brilliant -- the funniest sketch comedy I've ever seen. I absolutely adore it. Fry and Laurie is at least as good as Monty Python's Flying Circus, if not better. Not to knock Python -- I love Python, too -- but if given a choice between Python and Fry and Laurie, I'd probably pick the latter most of the time. Their humor is incredibly smart and sophisticated, but, at the same time, just as silly as Python. What I love is the combination. For example, here's a monologue spoofing Alan Bennett's "Talking Heads" programs (which I've never seen).

In the sketch, which is called "Gossiping Heads," Stephen is dressed as a conservative, middle-class woman in her sixties. He plays the thing very straight -- not broad like the Python old ladies with their silly voices -- but if you listen to what he's actually saying, it's hilarious, and some of it is delectably surreal. For example:

Lovely boy he was. Teeth weren't his strong feature, of course, and his hair wasn't what you'd call Leslie Howard, but I always say, "Teeth is teeth, what does it matter so long as you've got your wealth?" He said, "I can't wait to get out of here, Auntie Ivy, and make my fortune down south." I said to him, straight, I said, "Alan," I said, "I may not be as cabbage looking as my tongue is a fisherman's doily, but what's London got that you won't find in the Arndale Centre in Todmodern?" Well, he was stuck for a reply.

As played by Stephen, the sketch is delicious. I mean, "I may not be as cabbage looking as my tongue is a fisherman's doily"? Where does that come from?

Here's another Fry monologue, this one perhaps even more absurd:

The Day I Forgot My Legs

I don't know if I ever told you about the day I forgot my legs. I can't remember which day it was: it was one of those ones that happened in 1987, I can't remember which exactly, there were so many. In particular there were quite a lot of Tuesdays then, I remember, so I've a feeling it might have been one of those. Anyway, I was on my way into work with Sir Peter Thorneycroft, no relation, one fresh June morning in early May and we took the shortcut across the fields. I stooped to pick a buttercup, why people leave buttocks lying around, I've no idea. The gentlest breeze and mildest Camemberts were packed in our hamper and all nature seemed to be holding its breath. We made good time by taking a back way across what was then the main Corpusty to Saxmundham Road. I was just remarking to Peter how still and peaceful everything was when he suddenly agreed with me and said how he thought everything was still and peaceful too. You know how if you half-close your eyes you can't see so well? I'd just discovered that it was equally true if you half-opened them. I was pointing this out when I suddenly noticed that I'd completely forgotten my legs. We had to go back and get them. The moment was spoiled and three years later almost to the decade, Margaret Thatcher was hounded from office. I sometimes muse on what might have happened if I had forgotten my ears as well. Never go back, ladies and gentlemen. Never go back.

There is a VHS tape available that contains some of my favorite sketches from A Bit of Fry and Laurie (though not the "Gossiping Heads" one quoted above, unfortunately). For example, it contains my favorite sketch in the history of sketch comedy, "Haircut." The tape can be purchased here.

Sadly, beyond that one tape, it is very hard to see A Bit of Fry and Laurie in the U.S. A PBS station around here (Seattle) used to run it, but they stopped years ago. If only the unwashed masses had better taste! (And better hygiene!)

Sketch Comedy
Click here to listen to various New Yorker cartoonists talk about what it's like to be a New Yorker cartoonist. (From the February 23, 2002, episode of The Next Big Thing.)

Fab Gab
Here's an excerpt from Harry Thompson's biography of Peter Cook, concerning Cook and John Lennon during the sixties:

[Peter's] basement kitchen became the setting for a series of huge dinner parties, hosted by [Peter's wife] Wendy with almost military precision. As often as three times a week, every week, up to twenty guests would gather round the big dining table, which literally creaked under the weight of ratatouilles, moussakas and quiches lorraines. Peter, a self-confessedly awful cook, would take no part in the preparation of the feast; instead he would sit and hold court at one end of the table, ensconced in a large Windsor chair. Wendy would sit at the opposite end, on a slightly smaller seat. Lined up between them on either side of the table were London's famous, celebrities of all shapes and sizes assembled in a deliberately eclectic mix. Regular guests included John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Charlotte Rampling, Peter Sellers, Cat Stevens, Peter Ustinov, Ken Tynan, John Cleese, Paul Jones, John Bird, Eleanor Bron, Willie Rushton, Michael Foot, Bernard Levin, Jay and Fran Landesman, Malcolm Muggeridge, Victor Lownes, and of course Dudley and Suzy Kendall. Most of the guests were purposely selected for their fame and interest value, but they were almost all distinguished by the fact that they had sought Peter's friendship, rather than he theirs. As Barry Fantoni points out, 'Peter was the sixties icon. Pop stars were presented to him at parties, not the other way round.'

Harriet Garland remembers 'Wonderful, happy, happy evenings at Church Row, with John and Cynthia Lennon and Paul McCartney. Lennon was there a great deal. Wendy would do this wonderful spread -- she was very ambitious -- she'd think nothing of roasting a whole boar for instance, and putting it on the table; and it was all wonderfully decorated, with fantastic puddings. I've never laughed so much in my whole life -- Peter and Lennon were just frightfully funny together. The two of them would do an act: Peter was always becoming somebody, Barry McKenzie or E.L. Wisty or whoever.' John Lennon, in fact, told Peter and Wendy that he had written the song 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' for their daughter.

[I'm skipping a few paragraphs here.]

Jonathan Miller's comparison between the Fringe quartet and the Beatles still held true to some extent: Peter and John Lennon had become drawn to each other because of their profound similarities, both being sharp, cynical, witty and the brains of their respective writing partnerships. Dudley and Paul McCartney were in each case the housewives' choice of the duo, their wholesome, sympathetic, and in some ways greater mainstream appeal providing a slight source of irritation for their more caustic and dominant partners. In each case, however, the relationship was symbiotic; both Peter and John Lennon knew, deep down, that they performed better with their sidekicks than without. It is interesting too that both men, unaccustomed to deferring to others in public, did so in each other's company, giving each other space in which to perform. The Cook-Lennon dinner party double act gave Lennon more room than Peter ever afforded Dudley. A further similarity, of course, was that by the mid-1960s both Peter and John Lennon's marriages were, though they were unaware of it, on course for disaster.

Eleven Herbs and Chuckles
I've never read Don Novello's Lazlo Letters, although I am aware of its existence and have, I think, paged through it in bookstores once or twice.

A very similar book was published in 1981 (four years after the original publication of The Lazlo Letters). This book was called Modest Proposals: The Official Correspondence of Randy Cohen. Randy Cohen writes the Ethicist column in the New York Times, used to be the editor of Slate's News Quiz, and was a writer for Late Night with David Letterman. He's a very funny guy, and some of his letters are hilarious.

Here, for example, is one he sent to the executive offices of Kentucky Fried Chicken:

April 2, 1979

To the Director:

I assume you've heard about the new Broadway musical, produced by Lee Guber and Shelly Gross, called Murder at Howard Johnsons. But, did you know that Mr. Johnson not only approves of this project but is going to aid in its promotion by opening a 28-flavor ice cream stand in the lobby of the Golden Theater?

Knowing that yours is a modern operation, I presume we both believe there is no such thing as bad publicity. Thus, I'd like to propose a theatrical venture for your franchise, to be called Grand Theft Auto at the Colonel's. It's a terrific romantic/suspense/comedy with music. I've not only prepared an outline of the script, but I've also written several songs, and I think they're hot. Get a load of these song titles: "The Colonel's Got Ribs, but I've Got the Girl," and "Coming in on a Wing and a Drumstick," and "Extra Crispy, Extra Love."

What do you think? It sounds like big B.O. to me! Where would you like me to send the outline and the lead sheets? Do you think Col. Sanders will love it as much as I do? Let me know because, while you're my first choice in dining as well as entertainment, I know I've got a hit on my hands. So, if you folks don't want to procede, I'd like to rewrite it as Grand Theft Auto at Burger King.

Remember: think Boffo and Socko and SRO! Picture this -- for the big Act One closing, a tremendous production number in front of a pair of crossed drumsticks! I'll say no more till I've heard from you.

Yours,

Randy Cohen

===============

Here's the reply Randy received:

April 18, 1979

Dear Mr. Cohen:

Thanks for thinking of KFC in conjunction with the musical comedy you're writing. Unfortunately it doesn't fit into our marketing plan and, in fact, conflicts with a musical comedy about the Colonel's life that he has authorized.

We appreciate the kind words about our chicken and your giving us first crack at your musical.

Best regards.

Cordially,

John Cox
Vice President -- Public Affairs

Laugh Track
Here you can listen to New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin discuss humor with New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff and New Yorker humorist/artist Bruce McCall.

Dogging the Wag 2: Trials of a Laffmeister
The following is culled from an article in the September 12, 2003, issue of Entertainment Weekly:

"The last 10 years have been like a Bataan Death March that ended at a Dairy Queen," notes [Conan] O'Brien. "Long, arduous, difficult -- but ultimately happy and refreshing."

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"The perfect world would be where The Conan O'Brien Show would be on, and you'd be reading my short story somewhere and wearing my designer jeans," O'Brien told The Harvard Crimson upon graduating in 1985.

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He [O'Brien] applied to write for Late Night with David Letterman in 1987 -- but was rejected.

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Robert Smigel [Conan's first head writer]: We were getting bad reviews fairly quickly, but at the same time I was getting congratulatory phone calls from people in comedy. George Meyer, legendary Simpsons writer [and former writer for Late Night with David Letterman], calls and he's like, "Amazing. You guys figured out how to replace Letterman. It's completely original and funny." And at the same time we're hearing "This is a disaster."

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O'Brien: People can say Wow, you suck at sports, or your hair is weird, but if someone says you're not funny, that's the thing that would hurt me the most. For a year there, it looked like I could become famous as one of the most unfunny people ever, and that was the nightmare. I was in a sinking car that was going to the bottom of the ocean and I was getting out of that car. I was not going to become famous for being unfunny. I'll cudgel America into accepting me.

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[In April 1995, Conan hosted the White House Correspondents' Dinner.]

O'Brien: It's a tough, tough room and I just started killing. Clinton was pounding the table and his face was red and he was crying. The next day I felt like I had taken a backpack off. [Studio] 6A seemed smaller and more manageable.

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Last year, O'Brien signed another lucrative deal, earning him an estimated $8 million a year. But his contract expires in December of 2005, raising the question, Will he be ready to replace Letterman or Leno one day in the 11:30 slot?

O'Brien: People think you've got to move earlier and earlier to 11:30. But my theory is, like Batman, I want to move deeper and deeper into the night. Carson Daly will be confused because I will pass him going the other way. I'll get his 1:30 show and then I'll go to 2:30 and then 3:30 and by the time I'm a very old man, I'll have a mildly popular morning show in Miami. Andy and I will be just sitting there on stools with pink coffee mugs that say "Mornin' with Conan and Andy" and we'll have a houseboat that we both live on and we'll solve crimes on the side. Yeah, it's going to be good.

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Here is The Onion A.V. Club's May 2001 interview with Conan.

An excerpt:

Conan: I think people came around to our sense of humor, but initially, I don't think all the criticism was wrong. Maybe in the severity, but I wasn't nearly as good a TV performer as I am now. I got a lot better, and I learned how to just be myself and do all that, whatever, muttering, and those asides, and make those observations. I learned how to just do that and be the way I am with my friends in a very unnatural situation. I think that's the part of doing these shows that no one understands. The trick to them is not to become a funny guy. You have to just be that from the beginning. The trick of these shows is figuring out how to be the person you always were in an unnatural situation, with five cameras staring at you, and with an audience sitting there, and lights, and celebrities you've never met coming out.

How to Answer a Question
The following is an excerpt from an essay in the fiftieth-anniversary issue of The Paris Review (in stores now!) in which Cynthia Ozick reflects on the interview she did with the magazine years ago.

Long ago, in college, I came upon a paperback of Susan K. Langer's Philosophy in a New Key. It opened, I recall, with a discussion of the meaning of a question. A question, Langer maintained, is that which portends its own answer. If I ask you something about money, money will turn up in your answer. If I ask you something about religion, religion will turn up in your answer. The premise of any inquiry induces, and subsumes, its like.

Now this may not seem terribly esoteric, and surely Langer went on to resolve it in the complexity of her thesis -- but then, at seventeen, I found it dazzling. There was a lesson in it. It has taken me decades to learn it. The lesson is that one must not be submissive to every question, or one will be taken far, far from the measure of one's own defining imperative. And the root of submissiveness is politeness. The truth is that I no longer wish to be polite -- a truth I have come to belatedly -- and if asked certain questions today, I would not be so accommodating: there is always a lie in accommodation.

Tate Gallery
Three poems from James Tate's latest collection, Memoir of the Hawk: Poems:

Memoir of the Hawk

I was sitting on a bench in the park when
I saw this large hawk circling overhead. I had
my eyes on it when it suddenly swooped down and
picked up this little baby right out of its
carriage and flew away with it. My heart almost
stopped beating. I ran over to the mother, who
was eyeing a dress in a window. "Ma'am," I
stuttered, "that bird just stole your baby...."
She looked into the carriage and then up at the
sky. "Oh, I know that bird. She's a good bird.
She just took my baby to play with her babies
for a while. She'll bring him back in a short
time. My baby loves her babies. But thanks for
telling me. By the way, what do you think of
this dress? Is it right for me?" I thought of
her baby sailing through the sky in the claws
of that bird. "Well," I said, "I think the
mignonette green captures the amplitude of your
inner aviary." "What are you, some kind of loose
nutcase? Get out of here before I call the
police," she said.

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Endless Time

The donkey stood alone in the paddock
swishing its tale to rid itself of flies.
It was a hot day, but billowing white clouds
occasionally blocked out the sun's rays.
The donkey shook its head and wiggled its
ears, blinked its eyes and now and then
kicked its legs. At night, when no one is
around, it leaps over the barns and turns
somersaults in the air. It is a way of
relieving tension, the donkey's mother
explains to the farmer's wife.

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Just to Feel Human

A single apple grew on our tree, which
was some kind of miracle because it was a
pear tree. We walked around it scratching
our heads. "You want to eat it?" I asked
my wife. "I'd die first," she replied. We
went back into the house. I stood by the
kitchen window and stared at it. I thought
of Adam and Eve, but I didn't believe in Adam
and Eve. My wife said, "If you don't stop
staring at that stupid apple I'm going to go
out there and eat it." "So go," I said, "but
take your clothes off first, go naked." She
looked at me as if I were insane, and then
she started to undress, and so did I.

Killing You Softly
Funny new McSweeney's list: "Popular Pickup Lines Used by Serial Killers" by Wendy Molyneux

Here are some pickup lines you may have missed.

Stand and Deliver
This week's "Shouts and Murmurs" piece -- "I Killed Them in New Haven" by Simpsons writer Larry Doyle -- is hilarious.

In 1997, Doyle did a Slate diary.

Some excerpts:

Just before Christmas, Becky got an exciting new job in public relations; then about 5 p.m. on Jan. 2, the night before her first day, my agent called to ask if perhaps I wanted to move 3,000 or so miles to write for The Simpsons. My wife gave notice on her second day of work. A week later we were in Los Angeles finding me a temporary apartment. Four days later we discovered we had somehow bought a supercute house in the Hollywood Hills.

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"Honey," my wife said this morning, looking around the apartment I have been living in for two months without her. "I think I'm going to get a maid in here."

"Why?" I asked, drawing it out, apparently to noncomical effect.

"Because I want to show her how a properly cleaned apartment looks. Maybe I'll even bring in two. Start a school."

My wife is real funny.

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At lunch, we talked about our weekends. One writer had just gotten back from a vacation in Paris, where he confirmed that the restaurants did indeed have snooty waiters, and Amsterdam, where he reported that the brothels now have Disneyland-style animatronic prostitutes who provide price-list information at the push of the button. "For 50 guilders," the robo-harlot recited, "I will give you the hand-job of your life." This prompted another writer to recount that he had gone to Hermosa Beach on Sunday, where he had had the doughnut of his life. Somehow, we got onto the subject of starting a chicken farm, then the doughnut gourmand announced that he had started investing in a new biotechnology stock after getting a tip from an endocrinologist. This segued into discussion of an article in the current Scientific American, and subsequently Deadly Feasts, Richard Rhodes' new book about the spread of spongiform encephalopathies.

Then we went back to writing The Simpsons.

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I told the guys at work I bought a house today.

"Congratulations," one of them said. "You're fired."

Every day at The Simpsons is one laugh after another.

========

People keep asking me what it's like to write for The Simpsons. I don't really know. Mostly so far I've watched other people write for The Simpsons. But I've learned this much:

• No joke is so funny that it can't be thrown out.


• It can always be funnier.

The way the process works, basically, is that you sit in a chair all day saying funny things. And if you have nothing funny to say, which for me is most of the time, you just sit around.

I thought I knew some funny people. I've worked at the National Lampoon, Spy, and Beavis and Butt-Head; I know New Yorker writers, Letterman writers, and at some point or another have been cornered by every one of Manhattan's young wags. But I've never been in a room with this many funny people (I am not stupid enough to try to provide an example here).

Back in New York, I was the sourpuss, the guy who never cracked a smile, never laughed at anything. Now I laugh all day long. I've never had so much fun.

It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

Jurassifacts
On the Jurassic Park III website (I was looking at the Flash version), the movie makers come clean about how they played fast and loose with the facts. Velociraptor, such a scary fella in the movies, was, in fact, only two feet tall. Also, it probably had feathers.

An excerpt from the Velociraptor entry:

One of the most fascinating fossil discoveries ever made is of a Velociraptor locked in mortal combat with a Protoceratops. Both creatures probably died instantly in a sandstorm and their bodies were buried with the claws of the raptor in the body of the little ceratopsian, whose mouth was firmly locked on the raptor's leg.

Spinosaurus -- the star of the third movie -- was, like T. rex, about sixteen feet tall (the movie didn't change that), but the real Spinosaurus's diet probably consisted mostly of fish.

An excerpt from the Spinosaurus entry:

Spinosaurus is somewhat of a tragic story. At one time, there was an almost complete specimen on display in a museum in Germany. However, it was completely destroyed and lost forever during the bombing of Germany in WWII.

Pteranodon, the large pterodactyl in Jurassic Park III, really was that big -- its wingspan was thirty feet. The site says, "When it spread its wings, it could reach from the front to the back of a school bus." (The little dinosaurs in the back seat couldn't get away with any monkey business when Mr. Pteranodon was driving.) It goes on to say, "Members of the pterosaur family lived through much of the Mesozoic, some with wingspans close to 50 feet." Wow. You'd need more than a mosquito net to keep those guys out of your business. Luckily, they ate mostly fish. (Not lucky for the fish, though, of course.)

Here's something that has nothing to do with dinosaurs, but does involve old bones -- and a chariot. (Via Mike Gerber.)

White History

E.B. White -- perhaps best known for Charlotte's Web or Strunk and White's Elements of Style -- was responsible, more than any other writer, for creating the distinctive voice of The New Yorker magazine. For the most part, he did this in the magazine's "Notes and Comment" section, which he wrote, with varying regularity, for fifty years.

Here are some excerpts from his "Notes and Comment" pieces:

5/28/27 : Lindbergh

The lonely Mr. Lindbergh made the hop without a cup of coffee. This fact alone startled fifty million Americans who have never been able to get through a working day without one. Furthermore, the flyer came down in France without saying that he did it for the kiddies -- un-American and unusual. We loved him immediately.

We noted that the Spirit of St. Louis had not left the ground ten minutes before it was joined by the Spirit of Me Too. A certain oil was lubricating the engine, a certain brand of tires was the cause of the safe take-off. When the flyer landed in Paris every newspaper was "first to have a correspondent at the plane." This was a heartening manifestation of that kinship that is among man's greatest exaltations. It was beautifully and tenderly expressed by the cable Ambassador Herrick sent the boy's patient mother: "Your incomparable son has done me the honor to be my guest." We liked that; and for twenty-four hours the world seemed pretty human. At the end of that time we were made uneasy by the volume of vaudeville contracts, testimonial writing and other offers, made by the alchemists who transmute glory into gold. We settled down to the hope that the youthful hero will capitalize himself for only as much money as he reasonably needs.

12/4/48 : Television

Like radio, television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing. Already you can detect the first faint signs of this apathy. Already manufacturers are trying to anticipate it, by providing the public with combination sets that offer a triple threat: radio, record playing, and television -- all three to be turned on at once, we presume.

Television, when it gets going, will almost certainly pick up and throw into one's home scenes it didn't reckon on when it set up its camera. There have already been examples of this. In London not long ago, a television broadcaster was giving his impressions of the zoo when a big lizard bit him on the finger. The technicians in charge of the broadcast, delighted at this turn of events, kept their camera trained on the spurting blood. Thus what had begun as a man's impression of an animal ended as an animal's impression of a man, and a few drops of private blood gained general currency and became a great pool of public blood, and the world immediately contained more persons who had seen a lizard bite a man.

11/30/63 : J.F.K.

When we think of him, he is without a hat, standing in the wind and the weather. He was impatient of topcoats and hats, preferring to be exposed, and he was young enough and tough enough to confront and to enjoy the cold and the wind of these times, whether the winds of nature or the winds of political circumstance and national danger. He died of exposure, but in a way that he would have settled for -- in the line of duty, and with his friends and enemies all around, supporting him and shooting at him. It can be said of him, as of few men in a like position, that he did not fear the weather, and did not trim his sails, but instead challenged the wind itself, to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.

7/26/69 : Moon

The moon, it turns out, is a great place for men. One-sixth gravity must be a lot of fun, and when Armstrong and Aldrin went into their bouncy little dance, like two happy children, it was a moment not only of triumph but of gaiety. The moon, on the other hand, is a poor place for flags. Ours looked stiff and awkward, trying to float on the breeze that does not blow. (There must be a lesson here somewhere.) It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly. Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky. What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.

Moses Reposes



John Updike wrote the following, which was published in The New Yorker in December 1961:

Grandma Moses

The death of a very old person seems no more natural, no less an untoward incursion, than the death of a young one. Perhaps death seems natural only to Nature herself -- and even she may have some doubts. Yet we cannot think of the life, now concluded, of Anna Mary Robertson Moses without cheerfulness. To live one allotted span as a farm wife and the mother of ten children, and then, at the age of seventy-six, to begin another, as an artist, as Grandma Moses, and to extend this second life into twenty-five years of unembarrassed productiveness -- such a triumph over the normal course of things offers small cause for mourning. If we do mourn, it is for ourselves; she had become by her hundredth year one of those old people who, as old buildings civilize a city or spindly church spires bind up a landscape, make the world seem safer. Shaw and Brancusi were examples; Churchill and Schweitzer still are. They pay the world the great compliment of being reluctant to leave it, and their reluctance becomes a benediction. Little is said nowadays about the wisdom of age. Perhaps such wisdom is dreaded, for there is melancholy in it. Yet even awkward truths can be gracious and cheering in their expression. Describing her method of painting, Mrs. Moses once said, "I paint from the top down. First the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then the cattle, and then the people."

Here's a short article about Grandma Moses.

Here's information about the Grandma Moses Gallery at Bennington Museum, in Vermont.
Here you can look at small reproductions of Grandma Moses' paintings.

Pet Peeves
Here's a funny little piece by Robert Benchley, from his 1936 collection My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How They Grew:

Dog Libel

A friend of mine who calls himself a dachshund is furious over an article he has just read in a scientific paper purporting to give the essential qualities of a good dachshund. He finds himself libelled by implication.

"I think I could sue," said my friend. "This man here has said, in effect, that I am not a real dachshund."

"I wouldn't sue," I advised, cautiously. "In the first place, you would have to show that you had been damaged by the publication of the article. Your standing in this household is just the same as it was before the article was written. We won't go into just what your standing is, but it remains unchanged at any rate.

"Furthermore," I added, sagely, "the magazine, pushed to the wall, might dig up a lot of ugly stories which you might not relish having told in court. You are not immaculate, you know. Remember that Seelyham named 'Arthur.'"

"That was just wrestling in fun," my friend said. "I meant him no harm."

"Just the same," I warned, "it wouldn't look very well in the tabloids. And, anyway, the case wouldn't come up for a year or so, and even then it would drag on, with appeals and reappeals, until you were flat broke. I couldn't do very much to help you out with the costs, you know."

This rather sobered him up, I thought. He had evidently been more or less counting on me to back him in this crack-brained suit of his.

"Listen to this!" he said, trying to swing me into his own irrational state of mind. He spread the paper out on the floor with his paw and adjusted his spectacles. (He wears them only for very fine print.)

I am afraid that this account is getting to sound just a mite whimsical, what with dogs wearing spectacles and talking like people. My only excuse is that it is an actual stenographic account of a conversation and is designed only to show the futility of libel suits.

"Listen to this," he said (we will leave out the spectacles this time): "'The special work of a dachshund is to enter a badger hole and hold the attention of the animal until it can be dug out.'

"I never saw a badger," he said, without looking up from the paper, "much less try to hold its attention. How do you hold a badger's attention, anyway?"

"I shouldn't think that it would be very hard," I said. "You could make faces, or just say 'Look, badger!' I don't imagine that a badger's mind wanders easily, once the badger has caught sight of something."

"That is beside the point, anyway," he said, crossly. "The point is that I do not go into badger-holes myself. Does that, or does it not, imply that I am not a real dachshund?"

"You are too touchy," I said. "There must be plenty of real dachshunds in this country who don't go near a badger-hole from one year's end to the other. No jury in the world would count that as a personal slur on you."

"Very well, then -- here is another crack: 'The hind legs should be strong and capable, and viewed from behind must go down straight and by no means show the turning in at the heel known as cow-hocks. This is very common and very bad.' Why doesn't he mention my name and be done with it? Why doesn't he come right out and say Friedel Immerman is not a genuine dachshund?"

"Could you prove in a court of law that you are a genuine dachshund?" I asked, trying not to be brutal about it.

He turned in disgust and walked away without deigning a reply. As he disappeared through the door I distinctly saw the "turning in at the heel known as cow-hocks. Very common and very bad."

It probably is just as well that he dropped the suit.

Dogging the Wag
Here's an archive of articles about Conan O'Brien. It includes the following article, by Conan himself, which was published in the New York Times on September 13, 1993, the day his show debuted:

O'Brien Flops!
By Conan O'Brien

There has been much speculation about the new 'Late Night with Conan O'Brien.' Little is known about the host, and even less about the show's format. Last week, this writer had the opportunity to watch a test show in Rockefeller Center's legendary studio 6-A. Frankly, I was not impressed.

The crowd was visibly eager to like the young newcomer, but some seemed puzzled by the radical new set. The backdrop, consisting of 15-foot representations of Mr. O'Brien's laughing head, loomed over his desk and chair, both carved from illegally imported African ivory. While this was somewhat unsettling, an aura of eager anticipation still hung in the air.

Until, that is, the new Late Night band began to play. Composed of musicians cut by the Boston Pops, the band lurched into an interminable version of 'Waltzing Matilda,' apparently the show's theme song. The bandleader, a surly cellist, refused to make eye contact with anyone and hissed at a young girl who tried to clap along. As the music sputtered to a flaccid conclusion, thick jets of foam were dumped on the audience from hidden ceiling ducts. As people wiped the stinging lather from their eyes, Mr. O'Brien jumped out from behind a curtain and cheerfully quipped, 'Ha, ha, you're all foamy!' Unfazed by the lukewarm reaction to this ill-conceived prank, Mr. O'Brien launched into his monologue. Whipping out a large book, he read a string of childish 'knock-knock' jokes. While the material was fair, Mr. O'Brien's delivery was halting, and he paused several times to adjust his reading glasses.

The worse was yet to come. Strutting arrogantly to his desk, Mr. O'Brien tried to converse briefly with his sidekick, an elderly Irish priest. But the old man seemed confused, and despite constant goading from Mr. O'Brien, sat in stony silence.

Sensing a loss of momentum, Mr. O'Brien quickly launched into a 'Top Ten' list, something he'd repeatedly told the press he would never do. The list was rife with misspellings, and three of the 10 entries read 'joke to come.' Moments later, he tried playfully flipping a pencil at a camera, but missed and stuck a woman in the eye. 'At least it wasn't me,' quipped the first guest, the former Mets outfielder Vince Coleman. O'Brien burst into laughter at this distasteful comment. 'Now we're cooking with gas,' said the cocky new voice of 'Late Night.'

Mr. O'Brien's guests that evening also included the deputy director of New York's wastewater collection bureau, the editor of the NBC inter-office newsletter and a man who could eat oranges without getting any juice on his shirt (although he failed to do so on camera). Inexplicably, all the guests were introduced at the same time. Mr. O'Brien then asked each, in turn, his favorite color. To every answer, he snorted that the chosen color was 'for girls.'

During a commercial break, several NBC executives entered the audience and asked for volunteers to hold up a gaudy 'Nobody Beats Conan' banner, but the crowd jeered bitterly and one youth kicked the sign.

The last 20 minutes of the program consisted of Mr. O'Brien performing a strange, snake-like dance in front of his desk as audience members filed out in disgust. 'You'll be back!' he shouted several times, until the entire studio was empty (except for the orange-eater and Mr. Coleman, who giggled frenetically under the closing credits).

As much as this writer would like to root for Mr. O'Brien, one can't help but have grave doubts about his prospects. Despite the considerable power of his raw sexuality and mesmerizing intellectual presence, this 'Late Night' may very well end up the late 'Late Night.' Or not, I gotta go.

When Conan was in high school, he won a national writing contest and the Boston Globe wrote this article about him.

Here's an excerpt:

O'Brien's English teacher, Christopher Reimann, says Conan's writing is very good. "Unlike most high school students, he is able to communicate what he is thinking very clearly. That can be a two-edged sword. If your thinking is confused, you have to have the ability to handle ambiguity. I criticize Conan's papers not on a high school level but on a more mature basis and he handles criticism fairly well. It is clearly important to him."

O'Brien says, "There's not that much that separates me from other students, except that I take English very seriously. If I get a mediocre mark in math, I let it slide, but not in English."

Adds Conan, "I wrote to E.B. White, one of the writers I admire most, once and asked him how he handled criticism of his writing. You put so much of yourself into it that it's hard not to take criticism personally. White wrote back that he never minded critics much except when they had their facts wrong."

"I like Hemingway, too. He has a vocabulary about as extensive as mine, but he puts it together well. And Woody Allen. He's made up a style of his own. Everytime he starts with a thoughtful sentence he slips in something totally absurd."

Asked about the name, Conan, O'Brien says it is not for mystery writer Conan Doyle, but for Gaelic priests. "Something so simple that you can't make a nickname out of it.

"College? I'll take the best one that picks me. I tell my parents that next year they'll have to ask someone else to drive the little kids around and do errands, but I'll miss it just the same. There are a lot of real characters in this family."

Of course, Conan went on to Harvard, where he double-majored in literature and American history. In 1985, he graduated magna cum laude.

In the summer after it was announced Conan would replace Letterman, there was a lot of curiosity about who the heck this Conan O'Brien fellow was, so, in the July 1993 issue of Esquire, people who knew Conan were asked to provide some illumination. Unfortunately, this article is not in the archive, but, since I own a copy of the magazine, I can provide the following excerpts:

Thomas O'Brien, Conan's father: At some point in grade school, he developed the idea that his career would be as a professional teaser. He'd go from door-to-door with his kit and his apparatus teasing small children, which he happened to be very good at. But the straight-faced premise was that somehow this would be a career, that people would pay him for this. Which is absurd -- and he was aware of that -- that he was going to rise in his profession as a door-to-door, itinerant teaser.

Ruth O'Brien, Conan's mother:That's what the kids in the family called him: Tease Man. And that's what he called himself.

Jeff Young, Conan's high school English teacher: He was in a class of mine called Art of the Essay, and one of the writers we studied was E.B. White. He became quite enamored of White's style and at the same time wondered what it was like to be a writer -- which was his career goal at that point -- and how writers managed to fend off criticism and deal with praise. I suggested to him that he write to E.B. White and ask him. Which he did. I have a pretty clear memory of him running into class that year waving this letter from E.B. White. And I remember the essence of White's advice was not to be swayed either by public adulation or by public criticism but to remain true to your own voice and ideals and just write from your heart and that all the other stuff was external. I think that made a pretty big impression on Conan.

Eric Reiff, Conan's college roommate: I think the first piece he ever wrote for the Lampoon was this thing called "Conflict: The Sitcom," which was a parody of One Day at a Time. It was published in the magazine and senior editors came up to him -- Jeff Martin, who wrote for Letterman and The Simpsons, came up -- and said, "That's really great. That's great writing." That's pretty rare. They're a pretty horrible bunch.

Jeff Martin, Lampoon alumnus and former writer for Late Night with David Letterman and The Simpsons: The stuff he wrote that I liked the best was a bunch of Abe Lincoln comics. Just Abe Lincoln in odd situations, but always being very stern and statesmanlike. He'd be in a Soap Box Derby or something and a kid would be going like, "You won, Abe!" And Lincoln would be just sternly saying, "Yes, Corky, but not the race to unite our world."

Mike Reiss, Lampoon alumnus and former executive producer, The Simpsons: What made everyone take notice of the guy was that he had been elected president of the Lampoon in his sophomore year, which just never happened. People wanted to know: Who is this guy?

Jeff Martin: In 1985 five of us went down to Florida for spring training. Conan started telling people -- generally our waiters and waitresses when we'd eat out -- that he was Harry Morgan's grandson. Harry Morgan of M*A*S*H and Dragnet fame. We tried it on about ten different people. "You know, Harry Morgan? On M*A*S*H? Colonel Potter?" And they'd say, "Yeah." And he'd go, "He's my grandfather." And the reactions would run from people delighted and wanting to know all about life on the M*A*S*H set to "Oh, yeah? Who cares?" But I think most people believed it, because why in the world would you make that up?

Mike Myers, cast member, Saturday Night Live: First time I met Conan, I had just arrived. He goes, "Hi, welcome." We chatted for a bit. Then he left a note at my desk that said, "Dear Mike, I will destroy you. I don't know how and I don't know when. But oh, yes, I will destroy you. And the beautiful thing of it is that no one will know I had anything to do with it. Signed, Conan." This was my first day. So I kept that letter. It's up on my corkboard at work.

Lorne Michaels, executive producer, Saturday Night Live: We never really considered him as a sketch player because the way in which he is funny is at being himself. In the early days of the show, Chevy, who was a writer before we went on the air, was also somebody who was really funny in the office and funny being Chevy. And not to diminish Chevy's ability as a sketch player, but he wasn't the same kind of sketch player that Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi and Bill Murray were. Chevy was funny being Chevy, and I think Conan's funny being Conan.

Josh Weinstein, co-producer, The Simpsons: We were going to record an episode. We all sat down at the table. And then right before we got started, he got a call and left and then he never came back to the room. And then he came in later in the afternoon and said, "Well, I got the 12:30." He seemed sort of stunned. It was obviously the hugest thing that had ever happened to him.

Conan O'Brien: I got a telephone call from my agent in the morning and that day it just took off immediately. There wasn't time to just celebrate. I did not get a chance to say, "Wow, this is terrific." I just had to go immediately. They ran me over to the Leno show at the last minute. I just ran out there and said, "Hi, America -- I'll see you later." It's just crazy. The next morning I'm walking through Westwood and my picture's in USA Today. It's the worst picture of me ever taken. It looked like a satellite photo.... I've always fantasized about being famous. I've always fantasized about being a performer, having people recognize me. But that's a fantasy for a lot of people. When it really starts to happen, there is something creepy about it.

You're Only Dead Once
Next year is the centennial of Dr. Seuss's birth. This beautifully designed website is full of information about Seuss, his work, and events planned to celebrate his one hundredth birthday. The site's biography of Seuss is quite well done.

Voice Squad
You'll find some interesting audio recordings here, including:

Ernest Hemingway's Nobel Prize acceptance speech

William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech

T.S. Eliot reading The Waste Land

J.R.R. Tolkien reading excerpts from The Lord of the Rings

Peter Ustinov reading James Thurber's fables

Little Shop of Horrors
In the May 1958 issue of Esquire, Dorothy Parker wrote the following:

The late Robert Benchley, rest his soul, could scarcely bear to go into a bookshop. His was not a case of so widely shared an affliction as claustrophobia; his trouble came from a great and grueling compassion. It was no joy to him to see the lines and tiers of shining volumes, for as he looked there would crash over him, like a mighty wave, a vision of every one of the authors of every one of those books saying to himself as he finished his opus, "There -- I've done it! I have written the book. Now it and I are famous forever." Long after Mr. Benchley had rushed out of the shop, he would be racked with pity for poor human dreams. Eventually, he never went anywhere near a bookshop. If he wanted something to read, he either borrowed it or sent for it by mail.

Constant Reader
Here you can listen to Dorothy Parker read her poems. Click here for a sample: Parker reading her most famous poem, "Résumé."

The New York Harold
This interview with Thomas Kunkel about the founding editor of The New Yorker, Harold Ross, features recordings of Ross's voice.

Two Wrights Don't Make a Wrong
This Weekend Edition piece about the Wright brothers is amazing. It includes audio recordings of family and friends of the brothers.

Old School
Go here to watch a video of Will Ferrell's 2003 Harvard Commencement Address. It's hilarious.

Allentown
Today is Woody Allen's birthday. He's 112. Let's celebrate by reading the only piece of his I could find online: Death Knocks.

Dawson's Creep
I greatly enjoyed this open letter to a Family Feud loser. It was written by Mollie Wilson, who last year became the first female editor-in-chief in the 130-year history of The Yale Record, America's oldest college humor magazine.

Here are some other things Mollie has written:

The Big Jewel:

Super-Condensed Classics

Duck, Duck, Greatness

Kevin K.'s Halloween Story: A Literary Analysis of a Found Document

McSweeney's:

Jim Croce's List of Things It Would Be Imprudent to Do

Rejected Titles for Hymns

The Village Voice:

Mama Don't Preach