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Showing posts with label The New Yorker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The New Yorker. Show all posts

Friday, April 10, 2015

All hail the Comma Queen!

When a copy editor of the Salon e-zine chats up the copy editor of New Yorker magazine who also happens to have published a book about her profession, what results is an interview that puts the spotlight on a vital job: editing.

Here is a sample Q&A: 

Q: Schools are teaching grammar a lot less and relying on technology and word processing programmes to “teach” it by default, pointing out grammar mistakes. Do you think this, not to mention texting and tweeting, will have a significant effect on the grammar and spelling of future adults? 

A: That’s not a very nice way to learn, just by having your mistakes pointed out. But there are fun ways to do it: “Schoolhouse Rock,” for instance, and pop music. Lately, Weird Al Yankovic has been singing about grammar and usage. Texting and tweeting shouldn’t really affect grammar, though spell-check programmes and autocorrect will have an effect on spelling. I believe that the only way to learn English grammar is to study a foreign language.


MARY NORRIS: COPY THAT!

Q: Your profanity chapter is full of hilarious examples of language writers are competing to get into the magazine. One piece by Ben McGrath debuted “bros before hos” in the New Yorker, creating a spelling dilemma with “hos”—hmm, I see that Webster’s gives the plural of “ho” as either “hos” or “hoes.” Where do you turn if it’s not in the dictionaries of record? 

A: When a word is not in Webster’s or Random House, I will look online. There are many dictionaries of slang, but you have to choose your source carefully. One of our sources is the New York Times, but of course it’s no good for profanity! One feels so silly looking up “jism,” say (though there are variant spellings), and even sillier querying it. You try to find a respectable source for the profanity, and it is a bit of a challenge. Rap lyrics, especially.

Read this fascinating feature in its entirety here: New Yorker copyeditor dishes on the wacky side of her (quite dignified) job: “One feels so silly looking up [profanity]” 

Saturday, June 14, 2014

How does a great photographer prepare to shoot a portrait of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip?

What a wonderfully instructive experience this is!

Here, in a passage from a masterly essay by my new favourite author, Janet Malcolm, is the famed German photographer Thomas Struth, describing his preparations to make a portrait of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh:

He studied old photographs and found most of them wanting. He saw the technical mistakes, “what should not happen” — notably their distracting backgrounds. He visited Buckingham Palace and decided it was too cluttered. When the gilded green, red, and white drawing rooms at Windsor Castle were offered, he selected the green room (the white room was “too tired” and the red room “too much”) and spent a day there making test shots.

“While I was there, I said, ‘I want to see the dresser’ — the woman who is in charge of the Queen’s wardrobe. Because the second thing I noticed when I looked at the past photographs of the Queen was that many of the dresses she wears are very unfortunate. She has quite big boobs and she often wears something that goes up to the neck and then there is this stretch of fabric under the face that makes it look small.” (I smiled to myself at Struth’s coarse reference to the royal bosom — a rare lapse in his excellent English.)

The day before the sitting, Struth continued, “the dresser came in with twenty dresses. She was a very nice woman, and we had an immediate chemistry. I felt that she saw me. Later, she told the Queen that I was O.K. — that I was a nice guy. I selected the dress, a pale-blue brocade with garlands, a bit shiny, and it matched nicely against the dark green.”

I asked if the Queen accepted his choice and he said yes. He did not choose the Duke’s costume, except to ask for a white shirt. At the sitting, the Duke wore a dark suit and a blue tie. “He was perfect,” Struth said.

In further preparation, Struth read a biography of Elizabeth, and “I felt sympathy. They were my parents’ generation. She was exactly my mother’s age and Philip was born in 1921, two years after my father was born.”

Thomas Struth’s large-scale portrait of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, taken at Windsor Castle, was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London, for an exhibition of paintings and photographs of the Queen commemorating her Diamond Jubilee in 2012. When Struth was approached, he wondered, “Would I be able to say something new about people like this?”

Later in the essay, Malcolm writes about going along with Struth to visit the printing lab to inspect the portrait:

Struth ... said that the picture was too yellow, and for the next half hour colour adjustments were made on test strips, until he was satisfied that the print had reached the degree of coolness he wanted.

THOMAS STRUTH
Then the issue of size arose. The print we were looking at was big, around sixty-three by seventy-nine inches, and he asked that a larger print be made. When this was produced, he regarded the two prints side by side for a long while.

It seemed to me that the smaller print was more flattering to the Queen — the larger print made her look larger, almost gross.

Struth finally asked that the smaller print be taken away so that he could study the larger print without distraction, and he finally decided on it.

Further colour adjustments were made on the big print — the Queen’s hands were made less red, the background was darkened, to noticeably good effect — and Struth was satisfied.

The essay contains more details: Struth's experiences during the sitting (he was nervous, he says), Malcolm's analysis of the royal portrait ("a composition of satisfying serenity and readability"), and her take on the art of photography itself ("The camera doesn't know how to lie. The most mindless snapshot tells the truth of what the camera's eye saw at the moment the shutter clicked.").


I read the essay in a collection of Malcolm's finest writings, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (author and book cover pictured above). But the essay is also available on the website of The New Yorker, where it was first published. You can read it here: "Depth of Field".

By the way, Janet Malcolm was in her mid-70s, in 2011, when she flew over to Germany from the U.S. to interview Thomas Struth. Just sayin'.
  • From reading an interview with Thomas Struth on the Leica Camera Blog, I learned that a picture of his a self-portrait in front of Albrecht Dürer’s famous self-portrait (see below) — was sold at Sotheby’s in an auction in February 2011 for 502,000 euros (Rs.4 cr approximately at today's exchange rates).

ALSO READ: A profile of Janet Malcolm, who has been writing for The New Yorker since 1963. And "When you have two hours to shoot ace director James Cameron for a National Geographic magazine cover, how do you do it?"

ADDITIONAL READING: "Meet the 93-year-old journalist who still goes to work almost every day".

Monday, June 9, 2014

Meet the 93-year-old journalist who still goes to work almost every day

For more than five decades now, Roger Angell has worked at the hallowed New Yorker magazine.

And during that time, as Sridhar Pappu points out in an elegantly written profile for Women's Wear Daily (also known as the bible of fashion), Angell has edited fiction and non-fiction while also publishing his own light-verse poems, short stories, profiles, and other features in the New Yorker's pages.

ROGER ANGELL WITH HIS FOX TERRIER, ANDY.

A few months ago, Angell made news on his own when he wrote a piece for the New Yorker that, as Pappu says in the profile, "managed to cut through the noise, becoming a subject of conversation at Manhattan cocktail parties and in Brooklyn bars while also generating thousands of tweets and more than 40,000 Facebook shares".

No wonder it created such a buzz. Look at that zinger of an opener:
Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the K.G.B. No, it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the curveball, who retired from the game in 1877. To put this another way, if I pointed that hand at you like a pistol and fired at your nose, the bullet would nail you in the left knee. Arthritis.

And here's another passage that speaks volumes for Angell's sense of humour:
Decline and disaster impend, but my thoughts don’t linger there. It shouldn’t surprise me if at this time next week I’m surrounded by family, gathered on short notice—they’re sad and shocked but also a little pissed off to be here—to help decide, after what’s happened, what’s to be done with me now. It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed rope just over my head, that makes everyone so glad to see me again. “How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!” they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads, “Holy shit—he’s still vertical!”

Read Angell's marvellous essay in its entirety here: "This Old Man".

And check out the profile written by Sridhar Pappu here: "Roger Angell: A Hall-of-Famer at 93".
  • Two delectable nuggets from the profile:
*The writers Angell has edited include Woody Allen and John Updike.

*In 1956, [the editor of the New Yorker] gave Angell a staff position, only to ask him to take an editing test at the last minute. “I said, ‘No, I’m not going to take a test,’ ” Angell recalls. “I said, ‘I’ll start, and if it doesn’t work out, you can fire me.’ And it worked out.”
  • Photograph courtesy: The New Yorker
  • Back in June 2000, Sridhar Pappu had written an essay for Salon about his "experience with the new world of high-stakes Indian American dating". Read it here: "Deranged marriage".
ALSO READ: In the New Yorker — "Citizens Jain: Why India's newspaper industry is thriving"

  • Patrick Michael, editor of the Dubai-based Khaleej Times, commented via Google+
What a zinger of an opening line! Reminds you of Charles Dickens (classics) and Raymond Chandler (non-fiction).

What is it about words that can stop you in your tracks no matter what you are doing? Opening lines was actually a topic for debate at the recent Emirates Literature Festival in Dubai and almost all the authors agreed that an opening lines makes all the difference between picking up or dropping a book. Perhaps you should invite your students to offer the best opening lines they have read... and the worst.

Here's mine:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
.
Beat that.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

If you think some things are indescribable...

...Harold Ross, the legendary founder-editor of The New Yorker, would have told you that you've got another think coming. Read this passage from an absolutely brilliant, and brilliantly funny, book by Brendan Gill, who worked with the iconic magazine for 60 years:

I recall on one occasion writing a "Talk" piece [for the magazine's "Talk of the Town" section] about a man who had invented a toy that became, as toys will, a seven days' wonder; it was called a Zoomerang and it sprang into existence as a result of its inventor's having noticed that a certain kind of laminated paper used in adding machines and the like had a tendency, when stretched out and then released, to curl back tightly upon itself. Well! The toy itself was so unimportant and at the same time so difficult to give an accurate account of in words that for what must have been the first time in my career, and was certainly the last, I fell back upon applying to it that lamest of adjectives, "indescribable".


Ross was on the phone the moment he got my copy.

"Nothing is indescribable, Gill," he barked. (Ross had no difficulty turning "Gill" into a bark; moreover, he gave it the same ring of contempt that he gave the "god" in "goddamn".) "Send that damn toy down to me. I'll show you."

And so there appeared in the magazine a "Talk" piece in which Ross demonstrated to his satisfaction the triumph of the prose of reason, however lumpy, over the prose of intuition, however graceful.

The piece began: "The hottest novelty in the toy line this season is an article called the Zoomerang, which consists of a two-and-a-half-inch-wide strip of tough, resilient red, white, and blue paper attached to and wound around one end of a stick somewhat smaller than a pencil. Using the other end of the stick as a handle, you flick the wrist or flail the arm and whip the coil outward in an elongated spiral for a distance of up to eight feet. The paper then springs back into place (if all goes well and it doesn't get tangled up)."

The anticlimactic parenthesis is characteristic of Ross. It effectively drains much of the looked-for playfulness out of the piece by its earnest truth-telling. What had happened was that Ross, by then a grumpy man in his late fifties and one not regularly given to playing with toys, had felt obliged to experiment with the Zoomerang and had found that it didn't always work properly.

Who cared?

Why, Ross cared, of course. He would no sooner have withheld from the readers of The New Yorker the fact that the Zoomerang occasionally failed to recoil than he would have given them an inaccurate measurement of the height of the Washington Monument.

Ross clung to facts as a shipwrecked man clings to a spar.

And there you have it: Nothing is indescribable, not even the endeavours of a magazine editor who is attempting to show the ropes to an underling, as proved by that masterly passage by Brendan Gill (what an eloquent phrase Gill has given us: "the triumph of the prose of reason, however lumpy, over the prose of intuition, however graceful"). It is no wonder, then, that Here at The New Yorker is one of my prized possessions.
  • Many books have been written about Harold Ross. Here's a review of one of the best: "Genius in Disguise".
ALSO READ: In the New Yorker — "Citizens Jain: Why India's newspaper industry is thriving" and "The amazing books that made me fall in love with journalism all over again-1"

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

In the New Yorker — "Citizens Jain: Why India's newspaper industry is thriving"


Call it coincidence. Call it irony. Just a day after I published a post about the late Arthur Ochs Sulzberger of The New York Times ("A newspaper publisher like no other"), I learn from Outlook editor Krishna Prasad's blog that another venerable American publication, The New Yorker, has devoted a nine-page article to The Times of India and its owners, Samir and Vineet Jain.

Read Krishna Prasad's post here: "Samir Jain, Vineet Jain and TOI in The New Yorker".

And you can read the New Yorker article here: "Citizens Jain".
  • EXTERNAL READING: On April 27, 2013, Mint, too, provided evidence of the appeal newspapers have for Indians:

 Take a look at Mint's photo essay here: "Newspaper Nation".
  • UPDATE (May 7, 2013): The New Yorker has just published a letter by the executive editor of The Times of India regarding the "Citizens Jain" article. Read the letter here.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

How a great cartoonist does what he does

Did you know each cartoonist who freelances with The New Yorker, that storied magazine founded by Harold Ross in 1925, is required to submit 10 panels a week for consideration (nine of which typically get rejected)?

How do they do it? How do they come up with so many original jokes?

Well, thanks to Jeff Bercovici of Forbes, we know how one great cartoonist does it. In an interview with Matthew Diffee, who draws cartoons for The New Yorker and other media organisations, Bercovici draws out the essence of a cartoonist's light-bulb moment. We learn that Diffee parks himself at a table for the first hour or two of each day — however long it takes him to drink an entire pot of coffee — and forces himself to free-associate on a blank sheet of paper. That means writing, not drawing:

Diffee says his cartoons always start with words, not images. Typically, he’ll take a phrase that’s lodged in his mind and tweak it this way and that until he comes up with something funny or hits a mental dead end. By the time he fills up the paper, he usually has at least a couple workable ideas.

Here is a Diffee cartoon from a recent issue of The New Yorker:

“I’m sorry, Paige, but grades are based on the quality of the writing, not on your Klout score.”

Diffee also demonstrates how he does what he does in a brief (less than five minutes) video interview with Bercovici:


You can read the Forbes interview here: "New Yorker Cartoonist Matthew Diffee Shows How To Be Creative".

And take a look at a collection of New Yorker cartoons here.
  • Plus, meet the R.K. Laxman of England, Matt of The Daily Telegraph: "There’s no cartoonist like Matt. With his sharp humour and kind touch, he expertly captures the absurdities of everyday life. No wonder our readers start the day with a smile" — A tribute by Mick Brown.