Word: yorkerism
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...Nabokov wrote about the appalling manners of the bourgeoise--as if from a great height, but always with a folksy, familiar smile. In a way it's a style that accentuates the very elegance it is perhaps trying to diffuse; a style all the more fitting to The New Yorker, that dual bastion and mausoleum of literacy, where Arlen's "The Air" column regularly appears. The New Yorker's literacy is a curious one, of course, harking back to the most Anglophilic time in our history. It is a magazine to be read in a mock-British accent...
...Camera Age, Arlen's latest collection, is also full of meticulously well-crafted writing. Thirty pieces, all written in the last five years for the pages of the New Yorker, are here. There are essays on "Dallas," on Olympic coverage, on the most ridiculous of game shows. Arlen has extraordinary control, often just quoting dialogue verbatim; it seems all the more ridiculous in print. (A game show question asks "Which part of the contestants anatomy droops?" The husband answers "chest." His secretary answers "boobs." When the wife matches them for the grand prize, the three of them go into happy...
...course, there's something strange about reading literary television criticism at all. Somehow form and function seem skewed. When you read it in the pages of the New Yorker (which for years ran a racing column that inexplicably described the decaying Aqueduct as if it were Epsom Downs), the feeling starts hitting you even harder. One wonders--why is it there? Clearly people do not watch "Dallas" to muse over the fact our interrelationships are destabilized and smooth. On the other hand, it seems a strange intellectual game--a furious overcompensation--for one to watch a soap opera and then...
...turn, gives them not only jazz that sells records-a rare enough commodity-but jazz to boast about, jazz that sets a style and a standard. A young jazz musician would want an ECM label the way a short-story writer would want to be published in The New Yorker...
Leon's vision was of a broader market for the Bean line: His grandfather focused almost totally on hunting, fishing and camping; Leon added a fourth category--attending social functions. L. L. had advertised in Field & Stream; his grandson began buying space in the New Yorker, Smithsonian, and a host of other publications. Gun-toting hunters had beat a path to L. L.'s door in his lifetime; they have been joined in years since by racquet-toting preppies...