and now the contents of the envelope
Wednesday 3 March 2004 | I like a cookie
1. Mandarin sent me pale luminous wavery skycolored mirrored hearts! She hearts me!
2. She sent me a hilarious cartoon about the vodka cooler (could she possibly swing a placement in that office setting?).
3. She sent me two PC Vey book cartoons—I may copy these for M.’s book clerkly amusement.
4. She sent me a Roz Chast cartoon of introvert sitcoms—like the CD my friend Amelia and I found in the SJC weight room: “Workout Music for Sad People.” (It was mostly Moby…mostly.) (Which, the Film Critic informs me, is actually from Alien, and not the invention of Eric Cartman.) And I specially like the last panel of the guy screening his calls, because that’s all I ever do, and cos it makes me feel better to think that Roz herself probably lives like this, eating cereal from the box and reading Jane Eyre and avoiding others.
5. “Mr. Bernstein is survived by his wife, Selma, who died in a skiing accident in 1974.”
6. Tarzan of the Canapés! Cf. Warren Beatty in Bulworth: “Excuse me, miss—yes, you. Now, tell me the truth and don’t spare my feelings: Do you have any more of those little crispy crab cakes?”
7. “Dusk approached, and as it grew colder it occurred to us that we could possibly die. It happened, surely. Selfish mothers wanted the house to themselves and their children were discovered years later, frozen like mastodons in blocks of ice.” Have you read Me Talk Pretty One Day?
8. The mating season of hikers and bikers. Possibly the best thing in the entire issue which encased it, a tiny Dickinsonian gem.
9. Okay, I just have to say something here about Nancy Franklin, the NYer TV reviewer: I HATE HER. I think she is awful. She writes like she’s about seventy-three and dressed like Helen Gurley-Brown in a wide-brimmed hat with a veil, smoking a cheroot in a long holder, and nursing a martini, extra olives. She writes, in fact, a lot like Edith Kurzweil. I imagine her hunched over the typewriter, pecking out a letter at a time, congratulating herself on sentences which she thinks are particularly astute or witty. I’ve loathed her work for years now and don’t understand why they show no sign of replacing her?! Possibly she really is seventy-nine, and related to Wallace Shawn, and they can’t just ditch her this late in the game? I don’t know, I don’t care—I just wish they’d let me or the Film Critic have a go. I can watch hours of cable and say witty things about it, I know I can!
9b. The Attila of the unions!
10. It’s not Doan Eye for the Tangaryo Guy, but hey, Queer Eye for the Dead Guy isn’t bad (”Love the satin. Keep the satin.”). On the back of which Anthony Lane once again proves his literary worthiness by deftly inserting an arcane reference to Queneau—Queneau!—and ending his review: “One has to be impressed by any body of work that runs for more than three hundred and forty minutes yet, despite being set in France, features no sex whatsoever. I thought it was required by law.”
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