New do for summer

Is that hairline getting a little high on the sides? No—can't be.

That's me with Aeisha, my Iraqi barberess. Her shop on 4th Ave. (not a salon, as you can see by the Barbasol receptacle at bottom right) is one of the few places in Vancouver where you can still get the hot-shaving-cream-and-straight-razor treatment, although, to be honest, you can do better in five minutes with your Sensor and some intention. She says some guys make jokes about Iraq while she's scraping their throats with the razor. Reckless, say I.

The reason for the grooming is my temporary leap up the blogging food chain. Today I—drum roll set off in em dashes, please—started a summer internship at Emdashes, which is, as I explained to my family, the Internet's première site about The New Yorker. In no time, I'm sure, Mom will be telling everyone at work that I got a job at the magazine, an elision we should discourage.

I'm working from Vancouver, so the haircut isn't strictly necessary—Emdashes is based in NYC—but with a Kerouackian huzzah and a fit of '20s optimism I decided to make an offering of sideburns to the writing gods. You'll be the first to know how it goes. God, 'Kerouackian' has got to be my favorite name-based adjective.

I spent way too long labouring over my introduction, which, it's not hard to see, comes over as a weak slider for a ball. Give me time, though; it's a comfort zone thing.

Extra listening
Now that we're on the subject, Jack Kerouac reading from "On the Road," in a way both cool and strangely not—your call.

Harry Crosby reading John Updike's "On the Sidewalk," a spot-on Kerouac spoof first published, I believe, in The New Yorker. (I've got it in "Fierce Pajamas" a humor anthology edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder.)

Originally published on May 10, 2007

Dept. of What's She Reading

The pixellation doesn't do this fine Adrian Tomine cover (June 11 & 18) any justice, but I knew immediately—didn't you?—what this tourist-bus cutie was reading.

What is it?

(Is it me, or do Tomine's lines have an Asian look?)

Dept. of Cloppier Times

In a Talk of the Town piece, you don't see the writer's name until the end, set discreetly behind an em dash. When an author's reputation succeeds him in this way, you can work up all sorts of funny feelings before you figure out who he is.

"Horsepresence took another hit last month, when the ancient Claremont Riding Academy, on West Eighty-ninth Street, closed its doors, reducing our equines to that redolent line of tourist-pullers on Central Park South. A few older city types (this writer among them) can remember cloppier times."

Horsepresence? Tourist-pullers? Cloppier times? Who the hell is this huckst—oh, Roger Angell. I guess that's okay.


Angell, who would be the weirdest and most affected 45-year-old in New York, turns 87 this year, as it turns out. That forgives him some anachronistic phrasings.

Plus, he's the stepson of a great writer. Until I read his intro to the new edition of the semi-sacred "Elements of Style" (and again thought, Who the hell?) I didn't realize that his mom, a New Yorker editor named Katherine Angell, married the "renowned essayist" E. B. White. And that sorts out his pedigree, sort of.

The only real measure of a writer is his writing, of course—the only reason Paul Theroux is still invited to dinner. Angell's prose is admirable, ambling, thick with detail—particularly his meditations on baseball. I remember warmly his tidy comment about the Red Sox after they'd won the pennant, and a longer piece, further back, about a statistics whiz who'd reformed the team's system of scouting.

Tell me this: How do you pronounce his last name? It's one of those ones I'm always afraid of saying wrong, like 'deluge.'