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World through a Monacle

February 4, 2009 in Odds and Ends, Writing New York by Bryan

FivePoints1827,jpg.jpg

This morning in lecture I mentioned — while showing this familiar image of the Five Points — that the little fellow up front to the left, the one with the top hat, always reminds me of Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker‘s monacled mascot.

Turns out this week’s magazine includes the results of the 2008 Eustace Tilley contest, in which readers were invited to redesign Tilley for the contemporary city. Lots of people submitted Obamafied versions; lots of representations of a homeless Tilley too (which, along with Tilley the suicidal investment banker, seemed to speak to our current economic crisis).

Here are a couple of my favorites; the rest of the entries can be found here.

watchmen tilley.jpgbanksy tilley.jpg

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Dissing White

January 27, 2009 in Books, Writing New York by Bryan | 5 comments

E.B. White’s Here Is New York will never suffer from a lack of fans. So I don’t feel bad (especially since we sell at least 100 copies a year for the old fellow) posting a link to a contrarian view, published in Salon back in the pre-9/11 era. According to Charles Taylor, White was a big old phony, his descriptions of NYC a string of cliches:

Thus, White can
encounter the residents of the Lower East Side sitting on their stoops
on a hot summer night and banish the crowding and poverty by
transforming it into “the nightly garden party of the Lower East Side
… It is folksy [emphasis added] here with the smell of warm
flesh and squashed fruit and fly-bitten filth in the gutter, and
cooking.” Visit exotic New York! See the quaint and colorful peasants!
“A large, cheerful Negro” panhandler begging coins from a crowd exiting
a Broadway show prompts White to observe that “a few minutes of
minstrelsy improves the condition of one Negro by about eight dollars.
If he does as well as this at every performance, he has a living right
there.” (And eventually, no doubt, a summer place in the Hamptons.)

The rest here.

Thoughts?

p.s. Speaking of dead New Yorker writers, RIP John Updike (1932-2009).

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