Clerihew Up in the Old Hotel

JOSEPH MITCHELL

Joseph Mitchell
Without a hitch'll
Still be read
When The New Yorker's dead.

Clerihew for Classic Crime

CALVIN TRILLIN

Wish Trillin
Was still in-
To villains,
As per his Killin's.

A Caricature

Clerihew After Cocktails

JEAN STAFFORD

The rather mean laugh heard
Out of Jean Stafford,
Was as nothing compared to the quiet rage
She went home to write out on the untroubled white page.

A Caricature

A Caricature

Clerihew for a New Yorker

LILLIAN ROSS

Lillian Ross
Came across
With many a corker
In the New Yorker.

A Caricature

Clerihew for the Ovid in Ossining

JOHN CHEEVER

True believer
John Cheever,
Thought his whites always rinsible
and "A page of Good prose remains invincible."

Daily Dose

From The Long-Winded Lady, Notes from the New Yorker, by Maeve Brennan

BROADWAY

"Those Broadway lights are selfish. They illuminate only themselves."

From I Look Down from the Window of This Old Broadway Hotel

A Caricature

A Caricature

Clerihew for an Editor in Chief

DAVID REMNICK

David Remnick
Is quick to condemn schtick,
Hubris, or guile
In lieu of style.

Daily Dose

From My Ears Are Bent, by Joseph Mitchell

DURANTE

"'Look at them angels,' said Durante, smacking his hands together, 'Can you blame me for loving the pickle works?  Why, it's a privilege to work here.  I should be paying the boss for the privilege of working here.  Geeze."

From It's a Living

Daily Dose

From This Old Man: All In Pieces, by Roger Angell

HOVERING KNOWLEGE

“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!’“

From This Old Man

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From The Years with Ross, by James Thurber

IF IT WASN'T

"If it wasn't one thing it was another, at the New Yorker, and sometimes it was both."

From Chapter XI, Up Popped the Devil

Daily Dose

From The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: The Story of a Soul, translated by John Beevers

SOMETIMES

"Sometimes the change that comes over a soul from one day to the next is like magic."

From Chapter Ten

Daily Dose

From Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs, edited by Thomas Vinciguerra

PHYSICALLY

"Physically, he is not majestic, or even especially bizarre, which is probably the next best bet."

From St. George and the Dragnet

Quick Review

New York Drawings by Adrian Tomine

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I draw a little.  Nothing all that expert or polished, just doodles mostly, and some caricatures; pencil stuff.  The point of most if not quite all of it, for me, is to amuse: first myself, obviously, then my friends and finally the few other people who might ever actually see something I've drawn.  I've never studied either drawing or art, though I shouldn't mind taking a life-study class someday.  Something I've always meant to do.

Doesn't mean I haven't poured over other people's stuff with something like an appraising eye, looking to understand what they do, often as not, so much better than I ever might.  I've been losing myself in other people's drawings since I got hold of my first OZ book and disappeared into the world created as much for me by the illustrations of the great John R. Neill as by L. Frank Baum.  I sat copying those pictures of Jack Pumpkinhead and the Patchwork Girl by the hour. Now that I've settled heavily into middle age, I'm comfortable within my limitations, but there is still a very particular style of witty realism, something I've come to identify specifically with the New Yorker magazine, and even more specifically with Adrian Tomine, that I can not help but envy.  Is there anyone alive with a better eye and ear for a subway passenger or a telling moment on the platform?  Anyone with this economy of frame, anyone who can so effortlessly delineate character in five, three, two thick black brush-lines, use such perfectly true, perfectly tasteful and spare watercoloring to create both life and depth in even the simplest drawing?

Adrian Tomine is at pains at various points in this glorious new book to remind the viewer that he is still, first and foremost a cartoonist.  There are a few traditional, multi-panelled strips here -- all with distinctly New York gags, and all good.  I have to say though, I'd almost rather they weren't.  I admire Tomine's Optic Nerve enormously, but it's really just here, in his article illustrations, his witty covers, his spot illustrations for Talk of the Town, and most of all in his notebook sketches that I stand in complete awe of his incomparable taste and talent.

Taste seems a strange thing to admire in a contemporary cartoonist, but there it is.  For me, this has little or nothing to do with subject -- though there must be some influence admitted there as well -- and nearly all to do with the kind of discrimination that respects the weight of the frame, placement, necessity, color, wit.  Look at even one of the artist's more obvious covers: the owner of the little bookshop stepping out just in time to see his neighbor accepting her Amazon.com order from the UPS man.  Nothing is extraneous, nothing overdone, and yet there is such a beautifully controlled, and apt use of color, such clean and expressive use of the space, the street, the reactions.  Subtlety doesn't cover this kind of thing.  The joke isn't all that subtle -- likewise another favorite cover, the beautiful ice cream truck in the snow.  Either might as easily be a classic New Yorker cartoon from any number of other, cruder artists.  But Tomine isn't that guy.  Everything about his covers suggest an artist at the top of his form, masterfully aware of what does and does not matter pictorially and editorially, what will be both right and beautiful.

I really do wish I could do even a few of the things Adrian Tomine seems to do now all but automatically.  I don't think I ever could.  All i can do is be grateful for this beautifully made book which gathers up so much of the stuff of his that I love best.  I'm lost in Adrian Tomine's New York, a place every bit as beautiful and magical to me as OZ.



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