The New Yorker Five

The US contingent of the festival kicked off last night with an evening with The New Yorker 5: cartoonist Roz Chast, art critic Peter Schjeldahl, staff writer David Grann, and music critic Sascha Frere-Jones, hosted by the magazine’s Edtorial Director Henry Finder.

The night promised to deliver recollections and behind the scenes insights into the highly regarded magazine, now available pretty much anywhere you can find a powerpoint.

Being a reader of the The New Yorker (hereafter TNY) myself, I could definitely sense a feeling of shared excitement in the cavernous Town Hall. Anticipation that what that these writers from abroad had to say was bound to be insightful and important, even before they started to speak.

As the panelists fund their chairs, I recalled a letter from Australia published by LA Review of Books last month that read “Like do you guys get how hard we are trying to impress you?”

The letter was written by Sydney writer Sam Twyford Moore, and asks what we’ve all wanted to ask but never could with such intelligence and precision: why does American opinion mean so much to the views of Australians and the careers of Australian writers?

Later in the session, when each of the writers were asked to respond to questions from the audience, Editorial Director Henry Finder addressed part of Sam’s question indirectly when asked why Australian’s cared for TNY.

Finder suggested that with much of the magazine’s audience now based outside of its home town, TNY stood for less of a geographic concern, and more for set of common values; of journalistic vigour, intelligence, humour and creativity.

The night revealed a TNY editorial structure of strict vertical departments, with each ‘vertical’ (such as music, art, nonfiction, fiction) guided by common standards of excellence and accuracy. Much that appears in today’s TNY is months old, with some pieces the product of a year’s work, checked and re-checked by the magazine’s famous fact checking department.

This structure reflects my own reading habits of the magazine. Every reader is different, but I rarely read the commentary or criticism, I flip through the cartoons and bunker down in the glorious long form journalism, usually reading one to two pieces per edition.

I’m happy with this because one good article of TNY replaces a dozen or more average reads of a number of other information sources I draw from, online and off.

Long time New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast revealed the inner machanisms that help ensure the magazine’s standards never slip. Chast submits six to eight cartoons a week to the editor, selling one to the magazine in a good week, but more often than not lucking out completely. There are over 40 contract cartoonists working on the magazine, each submitting a similar amount every week, plus a growing slush pile.

It is hard to get into TNY, even when you’re already ‘in’.

The stories of staff writer (and my current man-crush) David Grann are a perfect example of this uncertainty. He captivated the audience (or maybe it was just me) with the genesis of his 2004 Squid Hunter piece for the magazine, in which he failed to deliver on the original brief to document the successful capture of a giant squid.

Grann, who refined his journalistic knack for accuracy through writing obituaries, explained that not knowing where a story was going to end up had become a necessary part of finding a good story:

The endings we don’t expect are those that most captivate.

As each panelist went on to reveal their own conflicted relationship with writing, the session signed off with a view from art critic Peter Schjeldahl, explaining that writing for him was “hell”:

Just because you like sausages, doesn’t mean you want to see the sausages being made.

While I left the session with my views of TNY unchanged (I’ll still likely never read the commentary), I felt renewed respect for the writers, who ultimately bear the scars of the magazine’s high standards. My only disappointment was that we didn’t get a glimpse into what drives these writers to continue submitting, even when the ends remain unknown.

Short thoughts: on Jonathan Franzen

Last night’s Franzen-fest for me ended in a bottle of wine and tweet-ups, but only after listening to the man himself engage in a critical examination of the intersection between life and art. Focusing less on concepts than on craft, and expressing frustration at the question ‘Is your work autobiographical?’ and its implications, Franzen spoke candidly about how the process of writing The Corrections – indeed, the final book itself – was inextricably connected to his personal life. 

At pains to stress that this did not mean his work was littered with scenes taken directly from events in his own experience, he explained that the novel as it stands today could not have been written – would not work and could not be completed – until he had overcome the guilt, shame and misplaced loyalty that was eating away at him as a person. In this way, perhaps there was more of a lesson in Franzen’s talk for writers of fiction themselves than an audience of fans. Citing Kafka as an example, he claimed that the closer a writer gets to accurately portraying those deeper, murkier parts of themselves in their fiction, the less such fiction resembles the narrative of their own life.

I came away from Franzen’s keynote with the distinct impression that under that shuffling but endearing awkwardness, and books so fat they resemble house bricks, here is a writer who cares very deeply about literature as an art form and, I think, as a political tool. His uncompromising stance on the responsibility of fiction writers (and of literature in general) to push past simply churning out what comes easily is readily digestible in quip form but not so easily practised. Unless the writer feels personally at risk, he argued, unless they are attempting to surmount what feels like the insurmountable, unless they are digging deep into themselves and critically examining what they find, then their work is not worth reading, and the book itself was not worth writing.

Jonathan Franzen will be appearing at two more MWF events: discussing birdwatching with Sean Dooley and Michael Veitch on August 27 and  In Conversation with Chloe Hooper on August 28.