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I was surprised to see last week’s New Yorker, the Style Special, for a couple of reasons. First it was poly-bagged with a supplement called “Fashion Rocks” (more about this in a moment), and second, because it contains what I first thought to be one of the bigger flubs in New Yorker history.

Considering that New Yorker errors usually run to about two typos per year (“emnity” is the only one I’ve spotted in 2005), and a marginal dangler or two in a Lemann rush-job commentary, this one seemed a doozy. Pages 155 to 162 were published twice. Once where they belong, and again in the middle of the book, replacing pages 81-91.

Now, I don’t usually notice the pagination in itself, but it seemed odd to me that they’d suddenly plopped Nancy Franklin and David Denby into the feature well, along with the Postal Service boilerplate. I knew the jig was up when I saw the backpage caption contest in the middle of the book, and it was the same one that appeared at the back of the book. Editors hate when this happens. The sympathetic nausea set in. Being experienced in these kinds of capers, I eventually figured out that the error eliminated Shouts & Murmurs and the first couple pages of Peter Hessler’s letter from China. Knowing how we writers and editors all idolize the New Yorker, I felt especially bad for Paul Rudnick, who doesn’t get that many stabs at the humor page.

I asked David Remnick about this, and it was apparently the first he’d heard about it. I asked around here, and so far, I seem to have the only mixed-up copy, so that is a sympathetic relief. Here I was prepared to offer the cynical explanation that these special theme issues are so easy to set aside that no one but a truly pathetic magazine geek would notice. (Is your copy FUBAR? Let me know.)

This is no reflection on the quality of theme issues, per se. I just think it’s human nature to reject products that are overpackaged. There are huge sections of wonderful magazines and newspapers that I do not read, simply because I am annoyed to have to machete the cane breaks that tell me I’m about to wade into the “Arts Feature” or the “the World of Michael Musto” or a “Special Advertising Section on Head Trauma,” or whatever. Surprise me.

Other than the lingering influence of Tina Brown’s evanescent moment, it is not entirely clear to me why the New Yorker still publishes a dozen or so special issues per year. The fiction specials make a certain amount of sense, but beyond that–travel, food, style–they begin to devolve into mannered exercises in grouping vaguely related content, I suppose for the benefit of advertisers. We experience that kind of pressure around here all the time; salons and spas wish to buy ads in our special salons and spas issue, or our special salons and spas section. Can we please fax over our editorial calendar? And when we tell them we don’t have that sort of thing, they seem confused and concerned. (We believe they have been brainwashed by certain low-rent publications that are always promising to write about them if they purchase advertising.) It would be a useful tool for advertisers, I suppose, to know if we are planning any editorial content that would make their advertisments look especially good. But we don’t like to run a magazine just to satisfy advertisers, because that is inevitably insulting to readers, who begin to feel like a third wheel. The larger irony in my mind is this: Why do advertisers wish to congregate with their direct competitors in special issues and special sections? The whole point of advertising at this late date is to cultivate a remarkable, unique, “big bang” brand in an overcrowded media marketplace. Contrast. Juxtaposition. Innit?

I have not noticed a major inflow of advertising in the New Yorker’s special issues. Depending on how you count, and whether your issue is paginated correctly, this number is large enough to be perfect bound, but not exactly a bag-buster. But look at this: The sixty-page “Fashion Rocks,” an unpaginated glossy stand-alone that appears to have been seeded by Citi bank.

I have the habit of looking at magazines backwards, from the back cover in, and as I browsed the separate supplement, I had two thoughts–this could not possibly have been put together by New Yorker staff. Two, it looks and reads like a Rolling Stone feature well from about 1998, featuring one-on-one style-related interviews with rock stars like David Bowie, Gwen Stefanie, Nelly, Duran Duran (Duran! Duran! My god) and so on. Indeed, I haven’t seen such a relentlessly sycophantic and ephemeral group of soft-focus celbrity “profiles” for almost a decade, having thought the glossy form died long ago and was buried in the local newspaper.

Great moments in music journalism revisited (and these are just the leads:

“When Joss Stone landed a record deal at the age of 14, she made one thing clear to the label brass: The clothes stay on.”

A quick glance at the masthead–have to admit it is surprising anyone would actually want to take the blame for this unfortunate enterprise–reveals that
a lot of people are either calling in favors or working on a third mortgage. It is like a time machine back to The Nineties at Wenner Media. The buck stops at the top of the masthead with Bob Love, the longtime, genteel, but aged editor of Rolling Stone who was displaced by rampant Ladism, but it passes through the hands of a kind of Love Boat cast of nineties “rock journalists” who specialized in the longform kissup–Jancee Dunn, Danyel Smith, David Wild, and so on. I have nothing against any of these people personally (indeed, I composed a few real stinkers myself back when), but the exposure is frigidly dated, and calls to mind an old adage: Never do anything just for the money. Also: You’re only as good as your last byline. Also: Script faces and faux xerox faces went out of style about six years ago, and do not yet qualify as kitsch. (Okay, now I’m being mean.)

In fact, the Fashion Rocks supplement to The New Yorker shows so little actual substance or style that it cannot possibly have passed over the desk of any editors at the New Yorker, and I wonder whether the publishing side even got a peek at it. Perhaps it is so bad because its chosen parameters–rock stars who wear or sell or talk about their own fashion lines–are inherently lame. It strikes me that the relevance of, say, P. Diddy and Scott Stapp and Boy George to the sartorial world is inversely proportional to their relevance in the music world. In other words– diversify your brand while you can, rock star and rock writer. There are advertising supplements waiting for you.

True, I am such a hopeless and idealistic magazine dork that part of me believes this messed up issue of The New Yorker will somehow be collectible, like a mis-struck coin from the mint, or a Dewey Defeats Truman headline–if only I hadn’t torn into the polybag and forever devalued it. That Fashion Rocks supplement, though. Unfortunately, due to the high gloss and clay content, I can’t even use it for fish wrap. But I may keep it around anyway, as a sort of professional warning, or an idol to mammon.

P.S. If your copy of the September 26 issue was screwy, before you sell it on e-baylet me know, and I’ll pass along the info to Remnick. They’ll probably be glad to know what the exact damage may be.

Amid all the news of the End Times, you may not have noticed that the New York Times Magazine introduced a new department last Sunday. They are calling it “The Funny Pages.” They are not funny.

The most obvious attempt at what would normally be called humor was Elizabeth Gilbert’s confessional essay on yoga, in which the author describes a yoga class she’d taken while living in Tennessee–the first time, she says, she’d ever lived in “the South.” She is obliged to overcome her yoga purism, which is a backward way of saying she thinks her Southern Belle instructor is an idiot, and this of course is funny in the traditional “Y’all talk funny down here!” line. The juxtaposition might be a humorous one in the hands of an actual humorist, but Gilbert really manages just one laughline, which she isn’t convinced y’all heard the first time, so she repeats it. (“Work them BOOBS off, y’all!” Would have been funnier if she’d said “tits,” but I don’t see the Times, or Elizabeth Gilbert for that matter, going there.) I like Elizabeth Gilbert fine–she’s done some really nice work, particularly when she’s following the wise instinct to write about other people. A few years ago, in speaking about her first book, “Pilgrims,” she told Ploughshares, “I did not want to write a thinly veiled, autobiographical, memoirish book. I wanted to tell stories about other people besides myself, stories about the kind of people I love and feel for in this world.” That is surely an admirable and rare instinct in a writer, and I don’t hold this yoga business against her. It just feels like a piece that had been lined up as a palliative evergreen for the terminally maudlin “Lives” department. I’d be more convinced by a piece from a practicing humorist like, say, Garrison Keillor or even Neal Pollack, or better yet, Jeff Johnson.

A reader starting from the back of “the Funny Pages” will find the first installment in a serialized novella called “Comfort to The Enemy.” Elmore Leonard, of course, is a great, unusual, underrated American writer. (So good, in fact, that he apparently has one of those coveted “no-edit” clauses in his contract with the Times, which led him to give his protagonist an honorary discharge from the Navy, rather than an honorable one; or maybe Carl has gone AWOL unintentially.) It is certainly a good thing to see Leonard writing in the popular press, and it reminds me of Stephen King’s awesome back page in Entertainment Weekly–an example of why great writers can make just about anything fun to read. I have to admit, though, that Leonard’s first chapter was an exhausting strafing of nouns. Also, it was not funny.

What may be the most obvious or literal feint at a “funny page” is Chris Ware’s page, a serialized panel in the stoic but expansive style of Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid on Earth. It’s a nice gesture–and a symbolic one, the Times being probably the Last Major Periodical on Earth to publish serious adult comics. But a funny (weird) thing happens on the way to the printer. Given the otherwise relentlessly humorless context of the Times Magazine, the emotionally masochistic Ware is being positioned as humor– that is, as light, diversionary, experimental material–but this does him a great disservice and plays to the highly irritating, dated, and stereotypical misunderstanding that comics, especially “literary comics” or “graphic features” are necessarily funny, just like children’s books are always supposed to be moral fables, or a crime novel must always be a police procedural.

The funniest thing about the funny pages is probably the appropriation of Gen-X self-consciousness on the cover of the magazine, hawking the new department, which I can’t copy down for you, because I don’t have the thing in front of me at the moment. These antique stylings landed there no doubt at the gentle insistence of “Funny Pages” editor John Hodgman, and could have been lifted from McSweeney’s (a crush that has lately flowered publicly at the Times magazine, a couple years late, as befits the general Male Patttern Baldness of the Times magazine since Adam Moss left for, erm, New York). Editor Gerry Marzorarti may not be the hippest guy, but he eventually comes around to it. (He’s polite, though, and he apparently turns on the listening ears once in a while; Hodgman is a sort of second-string Dave Eggers who has been running the happy “Little Gray Book Lectures” for literary groupies in Brooklyn. Also, he knows how to roll logs for his friend Elizabeth Gilbert. She is not funny. Did we mention that?)

There is the possibility that the new elements are merely misnamed. As the editors themselves make clear, the new pages were inspired by a somewhat historic sense of the phrase “funny pages,” i.e. The American Weekly, a diversionary Sunday supplement slipped into Hearst newspapers during the Gilded Age. These sorts of things were really funny-weird as much as they were funny-ha-ha, but reappropriating that aesthetic to the twenty-first century is a little problematic, and feels more like hedging their bets against the notoriously brutal world in which professional humorists run.

Then too, it may be more an organizational issue than a content issue. If there is one thing that is most striking about the state of the art in American magazines today, it is that they take themselves far too seriously, and they read other magazines much too closely. There is little or no innovation. If the Times got one thing right, it is the impulse to look back through the yellowing stacks of the 20th century, and to see just how much has been lost. When magazines were the mass medium of entertainment, before radio, TV, and film, they were far more entertaining. Today, they either want to change the world or change your buying habits, but they figure you’ll entertain yourself someplace else. The Times magazine, to its credit, I think, has somehow managed to preserve the impulse (and, no doubt, the margins) to innovate and invent, and keep life interesting.

I realize that humor is a hard thing, but what’s wrong with, you know, the more obvious kind of funny-ha-ha humor? I’d guess that if the pages themselves don’t actually get funny before too long, in other words run the risk of being spectacularly unfunny (not precisely the same thing as being humorless) they’ll be dropped like a prom dress.

I see where there is a new biography of Mark Twain, and I intend to clean out the office to see if it might have arrived while I wasn’t looking. It is my shameful practice to deal with most of what I receive here in the mail by stacking it in small pillars that lean and topple until I can gather enough nerve to ask for help, like a drowning man, from one of the interns. I feel like I need to swear them to secrecy before they dig in; they may find obscene letters from angry readers, or bills from my wife’s cell phone. What’s worse, they may not realize that I cannot control what is sent to me. I did not request that exhaustive and exhausting tome on the timeless brilliance of Britpop, for example. I did not ask to be sent reviewer’s samples of four new scents of “personal lubricant.” I do not specifically remember requesting a PR copy of the new Suicide Girls DVD. (Actually, I do remember that, and I also know for a fact that it has not arrived yet.)

I like biographies, generally. THere has been some hue and cry around here about biopics (most seem to be agin’ ’em), but I don’t know about them so much. I don’t go directly to the biographies section at the bookstore, although if I wander in there, I often find myself stuck for a while. But panic inevitably sets in, and I decide not to drop the thirty bucks on a new book.

Biographies tend to make a person feel small. A really well written story about an important person’s life gives it a narrative arc that makes my own life feel like an insane, rudderless, anonymous cacophony of trivialities. Biographies tend to make a reader feel small, too, because the reader realizes this may be the one and only book on the subject that he will ever read, whereas the writer of a good biography should have a firm grip on just about anything that has ever been written by and about his subject. On top of that, a good biographer should have a working knowledge of most of the finest examples of his chosen genre. Inevitably, that pressure is experienced by the reader. You do not have to know what the ten best biographies ever writter are, but you cannot escape feeling like you really ought to know a few of them, since you have now gone on the record claiming to be a big fan of biographies.

I think I’d like to read this biography of Twain, although I am not very happy with WIlliam Grimes review of it. Grimes, I am pleased to say, does seem to have read the canonical biographies of America’s first great writer, which is the least we should expect from a book critic. But he is disappointed that Ron Powers did not aspire to cultivate more controversy about the person of Samuel Clemens. As an example, he suggests that Powers’ review of “Huckleberry Finn” is emblematic:

It is less than satisfactory to have Mr. Powers conclude, after canvassing divided critical opinion on the final chapters of “Huckleberry Finn,” that “nearly everybody agrees that it is one hell of a book.”

True enough. No argument there. And that’s the problem. A biography should give readers something to argue about. Mild, dutiful and inoffensive, “Mark Twain” declines to do so. It is, in the end, too much a Samuel Clemens.

Now, I think Grimes is confusing this sort of thumbs-up, thumbs-down brinksmanship with an earlier complaint that the book does not take enough leaps.

Mr. Powers has marshaled the data and organized and packaged it in a coherent, readable narrative, but the results are less than enthralling. If “Mark Twain” rarely stumbles, it never makes any leaps, either. Like the prairies surrounding Twain’s Missouri birthplace, it just rolls on and on.

Grimes himself is sort of spinning his wheels at this point, but the key to his own befuddled thinking is in his lead.

Throughout his judicious, coolly considered biography, Mr. Powers prefers simple explanations to the complications of psychoanalysis.

When I think back on my favorite biographies, I have a strong preference for works that try to do both things–marshal all the facts from a life, and then try to paint a sort of symphonic, three-dimensional portrait that includes an attempt at an interior, spiritual wire-tap– to speculate from the evidence what only the subject and the subject’s God really know, their unspoken motivations and obsessions and fears and so on. Biographers of highly prolific writers have an especially rich record to draw from. If you’re not too muchg of a post-modernist, and agree that there is some element of autobiography in almost everything the writer publishes, then a man like Twain isn’t so much an open book to be read by the biographer as an open library–for those who know the language.

One of my favorite biographys is Scott Elledge’s life of E.B. White. I don’t know if it is a classic in its genre, but I admire it a lot, because it is a very well written and researched, conscientious portrait of a complex man who led an interesting, taciturn life–but who wrote about himself endlessly, in fact claimed that he did not sympathize with anyone who wasn’t first and foremost interested in himself. So Elledge performed the neat trick of extrapolating from all of the writings of E.B. White, including the private papers and letter, who the man was, what he did, and what he thought about. (Published while White was still alive, White approved of it, though he thought it was too long. This is not necessarily a good thing, of course–to have the living subject of a biography approve it is, to a skeptical mind, evidence that it may be too sycophantic and uncritical. White, though, was undoubtedly wise enough not to quibble out loud, and in any case, there were sharply insightful sections of the book that must have made its writer cringe, knowing White would be reading it.)

The book left me with two strong secondary impulses of sehnsucht. First, I feel bad that an equally good biography has not been written about Katherine White (the one was written by a first-time biographer, and oddly focussed on her septuagenarian hypochondria, a subject that was finally redeemed by her son’s recent scribblings on the matter). Second, I wonder how biographies will be written in the future, now that the age of letter-writing has entirely died.

I suppose my own little life could easily be reconstructed, in its main shape, from my email inbox and outbox. Most of my short- and longterm memory is now stored there, but the boss has reminded me that bandwidth and server space is not endless, and most of this material is being deleted in six-month blocks going back a year or so at a time.