Mary Norris. (Photo by Roni Gross)

The Observer reached veteran New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris last week at Rockaway Beach, where she was taking a deserved vacation. She had, after all, just sold a book.

After three decades of red-pencil duties, Ms. Norris has, of late, been punchily defending the peculiarities of the storied weekly’s punctuation and house style for its Page-Turner blog. From these posts, which range in topic from the dreaded diaeresis (seen in coöperate and reëlect) to the mag’s prudish-but-evolving stance on the F-word, her forthcoming book, Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, was born, with development help from her agent, David Kuhn.

An “irreverent manifesto” about the pleasures of language (“English, mostly, although I may throw in some Portuguese,” Ms. Norris wrote in an email), the book will be more instructive than personal, her editor at W.W. Norton, Matt Weiland, told us. But it’s not as if her own story doesn’t deserve telling: she has kept a blog for five years that is tangentially about alternate-side parking (tangentially being the only way one could sustain discussion of such a topic for so long), and she has written for other outlets about the two Dennises in her life—her transsexual sibling (now called Dee) and her second cousin Dennis Kucinich.

The book sold at auction for a rumored $425,000. Ms. Norris declined to comment on her advance, but noted wryly that it was considerably smaller than the reported $4 million Billy Crystal received for his memoir, which was sold on the same day. Despite the windfall, will she continue to report to the Condé Nast building every day? “Yes, I plan to keep my job,” she told us. “For one thing, I need the material.”

“When I heard about Bloomberg’s plan, on the national news, to make large sodas illegal, my mind immediately went to ‘Are people going to jail for this?’” the artist, Owen Smith, told the magazine's Cover Stories blog.

The New Yorker has never been one to shy away from Hizzoner's more colorful aspects. Last year, the Mayor's ban on smoking in parks prompted this Bruce McCall cover, which shows New Yorkers in the stocks for indulging in salt or a smoke. And who could forget last year's Valentines Day cover? That one, drawn by Barry Blitt, had the Mayor mooning at himself in the mirror over chocolates and Champagne. (His birthday is February 14.)

Not that he needs take it personally. Mayor Bloomberg's predecessor Rudy Giuliani also made the cover three times, according to the New York Times.

Freudenberger. (David Jacobs)

One of the more recent entries in the annals of literary hype that threatens to overshadow actual achievement is Nell Freudenberger. Back in 2001, when the recent Harvard grad was an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, her short story “Lucky Girls” was published in the magazine, and she soon became known, both in New York publishing circles and beyond, as a wunderkind. She happened to be attractive. “Too young, too pretty, too successful” said the title of an article by Curtis Sittenfeld, in Salon. But then came a well-received first novel, The Dissidents, and a short story, “An Arranged Marriage,” in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction issue, in 2010, and awards, like the PEN/Malamud. And now with her second novel, Newlyweds (Knopf, 352 pp., $25.95), an extended version of “An Arranged Marriage,” comes her most successful effort yet, one that shows a more mature voice and the true triumph of her talent over her hype.

As she did in The Dissidents, Ms. Freudenberger has again taken on a foreigner’s acclimation to life in the U.S. Newlyweds’ appealing protagonist, Amina, is a young, slender Bengali (e)mail-order bride who grew up in and around Dhaka, the only daughter of a hapless dreamer of a father and an ailing mother. The novel follows her to Rochester, N.Y., where she meets her fiancé, George, an unambitious engineer who lives in a generic three-bedroom house on a suburban cul-de-sac, learns the meaning of words like “dumbstruck” and how to shovel snow, and gets a job as a sales clerk at a local retail store called MediaWorks.

George met Amina, we learn, through the online dating service AsianEuro.com, to which he had come in the wake of personal troubles. He fell for her because “she was ‘straightforward’ and ... did not play games.” She saw an opportunity to escape her circumstances in a man who seemed honest and well-to-do.

In Rochester, Amina came face-to-face with the banal reality of what “arranged” entails, at least in the beginning—unpleasantly cordial sex and responsibilities, not to one another, but to some greater sense of the American Dream. Meanwhile, Amina attempts to keep intact her ties to her family back home, saving up what little money she earns at MediaWorks and, later, Starbucks to send to her parents, and set aside for citizenship and visa applications. Ms. Freudenberger captures how Amina’s panic at getting lost in a shopping mall on her first day of work becomes, strangely, a source of almost erotic excitement:

It was like a nightmare. She had a physical sensation of panic; if she’d had to describe it, she would’ve said it was in her stomach—although it was more like a lightness in her sexual organ, a feeling that sometimes came upon her at surprising moments (unfortunately not when she was doing that with George). She could hear her mother’s voice, Inshallah, but it wasn’t God’s presence she felt. It was her mother’s hovering beside her just as she had every day Amina visited the British Council, traveling all the way there and back with her by rickshaw so that Amina wouldn’t have to go alone.

Where Ms. Freudenberger excels, generally, in Newlyweds is in her understanding of familial love and the comical side of learning to live in a foreign land—no mean feat when you consider that she is, herself, a native New Yorker. (She was inspired by a young Bengali she met on a flight to Rochester.)

Many of Amina’s experiences in Rochester—spending time alone with manager Carl in the stockroom at MediaWorks, drinking Aunt Cathy’s sangria at family dinners, even remaining unmarried to George in her parents’ eyes (having failed to have a proper Deshi ceremony)—should have made her uncomfortable, she decides in retrospect, but she is quick to take note that “they had happened only to her American self, a person about whom her Bangladeshi self was blissfully unaware.” It is only in the latter half of the novel, when she returns to her native Bangladesh, and her family, that her new life comes in conflict with her old one. Waiting for her in Rochester is a husband whose past, uncovered, remains unresolved. In Bangladesh is Nasir, a family friend and childhood crush with whom she shares a past she was once eager to leave behind, but now  just as eagerly embraces. Amina experiences a disorientation that cuts to her very core:

You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

Unlike in The Dissidents, which was criticized for spreading its focus too thinly among a cast of displaced oddballs, Ms. Freudenberger, in The Newlyweds, keeps her lens trained on Amina, and it’s a good move. Amina is unpretentious, a character who shares a common language with the reader. Her perceptions of her new life are inflected by her unfamiliarity with America and those of her past in Dhaka brought to life in an angry vividness where discontent finds anything and everything to latch onto. Ms. Freudenberger’s masterful prose makes comprehensible how someone can become a stranger in two places at once.

mwoodsmall@observer.com

We haven't managed to get our hands on a copy yet, but David Remnick's excellent review in this week's New Yorker relayed the anecdote:

"Two white aides objected, saying that having the First Lady appear in Vogue, inevitably dressed in expensive designer clothing, would look unfeeling when so many people were living in misery. Two black advisers, Valerie Jarrett and Desiree Rogers, argued that, on the contrary, having an educated, attractive African-American First Lady on the cover of Vogue could be a source of inspiration, and counteract a plenitude of negative images. In the end, Obama posed for the magazine wearing clothes from both a young American designer she helped discover, Jason Wu, and J. Crew."

As for whether Vogue editor Anna Wintour's fundraising for the Obamas played a role in her decision, we'll have to wait for the book.

Crumb's cover

Robert Crumb, the alt-comic writer with a piggyback fetish, has always been ahead of his time. That's what made his comics--usually featuring giant Amazonian women with humungous thighs as a chronic masturbatory fantasy-- so transgressive to begin with.

But for all his former subversiveness, Mr. Crumb is pretty mainstream nowadays. Maybe not New Yorker mainstream though: Vice magazine unearthed a 2009 drawing from the cartoonist that was rejected by David Remnick's magazine. Though an answer was never given on why the cover wasn't run, Mr. Crumb suspects it was because the New Yorker was too afraid of offending people with the image of a (possible?) drag queen and a twee person of unidentifiable sex trying talking to a sweating official from the marriage license bureau, with a sign pointing to a "Genders Inspection" office next to his window.

Below, a high res image of the cartoon, which was discovered at the Venice Biennale in June.

Since Mr. Crumb has drawn for the New Yorker before (though now refuses to), we doubt that it was the cartoon's scandalous nature that led to it getting the axe. The magazine just never ran a gay marriage cover drawing in 2009. If Mr. Crumb had submitted it this year, when gay marriage was actually passed in New York and the New Yorker featured a cartoon of two women walking down the isle, it very well may have passed the P.C. test.

Looking for a fight.

On Wednesday The Hollywood Reporter reported that Twilight teen heartthrob Taylor Lautner had optioned a New Yorker story to be made into a small-budget movie directed by Gus Van Sant.

After the critical and box office failure of his first post-Twilight job, Abduction, the combination of the New Yorker and Mr. Van Sant lent the 19-year-old an instant aura of taste and gravitas, causing a spike in the Mr. Lautner futures market.

As for which story he'd bought, we and other New Yorker readers scratched our heads. Our best guess was Julia Ioffe's profile of Andrey Ternovskiy, the young creator of Chat Roulette. A video chat site where the anonymity and eroticism and vastness of the Internet converge, as seen through the eyes of a teenage boy? So Van Sant.

But could Mr. Lautner pull off a Russian accent? And how much shirtless time would the role allow him? Perhaps it was the recent profile of his ex-girlfriend Taylor Swift that he'd wanted to interpret.

According to a source, our conjecturing was in vain. Apparently, the optioned article actually comes from New York magazine, not the New Yorker. (Ugh, Californians!)

He says Alex Morris' "Fight Like a Pretty Boy," published in February's fashion issue, is the story that caught Mr. Lautner's eye.

It's not hard to see what Mr. Lautner would see there. It describes an illegal Chinatown boxing club where "most of the fighters in the lineup are lovely enough to turn heads, and some of them have made money on it."  On Friday nights, hundreds of downtown types pony up $20 to see male models in the ring against real street fighters and boxers.

"They’ve come for the sheer violence—the wormhole back to a long-lost New York," Ms. Morris wrote. "But they’ve also come for the spectacle of beautiful boys stripping to the waist and submitting their features to a thorough pummeling," she writes.

Sounds like a winning pick for Mssrs. Van Sant and Lautner. We reached out to New York, the New Yorker, and Alex Morris for comment but have yet to hear back. The talent and literary agents at ICM recently opened a special shop for snapping up cinematic pieces from New York and the Atlantic but this piece pre-dates that arrangement. We'll keep you posted.

Linda Lovelace.

In 1972, Gerard Damiano was a 43-year-old hairdresser from the Bronx with a cheap toupee and an opulent dream: to become the first auteur of hardcore. Over a single weekend, he wrote a script centering on the erotic act Humbert Humbert referred to as “a fancy embrace,” convinced local mobsters to kick in a couple bucks and started shooting. The 61-minute movie that resulted might not have had Godard shaking in his pantaloons but it did have a few things going for it: a cute title, an even cuter gimmick, and a leading lady who wasn’t the usual sex-kitten-cum-hell-cat triple-X vixen but a fresh-faced young moppet with an alliterative name and the most muted gag reflex this side of Barnum & Bailey.

Damiano’s decision to trade in blow dryers for blow jobs proved an inspired one. His film, Deep Throat, turned into a national phenomenon, grossing over $600 million and kicking off the era known as porno chic, upwardly-mobile, squeaky-clean types getting down and very, very dirty. How then did it happen that the critic who lost it at the movies failed to pick up the scent of the movie that taught America there was more than one orifice to lose it in? The answer is, she didn’t. Pauline Kael’s nose was too keen, Deep Throat’s musk too potent for their encounter to be other than inevitable. No, the two had locked gazes across a crowded room, were circling each other, about to connect, when an outside party intervened, bringing the seduction to a halt. Bliss denied by The New Yorker magazine.

As a writer, Kael was hot stuff and she knew it. Whatever the female equivalent of macho is, she had it. There was a swagger to her prose, a style and a strut, a sex confidence supreme. And she brought this erotic awareness and avidity to bear on the movies she reviewed. She saw movies for what they were, “a tawdry corrupt art for a tawdry corrupt world.” They’d let her down in the past, but disappointment hadn’t turned her bitter. Or off. And no one wrote better about the compensatory pleasures of well-made trash, slick and soulless and whorey as hell, of the fun you could have if you didn’t ask for too much.

If the filmgoing experience had been eroticized before Kael came on the scene, it was from the prospective of a voyeur, L.B. Jeffries in Rear Window ignoring the luscious Grace Kelly draped across his lap to peer furtively at the decidedly unluscious Raymond Burr sweating it out in the apartment opposite. Kael was a different brand of deviant. She was a spectator, sure, but she wanted to do more to a movie than just look at it. She craved ecstatic engagement, the headlong rush of going all the way. “The special aphrodisia of movies—the kinetic responsiveness, the all-out submission to pleasure,” was something she referenced frequently in her writing. Sex as a metaphor is an overworked rhetorical device and is often used improperly—to titillate or shock—but in Kael’s case it’s not merely applicable, it’s essential. There’s simply no other way of describing her relationship to her subject matter. She didn’t watch a movie; she bedded it. The review was her cigarette afterward, a chance to answer the age-old question, Was it good for you, too?

At the time of Deep Throat’s release, Kael was movie critic for The New Yorker. She’d only held the position a few years and was still looked on by her colleagues with skepticism and more than a little distaste. Kael reminisced about the early days: “I remember getting a letter from an eminent New Yorker writer suggesting I was trampling through the pages of the magazine with cowboy boots covered with dung and I should move on out with my cowboy boots.”

William Shawn had hired Kael back in 1969, purchasing her 7,000-word essay on Bonnie and Clyde, more an impassioned plea than a review, so enraptured was she by the movie’s blend of sex and violence and poetry. Writer and editor, however, were less than ideally suited temperamentally, one being an exultant oral compulsive, the other the anal retentive’s anal retentive. And according to filmmaker James Toback, the two often found themselves at odds, Shawn exasperated by Kael’s insistence on references scatological and sexual, Kael exasperated by Shawn’s exasperation. If he wanted to subdue her, she was just as eager to provoke him. How else to explain her describing Jack Nicholson in Goin’ South as “a commercial for cunnilingus”? It was a good line but she must’ve known it was never going to play and could have only stuck it in there to incite a reaction. Which it did. Shawn went so far as to circle the offending phrase and scrawl the words, “This has to come out. We can’t or won’t print it,” in the margins, a five-alarm hissy fit for the man dubbed by Renata Adler “the legendary, saintly, canonical Mr. Shawn.” And, indeed, when the piece ran, all Latin terms had been excised.

By late 1972, Deep Throat had become so mainstream that a joke about the movie even found its way into the act of show business dinosaur Bob Hope: “I thought [Deep Throat] was about giraffes.” Eager to see what the fuss was about but wary of going alone to a toilet bowl theater, Kael asked writer Charles Simmons to accompany her. (There’s a thinly fictionalized account of their adventure in his novel Wrinkles.) What did she make of it? She spoke to Francis Davis in 2001: “I didn’t think it was good, but I very badly wanted to write about it … I think half of the reason that people become interested in movies in the first place is sex and dating and everything connected with eroticism on the screen. And I felt that not to deal with all of that … was to shirk part of what’s involved in being a movie critic.” But shirk it she’d have to. With Deep Throat, the irresistible force of Kael had met the immovable object of Shawn and something had to give. In this instance, she did. The review never appeared.

Or did it? Critic Armond White has suggested that Kael’s review of Deep Throat was buried inside her review of Last Tango in Paris, released in the same year and every bit as interested in the libidinal. “The movie breakthrough has finally come,” she wrote rapturously in the Oct. 28, 1972, issue. “Exploitation films have been supplying mechanized sex—sex as physical stimulant but without any passion or emotional violence. The sex in Last Tango in Paris expresses the characters’ drives … Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form.” Deeply buried, maybe, but it’s there.

Backed into a corner by the hidebound sensibility of The New Yorker’s editors, Kael, it seems, did what Hollywood writers had done decades before under the righteous gaze of the Hayes Office: she got devious, sneaky, found a way to say what she wanted to say without saying it. It was a long and illustrious tradition she was joining. When Bogart told Bacall in 1946’s The Big Sleep that she had “a touch of class” but that he didn’t know how far she could go, and she responded with, “A lot depends on who’s in the saddle,” everybody in the theater over 12 understood it wasn’t horses they were talking about.

editorial@observer.com

The Occupy Wall Street protest has had some legitimate backlash, include the personal American dreams on the 53 percent Tumblr, a reference to the 53 percent of Americans who pay income taxes. But there is a movement for a counter-protest simmering over on the largely OWS-sympathizer forum Reddit. "Interested in a OWS counter-protest?" the thread says, inviting "people who have unwrinkled business attire" to join an ironic supplemental protest in the spirit of "Occupy Occupy Wall Street," a development that reminds us of the Million Bunny March at Burning Man, which was protested by attendees dressed as carrots.

Proposed slogans include:

• These protests are making it difficult to get to my yacht.
• I thought there would be foie gras.
• So this is what the rabble looks like.
• Revolutionaries have overthrown the government in a country that I have heavily invested in. Of course, they aren't the revolutionaries that I've been funding! FML!
• Occupy Main Street!
• Everyone who works at a corporation IS A PERSON!
• Let them eat cake

"Clever ideas like this are why OWS is having such difficulty gaining credibility," one comment notes.

Relevant:  The New Yorker.

Housewife de Lesseps.

Don’t let the warm weather fool you, we are officially in Fall season mode. You can always tell the changing of the seasons by the changing of the leaves, or at least by the changing of the hair colors of The Real Housewives of New York—which we anticipate will take place any day now in some of the city’s higher end hair care establishments as LuAnn de Lesseps and Ramona Singer reap the rewards of their cast-off cast members by doubling their salary. The two will now be getting $500,000 each to throw champagne in each other’s faces. Who says that there are no high-paying jobs anymore? Rather unbelievably, fellow New Yorkers, these are the 1%.

Meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street protesters, who are some heretofore undetermined percentage of the remaining 99%, have moved on to their fourth consecutive week in the hospitable lodgings of Zuccotti Park. Mayor Bloomberg changed his tune about the city’s newest attraction, saying that the protesters were welcome to stay in the park as long as they liked. (Which, he’s hoping, will not extend past November’s first frost.)

The cooling temperature could also be a good excuse for city-dweller Beyonce, whose baby-bump seemingly collapsed during an interview with an Australian TV show this week, fueling speculation that she was just using the padding... as insulation for her real baby, due in February! It was an embarrassing faux-pas for the Harper’s Bazaar cover celeb, who spent her profile in this month’s glossy talking about her pregnancy. The reception was, shall we say, icy.

Other places where the chill factor drops to below zero? The New York Times, where a memo circulated reminding staffers to report any speaking engagements where they received more than $5,000. We’re still trying to guess the blind item on who failed to ask “pretty please,” but if we had to take a guess, we’re going with Jill Abramson pocketing extra scratch by talking up cute puppies during a secret Westminster semi-final event. Perhaps she could join up with New Yorker’s Susan Orlean, who held her book party for Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend at The Kennel Club.

And really, is there a quicker route to fame and fortune than writing a book about dogs? Sure: just be the perkiest thing at 4:30 in the morning (without the use of recreational stimulants). We assume that’s the reason that NY1’s traffic reporter Jamie Shupak was profiled in The New York Times this weekend under the title “A Star Is Born.” We have nothing against Ms. Shupak, who we recently named one of New York Media’s most eligible bachelorettes, but the bar for stardom must have dropped a bit closer to sea level if you can reach it now by reporting construction delays on the BQE. (That or Times headline writers have been using recreational stimulants.)

Then again, we’re not sure where the stardom bar is anymore anyway. Elizabeth Olsen, who took a break from NYU classes to premiere her breakout feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene, at the New Yorker Film Festival, seems to be eclipsing both of her famous twin sisters. The bar there, for thespianism at least, is somewhere in the Dead Sea basin range, but the Other Olson seems to doing well critically. You never know what Autumn will bring.

(from The New Yorker)

Nancy Franklin announced that she is stepping down from her position as New Yorker television critic on Twitter today.

"I've been a critic for 18 years, and a TV critic for 13 of them. That's a lot of sitting alone indoors playing with one's equipment," Ms. Franklin wrote the Observer in an e-mail.

"I wanted to get out of the routine of writing a regular column and to get away from writing itself, at least for a while. It's a good move,and I'm just stupid enough not to be worried that I don't know what I'm going to do next," she added.

Despite the bittersweet tone, New Yorker editor David Remnick is confident she'll be back.

"I fully expect she’ll be back, but not about television," Mr. Remnick, a television fan himself, told the Observer. "There is no law that says once you're a television critic you must be one forever."

As for who will take over the On Television column, he had fewer expectations.

"We'll look around," he said. "Who knows? I'm doing what you do. I'm reading."

Ms. Franklin will do two more columns, he added. (Please, Ms. Franklin, do New Girl!)

She joined the New Yorker typing pool in 1978 and over the next decade climbed the ranks to nonfiction editor. She became a theater critic under Tina Brown and has been television critic since 1998.