Comments on: Calvin Trillin For Mayor Of Awesome Town

By: s.

s. — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:19:52 +0000

Ages late to the party, but nearly six years later http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/11/17/031117sh_shouts is still hilarious.

By: JaguarPaw

JaguarPaw — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:08:33 +0000

Regardless of whether he's a dick or not this line is awe-inspiring:

Why make him into some Darth Vader
For sodomizing one eighth grader?

By: Adouble

Adouble — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:04:20 +0000

Also aggravated: the Governor General of Canada.

By: TerseNursePornstein

TerseNursePornstein — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:45:09 +0000

..on the op-ed page of today's Times, or, "The Secret Sharer."

By: Lionel Mandrake

Lionel Mandrake — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:45:19 +0000

"Alice, Off the Page," broke my heart.

By: Balk

Balk — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:04:47 +0000

That is a remarkably, and probably deliberately so, ahistoric read.

By: Balk

Balk — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:02:18 +0000

And I'm living it.

By: mike d

mike d — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:53:46 +0000

I'm waiting for the "An Intimate Evening with Alex Balk" talk series to finally take off.

By: Balk

Balk — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:39:30 +0000

That's exactly the point. A lot of people got overheated that someone in her twenties got a job whose responsibilities they did not understand.

By: puzzled

puzzled — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:33:27 +0000

Why is this clip of interest? Trillin doesn't seem to know much about the position or anything about its occupant. Its appeal seems limited to people who feel that by comparison with the "punk kid" they themselves are underachieving…

By: libmas

libmas — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:28:41 +0000

Please install a regular doggerel feature here at the Awl. Balk, I'm looking at you.

By: eh

eh — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:54:18 +0000

Yeah, he's adorable and all, but does he think the magazine miraculously appears on paper every week without people hounding creative and playing "traffic cop"? I have to imagine saying something like this aggravates numerous people who put in a lot of hours at the New Yorker who DON'T write wry pieces about how good the nachos are in Kansas City. It's not a mimeographed newsletter.

By: hman

hman — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:38:50 +0000

I don't get what he sees/saw in Shopsin's, but he's always steered me right otherwise.

By: Dave Bry

Dave Bry — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:20:38 +0000

Yes. "Alice, Off the Page" is incredible. All the food writing, too. (I often choose a bottle of wine based on Trillin's criteria: examine the picture on the label, look for mountains, "preferably in the middle-distance.") Lately, I've been floored by the criminal reporting he's been doing. "The Color of Blood" in 2008. "At the Train Bridge" earlier this year. He's so very great.

By: lawyergay

lawyergay — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:12:38 +0000

I'm not a fan of Trillin's Remembering Denny, a memoir of his friendship with a gay Yale undergrad and Rhodes scholar who committed suicide.

The facts were just fine, but Trillin's idiotic point (the book was published in the early 1990's) was that 'this wouldn't happen now.' Except that gay and lesbian and hetero-nonconforming people are wildly more likely to commit suicide than almost any other cohort in society.

Stick to Polanski poetry, Trillin.

By: johnpseudonym

johnpseudonym — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:53:08 +0000

Dear Calvin Trillin,

Bite me.

Sincerely,

John Pseudonym
Governor General of Canada

By: Bittersweet

Bittersweet — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:46:57 +0000

Plus, you are right, Balk, Calvin Trillin is a freakin' national treasure.

By: Bittersweet

Bittersweet — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:44:57 +0000

Yep, says the 'Senior Manager' who manages no one and lives about 7 levels down from the global CEO…

By: iplaudius

iplaudius — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:37:46 +0000

Beg your pardon: since I didn't have all the javascript on the page enabled, the video didn't appear.

By: amuselouche

amuselouche — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:28:15 +0000

My answer too! I love that piece.

By: sunnyciegos

sunnyciegos — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:25:32 +0000

I went to a reading of this at the Strand. I totally expected some funny poems and got leveled instead. My heart hurt.

By: Balk

Balk — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:23:32 +0000

It is the video itself. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

By: iplaudius

iplaudius — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:21:31 +0000

The piece he wrote in memory of his wife is remarkable.* If someone asked me what love is, I might give them that text by way of an answer.

(Could we please have the link to the piece described in the third sentence of this post?)

Three cheers for Trillin.

*Calvin Trillin, Personal History, â€œAlice, Off the Page,â€ The New Yorker, March 27, 2006, p. 44.

By: jfruh

jfruh — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:17:52 +0000

I remember when I was at my first job and got "promoted" from copy editor to "senior copy editor." This entailed no concrete change in duties or role (I was the only copy editor working there at the time), but did come with a modest raise and a sort of affirmation that that they liked what I was doing and was hoping I would stick around, and would also let me off the leash a little bit. Around the same time, my boss's boss's boss was "promoted" from "editor in chief" to "vice president of editorial," which, it quickly became clear, was a promotion not unlike the one I had received (though I imagine that the raise he received was larger both in relative and absolute terms).

Anyway, that's when I learned that job titles are often a sort of social currency, not an actual explanation of what you do or where you stand on the org chart.

By: Baboleen

Baboleen — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:15:43 +0000

Another member of the obnoxiously articulate society.