The complete nerd

I recently ran across my friend Laura's post about The Complete New Yorker DVD set and James Wolcott's enthusiastic review of it in New Criterion. Wolcott's thoughtful piece isn't free, but it's the best piece of writing I've seen about the set, and it's worth looking up.

As Wolcott and most reviewers have noted, the collection's search function is bad. I could list many complaints, but perhaps most irksome is that the search window is so small. I have a nice big display, but I can only search using this cramped, cluttered little interface, which is made all the more unattractive by the extensive use of bold typeface, a design no-no since, oh, 1995.


I'm also frustrated by the limited options. Yes, under Department I can click Cartoon and see only cartoons. But what if I want to see everything except cartoons? I mean no disrespect to The New Yorker's signature funnies, but there are a lot of them in any given issue, and for the purposes of my browsing I am, for the most part, not that interested.

I could go on. The good news is that with a little IT elbow grease I've devised much more agreeable ways to poke around this marvelous archive. What makes them possible is the fact that although the images of the magazine pages are encrypted, the database with all the information about the archive is not. It is, for those of you following along at home, a plain old SQLite database, as I learned from this page ages ago when I was trying to figure out how to copy all the DVDs to a hard drive.

I have a bit of experience with databases, so after much fiddling -- which involved making a copy of the 640-megabyte database file, installing what's called an ODBC driver to make the database accessible, and dusting off some programming skills -- I used sturdy old Access 97 to build searching and browsing tools that make me a much happier Complete New Yorker owner.

What I'm most pleased with is this form, which lets me look at the article information in a nice big grid. In the upper left corner are drop-down boxes that let me filter by month and year. I like being able to see article abstracts at much greater length, and to see several abstracts on the screen at once. It's also helpful to see the articles in order by page number. If there's a system to how the built-in search interface orders articles, I don't know what it is.


In this form I am filtering out categories of items and articles I don't want to see, like cartoons and -- sorry, poets -- poems. (I was amused to see that in the database, these categories are collectively identified as "rubrics," which seems a New Yorker-y sort of word.) I somewhat crudely do this filtering by directly editing the underlying database query. The query is in SQL, the computer language widely used for manipulating databases. My New Yorker SQL looks like this (it would probably look better if the New Yorker fact checkers had a crack at it):


I also made this form, which lists movie reviews. I love New Yorker movie reviews, including Pauline Kael's and also those by the likes of Penelope Gilliatt. (Remember her?) But another problem with the Complete New Yorker database is that the data entry was sloppy -- surprising, given The New Yorker's famous fussiness -- so for many movie reviews there are no abstracts. But at least the movie titles have been entered as keywords, so on this screen, for example, I can see that Roger Angell's 1979 piece "High and Low" is about (get it?) Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Jerk. Cool.


Of course, when I use this software to find an article I'm interested in, I still have to clumsily switch over to The Complete New Yorker program and look it up. But what I have done here is, for my purposes at least, a big improvement. I have long been so very happy with The Complete New Yorker, and now I am even happier.

Good word

"(Public relations is shown in this picture to be an even more dreadful doom than alcoholism, with the added disadvantage that one doesn't practice it simply because one is sick.)"

-- Brendan Gill, on The Days of Wine and Roses

Ahoy

Good word

"Happiness is a warmed-over event, happiness is half a million friends in a sandbox with no fighting, happiness is 'Woodstock,' and 'Woodstock' isn't peanuts, for the movie is going to make a mint because of the balm it hands out at a bad time. I must say that I found seeing it a bit like going to a Busby Berkeley film in the Depression and then whistling the tunes while sheltering from a hail of falling suicides."

-- Penelope Gilliat, The New Yorker, April 11, 1970

Good word

"Whereas most cartoonists, lacking the economic resources of a Nero, a William Randolph Hearst, or a sir George Reresby Sitwell, are unable to amplify their fantasies into anything so ambitious as a Golden House, a San Simeon, or a Renishaw, I reflected that Disney (whose brother and chief business associate, Roy, has a sound understanding of banking principles) has since 1928 managed to arm his assault on the impersonal universe with ever more expensively contrived choreography, color, stereo, and wide-screen gimmickry -- these efforts reaching their climax, I now perceived, in Disneyland, where, in this most elaborate of the Master's animated productions, his live public has been fitted into the cartoon frame to play an aesthetic as well as an economic role."

-- Kevin Wallace, The New Yorker, Sept. 7, 1963

Pray TV

Frances Fitzgerald's 1990 New Yorker article on Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker is a fascinating look at an ugly time. Fitzgerald is pointed in describing the follies of the 1980s televangelists in general and in particular those of the Bakkers, whose theology was thin but whose television appeal was limitless. They convinced viewers to send in money for their ministries, then skimmed off healthy portions of the take for their crazily lavish lifestyle. There's also lots of interesting backstory about the mainstreaming of Pentacostalism, and the Bakkers' not altogether comfortable place in that tradition.

Fitzgerald's tour of the Bakkers' South Carolina theme park, Heritage USA, is hilarious and devastating ("In Billy Graham's reconstructed family house, there was no sign of Billy Graham"). Even better is a passage describing how the Bakkers were so very much a product of their time:

They personified the most characteristic excesses of the 1980s -- the greed, the love of glitz, and the shamelessness -- which in their case was so pure as to almost amount to a kind of innocence. To this list could be added narcissism, the characteristic disease of the age. The Bakkers, like many people on Wall Street and in Washington, celebrated freedom from the punishing old laws and preached faith in miracles.

Fair abuse

I'm a bit of a World's Fair buff, partly because for many years I lived near the old fairgrounds of one of the most famous expos, Chicago's Columbian Exposition, which in 1893 blew minds with electricity and dancing girls. But I also was enchanted by the 1982 World's Fair, which took place in my natal city of Knoxville, Tenn. The terra cotta warriors! The giant Rubik's Cube! The jet pack guy! I was 11 that summer.

So I was intrigued to find, in the Complete New Yorker DVDs, a review of the Knoxville fair by E.J. Kahn. Kahn was, in that fussy New Yorker way, unimpressed:

Dinah Shore, a native Tennessean, who served as mistress of ceremonies at the grand opening, drawled, "What you're goin' to see here is goin' to knock the socks off your feet." Well, not quite. This fair is not apt even to loosen your shoelaces.

As near as I can tell, though, Kahn's chief quibble with the Knoxville fair was that it wasn't Expo 67, but what was?

Way up high

Some years back I was enthralled by Henry S.F. Cooper's book A House in Space, published in 1976, about life for three successive crews aboard the early-1970s U.S. space station Skylab. Only later did I realize the book first appeared as two installments in Cooper's long, wonderful series of articles about space in The New Yorker, and only later still -- last week, actually -- did I look up the articles in the Complete New Yorker DVD set and revisit this marvelous work of science journalism, the finest piece of writing on space exploration I've read.

I'm fascinated by those cranky astronauts, their impatience with the color of the clothes NASA designed for them, their delight at floating about in the roomy interior of the station, and especially their awe at the planet Earth as they gazed at it through the observation window.