Adrian Tomine's New Yorker Cover

I really like this cover illustration by Adrian Tomine for the New Yorker (Feb 25, 2008).  I like it so much that I’m going to talk about each frame right now. This will be sort of like ‘brain storming.’

[Going in conventional reading order]

I. I like that the writer is female, kinda seems like it would be lame it if was a male. I like that she has a white Macbook because I’m always suspicious of people who have the more powerful RAM-type black Macbook. Is Apple trying to invert racism by making the black one better? I bet those post-its and pieces of paper on the wall are supposed to be notes, like “chapter. 4, Emile dies,” or “no similes!”

II. I also like that the agent is colored (damn, I don’t think “colored” is the right word — though I’m thinking more of “coloring book” since it’s a cartoon). He seems either Indian or Filipino or Mexican. (Is it funny how you’re either black, white, or brown — and how brown is ‘every other race’?) I don’t like how the binder-clip is in the middle of the manuscript, seems unrealistic.

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A book review from Louis Menand turns into a pretty evenhanded look at the age old question: Can writing be taught?

I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.