Displaced

Maira Kalman has been doing New Yorker covers and illustrations and children’s books and all sorts of things for ages. She crossed my path officially when a friend gave me the re-issue of Elements of Style, for which Kalman had done the art work.

I didn’t love the pictures at first, but the whole thing, as an endeavor grew on me. She pulled odd things out of the text to illustrate, marginal things and I liked that more and more.

Then she did a blog for the Times that I loved and that ended up in her book Principles of Uncertainty and which I gave to everyone for Christmas that year. Her optimism and art lightened the sky when I was suffering and losing perspective.

Well, she’s back: she’s got a last Friday of the month blog, again at NYTimes.com.

(If you’d like to see her in person, there’s a brief video of an interview on Principles of Uncertainty here.)

Check out my pal Molly’s sophisticated taste: she reads The New Yorker and gets her New York fix. Go Molly!

I got The New Yorker for ages. It languished. I couldn’t read it fast enough and that made me feel guilty. Also, I only read bits of it. As a New Yorker and an intellectual of sorts, I feel ought to have enjoyed it as much as everyone else does. Maybe that’s because I’m 2/3 of the way through half a dozen heavyweight non-fiction books on psychology and society and I can only take so much. Also, it’s like NPR: I can only listen to that same tone for so many hours before I can’t anymore. Does that make me a bad New Yorker?

Instead, I read straight-out New York porn: New York Magazine, you are my secret honey. You even have a centerfold and I love you for that. Plus, you like sunsets and puppies and walks on the beach. No way! Me too! And yes, I read it for the articles, so get off my back.