Ken Levine’s Play In May
From Broadway World, April 25, 2023, “Ken Levine’s ‘Guilty Pleasures: An Unapologetic Comedy’ Premieres At The Black Box”
Mr. Levine began contributing to The New Yorker in January of 2022. Visit his blog here.
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Latest Addition To The Spill Library
It took me five years to get around to John McPhee’s Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. The delay was due to the word “process” in the title. Anytime I see “process” in relation to writing or drawing, I shut down, or run the other way, or turn tail — any one of those fun familiar (and tired) expressions will do. Then, last week, after coming across an old review of Mr. McPhee’s book, I took a glance at a snippet of the “Editors and Publisher” chapter provided online and was immediately taken in. The gem of a chapter is primarily about William Shawn, Mr. McPhee’s, and The New Yorker‘s long-time editor. There is, within the chapter, a helpful listing of authors who have written at some length about Mr. Shawn; Mr. McPhee rightly offers that his own name will now be added — “Editors and Publisher” is yet another chapter in the Shawn biography readers must assemble for themselves.
The are diagrams, but no cartoons, in Mr. McPhee’s book. Lee Lorenz, the magazine’s late great cartoonist and art/cartoon editor (from 1973 -1997) is mentioned, as is Shawn’s successor, Robert Gottlieb, who, of course, had final say on the magazine’s cartoons from 1987-1992. As the book just arrived, I’m still in the exploring phase with it (I generally don’t read books from cover-to-cover; I thumb through and land on a section, then begin reading).
I didn’t realize, until I read the flap copy of Draft No. 4, that Mr. McPhee had published 32 books. The Spill library includes the classic Coming Into Alaska, as well as The Headmaster, The Pine Barrens, The John McPhee Reader, and Table Of Contents. That leaves approximately twenty plus McPhees to go. Over thirty years ago, when my wife and I moved upstate (upstate New York that is), we soon discovered that one of our closest neighbors was Pat Crow, McPhee’s New Yorker editor. One day, Pat, intent on broadening my McPhee library, handed me a small stack of McPhee’s books (most of them about geology). I never got around to reading them because I still had some antsy feelings about a difficult geology college class (the teacher’s name was, no joke, Mr. Rockman). Maybe it’s finally time to charge into the pile of unread McPhees — the beginning of a mini-McPhee Fest in this house.