The Dish

From Rag To Comedy Riches

George Meyer’s late-’80s humor magazine Army Man had a staff that went on to fill the ranks of The Simpsons, SNL, and The New Yorker. James Folta scans old copies of “America’s Only Magazine” and marvels that it isn’t more well-known:

[W]hat makes Army Man‘s humor so relatable is that many of the pieces are pointedly critical and, like much great humor, evidently reflect the writers’ frustrations. The jokes land with more honesty and truth as a result. … It’s the density of the jokes that makes them more than just a quick laugh. They are able to pull in large ideas, universal gripes, and pain. This universality and relatability is what would make the Simpsons one of the greatest shows of all time. …

In the age of Twitter, it can be tempting to compare Army Man‘s short, punchy humor to tweets. But unlike Twitter, Army Man has no chaff. This is the power of an editor with a strong vision. Meyer chose the funniest of funny. Careful attention is given to each joke but also to the unity of the absurdist, off-kilter voice. With Twitter and democratic or algorithmic organization, the steading hand of an editor is lost. Meyer’s editorial guidance makes Army Man more than what it would appear to be.

The magazine’s success would be its ultimate downfall.

One of Army Man‘s biggest fans was producer Sam Simon. When Simon needed to quickly pull together a writing staff for the first season of The Simpsons, he opened a copy of America’s Only Magazine and hired George Meyer, Jon Vitti, and John Swartzwelder. Later, most of the masthead of Army Man would end up writing for The Simpsons. Which was great for The Simpsons, but it doomed the magazine. Meyer didn’t want to sacrifice the quality of either by trying to juggle his attention. So after just three issues, the magazine stopped.

Army Man‘s ranks also included Jack Handey, Andy Borowitz, and Bob Odenkirk.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Sex And The Civil War

Angela Serratore revisits a curious chapter in America’s sexual history. In 1862, Nashville’s population of sex workers had risen more than sevenfold over the past two years, and gonorrhea and syphilis were on the rise among Union soldiers. After unsuccessfully trying to expel the prostitutes from the city, George Spalding, provost marshal of Nashville, legalized the profession:

Resigning himself to the fact that prostitutes would ply their trade and soldiers would engage them, he reasoned that the women might as well sell sex safely, and so out of sheer desperation, Spalding and the Union Army created in Nashville’s the country’s first system of legalized prostitution.

Spalding’s proposal was simple: Each prostitute would register herself, obtaining for $5 a license entitling her to work as she pleased. A doctor approved by the Army would be charged with examining prostitutes each week, a service for which each woman would pay a 50 cent fee. Women found to have venereal diseases would be sent to a hospital established (in the home of the former Catholic bishop) for the treatment of such ailments, paid for in part by the weekly fees. Engaging in prostitution without a license, or failing to appear for scheduled examinations, would result in arrest and a jail term of 30 days.

The prospect of participating in the sex trade without fear of arrest or prosecution was instantly attractive to most of Nashville’s prostitutes, and by early 1864 some 352 women were on record as being licensed, and another hundred had been successfully treated for syphilis and other conditions hazardous to their industry. In the summer of 1864, one doctor at the hospital remarked on a “marked improvement” in the licensed prostitutes’ physical and mental health, noting that at the beginning of the initiative the women had been characterized by use of crude language and little care for personal hygiene, but were soon virtual models of “cleanliness and propriety.”

(Image: Case Western Reserve University’s Dittrick Medical History Center)

A Poem For Saturday

Wendell Berry, prolific and versatile poet, essayist, and fiction writer, and a dedicated activist, has lived for decades as a writer and small scale farmer on seventy-five acres in Henry County, Kentucky where his ancestors settled in the early 19th century.

Berry has written novels set there, including Hannah Coulter (2004) and A Place on Earth (1967). Along with his many books of poems – among them, Given: New Poems (2005) and The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (1998) – he is the author, as well, of many collections of essays, including The Art of the Commonplace: Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002) and What Are People For? (1990). His many books of stories include That Distant Land: The Collected Stories of Wendell Berry (2002).

In 2010, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal. Today and in the days ahead, we will post several characteristically beautiful poems of his, beginning with “The Meadow”:

In the town’s graveyard the oldest plot now frees itself
of sorrow, the myrtle of the graves grown wild. The last
who knew the faces who had these names are dead.
and now the names fade, dumb on the stones, wild
as shadows in the grass, clear to the rabbit and the wren.
Ungrieved, the town’s ancestry fits the earth. They become
a meadow, their alien marble grown native as maple.

Creative Voices

A Radiolab podcast reviews the career of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, who turned 80 this week. In an interview with Suzanne Koven of The Rumpus, Sacks discusses his new book Hallucinations and the connection between hallucinations and creativity:

Rumpus: You describe the hallucinations Henry James had on his death bed—vivid scenes of the Napoleonic Wars—and novelist Amy Tan’s hallucinations when she had Lyme disease. Do you think that creative people have more interesting hallucinations? Or do you think they simply describe their hallucinations in a more interesting way?

Sacks: Well that’s a very nice, contrasting pair. Amy called them “a detritus of a dream,” or something like that and had not much interest, whereas Henry James thought it was some subjacent fantasy which he’d had all his life and finally sort of took over. At one time I did read a book called The Voices of Poetry, where the thesis was very much that a “voice” is not just a metaphoric reference to the muse.

Rumpus: Have you had that experience in writing? Of hearing a voice?

Sacks: No. Yes. Although I wouldn’t call it … I’m not sure what to call it. I have it less now, but with my first book, with Migraine, there were many, many problems, including a sort of mad, internal threat in which I said to myself, in September of ’68, You have ten days to write it and if you’re not finished by ten days, you’ll commit suicide. This sounds even madder than it was. You have to know some of the background. Anyhow, under my own threat or joke, I first started writing and within hours the feeling of terror was replaced by a feeling of joy in the writing and, in particular, a feeling that I was taking the book down to dictation. It came to me absolutely fluidly by a sort of inner voice. I was excited. I didn’t want to go to bed. I slept for two or three hours a night and no more. Perhaps I was hypomanic. I’m not sure what word to use.

So that was very much like hearing a voice. I can’t say it was anyone’s voice in particular. But my verbal auditory imagery is as vivid as my visual imagery is poor. My musical imagery is somewhere in between.

“What If Superheroes Were Psychotic?”

That’s the question Amber Frost thinks is posed by the short film above:

In this beautiful, unsettling short film, “The Flying Man,” a powerful Übermensch actually takes it upon himself to be judge, jury, and executioner. Unlike the usual underdog superheroes of comics, where the audience is meant to casually rationalize their operation outside the rule of law, we are left completely chilled as he drops people from dizzying heights to their terrifying deaths with a sadistic resolve. He is in no way the protagonist, or even an anti-hero: he’s a terrorist.

A Stroll Through Literature

Matt Seidel emphasizes the metaphorical power of describing how literary characters walk. One example:

“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” betrays a pathological fear of “biological degeneration” that manifests itself in the narrator’s loathing of the Innsmouth natives, those “blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design” who hop irregularly through abandoned streets.

The tale is partly about an abiding embarrassment over the clumsiness of our ancestors as they crawled forth from the ocean and were literally fish out of water. Aristophanic gymnasts these Innsmouth creatures are not. Fish-like though they may be, their motion at times seems “positively simian.” Particularly noteworthy is their “alien-rhythmed footfalls,” the “dog-like sub-humanness of their crouching gait,” as they surge “inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare.” The narrator feels a growing and uncanny connection to the natives, and thus in a nice touch, he manages to escape partly by imitating their shambling hop. The walk, though feigned, nonetheless reveals a certain truth about his origins. By the end of the tale, and after some timely physiological changes, the narrator becomes a Prufrock with gills who can more than merely fantasize about cavorting with underwater sirens.

The View From Your Window

Arles, France, 7.34 pm

Essay What?

Leslie Jamison uses Rebecca Solnit’s “collage-style memoir,” The Faraway Nearby, to consider the contours of the essay:

As a genre grounded in productive uncertainty—collage rather than argument, exploration rather than assertion—the essay is constantly posing the conundrum of its own existence: What should an essay do? What should it offer? It finds its etymological roots in the old French essai: to attempt. It blends inquiry and confession into a hybrid weave that deepens each. It draws personal material into public mattering.

In a recent New York Times Op-Ed called “The Essayfication of Everything,” Christy Wampole traces these exploratory practices back to Montaigne—godfather of the essay and patron saint of strange conceptual constellations—in examining how the modern essay has updated an older mode of assemblage: “Banal, everyday phenomena—what we eat, things upon which we stumble, things that Pinterest us—rub elbows implicitly with the Big Questions: What are the implications of the human experience? What is the meaning of life?” Solnit’s book forces us to confront that these questions of formal construction—How is the essay assembled? How do its parts rub elbows?—are also questions of emotional motivation: What drives the essayist toward these acts of assemblage? What abiding hungers make us want to link the Big and the banal?

The Best Of The Dish Today

It was a sad day for me. My dear friend, the photographer Norma Holt, let go of this life this afternoon at around 5.30 pm. At 94, she was still thriving as recently as a couple of months ago. I saw her in New York City just before I left for Provincetown, a place she truly felt at home. A slide-show of her photography is above. A summary of her career is here. A photographic appreciation of her remarkable grace and stubbornness in her nineties – by Jane Paradise – is here. I wrote a post about her last January. I can’t summon up much else right now, except that she taught me to live until I die. But I will soon.

Today, it seemed as if the Republican death spiral quickened. Brooks did his best, but they are not listening. They don’t have to. We initiated a NSFW Saturday night and I wondered if there are double standards about male and female nudity.

If you think Islamist terrorism is a phantasm, look into this face. But don’t mess with Glenn Greenwald.

The most popular post was this one illustrated with vaginal mucus, followed by the corpse of Trayvon Martin. Both SFW.

May she rest in peace.