"The quaint hiss and crackle of the blunted needle as it gently rose and fell with the warp of the album sounded like the ether, through which the dead were hopelessly calling to us." — A New Yorker short.

I figure Jonathan Lethem's recent contribution to The New Yorker, a tale called "The Porn Critic," is the magazine's first story about a porn critic. Fun fact: My first college newspaper editor later became a professional porn critic/cataloger. The Daily Northwestern has started many careers.

Accompanying the fiction is what I imagine is the magazine's first art in which the illustrator got to make up names of many pornographic films.

The drawing has two titles Lethem mentions. The rest apparently come from the illustrator and the minds of other New Yorker staff. Highlights include: Meals on Wheels, Six Days from Sunday, All on Eve, Adam's Ribs, Game Theory, Butt Man Returns, The Battle of Brisbane, Logjammin', See Men Run, Tugboat, Game Changer, Window Licker, That Can Be Arranged, Love & Caring, Jumbo (a nod to Robert Caro excerpts?), and Apres Moi.

I hope there was an all-office email soliciting ideas for porn titles. If so, the magazine owes us a match-the-porno-with-the-staffer Web game. For instance: Tugboat, McPhee. Window Licker, Marx. Apres Moi, Gopnik!

But I've fallen off topic.

The initial reason I wanted to blog about Lethem's story was because the first paragraph is so good. The full story may not be safe for work if you aren't in publishing or a Gender Studies department. But the initial paragraph is clean enough — and gloriously sordid enough — for here.

Kromer couldn’t operate hedonism but these days it operated him, in the way that a punctuated cylinder operates a player piano. What he knew came mostly from books—Anaïs Nin, William S. Burroughs, “The Hite Report,” stuff gleaned as a teen-ager from his parents’ shelves. Yet, in his current circle of Manhattan friends, who were mostly graduate students and legal proofreaders, Kromer played the role of satyr. The more he protested that it was only a single heroin-laced cigarette that had happened to be placed in his hand, or that his so-called threesome had consisted of scarcely more than heavy petting and a brush with sleep apnea, the more they looked to Kromer as their saint of degeneracy.

Maybe it was a combination of missing breakfast and having no-meat Lent Friday yesterday, or maybe I can related to a certain level of love for cookies, but Stephen Dunn's half-joking, half-purposed "Testimony" poem in the new New Yorker actually did something for me. About this poem and a second one, Dunn tells the magazine in a side interview:

In each case I was fooling around. In each case, none of the details in the poem has any experiential base. This gave me the latitude to pursue a certain imaginative logic. When working like this, as I prefer to work, one has to trust his seriousness to manifest in the face of his frolic with situation and language.

I'm also a fan of Dunn's "The Imagined" and his self-interview here.

I agree: to listen well is an act of curiosity and respect. It presumes that someone has something to say. But I know it’s not enough to be a good listener. The best listener listens, à la Wallace Stevens, “with the innermost ear of the mind.” Then what he says in response must reflect the quality of his hearing.

About Dunn's beliefs, I have no idea. Two minutes of Google has no easy answers there. Across some interviews and poems, he appears to be a seeker or, actively reflecting that last passage, a questioner.

At church for Ash Wednesday, the new translations continued to throw me off. I've gone back and forth on them from a language perspective.

Does shaking up wording get you positively away from mere recitation, refreshing the interaction? Or does it get you negatively lost in foreign customs, where the salutations throw you so much you never reach a deeper conversation? On top of this on Ash Wednesday, the Mass was bilingual, which I didn't mind a bit (seeing two translations of a word at once makes you consider more the word's meaning and root), and the song choice was weak, which I did mind. They were too weakly purple.

An exception to the choices came near the end, though. A song called Ashes, one I'd heard before, had a cloying pace but two amazing lines in the middle: "We offer you our failures, we offer you attempts / The gifts not fully given, the dreams not fully dreamt." The wording was so unique and stilted, just like our failed attempts in life. Despite my call-and-response trouble and whatever musical choices, those lines and the Dunn pieces reminded me the newest translation happened each time we attempted to listen and respond. Dunn has his outcome. You had yours. I had mine. Not full, we continued to trust in manifestation.

A year and a half ago, I hit Conde Zero, having read all of the copies of The New Yorker and Wired in my home. As usual after that occurrence, I immediately fell behind again. Playing catch up this autumn and winter, I attempted to focus on reading The New Yorker a bit more than Wired.

This week, finally, I caught up with Remnick.

For a period of a few hours before the mail arrived, there were no New Yorker issues to read. It was unbelievable. I was glad! I had managed to catch up again! But then I discovered the coffee-table consequence.

Every once in a while, at the beginning of a day (almost never later in the day, it seems), I run across passage in saved notes. Courtesy my favorite magazine, the passage is what Neil Young says to Jonathan Demme as they chat on Skype and edit a concert video together. They disagree about whether to include a crowd shot. What you get is not only a musician's amusing rant, but a reminder of how, famous or not, we are all the audience, the performer (the observed) and kind of silly.

Yeah, but generally we hate the fucking audience. They disturb the whole thing. (On the laptop screen, Young waves his arms back and forth in the air, in the manner of an enthusiastic concertgoer.) They’ve got people who do that. They have people who wave their hands back and forth in the background. That’s what they do. It doesn’t matter what the music is. It’s a way to make a living, I guess. (Demme looks up at the clock and exchanges a glance with an assistant.) I remember we did a tour, and they had these cranes out in the audience, flying around, casting cones of light down on the audience, so that everyone in the audience had these halos on their heads. I walked out onstage and said to myself, “This is fucked up. I might not even play. This is so wrong.” All night long I was thinking, Why do I have to see people? I’ve never seen them before. I hate looking at them.

Today was planning day at work.

We work in two-week cycles. The first day of the cycle is planning day. The team gathers. We review, frame and prioritize the cycle's work. If the effort is part of a project just beginning, we discuss overall goals, and we demarcate the first chunk of work. What pieces do we address first, we ask, and how well do they put us on the road to completion?

Riding to our offices this morning, the following passage turned up in a story from a couple weeks ago. Pianist Jeremy Denk was writing about the experience of recording a piece in a studio. He described the initial moment, of seeing all of the pieces, knowing their interaction potential:

The microphones and the piano face each other like enemies. The piano is a very finicky instrument to record, with an existential problem: attack followed by decay, every note a death. You want to capture the ping, the clarity of the beginning of each note, but you also want to get the ephemeral singing tone that remains. It's a complicated balance: the souls of the piano and the pianist hang in it. The microphone's distance from the piano is a key variable, affecting the roundness of the sound, and how much room you get versus how much piano. And since the piano is harp-shaped, tapering from long, thick bass strings to teeny treble strings, the precise angle of the microphone determines the sound's shape — fatter or thinner, squeakier or burlier. Finally, the microphones themselves are not absolutely neutral; each one is like an ear, with its own propensities.

I dog-eared that passage's page this morning because the description felt like the day ahead. Looking back tonight, the writing was spot on.

The piano was the Internet, attack followed by decay. Whatever things we set out to create today, future notes eventually replaced them. We had to capture newness but also sustainability, all of which had to die.

We each also sat at difference distances from different sections of our piano. However solid, unified or clear any communication was, we each by nature heard slightly differently. And we each had our propensities.

By day's end, in each of the projects I'm on, we completed most of our planning for the cycle. There were frustrations, but we reached strong blueprints and levels of understanding for the days ahead. We weren't world-class pianists yet. But we were ready to begin playing together.

If we hadn't finished ready, if we hadn't reached understanding, video that found my stream tonight would have helped. The footage showed Prince performing a 13-minute, pre-album version of Purple Rain, so raw and intense I stopped my multitasking tonight to watch it. He of course wasn't on a piano, but he played the guitar like one, every note bound to die yet so individually important, the origination of the sound crucial in relation to the pick-up, the resulting shapes part of the full journey.

Depending on what kind of day you had — fatter or thinner, squeakier or burlier – the song could help you too, imperfect but arcing forward.

If you're a poet and writing about how you're very old, they'll allow it.

The third sentence of Donald Hall's recent "Out the Window: The view in winter" about reaching the winter of his years reads: "I am eighty-three, I teeter when I walk, I no longer drive, I look out the window."

Comma splice explosion! I love it just for how the sentence trashes the normal rules. I kid about the reason above, of course. This usage lands in the sometimes rule that shorter sentences don't have to obey rules.

E.B. White, Strunk partner, New Yorker writer, would have loved it. The rest of us can worry about "it's okay if your famous" grammar elitism.

I know it's only about 9:30 on the East Coast. But whether you are a Yankees fan or a Yankees hater, whether you think "annunciatory" is a word, whether you've enjoyed Ian Frazier's Radiolab find about Tic Tac Toe or his amazing New Yorker history of trans-Siberian van trips or a million other things, you may love this sentence of his, a recent lede:

"On a dark winter evening when Yankee Stadium is all lit up, it radiates an annunciatory glow, as if an amazing idea had just occurred to it."

"Horse Piano," by Anna McDonald, resolves well but is so strange.

I'm working on catching on my New Yorker issues. What else is new?

But I like, when editors put pieces of content together in a magazine, when they fit moods. The grace notes work for no one but the reader who has, for some span of pages, given over himself or herself to the mood, perhaps after finding a personal and shared connection to it.

On one page of the December 12 issue, we read about Jon Gruden:

Gruden wakes up early, at three-seventeen (an arbitrary alarm-clock setting that stuck), and on a recent Thursday morning he arrived at the F.F.C.A. at around three-forty-five, pulling his white Mercedes into the empty lot. He wanted to learn everything he could about the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs, who were playing in the following Monday’s game. Gruden spent the morning examining “melts,” video compilations that allow him to view every play from just about every angle.

He is fit and reflexively physical, with a habit, common to coaches, of accentuating his statements with pokes, taps, and gentle shoves. But he has trained himself to sit still for hours, holding a professional-grade remote control called a Cowboy clicker, watching plays forward and backward, at full speed and in slow motion. He works in silence, except for his own occasional remarks. Every week, as he gets to know the two teams, he quickly comes to view their achievements and blunders as his own. “That wasn’t very good,” he murmured, after one uninspired Chiefs sequence. “That wasn’t our best effort. Wonder what happened.” Then he hit rewind and watched the play again.

The next page, as the Gruden pieces continues, we get a poem called "The New Song" by W.S. Merwin. He begins, "For some time I thought there was time / and that there would always be time / for what I had a mind to do." The poem starts sadly, acknowledges the time passing in repetition, but manages to find a pleasure in the onrushing reality.

If life is the Cowboy clicker, at least you love football. At least you love, as Merwin does, the song of a waking thrush. In the winter, when the mornings are harder, the Cowboy clicker requires more of an answer.