It's nearly time for the Salzburg Academy again — congrats to those going! — and there's no better reminder of why the Academy exists than in this week's New Yorker. Ken Auletta profiles Afghanistan media mogul Saad Mohseni and the complicated nature of his broadcasting.

Among the angles, Auletta writes about the Afghan Star show, the local take on American Idol. "Every Thursday night, an estimated one-third of Afghanistan's thirty million citizens gather in front of television sets to watch," Auletta writes. "In rural places without electricity, people fill generators with gasoline or hook up their TVs to car batteries."

The culmination of the passage is a sublime reminder about speech.

As on "American Idol," winners on "Afghan Star" are determined by the judges, the audience, and text messages sent from mobile phones throughout the country. Before the show aired, Mohseni made a deal with Roshan, the country's leading mobile-phone company, and ran promotional ads on Tolo and Arman instructing citizens how to place a vote. (The text messages cost voters about seven cents, the equivalent of a loaf of bread; three hundred thousand votes were cast in the final week.) With suspicious egalitarianism, the finalists have often been from each of the three main Afghan ethnic groups: Tajiks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras. At first, losers reacted badly on the air, smashing stage equipment and claiming ethnic prejudice, but, because their tantrums were so public, they were humiliated and seen as dividers.

In the third season, one of the finalists was Lema Sahar, a Pashtun woman from Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban. Religious leaders were outraged that a woman was allowed to perform in public, and Sahar received death threats. In the "Afghan Star" documentary, she said, "We hide the songbooks and other things at night. If the Taliban come at night, we have a special place to hide the computer. If they find something, they kill you." She was undaunted. "If I do not sing, what else can I do?" she said. Sahar's performances on the show demonstrate a somewhat tenuous relationship with pitch and rhythm, but she was a crowd favorite. Mohseni told a reporter at the time, "They all realized how it was for her to come from Kandahar, and we all want to root for the underdog." The text-message voting did something else, Mohseni says: It "has changed Afghanistan in ways you could not imagine ten years ago. It has given people power to vote someone off."

As my coffee table and I aren't having the greatest year in keeping up with The New Yorker (every week, Remnick? haven't you heard of the Internet destroying publishing revenues?), I'm clearing my mind today before reading the self-debated "20 Under 40" summer fiction issue.

First, I've just finished reading the short-story collection Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me, the birthday gift from my brother that pretty much makes up for the time when we were kids and he gave me a crossword puzzle book when he was the one who loved crossword puzzles. Rob, consider all the crosswords forgiven.

Here is my favorite passage from that book that isn't totally obscene or the last essay in the book, as I try to stay away from quoting endings. It's from Will Forte's "Beware of Math Tutors who Ride Motorcycles."

… As we got off the phone, I wondered about Steve. Was he some tattooed clubber guy? Was he on a collegiate sports team? Would a representative for a modeling agency approach him on the street and give him their card?

I walked back to the van and, in a jealous mini-rage, slammed the door hard enough to provoke a "Trouble in paradise?" comment from one of the ski teamers. Could be, ski teamer, I thought to myself. Could be.

That night, I slyly asked Michelle all about Steve. I didn't like what I heard. Apparently, Steve was a blond-haired, blue-eyed surfer. He was nice, smart and funny. But nothing scared me more than the information I found out next: Steve played bass for a popular campus band called the Brewmasters. Oh, great, a fucking musician. When pressed, Michelle admitted that she found Steve attractive, but claimed she didn't think of him in "that way." As I went on with my questions, Michelle became annoyed. Didn't I believe her? They were just friends. Steve was helping her with her studies. If anything, he should be thanked — I mean, the more solid grasp she had on her math theorems, the quicker she could do future math theorem homework, and the quick she could meet me for romantic date nights at local taco establishments.

Next, I watched Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears play Get Yo Shit.

Remnick, I'm ready. Right after breakfast. And more procrastinating.

I'm excited to see Karen Russell, long a fav of this blog, on The New Yorker list of "20 under 40" fiction writers. "The list will be published in the double fiction issue of The New Yorker that arrives on newsstands Monday," the NYT tells us. Can we have writing with this list, please?

Between Russell, the fantastically debuting Joshua Ferris, all the folks who have blown me away in their New Yorker work (like Yiyun Li), let's feature their short stuff and forget about Talk of the Town for a week.

In related news, it appears that Russell's Swamplandia! is now due for either a February 2011 or spring 2011 release. Looking forward to it.

Update, days later: Should've mentioned that I first heard about the issue via Gawker's quality "How to Complain About The New Yorker's 20 Favorite Writers Under 40." And the post answers my concern — "eight of whom will be published in an upcoming 'fiction' special; the other 12 in subsequent issues of the magazine." Awesome.

Even the people who love it the most (and fight our wars). When his less-than-glowing quote appeared in the Times this week, the NYer line jumped to mind. It had struck me at the time as progressive, an example of how to use an app well. But you attend enough briefings…

New Yorker, September 2008:

Petraeus is a professional briefer, and with a PowerPoint slide before him he will slip into a salesman's rapid-fire patter. He illustrates his remarks with a laser pointer; he will swirl a bright dot of emerald light around a particular sentence fragment until a listener risks succumbing to hypnosis. Petraeus and his staff will discuss at length the shading of colors on a slide, or the direction of arrows depicting causality. When I asked, in a skeptical tone, about this passionate use of PowerPoint, the General responded in the staccato of the medium: "It's how you communicate big ideas–to communicate them effectively."

New York Times, April 2010:

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is "just agony," nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.

But is there pride involved? Outside the watch of the Times, he's still presenting enthusiastically, the 92nd Street Y shows this week.

I had to present a Powerpoint deck this week. I printed it out.

(Sorry, trees.)

Good for the Post Story Lab. Steve Hendrix noticed this line in a New Yorker blog item and posted about it: "The biggest play of the game may have been Alex Ovechkin's open-ice demolition of Jagr, which led to a quick Russian goal and an arena-wide gasp (it was the hockey equivalent of the collapse of the North Tower)."

Like Hendrix, I'm a big fan of NYer writer Nick Paumgarten, but what a bizarre comparison. One other blogger thought the same: "I mean, I love me some Ovechkin talk on newyorker.com, but this may be a tad inappropriate." (The one funny thing was Hendrix's initial post title, still reflected in the URL: "But what can he do with curling?") No one else on the Internet seemed to notice. I posted the line and Story Lab link on Facebook yesterday, and friends were similarly mystified.

But as the day rolled on, friend Andy noticed the New Yorker quietly removed the North Tower reference. No explanation, no note. The line lost its parenthetical and joined with the next sentence, "The biggest play of the game may have been Alex Ovechkin's open-ice demolition of Jagr, which led to a quick Russian goal and an arena-wide gasp, but Datsyuk's defensive work, as resolute an expression of skill as any spinorama or one-timer, was the secret to Russia's success."

Not a cool way to edit online, New Yorker. See the post here.

Claire Keegan's "Foster" is what you read leaning against the handle of the refrigerator as the water boils and your wine glass gets lonely on the counter. You continue to read the story through the meal and, returning the plate to the sink, as your clothes washer spins off in the hall, then the dryer. Most of the sentences in the story gaze outward but every fourth or so looks in. A line looking in? "I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be."

Right now… I'm in search of awesome. That's what I've decided.

Colliding with the above story about a little Irish girl, I've posted this similarly (seriously) themed Wilco song before but never this version.

My refrigerator is covered with stuff, out of a lack of any bulletin board and a belief that fridges are where magnets should go. Covering much of the space and held by the many magnets are magazine-torn poems.

Many, of course, come from The New Yorker, so when friend Katie said she clipped poems from its pages, I got inspired to mention my fridge rips here. I've been thinking about throwing them out, if just to start over. But NYer poetry hasn't done much for me recently. And I like the pages when I'm making dinner. Like the pots on the stove, they give distance on the day. The steam makes all of the specifics matter less.

"In a Haystack," Andrea Cohen.
"Clouds," Charles Simic.
"The Indivisibles," Campbell McGrath.
"Element It Has," Glyn Maxwell.
"Oppression," Marvin Bell.
"Wise," Elizabeth Macklin.
"Here You Are," Michael Blumenthal.
"Troy," Meghan O'Rourke.
"Our Flowers," Barbara Ras.

For a week early in my freshman year at Northwestern, 11 years ago, Claude Levi-Strauss was the bane of my existence. The class was art, "Introduction to Visual Culture," and I struggled. While I couldn't fully grasp the concept of negative space, I knew I was in it. And Claude? At one in the class, we watched an early film of Haitian voodoo dance. The film involved Levi-Strauss in some way. Whether he had made the film, done the research or danced his jeans off, I never understood.

Upon further review, Levi-Strauss > Katherine Dunham > Maya Deren.

But even still, after reading Patricia Marx's holiday shopping round-up in a recent New Yorker, the first thing I did was Google her mention of Squirrel Underpants. The second thing was post her take on mini gifts:

Claude Levi-Strauss believed that the appeal of a miniature has to do with its being a scaled-down replica, and therefore easier to grasp than the big, messy totality:

To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it. Reduction in scale reverses this situation. Being smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable. By being quantitatively diminished, it seems to us qualitatively simplified. More exactly, this quantitative tranposition extends and diversifies our power over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the latter can be grasped, assessed and apprehended at a glance

is part of what Levi-Strauss wrote, proving that his case applies to paragraphs, too.

Ha! Take that, Levi-Strauss. Shopping vs. anthropology takedown!

I didn't know Rachel Wetzsteon, but I read her obituary in yesterday's New York Times and wondered some. "Rachel Wetzsteon, a prominent poet whose work was known for its mordant wit, formal elegance and cleareyed examination of the solitary yet defiant lives of single women, was found dead on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 42. Ms. Wetzsteon, who died apparently late on Dec. 24 or early on the 25th, committed suicide, said her mother, Sonja Wetzsteon. She had been severely depressed in recent months, partly over the breakup of a three-year romance, her mother said." The poem in her obit is good, but most moving for me now is "Love and Work" from The New Yorker.

"When I think of you I find the nearest lamp and turn it on."

If you don't have a registration, the poem is here as well.

I hate posting the last graf of an article, but once again Adam Gopnik leaves me no choice. From his latest piece, on van Gogh and Gauguin:

It's true that the moral luck dramatized by modern art involves an uncomfortable element of ethical exhibitionism. We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets; that's the nature of the collaboration that brings us together, and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they're not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life.

The phrase that obviously comes to mind is "carpe diem," but at this point in the year, it's worth going to Horace's hows and whys as well. You can't seize the day like a jerk. Reasons via Wikipedia, with edits:

Don't ask (it's forbidden to know) what end
the gods will grant to me or you, Leuconoe. Don't play with Babylonian
fortune-telling either. It is better to endure whatever will be.
Whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one
which even now wears out the Tyrrhenian sea on the facing cliffs
– be wise, drink your wine, and scale back your long hopes
to a short period. While we speak, envious time will have already fled
Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next.

(I seized the day tonight with an Elevation burger. How bout you?)