In the New Yorker...

[Front-Ranger]

I am not a big fan of weddings. They go on way too long and you have to spend most of your time with people you don't even know.

The only wedding I really enjoyed was my daughter's, and even then it was stressful at the end because we had to clean up, while my mother just wanted to go home and insisted on sitting in the car for an hour while we cleaned up.

[serious crayons]

I guess I should clarify that what I enjoy are actually the receptions. The weddings themselves range from pleasant enough to outright boring depending on setting, degree of formality and religiosity and traditionalism, aesthetics, length ... things like that.

Receptions I usually find outright fun, though I guess I wouldn't if I didn't know anybody. And by reception, I mean a proper party with food and drink and music and dancing -- not coffee in the church basement.

I hate to say this, but sometimes I even enjoy funerals. Not enjoy-enjoy, maybe more like appreciate -- at least the ones that fit my ideas of proper funeral style. Both of my parents, I'll have to say, had nice funerals. A few years ago I went to a Catholic mass funeral for an old high-school friend. The guy's family were very devout Catholics and the service itself was formal and traditional and impersonal -- a giant snooze, I'm sorry to say, for this non-Catholic. Then the guy's 20-something son got up and gave what was hands down the most amazing eulogy I'd ever heard -- funny, sad, perfectly capturing the guy's character and big personality, including his goofy quirks but also his great heart. Afterward, the son got a standing ovation from this giant packed church.

Years later, I was asked to write something about how to give a eulogy and I called up the son and asked how he'd gone about it. It was a very touching story. He said the day his father died was the worst day of his life, but the funeral was the best day of his life.

[Penthesilea]

I guess I should clarify that what I enjoy are actually the receptions. The weddings themselves range from pleasant enough to outright boring depending on setting, degree of formality and religiosity and traditionalism, aesthetics, length ... things like that.

Receptions I usually find outright fun, though I guess I wouldn't if I didn't know anybody. And by reception, I mean a proper party with food and drink and music and dancing -- not coffee in the church basement.

I hate to say this, but sometimes I even enjoy funerals. Not enjoy-enjoy, maybe more like appreciate -- at least the ones that fit my ideas of proper funeral style. Both of my parents, I'll have to say, had nice funerals. A few years ago I went to a Catholic mass funeral for an old high-school friend. The guy's family were very devout Catholics and the service itself was formal and traditional and impersonal -- a giant snooze, I'm sorry to say, for this non-Catholic. Then the guy's 20-something son got up and gave what was hands down the most amazing eulogy I'd ever heard -- funny, sad, perfectly capturing the guy's character and big personality, including his goofy quirks but also his great heart. Afterward, the son got a standing ovation from this giant packed church.

Years later, I was asked to write something about how to give a eulogy and I called up the son and asked how he'd gone about it. It was a very touching story. He said the day his father died was the worst day of his life, but the funeral was the best day of his life.

I totally get you. I kind of like like the social aspect of funerals, too. The meeting of old friends, far away relatives, etc. After the actual church/secular service and burial.
Some people dislike the funeral feast because they think it's tasteless and disrespectful to the deceased. Like having a party on their expense. But I think humans need a kind of reassurance directly after leaving the cemetery. The mood is subdued at the beginning but tends to get lighter with time. It doesn't hurt the deceased and I think it helps the bereaved. Humans are social animals and they find solace in each other. In my book that's a good thing.

[serious crayons]

Like having a party on their expense.

My dad's funeral was an actual party, in a restaurant that he and my stepmother liked to go to a lot. It was all her idea and planning. The restaurant's owner shut down the place for a couple of hours for the event. There was champagne, hors d'oeuvres, funny and poignant speeches. The owners sat down with me and told me a really touching story about my dad, and how nice he was to everyone on the restaurant's staff. My dad liked friends and jokes and stories and good meals. I'm sure it's just what he would have wanted. 

[Front-Ranger]

To bring this subject around to relevance again, I'd like to suggest that you, Katharine, should write a New Yorker piece about weddings and/or funerals!

The funeral seems to be a dying institution (sorry about the bad pun). I can't remember the last funeral I went to...probably my stepdad's about 15 years ago. These days it's all about the memorial service or celebration of life.

[Jeff Wrangler]

The Oct. 5 article about the poet Kenneth Goldsmith bored and baffled me, except for one thing that I think sounds like fun. It's an avant garde technique called N+7, where a poet--really, anybody could do it--takes a text, removes certain words from it, and replaces each word with the seventh word that follows it in the dictionary. The article gives as an example a poet named Rosmarie Waldrop, who used this technique on the Declaration of Independence, and ended up with something that begins, "We holler these trysts to be self-exiled." 

[serious crayons]

From the Sept. 21 issue:

"Blah blah blah [paraphrasing]," Todd Haynes, in whose Safe (1995) and Far From Heaven (2002) Moore has given two of her greatest performances, said.

What are style rules for if not to make writing clearer, smoother or more graceful? Or, if they must for whatever dumb reason prohibit declarative sentences in which the verb precedes the subject (tradition, I suppose, like their insistance on spellings like reëlection), how about just splitting it into two sentences?

"Blah blah blah," Todd Haynes said. Moore gave two of her greatest performances in Haynes' Safe and Far From Heaven.

That's still a little clumsy, but not laughably so. I highly doubt David Remnick wrote weird-ass sentences like the top one above when he was a reporter at the Washington Post.

Maybe the writers all find that style rule ridiculous and keep pushing it further and further into ludicrousness in hopes of forcing the magazine to change the rule.

[Front-Ranger]

After reading that article I had the distinct impression that the author didn't like Julianne Moore very much. 

[Jeff Wrangler]

After reading that article I had the distinct impression that the author didn't like Julianne Moore very much. 

I came away from it feeling that she might be a fine actor, but I wouldn't be much interested in knowing her personally.

[Jeff Wrangler]

So. Gloria Steinem was Christian Bale's stepmother (Oct. 19). I didn't know that.