Joseph Mitchell

Bored with The New Yorker for about a year, except for the cartoons (a guy sitting in an easy chair reading a newspaper, an empty fish tank on the end-table beside him, looks up at a small school of goldfish swimming at eye-level and says, "How many times do I have to tell you to stay in the bowl").

Unbored, now that The New Yorker's gone to sending daily dispatches on-line, on such a dazzling variety of irresistible subject matter--Hope Solo, Jurassic Park, the geography of cuisine in Los Angeles--I've commenced reading The New Yorker again and it's surpassed TruthDig and ESPN as personal on-line reading favorite.

I suspect the new on-lineness of The New Yorker has reenergized my interest, which in turn makesthe writing more lively, full-bodied, and less a caricature of Vanity Fair which it seemed to be becoming.

Which brings me to Joseph Mitchell. If there's a better book of American prose than Joseph Mitchell's "Up in the Big Hotel" I dare you to find it, since there isn't.

Mitchell wrote for The New Yorker for many years (he became a staff member in 1942) and "Up in the Big Hotel" is a compilation of the 'pieces' he wrote for the magazine. He wrote about real people, the weird, the strange, the eccentric but apparently with enough invention and fictional leeway (he was a lifelong devotee of Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake") to make them even stranger, more lovable, more memorable than they would have been otherwise. The stories have great titles too: "Hit Over the Head by a Cow", "Goodbye Shirley Temple."

Mitchell wrote on an old typewriter at an office at The New Yorker, almost until his death in 1995. He'd come in every day, impeccably dressed, close his door and type. His colleagues could hear the typewriter, steadily clacking away, though he never turned in a story after 1965.

If American prose has a Bible, Joseph Mitchell's "Up in the Big Hotel" is the new Old Testament.