Clicking through 80 years of literary history
The last thing you want to do at this time of the year, with its festive panics and plunging depression, is get something new ''up and running" on your computer. Yet that is just what I tried to do when ''The Complete New Yorker: Eighty Years of the Nation's Greatest Magazine" made its way into my home (Random House, $100). This consists of eight DVD-ROMs, a book of ''highlights," and instructions meant to guide one in gaining access to every page of the 4,109 issues of The New Yorker that appeared between Feb. 21, 1925, and Feb. 14, 2005. I won't give you a full description of the tribulations of getting this marvel to work, of the fruitless rattling about of disks in one computer and not in the other, of the popping up of such dark and gnomic messages as ''invalid frame," of the product's occasional independent-mindedness, or of the temporary disappearance of the year 1976. What I will say is that throughout the adventure I was put strongly in mind of S. J. Perelman's ''Insert Flap 'A' and Throw Away," which comic gem lay buried, or so I tried to believe, somewhere within the giant database before me.
And indeed it does, though if you try to look it up by title or plausible keyword (''Christmas," say, or ''Flap A") you will come up empty. If you didn't know what year it was published, you would have to sift through the abstracts for Perelman's 287 entries. Or you could, as I finally did, go to the bookshelf and look up the piece in ''Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing From The New Yorker" and discover that it was published in 1944, thus narrowing your search to Perelman's 10 entries for that year. When you do find it on the computer, you are let in on the secret of what keywords would have summoned it had you chanced to hit upon them: ''Cardboard" and ''Jiffy-Clos" in this case. Let's just say, we're not dealing with Google here.
Still, once you have lost the habit of ease engendered by web search engines, you will find yourself possessed of -- if not exactly in command of -- an astonishing abundance of riches. The existence of this for a mere $100 ($70 as of this writing if you order it from the magazine itself, at www.newyorker.com) is incredible from an archival, technological, and copyright point of view. (Copyright infringement has been circumvented by presenting the entirety of each magazine in a nondigitally searchable form -- if you see what I say.)
Everything is here: ads and all, including, as it happens, my own parents' short stories. But what makes this the treasure and monumental time waster that it is, is the presence of all the bits and pieces that make up ''The Talk of the Town" (with the once-anonymous authors now revealed) as well as the countless departments and other contributions that you would never even think of thinking of if you didn't come across them.
After days lost wallowing in entertaining obscurities, I turned to Dorothy Parker's columns on books, hoping to transform a binge into what people call a business tool. I am, after all, in something like the same racket as Parker was. Or maybe not. She wrote an awful lot about not reading and even more about such things as ''getting up with a hangover that ought to be in the Smithsonian Institute under glass." Indeed, she devotes column after column to explanations of why she could not possibly read the books in hand, including Mussolini's novel ''The Cardinal's Mistress." As with other unread books, not reading this one was no barrier to weighing in on its merits: ''I do know from reading the newspapers, that those who attempt disagreement with the Dictator trifle with their health; so I shall but remark, in a quiet way, that if 'The Cardinal's Mistress' is a grande romanza, I am Alexandre Dumas, pere et fils."
Of all the great writers whose works are found in these half-million pages, those in whom I rejoice most of all, and on whose hundreds of pieces I completely shot the last week (''a whole week, and one out of the best years of my life -- which I should certainly hate to believe these are," as D. Parker put it) are the humorists. My favorites -- the ones who, when they were on, could really nail it down -- are Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Perelman, George W. S. Trow, Veronica Geng, David Owen, Garrison Keillor, Bruce McCall, and Ian Frazier. Indeed, one of the things I was bearing in mind as I wrestled with ''The Complete New Yorker" was that if I ever brought it to the mat, I would be able to extract Frazier's essay on Canal Street from it, which, though not a humorous piece per se, is plenty funny and has stuck in my mind ever since I read it some 15 years ago. Then, in a dramatic development, what came through the door in book form just as I had DVD no. 2 ready to cough up the essay? None other than ''Gone to New York: Adventures in the City" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22), a just-published collection of pieces by Frazier, and among them was ''Canal Street."
''Kindly sock me if I appear dogmatic" (D. Parker), but, really, you cannot beat a book. Elegant operating system, user-friendly table of contents, compactness, durability, and modest power requirements: That's what you get. This particular model consists of 200-plus high-definition pages on which are displayed an affectionate foreword by Jamaica Kincaid and 22 essays by Frazier, of which the longest is ''Canal Street." The piece is a perfect mixture of memoir, minute observation, and history. It expands and contracts to describe Frazier's life in his Canal Street loft; Gary, the Romanian army-navy-surplus store owner who is his landlord; the street itself, where the unit of exchange is the ''dallah"; and the history of the Holland Tunnel. I did begin to notice that practically every piece in the book touches in one way or another on the rubbish that litters the cityscape: New York's, Brooklyn's, and New Jersey's. In fact, I think we can call Frazier America's Bard of Debris. With only a couple of exceptions these essays are brilliant in their observation, eccentric vision, and inspired economy of words. If I were searching for a complete entertainment system in the $22 range, this would be it.
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@earthlink.net. 
