On the train this morning, the girl in the seat behind me was intently putting on doing her makeup. (Anyone who has tried to deal with loose powder in a moving vehicle knows how tricky this can be.) When she finished, she looked exactly the same as when she started. What does it mean to do all that work for no visible improvement?

Speaking of square one, here's an article in which Art Spiegelman explains why he's leaving the New Yorker, again (via MediaNews). (Hasn't this already happened?) I was struck by his comments about the current and past editorship of the magazine:

Sez he: "From where I sit it looks like David's trying to sew Tina's gains back into the earlier tradition of the magazine. And it must be said--I never read the earlier editions of the magazine. David grew up loving [former editor William] Shawn's New Yorker. "

As exciting as it would be to work for such a magazine, I feel a little sorry for anyone who tries to do so. It must be hard to work where you are constantly being defined by the people who went before. Not just the people who were in the job last, but people from previous decades, people everyone knows by name. What is it like to work where, no matter what you do, you will always be standing on the shoulders of giants? To always be compared, favorably or unfavorably, to someone else? Maybe there's something to be said, after all, for toiling in relative obscurity.

Art's latest project, a comic strip dealing with 9/11, is being serialized in The Forward. It's not online in its entirety, though, so you'll have to hit the newsstand.

Here's what "standing on the shoulders of giants" means, according to one
interpretation.