Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Acts of Seeing: Birch Chandelier

Photo by John MacDougall














Rained yesterday. Temperature dropped below zero. Everything encased in ice. This morning the sun came out. Woods turned to crystal. There’s a path that runs along the edge of John Arch’s Pond to the beach. I went in there. Bent-over birches like fabulous chandeliers. Branches fused in cascading luminosity. What a scene! I couldn’t get enough of it. By afternoon the ice melted. Trees dripped water. Scene dissolved. 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

March 11, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his absorbing “The Boy Who Cried Art,” in this week’s issue, says of graffiti artist Keith Haring, “His chalk drawings are almost always very crude, so as not to interfere with the whooshing immediacy of the performance or the nervous allure of the performer.” That “whooshing immediacy” is brilliant. I wonder if it was inspired by Norman Mailer’s great “The Faith of Graffiti” (included in Mailer’s 1982 essay collection Pieces and Pontifications). Mailer wrote, 

Yes, the graffiti had not only the feel and all the super-powered whoosh and impact of all the bubble letters in all the mad comic strips, but the zoom, the aghr, and the ahhr of screeching rails, the fast motion of subways roaring into stations, the comic strips come to life.

Arn mentions Mailer’s essay in his piece. I think Mailer’s appreciation of graffiti was deeper than Arn’s is. Arn calls it “Business Art.” He calls Haring a “Business Artist.” What do those terms mean? Arn writes,

Even in its infancy, there was something in New York graffiti that smacked of Business Art. You can see it in Basquiat, who put a copyright symbol on his creations well before they hung in galleries. Or watch “Stations of the Elevated,” Manfred Kirchheimer’s ecstatic M.T.A. documentary. Pay attention to the way he cuts between spray-painted trains and signs for Burger King and Coppertone. When people watched the film in 1981, they may have sensed aesthetic deadlock: commercial art and street art face to face, without much of anything to say to each other. But you might also interpret these scenes as street art competing with commercial art, trying to match its bigness and brightness—and, the moment you do, Haring seems less the artist who betrayed graffiti and more the artist who made its guilty dreams come true.

"Guilty dreams"? I don’t see anything guilty about graffiti. I see it as our version of cave painting, an exuberant assertion that we exist in this time and place. 

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #8 "Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' "

Illustration by Eric Nyquist, from Kathryn Schulz's "Pond Scum"













This is the third post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is "Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' " (October 27, 2015):

Kathryn Schulz, in her virulent "Pond Scum" (The New Yorker, October 19, 2015), calls Henry David Thoreau "self-obsessed," "narcissistic," "fanatical," "parochial," "egotistical," "disingenuous," "arrogant," "sanctimonious," "hypocritical," and a “thoroughgoing misanthrope.” She says, “The poor, the rich, his neighbors, his admirers, strangers: Thoreau’s antipathy toward humanity even encompassed the very idea of civilization.” Reading her evisceration of Thoreau’s character, I was reminded of John Updike’s comment on Lord Byron: he “was a monster of vanity and appetite, with one possibly redeeming quality: he could write.” Schulz doesn’t spend much time on Thoreau’s writing ability. She’s too busy excoriating him for, among other things, shunning coffee (“I cannot idolize anyone who opposes coffee”). 

“Pond Scum” contains a number of original poison-tipped barbs. My favorite is Schulz’s description of Walden as “less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.” 

Granted, Schulz does praise Thoreau’s gift for nature description. She says,

Although Thoreau is insufferable when fancying himself a seer, he is wonderful at actually seeing, and the passages he devotes to describing the natural world have an acuity and serenity that nothing else in the book approaches. It is a pleasure to read him on a battle between black and red ants; on the layers of ice that form as the pond freezes over in winter; on the breeze, birds, fish, waterbugs, and dust motes that differently disturb the surface of Walden.

Yes, it is a pleasure to read him on those things, and many more besides. So what’s Schulz’s point? Robert Sullivan, in his wonderful The Thoreau You Don’t Know (2009), says, “A central theme that anyone considering Thoreau must face early on is the jerk factor. Was Thoreau a jerk?” Well, we know where Schulz stands on that question. According to her, he was a jerk par excellence. But if he hadn’t been a jerk, maybe he wouldn’t have written the way he did. Somewhere in his letters, Van Gogh says, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t paint.” Similarly, Thoreau could say, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t write.” Who cares if Thoreau was a jerk? Most of us are jerks one way or another. But not many of us can write like Thoreau. 

Friday, March 8, 2024

On the Horizon: Ian Frazier's New Book "Paradise Bronx"

I see that Ian Frazier has a new book coming out. It’s called Paradise Bronx. His publisher, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, promotes it as his magnum opus (“Ian Frazier’s magnum opus: a love song to New York City’s most heterogeneous and alive borough”). Frazier is among the New Yorker greats, right up there with Liebling, Mitchell, Kael, and McPhee. His Great Plains, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia are among my favorite books. For me, the release of Paradise Bronx, scheduled for August 20, 2024, is one of the major literary events of the year. I avidly look forward to it.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

On the Horizon: 5 McPhee Canoe Trips

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy's Blog







In homage to one of my all-time favorite New Yorker writers, John McPhee, I’m launching a new series – an appreciation of five of his best pieces, each of which is about a canoe trip he took.

The five pieces are “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” (February 24 & March 3, 1975), “The Keel of Lake Dickey” (May 3, 1976), “The Encircled River” (May 2 & 9, 1977), “Farewell to the Nineteenth Century” (September 27, 1999), and “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (December 15, 2003). 

I’ll focus on one piece each month, examining what it’s about, how it’s made, and why I’m drawn to it. A new series then – “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – starting April 7, 2024. 

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

March 4, 2024 Issue

I love these sentences:

1. Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works. [Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B.”]

2. In 2005, Goswick sliced his suit going through the windshield of a car that went off the old Tappan Zee Bridge. [Ben McGrath, “Where’s My Car?”]

3. Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and others like it (all products, probably, of an offstage cloud-making machine), vividly captured beams of light from above the stage that came down in vertical shafts, suggesting interrogation lamps, the columns of a courthouse, or the bars of a prison cell. [Ian Frazier, “Uncaged Birds”]

All three are from this week’s New Yorker. Which one’s my favorite? Well, all three are great. And I don’t actually have to choose. But if I did, I’d pick Frazier’s surreal “cloud” description – such a surprising, delightful combination of words: “performance,” “cloud,” “off-stage,” “cloud-making machine,” “beams of light,” “vertical shafts,” “interrogation lamps,” “columns of a courthouse,” “bars of a prison cell.” You’d wonder how their combination makes sense. But it does, in the context of Frazier’s excellent Talk story about an opera for the wrongfully convicted. Bravo, Ian Frazier!

Postscript: I see the magazine has a new film critic – Justin Chang. Is this just for this issue, or is it permanent? Chang’s review of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses” intrigues me, particularly its exotic setting (eastern Anatolia). If I get a chance, I’ll check it out.

Monday, March 4, 2024

Acts of Seeing: Calçada da Glória

Calçada da Glória, 2024 (Photo by John MacDougall)










I’m never sure about my choice of photos. For some reason I’m drawn to this one. I took it last month when we were in Lisbon. I love this old street. Its name is Calçada da Glória. We walked it up and down and took many pictures. But it’s this one that speaks to me. Of course I relish the receding, curving, downhill perspective, and the mash-up of walls and buildings, and the rails and cobblestones, and the overhead funicular railway wires. But what I like most, what makes the photo distinctive (for me, at least) is the graffiti-painting session going on in the yard at left. I love the juicy colors of the graffiti on that immense dingy white wall. What a canvas! Dan Chiasson once wrote, “Reduced to its bluntest purpose, all writing is a form of graffiti, an assertion that we exist in this time and place.” I think this is true.