May 11, 2015 Issue

Of the many pleasures in this week’s issue – Richard Brody’s capsule review of Elaine May’s 1976 gangster movie Mikey and Nicky  (“Cassavetes, his head down, his forehead like the prow of a near-wreck, and Falk, with his canny nervousness, blaze a trail of trouble that, in its emotional extremes, distills a lifetime of frustrated energy into a single deadly night”); Peter Canby’s description of sleeping out in Central African Republic’s Dzanga-Ndoki National Park (“I spent a long, cold night on an underinflated air mattress with only a thin sheet covering me, my sleep repeatedly interrupted by trumpeting elephants close by, louder than any Manhattan garbage truck”); Dan Chiasson’s review of Terrance Hayes’s new poetry collection How to Be Drawn (“I have no idea how he works, but the poems give the impression of spontaneity; even if he labors over them, the result is a wild ride without an off switch, an unbroken verbal arc propelled by his accelerating actions of mind”) – the most piquant, for me, is Mark Singer’s superb Talk story, "All-Nighter," an irreverent account of Singer’s attendance at “A Night of Philosophy,” a marathon series of “twenty-minute lectures by academics, mostly French and American, who are addressing such topics as ‘Can You Decide to Believe in God?’ and ‘Must Intellectual Life Be Boring?’ and ‘Will This Be Worthwhile?’” The event causes Singer to question the meaning of “philosophy”:

Does it connote great ideas by celebrated thinkers who, by their elegance of presentation, illuminate for us the most profound questions? Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?

That “because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?” made me smile. I enjoyed “All-Nighter” immensely.