The New Yorker & Me: September 21, 2020 Issue

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, October 8, 2020

September 21, 2020 Issue

My favorite piece in this week’s issue is Julian Lucas’s “Death Sentences,” a review of Hervé Guibert’s writings on his battle with AIDS. Two passages in particular stand out:

1. Forget Susan Sontag’s dictum that diseases shouldn’t have meanings. Guibert inhabited AIDS as though it were a darkroom or an astronomical observatory, a means for deciphering the patterns in life’s dying light.

2. Perhaps it’s this mischievous affirmation of life’s mess and sensuality, even in the face of death, that will define Guibert’s contribution to the literature of illness. Rejecting its taboos, he scaled AIDS’ very long flight of steps and fearlessly recorded what he saw on the climb.

That last line is inspired!

Postscript: Another excellent essay on Guilbert is Wayne Koestenbaum’s “The Pleasure of the Text” (Bookforum, June/July/August, 2014; retitled “On Futility, Holes, and Hervé Guibert,” in Koestenbaum’s recent Figuring It Out). Koestenbaum says,

Futility and botched execution are the immortal matter of Guibert’s method. Futility and botched execution—combined, in Guibert’s work, with finesse, concision, and a heavy dose of negative capability, which includes curiosity about the worst things that can befall a body—are undying aesthetic and spiritual values, worth cherishing in any literature we dare to call our own.