The New Yorker & Me: September 28, 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.

Friday, October 9, 2020

September 28, 2020 Issue

Dan Chiasson makes an interesting observation in his “Critical Distances,” in this week’s issue. He says, “Reduced to its bluntest purpose, all writing is a form of graffiti, an assertion that we exist in this time and place.” Is this true? I recall Ian Frazier saying something similar a few years ago. In his “Carving Your Name on the Rock” [included in The Art and Craft of Travel Writing (1991), edited by William Zinsser], he writes, “What the travel writer is doing, in essence, is carving his name on the rock. He is saying, ‘I passed this way, too.’ ” Is that what I’m doing when I write this blog – asserting my existence? Blogito, ergo sum. I blog, therefore I am. No, I don’t think so. Blogging is too ephemeral and insubstantial for that.

Roger Angell, in his “This Old Man” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2014), writes, “I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window.” That’s a perfect metaphor for blogging, conveying both its freedom and its ephemerality.

These last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my motive for blogging. Last week, I was close to winding things up. Then along came the September 7th New Yorker containing Jay Ruttenberg’s wonderful “Goings On About Town” note on Bettye LaVette, and I felt rejuvenated. I listened to LaVette’s raw, croaky rendition of “Blackbird,” and I loved it, and wanted to say why. Right there, I think, is at least one reason I blog – to figure out why I’m drawn to a particular writing or artwork.