The New Yorker & Me: March 29, 2021 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.

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

March 29, 2021 Issue

Carnal sentences are a particular fetish of mine, as you likely know, if you follow this blog. A line such as this one, from Hannah Goldfield’s delectable “Tables For Two: Peter Luger Steak House,” in this week’s New Yorker, delights me immensely:

At my table, in the shadow of the historic Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, I ordered another wedge salad (rapture, again) and a burger, a beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun.

That “whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun” is ravishing!

Goldfield’s food descriptions are not the only literary source of carnal satisfaction. Judith Thurman’s clothing depictions do it for me, too. This one, for instance, from her excellent “Eye of the Needle,” also in this week’s issue:

One of the earliest garments with an “Ann Lowe” label is now at the Met Costume Institute: a sublime wedding dress from 1941, with the silhouette of an Erté Tanagra. Embroidered trapunto lilies, bedewed with seed pearls, cascade down the bodice; molten satin bubbles at the hem like a pool of candle wax.

A special shout-out, as well, to Naila Ruechel, for her wonderful photos of Lowe dresses, illustrating Thurman’s piece. I think my favourite is this beauty: