The New Yorker & Me: July 11 & 18, 2022 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.

Tuesday, July 19, 2022

July 11 & 18, 2022 Issue

I relish Joy Williams’s brisk, quirky, humorous, concrete writing style. There’s an excellent example of it in this week’s issue. Called “Mine Field,” it’s an account of a road trip she took through a breathtaking western landscape scarred by mines. Here’s her description of the route:

Lately, I’ve been taking another route (only about nine hundred and fifty miles), up 77 through Globe and the twisty, magnificent Salt River Canyon and the White Mountain Apache lands to funky Holbrook, a city that still primarily sells rocks, then on through Navajo and Hopi lands into Utah and strutty Moab (which has truly jumped the shark) toward Colorado Springs and the shrinking Colorado River, through the lovely Yampa Valley, past sprawling Steamboat and through the forbidding Rabbit Ears Pass and into Wyoming, the Meadowlark State.

Globe, Salt River Canyon, White Mountain Apache, Navajo, Hopi, Utah, Moab, Colorado Springs, Yampa Valley, Steamboat, Rabbit Ears Pass, Wyoming, Meadowlark State – there’s poetry in those names! The entire piece is like that. Despite its bleak message (“But we are also realizing our powerlessness to preserve or protect anything—children, the Earth, our instinct to harbor and honor the holy”), I enjoyed it immensely. The last paragraph made me smile:

If you’re weary (and who can blame you, with all that’s going on) and just want a suggestion for where to stay on this particular route, try the dear and simple Recapture Lodge, in Bluff, Utah. If you make it to Laramie, Wyoming, the vegetarian restaurant Sweet Melissa and its attendant bar, Front Street Tavern, should not be missed.