The New Yorker & Me: August 15, 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.

Thursday, August 18, 2022

August 15, 2022 Issue

I see in this week’s issue there’s going to be an Edward Hopper exhibition at the Whitney, opening October 19: see Andrea K. Scott, “Art: Fall Preview.” Not many events can pry me from my roost here on the Island. But that Hopper show just might do it. Notice in her preview that Scott describes Hopper as “the bard of American solitude” – solitude, not loneliness. Peter Schjeldahl pretty much shot down that idea a few years ago when he said,

His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint. (“Ordinary People,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2007)

He hammered the point again recently:

Regarding his human subjects as “lonely” evades their truth. We might freak out if we had to be those people, but—look!—they’re doing O.K., however grim their lot. Think of Samuel Beckett’s famous tag “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Now delete the first sentence. With Hopper, the going-on is not a choice. ("Apart," The New Yorker, June 8 & 15, 2020)

Okay, I get it – solitude isn't loneliness. But that girl sitting at the table in Hopper’s great Automat ((1927) seems pretty damn lonely to me. Can we split the difference? Not solitude, not loneliness – melancholy. Hopper’s paintings seem drenched in exquisite melancholy.