The New Yorker & Me: September 12, 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.

Friday, September 16, 2022

September 12, 2022 Issue

It’s time to talk about Leanne Shapton. She has a new series of swimming pool paintings in this week’s New Yorker. That’s one reason to talk about her. Another is the great job she’s doing as The New York Review of Book’s new art editor. She’s enlivened the covers of that excellent publication immensely. And she’s contributed some wonderful illustrations of her own. This one, for example, a portrait of Henry David Thoreau, for Brenda Wineapple’s “New England Ecstasies” (March 10, 2022):

Shapton is a superb watercolorist. I first encountered her work back in 2012, when I read Jordan Awan’s “Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Pools,” newyorker.com (August 15, 2012). Awan’s piece is accompanied by a slideshow of twelve Shapton swimming pools, including this cream-green abstract beauty, titled “Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre, Brantford, Ontario”:

Now, in this week’s issue, Shapton has a new set of swimming pools, this one called “The Swimming Scene: Sunset Park Pool” – nine exquisite paintings of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park Pool, each representing a view of the pool at a particular time of day, each with a caption describing what is happening at that moment. For example, here’s the “4:05 P.M.” painting and its caption:

4:05 p.m. Twenty people in the pool. Then forty. More families, more small children in swim diapers. With no diving board, the most popular move is running hard to the edge and jumping. Splashing like cymbals.

Shapton's luminous pools are cool and inviting. They make me want to go for a swim.