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.

Monday, May 15, 2023

Acts of Seeing: Fat Bike

Lorna on Fat Bike, 2021 (Photo by John MacDougall)














Last night I was reading Clive James’ brilliant photography piece “That Old Black and White Magic” (The New York Review of Books, December 17, 1981). At one point, discussing the work of William Henry Jackson, James says, “Jackson got a terrific action shot, in color, of the Yellowstone Great Geyser in 1902.” Reading this, I found myself thinking about my own action shots. One of my favorites is of Lorna riding her fat bike on a path through the dunes down to the beach at Covehead Harbour lighthouse. What I relish about it is (1) the upward angle, and (2) the wonderful winter light.

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