The New Yorker & Me: September 18, 2023 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, September 21, 2023

September 18, 2023 Issue

Behold, in this week’s issue, a beautiful full-page Riccardo Vecchio illustration of subtly colored glassware, gracing Lore Segal’s short story “On the Agenda.” Vecchio is my favorite New Yorker illustrator. His portrait of the poet Bill Knott for Dan Chiasson’s “The Fugitive” (April 3, 2017) is my choice for best New Yorker artwork of the last ten years. The Segal story consists mostly of dialogue. Vecchio’s illustration picks up on something one of the ladies says:

“Well, there is nothing interesting, I promise you, in not being at home when the window washer comes to wash your windows, or in being home when he comes to wash the windows and you haven’t cleared a lifetime collection of colored glassware from the windowsills.”

Segal’s style is distinctive and natural. Her “Spry for Frying” (The New Yorker, April 18, 2011; included in her 2019 collection The Journal I Did Not Keep) is one of my all-time favorite memory pieces. Here’s the marvellous ending:

The refugee in me still tends to feel displaced when I leave New York. It’s not in America, not in the United States, that I’ve put down my new-grown roots. It is in Manhattan. And I have a plan for the completion of my naturalization: I would like my compliant ashes to be strewn—I hope it’s not illegal—on Riverside Drive. Let me blow across the Hudson, and go where Spry is gone.