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.

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Acts of Seeing: Spring Breakup

Sylvia Grinnell River, 2007 (Photo by John MacDougall)










Reading R. M. Patterson’s description of spring breakup on the Nahanni, I recalled my own experience walking the Sylvia Grinnell just after the ice went out. June 21, 2007, Vernon (our Saint Bernard) and I hiked along the riverbank, watching big chunks of ice collide. Sylvia was running wild, celebrating her liberation. Along the river edge, bundles of candle ice glittered in the sun. Snow, clouds, ice, blue sky, and the frothing blue-green braid of the river surging past – it was exhilarating to be there. My eyes devoured it. 

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