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 20, 2024

Acts of Seeing: Montreal Bridge

Montreal Bridge, 2024 (Photo by John MacDougall)










What is beauty? That old question again. I took this shot when I was in Montreal recently. Lorna and I were biking a trail that ran along the St. Lawrence River. It took us past an old bridge made of rusty steel beams. The rust, the rivets, the splotchy spray paint (beige on olive green with random rust marks showing through), the stenciled “BRIDGE” in an interesting industrial font – all of this spoke to me for some odd reason, and I took the picture. Berenson's “tactile values” comes to mind. The bridge roused my sense of texture. I wanted to capture it. 

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