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 Galchen, 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, May 29, 2024

May 27, 2024 Issue

“Dialectical,” “epistemological,” "ontological" – stand aside. A new adjective is being ushered into the critical lexicon: “horny.” The usher is Amanda Petrusich – first in her wonderful “Troye Sivan’s Songs of Desire” (“But then there is the video for ‘Rush,’ the first single from the Australian pop star Troye Sivan’s third LP, ‘Something to Give Each Other’—it is, as they say, horny on main”) – and now, in her superb “Age of Anxiety,” in this week’s issue, where she says of Billie Eilish’s song “Lunch,”

“Lunch” is a weird, pulsing track, vigorous and horny. It’s also my favorite song on the new album, in part because Eilish sounds incredibly free, which is to say, she sounds like herself. 

Petrusich seems incredibly free, too. Her unselfconscious celebration of sexual pleasure is bracing. Her writing enacts the condition it extols. It’s vigorous and horny. 

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