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, March 27, 2024

March 25, 2024 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his “All That Glitters,” in this week’s New Yorker, calls T. J. Clark “the most eloquent Klimt hater.” What’s that based on? I had to dig to find out. It turns out that, in 2010, Clark wrote a letter to the London Review of Books, responding to correspondence generated by Michael Hofmann’s “Vermicular Dither” (London Review of Books, January 28, 2010), a review of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, in which he (Hofmann) refers to Klimt as “the Kitschmeister.” Clark writes,

I have no dog in the ring as regards Stefan Zweig; but as Gustav Klimt has come up in your correspondence, and even been claimed as ‘one of the greatest painters ever’, I do want to say that when I read Michael Hofmann’s verdict on the artist I found myself breathing a sigh of relief (Letters, 11 February). At last someone had dared state the obvious. As for ‘greatest painters ever’, there is a special place in the hell of reputations for those who tried hardest for the title in the first years of the 20th century: the Frank Brangwyns, the Eugène Carrières, the Anders Zorns, the John Singer Sargents, the Giovanni Segantinis. Not that these artists are uninteresting. Someone with a strong stomach and a taste for tragic irony should write a book about large-scale and mural painting in the two decades leading to Mons and Passchendaele. But taken at all seriously – compared with their contemporary Akseli Gallen-Kallela, for example, let alone the last achievements of Puvis de Chavannes – the greats of Edwardian Euro-America strike me as Kitschmeisters through and through: early specialists in the new century’s pretend difficulty and ‘opacity’, pretend mystery and profundity, pretend eroticism and excess. Klimt has a place of honour in their ranks.

Arn is right. There's no love there. By the way, I wasn't doubting Arn's word. I just couldn't recall ever reading anything by Clark about Klimt. And I've read a lot of Clark. I devour him.

Postscript: Just as an off-set to Clark’s acid verdict, consider what Peter Schjeldahl said about Klimt’s “Adele”:

With the best of will—and I have tried—“Adele” makes no formal sense. The parts—including the silky brushwork of the young lady’s face and hands, which poke through the bumpy ground as through a carnival prop—drift, generating no mutual tensions. The size feels arbitrary, without integral scale in relation to the viewer: bigger or smaller would make no difference. The content of the gorgeous whatsit seems a rhyming of conspicuously consumed wealth with show-off eroticism. She’s a vamp, is Adele; and for whom would she be simpering but the randy master, Herr Klimt? The effect is a closed loop of his and her narcissisms. They’re them, and we aren’t. I think we are supposed to be impressed. And let’s be. Why not? Our age will be bookmarked in history by the self-adoring gestures of the incredibly rich. Aesthetics ride coach. ["Changing My Mind About Gustav Klimt's 'Adle' "]

I love that “gorgeous whatsit.” Can kitsch be beautiful? Schjeldahl said yes. 

Friday, March 22, 2024

On the Horizon: "Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb 'New Yorker' Essayists"











Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023) are two of the great New Yorker essay collections of the last twenty years – where “great” means original, acerbic, perceptive, evocative, analytical, passionate, illuminating, stylish. To celebrate them, I’m going to select four of my favorite pieces from each book (one per month, for the next eight months) and try to express why I like them so much. A new series then – “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists” – starting April 15, 2024.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

March 18, 2024 Issue

My fascination with the two versions of Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” continues. This week she reviews Misipasta, a Williamsburg market that sells fresh pastas and sauces, and is also a restaurant. In the print version, she writes, “There are about twenty counter stools, and the air smells like Parmigiano and butter.” In the extended newyorker.com version, she says,

There are about twenty seats indoors, all of them counter stools, and one or two are nearly always empty. The lights are just dim enough to soothe, the tidy menu of cocktails and bitter Italian sodas ready to offer a bit of relief. The air smells like Parmigiano and butter, the sound system is playing the Pointer Sisters. 

What fascinates me is (1) the artful economy of the magazine column, and (2) the ravishing extra details of the web version. Here’s another example: in the magazine, she writes, 

Have a slice of crispy farinata, a lacy-edged chickpea-flour pancake aromatic with rosemary. Have an artichoke sandwich, one of the city’s great secret sandwiches – an enormous mess of grilled artichoke hearts and hot chili peppers, barely held together by oozing provolone cheese. Bring home a pound of pasta – frilly lumache, or long, flat tubes of paccheri – and a jar of thirty-clove sauce. You won’t make pasta nearly as good as Robbins’s – even with the same ingredients, some things just have to get all the way into your bones—but it doesn’t hurt to try. 

Here's the web version:

Have an espresso, fruity and bitter. Have a slice of crispy farinata, a lacy-edge chickpea-flour pancake aromatic with rosemary. Have one of the city’s great secret sandwiches, an enormous mess of marinated and grilled artichoke hearts, spiked with hot chilis and barely held together by oozing provolone cheese. Buy a pint of Robbins’s satiny hazelnut gelato. Get a pound of pasta—frilly lumache, or long tubes of paccheri—and a jar of thirty-clove sauce, heady with garlic. You won’t make pasta nearly as good as Robbins’s at home—even with the same ingredients, even with the same tools, some things just have to get all the way into your bones—but it doesn’t hurt to try.

Who would not want such delectable writing to go on forever? The print version is wonderful. But the expanded newyorker.com version is divine. To have them both is double bliss! 

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Acts of Seeing: Birch Chandelier

Photo by John MacDougall














Rained yesterday. Temperature dropped below zero. Everything encased in ice. This morning the sun came out. Woods turned to crystal. There’s a path that runs along the edge of John Arch’s Pond to the beach. I went in there. Bent-over birches like fabulous chandeliers. Branches fused in cascading luminosity. What a scene! I couldn’t get enough of it. By afternoon the ice melted. Trees dripped water. Scene dissolved. 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

March 11, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his absorbing “The Boy Who Cried Art,” in this week’s issue, says of graffiti artist Keith Haring, “His chalk drawings are almost always very crude, so as not to interfere with the whooshing immediacy of the performance or the nervous allure of the performer.” That “whooshing immediacy” is brilliant. I wonder if it was inspired by Norman Mailer’s great “The Faith of Graffiti” (included in Mailer’s 1982 essay collection Pieces and Pontifications). Mailer wrote, 

Yes, the graffiti had not only the feel and all the super-powered whoosh and impact of all the bubble letters in all the mad comic strips, but the zoom, the aghr, and the ahhr of screeching rails, the fast motion of subways roaring into stations, the comic strips come to life.

Arn mentions Mailer’s essay in his piece. I think Mailer’s appreciation of graffiti was deeper than Arn’s is. Arn calls it “Business Art.” He calls Haring a “Business Artist.” What do those terms mean? Arn writes,

Even in its infancy, there was something in New York graffiti that smacked of Business Art. You can see it in Basquiat, who put a copyright symbol on his creations well before they hung in galleries. Or watch “Stations of the Elevated,” Manfred Kirchheimer’s ecstatic M.T.A. documentary. Pay attention to the way he cuts between spray-painted trains and signs for Burger King and Coppertone. When people watched the film in 1981, they may have sensed aesthetic deadlock: commercial art and street art face to face, without much of anything to say to each other. But you might also interpret these scenes as street art competing with commercial art, trying to match its bigness and brightness—and, the moment you do, Haring seems less the artist who betrayed graffiti and more the artist who made its guilty dreams come true.

"Guilty dreams"? I don’t see anything guilty about graffiti. I see it as our version of cave painting, an exuberant assertion that we exist in this time and place. 

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #8 "Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' "

Illustration by Eric Nyquist, from Kathryn Schulz's "Pond Scum"













This is the third post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is "Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' " (October 27, 2015):

Kathryn Schulz, in her virulent "Pond Scum" (The New Yorker, October 19, 2015), calls Henry David Thoreau "self-obsessed," "narcissistic," "fanatical," "parochial," "egotistical," "disingenuous," "arrogant," "sanctimonious," "hypocritical," and a “thoroughgoing misanthrope.” She says, “The poor, the rich, his neighbors, his admirers, strangers: Thoreau’s antipathy toward humanity even encompassed the very idea of civilization.” Reading her evisceration of Thoreau’s character, I was reminded of John Updike’s comment on Lord Byron: he “was a monster of vanity and appetite, with one possibly redeeming quality: he could write.” Schulz doesn’t spend much time on Thoreau’s writing ability. She’s too busy excoriating him for, among other things, shunning coffee (“I cannot idolize anyone who opposes coffee”). 

“Pond Scum” contains a number of original poison-tipped barbs. My favorite is Schulz’s description of Walden as “less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.” 

Granted, Schulz does praise Thoreau’s gift for nature description. She says,

Although Thoreau is insufferable when fancying himself a seer, he is wonderful at actually seeing, and the passages he devotes to describing the natural world have an acuity and serenity that nothing else in the book approaches. It is a pleasure to read him on a battle between black and red ants; on the layers of ice that form as the pond freezes over in winter; on the breeze, birds, fish, waterbugs, and dust motes that differently disturb the surface of Walden.

Yes, it is a pleasure to read him on those things, and many more besides. So what’s Schulz’s point? Robert Sullivan, in his wonderful The Thoreau You Don’t Know (2009), says, “A central theme that anyone considering Thoreau must face early on is the jerk factor. Was Thoreau a jerk?” Well, we know where Schulz stands on that question. According to her, he was a jerk par excellence. But if he hadn’t been a jerk, maybe he wouldn’t have written the way he did. Somewhere in his letters, Van Gogh says, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t paint.” Similarly, Thoreau could say, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t write.” Who cares if Thoreau was a jerk? Most of us are jerks one way or another. But not many of us can write like Thoreau. 

Friday, March 8, 2024

On the Horizon: Ian Frazier's New Book "Paradise Bronx"

I see that Ian Frazier has a new book coming out. It’s called Paradise Bronx. His publisher, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, promotes it as his magnum opus (“Ian Frazier’s magnum opus: a love song to New York City’s most heterogeneous and alive borough”). Frazier is among the New Yorker greats, right up there with Liebling, Mitchell, Kael, and McPhee. His Great Plains, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia are among my favorite books. For me, the release of Paradise Bronx, scheduled for August 20, 2024, is one of the major literary events of the year. I avidly look forward to it.