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.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Celebrity Obsessed: The Talk of the Town Special Issue


Where are the zipper fixers, oven repairmen, dog washers, and pigeon mumblers? Where’s the balloon aeronaut? Where’s Doc Sternbach? They’re all interesting people. They all appeared in Talk of the Town. Why aren’t they in The Talk of the Town Special Issue? I open its pages and all I find are celebrities. Ugh! It’s a collection of all the stories I skipped (except for one or two) when they appeared in the magazine. Do I care that James Franco has “a glaze of coffee on his teeth”? No! Am I interested in the fact that Prince eats carrot soup, Janet Reno’s eyeglasses are “a bit smudged,” Ellen Barkin has four herniated disks? No, no, and no. Do I need to know that Cindy Adams says, “I have more hair under my arms than Juicy has on her whole body”? I don’t think so. Juicy is a dog, by the way. The Special Issue comprises fifty Talk of the Town pieces from the last decade, and not one of them is about an unfamous person. Why isn’t Robert Sullivan’s great Talk story about the woman who investigated the history of a hundred and seventeen year old piece of cheese (“Say Cheese,” September 13, 2010) included? Where’s Ian Frazier’s memorable Talk piece about the Naked Cowboy (“Nude Dude,” August 24, 2009)? Where is Mark Singer’s Talk story about Reid Stowe and his attempt to sail for a thousand days (“A Thousand Days,” February 15, 2010)? I know it’s impossible to include everything. And not everyone shares my interest in under-the-radar-type characters. But couldn’t there have been at least one or two stories in the Special Issue about “ordinary,” i.e., non-celebrity, but larger than life human beings? Frazier, Singer, and Sullivan are among the finest Talk writers in the magazine’s history. Their work should be represented in an issue that claims to contain “highlights from the past ten years of The Talk of the Town.” To find them absent is, to say the least, disappointing.

But I'll get over it. Of the Special Issue’s fifty pieces, which one do I like the best? That’s easy: Nick Paumgarten’s “Skype Chat.” It’s a transcript of a conversation between Jonathan Demme and Neil Young, conducted via Skype. The conversation itself is very funny, but what I like most are the italicized bits in which Paumgarten describes the process (e.g., “Young faces the camera – eye contact, of a kind. On the laptop, his image breaks apart, and his voice burbles. There is something warm and archaic about Skype’s flaws. A Skype call can feel like a telegram. ‘It’s so fragile,’ Demme says, ‘It’s sweet’”). The piece is illustrated by Tom Bachtell’s brilliant full-page drawing of Young playing the guitar. “Skype Chat” is one of Paumgarten’s two Neil Young Talk pieces. The other one is called “Request Line” (The New Yorker, January 7, 2008). It’s about a Neil Young concert held at Christ United Church’s Palace Cathedral. It’s not included in the Special Issue, but it’s well worth checking out.

Neil Young (Illustration by Tom Bachtell)




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