The New Yorker & Me: February 3, 2020 Issue

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.

Friday, February 7, 2020

February 3, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Richard Brody’s “In Revival” note on Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 Stranger Than Paradise contains this superb line:

Jarmusch lets time run free in stylized and static long takes that blend his characters’ Beckettian inertia with the quasi-documentary fascination of the idiosyncratic performers just being there.

Interestingly, Pauline Kael mentioned Beckett in her 1984 review of the same movie:

The images, like the characters’ lives, are so emptied out that Jarmusch makes you notice every tiny, grungy detail. And those blackouts have something of the effect of Beckett’s pauses: they make us look more intently, as Beckett makes us listen more intently – because we know we’re in an artist’s control. But Jarmusch’s world of lowlifers in a wintry stupor is comic-strip Beckett. [“Faked Out, Cooled Out, Bummed Out,” The New Yorker, November 12, 1984; included in her 1985 collection State of the Art]

2. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: HK Food Court” brims with sensuous description, including this scrumptious paragraph:

I knew what to get at a seafood stall called Chili Boiled Fish, where live ones flopped around in a tank. A friendly cashier with a tattoo on her neck of a lipstick kiss carefully sealed a patterned bowl (for which I paid a five-dollar deposit) with plastic wrap to insure that it stayed hot. That proved unnecessary; it was many minutes before the dish cooled to less than scalding—which didn’t stop me from immediately plunging my flimsy spoon into the oily depths to find silky fillets of fish, tender cabbage, and chunks of cucumber, Sichuan peppercorns clinging to all, staining my rice with neon drips.

That “staining my rice with neon drips” is wonderful. The whole piece is wonderful. I devoured it.