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, November 16, 2020

November 9, 2020 Issue

Two delightful sentences in this week’s “Goings On About Town”:

1. The bright moments—including the fragments of sampled speech, rapidly chopped up, that bracket the album—make up for Lopatin’s overreliance on sad robot voices. – Michaelangelo Matos, “Music: Oneohtrix Point Never”

2. A group of thirtysomethings celebrating a birthday plucked a bunch of eerily fresh-looking calla lilies out of a public trash can. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: The Odeon” 

I relish the Matos construction for its surreal elements - "fragments of sampled speech, rapidly chopped up," "sad robot voices." Goldfield's conjures a sweet image of found poetry. Both are marvelous!

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