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.

Friday, December 4, 2020

November 16, 2020 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl is the most original New Yorker stylist since Pauline Kael. His tone, rhythm, texture, diction, syntax are instantly recognizable. One of his favorite words is “drench.” It figures in some of his most ravishing lines. This one, for example:

Kiefer’s Pollockian machines - with heart-grabbing yellows, blacks, and browns that affect like tastes, sounds, and smells and their incorporation of photographs that drench the mind in tones of memory – evoke a quasi-religious feeling of delicious melancholy, slightly masochistic abasement before sheer ancientness. [“Our Kiefer,” The Hydrogen Jukebox, 1991]

In this week’s issue, he deploys it again, to marvelous effect:

Gilliam broke ranks with the movement—or extended it—in the mid-sixties, when he began draping vast unstretched paint-stained and -spattered canvases from walls and ceilings, creating undulant environments that drenched the eye in effulgent color. [“Off the Wall,” a review of Sam Gilliam’s “Existed Existing,” at Pace Gallery, New York]

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