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, March 4, 2024

Acts of Seeing: Calçada da Glória

Calçada da Glória, 2024 (Photo by John MacDougall)










I’m never sure about my choice of photos. For some reason I’m drawn to this one. I took it last month when we were in Lisbon. I love this old street. Its name is Calçada da Glória. We walked it up and down and took many pictures. But it’s this one that speaks to me. Of course I relish the receding, curving, downhill perspective, and the mash-up of walls and buildings, and the rails and cobblestones, and the overhead funicular railway wires. But what I like most, what makes the photo distinctive (for me, at least) is the graffiti-painting session going on in the yard at left. I love the juicy colors of the graffiti on that immense dingy white wall. What a canvas! Dan Chiasson once wrote, “Reduced to its bluntest purpose, all writing is a form of graffiti, an assertion that we exist in this time and place.” I think this is true. 

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