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.
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We, your followers, should be grateful. Speaking for myself, I don't even know how to thank you for all the writers I discovered thanks to your blog. I have been visiting you daily for years and will continue to do so, in the hope that one day I will find a new post with a link to your next blog. Thanks for everything, John.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your kind words, Guilherme. It was a tough decision. I'm thinking of launching a new blog. If I do, I'll provide the link in a postscript to the above post. All the best to you.
DeleteI'm gutted, John. Don't remember when & how I discovered your blog, but it's been a constant go-to all these years. So many writers, so many sentences... I wish you'd never stop, but I understand your sentiments (and, maybe, the end is been coming from the few other times you'd had enough). Anyway, hope you resume this or start anew, but do keep what is there -- it is an archive in its own right. Thank you for the ride. To borrow one of yours, I enjoyed it immensely!
ReplyDeleteThanks vidura. Much appreciated. All the best to you.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if this is really the end or just a well-deserved pause (I'm delighted to see the "10 Art and Literature" series will be completed). But if it is, I should take this opportunity to thank you for the writers you've reminded me of (McPhee, Frazier, Thurman) or turned me onto for the first time (Bailey, Roueché, Mogelson).
ReplyDeleteThanks, MA. I don't know if it's really the end either. I appreciate your feedback. All the best.
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