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.

Sunday, February 15, 2026

Inspired Sentence 8

There is an odd rakishness, a mettlesome spirit, running through the cubism of the rocks of this natural esplanade, which must be the combined effect of its undulant surface, the general twist the nearby fault has given to the vicinity, and the carefree poise of a square-faced block – I am sure it must measure forty feet each way – that has detached itself from the cliff against which it leans one elbow, and stands on two fat little legs looking as if it were about to skip into the sea with the ponderous charm of one of Picasso’s surreal beach girls.

That’s from Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1985) – one of the great landscape books. Robinson is describing a section of the north-western coast of Aran. I love that “the cubism of the rocks” and the way the metaphor is picked up again at the end in the description of the square-faced block that “leans one elbow” against the cliff. When was the last time you saw a giant chunk of coastal stone compared to “one of Picasso’s surreal beach girls”? Probably never. It’s a surprising, imaginative, original image – one of dozens in this extraordinary book.  

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1 comment:

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