July 20, 2026 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:

1. Taran Dugal’s “Bar Tab: Folk.” Here’s a sample: 

The guests ordered the Mangalorean, named after the chef Jay Kumar’s birthplace, an Indian city on the Arabian Sea: a sublime, sweet, velvety mix of rum, pineapple, lime, and coconut cream infused with amchur, a tangy spice made from unripe mangoes. 

2. Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Fro-Yo Fever.” Here’s a taste:

You’ll do far better if you walk to Eighty-eighth and Madison and dip into the small, cool Madison Fare, a specialty-foods-and-candy storefront opened, in 2022, by the chef Amin Kinana, whose frozen-yogurt creations are, by my estimation, unreserved works of art. The yogurt itself is dense and almost puckeringly sour, and oh, my God, the toppings. They’re some of the most spectacular toppings I’ve ever encountered, an array of ritzy, globe-spanning garnishes that evoke the posh worldliness of peak-era Dean & DeLuca: snowy cubes of Turkish delight, cinnamon-dusted pecans, bitter cocoa nibs, pistachio knafeh, vibrant edible flowers, honey on the comb, actual honest-to-goodness raspberry coulis.

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Fro-Yo Fever"

3. Dan Chiasson’s “One Last Thing,” a review of Franz Wright’s posthumous Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments. Chiasson writes,

Celan’s shattered “neversongs” taught Wright important elements of his own style: the lines narrowing as they approach silence, like water disappearing down a drain; the clauses and multisyllabic words split like cordwood by line breaks; the pressurized neologisms picking up where available vocabulary runs out of road; the rich, sometimes asphyxiating details that make a beeline into the senses.

4. Zachary Fine’s “Go East,” a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition “Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy.” Fine’s commentary on the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme is excellent. Here’s a sample:

Gérôme is the rare artist who’s easy to like and to hate. Every painting is a model of academic crispness and polish, filled with visual cues and prearranged emotional payoffs. “The Snake Charmer,” on loan from the Clark, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, shows a naked boy wrapped in an enormous snake while an old man plays a flute. We’re brought into the scene via the boy’s illuminated buttocks, and conducted to the background, where a crew of ten soldiers gawk at the spectacle. To the right, there’s a guy with a beatific smile who seems to be enjoying more than the snake, an enormous gun propped vertically between his legs. Tabulate the number of stiff objects in the painting (gun, stick, flute, sabre, etc.) and you’ll see that the whole thing is a festival of phallic abundance. Just in case you forget to feel aroused, Gérôme reminds you to.

And another:

How do we account for the beauty of “Bashi-Bazouk” (1868-69)? The subject is just a man with a colorful headdress. Bashi-bazouks were a feared paramilitary outfit in the Ottoman Army, known for cracking skulls, and yet the sitter is a paragon of calm, not violence. He’s almost certainly a civilian whom Gérôme put in a costume. There’s a rifle on his shoulder, but it’s not shooting anytime soon; if anything, the mouth of the gun feels like a chimney inside the painting, letting out invisible puffs of psychological smoke. All the exquisite details—the man’s glowing salmon-pink tunic, the cherrylike tip of his headdress, the fluffy tassels—are an excuse for pure visual stimulation. 

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk (1868-69)

August 11, 2025 Issue

I’m delighted to see Dan Chiasson back in the magazine. He’s been gone four years. I’ve missed his perceptive, original reviews. He’s a protégé of Helen Vendler. Like her, he’s keenly attentive to style. In this week’s issue, he reviews Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other, a biography of poet James Schuyler. Chaisson likes the book. He calls it a “filigreed and astute presentation" of Schuyler's life.

Chiasson is a fan of Schuyler’s work. He says that several of Schuyler’s poems “rank among the glories of twentieth-century American literature.” He writes,

Schuyler worked in two primary verse modes, ostensibly opposites: we could call them blips and loop-the-loops. The blips are short, ribbonlike lyrics, trimmed to the moment, their sharp enjambments inspired by the Renaissance-era poet Robert Herrick; the loop-the-loops follow long Proustian arcs in margin-busting lines reminiscent of Walt Whitman. 

My favorite line in Chiasson’s piece is his comment on Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem”: 

Schuyler’s celebration of the damaged body and its persistent joys, including a free jukebox inside the brain and a soft-core-porn channel that we call the imagination, made “The Morning of the Poem” the best keep-profane-the-Sabbath poem since Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”

Chaisson has written about Schuyler before. In “ ‘A Hat off a Yacht ...’ ” (The New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010), he reviewed Schuyler’s posthumous Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems. In that piece, he said,

Schuyler’s brilliant trick was to translate things, even throwaway things, as little as possible, as though testing the innate power of disposable reality to withstand the test of time. 

In the earlier review, it’s the seeming artlessness of Schuyler’s poems that fascinates Chaisson. In his new piece, Chaisson praises Schuyler for his “brilliant use of embodied attention to contour time, when everything off the page was turbulence.”

The Art of Quotation (Part I)

Jonathan Kramnick, in his absorbing Criticism & Truth (2023), argues that quotation is a key element of critical writing. He says, “Much of literary criticism turns on the art of quoting well.” He sees quotation as a form of craft – “weaving one’s own words with words that precede and shape them.” I agree. Kramnick identifies two types of quotation – in-sentence quotation and block quotation. In-sentence quotation is “embedding language from a text within your sentences.” Block quotation is “setting off larger gobbets in block form.” In-sentence quotation is a form of weaving; block quotation is a form of mortaring. Both forms are creative: “The skilled practice of writing about writing makes something new in the act of interpreting it. It is fundamentally and irreducibly a creative act.”

It’s tonic to see these points being made. Not all critics are quoters. Edmund Wilson rarely quoted. He preferred paraphrase to quotation. But, for me, the best critics are the ones who quote extensively, e.g., John Updike, Helen Vendler, James Wood, Janet Malcolm, Dan Chiasson, Leo Robson. 

Updike included quotation as Rule #2 in his “Poetics of Book Reviewing”: “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste” (Higher Gossip, 2011).

That’s one compelling reason for critics to quote. Another is to point something out. Mark O’Connell, in his review of James Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed (“The Different Drummer,” Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s method. It’s a form of literary noticing. Kramnick calls it “fundamentally demonstrative and deictic: look at these lines, this moment; observe how they do this thing.” 

Seldom have I seen such a deep appreciation of quotation as Kramnick’s. He calls it an art, and he shows why. I applaud him. 

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. 

September 18, 2023 Issue

Behold, in this week’s issue, a beautiful full-page Riccardo Vecchio illustration of subtly colored glassware, gracing Lore Segal’s short story “On the Agenda.” Vecchio is my favorite New Yorker illustrator. His portrait of the poet Bill Knott for Dan Chiasson’s “The Fugitive” (April 3, 2017) is my choice for best New Yorker artwork of the last ten years. The Segal story consists mostly of dialogue. Vecchio’s illustration picks up on something one of the ladies says:

“Well, there is nothing interesting, I promise you, in not being at home when the window washer comes to wash your windows, or in being home when he comes to wash the windows and you haven’t cleared a lifetime collection of colored glassware from the windowsills.”

Segal’s style is distinctive and natural. Her “Spry for Frying” (The New Yorker, April 18, 2011; included in her 2019 collection The Journal I Did Not Keep) is one of my all-time favorite memory pieces. Here’s the marvellous ending:

The refugee in me still tends to feel displaced when I leave New York. It’s not in America, not in the United States, that I’ve put down my new-grown roots. It is in Manhattan. And I have a plan for the completion of my naturalization: I would like my compliant ashes to be strewn—I hope it’s not illegal—on Riverside Drive. Let me blow across the Hudson, and go where Spry is gone.

Riccardo Vecchio's illustration for Lore Segal's "On the Agenda"

January 23, 2023 Issue

Merve Emre, in her "Everyone's a Critic," in this week’s issue, bashes literary scholars. She calls them deformed. She quotes John Guillory’s new book, Professing Criticism: “If there is a thesis that unites the essays in Professing Criticism, it is that professional formation entails a corresponding ‘déformation professionnelle.’ ” She argues that academia has ruined literary criticism. She says that in university, criticism is "more interested in its own protocols than in what Guillory calls 'the verbal work of art.' "  

Well, all I can say in response is that, in a lifetime of reading, some of the best criticism I’ve read is by university scholars. Examples:

Sandra M. Gilbert’s Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1972 (Gilbert taught at Queens College of the City University of New York, at Sacramento State College, at California State College, Hayward, and at St. Mary’s College of California);

Bonnie Costello’s Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 1991 (Costello is Associate Professor of English at Boston University);

Roland Barthes’ New Critical Essays, 1980 (Barthes was professor at the Collège de France);

James Wood’s Serious Noticing, 2019 (Wood is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University);

Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, 2015 (Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University);

B. J. Leggett’s Larkin’s Blues, 1999 (Leggett is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville);

Dan Chiasson's One Kind of Everything, 2007 (Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College);

Bożena Shallcross’s Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky, 2002 (Shallcross is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago);

Eleanor Cook’s Elizabeth Bishop at Work, 2016 (Cook is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Toronto);

Robert Hass's What Light Can Do, 2012 (Hass teaches at the University of California);

Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, 1994 (Wood is Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University).

I'm just scratching the surface here. These literary scholars are interested in the verbal work of art, deeply so. I enjoy their writing immensely. 

2022 Year in Review

Illustration by Seb Agresti, from John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa 3"

Begin with a drink. In tribute to the brave people of Ukraine, I’ll have one of those borscht Martinis that Talia Lavin wrote about a few years ago: “Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim” (“Bar Tab: Anyway Café,” April 30, 2018). Mm, that hits the spot! Slava Ukraini! 

The top story of 2022 was Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. The New Yorker covered it superbly, publishing at least a dozen pieces, including Masha Gessen’s “The Devastation of Kharkiv, Ukraine” (March 22, 2022), Jane Ferguson's "A Search for Survival Outside Kyiv" (March 15, 2022), Keith Gessen’s “The One Place in Lviv Where the War Was Never Far Away” (March 29, 2022), Joshua Yaffa’s “The Siege of Chernihiv” (April 15, 2022), Luke Mogelson’s “Collecting Bodies in Bucha” (April 6, 2022), and David Kortava’s “In the Filtration Camps,” October 10, 2022. I devoured them. If I had to recommend just one, it would be Luke Mogelson’s brilliant “The Wound-Dressers” (May 9, 2022). Here’s a sample:

To prevent the Russians from penetrating Kyiv, the Ukrainians had destroyed the main bridge over the fast-moving Irpin River. Several buildings on the south side of the river had been hit by Russian shells, which had also killed some fleeing civilians. To the north, explosions sounded and smoke filled the sky above another nearby suburb, Bucha. Russian forces had stalled there, and waves of residents were now arriving—abandoning their vehicles at the edge of the caved-in bridge, clambering down a high embankment, and crossing the icy currents on a treacherous walkway composed of pallets and scrap lumber. Passenger buses idled, ready to bring displaced Ukrainians to downtown Kyiv. People advanced single file, lugging bags and suitcases; some hugged dogs, cats, or babies to their chests. Elderly men and women with canes and walkers staggered haltingly over the rickety planks.

For me, the #1 literary story of the year was the loss of Peter Schjeldahl. He died October 21, 2022, age eighty. He’s one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on his name in the “Labels” section, and you’ll find 138 references to his writing. Schjeldahl spun his special brand of magic right to the end. Here’s an excerpt from his wonderful “Dutch Magus” (October 3, 2022), a delectable review of Hans Janssen’s Piet Mondrian: A Life:

Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch.

That “Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral” is inspired! 

Another highlight this year was the appearance of Volume 3 of John McPhee’s on-going personal history “Tabula Rasa.” These pieces are ingenious assemblages of time and space – memories interwoven with story ideas that McPhee never got around to developing. For example, in Volume 3, there’s a wonderful section called “Citrus, Booze, and Ah Bing” that begins with how he came to write his 1967 classic, Oranges, segues to a fascinating account of a 2004 road trip he took in central Kentucky, checking out distilleries (“Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses”), and ends with a visit to an Okanagan Bing cherry orchard (“Dessicated. Lovely. Irrigation-green. Trees punctuated with deep-red dots”). If you relish McPhee’s writing, as I do, you’re sure to enjoy this latest “Tabula Rasa” instalment. 

One of my favourite New Yorker writers, Rivka Galchen, had a great year, producing three marvellous pieces – “Change of Heart” (February 22, 2022), “Who Will Fight With Me?” (October 3, 2022), and “Sound Affects” (October 17, 2022). “Who Will Fight With Me?” is a fond remembrance of her father. Here’s an excerpt:

It would have been difficult for him if he had been vain, because he didn’t buy any of his own clothes, or really anything, not even postage stamps. Whenever there were clearance sales at the Dillard’s at the Sooner Fashion Mall, my mom and I would page through the folded button-up shirts, each in its cardboard sleeve, the way other kids must have flipped through LPs at record stores. We were looking for the rare and magical neck size of 17.5. If we found it, we bought it, regardless of the pattern. Button-ups were the only kind of shirts he wore, apart from the Hanes undershirts he wore beneath them. Even when he went jogging, he wore these button-ups, which would become soaked through with sweat. He thought it was amusing when I called him a sweatbomb, though I was, alas, aware that it was a term I had not invented. He appeared to think highly of almost anything I and my brother said or did.

And while we’re at it, let’s give a huzzah for my favorite section of the magazine – “Goings On About Town” – a weekly smorgasbord of delectable notes on, among other things, art, movies, music, and restaurants. Here, for example, is Richard Brody on King Vidor’s 1928 silent film Show People:

Winking cameos abound: Davies takes a second role, as herself; Vidor plays himself, too; Charlie Chaplin, slight and exquisite, brings a Shakespearean grace to his self-portrayal as a humble moviegoer; and a long tracking shot of stars at a studio banquet table plays like a cinematic death row, displaying such luminaries as Renée Adorée, William S. Hart, and Mae Murray, just before they were swept away in waves of sound.

Other highlights: Five book reviews by my favourite literary critic James Wood, including his recent "The Numbers Game" (December 19, 2022); two wonderful pieces by Joy Williams (“Mine Field,” July 11 & 18, 2022, and “Curran Hatleberg’s Florida, Past and Future,” August 5, 2022); Hannah Goldfield’s sublime “Tables For Two”; and Laura Preston’s delightful “Talk of the Town” stories “Incidental Masterpieces” (April 4, 2022) and “Pipe Dreams” (August 22, 2022). 

Any disappointments? The only one I can think of is the absence of Dan Chiasson. He hasn’t appeared in the magazine since May 31, 2021. Not sure if he quit or was fired or is just taking a break. But I miss his subtle close readings.

Enough for now. Over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I enjoyed most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another glorious year of reading bliss. 

Best of 2020: The Critics

Illustration by Chloe Cushman, from Anthony Lane's "Plotting a Course"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Anthony Lane's “Folies à Deux,” June 1, 2020 (“To see Coogan and Brydon being waited upon by unmasked servers, who carry the plates with bare hands, is to yearn for the touchstones of a mythical past. As one kindly waitress inquires, in a lull between courses, 'Do you want to continue?' Yes, if we can. Forever”).

2. James Wood's “Reward System,” September 14, 2020 (“At those moments when Gyasi’s prose is summoned to intense specificity, it smears into cliché: ‘On the nights when he would slink in through the back door, coming down from a high, reeking to high Heaven’ ”).

 3. Peter Schjeldahl's “Off the Wall," November 16, 2020 (“Bevelled edges flirt with object-ness, making the works seem fat material presentations, protuberant from walls, rather than pictures. But, as always with Gilliam, paint wins”).

 4. Anthony Lane's “Plotting a Course,” December 14, 2020 (“Could Susan be the first person on record to discuss her distant sexual history while playing Monopoly and Scrabble, and, if so, does a threesome count as a triple-word score?”). 

5. Julian Lucas's “Death Sentences,” September 21, 2020 (“Forget Susan Sontag’s dictum that diseases shouldn’t have meanings. Guibert inhabited AIDS as though it were a darkroom or an astronomical observatory, a means for deciphering the patterns in life’s dying light”).

6. Dan Chiasson's “Suspended Pleasures,” September 7, 2020 (“The Airstreams and roadsters, the delis and coffees are there whenever and wherever we want to experience them, and they can be reanimated on demand”).

7. James Wood's “Enigma Variations,” August 24, 2020 (“A sparse realism scars the pages—Leonard, abandonment, the phone call, a North Dakota hospital”).

 8. Leo Robson's “The Art of the Unruly,” July 6 & 13, 2020 ("As she invokes a world of pounding hearts and thumping ears and watering mouths, she exhibits a refreshing freedom from embarrassment, an indifference to the concept of overkill").

9. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Target Practice,” February 17 & 24, 2020 (“He sneaks whispery formal nuances into works whose predominant effect may be as subtle as that of a steel garbage can being kicked downstairs”).

10. Dan Chiasson’s “A Trick of the Senses,” January 20, 2020 (“This is the core feature of Hass’s work, in my view: an Etch A Sketch method that allows the surface of the completed poem to be erased and revised, with traces of previous attempts, along with gaps for when the lightning strikes”).

September 28, 2020 Issue

Dan Chiasson makes an interesting observation in his “Critical Distances,” in this week’s issue. He says, “Reduced to its bluntest purpose, all writing is a form of graffiti, an assertion that we exist in this time and place.” Is this true? I recall Ian Frazier saying something similar a few years ago. In his “Carving Your Name on the Rock” [included in The Art and Craft of Travel Writing (1991), edited by William Zinsser], he writes, “What the travel writer is doing, in essence, is carving his name on the rock. He is saying, ‘I passed this way, too.’ ” Is that what I’m doing when I write this blog – asserting my existence? Blogito, ergo sum. I blog, therefore I am. No, I don’t think so. Blogging is too ephemeral and insubstantial for that.

Roger Angell, in his “This Old Man” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2014), writes, “I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window.” That’s a perfect metaphor for blogging, conveying both its freedom and its ephemerality.

These last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my motive for blogging. Last week, I was close to winding things up. Then along came the September 7th New Yorker containing Jay Ruttenberg’s wonderful “Goings On About Town” note on Bettye LaVette, and I felt rejuvenated. I listened to LaVette’s raw, croaky rendition of “Blackbird,” and I loved it, and wanted to say why. Right there, I think, is at least one reason I blog – to figure out why I’m drawn to a particular writing or artwork.

September 7, 2020 Issue

It’s fascinating to see a great critic grapple with a complex, experimental work, trying to describe it, analyze it, extract meaning from it. That’s what Dan Chiasson does in his superb "Suspended Pleasures," in this week’s issue. The object of his study is Bernadette Mayer’s 1971 “crazy-headed journal” (Mayer’s words) Memory. He considers it variously as an exploration of the layers of what a person thinks they remember firsthand”; as nostalgia (“Nostalgia—for the carnal, improvised mood of 1971, but also for the halcyon days of, say, last summer, before we were afraid of communal life—has become the work’s dominant key”); as “a database of half-captured meals, barns, bodies—a kind of analog Internet”; as “a time capsule” ("Mayer wanted 'Memory' to serve as a time capsule, its meaning deferred until a future, or a range of futures, that she couldn’t have foreseen"); and as elegy (“Elegy always has a way of creeping into art that documents the once teeming, now empty past”). 

Of Chiasson’s many brilliant analytical moves, my favorite is his “reanimation” of some of Mayer’s subjects. He writes,

The Airstreams and roadsters, the delis and coffees are there whenever and wherever we want to experience them, and they can be reanimated on demand. Reading “Memory” with a phone handy, I followed Mayer and her crew along the back roads of the Berkshires to Nejaime’s, a local liquor store, which, I learned, stayed open this spring, deemed an essential business. In the city, Mayer took a photograph of a New York storefront: Casa Moneo. The business closed in 1988, but Google reveals its old address, on Fourteenth Street, in a building that once housed Marcel Duchamp’s studio. When I came across mysteries in the text—a forgotten restaurant, a long-gone landmark—I posed my questions to the Internet, and got answers from the hive mind. Though “Memory” is a famous work, it has been experienced firsthand by relatively few people: it is still a choose-your-own-adventure—uncharted, wide open. Finding a path through “Memory” seems like both a highly personal lark and a spur to collaborate.

That “The Airstreams and roadsters, the delis and coffees are there whenever and wherever we want to experience them, and they can be reanimated on demand” is thrillingly good! The same goes for the whole piece. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Falling Behind

Photo by Justine Kurland, from Peter Schjeldahl's "The Great Outdoors"

I’m falling behind in my New Yorker reading. The mail is slow. I suppose I could read the online versions, but I prefer the print editions. They’re easier on my eyes, and I like to underline notable passages. I’ll just have to be patient. The magazines will eventually get here. Pieces I’m looking forward to are Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Great Outdoors,” Dan Chiasson’s “Suspended Pleasures,” and James Wood’s “Reward System.”

Best of 2019: The Critics

Josh Cochran's illustration for Sarah Larson's "Home on the Range"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Not Waving,” May 27, 2019 (“I was lucky to catch a rehearsal of a performance work by Brendan Fernandes that will take place at scheduled but infrequent times: five ballet dancers in black leotards strike varying poses on an arrangement of skeletal frameworks in black-painted wood. That was dreamy”).

2. James Wood, “Contents Under Pressure,” January 14, 2019 (“It’s a sign of how vital the rest of the book feels that a phrase like ‘caustic speech,’ which would be inoffensive enough in many novels, seems here irradiated with fakery”). 

3. Dan Chiasson’s “Freewriting,” October 14, 2019 (“The black bars of redacted text, which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours”).

4. Anthony Lane's “What If?,” July 8 & 15, 2019 (“Boyle, especially in the early scenes, provides acceleration; at the exact moment when Jack, standing at a bus stop, properly understands what the future holds, the camera hurries toward him like an excited kid”).

5. Alex Ross’s  “The Concerto Challenge,” March 25, 2019 (“The first movement follows the rudiments of sonata form, with the scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn”).

6. Sarah Larson’s “Home on the Range,” February 4, 2019 (“The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast”).

 7. Alexandra Schwartz's “Painted Love,” July 22, 2019 (“She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and Picasso’s tyranny and brilliance are hardly in dispute”).

8. Hilton Als’s “Seen and Heard,” September 23, 2019 (“As in the Williams portrait, whiteness—here the whiteness of Horne’s turban, which sits like a beacon at the top of the image—is used to underline the blackness in the photograph, black skin and black as a color that leads to black feeling and thought”).

9. Janet Malcolm’s “The Unholy Practice,” September 23, 2019 (“The best intentions, however, can be broken on the wheel of skillful (or even inept) interviewing. Discretion so quickly turns into indiscretion under the exciting spell of undivided attention”).

10. Thomas Mallon's “Word for Word,” December 16, 2019 (“These changes alchemize a small piece of gold into a small piece of lead. Lowell slackens Hardwick’s prose into poetry, robs it of precision and pith”).

November 11, 2019 Issue

Three pieces in this week’s issue that I enjoyed immensely: Johanna Fateman's “Goings On About Town: Art: Howardena Pindell”; Nick Paumgarten’s “The Symptoms”; and Dan Chiasson’s “Make It Old.” 

Fateman’s note contains a wonderful description of Howardena Pindell’s paintings:

Punctuating the surfaces of these handsome abstractions are seams—fissures, really—bridged by stitches resembling little teeth, and fragments of photographs and postcards. They lend the paint-toughened surfaces a pieced-together fragility and form their swirling and fanning interior structures. The found imagery, emerging from dense areas of acrylic color, includes disembodied hands, a frog, and a statue of Shiva. Neither random nor coherent, the fragments seem to represent the impressionistic puzzle pieces of partial recollection, which the compositions dynamically integrate into a meaningfully illogical whole.

Paumgarten, in his “The Symptoms,” writes about three concussions he suffered playing “beer league” hockey. Here’s his description of the first one:

I didn’t lose consciousness, or even my footing. When it was over, I skated away, with a ludicrous grin but without every item of my equipment or all of my wits. I had a sudden headache and a sense already of an alteration in the fabric of the world beyond the confines of my skull. Teammates leered at me. Aluminum rink light glinted off a thicket of surfaces: ice, plexiglass, helmets, sticks. The referee bent to report the infractions to the timekeeper, through a slot in the glass. In the penalty box, I fought the urge to lie down.

That “Aluminum rink light glinted off a thicket of surfaces: ice, plexiglass, helmets, sticks” is excellent.

Chiasson’s piece reviews Charles Wright’s new collection Oblivion Banjo. Chiasson says of Wright’s poetry, 

Within the repetitive cycles of his verse we find the loveliest surprises: an afternoon in the cupola at Emily Dickinson’s house, the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, the “sizzle like E.T.’s finger,” the “afternoon undervoices” of kids playing red rover.

Adorning the piece is a delightful portrait of Wright by Tom Bachtell, who for many years illustrated “Goings On About Town.” It’s great to see him back in the magazine. 

Tom Bachtell, "Charles Wright"

October 14, 2019 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Dan Chiasson’s “Freewriting,” a review of Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Felon, points out a cool thing: Betts’s use of redacted court documents to make poetry. Chiasson says,

Several poems here are constructed out of redacted court documents from cases in which people have been held for not paying bail—in essence, for being poor and black. “Redaction is a dialect after prison,” Betts writes, in “Ghazal.” The black bars of redacted text, which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours. They’re also rhythmic units, building time and suspense into the otherwise affectless prose. For Betts, the way to expression passes through such troubled silences. 

2. James Wood’s “Lifelines,” a review of Jokha Alharthi’s novel Celestial Bodies, contains this wonderful description of the way Alharthi shifts narrative time:

Within all the chapters, the stories float like this, lightly tethered to what the French call récit—the moment in which the story is being told, the narrative present. The result is a beautifully wavering, always mobile set of temporalities, the way starlight seems to flicker when we gaze at distant and nearer celestial bodies.

3. Hannah Goldfield, in her “Tables For Two: Mo’s Original,” posits the existence of something I’ve never thought about before – a “three dimensional flavor”:

The “smoke” ramen, made with both smoked-chicken broth and shreds of smoked pork loin, would be my second choice, and, in the mushroom-broth ramen, the three-dimensional flavor of the sweet smoked cherry tomatoes alone makes that dish worth ordering.

4. I relished Briana Younger’s quasi-abstract description of Bon Iver’s new album:

Its expansive new album, “i,i,” revels in anxious emotional rawness, which is at once muted and augmented by serpentine arrangements that form its gorgeously visceral bedrock. ["Indie Rock"]

July 8 & 15, 2019 Issue

Is this a misprint? “I tried the snowsuit out on a stuffed bear the brown of the bark of a sugar maple.” It’s from Jill Lepore’s absorbing personal history piece “The Deadline,” in this week’s issue. Should it read, “I tried the snowsuit out on a stuffed bear brown as the bark of a sugar maple”? Maybe that’s too square. Maybe Lepore is trying for something more spontaneous and concise. Her style is compressed, like Muriel Spark’s. But there’s something jarring about that “the” between “bear” and “brown.” I compared the print version with the online version; they’re the same. So it’s either a typo or a stylistic quirk. I can’t decide.

Another line in Lepore’s piece that puzzled me is “Most of my ideas about parenting came from Marge [Simpson], fretting beneath her blue beehive.” Come on! There’s no way that’s true. Lepore is angling for a laugh; in so doing, she undermines her credibility. 

But “The Deadline” also contains a sentence so beautiful it took my breath away: “Upstairs, one of the skylights blew open and the rain came pouring in, onto the wedding dress I’d sewn from a bargain bolt, brocade.”

Other inspired sentences in this week’s issue:

If the crunch of the artery pleases you, move on to the pork kidney, which is cut into flowery shapes that vaguely resemble miniature porcupines and lands on the tongue with an umami-forward bounce. – Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Da Long Yi Hot Pot”

Basquiat’s is no genre of art but art, period. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Could Have Been Me”

He was a genial American eccentric, cultivating his own slant. – Dan Chiasson, “The Sense of an Ending”

Boyle, especially in the early scenes, provides acceleration; at the exact moment when Jack, standing at a bus stop, properly understands what the future holds, the camera hurries toward him like an excited kid. – Anthony Lane, “What If?”

Joanna Biggs on Sylvia Plath's Letters

Sylvia Plath, Letter to Aurelia Plath (November 22, 1962)

I’ve just finished reading Joanna Biggs’ “I’m an intelligence” (London Review of Books, December 20, 2018), a review of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. What an impressive piece of critical writing! Quoting extensively from the letters, Biggs reconstructs Plath’s life, blending it with her own personal history and her love of Plath’s writing. For example:

And I had married in a Sylvia dress, with ‘love set you going’, the first half-line of ‘Morning Song’, which begins Ariel, engraved inside my wedding ring. My idea of marriage was a Plath-Hughes one: meeting at Oxford, honeymooning in Venice, sharing a study, writing a book each, painting our North London living room French grey, babies in view. It broke down even so. During my divorce, I remember thinking: am I victim or beneficiary? Sylvia’s late poems suggest: always both. The speaker of ‘Lesbos’, ‘The Jailer’, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ couldn’t be more of a victim, but she expresses herself as if no one has told her that. The Arielvoice makes something glorious of a woman’s always abject – divorced or not – position in the world. ‘Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff!’ Sylvia wrote to her mother ten days after Ted left the marital home. ‘What the person out of Belsen – physical or psychological – wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there & knows the worst, just what it is like.’ 

Describing Plath’s state of mind after Hughes left her, Biggs says,

The lowest point came when she found Ted’s poems about Assia, ‘describing their orgasms, her ivory body, her smell, her beauty, saying in a world of beauties he married a hag, talking about “now I have hacked the octopus off my ring finger”. Many are fine poems.’ It was torture:

I am just frantic … I still love Ted … I am drowning, just gasping for air … I have no one … How can I tell the babies their father has left them … How and where, O God do I begin? … Frieda just lies wrapped in a blanket all day sucking her thumb. What can I do? I’m getting some kittens. I love you & need you. 

At the end of this letter I was in tears, and had to stop reading. Plath received a reply from Beuscher before she posted the letter and added a postscript: ‘PS Much better. The divorce like a clean knife. I am ripe for it now. Thank you, thank you.’

The piece’s final paragraph is amazing; Biggs imagines Plath is still alive:

I sometimes like to imagine that Sylvia Plath didn’t die at all: she survived the winter of 1963 and she still lives in Fitzroy Road, having bought the whole building on the profits of The Bell Jar and Doubletake, her 1964 novel about ‘a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter & philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful and perfect’. She wears a lot of Eileen Fisher and sits in an armchair at the edge of Faber parties, still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction earlier this year, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet. She is baffled by but interested in MeToo. She still speaks Boston-nasally, but with rounded English vowels. She stopped writing novels years ago, and writes her poems slowly now she has the Pulitzer, and the Booker, and the Nobel. She is too grand to approach, but while she’s combing her white hair and you’re putting on your lipstick in the loos, you smile at her shyly in the mirror and she says: ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’

That “still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction earlier this year, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of the most absorbing, memorable reviews I’ve read in a long time. 

Postscript: Biggs’ piece has at least four New Yorker connections: (1) the magazine published twenty-eight of Sylvia Plath’s poems, including “Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor” (August 9, 1958), “Water Color of Grantchester Meadows” (May 28, 1960), and “Tulips” (April 7, 1962); (2) Biggs has written two New Yorker pieces: “We,” a review of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (January 27, 2014); and “He’s Gotta Have It,” a review of Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana (July 30, 2018); (3) Dan Chiasson, in his excellent “The Girl That Things Happen To” (The New Yorker, November 5, 2018), reviewed the second volume of Plath’s letters; (4) and, of course, Janet Malcolm’s brilliant The Silent Woman, a critical analysis of writings about Plath, originally appeared in The New Yorker (see here and here).  

January 21, 2019 Issue

Poetry critic Dan Chiasson creates gorgeous quasi-surreal verbal combines embedded with glittering fragments of quotation. His “Blank Looks,” a review of Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus, in this week’s issue, contains several of them: 

Wong says that, because she almost never got to kiss the romantic lead, “I had to marry / my own cinematic death,” like the character she played in “The Toll of the Sea,” a 1922 film inspired by “Madame Butterfly”—and not so unlike the Instagrammed woman, nearly a century later. 

In this world, green stands for both escape and annihilation, red for both peril and relief. But in the poem new colors quickly emerge: first white, “the color of erasure,” then blue, which stands for “the ocean that drowns the liars,” “the shore where the girl keeps living,” and the place where she awakens, “prismatic, childless, free.”

But Mao’s fabricated Wong is a wild creation: she has a “time machine” and rides a “comet, / to the future,” where she makes out with Bruce Lee and hangs around the set of “Chungking Express,” yet she’s also shunted into minor roles in “The Last Samurai,” “Kill Bill,” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.”

Mao evokes the performance under the big skylight, “through which all fears still burned,” and the audience watching “without cameras / except our eyes and faces.” 

Chiasson is a critic-collagist. He has a knack for selecting vivid bits from poems and piecing them into his own meaning-making constructions. I enjoy his work immensely.