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.
And this:
At 8 p.m., the band slunk onstage, the house lights cut out, and Puth trotted up in a baggy Elastica T-shirt. He parked at the fake Rhodes, and the set began. At every keys solo and drum rip, he put on a goofy grin or a quasi-sexual stank face.
“Stank face” is interesting; “quasi-sexual stank face” even more so. I’m trying to imagine it. Whatever it looks like, it’s inspired description. More Bua, please.
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