From our far-flung correspondents
The new New Yorker
The new New Yorker arrived, a day early, actually, issue dated March 27, 2006. This is both a joy and a pain, as it is every week. I'll explain. On my 40th birthday last year, Stuart Maconie began a subscription to the weekly journal for me as a gift. I have recently renewed my subscription, having truly had the quality of my intellectual life improved in the interim. I'd obviously always been aware of the New Yorker, I'd even flicked through it a couple of times, but not until it started arriving on my doormat did its true magnificence hit home. It has been a vital part of my reading week ever since, and I daresay always will be.
I quickly became obsessed with it - the insane length and intensity of its features, the old-fashioned language, the sense of history, the abiding interest in the Supreme Court and the White House (in that order), the refreshing, leftist politics, the sheer poetry of Anthony Lane's movie reviews (oh what a disappointment when it turns out on occasion to be David Denby - there ought to be a word to describe that peculiar sense of melancholy), the arch, obtuse, think-about-it nature of the cartoons, the artistry of some of the cover illustrations, the typeface, the dogged refusal to list what's inside the magazine on the cover, the - for me - totally pointless Time Out listings at the front for concerts, restaurants and art exhibitons it would be most inconvenient for me to attend, even the curious, arcane netherworld of the small ads (Orvis Fly-Fishing Adventures; Bensonwood Open-Built Homes; Hoosac Boarding School "since 1889"; The Poke Boat - "it's everything a canoe/kayak isn't", Asiatica, Kansas City, "Timesless clothes for worldly women"; The Retreat at Sheppard Pratt, "psychotherapeutic mileu" etc.). I bought every book about the New Yorker I could get my hands on, personal accounts of working there since it was launched in 1923 from the likes of Brendan Gill and James Thurber, Peter Arno anthologies, even back issues from eBay, including some elegant bound volumes from the 70s. In short, I gave my life to the New Yorker. Not bad for someone with deeply-grained anti-American prejudice. (Hey, I pick and choose which bits of America I'm anti.)
Here's the rub: I cannot physically finish an issue before the next one arrives. I tend to keep them in the toilet, and, as I've explained, the Seinfeld book has dominated these past few weeks, which has put the magazine in second place, albeit with a certain symmetry, as it's New York either way. So the new issue (pictured) has arrived. I've started reading it - Anthony Lane, a piece about Bill O'Reilly (his "baroque period", apparently) - and that means last week's will have to go "on the pile". The final score, then, for issue dated March 20, 2006:
Read
The Talk Of The Town(front section, smaller pieces): Chilling (about climate change), Glass's Master Class (about a Philip Glass score to a Samuel Beckett play), Taggers (electronic tags)
The Financial Page: Net Losses (about "tiered access" to the Internet - always read this page, as its writer, James Surowiecki, is such a good communicator)
The Utopians by Ben McGrath (about Playa Grande, a private playground for the boho rich in the Dominican Republic, in which we learned that money manager, environmentalist and Manhattan socialite Boykin Curry and his interior designer girlfriend Celerie Kemble, "have got such startlingly good taste, and not just the kind where it's, like, they know how to put a certain lamp with such and such a textile throw." They sound like wankers, the lot of them, and I was thus compelled to read on, for seven and a bit pages. Moby is an investor)
The Current Cinema (Lane on V For Vendetta, as exquisite as ever: "At this point, a few simple questions need to be asked of [the filmmakers], such as, What in the world are you doing?")
Half-read
To Shop And Drive In L.A. by Patricia Marx (a seven-day retail odyssey on the Other Coast, a nice idea that descended into a list of shop addresses and clothing items . . . "a Balenciaga Jacket, embroidered jeans and a sheer skirt")
Ideas For Paintings by Jack Handey (the obligatory "humor" page, not unfunny, quite surreal)
The Alchemist by John Colapinto (about Tobias Meyer, chief auctioneer and worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby's - a tyical New Yorker profile, incredibly detailed and in apparent awe of some guy who does an important job, nine pages long!)
The Raid by Ken Auletta (something about corporate raiders and AOL Time Warner, which I would have finished, had the new issue not arrived!)
Unread
Fiction: Gleason by Louise Erdrich (I never read the fiction - there's too much non-fiction to get through)
Pretty Things by Nick Paumgarten (about Hedi Slimane, a fashion designer, not bothered, although the "weird French bloke" did take pictures of Pete Doherty, whose name caught my eye while skimming. Alan McGee is quoted as saying, "He's not a leech, he's not a user," but that's as far as I got)
Meet The Mets (baseball, not interested)
The Girls Next Door by Joan Acocella (about Playboy, looked interesting, ran out of time)
Mysterious Skin by Paul Goldberger (the Allianz Arena in Munich, an architectural piece)
Ghost's World by Sasha Frere-Jones (the Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah by the mag's very clued-up rock writer - I will read this)
The Theatre (tend to ignore, as it's the New York theatre, unless it's a play I've heard of or an actor I recognise from the illustrations - Ibsen this week; it seems Cate Blanchett is at the Brooklyn Acadmey of Music in Hedda Gabler, check local press for details)
So, I think you can appreciate my frustration. Such a lot of interesting stuff. So little time. Long may the New Yorker frustrate! Read the best of the new issue for free here
posted by Andrew Collins @ 7:09 AM
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10 Comments:
What a shame you dismissed the baseball article so readily although I can understand why. This is clearly a magazine with a lot to offer! Even so, I think you would like baseball if you gave it a chance. The sport is struggling to deal with the steroids issue at the moment but it will rise again because the nation loves baseball. At major-league level it is played by multi-millionaire superstars who routinely make sensational plays but always respect the game and opponents. This is what makes baseball so special.
I respect baseball, John, but I'm never going to be interested in it. I've never liked cricket, and only ever enjoyed playing rounders at school. I only watch football when England are in a major tournament, for sort of in-built reasons (I'm not in the least bit proud to be English!), and take note of how Northampton Town do for old times' sake. Sport is really not for me. I have too much other stuff in my head to fit in results and statistics about fit people running around, throwing things and hitting things for money and glory. But, as I say, I respect those who do. And I don't see why sportspeople shouldn't be allowed to take drugs if it helps them. After all, training is pretty unnatural, as indeed is most organised sport.
It's best to keep as many drugs out of sport as possible because ultimately it would become a contest between scientists not athletes - let scientists come up with their own games. Also drug use can provide short-term gain but kill you long-term thus disadvantaging relatively sane people who want to compete but not take such risks. I hate the thieving lying drug cheats and would like them all banned for life and given community service. They destroy the sports they compete in because most spectators want to see the beauty of what a human being can do with natural ability and hard work and will turn off if they think it's the result of powerful drugs.
By the way I understand why many people can't tolerate all the boring, macho, incomprehensible stuff of sport - that's the deal really, if you don't you'll miss the beautiful moments (which are not always about winning*).
*like the kangaroo leaping in front of the mountain biker at the commonwealth games!
I wasn't being entirely serious about the drugs. (I'm not a big fan of scientists, nor drugs companies!) As I said, I appreciate why people love sport, I just find myself unmoved by much of it. I understand there was a really amazing high jumper from the Bahamas in Melbourne. I like stories like that. And a man I just saw throwing the hammer was chucking the equivalent of the two heaviest dumbbells I use about the length of a football pitch. Not bad. But he must eat an awful lot of pasta.
I get that Anthony Lane feeling with the tv reviews in The Guide in The Guardian when I look to the top of the 'Screen Burn' page and see Michael Holden's name instead of Charlie Brooker. Holden's a good enough writer but sometimes you feel as though he's trying too hard to be Brooker without quite getting the chemistry or naughtiness quite right.
For me, the most amusing and bemusing small add is for the $10 “European Beret” which seems to have populated the back pages of the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly for years. Who’s buying them?
I'm curious about that New Yorker cover - I don't suppose it is supernanny but is it?
Not Supernanny, no, The drawings of Bruce Eric Kaplan are very stylised. All his characters kind of look the same. This illustration is called "Childproof" (it's named on the contents page. I think it's about parental paranoia, but, as with all New Yorker cartoons, it's never cut and dried.
I've been a New Yorker reader for 5 or 6 years and looove this magazine. When I had a roommate, we each had a subscription -- if we had tried to share, we would have had no hope of ever finishing an issue. I try to read from front to back, starting with the letters, skipping over most of the NYC listings, picking up with Talk of the Town (delighted when Hendrik Hertzberg had written the Comment piece, as he crafts fantastic arguments against Bush), savoring the better Shouts & Murmurs, and forging ahead until I get to the media criticism, where I tend to read just the movie reviews and then get annoyed when I see that aggravating back-page cartoon caption contest (why won't this magazine let its wonderful cartoonists work their comic genius?). And no, I have never bought the European beret.
The article on Boykin and Celerie (what kind of parent names their child after a vegetable?) is hilarious. Two vapid beings with too much money and too little class, who belittle the people of the country where they just made a major investment, and who want to build a Creative Person's Utopia, but who are, themselves, a money manager and an interior decorator. I guess they are so bored with their own dull, un-creative jobs that they need to be with more interesting people -- but why would interesting people want to be with them????
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