Last Week's New Yorker Review: April 14
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of April 14
“a room with a bed, a desk, and a shower, where writers can isolate themselves from distractions, in a process known as kanzume, or ‘canning.’”
Must-Reads:
“The Alien Eye” (Profiles) - Elif Batuman enters a marriage of convenience store with Sayaka Murata. Batuman approaches this as a piece about a big weirdo encountering a much bigger weirdo, and reconsidering her judgement of alienation as a result. That allows the profile to expand beyond Murata’s work or her personality, and to consider more deeply what it means that a person like her exists – yet because Batuman comes at this from a place oriented toward transformation, it never feels like we’re gawking at Murata. Murata and Batuman share a gendered pain, but they also share a response to it that transcends mere compensation – a deliberate “defamiliarization” which may initially have been a defense mechanism, but is ultimately the thing that makes both of them such potent writers. Everything is prodded and turned about, including the self. (Murata makes a diagram of writer-self dissecting a separate human-self and separating out each organ, an extremely Deleuzeian concept.) This characteristic curiosity, which Batuman suggests is opposite to anger and resentment, has revolutionary potential; if “current norms” are manufactured, part of the societal “‘experiment’” which Murata is awake to, then one can extract them (like organs) and consider from a distance what is fascism and “genocide” and what is love. (Murata softly rejects these ideas by saying she doesn’t want to let any “human thoughts” into the aquarium; understandably the artist’s prerogative, who can’t risk inserting a lens of ideology, though certainly not an indication that the critic ought not to go there either.) Murata finds a sexual charge toward the idea and the object, she writes to recover something related to a “childhood unhappiness” from writing, but even terms like “ace” or “queer” or “traumatized” or “female” project so much human detritus onto Murata. We live in this world, and still must project; she, the writer without organs, surely shouldn’t.
“Strongmen” (Letter from Brazil) - Jon Lee Anderson knows history has its de Moraes on the country’s Supreme Court. Man, Anderson can write; his surveys of the political environment in various Central and South American countries have been, for years now, one of the best recurring features in this magazine. If nothing is special about this one, in the sense that there’s no particular twist on the formula, its degree of difficulty is still far higher than usual; Brazil is such a massive and multivalent country that Anderson could start anywhere. He starts with political violence and the descriptor “febrile”, portraying a fight over the “political reality” of the situation; he focuses on the role of tech in shaping that febrile mood. The digital environment, of course, facilitates the spread of misinformation; Anderson does a good job alarming us without being alarmist, portraying Brazil as the earliest clear battleground in a digital fight for political power. (At least their left is putting up a fight.) While de Moraes is nominally the subject, the piece is just as much about Bolsonaro, but Anderson makes the wise choice to expand the frame to encompass many other parts of the picture of digital extremism in Brazil: Especially good is the mini-profile of a crusading reporter who was harassed by the Bolsonaristas and sued them. No survey can be comprehensive, but Anderson’s frame is intelligent: Brazil is very online (Please, come to Brazil), very turbulent, and has a very powerful judiciary; these three things are connected (though Anderson knows better than to imply causation). You don’t have to be a Brazil nut to benefit from reading.
Window-Shop Plus:
This is a strong edition, and these would be must-reads in many issues.
“Enemy of the State” (Books) - Nikil Saval is infrapenny, infrapound with the infrapolitical James C. Scott. When David Brooks starts calling for a popular uprising, it’s time to brush up your Anarchist philosophy. Saval’s survey of Scott is a great place to start. His work generally considered how small acts of rebellion and disobedience can create a pattern that destabilizes regimes; his new book praises floods as lifegiving and beautifully uncivilized, while earlier work explores state power that, even when well-meaning or nominally revolutionary, are structured in unhelpful ways – they dam up the energy that keeps people fed and functioning. Scott’s argument against hierarchy is multivalent and complicated, but Saval does a wonderful job simplifying and sharpening it; Saval notes that Scott was never an “activist” like David Graeber, but given a reading this incisive and distilled,, his ideas become catchier and easier to pass along. Does it matter that libertarians cottoned to his ideas? Probably not as much as Saval thinks; it’s noteworthy that, in a piece filled with quotes, the best he can do to back their reading up is to say his writing, by asking for “‘surprises’”, “might suggest” that deregulation is the way to go. It also might not suggest that – especially because Scott explicitly says that planners ought to move slowly and try not to break anything. Scott says that to resist Authoritarianism, we must first simply prefer not to prop it up.
“Fresh Paint” (The Art World) - Adam Gopnik is re-Frickin’-furbished. Presumably this is something of a post-Arn rush job, but you’d never know it; Gopnik’s obvious adoration of the Frick is quite charming, and his nerdy esprit makes him the perfect tour guide to lead reintroductions. On a quartet of Whistlers: “They remain: four wraiths of fashion, studies in the chic of attenuation, so flat that one feels they could be rolled up, like Peter Pan’s shadow, each night when the museum closes.” On artistic lives made, and ruined, by capitalists like Frick: “Rembrandt was a casualty of the same commercial culture that produced the gallery in which his image hangs today, and his self-portrait conveys the richest and most ambivalent emotions that the collection contains.” The last paragraph is a classic vaguely-telling non sequitur, of the sort this magazine used to specialize in. A thoughtful renovation might encourage that sort of thing.
“Let It Lie” (Books) - James Wood dissects Darkenbloom’s taxonomy. An epic small-town novel that holds within it a suppressed Nazi story – one Wood calls ironic in the existential sense. I come from Austrian Jews, not the Hungarians that were shot in Austria, as recounted here, and more urban/urbane than these “provincial” characters – but still complicated and close. Wood tries mightily to get the novel’s “irritated prosaicism” to come across – he might, though, have benefitted from some more substantial quotes in that regard. A short review of a long book, this can only be glancing; Wood’s letter of recommendation always reveals more to a reader familiar with the text he’s reviewing, though. There are secrets hidden.
Window-Shop Regular:
“Exit Wounds” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang wants it wars and all. War is sick and horrifying, and making a sick and horrifying film is probably the way to convey this; it’s also slow and procedure-driven, though, and this is the thing Garland seems determined to get across. Certainly worthy, though using the trappings of star-driven narrative makes subverting them more complicated, and I’m not sure Chang asks why enough – the film may be formally successful, but in service of what? (“...superficially apolitical in spite of itself”, says David Ehrlich; “you might come away from it wondering what the point is”, says Matt Zoller Seitz.) The film “is waging a war of its own”, Chang says, one against the way war movies are usually made; but it’s waging this war without any sense of a desired outcome. That kind of fight has a tendency to go on forever.
“Boy, Back in Town” (Talk of the Town) - Nick Paumgarten has one more for the road. The heart of the city.
“Social Butterfly” (Onward and Upward With Technology) - Kyle Chayka never saw the sun shinin’ so bright. As a longtime Twitter addict, I of course have transitioned over to Bluesky, which does have a methadone tang to it, but is good enough in a pinch. The replies are notably awful, something Chayka ought to touch on – the swarming of the site by un-plugged-in resistance libs who seem to think it’s a politics listserv for them to police does tend to harsh the vibes. I already knew most of what Chayka discusses here – or, in the case of decentralization, I continue to not know despite having read about it a hundred times; in the end, I really only care about whatever is user-facing, and I have no interest in building my own algorithm. I do wish Bluesky had an easy way to search only the skeets of people you follow; if this exists and I just can’t find it because the site is (deliberately?) unintuitive, please help me out. The sections profiling Graber, the CEO, are most compelling; she’s a fairly likeable weirdo, though she’s also basically just Moxie Marlinspike with the edges sanded down. Chayka is an excellent tech philosopher; his feature writing is much more traditional and less snappy, and I wish the magazine would let him mix those modes more. The sky’s the limit!
Atwood on Gallant - Gives away the entirety of a fairly short story. But Atwood’s warm assessment of Gallant’s character (“She was a tough little nut… she saw through subterfuge, no matter who was trying it on”) is charming.
“Clear As Folk” (Pop Music) - Kelefa Sanneh packs up the punk. An inappropriate titular pun for a piece about a cis dude, I think. This is perfectly alright; Schneeweis’ music is pretty intolerable just on a vocal level, and hardly popular or “pop” enough to appear under this heading – he’s more anti-pop – but any coverage of counterculture is worthwhile. Sanneh’s approach is pretty apolitical, and the concluding support for “respectability” is something that I’d rather hear from Pat himself than have projected onto him – it’s not quite what I get out of the quote Sanneh includes. But the story of surmounting a serious addiction and emerging back into artmaking is a joyous one.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Man Up” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw hears one guy, two guy, Red guy, Blue guy. Because Shaw is a Glengarry fan, she’s a bit less harsh on the political implications of its staging than other reviewers; even Jesse Green is talking about the “consortium of thugocracies” the show prefigures and is thus rendered a bit irrelevant by. But Shaw still sees the show as a “razor-edged critique”, though that assessment is made warily. On Clooney, she awkwardly asserts that the few wealthy who can afford tickets are probably “the very folks Clooney is trying to reach”, but surely inaccessibility is an odd way to spread a message – and an easy way to, you know, make money. I’m skeptical that Clooney’s show, which Shaw admits is ungainly, has much more on its mind than the trappings of courage.
“Going Nuclear” (Books) - Elizabeth Kolbert splits the atomic difference. Kolbert partly overlooks the best case against nuclear, even though one of its boosters’ counterarguments so perfectly tees it up. He argues that “opposition to nuclear” has lead to “delays and cost overruns”, but isn’t it true that he’s essentially arguing for less regulation of nuclear – the only way building such things makes sense? The argument isn’t “should we build nuclear or shouldn’t we,” it’s “can we afford to build nuclear safely, or should we lower our safety standards?” Japan’s reactors were built to a high standard and still failed catastrophically. As Kolbert says, our world is one “of errors, terrors, and corruption.” She flirts, as usual, with a technofascist argument toward the end – that actually, nuclear disasters might be good because at least they’ll keep the humans from messing with the pure land – though she couches it with a nudge. I’m sick of it. As usual, her book-review prose is noticeably flatter than her feature-article prose. She still knows how to explain things; this is basically coherent and not misleading or uninteresting, exactly. But it doesn’t split the atom; it doesn’t even try.
“Life After Death” (Annals of Zoology) - D.T. Max faces Dire consequences. If I wanted to read a regurgitation of a tech startup’s investor pitch, I’d read WIRED – except WIRED is very good now, so I guess I’d read pretty much anybody else. Max is awfully starry-eyed, and his own choice to start the piece with an extended meditation on extinction as a concept shows just how hollow Colossal's claims to actually not care at all about de-extinction and instead only care about “rewilding” really are. If there’s any evidence that rewilding would be actually helpful to any given ecosystem, Max doesn’t provide it. Apparently, the model is less environmentalist and more touristic and Jurassic Park-esque; when a startup is selling you a theme park, run away. I deliberately wrote this blurb before reading Tom Scocca’s takedown of this piece in Indignity, figuring we’d cover the same ground; we did, basically, although his acid wit is nonpareil. Max says that it’s “for the reader to decide” whether these critters are actually dire wolves. Well, no – there’s not as much grey area (or sparkling white area, as the case may be) as Colossal would like you to think. There’s no reasonable definition of dire wolf that includes those two pups, and yet the piece’s online title (never to be trusted) is: “The Dire Wolf Is Back.” Chat, it’s so over.
Letters:
Susan found Catallus, covered by Daniel Mendelsohn last week, “in college, through Dominick Argento's masterful song cycle… I Hate and I Love. It was written for mixed chorus and percussion. Fantastic. Worth seeking out and listening.” Thanks for the rec!
pumpernickel