Last Week's New Yorker Review: December 23
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 23
“‘Just because I am a librarian doesn’t mean I have to dress like one!’”
Must-Read:
“The Archivist” - Hilton Als asks what’s da Costa passing? Als is maybe a little too comfortable posing theoreticals about strangers’ lives (Did da Costa Greene’s father represent a “dark shadow her heart could not let go”?) but his cutting-through-the-bullshit style serves him well here; he treats Greene’s choice to pass as white as both understandable and unbearable. He drops the true costs of her actions slowly; her final, greatest loss hits like a sledgehammer at the very end. Als doesn’t ignore the incredible things Greene accomplished, but they’re neither what remains crucial about her story, nor what draws him to it. (Plus, as he says, she could’ve put her talents to work on behalf of Black people, and didn’t.) When I make it out to the Morgan, I’ll be interested to see how much Als is pulling from the Morgan exhibition, and how much is off his dome – it’s ambiguous. If you aren’t a museum obsessive, though, this might be your only encounter with Greene’s dark tale; Als gives the whole story: The way he sees it, and the way he’s seen by it.
Puzzle Corner:
“Grocery Run” - Very easy, fairly charming.
“Yule Log” - Clever, perfect difficulty (allow six or seven minutes.)
“Complements of the Chef” - The cross-out mechanic doesn’t really work – what, are we supposed to have a straightedge? But the clueing is very clever. Easy, but I still hit a snag, so it can’t be that easy.
“Laugh Lines” - I recommend ignoring the listed dates and just trying to fill in the years. Otherwise it’s way too easy. Also – only 2001’s is funny, whatever that tells you.
“The Supper Soiree” - Struggled with this for about an hour then got hopelessly entangled in suppositions and gave up. Theming is cute even though I’m not the biggest Judy Chicago fan.
“Stop Right There!” - Theme is nothing special, but it’s still a decent easy-to-medium crossword.
“Recipe Swap” - The drawing for I is not how I envision that dish. Everything else basically works, although the idea that anyone would be solving this left-to-right and not right-to-left is an absurd pretense. Obviously unscrambling food names is easier than blind-solving rebuses.
Window-Shop:
“A Family Roast” (Comics) - Will McPhail follows a recipe. The first three quarters are undeniably charming. Whether the ending works for you will depend on your ability to accept a rapidly pivoting tone. The execution is pretty much flawless; it’s still a big leap.
“Snacks of New England” (Comics) - Ben Passmore pahks the cah in Hahvahd Yahd. Passmore did great work for The Nib (rest in peace – it had a good run) and this is a pleasant tale – like a lot of comics in the magazine, it feels edited within an inch of its life, to the point where it reflects the magazine’s This-American-Life-core perspective as much as the artist’s. (Is this a François Mouly thing, perhaps?) Still, I won’t knock it – it works.
“Occupy Paradise” - Merve Emre is laughing all the way to the blank verse. Pegged very loosely to an academic study, this is really just Miltonania for its own sake. Emre is a hugely intelligent reader, and while this does have the rushed, scattered quality of a teacher cramming a semester’s worth of material into a single class, that also means there’s plenty for the already devoted to nibble on. (I can’t say I count myself among them – I can barely get through a line of the stuff.) If Emre is making a broader point, it eludes me; the theme is basically “the very best of my critical annotations”. There are certainly worse things; then again, I wonder how many non-mandated readers will stick with a piece that opens with a syllable-by-syllable analysis of the poem’s first line. The online edition has grown desperate: “Did You Know [Paradise Lost] Was Sexy?” it blares. Unfortunately, that’s just false advertising. I don’t need temptation to do the reading – I have a mandate. For everyone else, sex is just within reach; Satan is alive, and now he has clickbait on his side.
“ThuggerDaily Speaks” (Talk of the Town) - Charles Bethea knows never will he commit treason. Discord culture has been largely under-reported-on by the press; this is an especially vivid example of the strengths of the platform – Bliv's group got ahead of the pros in part thanks to the communal information-sharing that Discord facilitates. Bliv is also a good character, and who doesn't dream about getting their weird semi-anonymous internet hobby covered in a major periodical? (It can happen to anyone.)
“Outside Man” - Alexandra Schwartz says it’s Brutalist out here. Has it both ways: If you estimate Corbet as a genius, there’s lots of praise here, but if you find him a self-serious fraud, there’s plenty of rope. Corbet has a lot in common with Jeremy Strong; both are obsessed with slotting into a lineage of ambitious, afflicted great male artists that’s both creatively admirable and also kinda outmoded. But this won’t prompt the discourse cycle of Michael Schulman’s Strong profile, both because Corbet’s excesses are more rhetorical and because pomposity fits an auteur-director making a four hour movie about an architect but looks ridiculous in an actor playing a douchebag. (Just to be clear: Strong rocks.) Schwartz spends a very long time on Corbet’s early years – his childhood acting jobs (“‘Time to thunderize!’”) and young-adult gigs with legends; his first film, about a baby fascist. It’s somewhat slow going. Then again, it’s nice that the piece doesn’t give so much away about The Brutalist, which has barely been released, that one will resent having read it before spending their whole day on the film. I would’ve liked more on how ten million was stretched to fill an epic (sure, there were scale models… but were there scale paychecks?) and on Corbet’s directorial sense – he’s a writer-director, but he talks such a big game about the latter half that it’s a shame Schwartz mostly delves into the former. And surely Corbet’s partner’s films, two of which he cowrote, could be referenced at least a bit – especially because her latest is a musical about the founder of the Shakers, which… come on. (The pair also co-directed a T.V. miniseries, which isn’t even mentioned.) Despite these weird omissions, the piece chugs along amiably – I’ll know how I really feel about it, and Corbet, in around two weeks and four hours.
“Stirring Stuff” - Anthony Lane goes with the grains. My chief associations with risotto are that my parents’ go-to dinner is an undersalted Instant Pot variation that’s not especially to my liking, and that everyone who tries to make it on Top Chef gets sent home. I’ll take Lane’s word that the Italians know what they’re doing. Lane waits a while – maybe too long; the grains start breaking down – to get to the travelogue portion, which is moderately charming if you liked The Trip to Italy’s scenery and goofy dry humor but wished it had one less British man. Lane has a little breakthrough at the very-very end, but really this is fluff – no bite left in the rice.
“Goops and Slops” (Comics) - Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein are cooked within an inch of their lives. Never more than the sum of its parts; just a variety of chatty bits about food texture. (No mention of risotto, somehow!) The gristle being labeled a “Kosher” is what rescues this from banality. I’ll remember that.
Skip Without Guilt:
“First Fast” (Comics) - Navied Mahdavian is an abstain remover. Just kinda literal – not knowing where home is, represented by a bunch of arrows labeled “Home?” and pointing in different directions; come on. Neither funny nor moving; just somewhat charming.
“Chaos Theory” - Jennifer Wilson gets stuffed. Nothing too surprising – I could’ve guessed that professional organizers are really serving a role closer to therapist, helping overwhelmed people negotiate their relationship with stuff that serves a symbolic need while also functioning as a practical impediment. So could you, if you’ve watched even one episode of Hoarders. (One doesn’t have to have stacks to the ceiling to need essentially the same kind of help.) I do wish Wilson would consider the non-anglophile world, whose customs have sparked so much of the tidying industry but who’re invisible here. Some of the jokes stretch on too long; a phonebook sex work gag gets repeated twice and it’s a tad more pearl-clutchy than Wilson thinks. Elsewhere, she jumps around too quickly – surely the point that clutter isn’t just an issue afflicting the affluent could be bolstered by more than one flimsy anecdote about what Wilson has seen on TikTok. Still, the ending is strong; the piece is a good starting place if you know nothing about professional tidying… and if your boxes have boxes in them, well, you probably don’t have time to read this magazine anyway.
“Up From Urkel” - Vinson Cunningham did do that. It’s remarkable that Cunningham can get me to care even a little bit about Jaleel White’s bitterness at the entertainment industry for – if you can believe it – taking advantage of him! What a story. Urkel was a child’s impression of a nerd, initially charming because the child underneath was so visible, eventually curdling into a teenager’s impression of his own childhood self. That’s not even to touch the racial component, which Cunningham gets into a bit; if he doesn’t quite call Urkel a “cooning distraction” (that’s J.J. on Good Times) he comes very close. That White was miserable the whole time is pretty much self-evident; that he doesn’t seem to have learned any lessons from the whole affair is more deeply sad. He can’t see for snorting.
“Bored Game” (Comics) - Liana Finck plays the thing. A cliché, not given much spunk in execution. Relies on identification with a very particular type of family to work at all, and even then it’s just the easy humor of resemblance.
“Holiday Punch” - Helen Shaw is gonna send thee ten by ten. Both rather flat in terms of prose and surprisingly unwilling to probe beyond Cult’s surface – Shaw addresses its elevator pitch, is bored by it, and leaves things at that. (There’s hardly a thing about faith and belief, which is pretty much the show’s central theme; that’s not to mention whiteness and appropriation, inherited trauma, casual alcoholism…) No President, meanwhile, is just hard to visualize; that’s not Shaw’s fault, exactly, but maybe it’s not worth reviewing an already-closed show that doesn’t come across on the page.
Letters:
John writes in with a helpful correction and a guess as to how Calvin Tomkins keeps writing pieces like his profile of Rashid Johnson: “I believe Tomkins just turned 99, not 100. Still, it's a miracle that he is still producing feature-length profiles at an age when Roger Angell was mostly just blogging (no shade, of course). As for how he's able to do it, Tomkins's recent profiles often mention his wife, Dodie Kazanjian, accompanying him on studio visits. I suspect she may be playing a bigger role than that.”
a frown
is a wish your face makes