Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 29 & January 5

“When either of the two stars took the stage, though, I thought of a car that breaks down in the middle of a road and then stays there, hazards blinking, as traffic detours around it.“

Must-Read:

“On Y Va” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw has a Tartuffe ache. An excellent sendoff for Shaw (one or two more pieces might come out, but this ending feels to me like a capper), who’s moving to the Times. Her tenure at the magazine ended up rather short, and whether for reasons of editing or something more opaque, I sometimes sensed a reluctance to stretch her legs which was not in evidence during her New York tenure. I remain a huge Shaw fan, though, and she’s still a master of the popping-boba phrase (here, the leads are “studies in otiose passivity”, while Emily Davis’ “arrangement of topknots… bounces on her head like a prize curly lamb”) and, more generally, the mixed review which does not sink into sullenness or rush past points of failure, but treats both a show’s failures and successes with a lively critical eye. The critique of Hnath’s clunky rhymes, probably hard to avoid, still sings, since Shaw is able to link it to the text at hand: Both involve discernment of the real deal. Shaw closes things out by beckoning us forward, willing us to engage in places we have no formal welcome. As a largely untrained critic who nitpicks the professionals without solicitation every week, suffice it to say I’m pushing, Helen!

“For Richer or Poorer” (Brave New World Dept.) - Jennifer Wilson engages a lawyer. Now this is how you write a trends piece! It’s an ever-popular form, seemingly simple but actually devilish because the balance between amusement, perspective, and background is so hard to strike – it usually becomes a “pick two” situation. Here, without working up a sweat, Wilson manages to take the political context(s) of the prenup seriously, to jab at the tech-forward lunacies of the scene without dismissal or even sarcasm, and to convey her own personality and point of view on the subject without swerving into personal-essaerobics. Wilson gestures a bit toward Zoomers, but she’s really written a sidelong treatise on Millennial love, with its odd aspirational-doomer tone that defines the Dumpster Fire generation. The pre-money prenup, which guards against the disaster of success, is such a perfect metaphor for the mindset it’s a wonder it’s an actual social phenomenon – things are rarely so neat. Wilson opens the article with a couple joined by Hamilton OkCupid bios and “watching ‘Ted Lasso’ over a plate of tahini noodles”; amazingly, the cheugy¹ signifiers only accumulate from there. Whether you’re annoyed by or attracted to the beige-pink of it all, it’s hard not to be amused. A great one to read with relatives; the meaning of marriage has shifted so much so quickly you’ll find out that every generation has its own ring to it.

Special Section:

Back-to-front excellent Talk of the Towns! Couldn’t rank ‘em, and they’re all top notch anyhow. Here they are:

🗣️ “The New Guy” (Comment) - Eric Lach says we mayor may not be able to count ‘em. Lach is taking full advantage of the Mamdani beat, and this is a solid setup with interesting historical detail. About as good as Comment gets.

🗣️ “Not Your Average Bear” (London Postcard) - Anna Russell bears and grins it. A charming treatment of a special effect that’s really quite astounding. Great button.

🗣️ “Shadow Boxing” (Mockup Dept.) - Bruce Handy has the tchotchkes to the kingdom. Well-pitched; this is a silly idea, but you wouldn’t want to mock it, exactly, especially because Cornell is a visionary who deserves the meticulousness. The work needed to create false mess is an eternal droll standby; “set decorator” is, without being loud about it, one of the funniest jobs.

🗣️ “Shaking” (Dept. of Austerity) - Michael Schulman pulls a Fastvold one – a chair, that is. A very interesting mini-history of Shakers; a thoughtful, funny quote on spousal artistic inspiration; a successful enticement for Fastvold’s new film. Talk of the Town almost always works better with directors than actors; even by that metric, Fastvold makes a fine guest.

Window-Shop:

“Freudian Slips” (Books) - Leslie Jamison is becoming. Jamison’s writing seems to get better the less she delves into her personal life and the more she unpacks complicated theoretical ideas, which is a rare quality in any writer but especially bizarre for a memoirist. This book review focuses mostly on the history of fashion, and the glimpses of Jamison’s life we do get don’t take over until the very end, where they make a decent, if slightly predictable, capstone. The history is excellent: Precise, dynamic, fun. The review gains a lot if you’ve seen the show at F.I.T, since most every dress Valerie Steele references in her book (which is somewhere between a show catalogue and a stand-alone work) is included; luckily, I caught it a few months back. Steele’s thesis is not incredibly deep (clothes help us become ourselves; we’re all born naked and the rest is, uh, dress), and her examples tend toward the overliteral, as Jamison notes. But Jamison makes of it something more, emphasizing the drama that lurks in Steele’s idea: Dress isn’t representation but exaggeration, and, Jamison adds, perhaps sometimes even negation. (“A garment invites us to invent a self that has never existed before, and then, when we take it off, to kill that provisional self”.) There is more than a hint of the capitalistic in this – must the self always be self-promoting? – and fashion as an art does seem to be all couture, no collective. Of course, for dress to tell a story, it must act as a signifying uniform. Otherwise, you’ll raise the question: What the shit are you wearing?Nobody likes an anal expulsive.

“Last Highway” (Profiles) - Alex Abramovich is caught in a full Nelson with his Willie out. Rare that I’d describe a profile as “languorous” and mean it as a compliment, but this qualifies. Even if it is frequently repetitive (did you know Nelson sings behind the beat?) and borderline facile, even if it’s largely an exercise in printing the legend, still it’s hugely pleasurable to hang with Nelson, hear his story, and watch him get his flowers. (Bob Dylan, at the very end, throws him a block-quote bouquet.) Religion and politics are present, but not exactly central: a labor dispute seems like it might result in an awkward detente, but blows over; Nelson’s knack for holding to his principles but keeping an audience in conservative corners is mentioned more than it is explained; one can’t help but think that the almost charming outmodedness of a Carter Democrat in this day and age (combined with his being a white guy with a familiar face) helps insulate him from backlash; that this is less a matter of skill than timing. (Abramovich, thankfully, doesn’t press the point too much; there is no suggesting that Nelson should be the pro-labor Joe Rogan, or whatever.) The pleasures of this piece, though, reside in its less substantive sections; the band shooting shit, Abramovich listing songs that fit a theme (“The idea of home” is one), an eerie description of a major storm hitting Nelson’s band (it quickly lead to the horrific Kerr County floods nearby). Like Nelson, the piece is melodious, unhurried, charming. And if the tempo seems to drag, that may just be a matter of perspective.

Wright on Liebling (Takes) - If this is the last installment of this feature, it’s slightly anticlimactic, but it’s still fun hearing Wright gush over the remarkable Liebling – the last two paragraphs abandon the piece at hand to brim over with Liebling anecdote. He put the you-know-what in indefatigable.

“Yes, Boss” (A Reporter at Large) - Ian Parker had Navarro doubt. An awfully long way to pronounce “lookit this asshole!” – but surprisingly fun, as it gets to the heart of Navarro’s shallow rottenness and insecurity. Did he pioneer the specific way people suck up to Trump, by acting like his malformed clones? I’m skeptical, but Parker does make the case. Navarro is not quite the classic useful idiot, but it may be more important that he’s a useful prick, perversely seeking to be disliked by everyone but his boss, so as to validate his view of himself as underappreciated. He’s also exactly the sort of low-rent scam artist prone to falling for scams. Parker makes sure that every single paragraph contains at least one detail that makes the guy look like a prick, which somehow gets funnier and funnier as the piece goes on and on and on. This is a very dark comedy, but political comedy pretty much has to be right now. No one will be shocked that those closest to Trump – especially the freakish few who’ve made it through both terms – have gnarled and grimy souls. But as long as they’re in power, it’s worth punching up at them.

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Sound of Silents” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross moves a body with organs. Boy, there really isn’t much to this! Anyone that’s seen a film with live music will innately grasp Ross’ thesis (“The technological mastery of cinematic spectacle is humanized by the immediacy of live performance”) and this is more appreciation than review. As such, it could probably have been a Goings On… except, oh, right, it’s in Los Angeles. Covering operas in other cities I understand, but going to events this small-scale all the way across the Hudson River and some other stuff just seems irrelevant to my interests.

“Alphabet Soup” (Annals of Education) - David Owen gets a read. My sister has dyslexia and went to an excellent private school for those needs, which, along with my training² as an English educator, meant I knew the basics of this subject. And unfortunately basics are all Owen gets into here. It’s hard for me to say whether this article will be revelatory or interesting for a general audience, but dyslexia is widespread enough that I wonder how many people really need such a lengthy explanation of its emotional effects. (Or even the explanation that phonics, actually, do work – research I’ve been familiar with for a decade, and have brought up at parties to knowing nods.) Given how traumatic schooling can be for those of us that do read easily, it’s not hard to grasp why its frustrations and cruelties are magnified when its modalities are an astonishingly poor fit. Still, I do think Owen’s choice to emphasize the “laughter of… classmates” is odd, given that a good teacher ought to control what’s seen as success in their classroom; even with broken modalities, the troubles with valorizing achievement over effort seem central. Owen paints teachers as initially frustrated by what feels like a rigid phonics-based system, but encouraged when it actually works; I’d counter that tactics and prearranged lesson plans are a sliver of the job of a teacher, and slotting these more scientifically validated methods into English classes with high expectations will probably work well in healthy schools and fail in unhealthy schools. Owen doesn’t ignore the need to focus on social-emotional well-being entirely, especially because so many of his interviewees emphasize it again and again. But it’s ultimately not what he cares about. He wants kids to spell, and they should. But school shouldn’t feel like a sentence.

“Look It Up” (A Critic at Large) - Louis Menand acts like a total dictionary. Very quickly gets distracted from its only moderately compelling apparent topic (is the dictionary culturally obsolete?) and never recovers, devolving into a list of funny words which are in one dictionary and not in another. After a pro forma history of prescriptivist versus descriptivist lexicography, Menand gets right to it in often cringy fashion. (“Today, you could probably find many ‘cyber’ words and ‘bro’ words” in the dictionary.) Each of these paragraphs is making exactly the same very simple point: Language is mutable! Don’t we all already know that, bro-ssayist? Do we really have to hear about “irregardless” yet again for you to make that point? And if this linguistic phenomenon actually rendered dictionaries less useful, it would have to be happening more now than before. Read a 1920s issue of this very magazine and you’ll see that coinages have been occurring at an unfathomably rapid clip since at least early modernity, before Web. II and well before Web 2.0.

“The Victor and the Spoils” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody doesn’t put much spin on it. It always annoys me when movie critics directly compare a new film to the director’s previous film, and Brody quickly and thoughtlessly labels this a version of Uncut Gems and then does nothing to prove this point. He spends a while on Ronald Bronstein, which mostly seems like a thin excuse to shout out some indie movies he carries water for. It’s only the final paragraph that expresses any critical point of view on the film: It’s about ambition! I could’ve told you that from the poster, though. This serve hits the net.

Letters:

Heather has many fascinating thoughts on Rachel Aviv’s Oliver Sacks exposé, which I have to publish in full below.

I… found myself wondering about the negative impact Sacks’ lies might have had on the study and practice of medicine. It can be difficult to imagine a situation in which empathizing with patients and allowing them to construct coherent stories of their own experiences could be damaging. 

I was reminded of the narratives expected of trans people —this idea, perpetuated by both physicians and the general public, that a certain narrative is often a prerequisite when seeking medical and social recognition and support, a narrative (based on the typical coming-out story) of “always knowing” from very early childhood as proof that the narrator was “born this way” and has completed a journey of clear, simple self-discovery and -revelation. Of course, all human stories are far messier and more complicated than that, but medical professionals by and large expect it. Narratives, when allowed to be authentic to the narrator, can be powerful, but when listeners apply specific expectations and parameters to these narratives, they become limiting, diminishing, even dangerous. 

One impact of Sacks’ (and others’) approach, I thought, could be on expectations of patients — if physicians might now expect a certain depth of connection or redemptive arc. Disappointment, in that case, might have repercussions for patient care. I found this essay illuminating in this regard. Teare makes it clear that narrative medicine, when not appropriately practiced, can ask patients to earn their care by constructing the right narrative, and he does so in the context of the punishing, exhausting, and harmful American healthcare system:

“And so we waited, my partner and I. We waited to hear the story about my body we thought Western medicine was going to tell us, the story of restitution that we’d been promised only it could tell, the familiar one that goes: illness, diagnosis, treatment, health. We also waited for my story about bad capitalism to end—exploitative labor, low income, chronic illness, and a health care system that at that time denied insurance to people with preexisting medical conditions—and for another, better story offered by taxpayer-funded public health care to begin.

Fairy tales are known for their narrative expedience and relative brevity: all action is external, suspense is brief, and soon the mortal threat has been vanquished. But in the woods of illness, time stopped moving in a linear fashion, and the compass supplied by stories of the ordinary world no longer pointed north, pointed true. The language of narrative—protagonist and antagonist, conflict and denouement—couldn’t orient me in that landscape.”

Gee, thanks so much for that, Heather.

happy kwanzaa

Coming soon: Best Ofs. Going whole hog to make up for the lack of a midyear list. Subscribe to show appreciation. and to receive the Cartoon and Poem Supplement, which incidentally is by far the meanest installment of this newsletter. The paywall instills (surely unwise) bravery.