July 19, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker Review: July 22, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 22

"Damnation to the Governour and Confusion to the Colony"

Must-Reads:

“The Power of the Pirates” - Daniel Immerwahr takes the radical out of piratical. A fascinating corrective to the recent wave of mild historical revisionism that cast pirates as “the last holdouts against a world dominated by states and corporations”. That’s still a new enough idea that Immerwahr’s summary of that line of thought has to take up about half this piece; he keeps things lively enough till four sections in he swaps his flags and catches the reader by surprise. He’s not actually paying tribute to pirates’ radicalism – he’s pointing out how much they relied on, and contributed to, the burgeoning capitalist states from which they set sail. The only recognizably radical pirate era lasted a mere decade, and was the result mostly of desperation. Then again, desperation often provokes radicalism; Immerwahr could do more to explain why the pirates’ efforts ended how they did, with a massive bloody crackdown by the British state, followed immediately and “oddly” by “the start of Britain’s pirate obsession”. That word “oddly” indicates to me there’s more to be unpacked; Immerwahr’s concluding guess that pirates served as posthumous mascots for capitalism isn’t the most compelling, or evidence-based, idea here. Elsewhere, especially when discussing the piratical relationship to sex work and “hard currency”, Immerwahr condenses the work of scholars into concise and catchy bits of knowledge. (“…rather than locking these women in the wench kennel, Jamaica should have erected statues to them for resolving the colonial liquidity crisis.”) He does more than parrot – he shoulders the work so you don’t have to. Polly want a cracker?

Window-Shop:

“Dances with Woolf” - Jennifer Homans says she will watch the ballet herself. Oh man, that third movement sounds so deeply misbegotten as to be incredibly offensive. One hardly needs to probe any deeper questions around dance and narrative to make that clear. Homans does so anyway, and her beginnings of a case for dance as a “language in and of itself” are compelling – I’d love a further expansion on those points. Instead the review takes hold, steady and light on its feet. (The star’s “sense of distance from her own body gives us the long view from youth to mortality that the novel also evokes”, in another “dance of feints and falls” with two performers, “the stage seems to open to their desperation.”) Eventually, Homans has to get to the jaw-dropping mess of the third act’s “Waves” adaptation, both incredibly literal and entirely tasteless in its both hyper-literal and inaccurate depiction of Woolf’s suicide. Homans conveys well how stupid this all is, though it’s a pity one of her too-rare reviews is spent on this manifestly muddled work.

“Sex and Sensibility” - Margaret Talbot puts her best Bluestocking forward. It’s something of a classic genre in this magazine: This center-left group deserves reclaiming even though their politics now look retrograde! As ever, the point is not invalid, but the forum prompts an eye roll. Disregarding that, this is an interesting history in brief – the usual sort of book review that summarizes rather than reviewing. The Bluestockings’ desperate respectability politics are difficult to like, especially when they’re closing ranks against the mildest social nonconformity, but if you can judge a woman by the quality of her enemies, the Bluestockings clearly merit some rescuing. Most interesting is the third section, which speaks to their work – rescuing Shakespeare from Voltaire and patiently disagreeing with reactionaries. That the longest section is concerned with infighting shows, a bit, that even when reclaiming these sorts of troublesome actors, it’s hard not to accentuate the drama: Call them the Rational Hostesses of Somerset County.

“Blocking” - Justin Chang dreams of escape from Sing Sing. Chang in a reserved and joke-light mode; if he doesn’t have much to say about this film in particular, which lays the usual “sturdily conventional” narrative atop its drawn-from-life setting, he positions it nicely as part of a new canon of theater-in-jail films. He even lifts a line from Pauline Kael, written to describe an earlier attempt at much the same thing, which fits this new try just as well. How economical!

“Seine Swim” (Talk of the Town) - Lauren Collins comes on in, the water’s… fine? Every so often, a publicity stunt is just what the doctor ordered. Though probably not literally, in this case.

“Inside the Trump Plan for 2025” - Jonathan Blitzer says they’ve brought Trump whole binders full of fascists. If you’re hoping for some sort of beat-by-beat guide to what a Trump term might look like, this isn’t the piece. Blitzer’s real concern is providing a history of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a group that mainly seeks to come up with lists of suitably pliable far-righters that can be installed in the event of a second Trump term – so that this time, when he asks his people to break the law, they won’t shake their heads. Blitzer gets a surprising amount of drama out of what’s in many ways a nuts-and-bolts politics story – but it helps that the future actions being discussed are less “passively propping up the brutal tools of empire as per usual” and more “actively blowing shit up for fun”, like, these people are upset that Trump got told no when he tried to plan for a war with Mexico. The theory of a demagogic fascist power-grab is one thing; the practical workings needed to make it happen are another. This is still fundamentally a longread about political staffing, though; it’s full of stuff like this: “Shortly after DeMint started C.P.I., in 2017, he and a colleague flew to Houston to meet with Rydin and other potential donors. Rydin had donated to Heritage while DeMint was there but stopped after his departure… Now DeMint told him about his plans to create a conservative community in Washington.” Most of the “fun” is metatextual, derived from the dissonance between mundane strategy talk like that and the cruel and baroque insanity it’s in service of, e.g. trying to deport a million people a year. If you want to know thy enemy, it’s probably a good idea to know thy enemy’s staffing agency.

“Bot Therapy” (Shouts and Murmurs) - Mary Norris falls for the newest trick in the book. Not at all funny, but I really appreciate the attempt at doing something different, and quite enigmatic, with this column space.

“Hear No Evil” - Doreen St. Félix knows Abu Hamdan is talking about a revolution’s sounds. Hamdan is leading the vanguard of “research-based works”, which is the vague category artists now must slot their politically-engaged practices into – it replaces “social practice”, which is so fifteen years ago. The real negotiation isn’t really the one St. Félix spotlights at the end of the first section, between the standard of truthfulness in an “investigatory report” and the standard in art – it’s the negotiation between the salability of art and the extreme difficulty of finding funding for leftist investigative work from the journalistic sources of the past few decades. That’s the paradigm Hamdan is subverting, really; he makes gutting and powerful articles with multimedia components and political points of view – it’s “Snow Fall” with a conscience. But Hamdan’s canny positioning has helped him succeed, and so much the better. St. Félix is distractable – she sets up interesting questions in the first section that she never gets around to exploring – but this piece is still compelling throughout, with an admirable willingness to discuss the political implications of Hamdan’s work. Especially in its second half, the piece can almost feel like a way to sneak a Gaza story in through the back door, but hey, I’m no guard – I’ll let it by.

“Dibs” (Talk of the Town) - Nick Paumgarten holds space for Wilco. I enjoy the attempt at play within the bounds of a Talk column. When Tweedy starts talking about hip replacements, the novelty is mostly lost.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Paradise Bronx” - Ian Frazier talks the talk and walks the Bronx. The unfortunate reality is that even a fantastic prose stylist like Frazier can’t make a story out of no story. Frazier never quite finds a point to his years of Bronx strolls, and far too much of this piece feels like a barely reconfigured draft of a walking tour. (Oddly, a ton of the details come from circa 2021 – did Frazier sit on this piece for three years, and if so, why?) Maybe if Frazier’s anecdotes were really fantastic, the lack of structure could be forgiven, but they’re strangely lackluster, a series of shaggy dog stories with payoffs such as: One of the Bronks became a famous poet. Gouverneur Morris is mostly forgotten because they tore his house down. Jimmy Carter’s visit had no direct effect, but it probably had an indirect effect. Robert Moses, didja know, was a megalomaniac. Only one section, the next-to-last, tells a tale worth your time; its story about fire alarms and childhood stands alone as a great read. The piece’s thesis, to the extent it has one, is questionable: Apparently, the Bronx’s issues stem from it being a place people move away from once they’re successful. Maybe that’s part of the problem, but that force (which can’t be controlled) gets blamed a lot where corruption and systemic dispossession (which can be) are really to blame. Frazier is generally trying to walk a thin line between the preservation of important histories and the shameless indulgence of nostalgia; toward the end, during his reveries on stickball, he tips the balance permanently toward the latter. This means the politics of this piece, while well-intentioned, are a bit weird; sure, perhaps the Bronx is paradise lost, but what’s Frazier’s vision of how it might look as paradise regained?

“The Summer of Sci-Fi” - Anthony Lane finds eight picture postcards from twoscore and two years ago. Lane on blockbusters is just never going to be my jam, and because this isn’t a review of the films at hand but a review of a very enthusiastic book about those films, all the joking around is barely tempered by critical analysis. (Then again, was it ever?) Nashawaty, who currently works for Netflix, isn’t a model of journalistic objectivity, and it’s somewhat baffling that Lane is charmed by his book, even as he pokes some obvious holes in its thesis. There’s some fun to be had in this rambling and amiable piece, but it didn’t leave much of an impression. I’m just here for the air conditioning.¹

“Charmed” - Amanda Petrusich goes to the garden center with Clairo. Can’t be called a review of the new Clairo album by any stretch of the imagination – only the first two songs are even mentioned. It’s just a hangout, and, unfortunately, I didn’t find Clairo to be especially interesting company. Nothing she said deepened my understanding of her art – and isn’t that what we’re supposed to be here for? Her music is more about sounds and vibes than complex thought, so it makes sense! The piece is just misconceived. I did appreciate, though, the R&B deep cut she references – that’s a bop.

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Letters:

Regular correspondent Michael draws my attention to the Times Literary Supplement, where M.C. addressed Rebecca Mead’s piece on Fitzcarraldo Editions. “Not to cast any nasturtiums at Fitzcarraldo, we reflect wistfully on an unhappy accidental effect of Mead’s piece in obscuring those anglophone publishers who had already taken a chance on these then unknown authors… Ernaux’s works continue to be published in the US by another relatively small press, Seven Stories, which must be bemused to be overlooked on this occasion. To twist the awfully chic knife, Mead quotes Edmund White’s praise of Ernaux… The texts are essentially the same, we gather, but please note: White was talking about The Years in its Seven Stories edition.”

I asked for your takes on Emily Witt’s personal history, and mostly had my initial read validated: “100% agree”, says Ellie; “She seemed to think she had much more self awareness than she really did”, says Jasmine; “Close to unreadable”, says Susan; “Afterwards was left feeling oddly emptied, as though she had snuck in and stolen the point as I was reading”, says Helen; “It felt like a big dollop of narcissism dropped on unsuspecting readers”, says Caz. Joel, though, had a different perspective: “The kind of lowkey abusive relationship is familiar, but rarely represented in the media as abusive. Most of us who have been in relationships that resemble the one described in the piece need a fair amount of therapy to get to the place that Witt arrives in understanding that codependency and abuse can be separate phenomena of the same relationship. Consider yourself lucky if that's a tale old as time.” Fair enough, and the more I reflect on the piece, the more I appreciate some of what it was trying to do. Apologies to the choir I was apparently preaching to.

By the by, if you liked that cartoons-through-history post from a little while back, I’m now including a few cartoons from a randomly selected archival issue in every week’s Cartoon and Poem Supplement – for paying subscribers only. That’s your cue to pony up!

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1. ps. the best movie from 1982 is Fanny and Alexander.