Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 1

“…even a beloved household pet will eat our remains if left alone with our lifeless bodies. That is something our children, in similar circumstances, would not do. Or so we hope.”

Must-Reads:

“Dogged” (Books) - Adam Gopnik addresses to the canines. This suffers from a poor selection of reproductions (probably due to rights issues) that doesn’t include some of the images Gopnik discusses in the most depth. That’s outside the writer’s control, of course, and the internet is good for such things. Gopnik starts with a meditation on dog death that makes some big, dubious suppositions which are so obviously led by his doggy grief that they must be instantly forgiven. Gopnik’s vulnerability here is not a demonstration of weakness or bravery but simply of singularity; it’s a quick way to establish critical perspective, one more critics should consider.¹ From there, Gopnik’s exploration of Laquer’s new book, The Dog’s Gaze, has built-in life and stakes. Gopnik points out that “Laqueur begins, bracingly, with his own story” – and one must note that Gopnik is, bracingly, doing exactly the same thing. He provides the requisite trivia he’s mined from the book – there’s not a dud in the batch! – and the aforementioned close readings. Then he moves to a wonderful philosophy of dogs as “moral creatures without anything like moral volition”, trained and bred to embody our best virtues, but with no inherent sense of their meaning – or the meaning of death. He’s not the first to approach pet studies, and he could stand to cite some sources, but he still understands dogs deeply: As he points out, like any pet owner, he’s a subject (fecal) matter expert. What a treat.

“Breeding Ground” (Brave New World Dept.) - Shayla Love knows we can never go bacteria to before. Expertly balanced between the gory detail and the ominous overhead shot. Too much of the former and the piece might feel like anecdotal fearmongering; too much of the latter and our morbid curiosity withers. With so much blood in the crab bucket, there is a risk that readers will take the advice not to swim in warm water with an open wound and ignore that the specific risk posed by that bacteria is not especially high, it’s just an already prevalent stand-in for the many risks that will exponentially increase in our sweaty future. Love’s real coup is not that story, anyway; it’s the tale of candida auris, an ominously named fungus (Derrida: “The ear is uncanny”) that’s deadly and impossible to remove once present; one can imagine a Poe story about a hospital infected by an invisible spore that accumulates in the ears and cannot be removed, and Love makes the most of its horror. There’s also a brief mention of scientists doing scientist things, in this case, grinding “yellow Starburst candies onto the sidewalk” in Baltimore² and collecting the resulting fungi.³ Uh, alright, man. As Love knows, we’re cursed to live in interesting climes.⁴ Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!

Window-Shop:

“Power Clash” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody gets the goods, the fines, and the poors. If Richard Brody isn’t in love with your hyperkinetic lefty spectacle film, you’ve probably done something seriously wrong. While he mostly delights in the vibrant mess of Boots Riley’s new effort, it’s easy to sense how disappointed he is in its ultimate lack of coherence. For once, Brody’s usual gripe about a lack of personal stakes is entirely warranted, given the needs of the film. Despite his weary vibe, his prose is at its best, building to a final-sentence summation that falls on this movie’s hopes like a clearance stamp.

“Flyover Country” (Books) - Caleb Crain answers two across. Neither the legend of Lewis and Clark nor the shallow popular revisionist version – which usually starts and stops with pointing out that Sacagawea was enslaved – really offered me a sense of the political conditions of the journey. Crain is here to fill out the myth, its brutality and its occasional, partial visions of progress. If that sounds like the story of America, Crain thinks so too – and wears the somewhat tired notion out. The piece is better when it focuses on close readings of the vast texts created in the trip’s execution, which are variously horrifying (the one Black man comes “verry near loseing his Eyes by one of the men throwing Sand at him in fun” – not much compared to the slave beatings Crain chronicles, but still wildly cruel) and shockingly lovely (the description of Sacagawea reuniting with her people; Lewis’ documentation of nature, like plains “black with buffalow”). Asking whether a mythic history really mattered in the course of events is somewhat beside the point; we remember it as useful shorthand more than as fact. But looking at its truth helps us understand what that shorthand constructs and obscures. Write makes might.

🗣️ “Knicks Licks” (Fandom Dept.) - Amanda Petrusich appreciates a rock Garden. What a sincere man.

“Marriage Stories” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum wouldn’t espouse a spouse. The Well I’ll Let You Go review just gives away far, far too much – I’m not a spoiler purist, exactly, but this isn’t a show that can survive precise knowledge of its destination, and while Nussbaum sort of plays coy, it’s not difficult to put the pieces together and decode the show’s exact arc and destination. The Othello review is almost good enough to make up for it, though that production is a critic’s dream, filled with interpretations just waiting to be unpacked. They are not what they are!

Skip Without Guilt:

“Act of Faith” (Annals of Television) - Rachel Monroe gets cross with pres†ige T.V. Monroe clearly wants to follow her best material, which is the surprisingly nasty story of the Harmon Brothers and Derral Eves, corporate Mormon con artists (known in Utah as “salesmen”) who have apparently had a hand in all the most repugnant pieces of wide-release American media of the last five years, from Mr. Beast to the QAnon movie to the CG Animal Farm. They give Monroe a couple of wildly slimy quotes, but unfortunately they only factor into the origins of The Chosen, a show that tells the Christ myth how it was always meant to be told: As a shamelessly derivative TV drama combining the emotional spectrum of Yellowstone and the LUT of Game of Thrones. Jenkins, the series' mastermind, comes across as a near-auteur compared to the Harmons, but Monroe lets him off too easily; the ending makes him look fame-hungry, but the idea that this born-again bastardization comes from somewhere less than sincere seems never to have crossed Monroe’s mind. (Mind the cross!) Even if it takes but vision the size of a mustard seed to make art, this show still doesn’t cut the mustard.⁵

“The Stunt Pilot” (Letter from Kyiv) - Ed Caesar is no office drone. Very weird to be covering what’s basically an ongoing humanitarian crisis with some fighting on the side in such a thrills-and-chills manner – not to mention Caesar doesn’t even find many thrills and chills! So much time spent with predictably rough-around-the-edges fancy fliers taking down drones gets repetitive, and Caesar is weirdly determined to give no sense of the current political (let alone geopolitical) moment in which the Ukraine war now resides, instead sticking firmly to the weapons-supply side of warfare, and mentioning the deprivation of most Ukrainian soldiers only as a negative example, i.e, to demonstrate why these men feel lucky to be doing their part in such a makeshift, sometimes torturous manner. Caesar’s prose does its job, and the individual fighting scenes come across well enough; it’s only in the bigger picture that things blend together, like so many dots on the radar map.

“My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (Reflections) - Arthur Krystal runs patriot. As mundane as it is misguided. Krystal’s cultural references all date to pre-Obama (mostly pre-Clinton!); there’s a sense that he’s spent the last quarter-century alone at home with CNN on. Otherwise how could he possibly arrive at takes like “Wokeness… helped chill the left’s admiration for the nation” (He cites a Gallup poll that is quite literally measuring extremism, and which, read another way, finds that 96% of Americans are proud) and apparently think he needs to point out that the “self-styled patriots” of January 6 “were being profoundly un-American”? Not news. (He also thinks, for some reason, that they weren’t attempting insurrection – possibly because they had their phones out. All the more reason to think he hasn’t seen images of literally any recent protest anywhere.) Krystal’s mamby-pamby self-righteousness would be fairly revolting even if he had anything worthwhile to say, but he doesn’t even bother coherently defining the sort of patriotism he’s fretting about; his positive examples are all cultural products used in basically metaphorical fashion – handshakes at a post-9/11 baseball game, the “movie version” of Our Town (heaven forbid we have to go to a theatre to get our midcult tripe). It’s a lot easier to call a symbol patriotic than a person. Heather Heyer had but one life to give; she didn’t give it for her country, but she’s still closer to the meaning of America – as I take pride in it – than any elected official in our history. Words, even the words of the Constitution Krystal encourages us to reread, can only signify.

Letters:

ABC. Hey, those are letters.

Espy L.A.;

cop an apocalypse.⁶