Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 2

“robber bandits in old Germany, E.T.A. Hoffmann, children’s toys, the Bastille, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, postage-stamp fraud, and dogs.“

Must-Reads:

“The Original” (Books) - Anahid Nersessian gets at Walter Benjamin, one way aura ‘nother. Benjamin is, as the piece notes, something of a hero to bookish flaneurs; your humble servant is no exception. Nersessian has time for just a skim, and chooses to emphasize Benjamin’s “tragic idealism”, focusing on his refusal to relinquish a briefcase holding a manuscript as a synechdoche for the rest of his work, which places such value on steadfast self-possessiveness, even at the cost of self-preservation. Nersessian, following the lead of a “short, serene” new biography, doesn’t try to unsettle our view of Benjamin but only to clarify it – the piece also makes an excellent introduction to his ideas, ideal for the overwhelmed undergrad whose frantic annotations aren’t proving useful. The project you’re reading is very much intended in the Benjaminian sense of extension; my rickety metaphysical shack, plastered with hyperlink-posters, abuts a grand edifice and, by laughing both with and at it, pays homage. If I aim for “pithy, highly evocative, and sometimes surreal”, I usually land at bloggy, largely disposable, and often opaque. Good enough: The project is simply to do the same thing, over and over, for as long as I possibly can; paragraphs full of artifice and fingerprints, helping both of us see differently. You are getting verrrry sleepy…

“Into the Woods” (Letter from Poland) - Elizabeth Flock knows it’s not easy being at the Green Border. Excellent, gut-wrenching reporting from the Poland-Belarus border, where the supposedly liberal Polish state is using Belarus as a justification for increasingly authoritarian security tactics, many of which infringe on migrants’ human rights. Flock ably balances the situation’s politics with reportage on the migrants themselves; this never approaches pity porn. Poland has a long history of complicity in discriminatory violence, as anyone who’s seen the first half of Shoah will know¹; this history is rendered quite literal by the fact that the Polish forest the refugees are escaping into was also where Jewish families hid during the Holocaust, some for years. The outrages Flock recounts have been covered elsewhere (including in a dramatic film) and Flock doesn’t uncover many new stories; if you’re familiar with the details, you might not need an article that could be reduced to “it’s all still happening”. I can’t keep track of what atrocities do and don’t garner widespread awareness, so I won’t do the nobody-is-talking-about-this song and dance; I’ll just say I think many of us can use the reminder, and Flock’s writing is attuned to the many nuances and self-justifications of oppression and hatred.

Window-Shop:

“Red Card” (Books) - Ian Buruma says the soccer ball was once mightier than the sword. Quite a compelling thesis: That rabid sports fandom can be a way to displace nationalism and enact tribal ritual – a pressure-release valve that exists not outside of other influence but to the side of it. Even as teams are increasingly owned by petrostate oligarchs and staffed by immigrants, what matters most to fans is the flag they wave. The thread from that displacement to the capture of our politics more broadly can feel so obvious that Buruma’s efforts to outline it explicitly turn clunky toward the end. Generally, though, Buruma makes the argument with nuance, and still finds time to pick a few related anecdotes from the book under review, of which the exploitation of Black South Africa by FIFA is especially resonant – partly because it complicates Buruma’s own point by showing that violence was never really sublimated by sports, just administered out of the public view. How’s that for an eye in the sky?

“Vocal Opposition” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross harbors Fugitives. Just the right amount of historical context in this review of a concert of vocal music by exiled Jews. They move from the “refined aestheticism” of “fin-de-siècle Vienna” to more pointed material, following a crafted narrative line that is the signature of artistic director Steven Blier, “a genial host, and also a knowledgeable one.” Some of the music can be heard at home, such as the “acidulous” ‘Black Market’, by a writer whose “wit was as lethal as his melodies were lithe”, though without Blier’s “stage patter”, the evening is just a faint apparition.

“A Family Trial” (A Reporter at Large) - Rachel Aviv takes it personally with the Pelicots. The Pelicot trial has already been cemented as a landmark in the history of sexual politics, and Aviv arrives to complicate it by pointing out other family members’ accusations against Dominique, especially the revelations of nude, perhaps drugged photos of Caroline, Gisele’s daughter. It’s heart-wrenching, but there is no major revelation at its center, and Aviv is mostly interested in considering the psychology of Gisele, and why her attempts to keep intact psychologically may have led to reactions that her daughter found shatteringly dismissive of her pain. Other reporting has focused largely on the perpetrators, painting Gisele as a perfect victim; Aviv does excellent work complicating that narrative, although in so doing she reiterates a fairly simple psychological conflict – avoidant intactness versus anxious collapse – so repetitively that the piece loses intensity and shrinks to a sort of chamber drama; and one in which a main character declined to be interviewed. Am I judging Aviv too harshly against her own incredibly high standard? Her prose is as reliably excellent as ever; this is not a deviation from form. But Aviv’s usual reliance on interiority here reduces a reckoning to a quarrel.

🗣️ “Poached” (Dept. of Sharing) - Charlotte Goddu feels the brothy love. A mouth-watering delight.

“Cash and Carry” (Personal History) - David Sedaris asks if we’d even lift. Among the more charming recent Sedaris offerings, whether despite or because of its featherweight stakes. In part this is due to its middle, a memory of pre-fame, with a tough-luck Sedaris at its center. The story would almost be inspirational, except that nouveaux Sedaris doesn’t seem especially happy, despite slyly revealing his 40-million-dollar net worth. Sedaris’ best stories complicate their own neatness, and this doesn’t really do that; one sees the ending coming. But it still lands! Plus, it’s a New York story. I’ll never turn that down.

🗣️ “Gateway Dig” (Hard Hat Dept.) - Nick Paumgarten takes a fence. Love the sudden opening, and the artist-on-artist vibe.

“Snow Days” (On Television) - Vinson Cunningham catches the drift. Very odd to frame this Olympics as some sort of American embarrassment; having mostly skipped it, what filtered down to me is the triumph of Alysa Liu, the amazing Elana Meyers Taylor, and the double golds for Men’s and Women’s Hockey. Some of this probably postdated Cunningham’s deadline, but I’m not sure the Quad God slipping draws any particular metaphor beyond the usual sports lesson: everyone has bad days. When I do tune into the Olympics, I tend to watch livestreams and not the prepackaged evening edits; it seems that Cunningham stuck to the latter, and given that, I wanted more commentary on the commentary: Surely the presentation of these sports speaks more to the national mood than the fundamentally chaotic results themselves. It’s also iffy to spend any time on the winning French figure skaters without mentioning that their controversy is not merely technical. Anyway, it’s still worth reading this short piece by Cunningham, if only for his sprightly prose. “Even the bobsled, that vehicle for the death wishes of puppyish youths, has a kind of intuitive connection to the fear and the thrill we feel while gliding or slipping on the ice.” Bracing!

Skip Without Guilt:

“Ghost Stories” (The Art World) - Zachary Fine gets nocturned on. Philadelphia is a more reasonable trek than Germany, but it’s not one I can make for the purposes of certifying Fine’s readings of these paintings. I trust that they’re apt; I still find his writing a bit stilted, and the art-historical references too close-at-hand. (Not every depiction of flat blue water is indebted to “A Bigger Splash”; also, between references to Hockney, Whistler, Tanner, Eakins, Malevich, van Gogh, and Munch, surely Fine could have thought of at least one woman. In that context, it’s a bit insulting that Kahlo and O’Keefe are tagged for their lifespans, but not their work.) His take on a painting of boat-bearers is compelling (runny paint “gives the impression that the rowers are pallbearers and the boat is a coffin”) but another work “has all of the moral weight of a circus tent” – surely circus tents do have moral weight? And I’m not sure what it means for a painting to not have it – and a third is “not beautiful or soothing, per se” – but it’s unclear why that matters, or who said it might be those things. Next time Fine covers a show in the city, I’ll be able to give a more fair assessment. (I also hope he visits galleries at some point! Please!!)

“Leap of Faith” (Profiles) - Tad Friend turns the volume up on Talarico… suave… Not a terrible piece, just a terrible use of Tad Friend, a wonderful writer whose charm is almost entirely suppressed by this pro forma politician profile. The unnecessarily nasty primary battle between Jasmine Crockett and Talarico is something Texas Democrats should be embarrassed by; Talarico is a better candidate fighting in better faith, but the real story is the race, so profiling Talarico is odd. My best guess is that Friend was originally planning on reporting this out for a much longer time, but after CBS pulled Colbert’s interview with Talarico, the timeline moved up. There are many scenes here just observing the candidate and his team as they campaign; they are remarkably unrevealing, mostly concerning framing. There’s almost nothing here from Crockett or her team, and Talarico is at most a locally interesting candidate, so I don’t really see what the story is supposed to be.

Letters:

Negatory, morning glory.

means

tested