November 4, 2024

Last Week's New Yorker Review: November 4, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of November 4

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 28

“No dolphin will ever perform an autopsy, no dingo will read Heidegger, no macaque will write a requiem for piano and violin.”

Must-Read:

“Each Mortal Thing” - Kathryn Schulz can’t beat a dead horse at its own game. It’s sort of amazing that this entire field began with a viral video in 2008, but I suppose that’s the way of such things. (It’s not the only 2008 viral video that was a sign of things to come.) Using “logical rigor” to meticulously define a “concept of death” is the sort of work philosophy is built for; while logic can only get you so far, the ways in which we privilege humans are so illogical that it’s a welcome antidote. Monsó ends up with “irreversibility and non-functionality” as the two characteristics to take note of; to me, these raise the question of whether understanding death as brokenness is truly understanding it; anything that’s broken may be irreversibly non-functional, but that doesn’t make it dead. Schulz quickly points this out as a flaw, then breezes past, but it’s not as though the piece would benefit from getting bogged down in the minutiae of philosophy, so that’s alright. I agree with the conclusion that our impulse to assume animal emotions are so wildly different from our own can be a way of limiting our empathy; of course, it doesn’t have to be – and I’m troubled by the idea that we can only feel for what we can relate to. Schulz’s prose is so elegant it’s easy to think it’s just acting in service of her ideas, but clarity is always hard-earned, as in lines like: “Anyone who has ever been in mortal danger or in the grips of primal grief will recognize the error of Rousseau’s claim that knowledge of death and its terrors moves us away from the animal condition.” Schulz also does a tremendous job conveying the depth of her consideration without the pretensions to full expertise that often tag along. On this subject, especially, knowing that we know nothing has to come first. …Also: the illustration! Possum Hamlet!!

“The Last Mile” - Dorothy Wickenden shouts Oh, the humanitarian. The devastation chronicled here will mostly prove familiar; what’s more unexpected, and deeply moving, is the focus on the nuts and bolts of humanitarian operation in a situation that’s rendered it nearly impossible. It’s a really smart choice; it makes the stakes of survival desperately clear but has enough distance (some of which is literal; Wickenden seems to mostly be reporting on phone and Zoom calls) that the horrors feel graspable; the unthinkable is rendered thinkable. (Which is not to say cold – there’s still plenty to shock, but some of the most gut-wrenching material comes when the I.D.F. and the Israeli government issue brusque denials and propaganda to contradict things Wickenden has directly borne witness to. There’s also the malfunctioning A.I. system the I.D.F. is apparently using to target victims, such a grotesque, satirical detail it feels impossible to witness.) I’ve been hoping the magazine would run a piece like this; it took too long, frankly, but I’ll still praise it.

Window-Shop:

“The Puppet Masters” - Jennifer Homans unhands it to the masters of Bunraku. I was skeptical I’d find anything to remember in what’s essentially Last Month’s Puppet Show Review, but I was wrong; Homans builds a thesis about the entire art form that’s casually brilliant: “With Bunraku puppets, culpability for unbearable individual acts is shared, making intimate human violence possible and even disturbingly beautiful. None are guilty; all are complicit.” Everything else is basically buildup to that revelation; still, it’s excellent – “...in an extraordinary moment… she meets her barefaced puppeteer at the top of the tower stairs. All I could see was him, his thick right arm coiled around her frail limb as she – he – struck the bell.” Look at that second sentence, a sequence of single-syllable words pulsing like a drumbeat. Her critique of the “jarring” explanatory moments is apt, too. This is wonderful. It’s only not a Must-Read because two meatier pieces matched its power; still, I was tempted. If the puppet fits, wear it.

“Star-Crossed” - Helen Shaw chases Sunset Blvd. As is often the case, Shaw, disliking two shows, still finds the good in them – Sunset may be a confusing production of a “shoddy” musical, but it can be “thrilling” and “gothic”, and at least the audience likes it; Romeo + Juliet mostly doesn’t work, but the “swoony sections” nail the “mood”. Thankfully, she still gets her jabs in, as isn’t always the case; R+J have “inverse chemistry – as they get farther away from each other onstage, their connection appears to strengthen”; Joe and Norma “seem depersonalized; cold mannequins, colliding in space.” Even in those examples, Shaw leaves room for the possibility that these are purposeful choices; she doesn’t need to say that she can’t tell what their purpose could possibly be. 

“A Piece of Her Mind” - Adam Gopnik has a lot to say about Châtelet. A focused Gopnik is not always a fun Gopnik, and this is a fairly dry and intellectually dense discussion of the important Enlightenment thinker, and her place in the milieu. Gopnik is not a physicist, and he’s not great at making clear exactly what the argument between Newton and Descartes was about, even less why it matters. What he does convey is a sense of the world in which Voltaire and Châtelet lived, the “Parisian gratin” (a new one for me – it’s the French equivalent of “upper crust”) with their “sharply defined” role for a top intellectual, who is “supposed to be imperious and maximalist”, along with their somewhat lax but very complicated sexual and gender mores. It’s fun, and all in service of sketching out a figure who I knew nothing about. Let’s follow Châtelet’s example, and get physical.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Songs of War” - Justin Chang hails to McQueen. I found Chang’s praise for the new film oddly unconvincing; he tells us there’s “astoundingly intimate detail” but never says what it might be; “one of the film’s loveliest moments” is, one sentence later, called “gauzy sentimentalization.” It’s “not exactly subtle”, but maybe that’s alright, because… neither is prejudice? Sure. Chang nails McQueen’s project (“His movies unfold, thrillingly, on a scale between classical narrative and radical form, and he is versatile enough to adjust the slider according to the material”) but if the new film is “radical” in any way, that doesn’t come across. If the slider is all the way down, it may as well just be a lightswitch.

“The Big Deal” - Nicholas Lemann says we did it, Joe, so why does nobody know? The thesis is pretty convincing – Biden got a lot accomplished on domestic issues, but has had trouble communicating that. It’s also pretty unsurprising; I could’ve told you after one year of his administration that he was significantly better than expected on domestic policy, about as bad as expected on foreign policy, and significantly worse than expected on communicating with the press and the public. (His foreign policy grade has slipped to “disastrous” with his handling of Gaza.) There’s a reason Bernie fought so long for the guy; he incorporated lots of Sanders-ian thinking into his domestic schemes. I just don’t personally need to hear it, especially at somewhat excruciating detail and length. Too much of what Lemann says is just repeating the stock lines he’s been given; not to say those lines are wrong, just that perhaps the reason why Bidenomics aren’t in the news is that in a shit world, there’s little reason for good stuff to make news. It’s outweighed by the shit. The incredulous face Lemann pulls comes from an assumption that people are rational, but a lot of the lack of belief in Biden comes from a feeling that he was elected without much of a mandate beyond “let’s get back to normal”, an impossible goal. At least with fascism it’s pretty clear what, exactly, you’re voting for; grievance and cruelty, setting fires. Vote against the fire, though, and when it’s still raging in four years people will blame an inept firefighter before they’ll blame an impenitent arsonist.

“Take Me Home” - Julian Lucas ships statues with Mati Diop. I saw Dahomey right before reading this, and faced double disappointment – the film and the piece, both, stuck rigidly to a set form while having pretensions of innovation. The film has some poetic first-person voiceover to disguise that it’s basically an issue doc; its political intent is right at the surface, to the point where it may as well end with a URL. I wouldn’t be as bugged by that except that the loopy score and general ambience, plus the way it’s written about here, suggest that Diop thinks she’s made enigmatic experimental cinema, when in fact her film is fairly blunt and didactic. (The thing Lucas calls the “subtlest insight”, toward the end, is practically screamed – I think one of the monologuing students says the same sentiment almost word-for-word.) This is confirmed by its serving mostly as a topic of political discussion in Europe. Such things are worthy, but don’t feed me An Inconvenient Truth and tell me it’s Sans Soleil. Diop’s Atlantics, which I haven’t seen, was heralded widely; it did help that she matched the moment, as a Black woman who happened to have made a proudly African film around the time of BLM, which is not to suggest she wasn’t entirely worthy of the praise. Her uncle made Touki Bouki, which despite Lucas’ mild protestations to the contrary is clearly a big part of why she was able to marshal the resources to make a feature in Wolof. (I did want to know much more about Judith Lou Lévy, her producer.) Lucas lets Diop speak, mostly, and she clearly has a probing intelligence – which is not to say any great fount of charisma. (She’s upstaged by Clare Denis, though most people would be.) Some of his “telling” details are way too cute – see a particular untouched glass of wine – and Diop’s project has so much to do with language, I wanted Lucas to let his words sing more. Things are readable, but they aren’t risky. Nobody wants to break anything.

“The Convert” - Benjamin Wallace-Wells pays a visit to the Office of Institutional Vance-ment. Unaccountably and inexcusably sympathetic toward Vance, who does come across as a tight-laced toadie, but certainly not as a malignant fascist – many of his gripes are lent credence, his biggest early flaw was apparently that he’s too rough-hewn for CEOs, and while, on the one hand, he’s a smart guy and an exceptional debater, he was also led down the garden path by Trumpism, lured in by his own taste for partisan battles. I call bullshit, mostly; Wallace-Wells barely focuses on Vance’s book, but if he did he might find that it’s a horrific portrayal of Appalachia in which poverty is presented as a moral failing, a White Mudville is rendered as perpetually joyless, and your taxes are paying for their bags of fudge rounds; that liberals cottoned to it suggests a rot on their side of things more than anything worth retaining from Vance’s. (The book is also full of quarter-truths.) If Trump is unbridled Id, Vance is disdain-driven ego, simple as that. I suppose the magazine feels they have to run a piece on each of the four players in the election, but this cycle’s quartet has been mostly pointless, and more enervating than enlightening. 

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Letters:

Kristina writes in on the Mishima archival fiction: “I don’t have much patience… with the shock that some foreign admirers had about his death spectacle, and their inability to square it with his work. If you take a wider view, just because you are a modernist in terms of style and experimental about form, doesn’t mean you can’t also be in love with a (usually ahistorical) fanatic traditionalism. Isn’t that what Mussolini’s postmodern-classical architecture is all about? …I just wish Mishima had lived at a time when he could have discovered the rave scene, as opposed to the Hagakure.”

What did you think of this week’s issue?

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rocking back and forth in tears while repeating my mantra:

seltzer iowa +3, seltzer iowa +3…