Last Week's New Yorker Review: November 11, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of November 11
“a maverick pioneer who supposedly had beaten Schoenberg in the race to the atonal pole.”
I’m going to keep posting like nothing is different, because really nothing is.
Must-Read:
“Connoisseur of Chaos” - Alex Ross breaks out in Ives. Helped greatly by the availability of recordings of many of the pieces Ross cites; the Denk Jackiw rendition of Ives’ Violin Sonata no. 4 is especially phenomenal, and improved by Ross’ analysis. (Their rendition turns “formal intricacies into an infectious colloquy of voices.”) I didn’t realize the degree to which Ives was a self-promoted man, who “launched a bid to rebrand himself as an American Beethoven”, complete with photocopies of his scores; it’s nice to imagine artists as plucked from obscurity by aesthetes, but self-aggrandizement has always been part of the gig. Ives was a “crank” with a “cult”, then he was “canonized”, now he’s pushed to the margins. Ross ends the piece with the nearly impossible: A coded reference to current events which is insightful and not too cute. A “blistering” Ives piece on electoral politics is “ostensibly hopeful” but actually unsteady; Ives’ “refusal of simple stories” and “readiness for the unknown” is a lesson. There’s meaning in dissonance.
Window-Shop:
“The Shipwreck Detective” - Sam Knight draws the X that marks the spot with Nigel Pickford. An absolutely blistering opening anecdote, with mystery, strange beauty, “death and desire.” I braced myself for a journey at sea… then was left high and dry, as Knight pivots to the landlocked researcher who helps locate wrecks. Theoretically, that could be interesting, but while the legal history of finding wealth in wreckage isn’t exactly dull, neither is it visceral. Pickford himself is a benign academic type; yes, that’s part of the point – it contrasts with the unsavorily capitalistic side of his work – but it isn’t much fun. Things get rambly – the extended Tek Singh story mostly just affirms points that are already covered elsewhere in the piece; it’s immediately followed by another extended anecdote, about the Gloucester, that also leans repetitive. When we finally get back to the opening story in the last section, though, the fire is lit again – there are shocking revelations, bursts of insight, human drama. It’s brilliant! Read the first, third, and last sections; the rest can be skimmed.
“President For Sale” - Vinson Cunningham knows the medium is the MAGAge. Pretty much nails it: The Democrats never found a message that would stick to Trump (the abortion ban is unpopular, but it’s hard to imagine Trump’s personally invested in that; his responsibility for COVID could have stuck if Biden didn’t try so hard to proclaim it over; his responsibility for a coup attempt could have stuck if the Democrats didn’t pull their classic trick of saying one thing and doing another) and Trump’s message is so simple it sticks effortlessly. None of what Cunningham points out is hugely original or unexpected, but I suppose the night before the election is a time for summation and not originality. Cunningham takes a McLuhanish approach; it’s not just the facts of what’s being said, it’s the scale, the pace, the pattern. Fascism is electric, and our world is sliding. Boogie woogie woogie.
“Syria’s Empire of Speed” - Ed Caesar thinks Assad is the Middle East’s captagon girl. Most interesting when it’s just about the drug and its newfound centrality to Saudi life; it’s a great fun fact that a massive number of Saudis are addicted to street Adderall. Caesar tries to untangle how central Assad is to the drug’s spread, but it’s not an easy thing to know, and he has no great scoop. Why we should care about the answer to that question also isn’t entirely clear; the political stakes of Assad’s power, in the present moment, ought to be unpacked a bit. Yes, it’s depressing the way that abuse of power usually serves to strengthen power and not erase it, but it’s nothing new; state-sponsored regime change usually doesn’t work out even when the regime being changed is one of abusive authoritarianism, so it’s not clear what Caesar thinks should be done here, in any case. A narco-state is not inherently more or less legitimate than any other type of state; it’s probably a lot less ethically troublesome than the Saudis’ petrostate, all things considered. At some point, “normalizing” Assad is less a matter of papering over his actions and more a matter of accepting what is. There’s more than one way to have a speedy recovery.
“Tucker Everlasting” - Andrew Marantz says Carlson is still preoccupied with 1985. Won’t reveal anything that unexpected for people who generally know Carlson’s whole deal, his evolution from smarmy jerkoff to fascist lunatic in a smarmy jerkoff costume having been pretty thoroughly chronicled. And it’s not easy to tell his future; who the conspiracist far right will elevate and who they’ll spit out is fickle and almost arbitrary. But Marantz does good work getting to the root of Carlson’s toxicity, which is his militarist belief in the interests of the “nation” über alles. The liberal class has finally awakened to the fact that calling MAGA fascist is not an ideologically driven loosening of the term; it could hardly be more on the nose. It’s too little too late, of course; as usual, their actions don’t match their rhetoric anyway. (Yeah, I linked to the same piece twice in one newsletter; what of it?) Marantz frames Tuckerism as “an ornate pyramid, with a lot of weird stuff about testosterone and declining sperm counts near the top,” and immigration at the bottom. That’s about right, and Marantz is an excellent guide. I never want to look at Carlson’s stupid face again, but if I’m going to punch him, it’s better that I do it for a good reason, and not an aesthetic one.
“Beautiful Dreamers” - Jennifer Wilson gives us a Grimm reminder. Wilson’s thesis regarding the Grimms, that they were “Germanists before there was a Germany”, is obviously correct, but it’s also basically inarguable, stranding the piece in a holding pattern: Here’s something the Grimms did (publish a book called ‘German Mythology’) and here’s why it was nationalist (Uh, because Jacob explicitly described it in those terms. Also, Wagner loved it, which is usually a sign.) It’s not uninteresting, but it won’t make you rethink the Grimms. Wilson barely considers the influence of their tales at all, sticking quite tightly to a chronological biography; that keeps things focused, but it misses why the Grimms are important: Their versions of these tales became the canonized and accepted versions, spreading their ideology along with the heritage they sought to preserve. Only at the very end is the obvious link to Naziism made (and, with the last line, a gesture toward our election that’s a bit less elegant than Ross’s a page later); there’s room for some less obvious links, some stranger tales.
Skip Without Guilt:
“The Artificial State” - Jill Lepore says a problem exists between keyboard and constituent. A sleepy and repetitive piece which defines its central idea in a hopelessly broad and vague way; it’s an “infrastructure” but also a “reduction” to “algorithms” and also a “trussing of government” – and the issue with it is that “nearly every element of American democratic life… is vulnerable to subversion.” But wait – wasn’t that pretty much the case before everything moved online? What period of genuine “democratic deliberation” is Lepore hoping we’ll return to? Was America ever really a representative democracy? Certainly it wasn’t until the 1960s, and Lepore’s opening anecdote is from just before the Civil Rights Act. Then in 1968 Nixon sweeps a divided Democratic party and sets about undermining as much as he can. Is tech really the issue, or is it, you know…?
“The Home Front” - Charles Bethea makes the case for prepper stations. We just got a Patricia Marx bunker story; I suppose there’s theoretical romance and excitement in this kind of paranoid selfishness, but Bethea doesn’t really find it. It’s too obviously a drama of individual conspiracists united by a need to monitor the boundaries of the self in the most extreme and expensive way possible; such a thing is, I guess, the American condition, but Bethea does way too much to encourage it and not enough to point out the rottenness at its center. More philosophy is needed, and less marveling at the vast array of nonperishables which are available to buy, didja know? This piece wants to be politically relevant, but it’s afraid to say anything political, to probe the ideology of the people it surveys. It ends up glib, reliant on polls to score its points (surely those are never wrong) and surprisingly insta-irrelevant, surveying the people who’re bracing for a bang instead of listening to the whimpers.
Letters:
Nothin’ in the mailbag. I assume we’re all shell-shocked.
What did you think of this week’s issue?
worm
turns