Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 12

“She gave up on Foucault, though it amused her to learn that I had once served as his interpreter on a tour of the West Street leather bars.”

At this point I should really call it Past Week’s New Yorker. Doing my best!

Must-Reads:

“A Self-Made Woman” (Personal History) - Judith Thurman dolls up. Heartrendingly gorgeous. Am I dim for not realizing this was going to be a trans story until Thurman makes it clear, with well-modulated casualness, about a third of the way in? You may think so. Regardless, well before that point Thurman had her hooks in me. The setup could hardly be simpler – this woman, now dead, asked me to tell her story; I must oblige. And because it is so simple, Thurman can fill it with the rampant complexity of a life. Certainly there are some era-specific weirdnesses here; it is probably for the best that inviting a newcomer to town for a scared-straight-out-of-BDSM dinner at your house was a tradition (?) lost to third-wave feminism. Thurman is mostly telling us of Laura’s traumas, but, to her credit, this story doesn’t quite feel like a trauma plot; Laura’s fantasies are not merely a reaction to the horrors she endures, or even the way she was raised, but spring from somewhere deeper. Thurman is telling us a tragedy, but she makes room for beauty.

“For Richer” (Annals of Money) - Nicholas Lemann takes a different tax. Surprisingly fun, though it may be in part that I’m just very relieved to read about a political battle in which the stakes of a left-wing loss would not be mass death. Lemann is skeptical of the wealth tax, but he doesn’t slant the piece too precipitously; mostly, he correctly identifies the ways in which this battle may foretell things to come: Extreme spending by a newish, anti-democratic tech right wing; a left populism that relies on scrap and bodaciousness and is led by the labor movement; dirty tricks on all sides. The new proposition is absolutely imperfect; at this point, though, we could use some good enough policy.

Window-Shop:

“The Bear Minimum” (Books) - Gideon Lewis-Kraus wants an escape claws. The opening steals the titular anecdote of the book under review, and I’m fine with that because it’s just wonderful to think about a bear so tricksy he becomes a standard of compliance. That book is a “terrific vector for the delivery of high-quality anecdotes”, and Lewis-Kraus is happy to be the deliveryman. Some of them will be familiar, others will be new; I was delighted to learn how precisely those child-safe bottles are calibrated, perhaps all the more so because my local pharmacy’s bottles vary from palm-destroying to arthritis-friendly, with no rhyme or reason. The two paragraphs of A.I. discussion at the end are fairly shrugging; they aren’t what you’re here for, but Lewis-Kraus ends on a suitable note: No matter how advanced the model, decisions about humanity should ultimately rest with real people. How’s that for a kick in the testees?

“Play It Back” (The Art World) - Zachary Fine picks at the seems with Arthur Jafa. The first line is striking but a bit confusing – if he’s widely viewed as avant-garde, with “his more conservative tendencies” ignored, then wouldn’t he be a rearguard artist “in disguise”? The idea of ravishing alienation that Jafa seeks, friction that serves as heat and chill, is Pop-ish; Fine’s conclusion, that he succeeds more through the flicker of the moving image than the simple correspondences of stills, fits with the Jafa work I’ve seen. Fine’s view of Jafa emphasizes the pop simplicity of his concept above and beyond his racial politics; it’s easier to fit that all into a magazine review, though it’s strange how many of the takes on this show have skirted interrogating its content in favor of analyzing its form. Are we still scared?

“Oil and Rubble” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang is too Dig to fail. With the Digger discourse already thoroughly exhausted, this piece reads a bit differently than it did when it was fresh and Chang was among the first calling for an appreciation of the film’s “circus of bombast” and its “bracing theatricality”. As a Birdman hater and Iñáritu skeptic I doubt I’d have much patience for this effort, and I think there’s a big difference between a studio taking a smart risk on art and Zaslav handing his last big check to the Bardo guy. Still, I appreciate Chang’s disinclination to cast aside a commercial failure solely for its commercial failure. Sorting the John Carters from the Speed Racers doesn’t have to be left to posterity.

🗣️ “Chaos Agents” (Comment) - Jonathan Blitzer puts assault on the ICE-y streets. I really appreciate how forthright and specific Blitzer is about the “pattern of abuse” by the government. There are so many branching horrors associated with ICE that it’s helpful to get this concise overview.

“Sick Lit” (A Critic at Large) - Hermione Hoby knows convalesce is more. Hoby’s apparent desire to contemporize Woolf is forgivable but awkward; she literally imagines pressing a novel into Woolf’s hands, to try “perhaps returning her to her body”. Presumptuous, no? But Woolf is “basically right”, anyway, that “illness still doesn’t have the salience in literature that it has in life”, perhaps because suffering can eclipse story. If Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain has quickly come to be one of a small handful of Important Representative Works of Contemporary Fiction, Hoby’s gloss on it is still compelling (“close enough attention to the actual may be what allows an account of one body to acquire meanings beyond it”); but as she moves to Anne Boyer’s Pulitzer-winning cancer memoir, the questions and answers grow repetitive. Hoby finds every angle from which to approach the individuality of specifics versus the collectivity of conclusions, but she’s unwilling to let any beat rest on one side of the divide without gesturing toward the other side as well: “Here we go alone. But not entirely…” goes a representative pivot at the very end of the piece. A half measure of illness is a tricky thing – should you clock in, or call out? In either case, a decision must be made.

🗣️ “Resident Allien” (In the Clubs) - Nick Paumgarten makes acid-house a home. Never heard of this DJ before, but she is very charming in a matter-of-fact Euro-hippie way. (‘This man was so rich, ja?’)

Skip Without Guilt:

“Year of the Horse” (Our Local Correspondents) - Michael Schulman won’t miss carriage. A wonderful illustration suggests something rollicking, and the first two sections nicely set up the two gutsy opposite numbers on either side of the carriage fight. But there’s really no need for an entire Brief History of the Horse; Nislick is a less compelling figure (though I suppose most rich people don’t literally keep their pet causes as pets); the effect of one PAC on Christine Quinn’s doomed mayoral campaign is certainly overstated; and the piece peters out with a cutesy button. Selling you on appearances, then giving you a rather short, bumpy trip… does that ring any crotals?

“Paradise Lost” (On Television) - Inkoo Kang thinks Florence is Eden and leaving no crumbs. Awkward in the usual Kangian style; the first paragraph speaks of “an echo of God’s partiality to Abel’s offerings over his brother Cain’s in the Old Testament”, which is a bit clunky, but surely doesn’t need to be followed by a reminder that “envy drove Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, to kill Abel — the Bible’s first murder.” Hey, spoiler alert! There is also a paragraph with seven em-dashes. I do like the airflow metaphor in the last paragraph, though I don’t know if Kang intends it as a gag. (“…the relative wholesomeness of their adolescent troubles ushers in a fresh breeze that ends up strangely off-putting. I found it far preferable to soak up the stagnant air in Cathy’s room at the brothel”.) Hey, she who smelt it…?

“Fight for the Right” (The Political Scene) - Emma Green snowflakes on the group Project. Not offensive, just very boring. There is, presumably, some fun to be had in the infighting of these rancid orcs, but Green is more focused on policy than personality. There are very few actual scenes here; the extended history of the Heritage Foundation takes place solely in the past tense, and we move directly from there to group chats and X threads. The lack of physicality here could be made to say something, but I’m not sure Green really noticed. Tucker Carlson continues to be very happy to do press hits; Chris DeMuth gets to dog-whistle to white nationalists without Green holding him accountable; Kevin Roberts is relentlessly cagy. We’ve heard from these people before; they do not have a new game. Hide and go Sieg.

Letters:

Ingle bingle thingle tingle.

frimbus

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