Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 20
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 20
“Scott enjoyed his trips to Sydney, where he joined a university choir and an ice-skating club made up of suburban housewives.”
Must-Read:
“A Brother’s Conviction” (Letter from Australia) - Eren Orbey pays a steep price for justice. Orbey doesn’t really attempt surprise in this true-crime miscarriage-of-justice tale (as ever, the magazine’s favorite thing): You’ll certainly clock the thick layer of disdain toward Steve Johnson before it becomes clear why he deserves it, and by the time Scott White, the railroaded suspect, arrives, you’ll be sure there’s a lot of evidence of his innocence, just for narrative reasons. And this is certainly more of a Crime Lovers’ Pizza than it is anything especially pertinent to American readers – unless you’re hoping to make a case that we aren’t the only country where criminal investigators do shoddy, biased work. Despite that predictability, the narrative has enough turns and compelling characters (the natty lover, White’s ex-criminal brother, the severe and righteous policewoman who the ranks close against) and dynamics (Who knows someone best, family or a partner? What’s the true meaning of brotherhood? Who really cares about queerness, and who’s looking for easy allies? Who ‘deserves’ to be in prison, and why?) that one doesn’t feel shepherded through the motions. Steve is hard to like, but one does sense that perhaps Orbey’s outrage, which seeps through, is also a journalist’s outrage at the wrong person being heard; as with Rachel Aviv’s Lucy Letby story, it’s as much a Bad Media story as a Bad Justice System story – and if the Hollywood film is actually made, it won’t just be Australia that’s culpable for that half. On the other hand, while this is a story involving politics, it’s not really a political story; any attempt to untangle what the whole mess says about queerness, for example, will leave you, as the Aussies say, bushwhacked. It’s a yarn; don’t get strung up.
Window-Shop:
“This Is Miss Lang” (Life and Letters) - Anthony Lane hops for Bunny. Makes the smart decision to include as many block quotes as humanly possible. Lang’s poetry is wonderful and not especially difficult to understand, so like an apple sharlotka this thing is mostly just apples, plus a minimal amount of eggy batter to hold it together. Yes, some of the details Lane gives are still thoroughly extraneous – no big deal, as that’s in keeping with the spirit of New York School poetry – and some of his analysis seems off: Isn’t it rather normal for those with proper backgrounds to rebel with “scuzziness and outrage”, not actually “enticingly hard to pin down”? As to the poetry, though, Lane proves an able exegete, for example when disambiguating her birdsong use of “accidie”: “In early Christian thinking, its connotations of languor and listlessness, within the spirit no less than the body, lent it the status of a sin — a turning aside from God for the sake of earthly sorrow. One could plausibly claim, perhaps, that accidie foreshadows our modern concepts of depression; yet here is Lang deploying it as a piping rhyme for birdsong.” I’m trilled!
Schwartz on Acocella (Takes) - Absolutely nails what’s so wonderful about Acocella’s writing, “unpretentious plainness” wedded to “sophistication”. A glowing, quote-heavy tribute/review.1
“Ready or Not” (Profiles) - Eric Lach says Zohran is flying: There’s not a star in heaven that he can’t reach. A totally serviceable profile. The most shocking material, and what was pulled from the piece to go viral, concerns the media’s often viciously blithe response to Mamdani’s rise; for example, the Colbert producer who suggests Mamdani respond to the prompt “‘Thumbs-up or thumbs-down: Hamas.’” But most of what’s here is more traditional and, for those with a passing familiarity with Mamdani’s mythos, far less surprising: his truly unique and oft-recounted parental lineage, which combines media representation of identity and clear-eyed lefty political theorizing so neatly it would seem a hackneyed script; his lifelong focus on Palestinian solidarity; his idolization and emulation of Heems from Das Racist. I didn’t realize the first campaign Zohran worked on was in Bay Ridge, my neighborhood; I didn’t know that one of the three bills he passed in Albany “had to do with where beer could be sold within the confines of the Museum of the Moving Image” – there are some other very funny details here. I’m not sure why the policing section comes before the backstory section – in general, this never stops feeling like a collection of scenes and anecdotes; if Lach has a thesis, it’s that it’s just too soon to tell what Mamdani will end up being. That’s the one bet that will always hit – but the payout is 0:1.
“The Key to All Mythologies” (A Critic at Large) - Manvir Singh throws a bone at the monomyth2. An interesting piece which doesn’t follow its thread to the very end. Singh repeatedly dismisses Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, which is unfortunate because he proceeds to slowly unpack what Campbell and Jung already figured out: That the similarities between myths are less a matter of a common ancestor and more a matter of an archetypal structure that connects so fundamentally to what makes us human – “the basic patterns of how we think, feel, and tell stories” – that the two are inextricable. It is sort of astonishing that Singh still refuses to call these “latent forms”, and one senses that he is predisposed to posture against Jung for both methodological and aesthetic reasons – because Singh is a Good Anthropologist – even as he substantively agrees with him. Singh makes his living using “evolutionary, cognitive, and sociocultural” science to understand “traditions such as shamanism, witchcraft, story, and music.” As thoughtful as he may be, his belief that he has somehow stepped outside the realm of story is hard to agree with. As Derrida writes, he is “swallowed up in metaphysics by the whole body of the discourse that they claim to have disengaged from it.”3 But the most interesting place to begin a piece like this is exactly where Singh ends up: If we do repeat the same story because it arouses the most pleasure, then what world might we shape? What visions of peace and justice might our rhythms hold?
“Rambling Man” (Books) - Maggie Doherty gets hard at work with Peter Mathiessen. I’m completely unfamiliar with Mathiessen’s work, and Doherty doesn’t do enough to build him up before tearing him down. It’s only sort of interesting to find out that he’s a naturalist who “neglected his family”, cheated on his spouse, and indulged in dependency (gee, surely there aren’t many of those?) – mostly because the details are so lurid. He was romancing two women at the same time while writing a book about his grief at the loss of his wife and guilt at the abandonment of his son. The CIA stuff is obviously terrible, but at least Mathiessen seems to have devoted the rest of his career to less muddied leftism (as far as we can tell). Whether or not he was a good writer, let alone whether his biography is well-written or worth reading, you can’t really tell from this nearly quoteless summary. Doherty’s last few pieces, each about variously troublesome men, have generally not been as strong as her prior batch about variously troublesome women. But learning about semi-obscure literary figures remains the best second reason to pick up the magazine.
Skip Without Guilt:
“For Art’s Sake” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody will watch both movies now and find the Linklater. Not nearly enough formal analysis here; I don’t think there’s a single description of a formal choice Linklater has made. I know he’s not the showiest director, but that’s all the more reason an expert is needed to describe his choices. Theoretically, it helps that Linklater’s stories reasonably overlap with Brody’s interests (especially but not exclusively Godard) so that his honed eye can assess the realism of the reproduction; in practice, there’s not enough of that, just a semi-hacky read of the film as a love letter to Godard, including an awkward downer of a last line.
“Degrees of Hostility” (Annals of Higher Education) - Emma Green slips away across the university. Not as evidently right-wing-biased as some of Green’s prior work; in fact, it’s impossible to come away thinking that MAGA has any chance at accomplishing their supposed goal of pivoting the university to some sort of anti-woke palace of war, white nationalism, and career training (if you understand their actual goal as maleficent destruction, on the other hand, their actions make a bit more sense.) What’s odd is that Green, even as she positions the administration as malignant, refuses to position them as blundering; they’re always waging “an effective, unrelenting assault”, as though the leadership at the highest echelon of schools hasn’t been generally willing (at least until recently, when it became clear just how bad the optics were and how little would be gained) to go along with the authoritarian pivot – not generally the reaction to an “assault”, unless one understands the assault is not actually on universities but more specifically on students and professors, whose intellectual freedom is unacceptable to the fascist administration. Green’s whole framing is off, which means she gets the basics wrong; Trump’s funding cuts have, by a two-to-one ratio, mostly affected public colleges, but Green (in what remains a pervasive, though constantly-remarked-upon, issue with the magazine’s coverage of higher ed) over-focuses on the tiny group of super-elite colleges that are actually run like “‘hedge funds, welded to multinational corporations, welded to think tanks’”, the words an influential righty political scientist uses to describe universities in general. Luckily, Green does clock this point of contention, and spends some time discussing UMaine and the lasting issues with research-funding cuts; in a generally scattershot article, these sections are admittedly very good. To get to them you’ll have to skim a reading of the Trans-people-in-sports issue that is uselessly credulous, and after them skim even more conflating of élite institutions with higher education writ large. Maybe you’ll stick it out; if you weren’t paying me4 I’d have dropped the class.
Letters:
Zoe has another typo to add to the collection: “I noticed that in this issues’s contributor bio for Ann Patchett they describe her as the author of ‘Ted Lake’ - really??”
And Michael B has an excellent link, courtesy of Carl Wilson at Slate, for those who want a counter-kvetch to Kelefa Sanneh’s kvetch on poptimism.
Also: I very highly recommend this Times obit of a magazine original, with whom I was somehow not previously familiar.
there
I originally wrote review-cum-tribute, but uh, that’s not… ↩
the joke is just that it sounds like monolith. I was tired, OK? ↩
Any misunderstanding or misuse of Derrida herewith is, of course, covered under caveat emptor. ↩
You are paying me, right? ↩