January 12, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (January 6)

The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Boyles (for fiction), Harrimans (for essays), or Parkers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Boyle, Harriman, or Parker indicates a generally positive review.

There’s gonna be two of these Weekend Specials in, hopefully, rapid succession. Thanks for bearing with me.

🌱 Fiction

This is the edition for the week off, so there’s no fiction – instead I’m doing both a reader-submitted pick (thanks for the twenty bucks and the excellent choice) and a random pick.

🌱 Weekend Essay

“The Unstoppable Rise of the State Symbol” by Casey Cep. One Harriman. symbolism, smorgasbord, Smith Island. Bizarrely relevant – this Christmas, some relatives had a Smith Island cake shipped as a Christmas present to my parents’ home in Maryland, and as we ate it I Googled official state foods and we chatted about them around the table. A good friend from Maryland’s family swears by a particular local formulation of the cake, and I’d always assumed it was totally authentic. Turns out, smithislandcake.com, although it’s cited on Wikipedia, is probably lying to you. That brief second section is easily the most compelling and funniest thing here (“All’s fair in love and tourism”) as the rest is a sort of rah-rah defense of state-object-naming as a way to get kids (and Christmas Googlers) interested in governance. That’s charming, I suppose, but a bit pat – perhaps a society where children can drive real change would be healthier than one in which they’re disenfranchised but offered a meaningless token of responsibility. 

🌱 Random Pick

“The Ultimate” by Winthrop Sargeant (November 28, 1959). No Parkers. form, performance, formidable. This is more of the same from Sargeant, who I’ve covered before – his appreciation of the Bruckner is fine (if a little indulgent in both granting it a superlative and then also griping about the meaninglessness of superlatives) but the ensuing rant about the crappiness of atonal music is just tiresome. I’ve already covered Sargeant so per my policy I spun again, and got…

“The Case for Trappism” by Kenneth Tynan (November 28, 1959). Three Parkers. tutor, throwback, testy. And this time the random gods were beneficent, doling out this teardown of The Sound of Music in its original Broadway run. There’s something inherently compelling about a contemporaneous hater of a now-classic show; anyone can hate a thing after it’s popular, but a real critic gets there early. Tynan is riotous, and it’s no wonder he hates Sound; despite its pleasures, it is, as he says, kiddie stuff, and Tynan is among the most adult adults to ever write. I never noticed that Music is a slightly self-plagiarizing riff on the structure of The King and I – time erases chronology and replaces it with famousness. Sound is “the very kind of musical” that Rogers and Hammerstein “had labored so hard, and so successfully, to abolish” – an oversweet “romantic melodrama.” The show ranges from “overwhelmingly quaint” to “damp and dowdy”, in Tynan’s estimation, and it’s a challenge not to start to see the show through his lens – maybe my enjoyment of it was really just nostalgia. Tynan tears down the curtains.

🌱 Your Pick

“The Egg Men” by Burkhard Bilger (September 5, 2005). Three Parkers. crazy, crowded, cracked. Thanks much to the reader who sent this in; it’s an unimpeachable delight, building a sort of treatise on work around the manic labor of short-order egg cooks in a Las Vegas hotel kitchen. It’s hilarious from the very start (“the energy for all that vice had to come from somewhere, and mostly it came from eggs”) as Bilger strikes a tone of cockeyed curiosity; dry but never quite cynical – call it soft-boiled. Look at the details he picks out when summing up one cook’s journey: The cook “says that he couldn’t get used to the newness of the place at first—the rectilinear streets and bulldozed desert plots; the jagged rim of mountains on the horizon. But real estate was cheap and the casinos needed chefs. So he bought a house in one of the stucco subdivisions south of town. Then he bought a newer, bigger house nearby and rented out the first. He had two more children, bought a charcoal-gray Mustang convertible, and slowly began to feel at home. ‘I was, like, “Holy shit,”’ he says. ‘“You can make it in this town.”’” Who’d think to include “charcoal-gray” or “stucco”, or reach for “rectilinear”? It’s a masterclass – and every line is like this. Bilger is also quick to extend the piece’s scope in unexpected directions: In a section about flipping eggs (the trick, apparently, has more to do with the catch than the flip) we’re suddenly talking to “a neuroscientist at Duke University” who’s explaining “oscillatory neurons” and the role of dopamine in regulating an inner sense of time, with “a separate neural circuit set up for every task: an over-easy circuit, an over-medium circuit, a sunny-side-up circuit, and so on, each one reinforced through constant, repetitive use.” It could seem like a whimsical turn if it weren’t so helpful in showing Bilger’s point. This piece is fascinating and fun – it goes over-easy. 

🌱 Something Extra

I finally made it out to Siena: The Rise of Painting at the Met – it’s as good as everyone’s said it is; it’s up for two more weeks.

Sunday song: