Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (September 2)
The Weekend Special (September 2)
Pieces are given up to three Jacksons (for fiction), Malcolms (for essays), or Rosses (for your picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Jackson, Malcolm, or Ross indicates a generally positive review.
☀️ Fiction
“Greensleeves” by Sigrid Nunez. No Jacksons. self, separated, searching. Kept waiting for this to kick into gear, and it instead idles and even shifts to a slower, less consequential key. There’s just not much that’s interesting here – sometimes I say that a cartoon caption in the magazine “wouldn’t make me laugh if someone said it in real life”, and this wouldn’t be an engaging story if someone told it to me. The story feels trapped at the boring party where it starts; even as it roams (slightly) beyond, there’s still a sense of uncomfortable malaise hovering over everything. (Is this intentional, making some meta point about depression? Look, maybe. It’s still a slog.) For a story about a therapist, it’s odd how we hover over the surface of every thought here; there is no depth of realization, no breakthrough. It’s all exterior.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” by Ted Chiang. One Malcolm. intention, intelligence, interest. Chiang is always a witty naysayer to ridiculous A.I. hype; his “Blurry JPEG” piece is an instant classic. So of course he gets some credit; even if his argument is now being parroted (non-stochastically) all over the place, he still got there first. There are two big problems with this essay, and although they sort of counteract one another, that doesn’t fix either. First, Chiang quickly gets distracted from talking about art in particular and spends the vast majority of the essay just countering a random assortment of pro-A.I. arguments (which is very fun, to be clear); only in the final paragraph does he get back to art, and even then he doesn’t have much to say. Second, the little bit of new ground he does carves out relies on an understanding of art and the artistic impulse that basically ignores anything anyone has written on the subject since 1968. Chiang quite openly states that what determines the meaning of a text is the author’s “choices” and “unique life experience.” That Chiang doesn’t seem to know how inflammatory this statement is, that he’s basically looking at Barthes and all he spawned and saying “…no”, is inexplicable. By no means do I think that it’s impossible or even that difficult to make an anti-A.I.-art argument that is at least vaguely reconciled with post-structuralism. Pretending not to see the entirety of continental philosophy and instead structuring your whole essay around your shower thought that art is about choices, is, frankly, the height of hubris. But, again, Chiang gets distracted so quickly even the crux of his argument isn’t very, uh, cruxy.
☀️ Your Pick
“The Memory Kitchen” by Elif Batuman. (April 19, 2010.) Two Rosses. kisir, keşkek, kebab. A reader writes: “Spring 2010 was a time of tumult in my life, as crises of identity and relationship coincided with the end of college and a long-planned trip to China. This was two years before I started reading the magazine, but I think a food-focused letter from Istanbul – a place I have since visited and loved –would have been exactly the thing [I’d] have devoured.” This is certainly a piece you can sink your teeth into. Batuman begins with what’s essentially a restaurant review of Çiya Sofrasi, on “the Asian side of the Bosporous”; Batuman’s writing is as vivid and dynamic as the best food critic’s – kisir “suddenly reminded you that wheat is a plant”, “candied tomatoes, dull-red translucent disks, resembled ancient talismans”, “a stew uniting beef, roasted chestnuts, quince, and dried apricots in an enigmatic greenish broth tugged at some multilayered memory involving my mother’s quince compote.” Glorious. From there, the piece shifts to a profile of the restaurant’s owner, Musa Dağdeviren. It’s a short piece, focused mainly on sense memories; this means that the complex politics behind Dağdeviren’s takes on food get a bit lost, which is a pity – he’s clearly not just a gourmet but a deep thinker, and Kurdish-Turkish politics are complex enough they demand a bit of unpacking. Perhaps the 2018 Chef’s Table episode on Dağdeviren delves deeper into these topics; it’s on my watchlist. It’s still well worth going on a journey with Dağdeviren and Batuman, questing after foraged herbs and female chickens. I believe this is Batuman’s first piece on staff for the magazine, though she’d already written a few as a freelancer; her voice is already remarkably assured, and she’s unafraid to pivot from deep thought (“As Musa sees it, keşkek risotto is the invention of someone who can’t fathom the incredible richness of keşkek”) to gristly detail (“Finally, the farmer tossed the turkey’s tiny head some distance away, and the dog went off to look for it.”) Mostly, we’re given thick slabs of Dağdevirenian monologue. If a bit more contextualization might bring out deeper flavor, that may also just be my untrained palate talking.
☀️ Something Extra
Starting a cruise-ship soul band and calling it “A Supposedly Funk Thing I’ll Never Doo-Wop Again.”
“Your Pick” is a piece chosen by a randomly selected paying subscriber. (Except when it’s a “Random Pick”, in which case it’s chosen by random number generation.) Have a piece you want to be "Your Pick"? If you're a paying subscriber, you can also skip the vicissitudes of fate and force your way to the front of the line! Venmo $20 per request to @SamECircle, then write me an email or a note on Venmo letting me know you've done so and what your requested piece is. No limit on the number of requests, BTW. If you want to give me a more open-ended prompt ("1987 reported feature by a woman") that's great as well – and pieces from other venues are okay too, if you ask nicely.
The Sunday Song: