Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (September 30)
The Weekend Special (September 30)
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
“Stories About Us” by Lore Segal. No Jacksons. old, hold, moled. Another batch of Segal’s women’s-group sketches, this one slightly more enlightening than the last, though not by very much. The first bit here is the best; it has a metafictional kick – nothing too original, but it’s charming. The rest are either vague reflections on age or extremely quote-heavy considerations of texts – a children’s book, a comedy sketch, a poem. Exegesis is wonderful, but that’s not what Segal’s doing here – it’s more like a sampler platter. Not the worst thing, but relying on other art to provide the profundity does make one wonder what Segal is bringing.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“Allrecipes, America’s Most Unruly Cooking Web Site” by Ruby Tandoh. Three Malcolms. best, test, Midwest. Just wonderful – and my jaw dropped when I realized, after reading, that it was written by Ruby from Bakeoff. Tandoh makes the wise choice to essentially write a tech article – the piece is really about how a changing web has changed the way we think about recipes, as an early Midwestern anarchy has been tamed by magazine-industry ignoramuses who’ve plucked out the soul (and some of the most useful features) of the site. There’s more appreciation than diatribe here, though; the backstory of what was originally called Cookierecipe is fascinating and unafraid to be technical (“Instead of ‘a cup of flour,’ the database would place ‘one cup’ in one column and ‘flour’ in another”) and the interview with a typical user is vivid fun. (“Carnes’s voice, an Iowa singsong, can wend from weary to impassioned in the course of a single thought.”) This is absolutely magazine-quality work; Tandoh’s published a streak of pieces online which I’ll have to go back and peruse, but they’re ready for print.
☀️ Random Pick
(Last week’s pick by Andrew Graham-Dixon was incorrectly labeled a “your pick”. It was a “random pick”. We regret the error.)
“Nice Two-Year-Olds Run Straight – Derby Entries – Band Notes” by Audax Minor. One Ross. Hialeah, Clarify, Springsteel. Minor, a pen name (and a great one), was the magazine’s horse-racing columnist for fifty-two years; as far as I can tell, he wasn’t replaced, so in a sense he remains their horse-racing columnist in perpetual absentia. This brief column is completely meaningless to me but it still makes great Ashbery-ish poetry, something Minor leans into, with notes on the quality of stable names and an attention to the paper parts of horse racing over the physical stuff. (Which is for the best – it’s a pretty ghastly attraction, I think.) The last paragraph, which is just a few stray remarks, tips totally into surrealism: “Lester Doctor says he has to take an interpreter with him when he goes down to the Red Sea mornings… The Honourable George is putting on his fur-lined swimming trunks for a dip, and how he dreads it!” Blow the bugle.
☀️ Something Extra
Recently gave Julian (who, as previously noted, you’ll continue to see around these parts) an old free-write I’d done; he edited it into a poem. The formatting isn’t playing very nice with buttondown but that’s alright. Here ‘tis.
DREAM CASTING
Put Chris Pratt here in a hat of boar's hair
and someone named Lux Delicious over there
bring them together like dolls and make them kiss
then throw them across the room and stare
at the kingdom's men cascading out
of their blue tupperwares with matching lids
to tempt me with parades and gooseflesh juxtapositions
you solder electrical outlets as a form of escape
digest synonyms for your own eyelids
pour a glass of milk and chug seagulls
Rodney come quick they're playing it again on T.V.
that thing I see when I wake up and can't move
come quick
they're digesting my memories on the nightly news
a handyman a violinist
a real pig wearing a facemask of a rubber pig
a rubber pig wearing a facemask of a rubber pig
a homunculus with braided hair
a knock at the door when you're fast asleep
“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: