Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (October 14)
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
“My Camp” by Joshua Cohen. Two Jacksons. dismiss, distribute, dissent. A long, wild, brilliantly written, risky, artful shaggy dog story – one with a rotten core. We open with a digressive, almost gothic journey that seems mostly intended to knock us out before Cohen zaps us awake with October 7th. A long scene with cousin Oded nails the characteristically sociopathic Israeli communication style; a party is full of caricatures of the Wall Street wealthy. It all leans broad, but the balance doesn’t tip. Everything on the student protest movement is idiotic; I know it’s the “speaker” talking, but these are obviously Cohen’s hot takes (a dashiki is nothing like a kaffiyeh; a kente cloth is maybe what he’s reaching for, but Nancy Pelosi wore one of those), although he immediately makes himself look bad in a fairly classic literary way – he has a character we’re supposed to hate say some of the same stuff, but racistly. The late turn is seriously clever; the ironic fulfillment of the homesteading fantasy is the perfect capper to a story about Jewish angst over two settler states. But it’s pretty clear that the speaker’s empathy only extends so far; he turns the climactic image of heart-wrenching sorrow into an admission that the thing that makes him saddest is that all these orphaned children are going to hate Jews, now. Buddy… Kvetch on someone your own size. There’s a nihilism to this story that’s no less repulsive for being cloaked in autofictional self-deprecation. The dream of opting out of a system is a recurrent one – “I’ll give some money to charity, tip my waiters, and never have to worry about my complicity in capitalism again” – and it gets one thing right, which is that anxiety is unproductive. But that doesn’t mean that every action is unproductive. Maybe every individual action is; maybe this narrator is too much of an individualist to ever be part of a camp that would have him as a member. Buying your own camp might work – until you realize that no one else is there.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“Ukraine’s Waiting Game” by Keith Gessen. One Malcolm. troop, trap, trip. Not much of an update, but I suppose the update is that there is no update, which this conveys ably. The battles have push and pull, which is measured in lives. Aksina Kurina, who hates the war and the politics of fighting it has engendered, is a fascinating voice; before we get to her, the piece is scattered, but in that last section it gains focus and intensity. It’s brief – there’s not much to report. Which doesn’t mean the losses don’t pile.
☀️ Random Pick
“This and That” by G.J. (May 17, 1952.) No Rosses. fetching, faille, fly-front. Apparently the magazine would publish columns meticulously describing various articles of clothing with zero illustration of any of these clothes, a strange kind of Vogue-for-the-blind. Mostly I learned from this that fashion in the 1950s was seriously obsessed with cultural appropriation: Cottons “printed with African tribal signs”, Hawaiian beach clothes “printed with fishes and ferns in several combinations”, an impossible-to-picture riff on a toreador uniform where “bullfighter breeches become sailcloth pedal pushers, one leg red and one leg black.” If you have a vivid imagination and a knowledge of fashion terminology, you might get a historical kick out of this. I have neither.
☀️ Something Extra
I liked this Dennis Kardon show and this story about it. I also saw the Suzanne Jackson show Hilton Als wrote about, which was as good as advertised. And Anna Rubin has some kickass videos up.
“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.
Sunday Song: