The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Ellises (for fiction), McClellands (for essays), or Whitakers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Ellis, McClelland, or Whitaker indicates a generally positive review.

⏰ Fiction

“Kim’s Game” by Sadia Shepard. Three Ellises. observe, obscure, object. Rich and classic-feeling, fitting a character portrait and a very tidy but not especially predictable narrative in a small package. The missionary character Helen doesn’t feel like someone I’ve met before, but she feels real; her cloistered cynicism and fastidiousness are always prevalent but never overwrought. Kim, too, whose self-destructive curiosity feels tied, in complicated ways, to his Muslim-academic identity in a place very far from both impulses (in what Shepard points out is a subtly comic touch, the latter, and not the former, is what Helen “finds distasteful”), is not a type I’ve seen addressed in fiction. Toss them together, and what emerges is a potent sort of love story, one so entangled in colonialism and the other troublesome legacies of both missionary and anthropological work that you may come away touched by Helen or loathing her. (Likely, you’ll land somewhere in between.) The guilty conscience is operative; grief tends to activate it in complex ways, and putting yourself in other people’s business is a powerful, ever-returning urge. Often, even, a loving one; a ‘selfless’ gesture that still inserts the self. Despite a straightforward quality and lack of abstraction or narrative guile, this story is complex, even cagey; it may be hiding more than you think. Is there one stone missing, or two?

⏰ Weekend Essay

“The Robot and the Philosopher” by Dan Turello. No McClellands. photograph, physical, phenomenological. Clunky, basic, dull. Sophia the robot is a media-facing scam with expensive PR, and its company, Hanson, has done next to nothing to advance AI technologies; this is widely understood in the industry. Turello is ultimately skeptical-ish of Sophia’s “sentience” (though he still uses human pronouns for some reason); he “has no way of knowing whether” the robot was “simply executing a preset routine” – except, you know, journalism. Did he ask? The piece boils down to: Turello felt different photographing a robot than he did photographing a person; also, here are the first ten minutes of material from a Philosophy 101 class on consciousness. This is a waste of space; also Turello’s book cover is butt-ugly¹ and his photos aren’t great either.

⏰ Random Pick

I’m approaching the point where I’m running out of critics to review here, so I end up covering the feature piece while still reading a number of the critics’ pieces. I read four of the five nonfiction articles in the January 24, 1983 issue this week, and while I’ll cover the very lengthy feature below, I was much more interested in Pauline Kael dismantling an iffy lefty farce (“this phlegmatic demonstration of what drives a chicken-hearted man to violence is a French academic’s idea of a dark thriller”) and a rote marriage-plot comedy (“All its small talk is low-key and listless. It stays on the surface, yet it’s dissatisfied with the surface…”). Andrew Porter dissected an iffy Semiramide, which compelled me to listen to his preferred Semiramide (it’s definitely… opera!). And Jane Kramer discussed French politics and trickle-down linguistics in informative but nowadays sort of hard-to-follow fashion. (The relevant question: Is the past a foreign country, or have we just gotten dumber?) She also visited a show of prints of fait divers, a kind of tabloidish true crime, that sounds really great: “It is cheering, over this rhetorical winter, to escape for an hour or two to master poisoners and sinister hôteliers.” Read any of those before you read this:

“Allocating Sacrifice” (Profiles) by Jeremy Bernstein. (Jan 24, 1983). No Whitakers. council, collapse, collect. Two halves, very different but alike in dullness. The first is theoretically interesting but boring in practice; the Municipal Assistance Corporation was a novel approach to the thorny problem of the NYC fiscal crisis, but it was also essentially just a very complicated way of refinancing debt and firing a lot of state employees. Rohatyn’s background in mergers and acquisitions doesn’t need nearly as much space as Bernstein grants it; when things finally get to the bailout, Bernstein tries his best to keep things comprehensible, but there’s a lot of material like this: “…Rohatyn and his co-workers began an ultimately successful campaign in Washington to get not only seasonal loans but also federal guarantees for long-term MAC bonds. (Seasonal loans were meant to deal with the city’s cash-flow problems during periods when tax revenues were down, and had to be repaid by the end of every year. Long-term bonds can be used to finance the city’s capital-construction projects, and are repaid over the life of the project.) The seasonal loans began in December of 1975, and the guarantees in the summer of 1978.” There are flashes of life here – the quote on press coverage was particularly compelling² – but it’s largely a slog.

The second half is more fun to read but thoroughly inessential, as Rohatyn is given ample time to proclaim all his political Subway Takes, and, wouldn’t you know it, they all basically conform to the liberal consensus of the era. Many are wise – you really do have to raise taxes to provide goods and services, and voters can understand this; government jobs can generate employment – while others, like the suggested ways to copy Japan in order to keep up with Japan (improving “work ethic”, somehow; relying on one-year instead of two-year labor contracts), now seem like dull arrows being fired backward. Almost nothing is novel, and Bernstein runs his monologue verbatim.

⏰ Something Extra

It’s theater festival season, which means that I’ll be covering a lot of shows that have already closed – which isn’t that different than usual, I guess.

The big hits for me so far were the astonishing blast of anguished joy MAJOR, an exploration of Majorette dance that was part of Live Artery; the wildly bisected avant-parable The Mushroom, too good to spoil so I hope it gets a longer run, part of Exponential Fest at Sunset Park’s Target Margin; and the refractive, architectural, time-battered Reconstructing, a ballsy consideration of the role of race in artistic collaboration that had me yawping, part of Under the Radar way out at Brooklyn College.

I also caught Marjorie Prime on Broadway, which I expected to be annoyed by but found largely successful, sometimes despite its script; the performances were just so good, especially Cynthia Nixon, whose Tony campaign I’m launching now.

Sunday Song: