August 5, 2024

Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (August 5)

The Weekend Special (August 5)

Before we get started, I wanted to make a note in a free edition that paid subscribers have been getting archival cartoon reviews in the Cartoon and Poem Supplement! I randomly select an issue and pick a few of my favorite panels to screenshot and riff on.

I am vaguely considering a few more new features for paid subscribers; if any of these would definitely or probably get you to pony up, let me know in the comments or by replying to this email.

1. An audio recording of me reading the newsletter. (I like to think I have a rather mellifluous voice.)

2. A monthly or bimonthly review of an entire archival issue of the magazine.

3. A stuff-to-read-elsewhere "good links" feature of the sort that seems to inevitably worm its way into every newsletter.

4. Paid-subscriber Zoom calls for chatting about the magazine, book-club style.

These are not fully-thought-through ideas, just spitballs. (Ew, spitballs!) If you have a different feature in mind, please let me know.

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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

“Clay” by Caleb Crain.¹ One Jackson. abandon, ability, abuse. Certainly worthy, not merely because it presents injustice, but because it considers and complicates a received narrative of victimization. Still, it never gelled for me. The dream sequence is both the strangest moment and representative of a bigger issue, as when Crain writes that “the trees had recently flowered, and the lawn under their branches was littered with dusty, brittle catkins.” I don’t really believe that Jane, in the midst of a dream, would notice such a thing – which means the narration is describing an interior experience from a third-person omniscient perspective. Similarly, this, after Jane is shot: “She balanced her head on the stem of her neck as if it were a thing. As if it were a wobbly pumpkin. Like in ‘Ozma of Oz.’” Certainly one may draw whimsical analogies in the midst of trauma, but somehow I couldn’t make the leap to belief – the moment feels too transparently, to me, like the writer stopping by to drop an eerie description in. Nearly every gorgeous description felt like that. Maybe Crain is cultivating that odd perspectival distance; perhaps he’s saying something about fiction’s Golem-like falsity – I mean, the story is called “Clay.” I don’t really buy that, though. I think Crain is hoping to write a character study about a victim of cruelty and violence, while trying not to rub the reader’s nose in Jane’s helplessness and victimization – but, somehow, the ever-presence of that trying kept pulling me out. Crain’s intentions are not merely noble but specifically thoughtful about the role fiction has to play in cultivating empathy and showing us the lives of others. Nonetheless, he’s still writing toward a particular aim, shaping the story’s path too transparently – slipping into didacticism despite his every effort not to.

☀️ Weekend Essay

“Two Paths for Jewish Politics” by Corey Robin. Three Malcolms. antisemitic, antidemocratic, anticipation. Could be taught in a class on argumentation, which means it won’t be to everyone’s taste – it’s honed to make and strengthen its point with little concession to storytelling (after the tossed-off opening paragraph.) So much the better, I say, when your argument is this clever and your evidence for it is this strong. That argument, basically, is that American Jews rejected an ancient and eventually European model which was “conditioned on cleaving the citizen from the Jew” and granting Jews sovereign privileges which could then be revoked. Instead, they built a series of democratic systems that supported other subjugated groups and sought power by different, more egalitarian means. Robin moves so quickly you’ll have to reread; at the end, the piece slams shut like a garage door. But it’s easily my favorite Weekend Essay since I started reviewing them – punchy, convincing, timely, genuinely unexpected. It’s news Jews can use.

☀️ Your Pick

“The New York Times and The New York Post Walk Into a Bar” by Edward Steed. (March 6, 2019). Three Rosses. clippings, strangers, dwarf-tossing. Somehow, presumably because it was an online exclusive, I missed this delirious comic imagining the publications as two strangers at a bar – all the dialogue is “composed of clippings from the [respective] January 26th issues”. I think it leads with its best joke – the Times at the bar ordering “1/3 cup water” – but everything is wonderful. Steed comes up with two good solutions to the issue of incoherence: One character is meant to be incoherent, the other is simply continuously interrupted. Trying to unpack this further would ruin it, I think. I do kind of want to try a Bulgarian Umbrella, though.

Okay, since that was short here’s a random pick as well.

☀️ Random Pick

“Playing With Desire” by Nancy Franklin. (May 15, 1995). Two Rosses. farce, flamboyance, full-frontal. Vinson Cunningham’s recent transition from theater to television isn’t, it turns out, without precedent: Franklin made the same switch after a couple years, and stayed on as the T.V. critic for thirteen years. (She was at the magazine for fifteen years as a fact checker before she wrote a word for its pages.) She didn’t leave to write elsewhere – she just quit the field altogether. Her LinkedIn bio reads “available for, and open to, anything except writing”, and the only experience listed is at the magazine, where she started immediately after graduating college. She’s still on Twitter, trying to resell theater tickets and such. Truly, isn’t it the dream?

Anyway, this week we eye one of Franklin’s earliest pieces, reviewing revivals of a Jean Cocteau comedy and a Tennessee Williams romance. The former is a London transfer, and as with so many of those, it’s deliriously unsubtle. A young Cynthia Nixon and an unknown Jude Law both feature, but neither acquit themselves well: Nixon is “schoolgirlishly bland” while Law, at the climax, “goes merely from being a big puppy to being a small puppy.” (Both got Tony noms, but again, that doesn’t mean too much.) Eileen Atkins is better, “such a master of flamboyant minimalism, and so magnetic, that you begin to almost feel sorry for the other actors,” such as Roger Rees, left “pacing the floor like a neurotic leprechaun.” All of this is very good fun, and there are enough details about the production, like a set “so spacious that the actors seem lost in it”, to keep things from becoming a tally of names. The Williams review is mostly notable for its seriously funny ending, which calls out the show’s use of “highly identifiable” Ennio Morricone soundtracks as underscoring: “It works, and I like it, but I don’t approve.”

☀️ Something Extra

A recommendation for lovers of periodicals: I often read Harper’s feature pieces online, but it wasn’t until recently that I subscribed to the print magazine. As it turns out, the front matter, called Readings, a grab-bag of excerpts from various different sources, is reliably delightful. In the July issue you’ll find Donna Tartt waxing philosophical (“Unlike artifice, art cannot be boiled down or reduced to its influences and component parts without falsifying it; its depths, which are nonlinear like dreams and unbound by time, are eerily self-renewing and inexhaustible, and they always have something new to say to us”), Joy Williams flashing her fiction (“The dog accepted an ice cube as was customary”), Simone Weil corresponding (For the Greeks, “purity of soul was their only concern; imitating God was its secret; the study of mathematics helped to imitate God insofar as one saw the universe as subject to mathematical laws, which made the geometer an imitator of the supreme legislator”), Diane Seuss penning a poem (“My husky boy / feet cemented into the concrete / veranda”), plus striking photos by Yoko Ikeda and Rahim Fortune and a stunning full-page print of a Sarah Sze artwork. In August, there’s a roving, gutting Hisham Matar essay on sight and knowledge (“Not being able to see, while believing that I possessed perfect vision… helped form some of my early ideas of the world… I am bad at remembering that I am not you and you are not me. I secretly believe in the unity of spirits and matter” – leading eventually to: “…it also makes one wonder what it is that people believe they have possessed by not knowing enough about something… What would knowing enough about Israel and Palestine do? And what does not knowing enough about it allow?”) a pop of autofiction by Amalia Ulman (“I know she’s a junkie not because she’s drinking liquid morphine but because she says sorry a lot”) and a few paragraphs of advice from “the Enhanced Games”, where “participating athletes will be permitted to use performance-enhancing drugs.” (“If a friend comes out as enhanced to you, respect their commitment to their health.”) Perhaps the plate of nibbles I’ve gathered from their charcuterie boards will convince you to subscribe. Or maybe it’s only new to me.

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“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.

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The Sunday Song:

I generally prefer the rerecording but I’m in a lofi mood. Somehow I imagine there aren’t a ton of Car Seat Headrest fans (headrestheads?) who also read this newsletter, but I’d love to be wrong. Reveal yourselves!