The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three KATs (for fiction), Anunobys (for essays), or Brunsons (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one KAT, Anunoby, or Brunson indicates a generally positive review.

I was gonna skip this because of the double week, but then I realized that due to an editing error, I hadn’t reviewed one piece in the prior issue, which can take the place of the fiction piece.

🏀 Fuckup

For whatever it’s worth, Rothfeld’s excellent review was meant to be the top piece in “Window-Shop” last week.

“Vanishing Act” (Books) - Becca Rothfeld finds the new Rachel Cusk novel a little lifeless. Cusk’s program to un-write the novel – to wrong it, maybe? – is one I find frustrating, at least as she executes it. I’ve criticized Cusk’s project already; Rothfeld touches on the tortured gender politics highlighted by other reviewers, but is more interested in the formal effect of Cusk’s egoistical refusal to see herself as subjective – which is to deaden Cusk’s work almost entirely. Because Cusk aims for the authority of the object, she abandons the humanity that’s so central to the usual workings of fiction, and replaces it with her fluoride stare. It’s unbearably bright.

🏀 Weekend Essay

“A Passage” by Ledio Cakaj. No Anunobys. Out of the five clearly labeled Striking Details in this essay, only one really struck me – the map on the bathroom wall. That’s a good enough, unique enough detail to singlehandedly justify an essay. But it gets buried here as one beat amidst a too-traditional escape narrative, written without a ton of verve and in a pretty stock-poetic voice. Cakaj is ex-State Department, yet he is either too humble or too scared to draw any political conclusions from his personal narrative; on some level I appreciate that this doesn’t become an essay about immigration in general, but the lack of context and the corny, love-one-another ending make the essay feel small and rather dull.

🏀 Random Pick

“The Eleventh Edition” (Onward and Upward With the Arts) by Hans Koning. (March 2, 1981). One Brunson. It is, arguably, a pretty cheap shot to review an encyclopedia from 1910 and spend most of it going ‘this is really racist!’ over and over. On the other hand, it is really racist. Koning, one of the first to point out how evil Columbus was, gets a pass for any note of self-righteousness, because this was 1981 and the intellectual world needed any righteousness it could get. He also does the can’t-make-them-like-this-anymore, death-of-paid-experts critique; similarly now-familiar. To say this reads a bit like a Baffler article published yesterday is both a judgement of The Baffler¹ and a defense of Koning. Still, the most fun material here is just extemporaneous quotation: on diets, on Paris, on bridges and hydraulics (complete with seventy-five pages of “differential and integral calculus” – some things, uh… It’s always interesting to see how the past viewed the more-distant past; here, the double hindsight emphasizes the continuing brutality of warfare and capitalism. How far have we really come?

🏀 Something Extra

Caught a few consecutive puppet shows as part of the International Puppet Fringe; of note were the witty Judy Punches Back – a remarkably well-balanced and never too didactic feminist reimagining of Punch and Judy that doesn’t lose sight of the joy inherent in watching puppets fight – and the gorgeous Shterna and the Lost Voice – a lovely, quiet crankie folk tale that featured a truly exceptional klezmer score.

Dukes, caught on closing night, was both more theatrical and funnier than I expected (despite some perversely bad mic’ing choices, possibly the result of tech difficulties since I don’t see the giant, continually popping headsets in most of the photos online). I’m a sucker for a novelty song with a surprising moment of pathos, and Wickline and Pierce deliver some three or four, plus a few that are just start-to-finish lunacy. Would work well enough as an album that I’m surprised they aren’t already booked at the Audible theater.

The Central Park Winter’s Tale was definitely minimum viable Winter’s Tale, but it’s a beautiful play and they didn’t mangle it. No choices is sort of a choice!

Sunday Song: