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

“A Private View” by Douglas Stuart. No Ellises. seeing, semen, sequins. I give Stuart a lot of credit for successfully pulling off a Big Twist. (He attempts a second Big Twist shortly thereafter, which doesn’t land.) The pathos and melodrama of this variation on his own story – alcoholic mother, art-world partner – do land. And I don’t begrudge him the creation of a relentlessly bitter world. My initial issue was just that I didn’t buy, at all, that this particular mid-career artist’s iffy Koons-esque show would be in any NYC museum; I swear to god I thought to myself “this sounds more like an artist who’d have a small show at Gagosian” – before I looked up Stuart’s husband and found out he works there. He previously worked under Kynaston McShine, who used a wheelchair, at MoMA; his stand-in, Fredrik Bolin, has been turned from a West Indian to a Norwegian, removing a racial dynamic that would add a layer of complication to the boyfriend’s Texan family’s concern that he’d be pushing the wheelchair. Just about everything that doesn’t directly involve the speaker and his mother feels off to me, sour and skewed. That central relationship fares better, successfully portraying the grief that accompanies a parent lost to addiction, but even there the misery is diluted by the various other, less effective miseries surrounding it.

⏰ Weekend Essay

“Mad About the Mandolin” by Tim Parks. One McClelland. chosen, chest, cheerful. A charming essay about picking up a new instrument, this is certainly not transcendent, and it’s a bit long for what it is, but if you listen to some of the mandolin tracks along with it (here’s the YouTube video he references, which currently sits at only 559 views and could probably have used a link-through in the article) you’ll enjoy yourself. The most interesting idea is that mandolins were built for an era in which music was played at home; this is clearly true, but one rarely considers the conditions in which a technology was created; it’s all too easy to default to the feeling that everything was built for the present moment; the corrective is always appreciated. Don’t mind if I mando!

⏰ Random Pick

“Cornucopia” (Books) by George Steiner. (September 14, 1987). No Whitakers. tectonic, teeming, temporality. Unfortunately, just a dull little review of a book about Dutch culture in the 1600s. Steiner is hugely intelligent, he just gives a reader no reason to care about this subject; while it’s good that the book he’s reviewing doesn’t limit itself to a single thesis, Steiner’s review is short enough that he ought to pick out a point to nail down. ‘87 marked a transitional era for the magazine; it was just after William Shawn was pushed out by Condé, at the beginning of the fairly brief Gottlieb era. This review retains some mustiness.

⏰ Something Extra

Uncle Vanya, scenes from country life, Dmitry Krymov’s recent staging/revision at La Mama, was fascinating and balls-to-the-wall, reconfiguring the story around Yelena and turning it into a cry of horror. More conceptually than dramatically successful, but deeply fascinating. And already closed, sorry!

I also went to a fundraiser for a new Bushwick venue of Practice Space that involved improvised performance by randomly selected members of the audience; it was one of the most celebratory and joyful nights I’ve had in a while.

Sunday Song: