I Hate The New Yorker

gail collins, my heroine!

2009-11-30T21:49:00.005-05:00

Or, The Moment When (not really) Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.

One of my biggest pet peeves (you probably know this) is when people assume that "women" in the US went to work in the 1960s or that two-income households began then or whatever. Please. Only if you ignore the history of the (African-American, Latina, white, immigrant) working class. Bite me, Michael Pollan. Etc.

And a big working-class, feminist thank you to Gail Collins and to Ariel Levy, who reviewed Collins' book in the Nov 19 New Yorker!! Levy quotes Collins,

“In reality, however, by 1960 there were as many women working as there had been at the peak of World War II, and the vast majority of them were married,” Collins writes. Forty per cent of wives whose children were old enough to go to school had jobs.

Ahem!!

This isn’t just about the haze of retrospection: back then, women saw themselves as homemakers, too. Esther Peterson, President Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of Labor, asked a high-school auditorium full of girls how many of them expected to have a “home and kids and a family.” Hands shot up. Next, Peterson asked how many expected to work, and only a few errant hands were raised. Finally, she asked the girls how many of them had mothers who worked, and “all of those hands went up again,” Peterson wrote in her 1995 memoir, “Restless.”

The rest of the article is not quite so good, and, in fact, painful to read, in parts. Levy is worried that people are mis-remembering and mis-representing second-wave feminism, but she seems to have just as deeply misunderstood identity politics, liberation activism and sexuality.

eustace tilley, lost at sea

2009-11-07T09:25:00.004-05:00

I was watching the movie Lifeboat and one of the opening shots is a copy of The New Yorker magazine, with a Eustace Tilley cover. The magazine is floating amid other debris from the torpedoed ship that had carried the rag-tag crew that would eventually find themselves in the aforementioned lifeboat. Cute.

i love the NYRB

2009-11-02T23:11:00.002-05:00

If you find yourself with time to read the Nov 19th issue of the New York Review of Books cover to cover, go for it!

More 1930s realism; Jonathan Raban on 2 Dorothea Lange bios. Critical in the right ways.

And a bit on Irving Penn. Smart enough.

The Gaia Hypothesis. Weird, brilliant and very British.

The Glorious Revolution. Not so British, after all.

American education: history, theory and practice. Excellent.

Peter Brooks on the history of the Louvre. Elegant.

And Dan Chiasson reminded me of all the reasons I love Wallace Stevens. Before I got (as usual) bored.

let's pretend it's the week of sept 21

2009-10-20T22:20:00.003-04:00

We've all just gotten a new issue of TNY and we're mulling things over. These things might be:

Crain on the culture of the Great Depression, and Depression-era "holidays." This Dickstein book is something I'd like to read. I love 1930s realism.

Denby on Campion's Bright Star.

Campion makes only one serious mistake: when Whishaw recites the lines “Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast, / To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,” he actually rests his head on Cornish’s chest. The literalness borders on the laughable . . .

This made me smile. I had the same reaction during a recent episode of "Mad Men," when Don is confronted by his father's ghost. I think, time-wise, Denby wrote this before I yelled at the TV "No, don't look at your hands!" I give up. We have a deep, spiritual bond, Denby and I.

Though, immediately afterwards, I think he's wrong. The sentence continues . . . and you wonder, disconcertingly, how these two relieve what look like unbearable states of arousal. Maybe Campion is making the joke that you are laughing at Denby? Did you ever think of that? She makes lots of great visual sexual jokes. She's like that. Then again, so do the MM writers.

Paul Simms' "Shouts and Murmurs." A hilarity that exists somewhere between houseguests and colonization.

And Ben Yagoda's letter about Rose Wilder Lane. She is "in fact, the first ghostwriter in history." Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin and Art Smith, "Boy Aviator" owe her.

Thank god my wait at the doctor's office did not allow me to read all of "The Eight Days of the Financial Crisis." I don't even think I made it through day one. But I was impressed with what one might call the (pardon me) "economy" of the writing. Not a lot of superfluous detail. Stewart sets the scene and gets to business. Everything he tells you means something, and soon. I wish more New Yorker pieces were this controlled.

I also laughed out loud at more than one of the cartoons. Including the contests in the back. Fellow patients stared at me in wonderment.

Block that Metaphor!

2009-10-11T21:56:00.001-04:00

Hollywood Manipulated The New Yorker

And lots of nasty names were exchanged. Read all the way to the end.

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On their game.

2009-09-28T11:51:00.002-04:00

Martin Schneider, of Emdashes. Takes The New Yorker to task for hedging about a man's sexuality with the word "partner" - "You know, either bring it up, or don't. But avoid this in-between."

And Sasha Frere-Jones, at his New Yorker blog, "I’m only tweaking the faithful because there are so many to tweak and I’m a terrible person."

my two favorite things: sleep + The New Yorker Magazine

2009-09-15T16:53:00.003-04:00

Christoph Nieman on insomnia. In the NYT. Doing battle with the mosquitoes. With TNY.

the overpopulation of the moral high ground

2009-09-05T14:38:00.004-04:00

I enjoyed Elizabeth Kolbert on "eco-stunts" in a paper copy of last week's magazine that I bought in a local news shop. I read her book review immediately upon waking up, so this is through a happy, groggy Labor Day Weekend haze.

The first thing that I thought was that Kolbert was, literally, calling the author "No Impact Man" because he had no real impact, politically. Or, really environmentally either. I only realized slowly that that was the actual title of his book. In any case, it was a good weekend read simply because she put so well things that I feel: personal extremism is silly and doesn't make for real, lasting change; change needs to be structural, large-scale, social and political; these stunt-ers taking the moral high ground are dull and annoying and yet another example of the self-indulgence of late capitalist nincompoops. So, not the most informative article for me, but satisfying in a small way that allows me to take the moral high ground and thus the cycle of life continues . . . etc, etc.

I love the ending: What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

Ah, there's the pun.

But there was something about the cloth diapers and cloth napkins and the reusable food storage and the one-car/no-car family that really seemed familiar, do-able and appealing. What if Americans all did just live like it was the 1970s? Could we run the statistics on that? If Americans just created as much landfill waste and used as much electricity and emitted as much carbon as they did (per capita) in the 1970s? And maybe recycled as much as they did during WWII? What would that look like in terms of large-scale change? Can we legislate that?

I also learned a few things about Thoreau that I did not know before.

Well Played

2009-08-20T17:51:00.001-04:00

Another New Yorker reference on Go Fug Yourself! Well Played, Fergie/The F.U.G.

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Another article I missed!

2009-08-09T18:55:00.004-04:00

IndieWire mentions a key plot point in the new movie Cold Souls:

The film plays out on the edges of fantasy and reality with Paul Giamatti portraying an established American actor - named Paul Giamatti - who is trying in vain to perfect his interpretation of “Uncle Vanya.” Stymied by his anxiety, he happens across an article in The New Yorker about a high tech company that can alleviate personal trauma by removing souls. Giamatti goes for it, hoping the temporary removal of his soul will allow him to concentrate on the character in his performance.

High-brow wackiness ensues.

hungry much?

2009-08-04T15:02:00.008-04:00

I still haven't renewed my New Yorker subscription. But Lagusta has some tantilizing things to say about the Ariel Levy password protected profile of Nora Ephron.

And you know how I feel about Nora Ephron. And romantic comedies. And Julia. And Jacques. So I'd love to read this, if I can figure out a way to get my hands on it. Maybe I'll buy the issue at my favorite bookstore and then, finally, resubscribe.

it could be worse

2009-07-27T22:16:00.003-04:00

Or better. Sasha Frere-Jones' forthcoming book on Michael Jackson.

All of you who followed his live blogging of the memorial will have to let me know what you think.

acocella and gladwell make me sick

2009-07-27T13:31:00.005-04:00

I found myself reading The New Yorker at the doctor's office again.

Although I was intrigued by Gladwell's thoughts on "Overconfidence" and the Wall Street crisis, I put the magazine down after I read the following:

Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn’t know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street’s crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.

I go with structural every time. I'd read an article about how psychology plays a part, or about how an overconfident Wall Street psychology is structurally produced. But putting it this way is just silly.

However, I picked the magazine right back up again, because the wait at my doctor's office is very long. Because she's an asshole? NO. Because our heath care system is structurally unsound.

Anyway, I read the thing about the new director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Brilliant analysis of an institution, in all its complexity. Rebecca Mead, not online.

And I read Joan Acocella on Michael Jackson. Offensive, without directly confronting questions of race, fame, fortune, art, power, money, gender, or sexuality at all. Offensive because it indirectly invokes all these issues, in the half-assed way that most of the MJ coverage did, does and will. Possibly the worst thing I've read in The New Yorker in recent memory. A predictable failure.

She can describe dance moves so that you can see them in your head, though.

the song of the snark

2009-06-14T11:09:00.006-04:00

Benj is reading Barbara Tuchman's history of the fin-de-siecle-before-last The Proud Tower, which I thought I had begun and not finished. But every time he tells me something new from the book, I realize, "Oh, I read at least that far." Hm.

Anyway, one of these exchanges took place when Benj got to the part about Strauss' opera Salome. And this, combined with other factors caused me to buy, immediately, my own copy of of Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, which I am now reading. Beach reading is no joke, because I go to the beach a lot.

Ross uses the phrase, "for whatever reason," which a lot of people don't like. But I like it. It's more palatable in polite conversation than saying something is overdetermined. And it's kind of respectful. As in, you know the reasons as well as I do.

We still haven't renewed our New Yorker subscription. But I picked up the fiction issue and I read Louis Menand's account of the history of "Creative Writing." Smack dab in the middle of it, he uses the word "snark" in the old-fashioned Lewis Carrollian sense of the word.

coasters, $.80 each

2009-05-14T22:21:00.014-04:00

So I still haven't renewed my New Yorker subscription. Which puts me one giant step behind the Fug Girls. Or at least Heather, w ho has a pile of them on her coffee table. And I thought all we had in common was Anne of Green Gables, the Wakefields of Sweet Valley and Bea Arthur. And fur sleeves.

Barney Frank, ways back

2009-05-08T08:36:00.003-04:00

I thoroughly enjoyed Toobin's profile of Barney Frank.

Now it's kind of a moment in history (January 12th, 2009) but it's maybe even more interesting than it was?

I have cable TV. And the rest is history . . .

2009-03-18T09:49:00.002-04:00

My media diet has been omnivori-fying. (Horrifying.)

My New Yorker subscription has actually lapsed (so I can't play with the by-subscription archives mentioned here**). And I now have cable TV.

So I saw the cover of a New York Review of Books that hasn't arrived yet in my mailbox on Rachel Maddow. And I also saw Mark Danner there. He was doing this weird thing where he claimed that the very language of the victims of CIA torture - as he quoted it - would testify to the authenticity of their accounts. It's been awhile since I thought about language that way.

I actually heard the same news - that the Red Cross is calling it torture - on the radio, on Democracy Now. In the car. Such is life.

** Martin Schneider follows up on a twitter from Matthew Yglesias and discovers an elaborate nest of New Yorker love/hate.

Milk Monitor

2009-03-17T15:49:00.003-04:00

Hilton Als review of Milk in the NYRB was pretty interesting.

He calls our attention to the fact that the movie is not about one man finding personal freedom, though it could have been, if it had been about the first half of Harvey Milk's life. But is, instead, about one man devoting himself to a community.

Als also registers his discomfort with a few tired cliches, and falls into some himself (calling the film and Van Sant's aesthetic "cinematic" when he really means "visual"). And there's this interesting high school theme running through; Als mentions Van Sant's Elephant and ends up at the Harvey Milk High School.

Als is particularly good when he describes the actors, though not particularly clear.

On Brolin, "a remarkably controlled film actor - he doesn't overact and give the camera more than it can handle; he keeps his facial muscles relatively still . . ." - that's a lot of punctuation!! "His ramrod-straight back growing tighter and tighter." Ouch!!

On Hirsh, "as Milk talks, Hirsch seems to resign himself to his attraction, letting his arms fall to his sides. In most of their scenes, Hirsch makes Penn resist the temptation to play cute by confronting him with a vulnerability that's greater than his own. Indirectly, Hirsch represents Van Sant's intuitive visual approach to filmmaking, while Penn sticks close to his need to please - a desire that mirrors Milk's own desire to charm, always." His whose? But he's right.

On Penn, "[he] mutes his voice in his private scenes with Brolin, like a particularly caring coach."

I was planning to read Sanford Schwartz on Peter Scheldahl too. Also in the NYRB.

Oh, and it seems like missed a lesbianostalgia thing in TNY. Damn.

Suprise! Poetry!

2009-02-15T21:16:00.003-05:00

First ever? Poem I liked in The New Yorker.

"Acting Like a Tree" By Jonathan Aaron. Back in the Dec 15 issue.

The cartoon on the facing page was good too. "I'm such a perfectionist."

Your Turn

2009-01-02T09:47:00.002-05:00

I played the official caption game. It was pretty fun and a bargain too.

Like Boggle, it's fun to lose and your perception of something (the board, the cartoon image) changes suddenly when everyone else offers their contributions. And good thing it's fun to lose, because my family did NOT ONCE vote me funniest caption.

My favorite caption for this image came from Little Brother,

"Fine, go ahead. But you've mislabelled my photo in the last three newsletters."

We didn't use the board, we just kept score.

If David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell had a love child...

2008-12-16T17:21:00.005-05:00

...it would, perforce, be an adopted baby from China? Brooks on Gladwell, in the NYT.

Synecdoche, New Yorker

2008-11-22T21:11:00.005-05:00

"The seller is extremely motivated."

That was a caption contest winner, right?

There's a rather similar image, accompanied by a very similar line, in the very eh Synecdoche, NY. I should have read the Lane review. Or heeded other signs, of which there were plenty.

what we're reading

2008-11-21T10:35:00.002-05:00

Brando in the bathroom, pyschopaths in the living room.

i think my subscription has lapsed

2008-11-11T11:48:00.008-05:00

Remember that cover? For the record, I didn't think it was funny.

It bothered me that so much of the defense of the cover insisted that you just had to take the cover in context - you had to know this and the other and then it was funny. Well, there were contexts in which it was not funny - if you knew this, that and some other other - and those contexts seemed just as important.

Also, I hated the teacherly position that so many folks took, explaining satire. I know what satire is, and I know when it is a useful political rhetoric.

What else is new? Oh, they've got Emily Gordon tied up in a basement (with internet access) over at Emdashes, and now Martin Schneider, Benjamin Chambers and the mad cartoonist are running the show. Link to a recent Gladwell thing that may be of interest.

Red Sex, Blue Sex was a little slight. We wanted more. Sex. Or more talk about not having sex.

And Herzberg's Karl the Marxist punchline awhile back just killed me! Ha! Ha!

spike lee, dw griffith and the history of film studies

2008-10-06T12:16:00.002-04:00

Someone recommended that I take a look at this, and I recommend it to you. See the part about Spike Lee at NYU, from Colapinto. Lee was, apparently, "fresh."