Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 8

“fat biographies that are collections of dropped balls”

Must-Read:

“Mr. Microcosm” (Books) - Merve Emre says it’s Goethe be back. Emre mostly adopts the thesis of the book under review, a new biography by Matthew Bell, and she never really reviews Bell’s book, making this one of those potentially-enervating-to-the-author précis¹ – but Emre is a lively enough writer that, in this weakish issue, it’s still narrowly the must-read. That’s due to the sheer moxie of her treatment, which posits that the man is “the German Shakespeare, the German Cervantes, and the German Racine, and perhaps even the German Franklin and the German Huxley, compressed into one endlessly energetic and kaleidoscopic figure”, and then sets out to prove it. Bell’s idea is that he was able to be all these many things because he compromised between politics and art; there is something of the eternal student in him, as, because he is always learning the ropes of some new field and attempting to incorporate the information into his morality, he takes on a countenance of eternal bildungsroman hero, whose spiritual education is never done. Emre charts his journey quickly but with an eye for his often modern-seeming phraseology: “After three years, a pulmonary hemorrhage ended his studies and sent him slinking back to Frankfurt — like ‘a wretched little fox,’ he chided himself.” “…Goethe started to collect folk poetry. ‘Germanness emerging,’ he noted in his diary.” “He thought he had the strength of mind to withstand the tedium and the pettiness of court: ‘I’m better positioned to recognize the thorough shittiness of this our secular majesty.’” There is also an amazing snippet from an erotic poem. Emre ends with a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s proposed biography, and finds a home-run quote from Goethe essentially approving in advance of a biography that exhibits what Benjamin called historical materialism. Please, Emre, don’t Goeth ‘em.

Window-Shop:

“Only Fans” (The Sporting Scene) - John Seabrook’s pockets are too short to skybox with God. Many things at once, most of them enjoyable. Partly this is a sort of sequel to Zach Helfand’s piece from just last week, complete with many-tiny-figures spot art; both concern the ways in which increasing levels of privilege don’t necessarily buy you a better product, just a more exclusive one that is coded as fancier, plus perhaps a smoother transition from the rest of your “similarly elevated experiences”, thus “enabling a 24/7 premium life style”. Another part is a slippery-slope argument that stadiums may eventually get rid of the non-premium fans to the extent possible; some of this gets pretty esoteric, as when a football club’s president opines that, because eighty-five to ninety percent of their revenue will come from premium seats, and not merely eighty percent, he ought to have asked for a higher proportion of premium seats. The counterargument, that the cheap-seat fans bring atmosphere, is already well understood by colleges – where student tickets are often near-free, subsidized by the tickets for everyone else. But it is interesting to realize just how many miserable, uncultured millionaires there are in America… and more every day. That group is a central audience for football (a sport I should say I thoroughly enjoy watching; je ne suis pas un hater) and it makes sense that their elaborately unfulfilling lifestyle would start to infect all their favorite places: Stadiums, airport lounges; presumably also rooftop bars and fitness centers. Seabrook drops the delightful gonzo anecdote, involving some strong gummies, very early; the second half, without the promise of escalation, drags a bit. Leave early, beat the rush.

Graham on Bishop (Takes) - I guess it stands to reason that Jorie Graham would also be good at writing prose. This is a sweet exegesis; quite literally, since it touches on the “divinatory” at Bishop’s poem’s heart. Sensus plenior!

“The Mail” - Three fun letters!

“A Further Shore” (Personal History) - Tatiana Schlossberg has no immunity, so she won’t be diplomatic. A very brief piece, largely a moving if pro forma expression of the unthinkable sadness of too-soon-impending death. Right before the end there is some refreshingly unguarded disdain for RFK, all the better for its stoic style. I get why this was emailed around. It’s not what I go to the magazine for, but there’s a place for it.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Skipping Class” (Books) - Rachel Syme shuffles Decca’s cards. After four paragraphs on how much Syme adores these messy sisters and their biting quips, she points out that the book she read is basically expressly set up to not indulge that sort of thing, pointing out that Jessica “Decca” Mitford is extraordinary and everyone else is pretty awful, at the end of the day (there was more than a bit of fascism in the house). That seems right… and Syme seems disappointed about it in ways that color the rest of the piece. There is significantly too much on Decca’s childhood, which is only relevant to her activism in sidelong ways, and is mostly of interest from a psychological, not historical, perspective. It’s only six paragraphs from the end that we hear about Decca’s career as a reporter and about her best-known book, on the scamminess of funerals, at which point the piece starts to pick up just in time to skip past Decca’s last thirty years, and fizzle out. Despite its lumpiness, there is still fun to be had here, and Decca’s witty, hard-charging persona comes across. Here’s to her.

“Valley of Babel” (Letter from Switzerland) - Simon Akam has a whirlwind Romansh. Has maybe a bit too much fun with its premise, positioning this fight between Romansh-language standardizers and sectarians as sort of a goofy small-town battle, without considering deeply enough exactly why these people are so up-in-arms. The globalization of Europe has caused some deep psychic wounds, and if Akam thinks some of these first-generation Romansh speakers are cosplaying (perhaps “Romansh became a refuge when your larger ambitions went to ground”, he posits, rudely) I wonder who gets to draw the line between valid and invalid reclamations of cultural heritage. Akam is a bit glib, in other words, which would be more forgivable if the piece were more lively; it would help with that if the details of rural-Alps life came to us before the esoteric linguistic battle. Only in the last three sections (the piece’s sections are very short) do locals, and not just scholars, actually come into view. An outlet like the now-sinking-into-media-quicksand Atlas Obscura might have been a better home for this piece; as a meticulous longread, it runs out of steam. I’d like to sell a vowel!

“Under Cover” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody comes to Brazil. A slightly disengaged glowing review; I’d love to hear more about the formal techniques Mendoça does use to add tension, not just that he avoids “distorting angles” and “dunning musical cues” and favors complex motivations. Brody probably doesn’t want to give too much away, but too much of the review just spams positive adjectives; “deftly composed widescreen images” and “memorably eccentric details that reverberate with thematic significance”. I know very well how hard it is to do anything else when you really like something, but I’m not the professional here; more specific examples would really help. The film “reveals and conceals just enough”, and Brody tries to follow suit. It’s a hard trick.

“Ibsen on the Beach” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross has a spa day. Even with Ross at the reins, it’s hard to get much pleasure out of a mixed pan of an opera seen in Spain. I am not in Spain, and I might not see it if I were! Predicating your entire piece on “it sure is hard to see these shows outside of Spain” and then landing on “maybe that’s for a good reason?” is awfully disappointing. The very brief history of Spanish opera could be expanded, and the two reviews turned into blurbs.

“In the Line of Fire” (American Chronicles) - Benjamin Wallace-Wells is violently ill. Rather muddled; there are some poignant insights and critiques here, but also a good deal of nonsense and unnecessary scene-setting, and I reckon five different readers would come away with five different senses of what exactly Wallace-Wells is trying to say. Josh Shapiro is the central figure, and at first Wallace-Wells gives him a lot of space to bemoan his own brush with political violence; eventually, though, he comes in for a very harsh and well-deserved critique; the centrist language he speaks doesn’t fit this moment at all, and Wallace-Wells is canny enough to notice. He also notes that the conventional political response to atomized violence is fundamentally authoritarian: Less access, more policing, more interpretation of all protests as threatening. Whether the force causing these authoritarian moves is actual fear, as he suggests, or whether that’s a helpful scapegoat to consolidate power, is more of an open question. And even if he doesn’t intend it, by meticulously describing these security threats but only vaguely gesturing toward the escalating state violence, he does frame one as more consequential than the other; the powerful, here, are probably inept but are still victims. Are there any actual perpetrators in Wallace-Wells’ mind? Who is poisoning this well? That’s a good question, and one the piece ought to make space for. He ends on some of Shapiro’s “willful acts of elision” – but he’s doing some eliding of his own.

Letters:

Serena was not a fan of the Joan Silber fiction piece I lauded. It “seemed in a hurry to get to the point that ICE is terrifying and can grab anyone at any time for appearing ethnic. I would have loved to hear more about the girls’ early friendship or these supposedly hilarious jokes — what was so funny? … I also found the characters two dimensional — the liberal Jewish lawyer without a family history and her bestie, the sassy daughter of the innocent and good Muslim refugee with a tragic backstory who is forever traumatized. The girls have a wonderful and perfect friendship and then drift apart until we meet them again as upstanding, woke grown-ups. Then we meet the salt of the earth comedian who just wants to provide for his family but who is nabbed by nightmarish agents of the state and is provided unfeeling legal counsel (I have done asylum work and believe me, none of us are unfeeling robots).”

All valid critiques, and there isn’t much I can say in response except that it all worked for me anyway; I don’t mind simple characters in a short story as long as they possess inner lives, but yes, it is convenient to create untroubled people and force them, narratively, into trouble.

I’m going to try to stop implying that this newsletter is going to get out on time again soon, and also, unrelatedly, going to try to start getting this newsletter out on time again soon.

itsy

bitsy