I have an uneven relationship with The New Yorker. Fond, enthralled, amused, bemused, mildly bored. Admiring. Impatient. Really interested. Profoundly disinterested. Buoyed.
This is, I suppose, like all really long relationships.
When I started reading The New Yorker, I think I hoped sophistication was transmissible. I remember looking over the events listing and thinking something like this. “I’m okay with the Midwest; I like the city I live in. But look at this! Look at that! Look what I could be doing if I were in New York! Look at the shows, look at the music, look at the libraries and venues and restaurants!”
“Oh, New York, New York”, I would think.
Those happenings were packed onto a few magazine pages in the way that things are packed into the city. Little white spaces on the page, punctuated by wild interest and glamor. I learned to sigh for NYC long ago.
I don’t study The New Yorker, analyze it, or think about its attitudes. I cruise the cartoons. I take a good look at the spots, those periodic and yet continuous small artworks that are dropped into text pages…astonishing tiny masterpieces of brevity and line. I am caught by a poem, and un-caught by many others. I love the covers, those catchers of the weekly gestalt, which I sometimes show people in the elevator, peeling off the mailing label to get the full effect. Sometimes for an extended period, I feel no resonance at all with the magazine and start to think about how expensive it is and how I could probably read it at the library. I then put the new issue on the top of my tottering pile.
Every once in a fortunate while comes an issue in which everything catches me. Here is what I dog-eared in the 9/1-8 New Yorker of this year:
From a story over-titled as “Annals of Artificial Intelligence: “…the world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.” Hmmm.
And from later in the same story: “…what’s the most important thing humanity has engineered?…Arguably, it wasn’t the internet, or agriculture. It was the creation of the systemic and institutional trust that was required for us to build societies. And a lot of that engineering was actually collective stories – God, government – that helped us see ourselves as one family, one community. With our current technology, it’s like we’re playing Jenga. (He mimed a tower of blocks at the table. ) We’ve been pulling blocks from down here, from the foundation of collective understanding and belief in a shared world, and using them to build farther up on the tower. And, if we keep doing that, the whole thing will collapse, and we’ll go back to only being able to trust the hundred and fifty people in our tribes.”
On a facing page (the proximity!) in a story about E.B. White’s short commentary in the magazine: “With perfect paragraphs set one after another like flagstones in the high grass, White knew, you could lead a reader anywhere.”
Three pages later, a piece about the writer Patricia Lockwood: “…who writes with the impish verve and provocative guileless-ness of a peeing cupid…”
And one page over (again, the proximity!), a cartoon of a blank-faced couple looking at a free-form sculpture. One says: “I particularly like how its abstract qualities make anything I say about it sound plausible.” I think I might know these people.
What about some other things? I am neutral on the fiction. Does this mean that I am not in synch with contemporary short fiction? Possibly. I don’t care.
I find much of the poetry lands somewhere between opacity and obscurity. There are exceptions that make the reading worthwhile: see “Murmuration” by Rae Armantrout, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet with whom I was entirely unfamiliar, and whom I now think of every time I see even a single starling.
I can’t speak for other readers, but when The New Yorker is right for me, it is stay-up-reading-by-the-nightlight brilliant. I have read that the word ‘magazine’ is derived from the Arabic word ‘makhazin’, meaning “storehouses”. I find that resonant. Sometimes opening the magazine is like walking into a vaguely familiar well-decorated room and realizing that the shelves are filled with objects of interest; you cannot wait to take them in your hand. A collection of information. Exactly.
It’s almost time to renew my subscription, and, New Yorker editors, I’m in for another year. You had me at “…the provocative guileless-ness of a peeing cupid…” and also with “Murmuration”.
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