November 2011 New Yorker Reading

My intentions..... um..... I hope to fish the very wrinkled NYers out of my bookbag and read at least one? two? three? It's very strange how I'll just be on a roll reading them and then, bingo, stop dead and just can't bring myself to even open one to read the funnies.

I'm halfway through September and want to be current by the end of the year, so the goal is to get through early to mid November. I'm so far behind on book reviews that I'm afraid to start reading another book, so maybe I'll focus on magazines for awhile.

I actually read some of yesterday's New Yorker issue! There's a wonderful profile of the actress Nina Arianda by John Lahr, which was especially attractive to me because I have seen her work in New York and she is an incredibly gifted performer.

And then, on the subway today, I was sitting next to a very unprepossessing-looking guy, I would guess in his 50s, in an oversized baseball jacked and baggy jeans, and he was reading the New Yorker! and this very article! I couldn't help asking him if he's seen her performances, but he hadn't. Just a regular working guy, reading the New Yorker. It did my heart good.

Do read the article when you can. Arianda will be a star, if the expectations don't weigh her down.

That is indeed very cool. I might be inspired enough to even tackle that last August issue....

September 19 done. Talk of the Town: Obama and the economy, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach vs Muammar Qaddafi in NJ, DNA artist Dennis Ashbaugh vs mosquitoes, cartoonist for Dummies Rich Tennant. Michael Schulman re Katori Hall and Martin Luther King Jr: "Hall says that she wrote the play out of a desire to give her mother a retroactive audience with King." and "I fucking hated 'The Blind Side," Hall said." Dexter Filkins re murdered Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad: Pakistan's army is the eighth largest army world and gets a quarter of the national budget; army and ISI and Islamic militants are intertwined and wary of investigation. Roz Chast re an Elastic City walk: illustrated. Louis Menand re TS Eliot: "'The Waste Land' is a collage of allusion, quotation, echo, appropriation, pastiche, imitation, and ventriloquism. It uses seven languages, including Sanskrit, and ends with several pages of notes, written in a sendup of academic citation. ... It's astonishing how readily these notes have been taken at face value -- as useful annotations, or keys to interpretation. In 'The Norton Anthology of English Literature,' Eliot's notes are printed not at the end of the poem, which is where he put them, but at the bottom of the page, as footnotes, interspersed with the Norton editors' own annotations. On what authority? The notes are not a reader's guide to the poem. They are part of the poem." Ariel Levy re sexual revolutions: several books of history, 1800s, 1700s... sex is rediscovered every century. Briefly Noted: Black in Latin America by Henry Louis Gates is of interest. Paul Goldberger re science buildings: Rafael Viñoly at UC San Francisco, Rafael Moneo at Columbia U, Mitchell/Giurgola at Rockefeller U; the emphasis is on collaboration. Read cinema re 'Contagion'. Skipped Alice Munro personal history. Skipped Gay Talese re Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga. Skipped fiction.

September 26, and thus September, done. Yay, the style issue, lots to skip. Talk of the Town: Palestine and the UN, skipped the others. James Suroweicki re jobs bill: Fat chance. Peter Hessler re a druggist in small town Colorado: Says another resident, "I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That's sort of like living in a small town. It's a simpler game, but it's played to a higher level." I was enough taken by this article that I checked the author blurb, and found that he's written a book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, which goes immediately into the cart. Janet Malcolm re photographer Thomas Struth: Chosen to photograph Queen Elizabeth; his current project is industrial and scientific workplaces. Jenny Diski re a book about shoplifting: "The rich have kleptomania, while the poor are taken down with larceny," a NYC store executive said in 1878. Briefly Noted: Nothing of interest. Peter Schjeldahl re Willem de Kooning: Read with idle curiosity. Skipped Rebecca Mead re somebody I never heard of and "the art of looking interesting". Skipped David Owen re bulletproof clothing in Columbia; well, I suppose that'd be a place for it. Skipped Susan Orlean re... something with creepy lighting; oh, a fashion designer. Skipped fiction, theater.

Somewhat off-topic, but I can't wait to see if the New Yorker reviews the current production of King Lear at the Public Theater. It is, I think, the WORST Shakespeare production of any title I've seen. What a pity. Some good names, but the set, the direction and a lot of the acting were not to be believed, alas. Let's see what the NYr reviewer makes of it.

Yah, I like the style issue too, for the same reason as you! A quick read! Not that I'm reading it. Somehow right now I can't do the NYer. It's sad really as I got so close to catching up.

October 3 done. Talk of the Town: Confidence Men by Ron Suskind, and the demise of DADT. Ian Parker re Nandan Nilekani: The former CEO of InfoSys is creating an ID system for India, Aadhar. "The fears are of two kinds. One is that the government will pry, illegally, into Aadhaar's database. The other is that India will lose the natural privacy of chaos." Mindy Kaling re women in movies: A guide to the types. John Colapinto re Lexicon: The name of the product is too important to be left to mere amateurs. Or it doesn't much matter. Atul Gawande re personal coaching: What is the difference between teaching and coaching? A surgeon who had plateaued asks around, and asks another surgeon to be his "outside eyes". "The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate. Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things...In the absence of guidance, how many people can do such complex tasks at the level we require? With a diploma, a few will achieve sustained mastery; with a good coach, many could. We treat guidance for professionals as a luxury—you can guess what gets cut first when school-district budgets are slashed. But coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society." Lauren Collins re IKEA: A Utopian vision, with flaws. Elizabeth Kolbert re The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker: Violence has declined if a bunch of stuff is discounted. Briefly Noted: The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone is of interest. Read cinema re Moneyball. Skipped fiction (Thomas McGuane), TV, dance.

Nicely put about the violence, Q - 'if a bunch of stuff is discounted'!

If I ever finish that P&C tome, I think I will be able to pick up again on the NYers. I am closing in on it though, I just got below 200 p. to go.

I did read the article on coaching. It's a splendid idea, but one that takes cultivation of the talent to receive as well as to give. I'm working on it.

10: You will finish P&C! And you will catch up with NYers once you shift attention; you zipped through them at an awesome pace in August.
11: It is a splendid idea in principle, but the talent to receive is difficult even when the coach is known and trusted.

October 10 done. The money issue. Which was more interesting than I'd expected, economic quirkiness from around the world. Talk of the Town: Euro zone troubles, and the iridium layer in NJ. James Suroweicki re Solyndra: These things happen. John Cassidy re John Maynard Keynes: We are all Keynesians now. Joshua Davis re bitcoin: The code required a relatively unique set of skills, but its developer has not been identified. Akash Kapur re India: A cow broker put his children through college, but now the world is changing. Calvin Trillin re cash for gold: Competition between Toronto businesses gets bizarre when the price of gold rises. Jane Mayer re Art Pope of NC: I hope I don't need to know about this. Joan Acocella re Georges Simenon: I've never read anything by him, and now I feel too much aversion to do so. Briefly Noted: Driving Home by Jonathan Raban is of interest. Read or skimmed the "Sticky Fingers" essays, memories of stealing. Skipped fiction, music.

Phew. October has 5 issues and this is a double. Glad to be moving on.

I must take a look at October 10 soon. I'm especially interested in the Simenon, as I have read lots of his mysteries, but understand he is a problematic figure himself.

October 17 done. Talk of the Town: Occupy Wall Street, NYC mayoral race, Steve Jobs. James Suroweicki re Steve Jobs: He was a perfectionist, but Apple's success increased when he loosened up. Adam Gopnik re The Phantom Tollbooth: 50th anniversary of the book, written by Norman Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer. "In the best-loved kids' books, the choice is often between the true education presented in the book... and the false education of the world and school... Each story of self-education has... its period slant." Michael Specter re drug decriminalization in Portugal: Strict penalization made things worse, so now drug addiction is treated as a public health issue. This change that is not without critics, and the degree of success is difficult to measure. Evan Osnos re Fukushima: "Years before the tsunami, labor activists had drawn attention to the dangers facing 'nuclear gypsies', the low-level workers who roamed from reactor to reactor looking for work." Tad Friend re Andrew Stanton of Pixar: An animator tries live action. Adam Kirsch re H. G. Wells: Summary of and comments on a novel A Man of Parts by David Lodge, and a biography H. G. Wells: Another kind of Life by Michael Sherborne. "If Wells is neither a great literary artist, which he never claimed to be, nor an admirable political thinker, which he certainly did claim to be, then why do we continue to care about him?... Wells remains our contemporary in ways that Verne does not. This is because of the conviction of utter hopelessness that runs through all of Wells's science fiction. As different as he was from Henry James, he possessed a full measure of what James called 'the imagination of disaster'." Peter Schjeldahl re Degas: A rather unsavory person. "The perennial appeal of his ballet pictures to genteel and young-girl tastes is an old irony, given his actual, pitiless focus -- pretty costumes and effulgent stage lights aside -- on the grueling strenuousness of the dance." Briefly Noted: God's Arbiters by Susan Harris is of interest. Skipped Eugene O'Neill. Skipped literature, poetry, theater, cinema.

October is interminable... I hope the NYer takes holiday breaks.

14: Yeah, it's partly him as a person, but also the books considered to be his best strike me as too creepy.

I have only twenty pages left of the huge book I've been staggering through -- and a plane flight on Monday, so I hope to be back in the New Yorker saddle soon..... I have to do September -- my mini-goal then will be to at least finish Sept. before December begins. Interminable October already has me quaking in my boots.....

Wells was a phenomenon, all right.

17: I have only twenty pages left of the huge book I've been staggering through
May feel like staggering to you, but I'm appreciating the reports. (Glad I don't have to read the entire thing.) I'll look forward to your September NYers, since you and I tend to notice different things.

Remember the NYer article about Neanderthals that had you (sibyx) "RIVETED"? Here's more: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/11/14/neanderthal-neuroscience/.

I actually read an issue! Sept 5. Just about everybody in this issue comes under the "Never heard of you (I am sooooo out of it!) category: Timothy Ferriss (so not interested in this kind of person), Derek Parfit -- a fascinating and somewhat poignant philosopher. Great quote but I don't have the mag. any more, to the effect that Kant was the one who made bad writing acceptable in philosophy. Snorting coffee out my nose on that one. It is, alas, so true! Finally a piece on the Dutchman, Theo Jansen who makes these astounding sculptures that 'walk' and even, theoretically, have a purpose (to scoop sand and help keep erosion down). There are links to see his 'strandbeests' and I will post one after I read about the Neanderthals.

The story was reasonable, quiet and intelligent and ever so slighty spooky. The budget dispute article about --- oh gosh -- a town in Orange County was depressing. Octavia Butler wrote a very disturbing dystopic novel about a community around this area where all services had become 'pay as you go' and the chaos that ensued, eventually, in fact, the breakdown of everything...... at the time I read it it seemed..... not farfetched but unlikely.... and then you read a story like this!

Since we did not change planes (direct flight from Plattsburgh to Clearwater, little airport to little airport) I only had time to read one NYer! So I have three more to go here, not doing so well.....

20: So I'm spending my Thanksgiving morning at the computer cataloging books...
My mother took the issue w/ Derek Parfit, because he was a student of Peter Strawson, who is a favorite of hers. For reasons not entirely clear to me, because asking evokes answers w/ layers of code words... I read the Theo Jansen article because I'd seen a TED video. Did you see the film Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control? He reminds me of those people, obsessed with some quirky thing that also has pragmatic and philosophical aspects.

Yes exactly! -- My spouse is actually a bit disgruntled (w/himself) that he hadn't heard of Jansen, since he usually is up on things......

Ha ha! That is cool about yr Mom and funny too! Gives me a whole picture of her. I studied philosophy rather intensely in college and then decided, well, it was simply too convoluted and isolated, even for me. And I'm truly more of a generalist anyway. Thus the library field and writing.

LOVED the Neanderthal piece. The mice are a bit chilling though. Frankly, it sounds like a very rudimentary form of consciousness...... Please send me anything else you come across in yr. travels.

You lucky duck to get to play in your library all day!

22: Not all day... :-( Family thing this evening, and I have to prep this afternoon.
Yeah, the mice. Fascinating and troubling.
Hmm... My mother dropped out of college, returned in her 30s, majored in philosophy, wanted to continue in grad school, but options were limited, and she has a strong pragmatic streak, so she became a librarian.

Interesting, isn't it....... the philosophy/library nexus..... I mean.

Enjoy yr. evening!

Oh my, I have to go back and read that September issue before it hits the storage locker. Sounds fascinating - and no, I never heard of those people either.

October 24 is done, but so is the day. I'll document it tomorrow. October 31 is ANOTHER double issue. And November has four issues and one of those is double too. And I spent three hours summarizing Scientific American this morning, which left insufficient time for both reading and reviewing the backlog of books. Reading won.

October 24 done. Talk of the Town: How many people can the earth support? Zucotti Park. Vendy Awards honor the Tunisian fruit and vegetable vender. Jerome Groopman re premature babies: Fragile things, raising questions about where to intervene and who makes the decisions. David Sedaris re swimming: But it's more about his father. Ken Auletta re executive editor of the New York Times Jill Abramson: To survive, the Times will have to become more than a newspaper. Elif Batuman re Turkey: The highlight of this issue, IMO. About her friend Cagan Sekercioglu (some of the letters should have squiggles), an ornithologist, who founded KuzeyDoga (more squiggles), an NGO to protect biodiversity. And his colleague Emrah: "We wandered among the ruins. In a thirteenth-century church, Emrah indicated a swallow's nest overhanging some frescoes of the life of Gregory the Illuminator, who converted Armenia to Christianity. In Ani's eleventh-century cathedral, we took turns looking through Enrah's enormous binoculars, which resembled two giant beer steins, at a red-billed chough feeding its chicks. I thought of E. O. Wilson, who, on a tour of the walls of Jerusalem, had been interested primarily in the harvester ants." Also about Alexander Pushkin and his travelogue Journey to Arzrum: "Pushkin eagerly spurs his horse across the Turkish border -- only to learn that the border has moved and he is still in Russia." Also about the city of Kars, setting of Snow by Orhan Pamuk: "Pamuk, unlike Pushkin, was not a formative writer for me. For many years, I even thought that, despite being a write of Turkish descent, I might live my whole life without reading any of his novels. My first inkling that this would not be possible came in 2008, when I was interviewed for the first time by a Turkish newspaper. The interview was about the band Vampire Weekend, but the reporter still required my opinion of Turkey's only Nobelist. My answer appeared as a subhead, in all caps: 'I WAS UNABLE TO FINISH PAMUK'." She has written a memoir The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, that I now must read. Nathan Heller re Pauline Kael: "In the years following Kael's rise to influence, her career swiftly acquired the social rhythms of a fall term in the seventh grade." Briefly Noted: What I Don't Know About Animals by Jenny Diski is of interest. Read about the Katori Hall play because she'd been subject of a previous NYer article; this review is less flattering. Skipped fiction, TV, film.

Great quote about the Turkey article and EO Wilson!

October 31 done. Talk of the Town: Muammara Qaddafi and US foreign policy. New York cigarette tax loophole: make your own. James Suroweicki: We romanticize small businesses, but larger businesses correlate with better economies. Burkhard Bilger re southern food: I was skimming with expectation of skipping this, then realized it as much about agriculture, heirloom seeds, and history, as it is about food. Sasha Frere-Jones re Tom Waits: I read this but lack context. Alex Ross re opera in Oklahoma and Kansas: Opera singer Sarah Coburn is Senator Tom Coburn's daughter. Peter Schjeldahl re African tribal sculpture at the Met: Alisa LaGamma, museum curator, "takes us in hand like a patient teacher". Hmm. I may be in NY next month... This is the cartoon issue, with pages of B&W single panels and color multi-panels. The highlight: Mark Alan Stamaty about his father. Briefly Noted: James Madison by Richard Brookhiser and The Voyage of the Rose City by John Moynihan are of interest. Skipped theater, fiction, review of poetry, art about film.

The interminable October has terminated!

>29 qebo: When next month?

30: I've posted a "maybe" to the meetup thread. Seeing how it sorts out re time frame and family obligations. (Also it's currently appearing that I'd be crashing the party.)

I'm scampering by to mention I did polish off a second September 12 issue -- the one memorializing the 10th 9/11 anniversary. I'm not going to say much -- the NYer did all right with it, but it's like a giant slab of misery to me on which too many people have painted whatever agenda they were already carrying around with them. The story was Korean, not memorable -- about a condoned village adulterer.

And onward to #3 of September.

Well, they had to do something. My notes indicate that Adam Gopnik and Paul Goldberger stood out, the rest not so much.

Yep -- those were the two better pieces. And I agree, they did have to. I'm partway into #3 btw, hope to finish it today. Will I make the deadline? Probably not, but stay tuned.

I've finished #3 - as usual it is a bit as if Q and I have read a different mag! so cool. Hall, the young playwright, tackles MLK as a real person, in the last hours of his life. Sounds like a play I would like to see. Laughed over Patricia Marx's "Home Colleging" but my spouse and I agreed our daughter wouldn't find it funny (Bradley Lumpkin accepted at Lumpkin Home College..." Courses like -Fundamental of Art Appreciation. A survey course of early antiquities, especially the broken ones in the living room" and "L.H.C. is the only college in America where first-year students gather to wet-mop Grandma's room every Thursday, which is the least you can do after what you did to her credit rating." Okay I'm giving it too much space, but I rarely find these funny pieces all that funny. The Munro memoir piece tackles a bit of her own mythical history -- a story, a scary neighbor, and echoes of it down the years of her life. It seems a scattershot piece of writing and it is, as Munro insists several times, because life is that way, not at all like fiction, way way more unbelievable. Skimmed the piece on the murdered Pakistani reporter. I admire and can't understand those who risk their lives to report things they know will probably get them killed. After a quick reading of the piece on Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett I had to google what Lady G even looks like. Oh I am that out of it! The story, by Ann Beattie, an old favorite of mine seems to be a riff on various memoirs, photos, apocryphal tales of the Nixons -- a strange piece, ultimately, although I enjoyed the Nixon riff on the dog in the middle of it. She captures his sentence structure perfectly. I probably didn't give the Eliot piece the attention it deserves but i didn't miss this quote of E's assesment of Henry the James: "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it." Sublime! A piece on some new book or other that basically points out that every generation thinks it has invented sexual pleasure..... and finally a piece on a couple of new buildings built specifically for scientists to work in. The one in La Jolla looks marvelous, responsive to the site, and while not cosy, not meant to impress. It feels, from the photo, like a place that would, if you stepped outside, refresh you and encourage you to linger a moment. All good.

While it remains unlikely i will read a whole NYer between tonight and tomorrow night, you never know, but even if I don't I'm happy I got 3/4 of the way.

Was that a Shouts & Murmurs? I've taken to skipping with barely a glance. Few people can manage be funny for two pages without visible strain.

I wanted to be one or two issues into November, but it'll be closer to a half issue.

I think so, and I agree, I usually give it a paragraph or two just in case. I think I thought it was funny because I have a teenager underfoot.....

Looking forward to zipping through this last issue too.

To my utter amazement I have finished this issue. It helped that I really wasn't interested in knowing anything about Daphne Guinness..... I mean, please? I had a roommate in college who was from a v. swanky background, fancy school in Switzerland etc. and she never shut up about her friendships with various Guinnesses, so who knows, maybe this is one of them? Nor could I read about bullet-proof suits.... so it was on to the lovely redemptive article about Dr. Don in Nucla CO., Thomas Struth, the photographer, a story which I started to read but couldn't get a way into (as in, I couldn't care at all about it, the writing, the character, his predicament, it felt artificial).... there was a good review of a new book on shoplifting -- more women do it because more women shop etc. Everything I loathe about department stories is brought to light in this piece as well -- the deliberate confusion, the artful draping of glittery things -- you're supposed to get disoriented and lose your head.

So I'm done with September!!!! Only two months behind!

Congrats! And this time we seem to have read the same magazine.

It's interesting isn't it, when our interests converge!

I loved the article about the pharmacist in CO, have the author's book about China in my cart, all set to go, but I'm on a book buying ban until January so I can't click the button...

Shall we start a December thread or stick with this one????

Oh, I think a December thread since this one says November.
Though I may continue the November science thread into December since my goal for this year is only one more issue.

Okay I'll go make one -- sadly we can't use the continue feature! I need practice with it. Back in a sec. with a link.

Here is the new thread: DECEMBER

Continuation is not such a problem here. Easy to find posts on the group page, and I suspect the audience is in the single digits.