The New Yorker 24 July 2017

Cover:  “Grounded”  by Barry Blitt

This week we read about  Barry Blitt (1958) . He is a Canadian-born American artist. Blitt creates his works in traditional pen and ink, as well as watercolors.

He won first prize best cover of the year 2006 depicting President Bush being flooded in the Oval Office after Hurricane Katrina It is  entitled “Deluged”  and appeared on the Sept. 19, 2005 issue

President Barack Obama chose one of Blitt’s New Yorker covers to hang in the White House. The cover depicts the President picking the family dog at the same time as he is vetting candidates for his national security cabinet.

 Conclusion:

I had difficulty reading through this issue of The New Yorker.

It seems my favorite (…perhaps the best) writers are lounging on a beach somewhere.

Fortunately there were three writers  that did capture my attention.

Danielle Allen : Personal History – a political theorist and the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard. Danielle Allen is an academic and gives us a rivieting story about her cousin. “My cousin became a convicted felon in his teens. I tried to make sure he got a second chance. What went wrong?”  This was a very good article about Allen’s struggle to save a beloved cousin from sinking into the swamp of LA South Central criminal world. (photo: Sharon Renee Hartley)

Hua Hsu: Book critic –  contributor to The New Yorker. He is currently an associate professor of English at Vassar College.   This article was very informative…as I did not know much about Bob Marley. He  became a model for how artistic legacy has turned into an industry of its own.

Amazing:  2016, Forbes calculated that Marley’s estate brought in twenty-one million dollars, making him the year’s sixth-highest-earning “dead celebrity,”…”

 

 

Hilton Als : Theater critic –  Hilton Als, a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1994, has been awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Hilton Als never disappoints….his reviews are literary works of art,   magnificiant!

He mentions some American Theater playwrights in this review  who are  serious, original, and deeply ambitious. Perhaps their plays might interest you:

Annie Baker, Thomas Bradshaw, Lucas Hnath, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Richard Maxwell, Sarah Ruhl, and Young Jean Lee.

This week Hilton Als reviews:

Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau is an American playwright.

Morisseau grew up in Detroit, Michigan. Her mother’s family is from Mississippi.

Her father’s family is from Haiti

Morisseau is on the list of Top 20 Most Produced Playwrights

in America 2015–16, with 10 productions of her plays being produced

Plot:

A mother’s hopes for her son clash with an educational system rigged against him in PIPELINE.  This looks like an explosive play to read or if you are lucky

….to watch at The Lincoln Center in NYC.

This is a deeply moving story of a mother’s fight to give her son a future — without turning her back on the community that made him who he is.

Playwright: Dominique Morisseau      #MustRead play   Pipeline

 

 

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James Wood:  Book critic – staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007.

Moving Kings    by  Joshua Cohen

1. I always look forward to reading book reviews….but cannot for the life of me
2. ..enjoy James Woods’ comments.
3. His Book review  lacks a certain sensitivity that makes the article work.
4. You have to be careful to write at the level of ALL the readers in the audience.
5. This is not always an easy task.
6. Unfortunately I went through Woods’ review asking myself:
7. “Really, what does this mean?
8. Am I crazy? Why can’t I figure out what this means”
9. I will close with a few examples of phrases I had difficulty with:
10. — his fiction displays the stretch marks of its originality
11. What does this mean? Typical phrase to confuse instead of clarify!
12. — sentences are loaded with the refuse of the real,
13. with ….informational surplus of postmodernity. (sigh)
    
14. — sentence is also a micro-adventure in abundance!
15. — ..David’s Jewishness has been atavistically reflexive… (hugh?)
16. –unpersuaded by Cohen’s thematic ambitions, by this stabbing at similitudes
17. I rest my case.
18. This is the last review by James Wood I’m ever reading!