The New Yorker 10 and 17 July 2017 – NOTES

Cover:  Off the Leash    Dogs are Mark Ulriksen’s  favorite subject to draw!

Who is Mark Ulriksen?

1. He is  a San Francisco California based artist whose
2. …work has appeared on the cover of The New Yorker 48 times since 1994.
3. Ulriksen’s cover for the February 27, 2006 edition of The New Yorker
4. …won the 2006 an award for Best News Magazine Cover.
5. The cover is titled Watch Your Back Mountain.
6. It was prompted by the hunting incident of Vice President Dick Cheney.

 

 

Contributors:  Who are these people?

• Louisa Thomas: The Sporting Scene  –  contributing writer for The New Yorker and author of  Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams.
• Yonni Brenner: Shouts and Murmurs – writes for film and television, and has contributed humor pieces to the magazine since 2007
• Stephen Greenblatt: Annals of Culture – John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard.
• Lawrence Wright : A Reporter at Large – staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. Blah…
  
• Emily Flake: Comic Strip – cartooning for The New Yorker in 2008.
  
• Hye-young Pyun:  Fiction – Award winning South Korean author, Pyun Hye-young signed a two-book deal with Arcade Publishing in the U.S. and her books “Ashes and Red” and “The Hole” will be published there in autumn and in 2017  #MUSTREAD
• Compared to the popularity of K-pop or Korean cinema, he said that Korean literature is almost unknown to U.S. readers. Young Korean writers are trying to make it on the global scene.
• Alex Ross: Music critic – He is  staff writer for The New Yorker (classical)
• David Denby: Book critic – staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.
  
• Jane Kramer: Book critic –  staff writer at The New Yorker since 1964. – EXCELLENT !!
  
• James Wood: Book critic – staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007.
  
• Amanda Petruisch: Pop Music critic – contributing writer.
  
• Anthony Lane: Movie critic – British journalist, currently a film critic for The New Yorker.
  
• Hilton Als : Theater critic –  Hilton Als, a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1994, has been awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
  
• Clive James: Poem ‘A Heritage of Trumpets” – Australian poet, author, critic, broadcaster, translator and memoirist.
• Andrea Cohen: Poem ‘The Wrecking Ball’
  

SAVE:  link Hilton Als – read his articles:  http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/hilton-als-wins-the-pulitzer-prize-for-criticism

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Alex Ross – ‘Classical Music’ – I read very little about music. I started with Tyshawn Sorey (preforms, composes and teaches at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.) 

The prodigious drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey transcends the borders of jazz, classical, and experimental music. I did not know how many different cymbals there are!

I got very side-tracked after reading this article. I moved to Cory Smythe (young pianist) and Hilary Hahn that is an extremely talented violinist (1979) Album:  In 27 Pieces: Hilary Hahn Encores

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Joan Acocella – staff writer on books and dance. – revival of ‘tap dancers’ in documentary. Quaint.

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Stephen Greenblatt: Annals of Culture – John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard.  ‘If you Prick Us’  — Story was TOO long and fizzled out. I just lost interest. The article felt like Shakespeare Lit 1o1.

Quote: GOOD:  What you inherit, what you receive from a world that you did not fashion but that will do its best to fashion you, is at once beautiful and repellent. You somehow have to come to terms with what is ugly as well as what is precious.

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Lawrence Wright : A Reporter at Large – staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992; Pultizer Prize winning author The Looming Tower 2007 (general nonfiction) – “The Future is Texas.”

Texas: s politically divided as the rest of the U.S. but has fed its reputation for proud know-nothingism and retrograde thinking  (Ouch!)

Texas: Texans see themselves as a distillation of the best qualities of America: friendly, confident, hardworking, patriotic, neurosis-free. Outsiders see us as the nation’s id, a place where rambunctious and disavowed impulses run wild. (Ouch, ouch!)

Texans: …mindlessly celebrate individualism, and view government as a kind of kryptonite that weakens the entrepreneurial muscles.  (VERY GOOD!)

NEGATIVE description: reputed to be braggarts; careless with money and our personal lives; a little gullible, but dangerous if crossed; insecure, but obsessed with power and prestige.

State divided: (CLEVER… use morning radio to emphasize your point!)

FM Texas and AM Texas:

• FM Texas is the silky voice of city dwellers, the kingdom of NPR.
• It is progressive, blue, reasonable, secular, and smug—almost like California.
• AM Texas speaks to the suburbs and the rural areas:
• Trumpland. It’s endless bluster and endless ads.
• Paranoia and piety are the main items on the menu

Texas is the future:

Number of Texans is projected to double by 2050, to 54.4 million, almost as many people as in California and New York combined.

Three Texas cities—Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio—are already among the top ten most populous in the country.

Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, and Kansas and Louisiana more out of whack, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future. (Texas)

(CLEVER…make your point by using states as the basis for your description!)

Now, this article could have been a book!  It was way TOO long to retain my attention.  I enjoyed some general info and statistics about Texas ….but then Wright slipped deep into the arcane ‘wheeling and dealing’ of Texan polititians. It was just not interesting …to an outsider like me. I love politics but on Washington DC level.

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David Denby: Book critic – staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.

Article was informative….but sounded stuffy, dated…..who is interested in this conductor today…, not me.

A. Toscanini – For generations, the Italian maestro was the most electrifying figure in classical music. Why did critics turn against him?

WWII: After 1931, Toscanini refused to conduct in Italy, resisting Mussolini. Hitler pleaded with him to honor holy German art and preside over the Wagner rites at the Bayreuth Festival. When Toscanini turned him down, his recordings and broadcasts were banned in Nazi Germany.

Style: Toscanini did not make speeches; he stuck to business. But his sentiments were widely known, and he became a lodestar for anti-Fascists.

Modern: He never moved into the twentieth century, ignoring the dazzling rhythmic and harmonic explorations of Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, Berg.

Importance: Toscanini’s historical importance is beyond debate, but can we still experience the excitement and more, the sense of exaltation that he once produced? The rejection of him after his death represents a shift in musical taste.

 

GOOD:  description of a book I could not put down:  (Kennedy and King??)

It’s a days-and-nights book, a detailed, sobersided, but very engaging and at times gripping chronicle of civil rights movement and society.

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BEST WRITER in this issue!!  Jane Kramer: Book critic –  staff writer at The New Yorker since 1964

“Prussian Blue,” whose plot takes in high crime, sexual scandal, financial fraud, methamphetamines, and murder in Hitler’s Alpine dystopia during the week before the Führer’s fiftieth birthday.

Philip Kerr‘s Bernie Gunther solves crimes for Nazi Germany. Why do we like him so much?

Bernie  is one of crime fiction’s most satisfying and unlikely survivors: the good cop in the belly of the Nazi beast.

Since then, Kerr has kept Gunther one step ahead of the Gestapo—not to mention the Mafia, the South American diaspora of death-camp commandants, and the Stasi—and scrambling for his life in novels that cover more than twenty years of mid-twentieth-century German history.

Reviewer…..I was waiting for Gunther, whose blunt Berlin chivalry I had found appealing. I was still waiting when Bedford’s “Quicksands” arrived, in 2005, reminding me that, in matters of the cost to conscience of survival, Bedford and Gunther might well be kindred spirits.

Thrillers are thorny gifts for critics. It’s

not a matter of Elizabeth meets Darcy:

• after a number of setbacks involving pride, prejudice, and social station,
• they work things out,
• declare their love, and,
• in the end, marry.

With a great thriller, the important thing is to tell the story while

• never giving anything away,
• certainly not who did it and, in the case of a Gunther thriller
• —densely populated and always dizzyingly complex—
• the logic by which our redoubtable protagonist finally gets his man

Good points:

Exhaustively researched, reportorial in detail, and, in their invention, obsessively liberating, which may account for the fact that most journalists I know love them, and more than a few end up writing them.

1. Read Jo Nesbø’s series about the brooding, tormented policeman Harry Hole, for the texture and temperament of Oslo and the crimes and cops that describe it.
2. Read Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander novels for their evocations of numbing loneliness in provincial Sweden.
3. Read Ngaio Marsh for New Zealand
4. Read James McClure for Natal
5. Read Martin Cruz Smith for Moscow
6. Read James Lee Burke for Louisiana
7. Read Michael Dibdin for Italy whose police detective Aurelio Zen sorts with Cartesian clarity the cultures of that polyglot country, region by region, and the crimes that express their difference.
8. Read John le Carré for anywhere his imagination alights.
9. Read Raymond Chandler, to whom Kerr is often compared and whose Philip Marlowe (indistinguishable now from Humphrey Bogart) will lead you through the streets and the secrets of Los Angeles.

Characteristics Gunther: (…just like Marlowe)

1. Cynical by nature,
2. Skeptical of “truths,”
3. shrewd and acute interpreters of what passes for reality in our vividly postlapsarian world.
4. Sentimental weakness for women….
5. Gunther’s taste tends to be more Weimar than Hollywood.
6. One of his ‘flames’ is a woman almost androgynously slim, partial to trousers, men’s shirts, and, for panache, a casually tossed-on white fur jacket.

GOOD:  Melancholic would be too mild a word to describe Bernie Gunther. I prefer to think of him as the Marlboro Man of Weltschmerz (world-weariness)

GOOD:

1. same wry, penetrating, cowboy gaze, the
2. eyes that tell you he’s seen it all. He can
3. quote the most mournful bits of Goethe and
4. brood over the philosophical “I” of Ficht
5. reluctant to show his hand,
6. unless it levels the field in a potentially nasty encounter or
7. gives him a tactical advantage while out fishing for information.
8. radical pragmatism of Gunther’s moral compass,
9. which is keyed to neither outrage nor indifference
10. Then his style is pure Berlin—
11. tough, mocking, scathingly direct. He
12. never mentions the Iron Cross that he earned fighting in some of the worst battles of the First World War and has left buried in a drawer; or
13. never mentions the loss of his first wife, the love of his life, to the influenza epidemic that decimated what was left of Europe in 1918.

 EXCELLENT !! Character  Gunther:

1. Gunther had moved beyond disillusion, which is to say, he
2. had no expectations left of human beings.
3. He decided to survive.
4. It was his one ambition…
5. a personal je m’en fous to the regime.

List of publications

Good quote: Survivors pay with their conscience,” the novelist Sybille Bedford wrote in her memoir, “Quicksands.” “Some have paid to the end of their own road. Those who have got off lightly paid perhaps too little. . . . I feel I am one of those

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

GOOD article…not great.  The book does not interest me…so after 60% I just skimmed it.

Emmanuel Carrère’s “The Kingdom” explores how a tiny sect became a global religion. (2014)   Le Royaume.

Backround Carrere:

Carrère was born in 1957 into a privileged and intellectual family. (His mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, is a distinguished historian and the permanent secretary of the Académie Française.) Though Carrère’s wife jokingly suspects him of being “Catholic around the edges,” he comes from a milieu that was likely to be interested in theology only, in Borges’s words, “as a branch of fantastic literature.”  (GOOD)

Yet by the late nineteen-eighties, after launching a fairly successful literary career—a book about Werner Herzog; a few well-received novels—he had become depressed and unproductive.

Now: an agnostic, Carrère spends the early sections of this book reviewing his almost three years as a committed Christian. What shocks him is the extremism of his faith. He was drawn to theological stringency, melodramatic all-or-nothings, and obnoxiously proud circularity.

2011: “Limonov”, which describes the rebellious life and career of the Russian writer and troublemaker Eduard Limonov, who lived in poverty in New York, prospered in Paris, and returned to Russia, where, once an opposition leader, he has since become a fierce supporter of Vladimir Putin.

It is a hard book to put down, perhaps because it has a certain uneasy moral short-circuiting of its own: again, there are no references, so fact and fiction are allowed to trade uniform and mufti; and Carrère’s pumped-up admiration of Limonov’s often cruel escapades seems, at times, like the wan intellectual’s envy of bloody warfare. WEAK POINT: Carrère’s  interventions seem at times showy or superfluous.

Carrère:  works himself and his own stories into these books. He  is suspicious of concealed or “invisible” third-person narrators. He likes intervening frames. As he puts it in “The Kingdom,” “When I’m being told a story, I like to know who’s telling it. That’s why I like narratives in the first person, that’s why I write in the first person and would even be incapable of writing anything differently.

TENSION: between 1st and 3rd person narration: For one thing, it has become exceedingly rare to encounter crises of faith as experienced by (2 different voices…) a secular intellectual, and Carrère’s oscillation between orthodox fervor and wistful agnosticism holds undeniable fascination.

STYLE: But because Carrère is not a Biblical scholar, and doesn’t want to be one, he allows his imagination to linger and play. He likes to psychologize, to reconstruct scenes and episodes, to speculate when the historical record is thin.  But Carrère is like some brilliantly improper teacher, the one you were lucky enough to enjoy before he got fired, a whirling eccentric.

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Amanda Petruisch: Pop Music critic – contributing writer John Moreland  twang guitarist with Oklahoma roots.  I listened to 3 songs:  Heaven, Your Spell and Gospel – not my style.

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Anthony Lane: Movie critic – British journalist, currently a film critic for The New Yorker – Not impressed with his reviews….but I ‘ll read another one!

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Beautiful images  by illustrator: Byron Eggenschwiler   

The movie review by Anthony Lane for The Ghost Story  was average. His writing just does not ‘sparkle’ like Emily Nussbaum or Jane Kramer. But I did discover a very good illustrator, Byron Eggenschwiler!

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

Illustration for ‘Marvin’s Room’ is  wonderful. The image cannot be copied so here is the link for  the illustrator’s web site Chris Gash.  I found an image that I could copy on the theatre company’s website

Marvin’s Room by Scott McPherson:

The play turns around the characters dealing literally with confrontations with death at the core of the plot. The stage  performance is a a single set  and an intense evening.

Hilton Als review is refreshingly ‘critical’ as opposed to the movie reviews of Anthony Lane. A well-reviewed TV show, movie or play encourages people to watch it.  But a good production  that appeals to the public will generally rake it in at the box office despite evoking critical ire.  So I hope critics keep doing their job…don’t be likeable…be honest.

The play is being staged in the Roundabout Theatre Company, New York City (June 8- August 27).

Marvin’s Room:  criticism

1. lead actresses were having trouble remembering their lines
2. kept tripping over one another
3. Garofalo can’t speak and do any stage business at the same time
4. Garofalo is half in the role and half outside it
5. Weston, a pro, tries to stay out of the way and save herself
6. The play feels truncated ( what does this mean??) …
7. Hilton Als explains: “the play is little more than 2 hours …yet it feels truncated.” (terminating abruptly by having or as if having an end or point cut off). That’s because the actors are so unresolved when it comes to whom they’re playing and why.
8. Director Anne Kauffman does what she can with a script…that feels like a Lifetime movie
9. …ending with a healing circle and the quiet acceptance of home.

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“1984”  playing at The Hudson Theatre Broadway, NYC

Following four wildly successful U.K. runs, the new stage adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece comes to New York.

One of the most widely referenced and best known fiction titles of all time, 1984 has sold over 30 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 65 languages. Now, Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan have adapted this iconic novel into ‘a chilling, ingenious 101 minutes of theatre’.

“1984”  criticism:

R. Icke and D. Macmillan’s   weakness in the adaptation of Orwell’s classic 1949 novel…and their thoughts how to dramatize it…resulted in a play that is more than the audience can handle!

This is a measure of our limitation as audience members….not of their talent.

 

Synopsis ‘1984’:

Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, with its “rotting nineteenth-century houses” and “crazy garden walls sagging in all directions,” is defined by war—a war that never ends. It is ruled by the Inner Party, a political regime in which having your own opinion is considered a “thoughtcrime.” The Party says, “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” How did the world come to this? Nothing makes sense on a moral level, and so there’s no way to know how to be a citizen, let alone to care for your fellow-citizens. Big Brother, the Party leader, is always watching you.

Winston keeps a diary; although this is not specifically outlawed, it seems reasonable to expect that if it were found he would be sentenced to death or, as Orwell says, to “at least . . . twenty-five years in a forced labor camp.” We see Winston writing in the library at the Ministry of Truth, where he works with Julia (Olivia Wilde), who loves him, despite what she knows about him, as Inner Party members walk by, including O’Brien (Reed Birney), who enforces the anti-individuality laws, and Parsons (Wayne Duvall), whose big-chested bonhomie is at odds with the pinched, grief-stricken look of most of Airstrip One’s residents.

Big Brother knows that the best way to crush your mind is by stealing your soul, but Winston and Julia have managed to hold on to theirs—at least for a time. To convey the couple’s intensity—love racing against the clock—Icke and Macmillan sequester them in a room and videotape them as they hide from Big Brother and endeavor to understand what it means to make themselves naked and true to each other. The cameras are there because Big Brother is everywhere, but they also give Sturridge and Wilde, actors I’ve admired on film, a chance to do what they do best, which is to relate to each other in intimate circumstances defined by the screen, not by stagecraft.

Winston is finally found out and tortured.

Criticism: (blinding lights and amplified sound) – comes off as imagined and theatricalized.

We learn that this barbaric process  happens in silence….a silence apart from th voices that could save you.

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“Seeing You”  Off-Off Broadway ‘interactive’ play  created and directed by Randy Weiner.

Criticism:

1. not engaging – its gimmickry feels manufactured purely to freak you out.
2. narratives are clichéd versions of  The WWII movies that mattered.
3. staged in a former meatpacking warehouse…nothing’s organic here, not even death.