New Yorker magazine alert thread

I wish the magazine would find room for Brody in print, apart from capsule reviews. It's a shame that all of his long reviews are online-only.

― jaymc, Monday, January 4, 2021 10:40 AM (one hour ago)

yeah it's maddening, he's really their only full-time film critic with anything interesting to say

I remember really liking a piece where he picked some random year from the early 20th century and read every NYT #1 bestseller from that year and reviewed them all. Probably sometime in the 1990s.

― Guayaquil (eephus!),

It's better than Vidal's, after whom he modeled it.

I also dug his essays on Matthew Arnold, Gide, Bunuel.

I had no problem with Denby when he wrote for New York. I still on occasion look for reviews on '80s and '90s stuff of his on Google Books.

It's kind of interesting, there are all sorts of well-known and respected young-ish (let's say, liberally, under 50) music writers, but to my knowledge no equivalent for film writing. For some reason I thought Manohla Dargis was young, but she's almost 60 (same as Lane). AO Scott is in his mid-50s. Brody, fwiw, is 72.

Get @filmcrithulk the New Yorker gig

I love Brody. He’s a reasonably good guide for me, tho has a higher tolerance for twee aesthetics than I do

Same. Our sensibilities align even when we disagree.

A few youngish film writers working for top publications:

K. Austin Collins (Rolling Stone), Richard Lawson (Vanity Fair), Alissa Wilkinson (Vox), Angelica Jade Bastién (Vulture), Alison Willmore (BuzzFeed), Justin Chang (L.A. Times)

Also, Hunter Harris isn't a film critic, but she's a film writer with 100K Twitter followers and a Substack.

david sims at the atlantic

OEO OTM wrt Brody; i find him generally insufferable and tend to find his aesthetics incompatible with mine but at least he's working with an internal logic that mostly stands up even when i completely disagree with it.

i've been getting into old issues of cineaste lately

I don't know how old Vern is, but he's the only film critic whose taste I trust implicitly.

dril has a good letterboxd account

Vern has to have been born between 1971 and 1976.

reïmpeached

Löl

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/18/trolling-the-great-outdoors

hope the death threats get acted upon

i made it 4 or 5 grafs before tiring of the prospect that i would ever receive evidence pertaining as to why i should give a shit

"Hey, remember Tucker Max? Well, now he's in the wilderness clothing business!"

i feel like i need to rinse my eyes with bleach after reading about that dude

I really don't know why they bothered publishing that article, I actually read the whole thing and it was a total waste of time.

Yeah, I kept waiting for a turn in the article or some other revelation, but it was just nope, "this dude sucks". Which is true, but it was kind of a pointless read.

Mail delivery is so slow these days that I've been routinely getting the magazine a couple of weeks late. The last one I got was the Jan. 4-11 issue with the long Lawrence Wright feature about COVID. There were also a couple of issues in October and November that I just didn't get at all. Of course, I can read it all online, but I prefer print.

Lane, of all people, did, fairly recently, come up with a nuanced, even fairly deep-focus view of John Berryman's life and works---both quite the handful, but/and got me to check out some of his books (so far, so good).
Somebody else provided intriguing glimpses of Martin Amis's 20th Century books (looks like he might be one who gets better the further back you go?), before cutting a path to steady, measured (devastatingly described and quoted) demolition of the latest novel.
Also appealing presentations of Paul Celan and Alice Oswald. Casey Cep (whose eventually really good book about an abandoned Harper Lee project got initially carried away with tangential riches of research) came up with a multi-d profile of Marilynne Robinson that's gotten me way in the Gilead cycle, with other works to come. Good 'un on Adrienne Rich too.
Really like that all of these pieces *do* deal with life *times* works, not just getting into Behind The Music drama or lecturing us and the author, with backstory as boilerplate (as Judith Thurman did in her stern takedown of Ferrante's latest, also all her post-Neapolitan Novels work---she might be right, for all I know, but seemed more like thunderous stop-the-presses flash than honest frustration with somebody whose best is well worth the time, as many of us found it to be).

People are still trying to get the public to care about a racist alcoholic and mediocre poet like Berryman? Jfc. I really want to punch most mainstream literary critics in the face.

Berryman is accessible and popular -- I'm not an expert on his body of work but I like the hits, and it seems weird to say critics are "trying to get the public to care," it's like saying critics are trying to get the public to care about Frank O'Hara, these are the writers doing big friendly poems that people enjoy without training!

Booze is def. presented as a prob here, and “The Dream Songs” is a hubbub, and some of it is spoken in blackface—or, to be accurate, in what might be described as blackvoice. It deals in unembarrassed minstrelsy, complete with a caricature of verbal tics, all too pointedly transcribed: “Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.” To say that Berryman was airing the prejudices of his era is hardly to exonerate him; in any case, he seems to be evoking, in purposeful anachronism, an all but vanished age of vaudeville. Kevin Young, who is Black, prefaces his choice of Berryman’s poetry by arguing, “Much of the force of The Dream Songs comes from its use of race and blackface to express a (white) self unraveling.” Some readers will share Young’s generously inquiring attitude; others will veer away from Berryman and never go back.

For anyone willing to stick around, there’s a new book on the block. “The Selected Letters of John Berryman” weighs in at more than seven hundred pages... Probably too much for me, esp. given JB's range of moods etc., but from the subsequent description, can imagine getting hooked. I'll stick to the Kevin Young-chosen poems for now.

Not that I like them all, but anyway, this is the kind of unexpected opp that The New Yorker can provide these days.

I liked the Judith Thurman piece without recognizing her read at all -- Lying Lives feels totally of a piece with the Neapolitan 4 to me, while she sees it almost as a reaction against them.

I appreciated the Berryman episode as someone who's struggled without any success to like him for 25 years.

Berryman was a great racist alcoholic poet dude

Ugh

eephus!, the issue is that Berryman has been *dead* for nearly FIFTY YEARS, and the confessional poets that he's grouped with were consciously given attention (and continue to be given attention) by the press and Official Verse Culture (tm) because they wrote uncomplicated, accessible work about personal struggle. Meanwhile, in the 60s and into the 70s, the CIA was actively fostering movements toward continuing a confessional, observational USAmerican conception of poetry while engaging in active surveillance and repression of poets of the new Left. All of this is public record at this point, and has its continuance today in who gets major book contracts, media attention, and so on.

John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath— all wrote some fine poems, and like most poets, all wrote a great deal of trash. But there is NO WAY that their poetry could possibly merit the amount of attention heaped upon it without a concerted campaign by Official Verse Culture and its friendlies in the US government to keep it at the top of attention— it's the abstract expressionism of poetry, and it's fucking boring, and *ISN'T THAT GOOD*. And those who would say otherwise often haven't read a book of poems written after 1980.

Sorry, I just have obvious damage from seeing miraculous and accessible work gone unheralded while the third, expanded edition of Robert Lowell's abusive letters to his lesbian friend are published to glowing reviews in the mainstream press.

And I should say: I've read all of Berryman's books, some of them upwards of ten times. I can quote parts of the Dream Songs from memory. But the insistence by publishers and Official Verse Culture to dwell in the past of the confessional poets is absolutely infuriating to me. Why not give a spread in the Times Book Review to Joanne Kyger? The paper didn't even PRINT an obit of Kenneth Irby, one of Kyger's friends and one of the best poets of his generation.

I can't penetrate Berryman -- the obscurantism is a result of an inability to generalize his experiences.

I don't classify Bishop in his group at all.

Finally, for the record, I don't think that poets doing wild or experimental work should necessarily be written about in major magazines. But Kyger, Irby, Eigner, and any number of others wrote and published widely and with a great deal of accessibility to their work, and it is ignored by a lot of these established magazines. Thinking about what might be the reasons behind such glaring omissions— Kyger was a woman who didn't rape her children or kill herself tragically, Irby was a mid-western bisexual communist, and Eigner was a profoundly disabled genius who made abled people uncomfortable— is worth doing, imho.

But instead we get endless articles and reviews about the same white men leading tragic lives where they hurt many people, particularly their female partners, and the same white women leading tragic lives where they were brutalized by white men and patriarchal systems. The attention paid to this stuff seems to merely reify these dynamics, and that's why I am so tired of it.

(Tbf, re: Bishop— I don't consider her part of this crowd, either, but she's often lumped in with them, most likely because of her relationship to Lowell)

I mean, she had a sense of humor -- these dudes avoided it like virgin pina coladas.

I've read a couple Irby poems over the years, and I know about his collected poems -- I can see why he belongs with Creeley, Duncan, etc. I'll check it out of the library.

'To Max Douglas' is my favorite of Irby's, though there is a lot to love.

Also important to remember that he was a queer leftist who insisted on settling in his home state and chosen city of Lawrence, KS, where he taught generations of poets.

speaking of queer leftists, what do you think of Thom Gunn?

The Man with Night Sweats is the only Gunn I've ever rated, tbh. Just not too interesting for me otherwise.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/what-happens-when-investment-firms-acquire-trailer-parks

nothing is safe from the vampire squid

I swear that same piece ran somewhere like 3 years ago. am I crazy?

John Oliver / Last Week Tonight did a big feature on trailer park usury iirc

Seattle Times ran a good series a few years ago on a separate-but-related issue, the way people get trapped by extortionary financing on mobile homes: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/the-mobile-home-trap-how-a-warren-buffett-empire-preys-on-the-poor/. And that company is owned by Warren Buffett.

When you add to these things the entire payday-loan infrastructure, it is all a very efficient system for extracting every last dime from poor people.

relevant to several posters' interests

How Politics Tested Ravelry and the Crafting Community

Strike!

the signs, they’re good @newyorkerunion pic.twitter.com/YH3TzFSJtc

— Emma Whitford (@emma_a_whitford) March 27, 2021

The internet is so mad at the Ravelry article.

I laughed that the summary on Instagram used reëlection. Never change, New Yorker!!!

“Venders” in the Tucci article what is wrong with these people