Last Week's New Yorker Review: June 12, 2023

All one can do is howl in sorrow and, when sorrow has been exhausted, laugh.

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 12, 2023

Must-Reads:

“Back From the Dead” - Merve Emre reads Susan Taubes, whose darkly philosophical, Beckett-inflected works have recently been reconsidered and reissued. From the start, Emre’s prose is stunning, suggesting a book review when viewed from afar, but each line deepening into a poetic strangeness when reread or recontextualized. Like this section opener: “Her name was not Susan Taubes, not at first.” Or: “Here, one wants to insist, was a woman whose thoughts sprang from no one’s head but her own. Here was a woman who, when faced with the scorn and the judgement of the patriarchs, laughed the laugh of the Medusa, and turned these stony-faced men into even stonier stones.” The strange mirrored depth of this is then undercut by: “But this is too simple a revision.” By the end, you’re laughing not only at the horrific beauty of Taubes, but at Emre’s quicksand styling, which traps you in repetition and spins you around until you’ve lost your place, until what seemed the most straightforward sense is instead a dark infinity. “The homeland she could discover was in exile,” Emre quotes Elliot Wolfson, speaking on Taubes’ philosophical work. “But in such a homeland, one finds one’s place only by being displaced.” Then Emre says: “Her fictions are unhomely works, tales of bewildered, wild, and estranged women…” and home and place seem to dissolve, you’re wandering backward, like how the severed head, in Taubes’ novel Divorcing, “is free to wander backward through her life in a series of surreal images.” Then you’re at the start again, with the weird Greco-Freudian parable, and suddenly cast forward to Julia, the speaker in Taubes’ Lament for Julia, and maybe a speaker for Taubes, what Emre calls “a paradoxically singular and divided creature,” “made to reappear by an unnamed voice.” You think: Maybe the voice is Emre; you think: Why is the piece arranged like this? Why not some other way? You read Sontag, whose friend Julia, in a story, is “‘wondering about the relation of that leaf… to that one…’ also yellowing, its frayed tip almost perpendicular to the first one’s spine. ‘Why are they lying there just like that? Why not some other way?’” And then you’re back.

“What Am I Without You?” - Jiayang Fan circles her mother, and her mother circles her. A deeply lyrical second-person account of the compromises of care. Fan’s string of reported pieces for the magazine from 2016-21 marked her as one of the best prose stylists working; her more recent, more self-reflective stories (her forthcoming book Motherland will presumably draw on the earlier personal history published under that name) deepen the earlier narratives by revealing the difficult circumstances under which they were written, but both are powerful enough to function outside that shared context. It’s interesting to consider Fan’s mother’s request for “summary,” “taut and efficient, free of the metaphors and florid fuss of which you were always so fond,” (the you in the piece being Fan.) After all, this piece, though concise and self-contained, certainly moves further toward the florid than Fan’s more straightforward prior work. And this image, of Fan’s mother as internal editor, is made literal at the end, when a kind of ghost-voice appears and interrupts Fan’s story. It’s interesting to consider its accusation, that Fan is “doing the predictable thing” by resorting to literal metaphor. “A good story moves,” says Fan, or Fan’s speaker (this piece verges on the kind of poetic or autofictional narrative in which viewpoints might be shaky even as events are as factual as in any journalism.) “It glides and slithers like an octopus in a way that is unexpected yet inevitable.” Certainly, this piece embodies that gliding motion, that register-shifting. Its greater task is perhaps impossible, and perhaps something it sets itself up to deliberately, poignantly fail at: To create life from death.

Window-Shop:

“Uncanny Valley” - Katy Waldman reads an “increasingly surreal” debut novel that brings erotic fantasy to a mirror-world’s Hong Kong protests. It’s often hard, in a short book review, to tell what’s a reading of the book at hand, and what’s closer to a reading into the book. Regardless, the way Waldman describes “the book… depicting the reality-warping effects of an uncanny, constraining force — a force like state censorship” helps bring its concerns to life, even as its plot isn’t over-revealed.

“Child’s Work” (Comment) - William Finnegan addresses the mounting child-labor crisis. Very straightforward, but if you’ve missed this story (and don’t have time for more in-depth coverage like Jaya Saxena and Amy McCarthy’s at Eater or Hannah Dreier’s massive Times piece), it’s important.

“The Interview Artist” - Helen Shaw unravels the tales of James Grissom, who (probably) didn’t meet the theatrical royalties with whom he claims kinship. Most fun when it’s self-aware about being a campy iteration of a pre-existing genre in this magazine, as when Grissom brings up the “piece about Dan Mallory, the author who made up his own backstory— ‘I just think that’s what the piece is, that I’m this fabulist.’” What’s so delightful about the Mallory piece is, in part, all the terrible and derivative prose it exposes; it’s unfortunate that most of the quotes we get from Grissom capture him in sweaty, trying-not-to-be-exposed mode. I want more of his fake interview material, like the fantastically unbelievable one, toward the end, in which Tennessee Williams says he touches the written page “gently, a frightened queer faced with his first female breast, a nipple that seeks attention and ministration.” It’s practically spoken in Kristen Schaal’s comedic impersonation, or that of the speakers at the Scholars Conference who “imitated his rasping drawl when they quoted him.” There’s something Williams and Grissom have in common, a sweaty striving for love common to many theatrical writers, that Shaw might make more of, too. The piece’s restraint keeps it cogent, but keeps it from achieving the psychodrama of other entries in the magazine’s recently multiplying Fabulists-Exposed canon.

“Playtime” - Anthony Lane sees a “strikingly cautious, calm, and superfine” Korean drama, and a music-packaging doc. The ‘Past Lives’ review is quite nice at setting scenes, from “chunky sculptures in a park” to a hotel room that’s “a Whistlerian study in blue-gray.” Maybe it gives away too much plot — always tough to say, without seeing the film at hand — and maybe the Manhattan callback is ill-advised, plus obvious. There’s still a lingering ambience that’s more convincing than a trailer. The back half’s Hipgnosis documentary review, though, is a not-especially-charming nostalgia trip.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Minority Rules” - Andrew Marantz worries about I.S.L.T, the obscure legal “thingy” that American fascists are using to undermine democracy. At its best when it feigns at being a profile of “democracy activist” Sailor Jones, a compelling character who uses country-fried phrases like “as I live and breathe,” grew up in “one of the poorest counties in North Carolina” which was also “the birthplace of the environmental-justice movement,” and once protested an anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative “by running across the state, or most of it.” Unfortunately, Marantz doesn’t maintain focus on Jones, first sidetracking for a too-long but well-written history of I.S.L.T. (at its best when discussing the motives of the few respected thinkers who have backed it) and then flying completely off the rails for a reductive, redundant rehash of “autocratic legalism,” gradual erosion of norms, backsliding of democracy, et cetera. “Averting a disaster once, or a hundred times, does not mean that the disaster was not worth worrying about in the first place,” says Marantz, and it’s telling that what looks at first like a profile of an activist has to step away from that subject to make a case that what really needs to be done is not fighting but worrying. Marantz gets yelled at by a heckler: He worries. He sees a small town sheriff flaunting his power: He worries. He watches the court shift away from a disastrous ruling on I.S.L.T. after the midterms: He presents three consecutive quotes (“That’s the scenario that’s supposed to make me feel like everything’s fine?”) that add up to the message, “Continue to worry.” The piece’s last few sections are so far removed from the fight that you’d almost forget how engaged with that fight it initially appeared to be. But it’s still worth reading up to the strongest quote, which is a perfectly fitting ending, anyway: “Well, sure… [the Republican court] could do anything, if logic and principles go out the window.”

“Border Control” - Idrees Kahloon takes the economic and philosophical long view of immigration. I won’t really touch the political viewpoint of this piece, which frustratingly combines an insistence on asking only for what might be achieved tomorrow with a reminder that none of this will be achieved any time soon. That’s basically par for the course with reformist politics, and it’s near-inherent to economists’ viewpoints. What’s actually bothersome about this piece is how poor a job it does of summarizing the stances of the texts at hand, especially in its rushed final section. Joseph Carens has one quoted line to stand in for his entire view before he’s used repeatedly as a contrasting model; Kahloon makes him into a strawman for an entire open-borders movement, but seems afraid to give him a chance to explain himself. Sarah Song, whose book Kahloon clearly likes, somehow fares worse: Apparently, she “offers calm and methodical critiques of the logic of open-borders advocates,” yet those critiques aren’t actually in evidence here. Ultimately, her entire approach rests on “democratic norms against invidious discrimination,” to which one need only flip back to the button of Andrew Marantz’s piece to find the counterargument: “What has stopped this from descending into total farce, so far, is a shared political and legal culture, a sense of propriety and self-enforced boundaries… The less happy story is that there is no way to guarantee that it will last.”

“Comic Effect” - Michael Schulman tells the tale of the cadre of L.A. dweebs who started Marvel Studios. Demonstrates a shallow, Hollywood-ish understanding of both superheroes and comics culture in general. Actually, the shallowness extends to most issues it touches on. A few examples: Schulman adapts Kevin Goetz’s argument that “Marvel’s success” has “‘sucked the air out of’ more human-scaled entertainments” like adult dramas. But mid-budget cinema was already being mourned for in 2014, and the villain is more complicated. Schulman compares Marvel’s media omnipresence to how “you can live your tech life within the frictionless confines of MacBooks and iPads.” But hardware and software can’t be compared so easily; Disney probably can’t legally own movie theaters and Apple’s control over the App Store has lead to its own legal battles. Schulman says that “TV series like ‘Lost’ had primed audiences to follow byzantine serial storytelling.” But, not even mentioning soaps, primetime serialization had been popular since Hill Street Blues; while Lost may have been the hit big enough to let networks embrace serialization, it was far from the decisive moment; plus, it could just as easily be said that technologies allowing for replay, like VHS and DVD, were what really led to serialized TV’s accessibility. Schulman doesn’t need to get in the weeds about every one of these points, but if he’s going to tackle a rather nerdy subject, he ought to at least be willing to nerd out about something — and media machinations might be an easier sell than comics marginalia.

The piece can be reminiscent of a certain Onion article when touching on that scene, which is unfortunate, since many comics fans bemoan Marvel movies as bad ambassadors to a wide-ranging and brilliant artistic medium (the case with Marvel’s superhero comics is more complicated: Creators often branch out after establishing skills and gaining audiences there, in a reverse of the films’ sapping of creative talent; still, their creators’ diversity, both of identity and of style, lags well behind that of independent comics.) It’s annoying to see Marvel-comics readers conflated with Marvel-movie watchers; the two are surprisingly distinct groups, something Schulman seems not to even have considered a possibility.

If the piece lost its cumbersome, thinkpiece-y first section, it might start to succeed as a geeky boardroom drama — but even then, there’s not nearly enough characterization or grounding in place. Only Perlmutter really pops as a character, mostly because his stinginess is so inordinate; elsewhere, Schulman strains, and tells too much instead of showing. (“If Maisel were a Marvel character, he’d be a mysterious sorcerer in a cave.” Yeah, sure.) It’s also weird how frequently Schulman sidelines Kevin Feige: Sure, he didn’t grant an interview, but the piece isn’t generally reliant on quotes, and even if he wasn’t as big a presence as is usually claimed, a perspective closer to his interests should have been included, to keep the piece from feeling like it was inadvertently taking a side in an opaque internal power struggle. And Schulman, who mostly focuses on Marvel Studios on the rise, isn’t interested in discussing Disney in general, but their story has always been one of conglomeration; looking at their history of labor relations, for example, might provide more apt context to Marvel’s present than looking at rooms full of early comic-book writers.

It would also be helpful, in the wide-ranging but rote discussion of VFX, to be given a clearer picture of directorial involvement in effects-heavy sequences: Schulman says that “Marvel's strategy of tapping directors from sitcoms or Sundance means that the person in charge has little experience handling big action scenes,” but it’s been widely speculated, with some evidence, that, in fact, they often don’t fully direct those scenes, which are instead controlled by an internal team of second-unit directors, something that can contribute to a few of the issues Schulman cites with the movies. It would be helpful to get some actual reporting on this, but Schulman is more invested in yesterday’s workplace finagling. Basically: I don’t want him to like Marvel flicks, but it would be nice if he cared about them more.

Letters:

Zoë Beery sent in a brilliant missive on the lack of rave coverage in the Music Issue, which I must quote at length. “To this day, TNY has (I believe?) only run a single profile of a DJ, even though top DJs rival rock and pop stars in pay, fanbase and sordid business machinations. Where was the longread on the mind-numbingly festooned sets at EDM massives like Electric Daisy Carnival? The droll tag-along with Four Tet, Skrillex and Fred Again as they "surprise"-traipsed around Manhattan in February? The profile of Tatsuya Takahashi, who has quietly and almost single-handedly reshaped the global synthesizer market? Hell, why wasn't T.M. Brown's excellent “The Battle Over Techno's Origins” in this issue, instead of only on the website? Why wasn't feature space allocated for a piece by Emily Witt, an expert raver who is on staff at the magazine? I hesitate to make a direct comparison to the slow recognition by legacy media of hip-hop as a central cultural force, because that was about racism, whereas omitting electronic music stems from an entrenched view that it is unserious and solely valuable as a soundtrack for taking molly. It is still, though, an antiquated editorial stance, and one that also offends me personally as someone who runs a reading series about raving that regularly draws triple-digit attendance.” I agree: It’s really odd to focus so much on the social component of music culture and totally neglect perhaps the biggest socially oriented movement in music.

Regular correspondents Caz and Michael liked Evan Osnos’ piece on private pop concerts better than I did, calling it “an entertaining insight” and “by far the most interesting in this week's issue,” respectively. But Caz adds that Osnos’ slight of AC/DC, that they say “no” to private parties “for reasons that nobody can quite clarify,” is unearned: They “have always been true and principled,” and “live quietly in tax effective countries.” OK!

Gabe, though, says that “in principle I’m more into the idea of a regular music issue than a style issue, or an innovators issue, or even to be honest a money issue since that so often veers into credulous profiles.” He adds that the Style issue “so often lends itself to an ‘On and Off the Avenue’ piece by Patricia Marx and one on some fashion designer that I almost never care about.” I agree that the themed issues, fun in theory, can sometimes be a letdown in practice (or just totally irrelevant to the issue’s contents, like most of the money issue I link above.) I’d like to see them go weirder and more poetic/vibey with it… an “After Hours” issue, or a “Disembodied” issue, or a “Bivalve” issue… Am I nuts? Write in!