The New Yorker: September 4, 2006
The New Yorker arrives every week. Generally I look at the table of contents and then put it down. OK, that's not quite right: generally I look at the table of contents, flip through the Goings On About Town to find Tables for Two, read Tables for Two, because the wife of a chef must keep up with restaurant doings, and then put it down. Occasionally, though, I read some articles, or even the whole magazine, and even more occasionally, I blog about it.
But when I flipped through the table of contents of the most recent New Yorker, The Education Issue, I was pleased to be taking an airplane to California the next day, because I actually wanted to read it. And read it I did, most of it, at least. Fascinating article on the Duke lacrosse/rape story, though I'm suspicious of the "objective" tone and I take issue with the implication that "the coarsening of undergraduate life" is specific to Duke, when I would argue it is generic to the contemporary college experience. Liked the article on Deep Springs College because I'm always drawn to self-sufficient models of alternative education, even when they tend toward pretension and homo-eroticism (not that there's anything wrong with pretension or homo-eroticism) (OK, pretension isn't so great, though, let's face it, anyone reading this blog has probably been guilty of it at one time or another or many, but homo-eroticism is quite fine). Liked the piece on school lunches in Berkeley, especially because it pierced the Alice Waters idealism, and much as I love Alice, I love pragmatists even more, especially when it comes to the public schools.
Did not, however, so much like the Antonya Nelson fiction offering, "Kansas," yet that story is what I keep thinking about days after I put down The New Yorker and picked up the September Elle which M made me buy and which bored me to tears. I guess I don't get why this story is in The New Yorker (which comment presumes that if fiction is in The New Yorker it is somehow worthwhile, a presumption which is obviously ridiculous, especially given how utterly skeptical I am of the poetry in The New Yorker, and how pleased and surprised I am by the extremely occasional appearance of a wonderful poem therein).
Basically the story is about a dysfunctional family held together by its cellphones: seven of them, each number separated by a single digit, i.e. a family plan. There are two sisters (one pregnant), their husbands (an old psychiatrist and a young, abusive drug dealer), their mother, and their daughters, the one's teenager who abducts the other's toddler (and then returns her, and life goes on). The story is completely preposterous, in both situation and plot, and the cell phones felt way too gimmicky: FAMILY plan, FAMILY narrative. Yet the story was eminently readable, which is to say I read it, even as I was annoyed by it in the very act of reading.
I wonder if I'm missing something. I wonder if I'm incapable of appreciating the sophistication of contemporary fiction. I wonder if I should try to find out more about Antonya Nelson. Maybe not.
But when I flipped through the table of contents of the most recent New Yorker, The Education Issue, I was pleased to be taking an airplane to California the next day, because I actually wanted to read it. And read it I did, most of it, at least. Fascinating article on the Duke lacrosse/rape story, though I'm suspicious of the "objective" tone and I take issue with the implication that "the coarsening of undergraduate life" is specific to Duke, when I would argue it is generic to the contemporary college experience. Liked the article on Deep Springs College because I'm always drawn to self-sufficient models of alternative education, even when they tend toward pretension and homo-eroticism (not that there's anything wrong with pretension or homo-eroticism) (OK, pretension isn't so great, though, let's face it, anyone reading this blog has probably been guilty of it at one time or another or many, but homo-eroticism is quite fine). Liked the piece on school lunches in Berkeley, especially because it pierced the Alice Waters idealism, and much as I love Alice, I love pragmatists even more, especially when it comes to the public schools.
Did not, however, so much like the Antonya Nelson fiction offering, "Kansas," yet that story is what I keep thinking about days after I put down The New Yorker and picked up the September Elle which M made me buy and which bored me to tears. I guess I don't get why this story is in The New Yorker (which comment presumes that if fiction is in The New Yorker it is somehow worthwhile, a presumption which is obviously ridiculous, especially given how utterly skeptical I am of the poetry in The New Yorker, and how pleased and surprised I am by the extremely occasional appearance of a wonderful poem therein).
Basically the story is about a dysfunctional family held together by its cellphones: seven of them, each number separated by a single digit, i.e. a family plan. There are two sisters (one pregnant), their husbands (an old psychiatrist and a young, abusive drug dealer), their mother, and their daughters, the one's teenager who abducts the other's toddler (and then returns her, and life goes on). The story is completely preposterous, in both situation and plot, and the cell phones felt way too gimmicky: FAMILY plan, FAMILY narrative. Yet the story was eminently readable, which is to say I read it, even as I was annoyed by it in the very act of reading.
I wonder if I'm missing something. I wonder if I'm incapable of appreciating the sophistication of contemporary fiction. I wonder if I should try to find out more about Antonya Nelson. Maybe not.
posted by Becca at
9:47 AM
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