The New Yorker

The New Yorker magazine has always been in my life. I suppose I started looking at the cartoons when I was seven or eight and didn’t understand most of them….Peter Arno’s drawing of a blonde in a strapless dress sitting on a bar stool with her older boy friend next to her saying to the bartender, “Fill ‘er up!” Or Helen Hokinson’s dowagers, or Charles Addams’s wonderfully bizarre drawings, many without captions.

Eventually, I started reading The New Yorker, mostly the Talk of the Town and the non-fiction pieces, a habit which continues to today.

I remember the years when William Shawn edited the magazine, and every word seemed cut like a diamond, perfect in a perfect place, and then I grew weary as the magazine began to wander in an editorial wilderness, culminating in the fascinatingly strange years when the magazine was led by Tina Brown who was interested – or so I thought - in the plumes of spray from the waves of contemporary culture.

She finally moved on and was replaced by David Remnick. I don’t know much about Mr Remnick, but in the one or two glimpses of him I’ve had on the television, he seems full to the brim of intellectual intensity. Based on the magazine he edits, he has a strong pragmatic side, too, and I suppose that comes from his background as a writer.

The result has been that The New Yorker no longer sits in the middle of the pile of periodicials which I will get around to; it is always at the top, not because it is entertaining but because it is, once again, important, and there is something in each issue worth savoring, thinking about, remembering.

In the current issue devoted to the arts, Remnick himself writes in the Comment section of Talk of The Town an essay called “Many Voices.” In this brief piece, he refers to Walt Whitman, a United Airlines pilot, the LA Times, the New York teachers’ union, and George Kennan, but I would like to quote his last paragraph, without his permission:

Acts of terrorism cannot always be averted but terrorists
Themselves can be defeated. It will take military and
Investigative daring to do so now; it will also require
A sustained national self-possession, a refusal to fall
Into the welter of panic and recrimination that terrorists
For two hundred years, since the days of Robespierre and
Saint-Just, have counted on as allies more precious than
Arms.

The issue is the one with Art Spiegelman’s drawing called “The Tenth Music,” with all the muses of ancient Greece ball-and-chained to the largest (and newest) muse of all, “Moolah.”