tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post5123140267352996014..comments2024-03-28T16:48:23.212-05:00Comments on Anecdotal Evidence: `The Tug and Its Barges Will Sink With Us'Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08436175583386298032noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-44971900423767326792011-12-20T13:47:32.836-06:002011-12-20T13:47:32.836-06:00I wish it wasn't, but your description of the ...I wish it wasn't, but your description of the current trend toward self-absorption and the trivial at the New Yorker is disappointingly true.zmkchttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-38542553238463645012011-12-20T09:13:50.238-06:002011-12-20T09:13:50.238-06:00Interesting "new" writer, and an interes...Interesting "new" writer, and an interesting topic. I'm sure it's a generational thing but the <i>New Yorker</i> to me has always been standard-issue dentist office reading material, on a par with <i>Highlights for Children</i> -- fodder for hilariously unfunny cartoons and hilariously funny (unbelievably bad) poems. I've read, of course, numerous New Yorker Writers, most notably Cheever and Thurber, out of their contexts (and loved equally the poor Richard Yates, who tried diligently but unsuccessfully for 50 years to place one single story in the New Yorker), but the thought of the magazine as a whole in its golden age is on a par for me with reading the archives of the <i>Southern Literary Messenger</i> (which no doubt is also still being published somewhere). <br /><br />The idea of taking a staff writer out of that context many years afterwards, as Epstein notes, is a bit dizzying. The Christmas 1941 quote is a particularly telling case in point. On the one hand it shows itself as a precurser to the arch irony toward events that is <i>de rigeur</i> among the hyper-hip, but tinged with a rare acknowlegement of irony's failure (the failure is better known today as "rehab"). On the other hand, it is completely wrong about the future -- we want nothing more than to know what Christmas 1941 was like on the home front, especially how, as in wartime everywhere, the normal is enforced as a way of coping. <br /><br />This postcard from the past brings up all sorts of interesting questions of writers in the past, future and present tenses. It always seems be the case that full engagement with the present never lasts, and estrangement always does. Maybe there's room somewhere, as you suggest via Gibbs, for a rapprochment in our thinking.WAShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.com