Actually Reading The New Yorker

[In which, following yesterday’s post, we scramble up the ladder of American culture to its supposed heights.]

Most of the time, the New Yorkers serve primarily as reminders of my worthlessness. Not The New Yorker--I’m not that narcissistic--but the New Yorkers that pile up on the living room table, on the backs of toilets, in the magazine rack I bought at a yard sale to keep them from piling up on the living room table.

The New Yorkers that I don’t read, yet somehow cannot throw away until I have read them. The New Yorkers that stare at me reproachfully when I choose a newspaper or my most recent library novel instead of them.

I always check the table of contents. And I almost always read “Tables for Two,” being the kind of dedicated chef’s wife that I am. Sometimes I read an article or two (like A.M. Homes’ birth parents essay a few weeks ago), but usually each issue just stays in the mail pile for a few days and then heads for some other pile.

But this week? The one with the jazz club in the apartment building on the cover? Now that is one swell New Yorker. I actually read it cover to cover.

In fact, stop reading this silly blog right now and hie thee to the nearest news shop, library, or coffee table and see for yourself. Or, if you are a lazy [expletive I don’t want to write in my blog but can’t think of a substitute for] like me, you can just settle for my summary.

First there is Ian Frazier’s lovely memoir, “Out of Ohio,” which captures the ease of suburban life in the 60s and 70s (it’s still like that in many ways out here in the heartland), as well as the lethargy that finally drives an ambitious young man out on the highway toward New York.

(Actually, first is an article on prescriptions and children which I didn’t read, but I’m sure it’s good too.) (And before that there is an oddly upbeat tsunami Talk of the Town by Akash Kapur who grew up in Auroville, an intentional community that has always interested me.)

Then there is James Stewart’s fascinating account of the Michaels Eisner and Ovitz battling it out at Disney. Riches beyond belief!! Outrageous backstabbing!! Stewart clearly believes that Eisner was the villain but can’t come out and say it, so he has to show how Ovitz was a bad boy too.

We move on to Geraldine Brooks’ profile of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s dad. As a long-time Alcott fan who has already read M Little Women and half of Little Men, and taken both girls to Orchard House, this was my cup of organic herb tea. A good reminder of how 19^th-century America previewed more recent progressive fixations: vegans, communes, child-centered education, tax resistance…

A nice story by Edwige Danticat, an illuminating analysis of George Gershwin’s life and work, an astute and hilarious review of The Ballets Trockaderos de Monte Carlo, a brief introduction to mashups, and a thoughtful critique of Hollywood liberalism in the guise of a review of Spanglish round it off.

It’s a veritable panoply of Americana--that is, of white guy Americana (aside from the Haitian immigrant in Danticat’s story and the drag queens in the Trocks). But hey, white guys can be cool (and, as the pieces on Gershwin, the Trocks, and Spanglish show, race and gender matter to them too). Go read it!