TNY weekend reader: S is for senior moment
This is for those of you only getting to your issue of The New Yorker now, either because it just arrived in the mail or because it’s been waiting patiently for you in your briefcase or online all week. (image: carolita johnson)
Once you get past the first few rather dense paragraphs about Edward W. Said’s late work, “On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, Updike’s Late Works shifts gears into Shakespeare’s last works, in which is perceived “a slackening, as if something had snapped.” It sounds eerily like the kind of post-mortem speculation that follows a suicide, or a bad end. This sets the tone for the rest of the authors speculated upon, on how their last works reflect how they fizzled out, burned up and crashed (in the fashion of a geriatric scooter speeding out of control at 15 miles an hour), skipped away, or simply lost their marbles, at the end of their lives. From this point on, the pleasure in reading is partly in being reminded of Edward Gorey’s macabre alphabet, “The Gashlycrumb Tinies.”
To sum it up:
S is for Shakespeare, who favored Spectacle (“the least of tragedy’s necessary parts” according to Aristotle, Updike reminds us) over “Plot, Character, Diction, and Thought,” in his later, pre-mortem works.
M is for Melville, who whittled down his style, but wrote with no less “bumptious bombast” than his previous works.
H is for Hawthorne, who smouldered till he smouldered no more.
G is for Graham Greene, who published his dreams.
Other writers in the alphabet include Henry James and Iris Murdoch, with Beethoven thrown in for good measure. Updike seems to feel whimsical and merciless at the same time, noting Melville’s slightly “arthritic and desiccated” sentences, while Henry James’ later style in”The Outcry” is described as a “cumbersome though finely painted charabanc (...) pulled swaying along by a frisky pony of a plot.” Being on the older side himself seems to give Updike a certain license (like the Jewish-convert dentist telling Jewish jokes in one famous Seinfeld episode) to write thus about the various aspects of old fartiness, and he doesn’t hold back, feeling free to say: “we feel on our faces (...) the breeze of the senile sublime, a creativity liberated from its usual, anxiety-producing ambitions.” And I felt like I was being gently poked in the ribs when he wrote about Melville’s “bumptious bombast.”
Now, back to the living!
The Shouts & Murmers “Bush Quiz,” also online, begins with a question whose answer seems to be Bush’s best Edward G. Robinson impersonation:
“That’s why I’m having this press conference, see?”
He’s a funny guy. You get the feeling you could go out and drink a beer with him, don’t you?
“Bad Neighbors“, by Edward P. Jones, in Fiction, is a hometown piece about some people in a neighborhood thinking they’re better—or striving to be better—than other people in their neighborhood, a human flaw so universal that the phrase, “there goes the neighborhood” shouldn’t surprise us no matter who says it. The line of fate that runs through it, unifying all the good and bad neighbors, brings to mind many other works about prejudice and destiny, like To Kill a Mockingbird, and Crash.
Online only, in Online Only, is Blake Eskin’s Q & A: Blueprints for disaster, in which he interviews Steve Coll as a follow-up (I like to see these Q&A’s as Cliff Notes) to the magazine’s “Atomic Emporium,” which is not online. I like these Q&A’s, and though they should be read after reading the article they follow up, they stand alone perfectly well, and are not bad for when you just want to know what the article is about before reading it, or not.
Now, get outside and enjoy this spectacularly reasonable weather!
August 9th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Bad Neighbors is so superior to Crash.