TNY weekend reader: rethinking the past
(image: carolita johnson)
This is my first TNY weekend reader since the new online version of TNY. Have you seen it? It’s elegant, inviting, and spacious. And it’s got pictures, lots of pictures. Reading on the old version was a bit like stepping into an old fashioned phone booth, which was why it didn’t really matter whether I was reading it online on my 17-inch computer screen, or on my 2×1.5-inch cell phone screen. Now it does matter. (Now, it doesn’t look so good on my cell phone! Too many interruptions in the middle of articles, with things like “see more cartoons”, weirdly.) I’m sure the glitches will be figured out. So, welcome, new online TNY! (newyorker.com/magazine)
Speaking of pictures, I’ve realized that I’ve been silently admiring the work of James Surowiecki’s usual illustrator, Christoph Niemann, who also did this week’s cover, “T-Day.” Niemann is especially adroit with images that I call “charade” images—I look at them before I read the article (and if possible, before reading the title of the article), and try to figure out what the article’s going to be about. This week’s image is particularly eloquent: the snake of temptation, the indigestible house stuck in its gut. It’s about sub-prime mortgages and the devastation they’ve wrought, of course.
I’ll remember to mention Niemann’s illos more often, since they’re always just right.
While reading, “What’s normal?” which discusses whether it’s possible for children to be depressed or bipolar, I kept thinking back to my own depressed childhood and thinking: maybe their parents are depressing them. I say this not lightly, because I know that was the case for me. At the age of ten, I used to go to bed afraid to fall asleep for fear that I’d stop breathing once unconcsious for lack of enthusiasm for living; scared not of death, but that death might be even more boring and depressing than life. Then I’d wake up, ill-slept and incredibly grouchy, thinking, “not again.” My parents called me “grouchy,” and marvelled that strangers found me delightful, while they found me to be a “such a sourpuss,” poor things!
It took till I moved across the ocean and lived away from my parents for ten years to realize they’d raised me in what I now call a “culture of mental illness.” Basically, without realizing it, they educated me by example to cope with life through depression, anxiety, introversion or a sort of collapse, and paranoia. What a relief it was to realize I’d simply acquired some really bad mental habits from them and didn’t have to be so miserable. (One parent has Asperger’s Syndrome, and the other, well, no official diagnosis, but let’s just say possibly BPD).
“What’s normal?” is not online, don’t be depressed.
For some reason I found Joan Acocella’s review of “The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting†(Cornell $29.95), by Darren Wershler-Henry to be infinitely more interesting as a social history. I actually learned typewriting from the formidable Mrs. Gould (who was shaped, in fact, just like an iron manual typewriter sitting on a table) in Junior High School on an old fashioned, monstrous manual typewriter: the kind that made one feel like every key needed to be pushed about three feet down in order to pound out the individual, heavy letters of every word on my steno pad. It was a bit like a miniature “High Striker,” that hammer and gong game at carnivals. I had to type my college applications out on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter whose fine hum made the kitchen table vibrate under me. Those were (not) the days. Henry discusses all those days, the before, the after, the in between, and all the strange thoughts and social codes that came with being and having a typewriter. Acocella makes it all sound possibly more interesting than the book itself.
I’m still trying to figure out how the mother in Don DeLillo’s 9/11 fiction piece, “Still life,” could hear the kids talking at the 27th floor window as she “passed by.” Am I just being difficult? Somebody tell me if I missed anything about a passerelle, or a hall window.
John Cassidy’s “The Next Crusade” is about Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank. I had a friend who worked at the World Bank, who assured me in all earnestness (he was never disgruntled, and had it good there) that the World Bank was just another kind of mafia that pressed loans on poor countries in order that they might default and become indebted in ways that would be to the advantage of the bank. I’m not saying I believe this, but I think it’s worth mentioning.
Rebecca Mead’s “Den of Antiquity,” not online, is a wonderfully disturbing account of how museums acquire and justify their acquisitions. The hero or villain of the story (depending whose side you find yourself on) is a man named Picon. Arch villain, or arch hero? Arch he is, certainly. Read it, and you may never feel certain how you feel about museums again.
