The most depressing New Yorker issue ever
I should have known. Louise Gluck's name in the table of contents should have tipped me off. Her showcase poems of entrapment and darkness made for a vacant U.S. poet laurate term, and her appearances in The New Yorker have seemingly always landed equidistant from Shouts & Murmurs and the movie criticism, likely for the regular features' protection.
Here's a test. Louise Gluck or Conor Oberst?
"I read a lot of detective fictions. I stare at a lot of walls. There's a lot of unused, wasted time, but I think there's some importance in that."
"Q: What does keep you awake at night?
A: When I can't stop paying attention to my heartbeat. That's the worst."
Hard to tell, yes? Here's source one and source two. It's nice to find "29 Thoughts About the Apparent Sexiness of Conor Oberst" turning up in Nerve's 10th anniversary collection this month. Its foundations are applicable here.
4. I feel evil saying these things. I mean, pop music is truly terrible. We should be bending over backwards to thank guys like Conor Oberst for existing. Who would we rather have, Ashlee Simpson?
5. I mean, really, it's probably just me. I can't handle young genius of any kind. I'm a huge jerk. Really.
6. Still, if some guy showed up at your house party and started playing heart-tugging songs like Conor Oberst does, you'd be like, "Who is this clown?"
But I'm off topic. In the August 13 New Yorker issue, the one where the cover is dogs sweltering in an apartment building, Gluck appears in the middle of a story about an aging man who's putting himself in the poorhouse to attempt skydiving from 25 miles high. With that topic, your mileage may vary. This article precedes a fiction piece of a mentally ill neighbor and follows articles on the torture debate, global olive-oil fraud, and a disease where sufferers try to harm themselves, including lifelong attempts to bite off their fingers and lips.
In the front of the book, Talk of the Town writes about the Bancrofts blowing their empire, Carnegie Hall planning to evict aging artists from their homes of decades, people spending their weekends hunting ferns, and the scandals erupting in the college-loan industry. In the back of the book, the critics address Lil Wayne's success, Herbert Spencer's tendancies to be a jerk, Great Britain's actions leading to the deaths of millions in India and Pakistan, Lifetime's history of being awful, and Hollywood's debasement of Jane Austen. The tiny, sequential drawings throughout the book end around this point with a snake eating a man.
Left over, in the middle of the issue, Shouts & Murmurs is a page of Aesop fables adapted to modern New York. "A lion and a donkey go to a Knicks game, only to find that their seats are way back in Section 426," one begins. If Aesop, fern hunters and Lil Wayne are enough happiness for you, you just flip away. The rest of us, we're the dogs in August.
