Thursday, September 08, 2005

aug 29 New Yorker issue

Malcolm Gladwell informs wealthy New Yorker readers about health care and health insurance problems I know only too intimately, in his article "The Moral-Hazard Myth, Why our health-care system doesn't work." This same week I spent $300 to pay for doctors' visits last spring. The article is more rhetorical than informative. Now that I'm using del.icio.us I can easily keep an eye on discussions of the New Yorker magazine. If you search the bookmarks generally under "NewYorker" you get the best results, and there are a lot of links for Gladwell's article.

David Denby reviews the movie Pretty Persuasion. My partner in crime here read this out loud to comic effect. His thoughts - that Denby's passion and anger at the young girls plainly reveals that he has no sex. Ever. Given the comments left on one of my earliest July postings about American Sucker, it seems like this graphic and bitter honesty is the single most appealing thing about Denby's prose style.

His review of "The Aristocrats" is like every other review I've read or heard. Everyone seems to be ignoring that this joke might be about class, not sex. But pretentious old Denby is in a particularly bad position (see above) to address this. Or maybe he's the only man for the job . . .

Peter Schjedahl on "The Life of Matisse." Similar article in the New York Review of Books was much better. Actually, I think that article in the NYRB was written by the author of the book reviewed in the New Yorker. Our house is a veritable hotbed of general interest publications, so expect my next posting to be on the most recent New York Review of Books, the article on the politics of museum exhibitions. Now, that gets the blood boiling . . .

My new hobby, web visiting museums. The Hermitage, where The Dance (Matisse, 1909-10), above, is housed.

Categories: ,

2 Comments:

Blogger The Dissassociate said...

You know, I really thought it was about class, too.

The first time I heard the joke I thought it was entirely about class. I was looking for direct allegory.

11:53 PM  
Blogger zoe p. said...

No it would not be better if they were conservative, reactionary assholes.

Would it be better if I launched a critique of a conservative, reactionary publication? Maybe, but confronting unthinking conservatives is my day job.

10:40 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]