Hilton Als and I have a deal (he doesn't know; it only benefits me), which is that he writes about theater performances in New York that I will never see and I read his reviews anyway because he is usually writing about performance in general in a way that is engaging enough that whether he influences you to see or avoid the performance is almost beside the point. Through reading Hilton Als articles, I have learned a lot about how to watch actors, how to find the fingerprints of a director, and when you can wholeheartedly blame the writer. I was stunned a couple years ago to learn that he is a sweet-faced gay black man not much older than I am, which is funny because if pressed I am sure I have no idea what I was picturing but each of those things surprised me, so maybe a wiry older straight white man, Van Dyke beard and a tendency to look over his glasses at things? Who knows. I like that I have a picture of him now in my head when I read his writing. 

What I like about Hilton Als is that he teaches me to look at and think about theater in a way that of course applies to any performance and in fact to life. Chekhov's gun is everywhere. Watch the edges. Listen for the curtain. But I do also appreciate the little bits of him that slip into the critiques and what is interesting is how often I feel MORE connected to him when this happens, because we're pretty different. But he knows himself, and he knows the human experience because he knows how to observe it, and that is how he can write sentences like this, from a September review of "This Is Our Youth":

How can two people get close to each other in the minefield of their unspoken doubts and fears and the back-stories they're unwilling to share?

or even better:

We have all left home; we have all tried to make love suffer by turning our backs on it, if only to prove how little we need or deserve its warm, brutalizing complexities. 

And I felt like: ohhhh, yes, WE HAVE. I have. I needed that. And if I had skipped this review because I am not in New York, not a particular fan of Michael Cera or Kieran Culkin, and don't have any special interest in Kenneth Lonergan, either, I would have missed that sentence.

Anyway that's one of the reasons sometimes it takes me a ridiculously long time to read the New Yorker. 

You guys, I am in love with Emily Nussbaum, the television critic for the New Yorker. I have a crush the size and scope of which is not fathomable to me since I do not even know what she looks like, but I know I want to live with her so I can have her giant brilliant brain within reach all the time. She is so smart I feel smarter just READING stuff she writes, can you imagine what a year (oh, or more!) of living with her would do for me? I'd be an unstoppable force; I would lift Don Draper with my personal mind and throw him out the damn window already. 

No, listen! We'd get up in the morning and drink coffee (or tea! if Emily likes tea!) and then settle in to watch something and I'd be totally silent and attentive and try super hard to think of all the smart things that Emily would say and then afterwards I'd turn and for once keep my mouth shut and listen to her unspool all the meanings for me, tease out the rewards that come from paying attention to things that are deliberate from the questions that arise when those things are apparently unplanned. For lunch we'd take a picnic basket away from the TV and sit in a park somewhere and nod wryly at each other about feminism and false nostalgia, creativity in the 21st century, everything. 

Then we'd go home and sit at our respective computers and she'd drop brilliance out into her next review and I'd edit some medical papers or whatever. I'd restrain myself from offering to edit for her, even just to be her first reader, because the New Yorker editor is still my job crush, and you should only have one crush at a time or it gets confusing.

It's been a while since I've had a crush on a writer, really — usually I'm pretty good at understanding that beautiful sentences don't make beautiful souls (and/or the reverse, I guess). But ohhhh she's always just so great, and she's been on fire lately, and her break-down of Fargo in the June 23rd issue is exactly why I just need her and her brilliance to be in my life. "How good does a violent drama need to be to make the pain of watching worth it?" THIS. And her True Detective review a while ago, also. The way she has of looking at entertainment, at television, as a reflection and a projection, as intent and accident, as diversion and focus… sigh. 

I'm actually just happy having her in the world, for as long as she keeps writing. But boy, I could use a lot more of her in my brainspace, and a lot less of brilliant serial killer misogynist stuff. And I say that as someone who likes television so much that I used to say goodnight to the TV set. But like good television, her writing transcends what it's set out to do, and I'm just so grateful to have her, if not in my life, at least in my mailbox, almost every week.

Adam Gopnik bugs me. I expect it's the thing where someone is super-similar to you so you see your own flaws writ large in them and HATE them. He's so smug and so "my experience is universal" about his upper-middle New-York etc etc and it grates. I'll be reading an article and start feeling myself getting irritated and look back and aha! it is Adam Gopnik, of course. 

So okay, just out the gate we have problems, Adam and I. But the Shakespeare article in the recent (okay, it's not recent; it's from April. I was busy!) New Yorker was just so uhhhhhn. The article is ostensibly about a book that Shakespeare might have owned and a portrait that might be of Shakespeare. Gopnik interviews the owners of both objects and presents opinions supporting and refuting their claims. Fine. He also goes into excruciating detail about oh, everything. What Manhattan used to be like twenty years ago vs. how it is now is a long little bit of meander for an opening paragraph, citing Jane Jacobs and broad-shouldered strollers, and it's nice I guess but what has it to do with Shakespeare? Uhm nothing, just a piece of pretty prose.

And then and THEN, he really gets going. He casts Wallace Shawn and Paul Giametti as the book dealers, he describes accents in such detail that I suspect he's been reading a book on accents and wanted to show off, he's got sentences like "They find a great deal of nourishment in this word salad" where you just KNOW he's getting up and patting himself on the back after he writes them. In this he reminds me of Michael Chabon, who also yanks on my nerves with his excessive cleverness. Yes, you are very smart, now go and get mama a plot of some sort. I mean because… meanwhile, back at Shakespeare? Can we…?

Alright. Gopnik's main point (I think) is that we are fascinated not only with Shakespeare's writing, but with him as a person, with the world that he inhabited and the objects and people that surrounded him. We want to believe we can better understand the masterpieces if we know the master. And so in service of this sort of celebrity-crush hunger for knowledge, Gopnik is offering up a similar details-rich portrait of the two objects. That's kind of elegant, conceptually. I don't like how he did it because for example there was a particularly straining sentence about "the tallest mountains produce the most abominable of snowmen", seriously. BUT if I am right (and I hope I am right) and all the flourishes were meant to create a frame for the objects in the same way that the objects are hoped to create a frame for Shakespeare, then at least I can say that I admire the idea.  

You can still skip the article, though. Adam Gopnik has had enough attention for one day.  

Roger Angell's article in a February New Yorker about getting old (he's 93) started off pretty well and I was really enjoying it. I do not personally want to live that long, I think. I am sharp as a tack and do not wish to have people saying that about me when it is no longer true. People don't keep me around for my good looks, so I am not terribly worried about losing them, but nor am I particularly loved for my slow and easy charm (as I do not have much). Once I've lost my quick wits, I'm of no use to myself or anybody else, and I can't imagine I'll hold on to those into my nineties. Still, there is Angell, keeping it together pretty well, maintaining at least a sharp wit (though whether he is quick I can't say; the article may have taken ages). So in sum: he's getting old and his body is falling apart; this is pretty much what I would expect from getting old and I'm not excited about it but it's not unpredictable. People die around you left and right if you live long enough, and he finds this survivable (I am not sure. I take old people dying pretty well. I deeply resent it when people die young. So I am not sure if I start outliving people in great gulps how I will be.). He's learning different ways of communicating, and I found this part of the article fascinating — how your thoughts get shorter and you adapt the things you think about to fit that. Short poems and short witticisms, both easily memorized and easily dredged when appropriate. So he's got me, I'm thinking, my mind is with him, and then: THE PENIS. Oh my god, dudes, can you really not write five pages without sticking your penis in there? I just wonder. Fascinating thing you may not have realized about aging dudes: they still like getting it on and talking about it. Which would be ugh I guess a little boring but fine except he does insist on going on about it with that exhausting icky coyness that he's managed to keep off the rest of the article entirely. Sex! It's not just for young people! Nudge nudge! And his wife was totally okay with him doing it with other ladies if she died first! Ladies, Roger is single and primed for action! 

The article in the New Yorker this month about Storyboard P will not leave my brain. I keep thinking about how we learn (though doing, through repetition, through the desire to achieve some goal, etc), about creativity, about success. 

The recent New Yorker cover with the picture of Bert and Ernie cuddling on the couch in front of a black and white screen showing the Supreme Court Justices, which is intended to be a celebration of the end of DOMA and a cute nod to the idea that Bert and Ernie are a gay couple, is super offensive to me.

Sesame Street says they're not gay. Specifically, the Children's Television Workshop and the puppeteers themselves have responded on multiple occasions that (variously) they do not have sexual orientations, that they are puppets and not people, that they were based on the relationship between Jim Henson and Frank Oz and are thus a representation of friendship, not of romance, that they are meant to teach children that it is possible to get along with people who are different from us.

I find it annoying that people, especially people who have so worked hard to have their sexual orientation accepted, would be so eager to co-opt somebody else's. It's not like they're in the closet and a certain amount of good-natured taunting is going to get them out. Asked and answered; move on. 

And then there is a part of this that I find really difficult, which is that while I absolutely support the idea that sexual orientation is not a "choice" and that people are "born this way" (whatever way), I do think that discussions of sexuality specifically in terms of children gets into an ugly little area really fast. Bert and Ernie should get to not talk about it, and children should know that this is okay for them too. To be open to the discussion with your own children and/or with other adults is one thing, but to go into the kids' room and start using their toys for your narrative is… well, tacky.

It is okay to be gay. It's okay to be straight. It's okay to be bisexual, asexual, whatever. It's okay to feel like those questions are nobody's business. In my opinion. 

The Jill Lepore article about Jane Franklin was pretty great, though.