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~ Posted by Robert Butler, March 22nd 2012

This week's edition of the New Yorker is "the style issue", so I found myself paying particular attention to the magazine's style. The first main feature is about the guys who write hits for Rihanna. It begins:

"On a mild Monday afternoon in mid-January..."

The second main feature is about a guy who wants philanthropy to be sexy. It begins:

"On a recent afternoon in Santa Monica..."

The third main feature is about a guy who is redesigning Las Vegas. It begins:

"On a clear December afternoon..."

On a sunny Thursday afternoon in late March, a blogger sat at his desk on the 10th floor of an office block in central London and wondered if this type of opening sentence might have had its day.

The New Yorker Festival, now in its 12th year, is rather like a New York sandwich bar. There’s so much choice, it’s almost oppressive. 

On opening night, you had to choose between Steve Martin talking about art, Frank Gehry giving a tour of his new skyscraper, Joyce Carol Oates contemplating the dark side, Roland Emmerich screening his new film about Shakespeare, and a debate about war fiction. I put in for Gehry, with no luck; trust a magazine to be tight with the press tickets. So I settled for “Tales out of School: a New Yorker Night with the Moth”. This was fine, because the true star of this three-day extravaganza is not an actor or an architect or a novelist, it’s the New Yorker itself. 

The Moth is an organisation that puts on evenings of storytelling, which may be the new stand-up comedy. Five people from the New Yorker, all male, followed its format, speaking for ten minutes each without notes. The humourist (dread word) Andy Borowitz told the tale of his second and last reporting assignment: waiting ages to grab an interview at a book signing with Sarah, Duchess of York. She uttered one sentence, which was then shot down by the magazine’s near-legendary fact-checkers, who featured in almost every story. Like the dementors in "Harry Potter", they are agents of chaos and misery.  read more »

Recently, in the food issue of  the New Yorker, Burkhard Bilger chronicled the rise of so-called “extreme,” or craft beer in America—about 6% of the market and growing. Bilger framed his piece as a battle between the upstart Dogfish Head brewery, with its adventurous and creative brews, versus the monolithic Budweiser, with its insistence on Teutonic simplicity and consistency (read: tasteless swill). Of greater interest, perhaps, is the evolution of the microbrew-beerpub phenomenon in general: America is returning to its 19th-century roots, offering far more varieties of complex beers, while market forces kill off the more extravagant monstrosities. (I mean, c’mon, unless you’re the chairman of the Hanseatic League or an Estonian bricklayer, do you really need to drink Das Yak Sweat Doppelbock made with ten times the RDA-approved quantity of hops? Seriously.)

Suffice it to say, it’s a good time to be a beer snob in New York City. From the McSorley’s stalwarts to the Barcade regulars, our numbers are swelling, up and down Bleeker Street, in the crevices of Midtown, to Biergartens in Queens and further south in the specialty shops of Brooklyn. It would appear that craft beer has stolen the thunder from $4 coffee and $15 Cosmos as the new drink of choice in these trying times. But where to look?  read more »

I was reading an essay today on Poetry Magazine online--"Information Thy Nemesis is Reverie"--and was particularly struck by the way Ange Mlinko describes Linda Gregg's newish collection of poems "All of it singing":

And so with her language: compressed but unadorned, it recedes into the horizon of what can be called prosody. Almost always ending on a fade rather than a bang, her poems insist on tranquility and evanescence, on instinct over intellect. Seldom does a line or image call attention to itself. You could say, in Gregg's aesthetic, the materiality of words is to be resisted.

Mlinko draws particular attention to the atmospheric "Summer in a Small Town", in which each small word in the poem hangs together to create a languid and lonely sense of place.  read more »