Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Reading up the New Yorker

You know how it is with The New Yorker. You love it but the magazine come every week-- cover artwork marred by that mailing label --  and they tend to pile up.

But for some reason I've read a lot of the 2/8 issue and found some very sharp writing.

I'm a John McFee fan but not everything he writes grabs me. His piece on fishing for chain pickerel -- and his fathers death -- did.

"Under each eye, chain pickerel have a black vertical bar , not unlike the black horizontal bars that are painted under the eyes of football players, and evidently for the same reason: to sharpen vision by cutting down on glare. A pickerel's back is forest green, and its sides shade into a light gold that is overprinted with a black pattern of chain links as consistent and uniform as a fence."

Adam Gopnik's "Talk of the Town" on Salinger had some great prose and one jarring bit of jargon, maybe -- self- enclosed writer.  

The good stuff includes a description of Catcher in the Rye as  "the handbook of the adolescent heart."

Finally, a long but rich profile gospel singer Tonéx aka Anthony Charles Williams II.

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