Notes from New Yorker staff members on their literary engagements of the week.
I’ve been reading the first issue of Howler, a new magazine devoted to soccer. “Tell someone you want to start a soccer magazine for American fans and this is what you’ll hear,” the inaugural editors’ letter reports. “Do it online. Do it in Spanish. Do it for kids. Have you considered doing it online? You should really think of doing it online?”
I took out a subscription to Howler several months ago as part of a Kickstarter campaign to fund the magazine. I’d pretty much forgotten about it until I opened my mailbox a few weeks ago and found this large (ten by twelve inch), gorgeous print artifact rolled up inside. Surely I hadn’t been expecting a few mimeographed sheets of paper held together with a couple of staples, like a fanzine of old, but I hadn’t anticipated that America’s new magazine for soccer fans would be quite such a testimony to the beauty of print.
It’s also a testimony to the tribal, intensely local nature of soccer—or football—fandom, and to its increasingly global reach. Luke Dempsey’s piece on supporting Manchester United describes what it was like to grow up in the nineteen-seventies as a United fan by right of birth (his father is a Mancunian) when geography dictated that he should, in fact, be a follower of Aston Villa or Wolverhampton Wanderers or any of the other Midlands teams that played closer to his West Midlands home. Dempsey spent his childhood making a case for the purity of his connection to United, which is now among the most followed sports teams in the world. The tension between the possessive nature of the born fan, and the blithe enthusiasm of the late adopter is encapsulated in one quick aside in Dempsey’s piece. “If you’ve watched tribal British football from early childhood, your loyalty is probably going to be about your father and what team he supported. (I have an American friend who picked Chelsea when she came to the sport as an adult, because she had watched them lose the Community Shield in 2006 and ‘always likes to root for the underdog.’ Bless her.)” Howler’s going after both types of reader, and it can result in a certain tension in the magazine—an abundance both of granular detail and of general explanation—but its visual ebullience, and its designers’ ability to exploit every graphic possibility offered by twenty-two figures within a rectangular space, often succeeds in marrying the two approaches.
One of Howler’s constraints—the fact that it’s a quarterly print magazine devoted to a sport in which games, or even a full season, may be over weeks or months before an issue prints and ships—is also one of its virtues. It can escape the day-to-day nature of sports reporting, and instead cover anything from a single goal (the Netherlands’ first goal in the 1974 World Cup Final against West Germany); a game (River Plate’s victory over Almirante Brown on June 23, 2012, which secured its return to the Argentina’s Primera División); a season (European club football of 2011-2012); and a lifetime (thirty-eight years of soccer uniforms, logos, and stadiums in Seattle). As a result, the magazine is constantly re-contextualizing the way in which we think about (and see) soccer. Ryu Voelkel, a Tokyo-born photographer who has taken some of the sport’s most striking images in recent years, writes of a series of his photographs from Italy’s Serie A: “Sports photography is supposed to be in the moment, that’s probably why it’s so boring—because you’re shooting for a moment as a result, to prove that a goal was scored, or that the opposing team is unhappy. It’s my aim to make my soccer photographs so that you can look at them any time. I want them to stand on their own, outside of the context in which I shot them.”
—Cressida Leyshon
“Pops won’t sell the Olmec head!” begins “After the Fall,” by the New Yorker cartoonist Victoria Roberts. It is a project that is variously described as “a novel” (front cover) and as “a picture book for adults” (promotional materials). But I’d argue that “After the Fall” is a charming book for anyone who a) knows that the Olmec were an ancient Mexican civilization, b) is a bedside reader willing to field questions on Mesoamerican history (also: abseiling, Calvert Vaux, Zandunga), or c) is a precocious kid/ill-educated adult happy to store away the word “Olmec” until its true meaning presents itself, in some musty room of the Metropolitan Museum, or elsewhere, later in life.
Here is what is known about Roberts’s hard-to-pin-down creation: “After the Fall” takes about thirty minutes to read, longer if you linger over her hilarious drawings of wild-at-heart pugs, fat men in pajamas, squirrels performing “Hamlet,” etc. It describes a kooky, suddenly insolvent family that, having been booted from their Upper East Side townhouse, ends up living in Central Park, between Seventy-second Street and Seventy-ninth Street, just inside Fifth Avenue, their belongings rather mysteriously arranged exactly as they previously were indoors.
Pops is a stress-eating inventor who favors silk robes. (For lovers of Roberts, this bespectacled, be-schnozzed, bald fellow may look familiar.) Mother is a glam, chain-smoking Argentine who thinks that the Alice in Wonderland statue is “grotesque” and keeps her Eau Impériale by Guerlain submerged in the boat pond so that it stays deliciously cold. Their daughter, “Sis,” aged seven, has a yen for experimental theatre and says things like, “this is so Dickens.” Our narrator, Alan, is the straight-laced and responsible son whose plans to save his family involve getting a job at Schrafft’s.
Fret not: the family isn’t threatened by the sorts of dangers that you or I would face if we moved into the Park (muggers, rapists, death by freezing, starving, bubonic rats, to name a few). Their art collection—Warhol, Kahlo, Rivera, Siqueiros—is safely suspended in a tree. A pair of loyal maids bring pink sweet tamales for breakfast and a local maître d’ stops by each evening with tinfoil swans stuffed with grilled rognons and coq au vin. Everyone sleeps snugly in Pops’ Tempwing-covered shelters.
I have always loved books that I don’t really understand. It is my theory that that which befuddles you, (eventually) makes you smarter. For instance, Faulkner. Or “Eloise,” one of my favorites as a kid, which has passages as confounding as, “Our day maid’s name is Johanna. She has earrings with garnets and is going to take her Social Security to Bavaria on her birthday. One time she saw this man in this hair net and he bawled her out for taking his razor blades.” I’m still not sure I know what that means. But at least now, thanks to Roberts, I sort of understand abseiling.
—Emma Allen
The last time I shared what I was reading, nearly a year ago, I griped about my Nook, which I had recently received as a birthday gift—inciting more ire from blog commenters than I could have ever imagined. Despite being accused of Luddism, I couldn’t bring myself to read anything more on my Nook until last week, when I started Zadie Smith’s “NW.” After fact-checking her New Yorker essay on Joni Mitchell, I was eager to read her latest novel, and since it’s not yet out in paperback, I decided to buy an e-copy instead of lugging around the hardcover. Though I still prefer real, live books, consuming “NW” on an e-reader has not in any way diminished my pleasure in it. I say pleasure and not joy, mindful of the difference after reading (on my iPhone, incidentally, via the Instapaper app) another Zadie Smith essay, from The New York Review of Books, called “Joy.” That essay made me cry—specifically at the painfully (joyfully) romantic point towards the end when she starts to address her husband in the second person:
Anyway, “NW” is an extremely pleasurable read. A big part of what I like about it—in addition to the fact that it tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women, a subject of infinite interest to me—is its sense of place, and its depiction of the specific type of people who come out of a place. It’s set mostly in Willesden Green, a diverse part of Northwest London, where Smith was raised, and, though I can’t say for sure, having never been there, the novel and its characters have an air of authenticity that leads me to believe she hit the nail on the head.
Until recently, I had never read anything that captured my own hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, in such a way. But, before I started “NW,” someone recommended to me William Finnegan’s two-part New Yorker story about a young drug dealer in New Haven, written in 1990. Not only is it one of the most fascinating pieces of reportage I’ve ever read—I’d argue Finnegan managed the astonishing feat of integrating himself into the young man’s family, and becoming a first-person character in the story, without sacrificing his journalistic integrity—it paints a strikingly accurate, poignant picture of where I spent my first eighteen years. I was only four in 1990 and New Haven has been, in some ways, improving steadily since then; moreover, I was lucky enough to be raised in a middle-class, drug-free household. But Finnegan’s teen-age subject was instantly recognizable as someone I could have gone to school with, and the neighborhoods he walked, not far from my own, are places I still often drive through. What’s perhaps most familiar is New Haven’s inherent contradiction: a poor, gritty, diverse urban center built up around one of the most homogenous, exclusive, wealthy universities in the world. Finnegan helped me to understand, for the first time, how it came to be.
—Hannah Goldfield
