“Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. Once I'd enter his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain.”

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem - “Did I read The New Yorker? This...” 1

Similar quotes

“Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.”

Robert Moses
Read more

“The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I Am Not A Virginian, But An American!”

Patrick Henry
Read more

“Leave it to a New Yorker to put a bunch of trees in one place and call it wonderful.”

M.K. Hobson
Read more

“New Yorkers, I figured, just pretended to be unfriendly.”

Jeannette Walls
Read more

“Maybe it's wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people.[as quoted in "Brain Gain" by Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 4/27/09 issue]”

Paul McHugh
Read more