A Private Eye Wink at My Sophistication

Before I came to the United States and had discovered the New Yorker, pinnacle,
as New York Times’s A.O. Scott calls it, of middlebrow sophistication,
I used to read, in London, Private Eye, a most amusing literary monocle,
but have climbed from middlebrow to a much more pretentious elevation,
reading the New York Review of Books and London’s, far more anti-Zionistic,
plus TLS (Times Literary Supplement), and Jewish Review of Books,
not much too much, I hope, to read, with an effect that since it’s synergistic
does not spoil my highbrowness like the broth that’s spoiled by far too many cooks.

Two publications much enjoyed by members of the Jewish online universe
now publish verses I compose, inspired often by the journals that I name above,
enabling me for many unclose readers with my rhymes and reason to converse,
sent them before the deluge like old Noah’s post-diluvian dove.
The brows of both the Jewish Journal and the Times of Israel are in the Jewish middle,
which corresponds to the beinonim who to readers of the Tanya should appeal.
Dear viewers, please enjoy my verse like music that I used to play upon my fiddle,
until by old age made a Yiddel who on fiddles can no longer daily spiel.

***

According to the Tanya by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hasidism, the beinoni is one whose deeds and misdeeds are equally balanced, this being the highest goal that most people are able to reach, since the goal of having a majority of virtues outweighing one’s misdeeds is beyond most people.

In “An Ink-Stained Hymn to the Joy of Print,” A. O. Scott, explaining how Wes Anderson pays antic tribute to the old New Yorker and its far-flung correspondents, writes in the 10//22/21 NYT:

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun is the full name of a weekly periodical that isn’t quite The New Yorker but also isn’t quite not The New Yorker. Its editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr., has a few things in common with Harold Ross and William Shawn, the men who together and sequentially established The New Yorker as a pinnacle of middlebrow sophistication in the decades before and after World War II. Like Ross, Howitzer is from the western part of Middle America (Kansas, rather than Colorado), and like Shawn he’s a soft-spoken perfectionist. Really, though, he’s Bill Murray in a Wes Anderson film, which is to say the ideal grown-up, an embodiment of impish, saturnine charm and eccentric integrity.