The Good . . . .

Here are my picks for this month’s best bits of writing.

In the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl, reviews a “Degas and the Nude,” a “wonderful and weird show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.”

Viewing his work, we breathe the dizzyingly thin air on the snowy peak of the capital “A” in Art.

Paul Krugman, my favorite NYT columnist, apparently never sleeps: In addition to writing a twice-weekly column, he does Nobel Prize-winning work in economics and manages to update his blog five or six times a day. He is also an excellent writer who has come up with the best description of the federal government I’ve ever read. Pointing out that the money lost in the Solyndra debacle amounts to “a rounding error on a rounding error,” he writes that “the vast bulk of . . . spending goes to the big five: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and interest on the debt.” The clincher:

Your federal government is basically an insurance company with an army.

In an article in the UK newspaper The Guardian, author Will Self recounts his experience with a rare blood disease. The personal essay also delves into his history of intravenous drug use, and is far grittier than anything a U.S. paper would run. His language reflects his state of mind without being cutesy or using puns. He describes a skyscraper as

“. . . a vast hypodermic needle lancing up into the cloudy tissue of the sky.”

Adam Kirsch, writing on H.G. Wells in the New Yorker:

A malnourished childhood had left him short and slight, until he became short and stout with age.

Dan P. Lee’s article in New York Magazine describes Harold Camping’s life in the aftermath of the non-apocalypse. Two of his sentences stand out for the terrific, descriptive word choice:

The Bible is perfect—the literal word of God—infallible and utterly precise,” 89-year-old Harold Camping reminded them each weeknight, his slow, sonorous voice spilling from radios across the world.

At any minute, he was sure, trumpets would sound as Jesus Christ, flocked by angels, surfed the billowing clouds.

James Wood, writing in the New Yorker on Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty, pairs an elegant sample of prose with his own analysis:

“Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak violet heights.” We can suddenly see the twilit sky of a big city afresh, and the literary genius is obviously centered in the unexpected strength of the adjective “weak,” which brings alive the diminishing strata of the urban night sky, overpowered by the bright lights on the ground. The effect is paradoxical, because we usually associate heights not with weakness but with power or command.

Those were the highlights of the month. Moving on . . . .