Mid-Year Top Ten

Well, we’re slightly past the mid-year point, and I thought it might be fun to look back and pick my ten favorite 2010 New Yorker articles to date. Here they are (note the first three are from the fantastically great April 19th "Journeys" issue):

1. Lauren Collins’s “Angle of Vision”
2. Elif Batuman’s “The Memory Kitchen”
3. Burkhard Bilger’s “Towheads”
4. Susan Orlean's, “Riding High”
5. Alex Ross’s “The Spooky Fill”
6. Tad Friend’s “First Banana”
7. Alec Wilkinson’s “Immigration Blues”
8. Kelefa Sanneh’s “Boxed In”
9. Ben McGrath’s “Strangers on the Mountain”
10. Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills”

Credit: The above artwork is Laurie Rosenwald’s “On The Horizon” illustration, which appeared in the July 12, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.

July 26, 2010 Issue

My idea of a good fight story is one that gives me the whole “going to a fight” experience, makes me feel I’m on a night out. A. J. Liebling’s great “Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove” (The New Yorker, September 29, 1951; also included in his brilliant collection of boxing essays The Sweet Science) creates this feeling. Liebling says, “On the night of the fight, I started out early….” And he proceeds to make his way to the Polo Grounds, first stopping at Sugar Ray’s, which is Sugar Ray Robinson’s bar, for a drink and a bite to eat (“I dined on bourbon and the largest, pinkest pork chops I have ever seen, priced at a dollar-sixty-five”). Liebling describes not only the fight (between Sugar Ray Robinson and Randy Turpin) but also the preliminary bouts, the crowd, the ceremonial entrances, the main event (“Robinson acted like a young, nervous fighter; Turpin, eight years his junior and fighting for the first time in this country, was calm as a Colchester oyster”), a post-fight drink in Harlem, and a cab-ride past Sugar Ray’s. What put me in mind of Liebling’s piece is Kelefa Sanneh’s “Boxed In” in this week’s issue. It’s about the fight between Shane Mosley and Floyd Mayweather. I like the opening scene in which Sanneh takes us to a room on the fifteenth floor of the HBO offices in midtown Manhattan, where three hundred and twenty red boxing gloves are laid out on a conference table for Mosley to sign – part of the promotional campaign for the fight, which is two months off. Mayweather has already signed the gloves with a big, flamboyant autograph that leaves little room for Mosley’s signature. The scene is illustrative of the difference between Mosley and Mayweather: Mosley is unassuming; Mayweather is brash. I also enjoyed Sanneh’s description of a press conference, which involved a mock scuffle between the two fighters. Sanneh stitches a brilliant bit of dialogue into this scene: Mayweather looks at Mosley’s suit and says, “That’s off-the-rack.” And Mosley says right back: “This is custom, right here.” For some reason, that “right here” cracks me up – it sounds so grounded and real. As for Sanneh’s description of the actual fight itself, it’s just so-so in the pungent detail department. Sanneh does throw a great one-two combo when he says, “Mosley could see Mayweather’s punches coming, but he couldn’t move quickly enough to avoid them; in the slow-motion replays, you could sometimes see Mosley watching Mayweather’s fist heading toward him. It’s hell to have something all your life and then not have it.” That last sentence is a great line. It’s the reason I stick with Sanneh’s writing. I just wish he wouldn’t be so shy about putting an “I” in his stories now and then.

July 12 & 19, 2010 Issue

I’ve spent the last couple of days in the stimulating company of Meghan O’Rourke’s writings. She has an interesting piece (“The Unfolding”) in this week’s issue. After I read it, I decided to go back and look at two other items by her that appeared recently in the magazine, namely, her great poem “My Aunts” (April 20, 2009), and her critical piece “Good Grief” (February 1, 2010). O’Rourke is preoccupied with death. She says in “Good Grief” that when her mother died she felt “abandoned, adrift.” “Good Grief” is not directly about O’Rourke’s loss of her mother; it’s an analytical piece about ways of grieving. It looks at Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s “stage theory” and finds that it is largely a fiction. O’Rourke views grief and mourning as “complicated and untidy processes.” Of course, she’s right. How could it be otherwise? Grief is a messy emotion. What I find interesting is that O’Rourke doesn’t delve into the messiness; she stays at a fairly abstract level in this piece. Similarly, in “The Unfolding,” she appears accepting of the oblique approach that Anne Carson employs in her memory book Nox to capture the feelings she experiences flowing from the loss of her brother. “The Unfolding” is a beautifully crafted review of Carson’s Nox. Nox is an unusual book, to say the least. O’Rourke describes it as being “as much an artifact as a piece of writing.” She says, “The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson.” Nox appears to be more like an assemblage than a book. The premise on which Nox seems to rest is that “Michael hides in these images, and the point is that all the words and analytical exercise in the world can’t rescue him.” My response to this is: of course, Michael can’t be “rescued”; but through painstaking description and analysis, could he not be made more specific? In Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, which I am currently (slowly) making my way through, Mendelsohn visits Auschwitz. He finds the concentration camp too much of a “symbol.” He says, “I thought, as I walked its strangely peaceful and manicured grounds … [that] it had been to rescue my relatives from generalities, symbols, abbreviations, to restore them to their particularity and distinctiveness, that I had come on this strange and arduous trip.” Nowhere in O’Rourke’s review of Nox does she quote a description of Michael. She says Carson provides affecting details, “but she doles them out sparingly.” In O’Rourke’s most telling observation, she says, “The photos, the fragments of letters, the scraps of translated language enable her to ‘show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.’” But surely there is a better way to make use of these fragments? O’Rourke calls her piece “The Unfolding,” and I’m sure this refers, at least in part, to the act of opening up the “accordion” notebook inside the Nox box, but it could also describe memory’s sudden unfolding when it is triggered by an encounter with these scrapbook traces. O’Rourke doesn’t say whether Carson uses the traces of Michael contained in Nox as aide-memoire, but I suspect Carson doesn’t use them in this way. She doesn’t want to. O’Rourke quotes Carson as trying to convey “a certain fundamental opacity of human being.” I’m surprised that O’Rourke isn’t more critical of Carson’s opaque, metaphysical approach to writing about loss. Certainly, O’Rourke herself is not inclined this way, at least not in her delightful poem “My Aunts,” which when it came out in The New Yorker last year, I immediately identified as a keeper, clipped it from the magazine and put it in a folder of my favorite New Yorker poems. “My Aunts” is O’Rourke’s attempt to rescue her aging flamboyant aunts (how many is not clear; at least three, I think) from their mortality by representing them in such vivid, bright word imagery that they might live forever, at least in the form of this poem. It’s a breathless twenty-line sprint of exquisitely noticed (and remembered), crazy, funny details: “doing jackknives off the diving board after school”; “They used to smoke in their cars, rolling the windows down and letting their red nails hang out.” It ends in awareness of the aunts’ vitality imperiled by death: “Stop now, before the green comes to cover up your tall brown bodies.” Vitality and mortality, life and loss – these are O’Rourke’s dual themes. As in the midst of life we are in death, so, in “My Aunts,” in the presence of vitality, we feel its ephemeralness.

GOAT

Illustration by Stefanie Augustine

One aspect of the magazine that I absolutely love, but, as yet, have failed to do justice to, is Goings On About Town (GOAT). Well, there’s no time like the present, as they say. Here then is my GOAT tribute. My reading of the magazine always starts with GOAT, not just because it’s located at the front, but because it’s such a great source of pleasure, and it’s easily digestible in small delicious bite-size chunks of text. And it’s not only about the text; the GOAT photos and the GOAT illustrations are an important part of the mix, too. Right now, I have the July 5th issue open before me to the wonderful Julieta Cervantes concert photo of Allen Toussaint. I like this picture so much, I went, in celebration, to iTunes and bought a couple of cuts off Toussaint’s album “The Bright Mississippi,” to wit, “Blue Drag,” and “Solitude.” Cervantes is fairly new to the magazine, but from the evidence so far, I’d say she fits right in. Also in this issue is the lovely pink, green and turquoise Rachel Domm illustration for She & Him at the Beach @ Governors Island and at Terminal 5. It’s a good thing I don’t live in NYC or I’d be spending a fortune taking in all these events. It’s better, at least from a pocket book standpoint, just to read about them in GOAT – read about them and dream. Another marvelous illustration is Stefanie Augustine’s red-plaid, wild-hair portrait of Reggie Watts at (Le) Poisson Rouge. It’s spectacular! It’s also on the magazine’s page where my fine-point, black ink underlining of certain noteworthy passages of the text kicks in. For example, here’s one from the capsule review of the Charles Johnstone show of basketball court photographs: “The geometry of the setup provides a template that each site tweaks with dappled shadows, housing-project walls, or abstract passages of painted-over graffiti.” Writing like that – I eat it up! It must be the surprising word combos that I like so much. I mean when was the last time you saw “geometry,” “template,” “tweaks,” “dappled,” “housing-project,” “abstract,” “graffiti” all rubbing shoulders, jostling for attention, in the same sentence? My soul, it's beautiful! I wonder who wrote it? My guess is that it’s Andrea K. Scott, who has penned some of the most delightful Critic’s Notebook entries recently. Here’s another of my highlighted sentences from July 5th GOAT (actually, this is a sentence-fragment): “with the camera dollying back to reveal the band, in shadow, with spotlights gleaming off the bells of brass instruments and the chrome keys of woodwinds.” My, my, that’s beautiful! And to think Richard Brody, of all people, wrote it (in “DVD Notes: The Fury”)! I’ve been awfully hard on Brody in my comments on his blog. But he deserves it; his attacks (there’s no other word for them) on Pauline Kael are contemptible. Don’t get me started. But every now and then, Brody gets off a gem. Here’s another one he wrote a few months ago in GOAT: “the long, sinuous tracking shots, with expressive vertical accents thanks to a crane, suggest the convergence of expedience (Fuller also produced the film) and boredom with a drama, indeed a genre, in need of juicing.” That’s from a capsule review of Samuel Fuller’s “The Crimson Kimono.” Again, as with the quotation above, it’s the string of unexpected, delectable words (“sinuous,” “vertical,” “crane,” “convergence,” “genre,” “juicing”) – some specific, some abstract - that makes this sentence as ravishing as a Rauschenberg. Each issue of GOAT abounds with succulent details. Dipping into it is like dipping into a box of Godiva chocolates.

July 5, 2010 Issue

Tad Friend already has two pieces in my own personal anthology of great New Yorker articles: “Secret Agent Man” (March 21, 2005) and “Blue-Collar Gold” (July 10 & 17, 2006). And now his wonderful “First Banana,” published in this week’s issue, is going straight into it, too. Like “Blue-Collar Gold,” “First Banana” is about the rise of a particular kind of comedy. In “Blue-Collar Gold” the subject is, well, blue collar comedy. And in “First Banana,” it’s improv comedy. Both pieces fit into a larger theme – unorthodox ways of succeeding in Hollywood – that seems to fascinate Friend and helps him generate some of his best writing. For example, in “Secret Agent Man,” he writes about a Hollywood agent, Dave Wirtschafter, who “hates going out, hates being called bro or dude or buddy or baby, hates ‘Santa Clausing’ clients with gifts, hates schmoozing and toadying – hates all the aspects of being an agent that have traditionally defined the profession.” Yet, he is the president of a talent agency, William Morris Agency, that makes “some two hundred and twenty million dollars a year in commissions.” How Wirtshafter does business is Friend’s story, and it’s a dandy. Similarly, in “Blue-Collar Gold,” the impresario, J. P. Williams, “doesn’t believe much in other people’s rules.” He’s a risk-taker. The story is about how he pushes every button he can think of to get a Larry the Cable Guy movie, in which he has invested all his money, released. And in “First Banana,” the comedian Steve Carrell is portrayed as a second banana who is so good at improvising reactions to other actor’s lines, at a time in Hollywood when improv’d comedy is in the ascendancy, that he’s become a star. Friend doesn’t just say that Wirtshafter, Williams, and Carrell are different. He shows the difference. One of the main ways he does this is through dialogue. Friend has one of the best ears for dialogue in journalism today. For example, here’s Williams on the phone trying to get a loan approved: “Every day this drags on fucks me – someone needs to take a pen and sign their name. Hildi, you bring me to my knees, which I wouldn’t mind if it was in a different context, but in business it scares me! So treat me like the wedding china – I’m fragile and I need you to hold me tight.” And here’s Wirtshafter on working at night: “There’s no fear, because I’m alone, and the only anxiety I have is when I can’t figure out a problem, or if I come up with an idea and can’t communicate it – Blackberrying someone at 2 A.M. is unlikely to get a response. Those seven hours to 9 A.M. are a long time.” And here’s Carrell on improv comedy: “I look at improvising as a prolonged game of chess. There’s an opening gambit with your pawn in a complex game I have with one character, and lots of side games with other characters, and another game with myself – and in each game you make all these tiny, tiny moves that get you to the endgame. Not that your character would remember them all – who keeps track of everything he’s said to everyone? – but you as an actor have to remember everything.” I like the way Friend ends his pieces by giving the subject of his portrait the last word. “Secret Agent Man” ends memorably with Wirtshafter talking about the impossibility of winning everything and the impossibility of being perfect, and then saying, “Still, my inclination is to try.” “Blue-Collar Gold” has a great ending - Williams’s email to a potential buyer: “Pay me or leave me fuck you.” And “First Banana” concludes with Carrell one-upping Mark Rudd with the line, “Knute Rockne used to say that before the big game: ‘Let’s go lay eggs in his brain.’” I know that writing doesn’t come easy for Friend. In the Introduction to his collection Lost In Mongolia (2001), he says, “I resist writing. I resist it for the very good reason that it makes me pace and sigh and gaze despairingly at myself in the mirror. I find writing so painful that my girlfriend is amazed that I am a writer at all.” Nevertheless, notwithstanding his resistance, on the evidence of these three extraordinary pieces – “Secret Agent Man,” “Blue-Collar Gold,” and “First Banana” - he appears to be on quite a roll.

June 28, 2010 Issue

There’s still time for me to read more of the June 28th issue. The July 5th issue hasn’t arrived yet. But … I just can’t seem to get up for it. “Nothing ruins a critic like pretending to care,” says Peter Schjeldahl in the Introduction to his great collection “Let’s See.” I agree. I’m not going to pretend I care about Mike Huckabee, who is the subject of Ariel Levy’s article “Prodigal Son.” I’m not going to pretend I care about Roger Federer, who is the subject of Calvin Tompkin’s piece “Anxiety on the Grass.” I’m definitely not going to pretend I care about something called the “Eurovision Song Contest,” which is, unbelievably, what Anthony Lane chose to write about this week. (Doesn’t Lane know by now that television’s sole purpose is to sell?) And neither am I going to pretend I care about lexical hallucinations, which is the subject of Oliver Sack’s “A Man of Letters.” Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in, but I can’t find much of anything in the magazine this week that tickles my fancy. One exception is James Wood’s wonderful review of Adam Fould’s novel “The Quickening Maze.” When Wood puts his kooky religious theories aside (e.g., the idea that fiction is almost a religious activity) and, instead, looks at writing purely as writing, he is amazingly good – Updike’s successor (no less) as the best reviewer in the world.

Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing"

I first met the genius of Cormac McCarthy in the pages of The Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer, 2005). The encounter was accidental. I’d bought the journal to read a travel piece by Tom Bissell called “A Polar Turn of Mind.” The issue also happened to contain an excerpt from a new novel by Cormac McCarthy. The excerpt was titled "Agua." I read the opening sentence – “Moss sat with the heels of his boots dug into the volcanic gravel of the ridge and glassed the desert below him with a pair of twelve power german binoculars” – and I was hooked. I immediately read the whole piece straight through, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. It seemed to me it was like Hemingway evolved to another level. Not long after, in The New Yorker (July 25, 2005), I read James Wood’s "Red Planet," a review of McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men. Wood didn’t think much of the novel. He called it “an unimportant, stripped-down thriller.” Wood can be a severe critic, but in McCarthy’s case, he gentled his attack with very high praise for some of McCarthy’s other work. For example, he said that McCarthy “has written extraordinarily beautiful prose.” And he also said this, which touches directly on the reason I love McCarthy’s writing: “He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature.” I would go further and say that McCarthy is one of the world’s great nature poets.

This week, I finished reading McCarthy’s The Crossing, which is the second volume of his Border Trilogy. It is filled with descriptions of land, weather, and animals that are, in their exactness, vividness, and felt detail, simply amazing. Here is the night sky: “The earliest stars coined out of the dark coping to the south hanging in the dead wickerwood of the trees along the river.” Here are cattle: “The cows stood their distance and studied them back, a leggy and brocklefaced lot, part mexican, some longhorns, every color.” A horse walking in snow: “The snow in the pass was half way to the horse’s belly and the horse trod down the drifts in high elegance and swung its smoking muzzle over the white and crystal reefs and looked out down through the dark mountain woods or cocked its ears at the sudden flight of small winter birds before them.” The taste of river water: “He led the horse and wolf into the shallows and all three drank from the river and the water was cold and slatey to the taste.” On and on – I bet I could quote a hundred such passages from this great book, all beautifully precise, brilliantly inspired.

McCarthy is also a master at conveying swift, violent action. Here is a brief excerpt from one of the book’s most memorable scenes – the rescue of a wolf from a dog-fighting pit: “He rose and stepped to the iron stake piked in the ground and wrapped a turn of chain about his forearm and squatted and seized the chain at the ring and tried to rise with it. No one moved, no one spoke. He doubled his grip and tried again. The beaded sweat on his forehead shone in the light. He tried yet a third time but he could not pull the stake and he rose and turned back and took hold of the actual wolf by the collar and unsnapped the swivelhook and drew the bloody and slobbering head to his side and stood.” Note the frequent usage of “and” in the aforesaid quote – seven of them in the concluding sentence alone. In his review, Wood says, “His sentences are commaless convoys, articulated only by the Biblical ‘and’.” Wood calls it Biblical; he may be right – I wouldn’t know. I would call it Faulknerian. Consider this passage from Faulkner’s “Old Man”: “Wild and invisible, it tossed and heaved and beneath the boat, ridged with dirty phosphorescent foam and filled with a debris of destruction – objects nameless and enormous and invisible which struck and slashed at the skiff and whirled on.” “And” occurs nine times in that quote. Charles McGrath, in his wretched review of The Crossing, published in The New Yorker (June 27, 1994), says, “Cormac McCarthy may be the last of the great overwriters.” He says, “McCarthy never lets you forget that what you’re reading is writing.” Well, I strongly disagree. Like an over-zealous prosecutor, McGrath uses devious methods to indict McCarthy. For one thing, to provide grounds for the “overwriting” charge, he quotes from McCarthy’s early work. That’s like judging Faulkner solely on the basis of Pylon, and not on his masterpiece The Sound and the Fury. For another, he quickly skates over the magnificent precision of McCarthy’s nature descriptions, preferring instead to dwell on what he calls McCarthy’s “orating and pumping up.” More than anything else, what really seems to bug McGrath about McCarthy is that “he’s uninterested in the kind of heightened clarity that amounts to invisibility in prose” – hence the “overwriting" charge.

My response to McGrath is that McCarthy specializes in narrating action. There is no better action writer than McCarthy. Hemingway seems almost quaint in comparison. The key to McCarthy’s action-writing mastery is his ability to link together successive steps or procedures in amazing fluid sequences that seem to unspool almost in real time. “And” is the linking word par excellence. No writer deploys it better than McCarthy. McGrath is stuck in the Elements of Style school of writing that requires economy and compression if “invisibility in prose” is to be achieved. To me this is an “old school” approach to writing. To be mimetic of the action it describes, writing must move; it must flow, and not lazily either, but with speed. This is what McCarthy’s action sequences do incomparably. I can think of no one writing today – fictionist or non-fictionist - who describes action as well as McCarthy does.

Piecemeal faults might be found with The Crossing. There’s a Felliniesque aspect to some of the scenes (e.g., those involving a traveling opera company and a group of gypsies). But McCarthy’s great gifts deserve great indulgence. It seems to me James Wood said it best when he observed that McCarthy shows a “willingness to stretch the sinew of language with Shakespearian liberality.” Narrow-minded McGrath, clutching his copy of The Elements of Style, would probably reply that Shakespeare was a great overwriter, too.

Credit: The above portrait of Cormac McCarthy is by Mark Ulriksen; it appears in The New Yorker (July 25, 2005) as an illustration for James Wood's "Red Planet."