October 25, 2010 Issue

There are two dandy pieces in this week’s issue of the magazine: Ian Frazier’s “Fish Out Of Water,” and Tad Friend’s “Blowback.” I enjoyed them both immensely. “Fish Out Of Water” finds Frazier in Rust Belt country, moseying along the Illinois River, checking out the carp fishing. The story contains some wonderful details: “low-lying parking lots full of river mud cracked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle”; “carp of mint-bright silver”; “Confederate-flag halter tops.” There’s a memorable description of an event called the “Redneck Fishing Tournament,” which contains this inspired sentence: “Crushed blue-and-white Busch beer cans disappeared into the mud, crinkling underfoot.” Here’s another great sentence from later in the story: “Through waving weedbeds of bureaucracy and human cross-purposes, the fish swim.” My response to the story was double. I learned about the Asian-carp invasion and I soaked up Frazier’s delightful prose. The Ralph Steadman illustration accompanying Frazier’s piece is also terrific.

One of the few New Yorker writers in Frazier’s league is Tad Friend. His style is different from Frazier’s. Frazier is a poet of “bleak,” whereas Friend is more a celebrant of suburban bosk. For example, in this week’s “Blowback,” he takes us to Orinda, California, where “the stands of live oaks, valley oaks, pines, redwoods, and mulberries are all as artificial as Lake Cascade, which was created in the nineteen-twenties to irrigate the local golf course.” And he describes a fascinating event called a “‘No Blow’ summit and barbecue” on the Kendall family’s back deck, overlooking Lake Cascade. Reading Friend’s brilliant piece, I experienced the same blissful double response that I’d enjoyed reading Frazier’s article. I related to the issue, namely, the noisy menace of leaf blowers; and I loved the specificity of the writing, particularly sentences such as this one: “He donned his Echo PB-500T backpack blower and earmuffs and blew off the driveway, corralling the leaves into a mound for his two colleagues to collect.”

Interesting Emendations: Sallie Tisdale's "In The Northwest"

The world described in Sallie Tisdale’s great “In The Northwest” (The New Yorker, August 26, 1991) is a world of sensation, seen and described with love and precision:

On sunny days clouds cross the mahogany-colored hills nearby, sliding over the scrubby land like the shadows of huge coasting birds.

The narrow road was a wet black ribbon, like a cooper’s slat, between endless cone-shaped trees.

The bowl of the ladle tingled against my teeth; the water was as cold as ice, and as clear and clean as the high note of a trumpet.

The delicate rose-red lace of the young birch buds hung in halo.

A bridge in a certain light, a glass-walled skyscraper catching sun have a kind of organic virtue, and clear-cuts on a sunny day, from the heights, are warm and brushed to the tender, bare uniformity of suéde.

The Scott was low from a dry winter, the great humped stretches of basalt warm from the sun and smelling of mud and fish.

One of my favorite passages in “In The Northwest” occurs during Tisdale’s vivid recollection of a camping trip that she and three of her friends went on in the Siskiyou Mountains when she was sixteen:

The night leaned in, strong; the firelight was hot and yellow. Outside the flickering dome of light was a soft, sooty dark, and the furry trees were flung in black relief against the sky. We cooked egg noodles in Campbell’s tomato soup and passed a bottle of brandy around. The sweet tomato sauce on the buttery noodles was a feast, the cheap brandy was hot and sharp, and we sang softly what ever came to mind. We huddled under our parkas in the rain, not bothering to crawl into the wet tent, and water fell from our hoods and dropped hissing into the fire. My friends’ faces were shadowed, and their words rose up from under the shelf of coats.

What a limpid, ravishing, sensual piece of writing! I devour it! Interestingly, there is another published version of this passage. You can find it in Tisdale’s book Stepping Westward (1991). It reads as follows:

There were four of us, and the night leaned in, strong; the firelight was hot and yellow and close. Outside the flickering dome of light was a sooty, soft dark. The night was like water to wade through. The furry trees were flung against the sky in black relief. We cooked egg noodles in Campbell’s tomato soup and passed around a bottle of brandy. I remember this now as though I stood outside the light alone watched, and wished I were there, too, by the fire. The sweet tomato sauce on the buttery noodles was our feast, the cheap brandy was hot and sharp, and we sang softly whatever came to mind. We huddled under our hoods in the rain, not bothering to crawl into our moist tents, and water fell off the lids of our hoods and dropped hissing into the fire. My friends’ faces were dark and shadowed, and their words rose from under the shelf of coats.

As you can see, the book’s “the firelight was hot and yellow and close” becomes, in the magazine, “the firelight was hot and yellow”; the book’s “The night was like water to wade through” is deleted from the magazine version; the word order of “sooty, soft dark,” in the book, is changed to “soft, sooty dark” in the magazine; the sentence “The furry trees were flung against the sky in black relief,” in the book, is, in the magazine, joined with the previous sentence and changed to “the furry trees were flung in black relief against the sky”; the word order of “passed around a bottle of brandy,” in the book, is changed, in the magazine, to “passed a bottle of brandy around”; the sentence “I remember this now as though I stood outside the light alone watched, and wished I were there, too, by the fire,” in the book, is deleted from the magazine; “and water fell off the lids of our hoods,” in the book,” is changed to “and water fell from our hoods” in the magazine; “My friends’ faces were dark and shadowed,” in the book, is changed to “My friends’ faces were shadowed,” in the magazine.

I’m assuming the book version was written first, and then edited when it was turned into the magazine article. Tisdale obviously liked her original version well enough to retain it for the book. Both versions are wonderful, but I prefer the more compressed New Yorker piece; it seems more poetic. Comparison of the two versions is a lesson in artful pruning.

October 18, 2010 Issue

No writer I know of deploys “drench,” or variations thereof, to greater effect than Peter Schjeldahl. In his great essay, “Our Kiefer” (included in his 1991 collection The Hydrogen Jukebox), he says, “Kiefer’s Pollockian machines – with their heart-grabbing yellows, blacks, and browns that affect like tastes, sounds, and smells and their incorporation of photographs that drench the mind in tones of memory – evoke a quasi-religious feeling of delicious, melancholy, slightly masochistic abasement before sheer ancientness.” This is without a doubt one of the most gorgeous sentences I’ve ever read. It is Schjeldahl at his sensuously responsive best. Here’s another of his “drench” descriptions - this from his review “America” (The New Yorker, April 17, 1999; collected in Let’s See, 2008), in which he says of Arshile Gorky, “He developed drenchingly songful modes of abstracted thicknesses and thinnesses …” My god, I find that ravishing! And now, in Schjeldahl’s “Big Bang,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, he’s at it again, this time in an exquisite description of Barnett Newman’s “Vir Heroicus Sublimis”: “the painting is as drenching and as elevating as an organ chord in Bach.” I eat it up! His magnificent “organ chord” analogy set off a reverberation in my memory. He’s used it before. His celebratory review of the 2006 Betty Woodman retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, a review inexplicably missing from Let's See, contains this memorable description of the color in Woodman’s vase “Portugal”: “an indigo like an organ chord, at once rumbling and clarion”: see "Decoration Myths" (The New Yorker, May 15, 2006). I love Schjeldahl’s writing. But I have to wonder if he’s becoming just a shade too mellow these days. In “Big Bang,” he reviews MOMA’s “Abstract Expressionist New York,” which you would think, if it’s going to put Abstract Expressionism on full show, would contain lots of de Kooning and lots of Joan Mitchell. In “Big Bang,” Schjeldahl calls de Kooning “the all-time best of the American painters,” and in a previous review (“Tough Love: Joan Mitchell,” The New Yorker, July 15, 2002; also in Let’s See), he calls Mitchell “not just the best of the so-called second-generation Abstract Expressionists – a status already hers by common consent – but a great modern artist.” According to “Big Bang,” there are only four de Koonings in the MOMA show, and only one Mitchell. This seems to me to constitute a major fault in the show. Yet Schjeldahl glosses over it, saying only that the curator, Ann Temkin, “is candid about how the tastes of her forbears at MOMA account for the paucity of works” by de Kooning and Mitchell. How is it that this palace of high art failed to recognize and seriously collect two of the greatest Abstract Expressionists? Schjeldahl doesn’t say. He calls the show “terrific.” I’m wondering if he’s losing his critical edge.

October 11, 2010 Issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg’s lyrical reconstruction of Buffalo’s East Side, as it was in 1947 (see my “Interesting Emendations” post here ), was still fresh in my mind when I opened this week’s issue of the magazine and found an article with the heading “Letter From Buffalo.” The article, called "Pay Up," is by Jake Halpern. It’s about a small-time debt collector named Jimmy, and it describes a present-day Buffalo that is very different from Klinkenborg’s pulsing, thriving post-war metropolis. In 1947, Buffalo was, in Klinkenborg’s words, “still an outpost of the big time.” In 2010, Buffalo is, in Halpern’s words, “among the poorest cities in the nation.” Halpern hangs out with Jimmy, drives around with him in what Jimmy calls his “raggedy-ass truck,” visits Jimmy’s office, which is located in a former karate academy “on a busy thoroughfare in a rough area,” meets his oldest son, Jimmy, Jr., whom Jimmy had once beaten, goes to church with him, meets a friend who runs a soul-food restaurant, is present at Jimmy’s office for what’s known in the debt collection business as a “talk-off,” which Halpern vividly describes. Halpern writes a plain, point-and-shoot prose that eschews similes and metaphors. At least that’s the way he’s written “Pay Up.” I’m not familiar with his other work. His strong suit appears to be dialogue, and in Jimmy he’s found a street-smart, loquacious talker. Here is Jimmy talking about raising his young set of twins on his own, because their mother was serving a four-year sentence in jail:

“‘Man, I was Mr. Mom,’ he recalled. ‘I’m breaking down crying, ironing these little-bitty-ass pants at five o’clock in the morning, trying to get these kids ready for school. Like, man, if you let them oversleep they going to have a rough day, man. You got to get them up. That was worse than any street situation I was in, but the reward was so good, man.’”

And here is one of Jimmy’s “point callers,” a former crack dealer named Jamal, describing Jimmy: “‘Jimmy was never the kind of person you fucked with, and he still ain’t,’ Jamal explained. ‘Don’t take his kindness for weakness. The street shit is always going to be in you.’” If you put priority on reality over theory, as I do, you are going to appreciate Halpern’s “Pay Up.” It delivers you exactly into the rub of things. (“Man, you right in the underbelly of it,” Jimmy says to Halpern, at one point in their travels through the Bailey-Delavan area, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Buffalo.) Halpern’s piece reminds me of Ian Frazier’s "The Rap" (The New Yorker, December 8, 2008), except it doesn’t have Frazier’s descriptive artistry. There are no inspired sentences in “Pay Up” like this one, for example, in “The Rap”: “Railroad tracks in a sunken road cut run along-side, and the wider neighborhood offers auto junk yards of crashed vehicles with their air bags deployed, vast no-name warehouses, and chain-link fences grafted to thickets of ailanthus trees.” But "Pay Up" has its own merits, not least of which is its realism. It's a realist's raw variation on Klinkenborg's gorgeous elegy for a once great city.

Interesting Emendations: Verlyn Klinkenborg's "George & Eddie's"

The blurb on the back of the paperback edition of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s The Last Fine Time (1991) says it is a “tour de force of lyrical style.” That’s the way it struck me when I read the New Yorker version of it, called “George & Eddie’s,” when it appeared in the magazine’s December 24, 1990 issue. “George & Eddie’s” is a recreation of Buffalo’s East Side, circa 1947, right down to “the milk-glass bulbs of the street lamps, mounted on shapely iron posts.” My favorite passage is the part about the insurance atlases. Klinkenborg ingeniously uses insurance atlases of the period – “immense bound volumes that plot the distribution of indemnity and risk” – to introduce us to 722 Sycamore Street, home of the Wenzek family and location of the Thomas Wenzek Restaurant, soon to become George & Eddie’s bar. Klinkenborg says, “For the East Side of Buffalo in 1947, such atlases seem to have whole chapters of two-and-a-half-story frame buildings, all rendered in outline from a serial aerial view.” The insurance atlases help Klinkenborg call up the past by sparking his imagination, not by what’s in them, but by what is absent. Klinkenborg says:

But the atlases do not record the presence of large, graceful elms in East Buffalo, or the way the streets were edged with square stone curbs, whose cutting and laying were the fiefdom of a potent Italian union. They do not mention the bricks that ran between the streetcar tracks, or the rumble the bricks caused when trucks crossed them, or the slithering roar of the streetcars themselves. They say nothing about the markets and the parks and the dusty shopfronts. From the records it is impossible to learn that the acres of two-and-a-half-story frame houses on Buffalo’s East Side had long since cohered into a Polish neighborhood, where each house was bound to the houses around it by an incalculable number of associations – associations that in many cases reached back past the Atlantic voyage, past the crowded North Sea docks, and into the partitioned Old Country itself.

How wonderful those details about the “rumble of the bricks” and the “slithering roar of the streetcars.” It is the achievement of this lovely piece to bring the insurance atlases to life. Klinkenborg makes the Wenzek’s lives specific, bringing us close to their lived experience, thereby rescuing them from oblivion. He has a profound sense of life’s transience. At one point, he says, “Though no one sees the change coming, it surrounds them, in small ways as yet.” Interestingly, The Last Fine Time contains a different version of the above-quoted “insurance atlases” passage. Here is the passage as set out in the book:

Insurance atlases of the period do not record the presence of large, graceful trees in East Buffalo, or the way the streets were edged with square stone curbs, whose cutting and laying were the fiefdom of a potent Italian union. They do not mention the bricks that ran between the streetcar tracks or the rumble they caused when trucks turned across them or the slithering roar of the streetcars themselves. They say nothing about the markets and the parks and the dusty shopfronts. Nowhere do you find it written that this was part of town where a woman’s hands smelled different every day of the week – lye soap one morning, the next morning flour. From their commentary it is impossible to learn how the acres of two-and-a-half-story wood frame houses that rose up like a climax forest years ago had long since cohered into a Polish neighborhood, where each house was bound to the houses around it by an incalculable, and undelineable, number of associations – associations that in many cases reached past the Atlantic voyage, past the crowded North Sea docks and their rail connections, and into the absorbent landscape of the partitioned Old Country itself. According to insurance maps, the only thing the houses of the East side could communicate was flame.

The Last Fine Time is a filled-out version of “George & Eddie’s.” It’s as if “George & Eddie’s” was a preliminary sketch for the later book. Did Klinkenborg carve it out of The Last Fine Time manuscript? Or was it a preliminary draft on which he based the later book? My guess is that the book came first. I say this because of such indicators as the changing of “trees” and “turned across” in the book to “elms” and “crossed” in the magazine, and the deletion of “that rose up like a climax forest years ago,” “undelineable,” “and their rail connections,” “the absorbent landscape,” and the whole sentence about a woman’s hands smelling "different every day of the week" from the magazine version. To my mind, the tighter, crisper New Yorker version is preferable, although the more luxuriant book version better conveys Klinkenborg’s lyrical intensity. And in the book (but not in the magazine) there’s a paragraph that precedes the one above-quoted that contains the following additional beautiful description of the insurance atlases, a description that also works as a statement of Klinkenborg’s artistic purpose:

Here, from some supernal height, is visible the universal grid of urban living, as delicate a tracery as the lace on a christening gown. The tiniest squares are houses, every house an invisible suite of rooms through which daylight crawls and the smells of cooking percolate like moods. The feeling they stir comes from knowing that private life is a grave of incident – once lived, soon forgotten – and from trying to imagine the incidents of so many private lives without submitting to generalities. It is a feeling like compassion, but it also resembles the faith that existence is too varied, too ample, to be contained.

October 4, 2010 Issue

Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Scholar,” in this week’s issue, is dull and lifeless. I don’t mean just the subject matter is dull and lifeless; I’m talking about the writing, too. In fact, I’m talking especially about the writing. Lots of articles in the magazine are about subjects I find uninteresting, but I read them anyway for the writing, purely as writing. And great writing can bring even the most unpromising material to life: see, for example, Nicholson Baker’s recent piece on video games. But there isn’t an inspired line in “The Scholar.” It’s a workmanlike assemblage of quotations, mostly from court documents, about a fraud case. The magazine labels it an “Annals of Law” piece, but there’s scarcely any law in it. Toobin seldom enters the narrative frame. At one point, about two-thirds of the way through the piece, when he says, “I went to Alaska in August and, one morning soon after my arrival, Harris told me to go to the lobby of my hotel, where I would be met and taken to see Yould,” I perked up and started reading with more attention, hoping for a vivid description, a scrap of physical detail, an unusual word combination – something writerly. Instead, this is what Toobin provides: “We entered through a side door and went into what looked like a downscale corporate apartment, with generic furniture and without personal touches.” Unlike Calvin Trillin’s “Annals of Crime” pieces, Toobin's story fails to give us any sense of place. Unlike Janet Malcolm’s great “Iphigenia In Forest Hills” (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010), his article fails to capture and convey the court atmosphere. Toobin was, at one time, a government lawyer. He’s written a mildly interesting account of the experience called “Opening Arguments” (1991). In “The Scholar,” he’s still very much the government lawyer, ever skeptical of the defendant’s arguments. It doesn’t make for much of a story if all we are getting is a plain language version of the government’s case. Yet, that is what “The Scholar” delivers. Toobin concludes well before the judge does that “There is, in fact, very little evidence to corroborate her claims of abuse and harassment, especially in recent years.” The story answers its own tagline – “She was brilliant. Was she a fraud?” – with a resounding yes, guilty as charged. I think the real problem with “The Scholar,” aside from the lack of inspired writing, is that Rachel Yould is too easy a target. Her guilt appears open and shut. She's even pleaded guilty. So why are we reading about her? So we can feel morally superior? So we can look down on her and judge her? Well, there’s damn little reading pleasure in that for me. Sometimes I wonder if Toobin missed his calling. He’s more a judge than he is a writer.

Arthur Penn (September 27, 1922 - September 28, 2010)

This is my tribute to Arthur Penn, director of the landmark movie “Bonnie and Clyde,” who died September 28, 2010. I first saw “Bonnie and Clyde” when I was fourteen. It was 1967; my father and I went to see it at the old Kent Theatre in Saint John, N.B. It was my first encounter with an art film, although I didn't think of it that way at the time. All I knew, leaving the theatre that night, was that I’d seen something astonishing – not just the violence, which is what everyone was talking about, but the slow-motion ending and the acting, yes, above all the acting, particularly the performances of the supporting cast: Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Michael J. Pollard, and Gene Wilder. Going into that movie, if you’d asked me to name a movie director, any movie director, about the only one I might’ve come up with is Alfred Hitchcock. But leaving the Kent that long-ago evening (this is sounding more and more like nostalgia, I realize, but when you reach my age, what isn’t nostalgia?), I’d learned the name of another director, a name that I would never forget: Arthur Penn. For me the idea of a director’s movie begins with Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” His later pictures don’t come close to achieving “Bonnie and Clyde” ’s impact; there’s a great dropping off. But that’s irrelevant. Penn lives in one work, “Bonnie and Clyde”, and it is, as Pauline Kael says, “a work of art.” My encounter with it initiated me into the world of movies; for the next twenty years, I was a movie obsessive. The New Yorker has published two wonderful pieces about “Bonnie and Clyde”: Kael’s magnificent defence of it, entitled “Bonnie and Clyde” (October 21, 1967; included in her collections “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and “For Keeps”) and Louis Menand’s excellent “Paris, Texas” (February 17 & 24, 2003), which traces the French New Wave sources of the movie. Rereading these two great essays provides the pleasure of recalling the excitement of seeing "Bonnie and Clyde" for the first time. They remind me, too, of the genius of the man who directed it.