Best of 2010

From 2010’s rich yield of New Yorker writings, I have chosen ten favorites. I list them below and parenthesize a passage in each that strikes me as particularly inspired.

1. Susan Orlean’s “Riding High,” February 15 & 22, 2010 (“I wandered around the stalls, the soft sounds of snuffling and chewing and the occasional thump of a hoof as it hit the wood floor filling the air, and then made my way over to the auction ring.”)

2. Elif Batuman’s “The Memory Kitchen,” April 19, 2010 (“The bitter edge of sumac and pomegranate extract, the tang of tomato paste, and the warmth of cumin, which people from the south of Turkey put in everything, recalled to me, with preternatural vividness, the kisir that my aunt used to make.”)

3. Lauren Collins’s “Angle of Vision,” April 19, 2010 (“Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.”)

4. Burkhard Bilger’s “Towheads,” April 19, 2010 (“As we pulled out of the harbor on my second morning, wind was rising. It lofted flocks of frigate birds and pelicans high above the tug, then plunged them down again on scything wings.”)

5. Nicholson Baker’s “Painkiller Deathstreak,” August 9, 2010 (“You’ll see an edge-shined, light-bloomed, magic-hour gilded glow on a row of half-wrecked buildings and you’ll want to stop for a few minutes just to take it in.”)

6. Ian Frazier’s “On the Prison Highway,” August 30, 2010 (“Now the place existed only nominally in present time and space; the abandoned camp was a single preserved thought in a dead man’s mind.”)

7. Nick Paumgarten’s “The Merchant,” September 20, 2010 (“Sometimes, little brushfires of conversation erupt, and Drexler snaps his fingers and extinguishes them.”)

8. Ian Frazier’s “Fish Out of Water,” October 25, 2010 (“Crushed blue-and-white Busch beer cans disappeared into the mud, crinkling underfoot.”)

9. Tad Friend’s “Blowback,” October 25, 2010 (“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.”)

10. Gay Talese’s “Travels with a Diva,” December 6, 2010 (“At one point, she held a note for ten seconds, and it cut like a diamond sabre right through the sounds of a hundred choral singers and a hundred instrumentalists.”)

Honorable Mention: John McPhee’s “The Patch” (February 8, 2010); Jon Lee Anderson's "Neighbor's Keeper" (February 8, 2010); Ben McGrath’s “Strangers on the Mountain” (March 1, 2010); Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” (May 3, 2010); Calvin Trillin’s “Incident in Dodge City” (May 10, 2010); Alex Ross’s, “The Spooky Fill” (May 17, 2010); Alec Wilkinson’s, “Immigration Blues” (May 24, 2010); Tad Friend’s “First Banana” (July 5, 2010); Kelefa Sanneh’s “Boxed In” (July 26, 2010); Dana Goodyear’s “The Truffle Kid” (August 16 & 23, 2010); John McPhee’s “Linksland and Bottle” (September 6, 2010); Rebecca Mead’s “Adaptation” (September 27, 2010); David Denby’s “Influencing People” (October 4, 2010); Jake Halpern’s, “Pay Up” (October 11, 2010); Alec Wilkinson’s “Long Time Coming” (November 15, 2010); Chang-rae Lee’s “Magical Dinners” (November 22, 2010); James Wood’s “The Fun Stuff” (November 29, 2010); Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Flip Side” (November 29, 2010)

Credit: The illustration I’ve chosen for this “Best of 2010” is Laurie Rosenwald’s great “Picasso’s Guitars” from the December 13, 2010 issue.

December 20 & 27, 2010 Issue

This week in the magazine, in a piece called "Chronicles and Fragments," James Wood reviews Ismail Kadare’s novel The Accident. Reading it, I recalled John Updike’s review of Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone (“Chronicles and Processions,” The New Yorker, March 14, 1988; included in Updike’s 1991 collection Odd Jobs). Wood looks at Chronicle in Stone in his piece, as well. To my knowledge, this is one of the few times these two great critics have reviewed the same book, so it’s interesting to compare their approaches.

Kadare’s story is set in the medieval city of Gjirokastër in southern Albania during the Second World War. The city is real, but the way that the novel’s young narrator describes it, it’s also magical. Updike, in his piece, says: “A child’s self-centered, metaphoric way of seeing generates a constant poetry.” You can tell from the passages Updike quotes that it’s the poetry of the story that delights him. For example, he quotes Kadare's descriptions of roofs ("grey slates like gigantic scales), customs (brides' faces are decorated with "starlike dots, cypress branches, and signs of the zodiac, all floating in the white mystery of powder"), and city life ("Again the tender flesh of life was filling the carapace of stone").

Wood, in his review, doesn’t mention the poetic qualities of Kadare’s writing. Instead, it’s the comedic aspects of Chronicle in Stone that catch his attention. For example, Wood says, “War arrives, in the form of Italian bombing, British bombing, and, finally, the dark rondo whereby Greek and Italian occupiers arrive and depart from the stage like vicars in an English farce.” He says that in the story, “the memory of the past is regularly burlesqued.” He quotes a passage from the novel describing disoriented Crusaders marching past Gjirokastër, and says,

There is something Monty Pythonish about the Crusaders, miles-off-course, demanding to see the Holy Sepulchre, and the link to the hopelessness of the modern soldiers is deftly made. The city stands stonily against the new invaders, as it always has: that is Kadare’s own “chronicle in stone.”

Both critics admire the way Kadare blends legend and reality. Wood likens Kadare to José Saramago, and says they’re both “post-modern traditionalists.” Updike also refers to Saramago. He compares Chronicle in Stone to Saramago’s Baltasar and Blimunda, and finds that the two books sharply contrast. He finds that Kadare’s ghosts, fables, magic, etc. are “rendered, through a child’s eyes, intimate and familiar"; whereas, he sees Saramago’s “exotica” (e.g., ceremonies, pageants, and processions) as having a “stiff, brocaded quality” and an “embellished opacity” that translates into “novelistic inertness, a frozen tableau.”

Saramago’s writing style is a subject about which Wood and Updike hold deeply divergent views. For example, Wood likes Saramago’s run-on style. He has called Saramago’s labyrinthine sentences “extraordinary” (see Wood’s great “Death Takes A Holiday,” The New Yorker, October 27, 2008). However, what Wood deems extraordinary, Updike considers merely “gabby” (see Updike’s equally great “Two's a Crowd,” The New Yorker, September 27, 2004; collected in Updike’s 2007 Due Considerations). I find their conflicting viewpoints regarding Saramago fascinating. It goes to a fundamental psychoanalytical difference between them: Updike is a narrator; Wood distrusts narration. His preferred form, his “ideal sentence” (see Wood’s “The Fun Stuff,” The New Yorker, November 29, 2010) resembles free-association. Someday, I’d like to explore this subject further.

For now, I’ll conclude simply by noting that Wood’s “Chronicles and Fragments” and Updike’s “Chronicles and Processions” are both excellent. Comparing them, I think Updike is better at conveying the texture of Kadare’s prose; Wood is better at elucidating Kadare’s meaning.

Credit: The above portrait of Ismail Kadare is by Riccardo Vecchio; it appears in this week's New Yorker as an illustration for James Wood's "Chronicles and Fragments."

Interesting Emendations: Elif Batuman's "The Ice Renaissance"

To gain insight into Elif Batuman’s compositional process, I want to compare her “The House of Ice,” included in her excellent recent essay collection The Possessed, with an earlier version, “The Ice Renaissance,” published in The New Yorker, May 29, 2006. Both pieces tell the story behind a replica of Empress Anna Ioannovna’s ice palace built in downtown St. Petersburg, but each tells it in a different way. The magazine article is all historical facts told in the third person for most of its five thousand words, whereas the longer book version is narrated in the first person and is much more immediate and personal. It shows Batuman arriving in St. Petersburg (“Copious, fine-grained snow gusted and swirled through the night skies, rattling against the windows of the taxi”), describes her hostel room (“A chandelier hung from the ceiling – not from the center of the ceiling, but almost in a corner, like a sleeping bat”), takes us on a visit to a workshop for the restoration of eighteenth-century clocks at the Hermitage (“Grandfather clocks lined the walls, doors ajar, like recently evacuated coffins”), describes a dinner that Batuman and her friend Luba had with an eighty-four-year-old literary translator that consisted of “egg salad, black bread, and rassolnik (a soup made with pickles and brine).” It even lets us in on Batuman pitching the ice palace story to The New Yorker (“The New Yorker conceded that it might be nice to have a ‘Postcard from St. Petersburg’ about the ice palace – but only so long as I was ‘already going to be in Petersburg anyway’”). In many ways, “The House of Ice” is the story of how the “The Ice Renaissance” came to be written, and I much prefer it.

While there are many scenes and details in “The House of Ice” that are not in “The Ice Renaissance,” there is a core of material, e.g., the history of the original 1740 ice palace, the description of the 2006 replica, that is common to both articles. But there are interesting differences between the two pieces in the way this material is written. For example, in the magazine version, the giant hollow ice elephant that was part of the original frozen palace is described as follows:

Connected by pipes to the Admiralty Canal, the elephant had a trunk that spouted water twenty-four feet in the air; at night the water was replaced by flaming oil. The elephant could trumpet just like a real one by means of a man sitting inside, blowing into a pipe.

In the book version, the “ice elephant” passage is worded slightly differently:

The elephant’s trunk, connected by pipes to the Admiralty Canal, spouted water twenty-four feet in the air. At night the water was replaced by flaming oil. The elephant could trumpet in a highly realistic fashion, thanks to a man sitting inside, blowing into a trumpet.

I find the variation between these two passages fascinating. Notice that the New Yorker passage consists of two sentences, whereas the book version changes the semi-colon after “air” into a period, resulting in three sentences. Notice that the pipe connection in the magazine version is with the elephant; in the book version, it’s with the elephant’s trunk. Notice the simpler “just like a real one” in the New Yorker version, as compared to the book version’s “in a highly realistic fashion,” which is a bit more of a mouthful. And notice also that in the New Yorker passage, the man blows into a pipe; in the book, he blows into a trumpet. Overall, I’d have to say that I like the New Yorker version better; it’s simpler, more fluid and avoids the repetition of “trumpet” in the last sentence.

Let’s look at another example. Here is the magazine version’s description of the interior of the original ice palace:

With the exception of a few real playing cards frozen to an ice table, everything in the palace was ice. The doorframes and window frames had been dyed to resemble green marble. There was a dressing table with an ice “mirror” and a canopy bed with pillows, blankets, slippers, and nightcaps. On shelves and tables were cups, saucers, plates, cutlery, wineglasses, and figurines; several pocket watches and table clocks had visible mechanisms: cogs and gears cut from ice.

Here is the book version’s description of the ice palace interior:

With the exception of a few real playing cards, frozen into an ice table, everything in the palace was made of ice, some of it dyed to resemble other materials. The bedroom was equipped with a dressing table, “mirror,” canopy bed, pillows, blankets, slippers, and nightcaps. On shelves and tables stood cups, saucers, plates, cutlery, wineglasses, figurines, and even transparent pocket watches and table clocks, with dyed cogs and gears.

I love this passage. Either version is fine, but the specificity of the New Yorker’s “The doorframes and window frames had been dyed to resemble green marble,” as compared to the book’s “everything in the palace was made of ice, some of it dyed to resemble other materials,” strikes me as more vivid, as does “ice ‘mirror’” (magazine) instead of just “‘mirror’” (book) and “cogs and gears cut from ice” (magazine), instead of “dyed cogs and gears” (book). It makes you wonder what accounts for these differences. If the book version came first, why didn’t Batuman rewrite the above passages to retain the New Yorker edits? In the alternative, if the New Yorker version came first, why did Batuman decide to rewrite them for the book?

Whatever the explanation, it’s pleasing to note that the loveliest passage in “The Ice Renaissance” – one that evinces the superbness of Batuman’s work when she’s writing in the descriptive mode – makes it into “The House of Ice” unchanged:

What appeared to be a Renaissance marble angel had been sculpted from snow, as had two albatross-size songbirds perched atop two hearts. In the corner hulked a massive snow wedding cake, and staring impassively at the cake was a life-size, bluish Anna Ioannovna, shimmering in her throne like some sort of hologram.

Well, actually, now that I look more closely, I see there is one tiny amendment. “The House of Ice” version changes “shimmering in her throne” to “shimmering on her throne.” I wonder what meaning Batuman was trying to get at when she used “in” in the New Yorker version – maybe that the ice sculpture of the Empress and the ice sculpture of the throne had melted together such that Ioannovna appeared more in the throne than on it?

The Social Network: Denby v. Smith v. Wood

Just for fun, I want to compare three reviews of “The Social Network”: David Denby’s “Influencing People” (The New Yorker, October 4, 2010); Michael Wood’s “At the Movies” (London Review of Books, November 4, 2010); and Zadie Smith’s “Generation Why?” (The New York Review of Books, November 25, 2010).

I’ll be guided in my analysis by Anthony Lane’s view that “The primary task of the critic, (and nobody has surpassed the late Ms. Kael in this regard), is the recreation of texture – not telling movie-goers what they should see, which is entirely their prerogative, but filing a sensory report on the kind of experience into which they will be wading, or plunging, should they decide to risk a ticket” (from Lane’s Introduction to his great collection of New Yorker writings Nobody’s Perfect, 2002).

Denby starts his review excitedly, proclaiming “The Social Network” to be a “work of art.” He engages in some interesting interpretation (e.g., “‘The Social Network’ suggests that we now treat one another as packets of information”), and lays out an excellent overview of Fincher’s previous work. Along the way, he provides some wonderful, semi-abstract descriptions of the movie (“a tightly fitted mosaic of agitated fragments,” “a linear accelerator that breathes”). But it’s not until near the review’s end that his prose reaches its highest pitch, when he tries to get at what it is that gives Fincher movies their distinctive look:

Even Fincher’s patented junk and mess, first seen in “Alien 3” and then, in the rubbishy, derelict rooms in “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” has a perversely attractive appeal, a glowing awfulness, as if it were lit from within. He doesn’t hide the disintegrating walls, the sordid beds; we are meant to see the ugly poetry in them.

Denby’s insight – “we are meant to see the ugly poetry” – leads him to write what is, I believe, the most inspired line in his review:

The scenes of the Winklevosses in their boat, crisply cutting through the water, are ineffably beautiful; the twins are at ease in their bodies and in nature, while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in.

Zadie Smith’s “Generation Why?” is not so much a review of “The Social Network” as it is a rant against the evils of Facebook. She argues that Facebook is reductive (“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility”). She contends that it’s degrading (“In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is degrading”). She claims it encourages pack mentality (“But the pack mentality is precisely what Open Graph, a Facebook innovation of 2008, is designed to encourage”).

Smith likes “The Social Network” because (1) it’s a recognizable portrait of “a computer nerd, a social autistic” (“Oh, yeah. We know this guy. Over-programmed, furious, lonely”), and (2) it satirizes Generation Facebook’s “celebrity lifestyle” vision of the good life. Smith’s description of this vision is one of the great pleasures of her piece:

Again, we know its basic outline; a velvet rope, a cocktail waitress who treats you like a king, the best of everything on tap, a special booth of your own, fussy, tiny expensive food (“Could you bring out some things? The lacquered pork with the ginger confit? I don’t know, tuna tartar, some lobster claws, the foie gras and the shrimp dumplings, that’ll get us started”), appletinis, a Victoria’s Secret model date, wild house parties, fancy cars, slick suits, cocaine, and a “sky’s the limit” objective: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool?… A billion dollars.”

Michael Wood’s review is the briefest of the three pieces. Like Denby and Smith, he notes “the long, intense, information-crowded conversation before the credits,” but unlike the other two writers, he shows how the zinger that Erica scores against Zuckerberg in this early sequence (something along the lines of “You’ll go through life believing people don’t like you because you’re a nerd. This won’t be true. They won’t like you because you’re an asshole”) links with a line that a lawyer says to Zuckerberg near the end of the movie (“You know, you’re not really an asshole, you’re just trying so hard to be one”). Wood considers this linkage and says that it lends Erica’s line “a weird retrospective authority.”

Wood makes another illuminating point about the film’s structure when he says, “At the centre of the movie, with flashbacks radiating out from it, is the room where the depositions are being heard in the two cases.” This reminded me that my dislike of flashback shadowed my own response to “The Social Network” when I saw it a couple of months ago.

Denby admires the movie’s “ugly poetry”; Smith likes its satire; Wood notes its radiating flashbacks. And the Anthony Lane “recreation of texture” award goes to … David Denby for his felicitous “while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in.”

Travels In Siberia - Part V

In Part V, the concluding section of this great book, Frazier makes his fifth (and shortest) Siberian journey, a trip to Novosibirsk in the fall of 2009. Why Novosibirsk? Frazier says, “I had wanted someplace cold, dark, remote, and hibernating. Novosibirsk at five thirty on a November morning seemed to be all of those.” He describes coming out of the airport and smelling the air: “My lungs filled with a familiar, delicious Siberian combination of second-hand smoke and bitter-cold air. One basic purpose had been accomplished. I had breathed the air.”

During his first few days in Novosibirsk, he walks the city, visiting the Novosibirsk Regional Museum, the Novosibirsk State Art Museum, the Pobeda (Victory) Theatre, the Museum of Siberian Communications (displaying, among other interesting things, a “1950s TV that many older Russians remember because it had a tiny screen over which was superimposed a large magnifying lens that had to be filled with special distilled water”) and a giant shopping mall called the Mega-Ikea (“The only part of the mall I really liked was right at the door, in the rush of heated air that pushed back against the exterior cold”).

He takes the bus to Akademgorodok to meet Ivan Logoshenko, a friend of his brother-in-law. He gets off the bus in Akademgorodok and, while waiting for Logoshenko to come pick him up, observes a group of boys horsing around. His description of this scene is one of the best passages in a book brimful with great writing:

The boys continued to play all around me, oblivious, like fish around a scuba diver. One kid climbed partway up a nearby fir and began to shake snow down on his companions. This got a laugh. Then a boy who was hopping here and there doing karate kicks happened to kick an aluminum light pole. Atop the light pole was a shade like a broad, flat hat, carrying a tall accumulation of snow. The kick sent some snow down on another kid’s head. Great hilarity. All the kids then began karate kicking the light pole, which responded with satisfying dull bongs and cascade after cascade of snow. Meanwhile, several mothers pulled up in their cars and were chatting with one another, occasionally interrupting themselves to tell the boys to quit kicking the light pole. The boys only kicked more, and finally one of the boys, with high exuberance, began singing “Jingle Bells,” in English, in time to his kicks. Snow tumbling off the light pole in showers, “Jingle Bells,” bong, bong, bong, great laughter. He knew the words and sang them perfectly, without accent.

How fine that “Snow tumbling off the light pole in showers, ‘Jingle Bells,’ bong, bong, bong, great laughter” is! Frazier works his magic, strings these words together, and – presto! – a slice of Novosibirsk life springs into being.

Frazier ends his book on a humble note. Even though he’s shown us a huge, rich chunk of Siberia, its people and its history, he says, “What I’d seen of Siberia was only a tiny part.” He then proceeds to identify some of the things he didn’t see: bears, hydropower dams, reindeer herds, forest fires, climate scientists, a drunken forest (“a forest in which the thawing of the supporting permafrost causes the trees to lean every which way”), and so on. It’s quite a list and an effective way of emphasizing Siberia’s hard-to-comprehend complexity and vastness.

In “Acknowledgments” at the back of the book, Frazier says of Mike Peed, of The New Yorker’s fact-checking department, that he “pursued factual accuracy with rigor while never neglecting to listen for the poetical – a rare skill.” It seems to me that these words could be used to describe Frazier’s work, as well.

I think Travels In Siberia is a masterpiece. I can easily imagine someone fifty or a hundred years from now reading it and being so inspired that he or she tries to follow in Frazier’s footsteps, retracing his routes, searching for the places that he visited (e.g., Severobaikalsk’s amazing winter garden, with its “ficuses, banana plants, wild grapevines, cacti, pineapple plants, and lemon trees growing this way and that in the bath of the heat”), just as Frazier himself was inspired by George Kennan’s Tent Life in Siberia, and tried to find the pillar – “this grief-consecrated pillar,” as Kennan described it - that marked the spot where exiles walking the Trakt officially crossed into Siberia.

December 13, 2010 Issue

This week’s “Goings On About Town” (GOAT) is a cornucopia of verbal and visual pleasure, brimming with succulent details such as English Beat’s “punky edge,” Angie Wang’s stunning “Nellie McKay” portrait, “neo-fusion mashup” at Iridium, Warhol’s “tossed-off party pics,” Giacometti’s Montparnasse studio “overflowing with plaster dust,” a beautiful color picture of Rauschenberg’s 1955 “Short Circuit (Combine),” Joan Acocella’s “battle of the ‘Nutcracker’s,” Richard Brody’s memorable “depicts to the limits of consciousness” in his eloquent “Critics Notebook” tribute to “Shoah,” Andrea Thompson’s impeccably rhythmed “Whitewashed brick walls and green patterned wallpaper have the spare beauty of a homestead” in her superb “Tables For Two” review of Northern Spy Food Co., Bruce Diones on Cher (“her voice still has the roughness that can sandpaper the dullest lines to sharp finish”), and Laurie Rosenwald’s ingenious “On The Horizon” illustration, “Picasso’s guitars, at MOMA.”

Some of these great GOAT details triggered pleasant memories of past New Yorker pieces. For example, Joan Acocella’s mention of the possibility that the mice in Ratmansky’s “Nutcracker” will be “truly nasty-looking, with red eyes and yellow teeth” called to mind Arlene Croce’s “Baryshnikov’s ‘Nutcracker’” (The New Yorker, January 17, 1977), in which she describes the mice in Nureyev’s “Nutcracker”: “His mice were rats who tore off the heroine’s skirt.” Croce’s piece is included in her 1982 collection, Going to the Dance.

The illustration of Rauschenberg’s “Short Circuit (Combine)” took me back to Calvin Tomkins’ Robert Rauschenberg profile “Moving Out” (The New Yorker, February 29, 1964). I first read it twenty years ago in Tomkins’ 1965 collection The Bride and the Bachelor. It contains some great descriptions of Rauschenberg working, including this detail: “From time to time he paused to replenish a tall glass of vodka and orange juice.”

And Richard Brody’s powerful “Critic’s Notebook” on Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” in which he says the film “has transcended the cinema to become the primary record of the extermination of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War,” brought to mind Pauline Kael’s controversial 1985 “Shoah” review (The New Yorker, December 30, 1985), in which she dares to criticize Lanzmann’s technique, e.g., “Lanzmann’s closeups can be tyrannically close – invasions of the face.” Kael’s review is included in her 1989 collection Hooked.

Last week at newyorker.com, Brody posted a scathing critique of Kael’s “Shoah” review (see “‘Shoah’ At Twenty-Five,” December 7, 2010). In his piece, Brody comes perilously close to calling Kael’s review anti-Semitic. He says:

So when Kael charges that the movie ‘doesn’t set you thinking’ and adds ‘When you come out, you’re likely to feel dazed, and confirmed in all your worst fears,’ it’s clear that she simply doesn’t know what to think about it – and so, falls back on her own prejudices.

He also says, “Pauline Kael’s misunderstandings of “Shoah” are so grotesque as to seem willful.”

Kael faced this type of criticism back in 1985 when she wrote the review. According to Craig Seligman, in his book Sontag & Kael (2004), Alfred Kazin considered Kael’s objections to the film and found her "incapable of responding to the material.” Seligman says that Leon Wieseltier also strongly objected to Kael’s review. He quotes Wieseltier as saying that her dissenting view of the film is a “dissenting view about the film and the catastrophe.” And Seligman quotes another angry objector, the film critic J. Hoberman, as saying, “Imagine, he [Lanzmann] actually found anti-Semitism in Treblinka. If he’s not tied up again, he could probably find it in The New Yorker.”

Seligman correctly points out that “Kael was reviewing a film – she wasn’t reviewing the Holocaust.” He says that Kazan and Wieseltier “ignore the core of Kael’s argument, which is that “Shoah” fails as a film.” He says, “To deduce from her misgivings about “Shoah” that she viewed the Holocaust with insufficient gravity is malignantly unfair. (And, by the way, untrue.)” Regarding the implications of Hoberman’s statement, Seligman says, “That sentence has haunted me ever since I first read it, in 1986. Could it possibly mean what it appears to mean – that Kael’s review is anti-Semitic?” Seligman concludes that Hoberman’s charge is “an accusation of astonishing coarseness.”

I agree with Seligman. Richard Brody’s statement against Kael falls into the same category as J. Hoberman’s; to borrow Seligman’s words, it is an accusation of astonishing coarseness.

Credit: The above portrait of Nellie McKay is by Angie Wang; it appears in “Goings On About Town” in this week’s New Yorker.

December 6, 2010 Issue

Pick Of The Issue this week is unquestionably Gay Talese’s “Travels with a Diva.” Reading it, I was reminded of Ian Frazier’s description of Russia: “chaos almost out of control.” Talese’s piece is a profile of the young Russian opera singer Marina Poplavskaya. She is a classic study in pushy, mercurial, larger-than-life, heavenly diva conduct. I hasten to add that I’m not an opera buff. I read this article for the pleasure of Talese’s writing. I was not disappointed. Detail by detail, anecdote by anecdote, Talese patiently, masterfully builds his portrait, until it is as rich in color and texture as a John Singer Sargent.

Some of the details are extraordinary: Poplavskaya’s colored pencils (“She carries a dozen or so colored pencils with her, each representing to her a particular emotional color or key…. B minor is represented by emerald green, C major, by a shade of goldish red”), the seats in Buenos Aires’ Teatro Colón (“The theatre’s ornate chairs are upholstered in red velvet, and their carved-wood backs are topped with gold filigree”), Poplavskaya’s singing (“At one point, she held a note for ten seconds, and it cut like a diamond sabre right through the sounds of a hundred choral singers and a hundred instrumentalists”), Daniel Barenboim’s choice of cigar (“Edicion Limitada 2010”).

I like the way Talese keeps “Travels with a Diva” in the “I.” Reading it is like reading an excerpt from a really lively, personal journal. When Talese says, “I had never been to Russia, and when she suggested that late summer would be a good time to come I made the arrangements,” I smiled and said to myself, “Let the adventure begin.” And it is an adventure, a great ride all the way. I lapped it up, and when it was over, yearned for more.

Travels In Siberia - Part IV

Early in Part IV of Travels In Siberia, Frazier says, “Any book about Siberia should have cold and prisons in it. I began to think about making a winter journey.” He does more than just think about it –he throws his snowmobiling overalls, long underwear, down coat, and Glacier Extreme boots (“big and clunky as the shoes of Frankenstein’s monster”), among other things, into his suitcase, and he goes! Part IV is his account of the month-long trip. He flies to Vladivostok, and travels from there by various means of transportation to places mostly far to the north of where he went last time.

Of the many pleasures of Frazier’s report – his vivid descriptions of knocking around in dark, frozen cities and villages (Vladivostok, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Ust-Barguzin, Severobaikalsk, Yakutsk, Khandyga, Tyoplyi Kliuch, Topolinoe), a funny parody of “telegraphic style” writing (“Woman had on sweatshirt said TEXAS A&M. When she standing next to me at buffet, I asked if she an Aggie”), a memorable account of his two-hundred-and-thirty mile ice-road trip to Severobaikalsk at the north end of Lake Baikal (“In midafternoon we stopped for lunch and ate our kielbasa, bread, and hot, sugared tea off the Niva’s back bumper. In the wind the food tasted delicious, seasoned with cold and engine exhaust”) – the ones that I enjoyed the most are the quintessentially Frazierian descriptions of what I call “incidentals” – stuff that most travel writers leave out of their accounts, e.g., the time when Frazier and his guide Sergei are just about to leave Ulan-Ude on a bus, and Sergei discovers he’s still carrying the plastic hotel room key card in his pants pocket, and he (Sergei is sixty-one years old) “runs the two-mile round trip on icy streets in just under twenty minutes, and he’s back before the driver has started counting heads and making ready to leave.” Frazier tells Sergei that, “in America no one thinks twice about walking off with those keys.” Sergei replies that, “the woman at the reception desk was very grateful to him because she would have lost her job for not making sure he had returned the key card when he checked out.”

Travels In Siberia is filled with such real-life incidentals. They’re what give the book its Siberian thisness. Another example that comes to mind occurs near the end of Part IV when Frazier is traveling in a minibus with a number of other passengers, including one old fellow who is suffering from a dislocated shoulder. Frazier says, “His fortitude, and the silent contortions of his face every time we went over a bump, made me wince.” Frazier decides to give him some Extra Strength Tylenol Gelcaps. He says, “I shook two into my palm and gave them to the driver and said he should tell his father to take these now. Then I handed him another two and said his father should take these in four hours, per the directions on the bottle.” But due to a language problem, the father gets a double dose of Tylenol. This causes Frazier anxiety for the rest of the trip. He says, “Soon at each bump in the road, the old reindeer herder was swaying forward, swaying back. Sometimes his forehead almost touched the windshield. Sometimes he would slump way down to the side.” But by the time they reached their destination, he looked okay. Frazier says, “both he and his son thanked me with big smiles when we said goodbye. I was glad to have no worse outcome to my attempt at doctoring.” Incidentals like this are what I treasure in Frazier.

The heart of Part IV is Frazier’s visit to a long-abandoned Stalin-era prison camp. His account of this visit was originally published in The New Yorker, August 30, 2010, under the title “On The Prison Highway.” I posted a review here at the time it came out. It’s a powerful piece. Comparing it with the book version, I noticed a couple of slight changes. Describing the labor camp in the magazine piece, Frazier says, “Around it, like a bubble of prehistoric air frozen inside a glacier, a familiar atmosphere of 1954 hung on.” However, in the book, “hung on” is changed to “endured.” Another passage in the magazine article that undergoes subtle amendment is “His [Stalin’s] was the single animating spirit of the place.” In the book, “single” is deleted. I find these glimpses into Frazier’s compositional process interesting. “Hung on” seems to me slightly more tenacious than “endured.” “Single” emphasizes that it is Stalin’s spirit, and Stalin’s spirit alone, that animates the prison camp. Regarding these two changes, I think the magazine version might be just a shade stronger.

Frazier ends Part IV with a wonderful description of what he sees as he and his friend Luda leave St. Petersburg’s Marlinsky Theatre where they have just finished watching a thrilling performance of the ballet Manon. The concluding passage, in its imagery, lyricism, and rhythm, recalls James Joyce’s “snow was general all over Ireland” ending of his great short story “The Dead,” and is just as inspired, if not more so:

Afterward, Luda and I jostled through the remarkably long and slow line of people returning their rented opera glasses, and the equally full line at the coat check, and then we were outside in the cold among dissipating perfumes and faint cigarette smoke, and snow was falling steadily straight down. It was billowing in the streetlights overhead and making cones of the lights of the waiting taxicabs, and as we stood deciding whether to walk or take a cab, snowflakes came to rest among the fibers of fur in her hat. Each flake was small but unbroken, and detailed as a cutout snowflake made in school.

Reading that is pure rapture!

November 29, 2010 Issue

John Updike said that writing criticism is to writing fiction as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. This week in the magazine, two of my favorite critics, Peter Schjeldahl and James Wood, depart the shoreline and head for deeper water, not by writing fiction, but by writing something even more difficult – a piece of factual writing. The two pieces are quite different in content. But it’s their form that interests me. How do Schjeldahl and Wood – both masters of the review – fare when they try their hand at something more extensive?

Schjeldahl’s “The Flip Side” is about his attendance at a meeting of experts to examine the condition of the oak panels behind the six hundred year old Ghent Alterpiece. The painter at the centre of his piece is Jan van Eyck. Wood’s “The Fun Stuff” is about his love of rock drumming. The drummer at the centre of his piece is Keith Moon. Schjeldahl’s story wastes no time getting started. He plunges right in with “Several of the world’s top experts in the conservation of very old wood covered with very old paint met recently in a windowless, cramped room of the St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium.” I confess I’m a sucker for articles that start with meetings, whether they’re parties (e.g., John Seabrook’s “Ruffled Feathers,” The New Yorker, May 29, 2006), presentations (e.g., Arthur Lubow’s “This Vodka Has Legs,” The New Yorker, September 12, 1994), get-togethers at a bar (e.g., Tad Friend’s “Blue-Collar Gold,” The New Yorker, July 10 & 17, 2006), etc. Instantly, my curiosity is aroused: Whoa! What goes on here? That was exactly my response to Schjeldahl’s opening in “The Flip Side.” Whereas, it took me longer to get into Wood’s “The Fun Stuff.” He eases into his story with a tracing of his roots in “traditional musical education.”

Schjeldahl also does something else early in his piece to juice reader interest. He unfurls this gorgeous descriptive passage that damn near took my breath away: “But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color.” That “liquid radiance” is amazing! Interestingly, Wood almost matches it in his piece when he says of Moon’s drumming: “But he needed all those drums, as a flute needs all its stops or a harp its strings, so that his tremendous bubbling cascades, his liquid journeys, could be voiced.”

Describing something visual, like a painting, is, I think, easier than describing something aural, like rock music. But the multi-paneled Ghent Alterpiece, “a six-hinged polyptych, measuring twelve feet high by seventeen feet wide,” is no ordinary artwork. Schjeldahl takes his time and clearly describes each panel, at times laying on exquisite word paint such as “At the far left and right stand Adam and Eve, naked and melancholy, presented like statues in narrow niches but naturalistically vibrant with carnal candor.” Wood’s drumming descriptions are fine – almost as good as Whitney Balliett’s magnificent drum writings: see, for example, Balliett's great profile of Elvin Jones, “A Walk to the Park,” The New Yorker, May 18, 1968. Here is Wood on the complexity of Keith Moon-style drumming:

In addition to demonstrating intricate cymbal work, Moon is constantly flicking off little triplets (sometimes on the toms, but sometimes with his feet, by playing the two bass drums together), and doing double-stroke rolls (a method by which, essentially, you bounce the sticks on the drum to get them to strike faster notes) and irregular flams on the snare drum (a flam involves hitting the drum with the two sticks not simultaneously but slightly staggered, and results in a sound more like ‘blat’ than ‘that’).

Compare this with Balliett on Elvin Jones:

Then Jones took off. He began with heavy rimshots on the snare, which split notes and split them again, then broke into swaying, grandiose strokes on his ride cymbals, accompanied by lightning triplets and off-beat single-notes on the bass drum. Switching patterns, he moved his right hand between his big and small tomtoms in a faster and faster arc while his left hand roared through geometrical snare-drum figures and his high-hat rattled and shivered. He switched patterns again and settled down on his snare with sharp, flat strokes, spaced regularly and then irregularly. He varied this scheme incessantly, gradually bringing in bass-drum beats and big tomtom booms. Cymbals exploded like flushed birds. Jones had passed beyond a mere drum solo. He was playing with ear-splitting loudness, and what he was doing had become an enormous rolling ball of abstract sound, divorced from music, from reality, from flesh and bone. It trampled traditional order and replaced it with unknown order. It delighted the mind and hammered at the guts. Jones waded through his cymbals again and went into a deliberate, alternately running and limping fussilade between his snare and tomtoms that rose an inch or two higher in volume. Suddenly he was finished. Farrell played the theme and Jones slid into a long, downhill coda that was a variation on the close of his solo, paused, and came down with a crash on his cymbals and bass drum.

How I love that “Cymbals exploded like flushed birds.” One of the main differences between Wood’s description and Balliett’s is that Balliett’s is much more rhythmical. Of course, Balliett had the advantage of actually seeing Jones play in person. But Wood’s piece does contain one astonishing line that perhaps even Balliett wouldn’t have thought of. I’m referring to the part where Wood says, “For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but disheveled, careful and lawless, right and wrong.” This to me is a revelation: Wood wants to write Keith Moon-style. He’s dropped hints about his governing aesthetic before – in his piece on “Anna Karenina” (“At Home In The World,” The New Yorker, February 5, 2001), for example, where he writes admiringly of Tolstoy, calls him “a beast of instinct who can outrun the nervous zoologists of form,” and says he's “the great anti-formalist.” Does that not describe Keith Moon to a T? In his lavish appreciation of Henry Green’s writing (see “Henry Green’s England,” included in Wood’s book The Irresponsible Self, 2005), Wood says, “His [Green’s] stylistic principle is the Joycean run-on.” At one point in “Henry Green’s England,” he quotes a sentence by Green and says, “This fast, largely unpunctuated welter intensifies each word even as it seems to throw out the words as they are speedily consumed.” Now, almost everywhere I look in Wood’s writings, I see corroboration: Moon is the key to Wood’s aesthetic.