November 28, 2011 Issue

I crave thisness. My search for it in this week’s issue has been fruitless. Well, almost fruitless. I found a crumb, a little morsel of succulent thisness, in the last line of Rebecca Mead’s Talk story “Model Student,” where she says, “Gunn signed her name boldly across the blue shirtsleeve of the artist’s painting arm.” That’s it! That’s the only delectable detail in the entire issue. But I can’t complain. The last four New Yorkers were feasts. I’m still digesting them.

Sometimes, when the magazine’s fact pieces fail to impress, as is the case this week, I turn to the short story. The current issue features Alice Munro’s “Leaving Maverley.” It’s about a guy named Ray Elliot, who’s the night policeman in the small town of Maverley, his wife, Isabel, who’s seriously ill, and a young woman, Leah, who’s raised in a repressive, religious household in Maverley, and who’s life, from time to time, briefly intersects with Ray’s life. Of these three characters, Leah is the most interesting. Although described as “weirdly shy,” she elopes with a saxophone player, has an affair with a minister, divorces the sax player, loses custody of her two children, and, at the end of the story, is characterized by Munro as “an expert at losing.” When I read that, I immediately thought of Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem “One Art” (The New Yorker, April 26, 1976), which begins, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” It occurred to me for the first time that, in many ways, Bishop is like a Munro heroine, or, to put it the other way around, many of Munro’s heroines are like Bishop, and that the two writers have similar sensibilities. But to get back to “Leaving Maverley,” did anyone besides me find the final meeting between Ray and Leah a bit too coincidental? I felt the same way about Munro's “Axis” (The New Yorker, January 31, 2011). There were just too many damned coincidences. The story didn’t ring true, and neither does “Leaving Maverley.” Having said that, I also wish to note that Munro’s “The Turkey Season” (The New Yorker, December 29, 1980) is my choice for the best short story ever published in The New Yorker. Maybe someday, I’ll get around to posting a fuller appreciation of it.

November 21, 2011 Issue

Mmm, my favorite themed New Yorker, The Food Issue, is here. I love the Wayne Thiebaud “Turkey Dinner” cover. Thiebaud lays on the paint in such delicious thick strokes that I almost want to eat it. John Seabrook’s piece about the SweeTango apple (“Crunch”) is excellent. I particularly liked its last paragraph:

I bought as many SweeTangos as I could carry, walked out onto Broadway, and stood on the sidewalk with an apple in my hand, my fingers not quite encircling its girth, feeling the chill of the Fairway basement in the center of my palm. I stared at the skin, and the lenticels gazed indifferently back at me, as I contemplated man’s long and sometimes discordant relationship with this fruit. Then I set my teeth on its skin, and crunched.

That “feeling the chill of the Fairway basement in the center of my palm” is inspired!

Lauren Collins’s “The King’s Meal” brims with inspired lines (e.g., “‘The only way you can eat like a king is to eat like a king,’ Meltonville had said, liberating a gleaming ladle , part of Hampton Court’s collection, from its bubble-wrap cocoon”).

I smiled and chuckled my way through Calvin Trillin’s wonderful “My Repertoire.” At one point, I read a passage out loud to my daughter, and we both laughed. Here’s the passage:

One of my sons-in-law was not crazy about my salmon hash – I won’t say which one; that sort of thing will come out in good time at the reading of the will – but just about everybody else seemed to like it.

I like the boots that René Redzepi is wearing in the vivid photo by Alfredo Cáliz that illustrates Jane Kramer’s superb “The Food At Our Feet.” When I say “superb,” I’m referring to the second half of the piece. The first part, concerning Kramer’s preparation for her foraging excursion with Redzepi, didn’t grab me. It contains too much information about her “distinguished” friends and their bourgeois surroundings. But at the point where Kramer writes, “I met Redzepi at Noma early the following afternoon,” her piece really takes off. I savored Kramer’s beautiful long lines. For example:

But, at the moment, the food he cherishes is cabbage – from the big, pale cabbages that he slices and steams, at home, in a knob of butter and a half inch of his wife’s leftover tea, to the tiny, vividly green-leaved wild cabbages that sit in pots, basking in ultraviolet light, on a steel counter in the middle of one of Noma’s upstairs kitchens, waiting for the day they’re ready to be wrapped with their stems around a sliver of pike perch and served to customers on a beautiful stoneware plate, between a green verbena sauce and a butter-and-fish-bone foam.

Kelefa Sanneh's "Sacred Grounds" is factually interesting. But in terms of style, it suffers from the same weakness that afflicts all his pieces - an impersonal, almost godlike objectivity that leaves me cold. I much prefer the subjective approach in which the writer establishes his or her presence in the material.

November 14, 2011 Issue

John McPhee, in an interesting piece called “Progression,” in this week’s issue, talks about, among other things, the background sources of some of his early New Yorker articles. In a way, it’s sort of a companion piece to the fascinating Paris Review interview he did last year. It seems McPhee always dwells on structure whenever he talks about his writing method. In doing so, he sells himself short. Yes, structure is one of the hallmarks of his incomparable style. And yes, it’s absorbing and useful to learn how he structures his work. But structure is only one aspect of his composition. McPhee is a brilliant describer. For example (this is just one among hundreds that can be adduced), in “Ranger” (The New Yorker, September 11, 1971), which he mentions in “Progression,” he describes Hartzog’s boatman, Cal Smith, as follows: “Smith is a big man with heavy bones, frankfurtery fingers, lithic jowls.” How did McPhee arrive at that adjective “frankfurtery”? The average writer – someone like myself, say – would write “thick-fingered” or maybe, if he/she saw, as McPhee did (a mighty big “if”), the similarity between thick fingers and wieners, he/she might say “weiner-like.” But “frankfurtery” takes finger description to a whole new level, an inspired level, in my opinion. How did McPhee think of it? Here’s another example, also taken from “Ranger.” It’s a description of Hartzog fishing:

There are five eyes on his rod. He sights through the last one into a patch of flat blue among high mounds of cumulus. He finds a fragment of cloud loose in the blue and he frames it steadily in the fifth eye while he waits for the glass to bend.

What an inspired perspective! A view of a cloud fragment as seen through the eye on a fishing rod! How did McPhee conceive it? No amount of talk about structure accounts for it. It’s art; it’s inspiration; it’s genius. McPhee’s work brims with it. Here’s one more example. In “The Encircled River - I” (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977), McPhee provides this arresting image of salmon: “Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.” How did he conceive the comparison of river with sky, salmon with zeppelins? In a piece titled “Checkpoints” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2009), McPhee touches on his art of figuration. He says, “In ‘Coal Train’ (2005), I felt a need for analogy and guessed at one: ‘The releasing of the air brakes began at the two ends, and moved toward the middle. The train’s very long integral air tube was like the air sac of an American eel.’” I felt a need for analogy – right there is the nub of the creative mystery. Why does he feel that need? Maybe McPhee can’t explain it. Maybe no one can. It certainly involves more than structure. It’s sourced in the realm of inspiration. I wish McPhee would talk more about it.

Postscript: Last week, when I was in Trinidad, Cuba, I had lunch in the back yard of a little restaurant under the vast green canopy of a giant ceiba tree. The tree’s gray bark was like elephant hide. It struck me that the tree would be worthy of a poem. When I returned home, I opened this week’s New Yorker and was astounded and delighted to find just such an item, a poem by Mark Svenvold, titled “Ceiba Tree, Petac, Mexico.” I enjoyed it immensely, particularly the part about “the broad cloth / of a morning above us and in us, like some momentary shaft, / of sunlight on the floating seed of the ceiba tree, / that hangs like this and like that in the shadows and subaltern greens.” And is this the same Mark Svenvold who went up the Merrimack with John McPhee in McPhee’s wonderful “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (The New Yorker, December 15, 2003)? I believe it is. Perhaps this is another way in which, as McPhee says in “Progression,” pieces “skein out in surprising ways, finally ending in some unexpected place.”

November 7, 2011 Issue

Of the many pleasures in this week’s issue – Ian Frazier’s wonderful “History Lesson” (“One of the young men from O.W.S. – the one who said they would never leave – was wearing a dark suit jacket, a white shirt, a burgundy tie, a bolo string tie, a beaded Indian necklace, and a silver pendant. On his head he had a wildly multicolored baseball cap, set sideways. His hair was a braided ponytail. His trousers were skin-tight leggings, also multicolored, and he had beige flip-flops on his feet”), John Lahr’s superb “The Natural” (“Her excitement made her luminous”), James Wood’s “Shelf Life,” with its short, rhythmic, three-beat sentences (“I found him hard to love, easier to admire, and I rather feared him”; “I knew he would say it, hated him for it, agreed with him”) and breathtaking, long, loaded-up lines (“His Algerian childhood, his intellectual ambition, the diversion of that ambition into run-of-the-mill moneymaking, his isolation and estrangement in America, his confidence and shyness, pugilism and anxiety, the drinking and the anger and the passion and the pressurized conformity of his businesslike existence: of course, in some general way, these thousands of volumes – neatly systematic, proudly comprehensive – incarnated the shape of this life, but not the facets of his character”); the enticing, exquisite opening sentence of Peter Schjeldahl’s “Old and New” (“Fourteen lamps hanging, aglow, beckon you to an entrance to the Metropolitan Museum’s Islamic wing, which is open again after eight years of expansion and renovation”) – the most piquant is the glorious descriptive power of D. T. Max’s “Her Way,” a profile of the pianist Hélène Grimaud. Here, for example, is Max’s description of Grimaud’s hair: “On album covers, her hair telegraphs a mood. It is pinned up in a Clara Schumann-like bun for a Brahms recording, and on the cover of “Credo” – a CD of Beethoven and a pair of mystic-minded modern composers – it is tucked behind her ears, in wan, heroin-chic strands. Ordinarily, her hair is shaggy, with too-busy-to-blow-dry bangs.” And here is his image of her at the keyboard: “Grimaud opened with Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor, playing it as if she were lashing a carriage down the streets of Salzburg.” And here is his rendition of the sound of wolves howling: “Two Mexican wolves, in a nearby enclosure, joined in, several tones higher, glissando-ing down while the red wolves added a frenzied pizzicato.” Grimaud is an outstandingly great subject, and Max’s profile of her is commensurately outstandingly great. It’s incredible color, nuance, and texture reminds me of Kenneth Tynan’s piece on Johnny Carson (“Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1978), perhaps the finest profile ever to appear in the magazine. That’s just about the highest compliment I can pay a piece of writing.

October 31, 2011 Issue

The New Yorker is a great traveling companion. I took the October 31st issue with me to Cuba. It was a constant source of pleasure during my two-week visit there. There are so many delectable items in it: Lizzie Widdicombe’s description of The Leopard At Des Artistes’ zabaione with berries (“egg yolks and Marsala wine, beaten tableside over an open flame, until it reaches the consistency of a sugary alcoholic cloud”); Richard Brody’s representation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “architectural precision” (“he presses his lovers into hard-edged industrial, corporate, and domestic spaces by way of graphically etched, high-contrast camera work that emphasizes the coldly thrilling modernism of tall buildings, progressive urbanism, and avant-garde design”); the poetry of the vegetable names in Burkhard Bilger’s excellent “True Grits” (“He set aside a bag of Whippoorwill peas and another of Zipper cream peas – the ones speckled brown and black, the others bright pink, like magic seeds from ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’”); Dan Chiasson’s analysis of Tomas Tranströmer’s style (“Tranströmer seeks not the ‘deep image’ but the elusive surface of things”); James Wood’s assessment of Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving Atocha Station (“Lerner is attempting to capture something that most conventional novels, with their cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and ‘conflict,’ fail to do: the drift of thought, the unmomentous passage of undramatic life”); Peter Schjeldahl’s close look at an African wooden sculpture (“The figure is all palpably moving parts: mouth open, eyes raised, knees bent, weight shifted to the right leg, and breasts swaying. She wields a rattle. A pattern of bold striations repeats in the coiled hair, a necklace, and anklets”). I loved all these things. Most of all I loved Emily Eakin’s “Celluloid Hero.” I’m a sucker for descriptions of the creative process. “Celluloid Hero” contains a beauty – a description of how Tacita Dean made “FILM” for exhibition at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. In a beautifully crafted, intensely engaging narrative, Eakin reports the various technical obstacles Dean encountered (e.g., the difficulty involved in fashioning “masks” thin enough to convincingly create the illusion of a filmstrip with sprocket holes) and the ways they were solved (e.g., using a digital laser device to produce a 3-D plastic mask that was less than a millimetre thick). Along the way, Eakin provides gorgeous descriptions of Dean’s art. Here is one of my favorites: “Her carefully layered shots had a sculptural quality; the glass-matte ostrich egg, appearing more than twenty feet tall, protruded from the screen as if it had been hurled right through it.” Eakin is new to me. As far as I know, “Celluloid Hero” is her first New Yorker piece. I look forward to many more.