January 30, 2012 Issue

World into word – the crafting of description is, for me, the ultimate art. It’s beautifully on display in two pieces in this week’s New Yorker: Nick Paumgarten’s “The Ring and the Bar,” and Dana Goodyear’s “The Missionary.” Paumgarten’s piece is about Fanelli Café bartender, Bob Bozic. Paumgarten describes Bozic as follows:

Bozic, who is sixty-one, is a stocky six feet two, with bearish arms and shoulders and the belly of a man who likes a beer at lunch. He shaves clean what hair there’d still be over his ears; he’s got a melon. His features manage to seem both doughy and sharp = with his arched eyebrows and his piercing eyes, he looks a little like Lenin after a back-alley beating. He speaks in the sinusy muffle of an old prizefighter and has a bulldog laugh, all grunts and snorts. He often taps your arm or shoulder when he’s telling a story, to make sure you’re listening. He tears up easily, thinking about all that he has been through and the people who have put up with him.

That “He speaks in the sinusy muffle of an old prizefighter and has a bulldog laugh, all grunts and snorts” is inspired! It’s exactly the kind of sentence I treasure. It’s full of thisness – to use a term I owe to James Wood (“By thisness, I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, and detail that centers our attention with its concretion”: How Fiction Works, 2008).

Another aspect of Paumgarten’s article that I enjoyed immensely is its unabashed subjectivity. In the great tradition of Joseph Mitchell, A. J. Liebling, John McPhee, and Ian Frazier, Paumgarten doesn’t hesitate to occasionally step forward as a first-person character in his story – not obtrusively, but as an observant presence. For example, in one of the piece’s best passages, Paumgarten writes:

Bozic at sixty-one, shadowboxing in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror at the Church Street Boxing Gym, in lower Manhattan, on a recent weekday morning. He jabbed at his reflection, exhaling sharply, like an air brake. He had me hold the heavy bag for a while as he pounded it. I pressed my head into the bag, to absorb the blows. “This is when you feel who you are,” he said.

That, to my mind, is just about as perfect a piece of writing as you can get. Thrillingly, Dana Goodyear, in her excellent “The Missionary,” matches it. Her piece is about Baja chef Javier Plascencia. She describes Plascencia at work as follows:

On the last night of the Baja festival, Plascencia invited three Mexican chefs to cook with him at Caesar’s. In the kitchen, he wiped down a counter with a rag, and checked under the lid of a large steel pot cooking on a burner. He disappeared for a moment and returned with a small plate of haricots verts and snap peas, prodding them gently as he walked to the cutting board. A half-eaten bean dangled from his lips like a droopy cigarette.

How I love that “A half-eaten bean dangled from his lips like a droopy cigarette.” Goodyear’s piece brims with such details: “Molina, who wore pink pants and an Argyle sweater with a dribble of red wine down the front,” “He stopped at Manzanilla, an enchanting, unlikely place housed in an old shipyard, with hot-pink glass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling on green velvet ropes,” “a sleepy-eyed young man shaped like a bean bag,” a flask decorated with a picture of a slice of cherry pie.” If you find details such as these as satisfying as I do, you’ll enjoy “The Ring and the Bar” and “The Missionary” enormously.

GOAT Collage #1

From three months’ worth of The New Yorker’s vast, rich, layered, and loaded sensorium, “Goings On About Town” (GOAT), here’s an assemblage of choice (semi-surrealistic) quotations: In the mornings, mothers with children and scooters in tow line up behind subway-bound suits for dollar cups of Stumptown coffee – no lattes here, only drip (Andrea K. Scott, “Tables For Two: Jeffrey’s Grocery,” January 10, 2011); Exercising a tribal right passed down for generations, the Blackfeet artist Lyle J. Heavy Runner will paint a twenty-five-foot-tall tipi in a bleeding-buffalo-skull design at the Brooklyn Museum, as part of the exhibition “Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains” (“On The Horizon,” January 17, 2011); David Cossin was the star soloist in an energetic and – it must be said – splashy performance of Tan Dun’s “Water Concerto,” which employs tubs of water as percussion (Alex Ross, “Critic’s Notebook: Jersey Boy,” January 24, 2011); Instead, there’s a different kind of magic, as he lets Jackson’s vocals – drenched in echo and other effects, but still filled with the same strange baby-doll ferocity – loose on sexy, brassy covers of Bob Dylan’s “Thunder on the Mountain,” Dinah Washington’s “Teach Me Tonight,” and more (Ben Greenman, “Critic’s Notebook: Kinda Fonda Wanda,” January 24, 2011); With her tall body and her long, grave, gorgeous face, she truly does look like a messenger from the beyond (Joan Acocella, “Critc’s Notebook: Vestal Virgin,” January 31, 2011); You’re likely to end up slumped in your lounge chair, gazing at the bongos (Lizzie Widdicombe, “Tables For Two: Bohemian,” February 7, 2011); Nostalgia cascades (Peter Schjeldahl, “Critic’s Notebook: Getting Clocked,” February 14 & 21, 2011); At regular intervals, a semi-transparent section of a rear wall slides open, and out come Lo’s ornate, succulent creations, sparked by her blended heritage (Mike Peed, “Tables For Two: Annisa,” February 14 & 21, 2011); It was a knotty time to make art, and Benglis literalized it in tangles of painted and glitter-flecked cotton bunting, which gave way to elegant arabesques of pleated metal and Zen-punk wonders in glass and ceramic (Andrea K. Scott, “Critic’s Notebook: Making A Splash,” February 28, 2011); If you like hand-pulled noodles, as much for their simplicity as for their artistry, you’d do best to stay south of Canal (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Hung Ry,” February 28, 2011); There is an ingenious beer ice cream, made with the clove-y Bavarian Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel, and beignets are like the Platonic ideal of childhood carnival-truck zeppole (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: Riverpark,” March 7, 2011); This is what Southern funk music looks like now: no big-time bling, only ambition and raw nerve, denim short shorts and chili dogs (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Michael Schmelling,” March 7, 2011); In the roofless remains of schools, blackboards and painted walls display fading alphabets and numbers for the edification of a stray goat (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Juan Manuel Eschavarria,” March 21, 2011); Birdcages and dog crates in storage become a meditation on the modernist grid, as does a shrinelike arrangement of vases (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Jonas Wood,” March 21, 2011); A Tuesday-evening special of fried chicken holds the promise of spice, but it requires getting to the Carroll Street F stop well before 8 P.M. (Silvia Killingsworth, “Tables For Two: Seersucker,” March 21, 2011); Skip the scoop and kick back with a carmel-nut lager from Laos – or a house cocktail, like the Phuket Fizz, made of vodka, Thai basil, and fresh pineapple, as low key a pleasure as Kin Shop itself (Andrea K. Scott, “Tables For Two: Kin Shop,” March 28, 2011).

Credit: The above artwork is by Olimpia Zagnoli; it appears in The New Yorker (January 17, 2011) as an illustration for “On The Horizon.”

January 23, 2012 Issue

My idea of an ideal sentence involves a combination of two essential ingredients: (1) first-person point of view; (2) present tense. This combination is rare, and is seldom found in The New Yorker. When it does occur, as it does in Donald Hall’s wonderful “Out the Window,” in this week’s issue, it’s a source of great reading pleasure. Here, taken from Hall’s piece, are some examples of inspired first-person/present-tense writing:

After months of snow and snowbirds, I look out the window at flowers and a luxury of green leaves and always at the wooden ancient hill of the barn.

In spring when the feeder is down, stowed away in the toolshed until October, I watch the fat robins come back, blue jays that harass them, warblers, blackbirds, thrushes, orioles, redwings. Starlings strut in the grass pulling worms. A robin returns every year to refurbish her nest after the wintry ravage. She adds new straw and mud. Soon enough she lays eggs, sets on them with short excursions for food, then tends to three or four small beaks that open for her scavenging. Before long, the infants stand, spread and clench their wings, peer at their surroundings, and fly away. I cherish them, and look for farther nests, small clots in branches of oak or Norway maple visible from my window.

Whatever the season, I watch the barn. I see it through this snow in January, and in August I will gaze at trailing vines of roses on a trellis against the vertical boards. I watch at the height of summer and when darkness comes early in November. From my chair I look at the west side, a gorgeous amber laved by the setting sun, as rich to the eyes as the darkening sweet of bees’ honey.

That “I cherish them, and look for farther nests, small clots in branches of oak or Norway maple” is very fine. Hall’s piece brims with such descriptions. Accordingly, it’s this week’s Pick Of The Issue.

Postscript: Another pleasure in this week’s issue is William Finnegan’s excellent “Slow and Steady.” I particularly like its description of the plowshare’s marginal scutes: “magnificent, flared and overdraped like heavy theatre curtains.”

The Ides of March: Lane v. Wood

Last night’s South Carolina debate’s mesmerizing, nasty, opening moments, which saw Newt Gingrich and John King try to cut each other up over Gingrich’s ex-wife’s “open marriage” allegation, affirmed the truth of Michael Wood’s interpretation of The Ides of March: “politics is not about good deeds but about dirty business, a matter of getting down in the muck with the elephants, as one of the movie’s campaign managers puts it” (“At the Movies,” London Review of Books, December 1, 2011). It’s interesting to compare Wood’s piece with Anthony Lane’s review (“Primary Suspect," The New Yorker, October 10, 2011). Incredibly, Lane construes The Ides of March as a love story. He says, “The quirk of this movie is that, for all its pretensions to topical soothsaying and its somber machinations of plot, it remains, in essence, a love story.” The love that Lane detects is between the Governor (George Clooney) and his press spokesman (Ryan Gosling). Lane says,

There are small shimmers of gay longing on display here – Myers getting ‘all goosebumpy,’ as Horowicz [a Times reporter] points out, at the very thought of Morris, or tearing up slightly as he watches his boss breeze through a Q.&A. – but further than that the movie fears to tread.

Lane’s take strikes me as totally wrong-headed. The Ides of March is about as far from being a love story as you can get. Wood gets it right; the movie is about politics’ rottenness. But I’ll give Lane credit for his inspired description of the Governor’s campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman): “the human equivalent of a smoke-filled room.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Robert Risko; it appears in The New Yorker (October 10, 2011), as an illustration for Anthony Lane's "Primary Suspect."

January 16, 2012 Issue

“No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said. Patricia Marx intently follows the dictum, but the “things” she writes about (e.g., “a Moschino ‘Great Hits Spring/Summer 2007’ evening bag that looks like two 45-r.p.m. records stitched together with yarn,” “leather spats trimmed with polka-dot grosgrain ribbon,” “an I. Magnin black velvet hat with a marine-blue feather, circa 1945,” “a bristle brush shaped like a cross,” “Urban Decay eyeshadow,” “Murray’s lemony-garlic rotisserie chicken,” “a scoop-necked wool bouclé jacket trimmed with turquoise-like stones,” “sunglasses with taxicab yellow visors over the lenses,” “a flock of ghoulish Tweety Birds with x’d out eyes,” "chunky Marni necklaces made from colorful shapes of melted and stretched bovine horn”) make Williams’s “things” (e.g., wheelbarrow, rainwater) seem pretty tame. This week, in a piece titled “A Bushel and a Peck,” Marx describes, in detail after marvelous detail, the wondrous items she finds at Fairway, Whole Foods, Zabar’s, and other food megastores. Marx’s writing constantly enables us to see and feel the texture of things. Here, for example, is her description of some of the “quality grub” available at Eli’s:

At Eli’s the produce glistens: champagne grapes $4, seasonal), exquisite endive $5.99/lb.). (“My friend can always taste if my endive is from there. She’ll say, ‘Did you get this from the burglars? It’s sooo good.’”) The cheeses are evidently so valuable that some like the drunken goat cheese soaked in wine ($20/lb.) and the Tête de Moine, a Swiss cheese eaten by scraping it with a knife ($20/lb.), must be kept under surveillance in vitrines.

I’m not sure who’s being quoted in the parenthesis, but the sensuous “It’s sooo good” could stand as a tagline for the whole piece. And that detail about how Tête de Moine is eaten (“by scraping it with a knife”) is delectable.

A hallmark of Marx’s style is her habit of asking lots of questions, many of which are amazing – so loaded with specificity, so layered with detail, that they’re almost surreal. Her “A Bushel and a Peck" contains a beauty that went straight into my “Patricia Marx Great Questions” collection:

Oh, the bagels, the thirty-seven varieties of olive (in oil), the fat wedges of Parmigiano Reggiano, organic popcorn, French milled soap that lasts forever, frozen Barney’s Franks ’n Blankets, locally made Ben’s cream cheese, and how about Murray’s lemony-garlic rotisserie chicken (you could eat it till you die), plus six hundred artisanal cheeses from around the world, and, would you believe it, Velveeta and Spam, too?

This is classic Patricia Marx. She’s not really eliciting information; she’s expressing astonishment that Fairway carries all these exotic items and, in addition, has Velveeta and Spam.

When Marx starts a question with “Oh,” as she does in the above quote, look out - a wondrous string of words is about to unfurl. She did it a few years ago in her brilliant “On And Off The Avenue: Marni” (The New Yorker, January 5, 2009):

Oh, and could I also have that strand of fabric-covered beads anchoring a large plastron of midnight-blue resin? And the pendant that looks like a conference pass except that, instead of a name tag inside the clear plastic pouch, there’s a grid of acrylic gems?

These are questions, but they’re also akin to the inventory of the contents of a Joseph Cornell box.

Here are six more examples of Marx’s delightful questions, gathered from various New Yorker pieces she’s written over the last few years:

Are you certain that you have what it takes to shop discount? Do you have the patience to excavate heaps of finery that is frayed, smudged, stretched, faded, pulled, ripped, mis-sized, unstylish, out of season, or never was in season? The grit to see yourself in the glare of fluorescent lighting – if you can even find a mirror? The confidence to have an opinion without being told what it is by an encouraging salesperson? Do you thrill to the ambience of the Department of Motor Vehicles? (“The Price Is Right,” December 8, 2008)

Is the sign in the rest room that warns “No napping” directed at the employees? Or is it for the toddlers who shop here, knowing that Daffy’s is tops for European children’s attire? Wouldn’t that cunning white knit jacket with subtle embroidery be just the thing for a little one to spit up on ($59, reduced from $200)? (“The Price Is Right,” December 8, 2008)

Do you know what several dozen bottles breaking in the back seat sounds like? (“To Shop and Drive in L.A,” March 20, 2006)

Really, now, should a piece of plastic and a couple of breakable hinges cost more than the laptop I’m typing on? (“Four Eyes,” March 29, 2010)

Are toys passé? Would a child give the time of day to a model-train set or to finger paints when, not far from the playroom, the sirens of Penguin Whacker on the iPhone, and Fruit Ninja on the iPad, beckon? (“Toy Stories,” December 6, 2010)

Did you know that Minnesota enacted a law last year requiring all American flags sold there to originate in the land of the free and the home of the sewing machine? (“Made In U.S.A.,” March 16, 2009)

Marx is a terrific writer – where “terrific” means specific, artful, avid, humorous, sensual, quasi-surreal. I enjoy her work immensely.

Postscript: Another pleasure in this week’s issue is John Kinsella’s poem “The Fable of the Great Sow.” I like its kinetic pig energy (“A leap across the gate, a pivot on the wall / Opposite, and over into a neighboring pen”), its pig descriptions (“She was total pig,/Pure sow who’d farrowed litter on litter/To watch them raised to slaughter”), its pig reality (“flies and heat of the shed”). Kinsella is becoming one of my favorite poets. His “Goat” (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010) is brilliant.

Moneyball: Denby v. Brody

Yes, there’s a dramatic homerun in Moneyball. But most of the movie’s action takes place off-field in offices and conference rooms. Phones and computers play more of a role in it than player heroics. David Denby, in his “Playing The Numbers” (The New Yorker, October 3, 2011), says that Moneyball “could be used as a training manual at business school.” I know what he means. But I found all that behind-the-scenes managerial stuff - meetings with scouts, arguments with the manager, player trades, contract negotiations, etc. – fascinating. I couldn’t get enough of it. Denby appears to relish it, too. He says, “Swapping players with other general managers on the telephone, Pitt [playing Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane] is almost as quick as Cary Grant’s manic newspaper editor in 'His Girl Friday.'” But later in his piece he seems less impressed. Regarding the movie’s focus on Beane’s executive prowess, he says, “Some of this is enjoyable, but of minor interest.” I disagree. I think that Richard Brody, in his “ ‘Moneyball’ In Play” (“The Front Row,” newyorker.com, September 29, 2011), gets it right when he says: “I think that the depiction of Beane’s executive skill—or, rather, how Beane learns to become a better executive—is the core of the movie and its greatest strength.” Denby, in his review, gets another matter wrong, too. He says Pitt’s performance in Tree of Life “deserves an Academy Award.” In my opinion, Pitt is deserving of an Academy Award, not for Tree of Life, but for Moneyball. Tree of Life is one of the worst excuses for a movie I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t even call it a movie. It’s more like a video installation. Moneyball, on the other hand, is a real movie - tough, unsentimental, grounded, like Pitt’s Billy Beane, in life’s hard, cold, quotidian reality.

Credit: The above artwork is by Martin Ansin; it appears in The New Yorker (October 31, 2011) as an illustration for David Denby's "Playing The Numbers."

January 9, 2012 Issue

Ian Frazier has an inspired way of noticing plaques and markers, often located in out-of-the-way places, and weaving quotations from them into the fabric of his pieces. For example:

(1) The historic marker at Chancellorsville: “Many would never cross another earthly stream” (Family, 1994)

(2) The metal plaque where Sitting Bull’s cabin once stood: “Sitting Bull, best known American Indian, leader of the ‘hostile groups’ for a generation, a powerful orator, a clever prophet …” (Great Plains, 1989)

(3) The plaque beneath the bust of Clifford Holland at the westbound entrance of the Holland Tunnel: “the underground highway which joins a continent to a city” (“Canal Street,” The New Yorker, April 30, 1990; included in Frazier’s brilliant 2005 collection Gone To New York)

(4) The fatality marker indicating the site on Interstate 90 where SuAnne Big Crow’s car accident occurred: “X MARKS THE SPOT,” “DRIVE SAFELY”, and “WHY DIE?” (On the Rez, 2000)

(5) On the Barabinsk Steppe, two steel markers at the base of a pillar topped by “the drastically crumpled remains of a car”: “ZYKOV, ALEKSANDER VASILVICH – 24 X 1953 – 12 III 1996” and “OLIFER, ALEKSANDER IVANOVICH – 20 XI 1959 – 12 III 1996” (Travels In Siberia, 2010)

The incorporation of these found texts into his stories is one of a multitude of artful touches that constitute Frazier’s incomparable factual style.

His great Talk piece, “Bunkers,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, provides a fresh example of his inspired use of such material. In “Bunkers,” he attends a lecture given by Leonard Ursachi, “an artist and a sculptor who makes bunkers.” The lecture takes place at the Hebrew Home, a long-term geriatric-care facility in Riverdale. Frazier describes the lecture (“He speaks softly and was heckled, almost, to talk louder”), the question-and-answer session afterwards (“Where’s the door to your bunker?” “My bunkers don’t have doors. You can only get in it with your spirit”), and an actual Ursachi bunker located on the Hebrew Home’s lawn, overlooking the Hudson River (“In its gun-slit window is a mirror”). But then the river view catches Frazier’s alert eye; he writes:

Across the broad river, the New Jersey bank rises steep and thickly wooded, with little sign of habitation. A wilderness sun sets behind it. Farther along the lawn, beyond the bunker, is a pleasant gazebo with chairs and a sofa. It offers a good view of the river, and the soothing rhythms of the trains clicking by on tracks just below the bluff, out of sight. A plaque in the gazebo says that it was built in memory of Ida Abramowitz, who came to America from Europe, raised a family, and lived from 1830 to 1938.

Now the memory of Ida Abramowitz lives, not just in a plaque, but forever, in the limpid particulars of Frazier’s glorious, everlasting, memorializing prose.

George Packer: The Breaking of Style

George Packer’s gone objective, and it’s affected his tone. It’s like he’s switched from tenor sax to clarinet. His colors aren’t as warm or rich. He’s shriller. In 2003, when he started out with the magazine, his style was literary, descriptive, and gloriously subjective. Remember his great “Gangsta War” (The New Yorker, November 3, 2003)? Its opening line is classic Packer: “From my balcony on the eighth floor of the Hotel Ivoire, I could see downtown Abidjan across the lagoon in the mist.” Remember his brilliant “The Playing Field” (The New Yorker, August 30, 2004)? Reading it was like being in the company of a lively, adventurous flâneur (e.g., “To watch the Costa Rica game, I rode the metro down to the stadium with a group of four young Iraqis”). Remember “The Moderate Martyr” (The New Yorker, September 11, 2006), which contained such inspired details as Hasan al-Turabi’s “flower-patterned polyester socks”? That was amazing! Remember his superb “The Ponzi Scheme” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2009)? It’s narrated in the first person (e.g., “Recently, I drove around some of the subdivisions on State Road 54, as well as in other parts of Tampa Bay and in southwest Florida”), as is his terrific profile of the Israeli novelist David Grossman, “The Unconsoled” (The New Yorker, September 27, 2010): “When I visited, in July, the phone was constantly ringing, a cockatiel was singing in its cage, and Ruthi was practicing 'Good Vibrations' on the piano, while Michael and Jonathan came in and out of the living room.” These pieces all have a voice as well as an effect. But last year, Packer changed his style. He banished his “I” to the margins and adopted a flat, third-person perspective. “A Dirty Business” (The New Yorker, June 27, 2011), “Coming Apart” (The New Yorker, September 12, 2011), “No Death, No Taxes” (The New Yorker, November 28, 2011), and “All the Angry People” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011) are all essentially third-person reports. They’re less descriptive and more argumentative. I’m not the only one who's noticed this. Regarding “No Death, No Taxes,” a profile of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, the blog “Reading the New Yorker” (readingthenewyorker.com) recently observed: “Unfortunately, writer George Packer didn’t do himself any favors by turning the last page into an anti-Thiel rant.” Of course, we can’t expect great writers to stand still stylistically. Look at how Norman Mailer deliberately roughened the prose of The Deer Park because he found the first draft “too self-consciously attractive and formal, false to the life of my characters, especially false to the life of my narrator who was the voice of my novel and so gave the story its air” (see Mailer’s extraordinary essay, “The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” included in his 1959 collection Advertisements for Myself). But it’s hoped that the new style will be more satisfactory than the old. It was in Mailer’s case; it’s not in Packer’s. In “The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” Mailer says, “The most powerful leverage in fiction comes from point of view.” The same is true of journalism. I hope Packer gets back to first-person narration, of which he’s a master. I hope he gets back to limning cool details. I hope he gets back to describing the pattern of people’s socks.

Credit: The above artwork is by Mark Ulriksen; it appears in The New Yorker (November 3, 2003) as an illustration for George Packer's "Gangsta War."

January 2, 2012 Issue

This week’s issue serves up a rare treat: Peter Schjeldahl, in a piece called “The Reign In Spain,” reviewing a book about Diego Velázquez, titled Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda: The Making of a Masterpiece, written by long-time New Yorker contributor Anthony Bailey. Reading it, I experienced triple bliss. The piece brims with inspired writing. Regarding Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Schjeldahl says:

To behold it, transfixed by the eyes of the devastatingly pretty Infanta, as she accepts a little red jug from a gracefully bending maid, while a departing courtier pauses to look back, and a boy kicks a dog, is to ride a whirlwind of fact and conjecture into metaphysical infinity.

That “whirlwind of fact and conjecture” is very fine. Schjeldahl is unfailingly generous in his praise of Bailey’s book. This is as it should be; Bailey is one of The New Yorker’s greatest writers (see my “Interesting Emendations: Anthony Bailey’s ‘Outer Banks,’” January 13, 2011). Schjeldahl deliciously quotes Bailey as follows:

Bailey’s description is a tour de force of visual gourmandise, lingering on such passages as “the recess, barely a dimple, under her right shoulder blade” and identifying a zone of her lower back “painted with such skill that words fall away, useless.”

Schjeldahl is, as I am, a Bailey fan. In one of my favorite Schjeldahl pieces, a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Vermeer and the Delft School” (“The Sphinx,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2001; included in Schjeldah’s wonderful 2008 collection Let’s See), he refers to Bailey’s Vermeer Then and Now: A View of Delft, saying that it “perfectly complements” the Met’s show. I would say the same about Schjeldhal and Bailey: they perfectly complement each other. What a pleasure it is to see their work combined in one piece. What a great start to the new year!

Bishop's Wasps' Nest, McPhee's Caribou Antlers

I'm fascinated by bones, feathers, shells, fallen nests, and other natural remnants. Two writers who've shown a similar interest in such things are Elizabeth Bishop and John McPhee. Bishop, in her great poem, “Santarém” (The New Yorker, February 20, 1978; included in Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems), remembers traveling up the Amazon, stopping briefly in the town of Santarém, and while there, seeing an empty wasps’ nest on a drugstore shelf (“In the blue pharmacy the pharmacist / had hung an empty wasps’ nest from the shelf: / small, exquisite, clean matte white, / and hard as stucco”). She says, “I admired it / so much he gave it to me.” She takes it back to her ship:

Back on board, a fellow passenger, Mr. Swan,
Dutch, the retired head of Philips Electric,
really a very nice old man,
who wanted to see the Amazon before he died,
asked, “What’s that ugly thing?”

McPhee, in his wonderful piece “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977; Book I of his Coming into the Country), describes hiking with two companions in the central Brooks Range of Alaska and finding numerous caribou antlers protruding from the tundra:

Moving downhill and south across the tundra, we passed through groves of antlers. It was as if the long filing lines of the spring migration had for some reason paused here for shedding to occur. The antler, like the bear, implied the country. Most were white, gaunt, chalky. I picked up a younger one, though, that was recently shed and was dark, like polished brown marble. It was about four feet along the beam and perfect in form. Hession found one like it. We set them on our shoulders and moved on down the hill, intent to take them home.

I see myself in these passages. I, too, have lugged home found bones, horns, and skins from my Arctic travels. They are, in my eyes, the ultimate souvenirs. A mere glance at one is sufficient to trigger memories of the trip that resulted in its discovery. Others, looking at these irregular, organic oddments respond the way Mr. Swan does in “Santarém”: “What’s that ugly thing?”

After I’m gone, my mementos are likely headed for the trash. Their significance immediately disappears when the memories attached to them are snuffed out. What distinguishes Bishop’s wasps’ nest and McPhee’s caribou antlers is that, so long as there are eyes to read, they will endure.

Credit: The above artwork is Georgia O'Keeffe's Summer Days (1936).