May 21, 2012 Issue

Of The New Yorker’s many wonderful departments (e.g., Our Local Correspondents, Onward and Upward with The Arts, Profiles, Annals of Science, A Critic at Large), my favorite is Personal History. I like it because it shows excellent writers trying to make sense of some aspect of their past. Reading Personal History pieces, I sometimes make associations with my own past. Examples of recent Personal History articles that I’ve enjoyed immensely are: John McPhee’s “The Patch” (February 8, 2010), James Wood’s “The Fun Stuff” (November 19, 2010), Gabrielle Hamilton’s “The Lamb Roast” (January 17, 2011), Calvin Trillin’s “My Repertoire” (November 21, 2011), Aleksandar Hemon’s “Mapping Home” (December 5, 2011), Donald Hall’s “Out the Window” (January 23, 2012), and Jeremy Denk’s “Flight of the Concord” (February 6, 2012). This week’s issue of the magazine contains a beauty – Peter Hessler’s “Identity Parade.” It’s a strange piece - part autobiography, part police procedural (it even has a hint of suspense). It describes Hessler’s participation in police lineups during his student days at Oxford. I don’t recall ever before reading about this particular aspect of the legal system. Hessler recalls his involvement right down to the feel of sweat running down his back as he “tried to look as guilty as possible.” His description of the process is fascinating. But what most intrigued me about it is Hessler’s self-examination, his candid, introspective portrait of himself as a mixture of good and bad impulses.  He talks about deliberately breaking some of Oxford’s many rules (e.g., wearing shorts under his long gown, drinking at an off-limit pub, refusing to attend a practice examination). He says:

I never fit in at Oxford. I was there on a Rhodes Scholarship, and I allowed this identity to become a burden, for reasons that now seem childish. At the time, I knew that I had been a weak candidate for the scholarship, which was why I had been placed in such an obscure college.

I mirrored off this passage. I didn’t fit in at the university I attended. As in Hessler’s case, I was a loner. Hessler says, “I never met any other students or Americans at the St. Aldates station [where the lineups took place], which was one reason I liked going.” His description of his “last parade” is amazing. Here’s an excerpt:

And then there was a slight movement on the left edge of the glass. The one-way mirror wasn’t perfect; you couldn’t see clearly through the glass, but it was possible to tell if there was a presence behind it. A dark spot appeared and then it shifted to the right, crossing the row of reflected faces, as subtle as a shadow in an aquarium. Next to me the suspect breathed harder. A couple of times, his wind caught in his throat, almost like a sob, and now I felt him trembling. My right leg was pressed against his chair, and tiny thrills of vibration ran up through the metal. What did that feel like, to be a suspect in a parade, to be the only one shaking, the only one with a real mustache? I resisted the urge to turn and look; I kept my eyes straight ahead.

That “subtle as a shadow in an aquarium” is very fine. The whole passage is inspired! Hessler has written three previous New Yorker pieces I admire enormously: “Oracle Bones” (February 16 & 23, 2004); “Hutong Karma” (February 13, 2006); “Walking the Wall” (May 21, 2007). His superb “Identity Parade” now joins the list.  

May 14, 2012 Issue

The Innovator Issue is here, loaded with amazing items. I hover over it like one of those Nano Hummingbirds that Nick Paumgarten so vividly describes in his excellent “Here’s Looking At You” (“Keennon removed the Hummingbird’s dappled magnetic shell to show off the innards: tiny cables and pulleys and pushrods”), scanning for thisness. (Thisness is “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion”: James Wood, How Fiction Works, 2008.) I find at least a half-dozen prime specimens: (1) the Kees van der Westen espresso machine at Thirstbaràvin, “as sleek and sexy as a motorcycle” (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two”); (2) Pedrito Martinez thumping on the conga, “abandoning the subtle math he’d been sketching for almost a minute” (Sasha Frere-Jones, “Beat Happening”); (3) the “dozens of Puma drones in black caskets the size of guitar cases” on the shop floor at AeroVironment (Nick Paumgarten, “Here’s Looking At You”); (4) the young woman “with a lug-nut washer tattooed on her shoulder … daubing aquamarine paint on a cascade of small wooden dowels” (Andrea K. Scott, “A Million Little Pieces”; (5) Daniel Nocera’s ingenious “artificial leaf” – “a cheap, playing-card-size coated-silicon sheet that, when placed in a glass of tap water and exposed to sunlight, split the water into hydrogen and oxygen” (David Owen, “The Artificial Leaf”); (6) the “humongous metal lizards” that The Avengers’ Banner slings around the canyons of Manhattan (Anthony Lane, “Double Lives”). My favorite line of the whole, rich issue is Nick Paumgarten's delightful, surprising, quasi-surrealist, “As a visitor, you must present your passport and surrender your phone, which is a shame, because you come across skunk-work marvels that make you itch to text smartphone snapshots to gadget-geek friends.” Now there's a sentence that enacts the innovation it describes!

In Praise of Updike's Nonfiction

Phillip Lopate, in his recent review of Jonathan Franzen’s new essay collection Farther Away ("Manageable Discontents," The New York Times Sunday Book Review, May 18, 2012), says that, “John Updike was an ever-graceful critic, but few of his nonfiction pieces stir the blood the way his short stories or novels can.” For me, it’s the other way around. It’s Updike’s essays and criticism that stimulate me. If my house caught fire and I had only a few seconds to grab a handful of books from the flames, I’d pick my collection of Updike’s nonfiction: Assorted Prose (1965), Picked-Up Pieces (1975), Hugging the Shore (1983), Just Looking (1989), Odd Jobs (1991), More Matter (1999), Still Looking (2005), Due Considerations (2007), and Higher Gossip (2011). That’s quite an armload! And if I had to reduce it to one choice, I’d select Picked-Up Pieces, which contains, among so many wonderful articles, Updike’s incomparable appreciation of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (“Remembrance of Things Past Remembered”). Updike’s essays and criticism are, for me, a tremendous source of reading pleasure. 

Credit: The above portrait of John Updike is by Tom Bachtell.

Brody's Misinterpretation of Kael

Richard Brody, in his “Sontag On Movies: For Interpretation” (“The Front Row,” newyorker.com, May 23, 2012), says, “Sontag ghettoized much of classic Hollywood under the rubric of “camp” (famously, in her “Notes on ‘Camp’”), just as, around the same time, Pauline Kael ghettoized the same movies by calling them “kitsch.” I question the accuracy of his statement about Kael. In “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag identified Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon as “among the greatest Camp movies ever made.” Kael, in her brilliant 1991 collection 5001 Nights at the Movies, praises Trouble in Paradise as “Perhaps the most shimmering of the romantic comedy collaborations of the director Ernst Lubitsch and the writer Samson Raphaelson.” She says it’s “full of suave maneuvers and magical switcheroos; in its light-as-a-feather way, it’s perfection.” Regarding The Maltese Falcon, she writes, “This film is an almost perfect visual equivalent of the Dashiell Hammett thriller” (5001 Nights at the Movies). She says, “It is (and this is rare in American films) a work of entertainment that is yet so skillfully constructed that after many years and many viewings it has the same brittle explosiveness – and even some of the same surprise – that it had in its first run.” Kael’s admiration for these two movies is obvious. It’s difficult to comprehend how Brody concluded that she “ghettoized” them as “kitsch.” Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Credit: The above portrait of Pauline Kael is by Eda Akaltun.

May 7, 2012 Issue

Brimming with choice quotation and brilliant descriptive analysis (“all is alive, silvery, alert, rapid with insight”), James Wood’s "Invitation to a Beheading," in this week’s issue, is a model book review in every way. Yet, it fails to persuade. It’s a rave review of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels. But what is so wonderful about novels that fudge the facts? Wood says that Mantel “knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case.” Implicit in Wood’s position is that, in order to make the story interesting, it’s okay to invent details. For example, Wood refers to the Fugger bag that Mantel says was fashionable in Cromwell’s time (“This season young men carry their effects in soft pale leather bags, in imitation of the agents of the Fugger bank, who travel all over Europe and set the fashion”), and comments:

Do you know if Mantel has manufactured or borrowed from the record this information about the fashionable Fugger bag? In some sense, it doesn’t matter, because the writer has made a third category of reality, the plausibly hypothetical. It’s what Aristotle claimed was the difference between the historian and the poet: the former describes what happened, and the latter what might happen.

I’m not convinced. The “plausibly hypothetical” isn’t reality. Reality is, as John Updike brilliantly defined it, “a fabric of microscopic accuracies” (“Accuracy,” included in Updike’s 1976 collection Picked-Up Pieces). The “coroners of the human case” are writers who eschew accuracy in favor of fabrication. 

April 30, 2012 Issue

In order for me to enjoy Sasha Frere-Jones’s pop music reviews, I have to treat them as abstractions. The reason for this is that I cannot abide electronic music, which is what Frere-Jones mostly writes about. But Frere-Jones’s writing, considered as pure writing, is wonderful. His “Sound Machine,” in this week’s issue, contains a number of marvelous descriptions (e.g., “After a brief spray of notes, a white scrim fell, revealing the band members, each wearing a skintight bicycling outfit covered with luminescent white lines in a grid formation, as if they were being tracked on a green screen for later animation”). Frere-Jones says that Kraftwerk is “the Warhol of pop.” That analogy is valid, in my opinion, only if Kraftwerk’s electronic sound has an element that is equivalent to the painterly look of Warhol’s silk-screens. Yes, Warhol said he wanted to be a machine. But, as Peter Schjeldahl points out in his 2002 review of the Tate Modern’s Warhol retrospective, he also “wanted to be Matisse” ("Warhol In Bloom,"The New Yorker, March 11, 2002). Schjeldahl says, “Warhol was a supreme colorist who redid the world’s palette in tart, amazing hues such as cerise, citron, burnt orange, and apple-green.” It’s not clear to me from Frere-Jones’s review that Kraftwerk’s music has this Warholian aspect. In fact, his inspired description of the arpeggio in Kraftwerk’s “Computer World” as feeling “a bit like bubbles rising through mercury” points the other way - towards monochrome and monotone.