June 25, 2012 Issue

What a pleasure to read this issue! From Hannah Goldfield’s delectable “Tables For Two” (“But the Pok Pok Affogato – tiny scoops of rich, creamy condensed-milk ice cream floating in black Vietnamese coffee, served with the type of crispy Chinese crullers usually eaten with congee for breakfast – is nothing short of heavenly”) to Richard Brody’s "Critic’s Notebook" celebration of one of my favorite films, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (“a signal work of first-person cinematic modernism”) to Tad Friend’s richly detailed profile of Ben Stiller (“Onscreen, Stiller’s face is an unmade bed of comic distress, but his daily aspect, in a black Ralph Lauren T-shirt, black Simon Miller jeans, and black Nikes, is ascetic and pensive”) to four immensely stimulating, satisfying critical pieces (James Wood’s “True Lives,” Jill Lepore’s “Obama, The Prequel,” Sasha Frere-Jones’s “Revelation Road,” and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Young and Gifted”) - the whole gorgeous assemblage is blazingly extraordinary!

June 18, 2012 Issue

Reading The New Yorker, I navigate by the star of thisness. By thisness, I mean “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). I regret to report that there’s precious little thisness in this week’s issue, which is mostly concerned with politics, a subject that rarely generates textured writing. There are exceptions, e.g., A. J. Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana (1961) and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Prophet of Love (2004), but not the pieces in this week's issue. Peter Hessler’s “Arab Summer,” which describes the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt, has a “puff of palpability” near the beginning (“Rifaat stashes his cans of shoe polish behind the statue of Horus”). But more typical of the piece’s wording is this line: “The Brotherhood is extremely hierarchical, and each member belongs to a five-person usra, or “family,” which meets regularly.” However, Hessler’s piece is positively inspired compared to Ryan Lizza’s “The Second Term.” The closest it gets to thisness is this insipid description of the Bachelor Farmer’s menu: “A hundred people who each gave five thousand dollars to the President’s campaign dined on a salad of house-smoked pork and a choice of roasted chicken or Copper River sockeye salmon (a vegetarian menu was also available).” As for Jane Mayer’s “Bully Pulpit,” I skimmed it and quickly moved on. Evangelist talk-show hosts  are far too easy targets for The New Yorker. They’re irrational; we know they’re irrational. Forget them. There are bigger and better fish to fry. The fourth political piece in this week’s issue is Jill Lepore’s “Benched.” It’s sort of a companion to Jeffrey Toobin’s recent “Money Unlimited” (The New Yorker, May 21, 2012), except that its focus is more historical. Both pieces lack thisness. But they’re frustrating for another reason, too. Their analysis is driven by the same tired old Left-Right, Conservative-Liberal dichotomy that political writers have been applying for decades. Is there not some other lens we can use to try to understand our politics? See, for example, David Runciman’s use of risk assessment in some of the pieces collected in his excellent The Politics of Good Intentions (2006).

Postscript: Amid the abrasive, obnoxious politicians, revolutionaries, evangelists, and rappers crowding the pages of this week's issue, Eamon Grennon's swooping sand martins stand out - delightful, vital presences, "fill[ing] salt air with their shrill chatter" ("Sand Martins").
 

Interesting Emendations: Whitney Balliett's "Super Chops"

Recently, researching an article I’m writing (tentatively titled “Paper Rooms: The Art of Interior Description in New Yorker Profiles”) for this blog, I reread Whitney Balliett’s wonderful "Super Chops" (The New Yorker, January 29, 1979), a profile of jazz pianist, Dave McKenna. It contains the following vivid description of a bar’s interior:

The summer after Maddow’s death, McKenna went into the Lobster Boat, several miles down Route 28 toward Hyannis. It has a huge white mock ship’s prow that points into a parking lot that runs along the highway. Behind the prow are a lozenge-shaped lounge and a big, boxy dining room. The lounge has a bar and a small bandstand opposite, which holds an upright piano. The wall back of the bandstand is curved and contains a couple of dozen portholes, each of them fitted out with a hanging plant. The piano bench is flanked by carriage lamps fastened to the wall, and there are candlesticks on the piano and a glass chandelier over it. The ceiling is beamed and decorated with signal flags and ship’s wheels, and the patrons sit below in a comfortable rummage shop furnished with sofas, director’s chairs, captain’s chairs, overstuffed chairs, side tables, and standing lamps. It is three New England parlors placed end to end.

This passage is an excellent example of the type of detailed interior description that I want to consider in my “Paper Rooms” piece. Mindful of Balliett’s penchant for revision, I compared the New Yorker “Super Chops” with the version included in his great 1986 collection American Musicians. I discovered a number of interesting changes. For example, the magazine piece begins, “Some lives pivot on paradox”; whereas, the American Musicians version starts with, “Like his friend and great admirer Bobby Hackett, Dave McKenna’s life pivots on paradox.” The magazine version describes McKenna as “a man-mountain, whose perfect proportions contain a massive eagle’s head, a logger’s forearms, and hot-dog fingers.” The book version deletes “whose perfect proportions contain.” Its description is as follows: “McKenna is a man-mountain. He has a massive eagle’s head, a logger’s forearms, and hot-dog fingers.” The description of McKenna’s music, in the New Yorker version, includes this line: “The rock-rock, rock-rock, rock-rock of his time becomes irresistible: it is hypnotic, ecstatic.” In the book version, this is trimmed to “The rock-rock, rock-rock, rock-rock of his time is hypnotic.”

The depiction of the Lobster Boat’s interior, quoted above, remains unchanged. But another of my favorite passages – a description of McKenna’s style, as he duets with Teddy Wilson – has been altered. In the magazine, Balliett wrote, “It is a joyous, triumphant, foraging style, and by the end of Wilson and McKenna’s second number it was clear that McKenna was helplessly blowing Wilson out of the water.” In American Musicians, “triumphant” and “helplessly” are cut, and the line simply reads, “It is a joyous, foraging style, and by the end of Wilson and McKenna’s second number it was clear that McKenna was blowing Wilson out of the water.” Adjectives have been deleted from several other lines in the book version, as well. It appears that Balliett’s revisions were aimed at making the piece leaner. I find the American Musician’s version slightly preferable. But there’s one line that I wish Balliett hadn’t changed. It’s a description of Teddy Wilson’s technique:

Wilson would effect an almost transparent pointillistic chorus, and then McKenna, his left hand rolling and rumbling, would roar into his chorus, and all memory of what Wilson had just played would be gone.

In American Musicians, this is changed to:

Wilson would effect resplendent chorus, and then McKenna, his left hand rolling and rumbling, would roar into his chorus, and all memory of what Wilson had just played would be gone.

Why did Balliett change “an almost transparent pointillistic” to “resplendent”? Perhaps the use of the qualifier “almost” bothered him. But, it seems to me, in scrapping “transparent pointillistic,” he sacrificed an inspired description of Wilson’s delicate, subtle style. 

McPhee and Names

I crave specificity. No writer satisfies this craving more completely than John McPhee. One way he does it is by providing a wealth of proper names. The proper name is a form of specificity par excellence. “It is a voluminous sign, a sign always pregnant with a dense texture of meaning,” Roland Barthes says, in “Proust and Names” (New Critical Essays, 1980). McPhee is a compulsive namer; he names everything in sight – rivers, lakes, mountains, towns, valleys, rocks, geologic periods, rapids, dams, canoes, even such details as chocolate bars (“Militärschokolade, Chocolat Militaire”), lacrosse sticks (“Cyber head on a black Swizzle Scandium,” and Bubba Watson’s driver (“His 460cc Grafalloy driver has a pink shaft”). It’s an aspect of his phenomenal art of description. Here are a dozen passages exemplifying his use of proper names:

The canton is divided in language as well, part French, part German, and not in a mixed-up manner, which would be utterly un-Swiss, but with a break that is clear in the march of towns – Champéry, Martigny, Sion, Sierre, Salgesch, Turtmann, Ausserberg, Brig – and clearer still in the names of the hanging valleys that come down among the peaks and plummet to the Rhone: Val de Bagnes, Val d”Hérens, Val d’Anniviers, Turtmanntal, Lötschental, Mattertal. (“La Place de la Concorde Suisse,” The New Yorker, October 31 & November 7, 1983)

At Gornergrat one day, at the top of a cog railway five thousand feet above Zermatt, I was sitting in an almost windless stillness, slowly moving my gaze in full circumference from the Breithorn to the Matterhorn to the Dente Blanche to the Zinalrothorn to the Weisshorn to the Dom – all well above four thousand metres – and on to the Dufourspitze, the highest mountain in Switzerland. (“La Place de la Concorde Suisse,” The New Yorker, October 31 & November 7, 1983)

Twelve miles from Rawlins, the horses were changed at Bell Spring, where, in a kind of topographical staircase – consisting of the protruding edges of sediments that dipped away to the east – the whole of the Mesozoic era rose to view: the top step of the Cretaceous, the next Jurassic, at the bottom a low red Triassic bluff, against which was clustered a compound of buildings roofed with cool red mud. (“Rising from the Plains,” The New Yorker, February 24 & March 3 & 10, 1986)

From level to level in a drill hole there – a hole about a mile deep – oil could be found in an amazing spectrum of host rocks: in the Cambrian Flathead sandstone, in the Mississippian Madison limestone, in the Tensleep sands of Pennsylvanian time. Oil was in the Chugwater (red sands of the Triassic), and in the Morrison, Sundance, Nugget (celebrated formations of the Jurrasic), and, of course, in the Crataceous Frontier. (“Rising from the Plains,” The New Yorker, February 24 & March 3 & 10, 1986)

We shivered in the deep shadows of bluffs a thousand feet high – Calico Bluff, Montauk Bluff, Biederman Bluff, Takoma Bluff – which day after day intermittently walled the river. (“Coming into the Country,” The New Yorker, June 20 & 27, July 4 & 11, 1977)

They arrived in a pickup – with their axes and hammers, drill bits and drawknife, whipsaw; their new, lovely, seventeen-foot Chestnut Prospector canoe. (“Coming into the Country,” The New Yorker, June 20 & 27, July 4 & 11, 1977)

Above the line rise the Kennebec, the Penobscot, the Allegash, the St. John. Above the line is the Great North Woods. (“North of the C.P. Line,” The New Yorker, November 26, 1984)

Since 1960, some two hundred small-river dams have been removed in the United States, nowhere as feverishly as in Wisconsin, where the Slabtown Dam, on the Bark River, was destroyed in 1992; the Wonewoc Dam, on the Bark River, in 1996; the Hayman Falls Dam, on the Embarrass River, in 1995; the Readstown Dam, on the Kickapoo River, in 1985; the Mellen Dam, on the Bad River, in 1967. (“Farewell to the Nineteenth Century," The New Yorker, September 27, 1999)

After passing under three bridges, two of them abandoned, we would come to the end of our trip at A. J. Lambert Riverside Park, Hooksett Village, below Hooksett Dam – a spectacular scene colluding natural white cascades with water falling over the dam and plunging from the powerhouse. (“1839/2003,” The New Yorker, December 15, 2003)

From Breaky Bottom out through Beachy Head, under the Channel, and up into Picardy, and on past Arras and Amiens, the chalk is continuous to Reims and Épernay. To drive the small roads and narrow lanes of Champagne is to drive the karstic downlands of Sussex and Surrey, the smoothly bold topography of Kentish chalk – the French ridges, long and soft, the mosaic fields and woodlots, the chalk boulders by the road in villages like Villeneuve-l’Archêveque. (“Season on the Chalk,” The New Yorker, March 12, 2007)

Credit: The above photo of John McPhee is by Peter Cook.

June 4 & 11, 2012 Issue

One thing I’ve learned from writing this blog is that The New Yorker never lets me down. No matter how uninteresting its contents may first appear, a closer look always yields at least a pearl or two of reading bliss. This week’s Science Fiction Issue is a case in point. Monsters, zombies, humanoids, and aliens aren’t my cup of tea. I was dispiritedly paging through the magazine, thinking this issue might be the first about which I had absolutely nothing good to say, when I came to Colson Whitehead’s “A Psychotronic Childhood.” The first line (“Growing up on the Upper East Side in the nineteen-seventies, I was a bit of a shut-in”) hooked me. I immediately read the piece straight through, and enjoyed it immensely. It helped that I’d previously read Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York (2003), which features one of the catchiest, coolest opening sentences I’ve ever read (“I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you”). Encountering Whitehead in the Science Fiction Issue was like discovering an old friend in a roomful of intimidating strangers. Tucked within the pages containing “A Psychotronic Childhood” is a one-page piece titled “Olds Rocket 88, 1950” by William Gibson. My eyes strayed to it, lighting on this delightful construction: “The zeitgeist was chewy with space-flavored nuggets, morsels of futuristic design, precursors of a Tomorrow whose confident glow was visible beyond the horizon of all that was less wonderful, provided one had eyes to see it.” Provided one had eyes to see it. Thank goodness, I had eyes to see Gibson’s piece. It’s whetted my appetite for more Gibson, a writer whose work was, before now, unknown to me. I’m considering reading one of his novels. For me, that's a big step. I much prefer fact to fantasy. 

May 28, 2012 Issue

The most interesting sentences in this week’s issue are by Richard Brody. In his capsule review of Leos Carax’s Boy Meets Girl (1984), he writes:

Lucid, sardonic, cinema-centric asides (especially one great set piece involving an aged, hearing-impaired movie technician from the silent-era) adorn their all-night tangle of intimacy, building to a grungy, furiously self-deprecating Liebestod.

Notice how he deliciously delays the verb. His sentences are like long freight trains, multi-colored boxcars of description strung before and aft of the locomotive verb. I’m a sucker for such front-loaded constructions. Brody is a master writer of them. Here’s another example, this one from his mini-review of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), also in this week’s New Yorker:

The irrepressible allure of Hitchcock’s visual extravagance – his baroque swirl of caustic greens, voluptuous purples, acidic yellows, and fiery reds, the indecent glare of daylight – conjures a vortex of unconscious desires beyond the realm of dramatic machinations; his happy ending, of health restored and crime punished, resembles an aridly monastic renunciation.

I don’t always agree with Brody’s opinions. His listing of Hitchcock’s Marnie on his “Ten Greatest Films of All Time” struck me as excessively connoisseurish. And his grievous lack of appreciation for Kael’s writing borders on willful blindness. But, for me, it’s not the opinion that counts so much as the art with which it’s expressed. Brody is emerging as one of the magazine’s most distinctive stylists.