July 1, 2013 Issue

Part of the pleasure of reading John McPhee’s recent work is noting the allusions to some of his previous pieces. His delightful "The Orange Trapper," in this week’s issue, contains a number of such references. For example, George Hackl is mentioned (“Ask George Hackl, who grew up playing golf on courses around Princeton …”). Is this the same George Hackl who joined McPhee for that tasty feed of shad with whisky sauce in the Appendix of McPhee’s The Founding Fish (2002)? I believe it is. Another example is the anecdote about the Guayas River pirate who takes a sailor’s watch, looks at it, and gives it back to him because it isn’t good enough. This is out of McPhee’s great Looking for a Ship (1990). His reference, in “The Orange Trapper,” to “river batture” is an echo from his masterly “Atchafalaya” (The New Yorker, February 23, 1987; included in his 1989 collection, The Control of Nature): “In the river batture – the silt-swept no man’s land between waterline and levee – lone egrets sat in trees, waiting for the next cow.”

“The Orange Trapper” is also enormously enjoyable for its surreal sentences (e.g., “Tulip poplars tend to smear”; “If more than one player is using a Callaway 3 HX HOT BITE or a Pinnacle 4 GOLD FX LONG – or, far more commonly, there’s a coincidence of Titleists – you need your own pine tree”). They’re surreal in the sense that their word juxtapositions startle. But what’s really interesting about them is that, unlike surreal painting and poetry, they describe real life. Consider, for example, McPhee’s description of a hiking-and-birding trail:

This is not on one of my biking routes, but on solo rides I have been there, and returned there, inspired by curiosity and a longing for variety and, not least, the observation that in the thickets and copses and wild thorny bushes on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence are golf balls – Big Bank golf balls, Big Pharma golf balls, C-level golf balls (C.E.O., C.O.O., C.F.O. golf balls), lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay.

That “in the thickets and copses and wild thorny bushes on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence” is wonderful. But what makes the construction a true McPhee is that inspired last bit – “lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay.” I’m willing to bet that in all of literature, no writer has ever before combined “biking routes,” “solo rides,” “thickets and copses and wild thorny roses,” “Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence,” “golf balls,” “Big Pharma,” “abandoned,” “snorkeling in Caneel Bay” in one line. It’s a gorgeous, cabinet-of wonders sentence, one among many, in a terrific piece. I enjoyed “The Orange Trapper” immensely.

June 24, 2013 Issue

Facing the joyless content (suicide, terminal dementia, amyloid plaques, tau tangles) of this week’s mordant issue – I need a drink. Oh to live in NYC and have access to the bar at Lafayette where, according to Amelia Lester’s wonderful “Tables For Two,” the “spectacular Asterix Elixir, made with herbes de Provence, gin, yellow chartreuse, and egg whites” is served. I’ll have one of those, please. Lacking such access, I’m going to mix myself a dark-and-dirty (four parts Lemon Hart rum, one part Coke), sit in my somewhat mosquito-proof, screened-in porch and imagine Amelia and me in that “light-filled dining room on a balmy summer’s evening” savoring those “velvety baby scallops.” Here's to you, Amelia - “pure pleasure,” indeed!

Janet Malcolm's "Forty-one False Starts" - Part II

In late 2003, two remarkable Diane Arbus exhibitions (and accompanying catalogs) – the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Diane Arbus Revelations and Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art’s Diane Arbus: Family Albums - attracted the attention of two of America’s greatest critical writers – Janet Malcolm and Judith Thurman. Thurman’s review, "Exposure Time," appeared in the October 13, 2003, New Yorker, and was later included in her superb Cleopatra’s Nose (2007). Malcolm’s piece, "Good Pictures," was originally published in the January 15, 2004, New York Review of Books, and now, nine years later, wonderfully reappears in her excellent new collection Forty-one False Starts. Both pieces are brilliant. It’s interesting to compare them, as much for what they may tell about Malcolm’s and Thurman’s style, as for what they reveal about Arbus’s work. (I’m as interested in the way Malcolm and Thurman write as I am in the way Arbus took pictures.)

The first thing to note is that Thurman’s piece is a book review; it considers only the exhibition catalogs. In contrast, Malcolm’s review covers both the exhibitions and the catalogs. This is a significant difference that accrues to Malcolm’s benefit. Her critical approach thrives on comparative analysis. In her “Good Pictures,” she pounces on a fascinating discrepancy between the Family Albums exhibition and the Family Albums catalogue and uses it to illustrate what constitutes, in her words, “true Arbus photographs.” I’m referring to the point late in Malcolm’s narrative in which she reports that the younger Matthaei daughter, Leslie, “suddenly decided she didn’t want any pictures of herself published.” As Malcolm explains, this meant that Arbus’s Leslie portraits were viewable only at the show, not in the catalog. This fact generates a quintessentially Malcolmian line: “When I went to see the Mount Holyoke show, I naturally sought out the missing pictures of Leslie and immediately understood why she had not wanted them preserved in a book.” I find that sentence thrilling for at least three reasons: (1) it shows Malcolm entering her narrative, making a story of her pursuit of a story; (2) it turns a trip to the gallery into a form of psychoanalytic inquiry (what is it about the portraits that Leslie is repressing?); (3) it creates a delicious anticipation of Malcolm’s description of what the Leslie portraits look like. With respect to this last point, Malcolm doesn’t disappoint. Immediately following the above-quoted sentence, she writes: “Leslie, an attractive girl, is the disobliging daughter, the Cordelia of the shoot. In almost every photograph, she sulks, glares, frowns, looks tense and grim and sometimes even outright malevolent.”

Malcolm then makes another brilliant analytic move – a comparison of the Leslie portraits with those of her older sister, Marcella. In what is perhaps the piece’s most memorable line, she writes, “Marcella gave Arbus what Leslie refused.” It’s like a line from a novel. Malcolm reads the pictures as a story about how Arbus made art from what appeared to be a hopelessly banal family photo shoot. In fact, earlier in “Good Pictures,” she says, “The uncut Matthaei contact sheets straightforwardly tell the story of Arbus’s two-day struggle with her commissions.” The art that emerged from this struggle are the two Marcella portraits. Malcolm describes them unforgettably:

The two portraits of Marcella that Lee and Pultz reproduce in the book are true Arbus photographs. They have the strangeness and uncanniness with which Arbus’s best work is tinged. They belong among the pictures of the man wearing a bra and stockings and the twins in corduroy dresses and the albino sword swallower and the nudist couple. Like these subjects, Marcella unwittingly collaborated with Arbus on her project of defamiliarization. The portraits of Marcella – one full-figure to the knees, and the other of head and torso – show a girl with long hair and bangs that come down over her eyes who is standing so erect and looking so straight ahead of her that she might be a caryatid. The fierce gravity of her strong features further enhances the sense of stone. Her short, sleeveless white dress of crocheted material, which might look tacky on another girl, looks like a costume from myth on this girl. To contrast the pictures of balky little Leslie with those of monumental Marcella is to understand something about the fictive nature of Arbus’s work. The pictures of Leslie are pictures that illustrate photography’s ready realism, its appetite for fact. They record the literal truth of Leslie’s fury and misery. The pictures of Marcella show the defeat of photography’s literalism. They take us far from the family gathering – indeed from any occasion but that of of the encounter between Arbus and Marcella in which the fiction of the photograph is forged.

Diane Arbus, "Untitled (Marcella Matthaei)," 1969

I confess, as much as I admire this passage for its extraordinary interpretative beauty and originality, I find it disorienting. Nothing that’s gone before it, in “Good Pictures,” prepares the reader for critical phrases such as “project of defamiliarization,” “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work,” and “the fiction of the photograph.” In fact, if you are reading the essays in Forty-one False Starts serially from the beginning, you will have already encountered Malcolm’s observation, in  “Depth of Field,” that “Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness.” I don’t know if it’s possible to reconcile these two views. “Inescapable truthfulness” would seem to preclude fictionalization, unless Malcolm is reading the Marcella portraits as a type of narrative truth. Perhaps she is. Recall that in her great essay, “Six Roses ou Cirrhose” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in her 1992 collection, The Purloined Clinic), she defines narrative truth as “the truth of literary art.” Perhaps “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work” and “the fiction of the photograph,” in the sense that Malcolm uses them in “Good Pictures,” means “the truth of photographic art.”

If you read Judith Thurman’s “Exposure Time” after you read Malcolm’s “Good Pictures,” you might think that Thurman missed the story. In a way, she did. Not only does she not mention the Leslie and Marcella portraits, she devotes only three lines to Diane Arbus: Family Albums (“The pictures she took for the album, which was never published, were commissioned by magazines or by private clients, and some were made for art’s sake. Like all her work, they explored the nature of closeness and disaffection, sameness and anomaly, belonging and exclusion: the tension between our sentimental expectations of what is supposed to be and the debacle of what is. Arbus put it more simply to Crookston: ‘I think all families are creepy in a way’”). Instead, Thurman focuses on Diane Arbus: Revelations, which she calls the “much more ambitious Arbus show.”

But Thurman has her own Arbus story to tell or, rather, more accurately, her own Arbus brief to argue. “Exposure Time” is a tour de force of descriptive analysis that powerfully defends Arbus against, in Thurman’s words, “the hostility to her transgressions.” Thurman quotes Susan Sontag’s accusation that Arbus explored “an appalling underworld” of the “deformed and mutilated.” In rebuttal, Thurman says, “The respect and sympathy for her freaks that Arbus expresses in her letters – particularly those to her children – and her apparently solicitous, ongoing engagement with them, is at odds with the view that she was exploiting their credulity.” Conceding that Arbus was “cunning and aggressive,” she adds, “but so are many photographers.” She says,

Photography was then, and still is, a macho profession, and if she took its machismo to greater extremes than her peers of either sex, it was in part to scourge her native timidity and to prove that she had the balls to join her subjects’ orgies, share their nudity, endure their stench, revel in their squalor, and break down their resistance with a seductively disarming or fierce and often sexualized persistence until she “got” a certain expression: defeat, fatigue, slackness, anomie, or demented joy.

Diane Arbus, "Untitled (7)," 1970-71

Rereading “Exposure Time,” I’m struck by the naturalness of Thurman’s style. She is much more natural than Malcolm. Her lines are longer, richer, more sensuous and vivid. For example, here from “Exposure Time,” is her wonderful description of Arbus’s great Untitled (7):

In one of her masterpieces, “Untitled (7),” the rural landscape seems bathed in the lowering and eerie radiance of an eclipse, and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects—descendants of Goya’s gargoyles—march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear. A grave child of indeterminate sex with a painted mustache and averted gaze holds hands with a masked old woman in a white shift. They are oblivious of—and in a way liberated from—Arbus’s gaze. After years of posing her subjects frontally, she had begun to prefer that they did not look at her. “I think I will see them more clearly,” she wrote to Amy, “if they are not watching me watching them.”

That “and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects – descendants of Goya’s gargoyles – march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear” is very fine.

“Exposure Time” is more descriptive; “Good Pictures” is more analytical. Both are terrific - two of my all-time favorite critical pieces. It’s good to see them preserved between hard covers.

(This the second part of a four-part review of Janet Malcolm's Forty-one False Starts.) 

In Praise of Journalism (Contra Dirda)

Michael Dirda, in his absorbing review of James Salter’s new novel All That Is, says, “Robert Phelps once told me that the true test of one’s devotion to a writer is a willingness to collect his or her journalism” (“‘The Glory of Certain Moments in Life,’” The New York Review of Books, June 6, 2013). I’ve never felt that way. For me, it’s the opposite: it’s a writer’s journalism that I prize; I have to force myself to read his or her fiction. The way I look at it, fiction is merely a tune-up for the creation of the really important stuff – journalism. For me, Hemingway’s 1933 Esquire piece “Marlin Off the Morro: A Cuban Letter” is one of the best things he ever wrote. The same goes for Mailer’s 1968 Harper’s article “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” Pritchett’s 1956 Holiday Magazine travelogue, “South America,” Brodsky’s 1986 New York Review of Books memoir “In a Room and a Half,” Nabokov’s 1972 Saturday Review essay, “Inspiration,” Zadie Smith’s 2008 New Yorker memoir, “Dead Man Laughing,” Seamus Heaney’s 1978 Irish Times essay, “Full Face,” Martin Amis’s 1993 New Yorker essay, “Don Juan in Hull,” Joyce Carol Oates’s 1987 Art & Antiques essay, “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” John Updike’s 1972 Horizon essay, “Remembrance of Things Past Remembered,” Margaret Atwood’s 2002 Globe and Mail piece, “Of Myths and Men.” I could go on and on. Far from being a “test of true devotion,” a great writer’s journalism is often the source of my deepest reading pleasure. 

Credit: The above portrait of Norman Mailer is by David Levine.

June 10 & 17, 2013 Issue

The transfixing specificity of the procedure used to decapitate the “green-leather motorcyclist” in Cormac McCarthy’s “Scenes of the Crime,” in this week’s issue, invaded my imagination, and still haunts me, as I write this, three days after I read it. Only McCarthy could’ve written it – the same McCarthy who wrote what is, for me, one of literature’s most vivid, powerful, lyrical, horrifying, mesmerizing, violent scenes. I’m referring to the deadly knife-fight between the pimp Eduardo and John Grady Cole near the end of McCarthy’s extraordinary Border Trilogy. “Bar ditch” and “blacktop” figure in the Border Trilogy (although only in passing), as they do (more centrally) in “Scenes of the Crime.” In the series' second book, The Crossing, McCarthy writes, “He crossed through the bar ditch and rode up onto the blacktop and slowed the horse and looked back.” In “Scenes of the Crime,” the green rider is killed on the blacktop, and the septic-tank truck driver (“the wire man”) is fatally shot by “the wounded man” in the bar ditch. It’s all very surreal. Yet the details [e.g., the flatbed truck, the floodlight, the humming wire, the bouncing helmet (with the green rider’s head inside it), the brown sewage spouting from the bullet hole in the septic-tank] are amazing – “solidity within unreality,” as Updike said about Magritte (Always Looking, 2012). As spellbinding as “Scenes of the Crime” is, it contains only one sentence that’s comparable to the Border Trilogy’s inspired writing. It’s a description of what happens to the motorcycle after its rider’s head “zips away”: “The bike continues on, the motor slows and dies to silence, and in the distance we see a long slither of sparks recede into the dark.” That “long slither of sparks” is very fine. 

Janet Malcolm's "Forty-one False Starts" - Part I

The best pieces in Janet Malcolm’s recently published Forty-one False Starts are, for me, the four photography reviews – “The Genius of the Glass House,” “Good Pictures,” “Edward Weston’s Women,” and “Nudes Without Desire.” Interestingly, two of them, “Edward Weston’s Women” and “Nudes Without Desire,” begin with a discussion of pubic hair. In “Edward Weston’s Women,” Malcolm artfully links the visibility of “a few wisps of pubic hair” in a Weston nude with Weston’s audacious statement (in a letter to the Museum of Modern Art) that pubic hair “has been definitely a part of my development as an artist … that it has been the most important part, that I like it brown, black, red or golden, curly or straight, all sizes and shapes,” to launch one of her favorite subjects – Weston’s love affairs and their impact on his work. In “Edward Weston’s Women,” she writes,

Weston’s erotic and artistic activities are so tightly interwoven that it is impossible to write of one without the other. It is known (from Weston’s journals) that most of the women who posed for his nudes and portraits – arguably his best work – slept with him (usually after the sitting) and were sources for him of enormous creative energy.

Weston’s women fascinate Malcolm. In one of her first New Yorker photography pieces, “Two Photographers” (The New Yorker, November 18, 1974; re-titled “East and West,” and included in her superb 1980 collection, Diana & Nikon), she vividly describes Weston’s Charis (1925):

A photograph of Charis shows a girl in a black beret and a sweater straddling a ladder-back chair, her elbows outthrust and her chin resting on the junction between her wrists; her brow is furrowed, she is staring into the middle distance, and her slip is showing. The composition is striking in its symmetries of legs, arms, and chair posts and ladders, and in the deployment of blacks, grays, and whites. Equally striking is, “the thing itself,” as Weston called the object of his quest for realism – in this case, the relationship between the model and himself.

Edward Weston, "Charis" (1925)

Malcolm further says, in “Two Photographers,” that Weston’s portrait of Charis, “with its comical pose and the girl’s mock-serious gaze, expresses the playfulness and courtliness of the relationship between the young woman and the older man.”

But, interestingly, in another essay, written shortly after “Two Photographers,” Malcolm’s appreciation of Weston’s work appears to sour. The piece, called “Assorted Characters of Death and Blight” (included in Diana & Nikon), is a review of a Weston retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. She writes,

Weston’s major works (most done in the 1920’s and 1930’s) are the nudes, vegetables, shells, clouds, and landscapes that have been transformed – sometimes almost beyond recognition – into pure, cold, perverse, unmistakable Weston abstractions.

Note Charis’s absence from the list of “Weston’s major works.” Had she forgotten about it? She does refer to a nude portrait of Charis (Nude, Oceano, California, 1936):

A well-known photograph of Charis stretched out face-down on the sand – one of Weston’s most apparently straight-forward nudes – has an attenuation, a starfish-like quality of inanition that is evocative of death and sleep rather than of lovemaking.

Malcolm saw the MoMA retrospective as a “corrective” to the thinking that Weston’s art was sourced in his erotic interaction with his models. In “Assorted Characters of Death and Blight,” she says:

The picture of Weston that emerges from these sources [Weston’s Daybooks and Ben Maddow’s Edward Weston: Fifty Years] – of a vital and virile romantic who lived a life of physical simplicity and emotional richness in warm climates with one beautiful woman after another; who had the courage to leave his wife and children and go to Mexico with his mistress, Tina Modetti; who finally found the love of his life in his second wife, Charis; who enjoyed the friendship of such artists and intellectuals as Diego Rivera, José Orozco, Robinson Jeffers, and Ramiel McGehee – is at curious odds with the static, indrawn, remote, and sometimes even morbid character of the photographs.

Yes, but it’s not at odds with the portrait of Charis that Malcolm so glowingly described in “Two Photographs.” Curiously, she fails to point this out. Her view of his achievement has turned inexplicably icy. In one of the essay’s most pointed lines, she says, “Stieglitz’s blurry view of the Flatiron Building on a snowy day is surely a more literal rendering of ‘the thing itself’ than Weston’s razor-sharp close-up of a halved artichoke.”

Edward Weston, "Charis, Lake Ediza" (1937)

Malcolm must’ve been sitting on a sharp tack when she wrote that piece. Obviously, it isn’t her view today. In “Edward Weston’s Women,” she reverts to her initial position. She writes, “His nudes can indeed be characterized as ‘passionate collaborations,’ in which Weston’s passion for a certain kind of beauty and a woman embodying that beauty come together with an almost audible bang.” And she says, “Charis Wilson is the foremost of these collaborators.” She describes another “Charis” picture, Charis, Lake Ediza (1937):

This photograph, however Wilson remembers the circumstances of its making, is indeed sensual, probably the sexiest of all of Weston’s pictures of her. She sits with her legs spread and her hands crossed over the inner thighs. That she is wearing trousers and high lace-up boots only adds to the sexiness, you could even say dirtiness, of the picture. The face, wrapped in a scarf as a Bedouin might wrap it, stares at the viewer and beyond him. It is a very young face, perhaps a little sullen, certainly not unaware of the provocativeness of the pose, but refusing to register it. One’s eye goes back and forth between the hands and the face, alternating between the hands’ downward direction and the face’s straight-ahead one. I don’t know of another photograph that puts the eye through such paces.

Malcolm calls Charis, Lake Ediza “extraordinary.” In “Nudes Without Desire,” another of the excellent photography essays in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm says, “Edward Weston pursued the nude genre more assiduously – and, I think, more brilliantly – than any other practitioner.” And with that, Malcolm’s revision of her acrid opinion in “Assorted Characters of Death and Blight” is complete.

(This is the first part of a four-part review of Janet Malcolm’s Forty-one False Starts.)

June 3, 2013 Issue

It’s interesting to compare two pieces in this week’s issue – Nicholas Schmidle’s “In the Crosshairs” and Nick Paumgarten’s “The Manic Mountain.” Both are about men, action, and violence. Both are absorbing, gripping, bravura pieces of writing. “In the Crosshairs” tells the story of Chris Kyle, “one of the deadliest snipers in American history,” murdered on a Texas rifle range. “The Manic Mountain” is about Ueli Steck, “one of the world’s premier alpinists,” and his involvement in a nasty brawl with Sherpas on Mount Everest. Both are empathetic and sensitive, withholding judgement, refusing to take sides, probing the violent incidents they describe (the murder, the brawl) for meaning beyond mere sensationalism. If there’s a villain in “In the Crosshairs,” it’s the Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center for failing to properly treat Kyle’s killer’s post-traumatic stress disorder (P.T.S.D.) (“The V.A. is a sclerotic and overwhelmed bureaucracy”). And “The Manic Mountain” seems to suggest that the underlying cause of the Sherpas’ attack on Steck stems from their frustration with the guiding companies (“Everst has evolved into a seasonal society dominated by the interests of the commercial guiding companies, which for the most part are owned and operated by foreigners”).

However, in terms of style, the two pieces differ from each other in at least two ways. First, “In the Crosshairs”’s writing is plainer. The sentences are shorter, simpler. Schmidle’s style is quintessentially factual. A Schmidle sentence is sturdy, Shaker-like. Here are three typical samples from “In the Crosshairs”: “The point man, a twenty-eight-year-old named Marc Lee, began climbing the stairs”; “For all his bravado, Kyle had a compassionate side”; “They loaded up Kyle’s truck and went to pick up Routh.” Paumgarten’s style is richer. He writes a longer line; he uses figuration. Here, for example, is his description of Steck at a climbing gym:

He followed a progression of blue handholds, then orange, then pink, hopping down to the mat each time, brushing the talc from his hands on his shorts and peering up at the wall, his head tilted as though the wall were a language he was trying to remember.

That “as though the wall were a language he was trying to remember” is very fine.

Secondly, Schmidle’s “I” is less prominent than Paumgarten’s is. Schmidle keeps himself in the background. His pieces are sprinkled with “told me,” but other than that, he’s not much in evidence. An exception is the last section of “In the Crosshairs,” which begins, “In early May, I flew to northern Texas to see Raymond and Jodi Ruth.” I found that sentence thrilling. Finally, I thought, we glimpse the guy who’s telling this story. On the other hand, Paumgarten is gloriously subjective. His voice on the page is more distinctive than Schmidle’s. He injects more of his own personality into his writing. For example, there’s a humorous passage in “The Manic Mountain” where Paumgarten “growls” at the Eiger’s North Face:

I drove up from Interlaken one afternoon to have a look, and seeing it for the first time from the road leading up to Grindelwald, I found myself growling back at it. It was the bigger bear: a nasty shaded rampart of limestone and ice, nearly six thousand vertical feet from bottom to top, bedevilled by avalanches, falling rocks, sketchy verglas (thin ice), and sudden storms that can pin a climber for days.

I’m not pitting these two styles against each other. I like them both. Schmidle’s efficiency and specificity occasionally yield strikingly beautiful lines, such as “During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered” (“Getting Bin Laden,” The New Yorker, August 8, 2011). But when Paumgarten does something like growling at a mountain, he makes me smile. That’s a little bonus of his writing that I appreciate.

Second Thoughts: I want to clarify what I said above. Schmidle is a plain-style writer, but his “In the Crosshairs” is anything but plain. It’s an intricate, elaborate canvas, with a wealth of memorable detail worked into it (e.g., the “red crusader’s cross” tattooed on Kyle’s arm, the crawfish - “some live, some cooked” - that Rury stuffed down Kyle's shorts, New Mexico's “tumbleweed expanses,” the “knobby” tires on Kyle’s F-350, the “grooves in the sand around Littlelfield’s fingers”). It connects the Iraq war with Chris Kyle with P.T.S.D. with Eddie Ray Routh with Texas gun culture with murder on a rifle range. It makes the killer’s life as much a tragedy as the victim's. It’s an astonishing piece of work. It would make one hell of a great movie.

May 27, 2013 Issue

“Change the World,” in this week’s issue, marks George Packer’s welcome return to first-person narrative. The piece’s opening sentence signals the reversion: “In 1978, the year that I graduated from high school, in Palo Alto, the name Silicon Valley was not in use beyond a small group of tech cognoscenti.” I read that and I inwardly cheered: Welcome back, George! “Change the World” is about a group of “Silicon Valley moguls,” including Mark Zuckerberg, who’ve formed a political advocacy group. In Silicon Valley’s world, this is a groundbreaking development. Like his hero, George Orwell, Packer is an inveterate tracker of political currents (in the Introduction of his 2009 collection Interesting Times, he writes, “My ambition as a journalist is always to combine narrative writing with political thought”). He’s fascinated by Silicon Valley’s libertarianism, particularly its emphasis on less politics. He vividly showed this in his previous Silicon Valley piece, “No Death, No Taxes,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2011, a profile of billionaire techie, Peter Thiel (“Escaping from politics is a libertarian’s right and a billionaire’s privilege”). Packer is allergic to Thiel’s anti-political thinking. Near the end of “No Death, No Taxes,” he writes, “The next great technological revolution might be around the corner, but it won’t automatically improve most people’s lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly, but also inescapable. The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.” Packer further develops this theme in “Change the World,” where he says, “Technology can be an answer to incompetence and inefficiency. But it has little to say about larger issues of justice and fairness, unless you think that political problems are bugs that can be fixed by engineering rather than fundamental conflicts of interest and value.” However, in “Change the World,” he’s got a fresh actuality to consider – the rise of FWD.us, the Silicon Valley political-advocacy group organized by Zuckerberg and other fat Valley plutocrats to push for immigration reform. You can tell that Packer has mixed feelings about this development. On the one hand, he shows that the motivations of FWD.us’s founders are (to borrow Marc Andreessen’s memorable phrase, quoted by Packer) “relentlessly self-interested.” On the other hand, he sees the Valley’s decision to enter the political arena in order to effect change as an advance on its heretofore escapist libertarian thinking. In the last sentence of his piece, he says, “But if Silicon Valley’s idea of itself as a force for irresistible progress is running up against the unlovely reality of current American politics, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It might mean that the industry is growing up.”

“Change the World” is a brilliant pointillist construction of a variety of glinting materials - talks with Silicon Valley leaders and thinkers (e.g., Marc Andreessen, Joe Green, Reid Hoffman, Gavin Newsom, Joshua Cohen) visits to various locations (e.g., Apple University, a private club called Founders Den, Andreeseen’s office on Sand Hill Road, a café in San Francisco’s Mission District), quotes from various publications (e.g., a London Review of Books article by Rebecca Solnit, Alexandra Lange’s The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism, Gavin Newsom’s Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government). My favorite passage in “Change the World” is Packer’s description of the Woodside School Foundation gala, which, in its over-the-top extravagance, could be the Silicon Valley equivalent of Jay Gatsby’s decadent East Egg parties:

I attended it two years ago, when the theme was RockStar, and one of Google’s first employees sat at my table after performing in a pickup band called Parental Indiscretion. School benefactors, dressed up as Tina Turner or Jimmy Page, and consuming Jump’n Jack Flash hanger steaks, bid thirteen thousand dollars for Pimp My Hog! (“Ride through town in your very own customized 1996 Harley Davidson XLH1200C Sportster”) and twenty thousand for a tour of the Japanese gardens on the estate of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and the country’s highest-paid chief executive. The climax arrived when a Mad Men Supper Club dinner for sixteen guests – which promised to transport couples back to a time when local residents lived in two-thousand-square-foot houses – sold for forty-three thousand dollars.

Money is, of course, a major source of power, but it isn’t the only one. Journalism, when it’s written as effectively as Packer writes it, in “Change the World,” is a potent influence, too.