July 29, 2013 Issue

New Yorker pieces never live alone; they’re branches of a tree that can be traced backwards and forwards. Reading Vince Aletti’s absorbing “Critic’s Notebook” piece on Walker Evans, in this week’s issue, I recalled Anthony Lane’s wonderful “Eye of the Land” (The New Yorker, March 13, 2000), about a Walker Evans retrospective at the Met. Rereading Lane’s piece, I noticed a link with his witty capsule review of “Only God Forgives,” also in this week’s issue. In “Eye of the Land,” Lane says, “Evans was literate, difficult, and furtive, and you can hardly hope to scratch the surface of his achievement without steeping yourself in the following….” He then unfurls a multiplicity of considerations (“upper-middle-class society in the Midwest at the turn of the century,” the early technology of the penny picture and the Kodak folding camera,” etc.). But then, in his next paragraph, he impishly undercuts his point, saying, “Just kidding. In fact, the procedure could not be simpler. You walk to the Met, pay your ten dollars, go to the second floor, and look at the photographs.” I laughed when I read that - it’s such a delightful, surprising reversal. Lane pulls a similar stunt in his “Only God Forgives” review. He opens with “Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn, the star and director of ‘Drive,’ team up once more, this time for a charming comedy of manners set in an English village, in springtime.” Then he quickly says, “Just kidding. In fact, we are in Bangkok, in the company of kickboxers, drug dealers, and killers without a conscience.” It’s a great line, one that isn’t in the long version of Lane’s review (see “Grim Tidings,” The New Yorker, July 22, 2013).

Interesting Emendations: Lawrence Weschler's "Taking Art To Point Zero - II"

Robert Irwin, Scrim veil-Black rectangle-Natural light, 1977 (Photograph by Warren Silverman)

I see that the Whitney has re-installed Robert Irwin’s brilliant light installation, Scrim veil–Black rectangle–Natural light, on its fourth floor for the first time since he conceived it for the site, in 1977. This show was the subject of one of The New Yorker’s most inspired art descriptions – Lawrence Weschler’s account of his experience of the exhibit in his great “Taking Art To Point Zero – II” (The New Yorker, March 15, 1982):

As the elevator doors eased open onto the vast, empty room on the fourth floor of the Whitney, you were immediately in the thick of it, the thin of it. For a fragile moment, all your expectations were suspended and the world itself seeped in. Already, as you walked out of the elevator, you were triangulating, calibrating, trying to take a fix, to mend the tear in the fabric of your mundane anticipations. But even as you were doing so you were newly aware of the way in which that’s something you do all the time. Nor was the room all that easy to put back together again: the optics were slightly skewed, such that just as you began to figure out how the effect had been achieved your calculations were melting in the uncanny undertow of immediate perceptions. The only light was the natural light of day streaming in from a large, peculiar window over to the side and unfurling the length of a hauntingly sheer scrim piece that bisected the room longitudinally, suspended from the ceiling down to eye level. Also at eye level, a thin black line skirted the walls of the room, describing a huge rectangle and then flashing out along the base of the bisecting scrim. The pearlescent scrim was by turns utterly transparent and pristinely opaque – both, and then neither. As you walked around the space, under the scrim, into the corners, along the walls, the room itself seemed to hum. Things that had always been there – the even, modular hive of the ceiling, the dark rectangular grid of the floor – you noticed as if for the first time. There was a sense of great excitement in all of this, but at the same time an evenness, a lightness, almost a serenity. (Emphasis added)

Weschler’s wonderful account doesn’t just describe Irwin’s exhibit, it delivers us directly into the rub of it, puts us squarely there. Interestingly, Weschler changed it when he included it in his Seeing Is Forgetting The Name of the Thing One Sees (1982). Here’s the revised passage:

As the elevator doors eased open onto the vast, empty room on the fourth floor of the Whitney, you were immediately in the thick of it, the thin of it. For a fragile moment, all your expectations were suspended, and the world itself seeped in. Already, as you walked out of the elevator, you were triangulating, calibrating, trying to get a fix, to mend the tear in the fabric of your mundane anticipations. But even as you were doing so, you were newly aware of the way in which that is something you do all the time. Nor was the room all that easy to put back together again: the optics were slightly skewed, such that just as you began to figure out how the effect had been achieved, your calculations were melting in the uncanny undertow of immediate perceptions. The only light was the natural light of day streaming in from that large, peculiar window over to the side and spreading the length of the hauntingly sheer scrim that, suspended from the ceiling down to eye level, bisected the room longitudinally. Also at eye level, a thin black line skirted the walls of the room, describing a huge rectangle and then flashing out along the base of the bisecting scrim. The pristine scrim was by turns utterly transparent and then utterly opaque, both at the same time, but then neither at once. As you walked around the space, under the scrim, into the corners, along the walls, the room itself seemed to stand up and hum. Things that had always been there – the even, modular hive of the ceiling; the dark, rectangular grid of the floor – you noticed as if for the first time. There was a sense of great excitement in all of this, but at the same time, an evenness, a lightness, almost a serenity. (Emphasis added)

I count seventeen changes - some minor (e.g., the placement of the comma after “achieved” and the semi-colon after “ceiling”), some more significant (e.g., the substitution of “spreading” for “unfurling” and “pristine” for “pearlescent”). I’m slightly more partial to the New Yorker version; “unfurling” and “pearlescent” strike me as more evocative. Both versions are beautiful; both capture Scrim veil–Black rectangle–Natural light’s essential subject – the art of perception. 

The Whitney's "Hopper Drawing"

Edward Hopper, New York Movie, 1939

Artists’ studies, like writers’ drafts, afford fascinating glimpses of the creative process. The exhibition “Hopper Drawing,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which can be visited online, thrillingly provides just such a view. As Peter Schjeldahl says, in “Between the Lines” (The New Yorker, July 8 & 15, 2013), it “lets us into the factory of hand and mind that created ‘Nighthawks,’ ‘New York Movie,’ ‘Early Sunday Morning,’ ‘Office at Night,’ and other touchstones for which ‘iconic’ is praise too faint.” For example, it shows how New York Movie (1939) – my favorite Hopper – evolved from fifty-four drawings of, among other details, the stairs, the column, the theatre, the movie-viewers, and – most interestingly – the usherette. John Updike, in his great “Hopper’s Polluted Silence” (included in his Still Looking, 2007), calls her “the golden-haired usherette” (“a golden-haired usherette, in strapped high heels and pseudo-military uniform, much more glamorous than the dowdy girl he carefully sketched”). How did the “dowdy girl” become the “golden-haired usherette”? Hopper transformed her. This is the fascinating aspect of the Whitney show. Although it brings us transfixingly close to Hopper’s creative process, it can’t explain how Hopper conceived certain images. The barber pole in Early Sunday Morning (1930), “leaning as if the sunlight were a gale trying to flatten it,” in Schjeldahl’s memorable description (“Edward Hopper: Selections from the Permanent Collection,” The 7 Days Art Columns, 1990); the pull cord of the shade in Office at Night (1940), “one of the choicest details in art history,” says Schjeldahl, in “Ordinary People” (The New Yorker, May 21, 2007) – these are aspects of Hopper’s work that the studies don’t even hint at. What it comes down to is Hopper’s own subjectivity – his inspiration, his genius. As Schjeldahl says, in “Between the Lines,” “What he was getting at – slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life – could yield only to paint, and only to him.” 

July 22, 2013 Issue

Saul Bellow forged a brilliant style. But in the process, according to Greg Bellow’s Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir, he sacrificed a son. Was it worth it? James Wood’s absorbing “Sins of the Father,” in this week’s issue, says yes. Wood writes, “In two or three generations, that story will have faded from memory, outlived by what it enabled.” Wood’s verdict is too harsh. It’s true that most future readers of such masterpieces as The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet will not likely bother to go behind the books to Bellow’s personal history. But those few who do will find the son’s memoir. It’s now part of the record. As Janet Malcolm said in respect of Angelica Garnett’s Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, “But Angelica’s cry, her hurt child’s protest, her disappointed woman’s bitterness will leave their trace, like a stain that won’t come out of a treasured Persian carpet and eventually becomes part of its beauty” (“A House of One’s Own,” in Malcolm’s great Forty-one False Starts).

Postscript: My two favorite sentences in this week’s issue: (1) “Overhead, banner planes towed news of extraordinary holiday mattress deals, while bored-looking lifeguards, with no one to save, lounged in their chairs” (John Seabrook, “The Beach Builders”); (2) “But the literary assessments are so wrongheaded as to give the book a migraine of unreliability” (James Wood, “Sins of the Father”).  

Second Postscript: I was pleased to find a piece by Christine Smallwood in this week’s issue. Her “The In-Between World,” a review of the Dardennes’ great The Kid with a Bike (The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2012), was one of last year’s highlights. I look forward to seeing more of her work in the magazine. 

July 8 & 15, 2013 Issue

Nicholson Baker’s “A Fourth State of Matter,” in this week’s issue, does something very cool, very inspired. It takes an item most of us use, but have no clue about, namely, the ubiquitous LCD screen, and traces it to the source of its production, in South Korea. It’s essentially a “visit” piece, sort of like a long Talk story, about Baker’s attendance at the International Meeting on Information in Seoul. It’s absolutely brilliant! I devoured every line. Baker is an LCD poet. He says, “Liquid crystal’s aim is basically peaceable – it wants to give eyes what eyes want to look at.” In another memorable line, he says, “This was a liquid that could make light perform a pirouette.” My favorite part of “A Fourth State of Matter” is Baker’s splendid description of his visit to LG Display’s factory in Paju:

We gazed through the glass at the Piranesian vastitude of one part of the factory – an ultra-clean metropolis of automated modules, silver ducts, and rectilinear interconnections, all lit by a straw-colored light, in the midst of which a multiply jointed robot the size of a tree was nimbly sliding six-foot-long slabs of almost paper-thin mother glass into and out of the narrow inlets in something that looked like a pizza oven, except much bigger. The robot arm, fitted with what seemed to be faintly hissing suction cups, never hesitated, never paused to consider its next move. Inside the pizza oven, the glass received its subpixel matrix of color filters, using a photolithographic process of masking and deposition and removal. Each glass sheet shuddered slightly as it was turned this way and that, in the impossibly fragile manner of airborne soap bubbles, and my own arms kept going out toward it, as if to save the sheet from crashing to the floor – but, of course, no glass crashed. This was the place that made all Best Buys possible.

“A Fourth State of Matter” beautifully displays Baker’s awesome descriptive powers. Reading it is rapture. 

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

There’s a basic paradox at the core of Janet Malcolm’s brilliant deconstructive style: despite her express distrust of narrative as a means of representing reality, she uses the novels of, among others, Henry James, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy as sources of meaning-making. For example, in her superb “A House of One’s Own” (The New Yorker, June 5, 1995; included in her new collection Forty-one False Starts), Malcolm says, “Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel.” But, earlier in the same essay, she writes, “The legend of Bloomsbury has taken on the dense complexity of a sprawling nineteenth-century novel, and its characters have become as real to us as the characters in Emma and Daniel Deronda and The Eustace Diamonds.” How real is that? It’s not real at all if you accept, as I do, Malcolm’s central tenet that “our lives are not like novels,” that we should accept life’s inherent messiness and “live without a story” (“Six Roses ou Cirrhose?,” The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in her great 1992 essay collection The Purloined Clinic).

Zoë Heller, in her engrossing review of Forty-one False Starts, says, “The tension between the messiness of truth and the false tidiness of art is Malcolm’s great subject” (“Cool, Yet Warm,” The New York Review of Books, June 20, 2013). This is well said. Malcolm is skeptical of narrative art’s ability to represent life’s disorderliness. But it appears her skepticism admits at least two exceptions: (1) certain nineteenth century novels; (2) certain journals, memoirs, and letters. Regarding this second exception, she says of Vanessa Bell’s letters: “Vanessa’s letters make us care about these long-dead real people in the way novelists make us care about their newly minted imaginary characters.” Here, once again, Malcolm’s “novelists” analogy seems at odds with her “life is not a novel” theory.

Malcolm’s “A House of One’s Own” is curious in another way, as well. It departs from the usual journalistic mission of finding the real story behind the legend. Instead, it defends the legend (“the legend of Bloomsbury”) against a perceived threat – Angelica Garnett’s memoir, Deceived with Kindness (1987). Malcolm says,

Angelica denies that Vanessa was a splendid mother and believes Vanessa’s life was a shambles. Her book introduces into the Bloomsbury legend the most jarring shift in perspective. Until the publication of Deceived with Kindness the legend had a smooth, unbroken surface.

Malcolm calls Angelica’s book an “attack from within.” But she also considers it “a primary document,” one that “cannot be pushed aside, unpleasant and distasteful though it is to see a minor character arise from her corner and proceed to put herself in the center of a rather marvelous story that now threatens to become ugly.”

Angelica’s memoir seriously provokes Malcolm. She’s written about it before. In “What Maisie Didn’t Know” (The New York Review of Books, October 24, 1985; included in The Purloined Clinic), she says,

Angelica’s psychological insights seem half-baked (significantly, they are almost always insights into the motives of others), and the discussion of her complicated relationship with her mother – though it forms the matrix of the book – remains on a vague, platitudinous level.

In “A House of One’s Own,” Malcolm returns to this point, saying,

We withhold our sympathy [from Angelica] not because her grievance is without merit, but because her language is without force…. Angelica cloaks and muffles the complexity and legitimacy of her fury at her mother in the streamlined truisms of the age of mental health.

In “Cool, Yet Warm,” Zoe Heller says she finds this passage “shocking” (“In the absence of moral certainty, Malcolm suggests our sympathies are assigned on what are essentially aesthetic grounds – on the basis of who has the more attractive language, or the more engaging style. This is a rather shocking proposition and it is meant to be”). Is that what Malcolm is saying? I’m not so sure. Language that is “vague” and “platitudinous” is “without force.” It’s unpersuasive. This, I think, is Malcolm’s point.

Interestingly, “A House of One’s Own” appears to temper “What Maisie Didn’t Know” ’s harshness, concluding that “Angelica’s cry, her hurt child’s protest, her disappointed woman’s bitterness will leave their trace, like a stain that won’t come out of a treasured Persian carpet and eventually becomes part of its beauty.”

My favorite part of “A House of One’s Own” is Malcolm’s description of her visit to Vanessa Bell’s Charleston Farmhouse, “now a museum, complete with a gift shop, teas, lectures, a twice-yearly magazine, and a summer-study program.” Reading it, I recalled April Bernard’s “What I Hate About Writer’s Houses” (The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011, in which she says,

Here’s what I hate about writers’ houses: the basic mistakes. The idea that art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer. That visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work. That real estate, including our own envious attachments to houses that are better, or cuter, or more inspiring than our own, is a worthy preoccupation. That writers should be sanctified. That private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder.

Malcolm’s inspired description of her Charleston visit counterpoises Bernard’s dour view. She writes,

The ubiquitous decorations only extend our sense of Charleston as a place of incessant, calm productivity. They give the house its unique appearance, but they do not impose upon it. They belong to the world of high art and design, the world of postimpressionist painting and early-modernist design, and yet, quite mysteriously, they are of a piece with the English farmhouse that contains them and with the English countryside that enters each room through large, old-fashioned windows. During my tour of the house, I was drawn to the windows as if by a tropism. Today, we come to the house to see the decorations and the painting that Clive and Vanessa and Duncan collected as well as the ones that Vanessa and Duncan produced; but what Clive and Vanessa and Duncan looked at when they entered a room was the walled garden and a willow and the pond and the fields beyond, and as I looked out the window they had looked out of, I felt their presence even more strongly than I had when examining their handiwork and their possessions.

Janet Malcolm’s Forty-one False Starts is an endless source of literary stimulation. It branches in so many interesting, intricate directions – towards transfixing art (Arbus’s, Weston’s, and Struth’s photographs, Salle’s canvases), intriguing visits (to Salle’s studio, a Struth photo session, Vanessa Bell’s Charleston, Rosalind Krauss’s loft), brilliant writing (Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf, Carol Armstrong’s “Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography,” The Daybooks of Edward Weston), and Malcolm’s own extraordinary oeuvre (e.g., her wonderful 1980 Diana & Nikon). It’s a great collection. I’m enjoying it immensely.

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

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

Is Janet Malcolm’s view of Irving Penn’s photography a case of pay attention to what I do, not what I say? I think so. In her early essay on Penn, “Certainties and Possibilities” (The New Yorker, August 4, 1975; included in her 1980 collection Diana and Nikon), a review of a MoMA exhibition of Penn’s photographs of cigarette butts, she says, “Penn’s butts efface reality.” It’s one of the most devastating (and memorable) art criticisms I’ve ever read. What I treasure in art is its realism – depiction of, in Edward Weston’s famous words, “the thing itself.” Here’s a photographer, Malcolm says, pointing at Penn, who uses his camera – that most accurate of devices - not to capture reality, but to erase it. It’s an audacious claim, yet Malcolm’s piece persuasively makes the case:

Penn’s pictures of butts exhibit all the rough oddity of the found art object that emerges from the enlargement of a murky detail in a torn, unregarded snapshot or of a quaintly drab illustration in an old textbook; they partake of the transformation that quilts and ship propellers and industrial tools undergo when they are wrested from their functional context and put on show for their aesthetic qualities. And they suffer from the same paradoxical devitalization that comes over useful objects when they are no longer in use. The tacky machine-made synthetic comforter on the bed has more connection with life – is more genuine, in its way – than the handsome antique quilt that hangs on the wall as if it were a painting, and in this respect Penn’s sleek pictures of clothes and caviar in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, far from paling before the rough vigor of his pictures in the museum show, present a kind of rebuke to the latter’s false vernacularism.

Irving Penn, "Cigarette No. 86," 1972

Malcolm, in her “Certainties and Possibilities,” also looks at Penn’s portraits. She says that they are “first of all Penns and only incidentally pictures of individuals.” She says, in what is, for me, her clinching argument,

Penn removes people from their own context and treats them like botanical or zoological specimens. He lures them into his studio, sits them on cloth-draped structures, subjects them to a north light that shadows half of each face, and sometimes literally pushes them into a corner that his brutal direction has put them emotionally.

Malcolm quotes from Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room (1974), in which he says, “Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them.” Yes, Penn’s method is transformative, but not in a good way, Malcolm seems to say, in “Certainties and Possibilities.” Looking at Worlds in a Small Room’s pictures of artificially posed Peruvian Indians, Spanish gypsies, San Francisco Hell’s Angels, etc., I agree. They are, to use Malcolm’s excellent word, devitalized.

In her “Nudes Without Desire” (The New York Review of Books, April 11, 2002; included in her splendid new collection Forty-one False Starts), Malcolm continues her critique of Penn’s transformative approach. This time her subjects are two shows of Penn’s photograph’s of female nudes – the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn’s Nudes, 1949-50 and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Dancer: 1999 Nudes by Irving Penn. Regarding Earthly Bodies, Malcolm says, “The photographs immediately raise questions about their making.” She describes Penn’s “darkroom hocus-pocus” as follows:

Step one was to obliterate the image by overexposing the printing paper to such a degree that it turned completely black in the developer. Step two was to put the black paper into a bleach solution that turned it white. Step Three was to put the white paper into a solution that coaxed back the image, but only up to a point – the point where the earthly bodies exhibit an unearthly pallor and, in certain cases (such as the catalog cover picture), a flat abstractness that human bodies assume only in primitive and modernist art.

Once again, according to Malcolm, Penn has produced a series of devitalized (“flat,” “unearthly”) images. This isn’t the only similarity with his butt pictures. The type of body he’s chosen to photograph is ugly. Malcolm says, “The idea seems to be to make beautiful pictures of ugly bodies.”

Looking at the Dancer nudes, Malcolm says she “has trouble keeping a straight face.” She writes, “As Beller [Alexandra Beller, Penn’s model], with lowered eyes or averted gaze, strikes one absurdly theatrical attitude after another, Penn photographs her with an almost religious solemnity.” Comparing the Dancer nudes with E. J. Bellocq’s nudes, she says, “Penn’s dancer has nothing in common with Bellocq’s larkily relaxed whores.” She refers to the “wonderful warmth and life” of Bellocq’s photographs.

Malcolm makes an exception for the last eight photographs taken at the final Dancer session. She says, “They show the dancer in motion and have a “mysterious blurred painterliness.” “But,” she says, “they cannot change the show’s overall daunting impression.” She concludes “Nudes Without Desire” with the observation that “Not all experimental work works,” and that Penn erred in his decision to show the Earthly Bodies series and Dancer’s first nineteen images.

Janet Malcolm, "Burdock No. 1," 2005-07

But what Malcolm rejects in “Certainties and Possibilities” and “Nudes Without Desire,” she appears to embrace in her own photography and in her essay “Burdock” (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2008). In “Burdock,” she says, echoing Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room, “Taking a picture is a transformative act.” And the method she uses to photograph her burdock leaves is the same artificial one that Penn used to photograph his butts. She describes it as follows:

What I have done with the burdock leaves is, of course, part of the enterprise of decontextualization that received its awkward name in the late twentieth century and was a fixture of that century’s visual culture. Patchwork quilts hung on the walls of museums, African tribal masks used to decorate orthodontist’s waiting rooms, ship propellers displayed on coffee tables – these are some familiar forms of the practice of taking something from where it belongs and that has a function, and putting it where it doesn’t belong and merely looks beautiful. It looks beautiful in a particular way, to be sure, the way of modernist art and architecture and design. When I remove a burdock leaf from its dusty roadside habitat, I anticipate the stylized aspect it will assume when it is set upright against the clean white walls of my attic studio, its lineaments refined by sunlight coming from above.

Decontextualization is exactly the process Penn used to photograph his cigarette butts, his ugly nudes, and the various “simple people” (Penn’s condescending words) depicted in his Worlds in a Small Room. It’s the very process that Malcolm previously criticized (rightly, in my opinion) as “devitalizing” and “effacing reality.” Now, in an interesting volte-face, she says it’s “beautiful in a particular way … the way of modernist art and architecture and design.” Obviously, Penn has influenced her more than she admits. In “Certainties and Possibilities,” she says, “Penn removes people from their own context and treats them like botanical or zoological specimens.” That’s exactly the treatment she accords her burdock leaves. In “Burdock,” she says,

But I also see images that pre-date modernism: namely, the illustrations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century herbals and works of botanical science, whose subjects have been similarly plucked from nature and rendered in splendid unnatural isolation. Although these decontextualizations are in aid of identification and classification, the old botanical artists were hardly immune to the beauty of the forms they scrutinized with such care. Looking at natural forms close up is an exercise in awe. The botanical illustrators never failed to convey their sense of the mystery that adheres to the gorgeousness of the particulars of the things that are alive in the world. These photographs were made under their inspiration.

Like “the old botanical artists,” and like Irving Penn, whose method, she said, treated people “like botanical specimens,” Malcolm has chosen to render her subjects in “splendid unnatural isolation.” Are her denatured burdock leaves beautiful? No and yes. No, they’re not beautiful; they’re dry, devitalized, lifeless. They lack the “wonderful warmth and life” that Malcolm says she finds in Bellocq’s photographs. They efface burdock reality. But wait a minute. My tactile imagination is now in play. There’s another way of looking at them; my fingers accompany my eyes. Yes, they are beautiful – for their crumbly, wrinkly, time-eaten texture. Texture is, as Bernard Berenson pointed out in Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1952), an important aesthetic element. Malcolm’s burdock leaves have it; so do Penn’s butts. 

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

Mid-Year Top Ten (2013)

Every year around this time, I like to pause, look back, and take stock of my New Yorker reading experience. I regard the yield from this year’s first six months with appreciation and awe. Such an abundance of pleasurable, memorable writing! Such a variety of subjects, settings, and circumstances! Here from this rich harvest is my “Mid-Year Top Ten (2013)”:

Fact Pieces

1. Ben McGrath’s “The White Wall” (April 22, 2013)
2. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The Bad-Boy Brand” (April 8, 2013)
3. Nicholas Schmidle’s “In the Crosshairs” (June 3, 2013)
4. Dexter Filkins’s “After Syria” (February 23, 2013)
5. Ian Frazier’s “The Toll” (February 11 & 18, 2013)
6. David Owen’s “Notes from Underground” (March 18, 2013)
7. Joseph Mitchell’s “Street Life” (February 11 & 18, 2013)
8. Nick Paumgarten’s “The Manic Mountain” (June 3, 2013)
9. Adam Gopnik’s “Music to Your Ears” (January 28, 2013)
10. John McPhee’s “Structure” (January 14, 2013)

Critical Pieces

1. James Wood’s “Youth In Revolt” (April 8, 2013)
2. Nathan Heller’s “Semi-Charmed Life” (January 14, 2013)
3. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Shapes of Things” (January 7, 2013)
4. James Wood’s “Women on the Verge” (January 21, 2013)
5. Thomas Mallon’s “Wag the Dog” (February 4, 2013)
6. David Denby’s “Commitments” (April 15, 2013)
7. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Heaven On Earth” (March 4, 2013)
8. Anthony Lane’s “Fun in the Sun” (March 25, 2013)
9. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Flower Power” (March 18, 2003)
10. Dan Chiasson’s “End of the Line” (April 15, 2013)

Best Talk Story: Sarah Stillman’s “Up in the Air” (April 8, 2013)

Best Poem: Debra Nystrom’s “Pronghorn” (May 13, 2013)

Best Blog Post: Nathan Heller’s “Hello Laptop, My Old Friend” (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, January 18, 2013)

Best Cover: Mark Ulriksen’s “Hitting Forty” (April 8, 2013)

Best Issue: April 8, 2013, with its great Mark Ulriksen cover, two excellent Talk stories (Sarah Stillman’s “Up in the Air” and Mark Singer’s “Thar She Blows”), three terrific features (Jeremy Denk’s “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” Hisham Matar’s “The Return,” Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The Bad-Boy Brand”), and James Wood’s superb book review, “Youth In Revolt” 

Best Illustration: Bendik Kaltenborn’s “Lebowski Fest,” “Goings On About Town,” April 22, 2013 (see above artwork)

Best Photograph: Gabrielle Stabile’s “Paddling on the East River with the North Brooklyn Boat Club” (“Goings On About Town,” April 8, 2013)

Best Sentence: “Standing in a soggy no man’s forest near a beach, with invasive Japanese honeysuckle and bittersweet and greenbrier vines dragging down the trees, and shreds of plastic bags in the branches, and a dirty snow of Styrofoam crumbs on the ground, and heaps of hurricane detritus strewn promiscuously, and fierce phragmites reeds springing up all over, I saw the landscape of the new hot world to come.” (Ian Frazier, “The Toll,” February 11 & 18, 2013)

Best Paragraph: “‘I didn’t really think he was telling the truth,’ Laura told me. ‘And he’s, like, “Are you and Gaines in Hell with me?” And I was, like, “No, we’re not in Hell.” And he was, like, “Well, do you think I can get to Oklahoma?” And I was, like, “Oklahoma? What’s in Oklahoma?” And he’s, like, “Well, if I can get to Oklahoma, I can get out of this.” And I was, like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I think you’re telling me a story. Don’t lie to me. Tell me what happened.” And at this point we’re almost to the front door, and so we walked outside, and when we walked outside I thought I was gonna throw up on myself, because here’s this truck that I know he could never afford. The tires alone were expensive. That’s the first thing I saw—these giant, big knobby tires on this pickup truck.’” (Nicholas Schmidle, “In the Crosshairs,” June 3, 2013)

Best Description: “At Wadi Naim, three miles from the Israeli border, a vast Hezbollah bunker complex is hidden in a valley wall, camouflaged by limestone and bush. It’s invisible from the road, two hundred feet below, invisible from the air, invisible even to the visitor standing on top of it. The only way to find it is by using G.P.S. programmed with the precise coordinates. Under a foot of dirt and rubble is a trap door, and a ladder leading down to the main tunnel. Inside, the only sign of life was a colony of black bats, dangling silently from the ceiling. Startled by my entry, they dropped down, then glided up the shaft toward the light.” (Dexter Filkins, “After Syria, April 23, 2013)

Most Memorable Image: “We took a water taxi through the canals, past crumbling buildings and water-stained walls, and arrived at San Marco just as the floodwaters were rising. The area was swarming with tourists, and a narrow pathway of raised wooden planks was threaded precariously through the square. As the waters rose, the tourists crossed the square on the planks, shuffling in a long, two-person-wide line, like animals boarding Noah’s Ark.” (Lizzie Widdicombe, “The Bad-Boy Brand,” April 8, 2013)

Most Inspired Detail: Dallas Seavey’s dogsled, constructed from “sawed-off Easton hockey sticks” (Ben McGrath’s “The White Wall,” April 22, 2013)