May 26, 2014 Issue

Notes on this week's issue:

1. I suppose the use of a 1950s Saul Steinberg baseball drawing for a cover on this week’s issue is meant as a homage to Steinberg, creator of perhaps The New Yorker’s most famous cover – the 1976 view of the world westward from Ninth Avenue. But the grayish, crudely sketched baseball cover, which shows a catcher crouched in front of an umpire, each with a masked head that looks like the caged top of a lighthouse, strikes me as somewhat dismal. For a much sunnier, more vivid, natural rendition of the summer game, see Richard Merkin’s great April 5, 1993 New Yorker cover, titled “The Changing of the Guard in the House That Ruth Built.”

2. Richard Brody’s syntax is delicious. Thought, in his pieces, flows in jazzy runs of blended description and perception joined with the adroit use of dashes, semi-colons, and brackets. This week’s GOAT contains three excellent examples:

With the bright colors of new urban landscapes (built up in the wake of wartime destruction) and the brazen clash of calmly assertive compositions, Ozu captures the ordinary desolation at the natural heart of things – and contemplates his own place on the edge of the precipice.

The cast and crew of a politicized costume drama are holed up in a Spanish villa while awaiting their star, their equipment, and their money; meanwhile, they drink joylessly and engage in provocative sexual escapades, subtly Machiavellian manipulations, and cruel displays of power that threaten the film with emotional sabotage.

The druggy and drunken parties, games of truth or dare, casual sex, and violent amusements are recklessness-by-number; the catalogue of petty derelictions and frustrated yearnings is anchored by no inner world, framed by no context, and there’s nothing distinctive in the twenty-six-year-old Gila Coppola’s direction.

3. Adam Gopnik has a piece in this week’s issue. But I didn’t read it. I’m boycotting his work in protest against his appallingly wrong-headed characterization of Duke Ellington’s compositional process as “theft” ("Two Bands," The New Yorker, December 23 & 30, 2013).

May 19, 2014 Issue

I know I should be more interested in Michael Specter’s subjects. But science has never been my strong suit. And his style – mostly third-person with the occasional first-person-minor passage thrown in – didn’t grab me. But recently, his authorial “I” has begun to bloom. For example, in his excellent "Climate By Numbers" (The New Yorker, November 11, 2013), he visits the Climate Corporation in San Francisco:

I picked up a cranberry-flax-oatmeal cookie and a bottle of coconut water, and was led to the Ptolemy Room, one of many glass-walled conference areas, all named for famous scientists, many of whom had some theoretical connection to the work of the Climate Corporation.

And in his "The Gene Factory" (The New Yorker, January 6, 2014), his style has moved to about midway between first-person minor and first-person major (“While I was in Shenzhen, I saw a display that described B.G.I’s plans,” “I arrived in Shenzhen the day after Typhoon Usagi had shut down much of Southeast Asia,” “I saw no lava lamps, nobody wore headphones or Crocs or moved through the building on a skateboard, a pogo stick, or a unicycle,”  “At lunch, Zhang pushed a small pot of yogurt toward me,”  “While I was in Boston, I met with Flatley”).

Specter’s absorbing "Partial Recall," in this week’s issue, continues the trend. The piece is about Daniela Schiller’s research into emotional memory. Specter visits Schiller in her office:

We were sitting in her office, not far from the laboratory she runs at Mount Sinai, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was an exceptionally bright winter morning, and the sun streaming through the windows made her hard to see even from a few feet away.

“Partial Recall” describes various forms of memory (“procedural memories,” “emotional memories,” “conscious, visual memories”); it talks about “consolidation” (the process by which new experiences become “imprinted onto the circuitry of the brain”) and “reconsolidation” (under certain circumstances, as a result of recall, old memory undergoes changes as it retraces the pathways in which it originated). But, for me, the most enjoyable parts are Specter’s journal-like entries, e.g., “On a particularly harsh winter morning in February, I joined Schiller and one of her postdocs, Dorothee Bentz, at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Brain Imaging Core”; “Not long after my fear test, I took the train to Philadelphia to speak with Edna Foa, who is the director of the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School”; and most memorably, “I had come to his [Sigmund Schiller’s] house, in this sunny spot between Ben Gurion Airport and the Mediterranean coast, for an unlikely reason: not long ago, after decades of unwavering silence, Schiller spoke about his Holocaust experience.”

Specter’s journalistic “I” isn’t in the category of such first-person major stylists as John McPhee and Ian Frazier. But it appears to be moving in that direction. And that’s a positive development. For me, the presence of the authorial “I” brings the page alive. The observer becomes a participant; reporting becomes experience. 

Postscript: Two other pieces in this week’s issue that I enjoyed enormously are Alec Wilkinson’s "A Voice from the Past" and James Wood’s "The World As We Know It." Wood’s piece touches on the homelessness theme of his brilliant “On Not Going Home” (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014), which is the subject of a review I'm currently working on for this blog. I’ll post it in the next week or so.

May 12, 2014 Issue

The pleasures of this week’s issue are many: Peter Schjeldahl on “No Problem: Cologne/New York, 1984-1989” (“Nostalgia-stirring photographs, which appear in the show’s catalogue, find many of the glamorous names achingly young and, often, conspicuously plastered”); Richard Brody on Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (“His painterly framings have a teeming simplicity, with action spilling in from the margins and up from the background, entangling the characters in a web of conflicting forces”); Hannah Goldfield on Bunker (“But these slips, like the strip club, are forgiven in light of the restaurant’s other charms, including the creamy tapioca pudding, spooned over coconut, palm seed, and jackfruit, and the skateboard propped up against the bathroom sink”); Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The End of Food” (“With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad”); Sean O’Brien’s “Café de l’Imprimerie” (“All night I wait for you at the Café de l’Imprimerie”); Lee Siegel’s “Pure Evil” (“Nesbø’s books stand out for their blackness”); Keith Gessen’s “Waiting for War” (“One person’s little old grandfather fought in the Red Army to liberate Ukraine from the Nazis; another person’s little old grandfather fought in the U.P.A. to liberate Ukraine from everyone, Nazis and Soviets both. These historical narratives are very difficult to reconcile, and neither side has done a good job trying”); D. T. Max’s “Green Is Good” (“The silver Patagonia fleece jacket he wore accentuated the perception that he was someone you were more likely to meet on the chairlift at Telluride than chained to a power-plant fence”); Riccardo Vecchio’s exquisite wallpaper-and-naked-old-women illustration for Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive”; Jill Lepore’s “Away From My Desk” (“Leisure may be over, but that’s only because when your office is a cloud it follows you everywhere”); Joan Acocella’s “Selfie” (“Because Blackburn’s positions are so clear, his prose is clear. It is also unostentatious”); Anthony Lane on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (“We expect its austerity to fend us off, but no; it gathers us in and forbids us to look away”). In its sheer intelligence, wit, and craft, this is a brilliant New Yorker. I enjoyed it immensely. 

May 5, 2014 Issue

This week’s issue contains three excellent pieces: Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s “A New Kind of Spy”; Patrick Radden Keefe’s “The Hunt for El Chapo”; and Rachel Aviv’s “Prescription for Disaster.” What I like about them is the way the authors, writing for the most part in the first-person minor, occasionally enlarge their “I” ’s role to take the measure of their main characters. For example, in “A New Kind of Spy,” Bhattacharjee tells the story of how a Chinese-American engineer, Greg Chung, became the first American to be convicted of economic espionage. Most of the piece is a reconstruction of events of which Bhattacharjee has no personal knowledge. It’s based on interviews with, among others, F.B.I. agent Kevin Moberly, who investigated the Chung case. But in the piece’s brilliant last section, Bhattacharjee’s narrative “I” is more present. He writes,

Chung did not respond to my requests to visit him in prison, but Ling [Chung’s wife], who was never accused of a crime, reluctantly took my phone calls. One afternoon, I parked at the end of Grovewood Lane and walked to the iron gate in the Chungs’ driveway. There were cobwebs on the buzzer. The front yard was full of weeds, and an overturned wheelbarrow near the garage apparently hadn’t been used for years.

Thus begins the part of “A New Kind of Spy” that, for me, gives the piece the lived character of experience.

Similarly, in “Prescription for Disaster” ’s final section, Rachel Aviv deftly moves from first-person minor to first-person major in order to gauge firsthand Stephen Schneider’s innocence or lack thereof. She writes,

Schneider’s friends say that he was too trusting, a justification that I viewed with skepticism until Schneider began talking about the prison culture. “It’s surprising how nice these inmates are,” he told me. “It’s almost unbelievable, the camaraderie. People act like they’re in gangs, but I can’t say I ever felt I was in jeopardy. The blacks associate with whites, the whites with Mexicans.

And in his riveting “The Hunt for El Chapo,” Keefe’s low-key, reportorial first person becomes slightly more visible when he stops to comment on a curious facet of his narrative – Guzmán’s betrayal by two of his closest aides. Keefe writes,

I was impressed, initially, by the speed with which the marines had elicited leads from these subordinates, both of them ex-members of Mexico’s special forces who had been hardened by years in the cartel. One U.S. law-enforcement official told me that it is not unusual for cartel members to start coöperating as soon as they are captured. “There’s very little allegiance once they’re taken into custody,” he said.

But when I raised the subject with a former D.E.A. agent who has spoken to Mexican counterparts involved in the operation, he had a different explanation. “The marines tortured these guys,” he told me, matter-of-factly. “They would never have given it up, if not for that.”

Bhattacharjee, Aviv, and Keefe could’ve written wholly in the first-person minor, but their stories wouldn’t have been as effective. By artfully expanding their “I” ’s role, at crucial junctures, they personalize their reports, converting fact into experience.  

Taking A Break

I’m heading to Florida tomorrow for a two-week break. The New Yorker & Me will resume May 19th with reviews of the May 5th and May 12th issues. 

Credit: The above artwork is a detail from Jacques de Loustal’s cover for the April 18, 2011 New Yorker (“The Journeys Issue”).