March 23, 2015 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue (“The Style Issue”) that I enjoyed most is Rebecca Mead’s "Sole Cycle." It’s about the fashion makeover of the Birkenstock. The variety of ways in which the basic Birkenstock design has been tweaked without changing its “foot bed” (“You must not change the foot bed,” says Birkenstock director of product and design, Rudy Haslbeck) is fascinating: “a Boston mule made from textured velvet in crimson or gold, inspired by a Persian-lamb coat that Haslbeck had discovered in a flea market”; an Arizona sandal with a “rose-gold leather foot bed and an upper made from pinkish-peach tweed threaded with iridescent silver” that “looked as if it had been cut from the sleeve of a Chanel jacket”; another Arizona sandal, in black leather, “lined in sapphire-blue shearling”; “a whimsical pair of mauve high-top boots with a white sneaker bottom”; “a women’s lace-up boot in burnished brown leather and lined with shearling.”

“Sole Cycle” has a sturdy foot bed of its own, consisting of three “visits”: one to Neustadt, Germany, where Birkenstock’s “campus” is located; one to a Birkenstock factory outside Gorlitz, Germany (“When I visited the factory, it smelled as pungent as a bakery, redolent with the scent of cooking latex and cork”); and one to Las Vegas to attend FN Platform, “a three-day trade show that bills itself as ‘The Global Showcase for Branded Footwear,’ ” in which Birkenstock has a booth. All three are marvelous, yielding delicious, tactile word combos, e.g., “After I examined a prototype of knee-high socks in a textured oatmeal yarn, I was shown a tube of four-ply cream-colored cashmere, like a luxurious cable sweater for an indulged dachshund.” My favorite part is the campus showroom visit, in which Mead tries on the lace-up boot. She writes, “Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped.”

In its artful blend of subjective specifics, sensuous description, and delectable word assemblages, “Sole Cycle” is just about perfect. I enjoyed it immensely.

Moralistic Mendelson - Part I

Edward Mendelson, in his Moral Agents (2015), claims that the “New Yorker style” of the 1940s and 50s had “no moral content.” He says,

The “New Yorker style” got its name from the stories that appeared there weekly, written by John O’Hara and John Cheever, later by J. D. Salinger, John Updike, and scores of others, some famous, many forgotten. It flourished in American soil because it fed on American myths of detachment as the purest mode of existence and thinking. What distinguished it from the detachment of Huck Finn and Lambert Strether was that it had no moral content, no impulse to escape corrupt entanglements. Its detachment was aesthetic: it treated the world as interesting place to write about in a tone of calm, cool observation.

I’m not sure what stories Mendelson has in mind when he makes this statement. He mentions O’Hara, Cheever, Salinger, and Updike. Their styles differ from each other, of course. But their stories are all deeply felt. Look at the way Salinger empathizes with the children in his stories. You’d hardly call that detachment. Were they moralists? Cheever, in the Preface to his The Stories of John Cheever (1978), wrote, “The constants that I look for in this sometimes dated paraphernalia are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.” Updike explored sexual morality in his Maple stories (e.g., “Sublimating,” “Separating,” “Eros Rampant,” “Your Lover Just Called”). But he pursued other interests, too. “Discontent, conflict, waste, sorrow, fear – these are the worthy, inevitable subjects,” he says in the Introduction to his The Early Stories, 1953-1975. All four writers probed the nature of human character. So, yes, I would say they are moralists. But more to the point is that they’re artists – four of the greatest. It’s their art that interests me. O’Hara’s dialogue, Salinger’s narrative, Updike’s description, Cheever’s poetics - how did they do it? Critics who can illuminate their technique are the critics I want to read. Mendelson’s focus on “moral content” is too narrow. Without style, moral content is just a sermon.

The Pleasure of Description (Contra Kirsch)

Elizabeth Bishop, 1956 (Bettmann/Corbis)

Adam Kirsch, in his absorbing "Full Fathom Five" (The New Yorker, February 3, 2014), a review of The Poetry of Derek Walcott, says,

The visual and the literary make uneasy partners, since they operate according to different temporal regimes: everything at once versus one thing after another. As a result, when a poet takes to describing what he sees, the result can be boring and static. Visual descriptions are usually the most skippable parts of any poem.

I strongly disagree. I devour visual descriptions. Far from being the most “skippable parts of any poem,” they are, for me, an immense source of reading pleasure. Take for example the exquisite description of the beach in James Merrill’s “Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-Of-War”:

A mile-long vertebrate picked clean

To the palms’ tall seableached incurving ribs.

And Elizabeth Bishop’s depiction of fog in her great “The Moose”:

shifting, salty, thin,

comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals

form and slide and settle

in the white hens’ feathers,

in gray glazed cabbages,

on the cabbage roses

and lupins like apostles.

And Seamus Heaney’s unforgettable description of the Grauballe Man:

As if he had been poured

in tar, he lies

on a pillow of turf

and seems to weep

the black river of himself.

The grain of his wrists

is like bog oak,

the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.

His instep has shrunk

cold as a swan’s foot

or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge

and purse of a mussel,

his spine an eel arrested

under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,

the chin is a visor

raised above the vent

Of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.

The cured wound

opens inward to a dark

elderberry place.

I could multiply examples endlessly. The point is there’s a blind spot in Kirsch’s criticism. The pleasure principle is lacking.

March 16, 2015 Issue

Reviewing the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s "The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky" in this week’s issue, Peter Schjeldahl calls it a “wondrous show.” He says,

Just about everything in the exactingly selected and elegantly installed show—war clubs, shields, garments, headdresses, many pipes, bags, a saddle blanket, a bear-claw necklace, dolls, cradleboards—impresses as a peak artistic achievement. ["Moving Pictures," The New Yorker, March 16, 2015]

I agree. Looking at the 131 artifacts on display at the Met’s website, I find them transfixing. I love the materials they’re made of: native tanned leather, porcupine quills, glass beads, pigment, horsehair, human hair, grizzly bear claws, maidenhair fern, pinewood, brass tacks, bird skin, blue jay feathers, field horsetail, brass bells, ermine skin, wool cloth, silk ribbon, to name just a few.

Of an exquisite Eastern Plains horned headdress (circa 1780) made of split bison horns, sinew, deer hair, horsehair, porcupine quills, glass beads, wood, metal cones, cotton cloth, rawhide, birch back, silk ribbon, and pigment, Schjeldahl says, “The formal integration of so many elements into a shapely accoutrement of authority smacks of genius.” The same could be said for many of the show’s objects. 

Oglala Lakota Feather Headdress (circa 1865)

I think my favorite piece is the Oglala Lakota feather headdress (circa 1865) composed of eagle feathers, native tanned leather, rawhide, wool cloth and yarn, cotton cloth, glass beads, ermine, silk ribbon and horsehair. There’s poetry in that list! And the profusion of black-and-white eagle feathers embedded in the red cloth is ravishing. The whole collection is ravishing! “Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look.” That’s what Schjeldahl said about his experience of Vermeer ("The Sphinx," The New Yorker, April 26, 2001). That expresses exactly how I feel, looking at this extraordinary exhibition of Plains Indian art.

Jiayang Fan's "Searching for America with General Tso"

I relish “food quest” stories (the one that immediately comes to mind is Mimi Sheraton’s classic "Spit Cake," The New Yorker, November 23, 2009). And I enjoy autobiographical criticism. Both genres combine in Jiayang Fan’s superb "Searching for America with General Tso" (“Cultural Comment,” newyorker.com, March 12, 2015). It’s a review of Ian Cheney’s The Search for General Tso, which, Fan says, is “a jovial feature-length documentary that probes the origins of this iconic poultry dish.” She calls it “a detective story devoted to the art of un-blurring and disentangling: the ‘t’ from the ‘so,’ the meat from the myth.” On further consideration, she says it is “really a quest narrative in which the chicken is a Trojan horse for America’s history of complicated and choleric relationships with those deemed suspicious or disquietingly ‘exotic.’ ” But Fan's piece is more than a review. The film prompts her to consider an aspect of her cultural identity. She says that the name “General Tso” is “simultaneously so evidently Chinese and not-Chinese that its very pronunciation presents, at least to this neurotic immigrant, a paralyzing problem of cultural fidelity and perfidy.” She asks, “Is it a sense of belonging that I momentarily gain (even if it’s only in my head) when I say ‘Sichuan’ or ‘mapo’ in a way that signals my knack at convincingly feigning a non-Chinese?” In “Searching for America with General Tso,” Fan does more than describe Cheney’s film; she extracts personal meaning from it. The result is absorbing and memorable.

Gideon Lewis-Krauss's "A Sense of Direction"

The New Yorker’s "Briefly Noted" assessment of Gideon Lewis-Krauss’s brilliant A Sense of Direction strikes me as just about perfect. It says,

Always worried that he was missing some other, better party, Lewis-Kraus moved from San Francisco to Berlin and then set out on a series of pilgrimages: Camino de Santiago, in Spain; Shikoku, in Japan; and Uman, in Ukraine. He makes the three treks—Catholic, Buddhist, and Jewish, respectively—as a secularist, hunting for clarity while nursing his blistered feet: “In my terror of stasis I had chosen motion; in my total absence of stability or routine I felt both electrified and panicked.” Perhaps by design, the writing—beautiful and often very funny—frequently mimics the setting: during the Berlin segment it’s restless, and, on the circular route of Shikoku, sometimes lacks direction. But on the Camino Lewis-Kraus weaves a story that is both searching and purposeful, one that forces the reader, like the pilgrim, to value the journey as much as the destination. [“Briefly Noted,” The New Yorker, May 28, 2012]

My only quibble with this review is that it seems to consider the Camino section to be the book’s best part. For me, the Shikoku segment is the most absorbing. It contains Lewis-Krauss’s most descriptive writing, and his most reflective. Here are four excerpts:

A pilgrimage like this is an old and corporeal kind of shock therapy, a structure that is maintained and promoted to help inspire an embodied sense of gratitude and wonder at the variety and generosity of the world, a world much bigger than our petty fears and desponds and regrets. It’s gamed for you to have the experience, and then the memory, of finding an unclaimed one-thousand-yen note in an insulated shack in some middle of nowhere between remote mountain temples.

It’s a Saturday night and the traffic never let’s up, but I find a piece of plywood to block the door, and that keeps the worst of the rain out. I drift in and out of sleep, dreaming of the Camino. At first light I rise to look for an open convenience store for a rice ball and a can of coffee.

The descent is sharply pitched and I can barely see the towers of cedar through the motionless sulk of cloud, but I know I’ve got a place to stay ahead and I feel as though I’ve begun to get the hang of this. I pick my way with care between the slick rocks. Across the valley gray panes of mountain stack flat against the late horizon; a dense brume of smoky white gives depth to the ridges.

The next twenty kilometers follow a serpentine road along a high, rolling, hillocked ridge of peninsula, and the air is warm and clear, and off to our right are glimpses of an emerald inlet, and to our left and a few hundred meters below, sharp crimped spines of steep jetty shear and buckle into the silver sea, their steeps felted in dark cedar, unruly lime feathers of bamboo, and the occasional pink bursts of new-blossoming cherry. In the little bays the water pools in absinthe clouds, the beaches pebbled black.

Note the use of first-person, present tense (my favorite combination) and the attentiveness to both inner and outer reality. When he’s really on, really noticing, as he is in the Shikoku part, Lewis-Krauss thinks with all his senses. He seems alert to everything: experience, memory, “dense brume of smoky white,” rice ball and can of coffee, “steeps felted in dark cedar, unruly lime feathers of bamboo, and the occasional pink bursts of new-blossoming cherry.” Ravishing!

March 9, 2015 Issue

Of the nine mustaches mentioned in John McPhee’s delightful "Frame of Reference," in this week’s issue, my favorite is Norton Townshend Dodge’s “grand odobene mustache,” from McPhee’s great "The Ransom of Russian Art" (The New Yorker, October 17, 1994). I looked it up - “odobene” means walrus-like. This description makes me smile because it conveys the exact look of Dodge’s memorable visage, as shown in the Dudley Reed photo of him that illustrates McPhee’s piece. “Frame of Reference” is the sixth in a series of McPhee pieces called “The Writing Life.” In addition to providing valuable advice on composition (e.g., “You will never land smoothly on borrowed vividness”), this series is a powerful mnemonic, triggering pleasurable memories of many of McPhee’s finest works. For example, the mention of Dodge’s “odobene mustache,” in “Frame of Reference,” took me back to “The Ransom of Russian Art,” which I’d first read over twenty years ago, when it appeared in The New Yorker. Paging through the lovely 1994 book version of the same name, with its numerous color plates showing selections from Dodge’s massive Russian art collection, I noted several passages that I’d previously underlined in pencil, including this: “Larger works, he says – his thick eyebrows merging with his mustache – ‘had to go through channels.’ ”

David Macfarlane's "Traces of Mavis"

Mavis Gallant (Photo by Ian Barrett)

I’ve just finished reading David Macfarlane’s wonderful "Traces of Mavis" (The Walrus, March 2015). It’s an account of Macfarlane’s visit to Paris “for a story about Mavis Gallant.” He goes to the Montparnasse cemetery to see her burial place (“a spare room in the Peron family crypt”). He “strolled as Mavis Gallant had often strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens.” He “ate an old-fashioned French lunch in the artist’s bistro Wadja, on the rue de la Grande Chaumière, as she liked to do.” He “drank coffee with her friend Odile Hellier on the terrace of le Dôme—the grand café Gallant most enjoyed.” He “stood in front of 14 rue Jean Ferrandi, her home for some fifty years, and considered the view she had when she looked up from her work.”

Gallant is among the New Yorker greats. As Macfarlane points out, she contributed 116 short stories to the magazine. And yet, for me, her New Yorker masterpiece isn’t a short story; it’s her "The Events in May: A Paris Notebook" (September 14 & 21, 1968), later collected in her Paris Notebooks (1986), a record of her firsthand impressions of the 1968 student revolts in Paris. It’s written in a style I relish – first-person, present-tense, collage-like, written-on-the-wing, using sentence fragments, bits of dialogue, quotation, comment, observation, description, hearsay, anything at hand to convey reality at the moment it’s being experienced. Here’s a quick taste:

The ripped streets around the Luxembourg Station. People who live around here seem dazed. Stand there looking dazed. Paving torn up. The Rue Royer-Collard, where I used to live, looks bombed. Burned cars – ugly, gray-black. These are small cars, the kind you can lift and push around easily. Not the cars of the rich. It’s said that even the car owners haven’t complained, because they had watched the police charge from their windows. Armed men, and unarmed children. I used to think that that the young in France were all little aged men. Oh! We all feel sick. Rumor of two deaths, one a student, one a C.R.S. Rumor that a student had his throat cut “against a window at 24 Rue Gay-Lussac” – so a tract (already!) informs. They say it was the police incendiary grenades, and not the students, that set the cars on fire, but it was probably both. A friend of H.’s who lost his car found tracts still stuffed in it, half charred, used as kindling. Rumor that police beat the wounded with clubs, that people hid them (the students) and looked after them, and that police went into private homes. When the police threw the first tear-gas bombs, everyone in the houses nearby threw out basins of water to keep the gas close to the ground.

In his piece, Macfarlane says he and the photographer Ian Patterson discussed “how the personality of Paris was part – a crucial part – of the personality of Mavis Gallant.” This is an excellent point. In “The Events in May,” Gallant’s identification with the besieged city is total.

Julian Bell's "Van Gogh: A Power Seething"

Evidently, Julian Bell rejects Hans Kaufmann’s and Rita Wildegans’s revisionist version of how van Gogh got his ear cut off. He doesn’t mention it in his Van Gogh: A Power Seething (2015). Kaufmann and Wildegans argue that it was Gauguin who accidentally severed van Gogh’s ear while brandishing a rapier: see Adam Gopnik’s "Van Gogh's Ear" (The New Yorker, January 4, 2010). Gopnik attaches considerable significance to the “ear” incident. He calls it “the Nativity fable and the Passion story of modern art.” He says,

When, after van Gogh’s suicide, in 1890, his fame grew, and the story of the severed ear began to circulate, it became a talisman of modern painting. Before that moment, modernism in the popular imagination was a sophisticated recreation; afterward, it was a substitute religion, an inspiring story of sacrifices made and sainthood attained by artists willing to lose their sanity, and their ears, on its behalf.

In contrast, Bell adopts the orthodox version of the story (i.e., the ear-slicing was an act of self-mutilation) and spends little time on it. His “preferred focus,” he says, “is on a corpus of astonishing paintings and letters rather than on a lump of bloody gristle to which a social misfit is no longer attached.” He takes the same approach regarding van Gogh’s alleged insanity. He says, “Insofar as Van Gogh the painter communicates to us, with an oeuvre that viewers for over a century have found uniquely thrilling and sustaining, it is not our business to call him mad.”

I find Bell’s approach refreshing. Instead of treating van Gogh’s life as some sort of parable, as Gopnik does, he concentrates on van Gogh’s art. For example, he describes van Gogh’s Quinces, Lemons, Pears and Grapes (1887) as “a single resounding chord of yellow played out on various vegetal instruments, almost entirely freed up from perspective and chiaroscuro.” He further notes that “rather than using stained-glass compartments to generate complexity within this unity, Vincent created an over-all crackle of visual electricity through the emphatic, polyrhythmic hatching that was his and his alone.”

Descriptions such as this expand my appreciation of the work. Here’s another one:

Yet perhaps we should rather picture the seething of his mind as a surge of curling and hooking movements, translated by his handiwork into visible analogues to its hyperconnectivity. The Starry Night pictures a mystical consummation, although Vincent with his choice of bold modern means declined to call it “religious,” and at the same time, that great swirl was a vortex deeply structured in his soul.

How fine that “the seething of his mind as a surge of curling and hooking movements”! Bell’s Van Gogh brims with such descriptions. It takes me inside the heart of van Gogh’s incomparable art.

February 23 & March 2, 2015 Issue

“As I write this, The New Yorker is dead,” claimed Renata Adler, in her bitter Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999). Well, that was sixteen years ago, and The New Yorker is still with us, more vibrant than ever, as the current issue – the loaded and layered 90^th Anniversary Issue – vividly shows. Of its many pleasures – Mary Norris’s "Holy Writ" (“Chances are that if you use the Oxford comma you brush the crumbs off your shirtfront before going out”), Ian Frazier’s "The Cabaret Beat" (“Portrait photographers emphasized Ross’s hair, which grew straight up and which a famous actress said she would like to walk barefoot in”), James Wood’s "Look Again" (“It is the writer who sees everything, hears everything, and reserves the right to fiddle with the aperture”) – the most piquant, for me, is Ian Parker’s brilliant "The Shape of Things to Come." It’s a profile of Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice-president of design. Its materials are vast and finely woven: people [Ive, J. J. Abrams, Robert Bruner, Michael Ive (Ive’s father), Steve Jobs, Powell Jobs, Clive Grinyer, Bob Mansfield, Tim Cook, Eugene Whang, Dan Riccio, Jeff Williams, Marc Newson, Bart André, Richard Seymour, Jeff Williams, among others]; events (a launch of new Apple products and services, a visit to Apple’s industrial design studio, a tour of Apple’s future campus); things [“a black steam-punk watch,” “three eight-foot-high computer-numerical-control (C.N.C.) milling machines,” “dozens of custom sketchbooks that had padded blue covers and silver edging,” “Ive’s black Bentley, which is as demure as a highly conspicuous luxury car can be,” “a Rams-designed Braun MPZ2 Citromatic juicer,” “an Apple Watch … in rose gold, with a band of white rubbery plastic,” “a glass-topped Apple Watch display cabinet, accessible to staff from below, via a descending, motorized flap like the ramp at the rear of a cargo plane”]. It brims with inspired sentences (e.g., “Ive’s aesthetic is not austere: one could think of the work done here as a reticent man’s idea of exuberance, with rapture expressed in the magnetic click of a power adapter”; “But others may have had the thought, or the half-thought, that the sounds made the phones more coherent – a more natural accompaniment to glass, aluminum, and Helvetica Neue”). Best of all is Parker’s liberal use of the first-person. He’s not only an observer; he’s a participant (“I spoke to Dye at a table by the lawn at Infinite Loop”; “Inside the shed, I tried on a watch, and its stainless-steel bracelet, guided by magnets, fell into place with the click of someone stacking nickels”; “The next day, I visited Ive in his studio”). “The Shape of Things to Come” is a masterpiece. I enjoyed it immensely.