Lizzie Widdicombe's "Happy Together"

Illustration by Harry Campbell

This is just a quick note to say how much I enjoyed Lizzie Widdicombe’s "Happy Together" (The New Yorker, May 16, 2016.) I failed to mention it in my post on the May 16 issue. Now, I’m feeling guilty. The piece reads like a streak. Widdicombe makes writing seem so effortless, even though I know it isn’t – for her or anyone else. For example, take “Happy Together” ’s second paragraph:

First stop: Craigslist, for a place to live. Kennedy was unfamiliar with the city’s neighborhoods, but he’d seen HBO’s “Girls,” and, he said, “I pretty much knew I was going to be in Brooklyn.” He checked out one-bedroom apartments in Williamsburg, where the average monthly rent is around three thousand dollars. Nope. He eventually landed in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where a guy named Patrick was subletting a room in his two-bedroom apartment for a thousand and fifty dollars a month.

That “Nope” made me smile. Who owns it? It somehow belongs to both Widdicombe and Kennedy. It’s the journalistic equivalent of fiction’s free indirect speech.

Here’s an even better example: “But, he said, ‘I’d end up going to a bar and just sitting there, talking to a bartender and staring at Twitter.’ A thought surfaced: I’m surrounded by people and things to do, and yet I’m so fucking bored and lonely.” That second sentence is Widdicombe bending her words around Kennedy’s thought.

“Happy Together” has a brisk unostentatious naturalness that I relish. Its blend of modern materials (apps, startups, social media) enacts the new mode of living it describes. It seems to re-create, with extraordinary fidelity, the texture of everyday life in the “sharing economy.” It stoked my appetite for more Widdicombe.

May 23, 2016 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Jonathan Franzen’s "The End of the End of the World," an absorbing account of a deluxe three-week trip to Antarctica on board the National Geographic Orion that he and his brother Tom recently undertook. I think most of us would be exhilarated by the prospect of taking such a trip. Not Franzen. He says, “Tom reported being excited, but my own sense of unreality, of failure to pleasurably anticipate, grew only stronger. Maybe it was that Antarctica reminded me of death—the ecological death with which global warming is threatening it, or the deadline for seeing it that my own death represented.” But his attitude soon changes when he sees the gentoo and chinstrap penguins on Barrientos Island:

Downy gray chicks chased after any adult that was plausibly their parent, begging for a regurgitated meal, or banded together for safety from the gull-like skuas that preyed on the orphaned and the failing-to-thrive. Many of the adults had retreated uphill to molt, a process that involves standing still for several weeks, itchy and hungry, while new feathers push out old feathers. The patience of the molters, their silent endurance, was impossible not to admire in human terms. Although the colony was everywhere smeared with nitric-smelling shit, and the doomed orphan chicks were a piteous sight, I was already glad I’d come.

My favorite passage in “The End of the End of the World” is the description of Lemaire Channel:

Sheltered from wind, the water was glassy, and under a solidly gray sky it was absolutely black, pristinely black, like outer space. Amid the monochromes, the endless black and white and gray, was the jarring blue of glacial ice. No matter the shade of it—the bluish tinge of the growlers bobbing in our wake, the intensely deep blue of the arched and chambered floating ice castles, the Styrofoamish powder blue of calving glaciers—I couldn’t make my eyes believe that they were seeing a color from nature. Again and again, I nearly laughed in disbelief. Immanuel Kant had connected the sublime with terror, but as I experienced it in Antarctica, from the safe vantage of a ship with a glass-and-brass elevator and first-rate espresso, it was more like a mixture of beauty and absurdity.

Beauty and absurdity. Franzen’s piece is alive not only with acute perceptions of unreality (“Sitting in the lounge of a ship burning three and a half gallons of fuel per minute, we listened to Adam extoll the benefits of shopping at farmers’ markets and changing our incandescent bulbs to L.E.D. bulbs”) but with consolations of intense natural splendor (“Their plumage had the hypercrispness of pattern, the hypervividness of color, that you can normally experience only by taking drugs”). It’s an amazing trip! I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: Two other pieces in this week’s issue that I especially enjoyed are Matthew Trammell’s "Night Life: Wristband Tans" (“Merch booths shill ‘Boycott Beyoncé’ T-shirts, while surprise rap guests and dance routines set to current club staples give the set list a layer of menace; every reference to her maybe-unfaithful husband, Jay Z, tightens chests”) and Jiayang Fan’s "Bar Tab: Fat Buddha" [“At Fat Buddha, an East Village Asian-fusion ultra-dive, the eponymous Buddha (corpulent, imperious, swathed in mini disco balls, and encased in a glass box stuffed with cash) looks like a reincarnated bouncer who opted for an off-book route to enlightenment: namely, booze, hip-hop, and a jovial no-holds-barred policy on happy-hour pork buns”]. And while we’re at it, let’s give a huzzah for Ping Zhu’s five (five!) gorgeous “Goings On About Town” illustrations.

May 16, 2016 Issue

Narrate or describe? I say describe. I relish description, particularly art description, e.g., Peter Schjeldahl’s superb rendering of Nicole Eisenman’s Under the Table 2 (2014), in this week’s issue: 

Jumbled heads share a bottle, which a single hand lifts and pours out, under a table that is topped with a stuffed olive, a cigarette emitting an arabesque of smoke, and a huge salami, its sliced end textured with psychedelic dots of color. ["Seriously Funny"]

From my collection of Schjeldahl art descriptions, here are three of my all-time favorites:

1. Agnes Martin’s The Sea (2003) – “Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint.” ["Life Work," June 7, 2004]

2. Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Vertical-Horizontal Composition (1916) – “Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the tapestry’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture.” ["Shapes of Things," January 7, 2013]

3. Laura Owens’s Untitled (2013) – “Gestural glyphs and splotches in white, black, green, and orange on a ground imprinted with a blown-up page of newspaper want ads.” ["Take Your Time," January 5, 2015]

Postscript: Another description in this week’s issue that I enjoyed immensely is Colin Stokes’s depiction of a bartender: “One wore a single black latex glove and smashed a large ice cube with a wand-like spoon to make the gin-based Gloria, with Campari, dry vermouth, and triple sec, from a recipe he’d ‘found in a book not too long ago’ ” ("Bar Tab: The Ship"). What’s the key to great description? I think Schjeldahl nails it in "Seriously Funny": specificity.

Jill Lepore's "Joe Gould's Teeth"

In the Author’s Note of the 1999 Vintage edition of Joe Gould’s Secret, Joseph Mitchell wrote, “This book consists of two views of the same man, a lost soul named Joe Gould.” He’s referring to his two classic New Yorker Profiles, “Professor Sea Gull” (December 12, 1942) and “Joe Gould’s Secret” (September 19 & 26, 1964). Now comes a third view – Jill Lepore’s revisionist Joe Gould’s Teeth (2016), a shorter version of which appeared in the July 27, 2015 New Yorker. In contrast to Mitchell’s empathetic depiction of Gould as “an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over thirty-five years” (“Joe Gould’s Secret”), Lepore’s Gould portrait is much bleaker:

By now, hardly anyone could fail to see, he was mean; he was vicious. He was wretched and abandoned. He smelled; he was covered with sores and infested with bugs. He was terribly, terribly ill.

This is from Joe Gould’s Teeth’s fascinating “Miss Savage” chapter. Augusta Savage was a black sculptor (“the most influential artist in Harlem”) with whom Gould fell in love. She rejected him. He hounded her mercilessly. Lepore writes,

Gould hardly ever left her alone. He wrote her endless letters. He telephoned her constantly. If she gave an exhibit, he showed up. “Joe was making her life utterly miserable.”

According to a note at the back of the book, that “Joe was making her life utterly miserable,” in the above-quoted passage, is from an October, 1964 letter that Millen Brand wrote to Joseph Mitchell. One of the many impressive aspects of Joe Gould’s Teeth is Lepore’s deft stitching into her text of dozens of quotations from letters she found scattered in archives all over the country. The book includes thirty-one pages of notes.

Lepore is both a historian and a literary journalist. It’s a potent combination, as Joe Gould’s Teeth clearly shows. The book is a bravura piece of writing. I particularly relish the part where Lepore is talking about all the Gould letters she’s discovered and she suddenly conjures this extraordinary image:

I pictured it like this: I’d dip those letters in a bath of glue and water—the black ink would begin to bleed—and I’d paste them over an armature I’d built out of Gould’s empty cigarette boxes, rolled-up old New Yorkers, and seagull feathers. I called my papier-mâché White Man (Variation).

Interestingly, the New Yorker version of this delightful imaginary assemblage omits the empty cigarette boxes.

My favorite chapter in Joe Gould’s Teeth is the Epilogue, a sort of mental “Joe Gould” installation comprehending many of the elements of his life. Here’s an excerpt:

Shoved into the farthest, darkest corner of the room there’s a heavy oak desk and an empty oak chair. On top of the desk sits Joseph Mitchell’s typewriter and, curled in its roller, a piece of New Yorker stationary, blank. A Milton Bradley color top rests on a pile of newspapers and magazines: an old Harvard Crimson, a New Republic. Beside it is a bottle of ink, a fountain pen, and one last dime-store notebook, its black cover mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat. On its cover is written, Property of GOULD, JOE, and below that, MEO TEMPORE, THIRD VERSION.

That “one last dime-store notebook, its black cover mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat” is wonderfully vivid. It’s a repetition of the notebook description in the book’s opening paragraph – “their black covers mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat, their white pages lined with thin blue veins.” “Mottled” is the way I now see Gould’s life, marked with smears of appalling behavior. Mitchell’s “views” still stand, of course. How could they not – they’re so pungently alive. But I read them differently now. Lepore has darkened my view.

Interesting Emendations: Pauline Kael's "The Long Goodbye"

It’s interesting to examine the artful surgery that Richard Brody performed on Pauline Kael’s capsule review of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973). Kael’s version, 321 words long, is collected in her 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991). Brody cut it to 182 words, deleting the first and seventh sentences, and skillfully merging the fifth, sixth, and tenth lines. Here’s Kael’s version:

In his novel, set in 1953, Raymond Chandler situated his incorruptible knight Philip Marlowe in Los Angeles, the city famed as the place where you go to sell out. And Chandler wrote to his agent that what he cared about in this book was “how any man who tried to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or plain foolish.” Chandler’s sentimental foolishness is the taking-off place for Robert Altman’s heady, whirling sideshow of a movie, set in the early 70s L.A. of the stoned sensibility. Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is a wryly forlorn knight, just slogging along; still driving a 1948 Lincoln Continental and trying to behave like Bogart, he’s the gallant fool in a corrupt world—the innocent eye. Even the police know more about the case he’s involved in than he does. Yet he’s the only one who cares. Altman kisses off the private-eye form as gracefully as Beat the Devil parodied the international-intrigue thriller. Less accidental than Beat the Devil, this picture is just about as funny, though quicker-witted and dreamier, in soft, mellow color and volatile images. Altman tells a detective story all right, but he does it through a spree—a highflying rap on Chandler and the movies and L.A. The film drives you a little crazy, turns you on the way some musicals (Singin’ in the Rain, Cabaret) and some comedies (M*A*S*H, parts of Bananas and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex) do. Gould gives a loose and woolly, strikingly original performance. With Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, Jim Bouton, Henry Gibson, Jack Riley, and Ken Sansom. Vilmos Zsigmond is responsible for the offhand visual pyrotechnics (the imagery has great vitality); John Williams’ score is a witty series of variations on the title song; the script is credited to Leigh Brackett, but when you hear the Altman-style improvisatory dialogue you know you can’t take that too literally. Released in 1973.

Here’s Brody's version, published in the April 25, 2016 New Yorker:

Raymond Chandler’s sentimental foolishness is the taking-off place for Robert Altman’s heady, whirling sideshow of a movie, set in the early-seventies L.A. of the stoned sensibility. Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is a wryly forlorn knight, just slogging along; still driving a 1948 Lincoln Continental and trying to behave like Bogart, he’s the gallant fool in a corrupt world—the innocent eye. Even the police know more about the case he’s involved in than he does. Yet he’s the only one who cares. Altman tells a detective story all right, but he does it through a spree—a highflying rap on Chandler and L.A. and the movies. Altman gracefully kisses off the private-eye form in soft, mellow color and volatile images; the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is responsible for the offhand visual pyrotechnics (the imagery has great vitality). Gould gives a loose and woolly, strikingly original performance. Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, and Jim Bouton co-star; the script is credited to Leigh Brackett, but when you hear the Altman-style improvisatory dialogue you know you can’t take that too literally. Released in 1973.

With the exception of “heady, whirling sideshow of a movie,” all the words in both these versions are sourced in Kael’s great “Movieland – The Bum’s Paradise” (The New Yorker, October 22, 1973; included in Kael’s 1976 Reeling and her 1994 For Keeps), which I remember for this exquisite image: “When Nina van Pallandt thrashes in the ocean at night, her pale-orange butterfly sleeves rising above the surf, the movie becomes a rhapsody on romance and death.” As for the words “heady, whirling sideshow of a movie,” Kael inserted them when she condensed the 4000-word “Movieland – The Bum’s Paradise” to her 321-word capsule.

May 9, 2016 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The text under Goings On About Town’s "This Week" photo (portrait of Chelsea Wolfe by Parker Day) contains a piquant line: “But it’s the layers of dissonant, cold embellishments, like the acidic bass line on ‘After the Fall,’ from her 2015 album Abyss, that have prickly experimentalists and jet-black metal fans flocking to her sets.” Who wrote that? Is Sasha Frere-Jones back with the magazine? He has an ear for “layers of dissonant, cold embellishments” and “acidic bass lines.” I remember his "Brighter Tomorrow," in which he describes the Fuck Buttons’ first album as “ill-tempered and thrilling—long, sharp drones accompanied by vocals that sounded like they’d been driven through a small speaker to the point of disintegration.”

2. Lauren Collins’s description of the Trumps' marriage made me smile: “it is as blinged-out with male dominance as their penthouse is with Louis XIV furniture” ("The Model American").

3. I relished the brilliant Bendik Kaltenborn illustration for Emily Nussbaum’s "Hive Mind."

4. I made a note to see Luca Guadagnino’s new movie A Bigger Splash, which Anthony Lane describes as “fiercely unrelaxing and impossible to ignore” ("On the Rocks"). I enjoyed Guadagnino’s previous I Am Love immensely. 

May 2, 2016 Issue

I can’t look at a bag in a tree without thinking of Ian Frazier. That means I think of Frazier a lot, because there are a lot of bags in trees. I never used to notice them. Only after I read his three great “Bags In Trees” pieces in his 2005 collection Gone to New York did I become conscious of them. Since then I see their annoying presence everywhere. I frequently pick them out of ditches and off bushes and accessible tree branches. And when I see them fluttering in high branches where I can’t reach them, I find myself wishing I had one of those nifty bag snaggers that Frazier and his friend Tim McClelland invented (see Frazier’s brilliant "Bags In Trees: A Retrospective").

Reading this week’s New Yorker, I see that Frazier is still tangled up with the bags-in-trees problem. In a terrific piece titled "The Bag Bill," he writes about a lawyer, Jennie Romer, who specializes in plastic-bag law, and who is currently pushing for the passage of a bill called Intro 209A that will impose a fee on plastic bags in New York City. In my favorite part of the piece, Frazier describes accompanying Romer and members of a group from the West 80s Neighborhood Association on a sort of bag-snagging tutorial. Here’s an excerpt:

Lisa Scheppke, an employee of the Littoral Society, successfully snagged a bag, and Cheryl Sussman, a retired accountant who cleans up trash on the Far Rockaway beaches by herself as a hobby, got one, too. A member of the group took a bag from a tree in the Broadway median strip while standing almost on top of a guy on a bench who did not lift his eyes from his crossword puzzle. Elmore, the pro, then dazzled everybody by extracting a noxious blue plastic drop cloth from a sidewalk callery-pear tree in about half a second.

That last line is inspired! I enjoyed “The Bag Bill” immensely. I hope Intro 209A passes.

Postscript: Three other excellent pieces in this week’s issue are Jiayang Fan’s "Tables For Two: MáLà Project" (“When an adventurous first-timer pointed to the unfamiliar item rooster’s XXX, the handsome Uighur waiter deadpanned, ‘Chicken testicles, ma’am. One order?’ ”), McKenna Stayner’s "Bar Tab: Sycamore" (“The crawlers, finishing a hot whiskey cider that tasted like the dregs of an overly honeyed tea, passed through a teensy smokers’ patio and into the booze-soaked main bar, attracted by a glowing yellow counter, its surface like the cracked crust of a crème brûlée”), and Peter Schjeldahl’s "Insurance Man," a review of Paul Mariani’s The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens (“He came slowly to a mastery of language, form, and style that revealed a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism”).

Julia Rothman's Delightful Illustrations

Julia Rothman's "Ocean's 8"

One of the most piquant details in last week’s New Yorker (April 25 issue) is Julia Rothman’s “Above & Beyond” illustration of Mmuseum 2’s “Future Aleppo” exhibit. It shows a young man (green jacket, black backpack, green track pants with a thin yellow stripe down the legs) walking a gray city sidewalk, approaching the miniscule museum with its doors open and Mohammed Qutaish’s paper miniature of the Syrian city visible in a blue square within. To my knowledge, this is the first Rothman to appear in the magazine. Recently, three of her artworks were used to illustrate newyorker.com’s “Bar Tab” columns: "Paris Blues," "Sycamore," and "Ocean's 8." My favorite is “Ocean’s 8”: rectangles of flat green, brown, tan, and buff depict foreground pool table and backdrop bowling alley together with myriad whimsical liney details (orange drink-filled glass, pink purse, black overhead lamp, orange-and-white billiard ball, cream-and-orange tank top, gray-and-orange ping pong paddles) and three active figures (pool-player, bowler, drinker). I look forward to seeing more of Rothman’s delightful work in The New Yorker. It’s inspired!