November 20, 2017 Issue

It’s great to see Leo Robson back in the magazine. His last piece was “Doings and Undoings,” October 17, 2016 (on Henry Green), and the one before that was “Delusions of Candor,” October 26, 2015 (on Gore Vidal) – both excellent. His “The Mariner’s Prayer,” in this week’s issue, is a review of two books on Joseph Conrad: Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World and J. Hillis Miller’s Reading Conrad. He calls Jasanoff’s book “a special case of privileged-access criticism,” i.e., criticism that draws on Conrad’s life to illuminate his work. This contrasts with “Miller’s favored critical mode,” which Robson describes as deconstructionist. Still, he says, The Dawn Watch and Reading Conrad, “have one area of overlap – an almost complete indifference to everything that Conrad published after 1910.” Robson writes,

It’s surprising that neither gives more space to “Under Western Eyes,” a novel crowded with enigmas and transmuted personal history. But to ignore “ Chance” (1914) is to miss a crucial clue about Conrad’s sensibility—and his aversion to what he saw as the sea stigma.

Reading Robson’s absorbing piece, I recalled George Steiner’s “An Old Man and the Sea” (The New Yorker, April 23, 1979), in which Steiner rips Frederick R. Karl’s Joseph Conrad: Three Lives, calling it, among other things, a “turgid leviathan,” “composed in a style of the texture of ageing jello.” Steiner refers to Conrad’s “veiled, implicit way of conveying physical action.” This gets at what is, for me, a major stylistic weakness of Conrad’s writing – his oblique, muffled tone. Robson, in his piece, doesn’t touch on Conrad’s muted style, except to note his use of “philosophical digression” and his preferred method of transforming material “from particular to general.”   

Robson describes Saul Bellow as “the most Conradian novelist in recent American literature.” I disagree. Bellow’s writing brims with exuberant specificity. It’s the exact opposite of Conrad’s foggy obliqueness.  

Agnès Varda and JR's Wonderful "Faces Places"

A couple of week’s ago, at City Cinema, I saw Agnès Varda and JR’s wonderful Faces Places. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. What a sublime piece of personal filmmaking! It reminds me of Ian Frazier’s work. “You read an essayist like Frazier primarily for the encounter between his sensibility and the world,” Carl Rotella says, in his New York Times review of Frazier’s Hogs Wild. Yes, exactly. And that’s what I go to Varda’s films for – the encounter between her genial, curious, idiosyncratic sensibility and the world. To quote Richard Brody, “Shot by shot, line by line, moment by moment, Varda rescues the vitality and the beauty of the incidental, the haphazard, the easily overlooked—because she fills each detail with the ardent energy of her own exquisite sensibility” (“What to Stream this Weekend: Seaside Frolics,” newyorker.com, August 18, 2017).

In Faces Places, Varda travels with JR in his van (equipped with a photo booth and a large-format printer), exploring a number of small French towns, talking to various people (e.g., goat farmers, dockworkers, chemical plant workers). To quote Brody again, “The subject of Faces Places is the heroism of daily life, the recognition of the daily labor and struggles of factory workers, farmers, waitresses, and, for that matter, women over all whose private roles in sustaining the public lives of their male partners go largely uncommemorated” (“Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places Honors Ordinary People on a Heroic Scale,” newyorker.com, October 10, 2017). Varga and JR honor the lives of ordinary people, but also transfigure them, making huge black-and-white murals of their portraits, and pasting them on arresting surfaces such as railway tank cars, barns, and towering stacks of shipping containers. In the process, Faces Places magnificently fulfills one of art’s primary aims – giving the ordinary its beautiful due.

November 13, 2017 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ian Frazier’s wonderful “Clear Passage,” a report on the revamping of New York City’s majestic Bayonne Bridge. Frazier observes the construction from a park located at the foot of the bridge on the New Jersey side of the Kill Van Kull (“At a well-situated bench I listen to the machinery on the bridge, the shouts of the workers echoing in the steel beams, the hammering of metal on metal, and the beeping of lifter-arm vehicles backing up”). He tells about the bridge’s history and the engineer, Othmar H. Ammann, who built it, in 1931. He talks to some of the bridge workers (“On an afternoon in early spring, I talked to two painters from Ahern Contractors, in Woodside, New York, who told me that they were painting the bridge pewter-cup gray. It’s a nice shade, and everything that day—bridge, water, clouds, birds, sky—seemed to be a version of it”). He tells about the local pilots who steer the ships through the passage under the bridge. He describes the passage of the Theodore Roosevelt, “the biggest cargo ship ever to enter New York Harbor,” as it sailed under the bridge, September 7, 2017:

As the ship went by, its vast blue hull and stacked-up containers blotted out a good part of Staten Island. People exclaimed, and the cameras made their insistent cicada noises. The ship moved closer to the bridge, and closer. It appeared to have plenty of clearance. Still, many in the crowd held their breath and leaned one way or another, like football fans trying to help a field goal through the uprights using body English.

Most memorably, he describes the view that fills his windshield as he crosses the bridge:

In the arch itself, the road now goes through so high up that it’s as if you were in the bridge’s rafters. As you begin the descent, a grand scene suddenly appears before you: on the left, the vast expanse of the ports of Elizabeth and Newark, the cranes lined up like giant red-white-and-blue kitchen appliances—hand-crank juicers, maybe—with container ships docked alongside or waiting in Newark Bay, and the Passaic River joining the bay on the left, and the Hackensack River entering it up ahead, and the long I-78 bridge over the bay; and, farther off on the left, the runways of Newark Airport, the planes coming and going above it; and, beyond that, the vague gray-blue hills of New Jersey curving westward around the earth toward the rest of America.

“Clear Passage” is classic Frazier reportage – perceptive, lyrical, absorbing. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: In “Clear Passage,” Frazier uses the word “whatnot” (“Orange plastic-mesh fencing bordered the road; construction vehicles and Port-O-Sans and air compressors and whatnot sat alongside”). I smiled when I read it. It reminded me of Frazier’s great Wuthering Heights parody “Linton’s Whatnots” (The New Yorker, May 11, 1992), in which Cathy reveals to Heathcliff that her husband Edgar Linton has a collection of novelty nutcrackers.  

November 6, 2017 Issue

What was it like to be in Raqqa this summer during the fight to expel ISIS? Luke Mogelson’s extraordinary “Dark Victory,” in this week’s issue, tells us in detail after gritty detail. It puts us on the ground, near the front lines, with the Syrian Democratic Forces, amid the city’s bombed-out ruins:

Inside the city, the devastation was apocalyptic. Block after block of tall apartment towers had been obliterated. Every building seemed to have been struck by ordnance: either destroyed entirely, scorched black by fire, or in a state of mid-collapse, with slabs of concrete hanging precariously from exposed rebar and twisted I-beams. Bulldozers had plowed a path through heaps of cinder blocks, felled power poles, and other detritus. Up ahead, missiles hit: a whistle, then a crash, then a dark plume. Smoke and dust roiled over rooftops.

“Dark Victory” is riveting, and what makes it riveting (for me, at least) is Mogelson’s masterful use of “I,” which gives his reports the immediacy and authenticity of personal experience. Examples:

In August, in the living room of an abandoned house on the western outskirts of Raqqa, Syria, I met with Rojda Felat, one of four Kurdish commanders overseeing the campaign to wrest the city from the Islamic State, or ISIS.

One afternoon this summer, near a front line in West Raqqa, I sat in a requisitioned residence with Ali Sher, a thirty-three-year-old Kurdish commander with a handlebar mustache and the traditional Y.P.G. uniform: camouflage, Hammer pants and a colorful head scarf tied back pirate-style.

A few days after speaking with Ali Sher in West Raqqa, my translator and I followed two pickup trucks, crowded with about twenty Arab fighters, through the southern fringes of the city.

Another afternoon, on a street in East Raqqa, where the S.D.F. had pushed into the city’s old quarter, breaching a huge mud-mortar wall from the eighth century, I watched an armored bulldozer return from clearing some rubble nearby.

In another bedroom of the house, I found the ranking commander for the area, a Kurd, sitting on a box spring beneath a shattered window that overlooked the hospital.

These wonderful first-person sentences report war as lived experience. I devour them.  

The Mauricio Lima photos illustrating “Dark Victory” (especially the newyorker.com version) are transfixing, among the best to appear in the magazine in recent memory.

Photo by Mauricio Lima

“Dark Victory” is Mogelson’s third piece on the war against ISIS. The others are “The Front Lines” (The New Yorker, January 18, 2016) and “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017). Together they make one of the most brilliant series of war reports The New Yorker has ever published. I hope Mogelson collects them in a book. It would be an instant classic.

Postscript: Five inspired lines from this week’s New Yorker:

1. “Over here—put in potato—close—strong,” a centenarian named Anastasia instructed, pinching dumplings shut with practiced rhythm. – David Kortava, “Tables For Two: Streecha”

2. Three drinks in, a teetering twentysomething left most of his Up and Cumming—a frothy high-proof pineapple margarita—spilled on the bar. – H. C. Wilentz, “Bar Tab: Club Cumming”

3. The muralist packed up, leaving a half-painted Liza Minnelli to gaze out, smirking, on the besotted crowd. – H. C. Wilentz, “Bar Tab: Club Cumming”

4. The penumbral horse that Georges Seurat let loose with his black Conté crayon in 1882, on view here, might be up for a wild ride with Black Hawk’s “Buffalo Dreamers.” – Andrea K. Scott, “Paper Weight”

5. The cinematographer William Lubtchansky’s grainy black-and-white images have the feel of cold stone, and, when the pragmatic Lilie challenges François to get on with his life, the chill of hard reality is all the more brutal. – Richard Brody, “Movies: Regular Lovers”

October 30, 2017 Issue

I relish description. One of my favorite forms of it is ekphrasis. There’s a wonderful example of it in Peter Schjeldahl’s “Think Big,” a profile of the painter Laura Owens, in this week’s issue. Schjeldahl describes Owens’s one-off installation Ten Paintings:

The paintings didn’t exist yet, except in the potential form of concealed panels that shared a continuous surface of room-girdling handmade wallpaper: in effect, a single painting, more than fourteen feet high and more than a hundred and seventy-three feet long, executed in acrylic, oil, vinyl paint, silk-screen inks, charcoal, pastel, graphite, and sand. Non-repeating bitmap patterns, derived from a scanned piece of crumpled paper, underlay passages of newsprint reproductions, fugitive brushwork, a micrographic version of Picasso’s “Guernica,” and attached whatnots, including a watercolor of a sailing ship by Owens’s grandfather, patterns of embroidery by her grandmother, and a drawing by her younger brother Lincoln, who is a chef in New Orleans. Prevailing blacks, whites, and pale blues, with purple accents, imposed a gently rhythmic unity. At intervals on the walls, phone numbers were printed, with invitations to text any question that a viewer might have. The nearest of eight concealed loudspeakers would deliver an answer in a male, female, or robotic voice, to spooky or daffy effect, from a computer that Owens, with technical help, had programmed to recognize a hundred key words. (Imagine an ultra-high-tech Magic 8 Ball.) To the query “Where are the paintings?,” all the speakers replied, “Here!”

This is very beautiful, and its specificity (“Non-repeating bitmap patterns, derived from a scanned piece of crumpled paper, underlay passages of newsprint reproductions, fugitive brushwork, a micrographic version of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ ”) is what is beautiful.

Schjeldahl is a master ekphrasist. Here are five more examples of his work:

1. Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907):

The subject is placed off-center, to the right, on a canvas more than four and a half feet square. Imperious and smart, making her slightly horse-faced features seem a paradigm of feminine perfection, she wears a shoulder-strap gown with a cloak-like, billowing outer layer and broad gold and silver bracelets and a bejewelled silver choker. A storm of patterns—spirals, targets, nested squares, split ovals, checks, dots, short vertical bars, arrowhead triangles, ankh-like eyes—may represent fabric, furniture, and wallpaper, or they may be sheer invention. Most of the ground (not background, because almost everything in the picture that isn’t flesh snugs up to the picture plane) is mottled gold. Her asymmetrically upswept hair is painted matte black. Her right hand is oddly raised to her shoulder and, wrist bent at a painful-looking right angle, is grasped by her left, as if to restrain it. (On a Viennese note of that epoch, the pencil-outlined fingers faintly suggest claws.) Her frontal gaze turns inward, registering sensations that can only be sexual. Her dark-shadowed hazel eyes, under tapering black brows, are wells of seduction; someone could fall into them. Her bee-stung red mouth parts to expose two competent teeth. Blue tints along her collarbones, wrists, and hands hint at subcutaneous veins: erogenous zones. She is a lighthouse, or shadehouse, of desire. (Lauder, speaking for the Neue Galerie, has called the painting “our ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” I have seen the “Mona Lisa,” and “Adele” is no “Mona Lisa.” Not very much is mysterious about this cookie.) The picture is most excitingly viewed, after close inspection, from afar. Patterns shatter into drifting, pure abstraction while the facial expression still reads at full power. The double pleasure dizzies. [“Golden Girl,” The New Yorker, July 24, 2006]

2. Fra Angelico’s The Annunciatory Angel (ca. 1450):

The androgynous angel, in pink robes with a slash of blue, leans forward as if into a gust of wind, one hand on his chest and the other beginning to advance in a gesture of offering. The face is intent but serene. A swiftly brushed wing, of brown feathers, merges with the gilt background, above a swath of patterned floor in convincing perspective. The delicately roughened surface texture gives sensuous immediacy – suddenness, even – to a figure that feels less lit and shaded than made of materialized light and shade. [“Heaven on Earth,” The New Yorker, November 21, 2005]

3. Edward Hopper’s New York Movie (1939):

In a corner of an ornate theatre, a pretty usherette leans back against a wall out of sight of a screen that displays an illegible fragment of black-and-white movie, watched by two solitary people. Dimmed, reddish lights oppose a russet cast to inky shadows. Parted red curtains frame a stairway to the balcony. The usherette’s reverie, if any (she may be dozing), centers our involvement. She has seen the film. Wanting to be elsewhere, she is elsewhere. Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality—those of the movie, the audience, the usherette, the theatre, and the civilization that must have theatres. I comprehend the picture’s economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that fills the space and assaults the usherette’s unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness. [“Ordinary People,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2007]

4. Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940):

It presents Kahlo in a plain white blouse, with a thorned vine twisted around her neck, drawing drops of blood, and a dead hummingbird with outstretched wings, worn like a crucifix. A monkey toys with the vine at one shoulder; a black cat stares from behind the other. A background of ornamental vegetation includes what may be a zinnia and a fuchsia, which appear to be morphing into diaphanous insects like the two silver filigree butterflies in Kahlo’s hair. [“Native Soil,” The New Yorker, May 25, 2015]

5. Arshile Gorky’s Scent of Apricots on the Fields (1944):

A pileup of loosely outlined, thinly painted fragmentary shapes, like plant or body parts, embedded in passages of golden yellow, hovers above a green suggestion of a table and below a skylike expanse of brushy rose red. Dabs of raw turpentine cause runny dissolutions, as if some forms were melting into their white ground. The downward drips yield a paradoxical sensation of buoyancy. The picture’s visceral shapes seem to ascend like putti in a Renaissance firmament. The dynamics are at once obvious and inspired, stroke by stroke and hue by hue, and deliriously affecting—when viewed near at hand. [“Twentieth-Century Man,” The New Yorker, November 2, 2009]