The Relation of Fact to Thought in Elif Batuman's "The Memory Kitchen" (Contra Daniel Soar)

Photo by Carolyn Drake (from Elif Batuman's "The Memory Kitchen")

Daniel Soar, in his “The paper is white” (London Review of Books, December 14, 2017), a review of Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot, is critical of Batuman’s New Yorker writings. He says,

As a staff writer for the New Yorker, living for a time in Turkey, she has in recent years reported on football fandom in Istanbul, archeology in south-eastern Anatolia, transcranial direct-current stimulation in Albuquerque and an unusual kidney disease found only in the Balkans. These pieces are witty, personal, comprehensively reported (“But when I tried to get in touch with him I was told that he was unavailable, having recently been shot”), but they are also dutiful and information-heavy, with the occasional Wikipedia-like bit of background that anyone could have filled in (“In 1908, the sultan’s absolute rule was curbed by the Young Turks, who went on to encourage soccer as a means of Westernising and nationalising Turkish youth”). She has traded thoughts for facts. She doesn’t always have the room to reflect on how selective and partial those facts can be – or on whether, for example, working-class Beşiktaş fans may have a politics beyond the facts of their violence.

She has traded thoughts for facts – is this true? I don’t think so. It fails to credit the complex mental process underpinning Batuman’s factual writing. Take her wonderful “The Memory Kitchen” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010), for example, profiling the extraordinary Turkish chef Musa Dağdeviren, whose Istanbul restaurant Çiya Sofrasi has “tapped into a powerful vein of collective food memory,” “producing the kind of Turkish cuisine that Turkey itself, racing toward the West and the future, seemed to have abandoned.”

“The Memory Kitchen” is an artfully shaped narrative comprehending, among other things, the taste of Çiya Sofrasi’s kisir (“The bitter edge of sumac and pomegranate extract, the tang of tomato paste, and the warmth of cumin, which people from the south of Turkey put in everything, recalled to me, with preternatural vividness, the kisir that my aunt used to make”); the story of Dağdeviren’s rise “from errand boy to dishwasher, from apprentice to chef, and on to head chef and master chef”; an excursion to Kandira, on the Black Sea coast, to shop for foraged herbs (“We made one round of the wild-greens sellers. Most were women, wearing bright flowered head scarves, oversized wool cardigans, and long skirts or baggy pantaloons”); lunch at a fish shop (“The shop owner brought the fish, which had been fried in cornmeal. Musa ate in moderation, but with quick, restless, almost peremptory movements”); and, most memorably, a visit to a turkey farm (“Turkeys were wandering everywhere, producing their strange ambient gurgle, under the lugubrious eye of a large German shepherd”).

Writing is selection, John McPhee says in his Draft No. 4. In Batuman’s great “The Memory Kitchen,” the selection of facts and words is brilliant. The presence of a thinking, creating mind is palpable.

Sven Birkerts' Inane "The McPhee Method"

I’ve just finished reading Sven Birkerts’ “The McPhee Method” (Los Angeles Review of Books, November 20, 2017). What a tepid, piffling, silly, cockeyed, vacuous review. The piece is riddled with inanities. For example:

1. Birkerts’ comparison of McPhee’s writing with “mansplaining” (“But there is this one all-important difference between the mansplainer and John McPhee”). According to Birkerts, that “one all-important difference,” is that the mansplainer imposes his explanations, whereas McPhee “deploys his wiles of craft to have the reader not looking to escape, but rather to have her be saying, ‘Really? Tell me more.’ ”  But for that one difference – the ability to hook the reader’s attention – McPhee would be a mansplainer, as would, apparently, every journalist, male or female, who sets out to report on a particular subject. As I understand the term, “mansplaining” means explaining something to someone, characteristically by a man to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing. It’s totally inapplicable to McPhee’s innovative factual reporting, which David Remnick describes as “the best of what has been in The New Yorker” (“Notes From Underground,” The New York Review of Books, March 2, 1995).

2. Birkerts’ obsessive use of “context” to define McPhee’s compositional process. He uses it six times: “Context creates interest; the right disposition of detail creates context. The McPhee method”; “And each subject receives his best attention. It has been given deep establishing context, and then strategically staged for us”; “but possibly because it is self-reflexive, as opposed to outwardly directed, it lacks the slow and purposeful accretion of context which has always been McPhee’s greatest strength”; “His impulse to elaborate detail is as strong as ever, but for some reason the vital accompanying context has lost its vitality”; “Even the most gifted maker of contexts and supplier of explanations, the most cunning of raconteurs, must push hard against the universal distraction”; “We come back to interest and attention, to the idea that the interesting is what stands out, and that the art is to make the subject stand out — to create the context that will allow the particulars to connect in a provocative way.” “Context” is Birkerts’ word, not McPhee’s. It’s opaque, abstract, inert; it doesn’t illuminate the writing process the way, say, “structure” does. “Structure” is McPhee’s touchstone – his organizing principle. Here, from McPhee’s Draft No. 4, is one of my favorite passages from his description (with accompanying diagrams) of the structure of his great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977):

One dividend of this structure is that the grizzly encounter occurs about three-fifths of the way along, a natural place for a high moment in any dramatic structure. And it also occurs just where and when it happened on the trip. You’re a nonfiction writer. You can’t move that bear around like a king’s pawn or a queen’s bishop. But you can, to an important and effective extent, arrange a structure that is completely faithful to fact.

3. Birkerts’ opinion that McPhee’s structural analyses are “tedious” (“Still, if McPhee is instructive on the more generalized aspects of structure, he gets tedious, when he starts to offer up examples from his own work”). This is not a fan’s response. If you’re a fan of McPhee’s work, as I am, you’ll find his notes on how he worked out the structures of some of his greatest pieces exhilarating. Birkerts’ jaded response makes me wonder why he chose to review McPhee’s Draft No. 4 in the first place.

4. Birkerts erroneous statement that one of McPhee’s subjects is weightlifting (“He has taken on: oranges, Bill Bradley, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Alaska, Russian art, canoes, weight lifting, nuclear engineering, the geological history of our continent — have I missed anything?”). This is a major gaffe, in my opinion, showing Birkerts has no clue what he’s talking about.

For a warmer, much more appreciative and accurate review of John McPhee’s Draft No. 4, see Parul Sehgal’s “The Gloom, Doom and Occasional Joy of the Writing Life” (The New York Times, September 13, 2017).

January 22, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: The Narrows,” containing a couple of great drink descriptions [“As for the house drinks, the Pilar (mezcal, Cappelletti, Cocchi Americano) is a pure amber color in a globe-shaped glass, and splutter-inducingly smoky; the Babushka, a simple concoction of ginger, lime, and vodka, offers enough succor to allow the possibility of returning to the bitter cold of the street, where a lone bicycle lies in a snowdrift, buried up to its chain”], and this inspired detail: “In a corner booth, a man gently plucked a down-coat feather from a woman’s sleeve and blew it into the air.”

Thomas Struth's Pergamon Museum Photographs: Fried v. Schjeldahl

Thomas Struth, "Pergamon Museum 4, Berlin" (2001)

I dislike staged photos. This has nothing to do with absorption and theatricality – two issues that preoccupy Michael Fried, in his Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008). This has to do with reality – the amount of reality in the photo. Peter Schjeldahl says of the Bechers’ photography, “When their approach works, a picture delivers a sense of reality with the directness of a body blow” (“Reality Clicks,” The New Yorker, May 27, 2002). That powerful “sense of reality” is what I look for in a photo. In his book, Fried takes issue with Schjeldahl’s distaste for Thomas Struth’s staged Pergamon Museum photographs. Schjeldahl, in his “Reality Clicks,” writes,

A current show at the Marian Goodman Gallery, in New York, of new work by Struth—large-scale photographs of people at the Pergamon Museum of ancient Near Eastern art and architecture, in Berlin—suggests hubris. After failing to get satisfactory pictures of ordinary museumgoers, Struth brought in a crowd of his own choosing. The pictures are grand and beautiful, but the subtle self-consciousness of the “viewers” proves deadening. There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera. (I’m confident of this judgment because I felt the off-putting effect of these pictures before learning its cause.)

I agree. Fried criticizes Schjeldahl for failing to appreciate the Pergamon Museum photographs for what they are – “truthful pictures of museumgoers deliberately performing absorption.” But I think it’s Fried who misses the point. He’s so caught up in his absorption theory that he fails to see the obvious. These photos are fiction. For me, fact, not fiction, is what makes great photographs. As Geoff Dyer says, in his wonderful “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs” (The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016),

“There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.” The fact that versions of this observation have been attributed to two very different street photographers, Garry Winogrand and Lisette Model, underlines its wisdom and its mystery. It helps explain why attempts to stage photographs — to create fictions — only rarely work as powerfully as the kind of quotations from reality that we get in documentary photographs. Larry Sultan once said he “always thought of a great photograph as if some creature walked into my room; it’s like, how did you get here? ... The more you try to control the world, the less magic you get.” Winogrand had no objection to staging things; it was just that he could never come up with anything as interesting as what was out there in the streets.

Frazier on McMurtry; McMurtry on Frazier

Reading Ian Frazier’s wonderful review of Larry McMurtry’s Thalia: A Texas Trilogy (The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017), I was reminded of McMurtry’s equally wonderful review of Frazier’s On the Rez (The New York Review of Books, February 10, 2000). On the Rez is one of my all-time favorite books. It tells about Frazier’s experiences among the Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. McMurtry’s piece, titled “Lighting Out for the Territory,” is an excellent appreciation of it. He calls it “a complex follow-up” to Frazier’s superb Great Plains. He says of Le War Lance, one of On the Rez’s central characters,

Ian Frazier and Le War Lance begin as strangers, become friends, and end as brothers. The brotherhood they achieve is a high estate but not an easy estate. The spiritual travel involved was mainly Mr. Frazier’s; this book is the story of that pilgrimage, that is, of his effort to live up to what is best in the Sioux. And what is best in the Sioux, as he already knows from his attachment to Crazy Horse, is very good indeed. Living up to it involves a good deal of struggle and a lot of tension, as Mr. Frazier grapples with the uncertainties, inconsistencies, and inscrutabilities of life on the rez.

Frazier, in his piece, has some memorable things to say about McMurtry’s work, too. I particularly like this one: “The books in this trilogy are like songs for acoustic guitar, with maybe some chase-scene banjo thrown in.”

Frazier and McMurtry – two great writers in love with the Great Plains.

James Wood's Banality Hunger

James Wood (Photo by Juliana Jiménez)

I’m not crazy about the word “banal.” To me, it smacks of superiority, a snooty distain for everyday life. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1984) says,

With “common,” “commonplace,” “trite,” “trivial,” “mean,” “vulgar,” “truism,” “platitude,” and other English words, to choose from, we should confine “banal” and “banality,” since we cannot get rid of them, to occasions when we want to express a contempt deeper than any of the English words can convey.

James Wood, one of my favorite writers, relishes the word. He uses it endlessly – “the banal amnesia of existence,” “brutally banal,” “the present banality of her existence,” “the mere pantomime of banality,” “banal failure,” “level banality,” “beautifully banal,” “banal details,” “apparent banality,” “the repetitive banality of his existence,” “blind banality,” “the evil of banality,” on and on. What does he mean by it? Is he using it to express contempt? Or is it, for him, just another word for “ordinary”? To answer, I want to consider twelve examples of Wood’s use of “banal”:

1. Both have been caricatured, and what is being enjoyed here is not the deep comic surprise of ordinariness (as in Chekov, say) but the mere pantomime of banality. [“Julian Barnes and the Problem of Knowing Too Much”]

The mere pantomime of banality – a great phrase, in which “banality” is used negatively, contrasting with “the deep comic surprise of ordinariness (as in Chekov, say).”

2. But Porphiry does not really lie to himself, for he has lost touch with the truth. He speaks the “truths” (as he sees them) that are all around him, and they are the most dismal, banal, lying platitudes. [“Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Subversion of Hypocrisy”]

Here again, “banal” is used pejoratively (“the most dismal, banal, lying platitudes”). This is “banal” as old Fowler would use it.

3. And so his father, who surely knows this, meekly agrees, says, “That’s true!” – incidentally, a beautiful placing of the exclamation point, suggesting a final fervency before death, a fervency all the more affecting because it is about an apparent banality – and dies. [“Giovanni Verga’s Comic Sympathy”]

Here, too, “banality” is used pejoratively to indicate triviality. But it’s also an early instance of Wood distinguishing between banality and apparent banality. In the same piece, Wood says, “What seems to be a fleeting triviality is actually very important – this is both Verga’s subject and his mode of writing: his banalities, like those of his characters, are never unimportant.” It’s an indication Wood understands the aesthetic of certain writers (e.g., Verga, Knausgaard, Chaudhuri) who aim to give banality its beautiful due.

4. Exile is acute, massive, transformative; but homelooseness, because it moves along its axis of departure and return, can be banal, welcome, necessary, continuous. [“Secular Homelessness”]

This is an instance of “banal” used positively, as a desirable aspect of a way of life Wood calls “homelooseness.”  

5. Her life seems circumscribed, satisfying, banal, disappointing. [“All Her Children”]

Here, “banal” seems ambiguous; it could be positive or negative, though not as negative as Saltykov-Shchedrin’s usage in the example above.

6. This sort of ordinariness anchors the book. Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse, by contrast, is finely written but is afraid of banality. [“Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”]

Afraid of banality – this is interesting: “banality” used positively as a synonym for “ordinariness.”

7. Of course, Richard, who was just a child during the war, is guilty only of the evil of banality, the moral myopia that dims most of our lucky lives in the West. ["Strangers Among Us"]

The evil of banality – sounds bad, but as an element of “our lucky lives in the West,” appears to signify mere ordinariness.

8. He wants us to inhabit the ordinariness of life, which is sometimes visionary (the Constable sketch), sometimes banal (the cup of tea, the Old Spice), and sometimes momentous (the death of a parent), but all of it perforce ordinary because it happens in the course of a life, and happens, in different forms, to everyone. ["Total Recall"]

No question here; “banality” is used as a form of ordinariness (“all of it perforce ordinary”).

9. These people stare at us, as if imploring us to rescue them from the banal amnesia of existence. [“W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz”]

I love this line, but I struggle with its meaning. It’s Wood’s response to the photographs of people in Sebald’s Austerlitz. My interpretation is that “amnesia of existence” means “oblivion.” Wood describes it as “banal” because oblivion is the destiny that awaits most of us; it’s our common fate. Earlier in his piece, Wood looks at the Austerlitz photo of the white-caped little boy and says,

The boy’s identity has disappeared (as has the woman whose photograph is shown as Agáta, the boy’s mother), and has disappeared – it might be said – even more thoroughly than Hitler’s victims, since they at least belong to blessed memory, and their murders cry out for public memorial, while the boy has vanished into the private obscurity and ordinary silence that will befall most of us.

Note that “ordinary silence.” Wood sees our one-way death trip to oblivion as ordinary. “Banal” in this instance isn’t pejorative; it isn’t judging the average person’s fate as no-account. It’s simply a synonym for “common” or “ordinary.”

10. Arvid’s life is drifting, like the sentences he voices, moving between banal failure and bottomless losses. [“Late and Soon”]

Obviously, banal failure is more than just failure; it’s uninteresting failure, low-level failure, uninspired failure. But the question is: by using “banal,” did Wood also mean to convey a tinge of distain? I’m not sure.

11. As is generally the case at such final celebrations, speakers struggled to expand and hold the beautifully banal instances of a life, to fill the dates between 1968 and 2012, so that we might leave the church thinking not of the first and last dates but of the dateless minutes in between. [“Why?”]

This, to me, is one of Wood’s most questionable uses of “banal.” Obviously, there’s no pejorative intent here. But is there a hint of unconscious condescension? The line is from the first paragraph of Wood’s personal essay “Why?,” in which he describes his attendance at the memorial service of a man he’s never met. Wood writes,

He was the younger brother of a friend of mine, and had died suddenly, in the middle of things, leaving behind a wife and two young daughters. The program bore a photograph of the man, above his compressed dates (1968-2012). He looked ridiculously young, blazing with life—squinting a bit in bright sunlight, smiling slightly, as if he were just beginning to get the point of someone’s joke. In some terrible way, his death was the notable, the heroic fact of his short life; all the rest was the usual joyous ordinariness, given form by various speakers. Here he was, jumping off a boat into the Maine waters; here he was, as a child, larkily peeing from a cabin window with two young cousins; here he was, living in Italy and learning Italian by flirting; here he was, telling a great joke; here he was, an ebullient friend, laughing and filling the room with his presence. As is generally the case at such final celebrations, speakers struggled to expand and hold the beautifully banal instances of a life, to fill the space between 1968 and 2012, so that we might leave the church thinking not of the first and last dates but of the dateless minutes in between.

“Joyous ordinariness,” “beautifully banal” – I see the connection. “Banal” and “ordinary” are being used interchangeably. Still, I find it an odd thing for Wood to say about a person he doesn’t know. I believe he intends it as praise. But it’s a backhanded kind of praise because it judges the deceased’s life as ordinary. It denies him his singularity.

12. One’s own small hardships—such as forgetting one’s A.T.M. card number, as Julius does, and being consumed by anxiety about it—may dominate a life as completely as someone else’s much larger hardships, because life is brutally one’s own, and not someone else’s, and is, alas, brutally banal. [“The Arrival of Enigmas”]

Life is no longer “beautifully banal”; now, it’s “brutally banal” – “banal” as an expression of contempt. Fowler would approve.

What to make of all this “banality”? One conclusion is that Wood likes writing “banal.” Sometimes he uses it positively (“beautifully banal”); sometimes he uses it negatively (“brutally banal”). Sometimes he uses it simply as a synonym for “ordinary”; sometime he uses it to express contempt. Obviously, it’s an important word in his vocabulary. It’s part of his aesthetic. 

January 15, 2018 Issue

Bendik Kaltenborn is one of The New Yorker’s best illustrators. He has a dandy picture in this week’s issue, showing Trump swaddled in a bathrobe, lying on the Oval Office carpet, blissfully watching his favorite morning show, “Fox & Friends.” It’s an illustration for Andrew Marantz’s “Friends in High Places,” in which Marantz brilliantly describes “the thin fourth wall between Trump and his TV.” Kaltenborn captures Trump’s infatuation perfectly.

January 8, 2018 Issue

Siddhartha Mukherjee, in his absorbing “Bodies at Rest and in Motion,” in this week’s issue, recounts his experience of his father’s dying. He writes,

I had versed myself in the reasons that my father had ended up in the hospital. It took me longer to ask the opposite question: What had kept my father, for so long, from acute decline? I had to reimagine the fall—the blow, the bleed, the delirium, the coma—and try to understand why such disasters hadn’t occurred earlier, as his brain had inched, woozily, inexorably, unrecognizably, toward dementia.

Why is he still alive? – it seems like an odd question to ask about someone receiving medical care. Why is he dying? And what can be done to prevent it? seem more to the point. But Mukherjee already knows why his father is dying (“the blow, the bleed, the delirium, the coma”). He knows his father’s condition is terminal. His question – why is he still alive? – gets at a different matter, a quality we tend to take for granted when we’re healthy – the body’s resilience, it’s resistance to death. Mukherjee points out that the physiological term for this resilience is homeostasis (“the capacity to maintain a functional equilibrium”), which he says has often been called “one of the defining principles of life.”

I confess I’ve never thought of the human body as resilient. The adjective that leaps to my mind is “fragile.” “We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia,” Lewis Thomas said, in The Lives of a Cell. After the collapse of his homeostatic resistance, Mukherjee’s father is incredibly fragile. His “feats of resilience surrendered to the fact of fragility,” Mukherjee says. In what, for me, is the piece’s most memorable passage, Mukherjee describes his father’s death:

And soon all his physiological systems entered into cascading failure, coming undone in such rapid succession that you could imagine them pinging as they broke, like so many rubber bands. Ping: renal failure. Ping: severe arrhythmia. Ping: pneumonia and respiratory failure. Urinary-tract infection, sepsis, heart failure. Ping, ping, ping.

Andy Friedman on Andrew Wyeth

Andy Friedman, "Wallpaper, Kuerner House" (2017)

Recently, searching newyorker.com for a review of the movie Wind River, I stumbled on a wonderful piece by Andy Friedman that I hadn’t seen before. Titled “A Journey in Pictures for Andrew Wyeth on his Centennial Birthday,” it’s a sort of annotated sketchbook – beautiful watercolors of scenes and items that Friedman noted when he visited the Brandywine River Valley Museum of Art, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to see the “Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect” exhibit.

I’m drawn to Wyeth’s painting. I relish its expressionistic strangeness – the absorbed microscopic way skin, hair, fur, fabric, etc. are rendered. I relish its off-kilter angles and bird’s eye views. Most of all, I relish its undertow of melancholy. Friedman touches on this when he notes that Wyeth’s Pennsylvania pictures “are painted with reticent shades of melancholy ochre.”

Friedman’s sketches reflect Wyeth’s close attention to plain, ordinary-looking things. I particularly like his depictions of the frontispiece of a light switch in Wyeth’s studio and the crumpled wallpaper in the Kuerner house. Friedman writes, “In another room, the wallpaper has shrivelled like a blossom in reverse.”

Friedman’s “A Journey in Pictures for Andrew Wyeth on his Centennial Birthday” is delectable. I wish I’d discovered it earlier. If I had, I would’ve included it on my “Best of 2017” list. 

January 1, 2018 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl’s “Points of View,” in this week’s issue, has a great opening line:

I both like and dislike “Thérèse Dreaming” (1938), the Balthus painting that thousands of people have petitioned the Metropolitan Museum to remove from view because it brazens the artist’s letch for pubescent girls—which he always haughtily denied, but come on!

That vehement “but come on!” made me smile. Schjeldahl has long insisted on “Thérèse” ’s erotic charge. In his “Balthus” (The Hydrogen Jukebox, 1991), he writes,

Seduced rather than seductive, few of them [Balthus’s paintings of young girls] would appeal to Lolita’s Humbert Humbert as precociously sluttish nymphets – one exception being the Thérèse of 1938, a hard case if ever there was one.

And in his “In the Head” (The New Yorker, October 2013), he says,

Then, in 1936, Balthus met Thérèse Blanchard, the eleven-year-old daughter of a restaurant worker. During the next three years, he made ten paintings of her, which are his finest work. They capture moods of adolescent girlhood—dreaming, restless, sulky—as only adolescent girls may authoritatively understand. (I’ve checked with veterans of the condition.) In two of the best, a short-skirted Thérèse raises her leg, exposing tight underpants. We needn’t reflect on the fact that an adult man directed the poses, any more than we must wonder about the empathic author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” But there it is. Balthus claimed a quality of sacredness for his “angels,” as he termed his models. That comes through. Yet, looking at the paintings, I kept thinking of a line by Oscar Wilde: “A bad man is the sort of man who admires innocence.”

In his latest piece, Schjeldahl argues for the Met’s continued display of “Thérèse” on the basis of “the work’s aesthetic excellence and historical importance.” I agree. But I find the case he makes for the painting in his first piece more compelling. In that essay (“Balthus”), he says, “It is precisely in his perversity that Balthus achieves artistic authenticity, and perhaps only there that he does.”