August 20, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man,” an extraordinary profile of an extraordinary man – Virgin Galactic’s ace pilot, Mark Stucky. Schmidle puts us squarely there, in the cockpit of SpaceShipTwo, with Stucky and his co-pilot, Dave Mackay, as they fly into space:

Ten seconds into the burn, SpaceShipTwo was supersonic. Stucky began trimming the h-stabs, steadily increasing the vehicle’s pitch until it reached sixty-eight degrees. He and Mackay were travelling at Mach 1.8—about twice as fast as a Tomahawk cruise missile. Outside the vehicle, the light was draining from the sky, turning it a deep, muddy blue.

He describes what Stucky sees:

The Earth’s bright-blue surface filled his porthole. It was a stupendous sight: the outer edge of the atmosphere was dancing with wispy tendrils. The spaceship was now at eighty-four thousand feet—higher than he’d ever been. He could now testify to the awesome power of the “overview effect.”

He shows us Stucky’s poised reaction to an in-flight emergency (Schmidle calls it “a vertiginous surprise”): 

Hurriedly, Stucky attempted to right the ship by blasting thrusters of high-pressure air, which was stored in the wings and was used to orient the vehicle in low-gravity environments. Then he instructed Mackay to unlock and raise the feather. As it went up, the spaceship righted itself, just as it had on Stucky’s harrowing glide flight seven years earlier. The same innovation that had contributed to the 2014 crash was, when properly deployed, a godsend.

That 2014 crash haunts Schmidle’s piece. He describes it magnificently:

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo zoomed off the runway. They flew about a hundred and fifty miles northeast, alongside a craggy mountain range streaked with purple and green mineral deposits. After reaching Death Valley, and still ascending, they looped back toward the release point. Stucky, in mission control, was watching the cockpit video and listening over the radio as Siebold and Alsbury ran through their checklists.

Alsbury: “Seat belts and shoulder harnesses?”

Siebold: “Snug.”

Alsbury: “Rocket burn timer?”

Siebold: “Set and verified.”

Alsbury: “Stick?”

Siebold: “Stick is forward.”

The pilots flooded their masks with oxygen, in case of an emergency. Neither was wearing a pressure suit.

Alsbury armed the release switch, and the spaceship dropped from WhiteKnightTwo. He fired the rocket. “Good light,” Siebold said, his voice reedy from the onset of g-forces. A moment later, following Stucky’s protocol, Alsbury announced their airspeed: Mach 0.8. They were in the transonic zone. Everything was going well.

“Yeehaw!” Siebold cried out.

Then Alsbury did something inexplicable. “Unlocking,” he said. He began reaching for a lever that controlled the locks on the feather.

Stucky hoped that he’d either misheard Alsbury or failed to notice that the spaceship had passed the transonic zone. He checked the Machmeter on the main display screen, and saw that the speed was still below Mach 1. His body seized: without the locks in place, aerodynamic forces would push the feather up, creating a tremendous amount of drag and shredding the spaceship in midair.

He lunged at the call button, intending to scream, “Don’t!”

Siebold grunted in agony. The audio feed stopped, and the video froze mid-frame. An engineer looked up from his console and gave Stucky a searching look.

Stucky said, “They’re gone.”

“Rocket Man” begins and ends with Stucky’s successful piloting of SpaceShipTwo into space. In between, it chronicles his personal history and how he became involved in Virgin Galactic’s amazing quest to make commercial space travel a reality. It brims with fascinating details – the way SpaceShipTwo is “attached like a marsupial to the belly of a mother ship, WhiteKnightTwo”; the labor-intensive construction of SpaceShipTwo’s frame (“you had to bind together sheets of honeycombed carbon by applying resin, cut the sheets into shapes with laser-guided precision, and bake each piece in a Celotex oven”); the technique suggested by Virgin Galactic’s flight doctor for avoiding passing out while experiencing extreme gravitational forces: “‘Pretend like you’re squeezing a walnut down there,’ she said, referring to my glutinal muscles.”

Schmidle's “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011) and “In the Crosshairs” (June 3, 2013) are New Yorker masterpieces. Now he's produced a third - “Rocket Man.” He's become one of the magazine's best writers.

Updike's Exquisite Word Paint (Contra Christine Smallwood)

Christine Smallwood, in her “State of Affairs” (Bookforum, Summer 2018), says of John Updike, “He could describe a barn well enough, but to what end?” If you have to ask that about Updike, chances are you’re not going to appreciate his art. For Updike, things are interesting in themselves. Like Dürer and Vermeer, artists he admired immensely, he describes the physical world in close avid detail: 

Shed needles from the larches had collected in streaks and puddles on the tarpaper and formed rusty ochre drifts along the wooden balustrade and the grooved aluminum base of the sliding glass doors.

The lilac leaves, flourishing, flowerless, had reached the height of Nancy’s window and, heart-shaped, brushed her screen.

Her brown eyes, gazing, each held in miniature the square skylight above them.

Treading lightly upon the rime-whitened grass, ice to his bare soles, he finally located, southward above the barn ridge with its twin scrolled lightning rods, a constellation gigantic and familiar: Orion.

He was sitting on the brittle grass, his feet in their papery slippers stinging. 

He called; she held still in answer, and appeared, closer approached, younger than he had remembered, smoother, more finely made – the silken skin translucent to her blood, the straight-boned nose faintly paler at the bridge, the brown irises warmed by gold and set tilted in the dainty shelving of her lids, quick lenses subtler than clouds, minutely shuttling as she spoke. 

These lines are all from Updike’s Couples (1968), a novel that Smallwood calls smug, pompous, and silly. She doesn’t get Updike’s writing. His art is the art of description. Claudia Roth Pierpont, in her “The Book of Laughter” (The New Yorker, October 7, 2013), calls him “a painter in words.” This seems exactly right.

Andrew O'Hagan's Brilliant "The Tower"

For me, one of this year’s literary highlights is Andrew O’Hagan’s “The Tower” (London Review of Books, June 7, 2018), a massive report on the Grenfell Tower fire that killed seventy-two people. O’Hagan is a superb writer. His The Atlantic Ocean (2013) is one of my favorite essay collections. His The Secret Life (2017) was one of the best books of 2017. His “Imaginary Spaces” (The New Yorker, March 28, 2016) was one of the best New Yorker pieces of 2016 (see here).

“The Tower” has a fascinating dialectical structure, evincing a deep distrust of simplistic black-and-white narrative.

Divided into seven sections, it describes what happened, sketches the lives of some of the victims and survivors, considers various causes of the disaster, meets with activists, attends the memorial service for the victims, covers the rabid finger-pointing, political fallout, and scapegoating of the council that owned the tower – all the while weaving its own compelling narrative around “the complications of truth.” O’Hagan writes,

In an effort to politicise this, activists and media observers, both engaged on a prolonged mission to simplify, speak of the council as if it were the only organisation involved, and speak of the ‘cladding’ as if it were the only issue. Yet, of all the organisations, the council was the only one happy to spend (rather than to make) money. It was the least involved in nuts and bolts decisions about the refurbishment, as we have seen, and all the big decisions came quite appropriately from the TMO, which commissioned the project; from Rydon, the builders; from Artelia UK, the project managers; from Studio E Architects, the principal designers; and IBI Group, which acted as planning consultants. These organisations between them made the tower what it became in the early hours of 14 June, when fire escaped from a kitchen and was funnelled rapidly upwards through the wide cavities and across the unstopped boundaries between the flats, combusting the Celotex insulation which in turn combusted the Reynobond aluminium panels. (The insulation was made by Saint Gobain UK and the panels were made by Arconic.) This pile of names will no doubt irritate the simplifiers during the several years it takes for the inquiry to provide an answer. But their existence supplies us with one answer now: the tower’s vulnerability lay in a network of negligence that was beyond the capacity of any one man, and beyond the failings of any one material. Some truths are just too long to put in a headline.

He says of the media,

And journalism, hour by hour and day by day, showed by its feasting on half-baked items that it had lost the power to treat reality fairly. You saw it everywhere. Channel 4 News, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Sky News, the New York Times: from the middle of that night, they began to turn the fire into the story they wanted it to be. Reality wasn’t good enough, the tragedy wasn’t bad enough, it had to be augmented, it had to be blown up, facts couldn’t be gleaned quickly enough, and stories went without investigation, research, tact or even checking. In a world of perpetual commentary in which everyone and anyone is allowed their own facts, accusation stands as evidence.

O’Hagan’s “The Tower” is one of the most damning indictments of rushing to judgment I’ve ever read. 

"Not Parasitic, But Primary": On the Art of Criticism (Contra Brody and Robbins)

Garry Winogrand, "Gas Pumps, Santa Fe, New Mexico" (1955)

Michael Robbins, in his Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music (2017), says, “Criticism is parasitic literature.” Richard Brody said the same thing a few years ago: “Criticism is a parasitical operation” (“How To Be A Critic,” newyorker.com, August 22, 2012). I can see why they think so: critical writing is a response to other people’s work. The critic appropriates the work of another in a work of his own. But I object to likening this process to that of a parasite. Great critics don’t suck life out of their subjects; they breathe it into them. For me, criticism isn’t parasitic; it’s symbiotic. T. J. Clark analyses Picasso’s The Blue Room as a vision of space (“Space is intimate. The rug heads off abruptly into infinity, but the sheet on the unmade bed laps over it and leaps toward us and asks to be touched”) and I see it with new eyes. James Wood writes, “Saving the dead – that is the paradoxically impossible project of Austerlitz,” thereby providing a key to Sebald’s broody masterpiece. Geoff Dyer reads a Garry Winogrand photo of seemingly nothing (it’s a picture of gas pumps near Santa Fe, New Mexico), noting “the red and white of Coke machine and T-shirt; the Mobil gas pumps and lights; the red-lettered ‘HUNTER’ against the white background of the billboard; and, framed by blue sky, the ‘LISTERINE’ sign in the stripey colours of toothpaste,” and suddenly I’m marvelling at Winogrand’s ingenious eye for colour. I could list dozens of such examples – criticism that is as creative and original and stimulating as the work it examines. Laura Kipnis speaks for me when she says (quoting A. O. Scott), “Criticism is an art in its own right. Wait, not just an art, one that may supersede all other arts! It’s larger and more encompassing – ‘not parasitic, but primary’ ” (“Critical Condition,” Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2016). 

August 6 & 13, 2018 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue I enjoyed most is David Kortava’s “Bar Tab: Mehanata,” a vivid account of what it’s like to don a “vintage Eastern Bloc military overcoat,” step inside a “glass-walled ice cage,” and attempt to knock back six shots of vodka in two minutes. Kortava writes,

After downing four shots each, the financier and his associates egressed the cage, divested themselves of their ideologically laden attire, and stumbled over to some stripper poles, where they permitted themselves to dance, clumsily and with inane delight, to “Celebration,” by Kool & the Gang. Nearby, a graffiti portrait of Karl Marx had no choice but to take in the scene. 

July 30, 2018 Issue

If you enjoy reading ekphrasis, as I do, you’ll surely appreciate Zadie Smith’s “Promiscuous Painting,” in this week’s issue, a consideration of Henry Taylor’s paintings, including his brilliant Cicely and Miles Visit the 
Obamas (2017), which Smith describes as follows:

Yet to speak of this painting as I have—conceptually—is to pass over the difference between thinking with language and thinking in images, and no narrative explanation of the relation between these two pictures is as compelling as the horizontal line that marks the credenza in the photograph and the edge of the White House gardens in the painting, or the verticality of the white man in the photo’s top-right corner—with his squared-off shoulders—and his painterly analogue: a blue flagpole, with its crossbar and absence of flag. Taylor thinks primarily in colors, shapes, and lines—he has a spatial, tonal genius. Form responds to form: the negative space around Cicely and Miles in the photograph suggests the exact proportions of the White House, yet in the transition the abstract sometimes becomes figured, and vice versa, as if the border between these things didn’t matter. A burst of reflected light in the photo decides the height and placement of the windows in the painting, while two round signs at the movie première—one for Coca-Cola, the other for “Orange”—which can have no figurative echo in the painting, turn up anyhow on the White House façade as abstraction: a red sphere and an orange sphere, tracking the walls of what, in reality, now belonged to Trump. Like two suns setting at the same time.

This is very beautiful, and what makes it beautiful is the color, shape, and line that Smith blends into her analysis (e.g., “the horizontal line that marks the credenza in the photograph and the edge of the White House gardens in the painting”; “the verticality of the white man in the photo’s top-right corner—with his squared-off shoulders—and his painterly analogue: a blue flagpole, with its crossbar and absence of flag”; “a red sphere and an orange sphere, tracking the walls of what, in reality, now belonged to Trump”). The whole passage is inspired! I devoured it.

“Promiscuous Painting” is the latest in a trio of recent New Yorker art pieces by Smith. The others are “A Bird of Few Words” (June 19, 2017) and “Through the Portal” (May 7, 2018). I’ve enjoyed them all immensely.