John McPhee's "The Patch"

John McPhee is a master of literary structure. Ho, hum. We all know that. But another hallmark of his style, one less remarked on, is its kinesis. His pieces aren’t static descriptions of still life; they move, enacting the action they describe – canoeing, camping, fishing, basketball, tennis, lacrosse, golf, on and on – motion, motion, the McPhee narcotic. 

His new collection, The Patch, adds to the action. Keep in mind that McPhee is now eighty-seven. He may not jounce canoes much anymore, but he still gets around. The book is divided into two parts: “The Sporting Scene” and “An Album Quilt.” “The Sporting Scene” consists of six New Yorker pieces: “The Patch” (February 8, 2010); “Phi Beta Football” (September 8, 2014); “The Orange Trapper” (July 1, 2013); “Linksland and Bottle” (September 6, 2010); “Pioneer” (March 22, 2010); and “Direct Eye Contact” (March 5, 2018). I read (and savoured) all these pieces when they originally appeared in the magazine. They’re like old friends. It’s great to see them collected between hardcovers.

 “An Album Quilt,” is an arrangement of passages (“blocks”) excerpted from various McPhee pieces that have never appeared in book form. In this post, I’ll focus solely on “The Sporting Scene” pieces. 

1. “The Patch”

The action in this brilliant personal history piece is pickerel fishing. But it’s not only about pickerel fishing; it’s also about the death of McPhee’s father. McPhee ingeniously blends the two subjects. The piece shifts back and forth between two locales: an area of Lake Winnipesaukee that McPhee and his fishing buddy, George Hackl, call “The Patch” (“Across an open channel from the New Hampshire island lay a quarter mile of sharply edged lily pads, and soon we were calling it not a patch but The Patch”); and the Baltimore hospital room in which McPhee’s father lies dying (“During our second day there, my mother, brother, and sister went off at one point, and I was alone for an hour in the room with my father”). At the end of the piece, the two scenes merge magnificently. The piece is exquisitely designed: the blending of pickerel fishing with the father’s dying; “the repetitive geometries of The Patch, with its paisley patterns in six acres of closed and open space”; the motif of the father’s “bamboo rod.” “The Patch” is one of McPhee’s finest works.

Postscript: McPhee mentions in “The Patch” that his father was the medical doctor in a summer camp on the Baie de Chaleur. My mother was born and grew up in the town of Dalhousie, located at the mouth of the Restigouche River, where it flows into Baie de Chaleur. If McPhee and I ever meet (which isn’t likely), and I find myself tongue-tied (which is likely), I might mention the Baie de Chaleur as a sort of conversation-starter. 

2. “Phi Beta Football”

Another personal history piece – this one loaded with college football memories. McPhee didn’t play college football, but he was of that world, something I didn’t know until I read this absorbing essay. His father was the Princeton football team’s doctor. McPhee writes, “I was in grade school in what is now a university building, and every fall day after soccer I went down the street to university football practice and hung around my father, the trainers, the student managers, the coaches, the team.” And, of course, there’s action aplenty – reported in the present tense, no less, even though based on events that took place almost eighty years ago:

Bronco Van Lengen goes off tackle at the closed end of the horseshoe and a great cheer rises, but Bronco is lying on the grass and not getting up. It looks so serious that not only the head trainer but my father as well hurry to the scene and kneel beside Bronco’s unstirring body. Bronco opens one eye. He sees the teams collected on the one-yard line and waiting to resume play. He says, “Didn’t I score?” Actually, not that time, Bronco. Bronco leaps up off the grass, adjusts his helmet, and joins the huddle.

For me, a long-time fan of McPhee’s writing, “Phi Beta Football” ’s most interesting passage is this one: 

A year or two later, on a November Saturday of cold, wind-driven rain—when I was about ten—I was miserable on the stadium sidelines. The rain stung my eyes, and I was shivering. Looking up at the press box, where I knew there were space heaters, I saw those people sitting dry under a roof, and decided then and there to become a writer.

3. “The Orange Trapper”

Of The Patch’s six New Yorker pieces, this is my favourite. It’s a perfect example of McPhee’s late style – personal, playful, artful. “The Orange Trapper” is about McPhee’s golf ball collecting “compulsion” (“From my bicycle in New Jersey, if I am passing a golf-links batture, my head is turned that way and my gaze runs through the woods until a white dot stops it, which is not an infrequent occurrence. I get off my bike and collect the ball”). And what, you may ask, is a “golf-links batture”? McPhee explains: 

The woods that lie between public roads and private fairways remind me of the dry terrain between a river levee and the river itself. In Louisiana along the Mississippi this isolated and often wooded space is known as the river batture. If you’re in Louisiana, you pronounce it “batcher.” 

McPhee’s descriptions of his golf ball hunting adventures generate delectable quasi-surreal passages. For example:

You get off your bike, pick up a ball, and sometimes are able to identify the species it hit. Pine pitch makes a clear impression. Tulip poplars tend to smear. An oak or hickory leaves a signature writ small and simple. A maple does not leave maple syrup.

Tulip poplars tend to smear– pure McPhee. I devour it. Why? Why do I relish that sentence? It’s only five words – but what a combination! There’s something surreal about it. Only in the obscure context of golf ball collecting would you think of tulip poplars “smearing.” Tulip poplars tend to smear– it chimes. There’s poetry in it. 

And how about this beauty:

This is not on one of my biking routes, but on solo rides I have been there, and returned there, inspired by curiosity and a longing for variety and, not least, the observation that in the thickets and copses and wild thorny roses on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence are golf balls—Big Bank golf balls, Big Pharma golf balls, C-level golf balls (C.E.O., C.O.O., C.F.O. golf balls), lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay.

That “in the thickets and copses and wild thorny bushes on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence” is wonderful. But what makes the construction a true McPhee is that inspired last bit – “lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay.” I’m willing to bet that in all of literature, no writer has ever before combined “biking routes,” “solo rides,” “thickets and copses and wild thorny roses,” “Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence,” “golf balls,” “Big Pharma,” “abandoned,” “snorkeling in Caneel Bay” in one line. It’s a gorgeous, cabinet-of-wonders sentence, one among many, in this marvellous light-hearted piece.

4.  “Linksland and Bottle”

In this superb piece, an account of the 2010 British Open, at St. Andrews, Scotland, McPhee puts us squarely there with him as he walks the Old Course (“St. Andrews’ pot bunkers are nothing like the scalloped sands of other courses. The many dozens of them on the Old Course are small, cylindrical, scarcely wider than a golf swing, and of varying depth—four feet, six feet, but always enough to retain a few strokes. Their faces are vertical, layered, stratigraphic walls of ancestral turf. As you look down a fairway, they suggest the mouths of small caves, or, collectively, the sharp perforations of a kitchen grater”), watches the action from the gallery (“Woods and Darren Clarke come around the shed with an entourage two and a half times the usual size, starting with extra marshals. Clarke is out of bounds by the hotel. Woods is in the hay. He blasts out, goes into more hay. His third shot ignores the green. It crosses the cinder path, crosses the asphalt road, and stops a club length from the stone wall. Woods conjures a high parabola that sits down close to the hole”), visits the Media Centre (“The atmosphere is less bookish than bookie-ish. Along one side is a full-field scoreboard that resembles a tote board in an off-track betting parlor. It is not electronic, though. Its many numbers are changed by hand by women on sliding ladders. At either end is the BBC—golfers in action on silent screens about the size of sheets of plywood. Heavy rain on the tent roof can be so loud that nobody would hear the audio anyway”).

“Linksland and Bottle” brims with gorgeous sentences. For example:

After Angel Cabrera hits his second shot to some other destination, hay is hanging from his follow-through like Spanish moss.

From this same grandstand perch, the eighteenth tee and the great home fairway are right in front of us as well, where the Swilken Burn, straight-sided and in cross section no less engineered than the Los Angeles River, leaves town in ampersand fashion on its leisurely way across the eighteenth and first to the sea. 

If you are in the top row and the wind is coming over your back, seagulls hang motionless and stare into your eyes, a club length from your face. It’s a Bruegelian scene against the North Sea, with golfers everywhere across the canvas—putting here, driving there, chipping and blasting in syncopation, but being too smart to loft a wedge lest the ball be blown to the streets of St. Andrews a mile and a half away. 

How I love that “seagulls hang motionless and stare into your eyes, a club length from your face.” McPhee is The New Yorker’s greatest virtuoso stylist. 

5. “Pioneer”

In this piece, McPhee covers a 2010 lacrosse game that pitted the two winningest active lacrosse coaches, Bill Tierney (University of Denver) and John Desko (Syracuse University), against each other. But he does it in a novel way. Instead of reporting the game as it unfolds, he presents two “montages” – one of Denver’s goals, the other of Syracuse’s goals. He runs the Denver montage first:

Ninety-three seconds into the action, Alex Demopoulos scored for Denver. Trevor Tierney was pacing the sideline as much as his father was. If their relationship in Trevor’s undergraduate years was Shakespearean, so was this. At 8:39 of the first quarter, John Dickenson, one of the identical twins, out of Highland Park High School, in Dallas, scored for Denver. Early in the second quarter, Bill Tierney was screaming at a referee, “Hey, Mike! Up in the face! They can’t do that.” Trevor put an arm on his father. Evidently the team’s shrink, Trevor was equally mindful of the head coach, ready to do what he could to calm him when necessary, which is not a part-time job. At Princeton, Bryce Chase, a volunteer assistant coach who was also a trial lawyer, hovered close to Tierney during every game, to muffle what he could muffle, and help avoid technicals. A year or two ago, Tierney, shouting, laid a string of slanderous words on a passing referee, and that very referee was one of the three officials before him now, working this game in the Carrier Dome. (Tierney: “It’s not a problem. He’s used to it.”) At 2:53 of the second quarter, Todd Baxter, out of Eden Prairie High School, in Minnesota, scored for Denver. Four minutes into the third, Denver’s Alex Demopoulos scored again (Avon Old Farms School, Connecticut). He would score twice more. And Andrew Lay (Denver East High School) would intercept a Syracuse pass and drill a goal from thirty feet. Unfortunately (for Denver), this montage of Denver goals was insufficient.

So surprising is that last sentence, I laughed out loud when I read it.

Then McPhee runs the Syracuse montage:

So let’s roll back the clock and start again: Forty-one seconds after the opening face-off, Jovan Miller (Christian Brothers Academy, Syracuse, New York) scored for Syracuse. Twelve seconds later, Kevin Drew (John Jay High School, Cross River, New York) scored for Syracuse. The game was not yet one minute old. A minute and a half later, Max Bartig (Northport High School, Northport, New York) scored for Syracuse. Jeremy Thompson, out of Lafayette High School, in Lafayette, New York, was doing face-offs for Syracuse, with his braided ponytail hanging Iroquois style down his back all the way across his number to his waist. And why not? He’s an Onondaga. This was north-central New York, where the Iroquois developed this form of this game, and where they have lived for at least a thousand years. Onondaga, Mohawk—on Syracuse’s 2010 men’s and women’s lacrosse teams, two of the Six Nations of the Iroquois are represented by one or more athletes.

This montage continues for another two paragraphs. Syracuse wins the game 15-9. The point of the first montage is to give the Denver team its due. They were the underdogs. Syracuse was “the No. 1 team in the college world.” Denver didn’t win, but their defeat was honourable. As McPhee says near the end of his piece, “No one heckled the Denver coach.”

6. “Direct Eye Contact”

In this delightful piece, McPhee tells about his yearning to see a bear in his Princeton backyard (“While I flossed in the morning, looking north through an upstairs bathroom window, I hoped to see a bear come out of the trees”). McPhee is a bear writer extraordinaire: see, for example, his classic “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977) and his superb “A Textbook Place for Bears” (The New Yorker, December 27, 1982). Compared to these masterpieces, “Direct Eye Contact” is slight, only twenty-three hundred words long. But it contains many of McPhee’s signature moves: vivid imagery [“In Manchester Township (Ocean County), a wild black bear went up a back-yard tree in a neighborhood called Holly Oaks, where it tried to look like a black burl weighing two hundred and fifty pounds”]; geological description (“Kittatinny is actually a component of one very long mountain that runs, under various names, from Alabama to Newfoundland as the easternmost expression of the folded-and-faulted, deformed Appalachians”); interesting facts (“In the past three years, twenty-one bears have entered New Jersey homes, with no human fatalities”). My favourite passage in the piece is a description of a fallen oak:

In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, there was enough bear shit around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show. 

That last line made me smile. “Direct Eye Contact” is an excellent addition to McPhee’s bear oeuvre. 

Each of the above pieces illustrates the kinetic nature of McPhee’s writing. As an action writer, he's in a league with Ernest Hemingway. Harry Levin said of Hemingway that he presents “the sequence of motion and fact” (“Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway,” in Levin’s Memories of the Modern, 1980). The same applies to McPhee.  

January 28, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Robert A. Caro’s superb “Turn Every Page,” in which he takes us behind his great biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson, parts of which have appeared in The New Yorker (see, for example, his riveting “The Transition,” April 2, 2012), and describes some of his research experiences. If that sounds dry, it isn’t. It’s one of the most absorbing pieces I’ve read in a long time. Caro offers research tips (“turn every page”; “the importance of sense of place”), and he illustrates them with fascinating stories:

I requested Box 13 in the LBJA “Selected Names” collection and pulled out the file folders for Herman. There was a lot of fascinating material in the files’ two hundred and thirty-seven pages, but nothing on the 1940 change. George’s correspondence was in Box 12. There were about two hundred and thirty pages in his file. I sat there turning the pages, every page, thinking that I was probably just wasting more days of my life. And then, suddenly, as I lifted yet another innocuous letter to put it aside, the next document was not a letter but a Western Union telegram form, turned brown during the decades since it had been sent—on October 19, 1940. It was addressed to Lyndon Johnson, and was signed “George Brown,” and it said, in the capital letters Western Union used for its messages: “you were supposed to have checks by friday . . . hope they arrived in due form and on time.”

Even as a junior congressman, Johnson wielded power. That Western Union telegram led Caro to the source of it.

What I enjoyed most about Caro’s piece is the writing as pure writing. Caro is a master plain English stylist – vigorous, definite, specific, concrete, concise. Here, for example, is his description of his first sighting of the Texas Hill Country where Johnson grew up:

Looking back on my work on Johnson, I think I realized on my very first drive into the Hill Country—or should have realized—that I was entering a world I really didn’t understand and wasn’t prepared for. I still remember: you drove west from Austin, and about forty-one miles out you came to the top of a tall hill. As I came to the crest of that hill, suddenly there was something in front of me that made me pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car and stand there looking down. Because what I was seeing was something I had never seen before: emptiness—a vast emptiness. I later found out that it’s a valley, the valley of the Pedernales River. It’s about seventy-five miles long and fifteen miles across.

When I stood there looking down on it that first time, for a few minutes I didn’t see a single sign of human life in that immense space. Then something happened—a cloud moved from in front of the sun perhaps, and suddenly in the middle of this emptiness the sun was glinting off a little huddle of houses. That was Johnson City. When Lyndon Johnson was growing up in that town, three hundred and twenty-three people lived there; when I arrived, there were only a few hundred more. As I stood on that hill, I realized that I was looking at something, was about to drive down into something, unlike anything I had ever seen before, in its emptiness, its loneliness, its isolation.

No big fancy words – just plain language. And yet they evoke a vivid picture. E. B. White, in his (and William Strunk’s) The Elements of Style (1972), says, “The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.” Robert A. Caro’s writing exemplifies this approach perfectly. 

Andrea K. Scott on Maya Lin's "A River Is a Drawing"

Christina Gransow,  illustration for Andrea K. Scott's "In the Museum: Maya Lin"

There’s a wonderful GOAT note in the January 14, 2019, New Yorker on Hudson River Museum’s “Maya Lin: A River Is a Drawing” exhibition. The piece, by Andrea K. Scott, is worth quoting in full:

The Mohican name for the Hudson River was Mahicannituc—waters that are never still. Lin reflects that shifting nature in a dozen elegant works made of aluminum, bamboo, bluegrass seeds, recycled silver, palladium leaf, stainless-steel pins, encaustic, walnut ink, and, most dramatically, thousands of green glass marbles. The title of the exhibition, thoughtfully curated by Miwako Tezuka, is “A River Is a Drawing.” It would seem to be a sculpture, too. The best pieces here are the site-specific installations that put three dimensions through the paces of two. A metal lattice, representing the river’s submarine canyon, is a thirty-foot-long graphic suspended in space. As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded. Lin has been an environmental activist for many years, and the restrained beauty of her art is matched by the power of her message about what climate change threatens to erase.

That “As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded” is inspired. 

Scott’s note originally appeared in the December 24 & 31, 2018, New Yorker, accompanied by a beautiful Christina Gransow illustration. Gransow’s work is new to me. I look forward to seeing more of it in the magazine. 

January 21, 2019 Issue

Poetry critic Dan Chiasson creates gorgeous quasi-surreal verbal combines embedded with glittering fragments of quotation. His “Blank Looks,” a review of Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus, in this week’s issue, contains several of them: 

Wong says that, because she almost never got to kiss the romantic lead, “I had to marry / my own cinematic death,” like the character she played in “The Toll of the Sea,” a 1922 film inspired by “Madame Butterfly”—and not so unlike the Instagrammed woman, nearly a century later. 

In this world, green stands for both escape and annihilation, red for both peril and relief. But in the poem new colors quickly emerge: first white, “the color of erasure,” then blue, which stands for “the ocean that drowns the liars,” “the shore where the girl keeps living,” and the place where she awakens, “prismatic, childless, free.”

But Mao’s fabricated Wong is a wild creation: she has a “time machine” and rides a “comet, / to the future,” where she makes out with Bruce Lee and hangs around the set of “Chungking Express,” yet she’s also shunted into minor roles in “The Last Samurai,” “Kill Bill,” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.”

Mao evokes the performance under the big skylight, “through which all fears still burned,” and the audience watching “without cameras / except our eyes and faces.” 

Chiasson is a critic-collagist. He has a knack for selecting vivid bits from poems and piecing them into his own meaning-making constructions. I enjoy his work immensely.

Eleanor Cook on Bishop's "Filling Station" and Hopper's "Gas"

Edward Hopper, Gas (1940)

Eleanor Cook, in her Elizabeth Bishop at Work (2016), makes an intriguing comparison between Bishop’s “Filling Station” (The New Yorker, December 10, 1955; Questions of Travel, 1965) and Edward Hopper’s Gas (1940). She says of “Filling Station,”

It is a descriptive poem, yes, but I think Bishop may be writing an ekphrasis of sorts, an ekphrasis of a painting that should exist, a shadow painting. Look at Edward Hopper’s painting Gas (1940), a painting acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Point for point, “Filling Station” is the opposite. Hopper’s is meticulously clean, as against “Oh, but it is dirty!” The owner shutting it down in the evening is dressed in white shirt and tie, as against Father dressed in an ill-fitting “dirty, / oil-soaked monkey suit.” There is no outer porch with “grease- / impregnated wickerwork,” a dog, comic books, taboret with a doily and “a big hirsute begonia” (a fine touch). Bishop’s poem depicts a filling station that is more challenging as subject than Hopper’s painting. 

I’m not sure what Cook is getting at when she says “Filling Station” may be an “ekphrasis of sorts.” There’s nothing in the poem that suggests that. It appears to be a record of what Bishop saw at an actual gas station. Bonnie Costello, in her Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), says “Filling Station” is a “response to direct observation.” Cook’s contrasting of “Filling Station” with Hopper’s Gas is interesting. Her point about Bishop’s poem depicting a gas station that is “more challenging as subject than Hopper’s painting” is a good one. She says that Hopper’s painting is of a gas station “seen as aesthetic object.” I think Bishop’s poem is about a gas station seen as a piece of folk art. In that sense, I suppose, "Filling Station" is an "ekphrasis of sorts."

Geoff Dyer's "The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand"

Geoff Dyer’s The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018), a collection of his readings of one hundred Winogrand photographs, is a feat of critical imagination. I say “readings,” but a better word might be “riffs” – creative interpretations of photos in which, at first glance, nothing much appears to be happening. Take for example Winogrand’s 1964 black-and-white shot of a suburban house, its open garage containing a stylish American car (1958 Chev Impala Sport Coupe?) and a woman standing beside it. Dyer writes,

Atmospherically, it is one of Winogrand’s stillest images. The silent shadows. The perfect sky. No before and no after. The >s and s of the car's tail fins fit under the s and >s of the roof. The blank rectangle of the garage frames the smaller black rectangle of the car’s rear window: containers of the unknowable. The perfection of the image lends an idyllic air to what it depicts. But since the nature of any idyll is its transience or brevity, something in the picture subtly introduces an almost inaudible ticking … and the movement of time it so insistently denies. The car sleeps in the garage. The dream is intact but poised on the brink of wakefulness. All might not be quite what it seems. The fact that the car is protruding slightly from the garage – enough to cast a small shadow – suggests that perhaps it is not stationary, is being reversed out, which in turn reveals that she is not alone, is part of an active marriage. She is waiting to get in the car (without having to enter the dark) to go somewhere else. We can’t say for sure, but think of the woman quoted by Betty Friedan in her book The Feminine Mystique (published a year before this picture was taken): “I begin to feel I have no personality,” she famously said, before going on to identify the chores of the suburban housewife. “But who am I?”

That is a perfect Dyer riff, starting with its analysis of the photo’s “atmosphere” (“The silent shadows. The perfect sky. No before and no after”), and the ingenious use of angle brackets to describe the matching shapes of the tail fins and roof lines. Note how he gleans meaning from the car’s “small shadow,” and how this leads to his connecting the woman in the garage with the “woman quoted by Betty Friedan.” It’s all quite dazzling, and what makes it dazzling is Dyer’s use of imaginative inference.

Garry Winogrand, Untitled, Los Angeles, 1964

Here’s another example: Winogrand’s 1955 “gas pumps” photo. Dyer comments, 

There’s a certain amount of emptiness – the forecourt – in the middle of the picture but the something that is mainly there isthe colour. 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. There’s even a flattened bit of red — cigarette? — packaging littering the otherwise empty forecourt.

How I relish that “flattened bit of red.” It’s a detail I would’ve overlooked but for Dyer’s sharp eye. 

Garry Winogrand, Untitled, 1955

In his book, Dyer says, “Photography is all about details, about specific truths.” If you’re looking for keys to his critical approach, this is likely one of them. His attention to details is amazing: the face in the storefront window, “looking on like a gremlin,” in photo 96; the flowers at the corner of the building, in photo 22, blooming “like the sudden red of a bullet wound”; the open trunk of the station wagon, in photo 2, “conveying a sense of the funereal”; “the sunglasses suspended from a nail or hook on the far fence,” in photo 23, “suggesting that Winogrand has to go to some lengths to enable us to see what we see, to get this picture comprised overwhelmingly of horizontal bands”; the rectangle of light in the top-left corner of photo 24, “so pure and white that it has vaporized one entire wall of a building”; the shadows in photo 44 (“Can an afternoon really last so long? Yes, say the shadows”); the wooden stanchions, in photo 4, that “have the look of gallows”; the bike with “longhorn handlebars,” in photo 8, that “looks on curiously and cautiously”; the “ghostly, lovely bit of blue to the left of the young woman’s mouth,” in photo 19, “a reminder of how the sky – of which this blue is a metonym – can sneak in anywhere”; on and on – “galaxies of details,” as Dyer says, quoting Leo Rubinfien. 

My favourite Dyer riff is on the gorgeous 1967 Winogrand gracing the book’s front cover – the woman in the red coat. Dyer writes,

Has anyone so consistently chanced upon the random glamour of the street? To make sure I was not reacting over-enthusiastically to this image, I looked through Martin Harrison’s survey of fashion photography, Appearances, to see how it fared alongside famous images by Arthur Elgort, Louis Faurer and the rest. It doesn’t have the conceived and fully achieved perfection that we see in page after page of Vogue. If it had been posed, the woman with her back to us would have been more elegant, less boxy-looking but, equally, we would have lost that lovely — touching — accidental echo of hands that holds the black and white women together. It’s possible that, in a controlled shoot, a photographer might have arranged such a thing but the knowledge that it was contrived would have robbed the picture of its romance. 

That observation of the “lovely — touching — accidental echo of hands that holds the black and white women together” is inspired! The whole book is inspired - the equivalent of a brilliant jazz improvisation. Winogrand’s mesmerizing photos are the territory; Dyer’s inventive readings of them are the adventure.

Jonathan Raban's "Old Glory"

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi (1981). I’m taking my time, savoring both the trip and the prose. Raban writes the kind of direct, specific, first-person sentence I relish. Here are a few examples:

The front gates of the lock opened on a blinding rectangle of day, and I was out, past the railroad sidings, into another chamber, another drop, more clammy half-darkness, and another wide-open afternoon.

The river, barred black and silver, was too bright to take in all at once; I had to watch each wave, looking for the rim of shadow under its breaking crest, and steer the bow into it.

Blunt-nosed tows came foraging out from what I’d thought unbroken forest, and I learned to look for their giveaway inverted commas of diesel smoke tethered above the treetops.

Sitting in a bar on Schuyler Street, I watched the swinging Texaco sign of the garage opposite and waited for it to quieten.

I was afloat over a stump field submerged under just a few inches of water. As a roller sucked the river away, it exposed the bed of black-buttery peat, the sawed-off boles like bad teeth, and the boat grounded with a groan and a bang, the motor stalling as it hit a root.

I was frightened of popping a rivet as the booming hull hit the whitecaps as if they were blocks of concrete.

Keen to first-foot in Missouri, I beached at a town that looked like an unkempt graveyard.

But all I saw was water, scrolled with hairlines around the bow of the boat, darkening with the sky, slick as the top of a vat of molasses.

The water here was thicker and darker than I’d seen it before; all muscle, clenching and unclenching, taking logs as big as trees and roiling them around just for the hell of the thing.

Raban is a superb describer. An excerpt from his masterpiece, Passage to Juneau (1999), appeared in The New Yorker (August 23, 1999) under the title “Sailing Into the Sublime.” Maybe someday, I’ll post a review of that great piece. In the meantime, I’m enjoying Old Glory immensely. 

January 14, 2019 Issue

I love those collages of quotations that James Wood creates in his reviews. There’s a beauty in his “Contents Under Pressure,” an assessment of Guy Gunaratne’s novel In Our Mad and Furious City, in this week’s issue. Wood writes,

It’s a sign of how vital the rest of the book feels that a phrase like “caustic speech,” which would be inoffensive enough in many novels, seems here irradiated with fakery. “Caustic speech” is how a reviewer writes. Gunaratne’s characters are alive because they speak caustically—“I draw the morning snot up my nose.” Here is Caroline, originally from Belfast, sizing up the public-housing estate where she lives: “The grounds are empty except for the carping birds and trees.” And here is her son, Ardan, who dreams of making it as a rapper. In the mornings and evenings, he says, even this grim council estate can seem almost romantic, like something out of the Bronx or Brooklyn (as he imagines those boroughs): “Rest of the day is bleak as fuck tho, standard.” On his way to play soccer with his friends, Yusuf stops at Ray’s Chicken Paradise for chicken and chips—“a proper English breakfast.” He’s served by a man known as Freshie Dave: “His name tag said something like Devshi Rajagopalan. To save expense us youngers would just call him Freshie Dave. He spoke in a clipped Indian accent—fresh off the boat. I guess the name stuck, ennet.” Yusuf reflects on how recent immigrants like Freshie Dave are now on the front line; they have to bear all the racist jokes from their stupid white customers. “They had come here on student visas with their silly smiles and were now serving up fried fat to sons of England.” Serving up fried fat to sons of England—those caustic words capture an entire sad world.

No other critic does that. Wood relishes quotation, and so do I. What better way to showcase the merits of a particular writing style? My favourite Wood assemblage is one of his earliest – the list of Cormac McCarthy nature descriptions in his brilliant “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 25, 2005):

He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), has this picture of lightning: “Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly.” The protagonist of “Child of God” (1973), a psychotic necrophiliac named Lester Ballard, lights a fire in an old grate, and as it races up the disused chimney sees a spider that “descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.” How strange and original that “clutching itself” is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling. “Blood Meridian” is a vast and complex sensorium, at times magnificent and at times melodramatic, but nature is almost always precisely caught and weighed: in the desert, the stars “fall all night in bitter arcs,” and the wolves trot “neat of foot” alongside the horsemen, and the lizards, “their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks,” fend off the world “with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates,” and the grains of sand creep past all night “like armies of lice on the move,” and “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake.” McCarthy liked this last phrase so much that he repeated it, seven years later, in “All the Pretty Horses” (1992): “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.”

That “How strange and original that 'clutching itself' is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling” is one of my all-time favourite New Yorker sentences. 

January 7, 2019 Issue

Here we go – the first New Yorker of 2019. And what better way to start than with a Talk story by the premier Talk writer of all time – Mark Singer. His piece, “Man vs. Mouse,” is about a “situational genius” named Craig Avedisian and his determination to catch an elusive apartment mouse (“A single intruder, all avenues of egress sealed, was now trapped in the apartment, an accidental pet. Avedisian named him Horace, an homage to the building’s architect, Horace Ginsbern”). Avedisian’s pursuit of Horace includes installation of an infrared night-vision security camera that could be monitored from a smartphone, the arranging of “a Maginot Line of glue traps,” and setting out “a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps.” Singer writes, 

This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out. “We were pissed,” Avedisian said recently. “We’d left a feast for him. He somehow avoided the glue. He’s walking around like he owns the place.”

That “This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out” made me smile. Reading “Man vs. Mouse,” I found myself rooting for Horace. Brainy Avedisian, with all his technical gadgetry, finally catches him. But an editor’s note informs us that “Horace has gone upstate to live on a farm with a nice family.” I was pleased to read that. It humanizes Mr. Avedisian.