April 15, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Anne Boyer’s extraordinary “The Undying,” a personal essay on “what cancer takes away.” One of the things it takes away, Boyer says, is identity: 

Once my hair is gone, once I can no longer taste my food, once I have passed out while shopping for a bread knife in IKEA,once the ex-lovers have all visited to make one last attempt to get me in bed, once the generous humiliations of crowdsourced charity have assured me months of organic produce, I have become a patient. The old ways are through. Any horizon is made of medicine. Any markers of specific identity beyond “the sick” and “the healthy” come from another era. 

That “The old ways are through. Any horizon is made of medicine” is inspired! Boyer writes like an angel – an angry, perceptive, expressive angel. Her claim that cancer has reduced her identity to "patient" is belied by the verve of her writing. When she says, “But I was always starving for experience, not its cessation,” I believe her. She takes the mass experience of chemotherapy and individualizes it:

I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.

By interposing her perception and expression, Boyer transfigures her condition and effects thereby the redress of art. 

April 8, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Douglas Preston’s absorbing “The Day the Earth Died,” an account of paleontologist Robert DePalma’s discovery of an amazing fossil deposit in the Hell Creek Formation of North Dakota. Preston visits the site:

When we arrived, DePalma’s site lay open in front of us: a desolate hump of gray, cracked earth, about the size of two soccer fields. It looked as if a piece of the moon had dropped there. One side of the deposit was cut through by a sandy wash, or dry streambed; the other ended in a low escarpment. The dig was a three-foot-deep rectangular hole, sixty feet long by forty feet wide. A couple of two-by-fours, along with various digging tools and some metal pipe for taking core samples, leaned against the far side of the hole. 

He describes DePalma digging (“DePalma poked the tip of an X-Acto into the thin laminations of sediment and loosened one dime-size flake at a time; he’d examine it closely, and, if he saw nothing, flick it away”), unearthing a fish fossil (“He chipped away around the paddlefish, exposing a fin bone, then a half-dollar-size patch of fossilized skin with the scales perfectly visible”), and preserving it in plaster (“One by one, he dipped the burlap strips in the plaster and draped them across the top and the sides of the specimen. He added rope handles and plastered them in”). 

He visits DePalma in his lab at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton:

He stood up. “Now I’m going to show you something special,” he said, opening a wooden crate and removing an object that was covered in aluminum foil. He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass.

He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass – how fine that is. It’s my idea of an ideal sentence: specific, evocative, delightful, exotic. 

“The Day the Earth Died” is a Wunderkammern of fascinating items: golden blobs of amber (“Cretaceous flypaper”); the hip bone of a dinosaur “in the ceratopsian family, of which triceratops is the best known member”; a Cretaceous mammal burrow, with the mammal still inside it; a block of stone containing “a sturgeon and a paddlefish, along with dozens of smaller fossils and a single small, perfect crater with a tektite in it”; a fossil forearm belonging to Dakotaraptor; lonsdaleite, a hexagonal form of diamond that is associated with asteroid impacts; “flooded ant nests, with drowned ants still inside and some chambers packed with microtektites”; shark teeth; “the thigh bone of a large sea turtle”; a gigantic ginkgo leaf; “an unhatched egg containing an embryo—a fossil of immense research value”; on and on. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Chris Wiley's "How Larry Sultan Made His Father a Metaphor for Dashed American Dreams"

Larry Sultan, "Empty Pool" (1991)

I relish photography writing. There’s a dandy piece posted yesterday on newyorker.com: Chris Wiley’s “How Larry Sultan Made His Father a Metaphor for Dashed American Dreams” (April 7, 2019). It’s a consideration of, among other things, Sultan’s brilliant “Empty Pool” (1991), included in his 1992 collection Pictures from Home. Wiley says of “Empty Pool,”

In the picture that came out of that poolside photo shoot, we see that behind the elder Sultan is a rolling expanse of tightly cut grass soaking up the water from an automated sprinkler system, which passes for rain in those parts—a landscape on life support. His father is tan, but he is also old, his body clearly heading toward its twilight, and he looks somewhat melancholy—despairing, even—as if the empty pool in front of him were a reservoir of regrets.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Sultan’s dad, for one, would brook no sad-sack poetic crap: “All I know is that you have some stake in making us look older and more despairing than we really feel,” he complains to Sultan in the lengthy, interwoven text of the book. “I really don’t know what you are trying to get at.” The book [Pictures from Home] is filled with this kind of undercutting counter-narrative, culled from Sultan’s interviews with both his father and his mother, Jean, creating a postmodern tug-of-war between representation and reality.

That “as if the empty pool in front of him were a reservoir of regrets” is inspired. Wiley’s piece deepens my appreciation of Sultan’s work. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: Another excellent piece on Sultan’s photography is Philip Gefter’s “Sex and Longing in Larry Sultan’s California Suburbs” (newyorker.com, April 9, 2017).  

April 1, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Under Water,” a reporting piece on Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, one of “the fastest-disappearing places on Earth.” What I like about it is Kolbert’s active, participatory, first-person observation. She flies over Plaquemines: 

Flying at an altitude of two thousand feet, I could make out the houses and farms and refineries that fill the strips, though not the people who live or work in them. Beyond was open water or patchy marsh. In many spots, the patches were crisscrossed with channels. Presumably, these had been dug when the land was firmer, to get at the oil underneath. In some places, I could see the outlines of what were once fields and are now rectilinear lakes. Great white clouds, billowing above the plane, were mirrored in the black pools below.

She visits Louisiana State University’s Center for River Studies, in Baton Rouge, where she walks across an amazing scale model of the Mississippi delta (“I pulled off my shoes and tried to walk from New Orleans to the Gulf. By the time I got to English Turn, my feet were wet. I stuffed my soggy socks into my pocket”). She describes the effect when projectors in the ceiling above the model are switched on:

Suddenly, the fields of Plaquemines turned green and the Gulf blue. A satellite image of New Orleans glowed in the crook between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain. The effect was dazzling, if also a little unnerving, as when Dorothy steps out of sepia-toned Kansas into Oz.

She visits a “marsh creation” project known as BA-39 (Enormous diesel-powered pumps had sent this slurry gushing through a thirty-inch steel pipe. The pipe had run for five miles, from the west bank of the Mississippi, over the river levees, under Route 23, across some cattle fields, over the back levees, and finally into a shallow basin of Barataria Bay. There, the muck had piled up until bulldozers spread it around”). 

She boards a boat and goes out on the Mississippi to view new land created by the river’s sedimentary flow (“We sped in and out of unnamed bayous. A large alligator sunning itself on a log plopped into the water as we passed”). 

She explains the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s plan to save the Plaquemines by punching “eight giant holes through the levees on the Mississippi and two more through those on its main distributary, the Atchafalaya.” 

She gets on a bike and goes on a “subsidence tour” of New Orleans with coastal geologist Alex Kolker (“ ‘Pumping is a big part of the issue,’ Kolker told me, as we climbed back onto our sweaty bicycles. ‘It accelerates subsidence, so it becomes a positive-feedback loop’ ”). 

And she visits the Old River Control Auxiliary Structure located eighty miles upriver from Baton Rouge. She says, 

If there is a single feat of engineering that can stand for the centuries-long effort to dominate the Mississippi—to make it “go where it listeth not”—the Auxiliary Structure might be it. Unlike a levee or a spillway, built to stop the river from flooding, it was put up to stop time.

Kolbert’s “Under Water” is another piece in her ongoing documentation of man’s destruction of the planet. Her outlook is bleak (“Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analogue ecosystems, a whole no-analogue future”), but her writing is a delight. 

Agnès Varda’s Exquisite Sensibility

Agnès Varda (Photo by Paul Grandsard)

Alexandra Schwartz, in her “ ‘While I Live, I Remember’: Agnès Varda’s Way of Seeing” (newyorker.com, March 30, 2019), says of Varda’s films, they “celebrate the art of the foraged and the found.” She likens them to “associative essays or poems.” This strikes me as exactly right. Varda, who died last week at age ninety, made one of my all-time favourite movies – The Gleaners and I, a documentary about people in France who survive by scavenging food that others throw away. The “I” in the title is crucial; it’s the key to Varga's art. Richard Brody, in his “What to Stream this Weekend: Seaside Frolics” (newyorker.com, August 18, 2017)], writes, “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.” And, as long as there are eyes to see, that “exquisite sensibility” will live on in her work, including her wonderful The Gleaners and I.