September 16, 2019 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Johanna Fateman’s “Goings On About Town” note “Art: ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ ” contains this superb description:

The melancholy air of an oversized replica of a broken laundry basket, by Ester Partegàs, is balanced by the cathedral-like effect of light filtering through holes in its seafoam-green form. 

2. Shauna Lyon, in her excellent “Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana,” writes, 

For some reason, there are peas and corn, too, but also beans and guacamole (thank God), and the chips are nicely crunchy.

That parenthetical “thank God” made me smile. It reminded me of Pauline Kael’s many parenthetical wisecracks, although Lyon’s line isn’t so much a wisecrack as it is an expression of relief. 

3.  I enjoyed Nicholas Schmidle’s Talk story “The Anti-Perfect,” particularly the part in which the street artist Bahia Shelab talks to her empty paint can: “ ‘It’s too early for you,’ she scolded one empty can, its ball bearing rattling around inside it.”

4. Judith Thurman’s Talk piece “Postscript: James Atlas” pays eloquent tribute to biographer James Atlas, who died September 4, 2019. In her piece, Thurman mentions that Atlas studied under “the great Richard Ellmann.” She says of Ellmann:

In 1959, Ellmann had published his life of James Joyce, a masterpiece that redefined literary biography for a new generation. Its message was that in telling the story of a life with scrupulous fidelity to the facts, an erudite reading of the texts, and a novelist’s feeling for the narrative, a writer could aspire to create a work of literature in its own right.

I totally agree. I discovered Ellmann’s work many years ago when I read a paperback of James Joyce’s Dubliners that included Ellmann’s “The Backgrounds of ‘The Dead.’ ” This essay, which appears as Chapter 15 in Ellmann’s James Joyce, is inspired! It traces the various sources Joyce drew upon to compose his great short story “The Dead.” Here’s a sample:

No one can know how Joyce conceived the joining of Gabriel’s final experience with the snow. But his fondness for a background of this kind is also illustrated by his use of the fireplace in “Ivy Day,” of the streetlamps in “Two Gallants,” and of the river in Finnegans Wake. It does not seem that the snow can be death, as so many have said, for it falls on living and dead alike, and for death to fall on the dead is a simple redundancy of which Joyce would not have been guilty. 

5. Jonathan Dee, in his “Dearly Departed,” a review of two new collections of Lafcadio Hearn’s short stories and a novel about Hearn by Monique Truong, coins the term “meta-folk” to describe Hearn’s writing. Reading Dee’s absorbing piece, I recalled another fine New Yorker review of Hearn’s work – Brad Leithauser’s “Alone and Extremely Alone” (April 22, 1991), included in his wonderful 1995 essay collection Penchants & Places. Leithauser says of Hearn’s writings on Japan, “He pared his prose and showed himself increasingly capable of an almost epigrammatic finish.”