August 17, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. My eyes devour the thick luscious texture of Wayne Thiebaud’s “Two Scoops” – certainly my choice for best cover of the year (so far).

2. My favorite part of Peter Hessler’s absorbing “How China Controlled the Virus” is the first section in which he describes trailing a robot on his bicycle. Here’s a sample:

Now I waited with the robot, looking around at the silent dormitories. Finally, three students approached from different directions, masked and holding cell phones. Each of them entered a code on a touch screen at the back of the robot, and a compartment popped open, revealing a package inside.

3. Pick of the Issue is Jon Lee Anderson’s “Wanderlust,” an account of his 1978 trip to Nunivak, Alaska, to collect musk-ox wool (qiviut). Here’s his description of his arrival on the island:

The only other passengers were residents returning from a wedding on the mainland. When we landed, they offered me a lift into Mekoryuk, so I climbed into the back of their pickup truck and rode on a dirt track into town.

Anderson hikes across Nunivak’s interior (tundra, muskeg, lakes) to a place called Musk Ox Hill; shoots salmon (“A minute later, a big pink salmon—a humpy,’ they called it—poked its bulging back and head from the water, and I pulled the trigger. The fish thrashed and then turned dead on its side. When I pulled it from the water, I saw that my lucky shot had hit it cleanly in the head”); encounters musk oxen:

As I made my way toward them, one of the musk oxen, a hulking bull, appeared in my path. He was clearly scouting for trouble, and though he couldn’t see me or smell me, he’d heard me, and he was taking off fast back toward the others. I moved cautiously, hopping from tussock to tussock, keeping myself downwind of the bull. By the time I was sixty feet from the group, I was close enough to see their sunstruck hair, the qiviut sweeping off their massive shoulders and into the wind. I waited, hoping that they’d move, so that I could check their resting spot. To rouse them, I attempted some birdcalls: one that I hoped would sound like a kookaburra, and one like an owl. The oxen lay there, oblivious. A stork on a nearby slope strutted about scornfully.

The piece reminded me of my own Arctic travels. I enjoyed it immensely.

Does Photography Describe?

Eugène Atget, Café, Boulevard Montparnasse (1925)

Does photography describe? Kevin Moore says it does. In his Old Paris and Changing New York (2018), he says of Eugène Atget, “His images of Paris architecture, street vendors, shop windows, and parks were pure description, full of detail and information, so unlike the highly mannered, posed, and soft-focused art photography of the time.” He says it again later in his book, this time in reference to Berenice Abbott: “The Salon de l’Escalier crystallized for Abbott something she had already grasped intuitively: an idea of photography as an artistic medium that was unconditionally descriptive.”

I think I know what Moore is trying to get at – photography as an act of concentrated attention (“Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice” – Anthony Lane, “A Balzac of the Camera,” The New Yorker, April 25, 1994). But I’m not sure “description” is the right word for it. Writing describes; painting describes. Photography transcribes. “A representation emphasizes the identity of its subject, hence it may be called a likeness; a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, recording it, hence it is that it may be called a transcription”: Stanley Cavell, “What Photography Calls Thinking” (Cavell on Film, 2005).

Interesting Emendations: Peter Schjeldahl's "Shapes of Things"

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Vertical-Horizontal Composition (1916)

Reading Johanna Fateman’s recent “Goings On About Town” note on Sophie Taeuber-Arp, I recalled Peter Schjeldahl’s wonderful “Shapes of Things” (The New Yorker, January 7, 2013), and decided to look it up. Its first paragraph is a beauty:

In “Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art,” a splendid historical survey at the Museum of Modern Art, the most beautiful work, for me, is “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” (1916), a small, framed wool needlepoint tapestry by Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the tapestry’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture. The work bespeaks a subtle eye, a sober mind, and an ardent heart. If you could make something like that, you would drop everything else and do it. You wouldn’t need any great reason. I was mildly shocked by how unshocking Taeuber-Arp’s work is, amid rooms of strenuous sensations from the epoch of abstract art’s big bang. But, in a show that raises the question “Why?” at every turn, I kept coming back to it.

I think that’s one of my favorite art-review beginnings. The instant focus on a particular work – Taeuber-Arp’s “Vertical-Horizontal Composition”; the beautiful description of that work; the equally beautiful appreciation of it (“If you could make something like that, you would drop everything else and do it. You wouldn’t need any great reason”) – all these elements are delightful.

Schjeldahl included “Shapes of Things” in his splendid 2019 collection Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light under the title “Abstraction.” Comparing the book version with the New Yorker version, I notice that the description of Taeuber-Arp’s “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” is slightly different. Here’s the New Yorker version:

Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the tapestry’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture.

And here’s the book version:

An irregular grid of rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the fabric’s’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture.

Notice that “arranged” and “pleasantly” have been dropped, “tapestry” has been changed to “fabric,” and the phrase “an irregular grid” has been moved to the front of the sentence. Both versions are lovely, but I think I prefer the New Yorker version slightly more. Its use of zero article (“Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid …”) enacts the abstraction it describes.

Postscript: I had difficulty finding online the “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” described by Schjeldahl. Taeuber-Arp created at least two in 1916, neither of which appear to fit his description. To illustrate my post, I chose the one that appeared to be the most “matter-of-fact, nubbly.”

Eric Hobsbawm's Vile Politics

Eric Hobsbawm (Photo by Gérard Rondeau)

Mark Mazower, in his “Clear, Inclusive, and Lasting” (The New York Review of Books, July 23, 2020) says of historian Eric Hobsbawm, “The works themselves are his memorial. What is there to learn from his biography?” Well, one thing I learned is that his life and work are intertwined. Hobsbawm was a lifelong member of the Communist party. Even as other writers around him – George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Robert Conquest, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others – exposed Soviet Communism's monstrousness, Hobsbawm kept his membership. Hobsbawm’s vile politics distorted his view of history. You don’t have to take my word for it; read Tony Judt’s great essay “Downhill All the Way” (The New York Review of Books, May 25, 1995), a dissection of Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes.

Mazower doesn’t mention Judt’s piece. He doesn’t mention the twenty million Soviet citizens killed by Stalin. He treats Hobsbawm’s Communism as a “personal matter” unrelated to his writing. He praises Hobsbawm’s politics for “providing both a kind of ethics of scholarly practice and a vision of collective readership.” That’s bullshit. What it provides is evidence of moral rot.  

August 3 & 10, 2020 Issue

The most meaningful artistic credo I’ve ever read is John Updike’s “My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me – to give the mundane its beautiful due” (Foreword to his The Early Stories 1953 – 1975). I thought of Updike’s statement when I saw Serena Stevens’ “Rocking Chair” in this week’s issue. What a gorgeous painting! It illustrates Andrea K. Scott’s “At the Galleries.” Scott writes,

The young realist painter—who recently returned to her native Iowa after chasing the light in California, New Mexico, and Rhode Island—is at her best in scenes of domestic interiors, watchfully rendered rooms that convey the contradictions of home and the tension between melancholy and intimacy (as seen in “Rocking Chair,” above).

 

I relish the way “Rocking Chair” ’s vertical perspective includes the light-soaked brown chair and the intricate geometry of its gray shadow. Its rendition of light seems to me both painterly and photographic. I love it.

Serena Stevens, Rocking Chair (2020)

 

Andrew O'Hagan's Brilliant "Seventy Years in a Colourful Trade"

Muriel Belcher and Francis Bacon at Wheeler's in Soho, 1975 (Photo by Peter Stark)

Who is the best living literary journalist? John McPhee? Ian Frazier? Janet Malcolm? A strong case can be made that the reigning champ is Andrew O’Hagan. See, for example, his brilliant piece on the Grenfell Tower fire (“The Tower,” London Review of Books, June 7, 2018). O’Hagan has written for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, among other publications, but his home is at the London Review of Books. In the July 16, 2020 issue of that magazine, he reviews Darren Coffield’s Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia. What a piece! O’Hagan is rolling! You can tell he relishes his subject – “the drama of glorious promise spent and wasted, genius blabbed away in the pubs or pissed into the gutter.” Almost every line glitters with style and perception. For instance:

 

What you want is a single malt or a glass of something cruel from Mexico, and the place to get that late at night, before the clean-up and the corporatisation of everything, was in a Duluxed back room.

 

These were rooms with tacky carpets and ruined people for whom the morning was a long way down.

 

When it’s over, when your youth is gone, you wonder what those times were all about, but there’s no point asking. They were about Soho and a whole lot of nonsense you’ll never hear again.

 

The Colony was nothing much, on the face of it, a dirty little palace of nihilism, and yet, at the high noon of existentialism and the Bomb, it had served as a fountain of mirth.

 

Bacon was not yet known, but he’d really come home in that room of absinthe tints, dying plants and tarnished mirrors. 

 

Within a year or so of the club’s opening, Bacon brought in the crème de la crème of English debauchery. The room swayed.

 

Members felt that drinking anywhere else wasn’t really drinking.

 

Muriel had many tousled Boswells, but her friends were generally too stocious – even by Boswell’s standards – to write the kinds of memoir that gather pollen from the flowers of evil. It is simply not in the nature of the true Soho drone to remember the half of it.

 

Nightlife is a cabaret, or it should be, stuff happens and then it’s gone, so a person with nothing to say or nothing to quote had better give good audience.

 

But no elegy for Soho is up to snuff unless it confesses that it was always last orders. The loss is forever part of the gain.

 

And then there’s this extraordinary 233-word definition of the “classic Soho person”:

 

She was known by her habits, by a lexicon of slapperdom: a. she cried a lot, b. she liked gambling, c. she had sex with people who asked nicely, d. she cashed cheques at the bar, e. she loved nicknames, f. if she had it, she would always pay for those who couldn’t, g. she loved to name-drop, h. she abused her talent, and everybody else’s, i. she never saw her daddy again, or saw him every night in someone else, j. she called everybody ‘dear’, k. she drank doubles, l. she loved notoriety, not publicity, m. she loved a duchess, especially the duchess in herself, n. she liked other people’s kids, o. she distrusted daylight, p. she didn’t mind a bit of leopard skin, q. she had a well-trodden face, r. she loved the word ‘cunt’, s. she wasted her time and everything else was ‘whoring’, t. her hair was dyed, u. she smoked but she didn’t always inhale, v. she could spot a life-crusher at a hundred yards, w. she regularly mistook invective for wit, x. she loathed her body, y. she craved love, and z. she always took a taxi, unless she hadn’t a penny, even for the Tube, whereupon she walked, as the painter Robert Colquhoun did on the evening of one of his openings, from the Colony Room to the Whitechapel Gallery, three miles in the pouring rain.

 

O’Hagan’s piece is a delicious elegy for a nightlife world now long vanished. I enjoyed it immensely.

Camera Lucida

Illustration of use of camera lucida (from Wikipedia)

One of my favorite books is Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980). The title comes from a nineteenth-century instrument called the camera lucida. Barthes doesn’t provide much information on it, other than to say parenthetically, “Such was the name of that apparatus, anterior to Photography, which permitted drawing an object through a prism, one eye on the model, the other on the paper.”

 

Gaby Wood, in her recent “Diary” (London Review of Books, June 18, 2020), describes using a camera lucida to etch an image of an albatross skeleton. At first, she struggles:

 

The first time I tried to use mine, dejection was swift. The 19th-century instructions weren’t much help in angling the prism. The image was disconcertingly doubled – more like a migraine than a magic trick. Even when you could focus, you couldn’t see your drawing hand, or you could one minute and not the next. If you blinked it was a disaster. I found the whole enterprise confusing and over-complicated. No wonder it never caught on, I thought.

 

But she persists and eventually achieves a result she finds “liberating.” She says,

 

By the time I used the camera lucida in the museum, I’d spent several months grappling with the strange proposition offered by its prism. I’d read that the image was sharper if you held it over a dark drawing surface, but that didn’t make any sense to me until the smoked metal etching plate was beneath my hand. Suddenly the albatross skeleton appeared on it: bright, spectral. The process was different from the way I’d imagined it. There was a drag, almost a dance, under the needle – a tiny jump of resistance in the copper. Without seeing what you were doing, you could feel it more keenly. It wasn’t like ice-skating at all.

 

That “There was a drag, almost a dance, under the needle – a tiny jump of resistance in the copper” is delightful. The whole piece is delightful. I enjoyed it immensely.

July 27, 2020 Issue

Andrea K. Scott’s “Goings On About Town: Leidy Churchman,” in this week’s issue, is a beauty – worth quoting in full:

 Is there anything Leidy Churchman can’t paint? Among the subjects of the twenty-one paintings in the New York phenom’s show at the Matthew Marks gallery, which was interrupted by the pandemic, are a fever-dream bedroom, a moonrise, a girl on a bike, a rose garden, a monkey-filled forest from the Ramayana, hypnotic abstractions, and a laundry-room sign. The palette runs from monochrome black to hot purple and pink; dimensions change from a scant dozen inches to more than ten feet. The only logic at work is intuitive, even oracular. The mood is less image-overload restless than it is optimistically omnivorous—Churchman seems hungry to paint the whole world in all its mystery and ordinariness, two categories that often collide here. In Churchman’s deft hands, a cropped closeup of an iPhone 11 assumes a third-eye mysticism worthy of Hilma af Klint. 

That last sentence is inspired!

Leidy Churchman, iPhone 11 (2019-20)

Best of the Decade: #5 John McPhee's "The Orange Trapper"

Photo by Phillip Toledano, from John McPhee's "The Orange Trapper"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #5 pick – John McPhee’s “The Orange Trapper” (The New Yorker, July 1, 2013; included in his 2018 collection The Patch). 

“The Orange Trapper” is a perfect example of McPhee’s late style – personal, playful, artful. It’s 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 might 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 delightful combination! 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, memorable, light-hearted piece.