May 24, 2021 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his terrific “A Trip to the Fair,” in this week’s issue, says of Sigmar Polke’s Untitled (1990):

He created this work in the dark with slathered silver nitrate, silver oxide, silver iodide, and silver bromide. Exposed to light, the strokes resolved into a filmy gestural cadenza: quietly ferocious, if such is imaginable, like superimposed eddies in a whipping windstorm. 

Polke is one of Schjeldahl’s touchstones. He’s the subject of at least six Schjeldahl pieces: (1) “The Daemon and Sigmar Polke” (included in Schjeldahl’s 1991 collection The Hydrogen Jukebox, with a detail from Polke’s Hallucinogen on the front cover); (2) “Sigmar Polke” (in Schjeldahl’s 2019 collection Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light); (3) “The Trashmaster” (The New Yorker, December 7, 1998; in Schjeldahl’s 2008 collection Let’s See); (4) “Many-Colored Glass” (The New Yorker, May 12, 2008); (5) “Lens Crafter” (The New Yorker, June 1, 2009); and (6) “Shock Artist” (The New Yorker, April 28, 2014). 

Of these, I think the best is “The Trashmaster,” in which Schjeldahl says that Polke “attacked painting as if he meant to trash it.” The piece contains this delightful description of a series of Polke abstracts:

When Polke’s resinous medium is applied thinly, it turns its polyester ground transparent, like greasy paper. Marks may show through from the back, and shadows of marks may be visible on the wall. Some fabrics are iridescent. Many look webbed with chicken wire – actually, gold string mesh. Vaporous beauty dances, in a viewer’s eye, with tawdry glitz.

That last sentence is inspired. Polke’s art is so eccentric and original that it seems to defy description. But Schjeldahl, superb word painter that he is, rises to the challenge, creating exquisite, singular lines of his own. 

Sigmar Polke, Untitled (1990)

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's Brilliant "Audition"

Illustration by David Benjamin Sherry, for Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's "Audition"

I see Saïd Sayrafiezadeh has a short story titled “A, S, D, F” in the May 31 New Yorker. I’m looking forward to reading it in the print edition. His “Audition” (September 10, 2018) is one of the best New Yorker stories of the last ten years. Written in the first person, it reads like a chunk of real personal history, and perhaps it is. The opening line is terrific: “The first time I smoked crack cocaine was the spring I worked construction for my father on his new subdivision in Moonlight Heights.” I read that and just kept going. My favourite part is Sayrafiezadeh’s description of smoking crack in Duncan Dioguardi’s basement:

Soon, a perfect aluminum-foil pipe emerged from Duncan Dioguardi, glinting silver in the Magnavox light, reminding me of the way some family restaurants will wrap your leftovers in aluminum foil in the shape of a swan. But into this particular swan’s mouth disappeared a piece of the Chore Boy, followed by one small chip off the drywall, and then Duncan Dioguardi ran his lighter back and forth, orange flame on silver neck, and from the swan’s tail he sucked ever so gently, cheeks pulling, pulling, until, like magic, he tilted his head back and out of his mouth emerged a perfect puff of white smoke.

That is one of the damnedest great descriptions I’ve ever read. “Aluminum-foil pipe,” “glinting silver in the Magnavox light,” “a piece of the Chore Boy,” “one small chip off the drywall,” “orange flame on silver neck,” “from the swan’s tail he sucked ever so gently,” “perfect puff of white smoke” – what a surprising, original, delightful combination of words! 

Art is where you find it. In “Audition,” Sayrafiezadeh finds it in his memory of being nineteen and working for his father’s construction company as a general laborer while dreaming of becoming an actor. It doesn’t sound like promising material. But Sayrafiezadeh’s shaping perception transforms it into meaningful experience. It’s a tremendous story. I enjoyed it immensely.

Jerome Kagan and the Passion for Abstraction

Jerome Kagan (Photo by Rick Friedman)

I see in the Times that Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan died recently. In his Three Seductive Ideas (1998), Kagan analyzed human nature’s “passion for abstraction.” He said, “The human brain, like the brain of a rat, is biased initially to attend to generality rather than particularity.” 

If you believe, as I do, that specificity is the key to effective writing, you'll find that Kagan’s observation explains a lot. It explains why specificity doesn’t come naturally, why we have to school ourselves to use definite, specific, concrete language. William Strunk and E. B. White, in their classic The Elements of Style (1972), wrote,

If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers – Homer, Dante, Shakespeare – are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

This, to me, is writing's golden rule. It’s a difficult rule to apply because, as Kagan pointed out, it runs counter to our natural inclination to generalize. 

Leo Steinberg's Distinctive Geometrical Style

Jed Perl, in his absorbing “See More, Think More” (The New York Review of Books, May 13, 2021), a review of three recent collections of Leo Steinberg’s essays, gets at some of Steinberg’s most powerful ideas, e.g., simultaneity and ambiguity, but scants what I view is his most original contribution to art criticism – his distinctive blend of geometry and figuration. Steinberg loved words like “orthogonals,” “convergences,” “perpendiculars,” “obliques,” “verticals,” “diagonals,” “volumetric,” “trapezoid.” He combined them with vivid metaphors and similes to create inspired feats of quasi-abstract art description. This, for example:

For all its tectonic carpentry, the armature of floorboards and panels allows no averted planes, not even thinkable ones, so that the environment of both solid form and spatial containment becomes resistless like the limitless diaphane of outdoors. [Description of Picasso’s Reclining Nude and Seated Woman, study for L’Aubade, May 4, 1942; from Steinberg’s brilliant “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” Other Criteria, 1972]

And this:

Visually, choreographically, the motive force in the picture is the flare of Christ’s arms, and it is to their action that the whole picture responds. As Christ’s hands clear a site for themselves, his nearest neighbors roll back, make way, and fall into responsive diagonals. The redisposition of these flanking triads with respect to the table is instantaneous. On our left, parallel to the right arm of Christ, one oblique trine runs elbows-out from John to Judas. On our right, Thomas and Philip align with the startled St. James. Both trines together confirm the divergence of that central arm’s spread. They absorb its momentum and relay it, further amplified, to the tapestried walls, so that the walls, too, seem to expand, fanning out in remote obedience to the charge of Christ’s arms. [Description of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1490s); from Steinberg’s superb Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, 2001]

“Tectonic carpentry,” “armature of floorboards and panels,” “averted planes,” “spatial containment,” “responsive diagonals,” "flanking triads," “oblique trine” – this is the stuff of Steinberg’s wonderful geometrical style. He saw art in terms of its spatial order, and he invented a way of writing about it that expressed it exactly. 

Gordon Parks' "Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler"

Gordon Parks, Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler (1957)

Johanna Fateman, in her absorbing “Goings On About Town” review of the Jewish Museum’s “Modern Look” (The New Yorker, May 17, 2021), mentions Gordon Parks’ “incandescent staged portrait, commissioned in 1952 by Life magazine, envisioning the title character of Ellison’s novel Invisible Man." Unfortunately, that picture isn’t among the images available for viewing on the Museum’s website. But one that is available is Parks’ gorgeous Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler (1957). Interestingly, another version of this arresting photo illustrates the cover of Alexander Nemerov’s recent Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York. Nemerov describes the photo shoot:

When Parks came to her West End Avenue studio, Helen did not shrink from the occasion. In the images Parks took that day, she poses not only with her paintings but on one of them – Blue Territory. Her gaze variously pouty, confident, and serene, Helen gathers her legs up behind her, her blouse and skirt harmonizing with the pastel colors of her paintings…. Her simpering lips a beautiful shade of red, her dark hair a lustrous black, she looks up at the camera, Mountains and Sea over her right shoulder, her direct gaze suggesting a pride and power of ownership, a sense that she is the resident mermaid of this aqua-exotica, the maker of all the wall-to-wall shades of blue that translate so well to the magazine’s bright pages. 

Nemerov says, “Of course, these photographs were pieces of marketing.” Maybe. But just because they appeared in Life magazine, doesn’t spoil them as art. Parks’ Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler is a most original and striking picture. 

May 17, 2021 Issue

Johanna Fateman’s “Goings On About Town” note on the Jewish Museum exhibition “Modern Look,” in this week’s issue, describes a Saul Leiter photo, titled “Canopy,” as an “Ab Ex-inflected scene of a snowy New York City street almost entirely obscured by a jagged field of black.” Mm, I’d like to see that. I searched for it online at the Jewish Museum, but no luck. I found it at The Art Institute of Chicago.

It is an inspired shot. That “jagged field of black” is actually the edge of an awning that Leiter was standing under when he took the photo. 

Saul Leiter, Canopy (1958)

Leiter was one of the great flâneurs of the twentieth century. He roamed New York streets hunting for images. He often found them in the most unlikely places, like under that awning. Michael Greenberg, in his excellent “Catching Hold of the Devious City” (The New York Review of Books, July 9, 2015), says of Leiter,

Leiter photographed through windows, through rain, under awnings and canopies, and through the spaces between construction site boards to create (or more accurately, to show) a mystery of activity and simultaneous perspectives. Often his subject seems to be color and light itself. His pictures can be looked at as abstractions, but they never deviate too far from what is recognizably real. A blooming red umbrella materializes behind a yellow taxi in a storm; three Rothko-like panels of darkness frame an ordinary street scene with window-shoppers, walking pedestrians, and a passing white car. They seem to be instructing us in a new way to take in the city.

May 10, 2021 Issue

Adam Gopnik, in his absorbing “Peripheral Proust,” in this week’s issue, says that John Updike found in Proust “the only credible modern religious novelist.” He says that for Updike, Proust was “the last Christian poet.” Is this true? Updike loved Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In one of his finest essays, “Remembrance of Things Past Remembered” (included in his great 1976 collection Picked-Up Pieces), Updike wrote, 

Proust’s tendrilous sentences seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith. It was a revelation to me that words could entwine and curl so, yet keep a live crispness and the breath of utterance. I was dazzled by the witty similes – the vanished fresco, the book holding the known name – that wove art and nature into a single luminous fabric. This was not “better” writing, it was writing with a whole new nervous system.

That’s one of the most beautiful descriptions of writing I’ve ever read. Updike’s love of Proust was all about his style (“the dissecting delicacy of each sentence”). He says, memorably, “In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness.” Is that Christian? Maybe. Granted, Updike compared Remembrance of Things Past to the Bible, and called it “a work of consolation.” But I think it's the consolation of art, not God, that he was referring to. His love of Proust was sourced in those "tendrilous sentences." It’s the same for me. 

Is Photography Dissociative?

John MacDougall, Sanirajaq, September 24, 2005

Susan Sontag, in her great On Photography (1974), writes, “The habit of photographic seeing – of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs – creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature.” She goes on to say, 

Photographic seeing, when one examines its claims, turns out to be mainly the practice of a kind of dissociative seeing, a subjective habit which is reinforced by the objective discrepancies between the way that the camera and the human eye focus and judge perspective. 

Is this true? For me, it’s the opposite; photography isn’t estrangement; it isn’t dissociative. It’s an act of awareness. And when I’m really rolling, seeing object after object that I want to photograph, it’s an act of heightened awareness. I live for those blissful camera days when I’m so deep into image-hunting I forget myself. When I’m in a perceptual groove like that, photography isn’t dissociative; it’s immersive.

One such day I was in Sanirajaq, on the west coast of Foxe Basin. I got up early and walked the beach. I saw a group of Inuit launching a boat. They pushed it over the snow down to the water and slid it in. An elder, wearing a red toque, climbed in the boat. The others passed him red jerry cans and other supplies. He shoved off and floated out into the blue mirror-like water, thick with drifting ice right to the horizon. The colors were spectacular: blue sky, sculptural white ice, blue water, white boat with two beautiful stripes of aquamarine painted horizontally along the length of its hull, the elder with his brilliant red hat, a red buoy on the bow, also brilliantly red. The Arctic sunlight was ravishing! The scene seized my eyes – so gorgeously natural and painterly, I couldn’t get enough of it. I looked and looked, taking picture after picture. The scene unfolded over thirty minutes or so, I suppose, but I wasn’t aware of time passing or anything else except the remarkable sequence of events taking place in front of me. Maybe that’s what Sontag was getting at when she said photographic seeing is a kind of dissociative seeing. But, for me, a better description is immersion – total immersion. 

Salman Toor's Sensual Apprehension of Life

Salman Toor, Bedroom Boy (2019)

I first encountered the sensual art of Salman Toor last July as a result of reading Johanna Fateman’s excellent “Goings On About Town” note on Toor’s “How Will I Know” show at the Whitney. Fateman says of his wonderful Bedroom Boy, it “reimagines the trope of the reclining nude as a slender, hirsute young man snapping a come-hither selfie.” I like that. I found Bedroom Boy at Toor’s website. It is beguiling. 

Recently, another absorbing review of Toor’s work appeared – Sanford Schwartz’s “Young and in Love” (The New York Review of Books, April 8, 2021). Schwartz writes,

Whether he is showing blue jeans, a martini glass, or a person’s hair, Toor makes it seem as if he has brushed it in just a moment before. If he wants to show light descending from a lamp, he paints it in so many white, vertical, parallel strokes. If our sleeping nude has hairy legs, black flecks here and there will suffice. Every aspect of a given picture seems to breathe a little. 

That “If our sleeping nude has hairy legs, black flecks here and there will suffice” is delightful. 

April 26 & May 3, 2021 Issue

Just finished reading John Seabrook’s “Scooter City,” in this week’s New Yorker. What a terrific piece! It’s about e-scooters in New York City. Actually, it's more than that; it's about mode change, geofencing, multimodalism, and other aspects of the fascinating hi-tech world of micromobility. It's also about Seabrook's personal experiences driving an e-scooter: 

Cruising down Carlton Avenue, I caught the giddy appeal of e-scootering. “It’s like supercharging yourself for a few minutes,” as Assaf Biderman put it to me. You stand there, and with virtually no effort at all—only the slightest pressure of your index finger on the trigger-shaped throttle button—you’re skimming along through the air. But the standing position also accounts for the P.B.E. (Paul Blart Effect): you look like a blissed-out dork. 

Driving in the bike lanes, he encounters “hostile vibes”: 

Human-powered cyclists—my erstwhile mode buddies—seemed especially peeved at me. Was it my lack of body language, which seemed to make it difficult for oncoming riders to anticipate my projected path? Was it mode rage? Purists, like my friend Rob, think that bike lanes should not be for motors of any kind, including e-bikes, and certainly not for e-scooters. But, if you forgo the dangers of the open road, and scooter on the sidewalk, you menace pedestrians; in addition, some city sidewalks, which are maintained by property owners, are in worse shape than the streets. (It’s also illegal.) In vain, I searched the eyes of passing scooterists for some inter-modal camaraderie, but I found only a shared sheepishness.

I love that last sentence. The whole piece is intriguing. Are e-scooters the proto-vehicle of the future? After reading Seabrook’s absorbing article, I’d have to say it’s a real possibility.

3 for the Road: Action

This is the fifth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their action. 

Travelogues are inherently active. The writer moves through time and space and describes what he or she sees. But the three travel books I’m considering here are active in another way. Their authors aren’t simply passive observers; they’re participants. 

“John Ellis gets through work, gobbles a meal, and from six to nine o’clock we head off to pick up the bear which he shot yesterday.” So begins a wonderful action sequence in Notes from the Century Before. It’s exactly the kind of adventure I relish. Hoagland is in Wrangell, British Columbia, waiting for the boat that will take him up the Stikine River to Telegraph Creek. While in Wrangell, he meets Ellis, “a young fellow who repairs outboard motors.” Ellis invites him on this bearskin-retrieving mission, and off they go:

The skiff whirls and scuds over the water at 30 mph, with its bow high. We pass Dead Man’s Island, where the early Chinese cannery workers were buried; also Dairy Island, and Farm Island, five miles by fifteen, which splits the mouth of the Stikine. A boy of eight named Timmer is along, so John shows him the remains of the homestead on a point of the mainland where his mother grew up. We stop to look at a gold-rush message cut on a rock at the edge of the water. Only the simple numerals of the date are still legible. And an old bridge crosses a slough – two logs fitted onto a rock-packed frame, wide enough for a wagon. We whip and zoom into and out of the principal channel, which builds into slanting slopes of water against the sandbars. It’s as wide as the Hudson but is a rich brown-gray, littered with floating trees and boiling and pimpled with miniature whirlpools, with circles of surface water spinning and intersecting. Stunting for Timmer and me, Ellis shoots into the narrowest sloughs, curving with them and out at the end, after a mile between the close-set  walls of the rain forest. Mink, moose, beaver tracks. Cottonwood Island, Government Island. Government Island lies off the cove where the customs man had his cabin in the old days, in a thicket of tall hemlock trees and windfalls and brush. The roof has fallen in from the weight of the winters of snow. Nearby is the bearskin, about five feet long, representing an animal of two hundred pounds. John was watching a cow and calf moose in a slough, trying to photograph them, when the bear showed up on the opposite side and started across. He left the head intact when he skinned, and the mouth is still biting a mouthful of grass, the tongue is out, the lips are red-flecked. The ears are floppy, personable ears and the muzzle is well proportioned, the eyes not too small – a likeable face. Fine, unblemished fur, prime-of-life claws. Gracing the prow, stretched out, the skin makes the skiff look very big, but to me it’s a sad memento, and as he says it’s the sixth bear he’s killed, he begins to sound as if it were sad to him too. 

Again we skylark between the drift piles and swampy islands and crocodile logs, making the seething brown river a raceway, an obstacle course. The sun is low. The thick shoreline is that of a jungle river. Hundreds of great trees are stranded about in the shallows, so that parts of the estuary look like a naval graveyard. We swing near a beaver house, and swing near an eagle plunked in a tree. From time to time a seal surfaces and dives – whole herds go upriver during the salmon run. Besides the continual gulls, we start up a flock of ducks every couple of minutes, thirty or forty ducks, and since the boat zips along as fast as they do, we wheel them towards shore like a troop of horses, until they gradually outdistance us. 

It’s hard to stop quoting. The passage goes on for another three paragraphs, each a teeming run of exuberant eventfulness: “We visit the Farm Island farm, swerving up a creek, planing along”; “On the way out, we spot an otter and chase its ripples around”; “Then the river’s mouth again, with seals surfacing, and eagles and fleeing ducks, the snowing horizon – a profusion, a gushing of life.” It ends magnificently: “I goggle and grin quite helplessly, for this was the way the world was made.” The prose enacts the profusion, the gushing of life. Note the abundance of vivid, active verbs: “whirls,” “scuds,” “whip,” “zoom,” “shoots,” “swing,” “dives,” “wheel.” Note that wonderful “skylark”: “Again we skylark between the drift piles and swampy islands and crocodile logs, making the seething brown river a raceway, an obstacle course.” My god, I love that sentence! The whole book moves like that.

John McPhee, in his Coming into the Country, is also observer-participant. In one of my favorite passages, he watches Dick Cook, an outstanding woodsman, trapper, and dogsledder, ready his dogs for a trip to Eagle:

Dick goes out on the leveled stream and lays down harnesses in the snow. The sled is packed, the gear lashed under the skins. Everything is ready for the dogs. They are barking, roaring, screaming with impatience for the run. One by one, Donna unchains them. Out of the trees they dash toward the sled. Chipper goes first and, standing in front, holds all the harnesses in a good taut line. Abie, Little Girl, Grandma, Ug – the others fast fill in. They jump in their traces, cant’s wait to go. If they jump too much, they get cuffed. Wait another minute and they’ll have everything so twisted we’ll be here another hour. Go! The whole team hits at once. The sled, which was at rest a moment before, is moving fast. Destination, Eagle; time, two days.

Several paragraphs later, McPhee himself drives Cook’s dog team:

Dick has sometimes handed the sled over to me for two and three miles at a time, he and Donna walking far behind. On forest trails, with the ground uneven, the complexity of the guesswork is more than I’d have dreamed. We come to, say, a slight uphill grade. I have been riding, standing on the back of the sled. The dogs, working harder, begin throwing glances back at me. I jump off and run, giving them a hundred-and-fifty-pound bonus. The sled picks up speed in reply. Sooner or later, they stop – spontaneously quit – and rest. Let them rest too long and they’ll dig holes in the snow and lie down. I have learned to wait about forty-five seconds, then rattle the sled, and off they go. I don’t dare speak to them, because my voice is not Cook’s. If I speak, they won’t move at all. There are three main choices – to ride, to run behind, or to keep a foot on the sled and push with the other, like a kid propelling a scooter. The incline has to be taken into account, the weight of the sled, the firmness of the trail, the apparent energy of the dogs, the time since they last rested, one’s own degree of fatigue. Up and down hill, over frozen lakes – now ride, now half ride, run. Ten below zero seems to be the fulcrum temperature at which the air is just right to keep exertion cool. You’re tired. Ride. Outguess the dogs. Help with one foot. When they’re just about to quit, step off and run. When things look promising, get on again, rest, look around at the big white country, its laden spruce on forest trails, its boulevard, the silent Yukon. On a cold, clear aurorean night with the moon and Sirius flooding the ground, the sound of the sled on the dry snow is like the rumbling cars of a long freight, well after the engine has passed. 

Mm, that last line is crazy good! I relish the way the whole passage moves. It puts me squarely there with McPhee, now riding, now half-riding, now jumping off and running, now jumping back on, looking around “at the big white country, its laden spruce on forest trails, its boulevard, the silent Yukon.” Its immediacy is thrilling! 

There’s action aplenty in Frazier’s Great Plains, too. The killing of Crazy Horse, the slaughter of Custer and the 7th Calvary at Little Big Horn, the capture of a runaway yearling – these events are vividly described. As for first-person action, well, there’s lots of driving. In my post on structure, I mentioned Frazier and Jim Yellow Earrings’ wild ride to Sitting Bull’s cabin. That’s one of my favorites. Another is when Frazier and a friend are driving on the plains and get stuck in mud:

Suddenly we crossed the path of one of the rainclouds, and the hard dirt road turned to glue. Mud began to thump in the wheel wells, and the car skidded sideways, went off the road, and stuck. We got out in cement-colored mud over our ankles. Two pieces of harvesting machinery sat in a field nearby; other than that, there was no sign of people anywhere. I tried to drive while my friend pushed, then she drove while I pushed, then I left it in gear and we both pushed. We whipped the mud to peaks. It clotted on the wheels until they became useless mudballs. Finally I took a flat rock and got down on all fours and scraped the mud off each wheel. Then my friend drove carefully in reverse for one wheel turn until the wheels were covered again. Then I scraped the mud off again, and we drove another revolution. We kept doing this over and over until we made it back to dry ground. It took about two hours. Another event early travellers mentioned in their diaries was miring their wagons in the gumbo mud of the Great Plains. Now I knew what they meant. When I got back in the car, I was all-over mud and my fingernails were broken. From her purse, my friend produced a freshly laundered white cotton handkerchief. 

That “We whipped the mud to peaks” is excellent. Note the action-verbs – “skidded,” “pushed,” “clotted,” “scraped,” “whipped.” Frazier’s nouns and adjectives are also pretty damn effective. By the end of the passage, I felt as though I’d experienced “the gumbo mud of the Great Plains,” too. 

Action is a prime feature of all three of these great books. Another one is acute sense of place. That will be the focus of my next post in this series.