August 23, 2021 Issue

Heidi Julavits’s “The Fire Geyser,” in this weeks issue, has it all: fascinating subject (volcano eruption); exotic setting (Iceland’s Reykjanes Penninsula); personal experience (“I touched the hardened lava. It was the temperature of someone’s lap after a dog or a child has been sitting in it”); vivid description (“The center of the field resembled carbonized oatmeal. The lava near the path reached out with giant panther paws that seemed to demand petting”); arresting details (“There was now a strong and familiar odor. For a New Yorker, the association was immediate: 9/11. The air smelled like cataclysm”). 

It’s an account of Julavits’s trip to the Fagradalsfjall eruption in May of this year. It puts us squarely there at the top of Goggle Hill, looking down at the moving, molten lava fields:

Just beneath me, a bright-orange puddle, streaked with blue, bubbled up in the middle of what had seemed to be an inactive lava field. The puddle steadily grew as the surrounding surface melted away. Then a second puddle opened beside it, widening with the speed of film dissolving in a projector. As the puddles expanded, the heat surged, pushing me back, along with other spectators who’d come to the edge. Gas emanating from the puddles made my lungs constrict, causing light-headedness.

The piece brims with extraordinary description:

Seven or so minutes later, a man announced, in English, “Here it comes!” A notch in the crater’s side brightened as lava surged. Then a fire geyser shot above the crater’s lip, red-orange and slopping. It hung in the air, having apparently negotiated a deal with gravity during its time in the earth’s mantle. The lava gushed over the notch and fed the molten river. Bits of hardened crust floated along the top, resembling shards of black ice. A giant red-orange boulder flew about forty feet into the air, then landed and rolled halfway down the slope. Within seconds, it had seized in place, turning the color of ash.

The crater released an oceanic roar that filled my whole body. Even at a distance, I could feel the intense heat of the fire geyser on my face. If I closed my eyes, I was at the beach on a hot day, and had just emerged from the freezing water and was about to take a nap in the sun.

The lava here had an uneven, ominously scaly appearance, like glitchy dragon skin, and loomed ten feet overhead. It radiated an even heat, as though thrown from a cast-iron stove. This lava was palpably on the move, and it tinkled loudly as its glassy crust shattered. Molten rock, beneath a coating of solidified shards, rolled over itself at the pace of glue, churning the lava field forward and continuing to fill up a valley that, for the moment, still contained it.

“The Fire Geyser” is one of this year’s best pieces. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Law, Photography, Decontextualization

Irving Penn, Three Asaro Mud Men, New Guinea (1970)

I want to cross two very different experiences on each other, hinging them on the process of decontextualization. The first experience is of looking at Irving Penn’s photos in his classic 1974 collection Worlds in a Small Room. The second one is of arguing the unconstitutionality of constructive murder in the case of R. v. Laviolette [1987] 2 SCR 667. 

Penn’s photos are black-and-white portraits of Peruvian peasants, Parisian tradesmen, Cretan old-timers, Spanish gypsies, New Guinea tribesmen, and so on. Penn didn’t photograph them in their natural environments. Instead, he invited them into his portable studio, and photographed them against a neutral backdrop. In his Introduction to Worlds in a Small Room, Penn said, “Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them.” 

Yes, but did it transform them in a good way? That’s the question I struggle with every time I look at these arresting pictures. Janet Malcolm, in a review of an exhibition of Penn’s cigarette butt photos, in which he used the same isolating method he used in Worlds in a Small Room, said, “Penn’s butts efface reality” (Diana & Nikon, 1980). That strikes me as exactly right. The same applies to his Worlds in a Small Room portraits: they remove people from their own context and treat them like botanical or zoological specimens. They efface reality. To me, that’s one of the most damning things you can say about a work of art. 

The word for Penn’s method is “decontextualization” – divorcing something from its original context. It’s a good description for what happens in certain legal cases, too. I was reminded of this point recently when I read Dale Carpenter’s Flagrant Conduct (2012), an absorbing account of Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned America’s sodomy laws. Carpenter shows how Lawrence and Garner’s lawyers, realizing the constitutional potential of their case, repackaged it. They persuaded Lawrence and Garner, who denied engaging in same-sex sodomy, to change their plea from “not guilty” to “no contest.” That eliminated argument on the facts and focused the case solely on the constitutionality of the law they were charged under. As Carpenter says, “Lawrence advanced as a case because nobody wanted to know what the underlying facts were.”

The conversion of raw facts to elegant legal argument fascinates me. I engineered such a conversion in R. v. Laviolette, in which the Supreme Court of Canada struck down constructive murder. The facts were brutal. Three young men went at night to the parish house at Kelly’s Cross, Prince Edward Island, with the intent of robbing it. The oldest of the three, Stephen, went inside and fatally struck the occupant, a priest, on the head with a length of iron pipe. All three were charged with homicide under the doctrine of constructive murder, which holds that if a murder is committed during the course of commission of a felony, such as break-and-enter, all participants in that felony are guilty of murder. 

I represented one of the two men who stayed outside the parish home. At trial, he was found guilty. In the time between his trial and his appeal, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted. On appeal, I argued that constructive murder offended Charter section 7, which guarantees, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” I contended that one of the principles of fundamental justice is that intention to murder is an element of the offence of murder, and that constructive murder eliminates that element. The Prince Edward Island Court of Appeal rejected my argument. We appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. On December 3, 1987, the Court allowed the appeal, striking down the doctrine of constructive murder on the ground that it was inconsistent with Charter section 7.

But I’ve always had a twinge of guilt about Laviolette – the way the case was severed from its grisly facts (iron pipe, smashed skull, loss of a singular life), and repackaged as an abstract constitutional argument about the essential ingredients of murder and the meaning of “principles of fundamental justice.” It effaced reality.  

Echoes and Reverberations

Photo by Thomas Prior, from Eric Klinenberg's "Manufacturing Nature"

One of the pleasures of being a long-time New Yorker reader is noticing the connections. Five recent examples:

1. Eric Klinenberg, in his excellent “Manufacturing Nature” (August 9, 2021), mentions Brooklyn’s Plum Beach: “On a cold day this spring, Orff met me at Plumb Beach, a short, narrow stretch of shoreline at the southern edge of Brooklyn, and a nesting-and-breeding ground for horseshoe crabs.” I read that and immediately thought of Ian Frazier’s “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014), a brilliant piece on horseshoe crabs set, among other places, on Plum Beach (“Farther along the beach, Russian fishermen stood beside their belled fishing poles, impassive and unimpressed as only Russians can be. They had lit fires of damp straw to keep the bugs away; the sharp-smelling smoke coiled around”). 

2. In his piece, Klinenberg visits the wetlands that jut out from the mouth of the Mississippi River. This is a landscape that Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about in her memorable “Under Water” (April 1, 2019): “So thick with simulated sediment were the channels of the Bird’s Foot that they looked as if they were filled with ink.”

3. Also in his piece, Klinenberg mentions the federal levees that line the Mississippi. This triggered a remembrance of John McPhee’s great “Atchafalaya” (February 23, 1987), a piece on the construction of the levees by the Corps of Engineers: "Three hundred miles up the Mississippi River from its mouth—many parishes above New Orleans and well north of Baton Rouge—a navigation lock in the Mississippi’s right bank allows ships to drop out of the river."

4. Elizabeth Kolbert, in her absorbing “The Lost Canyon” (August 16, 2021), refers to the Colorado River Compact, a subject covered in David Owen’s superb “Where the River Runs Dry” (May 25, 2015). Owen, in his piece, travels the length of the Colorado, noting the many signs of water crisis ("Hinojosa Huerta explained that the embankment was a levee, built to protect locals from the river—a function almost impossible to imagine, because the channel of the Colorado was a mile to our east, and there was nothing between it and us but desert"). Kolbert focuses on the alarming depletion of Lake Powell, a giant man-made reservoir on the Colorado. Her piece could be considered a companion to Owen’s report.

5. Also in her piece, Kolbert mentions Floyd Dominy, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation in the nineteen sixties and Glen Canyon Dam’s biggest booster. Dominy is one of four men profiled in John McPhee’s masterful “Encounters with the Archdruid” (March 20, 27 & April 3, 1971): "Dominy begins to talk dams. To him, the world is a tessellation of watersheds. When he looks at a globe, he does not see nations so much as he sees rivers, and his imagination runs down the rivers building dams."

So lots of echoes and reverberations! They add an extra layer of meaning to my New Yorker reading experience. 

August 16, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rivka Galchen’s “The Youthful Universe.” It’s about the amazing seven-ton, ten-billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope, which, when launched, will travel 1.5 million kilometres from Earth and look back thirteen billion years. Galchen beautifully describes how it will operate:

On its way, the telescope will slowly unfurl five silvery winglike layered sheets of Kapton foil, about as large as a tennis court. These sheets, each thinner than notebook paper, will function as a gigantic parasol, protecting the body of the telescope from the light and the heat of the sun, moon, and Earth. In this way, the J.W.S.T. will be kept nearly as dark and as cold as outer space, to insure that distant signals aren’t washed out. Then eighteen hexagons of gold-coated beryllium mirror will open out, like an enormous, night-blooming flower. The mirrors will form a reflecting surface as tall and as wide as a house, and they will capture light that has been travelling for more than thirteen billion years.

For me, the J.W.S.T.’s most interesting capacity is its ability to study exoplanets, i.e., planets outside our solar system. Galchen says, “The J.W.S.T. will be able to describe the atmospheres of these planets, possibly detecting free oxygen or other gases—potential signs of life.”

Galchen’s similes are delightful, e.g., “The Hubble telescope was finally launched in April, 1990, and it sent back fuzzy images of spiral galaxies that looked like melted glaze on a galactic cinnamon roll.” I enjoyed “The Youthful Universe” immensely. 

August 9, 2021 Issue

James Wood, in his absorbing “Coming and Going,” in this week’s issue, returns to an idea he introduced in his great essay “On Not Going Home” (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014), namely, “secular homelessness.” It’s a term that bugs me. It’s vague and inaccurate. The opposite of tragic homelessness isn’t secular; it’s non-tragic. Why define it in terms of its lack of religion? In “On Not Going Home,” Wood says, “What I have been describing, both in my own life and in the lives of others, is more like secular homelessness. It cannot claim the theological prestige of the transcendent.” Come on! Who thinks of refugee life in terms of “the theological prestige of the transcendent”? It’s an unreal analysis. In “Coming and Going,” a review of Sunjeev Sahota’s new novel China Room, he repeats it: 

But the narrator of “China Room,” for all his experience of gray, racist little Englanders, doesn’t inhabit a before and after in quite the same way. Born in England, the relatively fortunate child of immigrants who have already made their difficult journey, and have done so, in part, for him, he has no personal knowledge of before and after. He inhabits something closer to a kind of secular homelessness, shorn of the religious echo of exile. 

But what about political and social echoes? Why focus on religion, or the lack thereof, as homelessness’s defining feature? Wood is obsessed with religion. I guess that’s the answer.

Calasso

Roberto Calasso (Photo by Louis Monie)

I see Roberto Calasso died recently (“Roberto Calasso, Renaissance Man of Letters, Dies at 80,” The New York Times, July 30,2021). I know of his work only indirectly through a wonderful review-essay by Charles Simic, titled “Paradise Lost" (The New York Review of Books, September 20, 2001; re-titled "Literature and the Gods: Roberto Calasso," in Simic’s 2015 collection The Life of Images). 

In his piece, Simic describes Calasso’s re-creation of the myth of Persephone, the goddess of fertility who was carried off into the underworld by Hades. Normally, I have little patience for this sort of thing – it’s too unreal. But the meaning Simic extracts from it is fascinating: 

Our precarious life, fleeting and irreplaceable, has another dimension. That which exists once and only once is beautiful, the myths keep telling us. It is precisely because we are mortal beings that things have a significance and an intense presence at times.

The linking of aesthetics and mortality seems to me inspired! It’s why I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art. Life is transient. We must try to capture it, preserve it, before it disappears.  

August 2, 2021 Issue

Three excellent pieces in this week’s issue:

1. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: We All Scream for Ice Cream,” a review of several blissful new ice creams, including Sea Salt Saba (“Trapani sea-salt base with a swirl of intensely concentrated grape-must syrup”), Red Flag (“sweet cream with strawberry jam and graham crunch”), and Roasted Banana with Coffee Caramel (“surging with dark reduced sugars”). Pleasure is palpable in every paragraph. Sample: 

There are pints to take home, too; availing myself of an insulated bag outfitted with ice packs ($7), I toted several on the subway, including Panna Stracciatella, flecked with dark-chocolate shards, and Somebody Scoop Phil, the brainchild of the sitcom producer turned food personality Phil Rosenthal, featuring a lightly salted malted milk-chocolate base, dense with chunks of Twix and candied peanuts, plus swirls of fudge and panna caramel that oozed obscenely when I peeled off the lid.

2. Nick Paumgarten’s Talk story “Lemonland,” an account of his visit to an intriguing Manhattan installation called Citrovia, created to disguise a giant construction shed. Paumgarten describes it as a “plasticine sanctuary of tangerine lemons and Teletubby trees, a contrived oasis where the lemons are yellow and the sky is always blue.” The air at Citrovia is scented with a custom-made fragrance. Paumgarten delightfully describes it:

It brought to mind the old seventies perfume Love’s Fresh Lemon, from Love Cosmetics (“The subtle way to get fresh with him”), the jangly tang of Mello Yello (“There’s nothing mellow about it”), and smoke-concealment strategies of yore.

3. Ann Patchett’s “Flight Plan,” a personal history piece on learning to live with her flight-obsessed husband. The opening sentence hooked me: “The three of us were in a 1957 de Havilland Beaver, floating in the middle of a crater lake in the southwest quadrant of Alaska.” The piece brims with arresting lines. This one, for example: “The only thing on hand to throw up in were the pilot’s waders, which seemed better (better?) than throwing up on the stamped-metal floor.” And this 138-word beauty:

Considering that about half of all small-craft accidents occur during either takeoff or landing; considering that taking off and landing was all we were doing; considering that the plane was rusted and the pilot had struggled with the aftereffects of Agent Orange and my boyfriend had never landed a plane on water before; considering that this lake was somewhere far from Iliamna and no one knew we were there in the first place; considering that if the plane flipped, as it had been established these planes could do, I would probably not be able to swim through the freezing water in my sack of neoprene (which I had stupidly worn against the cold), and that, if I did make it to the shore, my chances of surviving whatever came next were probably zero—I should have been afraid.

And this: “I saw the headlights against the garage door and went outside in the rain to meet him with my love and my rage and my sick relief.”

That last one is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely.

3 for the Road: First Person

This is the eighth 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 use of the first person.

All three of these books are written in the first-person major. That, for me, is a compelling aspect of their style. They aren’t second-hand reports (except when they're recounting other people's stories or telling about historical events). Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier were actually there, in northern British Columbia, in Alaska, on the Great Plains, walking trails, canoeing rivers, driving back roads. They’re writing from personal experience, which, for me, is the most concrete form of reality. 

But each of them has a distinctive way of “being there.” Their “I”s differ from each other. Hoagland is much more self-revealing than the other two. He discloses intimate details of his private life. For example,

I’ve been too busy and happy to be lonely, and I must say I’ve missed neither friends nor family, other than my former wife, whom I haven’t seen for two years now anyway, and have been missing right along. Sexually, instead of her, at night I visualize the English girl I lived with in Greece, whom I haven’t seen for nearly a year. She was a lean, dreamy, athletic blonde, born during the Blitz and frozen at the age of nineteen, it seemed to me, though she was five or six years older than that. She dreamed of love and being rich, mostly, and when we went to Izmir from Samos and lived it up, riding in horse-drawn cabs and so on, she crossed her tawny long legs and turned as creamy and smooth as a queen. The populace lined the curbs as we passed. She was loyal and sweet to me, but towards the end of the period we became choked with umbrages and unable to speak to each other except on the politest level. She ran away to another island on a night boat at one point, and after anguishing in uncertainty, I finally went to the police, imagining her death was on my head – I saw us as the petrifying snake and the bird. They thought that I might have murdered her and put a detective on my trail until she came back. Even so, as wordless as we grew after that, we made love better and better, my penis as big as a surfboard underneath us. Whether as the snake or not, from my window I watched her sunbathe and swim much of the day.

There’s nothing even remotely like that in Coming into the Country and Great Plains. McPhee and Frazier stick to what they observe. They look outward, not inward. Occasionally, they tell how they’re feeling:

Tracks suggest that it is something of a trail. I am mildly nervous about that, but then I am mildly nervous about a lot of things. [Coming into the Country]

I made sure I had a place to turn around, and then we started out. I was afraid I’d never get up the steep gully, but I did, my rear wheels tiptoeing along the edges of the ruts. [Great Plains]

Like pictures from pages riffled with a thumb, all these things went through my mind there on the mountainside above the grazing bear. I will confess that in one instant I asked myself, “What the hell am I doing here?” There was nothing more to the question, though, than a hint of panic. I knew why I had come., and therefore what I was doing there. That I was frightened was incidental. I just hoped the fright would not rise beyond a relatively decorous level. [Coming into the Country]

Whenever you see an abandoned house, you wonder. Usually, I was too shy to stop the car and go closer. The way a man in Texas looked at me when he drove up the driveway of an abandoned house as I was peering through the window and writing in my notebook (“busted air conditioner / empty Field Trial high-protein dog food bags / electric-fence transformer / pair of white water skis in corner”) gave me an idea of the way ghosts in these houses might look at me if they existed and could take shape for a moment. [Great Plains]

The trees finally end. I am pleased to see the big river. I make a bench of driftwood, eat cashews and apricots, and wait for Sarge. The walk took a little less than two hours. I don’t feel elevated by that journey, nor am I shy to describe it – just happy that it is complete. I scarcely think I was crazy to do it, and I don’t think I was crazy to fear it. Risk was low, but there was something to fear. Still, I am left awry. I embrace this wild country. But how can I be of it, how can I move within it? I can’t accept anymore the rationale of the few who go unarmed – yet I am equally loath to use guns. If bears were no longer in the country, I would not have come. I am here, in a sense, because they survive. So I am sorry – truly rueful and perplexed – that without means of killing them I cannot feel at ease. [Coming into the Country]

Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was; because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn’t end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met the President; because he never rode on train, slept in a boarding house, ate at table; because he never wore a medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe before going to where he expected to die; because, although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes referred to Red Cloud as Red and Spotted Tail as Spot, they never used a diminutive for him; because, deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena that our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists; because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate. [Great Plains]

(Note that last quotation is all one sentence – a 325-word tour de force that bespeaks Frazier’s deep love for Crazy Horse.)

All three books are self-portraits, as much about the beholder as the beheld. Frazier, in his “Carving Your Name on the Rock,” an essay on the writing of Great Plains (included in the 1991 collection They Went, edited by William Zinsser), calls Great Plains “an internal landscape, a memoir.” He says, “Of course, what you’re really writing about is yourself – Great Plains is an internal landscape, a memoir.” This is true of Notes from the Century Before and Coming into the Country, too.

What selves are portrayed? Hoagland, in his Notes from the Century Before, describes himself as a rhapsodist (“I’m a novelist, not a historian, but at best I’m a rhapsodist too – that old-fashioned, almost anachronist form”). Rhapsodic passages abound. This one, for example:

Swaying and bucking as on a life raft, we scraped over a further series of ridges and peaks. This was the highest flying we had done: we were way up with the snow so that the cabin was cold. But the sunlight washed the whole sky a milky blue. Everywhere, into the haze a hundred miles off, a crescendo of up-pointing mountains shivered and shook. A cliff fell away beneath us as we crossed the lip. The lake down at the base of it was oil-green. We passed over a glacier – blue ice nestled into a saddle. There was no chance to watch for game, the plunging land was life enough. It was a whole earth of mountains, beyond counting or guessing at, colored stark white and rock-brown. To live is to see, and although I was sweating against my stomach, I was irradiated. These were some of the finest minutes of my life.

McPhee rhapsodizes, too, but in a different key – less euphoric, more humorous:

When I have stayed with the Gelvins, I have for the most part occupied a cabin toward the far end of the airstrip – a place acquired not long ago from an old-timer named Curly Allain, who was in his seventies and went south. He had no intention of returning, but he left his cabin well stocked with utensils, food, and linen – a tin of coffee close to the pot, fifty pounds of flour, five pounds of Danish bacon, firewood in three sizes stacked beside the door. Outside, some paces away, I have stood at a form of parade rest and in the broad light of a June midnight been penetrated in the most inconvenient place by a swarm of indecent mosquitoes, and on the same spot in winter, in a similar posture at the same hour, have stared up in darkness from squeaky snow at a green arch of the aurora, green streamers streaming from it all across the sky. At home, when I look up at the North Star I lift my eyes but don’t really have to move my head. Here, I crane back, lift my chin almost almost as far as it will go, and look up at the polestar flirting with the zenith. The cabin is long and low, and its roof is loaded white – mantled eighteen inches deep. Its windows are brown-gold from the light of burning lamps. The air is so still I can hear the rising smoke. Twenty-two degrees below zero. Balls of ice are forming in the beard. I go back inside and comb it off, and jump into a bag of down.

That “The air is so still I can hear the rising smoke” is very fine.

Frazier’s rhapsodies are like arias, soaring, thrilling, passionate: see, for example, the Nicodemus passage I quoted previously. Here’s another one – Great Plains’ extraordinary opening paragraph:

Away to the Great Plains of America, to that immense Western short-grass prairie now mostly plowed under! Away to the still-empty land beyond newsstands and malls and velvet restaurant ropes! Away to the headwaters of the Missouri, now quelled by many impoundment dams, and to the headwaters of the Platte, and to the almost invisible headwaters of the slurped-up Arkansas! Away to the land where TV used to set its most popular dramas, but not anymore! Away to the land beyond the hundredth meridian of longitude, where sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn’t, where agriculture stops and does a double take! Away to the skies of sparrow hawks sitting on telephone wires, thinking of mice and flaring their tail feathers suddenly, like a card trick! Away to the air shaft of the continent, where weather fronts from two hemispheres meet, and the wind blows almost all the time! Away to the fields of wheat and milo and sudan grass and flax and alfalfa and nothing! Away to parts of Montana and North Dakota and South Dakota and Wyoming and Nebraska and Kansas and Colorado and New Mexico and Oklahoma and Texas! Away to the high plains rolling in waves to the rising final chord of the Rocky Mountains!

All three writers are artists to the tips of their fingernails. All three are superb describers of nature. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.