Postscript: Gerald Stern 1925 - 2022

Gerald Stern (Photo by Frank C. Dougherty)

I see in the Times that Gerald Stern has died, age ninety-seven. He had one of the most distinctive “voices” I know of – a wild on-rushing talking voice streaming down the page. I wrote about him here, when his delightful “Warbler” appeared in the January 6, 2020, New Yorker. Over the years, the magazine published thirty-four of his poems, including the extraordinary “The World We Should’ve Stayed In” (October 6, 2014):

The clothes, the food, the nickel-coated iron
flower tables, the glass-and-wood-fluted doorknob
but most of all the baby girls holding
chicks in one arm and grapes in the other
just before the murder of the Gypsies
under Tiso the priest, Slovak, Roman Catholic,
no cousin to Andy, he Carpatho-Russian
or most of all Peter Oresick, he of Ford City,
he of Highland Park and East Liberty
Carpatho-Russian too, or just Ruthenian,
me staring at a coconut tree, I swear it,
listening late on a Saturday afternoon
a few weeks before my 88th to
airplane after airplane and reading the trailers
by the underwater lights of yon organ-shaped
squid-squirming blue and land-lost swimming pool
the noise a kind of roar when they got close
I’m watching from the fifth floor up, Warholean
here and there oh mostly on the elevator but
certainly by the pool, his European relatives
basking under his long serrated leaves
coconuts near the top—ripe and dangerous—
like Peter, coming from one of the villages inside
Pittsburgh, like me, half eastern Poland, half southern
Ukraine born in the Hill, on Wylie Avenue,
the first village east of downtown Pittsburgh,
Logan Street, the steepest street in the Hill,
two blocks—at least—a string of small stores and
Jewish restaurants, Caplan’s, Weinstein’s, I was
born at the end of an era, I hung on with
my fingers then with my nails, Judith Vollmer’s
family was Polish but they were twelve miles away from
Peter’s village, this was a meal at Weinstein’s:
chopped liver first or herring or eggs and onions, then
matzo-ball soup or noodle or knaidel, followed by
roast veal or boiled beef and horseradish
or roast chicken and vegetables, coleslaw
and Jewish pickles on the side and plates
of cookies and poppy-seed cakes and strudel,
Yiddish the lingua franca, tea in a glass,
the world we should have stayed in, for in America
you burn in one place, then another.

Wow! The connections are flying here – from “nickel-coated iron flower tables” to “the murder of the Gypsies” to Andy Warhol to Peter Oresick to “me staring at a coconut tree” to “airplane after airplane” to “reading the trailers / by the underwater lights” to “organ-shaped / squid-squirming blue and land-lost swimming pool” to an elevator to “long serrated leaves / coconuts near the top – ripe and dangerous” to “downtown Pittsburgh” to “Logan Street, the steepest street in the Hill” to “a string of small stores and / Jewish restaurants, Caplan’s, Weinstein’s” to “Judith Vollmer’s / family” to the amazing “meal at Weinstein’s” described in seven glorious lines of delectable detail – lines that make me smile every time I read them. No one else could’ve written it. Stern was a true eccentric, authentically himself in every word and line. 

October 24, 2022 Issue

Joshua Yaffa, in his absorbing “Arming Ukraine,” in this week’s issue, writes about the weapons that Ukraine has received from the U.S. and other NATO countries – weapons that have enabled Ukraine not only to defend itself against Russia’s brutal onslaught, but also to mount an effective counter-attack. The shoulder-fired Javelin anti-tank missile, the M777 howitzer, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) – these are three key pieces of weaponry provided by the U.S. Yaffa says of the M77s:

The M777s allowed Ukraine to mount a defense in the Donbas. “In any war, of course, it’s not only about quantity, but quality,” Roman Kachur, the commander of Ukraine’s 55th Artillery Brigade, said. “There’s a difference when you’re fighting with a modern weapons system or one that hasn’t been significantly updated since the days of the Second World War.” For weeks, his forces had faced heavy artillery fire from a fortified Russian position near Donetsk, a Russian-occupied city in the Donbas. “We couldn’t knock the enemy out of there, because we simply couldn’t reach him,” Kachur told me. Then the M777s arrived. “Within three or four days, the Russians had pulled all their artillery out of there,” he said. “It’s a new situation. We are dictating their behavior to a certain degree.”

He says of the HIMARS:

The first batch of HIMARS appeared on the battlefield late in June. Within days, videos circulated of Russian equipment and munitions depots outside Donetsk exploding in clouds of fire and smoke. Reznikov announced that the military had used HIMARS to destroy dozens of similar Russian facilities. In response, the senior Biden Administration official said, Russian forces “have had to adjust their tactics and maneuvers,” moving command posts and munitions depots out of range—which also diminishes their utility in battle. “They are very mindful of the presence of HIMARS,” the official said.

If you admire the gritty fighting spirit of Ukraine, as I do, you’ll likely appreciate “Arming Ukraine.” It shows the crucial role that Western arms supplies have played in Ukraine’s success on the battlefield. 

October 17, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rivka Galchen’s “Sound Affects,” on the renovation of Geffen Hall’s acoustics. Is acoustical engineering a subject I’m normally interested in? No. But I’ll read Galchen on anything. I love her writing. In “Sound Affects,” she describes various aspects of the renovation – seating, paneling, ceiling, floor angle, and so on. She notes that the governing principle is psychoacoustics – “the study of how mood, color, sense of place, and other emotional factors affect the way people perceive and understand music.” She writes,

We were looking out at walls of plastic sheeting; something enormous was being hoisted up above the stage so that adjustable absorptive banners of wool serge could be installed. “One thing that’s really interesting to me is the psychoacoustics,” McCluskie said. “Restaurateurs know about this, of course—that the presentation of food affects the way it tastes.” The architects had to make the space warm and welcoming, so that the audience would feel connected to the musicians. For that reason, McCluskie had pushed for the reraking of the floor. “It’s just three degrees difference, but it really affects the sense of closeness to the musicians,” he said. 

My favourite part is Galchen’s description of the “sound-transparent mesh” that overlays the hall’s ceiling: “a hand-bent steel grid, with a clover pattern, that catches the light.”

Commenting on the acoustics in Boston’s Symphony Hall, Galchen says, “A balance of warmth and clarity was achieved.” The same can be said of Galchen’s writing. I enjoyed “Sound Affects” immensely. 

Postscript: Peter Schjeldahl 1942 - 2022

Peter Schjeldahl (Photo by Gilbert King) 

This is a sad day. I've just learned of the death of Peter Schjeldahl. He died yesterday, age eighty. He’s one of my heroes. If you click on his name in the “Labels” section of this blog, you’ll find 135 references to him. There’s a fine tribute to him on newyorker.com: David Remnick, “Remembering Peter Schjeldahl, a Consummate Critic.” And there’s an excellent obituary in The New York Times: William Grimes, “Peter Schjeldahl, New York Art Critic With a Poet’s Voice, Dies at 80.” Grimes says of him, “He was first and foremost a visual pleasure seeker, on the prowl for new thrills.” I’ll always remember his response to Vermeer’s art: “Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look” (“The Sphinx,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2001). That could serve as his epitaph. 

I’m going to miss Schjeldahl’s writing enormously. Fortunately, he left behind several resplendent collections, including The Hydrogen Jukebox (1991), Let's See (2008), and Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (2019). I’ll post a longer tribute to him later. He is and always will be one of my touchstones. 

Acts of Seeing: Abandoned House

Photo by John MacDougall

In this series, I look at some of my own photos and try to determine their governing aesthetic. 

Here’s one of an abandoned house that I took this summer on Prince Edward Island. I’m drawn to ruins. They speak to me of mortality. This one is a beauty. What is beautiful is the visual texture of the disintegrating cornflower-blue roof. If you could lift that roof off and hang it on a wall, you’d have a gorgeous abstract rendering of texture – the texture of time.

October 10, 2022 Issue

“Filtration camps” – Russian euphemism for concentration camps. Russia is depraved! If you need more proof, read David Kortava’s “In the Filtration Camps,” in this week’s issue. It tells about the hellish ordeal of a young man called Taras (not his real name), taken from his home in Mariupol by Russian soldiers and detained in a so-called filtration camp for nearly six weeks. Taras was lucky; he was eventually released. Many prisoners in these camps die. Kortava writes,

The following weeks took on a bleak rhythm. The detainees had only what clothes they had been wearing on the day they were apprehended. Cases of what appeared to be pneumonia or COVID broke out, but the soldiers provided no aid or medicine. When one sick detainee started to fade away, the others pleaded for an ambulance to be summoned, to no avail. Several hours later, the man was dead. Guards ordered two detainees to move the body to the gymnasium. 

Russian soldiers have no regard for the sanctity of human life. They’re despicable. Damn them all! 

Acts of Seeing: Burnt Bridge Piles

Inkerman Lake, 2022 (Photo by John MacDougall)

In this series, I look at some of my own photos and try to determine their governing aesthetic. 

I begin with a picture I took on a recent trip to New Brunswick’s beautiful Acadian Peninsula. It shows a line of charred posts – all that is left of the wooden walking bridge that used to cross Inkerman Lake. The morning light illuminates the burnt piles perfectly. That’s one aspect of the scene that appealed to me – the golden autumnal light on the blackened posts. Another is the way the piles follow one another in a gradual fade toward the opposite shore. I love that receding perspective. Ruskin did, too. In his great The Elements of Drawing (1857), he said,

Another important and pleasurable way of expressing unity is by giving some orderly succession to a number of objects more or less similar. And this succession is most interesting when it is connected with some gradual change in the aspect or character of the objects. Thus the succession of the pillars of a cathedral aisle is most interesting when they retire in perspective, becoming more and more obscure in the distance: so the succession of mountain promontories one behind another, on the flanks of the valley; so the succession of clouds, fading farther and farther towards the horizon; each promontory and each cloud being of different shape, yet all evidently following in a calm and appointed order.

October 3, 2022 Issue

Three excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Rivka Galchen’s “Who Will Fight With Me?”; Ed Caesar’s “Seize the Night”; and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Dutch Magus.”

Galchen’s “Who Will Fight With Me?” is a fond memoir of her father. It brims with her signature blend of inspired description and original perception. Here, for example, is her remembrance of her father’s lack of vanity:

It would have been difficult for him if he had been vain, because he didn’t buy any of his own clothes, or really anything, not even postage stamps. Whenever there were clearance sales at the Dillard’s at the Sooner Fashion Mall, my mom and I would page through the folded button-up shirts, each in its cardboard sleeve, the way other kids must have flipped through LPs at record stores. We were looking for the rare and magical neck size of 17.5. If we found it, we bought it, regardless of the pattern. Button-ups were the only kind of shirts he wore, apart from the Hanes undershirts he wore beneath them. Even when he went jogging, he wore these button-ups, which would become soaked through with sweat. He thought it was amusing when I called him a sweatbomb, though I was, alas, aware that it was a term I had not invented. He appeared to think highly of almost anything I and my brother said or did.

Caesar, in his brilliant “Seize the Night,” profiles d.j. Mladen Solomun, “master key to the pleasure of thousands.” Solomun presides over the Ibizan night club Pacha. Caesar takes us inside the club for a Solomun set: 

Reaching the d.j. booth from the street feels like a psychedelic re-creation of the Steadicam shot in “GoodFellas”: after walking past a security guard, you enter a garden filled with sculptures of unicorns, giraffes, and naked women, then follow a winding corridor, lined with red lights, that leads you past a bustling kitchen and mixed-sex bathrooms into the main room of the club, where you pass through the V.I.P. area and, finally, down a small flight of stairs. The loudness is engulfing. Mesmeric hexagonal light panels rise and fall over the dance floor in response to the music, making the club feel like a living organism. 

My favourite part is Caesar’s description of losing his notebook on Pacha’s dance floor:

Many ravers near the decks had pupils like bath plugs, and they greeted Solomun’s approaching set ecstatically. The roiling hook of “Dos Blokes” poured into the club. Like almost everybody present, I raised a hand in the air. While doing so, I dropped my notebook, then spent an uncomfortable minute crawling amid dancing feet to retrieve it. Solomun flashed a thin smile but hardly acknowledged the clamor. He was at work.

Schjeldahl’s “Dutch Magus” is a delectable review of Hans Janssen’s Piet Mondrian: A Life. It’s especially good on Mondrian’s rhythm as the essence of his art:

Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch.

That “Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral” is inspired! 

All three pieces are great. I enjoyed them immensely.

September 26, 2022 Isssue

Marius Kociejowski’s The Serpent Coiled in Naples sounds like the kind of book I might be interested in. I want to thank Claudia Roth Pierpont for bringing it to my attention. But there’s one disappointing aspect of her review. It fails to provide a sufficiently long quotation from the book that would allow me to judge the quality of Kociejowski’s writing for myself. John Updike, in the Foreword to his great Picked-Up Pieces (1976), listed five rules of book reviewing. Number two is “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.” 

New Yorker book reviewers should always keep in mind that readers like me want to know not only what the book is about, but also how it’s written. James Wood knows this in his bones; he’s a generous quoter. That’s why he’s the magazine’s best reviewer. Too bad his focus is on fiction. 

3 for the Sea: Figuration

This is the tenth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favourite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), and Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of figuration.

“Four A.M. in the cashmere blackness” – how fine that is! I wish I’d written it. It’s from McPhee’s Looking for a Ship. It’s only six words, but it’s one of my favorite lines in the book. “Cashmere blackness” – is there a more evocative way to convey the texture of a night off the coast of Colombia? I can’t think of it. Here’s another from the same book: 

To look far down over the side at light from our ship on the racing dark water was to feel the power of the weighted glide, its controlled uncontrollability. We were a bowling ball, avoiding duckpins.

The duckpins are fishing boats and merchant ships in Stella’s vicinity. 

How about this beauty, also from Looking for a Ship: “In the heavy roll, Stella’s bridge wings alternately reach for the water, like the hands of a swimmer.”

“ ‘Hey Redmond!’ said Luke, getting to his feet with excessive energy, throwing the bug-proboscis stub of his cigarette into the sink. ‘You can’t just sit there dreaming! We must go. A trawler skipper – he can’t afford to wait. Not for anyone.’ ” When was the last time you saw a cigarette stub compared to an insect’s elongated sucking mouthpart? Never, I’ll bet. It’s totally original, delightful, and memorable. It’s from Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler. A few pages later, O’Hanlon writes another cigarette metaphor equally as good: “Luke took a hard suck on his catheter tube of a cigarette.” That one makes me smile every time I read it. Trawler brims with vivid metaphors and similes. Here’s a passage containing seven of them: 

Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva, I worked my way out of my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag and, lying back again on the bunk, I pulled on my pants, my trousers. I found my black socks (three to each foot, against the cold) and, bundling forward like a curled foetus, I lodged into my wooly carapace of a sweater. The effort of it: there was no rest anywhere, nothing would stay still … The mind-emptying noise of the engines faltered, throttled back, dipped like a Lancaster bomber coming into land, and a that moment the siren sounded, a piercingly high BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. Other smaller, straining engines came into life directly beneath me, and the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue, gently, very slowly, prone, through the hanging curtains of Luke’s bunk, over his flat blue sleeping-bag, out the other side – and it tipped me off and down on to his linear collection of red, blue and yellow plastic biscuit-boxes. My buttocks, I’m sorry to say, must have landed on his favourite box, his red Jacobs biscuit-box, because under me its top and sides blew-up, releasing a tight stash of small, empty, plastic screw-lid Marine Lab specimen-bottles all over the floor.

That “The mind-emptying noise of the engines faltered, throttled back, dipped like a Lancaster bomber coming into land, and a that moment the siren sounded, a piercingly high BEEP-BEEP-BEEP” is inspired! Notice also, “Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva”; “my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag”; “bundling forward like a curled foetus”; “my wooly carapace of a sweater”; and “the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue” – all wonderful metaphors that help us see, hear, and feel exactly what O’Hanlon experienced.

How about this for vivid metaphoric description:

I am afraid of the sea. I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal wave whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension.

That “brushfire crackle of the breaking wave” is very fine. So is the comparison with the “trustful beetle on the surface tension” of the water. The quotation is from Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau. Raban is a superb metaphorist. Here, from Passage to Juneau, are nine more examples of his art:

The terminal fell silent, except for the complaining gulls and the bronchial rattle of the generators aboard the emptied boats.

Past the lighthouse on Point Wilson, to the west of the ferry’s course, the water seethed like a pan of boiling milk.

Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water, where I let go the anchor, switched off the engine….

The sea, scored with current-lines, was like an ice-rink imprinted by the tracks of figure-skaters.

In the morning calm, this productive turbulence was revealed in the snaking S-shaped lines of kelp and driftwood that collected on the margins between eddies; in finger-sized whirlpools; in windrows of slick water that ran in twisting paths across the surface; in threads and seams of current, like whorled fingerprints.

The boat sauntered, at eight knots going on nine, through Gillard Passage and Dent Rapids – a scene of spent turmoil, like the tumbled sheets of an empty bed, with an appropriately salty, postcoital smell of bladder wrack drying on the rocks.

Outside the shelter of the island, the water was like a bolt of gray silk, lightly undulating in the first intimations of the ocean swell ahead. Soon the swell was regular and well-defined; rhythmical pulses of energy, like rippling muscles, moving at speed through the windless calm.

After twenty minutes of roller-coasting sailing, there was no more than a brisk one-foot chop on a flat sea. Running before the wind, under the clearing sky, I sat back and listened to the twiggy sibilance of the bow-wave as it broke from the hull – air and water getting mashed up together like egg whites in a blender. 

Reluctant to break the windless silence, listening for animals in the brush along the shore, I let the sky revolve overhead and watched an eagle soaring on a thermal like a scrap of charred paper against the blue.

McPhee, O’Hanlon, and Raban are masters of figuration. Another aspect of their art is their keen eye for detail. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.