Two New Yorker Writers Make the Times' "10 Best Books of 2022"

Hooray for two New Yorker writers – Hua Hsu and Rachel Aviv – for making The New York Times’ “The 10 Best Books of 2022”! Hsu is on the list for his memoir Stay True, part of which recently appeared in The New Yorker as “My Dad and Kurt Cobain” (August 22, 2022). Aviv is there for her Strangers To Ourselves, a study of psychological distress, part of which appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker, under the title “The Challenge of Going off Psychiatric Drugs” (April 9, 2019). Congratulations to both writers! 

Postscript: There's another book by a New Yorker writer that I'd put on that list - Ben McGrath's Riverman, based on his brilliant New Yorker piece "The Wayfarer."

November 21, 2022 Issue

Sorry, I know I should be more responsive. But I’ve flipped through this week’s issue, and nothing grabs me. K. Leander Williams, in her “Goings on About Town” note on the indie band Alvvays, mentions Molly Rankin. I recall a wonderful portrait of Rankin, by Daniel Krall, that appeared in the March 9, 2015 New Yorker. I liked it so much, I included it in my “Best of 2015: Illustrations.” I’d like to see more of Krall’s work in the magazine. 

Lynne Arriale Trio's Exquisite "Estaté"

The Lynne Arriale Trio’s “Estaté” haunts me. I can’t get it out of my head. I don’t want to. It’s an exquisite song – intensely romantic, deliciously blue. Composed in 1960 by Bruno Martino (lyrics by Bruno Brighetti), it became a jazz standard many years ago when João Gilberto recorded a catchy Bossa nova version of it in on his classic 1977 album Amoroso. There have been many renditions of it since. But, for me, the most compelling is the Lynne Arriale Trio’s version on their Live at Montreux (2000). The Trio consists of Lynne Arriale (piano), Jay Anderson (bass), and Steve Davis (drums). Arriale interprets it so ardently, so achingly. You can see the depth of her passion for it in a YouTube video of her Trio performing "Estaté," among other songs, at a 2005 concert in Stuttgart. Great as this Stuttgart variation is, I still prefer the earlier Montreux version. Oh to have been there in person to hear it. The album is the next best thing to being there. I love it.  

November 14, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is David Owen’s absorbing “They Shoot, He Scores,” a profile of the film composer Carter Burwell. Owen takes us into Studio Two at Abbey Road – the Beatles’ old studio – where Burwell is recording his score for Martin McDonagh’s new movie, The Banshees of Inisherin:

On the first day in Studio Two, McDonagh, who had just returned from a holiday in the Lake District, told Burwell, “I’ve been humming all the tunes.” His only instruction to Burwell, he said, had been not to write anything that sounded like Irish pub music—“the easy go-to for a film like this.” Burwell’s score features the harp, an instrument so closely associated with Ireland that its image appears on the country’s coins, but there’s nothing publike about the melodies he came up with for it, which often float on a current of strings, in a way that the harpist himself called “dreamy.” The score also features a synthesized celeste, which Burwell played and recorded himself. A real celeste looks like a shrunken upright piano and sounds like tinkling bells, or a child’s xylophone; it’s the most conspicuous instrument in Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” and in John Williams’s “Harry Potter” scores. What Burwell described to me as the “plicky-plucky sounds” of the harp and the celeste created the fairy-tale effect that he was aiming for.

For me, the most interesting aspects of Owen’s piece are his descriptions of Burwell at work. For example:

Toward the end of the morning, Burwell recorded the music for a scene in which Pádraic’s sister, Siobhán, played by Kerry Condon, is riding to the mainland in an open boat. Pádraic watches from the top of a cliff, and they wave to each other. After the musicians had played the passage once, McDonagh asked Burwell to come up to the control room.

“This is a tricky one, Carter,” he said. “We’ve been working with a version where the music ends on the first wave.” In the version Burwell had just conducted, the music stopped ten seconds later. The difference was small, but it affected the emotional tone of the departure, adding emphasis to a moment that McDonagh preferred dissipate in silence. Starting the music earlier solved that problem but created a synchronization issue—a chord now arrived right before a small group of birds took flight from a pier, prematurely signalling their movement.

“It looks like it’s early by a few frames,” Burwell said. “The music can sometimes happen after the picture, but you can’t have it before.” He said that he would adjust the tempos in his hotel room that night but leave the “ink” unchanged—meaning that new scores wouldn’t have to be printed.

Another example:

On a video monitor in his office, Burwell played me a scene from “Banshees” in which Farrell’s character is driving milk to town in a wagon. There’s music but no dialogue. The melody, consisting mainly of flute, harp, and strings, is slow and understated. “My job is to bring you into this world,” he said. “But, if it starts to seem like it’s about the music, that’s another thing.” He showed me the scene again, with a slightly different score: “This was my first version. It’s very similar, but the chords are more definitively major.” McDonagh had found it “too warm” and “too resolved,” he said. “Martin felt—and I agreed with him—that, at this point in the film, it would be better to keep the over-all tone a little gloomier.”

Reading “They Shoot, He Scores,” I found myself wondering what The Banshees of Inisherin’s score actually sounds like. I went to iTunes and downloaded it. I’m playing it as I write this. It’s delightful. Now I want to see the movie. 

Acts of Seeing: Sand Dune

Photo by John MacDougall

I took this photo November 9, 2021. It shows the dune at Ross Lane Beach, in Prince Edward Island National Park. To take this picture, I stood on the boardwalk that crosses the dune and goes down to the beach. It’s one of my favorite places. In summer the dune is covered with pink wild roses. But I think I like the fall view slightly better. I love the wheat color of the marram grass dotted with bright red rosehips. The beach and ocean are just on the other side. Unfortunately, on September 24 of this year, Hurricane Fiona blew half this dune away. The above picture preserves the way it used to look – a look we may not see ever again.  

Who Should Succeed Schjeldahl?

Peter Schjeldahl (Photo by Alex Remnick)

Peter Schjeldahl is irreplaceable. Nevertheless, The New Yorker needs to have an art critic. Who are some of the possibilities? I see Hilton Als had an “Art World” piece in last week’s issue. But I'm not sure he’s the right guy for the job. He's too caught up in identity politics. I’d like to see someone in the position whose values are governed more by pleasure than anything else. And I’d like to see someone who writes with an unmistakable, idiosyncratic, formally coherent personal style. Here are some candidates I’d consider if I were picking the magazine’s new art critic: 

1. David Salle 

2. Wayne Koestenbaum

3. Gini Alhadeff

4. Susan Tallman

5. Johanna Fateman

The best living art writer is T. J. Clark. But his thinking might be a shade too metaphysical for the New Yorker job. The perfect choice is Salle: see his brilliant series of art pieces for The New York Review of Books. 

November 7, 2022 Issue

Am I the only one who finds Alex Katz’s paintings shallow? Andrea K. Scott, in this week’s issue, says of him, 

His sharp eye for fashion (a chic red lip, a patterned scarf, a snazzy pair of sandals) can be deceptive. Such details are to Katz what apples were to Cézanne (whom Katz has called “the first artist I understood”): an invitation to eye the interplay of color and light, load a brush with oil, and master the depths of a painting’s surface. [“In the Museums”]

Details? Katz’s paintings have no details, no specificity. They’re massive simplifications. His figures have the blank look of mannequins. 

Depth? That’s a laugh. There is no depth in a Katz picture. It’s all surface. Katz is a master of superficiality. 

October 31, 2022 Issue

One of the hallmarks of Peter Schjeldahl’s exquisite writing style is its poetic compression. David Remnick, in his “Postscript: Peter Schjeldahl,” in this week’s issue, touches on this quality when he says, “And a voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny. A poet’s voice – epigrammatic, nothing wasted.” Here are half a dozen examples from Schjeldahl’s most recent collection, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (2019):

The buzz of a Friedrich occurs when what have seemed mere tints in a tonal composition combust as distinctly scented hues – citron lights, plum darks – and you don’t so much look at a picture as breathe it.

Gradually the slot-eyed, sutured hoods give way to lima-bean-shaped heads as weighty as cannonballs, with cyclopean eyes transfixed by paintings, books, and bottles or staring into comfortless space. Belligerent arms wield garbage-can lids, and legs form grisly chorus lines on red and black killing grounds. Cigarette butts, old shoes, and studio detritus accumulate: junk for the junkman’s son. 

But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his picture’s smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color.

The effects serve sharply limned figures whose sculptural roundness, warm flesh, splendid raiment, and distinctive personalities leap to the eye. Anatomical details enthrall: hands that touch and grip with tangible pressures, masses of hair given depth and definition by a few highlighted strands.

At a quiet coast in a world at war, Mondrian reduced a pier, the ocean, and starlight to a digital code: this horizontal a wave, that vertical a gleam. It is not representation. It is a construction, shimmering in the mind.

I’m just in a mood – enhanced, now, by the thought of the inexplicably, inchoately thrilling arc of black paint that slashes Matisse’s Portrait of Olga Merson (1911) from chin to left thigh – to insist on a hierarchy of sensations that favor the experience of being tripped cleanly out of ourselves and into wondering glee. 

Acts of Seeing: Inuit Sled

Photo by John MacDougall

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

May 9, 2006, I found myself in Ikpiarjuk, Nunavut, for a Qikiqtani Inuit Association meeting. In the evening, after the meeting adjourned, I went out on the ice and photographed the many beautiful long-runnered Inuit sleds parked there. One sled, in particular, caught my eye. It was at least twenty-four feet long and had a cabin painted powder blue that matched the color of the sky. The picture is filled with clear Arctic light. That’s the aspect I most relish, that and the over-all colors – blue and white, with the tow rope adding just the right touch of bright yellow.  

3 for the Sea: Details

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

Art is in the details. Consider this passage, one of my favourites in O’Hanlon’s Trawler: 

Smacked left, hard, against the steel plates of the inward bulging port-bow and right, hard, against the steel partition of the rusty shower, I pitched to my knees in front of the seatless bowl and held on to the rim with both hands, hard. On the floor to either side were two big circular iron valves, each stamped SCUPPER DISCHARGE O/BOARD. I lowered my face into the bowl. The head-torch lit up every ancient and modern shit-splatter: one, particularly old and black, in front of my nostrils, was shaped like a heart. And then I said goodbye to all that Guiness, to the pig’s supper at the Royal Hotel (£28 for two) and even, perhaps to a day-old bolus of breakfast at Bev’s Kitchen, Nairn.

I remember reading this for the first time, and thinking, oh god, he’s not actually going to do this. Then comes “I lowered my face into the bowl,” and I realize ugh, here we go! And then comes that transfixing, unforgettable bit of grossness: “The head-torch lit up every ancient and modern shit-splatter: one, particularly old and black, in front of my nostrils, was shaped like a heart.” 

Let’s consider another example. I mentioned earlier the artful way Raban, in Passage to Juneau, blends his account of his journey through the Inside Passage with that of Captain George Vancouver two hundred years previous. At one point, Raban describes a flogging that took place on Vancouver’s Discovery:

At six bells in the forenoon watch (eleven o’clock), all officers and midshipmen were ordered to present themselves in uniform and wearing swords, in the main cabin. The fifteen marines aboard were mustered on the quarterdeck under their lieutenant, standing at attention with muskets shouldered. The bosun’s mate carried the cat-o’-nine tails in his ceremonial red-plush bag. (Hence “to let the cat out of the bag.”)

Archibald Menzies, as ship’s naturalist, claimed the privilege of a civilian and kept to his private cabin, where he still could hear the intolerably long-drawn-out administration of the punishment. The drumlike construction of the ship’s hull made the sounds of John Noot’s footsteps, and each crack of the lash, reverberate between decks.

After the first dozen lashes was an interval. Blood trickled from the welts on Pitt’s narrow back; his body looked like a carcass hanging in a butcher’s shop. Mudge detached himself from the line of officers and went up to the boy, saying that if Pitt would vow to behave better in the future, he would plead with the captain to remit the final dozen lashes. 

With what was left of his words, the midshipman said something about “honour,” and then that he “would not begd off by Mr. Mudge.”

Noot laid on twelve more strokes of the cat.

That, for me, is one of the most memorable scenes in the book. What makes it memorable is the detail – the red-plush bag in which the cat-o’-nine tails is carried, the reverberation of the crack of the lash between decks, Pitt’s body like “a carcass hanging in a butcher shop.” The terse unflinching final line (“Noot laid on twelve more strokes of the cat”) is inspired.

McPhee’s selection of details in Looking for a Ship is masterful. Here’s his description of Stella’s mooring line – itself a detail not many people would notice:

Ships are tied up with what the rest of the world would call ropes. They look anachronistic – like rope you would see in a seaport museum, but larger. A good mooring line costs eight thousand dollars. Made of Dacron for strength and polypropylene for flexibility, it is six hundred feet long. We carry eighteen. As a mooring line payed out over the side and reached like a suspension cable in the direction of the pier, the ship was so askew that six hundred feet might not do. You marry one line to another if the need arises. In Genoa once, on the Almeria Lykes, Washburn married three lines and winched the ship more than a thousand feet. The one line spanned the distance here and was soon secured to bollards. A dugout canoe passed below it, moving smartly under a sail made of flour sacks. Very slowly against the wind – completing what Washburn would later call “one of the poorest dockings in marine history” – Stella reeled herself in. 

I relish that extra detail – “A dugout canoe passed below it, moving smartly under a sail made of flour sacks.” It shows McPhee’s avid eye for particulars. 

In next month’s post, the last in this series, I’ll try to sum up my experience rereading these three great books.