Helen Shaw on Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan, Business Page (1985)

Helen Shaw has an interesting piece in this week’s issue. Titled “Out of Focus,” it’s a review of Sharr White’s play Pictures From Home, an adaptation of Larry Sultan’s 1992 photo-memoir of the same name. Shaw pans the play, but praises Sultan’s photos, a selection of which, she says, is projected on a wall, part of the stage set. She says of Sultan’s images,

His pieces gleam with a baked Southern California palette: jacaranda light, golf-course-green carpeting, and the parents’ burnished, teak-dark tans. 

She says that White’s play introduced her to Sultan’s work, “which knocked me sideways.” I know the feeling. That’s the way I felt when I first discovered it. His Business Page (1985) is one of my all-time favourite photos (see above). 

For an excellent essay on Sultan’s work, see Philip Gefter’s “Sex and Longing in Larry Sultan’s California Suburbs” (newyorker.com, April 9, 2017).  

February 27, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rebecca Mead’s excellent “Dutch Treat,” a review of Rijksmuseum’s landmark Vermeer exhibition. Mead writes, “The Rijksmuseum has corralled enough Vermeers to make the most hard-hearted of robber barons swoon—twenty-eight paintings, out of an acknowledged thirty-six or thirty-seven surviving works by the artist, who may have produced no more than fifty in his short lifetime.” She says that the exhibition “gathers more Vermeers in one place than Vermeer himself ever had the opportunity to see.” 

One of the Vermeers on display is the magnificent View of Delft (c. 1660). Proust thought this “the most beautiful painting in the world.” Mead describes it wonderfully:

The latter work, a cityscape in which the red-roofed town appears as a horizontal sliver between glimmering water below and a wide swath of sky above, inspired the rediscovery, beginning in the eighteen-sixties, of Vermeer, whose reputation had languished in the preceding two centuries. Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream. But the painting also conveys the sensation of atmospheric humidity. In a catalogue essay, Pieter Roelofs, one of the show’s curators and the head of paintings and sculpture at the museum, points out that Vermeer hangs this sky with low cumulus clouds of a sort that were almost never represented by his contemporaries. In this canvas, as in “The Little Street,” with its weeping brickwork and stained whitewash, Vermeer paints dampness as well as light.

That “Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream” is superb! The entire review is superb! I enjoyed it immensely.

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft (c. 1660)

Postscript: Charles Simic 1938 - 2023

Charles Simic (Photo by Beowulf Sheehan)

I don’t know how I missed it, but I just found out today that Charles Simic died last month, age eighty-four. He wrote several critical pieces that are among my touchstones. One of them is “Aberlardo Morell’s Poetry of Appearances” (included in his 2003 collection The Metaphysician in the Dark), in which he said of Morell’s photos,

The commonplace object is singled out, brought out of its anonymity, so that it stands before us fully revealed in its uniqueness and its otherness. In the metaphysical solitude of the object we catch a glimpse of our own. Here is the unknowable ground of appearances, that something that is always there without being perceived, the world in its nameless, uninterpreted presence which the camera makes visible. That’s what casts the spell on me in Morell’s photographs: the evidence that our daily lives are the sight of momentary insights and beauties which lie around us to be recovered.

Another piece I treasure is his “Poetry in Unlikely Places” (The New York Review of Books, September 25, 2003; included in his 2006 collection Memory Piano), a review of The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. Simic wrote:

Nevertheless, he is a far more original poet in my view when he had no plan in mind, when a poem came to him in the fish soup he was eating, as it were. Something close at hand, perfectly familiar, and yet somehow never fully noticed in its peculiarity set his imagination going. Can’t you see how interesting artichokes are? the poem about them says. For Neruda almost everything that exists deserves equal reverence and can become a subject of poetry.

My favorite Simic essay is “The Life of Images” (collected in his 2015 book of the same name). It’s a consideration of the photography of Berenice Abbott. It concludes:

The enigma of the ordinary – that’s what makes old photographs so poignant: An ancient streetcar in sepia color. A few men holding on to their hats on a windy day. They hurry with their faces averted except for one befuddled old fellow who has stopped and is looking over his shoulder at what we cannot see, but where, we suspect, we ourselves will be coming into view someday, as hurried and ephemeral as any one of them.

“The enigma of the ordinary” – right there is Simic’s great subject. I say “is” because, for me, his essays will always be alive. 

February 13 & 20, 2023 Issue

One character trait I cannot abide is snobbery. I detect it in James Wood’s description of his mother in this week’s issue. He says she “possessed a full complement of petit-bourgeois anxieties, tics, and unreadable rules (such as putting the milk into the teacup before the tea)." “Petit-bourgeois” is just a fancy way of saying “lower middle class.” So that’s what Wood thinks of his mother: she’s lower middle class. He’s said it before. In his “On Not Going Home” (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014), he writes, “It was important to my Scottish petty-bourgeois mother that I didn’t sound like a Geordie.” Is there a difference between “petty-bourgeois” and “petit-bourgeois”? Wood changed it to “petit” when he collected the piece in his Serious Noticing (2019). That sounds a bit better, a shade less condescending. But whether it’s “petty-bourgeois” or “petit-bourgeois,” it’s a snobbish thing to say. I admire Wood’s writing immensely. I just wish he wasn’t so damn class-conscious.  

Postscript: Ronald Blythe 1922 - 2023

Ronald Blythe (Photo by Eamonn McCabe)

I see in the Times that Ronald Blythe has died: “Ronald Blythe, Scribe of the English Countryside, Dies at 100” (The New York Times, February 8, 2023). Blythe wrote Akenfield (1969), one of my favorite books. It’s a powerful elegy for the fading of “the old pattern of life” in a Suffolk village. Blythe asked, “How much preserved? How much lost?” Pig farmer, sheep farmer, blacksmith, ploughman, nurse, gravedigger, orchard worker, thatcher, veterinarian, horseman, harness maker, magistrate, teacher – Blythe talked to them all, and many others as well. One of his most memorable portraits is of “the ringing men”:

The bells tumble through their paces with hypnotic precision. They are incredibly old and vast, with names of saints, princes, squires, parsons and merchants, as well as rhymes and prayers, engraved on their sides. The ringing men know them both by parish and individually, and will travel from tower to tower across the county in pursuit of a particular sound. The world to them is a vision of belfries. Some part of the general fretfulness of humanity seems to be soothed by this vision. Theology is put to the count. Lost in an art-pastime-worship based on blocks of circulating figures which look like one of those numeric keys to the Great Pyramid’s secret, the ringing men are out on their own in a clashing sphere of golden decibels. The great changes are mesmeric and at half-way through the “attempt” the ringers are drugged by sound and arithmetic. Their shirt-sleeved arms fly with the ropes and, because their whole personality bends to the careening mass of metal above, they often look as if they had lost their will, and as if the bells were in charge of them.

That “The world to them is a vision of belfries” is very fine. The book brims with surprising, original, delightful sentences:

The clay acres themselves are the only tablets on which generations of village men have written, as John Clare did, I am, but nothing remains of these sharp, straight signatures.

His own life and the life of the corn and fruit and creatures clocks along with the same fatalistic movement. Spring-birth, winter-death and in between the harvest. This year, next year and forever – for that was the promise. 

The older farmers, too, are still emotionally caught up in what they called at the time the “coming down process” and have vivid memories of being young in a twitch-ridden landscape, with water spread in thin lakes on top of the undrained clay and buildings sliding down into nettles.

Yet the one certain thing about Davie is his crushing sanity.

It is a suitable climate for a little arable kingdom where flints are the jewels and where existence is sharp-edged.

Blythe is gone now, but his splendid Akenfield ensures he will not be forgotten. 

Cormac McCarthy's Consoling Breakfasts

Illustration by Bill Bragg, from Dwight Garner's "Cormac McCarthy Loves a Good Diner"

One of the most enjoyable essays I’ve read recently is Dwight Garner’s “Cormac McCarthy Loves a Good Diner” (The New York Times, December 19, 2022), in which Garner notes the many wonderful food scenes in McCarthy’s work and wonders why they resonate so much. Garner says,

McCarthy likes to feed his characters, and the food in his fiction resonates more than it does in most novelists’ work. In part, this is because nearly all the lives in McCarthy’s world are lived close to the bone, often in isolation, and food is a rare respite from intricate forms of pain.

I think this is true. And maybe it’s also because McCarthy likes to describe process, whether it’s fixing a tire, roping a calf, breaking a wild horse, rolling a cigarette, or just eating a meal. Here, from The Crossing (1994), is one of his great breakfasts:

He was up in the morning before daybreak and he went through the dark house to the kitchen where there was light. The woman was sitting at the kitchen table listening to an old wooden radio shaped like a bishop’s hat. She was listening to a station out of Ciudad Juárez and when he stood in the door she turned it off and looked at him.

Está bien, he said. No tiene que apagarlo.

She shrugged and rose. She said that it was over anyway. She asked him if he would like his breakfast and he said that he would.

While she was fixing it he walked out to the barn and brushed the horses and cleaned their hooves and then saddled Niño and left the latigo loose and he strapped the old visalia packframe onto his bedhorse and tied on his soogan and went back to the house. She got his breakfast out of the oven and set it on the table. She’d cooked eggs and ham and flour tortillas and beans and she set it in front of him and poured his coffee.

Quiere crema? she said.

No gracias. Hay salsa?

She set the salsa at his elbow in a small lavastone molcajete.

Gracias.

He thought that she would leave but she didn’t. She stood watching him eat.

Es pariente del señor Sanders? she said.

No. Él era amigo de mi padre.

He looked up at her. Siéntate, he said. Puede sentarse. 

She made a little motion with her hand. He didn’t know what it meant. She stood as before.

Su salud no es Buena, he said.

She said that it was not. She said that he had had trouble with his eyes and that he was very sad over his nephew who was killed in the war. Conoció a su sobrino? She said.

Sí. Y usted?

She said that she had not known the nephew. She said that when she came to work here the nephew was already dead. She said that she had seen his picture and that he was very handsome.

He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her.

Tiene que hacer un viaje largo? she said.

He rose and put the napkin on the table and took his hat up from the other chair and put it on. He said he did indeed have a long journey. He said he did not know what the end of his journey would look like or whether he would know it when he got there and asked her in spanish to pray for him but she said she had already decided to do so before he even asked.

That “He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her” is superb. Nobody does “and” like McCarthy, not even Hemingway, although he’s a close second. I like the details, too – “the old wooden radio shaped like a bishop’s hat,” and the salsa in the “small lavastone molcajete.” The whole scene is comfortingly rendered, a rare instance of solace in this otherwise cold, pitiless, brilliant western. 

February 6, 2023 Issue

I don’t know, maybe it’s my mood. I can’t find a single thing in this week’s issue that sparks my interest, not even a single sentence. That’s unusual for me. But I’m not going to pretend I’m interested when I’m not. Even my go-to-when-all-else-fails column – Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two” – a reliable source of inspired description, did nothing for me this week. Bloody steak? Braised tripe? Black pudding? No thank you. But wait! There's dessert - something called Queen of Puddings (“a layer of custard topped with raspberry jam and torched tufts of meringue”). I'll have some of that, please.  

Photo by Morgan Levy, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables For Two: Lord's"

January 30, 2023 Issue

What to make of Elif Batuman’s “Novels of Empire,” in this week's issue? It’s an argument against PEN Ukraine and other Ukrainian literary groups who want Russian literature banned. It’s an argument against Ukrainians who want statues of Pushkin torn down. It’s an argument for rereading Russian classics “in the shadow of the Ukraine war,” to quote the tagline of the piece. What shapes her argument is her “need to find new ‘contrapuntal’ ways of reading." That means seeing the Russian classics as a body of literature with two geographies: one in Russia, richly elaborated; the other, Ukraine, strongly resisted. She says, “Literature looks different depending on where you read it.” 

Batuman’s argument seems reasonable enough. Why do I resist it? I think it’s because she doesn’t show a strong enough awareness of the brutal reality in Ukraine. She tries. She says, “Of course—I saw, in Kyiv—you couldn’t expect people in a war not to read from a national perspective.” But is PEN Ukraine’s call for a ban on Russian literature a matter of nationalism? Isn’t it a matter of deep revulsion at what Russia is doing? Isn’t it a form of protest? Batuman calls Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “sickening.” Yet ... she doesn’t seem to be sickened all that much. 

3 More for the Road: Robert Sullivan's "Cross Country"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favourite travel books – Anthony Bailey's Along the Edge of the Forest (1983), Robert Sullivan's Cross Country (2006), and Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia (2010) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Cross Country.

This book is a masterpiece. I first read it in 2006 when it was originally published. I enjoyed it immensely. Now, seventeen years later, I’ve just finished rereading it; I find myself relishing it even more, if that’s possible. It’s an account of a six-day, 2,900-mile road trip that Sullivan and his family (wife and two kids) took from Portland, Oregon, to New York City in 2004, driving interstate highways almost all the way. The key word here is “interstate.” Sullivan is an experienced interstate traveler. He's crossed the country close to thirty times. Now (in the summer of 2004), facing the prospect of yet another cross-country trip, he feels anxious, “imagining all that could go wrong, remembering all that has gone wrong in the past.” Yet, he also feels “really good, as if we were heading out for the very first time. That is what the road and a full cup of coffee in your hand on the road in the morning will do to you.”  

For Sullivan, the interstates are America. He says, “It seems to me that the real America is the farthest thing from people’s minds when they are stopping for some fast food on I-5 in between Los Angeles and San Diego, much less driving from the East Coast to the West. But there it is, the real America, right there.” He’s an aficionado of all things interstate. He notices everything – restroom towel dispensers (the enMotion towel dispenser is “a thing of on-the-road-recycled-paper-towel-dispensing beauty, or at least the nicest restroom towel dispenser I have ever seen”), plastic coffee lids (“There are variations on the peel-and-lock system, the variations mostly being in the design of the sipping hole shape, and in the configuration of the lock …”), concrete traffic barriers (“The Jersey barrier is a poured-concrete barrier that is anywhere from three to five feet tall and that is designed such that when a car’s wheels hit the low-sloped bottom, the wheels turn back toward the driving lane, the car tilting up as its wheel rides the barrier, to minimize scraping”), and much more. 

He’s also acutely aware of interstate history (“In the roads of America is the history of America”). He thinks about history as he’s driving, and he lets us (and his wife and kids) in on his thoughts. He’s constantly on the look out for road-side historical markers (“In between two dusty green hills on the Forgotten Trail, past the town of Dayton and just before the Forgotten Trail crosses the Snake River, our rental car pulls up beside a large Lewis and Clark roadside historical marker, the marker nearly as big as a pool table, the car blinker blinking, ticking, timing us”). He frequently draws parallels, sometimes humorously, between the historic Lewis and Clark cross-country expedition (1804–1806) and the cross-country “expedition” that he and his family are on (“We are commuters in the grandest sense, wagon train commuters, stagecoach followers, riding in the round-trip dust of Lewis and Clark”). And, as he drives, he tells fascinating stories about the origin of various interstate fixtures such as motels, gas stations, drive-through restaurants, traffic signs, hamburgers, even the rumble strip (“And now, I am about to swerve, ever so slightly to the right. I am about to hit the so-called rumble strip. Or at least I think I hit a rumble strip, the rumble strip having been developed by the state highway department of Indiana, on rural roads, out where a person might miss a rural Stop sign”).

As Sullivan drives across the country, he sees places that remind him of his previous cross-country experiences, including the worst one he’s ever had, when he attempted to drive a giant rental truck packed with all his family’s furniture and belongings from the West Coast to the East Coast, towing the family car on a trailer, and the truck broke down just outside Saint Paul, Minnesota, and he had to get another rental truck, and do a load swap, and leave some of his furniture behind in Saint Paul because the substitute rig was smaller than the one that broke down, and then, driving this substitute truck, with his car in tow, made his way to New Jersey, to the town where his parents live, and there “proceeded to experience the worst moments of the worst cross-country trip”:

As I began to drive through the town I spent my high school years in – the town I learned to drive in, even – the automatic-pilot part of my brain suddenly took a route that was off the main street, a route that I would have taken had I been in high school or even later, a route that I would have taken millions of times, instinctively, a route on which trucks are not permitted. As I drove down this road, I relaxed, having hat happy feeling of absolutely knowing deep in my driving bones precisely where I was going. I don’t think I was even thinking that I was driving a truck at all. As I remember it now, I must have been looking at the railroad overpass for at least ten or twenty seconds, my face likely smiling, my brain recognizing it as my brain would have recognized it when I was a high school driver with a station wagon that could easily clear twelve feet. I only began to read the railroad overpass as a guy driving a huge truck with a car trailer attached a few seconds before I reached it. When I did. I slammed on the brakes as much as I could slam them given my twenty-five-foot long vehicular condition, and I stopped about ten feet from having sheared off the top of the truck. Then I shouted a profanity, because I was upset, because I had traveled three thousand miles successfully through territory that was to me, a novice trucker-with-a-trailer attached, like territory at the middle of the map Lewis and Clark had set out with – blank, unknown, potentially treacherous, in light of my trucking skills – only to become trapped in the place I knew so well, perhaps better than anywhere, my teenage terra cognita.

This story of Sullivan’s “worst cross-country trip ever” is unforgettable. I remember it from my 2006 reading of the book. The above scene, traumatic as it is for Sullivan (and the reader), is not the most traumatic part. The situation gets even worse. Sullivan describes every excruciating detail of it, including the car trailer falling off the back of the truck and Sullivan not being able to move it by himself. He writes, “It was at this point in the worst cross-country trip I have ever taken that I broke down, as in wept.”

Sullivan is a superb describer. Here, for example, is his depiction of the Old Works Golf Course in Anaconda, Montana:

Here at the golf course, we walk simultaneously through lush green landscape, a re-creation of Scottish splendor, an idyllic ideal of a life-giving glade, and a denuded site, a scene of industrial detritus, of raw earth used and discarded and left for dead. It’s a vineyard and a graveyard. In view is the remediated, or at least partially remediated, Warm Creek, a stream once involved in smelting copper, now used to frame a fairway. Ahead I see the green of the greens as they fade into varying shades of less-watered green, and finally unwatered green, native plants and dried grasses, this last layer then surrounded by rubble from the roughed-up hills, the beat-up mini-mountains. I see the paths of slag, the dross of the mining process, an industrial waste, a metamorphic condition that from a distance could be a volcanic beach in the South Pacific.

And here’s his description of the Kum & Go convenience store and gas station in Miles City, Montana:

At Kum & Go, with coffee in hand, I pull up to the gas-pumping island, as people insert credit cards, open gas tanks, squeeze pump handles, as they say nothing at all. I look around to see that Subway sandwich shop that is built into the Kum & Go has a special on buffalo sandwiches: “delicious roast bison.” It is an example of diversity within monotony, a nationally orchestrated regional nondelicacy. I see the morning light hitting the diesel gas pump back where the truckers are fueling and wish, as usual, that I were a landscape painter – to capture the pure light that causes the entire convenience store and gas station to appear golden, like a promise!

Note the recurrence of that “I see” (“I see the green of the greens”; “I see the paths of slag”; “I see the morning light”). Cross Country is a tremendous act of ongoing attention. Here’s another example, a description of the Holiday Inn Express parking lot in Beloit, Wisconsin:

Outside, the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express this morning is like an old friend who has aged badly: a vast concrete steppe marked by fast-food restaurants that shoot up like grooves of leafless trees, by tumbleweedlike bits of trash. I see now – as I lug the bags to the trunk and remove the rooftop pack that I believed would ease our trip but did not – that the drive-through restaurant where I watched a group of young people accost drive-throughers last night was actually farther way than I originally determined. Indeed, between my rented Impala and the McDonald’s is a drive-through Wendy’s, a Wendy’s I completely missed, a Wendy’s where, at this moment, a garbage truck is taking away the garbage – a tidal movement that makes me look around to suddenly see all the Dumpsters in my vicinity, and causes me to conjure all the Dumpsters at all the fast-food restaurants along the forty-three thousand miles of interstate highways. I stand alongside the car, the Impala key safely around my neck, and also notice a truck filled with fencing materials, a cargo of demarcation that pulled up alongside our rented Impala as I lay sort of sleeping last night. In this panorama that I have faced every morning over the past few crossing days, I see little variations of sameness, a view of the identical places differently arranged: Country Kitchen, Arby’s, Econolodge, and next to McDonald’s, a giant billboard as big as a motel swimming pool that says, “Mmmmm …”

I see little variations of sameness – right there, I think, is one of the book’s main themes, perhaps even its governing aesthetic.

One of my favorite moments in Cross Country happens as Sullivan and his family cross into Ohio. Sullivan tells us what he sees:

A large billboard marks Ohio’s very first “WELCOME TO OHIO,” and as I see it and scan the horizon, I glimpse suddenly laundry flying on a line, a stunning view, a kind of mundanely breathtaking view: the first emphatic sign of pure non-road-related life, of life not solely based on a car, that I have seen for hundreds and hundreds of miles. It is a note of stationary domesticity that is startling in its nontransitory nature, especially alongside a really big road. I pointed to it but I’m not sure anyone else saw it. I’m pretty sure I did not imagine it.

That “mundanely breathtaking” made me smile. Who else would notice laundry flying on a line and respond to it like that? Not many. Sullivan has the sensibility of a great street photographer (except instead of streets, his subject is interstates). He sees the extraordinary in the ordinary. 

In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Cross Country, including its action, structure, description, point of view, sense of place, and sense of people. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Ian Frazier’s great Travels in Siberia. 

Postscript: Robert Sullivan has written some of The New Yorker’s best “Talk of the Town” stories, including “Facing History,” "Say Cheese," "Super-Soaker," "Rabbit Ears," "Shredding Party," "The Crossing," and "A Two-Hour Tour."