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| Janet Malcolm, Ermine (2013) |
Working with the cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, Reichardt films as if in a state of rapt attention, reserving her keenest ardor and inspiration for the art itself: as Lizzy sculpts and assembles and glazes and even just ponders, the film’s visual contemplations seem to get deep into Lizzy’s creative soul. ["Goings On About Town: On the Big Screen"]
Sounds good; I think I’ll check it out. Reichardt directed one of my all-time favorite films – Wendy and Lucy (2008). Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott listed it as one of their “25 Best Films of the Century So Far” (The New York Times, June 19, 2017). See also Jonathan Raban’s excellent review of it, “Metronatural America” (The New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009; included in his great 2010 essay collection Driving Home).
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| Photo by Grant Cornett |
Part of the disconnection that the movie presents as a universal fact of our world is produced by the odd way it is put together. And, once one notices the inorganic structuring of the material, and the hostile tease of the editing, one begins to wonder if the conjunction of so many mishaps isn’t a kind of abuse of the freedom that’s normally granted to fiction.
Of another Iñárritu movie, 21 Grams, he writes,
“21 Grams” moves sideways and turns itself inside out, but in no order. We see Sean Penn lying in a hospital bed and then, a few scenes later, moving around outdoors, and then back in bed, and then making love, and then nearly dead, and so on. But why? Since none of the characters are part of any reality that makes sense to us, we can’t say, as we did at “Amores Perros,” that a social malaise has made the normal sequencing of the story irrelevant. On the contrary, we may wonder if Iñárritu and his editor didn’t scissor the movie into fragments in order to give soap-opera dismalness the appearance of radical art.
Denby doesn’t totally dismiss these “puzzle box” films. He says of Pulp Fiction, “By scrambling the time sequence, Tarantino explicitly created an impression of the eternal present, the sense that what is happening was always happening, will always be happening.” But he does make the case for chronological structure:
Storytellers, relying on sequence and causality, make sense out of nonsense; they impose order, economy, and moral consequence on the helter-skelter wash of experience. The notion that one event causes another, and that the entire chain is a unified whole, with a complex, may be ambivalent, but, in any case, coherent meaning, not only brings us to a point of resolution; it allows us to navigate through our lives.
Contrast this with McPhee’s view in “Structure.” He finds chronological order boring. He says, “After ten years of it at Time and The New Yorker, I felt both rutted and frustrated by always knuckling under to the sweep of chronology, and I longed for a thematically dominated structure.” He refers to his “A Fleet of One” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2003), an account of a road trip he took with trucker Don Ainsworth:
Think about it. Think how it appeared to the writer when it was still a mass of notes. The story goes from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. Has any other writer ever done that? Has any other writer ever not done that? Even I had done something like it in discussing North American geology in “Annals of the Former World.” You don’t need to remember much past Meriwether Lewis, George R. Stewart, John Steinbeck, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and William Least Heat-Moon in order to discern a beaten path. If you are starting a westbound piece in, say, Savannah, can you get past Biloxi without caffeinating the prose? If Baltimore—who is going to care if you get through Cumberland Gap? New York? The Hackensack River. If you start in Boston, turn around. In a structural sense, I turned around—once again reversing a prejudice. In telling this story, the chronology of the trip would not only be awkward but would also be a liability.
McPhee opted for a thematic structure. He also tells about devising a structure for another journey piece, “Tight-Assed River” (The New Yorker, November 15, 2004). He says,
The river was the Illinois—barge route from the Mississippi to the outskirts of Chicago. At Grafton, in southern Illinois, the Billy Joe Boling collected its fifteen barges from larger tows in the Mississippi, wired them taut as an integral vessel, and went up the Illinois until constricting dimensions of the river forced another exchange, with a smaller towboat, and the Billy Joe Boling took a new rig of fifteen barges downstream. This endless yo-yo was not exactly a journey in the Amundsen sense. There was no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. If ever there was a journey piece in which a chronological structure was pointless, this was it. In fact, a chronological structure would be misleading. Things happened, that’s all—anywhere and everywhere. And they happened in themes, each of which could have its own title at the head of a section, chronology ignored.
I love that “Things happened, that’s all—anywhere and everywhere. And they happened in themes.” It’s certainly one way of looking at it. But does life really happen that way? Maybe in retrospect it does. I prefer chronology, a linear narrative that is mimetic of the journey itself. I suppose that makes me boring, but so be it. At least I’m not alone. To a degree, I think Denby is with me.
1. Vince Aletti, in his “Art: Tina Barney,” says of Barney, “Only when she realized she could get closer to the truth by staging it—by subtly combining fact and fiction—did her pictures really come together.” I’m not sure how staging pictures gets closer to the truth. For me, truth is based on fact, not fiction. Peter Schjeldahl said of Thomas Struth’s staged Pergamon photos, “There is a subtle but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for the camera”: "Reality Clicks" (May 27, 2002). I agree.
2. Johanna Fateman’s description of Helen Frankenthaler - “a mercurial colorist moving between pours and the palette knife, translucent washes and clotted impasto” - strikes me as perfect: see “At the Galleries: Helen Frankenthaler.”
3. Richard Brody notes the release of a new Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne film – Tori and Lokita. The Dardennes are among my favourite directors. Their The Kid with a Bike (2011) is a masterpiece. Brody says of their new film, it “has the ardour and the specificity of investigative journalism.” That appeals to me mightily. I think I’ll check it out.
4. It’s great to see Burkhard Bilger back in the magazine. His last New Yorker piece, the excellent “Building the Impossible," appeared November 30, 2020. His new piece, “Crossover Artist,” begins and ends with an elephant orchestra (“But no one could hear what the elephants were humming to themselves, in the deep subsonic of their own frequency, as the drums clattered and gongs crashed”). It's a profile of neuroscientist and musician David Sulzer, brimming with interesting musicological facts and observations. Example:
A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure.
I enjoyed “Crossover Artist” immensely.
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| Mimi Sheraton (Photo by Julien Jourdes) |
The Lutz Baumkuchen does not taper, because Kozik does not use a cone; before preheating the tubular spit, he wraps it in many layers of aluminum foil. Nor does he ladle the deliciously sweet batter on. Instead, he pours small quantities into the trough beneath the spit. Then he releases a lever that lowers the spit into the trough, where it revolves and picks up the batter before it is hoisted back up to cook. After about the eighth layer, Kozik holds a long wooden comb against the sides of the revolving cake to impress the ridges, a process that is repeated about six times until the ridges are firmly set. Then subsequent layers are baked on, and the drippings are smoothed off against a board as they turn. The process takes about two hours for a Baumkuchen that has twenty-four ridges, or is about forty-eight inches tall, with sixteen to eighteen layers of batter and weighing six pounds. The result was the closest to Kreutzkamm’s that I have found, but with slightly less defined rings and a milder flavor devoid of marzipan.
Rereading “Spit Cake” just now, I realize that the passage I most relish isn't about Baumkuchen; it's about the making of a Polish spit cake called sekacz. Here’s the passage:
Gradually blushing red-faced as we sweltered in the Sweet World’s tiny utility room, where Ryba clocks a three- to four-hour watch over his rotating sekacz, he demonstrated the most traditional method. First, he preheated a big, worn vertical gas-fired oven that looks like a Rube Goldberg improvisation of a sheet-metal barbecue grill. After wrapping a large metal cone in layers of parchment, he slid it over the spit’s spindle, where it establishes the cake’s tapering form. He then let the whole thing turn and heat for about fifteen minutes. “Cone must be hot, so first layer of batter sticks and also bakes the cake from the inside,” he explained. The turning of the spit also kept the batter clinging as it wrapped around itself.
Donning a protective clear plastic face mask, somewhat like a welder’s, as the heat built up, Ryba ladled the batter from a big pail. Every ladleful was poured into a trough under the spit so that it would become more liquid. As each layer toasted to a golden-brown glaze, the next was poured over, and so on until the desired width was achieved, thereby creating the defining brown rings one sees when the cake is sliced. With its rustic, nicely browned crust and the crunchy protruding brambles that developed as the drippings baked on, the cut sekacz revealed a buff-gold cake that had seductively dense sweet-smoky and slightly ripe overtones.
Mm, that description is crazy good!
Sheraton connects with The New Yorker in another way. In 1979, she wrote a piece for The New York Times, blowing the cover of the chef named Otto in John McPhee’s now classic “Brigade de Cuisine” (The New Yorker, February 19, 1979; later retitled "A Philosopher in the Kitchen"). According to Sheraton, McPhee pleaded with her not to publish her piece. She says, in her memoir Eating My Words (2004), that McPhee accused her of breach of trust. She replied,
“It’s not my breach,” I said. “I never promised Lieb [the chef’] or anyone else anything and you should not have, either, if you were going to write about him in The New Yorker. Anyway, the story is already in and the paper will be dropped on my doorstep in an hour or two. You made this a matter of public interest, especially when food is such a hot topic.
Maybe someday, I’ll delve into this ruckus in more detail. Today, I want to pay tribute to Sheraton as the writer of “Spit Cake” – one of the best food pieces ever to appear in The New Yorker.
The most memorable looks were the most demotic: shrunken puffers, blasted-out jeans, a leather gown spliced from old handbags, a series of hooded sweatshirts paired with tap pants so paltry that you could almost feel the goosebumps on the models’ scraggy legs.
She wore a black double-breasted suit with her usual lank hair and wire-rimmed glasses. The sleeves ran past her fingertips, as is Demna’s wont. He had added long flaps to the trousers, which blurred the line between pant and skirt, swishing like a liturgical vestment as Douglas walked.
You could hear his ski-parka opera coats rustling through the narrow corridors. There were murmurs of appreciation for a trapezoidal satin T-shirt that Demna said took three months to make, and for a clementine-colored day suit with edges that looked like they could draw blood, shown with a slick black fruit-bowl hat.
Collins’s couture descriptions are inspired – right up there with Judith Thurman’s, maybe better. Someday I’ll run a comparison and see who is the best.
This is the fourth 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 focus on their structure.
One of the pleasures of reading Along the Edge of the Forest is watching the masterful way Bailey uses his Iron Curtain journey to generate his themes. The book is divided into twenty-eight chapters – each a stage in Bailey’s road trip. The chapters roll out sequentially. Chapter 1 begins in Travemünde, West Germany, where the trip began; Chapter 28 ends in Trieste, Italy, where the trip ended. I relish this journal-like structure. As Bailey travels, he visits places and meets people. Certain themes emerge. For example, Chapter 3, titled “Absent Friends,” tells about Bailey’s stop in Hamburg, where he talks with several West Germans who make it a point to visit their East German relatives and friends as much as possible. The theme of the chapter is the difficulty of cross-border travel. One of the persons that Bailey speaks with is Bernhardt Fisher, a senior officer in the Hamburg city government. Bailey writes,
What worries East Germans most, said Bernhardt, is the simple fact that they can’t get out if they want to. They might not want to live permanently in West Germany, but they resent not having the choice. Some would like the chance of experiencing for a little while at first hand the high standard of living in West Germany, which, in the abstract, they feel bound to despise. Bernhardt thinks that the majority of East Germans – if the Soviet army left – would demand a change of government the next day. They don’t want to imitate the West, but they want to have a system and government of their own, not imposed by the Russians.
Each of Bailey’s chapters develops a theme. Chapter 4 is about the dangerousness of the border fence; Chapter 8 is about the island-like nature of West Berlin; Chapter 12 is about exile. The themes grow organically from the material – from the border towns that Bailey visits and the people and circumstances he encounters. For example, in Chapter 17, called “A Busy Day,” Bailey is in Bavaria, touring several villages in the company of two officers of the Bavarian Frontier Police, Hans Jacob and Alfred Eiber. Jacob mentions that they’re in an area where two families, the Strelzyks and the Wetzels, escaped East Germany in a homemade hot-air balloon. This piques Bailey’s interest. He seeks out the Wetzels (they live in Schauenstein, not far from where their balloon landed) to hear their story. His account of their escape is superb. Here’s an excerpt:
They had been on their way for twenty-three minutes when the burner flame began to die down; the gas was running out. They dropped slowly to 2,000 meters, the balloon revolving. The flame spluttered on the last of the propane. Their descent became rapid. They didn’t know whether or not they were still over the DDR. Looking down, Petra saw many lights, red and amber, which didn’t seem to her like the DDR. The earth was rushing to meet them: hills, woods, fields, roofs of houses came into view. They were coming down over a pine wood. It slipped past – here was the ground – and they landed with a sharp jolt in a thicket of blackberry bushes. Another 150 meters would have taken them into a high-tension power line. The flight had lasted twenty-eight minutes. Where were they?
Like Along the Edge of the Forest, Robert Sullivan’s Cross Country tells the story of a single journey – the six-day road trip that he and his family take from Portland, Oregon, to New York City. But Cross Country is structured more intricately. For one thing, Sullivan punctuates his present-day narrative (written in the present tense) with memories of previous cross-country trips he’s taken (he’s driven across the U.S. “close to thirty times”). For another, as he drives, he talks about interstate history, cued by historical markers, highway signs, physical features of the land, and just about anything else that catches his omnivorous attention. As he says, he’s “like a tour director nobody paid for, like a tour guide nobody can stop, like a human roadside plaque.”
The book is divided into seven Parts, each Part describing a leg of the journey: Part I – “Setting Out”; Part II – “Portland, Oregon, to Missoula, Montana”; Part III – “Missoula, Montana, to Miles City, Montana”; Part IV – “Miles City, Montana, to Minneapolis, Minnesota”; Part V – “Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Beloit, Wisconsin”; Part VI – “Beloit, Wisconsin, to Bellafonte, Pennsylvania”; and Part VII – “Getting There.”
Each Part is packed with an amazing variety of cross-country-specific material, generated by Sullivan’s voracious interstate consciousness. Lewis and Clark (“Backtracking along the Lewis and Clark Trail, you begin to realize that America has always wanted to remember the Lewis and Clark expedition one way – as heading west”), travel plazas, road signs, rest stops, rivers (Willamette, Colombia, Snake, Clearwater, Lochsa, Yellowstone, to name a few), gas stations, motels (“In the little Super 8 lobby, people are filling their coolers with ice from the ice machine that has a sign on it asking that people not fill their coolers with ice from the ice machine, people who look bright and cheery, as well as people who look as if they slept on the interstate last night”), mountains (“Into the Bitterroots, the 175-mile crossing of this 300-mile-long, 11,000-foot-high range of hills that Jefferson never dreamed of, that Lewis and Clark did not expect, that Patrick Gass, a member of the Corps of Discovery, called ‘the most terrible mountains I ever beheld’ ”), convenience stores, hot springs, Evel Knievel, tumbleweed, coffee, Emily Post, squeegees … Squeegees? Yep, even squeegees. Here’s the passage – one of my favorites:
At Town Pump, when our daughter was a toddler, I lifted her to the windshield and to the back window of the car, watched her enjoy the thrill of walking on the dust-covered hood, the excitement of the brownish squeegee water, the joy of the squeegee itself, the kick that one can derive from the squeegeeing process, especially as it applies to the removal of the remains of splotched bugs, gross, disgusting bugs. In the old days, I applauded her work (while holding her steady), as did her mother, as did her older brother, and thus, she returned to her car seat proud. I waited until she fell asleep or retired to the women’s room with her mother, or was otherwise distracted so that I might repeat the squeegee process and actually be able to see out the windows, toddlers not yet having developed the most refined squeegee skills, of course.
How does Sullivan do it? How does he make all this stuff cohere? I’m not sure I can explain it. Part of it has to do with the interstate-obsessed world he’s describing, and part of it has to do with his wide-open receptivity to it, the adhesiveness (Whitman’s great word) that draws him to it, and part of it has to do with his acute awareness of the historical underlay (“Even though I’ve been back and forth to Oregon numerous times, I have never bought a wooden wagon, taken it apart to be put on a boat in Saint Louis, and then put it back together, sometimes using it as a boat to cross a river”). However he did it, there’s no doubt that the structure he created to contain it all – first-person-present-tense chronological narrative punctuated with flashbacks and memory sightings and mini-histories – works beautifully.
Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia differs from the other two books. It describes not one, but five journeys. Actually, it chronicles Frazier’s five Siberian journeys, plus several related trips to St. Petersburg, and to Anchorage, Nome, and Little Diomede Island, Alaska. The book is divided into five chronological Parts. Part I covers the earliest trips (the 1993 trip to Moscow, Omsk, and Lake Baikal; the 1999 trip to Nome, Chukotka, and the Chukchi fish camp at the mouth of the Hot Springs River, Siberia). Part II tells about two trips Frazier took to St. Petersburg, one in 2000, and another in 2001. It also covers his 2001 trip to Little Diomede Island, in the middle of the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia. Part III chronicles his epic nine-thousand-mile road trip across Siberia, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, starting in St. Petersburg, August 5, 2001, and ending five weeks, two days later on the shore of Olga Bay, September 11, 2001. Part IV tells about Frazier’s first winter trip in Siberia, which he took in March, 2005. And Part V covers his fifth and shortest Siberian journey – his trip to Novosibirsk in the fall of 2009.
Each Part is divided into numbered chapters. Most of the chapters are organized chronologically, that is, they form a narrative timeline enacting the sequence of the journeys they describe. But there are exceptions. Now and then, Frazier inserts a chapter that is purely historical. For example, Chapter 8 tells about Genghis Khan and the Mongol empire; Chapter 14 chronicles Siberia’s history as a place of punishment; Chapter 18 tells about the Decembrist movement – an attempt to overthrow Tsar Nicholas I in 1825. Also, there’s a wonderful thematic chapter – Chapter 17 – in which Frazier pauses his narrative to show a verbal montage of Siberian images, including trash, ravens and crows, prisons, and pigs. Here’s the section on pigs:
Although roaming herds of pigs were occasional in villages in western Siberia, east of Novosibirsk they became more common. Now every village we went through seemed to have big gangs of them. Because the weather was so hot, the pigs had generally been wallowing in a mudhole just before they got up to amble wherever we happened to see them ambling. Evidently, the wallowing technique of some pigs involved lying with just one side of themselves in the mud. This produced two-tone animals—pigs that were half wet, shiny brown mud, and half pink, relatively unsoiled original pig. The effect was striking—sort of harlequin. The other animals that roamed the villages in groups were geese. When a herd of pigs came face to face with a flock of geese, an unholy racket of grunting and gabbling would ensue. I wondered if the villagers ever got tired of the noise. Whether challenging pigs or not, the village geese seemed to gabble and yak and hiss non-stop. The pigs grunted and oinked almost as much, but always at some point the whole herd of pigs would suddenly fall silent, and their megaphone-shaped ears would go up, and for half a minute every pig would listen.
That last line is inspired!
To sum up: all three of these books are structured chronologically, but each in a different way. In Along the Edge of the Forest, the journey is a narrative through-line on which Bailey drapes certain themes – the challenge of cross-border travel, Berlin as an island, the constant menacing presence of the border fence, etc.. Cross Country’s sequential narrative is punctuated with flashbacks and historical commentary on a multiplicity of interstate-related matters, including gas stations, motels, convenience stores, and coffee lids. Travels in Siberia chronicles five Siberian journeys, with chapters on historical subjects, e.g., Genghis Kahn, the Decembrists, and Stalin, interspersed throughout.
All three books contain an immense amount of action. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.
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