Thank you, David Craig

A special shout-out to David Craig for leading me to William Atkins’ The Moor (2014), one of the best books I’ve ever read. Craig, in a piece titled “Fox and Crow” (London Review of Books, July 31, 2014), reviewed The Moor, describing its subject (Atkins’ exploration of England’s wild, waterlogged moorland), praising its beauty and “fine focus.” He says of Atkins, “He is a fine reporter, not exactly impartial, letting the details speak for themselves.” I read Craig’s review when it first appeared in the LRB, noting to myself that The Moor seemed like my kind of book, blending travelogue and natural history. But it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I finally got around to reading it. What an extraordinary work! The writing is exquisite. Here are a few samples:

The wind up here was an assault: in the bracken it sang rich and loud, in the grass it was piping; between the boulders a hollow roar: it was a thousand voices and one, and each buffet hooted across my ears like a blast across the mouth of a bottle.

But try to name its colours and you’ll exhaust yourself. Beyond the white-grey of moss-spotted clitter, the moor sank through chartreuse slopes, down to the dulled emerald intake of Penhale Farm, to a motley lowland of pale lime dashed with tawny and dun and fawn, and then the intricate tapestry of purple moor-grass, cotton-grass, mat-grass, heather, moss and lichens: chamois, bronze, taupe, walnut – a hennaed, mouldering, rusting vastness shot with saffron, carmine and topaz, with swathes of reflectivity that shimmered like raffia in the low sun.

The moor ahead of me was a foaming, surging mass, a sponge squeezing itself, a waterlogged lung. I could feel its spume coming down on me, hear its roar. The track petered out into a handful of deep-cut trenches that ramified further until all that was left was a shorn expanse of dirty turf, and then, there, by the gate to the moor, was the lumpen sandstone artifact known as the Saddle Stone, which marked the boundary of the old Royal Forest.

Where drainage ditches had been cut, the peat’s profile was exposed: dark brown and knitted with rootlets at the surface, a fibrous velvet below, and darkening and distilling as it deepened to the blackest jelly at the cutting’s floor.

Lay out your right hand, palm up, fingers pointing left. Between your little finger and your ring finger runs Kinsford Water; between your ring finger and your middle finger runs the Barle; between middle and index, the Exe; and between index and thumb, Badgworthy Water, home of the blood-loving Doones.

Someday I’ll post a longer review of this great book. My purpose today is to thank David Craig for bringing it to my attention. 

Photography and Transience

Photo by Thomas Wågström, from his Case Closed (2022)

Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his absorbing “Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless” (newyorker.com, April 26, 2023), says, 

All photographs are about transience. This lies in the very nature of photography, since everything in the world is continually changing, and what a photo depicts vanishes the next instant, or becomes something else. One could say that all photography is about loss. But one could also say the opposite: photographs salvage something from time, as from a burning house.

This, to me, is just about the most perfect definition of photography I’ve ever read. The key is transience. Time pours, an unstanchable flow. What photography captures is the brief being of what never again will be. Photos are transiencies – instants of flux forever held.  

May 22, 2023 Issue

“Our political arena is filled with lies, but few liars are held to account.” I like the hardboiled way that’s put. It’s from Jeannie Suk Gersen’s “Reckless Disregard,” in this week’s issue. But I’m not sure Gersen wrote it. It’s a tagline. What Gersen wrote is “Our political culture is now strewn with lies; the Washington Post fecklessly awards Pinocchios, but few liars are truly held to account.” I prefer the tagline; it’s pithier. Gersen’s piece is about the “actual malice” standard in American libel law formulated by the U.S. Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan Does it set the bar too high? Gersen says yes: “The case effectively permits the publication of negligently false statements about public figures, very broadly defined, in the name of protecting the debate and criticism needed to make a democracy work.” She calls for a “recalibration” of the Sullivan standard. But she doesn’t say what that recalibration would look like. How about reducing the “actual malice” test to one of negligence? That’s my suggestion. But right-wingers aren’t going to agree with that. Their favourite media outlets would be in hot water immediately. 

Postscript: Martin Amis 1949 - 2023

Martin Amis (Photo by Jennifer S. Altman)

I see in the Times that Martin Amis has died. He’s likely best known as a novelist. But, for me, his criticism is what matters. Dwight Garner, in his “Martin Amis, Acclaimed Author of Bleakly Comic Novels, Dies at 73” (The New York Times, May 20, 2023), writes,

He also demonstrated, in the reviews and essays collected in “The War Against Cliché” (2001), that he was among the fiercest and most intelligent literary critics of his time. His reviews were an important part of his reputation.

I agree. My favourite Amis critical piece is “Don Juan in Hull” (The New Yorker, July 12, 1993), a passionate defence of Philip Larkin. At the time it appeared, Larkin was under savage posthumous attack, largely because of revelations of his politically incorrect prejudices. Amis based his defence on Larkin’s work:

The recent attempts, by Motion and others, to pass judgment on Larkin look awfully green and pale compared with the self-examinations of the poetry. They think they judge him? No. He judges them. His indivisibility judges their hedging and trimming. His honesty judges their watchfulness.

James Wood, in his tribute (“Martin Amis’s Comic Music,” newyorker.com, May 20, 2023), praises Amis’s comedy. He says,

Amis’s style combined many of the classic elements of English literary comedy: exaggeration, and its dry parent, understatement; picaresque farce; caustic authorial intervention; caricature and grotesquerie; a wonderful ear for ironic registration.

This is well said. But what I relate to isn’t Amis’s comedy; it’s his anger. Anger powers some of his best writing. For example, in his brilliant Koba the Dread (2002), he included a letter to his friend Christopher Hitchens, questioning Hitchen’s admiration for Trotsky, calling Trotsky “a murderous bastard and a fucking liar.” The letter goes on:

Let us laboriously imagine that the “paradise” Trotsky promised to “build” suddenly appeared on the bulldozed site of 1921. Knowing that 15 million lives had been sacrificed to its creation, would you want to live in it? A paradise so bought is no paradise. I take it you would not want to second Eric Hobsbawm’s disgraceful “Yes” to a paradise so bought.

Whatever his subject – Stalin, Nabokov, Trump, Updike, Princess Diana, Osama bin Laden, the list goes on and on – Amis wrote freshly, zestfully, beautifully. Recall the inspired final paragraph of his “Véra and Vladimir: Letters to Véra” (included in his 2017 collection The Rub of Time):

It is the prose itself that provides the permanent affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children (wholly unsinister, though the prototype of Lolita, The Enchanter, dates from 1939); the way that everyone he comes across is minutely individualized (a butler, a bureaucrat, a conductor on the Métro); the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather (he is the supreme poet of the skyscape); and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his sublime energy.

I love that “unresting responsiveness.” It applies to Amis’s writing, too. 

May 15, 2023 Issue

Reading this week’s issue, I was struck by something that Adam Gopnik says in his wonderful tribute to the great New Yorker illustrator Bruce McCall, who died May 5, 2023. Gopnik writes, “Many creative people of original gifts live at right angles to their talent, the difference between who they are and what they make being astounding, but no one was ever more right-angled—transcendent talent to human type—than Bruce.” I find this concept of the “right-angled” artist intriguing. It contradicts Buffon’s famous saying that the style is the man. Gopnik contrasts McCall’s outward “perfect Canadian” demeanour (“self-deprecating to almost hilarious degree,” “polite to an almost ferocious fault”) with his anarchic, elegant art, blending “a wild surrealist sensibility—founded on an impeccable illustrator’s technique, always manifesting visions, dreams, impossibilities in scrupulous hyper-realism—with a sharp, sometimes caustic tone, beautifully underlit by melancholia.” Note that “wild surrealist sensibility.” Right there, I think, is where McCall and his extraordinary art converge. The angle vanishes.  

Acts of Seeing: Fat Bike

Lorna on Fat Bike, 2021 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Last night I was reading Clive James’ brilliant photography piece “That Old Black and White Magic” (The New York Review of Books, December 17, 1981). At one point, discussing the work of William Henry Jackson, James says, “Jackson got a terrific action shot, in color, of the Yellowstone Great Geyser in 1902.” Reading this, I found myself thinking about my own action shots. One of my favorites is of Lorna riding her fat bike on a path through the dunes down to the beach at Covehead Harbour lighthouse. What I relish about it is (1) the upward angle, and (2) the wonderful winter light.

May 8, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Jackson Arn’s excellent “Early Bloomer,” a review of MOMA’s “Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time,” a show of O’Keeffe’s early drawings and watercolors. Arn finds O’Keeffe’s oil paintings “technically unexciting.” But he loves her watercolors. He says, 

With watercolors, O’Keeffe was an intuitive, surprising artist, but only because she was a technically rigorous one first. Choosing the right paper narrowed the range of outcomes without avoiding risk altogether. In 1916, she opted for a tissue-thin Japanese kind that warps with the slightest moisture. In the resulting quartet of “Blue” watercolors, the paper looks like a desert, but the brushstrokes seem as fresh as rain; it’s a controlled demolition of the blank page.

My favourite passage is Arn’s description of O’Keeffe’s three portraits of Paul Strand:

O’Keeffe is great with skies, suns, mountains, and smoke. With people, she’s more hit or miss. The Delaney portraits are nice, though head-only; the nude self-portraits are as stiff as first-year figure drawings. Tellingly, the three best portraits in the exhibition, watercolors of her friend Paul Strand, don’t look like anyone (though, as the critic Thomas Micchelli helped me notice, they do look like someone’s intestines, floating in a many-colored cloud). O’Keeffe is nobody’s idea of a comedian, but the Strand trio could almost be a prank: the great black-and-white photographer gets thrown into a smeary rainbow dunk tank.

That last sentence made me smile. This is my first experience of Arn’s writing. I enjoyed every word. More Arn, please. 

April 24 & May 1, 2023 Issue

A detail in Lauren Collins’ Talk story “Decorative,” in this week’s issue, caught my eye: Owen Wilson uses a Brompton to get around Paris. Collins writes, “Wilson arrived on a Brompton folding bike, which he padlocked to an iron fence.” Bromptons are great bikes. Lorna and I travelled Scotland and the Netherlands on them. You can take them on trains, hop off, unfold them, and away you go.  

3 More for the Road: Action

This is the fifth 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 action. 

All three of these books describe road trips. Their central action is driving. In Along the Edge of the Forest, Bailey drives his 1973 Saab station wagon from Travemünde, on the Baltic Sea, along the border known as the Iron Curtain, separating Western Europe and the Soviet Union, to Trieste, on the Adriatic Sea. “I drove to Hamburg to spend the night and talk to some people who work there”; “I got an early start and drove along the southern bank of the Elbe on a road that wound sometimes near the river and sometimes up and down the forested slopes nearby”; “I drove a few kilometers south toward the next village of Zicherie to a roadhouse Hunting had recommended, where there was game on the menu and a herd of deer in an adjacent paddock”; “I had arranged to be in Helmstedt in the early afternoon, so with a morning free I drove first to Braunschweig, which is perhaps better known to English-speaking readers under its Anglicized name of Brunswick, to enjoy the simple pleasures of looking at old buildings and pictures” – the book brims with such sentences. I devour them. 

In Cross Country, Sullivan and his family drive their rental Impala across the United States, from Seattle, on the West Coast, to New York City, on the East Coast. Sullivan’s descriptions of driving are superb. For example:

Finished refueling at Kum & Go, I am on I-94 again, pulling out of Miles City on this sunny Day Three morning and immediately I get a chance to let a giant chemical truck pass – it is covered with so many large FLAMMABLE stickers that it seems like the right thing to do, yielding to a highway monster. 

I try to look back as we pass each rock formation but when it gets dark, it’s difficult to look back on the road. You are forced to face forward, to concentrate on the future, rather than the past. You are forced to gaze into the rows and rows of red taillights, which blink and pulse on what appear to be whims. 

I had rolled the window up but now I am rolling it down again, and getting my face near the cool summer wind – like a dog we don’t have because we travel – which is making it more necessary for me to shout, when and if I do speak. Suddenly, out of the blackness, I have just been hit by water, only it’s not raining. The water has come from an agricultural irrigator of some kind, a farmer’s oversized garden sprinkler, my face startled by the accidental blessing. A Wal-Mart tractor trailer passes us and its lights light up the Impala’s interior, and then on the horizon, I see another giant cheese sign. With the sight of the cheese sign, hope fills my tired heart. I can see in the night an exit sparkling, the glow of an interchange. I can see the motels that are not our motel. 

Notice Sullivan’s use of the present tense – an excellent way to convey immediacy. First-person-present-tense is my favorite literary combination. Sullivan deploys it beautifully.

Driving is one of the main actions in Travels in Siberia, too. In Part III – the core of the book – Frazier and his two guides drive their used Renault step van across Siberia, from St. Petersburg, on the Baltic Sea, to Vladivostok, on the Pacific Ocean. For example, here’s Frazier’s description of them leaving St. Petersburg:

Past the city we turned onto the Murmansk highway eastbound. Its four lanes soon became two. Trucks were speeding toward us in the downpour. I thought Sergei was driving too fast but I couldn’t tell for sure, because the speedometer needle, which had been fluttering spasmodically, suddenly lay down on the left side of the dial and never moved again for the rest of the journey. 

And here (one of my favorite scenes), they’re in Vladivostok, parked facing uphill on one of the city’s steepest streets, when, once again, the van fails to start:

Volodya took the wheel. Sergei and I went to the front of the van, ready to push. Volodya adjusted the outside rearview mirror, gauged the traffic, stepped on the clutch, put the van in reverse, and gave the signal. We pushed. The heavy van quickly picked up speed downhill. We kept pushing, and the oncoming cars swerved around us in a wailing of horns. Volodya popped the clutch. The van lurched, the engine started, the van accelerated faster into the honking, swerving cars. Volodya dodged through them by rearview mirror until he was able to scoot around a corner into a quieter street, where by exquisite footwork he kept the engine alive. Running and out of breath, Sergei and I finally caught up with him. I describe all this in detail because it was the most outstanding feat of driving I have ever seen.

Two of these books – Along the Edge of the Forest and Travels in Siberia – also contain a lot of walking. Bailey, when he arrives in a border town, often parks his car and explores the place on foot: “I parked the car on the edge of town and walked the quiet cobbled streets to the marketplace”; “Before dinner I walked along the riverfront road, by the little haven, to a point with seats and benches where one could look across the river”; “In the course of a stroll that evening around Brome I dropped into what appeared to be the most flourishing pub, the Gasthaus Schmidt”; “I walk along a little track beside the border at the foot of various back gardens”; “I walked from the cathedral and across a small park to the Herzog Anton-Ulrich Museum.” He walks West Berlin (“I walked the boulevards and streets, and felt that fully charged zip in the air which a few cities have and which brings one’s nerves and senses alive”), and, unforgettably, he passes through Checkpoint Charlie, and walks East Berlin:

Gartenstrasse was empty of people. It was bordered on one side by what looked like an old railway yard, and on the other side by shabby three- and four-story apartment houses. At the end of the street I saw a bumpy, unfinished-looking wall – the inner wall, on which no cosmetic decoration had been wasted. Barbed wire. And a watchtower, within which binoculars swiveled and fastened on me. I was about a hundred yards from the wall, alone in the empty street. I came to a halt. I had – I assumed – every right to walk on. I was a foreign tourist. How was I to know that you had to have special permission to come within one hundred meters of the wall? I saw no signs. But, in that moment I felt like someone who lived there, and the will to walk closer, drained out of me. I stood there for a little while, as if in prayer, then turned away. I could feel the binoculars at the back of my neck as I walked off.

Frazier does the same thing during his travels, nosing around Siberian cities and towns on foot, seeing what there is to see. Here he’s in Severobaikalsk:

On our first day in Severobaikalsk, Sergei took a bus to some slopes outside town and spent the afternoon skiing. The return bus broke down, so he didn’t get back until evening. Meanwhile, I geared up for the cold, put on my snow-tire boots, and explored the town. The day was sunny, clear, and calm. By taking occasional breaks inside warm public places, I had no difficulty staying outside for long strolls. Beyond the central administrative area, the town looked ramshackle, like a Western mining town. On some of the houses, sections of railroad cars had been used to add a room, or repairs had been improvised with sheets of corrugated iron. Most of the buildings in town were blocks of apartments, usually four stories high. I sat in front of one for a while and sketched the many kinds of antennae on its roof. In ninety minutes of sketching, I froze so I could no longer draw and had to start walking again. On a hill above town, I came upon the ruins of an amusement park with carnival-type rides lying around in pieces, and benches and walkways deep in snow. In a sort of cove of benches near one dismantled ride, a group of teenage girls and boys were smoking cigarettes and drinking from plastic liter-bottles of beer. The gust of alcohol breath and cigarette smoke and pheromones that came from them was more pungent for being concentrated by the cold.

I love that image of Frazier sitting in the Siberian cold, sketching rooftop antennae. The drawing is included in the book, along with several others he did during his travels. They’re all excellent. 

Illustration by Ian Frazier, from his Travels in Siberia (2010)

Action is a prime feature of all three of these great books. Another one is acute sense of place. That will be the focus of my next post in this series.