November 20, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his absorbing “Made You Look,” in this week’s issue, writes about two immersive experiences he had recently: a viewing of Darren Aronofsky’s “Postcard from Earth,” at the Sphere, in Las Vegas; and a visit to Michael Heizer’s land sculpture “City” in the Nevada desert. Of his Sphere experience, he writes, 

Everything about this place dulls your palate for the natural. You walk under an emoji the size of the Death Star, you wait in lines for holograms, you sit in a state-of-the-art haptic chair, you stare at a screen almost as big as the one that brought you the emoji, and you’re supposed to believe that what’s up there is real ?

Not a great recommendation. His description of “City” is more beguiling:

This is, simultaneously, the quietest place I’ve ever been and one of the loudest—every breath and pebble-crunching step is deafening, in the same way as someone wrestling with a sweet wrapper at the movies. The slanted sides of the trenches suggest ancient ruins, but also the I-15. It’s not always obvious where the art ends and the desert begins. Toward either side of “City,” however, you’ll find big, straight-edged structures: to the west, a flock of concrete fins; to the east, a trapezoidal slab with concrete beams poking out. These objects look plainly more man-made than natural—“man-made” being the strange, polished stuff that refuses to admit that it’s natural, too.

Reading Arn’s piece, I recalled another account of a “City” visit – Dana Goodyear’s brilliant “The Earth Mover” (The New Yorker, August 29, 2016). Goodyear wrote,

In every direction, at every angle, wide boulevards disappeared around corners, to unseen destinations, leading me into depressions where the whole world vanished and all that was left was false horizon and blue sky. Fourteen miles of concrete curbs sketched a graceful, loopy line drawing around the mounds and roads. Ravens wheeled, and I startled at a double thud of sonic boom from fighter jets performing exercises overhead. I sat down in a pit; flies came to tickle my hands. It was easy to imagine myself as a pile of bones. Before no other contemporary art work have I felt induced to that peculiar, ancient fear: What hand made this, and what for?

T. J. Clark's Annoying Class Consciousness

Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid (c. 1657-58)

I’ve always loved the word “bourgeois.” I don’t use it very much. When I do, it’s usually in relation to the great Dutch art of the Golden Age. Vermeer, Hals, de Hooch, Terborch – art that caught the beauty and vitality of Holland’s new bourgeois individualism. T. J. Clark uses “bourgeois” a lot in his art writings, and not in a positive way. To him the bourgeoisie are a scourge, producers and consumers of kitsch. Clark is for the working class. There’s a lot of class content in his work. He sees society divided into at least four categories: the working class, the petty bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy. It’s a Marxist view of life and art. I don’t share it. I don’t see people in terms of class. “Nobody better, better than nobody” is my motto. The doctor, the movie star, the plumber, the hedge fund tsar – we’re all equal. Clark would likely scoff at that as naïve. That’s okay. We don’t have to share political views in order to enjoy art. But I will say this. If it wasn’t for Clark’s wonderful, perceptive descriptions of art, I likely wouldn’t read him. His descriptions show me details and felicities I wouldn’t otherwise see. Descriptions such as this: 

Look at the jester on the branch in the Louvre Ship of Fools: he is one of Bosch’s prime inventions. The pink, grey and white of the young man’s rags, dazzling as they are, don’t seem to be deployed just to dazzle. I think they’re meant to float the figure into a realm of fragility, vulnerability, perhaps even pathos – anyway, somewhere different from the idiocy below. The jester’s smallness is calculated: it moves him away from the group. The wandering lines of white on his costume, delicate even by Bosch’s standards, and dramatised by little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces – what do they do? What are they meant to suggest? Maybe that the costume is threadbare. Maybe that it’s flimsy and transparent. Jesters are beggars, after all. Burghers are not amused by them. Somehow the nature of the grey material draws the young man closer to the natural world (further from the nudities in the foreground). He fits into the frame of leaves; he grows out of the grey tree. The dialogue between his profile and the face on the wand is infinitely touching. [“Aboutness,” London Review of Books, April 1, 2021]

And this:

Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders. [“Strange Apprentice,” London Review of Books, October 8, 2020]

And this:

Look again at the angel in Paris with the pointing finger. There had never been a figure like it before in painting, and there never would be again. It is not just the foot on the grass and the pointing finger that are uncanny: it is the pose as a whole, spreading out laterally, half turning towards us, but meeting our eyes from an utter remoteness; and the roll of the green sleeve and the long pale arm inside its diaphanous puff of drapery; and the astonishing – unthinkable – explosion of rich red, tying the figure to a world of flesh and blood but spreading and unfolding far beyond (it feels like) the mere frame of the illusion. No wonder all this – this overflowing wish-fulfilment – had to be corrected in 1508. The London angel’s drapery is still elusive, but at least now it adheres to a possible anatomy: it does not just seem to occur as the brush tries out a new colour. Colour drains away. The angel’s shoulders come out of their carapace. The figure is clear and coherent (comparatively) but also (comparatively) unfelt. It is as if the invention had been put back inside a box – robbed of its first fairytale unfolding. [“The Chill of Disillusion,” London Review of Books, January 5, 2012]

Who would not want such glorious writing to go on forever? There’s not an ounce of class consciousness in it. That’s the way it should be. 

Acts of Seeing: P'tit Train du Nord

P'tit Train du Nord, 2023 (Photo by John MacDougall)

I love this shot. It captures the essence of that day last month when Lorna and I biked the P’tit Train du Nord from Mont-Tremblant Village to Labelle and back. The trail took us along beautiful Lac Mercier. Red, orange, and yellow leaves. Pale blue-white sky. Excellent paved trail, strewn with leaves. We ate the day!

Frans Hals's Extraordinary "The Laughing Cavalier"

Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier (1624)

Zachary Fine, in his absorbing “The Man Who Changed Portraiture” (newyorker.com, November 3, 2023), reviews the National Gallery’s Frans Hals exhibition. He notes that Hals painted only portraits and calls him “the most talented one-trick pony of the seventeenth century.” He says of him,

His genius boils down to a contradiction: loose, unblended smears of paint that create the flesh-and-blood likeness of a human being. The late works of Titian, Velázquez, and Rembrandt would all head in this direction with their “rough” manner, but Hals achieved a kind of scary immediacy that seemed almost foreign to the medium—a photographer suddenly among painters.

A photographer suddenly among painters – I like that. It gets at Hals’s exquisite precision. See, for example, his famous The Laughing Cavalier (1624) – the intricate pattern of the man’s doublet, the gold buttons, the subtle shades of black in his cloak, the ornate geometric design of his lace cuffs, the rich layering of his white ruff, the gold handle of his rapier. This is incredibly detailed, artful painting. You can almost feel the texture of that ruff and hear the rustle of the sumptuous cloak.

Which is why I question Fine’s conclusion. He writes, “Hals was a painter of fundamentally modest means with a deep intuition for his medium.” Fundamentally modest means? Come on! The Laughing Cavalier is having a good laugh over that one. How about “acutely descriptive”? That’s what Peter Schjeldahl said of Hals’s painting (“Haarlem Shuffle” (The New Yorker, August 1, 2011). I agree with Schjeldahl. 

Postscript: A. S. Byatt 1936 - 2023

A. S. Byatt (Photo by Ozier Muhammad)

I see in the Times that A. S. Byatt has died (“A.S. Byatt, Scholar Who Found Fame With Fiction, Dies at 87,” November 17, 2023). The Times writer, Rebecca Chace, emphasizes Byatt’s achievements as a fiction writer, particularly her Booker prize-winning novel Possession. A friend gave me that book many years ago and urged me to read it. I tried, but never made it very far. Romance in the Victorian Age is not my thing. Maybe someday I’ll give it another shot. But there is a piece by Byatt that I treasure – her brilliant “Van Gogh, Death and Summer,” included in her 1991 essay collection A Passion of the Mind. 

“Van Gogh, Death and Passion” starts out as a review of Tsukasa Kodera’s Vincent van Gogh: Christianity versus Nature (1990). But it soon morphs into something vaster and more profound: an appreciation of Van Gogh’s letters; a consideration of his “sense of the real”; an exploration of his ideas about color. She quotes liberally from his letters. She quotes Bataille, Artaud, Rilke, Freud, Stevens, De Quincey. She praises De Quincey’s concept of the involute – “the way in which the human mind thinks and feels in ‘perplexed combinations of concrete objects’ or ‘compound objects, incapable of being disentangled.’ ” She writes, “De Quincey’s Romantic involute, Stevens’s abstract and sensuous meditation on the relations between sun, earth, mortality, myth and metaphor, have become, with Van Gogh’s letters and paintings, part of a new involute for me.”

It's an extraordinary essay, a ravishing involute of her own making, drenched in Van Gogh’s colors, ending in a meditation on death, and one last quotation from Van Gogh:

Work is going pretty well – I am struggling with a canvas begun some days before my indisposition, a “Reaper”; the study is all yellow, terribly thick painted, but the subject was fine and simple. For I see in this reaper – a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of heat to get to the end of his task – I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is – if you like – the opposite of that sower I tried to do before. But there’s nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold. 

Notes on John McPhee's Wonderful "Tabula Rasa"

1. This new work surprised me. I expected it to be a collection of the “Tabula Rasa” pieces that appeared in The New Yorker: see “Tabula Rasa I” (January 13, 2020); “Tabula Rasa II” (April 19, 2021); and “Tabula Rasa III” (February 7, 2022). All those pieces are in the book – twenty-one of them. It’s great to see them preserved between hardcovers. But here’s the surprise: in addition to the previously published items, there are twenty-nine new ones on such variegated subjects as McPhee’s experience teaching his Princeton writing class during Covid (“students became sixteen pictures in varied levels of light”), the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, sports time-outs (“Time-outs in superabundance violate the spirit of the game”), the outcrops of Princeton’s Washington Road, New Jersey’s Province Line Road, Princeton University’s Joseph Henry House, fish he’s caught on the Upper Delaware River, Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, his mother, the length of time it takes to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” (“Roughly one minute and four seconds”), and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I particularly liked the piece on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Titled “The Delta Islands of the Great Valley,” it contains this wonderful passage:

Small roads ran along the tops of the levees. From them, you looked down on the tops of pear trees in the inverted islands, looked down into the countersunk asparagus, the winter wheat. Now look up. Left. Right, near, or far, you saw ships. They were crossing the delta on the rivers, which flowed between levees and were imperceptibly descending from thirteen feet above sea level (Stockton) and thirty feet above sea level (Sacramento). If you happened to be down in one of the polders among the crops, you might look up and see across a levee the wheelhouse of an oceangoing ship, inbound or outbound, sliding along against the sky. They were really up there. You had to crane your neck.

That “you looked down on the tops of pear trees in the inverted islands, looked down into the countersunk asparagus, the winter wheat” is very fine. I wish McPhee had been able to complete the project. Unfortunately, as he explains, the shipping company that owned the ship on which he planned to travel reneged on its permission. He says, “The disappointment diverted me into other projects. I wasn’t going to do the piece without riding through the delta on the bridge wing of a merchant ship, looking down across the tops of blossoming fruit trees.”

2. One notable aspect of McPhee’s late style is his frequent use of sentence fragments. Tabula Rasa contains dozens of them. For example:

Her blondness. His white beard. Her compactness. His heft. Her smile, and his. Their photogenic faces.

AFC divisional playoff, Raiders 7, Steelers 6, twenty-two seconds to go, no time-outs. Fourth and ten, Steelers on their own forty.

Wood frame. Fish-scale clapboard around the front entrance. Lancet windows down the sides, two stories tall. Cupola. Belfry. Gothic Revival spirelets at the high front corners.

Holyoke Dam. Hooksett Dam. The dam sites of Dickey-Lincoln. The many nameless dams on rural streams in upstate New York.

McKenzie River, in McKenzie boats, in Oregon with Dr. Dick.

Faculty housing. Row housing. Gwyneth King in the parlor with Joe.

Oh, my. Malcolm Forbes. His yacht. A party favor. Party of a-hundred-and-thirty-odd on the yacht to watch the Fourth of July fireworks on the East River. Mick Jagger. People like that. People from all over the news, the media, the world, the city. Lobsters. Smoked salmon. Caviar by the kilo.

Older writers tend to ramble. Their sentences get longer and baggier. Think Henry James. What a windbag! McPhee went the opposite way. He’s shortened up. His sentences are light, speedy. No long lines (or not many), just quick Cézanne-like touches: “In the church. Passing the plate. Mad as hell. Obedient”; “Starfish. Octopuses. Vicious-looking eels”; “And wait. And wait forever, it seemed. More rain.” 

3. Another tool in McPhee’s vast literary toolkit is the catalog. Recall his wonderful cargo lists in Looking for a Ship (1990). Tabula Rasa contains at least two memorable lists – one in “On the Campus,” and the other in “Bourbon and Bing Cherries.” The “On the Campus” list is part of a passage that brilliantly re-creates a slide show of WWII airplanes that McPhee remembers viewing when he was a kid. Here’s an excerpt:

But the course was fun, like some precursive television show, as the black silhouette of an aircraft came up on a large screen and was gone two seconds later while you were writing down its name. Messerschmitt ME-109. Next slide, two seconds: Mitsubishi Zero. Next slide, two seconds: Grumman Avenger. Next slide, two seconds: Vought-Sikorsky Corsair. Yes, the American planes were the only planes we would ever report to regional headquarters, in New York or somewhere, in a cryptic sequence from a filled-in, columned sheet: “one, bi, low,” and so forth—one twin-¬engine plane flying low, often a DC-3 descending to Newark. We saw Piper Cubs, Stinson Reliants, and more DC-3s. We saw Martin Marauders, Curtiss-Wright Warhawks, Republic Thunderbolts, Bell Airacobras, Lockheed Lightnings, Consolidated Liberators. It would be treason to say that we were eager to see Heinkel HE-111s and Dornier DO-17s. We didn’t really know what was going on. We were ten, eleven years old and not regarded as precocious.

“On the Campus” also contains one of my favorite lines in Tabula Rasa: “I don’t mean to downsize the women or their role in all this, but—Mrs. Hall, Mrs. Hambling—they didn’t know a Focke-Wulf 200 from a white-throated sparrow.”

Here's the “Bourbon and Bing Cherries” list:

Driving on, this is what I also learned: Jim Beam, of Clermont, Kentucky, made Knob Creek, Old Grand-Dad, Booker’s, Baker’s, Basil Hayden, and I. W. Harper. Brown-Forman, of Louisville, Kentucky, made Early Times, Old Forester, and Woodford Reserve. Buffalo Trace, of Frankfort, Kentucky, made many other not-well-known brands, including Pappy Van Winkle. Bernheim Distillery, of Louisville, Kentucky, made Rebel Yell. Maker’s Mark, of Loretto, Kentucky, made Maker’s Mark.

This piece also contains an inspired line: “Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses.”

By the way, the first part of “Bourbon and Bing Cherries” differs from the version that appeared in The New Yorker. It incorporates eight paragraphs from the Preface that McPhee wrote in 2000 for a paperback edition of his Oranges (1967), including this delightful sentence: “It was late March and the Valencias, in their overlapping cycle, were in fruit and in bloom, a phenomenon of this tree, which blossoms fourteen months before the fruit is picked, with the beautiful result that a Valencia tree in spring is under a snowy veil punctuated by spots of bright orange against an evergreen field of dark leaves.” 

November 13, 2023 Issue

Helen Rosner, in her superb “Tables for Two: Bronx Sidewalk Clam Heaven,” in this week’s issue, writes, “There’s something unavoidably primal about prying open an oyster or clam and sucking it from its shell—there’s no way to aesthetically refine the act’s essential ferality. It’s fun as hell, a disposal of ritual, a moment of pure sensation.” I agree. And the way she puts it is pure pleasure. The passage in the newyorker.com version is even more delicious:

There’s something unavoidably primal about prying open an oyster or clam and sucking it from its shell—there’s no way to aesthetically refine the act’s essential ferality. All the usual intermediations of human carnivorousness are absent: no slaughter, no butchering, no cooking. It’s fun as hell, a disposal of ritual, a moment of pure sensation. A white-haired gent in a topcoat and fedora throws down a dozen clams shoulder to shoulder with a twentysomething fashion girly in platform sneakers, an eleven-year-old boy in a camo jacket, and a middle-aged food writer: We are animals eating animals, in the middle of the street, in the Bronx.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m fascinated by the newyorker.com variation of “Tables For Two.” Here’s another example from the same piece: Rosner writes, “There’s an array of dressings and hot sauces, including a mouth-puckering homemade mignonette, and the oysters are glorious, a symphony of brine and richness.” Yum! That sentence is double bliss; both form and substance are delectable. The newyorker.com version contains a delightful extra clause:  

There’s an array of dressings and hot sauces, including a mouth-puckering homemade mignonette, and the oysters are glorious, a symphony of brine and richness, especially the Blue Points, mild and rich as salted butter, and the peachy sweetness of the Kumamotos.

Rosner is rapidly becoming one of my favorite New Yorker writers. 

November 6, 2023 Issue

David St. John has a poem in this week’s issue. Titled “Prayer for My Daughter,” it somehow combines Blake, the Thames, the Venice boardwalk, Leadbelly, Nirvana, Hendrix, Arcadia, among various other elements, to make a beautiful tribute (“this belated song”) to St. John’s daughter. 

St. John wrote one of my all-time favorite poems – “Guitar” (The New Yorker, December 18, 1978; included in his 1980 collection The Shore). It’s so good, I want to quote it in full:

I have always loved the word guitar.

I have no memories of my father on the patio
At dusk, strumming a Spanish tune,
Or my mother draped in that fawn wicker chair

Polishing her flute;
I have no memories of your song, distant Sister
Heart, of those steel strings sliding
All night through the speaker of the car radio
Between Tucumcari and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Though I’ve never believed those stories
Of gypsy cascades, stolen horses, castanets,
And stars, of Airstream trailers and good fortune,
Though I never met Charlie Christian, though
I’ve danced the floors of cold longshoremen’s halls,
Though I’ve waited with the overcoats at the rear
Of concerts for lute, mandolin, and two guitars –
More than the music I love scaling its woven
Stairways, more than the swirling chocolate of wood

I have always loved the word guitar.

God, I love that poem! Those last three lines are inspired. The whole gorgeous assemblage is inspired – one of the best poems ever to appear in The New Yorker. 

3 More for the Road: Details

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favorite 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 artful use of detail.  

What an astonishing density of detail there is in these three books! Everything is noted, named, and particularized, even coffee lids:

The least successful design and most rarely seen, in my cross-country experience, is the puncture style, such as David Herbst’s Push and Drink Lid, patented in 1990. This features a raised lid piece, often a kind of plastic sewer grate, that is depressed, thus puncturing the lid and allowing a flow of coffee. In the case of the Dart model, the grate is depressed anew each time the upper lip of the coffee imbiber seeks to gain access to the so-called coffee. I find them to be confusing, causing me to ask myself questions such as “Have I punctured sufficiently”? and “Is the coffee coming through, because I really, really need it to come through?” Often I will take the entire lid off and just admire it on the dashboard. This happened the last time I picked one up in Missoula, Montana, at Finnegan’s, the restaurant over the creek where Lewis and Clark supposedly camped. The coffee, by the way, was very good.

That’s from Sullivan's Cross Country. It's just one paragraph from an analysis that goes on for three pages, and includes a picture of a complicated reclosable lid called the Optima. Sullivan says of it, “I kind of like it, and I am certainly fascinated by it, but I also feel as if it is like the interstate itself – i.e., too much – and so I often take it off, and pour the coffee, for instance, into my porcelain Lewis and Clark mug.” That porcelain Lewis and Clark mug is, in itself, an interesting detail.

Frazier’s Travels in Siberia brims with memorable details. Here, for example, is his description of some of the Cold War relics he saw on display at the Museum of Siberian Communications in Novosibirsk:

The humorous blond woman with Nefertiti eyes who showed me around laughed about the huge old radios, the suitcase-size adding machines, the bulbous green telephone that had come from East Germany, the almost-primitive Yenisei TV set made in Krasnoyarsk, the Brezhnev-era TV that was the size of a desk and that everybody in the 1970s dreamed of owning, and the 1950s TV that many older Russians remember because it had a tiny screen over which was superimposed a large magnifying lens that had to be filled with special distilled water.

Bailey, in his Along the Edge of the Forest, also has a keen eye for detail. Recall, for example, his vivid description of the hitchhiking bag lady he encounters on the road to Wolfsburg:

Just outside the next village of Croya a lumpy human shape was standing rather perilously out in the road, and as I swerved the car around it, it – an elderly woman – waved a hand up and down. I stopped. She approached the car. Then having worked out that she could not get in what she thought was the passenger door, she came around to the other side of my Saab (which has right-hand steering for British roads) and got in. Clearly, I was giving her a lift. She was wearing a sheet of clear plastic over the shoulders of an ancient black dress. (Although the morning was gray, it wasn’t raining.) She began to talk and I didn’t understand a word. I think that even if my knowledge of German had been magnificent, I would not have understood her. She was speaking or rather barking a country dialect, and it may have been that even in that she wasn’t making much sense. Now that she was seated next to me I noticed that she had in her lap an apparently empty shopping bag and wore plastic bags on her hands as if she had been brought up to wear gloves when going out. Bristly black hairs sprouted from her chin and upper lip. Her eyes didn’t seem to focussed on anything external. She was visibly filthy and gave off a strong smell of urine. 

That pungent last detail has stayed with me ever since I first read it, almost forty years ago. The same goes for Frazier’s description of the men’s washroom at the Omsk airport, in Travels in Siberia:

The men’s room at the Omsk airport was unbelievably disgusting. Stepping through the door, or even near the door, was like receiving a blow to the face from the flat of the hand. No surface inside the men’s room, including the ceiling, was clean. There were troughs and stools, but no partitions, stalls, or doors. Everything done was done in full view. The floor was strewn with filth of a wide and eye-catching variety. At the urinal raised cement footprints offered the possibility of keeping your feet out of the flooding mire, but as the footprints themselves were hardly filth-free, the intention failed. Certain of this place’s images that I won’t describe remain inexpungible from my mind. I got out of there as fast as was practical and reeled away into the terminal’s dim lobby.

Once read, never forgotten.

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