Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #2 "Janet Malcolm's 'Forty-one False Starts' - Part II"

This is the ninth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts – Part II” (June 25, 2013):

In late 2003, two remarkable Diane Arbus exhibitions (and accompanying catalogs) – the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Diane Arbus Revelations and Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art’s Diane Arbus: Family Albums - attracted the attention of two of America’s greatest critical writers – Janet Malcolm and Judith Thurman. Thurman’s review, "Exposure Time," appeared in the October 13, 2003, New Yorker, and was later included in her superb Cleopatra’s Nose (2007). Malcolm’s piece, "Good Pictures," was originally published in the January 15, 2004, New York Review of Books, and now, nine years later, wonderfully reappears in her excellent new collection Forty-one False Starts. Both pieces are brilliant. It’s interesting to compare them, as much for what they may tell about Malcolm’s and Thurman’s style, as for what they reveal about Arbus’s work. (I’m as interested in the way Malcolm and Thurman write as I am in the way Arbus took pictures.)

The first thing to note is that Thurman’s piece is a book review; it considers only the exhibition catalogs. In contrast, Malcolm’s review covers both the exhibitions and the catalogs. This is a significant difference that accrues to Malcolm’s benefit. Her critical approach thrives on comparative analysis. In her “Good Pictures,” she pounces on a fascinating discrepancy between the Family Albums exhibition and the Family Albums catalogue and uses it to illustrate what constitutes, in her words, “true Arbus photographs.” I’m referring to the point late in Malcolm’s narrative in which she reports that the younger Matthaei daughter, Leslie, “suddenly decided she didn’t want any pictures of herself published.” As Malcolm explains, this meant that Arbus’s Leslie portraits were viewable only at the show, not in the catalog. This fact generates a quintessentially Malcolmian line: “When I went to see the Mount Holyoke show, I naturally sought out the missing pictures of Leslie and immediately understood why she had not wanted them preserved in a book.” I find that sentence thrilling for at least three reasons: (1) it shows Malcolm entering her narrative, making a story of her pursuit of a story; (2) it turns a trip to the gallery into a form of psychoanalytic inquiry (what is it about the portraits that Leslie is repressing?); (3) it creates a delicious anticipation of Malcolm’s description of what the Leslie portraits look like. With respect to this last point, Malcolm doesn’t disappoint. Immediately following the above-quoted sentence, she writes: “Leslie, an attractive girl, is the disobliging daughter, the Cordelia of the shoot. In almost every photograph, she sulks, glares, frowns, looks tense and grim and sometimes even outright malevolent.”

Malcolm then makes another brilliant analytic move – a comparison of the Leslie portraits with those of her older sister, Marcella. In what is perhaps the piece’s most memorable line, she writes, “Marcella gave Arbus what Leslie refused.” It’s like a line from a novel. Malcolm reads the pictures as a story about how Arbus made art from what appeared to be a hopelessly banal family photo shoot. In fact, earlier in “Good Pictures,” she says, “The uncut Matthaei contact sheets straightforwardly tell the story of Arbus’s two-day struggle with her commissions.” The art that emerged from this struggle are the two Marcella portraits. Malcolm describes them unforgettably:

The two portraits of Marcella that Lee and Pultz reproduce in the book are true Arbus photographs. They have the strangeness and uncanniness with which Arbus’s best work is tinged. They belong among the pictures of the man wearing a bra and stockings and the twins in corduroy dresses and the albino sword swallower and the nudist couple. Like these subjects, Marcella unwittingly collaborated with Arbus on her project of defamiliarization. The portraits of Marcella – one full-figure to the knees, and the other of head and torso – show a girl with long hair and bangs that come down over her eyes who is standing so erect and looking so straight ahead of her that she might be a caryatid. The fierce gravity of her strong features further enhances the sense of stone. Her short, sleeveless white dress of crocheted material, which might look tacky on another girl, looks like a costume from myth on this girl. To contrast the pictures of balky little Leslie with those of monumental Marcella is to understand something about the fictive nature of Arbus’s work. The pictures of Leslie are pictures that illustrate photography’s ready realism, its appetite for fact. They record the literal truth of Leslie’s fury and misery. The pictures of Marcella show the defeat of photography’s literalism. They take us far from the family gathering – indeed from any occasion but that of of the encounter between Arbus and Marcella in which the fiction of the photograph is forged.

Diane Arbus, Untitled (Marcella Matthaei) (1969)

I confess, as much as I admire this passage for its extraordinary interpretative beauty and originality, I find it disorienting. Nothing that’s gone before it, in “Good Pictures,” prepares the reader for critical phrases such as “project of defamiliarization,” “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work,” and “the fiction of the photograph.” In fact, if you are reading the essays in Forty-one False Starts serially from the beginning, you will have already encountered Malcolm’s observation, in  “Depth of Field,” that “Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness.” I don’t know if it’s possible to reconcile these two views. “Inescapable truthfulness” would seem to preclude fictionalization, unless Malcolm is reading the Marcella portraits as a type of narrative truth. Perhaps she is. Recall that in her great essay, “Six Roses ou Cirrhose” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in her 1992 collection, The Purloined Clinic), she defines narrative truth as “the truth of literary art.” Perhaps “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work” and “the fiction of the photograph,” in the sense that Malcolm uses them in “Good Pictures,” means “the truth of photographic art.”

If you read Judith Thurman’s “Exposure Time” after you read Malcolm’s “Good Pictures,” you might think that Thurman missed the story. In a way, she did. Not only does she not mention the Leslie and Marcella portraits, she devotes only three lines to Diane Arbus: Family Albums (“The pictures she took for the album, which was never published, were commissioned by magazines or by private clients, and some were made for art’s sake. Like all her work, they explored the nature of closeness and disaffection, sameness and anomaly, belonging and exclusion: the tension between our sentimental expectations of what is supposed to be and the debacle of what is. Arbus put it more simply to Crookston: ‘I think all families are creepy in a way’ ”). Instead, Thurman focuses on Diane Arbus: Revelations, which she calls the “much more ambitious Arbus show.”

But Thurman has her own Arbus story to tell or, rather, more accurately, her own Arbus brief to argue. “Exposure Time” is a tour de force of descriptive analysis that powerfully defends Arbus against, in Thurman’s words, “the hostility to her transgressions.” Thurman quotes Susan Sontag’s accusation that Arbus explored “an appalling underworld” of the “deformed and mutilated.” In rebuttal, Thurman says, “The respect and sympathy for her freaks that Arbus expresses in her letters – particularly those to her children – and her apparently solicitous, ongoing engagement with them, is at odds with the view that she was exploiting their credulity.” Conceding that Arbus was “cunning and aggressive,” she adds, “but so are many photographers.” She says,

Photography was then, and still is, a macho profession, and if she took its machismo to greater extremes than her peers of either sex, it was in part to scourge her native timidity and to prove that she had the balls to join her subjects’ orgies, share their nudity, endure their stench, revel in their squalor, and break down their resistance with a seductively disarming or fierce and often sexualized persistence until she “got” a certain expression: defeat, fatigue, slackness, anomie, or demented joy.

Diane Arbus, Untitled (7) (1970-71)

Rereading “Exposure Time,” I’m struck by the naturalness of Thurman’s style. She's more natural than Malcolm. Her lines are longer, richer, more sensuous and vivid. For example, here from “Exposure Time,” is her wonderful description of Arbus’s great Untitled (7):

In one of her masterpieces, “Untitled (7),” the rural landscape seems bathed in the lowering and eerie radiance of an eclipse, and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects—descendants of Goya’s gargoyles—march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear. A grave child of indeterminate sex with a painted mustache and averted gaze holds hands with a masked old woman in a white shift. They are oblivious of—and in a way liberated from—Arbus’s gaze. After years of posing her subjects frontally, she had begun to prefer that they did not look at her. “I think I will see them more clearly,” she wrote to Amy, “if they are not watching me watching them.”

That “and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects – descendants of Goya’s gargoyles – march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear” is very fine.

“Exposure Time” is more descriptive; “Good Pictures” is more analytical. Both are terrific - two of my all-time favorite critical pieces. It’s great to see them preserved between hard covers.

September 23, 2024 Issue

Three excellent pieces in this week’s New Yorker (“The Fall Style & Design Issue”):

1. Anna Wiener’s “Joy Ride,” a profile of bicycle designer Grant Petersen. Wiener visits Petersen at his company’s headquarters in Walnut Creek, California. She goes for a trail ride with him at Fernandez Ranch, in Martinez. And, riding a bike that Petersen loans her (“an A. Homer Hilsen the color of celestine, with upright bars and a metal basket”), she joins a group of cyclists for a day ride from the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin. She says of Petersen, “He is an advocate of pleasurable, unhurried riding—alone, or with family and friends—and is obsessive about comfort.” I can relate to that. I do a lot of cycling, and that’s my approach, too. I enjoyed Wiener’s piece immensely.

2. Rachel Syme’s “Sniff Test,” a profile of Parisian perfumer Francis Kurkdjian. This piece brims with wonderful descriptions of scent. This one, for example: “The resulting perfume did not smell edible or organic; it evoked something air-gapped and untouched by human sweat, like a new Porsche that happens to be filled with cotton candy.” And this: “At the end of the meeting, he pulled out a vial of a Privée scent he’d been working on, dipped a mouillette, and handed it to me. It smelled of honey and bonfire, cut through with a bright note of snap-pea green.” I enjoyed this sensuous piece enormously.

3. Jackson Arn’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” a review of Jackie Wullschläger’s Monet: The Restless Vision. Arn says of it, “Some important events are done in smudged glimpses, but the over-all shape of his eighty-six years is clear. Every few chapters, a sudden nub of detail robs you of your breath.” Arn also considers some of Monet’s paintings. Of Branch of the Seine Near Giverny (1897), he writes, “The scene is only a few firm details away from abstraction, a Rorschach test tilted sideways—not a thing plus its echo but an unbroken flat-deep surface. If it is still an impression of a lost moment, there is something newly sturdy mixed in; each brushstroke declares, I’m still here.” I love this line: “Diving into his lonely, flickering subjectivity, shushing his doubts, he discovered a kind of beauty beloved by so many that it became universal."

September 16, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ben Taub’s “The Dark Time,” a detailed look into the espionage war currently being fought on the border between Russia and Norway. Taub visits the Norwegian border town of Kirkenes. “In the context of nuclear escalation,” he says, “Kirkenes is in one of the most strategically sensitive regions on earth.” The other side of the border is the Kola Peninsula, “which is filled with closed military towns and airfields, nuclear-weapons storage facilities, and nuclear-submarine ports.” He attends a NATO military exercise called Cold Response, in which some thirty thousand troops were practicing Arctic warfare. He visits a watchtower that overlooks the Russian town of Nikel. He traverses roughly seventy kilometres of the border – 

mostly in snowshoes, occasionally in boots or on skis—and bunked with conscripts in remote outposts whose walls were coated in ice. The border region is a place where everyday life is imbued with geopolitical significance, where the stakes are visible in what little infrastructure exists amid the vast, unyielding wilderness: radar balls, listening stations, relay towers, a microwave-communications network for the military. On a patrol last November, to monitor the border in the mountains overlooking Russia’s Pechenga valley, two conscripts and I experienced total whiteout, and could hardly distinguish ground from sky. It was just freezing whiteness, minus twenty degrees Celsius—a void. Shortly after midday, everything faded to blue and gray, then to black.

In one of the piece’s most memorable passages, Taub joins a U.S. Navy crew for a mission aboard a P-8 Poseidon, “one of the world’s most advanced submarine-hunting aircraft.” The plane is piloted by Sandeep Arakali, a twenty-eight-year-old aerospace engineer. Taub describes the P-8 engaging in an air-to-air refuelling:

Arakali approached the stratotanker from behind and from slightly below. The tanker filled the P-8’s cockpit windows—four huge jet engines, spanning my peripheral vision. Arakali leaned over the controls and craned his neck upward. His hands shook wildly, compensating for forces that I could not see; in relation to the stratotanker, the P-8 seemed perfectly still. A young woman, lying prone in the stratotanker’s tail, stared back at him, her face framed by a small triangular window, as she guided a fuel line into the top of the P-8. There was a rush of liquid above us—two tons per minute. Then the line detached, and Arakali descended over the Barents Sea.

Everywhere Taub goes, he talks with people – Johan Roaldsnes, Norwegian regional counterintelligence chief; Frederick Hodnefjell, company commander; Thomas Nilsen, journalist; Tor Ivar Dahl Pettersen, air-ambulance pilot; Frode Berg, a Norwegian former border inspector; Kari Aga Myklebøst, Barents Chair in Russian Studies at the Arctic University of Norway; Harold Sunde, a member of Kirkenes’s municipal council; Georgii Chentemirov, a journalist exiled from Russia who settled in Kirkenes; to name a few. 

Reading “The Dark Time” is an immersive experience. Taub puts us squarely there – in Kirkenes, in the P-8 Poseidon, in the cold, dark Norwegian Arctic. My take-away from this great piece? Make no mistake, Russia is at war with the West.  

September 9, 2024 Issue

Seamus Heaney is one of my heroes. I first encountered his work on a 1985 trip to Halifax with several friends. One of them, Alan Buchanan, brought a slim book of poetry with him and read some of it to us as we drove. The book was Seamus Heaney’s Field Work (1979). Alan read it with great gusto. I relished every line. “You drank America / like the heart’s / iron vodka,” “I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken me into verb, pure verb,” and this beauty – “A rowan like a lipsticked girl.” Soon after, I discovered Heaney’s critical writings. His essay collection The Government of the Tongue (1988) is one of my touchstones. I mention all this because, in this week’s New Yorker, Maggie Doherty reviews The Letters of Seamus Heaney. I read it avidly. What was Heaney’s letter-writing like? Doherty doesn’t exactly say. She provides an excellent outline of his life. She quotes some of his poems, e.g., “Digging,” “Churning Day,” and “Funeral Rites.” She praises their sound:

Like a good anthropologist, young Heaney had a knack for thick description, but, as with Hopkins, the great pleasure of his early poems is their sound. Combining the hard consonants of Old English, which he’d studied in college, with the Latinate style favored by many lyric poets, he developed a voice that was by turns ruthless and refined. Consider the first lines of “Churning Day”: “A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast, / hardened gradually on top of the four crocks.” Each consonant cracks like a peppercorn between the teeth. These are poems you taste.

She occasionally provides a brief excerpt from a letter, e.g., “In a letter, he described California as a ‘lotus land for the moment’; walking to campus, he passed ‘hippies, drop-outs, freak-outs, addicts, Black Panthers, Hare Krishna American kids with shaved heads.’ ” But there are no extended quotes, nothing to indicate whether the letters themselves are worth reading. She says of the collection that it “shows the man to be both responsive and responsible, generous with praise for his fellow-writers, grateful for feedback from trusted readers, and open to the dissenting opinions of his colleagues and countrymen, even as he maintains his own beliefs.” Okay, all very interesting. But what of the writing purely as writing? Are there any flashes of the Heaney magic? Doherty doesn’t say. It’s a very disappointing review. 

September 2, 2024 Issue

When I read a book review, I want to know two things: what the book's about and how it’s written. For me, the “how” is more important than the “what.” I’ll read a stylishly written book on almost any subject. These days, New Yorker reviewers rarely address form. The only exception is James Wood. Case in point is Kathryn Schulz’s “Living Under a Rock,” in this week’s issue. It’s a review of Marcia Bjornerud’s Turning to Stone. Schulz beautifully describes it: 

In its pages, what Bjornerud has learned serves to illuminate what she already knew: each of the book’s ten chapters is structured around a variety of rock that provides the context for a particular era of her life, from childhood to the present day. The result is one of the more unusual memoirs of recent memory, combining personal history with a detailed account of the building blocks of the planet. What the two halves of this tale share is an interest in the evolution of existence—in the forces, both quotidian and cosmic, that shape us.

This is the kind of book I’d be interested in reading. What is the writing like? Schulz offers a hint:

Bjornerud is a good enough writer to render all of this perfectly interesting. She has a feel for the evocative vocabulary of geology, with its driftless areas and great unconformities, and also for the virtues of plain old bedrock English. (“There is nothing to be done in bad Arctic weather but wait for it to get less bad.”) 

That’s it, that’s all she says regarding the book’s prose. Not even one extended quotation to give the reader a taste of Bjornerud’s style. 

The best New Yorker book reviewers – John Updike, V. S. Pritchett, George Steiner, Helen Vendler, Whitney Balliett, Janet Malcolm – were all great quoters. Now only James Wood continues the practice. All the rest are so in love with their own voices, they’d rather paraphrase than quote. It’s a great loss.  

Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb "New Yorker" Essayists (Part VI)

This is the sixth post in my series “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists,” a celebration of Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023), in which I’ll select four of my favorite pieces from each collection (one per month) and try to say why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Lepore’s superb “The War and the Roses” (August 8 & 15, 2016). 

In this great piece, Lepore puts American politics to a reality test of her own devising. The results are dismaying. But first she plunges into the cauldrons of the 2016 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. She divides her piece into two sections: the first on the Republican Convention in Cleveland; the second on the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Here’s her opening paragraph:

They perched on bar stools, their bodies long and lean, like eels, the women in sleeveless dresses the color of flowers or fruit (marigold, tangerine), the men in fitted suits the color of embers (charcoal, ash). Makeshift television studios lined the floor and the balcony of the convention hall: CNN, Fox, CBS, Univision, PBS. MSNBC built a pop-up studio on East Fourth Street, a square stage raised above the street, like an outdoor boxing ring. “Who won today? Who will win tomorrow?” the networks asked. The guests slumped against the ropes and sagged in their seats, or straightened their backs and slammed their fists. The hosts narrowed their eyes, the osprey to the fish: “Is America over?”

That “osprey to the fish” is very fine. Lepore is herself osprey to the fish of American politicians, particularly those who throw around the phrase “the people,” which is almost all of them. “Hope comes from the people”; “Donald Trump is for the people!”; “the American people are not falling for it”; and so on. Lepore is deeply skeptical of politicians’ use of that phrase. She says, “Every tyrant from Mao to Perón rules in the name of the people; his claim does not lessen their suffering.” She quotes the historian Edmund S. Morgan: “Government requires make-believe.... Make believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are the people.”

Lepore uses everything – water bottles, T-shirts, placards, banners, monuments, ponchos, a jumbo teleprompter, even “a ten-foot-tall American bald eagle, made entirely out of red-white-and-blue Duck Brand duct tape” – to evoke the scene. Nothing escapes her osprey eye. 

And then she makes an extraordinary journalistic move. She steps outside the convention hall. She leaves the turmoil behind. She goes to a beautiful city park. In stream-of-consciousness mode, she writes,

The rule inside the Convention was: Incite fear and division in order to call for safety and union. I decided that the rule outside the Convention was: No kidding, it’s really awfully nice out here, in a beautiful city park, on a sunny day in July, where a bunch of people are arguing about politics and nothing could possibly be more interesting, and the Elect Jesus people are giving out free water, icy cold, and the police are playing Ping-Pong with the protesters, and you can take a nap in the grass if you want, and you will dream that you are on a farm because the grass smells kind of horsy, and like manure, because of all the mounted police from Texas, wearing those strangely sexy cowboy hats; and, yes, there are police from all over the country here, and if you ask for directions one of them will say to you, “Girl, I’m from Atlanta!” and you have to know that, if they weren’t here, who knows what would happen; there are horrible people shouting murderous things and tussling, that’s what they came here for, and anything can blow up in an instant; and, yes, there are civilians carrying military-style weapons, but, weirdly, they are less scary here than they are online; they look ridiculous, honestly, and this one lefty guy is a particular creep, don’t get cornered; but, also, there’s a little black girl in the fountain rolling around, getting soaked, next to some white guy who’s sitting there, just sitting there, in the water, his legs kicked out in front of him, holding a cardboard sign that reads “Tired of the Violence.”

I vote that one of the most memorable passages in all of political journalism. Real life is not in the convention hall; it’s out here on the grass of this beautiful park. That’s my take-away from this remarkable piece. 

Taking a Break

Canal bike route, Ireland (Photo from threerockbooks.com)

Today, Lorna and I travel to Ireland to do some cycling. We'll be gone three weeks. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about September 25. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #10 Ethan Iverson's "Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City"

This is the first post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Ethan Iverson’s “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City” (newyorker.com, August 17, 2017) is one of the coolest, most original, most memorable pieces of comparative analysis I’ve ever read. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Since the nineteen-sixties, there have not been jazz musicians as artistically significant and generally popular as Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, or Bill Evans. Today, jazz music is a miscellaneous collection of wide-ranging and disputed genres that stands to the side of American culture. How did the train go off the tracks? A listen to Ellington and Evans both playing an Ellington standard, “In a Sentimental Mood,” on the same hot Thursday night in New York City—August 17, 1967—offers a few clues. Here is Ellington’s version, at the Rainbow Grill, with the tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, along with John Lamb on bass and Steve Little on drums. And here is Evans’s version, at the Village Vanguard, with Eddie Gomez on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums.

That enticing introduction shines a brilliant beam of light down through the rest of the piece – illuminating its theme (jazz isn’t what it used to be) and setting up a fascinating contrast (Ellington vs. Evans). At the heart of it: two versions of Ellington’s great “In a Sentimental Mood” performed at different venues on the same night in New York City. What a wonderful subject! Iverson uses it as a springboard into an argument about the negative influence of “scalar thought” on jazz education. But first he describes the two performances. He says of Ellington,

Ellington packs a whole history of composition into only two and a half choruses. The first chorus is piano in D minor/F major, the “old style,” fairly close to the first 1935 recording. After the “old-style” chorus, Duke modulates to Bb minor/Db major for Gonsalves’s entrance, the same key used for the “new-style” version of “In a Sentimental Mood” tracked with John Coltrane, in 1962. Gonsalves’s greatest fame was authoring twenty-six choruses of shouting blues on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” at the Newport Jazz Festival, in 1956, a moment that many credit with revitalizing Ellington’s career. However, Gonsalves was also one of the greatest ballad players, and his silky, furry, almost murky legato here is pure delight.

Gonsalves’s mastery is only to be expected, but the sixty-eight-year-old Ellington is still full of surprises. Playing with Coltrane, Ellington’s “new-style” arrangement had a mournful raindrop piano part that was dramatic and distinctive. At the Rainbow Grill, Ellington doesn’t play many of the raindrops but goes all out in rhapsodic style: heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs. It would be hard to find ballad accompaniment this busy anywhere else.

This is descriptive analysis at its finest. I devoured it. And what a treat to be able to click on the text’s embedded hyperlinks and hear the actual music that Iverson is writing about. 

Iverson then shifts his focus to Evans’s performance. He writes,

The current Evans trio was a mix of new and old. Eddie Gomez was a fresh firebrand in the tradition of Scott LaFaro (the extraordinary bass virtuoso on “Sunday at the Village Vanguard”). The drum great Philly Joe Jones was a familiar Evans associate from their Miles Davis days and the swinging 1958 trio session “Everybody Digs Bill Evans.”

Bill Evans recorded “In a Sentimental Mood” a few times over the years, usually as a ballad, but at the Vanguard that night it was a medium swinger. There are three different takes from three different sets on August 17th and 18th, but the piano part is consistent. Gomez and Jones make all the rhythmic hits and substitute changes with the pianist, but they are also free to offer tasteful commentary. Over all, this is a much more modern and interactive approach to the rhythm section than Lamb and Little with Ellington at the Rainbow Grill. Unlike Ellington’s unwinding scroll, conventional small-band jazz practice dictated an identical “melody in” and “melody out.”

Note that word “conventional.” It’s the first hint of Iverson’s argument. In his next paragraph, he makes his point explicit: “It’s all very hip for 1967, but there was, nonetheless, a faintly homogenous and predictable air from Evans at this point.”

Iverson then makes another interesting analytical move. He looks at “The Real Book.” He says,

During the mid-seventies, a lead sheet of “In a Sentimental Mood” appeared in “The Real Book,” the most widely disseminated jazz manual ever made, a “fake book” of tunes and chord changes produced by students in the powerful jazz program at Berklee College of Music, in Boston.

If a student wanted to sound like Bill Evans on “In a Sentimental Mood,” he or she could quickly start getting close with the help of a chart in “The Real Book.” The sheet begins with four versions of D minor, “D-, D-(maj7), D-7, D-6.” These aren’t wrong, exactly, but they are far closer to Evans than Ellington, and suggest ways of articulating harmony in a blocky and unmusical fashion, one divorced from the idea and emotion of the original song.

Far closer to Evans than Ellington – right there is Iverson’s crucial point. For him, Evans represents homogeneity; Ellington represents avant-gardism. He puts it this way: 

If a student wants to sound like Ellington, there’s no point in looking at “The Real Book.” Ellington’s performance is too mysterious and detailed. Each of Ellington’s chords is its own universe. Some chords have added-tone harmony that fit a scale; some do not.

That “Each of Ellington’s chords is its own universe” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – a masterpiece of comparative analysis.

Credit: The above photo of Duke Ellington is by Marty Lederhandler.

August 26, 2024 Issue

The best thing in this week’s issue is Cocina Consuelo’s dulce-de-leche donut. Helen Rosner mentions it in her "Tables for Two: Fall Preview." But she doesn’t give any details. I found a picture of one on the restaurant’s Facebook page:

Mm, I'll have one of those, please. 

3 for the River: Nature

This is the ninth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favourite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their abundant nature content.

These three great books are in constant contact with first nature. That’s one of the of the many things I like about them. Dangerous River teems with wildlife: moose, black bears, grizzlies, eagles, wolves, beaver, caribou, Dall sheep, wild geese, lynx, mallards, whisky-jacks, blue grouse, marten, partridge, wolverine.

Here, in one of the book’s most memorable scenes, is Patterson’s encounter with a cow moose and her calf:

As I bailed I heard a grunting noise from upstream: a cow moose and her calf were swimming the river; the calf was having a rough time of it in the fast water, and the cow was talking to it and encouraging it. She probably intended to land where I had beached the canoe, but she saw me and headed straight for the bank, landing about a hundred yards upstream. The calf, however, had been doing its utmost and had nothing in reserve: it was swept down river and into the eddy, from which it splashed ashore about fifteen yards below camp. 

I was in the classic situation – in between mother and child; and mother weighed about eight hundred pounds, and a decidedly querulous note was creeping into her grunts. The calf let out a feeble bleat and the cow came a little closer, grunting angrily. I waded ashore and gently took down the rifle from the tree close to the canoe where it was hanging. Then I waded into the river to see if I could get around the calf and chase it back upstream to its mother: out of the corner of one eye I could see that the soup was boiling over; the tea pail also had a fine head of steam up, and no doubt the rice was burning – and I silently cursed the whole tribe of moose right back to its remote beginnings. Anything but a prehistoric-looking beast like that would have had sense enough to stay out of camp!

I was in the water now as deep as I could get, the rifle held high in one hand and the other busily engaged in unknotting the red silk scarf that was round my neck. The calf was watching me: heaven send the little fool wouldn’t lose his head and take off down the canyon and get himself drowned; if he did the cow would blame it all on me and come charging through camp and wreck everything – and stop a bullet, when all I wanted was peace. But the calf never moved, and I came dripping out of the river below him and walked up the bank. He seemed to be petrified: not so the cow, however. She was working herself into a fine frenzy and pawing at the sand – a bad sign. It was high time to get that calf on the move.

I came right up behind him, flapped the red scarf suddenly and let out one devil of a yell. I had intended to fire a shot over him as well, just to speed him on his way, but there was no need for that – he was already going faster than any mortal moose calf had ever gone before. And how perfectly it was all working out! He would pass between my bedroll and the fire; no damage would be done and there would still be time to salvage something of my supper from the ruins of what might have been ... 

But how completely the picture changed, all in a fraction of a second! Just as the calf drew level with it a little breeze from the west flapped the shirt that was drying on the tree: he gave a blat of terror and shied sideways, stumbling over the long logs of the fire. Over went everything, but particularly the mulligan pot, which he sent flying ahead with his front feet. He then bucked over the fire and landed with one hind foot through the stout bail handle of the mulligan pot, which somehow stayed with him for about three jumps and then, as he freed himself from it with a vicious kick, sailed into the river, from which I rescued it. That was the end of the party, and judging by the row that came up from the beach, the guests were leaving in a hurry. Supper was a wreck, the partridge mulligan had gone down the river and the calf had pretty nearly squared the pot for me; I spent half the night hammering it round again with the back of an axe. 

That was the end of the party – Patterson’s irony makes me smile. The partridge mulligan had gone down the river – his word combinations are inspired. And note that “red silk scarf.” Patterson was a Nahanni dandy. 

There’s wildlife in Raban’s Old Glory, too: turtles, butterflies, carp, snakes. But nature is most present in his vivid descriptions of Mississippi water:

Here the water was a deep olive green, mottled all over with leaf shadows. 

Until the river straightened out, I didn’t realize the strength of the south wind. It was blowing dead against the current, and the water was crumpling into it, ridged with lines of whitecaps running so close together that the boat just rattled across the top of this bumpy, corrugated river. 

By time it reached me, it had accumulated a frightening height and weight: lines of chocolate combers ran straight up and down the channel. They took hold of the boat and rocked it over on its gunwales. 

I had entered an absolutely seamless world. Everything in it tended to one color. Its browns and greens and blues had been mixed until they’d gone to the translucent gray of dirty gauze. I couldn’t tell what was shore, sky or river. The current, exhausted by the sheer space of Lake Pepin, had stopped altogether. In front of the boat, the water had the gleaming consistency of molasses; behind, it lay smashed and buckled by my wake. I slowed right down until the propeller left only a little string of corkscrew whorls, and even they were the marks of a vandal on an otherwise immaculate landscape. 

I went through Lock 6 at Trempealeau and the river changed again, into another crazy terra-cotta of islands, lakes and creeks, with the buoyed channel running close under the bluff on the Minnesota shore. Here the water, sheltered from the wind, was as dark as boot polish. 

Then the smooth humps of the boils began again, and the lurching, slithery motion of the boat as the motor did its best to keep a grip on the cross-currents of these greasy swirls of spinning water. 

Wharves, cranes and smokestacks were going past in a blur of black type. I caught a momentary glimpse of the Gateway Arch, its scaly steel turning to gold in the sunset, but it was an irrelevance beside the whirling surface of the river. The water here was thicker and darker than I’d seen it before; all muscle, clenching and unclenching, taking logs as big as trees and roiling them around just for the hell of the thing. 

There were sharp rips and creases in the current now, as if the Mississippi were trying to tear itself apart; but the most scary change was the succession of great waxy boils. I could see them coming from a long way off. Most of the river was lightly puckered by the wind, but there were patches of what looked like dead-calm water: circular in shape, a hundred yards or so across. I took them for quiet millponds, good places to light a pipe or unscrew the cap of a thermos flask. Delighted to find that the Mississippi now afforded such convenient picnic spots, I drove straight for one. I hit its edge, the boat slewed sideways and I was caught on the rim of a spinning centrifuge. I had mistaken it for calm water because its motion was so violent that no wind could disturb it. I could see the cap of the boil far away in the middle, a clear eighteen inches higher than the rest of the river. From this raised point, the water was spilling around and down the convex face, disappearing deep into the crack in which my boat was caught. Running the engine at full speed, I yanked myself out easily enough, but I had felt the river trying to suck me under, boat and all, and I was tense with fright. 

The junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio was a confluence of thick machine oil and rosewater. 

The Mississippi was just making waves for the hell of it; give it the temptation of a shoal and it would run in dark, serrated combers, three and four feet high, showing off its muscles. 

As dawn came up, the river went to a dim, gauzy gray. We were leaving a trail of ragged creases in the water behind us. Both shores were unbroken cypress swamps. We passed between sandbars as cold and bare as bits of Mongolian desert. 

I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak. 

I crept into it as slowly and as quietly as I could, trying to let the boat do no more than stroke the water as it went. It was strange water, too. Ahead, lit my misty sunshine, it was milky, streaky green like polished soapstone. There was no wind and no current. It looked so stable an element that one might have carved ashtrays and telephone stands out of it. Behind the boat, though, where the motor was stirring it, it was thick and peaty like black syrup. 

Raban is a virtuoso water-describer: see also his brilliant Passage to Juneau (1999), reviewed in my series “3 for the Sea.”

In Tim Butcher’s Blood River, nature is sticky equatorial heat, heavy bush, glutinous mud, high-canopy trees. It’s river and rainforest. It’s ants, mosquitoes, and cockroaches. And on the river, it’s the ubiquitous “lilac blooms of the water hyacinth on their mattresses of matted tuber and leaf.” 

Here’s Butcher’s description of trees:

Within moments of leaving Ubundu we entered full rainforest. There were trees so high I could not make out any detail of the leaf canopy tens of metres over my head. Some of the trunks were pleated into great sinews that plunged into the earth, as massive and solid as flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral. And high above my head, but beneath the gloomy leaf canopy, I could make out boughs as square and broad as steel girders.

Ants:

At one point an obstacle made us stop in a thicket of giant bamboo. Canes as thick as my leg sprouted close together before splaying out as they grew longer and thinner. I spotted a long, thin black line that looked like a gunpowder trail from a western movie. Walking closer, I saw the line begin to move. At first it shifted as one, but as I got nearer it separated into millions of component parts – a column of ants.

“Get away, get away,” Michel shouted at me. I had heard stories of Congolese ant columns descending on villages and eating everything in their path. Infants, the elderly and the infirm will perish if left to be consumed by the column. A hunter told me that he would prepare the trophy from an antelope hunt by deliberately finding one of those ant columns and then throwing the dead animal’s skull into its path. When he came back the next day, the bone would be spotless, stripped of every last piece of flesh and gristle, tendon and tissue.

Stupidly ignoring Michel, I approached to what I took to be a safe distance and started taking photographs. Within seconds I had a bite on my knee, and then one on my thigh, then another on my back. As I ran back to the bikes, the ants were so thick on my trousers I brushed them off like soot. It took ten minutes to undress and rid every last ant from the creases in my clothes. The worst of the bites stung for days. 

That “As I ran back to the bikes, the ants were so thick on my trousers I brushed them off like soot” is wonderfully vivid. 

Butcher is excellent at conveying the intensity of Congo heat:

The climate gets crueler and crueler with the descent. As altitude is lost, with it goes any hope of a cooling breeze. I found by late morning, even on a hazy day, the steel panels on the decks would be throbbing with heat. They were studded with rice-grain-sized bulges for grip, and through the soles of my sandals I could feel each one radiating warmth.

Notice, in the above quotations, the beautiful figures of speech: “Wharves, cranes and smokestacks were going past in a blur of black type”; “The junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio was a confluence of thick machine oil and rosewater”; “I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak.” Patterson, Raban, and Butcher create vivid figuration. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.