November 25, 2024 Issue

I enjoyed Ben McGrath’s “Clean Your Pipes,” in this week’s issue. It’s a “Talk of the Town” story about the renovation of the giant pipe organ in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Basilica. McGrath reports that the organ has been disassembled and trucked to an old tobacco warehouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. McGrath visits the warehouse. He writes,

Inside the warehouse, and in a garage behind it, technicians were working on the organ’s innards: applying alcohol to the oxblood-stained wooden pipes, attending to “witness marks” (dried candle wax, pencil notations) on the bellows, which turned out to have been reconfigured during a prior intervention, in 1902.

He says, “To a novice eye, the only clear indication that all this labor was in the service of a musical instrument was the triple-decker keyboard sitting on a table, next to some bubble wrap, on the second floor.”

McGrath’s piece reminded me of another New Yorker “pipe organ” story – Laura Preston’s wonderful “Pipe Dreams” (August 22, 2022). In that piece, Preston visits Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall to see some of the pipes of the massive Midmer-Losh get “voiced.” She watches Brant Duddy, a ninety-three-year-old master organ technician at work in the voicing room: “He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear.”

November 18, 2024 Issue

I’m suffering from chronic Trumpitis. I’m desperate for relief. Rebecca Mead’s “Color Instinct,” in this week’s issue, provides it. What a wonderful piece! It profiles British artist Jadé Fadojutimi, who is an extraordinary colorist. Mead writes, “Fadojutimi’s swirling images seem to capture a state of mind as much as they do a state of nature—they are always energetic, and sometimes ecstatic, blooming into color and motion and light.” Mead visits Fadojutimi in her London studio and is allowed to watch her paint:

Wearing gloves, Fadojutimi seized a dish of neon-pink paint in her left hand and a sponge in her right. She swept the color boldly across the canvas, then called for a bucket of water, into which she dipped two sponges, squeezing their contents over the paint she’d just applied, to create washes of color. With a round brush, she added punches of deep purple to the pink, then took up a flat brush, scraping all the pigment into a hard, tight arc before squeezing water on it again. She then seized a fine brush, applying busy patches of teal; climbing on a step stool, she added lines that clambered up the canvas.

Mead notes that “Fadojutimi often uses oil pastels and pigment sticks to push aside liquid paint on the canvas, creating wormy, convoluted lines that give the color an increased dimensionality.”

My favorite part of “Color Instinct” is the opening paragraph – a vivid description of Fadojutimi’s studio:

The studio of Jadé Fadojutimi, the British artist, is in a warehouse in South East London, with long skylights set into a corrugated-metal roof that reverberates loudly during the city’s frequent autumnal rains. At eight and a half thousand square feet, the space initially appears overwhelming, but at its center Fadojutimi, who is thirty-one, has created a small zone of intimacy. A pair of antique couches—one upholstered in emerald damask, the other in ruby—sit back-to-back, offering opposite vantage points on a dozen or so exuberantly colorful paintings propped against the walls. Some of the canvases are completed; others are works in progress. Vintage armchairs are positioned around a pair of coffee tables, each of which is strewn with the detritus of millennial life: iPads, rolling papers, bowls of fruit, vape pens, books, empty wine bottles, cooling mugs of herbal tea. Nestled in the corner of one couch is a plush panda bear, apparently well loved, its fur tinged with a rogue splash of citrine paint. Scores of potted plants encircle the seating area—spiky snake plants, opulent grasses, thick-leaved rubber plants—and a towering ficus tree filters the light from the skylights overhead.

That detail about the “plush panda bear ... its fur tinged with a rogue splash of citrine paint” is delightful. The whole piece is delightful. I enjoyed it immensely.  

P.S. A special shout-out to Alice Mann for her sublime portrait of Fadojutimi in her studio. Definitely a candidate for best New Yorker photo of the year.

Photo by Alice Mann, from Rebecca Mead's "Color Instinct"

Postscript: Sandra M. Gilbert 1936 - 2024

I see in the Times that Sandra M. Gilbert has died. She wrote one of my favorite literary studies – Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1972). She held that “descriptive attention” is at the heart of Lawrence’s style. She called him “a poet of pure attention.” She said,

For him the poem is a perceptual experience that the poet himself – and the reader along with him – must undergo, an act of attention whose purpose is epistemological: discovery through a certain process of attention, and the process or experience of discovery is as much the subject of the poem as the ostensible subject itself.

The poem as an act of attention is a brilliant notion. Lawrence conceived it. Gilbert explored and developed it. In doing so, she made a valuable contribution to literary criticism. 

On the Horizon: 10 Best "Personal History" Pieces

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces have appeared there. Over the next ten months, I’m going to pick ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. A new series then – “10 Best 'Personal History' Pieces” – starting December 15, 2024. 

November 11, 2024 Issue

David Remnick, in this week’s issue, says something that needs saying: the elements of Trump’s authoritarianism are “all there.” He says,

No small part of Trump’s authoritarian campaign is his insistence on dominance. And, though his aides and supporters are dismissive of comparisons to previous embodiments of fascism, the elements are all there: the identification of “vermin” and “the enemy within”; the threat to deploy the military against dissenters; the erasure of truth, the “big lie.” The MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden last Sunday did not feature starched gray uniforms, swastikas, or disciplined salutes. Lee Greenwood is no Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. But the rhetoric was rife with scapegoating, racism, and lies.

I agree. I applaud Remnick for having the guts to say it. 

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

This is the eighth and final 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 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 marvelous “The Cobweb” (January 26, 2015), in which she travels to San Francisco to visit an Internet archive called the Wayback Machine. 

What I love about this piece, what sticks in my mind, is the riveting way Lepore introduces her subject – not by describing the Wayback Machine, or even mentioning it, but by chronicling the crash of an airliner. Here’s her opening paragraph:

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam at 10:31 a.m. G.M.T. on July 17, 2014, for a twelve-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Not much more than three hours later, the plane, a Boeing 777, crashed in a field outside Donetsk, Ukraine. All two hundred and ninety-eight people on board were killed. The plane’s last radio contact was at 1:20 p.m. G.M.T. At 2:50 p.m. G.M.T., Igor Girkin, a Ukrainian separatist leader also known as Strelkov, or someone acting on his behalf, posted a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: “We just downed a plane, an AN-26.” (An Antonov 26 is a Soviet-built military cargo plane.) The post includes links to video of the wreckage of a plane; it appears to be a Boeing 777.

This is a strange way to start a piece about Internet archiving, is it not? Actually, it turns out to be quite ingenious. Lepore reports that two hours after Strelkov’s message was posted, it was deleted. The evidence was destroyed. But, hold on, not so fast. Check the Wayback Machine. Boom! There it is. The Wayback Machine saved it. Lepore writes,

On July 17th, at 3:22 p.m. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of Strelkov’s VKontakte post about downing a plane. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message “Grab of Donetsk militant Strelkov’s claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.” By then, Strelkov’s VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine.

Lepore’s use of the deleted Strelkov post to show the value of the Wayback Machine is brilliant! 

My favorite part of “The Cobweb” is Lepore’s account of her visit to the Internet Archive, at 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, where the Wayback Machine is housed. She describes the place:

At 300 Funston Avenue, climb a set of stone steps and knock on the brass door of a Greek Revival temple. You can’t miss it: it’s painted wedding-cake white and it’s got, out front, eight Corinthian columns and six marble urns.

Inside, she meets the inventor of the Wayback Machine – Brewster Kahle:

Kahle is long-armed and pink-cheeked and public-spirited; his hair is gray and frizzled. He wears round wire-rimmed eyeglasses, linen pants, and patterned button-down shirts. He looks like Mr. Micawber, if Mr. Micawber had left Dickens’s London in a time machine and landed in the Pacific, circa 1955, disguised as an American tourist. 

Kahle is quite a cat. Lepore tells of the time he put the entire World Wide Web in a shipping container: 

He just wanted to see if it would fit. How big is the Web? It turns out, he said, that it’s twenty feet by eight feet by eight feet, or, at least, it was on the day he measured it. How much did it weigh? Twenty-six thousand pounds. He thought that meant something. He thought people needed to know that.

Lepore points out that Kahle’s Wayback Machine has archived more than four hundred and thirty billion Web pages. What does such a machine look like? Lepore tells us:

At the back of the chapel, up a short flight of stairs, there are two niches, arched alcoves the same shape and size as the stained-glass windows. Three towers of computers stand within each niche, and ten computers are stacked in each tower: black, rectangular, and humming. There are towers like this all over the building; these are only six of them. Still, this is it.

Each unit has flickering blue lights. “ ‘Every time a light blinks, someone is uploading or downloading,’ Kahle explains. Six hundred thousand people use the Wayback Machine every day, conducting two thousand searches a second. ‘You can see it.’ He smiles as he watches. ‘They’re glowing books!’ He waves his arms. ‘They glow when they’re being read!’ ”

The way Lepore joins the dots – from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to reference rot to hyper-text to Brewster Kahle to the Internet Archive to the Wayback Machine – is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of her best. 

Acts of Seeing: Quickstop

John MacDougall, Quickstop, Iqaluit (2007)

I relish the “service station” shots of Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and others. Many years ago, in Iqaluit, Nunavut, I tried my hand at taking a picture of the gas bar in our neighborhood. The low Arctic sun was shining just right on the pump island, sort of spotlighting it. There was a snowmobile there, gassing up, which added a distinctive northern element. I love the colors – the greens and blues and dabs of red. You can see a hill of snow-covered tundra in the background. The scene has a certain cold beauty – at least to my yearning southern eyes. I miss the place. 

November 4, 2024 Issue

I’m embarrassed to say that of all the worthwhile subjects in this week’s issue – aid workers in Gaza, the remaking of J. D. Vance, Joe Biden’s economic policies – the one that caught and held me is Cocina Consuelo’s grilled cheese sandwich. Helen Rosner knows how to pleasure me. She writes,

A dish understatedly called “grilled cheese” has undeniable star power: made on, of all things, a croissant, it features tangy orange cheddar and is squashed on a griddle until the cheese and pastry are crisp. It’s liberally spread with a similarly sharp-textured salsa macha, a Veracruzan condiment akin to chile crunch, made with toasted hot peppers, garlic, and toasted pepitas and sesame seeds.

Yes, yes, yes! I’ll have one of those, please.

Photo by Evan Angelastro, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Cocina Consuelo"

October 28, 2024 Issue

Best sentence in this week’s issue? For me, it’s the opening line of Ray Lipstein’s “Bar Tab: Kelly’s Tavern”: “On a recent Wednesday night down in Bay Ridge, where the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge looms gorgeously overhead, a millennial with a dead phone stepped into a bar looking for the gym.” I read that and just kept going. The final sentence is very good, too: “To say more would be to kill some mystique; we may have said too much already.” Lipstein, who is new to me, seems a natural “Bar Tab” writer. I look forward to seeing more of his work in the magazine.

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #8 Wayne Koestenbaum's "The Inner Life of the Palette Knife"

Forrest Bess, Untitled (The Crown) (1949)

This is the third post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Wayne Koestenbaum’s brilliant “The Inner Life of the Palette Knife,” which originally appeared in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “My painting is tomorrow’s painting. Watch and see”: Forrest Bess (Christie’s, 2012), and is included in Koestenbaum’s great 2013 collection My 1980s & Other Essays. It’s Koestenbaum’s attempt to describe and comprehend Bess’s strange abstractions. 

Koestenbaum begins by suggesting that we should not so much read Bess’s paintings, as experience them. To do that, he recommends close looking. He writes,

The light in this room – where I’m looking at his paintings, one by one – shines irregularly on his black paint. Sometimes the black, arrested by light, seems matte; at other instants, light causes the black paint to glisten. These modest oscillations – matte one moment, glistening the next – are not the size of Texas. You need to stand very close to the painting to see these incremental changes, nuances so minor that it seems a culpable exaggeration to call attention to them, even if these delicate effects of light and texture are Bess’s major contribution to the philosophy of transgendered affect, to American abstract art, to the erotics of fear.

He says that to really appreciate Bess’s paintings, we must be willing to “waste time” looking at them, “without the certainty that it will reward you with ecstasy, knowledge, or satisfaction.” He goes on, 

In one of my favorite Bess paintings (untitled, like most of them), composed of oil and painted foil on canvas, I lose myself – I waste time – looking at a blue foil triangle’s nearness to a brown-black dot. That dot’s placement has no clear or verbalizable meaning; I can’t explain why the dot is near the triangle, though not too near. The dot belongs in the triangle’s vicinity, but the two entities – dot, triangle – have no fixed relationship. In that same painting, the background is composed of black swirls or blobs. The black blobs – gesso-like? – are separate from one another but also sometimes joined or interacting. Their edges – to the extent that the blobs cluster together in a community – are at once stable and unstable; the edges ululate, but don’t sing a clear melody.

To pay attention to these black blobs, or to pay attention to the blue foil triangle’s nearness to a specific dot, I must pledge allegiance to abstract art’s Bill of Rights, which contains, unlike the United States’, only one provision: the right to look, for unstructured amounts of time, at migrant and unspecific forms, and at the relation between them, without demanding that the forms have a single meaning, and without demanding that whatever significance I ascribe to these forms be defensible, explicable, or based on any evidence but my own sensations.... I have the right to find supreme significance in Bess’s blobs and lines, and to spend as long as I wish in a state of torpid yet ecstatic surrender to them.

That formulation of “abstract art’s Bill of Rights” is inspired!

Koestenbaum responds intensely to Bess’s palette-knife marks. In one of my favorite passages, he writes,

These experiences of transport, keyed to painterly moments almost too small to mention, I call jabs of intensification – microscopic illuminations, inner shudders, tiny spurts of “oh my God!”, as if a joy-bringing bubble were suddenly to open up a new hallway in my brain, or as if suddenly I were to become Keats reading Homer for the first time and standing proud on a silent peak to view the wild Pacific. But in Bess’s case, the wild Pacific is merely an edge mark made by a palette knife, where yellow gets divided into adjacent, parallel mini-panels of companionate yellows.

He says of Bess’s Mandala (1967), “The black paint surrounding the mandala has gorgeous gouge marks that awaken in me (the urge never went to sleep) a desire to make texture my god.” Koestenbaum’s expression of his love of texture makes me smile. It’s my love, too.

Koestenbaum’s main theme is the need to pay close attention. In his closing paragraph, he writes,

Bess’s hieroglyphic semiabstractions suggest not only that he was a remarkable artist but that abstract – or near-abstract – art, hovering on the edges of codes we’ll never comprehend, teaches us to pay fine-grained, undogmatic attention to the blobs and lines and curves we encounter in everyday life. Pay attention to scratches. Pay attention to the textured, importuning marks of a silent palette knife. Use Bess’s paintings to understand the difficult art of human attentiveness. In a would always willing to truncate the possibilities for closely noticing what occurs, allow attentiveness to flower, however private and inscrutable its flowering, however seemingly impractical, minor, puzzling, and antisocial its procedures of self-nourishment. 

Sage advice for these distracted times.

3 for the River: Details

This is the eleventh 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 amazing use of detail.

These three great books abound with inspired details: the shaving lather on Patterson’s rifle after he shoots a moose (“I was sitting on a log having my weekly shave when I heard a stone rattle. I looked up, and there was a bull moose by the water’s edge a couple of hundred yards up the Flat. Very quietly I put down my shaving brush and picked up my rifle and fired. Down came the moose, and I wiped the lather off the stock of the rifle and set the weapon back against the log”); the sinister wing dam that Raban momentarily glimpses while fishing for walleye on Lake Pepin (“The wake of a big downstream tow pulled the water away from the wing dam; just for a second it lay exposed, a serrated line of rocks like a jawbone of blackened teeth”); in Butcher’s Blood River, the coil of ivy that the palm-oil trader carries with him on his bicycle to use as a tire patch (“He smiled when I asked him what the loop of ivy was for. ‘That is from a rubber tree. If I have a flat, I break the ivy and a glue comes out that will mend the puncture. It is the repair kit of the forest’ ”).  

Patterson is a superb describer of method, of how he does things – makes a campsite, builds a log cabin, sews a pair of fur mitts. His art is in his precise details. Here’s an excerpt from a brilliant two-and-a-half-page description of how he manages to make a snug campsite in a blizzard: 

It was a dirty night. The roar of the wind could be heard out on the open river: inside the trees one could feel it a little and occasionally there would come the whirring thud of snow dislodged by the gentle movement of the branches. I chose two spruce about ten feet apart, more or less in line with the wind, and with an open space in front of them. I snowshoed quickly around the campsite, sharply striking each overhanging tree twice with the back of the little axe; that fetched down any loose snow that would otherwise fall into camp or on to the fire when the heat from the flames rose among the branches. Then I trimmed the two chosen spruce up to a height of about six feet, laying the small dead branches in a pile to serve as kindling. Next, off came the snowshoes, and one of them was used as a shovel to dig down to ground level, banking the snow up all around, but especially behind the fireplace where it would act as a reflector. Then I laid the kindling in the fireplace, together with a twist of birch bark from my pocket. A match was applied and the little pile burst into flame. I nursed it carefully, adding bigger twigs and then branches and then a log or two – anything I could reach till it became a fire. I got the tea pail and filled it with snow, rammed in and pressed down, for this dry snow is nothing but frost crystals; it has nothing in common with the snow of southern lands, and there is very little water in it. I pushed back the blazing logs and set the tea pail on the ashes, right against the hottest part of the fire – it was safe there and could not overturn. Next, I cut down a tall, dead spruce, about fifteen inches through, that was standing handy. I felled it behind the fire and moved alongside it on snowshoes, trimming the branches and flinging an armful on the fire to get more light to work by; then I cut through the tree and moved forward first one end and then the other of the big log till it lay resting on the snow wall at each end, just above and just back of the fire – between the fire and the big reflector wall of snow. The flames promptly curled around it and soon it would be a glowing, radiant mass of charcoal on the surface, giving out heat all night and ready to burst into flame again at breakfast time.

That “together with a twist of birch bark from my pocket” is wonderful – a real woodsman’s detail.

Raban’s forte is river description. Detail after detail gleams in his depiction of the Mississippi: “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 was afloat over a stump field submerged under just a few inches of water. As a roller sucked the river away, it exposed the bed of black-buttery peat, the sawed-off boles like bad teeth, and the boat grounded with a groan and a bang, the motor stalling as it hit a root”; “The current grabbed hold of the boat, flipped it around, and sent it skittering southward out of the city like a puck on an ice rink. I hardly had time to get the motor going before I was swept past the floating depot where the tows refueled and was into the humping, broken water below the highway bridges.”

I could go on quoting forever. Raban’s details are often in his adjectives – not just “peat,” but “black-buttery peat”; not just “boles,” but “sawed-off boles”; not just “water,” but “humping, broken water.” 

My favorite details in Tim Butcher’s Blood River describe his experience traveling down the Congo in a pirogue: “The low wicker seat was smaller than my backside, but it was surprisingly comfortable and as the paddlers began to find their rhythm, I let my fingertips trail in the river water. It was as warm and soothing as a bath.” “I ran my wet fingers across the coarse hull of the pirogue, tracing gouges left by the boatmaker’s adze. They felt like a rough-hewn braille, charting the history of a river nation both blessed and cursed by this great natural phenomenon.” Regarding his guides’ paddles, he writes,

The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their long-handled wooden paddles. About three metres long, they were shape of spades from a deck of cards, only stretched out to mansize, with shafts that were thin and shiny, polished by years of being slid through calloused hands. The leaf-shaped blade spread broad and fat before tapering gracefully to a point. It was no surprise when later on the journey I saw them being used both as trays for food and as weapons for fighting.

He describes the paddlers’ way of drinking from the river: “To drink they would squat down while we were out in midstream, lower their faces over the edge of the pirogue until their lips were suspended maybe ten centimetres above the river and literally throw the water into their mouths with their hands.” 

Butcher even describes what happens on a pirogue when you have to urinate:

They peed over the edge of the boat and were as sure-footed as if they were standing on terra firma. I was more ungainly, so when I tried, the effort of standing up and keeping my balance made me way too tense. Only after hours of discomfort could I build up the pressure required to overcome my nerves, and then only if I kneeled on my rucksack. Standing on the wobbly pirogue was much too nerve-racking ever to enable me to pee. 

Butcher’s immersive details put us squarely there, in the pirogue with him and his paddlers, as they make their way down the mighty Congo. It’s an unforgettable ride.  

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