March 24, 2025 Issue

I’m struck by the first line of Arthur Sze’s “Mushroom Hunting at the Ski Basin,” in this week’s issue: “Driving up the ski-basin road, I spot purple asters.” Purple asters – my favorite wildflower. You don’t often see them mentioned in poems. They appear late in the fall – among the last wildflowers to bloom before winter arrives. I like the matter-of-factness of Sze’s first line. I like his use of first person-present tense. It’s a journal-like poem. There’s another line that appeals to me, too: “I step on dry topsoil but sense moisture beneath.” It’s a poem about mushroom-picking, obviously. I’m tempted to read more into it, read it as a call for awareness of our relationship with nature – our connection to the “unseen web of mycelium / connecting all roots and branches.” But no, leave it as is – a wonderful description of mushroom-hunting. 

Sze wrote another excellent New Yorker poem – “Looking Back on the Muckleshoot Reservation from Galisteo Street, Santa Fe” (May 26, 2008). It, too, features an inspired first sentence: “The bow of a Muckleshoot canoe, blessed / with eagle feather and sprig of yellow cedar, / is launched into a bay.” I love that line – so simple, yet so vivid, specific, natural. Sze is a great poet. 

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #3

This is the third post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his superb Picasso and Truth (2013). It’s a description of Pablo Picasso’s Nude on Black Armchair (1932):

Touch – the imagination of contact and softness and curvature – is consumed in the Nude on Black Armchair by something else: a higher, shallower, in the end more abstract visuality, which will never be anyone’s property. The nude’s near hand, holding on to the clawlike white flower, is an emblem of this: fingers and petals become pure (predatory) silhouette. The body’s pale mauve is as otherworldly a color – as unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone – as the yellow and orange in the sky. Maybe in the picture night is failing. The blue wall to the left is icy cold. The woman’s blonde hair is sucked violently into a vortex next to her breast. Blacks encase her as if for eternity. The rubber plant tries to escape through the window.

I’ve chosen this passage to make a point. The word “imagination” in the first line is key. Clark is an imaginative responder to painting. He feels and thinks imaginatively. I relish his definition of “touch” – “the imagination of contact and softness and curvature.” Nude on Black Armchair is not a painting that invites your imagination to touch it, he says. Touch is “consumed by something else” – “a higher, shallower, in the end more abstract visuality, which will never be anyone’s property.” He sees the nude’s hand holding the white flower. He describes the flower as “clawlike.” This is imaginative description. Not everyone would see it like that. But Clark does. He’s trying to imagine his way into Picasso’s imagination. He calls the “clawlike white flower” an “emblem” of the nude’s sexual unavailability. She will “never be anyone’s property.” Fingers and petals appear “predatory.” Her body’s pale mauve is “otherworldly,” “unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone.” “The blue wall to the left is icy cold.” The woman’s blonde hair is “sucked violently into a vortex next to her breast.” Wow! Clark’s imagination is on a heater. He’s not done. “Blacks encase her as if for eternity.” And then this – the clinching line, the most inspired of all – “The rubber plant tries to escape through the window.” That line makes me smile every time I read it. It’s true, too. Look at the rubber plant. Clark says it’s a rubber plant. I believe him. Look at it. It does appear to be escaping through the window – escaping from the sleeping naked monster. It’s a strange interpretation of a strange painting. I love it. 

Credit: The above illustration is Pablo Picasso’s Nude on Black Armchair (1932).   

March 17, 2025 Issue

I’m enjoying The New Yorker’s “Takes” series. This week, Louisa Thomas revisits John Updike’s “Hub Fan’s Bid Kid Adieu” (October 22, 1960). It’s a wonderful celebration of this brilliant piece on Ted Williams’ last game, in which, in his last at-bat, he hits a homerun. Updike describes it:

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

I love that “It was in the books while it was still in the sky.” And I love what Thomas does with it in her piece:

“It was in the books while it was still in the sky,” Updike wrote, and it is still in the sky, sixty-five years later, because of the arresting vividness of his depiction. 

Yes, exactly. Updike did what all great artists do. He caught and preserved the moment. 

March 10, 2025 issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant “Dreams and Nightmares.” It’s an account of his experience in New Orleans, attending Super Bowl LIX and some of the parties and promotions leading up to it. “Eagles plus the Big Easy: I had to be there,” he says. The piece is part personal history and part reporting. Paumgarten reflects on his love of football (“I love the sport itself, the complexity of it, the variety of bodies and roles, the grace amid the peril, the sacrifice, the story lines, the religious devotion to the fate of the team and a city that’s not even my own”), his love of the Philadelphia Eagles (“The sight of the Kelly-green jerseys, against the sickly inchworm green of Veterans Stadium’s diabolical artificial turf, got its talons in me”), and his conflicted view of the Super Bowl. At times, he seems to relish the event (“It’s hard to think of anything that comes close, unless you count Christmas”). At other times, he seems to detest it (“The vulgarity and rot were palpable then, as they seem to have been, come to think of it, even when Hunter S. Thompson was in Houston for Super Bowl VIII, in 1974”). 

Paumgarten visits Media Row at the convention center (“I saw a man in a green Saquon Barkley jersey, green Eagles overalls, and green-and-silver face paint—bald but for a tight green Mohawk”). He meets up with a wealthy friend and they go to a night club called Empire (“Bouncers ushered us past the line and through the throngs inside to a table near the front”). He attends and Eagles-fan party in the Garden District (“cheesesteaks from Yinzer’s, soft pretzels, and Tastykakes”). His description of game day is detailed and vivid:

Tributaries of fans—from Bourbon and Baronne, Tchoupitoulas and Magazine—poured into Poydras Street and flowed toward the Dome. The doomsday prophets and kooks along the way brought to mind the streetside hubbub in John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces.” You had your born-agains bearing signs: “God Hates Your Idols” (possible), “Free Will Is a Satanic Lie” (true enough), “God Hates Drunks” (no, He does not), “God Hates Fags” (no), “God Hates You” (me?). A vender evaded the constabulary with his pushcart of “Donald Fucking Trump” and “Bitch I’m an Eagle” T-shirts. A group of gentlemen dressed in white, in white cowboy hats, with patches of presumably fake blood over their privates, led a protest against male circumcision, with a sign that read “Nobody Wants Less Penis.” It seemed right-wing-coded, but I couldn’t be sure. The Black Israelites, meanwhile, were out on Canal Street. Scalpers offered tickets: for a man bearing a notebook, the price was “face value.” (The average price of a ticket, on the secondary market, was sixty-five hundred dollars. The cheapest ticket was twenty-six hundred.) But there were some bargains around: you could get your face painted with your team’s colors for twenty bucks, and a Coors Light for eight.

The piece brims with wonderful, original, quasi-surreal sentences. This one, for example:

George Kittle, the San Francisco 49ers tight end, wearing a Little Caesars T-shirt adorned with pizza-slice icons, showed up with his mother at the Sports Illustrated booth—a sad little Wayne-and-Garth-calibre nook, reflective perhaps of the diminishment of both a medium and a “brand”—with boxes of Crazy Puffs.

And this:

At the Bounty House of Wingman, the hype guys lined up for free boxes of chicken wings to go with a roll of paper towels, while on a nearby patch of artificial turf civilians and pros took turns attempting to throw green Nerf footballs through downfield targets. 

“Dreams and Nightmares” is a tour de force of personal journalism. I enjoyed it immensely.

Interesting Emendations: Ian Frazier's "Paradise Bronx"

Sometimes a New Yorker piece appears that's been carved out of a larger work. Ian Frazier’s wonderful “Paradise Bronx” (The New Yorker, July 22, 2024) is such a piece. It comes from his recent book of the same name. Comparing the two versions, I found a number of interesting differences – some minor, some more substantive. For example, in the New Yorker piece, Frazier writes, 

Walking on Bruckner Boulevard one morning, I was stunned by the loudness of the trucks. (No other borough has truck traffic like the Bronx’s, partly because its Hunts Point market, for produce, meat, and fish, is the largest food-distribution depot in the world.) I also heard cars, vans, motorcycles, an Amtrak train, airplanes, and, on the lower Bronx River nearby, the horn of a tugboat pushing a barge. 

In the book version, Frazier combines the three sentences into one:

Walking on Bruckner Boulevard one morning, stunned by the loudness of the trucks (no other borough has truck traffic like the Bronx’s, partly because its Hunts Point market, for produce, meat, and fish, is the largest food-distribution depot in the world), I also heard cars, vans, motorcycles, an Amtrak train, airplanes, and, on the lower Bronx River nearby, the horn of a tugboat pushing a barge. 

Which do you prefer? The New Yorker version is more concise, less rambling. Nevertheless, the book version appeals to me. It’s less honed, more spontaneous. 

Here’s another example. In the New Yorker version, Frazier writes,

On the heights above the Hudson River, in Riverdale, I found the white stucco Moorish-Dutch-style mansion, empty and in disrepair, that John F. Kennedy moved into with his family in 1927, when he was ten. 

Here's the book version:

On the heights above the Hudson River, in Riverdale, I found the white stucco Moorish-Dutch-style mansion, now empty and in disrepair, which John F. Kennedy moved into with his family in 1927, when he was eleven.

The New Yorker version deletes “now” and substitutes “that” for “which.” It seems slightly smoother. But what I find startling is the change in Kennedy’s age – ten in The New Yorker, eleven in the book. Which is correct? I’m betting on the New Yorker version. It’s had the benefit of the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking.

Here's another example. In the New Yorker version, Frazier writes,

From the former Kennedy mansion, one can walk 4.7 miles to 825 East 179th Street, in the East Tremont neighborhood, where a thirteen-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald lived with his mother in 1953. The building that Oswald lived in no longer exists, and there is no historic marker.

Here's the book version:

From the former Kennedy mansion, one can walk 4.7 miles to 815 East 179th Street, in the East Tremont neighborhood, where a twelve-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald lived with his mother in 1952. Not only is there no historic marker, but the building that Oswald lived in no longer exists, and the address itself seems to have been abolished.

Again, the New Yorker version is smoother and more concise – more Strunk-and-White-compliant. But the book version’s extra “and the address itself seems to have been abolished” serves to emphasize the total vanishing of the Oswald address. What’s startling are the factual discrepancies: “825 East 179th Street” in the New Yorker version; “815 East 179th Street” in the book; “thirteen-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald” in The New Yorker; “twelve-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald” in the book; “1953” in The New Yorker; “1952” in the book. 

One more example. In the New Yorker version, Frazier writes,

You could swim in the Bronx River and in the East River, climb the beech trees in Van Cortlandt Park, sit on your fire escape and hear your neighbors’ different accents and languages, smell five different culinary traditions wafting through your building’s stairwell at suppertime: Paradise.

It's one of my favorite sentences in the piece. Checking the book version, I find it’s been lengthened to include additional details:

You could see the zoo animals over and over until you knew them by heart, swim in the Bronx River or the East River, climb the beech trees in Van Cortlandt Park, spend afternoons in a branch of the New York Public Library, sit on your fire escape and hear your neighbors’ different accents and languages coming from nearby apartments, smell five different culinary traditions wafting through your building’s stairwell at suppertime: Paradise.

Both versions are delightful. I relish the extra details in the book version. 

There are at least a dozen differences between the two texts. The New Yorker version reflects the style of New Yorker editing, with its emphasis on concision. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The New Yorker version is probably more accurate, too, due to the magazine’s rigorous fact-checking. But I also like the book version. It might be closer to Frazier’s actual voice – the singular way he thinks and expresses himself. Both versions are superb. It’s fascinating to compare them. 

March 3, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s fascinating “Shadow Warrior.” It tells about Ukrainian spy Roman Chervinsky and some of his audacious exploits. Yaffa starts with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. That story alone makes this piece worth reading. Yaffa writes,

In November, 2023, a suspect emerged. A joint investigation by Der Spiegeland the Washington Post, citing sources in both “Ukrainian and international security circles,” identified Roman Chervinsky, a former Ukrainian intelligence officer, as the operation’s alleged lead organizer. By then, Chervinsky, who had spent two decades directing secret operations for Ukraine’s intelligence services, including assassinations and multiple acts of sabotage, was under house arrest in a suburb of Kyiv. He had been charged in two separate criminal investigations, for extortion and abuse of authority, both of which he denies. Neither case, at least formally, had anything to do with Nord Stream. When I visited him recently, at his apartment, he was unequivocal about his involvement in the Nord Stream attack. “I didn’t do it,” he told me.

Note that “two decades directing secret operations for Ukraine’s intelligence services, including assassinations and multiple acts of sabotage.” Chervinsky is a bold and formidable operative, who, in person, appears to be quite ordinary. Yaffa describes him:

Chervinsky, who is fifty, with a slight frame and a head of thinning hair, wore a loose-fitting polo. An electronic monitor was affixed to his ankle. He made a pot of tea, and we sat at his kitchen table. “You look at him and see this absolutely ordinary person you could imagine standing next to on the bus that morning,” one person who has collaborated with him told me. “Then you come to understand who he is and what he’s capable of.”

Yaffa recounts a number of Chervinsky’s adventures. One of the most memorable is the assassination of a vicious pro-Russian militant named Arsen Pavlov in an elevator in a Donetsk apartment-building. How did he do it? Yaffa tells us:

Chervinsky had another idea. He had enlisted an agent to wear a pizza-delivery uniform and to sneak into Pavlov’s building. The agent reported that Pavlov was usually accompanied by a security guard who stood watch outside Pavlov’s apartment, which was on the seventh floor. But there was one place where the pair were confined and usually alone: the elevator. Chervinsky sent two other agents—a Donetsk local and a former special-forces soldier—to Chernobyl, where, in an abandoned apartment building, they practiced the basics of the operation: prying open the doors to the elevator shaft, jumping down to the compartment’s roof, placing an explosive packet on top and a surveillance microphone in the ventilation slats, and making a quick exit. The whole sequence took about a minute. “They were motivated,” Chervinsky said. “They knew what they were doing and why.”

Back in Donetsk, the pair took up a position down the street from Pavlov’s entryway. When one of Pavlov’s guards came outside for a smoke break, the local agent—“He looked like the most peaceful guy, you’d never suspect him of anything,” Chervinsky said—caught the door before it closed. He and his partner got into the elevator shaft and out of the building without being noticed. A week later, Pavlov arrived at his building and walked inside. The agent from Donetsk called Pavlov’s cell phone and heard, via the hidden microphone, that it was ringing inside the elevator. Pavlov picked up. “Is this Arsen Pavlov?” the agent asked.

“Yes,” Pavlov replied.

“This is the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper—we’d like to interview you.” The agent pressed a button, detonating the explosives. S.B.U. officers in Kyiv had tapped Pavlov’s wife’s phone, and listened in as she frantically called her husband, who didn’t pick up.

Yaffa tells about other Chervinsky operations that are equally daring. I’m allergic to spy fiction. But Yaffa’s “Shadow Warrior” isn’t fiction. It’s real life. I found it riveting. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #4 James Wood's "Serious Noticing"

This is the seventh post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is James Wood’s “Serious Noticing,” which originally appeared in the Fall 2010 Michigan Quarterly Review. A substantially revised version is included in two of Wood’s essay collections: The Nearest Thing to Life (2015) and Serious Noticing (2019). I’ll refer to the revised version here. 

In this great piece, Wood formulates one of the most compelling theories of literature I’ve ever read. He fuses three concepts – detail, looking, and rescue. Wood relishes detail: “I think of detail as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them.” He quotes from Chekhov’s “The Kiss” and Henry Green’s Loving, and says,

Like Ryabovich [in “The Kiss”] and Edith [in Loving], we are the sum of our details. (Or rather, we exceed the sum of our details; we fail to compute.) The details are the stories; stories in miniature. As we get older, some of those details fade, and others, paradoxically, become more vivid. We are, in a way, all internal fiction writers and poets, rewriting our memories.

To exemplify what he means, Wood dips into his own memory:

I was born in 1965, and grew up in a northern English town, Durham, home to a university, a majestic Romanesque cathedral, and surrounded by coalfields, many of them now abandoned. Every house had a hearth and fire, and coal, rather than wood, was used as domestic fuel. Every few weeks, a truck arrived, piled with lumpy burlap sacks; the coal was then poured down a chute into the house’s cellar – I vividly remember the volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar, and the drifting, bluish coal-dust, and the dark, small men who carried those sacks on their backs, with tough leather pads on their shoulders.

That “volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar” is wonderfully evocative.

Wood praises Chekhov’s eye for detail. He says Chekhov “appears to notice everything.” He calls him a “serious noticer.” For Wood, serious noticing is a key aspect of serious writing. He says, “In ordinary life, we don’t spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography.” 

He invokes John Berger’s distinction between seeing and looking:

You could say, following John Berger, that civilians merely see, while artists look. In an essay on drawing, Berger writes that “to draw is to look, examining the structure of experiences. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being looked at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree being looked at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking.

Interestingly, Wood links noticing with metaphor. He says,

Just as great writing asks us to look more closely, it asks us to participate in the transformation of the subject through metaphor and imagery. Think of the way D. H. Lawrence describes, in one of his poems, ‘the drooping Victorian shoulders” of a kangaroo; or how Nabokov describes a piece of tissue paper falling to the ground with “infinite listlessness,” or how Aleksandar Hemon describes horseshit as looking like “dark, deflated, tennis balls,” or how Elizabeth Bishop describes a taxi meter staring at her “like a moral owl,” or how the novelist and poet Adam Foulds notices a blackbird “flinching” its way up a tree.

These are superb examples. I agree with Wood’s main point – metaphor is an aspect of close noticing. But is it “transformation of the subject”? I don’t think so. Metaphor is descriptive. It calls up a picture. It helps us see the subject more clearly. It makes the subject more vivid. But it doesn’t transform it.

The third element of Wood’s theory – the most profound, in my opinion – is rescue. He says,

What do writers do when they seriously notice the world? Perhaps they do nothing less than rescue the life of things from their death – from two deaths, one small and one large: from the “death” that literary form always threatens to impose on life, and from actual death. I mean, by the latter, the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us – the memories of our childhood, the almost-forgotten pungency of flavors, smells, textures: the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention.

He refers to the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary – the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”) – is steadily retreating: in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back in the most ordinary things – to soccer boots and grass, to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Old Spice and Ajax.

That, to me, is the golden key – art’s germinating principle. Wood beautifully sums it up in his penultimate paragraph: “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself.”  

The Ugly Americans

Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times

America, America, shame on you! 

Yesterday, I watched the video replay of the meeting between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky in the Oval Office. Trump and Vance yell at the Ukrainian President, calling him “disrespectful” of the U.S., berating him for not signing a peace deal on whatever terms they dictated. It was a disgraceful, nauseating, ugly spectacle. But it did make one thing crystal clear: Trump has sided with Putin. Evil has triumphed. One dictator has embraced another. America has turned ugly.

I want no part of American culture right now. That’s my gut reaction. I hold Americans responsible for what happened yesterday – all Americans, including Democrats. Trump is a product of your sick bipolar politics. Whether you like it or not, he represents all of you. The New Yorker is about as anti-Trump as you can get. I realize that. Nevertheless, I’m tired of reading about him in your pages. I’m sick of the cartoon covers, too. Trump loves attention, good or bad. The New Yorker lavishes it on him.

Once again, I, a Canadian, find myself questioning why I should continue a blog that celebrates an American magazine, American literature, American art. A couple of weeks ago I went through this same soul-searching when Trump threatened Canada with punishing tariffs and suggested we’d be better off joining the U.S. as the 51st state. He even referred to our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, as Governor Trudeau. But I got over it. Did I want to terminate a fifteen-year-old blog, which I love writing, just because of Trump’s bullshit? I decided no, and resumed blogging. But now, after seeing the way Trump and Vance bullied Zelensky in the Oval Office yesterday, I don’t want to have anything to do with America. America has turned ugly, ugly, ugly. I don’t recognize it anymore. 

So I’m back in the same quandary I was in a few weeks ago. I want to go on, but I don’t want to go on. I’m going to take a few days to think about it. In the meantime, The New Yorker & Me is suspended.  

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Ian Frazier's "On the Rez"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review On the Rez.

This great book is a portrait of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation located in southwestern South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux. The area is part of the Great Plains. The book can be considered sort of a sequel to Frazier’s wonderful Great Plains (1989), which I reviewed in my series “3 for the Road” a few years ago (see here). Both books share a love of the prairie and the Indian way of life. Frazier’s longtime friend Le War Lance figures centrally in both.

But there are differences, too. On the Rez is edgier. The first chapter sets the tone:

Walking on Pine Ridge, I feel as if I am in actual America, the original version that was here before and will still be here after we’re gone. There are wind-blown figures crossing the road in the distance who might be drunk, and a scattering of window-glass fragments in the weeds that might be from a car accident, and a baby naked except for a disposable diaper playing in a bare-dirt yard, and an acrid smell of burning trash – all the elements that usually evoke the description “bleak.” But there is greatness here, too, and an ancient glory endures in the dust and the weeds. The way I look at it, this is the American bedrock upon which the society outside its borders is only a later addition. It’s the surviving piece of country where “the program” has not yet completely taken hold.

On the Rez is also darker than Great Plains. How dark? Check out this passage from near the end of the book, after it deals with the tragic death of Frazier’s Pine Ridge hero – nineteen-year-old star basketball player SuAnne Big Crow:

So much is so wrong on Pine Ridge. There’s suffering and poverty and violence and alcoholism, and the aura of unstoppability that repeated misfortunes acquire. But beneath all that is something bigger and darker and harder to look at straight on. The only word for it, I’m afraid, is evil. News stories emphasizing the reservation’s “bleakness” are actually using this circumlocution for that plain, terrible word. For journalistic reasons the news cannot say, “There is evil here.” And beyond a doubt there is. A bloody history, bad luck, and deliberate malice have helped it along. Sometimes a sense of it comes over me so strongly that I want to run home to bed – for example, when I walk down the row of almost-new child-size bicycles in a local pawnshop, or when I see a bunch of people the police have recently evicted from White Clay staggering back to it, or when I’m driving on a deserted reservation road at night and there’s a large object suddenly up ahead, and I skid to a stop a few feet in front of it, and it’s the hulk of a car so completely incinerated that it has melted the asphalt around it; it’s just sitting there with no warning, with no other cars on the scene, empty and destroyed and silent in the middle of nowhere. At such moments a sense of compound evil – that of the human heart, in league with the original darkness of this wild continent – curls around me like shoots of a fast-growing vine.

But good exists on Pine Ridge, too. Everywhere he goes, Frazier looks for it. He finds it in the life of SuAnne Big Crow. What a story that is! Frazier stumbles on it quite accidentally. One day, he and Le War Lance are driving on Highway 18 in Pine Ridge, and Frazier notices a single-story factory-style building across a weedy field. A sign by the highway says it is the Su Anne Big Crow Health and Recreation Center, and below that are the words “Happytown, USA.” Frazier asks Le if he knows who SuAnne Big Crow is. He says, “She was a basketball star for Pine Ridge High School who helped ’em win the state championship and died in a car wreck a few years back. It was when I was living in New York, though, so that’s about all I know.” A day or two later, Frazier visits the building, and the rest is literary history. He discovers one of his greatest subjects:

At the end of the hallway on the right was a smaller room with glass trophy cases along the walls. The trophies all were from the athletic career of SuAnne Big Crow, the teenage girl in the photos, the person for whom the center was named. I looked at the trophies, I watched a short video of playing on a VCR in the room, I read some framed news stories about SuAnne Big Crow, and a sense of discovery came over me. Here was a hero – not a folk hero, a sports hero, a tribal hero, or an American hero, but a combination of all these. I had thought that Oglala heroes existed mostly in the past. But a true Oglala hero appeared in the late 1980s, while the rest of the world was looking the other way, in suffering Pine Ridge, right under everyone’s noses: SuAnne Big Crow. 

Frazier digs into her history. He talks with her mother Chick Big Crow. He talks with her high school basketball coach Charles Zimiga. He talks with members of the basketball team that SuAnne played for – the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes. He describes the Lakota shawl dance that SuAnne spontaneously did at center court in a pre-game warm-up in the town of Lead. She was fourteen at the time. Lead fans were yelling at the Lady Thorpes, calling them “squaws” and “gut-eaters.” SuAnne ran out onto the court, “unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance.” She also began to sing in Lakota, “swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl.” The crowd went completely quiet. Frazier writes,

In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.” 

Most memorably, Frazier reconstructs the 1989 state Class A championship game in Sioux Falls between the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes and the Milbank Lady Bulldogs, in which SuAnne scored the winning basket in the last second of play. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s a scramble, Milbank has it for an instant, loses it; and then, out of the chaos on the floor: order, in the form of SuAnne. She has the ball. She jumps, perfectly gathered, the ball in her hands overhead. Her face lifts toward the basket, her arched upper lip points at the basket above the turned-down O of her mouth, her dark eyes are ardent and wide open and completely seeing. The ball leaves her hand, her hand flops over at the wrist with fingers spread, the ball flies. She watches it go. It hits inside the hoop, at the back. It goes through the net. In the same instant, the final buzzer sounds.

Frazier also recounts how SuAnne died. She and Chick were driving to Huron, South Dakota. At Kadoka, SuAnne took the wheel so that her mother could have a nap. About six miles past the exit for the town of Murdo, on a long, gradual upgrade, SuAnne apparently fell asleep. The car went off the road to the right and hit a delineator post. The car rolled twice. The driver’s-side door came open as the car rolled, and SuAnne was flung from it.  

In an unforgettable scene, Frazier visits the site on Interstate 90 where SuAnne and Chick’s car accident occurred. He finds the fatality marker erected by the state:

After a few minutes I walked back down the incline to the fatality marker and sat beside it in the grass out of sight of traffic. When I did, I noticed wildflowers – little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins. Mid-June must be these flowers’ peak season: among the roadside grasses, lost hubcaps, and scattered gravel, the spiderwort and creeping jenny grew abundantly.

It's a beautiful, lyrical passage – a wonderful tribute to SuAnne. At this point, Frazier seems in a state of heightened consciousness. In his head, he composes the text for a SuAnne Big Crow historic marker. He notices a grove of cottonwoods and walks to it:

Perhaps because of the rolling topography, I could hardly hear the traffic here. Just a couple of hundred yards away, the twenty-four-hour-a-day noise of the interstate had disappeared into its own dimension. The cottonwoods stood in a grove of eight or ten, all of them healthy and tall, around a small pool of clear water bordered with cattail reeds and dark-gray mud. Herons, ducks, raccoons, and dear had left their tracks in the mud not long before. From the cattails came the chirring song of red-winged blackbirds, a team whose colors no other team will ever improve on. Old crumpled orange-brown leaves covered the ground around the trees, and false morel mushrooms of a nearly identical shade grew in the crotches of the roots. The cottonwoods had appeared a deep green from the highway, but seen from underneath, their leaves were silvery against the blue sky. High above the trees bright white cumulus clouds piled one atop another. They went on and on, altitude upon altitude, getting smaller as they went, like knots on a rope ladder rising out of sight.

It's an extraordinary passage – beautiful, exact, epiphanic. It brings tears to my eyes every time I read it.

Over a four-year period, 1995-99, Frazier visits the rez many times. He roams its landscape, logging his impressions as he goes. His eye is for the overlooked and disregarded – that’s one of the things I love about his writing. “A man collecting empty cans in a big plastic sack walked across a vacant lot with the cans crinkling in the sack and the grasshoppers rising around his legs in such numbers that they collided with each other in the air.” “A pale bunch of teenagers sits on the curb outside Big Bat’s licking ice cream cones, making a row of white knees.” “Black cows topped with snow stood breathing steam in the whitened fields while hawks sat in cottonwoods above, their feathers so fluffed out against the cold they looked like footballs.”   

 

Meaning is where you find it. Frazier finds it in the most unlikely places – Big Bat’s Texaco, the Red Shirt Table Road, PTI Propane, the Red Cloud School, Bill’s Bar, the Arrowhead Inn, the Oglala Tribal Council room, the Cohen Home, and, as we’ve seen, the SuAnne Big Crow Health and Recreation Center. He finds it in the star quilt that Florence Cross Dog makes for him (“The quilt was like a map of the reservation, with the gravel roads and dirt lanes and one-water-tower towns and little houses in the middle of nowhere stitched together and made shiningly whole”). He finds it in the litter on the ground (“At the picnic area by the powwow grounds, a litter of bitterroot rinds covered the usual flooring of Budweiser shards”). He finds it in people: Le War Lance, Floyd John, Florence Cross Dog, Aurelia Two Crow, Chick Big Crow, Charles Zimiga, Doni De Cory, to name but a few. Most of all, Frazier finds inspiration in the life of SuAnne Big Crow: “SuAnne Big Crow, though gone forever, is unmistakably still around. The good of her life sustains this place with a power as intangible as gravity, and as real.” 

On the Rez is one of the most profound, moving explorations of place I’ve ever read. My review doesn’t come close to doing it justice. Maybe in future posts I can do better. My next post in this series will be on structure.