June 23, 2025 Issue

There’s not much in this week’s issue that catches my eye. The magazine isn’t the problem. It’s me. I’m jaded. My range of interests is getting narrower and narrower. Usually, when I’m in this funk, “Goings On” bails me out. But even that stimulating section seems lacking this week. I miss art reviews. I miss Jackson Arn. I miss Peter Schjeldahl. I miss poetry reviews. I miss jazz reviews. I miss photography reviews. I miss good formalist book reviews like the ones James Wood writes. I miss Janet Malcolm. About the only thing I really like in this week’s issue is Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin’s witty artwork illustrating Hannah Goldfield’s “Ladies' Night.” It’s amazing what those two can do with a Sharpie, transforming a tall glass of foamy beer into a basketball hoop.

Inspired Sentence #4

The land sharpens to a last dark-forested point, and beyond it the horizon widens into ocean and the co-motion of sky and water is lost in a white, grainy light, and there the river’s last trace is slow-vanishing spirals in the water, shallowing as they slip on; now just faint dints in the water’s pewter, now shined flat. 

This is from Part III of Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? (2025), which I’m currently reading. Part III is called “The Living River.” It’s my favorite section of the book. It’s about a kayak trip that Macfarlane and four others take down the Mutehekau Shipu River in the Nitassinan territory of eastern Quebec. The above quotation is a description of the Mutehekau Shipu’s mouth, where it empties into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Macfarlane is a superb describer. That “now just faint dints in the water’s pewter, now shined flat” is very fine. 

On the Horizon: Mid-Year Top Ten 2025

It’s time to start composing my “Mid-Year Top Ten 2025.” Each year at this point, I like to pause, look back, and take stock of my New Yorker reading. I find listing is a good way to do it. I’m not going to reveal my #1 pick just yet. But I’ll give you a hint. It features a flock of birds. That’s it, no more clues. As it is, I’ve probably given it away. Besides mid-year hasn’t arrived yet. There are two more New Yorkers still to come. Who knows what delightful surprises they might contain. 

June 16, 2025 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that really grabbed me (“seduced” might be a better word) is Helen Rosner’s “Pick Three” on ice-cream sundaes. Rosner recommends three: the Chow Nai Sundae at Bonnie’s ((“referential, rigorous, wacky, and wondrous”); Gramercy Tavern’s Passion-Fruit Sundae (“It brings to mind a pavlova, an ultra-messy Eton mess, the fruit-and-condensed-milk swooniness of Korean bingsu—even, fleetingly, a mall-kiosk Orange Julius”); and Harry’s Hot-Fudge Sundae, served at the Odeon, in Tribeca, and the Upper West Side’s Café Luxembourg (“The dark, slithery-hot chocolate sauce has a bittersweet edge that makes the whole thing feel a little bit electric”). Mm, I’ll have a Harry's Hot-Fudge Sundae, please, with banana. In the newyorker.com version of her piece, Rosner recommends adding banana. She says, “It’s worth noting that at both spots, for three dollars more, you have the option to add banana. This banana is the difference between mere greatness and glory. Add the banana. Always, when presented with the option, add the banana.”

NYRB's Art Issue: Tallman, Bell, and Salle

Arlene Shechet, Rapunzel (2024)

I just want to highlight three pieces in The New York Review of Books’ recent “Art Issue” that I enjoyed immensely:

1. Susan Tallman’s “String Theory”

This absorbing piece is a review of two exhibitions: the Museum of Modern Art’s Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art. It contains several wonderful descriptions of textiles. For example:

A rollicking pattern of orbs, blocks, and squiggles on a tunic from the pre-Inca Wari empire is so intricate it required six to nine miles of thread, and so jazzy in its peppering of orange, black, and magenta it might be fifty years old rather than a thousand.

In Hicks’s The Principal Wife (circa 1965), hanks of wool, intermittently wrapped in brilliant colors, fall in heavy arcs from a bar like the reins of some Brobdingnagian horse on a festival day. It takes discipline not to reach out and give them a tug.

In Eva Hesse’s 1966 Ennead, yards of brown cord sprout from a wall-mounted piece of plywood, like hair plugs aspiring to dreadlocks. Some drop straight down, while others travel in a sloppy catenary to a hook on the adjacent wall, then flop in a tangle to the floor. It is a work of inexplicable poignancy—the plain carpentry, the expansive eruption, the droop, and the casual splendor. The quixotically reinforced wire lattice of Gego’s Square Reticulárea 71/II (1971) is a lesson in distributed stress, gawky and graceful in equal measure. Alan Shields’s Shape-Up (1976–1977) occupies space in the manner of a minimalist painting, but instead of rigor we get an open crisscross of slightly slack ribbons, adorned here and there with a swag of beaded string, like postseason Christmas lights on an unkempt high-rise. Order and disorder check each other out, shake hands, and decide to get on. 

2. Julian Bell’s “Internalizing the Crises”

In this stimulating piece, Bell reviews Joseph Leo Koerner’s Art in a State of Siege. What’s it about? Bell tells us: 

The three artists on whom Koerner dwells in his highly wrought text—which was long in gestation before the advent of the forty-seventh presidency—occupy disparate historical worlds. He returns to Hieronymus Bosch, the subject of a 2016 book in which he paired and contrasted that astonishing innovator, working at the turn of the sixteenth century, with Pieter Bruegel, working some sixty years later. He crosses campus to Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum and ponders its most formidable holding, Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927) by Max Beckmann. Then, flying to Johannesburg, the renowned art historian hooks up with the yet more celebrated artist William Kentridge. Koerner’s salute to the achievements of this inspiring contemporary becomes warmly bromantic.

I’m interested in all three of these artists, particularly Bosch. Bell disagrees with Koerner’s interpretation of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1490-1510). First, he quotes Koerner:

The devil’s hatred of people, people’s hatred of other people, the Jews’ hatred of Christ and Christians, the hatred of Christians for their enemies, the hatred directed towards an “us” by an invisible “them,” and the wrath of God that consumes just about everyone: this global economy of loathing stands not just portrayed in Bosch’s pictures. It is performed in them, as if his brush were enmity’s instrument. Hatred contaminates. The aversion these images depict and enact defiles how we react to them. Uncertain whether they are for us or against us, we turn against each other. Bosch built his masterpiece to act like a time bomb set to detonate in every dangerous here and now.

Bell responds:

This is swaggering, adrenaline prose. Its assertions seem to me to fail the test of experience. Not defilement but diversion: to these eyes, that is what The Garden of Earthly Delights supplies. Its high, zinging hues go with its hilarity—the amorous sow in a wimple cozying up to one of its males, the flowers sticking out of another man’s bottom. Its crammed market stall of shape-shuffling caprices (ovoids, tunnels, shells, spikes, and soft flesh, vessels continually recombinant) offers a holiday from truth and necessity, one that allows us, in common with its earliest recorded viewer—writing a year after the painter had died—to revel without shame in “things so pleasing and so fantastic.”

Bell calls Koerner’s book “not an argument but an artwork.” I think I’ll check it out.

3. David Salle’s “ ‘Why Not All These Things at Once’ ”

This is a review of Arlene Shechet: Girl Group, an exhibition at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York. And what a review it is – one of the best of the year. Salle’s immense powers of art description are on full display. For example:

Bea Blue (2024) is a plump, rotund, pale blue, benign beast that appeared to be waddling down the mowed path on which it stood. From one side it’s a curvaceous, lumbering sumo knight holding a too-small shield; from the opposite side it’s an affronted pelican resting on a single skinny leg.

And:

The aptly named Rapunzel (2024), a beautiful shade of cobalt blue-violet nuanced by bright pale mauve accents, has something in common with both the Chicago Picasso (itself an essay in sculptural “hair”) and a playground slide or jungle gym. A flattened, shallow trough of metal swoops vertiginously from the apex, ending some feet above the ground. It’s tempting to want to slide down it. Viewed from the opposite side, the construction appears to be supported by a single giant foot. Up close, the tangled mass of wide, cake-pan cantilevered trough and narrow ribbon forms is turbulent, jumbled, almost menacing; from a distance it’s a slow-moving anteater in a purple coat.

And one more:

As April (2024) is a cluster of distorted rectangular shapes notched with semicircular removals, the planes welded together at perpendicular angles to make a top-heavy, squarish mass resting on a narrower base. It is painted in two shades of yellow—a warm cadmium yellow medium and a pale, cool, almost greenish lemon—and beribboned with unpainted metal extrusions. From certain angles the whole thing evokes an explosion in a plumbing supply house; the notched planes are interrupted here and there by flattened tubular forms, and a tangle of wires descends diagonally from a twisted spine. The construction appears to be going haywire. It’s either having a nervous breakdown or skipping rope, either high comedy or low clown (I can’t decide which), a slapstick gag in slow motion, a Beckettian tramp looking for a place to sit down. The crisp late fall day I visited, as the sun picked out the bright yellow notched shapes against the red-rust leaves of an oak, the vibrant ensemble felt satisfying, enlivening.

“A curvaceous, lumbering sumo knight holding a too-small shield,” “a slow-moving anteater in a purple coat,” “an explosion in a plumbing supply house” – Salle’s descriptions surprise, delight, and illuminate. I enjoy them enormously.

10 Best Personal History Pieces: #5 John McPhee's "The Patch"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is John McPhee’s superb “The Patch” (February 8, 2010).

This memorable piece has the compression and pent-up feeling of great poetry. It artfully blends two completely different scenes: (1) New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee, where, every October, McPhee and his friend, George Hackl, fish for pickerel; (2) a Baltimore County Hospital, where McPhee’s father lies dying from a stroke. It unfolds in four untitled segments. 

Segment one begins with pickerel fishing:

You move your canoe through open water a fly cast away from a patch of lily pads. You cast just shy of the edge of the pads—inches off the edge of the pads. A chain pickerel is a lone ambush hunter. Its body resembles a barracuda’s and has evolved to similar purpose. Territorial, concealed in the vegetation, it hovers; and not much but its pectoral fins are in motion. Endlessly patient, it waits for prey to come by—frogs, crayfish, newts, turtles, and smaller fish, including its own young. Long, tubular, with its pelvic fins set far back like the wings of some jets, it can accelerate like a bullet.

You lay a kiwi muddler out there—best white or yellow. In the water, it appears to be a minnow. Strip in line, more line, more line. In a swirl as audible as it is visible, the lake seems to explode. You need at least a twelve-pound leader, because this fish has teeth like concertina wire. I tried a braided steel tippet once, of a type made for fish of this family, but casting it was clunky and I gave it up in favor of monofilament thick enough to win the contest between the scissoring teeth and the time it takes to net the fish. I’ve been doing this for more than thirty years, always in October in New Hampshire with my friend George Hackl, whose wife owns an undeveloped island in Lake Winnipesaukee. Chain pickerel are sluggish and indifferent in the warmer months. In the cold dawns and the cold dusks of October, they hit like hammers, some days on the surface, some days below it, a mass idiosyncrasy that is not well understood.

Paragraph four of segment one brings McPhee’s father into the narrative:

As far as I know, my father never fished for chain pickerel. When I was three years old, he was the medical doctor at a summer camp on the Baie de Chaleur, and he fished for salmon in the Restigouche with his bamboo rod. He fished with grasshoppers in a Vermont gorge, and angleworms in Buzzards Bay, taking me with him when I was six, seven, eight. And across the same years we went trout fishing in New Jersey streams. On Opening Day, in April, we would get up in the pitch dark in order to be standing beside a stream at the break of dawn. One time, as dawn broke, we discovered that the stream was frozen over. On the way home, he let me “drive.” I sat in his lap and steered—seat belts an innovation not yet innovated. These are my fondest memories of my father, his best way of being close, and I therefore regret all the more that my childhood love of fishing fell away in my teen-age years, and stayed away, in favor of organized sports and other preoccupations.

And then, at the end of segment one, McPhee joins pickerel fishing with news that his father has suffered a disabling stroke:

At the end of the seventh October, after Yolanda and I had driven home to New Jersey, we came up the driveway and the telephone inside the house was ringing as we approached the door. My brother was calling to tell me that my father was in a Baltimore County hospital, having suffered a debilitating stroke.

Segment two cuts to the hospital room, where McPhee, his mother, brother, sister, and a young doctor are gathered beside his father’s bed. McPhee writes,

I was startled by the candor of the doctor. He said the patient did not have many days to live, and he described cerebral events in language only the patient, among those present, was equipped to understand. But the patient did not understand: “He can’t comprehend anything, his eyes follow nothing, he is finished,” the doctor said, and we should prepare ourselves.

In the next paragraph, McPhee expresses an intense anger at the doctor:

Wordlessly, I said to him, “You fucking bastard.” My father may not have been comprehending, but my mother was right there before him, and his words, like everything else in those hours, were falling upon her and dripping away like rain. Nor did he stop. There was more of the same, until he finally excused himself to continue on his rounds.

The remainder of segment two describes an hour in the hospital room when McPhee is alone with his father. Spontaneously, he begins to talk to him. He talks about pickerel fishing:

In my unplanned, unprepared way, I wanted to fill the air around us with words, and keep on filling it, to no apparent purpose but, I suppose, a form of self-protection. I told him where I had been—up in New England on the lake in the canoe, casting—and that the fishing had gone well despite the cold. One day, there had been an inch of ice on the water bucket in the morning. My fingers were red as I paddled and cast. Water, coming off the fly line as I stripped it in, froze in the guides that hold the line close to the rod, and so jammed the line that it was uncastable; so I went up the rod from bottom to top punching out little disks of ice with my thumb until I could make another cast and watch a fresh torpedo come out of the vegetation.

That last sentence is inspired. What does McPhee mean when he calls his talk with his father “a form of self-protection”? Protection from what? Feeling? Sadness? Grief? Does McPhee somehow feel threatened by his father? Perhaps it’s the presence of death in the room that he’s trying to ward off by his talk. “A form of self-protection” – it’s a curious phrase to use in the circumstances. Maybe McPhee is using pickerel fishing as an oblique way of telling his father that he loves him. 

Segment three is all about pickerel – “With those minutely oscillating fins, a pickerel treads water in much the way that a hummingbird treads air”; “If a pickerel swirls for your fly and misses, it goes back to the exact spot from which it struck”; “Pickerel that have been found in the stomachs of pickerel have in turn contained pickerel in their stomachs.” It brims with wonderful pickerel description, including this beauty:

A pickerel’s back is forest green, and its sides shade into a light gold that is overprinted with a black pattern of chain links as consistent and uniform as a fence. 

The fourth and concluding segment ingeniously cuts back and forth. First, the hospital room:

Silent myself now, in the attending physician’s presence, I looked down at my father in his frozen state, eighty-nine, a three-season athlete who grew up in the central neighborhoods of Youngstown, Ohio, and played football at Oberlin in a game that was won by Ohio State 128–0, captained basketball, was trained at Western Reserve, went into sports medicine for five years at Iowa State and thirty-six at Princeton, and was the head physician of U.S. Olympic teams in Helsinki, Rome, Tokyo, Innsbruck, and elsewhere.

Then to a quarter-mile area of lily-pad-covered water on Lake Winnipesaukee that McPhee and Hackl call “the Patch”:

In a small open pool in the vegetation, about halfway down The Patch, there had been, this year and last, a chain pickerel that was either too smart or too inept to get itself around an assemblage of deer hair, rabbit fur, turkey quill, marabou silk, and sharp heavy wire. The swirls had been violent every time, the strike consistently missing or spurning the fly, and coming always from the same place on the same side of the same blue gap. In the repetitive geometries of The Patch, with its paisley patterns in six acres of closed and open space, how did I know it was the same gap? I just knew, that’s all. It’s like running a trapline. You don’t forget where the traps are; or you don’t run a trapline.

Then back to the hospital room – the two scenes now almost merging:

As I was getting back into the story, again speaking aloud in the renewed privacy of the hospital room, I mentioned that I had been fishing The Patch that last morning with my father’s bamboo rod, and it felt a bit heavy in the hand, but since the day he had turned it over to me I had taken it with my other rods on fishing trips, and had used it, on occasion, to keep it active because it was his. Now—just a couple of days ago—time was more than close to running out. Yolanda was calling from the island: “John, we must go! John, stop fishing! John!” It was time to load the canoe and paddle west around some islands to the car, time to depart for home, yes; but I meant to have one more drift through The Patch. From the northwest, a light breeze was coming down over the sedge fen. I called to Yolanda that I’d “be right there,” then swept the bow around and headed for the fen. Since I had failed and failed again while anchored near that fish, I would let the light breeze carry me this time, freelance, free-form, moving down The Patch like the slow shadow of a cloud. Which is just what happened—a quiet slide, the light rustle on the hull, Yolanda calling twice more before she gave up. Two touches with the paddle were all that was needed to perfect the aim. Standing now, closing in, I waved the bamboo rod like a semaphore—backcasting once, twice—and then threw the line. Dropping a little short, the muddler landed on the near side of the gap. The pickerel scored the surface in crossing it, swirled, made a solid hit, and took the tight line down, wrapping it around the stems of the plants.

“I pulled him out of there plants and all,” I said. “I caught him with your bamboo rod.”

I looked closely at my father. His eyes had welled over. His face was damp. Six weeks later, he was dead.

It’s a wonderful ending – not the death, but the possibility that McPhee’s pickerel story broke through his father’s frozen state. The bamboo rod is key, binding father and son. The description is exquisite. A brilliant piece – one of McPhee’s best. 

Sasha Frere-Jones on T. J. Clark

I’ve just finished reading Sasha Frere-Jones’ Bookforum review of T. J. Clark’s new essay collection Those Passions: On Art and Politics. For several weeks now, I’ve been considering buying this book, but the “politics” part of the title puts me off. I love Clark’s writings on painting. But I’m allergic to his Marxist politics, particularly his obsession with class. The tagline of Frere-Jones’ piece – “An art historian locates the political in paint” – seemed a red flag to me. And yes, according to his review, Those Passions does contain a lot of politics. He says, “Clark’s latest collection of essays, Those Passions, continues a project that stretches (at least) back to 1999’s Farewell to an Idea, slowly x-raying the paint to find the fingerprint of capital.” But he also says this: “In “Sex and Politics According to Delacroix,” Clark sees a world in the vortical bodies in Delacroix’s 1855 painting The Lion Hunt.” Wait a minute! Could this be the same piece that appeared in the October 10, 2019 London Review, the one called “A Horse’s Impossible Head”? I believe it is. It’s one of my all-time favorite Clark essays. Its political content is minimal; its ekphrasis is extensive and ravishing. Later in his review, Frere-Jones refers to another Clark essay in the new collection – “Madame Matisse’s Hat.” That’s another one of my favorites. It appeared in the August 14, 2008 London Review. That clinched it. These two essays alone are worth the price of the new book. I’m buying it.

Acts of Seeing: Via Claudia Augusta

Photo by John MacDougall

I took this May 16, 2025, on the Via Claudia Augusta cycle route between Salerno and Trento. It’s one of the most beautiful trails I’ve ever biked. It takes you through the Adige River valley, filled with acres and acres of apple orchards and green vineyards. The sky was blue; the sun was shining. We came upon this old red wagon piled with dead twigs and branches. What a great subject! ! Unposed, unembellished, unimpeachably real – the Ding an sich, the thing in itself.    

June 9, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’ superb “Still Life.” It’s an exploration of New York City’s biggest graveyard – Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn. Williams roams its four hundred and seventy-eight acres. Nearly six hundred thousand people are buried there. She describes the place as a “sculpture garden.” It contains more than two hundred and fifty thousand monuments: 

Owls, horses, baseballs, clasped hands, winged hourglasses, and empty beds are among the iconography that I have seen incised on the funerary surfaces. The angels (and they are many) weep and sag, but they also look heavenward. Lambs mean children. Broken flower stems and shorn columns symbolize early death. There are sarcophagi and plinths and cenotaphs. Lord at the obelisks.   

She visits some of its hundreds of mausolea:

Topography is destiny: dozens of mausolea were tucked into those deglaciated cliffs, and during grassier seasons they resemble thatched-roof hobbit houses with bronze or stone doors. Other mausolea are freestanding. Some have Tiffany stained-glass windows. The tomb of Charles Feltman, a restaurateur who supposedly invented the hot dog, is nicer than my apartment. There are four front steps bracketed by two huge urns, half a dozen Corinthian columns, and six life-size maidens, possible goddesses. Atop a cupola, the archangel Michael stands seven feet tall, his sword lowered, facing a Burger King. Feltman’s eternal neighbors include the Sommers, the Lynans, the Archers, and the Gales. The Maniscalcos might like to know that their guardian angel has come to miss her marble arms.

She talks with people who work there, e.g., Rich Moylan, Green-Wood’s president of the past thirty-nine years; Neela Wickremesinghe, Green-Wood’s chief conservator; Jahongir Usmanov, Green-Wood’s operations manager; John Argenziano, the cemetery’s head of security.

She observes a grave being dug:

It was nine-thirty in the morning and so windy that miniature flags on graves were horizontal. The gravediggers were preparing for a funeral at two. Four neon-orange stakes marked off a rectangle in front of a headstone. The stone was inscribed with the name of a woman buried at nine feet; her husband was coming in at seven.

She goes on a Green-Wood tour led by Marge Raymond, “a seasoned singer with a blond updo and sunglasses the size of T-bones.” Paige writes, 

The best stop on her tour is Battle Hill. My trolley unloaded, and we climbed stone steps to the 1776 battleground, two hundred and eighteen feet above sea level. Marge approached an enormous bronze statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and war. Minerva faces New York Harbor. Marge told us to turn and follow her gaze. We did, and found the Statue of Liberty staring back.

The piece brims with interesting facts and observations:

Green-Wood’s earliest burial lots, typically fourteen by twenty-seven feet, cost a hundred dollars apiece; today, a grave starts at twenty-one thousand. 

A single grave may hold up to six people: three casketed, three cremated. Green-Wood stacks clients at depths of nine, seven, and five feet. 

A grave at Green-Wood is the only real estate that some New Yorkers ever own. 

Only at Green-Wood is it possible to enjoy a show performed on a Steinway concert grand piano near the tomb of the actual Steinways.

“Still Life” is the liveliest piece about a cemetery that I’ve ever read. Highly recommended. 

Andrea Barrett's "Dust and Light"

On my recent trip to Italy, I took a little book with me – Andrea Barrett’s Dust and Light (2025). It’s a collection of seven essays on the art of fact in fiction. I enjoyed it immensely, even though my interest is in the art of fact, not fiction. In the essay “The Years and The Years,” Barrett praises Virginia Woolf’s ability to balance fact and imagination. She writes, 

Fact dissolved fully into fiction: what Woolf learned is to so deeply integrated into her imagination that it emerges in her characters with the same offhand immediacy as lived experience.

Fact dissolved fully into fiction – I found myself turning this phrase over and over in my mind as I cycled the Via Claudia Augusta. When facts are dissolved in fiction, they lose their factuality. They become fiction. For Barrett, this is a good thing, this is what art (her art, at least) is all about – the transformation of fact into fiction. But for me, the dissolution of facts in fiction seems like a waste. I much prefer their preservation as facts, in first-person chronicles of real experience, e.g., John McPhee’s Coming into the Country, Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before, Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands, Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau. These books are as artful and meaningful as any novel, and yet their narratives are real, not fabricated. When it comes to representation of reality, I’ll take fact over fiction any day. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #1 T. J. Clark's "Strange Apprentice"

This is the tenth and concluding post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is T. J. Clark’s exquisite “Strange Apprentice” (London Review of Books, October 8, 2020).

In this great piece – one of the subtlest, most delectable, enthralling studies of style I’ve ever read – Clark opened my eyes to the genius of Camille Pissarro. He begins by telling about the mentor-mentee relationship between Pissarro and Paul Cézanne. In the mid 1870s, Cézanne visited Pissarro and painted with him. Clark says, “Cézanne came to Pissarro to unlearn his first style.” Cézanne considered Pissarro a master. Clark tries to see Pissarro’s art through Cézanne’s eyes. He wants to avoid the usual contrasts between Pissarro and Cézanne – simple/complex, dull/interesting. He takes Pissarro’s seeming simplicity, seeming dullness, and opens them up, illuminating their beauty and depth. He does this by focusing on two of Pissarro’s paintings – Paysage à Pontoise (1872) and Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873). He says of Paysage à Pontoise,

So the true intensity of the new painting, Pissarro proposes, will inhere in its showing us what, after all, of beauty – of emphasis, of the suddenness of things seen – is there inthe dullness, not ‘punctuating’ it, not coming out of it. This is Pissarro’s painting’s triumph: the complete steadiness of its hold on a single plain state of the light; the subduing of every separate entity to that state; and the peculiar beauty of that submission. Granted, certain episodes in the scene are on the edge of becoming ‘things in themselves’. The pale grey of the tree trunk at left is one such, done in a single smear. Or the path with its rustle of uncut dry grass, and then the path losing its way by the fence and going on into distance, across the rough fields, as a tentative green smudge. The pale blotted saplings on the other side of the fence; the flattened horizon way off to the right; the small square darker cloud. These are astonishments – the mind and eye can feast on them. But they do not disturb the sense of the whole. They are fine tunings of a single song.

I love that “These are astonishments – the mind and eye can feast on them.” For me, it’s the ultimate critical compliment. But Clark is only getting started. His description of Le Champ de choux, Pontoise is extraordinary:

Can we agree that the light in Le Champ de choux, which is breathtaking, is some kind of high-summer gloaming, maybe with moisture in the early evening air? (Of course the painting is equivocal about clock time. It isn’t a Monet coucher de soleil. But early evening seems reasonable.) Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders.

I nominate that as one of the great passages in all of art writing. “The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth” is inspired! We are approaching mid-point in Clark’s essay. Where is he going with it? Is it possible he’s arguing for a reconsideration of Pissarro, one that rates him even greater than Cézanne? Yes and no. Yes to reconsideration; no to higher rating. For in the end – in the second half of the essay – Clark returns to Cézanne. He compares Cézanne’s copy of Louveciennes (c.1873) with Pissarro’s original:

The difference between the two Louveciennes is summed up by what happens to the mother and child. Cézanne’s human beings do not really cast shadows: the mother’s shadow slides away from her, thick on the surface, and disappears into a rut. (In the Pissarro the rut carries a little rivulet of rainwater. Cézanne has no time for such traces of weather.) Space in Cézanne, we already begin to see, is not a reality inhabited by others besides ourselves, beings with an equal claim on the landscape. His two figures are groundless ghosts: they’re about to go around the corner into the abyss. Space in Pissarro is essentially containment, a form of surrounding: it can in the end be metaphorised, as here, by a holding of hands, the reaching up of a child to its mother. In Cézanne the gesture is the first thing to go. There need be no green gate at far left in the copy, leading out to other people’s property – marks of ownership are not part of seeing for Cézanne. No real light comes over the copy’s horizon – just a theatrical backlighting, which splashes crudely against the houses on the hill, breaking them into facets. There is no evening glow under the arches of the aqueduct. And of course no agriculture to speak of, no field system, no raked earth in peasant plots, no lines of new planting. Pissarro liked to call himself ‘a painter of cabbages’. Cézanne’s seeing does not divulge identities of this kind.

Clark finds the comparison of the two Louveciennes telling. He says, “The interest of the copy is not that Cézanne couldn’t do these many things that Pissarro could, but that the failures turn out to have their own coherence, their own aesthetic dignity: they shadow forth the Cézanne we know.” 

Clark also compares Cezanne’s Maison et arbre, quartier de l’Hermitage (1874) with Pissarro’s Maison bourgeoise à l’Hermitage (1873). He remarks on the “sheer strangeness” of the Cézanne – its “weird electricity.”  Strangeness is Clark’s governing aesthetic. Earlier in the piece, he calls it “the marker of modernity.” Cézanne is strange; Pissarro isn’t. This determines Clark’s ultimate judgment: “Cézanne was the greater artist.”

In the essay’s concluding paragraph, Clark makes one more inspired comparison:

Put Jas de Bouffan next to Inondation à Saint-Ouen-L’Aumône. The latter is dated 1873. (Saint-Ouen was a few miles downstream from Auvers, a village just beginning to be a suburb.) Look at the stretch of land in Saint-Ouen leading off between the trees to the village ... and the awkward pomposity of the house and chimney in the centre ... the factory smokestack just visible through branches to the left ... the birds battling the wind, the clouds still threatening rain ... the reflection in the water of the fruit tree’s supports. Humble and colossal. Every observation solid as a rock. A social world. The earth emerging after the flood. What must it have been like to have discovered, under such painting’s spell, that Pissarro’s feeling for time and place – his anarchist confidence in history beginning again – could not be one’s own?

Pissarro’s solidity versus Cézanne’s strangeness. It’s no contest. Cézanne wins. Or does he? Clark’s final paragraph gives Pissarro his beautiful due: “Humble and colossal”; “Every observation solid as a rock”; “Pissarro’s feeling for time and place.” My takeaway from this magnificent piece is Pissarro’s rich simplicity. Yes, Cézanne is the star. But Pissarro quietly steals the show. 

Credit: The above illustration is Camille Pissarro’s Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873).

The Urgency of Ephemerality

Jane Remover, Revengeseekerz (2025)

I still find myself thinking about Sheldon Pearce’s use of “ephemerality” in his dazzling “Goings On: Digicore” (May 5, 2025):

The hyperpop microgenre digicore—a chaotic, internet-forward mashup of music styles born on Discord servers for use in the video game Minecraft—might have vanished into the ether if not for the explosive artist Jane Remover. Inspired primarily by E.D.M. producers such as Skrillex and Porter Robinson and the rappers Tyler, the Creator and Trippie Redd, the Newark-born musician débuted at seventeen, as dltzk, with the EP “Teen Week” (2021), helping to define an obscure anti-pop scene moving at warp speed. Their music’s wide bandwidth now spans the pitched-up sampling of the album “dariacore” (under the alias Leroy) and the emo-leaning work of the side project Venturing. This all-devouring approach culminates in the ecstatic thrasher album “Revengeseekerz,” a maximalist tour de force that makes ephemerality feel urgent.

What does that mean – “makes ephemerality feel urgent”? Is ephemerality something that’s felt? You can feel the urgency of a moment, especially if there’s an emergency – something that calls for an immediate response. Does ephemerality call for an immediate response? Yes, absolutely. If you don’t capture it now now now! – it’s gone forever. That’s my interpretation, anyway. I love the phrase. The music is horrible.

I remember my first encounter with “ephemeral.” I was reading a dance review by Arlene Croce called “Hello Posterity, Goodbye Now” (The New Yorker, July 10, 1978; included in her Going to the Dance, 1982). In her opening line, Croce wrote, “Dance, the ephemeral art, is rebelling against its condition. Like mayflies who want to be cast in bronze, dancers are putting their dances into retrieval systems.” 

My most recent encounter with the word happened yesterday, in a wonderful London Review of Books piece by Dani Garavelli, titled “At the Whisky Bond.” It’s about an archive in Glasgow devoted to the preservation of Alasdair Gray’s legacy. Garavelli writes, “In the mid-2000s Gray’s visual work was still neglected, undermined by its ephemerality (his murals around the city were often just one step ahead of the wrecking ball); its ubiquity (he would draw pen portraits for almost anyone who asked); and what some saw as his ‘parochialism.’ ” 

Another word for “ephemerality” is “transience.” “For inherent in the magic moment is its transience” – one of my favorite lines. It’s by Hugh Kenner. He’s writing about Hemingway – Hemingway’s desire to perpetuate the perfect moment (A Homemade World, 1975). Transience is the key to Hemingway’s aesthetic, Kenner says. I agree. It’s the key to mine, too. Time is pouring through us, an unstanchable flow, and what memory and art and writing try to capture is the brief being of what never again will be. 

June 2, 2025 Issue

Louis Menand, in his absorbing “Strong Opinions,” in this week’s issue, gets a lot of things right about William F. Buckley, Jr. He calls him an “overgrown preppie.” I’d go further – he was a snob. He says, “Debate was his preferred medium of exposition, and he would take on anyone who could talk back to him.” This is true; it’s what drew me to his writing back when I was in my early twenties. Menand’s description of Buckley – “And the rumpled, rubber-faced manner, the popping eyes, the languorous drawl, the charmingly wicked grin he flashed when he thought he had scored a kill—Buckley was a show unto himself” – is bang on; it made me smile in recognition. But Menand seems to underestimate Buckley as a writer. Granted, he says of Overdrive (published in The New Yorker, in 1983), “Still, Buckley knew how to turn a phrase, and Overdrive is written with panache.” But overall, he appears to view Buckley more as an entertainer than a writer – “a show unto himself.” 

My view is that Buckley was an excellent writer. My best evidence is his brilliant essay “On Experiencing Gore Vidal,” which originally appeared in the August, 1969, Esquire, and was later included in his 1970 collection The Governor Listeth. It’s a fascinating account of what Menand calls “the Buckley-Vidal fiasco” that occurred live on ABC TV during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Menand describes what happened:

The 1968 Convention was, of course, the scene of the Chicago police clash with antiwar protesters, and the riots became a subject for Vidal and Buckley’s debate. At one point, Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” and got the reaction he hoped for. “Now listen, you queer,” Buckley shouted. “Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.” Vidal stared at Buckley during this outburst with the expression of a cat that has just swallowed a very large canary. He could barely believe his luck. They were contracted to do one more night on the air; ABC separated them with a curtain.

I didn’t see this broadcast. But, as a result of reading Buckley’s riveting piece, I feel as if I have. Buckley details the history leading up to the confrontation. Near the beginning, he says,

At this point my mind moved to Gore Vidal, and the dismal events of the summer of 1968, when he and I confronted each other a dozen times on network television, leading to an emotional explosion which, it is said, rocked television. Certainly it rocked me, and I am impelled to write about it; to discover its general implications, which are undeniable and profound; to probe the question whether what was said – under the circumstances in which it was said – has any meaning at all beyond that which is most generally ascribed to it, namely, excessive bitchery can get out of hand. But first the narrative.

I am impelled to write about it – right there, I think, is the sign of a true writer. The piece is extraordinary – piquant, detailed, analytical. The use of “faggot” and “faggotry” is offensive and unforgiveable. But in the end, the piece surprises. Buckley apologizes.

But now I’m having second thoughts. Having just finished re-reading “On Experiencing Gore Vidal,” I’m appalled by Buckley’s prejudice against gays. He had a distinctive style – provocative, needling, venomous. Too bad he used it to express such rotten views. 

May 26, 2025 Issue

Nick Paumgarten is on a phenomenal roll this year. In just five months, he’s produced three superb pieces: “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24); “Dreams and Nightmares” (March 10); and now, in this week’s issue, “Guitar Heroes.” The new piece is about the massive guitar collection of two guys, Dirk Ziff and Perry Margouleff. Paumgarten describes it as “the world’s finest collection of vintage guitars.” Last year, Ziff and Margouleff donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Paumgarten talks with the two men. He visits the warehouse where the collection is stored. He writes,

“Are you ready?” Margouleff asked at the warehouse. He unlocked a door, and immediately a thick, corky scent hit me, the emanation of hundreds of aging guitars—the great variety of hardwoods, the glue and paint and lacquer, the oxidation of strings and coils, the leather straps and handles, and the sarcophagal musk of the cases themselves. Guitar collectors know and savor this smell. Margouleff has thought of hiring a perfumer to try to re-create it. “When someone brings me a guitar, the first thing I do is smell it,” he said. “Smell is a fingerprint. It’s how I tell if it’s real or not.”

Receding into the warm amber light of the warehouse’s middle distance, on both sides and a few tiers, were red-carpeted shelves of old cases packed as snug as library stacks. Here was a Beinecke of guitars. Margouleff explained the sorting system—make, model, serial number, with a chronological overlay. Gibsons, Fenders, Martins, Gretsches, D’Angelicos. In the open floor space were Oriental carpets, black leather couches and club chairs, dozens of vintage amps, coffee-table books, and an old Schwinn Sting Ray with a banana seat. It was not so much man cave as man arsenal, teeming yet tidy, the lair of a latter-day Count of Monte Cristo. The temperature stayed at sixty-eight, humidity at fifty per cent. Photography was forbidden.

I like that “old Schwinn Sting Ray with a banana seat” detail. This piece brims with vivid details (e.g., “the sarcophagal musk” of the guitar cases, “an early Stratocaster prototype, with a half-melted pick guard”; “a 1959 Sunburst model, its cherry-red finish faded to yellow”).

Paumgarten also visits the Met to view the first tranche of guitars delivered to the museum. This results in some of the piece’s most absorbing passages. This one, for example:

The guitars kept coming, like pitches at a batting cage. Before long, we reached the heart of the collection, the dawn of the solid-body electric guitar and, eventually, of rock and roll. “These guitars were really for music that didn’t even exist yet,” Margouleff said. Wheeldon presented the “Klunker,” an Epiphone Zephyr DeLuxe that, in 1941, Les Paul modified to be essentially a solid-body—he bolted a steel bar into the body and sealed the f-holes. Later, Gibson, which Paul endorsed, insisted that he put a Gibson decal on the headstock. But the case read “Mary Ford,” who was Paul’s wife and partner, and an ace as well. “Mary and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were the first two female rock stars,” Margouleff said. “The instrument itself isn’t sexist.” Add Mother Maybelle Carter and Elizabeth Cotten to this particular Mt. Shredmore, and the story of the guitar is no longer as dude-centric as conventional wisdom deems it to be.

And this:

The next solid-body specimen was designed in Downey, California, in 1948, by a motorcycle builder and racer named Paul Bigsby. Merle Travis, the country-and-Western hot shot, had asked Bigsby for an electric guitar with the sustain of a Hawaiian lap steel guitar. “Bigsby built everything, including all the casting, the inlay, winding the pickup coils,” Margouleff said. Downey was where Leo Fender first saw Travis playing a Bigsby guitar, which he then copied, to produce a prototype of the classic Fenders. Opening a battered case, Wheeldon unveiled the prototype, its white body paint chipped—an object not nearly as elaborate as the Bigsby and yet, in light of the Telecasters and Stratocasters to come, possibly more august. Next up was an original Fender Esquire and then an early Stratocaster prototype, with a half-melted pick guard. Its materials had been “self-destructing.” “There was a lot of trial and error with the plastics,” Margouleff said. “They were working with volatile chemicals and man-made junk. There’s a reason Stradivariuses are still here. They’re made entirely of wood.” A pristine 1954 Strat was next, its shape as familiar and enduring as that of a spoon.

And this:

But the cream of the collection, and Ziff’s particular obsession, was the Les Pauls of the late fifties, which, when they débuted, did not sell well. Wheeldon presented a 1959 Sunburst model, its cherry-red finish faded to yellow. This was the “Keithburst,” which Keith Richards played on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the Rolling Stones’ (and, it is believed, the Sunburst’s) first appearance on American television, in 1964. “This was not a popular instrument at the time,” Margouleff said. “It was out of production.” He contends that Richards must have bought it in New York, on Music Row, though Richards has said that he got it in London. (In the early nineteen-fifties, the British government imposed import restrictions that affected American guitars, so they were uncommon in the U.K.) In England, Richards apparently shared it with Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, among others, whetting their appetites for the older American instruments.

And most especially this:

Margouleff handed me the Keithburst and, plugging it into a small amp, urged me to play. One grows accustomed to never touching the art, but I hit some open chords, the few I know. By gum, whether it was the instrument itself or the ghosts of fingers past, the sound was rich and sassy, and moved me to make faces.

That last line is inspired. The whole piece is inspired – one of Paumgarten’s best. 

May 12 & 19, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ian Frazier's absorbing "Pigeon Toes." It’s about “string-foot pigeons” – a term I’d never heard of before. String-foot is, as Frazier explains, “the common problem of pigeons getting string, threads, human hair, etc., wrapped around their feet and legs.” Frazier visits the Wild Bird Fund (W.B.F.), a wildlife rehab facility in Manhattan. He reports that W.B.F. “treats more than twelve thousand animals a year, from tiny songbirds to kestrels, seagulls, hawks, vultures, and wild turkeys. Of the total, about half are pigeons, and between five hundred and six hundred of them have foot tangles. At certain times of year, the Wild Bird Fund might see two or three string-foot birds in a day.” He describes an operation on a string-foot pigeon performed by W.B.F. clinician Rachel Frank:

Frank took the pigeon out of its intake pet carrier. The bird seemed unresistant, but it watched her closely with one eye and then the other, something pigeons do to improve their depth perception. “This one is what we call B.A.R.,” Frank said. “That means it’s bright, alert, and responsive. Impaired birds are Q.A.R.—quiet, alert, and responsive. Except for the feet, it’s in good shape. The ones Lori brings in are usually B.A.R., because they don’t have to be impaired for her to catch them.” After testing the bird’s flapping ability by holding it at its midsection and raising it up (flapping normal), and listening to its heartbeat (also normal) with a stethoscope, she gave it an injection of sterile fluid to keep it hydrated, and then an intramuscular injection of pain medication. She put a clear conical mask over its head and bill and began a flow of oxygen, combined with isoflurane gas to knock it out. Then she carefully laid it on a spread-out towel, with its head on a rolled-up towel for a pillow. The de-stringing was likely to hurt, and she thought the bird would be safer if it was unconscious. In a few seconds, its eyes had glazed over.

The pigeon lay with its feet spread, like a K.O.’d boxer. Frank started on the left foot, using scissors, tweezers, and other sanitized instruments she took from plastic packages. The work requires a watchmaker’s focus. She cut through brown packing twine and dark pieces of thread and unwound them with the tweezers. The right foot was even worse than the left—a fright-wig mass of string, feathers, human hair, and some pale, waxy, tightly wrapped stuff that turned out to be dental floss. She unpicked the layers carefully, one at a time. When both feet were done, she put an antibiotic cream on the lesions with a Q-tip, and bandaged them with thin pieces of gauze and strips of vet wrap to hold it.

That “The pigeon lay with its feet spread, like a K.O.’d boxer” made me smile. Frazier is a superb describer. On a visit with pigeon-keeper Pat McCarthy, he writes, “One afternoon, he led me up a steel ladder from the building’s fire escape and over a patch of ice to the coop, where the birds were kind of burbling, like gently percolating coffee.” My favorite passage in “Pigeon Toes” is Frazier’s description of a woman feeding pigeons near the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

She has a folding table; an ironing board; a cart with handles at both ends that contains a dozen or more orange-and-green Fresh Direct shopping bags; a broom; some pet-size water bowls; a pair of hockey sticks; and various bread knives. She has told me that she comes from Poland and now lives in her car, which is parked nearby. Her conversation can devolve into a kind of radio-static recitation of terrible things that happened in Poland in the previous century. On the ironing board, which is set at a convenient height, she cuts up old loaves that she gets for free from a nearby bakery, and then she tosses the bread cubes onto the granite paving blocks of the plaza. Pigeons appear almost instantly, pecking so avidly that dozens of individual bread cubes go flying into the air above the mass of birds like popping popcorn. Sometimes she looks over her shoulder for hawks and falcons. Once, when the pigeons all left simultaneously before the food was consumed, she said a hawk had come. I looked up in the trees but couldn’t see it. On occasion, she points out a limping bird, whose leg she says was broken by a hawk.

“Pigeon Toes” is a vivid, gentle piece that explores the world of street pigeons and the hazards they have to brave. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: And let’s give a huzzah for Rachel Syme’s delightful “Local Gems: Fountain Pen Hospital,” in this week’s “Goings On” (“The store’s longtime head salesman is a fountain-pen savant. I recently went hunting for a wet-writing flexible nib and, within a few moments, he produced from the back room a glossy black Parker Lucky 2½ from the nineteen-twenties. ‘This, this, is the pen for you,' he said. He was right”).  

May 5, 2025 Issue

Helen Rosner, in her “Tables for Two,” in this week’s issue, praises Danny & Coop’s, a Philly-cheesesteak restaurant in the East Village. She says,

The cheesesteak is good. It’s very good. It’s a hefty twelve-incher, the roll split lengthwise and filled with a glorious gloop of cheese (smooth and saucy Cooper Sharp, no relation to Bradley) and sliced rib-eye steak (tender, velvet-soft, paper-thin) run through with sweet ribbons of griddled onion. It’s the best cheesesteak I’ve had in New York, which isn’t saying much; it’s just as good as the best one I’ve had in Philadelphia, which is saying plenty.

Rosner’s review reminded me of another great “Tables for Two” Philly-cheesesteak piece – Nick Paumgarten’s “Tony Luke’s” (April 11, 2005). It contains one of my all-time favorite Paumgarten lines:

The cheesesteaks here are about a foot long, and they are served without the benefit of being cut in half. As a result, as you eat one, the structural integrity starts to go; well-cheesified clumps of steak ooze out the sides. Quick flanking bites along the roll’s perimeter don’t much help, and soon you find yourself pushing the thing into your mouth like a log into a chipper. 

April 28, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Adam Gopnik’s “In the Neighborhood,” a delightful postscript to his wonderful “Fresh Paint,” in last week’s New Yorker. It’s a guide on where to eat near the Frick. Here’s a taste:

Begin a blessed Saturday morning at the newly expanded Frick Collection. Be sure to stop at James McNeill Whistler’s “Arrangement in Black and Gold.” Then, though Madison Avenue—heavily weighted down by flagship stores, making a touch monotone the once beautiful flow of galleries, boutiques, and coffee shops—is not all it was, it can still be a pleasure to stroll, staring down the enticing side streets that point toward Central Park. Where to stop for breakfast? There is the last remaining Three Guys coffee shop, right up Madison at Seventy-fifth. All the breakfast dishes are available there, along with the great and vanishing run of sandwiches—B.L.T., tuna on rye—that marked New York cuisine for so long. E.A.T., the outpost of the Eli Zabar empire—which really is an empire, with a single emperor—is farther up, at Eighty-first Street, for unimprovable lox and soft scrambled eggs. And, for coffee after the meal, walk in the opposite direction to Via Quadronno, right off East Seventy-third, which makes one of the best cappuccinos in the city.

I enjoyed this brief piece immensely. I hope Gopnik writes more of them.

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Sense of Place

This is the sixth 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 focus on their sense of place.

How do you evoke a place in words? As these three great books show, one way is through the power of observation – the gift of the eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger. For example, in The Pine Barrens, McPhee describes Fred Brown’s house in Hog Wallow:

Fred Brown’s house is on an unpaved road that curves along the edge of a wide cranberry bog. What attracted me to it was the pump that stands in his yard. It was something of a wonder that I noticed the pump, because there were, among other things, eight automobiles in the yard, two of them on their sides and one of them upside down, all ten years old or older. Around the cars were old refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, partly dismantled radios, cathode-ray tubes, a short wooden ski, a large wooden mallet, dozens of cranberry picker’s boxes, many tires, an orange crate dated 1946, a cord or so of firewood, mandolins, engine heads, and maybe a thousand other things.

I relish the specificity of that list. McPhee’s descriptions are triumphs of observation. Here’s another one – a depiction of Chatsworth General Store:

When I first stopped in there, I noticed on its shelves the usual run of cold cuts, canned foods, soft drinks, crackers, cookies, cereals, and sardines, and also Remington twelve-gauge shotgun shells, Slipknot friction tape, Varsity gasket cement, Railroad Mills sweet snuff, and State-Wide well restorer. Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a wall shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter. A glass counter top next to the wooden one had been rubbed cloudy by hundreds of thousands of coins and pop bottles, and in the case beneath it were twenty-two rectangular glass dishes, each holding a different kind of penny candy. Beside the candy case was a radiator covered with an oak plank.

Details accrete, and a whole world springs into being. That “Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a wall shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter” is wonderfully noticed. 

Accretion is Robert Sullivan’s method, too. In The Meadowlands, he describes what he sees as he and his friend Dave canoe across Kearny Marsh:

Around us there were green hills of grass-covered garbage dumps. We saw more carp, more muskrats, mudflats covered with sandpipers, and the frozen-in-time remains of a snapping turtle that appeared to have been decapitated by a train just as it had crawled up out of the marsh. We also saw a Thermos, three unopened cans of Pepsi, a beach chair sitting on another island, and a Seven Seas Red Wine Vinegar salad dressing spill. Passing over more underwater fences, we felt as if we were paddling just above Atlantis. At precisely one hour and fifty-two minutes into our trip, we saw our first abandoned appliance, a refrigerator.

Sullivan not only notices visual details; he notes sounds, smells, and textures, too:

We stood for a while beneath the tall cement legs of the turnpike. Distant airhorns blasted, set off by train track workers nowhere to be seen, and the sound seemed like the sad calls of undiscovered birds.

Dave was the first to voice concern; he spoke after we inhaled a dank, sewery smell that seemed to have been stirred up by our paddles. “I feel like I just knocked a couple of years off my life,” Dave said.

Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires.

In one of my favorite passages in The Meadowlands, Sullivan touches a leachate seep, “a black ooze trickling down the slope of the hill, an espresso of refuse.” He writes,

But in this moment, here at its birth, at a stream’s source in the modern meadows, this little seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew of oil and grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc. I touched this fluid – my fingertip was a bluish caramel color – and it was warm and fresh. A few yards away, where the stream collected into a benzene-scented pool, a mallard swam alone.

Ian Frazier’s power of observation is immense. He, too, uses accretion of detail to convey his sense of place. Here, from On the Rez, is his description of Big Bat’s Texaco:

In Pine Ridge, Big Bat’s is the place you go. If you’re just passing through or visiting, you go to Big Bat’s because it’s one of the few places on the reservation that looks like what you’re used to in paved America. Big Bat’s has a big, highway-visible, red-and-white sign, and rows of pumps dispensing gasoline and diesel fuel, and full-color cardboard advertisements affixed to the top of the pumps, and country music playing from speakers in the canopies above; inside, it has the usual brightly lit shelves of products whose empty packages will end up on the floor of your car, and freezers and beverage coolers set into the wall, and a deli counter highlighted in blue neon and staffed by aproned young people who use disposable clear plastic gloves to put cold cuts on your six-inch or twelve-inch submarine sandwich, and video games, and TV monitors just below ceiling level showing CNN or country-music videos, and plastic tables and window booths where you can sit and eat or just sit, and a row of pay telephones. If you live on the reservation, if you’re not just passing through, you go to Big Bat’s because that’s where everybody goes.

Frazier’s descriptions of place are often lyrical, sometimes bordering on poetry. Here, for example, is his depiction of the sun-dance grounds:

We got in my car and drove a few miles north on the highway, then turned off into pasture. He said that he wanted to collect some more sage and that he knew a good place for it by the sun-dance grounds. We went through several fenced fields, Le getting out to open the gates. Then we came down a small embankment and into an open flat surrounded by cotton wood trees. In the center of it stood a sun-dance arbor – a shelter in the shape of an O, tree-limb posts supporting crossbeams laid over with a roof of bushy pine boughs – and in the center of the O stood the sun-dance pole. From the pole’s top fluttered strips of cloth in the four sacred colors, which are red, black, yellow, and white. A sun dance had taken place there a week or so before, and the grasses were still trampled down, and the dusty ground exhaled a good fragrance I couldn’t identify. There was not a scrap of litter anywhere. Near the sun-dance arbor remained the willow frame of a sweat lodge, a delicate sketch of a dome just big enough to sit under. By the lodge frame I saw a few remaining pieces of split cottonwood of a deep yellow, a heap of stones, and a sort of whisk made of long-needle pine boughs tied with baling twine. Aside from the twine, the fastenings of blue nylon cord on the sweat-lodge frame, and the cloth at the top of the sun-dance pole, everything in this ceremonial place was made from natural materials found close at hand. Most religious structures look as if they had descended upon the landscape from above; these looked as if they had risen on their own out of the ground.

That last line is quintessential Frazier – perceptive, lyrical, epiphanic. 

Description of landscape is one way to evoke place. Another is description of people. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.