My Cubist Summer

This month I’ve been happily immersed in two superb essays on Picasso’s Cubism – T. J. Clark’s “Cubism and Collectivity” (included in his 1999 collection Farewell to an Idea) and Leo Steinberg’s “The Intelligence of Picasso” (included in his posthumous 2022 collection Picasso). It’s fascinating to compare them. 

In “Cubism and Collectivity,” Clark considers some of Picasso’s most extreme works of Cubism, e.g., Man with a Pipe (1911), Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”) (1911-12), and The Architect’s Table (1912). To describe these strange, elusive paintings, Clark uses “grid”: “Look at the way the buttons in Man with a Pipe are rolled along various lines to apexes or points of intersection on the grid, like zeros in a three-dimensional sum....”; “The grid had been, and still was, essentially a compositional device....”; “The grid is never entirely part of the perceptions it totalizes....” “I should say that Picasso’s grids are very often, perhaps most often, stretched or filled to breaking point.” And this beautiful passage on the grid in “Ma Jolie”: 

It is filled with the luminous, the dappled and glistening, the chequered shade, the translucent and half-penetrable – indicators that geometry had somehow now been divulged by seeing. Lines are invaded by light. The grid shivers again with Cezanne’s perceptual uncertainties, not the Douanier’s confidence in the sign.

Clark changed my view of Picasso’s grids. He lit them up – “lines invaded by light.”

Steinberg wasn’t a fan of the grid. In his “The Philosophical Brothel” (also included in Picasso), he wrote,

New York painters and critics valued Cubism less as a body of work than as a modus operandi, a pictorial “strategy” that offered escape from the pitfalls and sinkholes of deep perspective. The so-called Cubist grid was an ideated flat-level armature that enabled a painter, any painter whatever, to traverse the expanse of a canvas without falling through. Rather than seeing Picasso’s Cubist creations as part of an artist’s personal inventory, continually feeding into the rest of the work, the supposed structure described by the term “Cubist grid” was depersonalized. [“The Philosophical Brothel”]

In “The Intelligence of Picasso,” Steinberg didn’t use “grid”; he used “facet,” “arris,” and “watershed.” For example:

From this moment forward, the arris or watershed in Picasso’s work gets off an amazing career: during the following year, 1908, he works every rounding surface to a sharp ridge. Every swell becomes discontinuous, breaking against an arris. Planes define themselves as prismatic facets. And not body planes only: in a back view, at bottom center, even the interval between the thighs joins in the faceting, as if solids and void deserved the same stepwise pacing from any one point to whatever lies next. Picasso here disavows all continuous surfacing – the kind you caress; he is plotting the incidence of watersheds in a faceted system. 

I confess that before I read Steinberg’s essay, I didn’t know what an arris is. The dictionary defines it as “a sharp edge formed by the meeting of two flat or curved surfaces.” Steinberg first used it in his description of the cheekline in Picasso’s Self-Portrait (1907):

In the 1907 Self-Portrait, the cheekline runs wild, lancing, impaling the ear. The line, black and rigid, flouts the ostensible anatomical program – cooperating neither with skin tone nor with the requisite continuities. It signifies a change of plane at the cheek from front to side on a receding slope – and that’s all it will do. With chin or eye socket it makes no connection; and that’s why it looks wrong. How shall we explain this wrongness? And explained it should be, if we believe in Picasso’s intelligence; because intelligence should be intelligible.

Steinberg explained it: 

So what about this cheekline that is clearly too long and too inorganic? Picasso has abstracted it from its bedding. In the given context, the line still tells as an arris, defining a change of planes – but without adhering to the planes it supposedly turns. Does this sound absurd? Can a ridge at the junction of planes, as in this early Picasso, exist apart from those planes? Think of the arris down the prow of a ship – can you imagine it without the planes it defines? Yet this is exactly what Picasso conceives. He wants the arris seen apart from its connection with body – as an idea: not a thing but a meaning. And by making it unanatomical, inorganic – black, rigid, and overlong – he dissociates that line from its physical cause, from the bulk it articulates, almost as an abstracted sign.

Steinberg called that cheekline “the most fertile single line drawn in the twentieth century.” He tracked Picasso’s subsequent use of it. He saw it as the source of Cubism:

From this moment forward, the arris or watershed in Picasso’s work gets off an amazing career: during the following year, 1908, he works every rounding surface to a sharp ridge. Every swell becomes discontinuous, breaking against an arris.

Clark doesn’t see it this way. He doesn’t see Cubism as a continuous line of development. He says, “I believe we can best understand the painting Picasso did in 1911 and 1912 if we see it as not issuing from the process of inquiry of the previous three years.” Where Steinberg saw a continuum, Clark sees a break. The break comes in 1911, in Céret: 

What the pictures from Céret posit is a hypothetically complete and alternative system of representation, which they have found and instantiate. Nothing could be more different from the manner and matter of the paintings done in the years before.

In Céret, Clark argues, Picasso “changed course. He made his way back to the world of phenomena.” He looks at the work Picasso did the previous summer, in Cadaqués; he sees a significant contrast. The Cadaqués paintings “speak a uniquely spare, impalpable, diagrammatic language: they are, and have always recognized to be, Cubism near freezing point.”

Interestingly, Steinberg, in his piece, looked closely at a Picasso painted in Cadaqués – Harbor at Cadaqués (1910) – and found it “lovely.” He wrote,

The boat, half reclaimed by its atmospheric surround, dissolves into quivering accents, tokens of planar change accentuated by light. The component parts of the boat are still recognizable: stem and stern; the hint of a mast; the ribbing of its concave; the phantom anchor at lower right; while the browns of the boat’s wooden fabric melt in blueing air.

So much for “Cubism near freezing point.” 

Clark’s governing aesthetic is strangeness. His taste is for “Cubism’s deep, wild, irredeemable obscurity.” The Cubism that appeals to him are the dense, complex grids of Man with a Pipe, Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”), The Architect’s Table. Clark revels in their strangeness. I do, too. But I have a question. Do they describe anything? Clark says yes:

The fragments of planes, lines, lighting, and spacing that make up the texture of “Ma Jolie” may or may not have forfeited “their former descriptive functions” ... but they clearly still carry their former descriptive appearance. They are full of the kinds of particularity, density, and repleteness that usually go with visual matching. They still look to be describing.

Steinberg said yes, too, but less emphatically: “Only minimally do the objects evoked serve as analogues to exclusively visual data.” But when he said this, he wasn’t looking at extreme Cubist paintings like Man with a Pipe, Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”), The Architect’s Table. He was looking at spare works of diagram and collage – Fruit Bowl, Bottle, and Bread Loaf on a Table (1912), Bottle, Wineglass, and Newspaper on a Table (1912), and Bottle, Glass, and Violin (1912) – that appear to be cousins of the 1910 Cadaqués paintings. Of Bottle, Wineglass, and Newspaper on a Table, he said, 

I love the airy brightness of it, every object conceived in thought, without clotting embodiment. If some find these products of Picasso’s nightlife unappealing, I hope, at least, they’ll respect the intelligence of their maker. My own pleasure in them derives partly from their elegant clarity, their cool; and in part from their wisdom.

That’s a perfect note to end on. These two great essays expanded my appreciation of Picasso’s Cubism immensely. Highly recommended.

Credit: The above illustration is Pablo Picasso's Woman with a Zither ("Ma Jolie") (1911-12). 

Pablo Picasso, Harbor at Cadaqués (1910)

On One

Patricia Lockwood, in her “Arrayed in Shining Scales,” in the current London Review of Books, writes,

The Silent Woman has everything: psychoanalysts puking because they found Hughes too attractive, Dido Merwin writing an entire essay about how Plath was a foie gras pig, Stevenson palely loitering, thought-foxes, chipped gravestones, poetic tribunals, lesbian readings of ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, and Malcolm being perhaps more on one than any journalist before or since.

What does “on one” mean? Is it a misprint? Maybe not. Google provides this definition: “Acting crazy, stirring the pot, causing trouble, being a menace in any capacity.” Does that describe Malcolm in The Silent Woman? I don’t think so.

If you ask me, Lockwood is the one who's on one. Her "Arrayed in Shining Scales" is as wild and strange as its subject (the life and work of Sylvia Plath). I devoured it. 

The Adventure of the Ordinary

Last night I found myself still thinking about James Wood’s review of Geoff Dyer’s new memoir Homework, in this week’s New Yorker. Wood praises it for, among other things, its detailed descriptions of a working-class English childhood. He writes, “Down among the Cadbury Fruit & Nut, the Vesta beef curry, and the Huntley & Palmers Breakfast Biscuits is a reality rarely touched by theorists, who are too busy theorizing.” Wood has a taste for writing that makes ordinariness vivid. “The adventure of the ordinary” – that’s what he called it in his great review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. I went back and looked that piece up. Wood writes,

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 to the soccer boots and to the grass, and to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Ajax. [“Total Recall," The New Yorker, August 13 & 20, 2012]

That passage is one of my touchstones. Wood values it, too. He used it again in his brilliant “Serious Noticing,” the title piece in his 2019 collection.   

July 21, 2025 Issue

Geoff Dyer and James Wood are among my favorite writers. In this week’s issue, Wood writes about Dyer’s new book Homework. The result is double bliss. Wood says,

Dyer’s memoir is a funny and often painful book that both follows and departs from the traditional working-class bildungsroman. It offers, perhaps, a stranger account than even Dyer quite allows: at times, a wounded narrative pretending not to be. Many of the classic elements are here—the murky atrocity of school food; the ecstatic discovery of literature (for Dyer, especially Shakespeare) and music (gallons of dubious prog rock); a spurt or two of rebellion; sexual fumblings in cars; the anxious opening of exam results in “buff-coloured” envelopes, those official passports to the wider world.

He says, 

Here, for the record, are the smallest specificities of a working-class English childhood in the sixties and seventies. Down among the Cadbury Fruit & Nut, the Vesta beef curry, and the Huntley & Palmers Breakfast Biscuits is a reality rarely touched by theorists, who are too busy theorizing. 

I’m interested in that reality. I will read Dyer’s book. Even if I wasn’t interested, I’d read it anyway for the pleasure of Dyer’s delectable style – a combination of “extended riffing, comic loitering, and dry exaggeration” (Wood’s description).

Near the end of his review, Wood touches on something I strongly relate to – the role that chance plays in the way our lives unfold. He says, “Dyer’s rise is solitary, freakish, and shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened.” Shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened. Exactly. I know that feeling. Wood expresses it perfectly.

Corrosion and Flow

A few days ago, we had to call a plumber. Our hot water tank was bulging alarmingly. It looked like it was about to burst. We called Luke, a local plumber who’d done work for us before. Luke is a great guy and a skillful plumber. He looked at the tank and recommended we get a new one. We agreed. He installed it the next day. It works perfectly. His fee was very reasonable. The episode reminded me of John Updike's short story “Plumbing” (The New Yorker, February 20, 1971), in which an old plumber “gazes fondly” at rusty pipes in the narrator’s basement, “musing upon the eternal presences of corrosion and flow.” I love that line. Updike repeats it near the end of the piece: “His eyes open wide in the unspeaking presences of corrosion and flow.” 

Updike could make art out of almost any experience, including a plumbing job. In the Foreword of his The Early Stories 1953-1975 (2003), he refers to his stories as “fragments chipped from experience and rounded by imagination.” I think that’s one of the most inspired definitions of art I’ve ever read. 

Edward Hoagland's Splendid "Tugboats on the Tanana"

A few weeks ago, I praised Robert Macfarlane’s “The Living River” (see here). There’s another river piece I’ve read recently that I want to commend – Edward Hoagland’s “Tugboats on the Tanana,” chapter 13 of his Alaskan Travels (2012).

“Tugboats on the Tanana” is an account of a 1983 trip that Hoagland took down the Tanana and Yukon Rivers on a push boat called the Tanana. The boat pushes two fuel barges from Nenana to Galena, a distance of 430 miles. Hoagland describes the trip superbly. Here are a few samples:

Streaks on the water’s surface showed Captain Keith Horton where the current was, although ruffling up to signal a shallows. He followed the flow, taking the long way around most of the bends, as it chewed at each side of the river in turn, but pointed the prow of the frontal barge out of the curve before the Tanana’s twin propellers lost their purchase and we skidded close to colliding with the bank, or slid too far to keep within the current’s five-to-seven-knots-per-hour boost. Deadwood lay strewn at sixes and sevens across the sandbars materializing inconveniently midstream; or jouncing stubs and spars poked out from the bottom like horse’s heads, galloping relentlessly till they would get scrubbed away. The banks were an atrocity zone for standing trees – havoc and slaughter wherever the river inched toward gripping them, though some survived at crazy angles if the roots had found a hidden boulder that had not been pulled loose yet. 

At Shirttail Channel – seven miles and forty minutes below Nenana – we passed several Indian fishing camps on the east shore, each with a fish wheel placidly turning. Maybe twenty feet high, these water wheels, set upright, rotated with the river’s push to scoop up any spawning salmon swimming upstream on a tangent to connect with the wooden blades, producing a sudden Ferris wheel hoist for the fish, till it was flipped backward into basket, then dumped into a collecting bin, where it twitched, smothering in the air, and eventually somebody would grab, gut, and fillet it, laying the strips with others to dry red on racks in the sun.

White birch and black spruce lined both banks, all different ages according to what the river had wrought. It chomped on trees like a horse crunching carrots, or else tipped them whole into the roil to travel beside us, the branches jutting up like a brown shark’s fin. Clouds built up on some of the knolls to make them look like snow peaks, or else turned bruise-blue, or pewter-colored. Sawmill Island stood two miles below Soldier Slough; then the deadwater of Totchaket Slough eight miles beyond that, at Pritchard Crossing. The complexities of Twenty-four Mile Slough followed soon after, and in another mile, Sawmill Slough, and, next, the braidings of Minto Slough, at an abandoned Indian settlement twenty-nine miles below Nenana, where beaver swamps and shortish streams congealed. At Campbell’s Crossing we tied up for lunch.

After the Upper and Lower Tolovana Sloughs, where we’d stuck close to where the river’s volume poured in, we carefully rounded an island to David Crossing, alongside a log like a moose in the water – its roots sticking up like antlers – and toward Sand Crossing, which was recognizable by a certain sweeper – a tree now hanging semi-horizontally over the tumult, but still leafy and partially attached to the disintegrating bank. 

More red-rock bluffs on the north side led to extensive thickets of moose pasturage opposite them, where the river broadened again, with anonymous islands and flats, until at last we reached Miller’s Camp, where we tied our stern to a tree trunk at ten-forty-five p.m., dusk, pointing downstream, and walked a pirate plank to a clay bank six feet high, having covered a hundred-forty miles in ten hours from Nenana.

From the Kokrine Hills, Sunset Creek, and Lady, Burns, and Chokoyik Islands, a settlement called Joe De Louis followed one called the Birches. Then, between Kathaleen, Edith, and Florence Islands, the Nowitna River, an important if corkscrewed tributary, joined us from the south. Moose Point faced Mickey Island, and Hardluck Island, the Big Bend, and Kokrines Village; then Fox and Ham islands; the white cliffs of Horner Hot Springs, and Shovel Creek. 

I love the poetry of the place names – part of the magnificent Hoagland specificity that just keeps rolling, like the Yukon itself, detail after immersive detail. Hoagland is a master writer. “Tugboats on the Tanana” is one of his best pieces.  

Acts of Seeing: Iqaluit

Photo by John MacDougall

A friend from Iqaluit recently visited us here in Stanhope. Her presence took me back twenty years to my own Iqaluit days, when I roamed the town, hunting for interesting images. One of my favorite walks was along the beach, where I could look at one of my favorite Arctic things – Arctic canoes. I took countless pictures of them. This one, for example, dated March 30, 2008. I love the curved bow and the dark blue-green with black trim and the orange rope and the chunk of snow sitting on top. This canoe is just biding its time, waiting for summer, when it can go down the bay.    

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #6

This is the sixth 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 “The Chill of Disillusion” (London Review of Books, January 5, 2012). It’s an excerpt from Clark’s brilliant comparative analysis of the two versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks – the Paris version (1483-1486) and the London version (1495-1508):

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

The first sentence is quintessential Clark, urging us (and himself) to “look again”: “Look again at the angel in Paris with the pointing finger.” 

The second sentence tells us why we should look again: “There had never been a figure like it before in painting, and there never would be again.” 

The third sentence is extraordinary – a ravishing blend of sensuous description and perceptual analysis: 

It is not just the foot on the grass and the pointing finger that are uncanny: it is the pose as a whole, spreading out laterally, half turning towards us, but meeting our eyes from an utter remoteness; and the roll of the green sleeve and the long pale arm inside its diaphanous puff of drapery; and the astonishing – unthinkable – explosion of rich red, tying the figure to a world of flesh and blood but spreading and unfolding far beyond (it feels like) the mere frame of the illusion.

That “the roll of the green sleeve and the long pale arm inside its diaphanous puff of drapery” is inspired! Drapery is one of Clark’s fondest focal points.

The fourth and fifth sentences pivot to the London version and begin the comparison: “No wonder all this – this overflowing wish-fulfilment – had to be corrected in 1508. The London angel’s drapery is still elusive, but at least now it adheres to a possible anatomy: it does not just seem to occur as the brush tries out a new colour.” 

The sixth, seventh, and eighth sentences continue the comparison: “Colour drains away. The angel’s shoulders come out of their carapace. The figure is clear and coherent (comparatively) but also (comparatively) unfelt.” 

The ninth and final sentence yields a vivid image: “It is as if the invention had been put back inside a box – robbed of its first fairytale unfolding.” Note the repetition of “unfolding.” Note the beautiful alliterative pattern: “unfolding far beyond,” “overflowing wish-fulfilment,” “unfelt,” “first fairytale unfolding.” The passage enacts the unfolding it describes and then ingeniously boxes it all up. 

Credit: The above illustration is the Paris version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks (1483-1486).  

10 Best Personal History Pieces: #4 Gabrielle Hamilton's "The Lamb Roast"

Photo from Gabrielle Hamilton's "The Lamb Roast"

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 Gabrielle Hamilton’s succulent “The Lamb Roast” (January 17, 2011).

Certain New Yorker pieces stick in my memory. This is one of them. It’s Hamilton’s enchanting evocation of her rural Pennsylvania youth, when she lived with her family in a “wild castle built into the ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill.” It centers on an annual party her father threw, featuring a spring-lamb roast. Is it nostalgia? Yes, but it’s bittersweet nostalgia. Hamilton remembers the lamb roast as one of her family’s last happy times before her mother and father separated.

The piece unfolds in five untitled sections. Section one introduces the subject: “We threw a party. The same party, every year, when I was a kid. It was a spring-lamb roast, and we laid out four or five whole little guys over an open fire and invited more than a hundred people.” This section also describes her family and her family home. Hamilton is the youngest of five (the others are Jeffrey, Todd, Melissa, and Simon). She says of her mother,

My mother was French, and she wore the sexy black cat-eye eyeliner of the era, like Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren. I remember the smell of sulfur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil. She pinned her dark hair back into a tight, neat twist, and then spent the day in a good skirt, high heels, and an apron. She lived in our kitchen, ruled the house with an oily wooden spoon in her hand, and forced us to eat briny, wrinkled olives, small birds, and cheeses that looked as if they might bear Legionnaires’ disease. She kicked our cat away from her ankles and said, “Ah là là là là là là, the problem with kittens is that they become cats!” I sat in her aproned lap every night after dinner and felt the treble of her voice down my spine while breathing in her exhale of wine, vinaigrette, and tangerine.

Of her father, she writes,

My dad could not cook. He was a set designer for theatrical and trade shows, and he had a “design-build” studio in Lambertville, New Jersey, where he had grown up, and where his own father had been the local doctor. My father went away to college and then to art school. In 1964, he bought the old skating rink at the end of South Union Street, with its enormous domed ceiling and colossal wooden floor, and turned it into his studio, an open work space where scenery as big as the prow of a ship could be constructed, erected, painted, and then broken down and shipped to New York. He built the sets for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and we would zip around on the dollies, crashing into the legs of the chain-smoking union carpenters and scenic artists who were busy with band saws, canvas, and paint. We ran up and down mountains of rolled black and blue velour, laid out as if in a carpet store, and shoved our arms down into fifty-gallon oil drums full of glitter.

Hamilton describes the town where they lived:

In our town, you could walk back and forth between two states by crossing the Delaware River. On weekend mornings, we piled in the car and ate breakfast at Smutzie’s, in New Jersey, then filled up the tank at Sam Williams’s Mobil, in Pennsylvania. After school, I walked to Jersey and got lessons at Les Parsons’s music shop. My home town has become, mostly, a sprawl of developments and subdivisions, gated communities that look like movie sets that will be taken down at the end of the shoot. But, when I was young, it was mostly farmland—rolling fields, rushing creeks when it rained, thick woods, and hundred-year-old stone barns. You had to ride your bike about a mile down a dark country road thick with night insects to find even a plugged-in Coke machine. Outside Cal’s Collision Repair, that machine glowed like something almost religious.

Note the specificity of the place names – Smutzie’s, Sam Williams’ Mobil, Les Parson’s music shop, Cal’s Collision Repair. It’s one of my favorite aspects of the piece.

Section two describes the preparations for the lamb roast party. It contains this gorgeous passage:

Jeffrey had a 1957 Chevy truck, with a wooden bed and a big blue mushroom painted on its heavily Bondoed cab. The day before the party, we drove out along the winding roads, past Black’s Christmas tree farm and the LaRue bottle works. I rode in the bed of the truck, in a cotton dress and boy’s shoes with no socks, hanging on to the railing, letting the wind blast my face. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell by the little patches of bracing coolness, and the sudden bright warmth, and the smell of manure when we were passing a hay field, a long thick stand of trees, a stretch of clover, or a horse farm. Finally, we got to Johnson’s apple orchard, where we picked up wood for the fire.

That “The day before the party, we drove out along the winding roads, past Black’s Christmas tree farm and the LaRue bottle works” is inspired. 

Section three describes the kids’ sleep-out by the fire on the night before the party. Hamilton remembers the thrill of being “packed into my sleeping bag right next to my siblings.” She says, “I felt cocooned by the smell of wood smoke, the anchoring voices, giggles, farts, and squeals of disgust. This whole perfect night, when everything is pretty much intact, is where I sometimes want the story to stop.”

 

Section four is the sad part. It begins, “I had no idea the divorce was coming.” It contains this brilliant sentence: “It took more than a year to fully dismantle the family, but I felt as if I had fallen asleep by the lamb pit one night and woken up the next morning to the debris of a brilliant party, a bare cupboard, and an empty house.” The lamb roast is the family’s turning point – the last glowing embers of happiness before they turn to ash.

In section five, Hamilton cuts back to the party:

In the morning, we awoke and found in the pit a huge bed of glowing coals, perfect for roasting lamb. My dad threw coils of sweet Italian sausage onto the grill. He split open loaves of bread to toast over the coals, and, for breakfast, instead of Cocoa Puffs and cartoons, we sat up in our sleeping bags, reeking of smoke, and ate these giant, crusty, charred sausage sandwiches. Afterward, we rolled up our pants and walked barefoot into the frigid stream, built a little corral with river rocks, and stocked it with jugs of Chablis and cases of Heineken, cream soda, and root beer.

She describes the roast:

The lambs were placed over the coals head-to-toe-to-head, the way you’d put a bunch of kids having a sleepover into bed. A heavy metal garden rake was kept next to the pit to move the spent coals to the edges as the day passed and the ashes built up, revealing the glowing red embers beneath. The lambs roasted slowly, their blood dripping onto the coals with a hypnotic hiss. My dad basted them by dipping a thick branch covered with a big swab of cheesecloth into a paint can filled with olive oil, crushed rosemary, garlic, and chunks of lemons. He mopped the lambs with soft careful strokes, as you might paint a new sailboat. All day, as we did our chores, the smells of gamy lamb, applewood smoke, and rosemary-garlic marinade commingled.

The piece ends magnificently:

The meadow filled with people and fireflies and laughter—just as my father had imagined—and the lambs on their spits were hoisted onto the men’s shoulders, as if in a funeral procession, and set down on the makeshift tables to be carved. Then the sun started to set and we lit the paper-bag luminarias, and the lambs were crisp-skinned and sticky, and the root beer was frigid, and it caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat.

My summary doesn’t do this great piece justice. I’ve omitted many wonderful details. Read the whole thing. I guarantee it will stay with you. 

Whitney Balliett: Four Great Jazz Pianists

Photo illustration by John MacDougall

I’ve been listening to a lot of Hank Jones, Ellis Larkins, Tommy Flanagan, and Bill Charlap this summer. They’re my favorite jazz pianists. What makes them so great? To help answer this question, I want to consider what Whitney Balliett wrote about them in The New Yorker. Balliett profiled each of them. The four pieces – “Einfühlung” (December 18, 1978), “Poet” (February 24, 1986), “The Dean” (July 15, 1996), and “The Natural” (April 19, 1999) – are among the best things he ever wrote.

The earliest piece is “Einfühlung,” on Ellis Larkins. Balliett wrote,

Larkins’ style gives the impression of continually being on the verge of withdrawing, of bowing and backing out. It is uncommonly gentle. His touch is softer than Art Tatum’s, and the flow of his melodic line has a rippling quiet-water quality. Nothing is assertive: his chords, in contrast to the extroverted cloud masses that most pianists use, turn in and muse; his single-note lines shoot quickly to the left or to the right and are gone; his statements of the melody at the opening and closing of each number offer silhouettes. But Larkins’ serenity is deceptive, for his solos have a strong rhythmic pull. It is clear that he once listened attentively to Earl Hines and Teddy Wilson, and possibly to Jess Stacy. Larkins’ short, precise, dashing arpeggios suggest Wilson, and so do the even, surging tenths he uses in his left hand. He attempts a vibrato effect by adding the barest tremolo to the end of certain right-hand phrases, recalling Stacy and the early Hines. His intent is immediate pleasure – for the listener and for himself – and it is also to celebrate the songs he plays. He endows and sustains them, indirectly fulfilling a nice maxim laid down not long ago by the drummer Art Blakey. “Music,” Blakey said, “should wash away the dust of everyday life.”

That’s one of the most beautiful jazz descriptions I’ve ever read. Two elements stand out for me – Balliett’s appreciation of melody (“the flow of his melodic line has a rippling quiet-water quality”; “his statements of the melody at the opening and closing of each number offer silhouettes”) and his preference for “single-note lines” over “the extroverted cloud masses that most pianists use.” These features appeal to me, too.

Next up is “Poet,” a profile of Tommy Flanagan. Balliett said of him,

Flanagan demands close listening. His single-note melodic lines move up and down, but since he is also a percussive player, who likes to accent unlikely notes, his phrases tend to move constantly toward and away from the listener. The resulting dynamics are subtle and attractive. These horizontal-vertical melodic lines give the impression of being two lines, each of which Flanagan would like attention paid to. There are also interior movements within these lines: double-time runs; clusters of flatted notes, like pretend stumbles; backward-leaning half-time passages; dancing runs; and rests, which are both pauses and chambers for the preceding phrase to echo in. Flanagan is never less than first-rate. But once in a while – when the weather is calm, the audience attentive, the piano good, the vibes right – he becomes impassioned. Then he will play throughout the evening with inspiration and great heat, turning out stunning solo after stunning solo, making the listeners feel they have been at a godly event. 

Note that reference to “single-note melodic lines.” A theme is emerging. Balliett loved single-note melodic lines, and he loved pianists who played them. Consider “The Dean,” the next portrait in this set. It’s a profile of Hank Jones. Balliett wrote,

Jones first came to New York in 1944, to join Hot Lips Page’s band, on Fifty-second Street. He was entering a land of pianistic giants and near-giants. Art Tatum was God, and nearby were Nat Cole, Teddy Wilson, and Marlowe Morris; and just coming up were Bud Powell, Al Haig, Erroll Garner, and Thelonious Monk. Jones listened, appropriating a little of Tatum, a little of Wilson and Cole, and a little of Powell and Garner. The result is a quiet, lyrical, attentive style, so subtle and technically assured as to be almost self-effacing; you have to lean forward to catch Jones properly. He will start two choruses of the blues with delicate single notes, placing them in surprising, jarring places, either behind the beat or off to one side—a path over a rocky place—and then play several dissonant chords; return to single notes, this time letting them pour in Tatum runs, some going up, some down; slip in more chords; and close the solo with a chime sound. Unlike most modern pianists, Jones constantly uses his left hand, issuing a carpet of tenths, little offbeat clusters, and occasional patches of stride. Jones’s solos think, and they rest far above the florid, gothic roil that many jazz pianists have fallen into in the past twenty years.

This piece also contains a wonderful review of Jones’s album Steal Away: Charlie Haden and Hank Jones (1995). Balliett wrote,

Most of the numbers are played straight but with the harmonic and rhythmic inflections that separate jazz from the rest of music. On “Wade in the Water” and “Go Down, Moses,” however, Jones improvises delicately, and on “We Shall Overcome” he pauses after a unison statement of the melody, Haden begins to “walk,” and Jones suddenly lifts into four ringing choruses of the blues, his single-note lines sparkling and his chords bell-like. It’s an electric moment. 

Again, in this piece, we see Balliett expressing his love of single-note lines (“delicate single notes,” “return to single notes, this time letting them pour in Tatum runs, some going up, some down,” “his single-note lines sparkling”).

I now turn to the last piece in my Balliett quartet – “The Natural.” It’s a profile of Bill Charlap, who is one of my heroes. I have all his albums. His music has provided me with countless hours of listening pleasure. This is the piece that led me to him. Balliett described his style:

His ballad numbers are unique. He may start with the verse of the song, played ad lib, then move into the melody chorus. He does not rhapsodize. Instead, he improvises immediately, rearranging the chords and the melody line, and using a relaxed, almost implied beat. He may pause for a split second at the end of this chorus and launch a nodding, swinging single-note solo chorus, made up of irregularly placed notes – some off the beat and some behind the beat – followed by connective runs and note clusters. He closes with a brief, calming recap of the melody. His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists. He constantly reins in his up-tempo numbers. He has a formidable technique, but he never shows off, even though he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, racing upper-register tintinnabulations, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines; each note is rounded. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us.

That “His sound shines; each note is rounded” is inspired. Balliett’s “single note” theme is much in evidence (“swinging single-note solo chorus,” “sailing-along-the-tonal-edge single-note lines,” “loose, almost atonal single-note lines,” “a handful of unevenly spaced single notes”). All four pieces are inspired - as artful and beautiful as the music they describe. 

July 7 & 14, 2025 Issue

The tagline of Anthony Lane’s “Easy Music,” in this week’s issue, hooked me: “How Elmore Leonard perfected his style.” I’ve never read anything by Leonard. But I am interested in how writers develop their style. Lane’s opening made me laugh:

Out of interest, could this be the best beginning to the sixth chapter of any book, by anyone, ever?

The girl with the stringy blond hair over her shoulders and the trading beads and the black turtleneck and Levi’s and the half-filled water glass of domestic wine in front of her on the bar said, “Do you like sex?”

Ryan hesitated. He said, “Sure.”

The girl said, “You like to travel?”

Ryan said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

The girl said, “Then why don’t you fuck off?”

In case you can’t pin the passage down, it is not from “Mrs. Dalloway,” or even “To the Lighthouse.”

Lane’s piece is a review of C. M. Kushins' Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard. He likes the book and he likes Leonard’s writing. Of the latter, he says,

Has anyone listened more intently than Leonard to the infinite bandwidths of spoken English? So sharp are his ears, when pricked up, that somebody, way back in the Leonard genealogy, must have made out with a lynx. That is why he earns his slot in the Library of America: he turns the page and starts a fresh chapter in the chronicle of American prose. His genius is twofold; he is unrivalled not only as a listener but as a nerveless transcriber of what he hears. No stenographer in a court of law could be more accurate. His people open their mouths, and we know at once, within a paragraph, or even a clause, who dreamed them up. Many folks, in many novels, might remark, “You certainly have a long winter.” But only someone in a Leonard novel would reply, “Or you could look at it as kind of an asshole spring.”

Lane analyzes how Leonard's style evolved. He writes,

With all writers of substance, as with all ministers of religion, it’s useful to reach back to their novitiate. Here is Leonard, kicking off a 1955 tale titled “No Man’s Guns”:

As he drew near the mass of tree shadows that edged out to the road he heard the voice, the clear but hesitant sound of it coming unexpectedly in the almost-dark stillness.

To his fans, this doesn’t quite sound like him. It’s not yet Dutch enough. The adjectival caution, the suspense-flattening adverb, the archness of that hyphen before “dark”: the sentence is not so much loaded as overloaded. No wonder it jams. So, when does Leonard become himself? Is it possible to specify the moment, or the season, when he crosses the border? I would nominate “The Big Bounce,” from 1969—which, by no coincidence, is the first novel of his to be set in the modern age. As the prose calms down, something quickens in the air, and the plainest words and deeds make easy music: “They discussed whether beer was better in bottles or cans, and then which was better, bottled or draft, and both agreed, finally, that it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. Long as it was cold.”

What matters here is what isn’t there. Grammatically, by rights, we ought to have an “As” or a “So” before “long.” If the beer drinkers were talking among themselves, however, or to themselves, they wouldn’t bother with such nicety, and Leonard heeds their example; he does them the honor of flavoring his registration of their chatter with that perfect hint of them. The technical term for this trick, as weary students of literature will recall, is style indirect libre, or free indirect discourse. It has a noble track record, with Jane Austen and Flaubert as front-runners, but seldom has it proved so democratically wide-ranging—not just libre but liberating, too, as Leonard tunes in to regular citizens. He gets into their heads, their palates, and their plans for the evening. Listen to a guy named Moran, in “Cat Chaser” (1982), watching Monday-night football and trying to decide “whether he should have another beer and fry a steak or go to Vesuvio’s on Federal Highway for spaghetti marinara and eat the crisp breadsticks with hard butter, Jesus, and have a bottle of red with it, the house salad . . . or get the chicken cacciatore and slock the bread around in the gravy . . .”

I love that question – “So, when does Leonard become himself?” I love the way Lane pursues it. Style is what draws me to writers and artists. Lane’s piece makes me want to read Leonard. That’s the sign of a good review. I think I’ll start with Rum Punch. 

Mid-Year Top Ten 2025

Photo by Mathias Depardon, from Nick Paumgarten's "Helicopter Parents"

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Helicopter Parents,” February 17 & 24, 2025 (“Lying in the desiccated grass, amid the dead sunflower stalks and the barrage of flies, the heat rising—the scorching of the sun, the wheedling of the engine—I had an uncommonly intense sense of our implacable need to bend nature to our will, for both good and ill”).

2. Burkhard Bilger, “Stepping Out,” February 17 & 24, 2025 (“Then a voice rang out: ‘Check! Adjust!’ A metronome sounded, and the band began to march. The voice belonged to Chris Kreke, the band’s director. He was standing on the roof of an observation tower four stories above us, leaning over the railing with a microphone in hand. When I went up to join him, I could see the band’s choreography unfolding below: lines crossing and reversing course, squares collapsing and turning inside out, circles exploding into smaller circles like fireworks in slow motion”).

3. Nick Paumgarten, “Guitar Heroes,” May 26, 2025 (“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”).

4. Paige Williams, “Still Life,” June 9, 2025 (“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”).

5. Ian Frazier, “Pigeon Toes,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“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”).

6. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Five,” January 20, 2025 (“I attribute my antiquity to dark-chocolate almond bark”).

7. Nick Paumgarten, “Dreams and Nightmares,” March 10, 2025 (“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”).

8. Jill Lepore, “War of Words,” February 17 & 24, 2025 (“ ‘A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back’ was another of Bennet’s aphorisms. ‘An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass’ ”).

9. Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Private Eye,” February 3, 2025 (“Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it”).

10. M. R. O'Connor, “Line of Fire,” February 3, 2025 (“We shrugged on our backpacks—which included silver, cocoonlike fire shelters that we could deploy if we were overtaken by flames—and lined up”).  

Best Cover

Richard McGuire, “Zooming In” (April 14, 2025)

Best of “The Critics”

Justin Chang, “Mean Time,” January 13, 2025 (“Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force. At a certain point, I began wondering whether Pansy would be best served not by counselling or antidepressants but by a few pints and an open mike”).

Daniel Immerwahr, “Check This Out,” January 27, 2025 (“Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers”).

Jackson Arn, “Royal Flush," February 17 & 24, 2025 [“In many of the cases from ‘Seeing Red’ where red does dominate, the work in question comes off as an affront, crossing some chromatic line—look at Warhol’s ‘Red Lenin’ or STIK’s ‘Liberty (Red)’ and feel the wet raspberry splatter you”].

Maggie Doherty, “Catch Me If You Can,” March 3, 2025 (“A devil and a sage, a trickster and a teacher, a farm owner incapable of farming, a professor without a college degree: Frost was always two incompatible things at once. He had a doubleness at the very heart of him, and he put his contradictions into his poetry”).

Hannah Goldfield, “Home Slice,” March 31, 2025 (“The first restaurant to become known for Indian pizza is Zante, in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. One day, a few months ago, I made a pilgrimage there, arriving midafternoon to meet the longtime owner, Dalvinder Multani. In the large, empty dining room, quiet but for a Punjabi radio station, I sat at a table by the window and sampled two of the restaurant’s most popular pies, served with mint and tamarind chutneys. One slice was vegetarian, thickly layered with masala sauce, paneer, spinach, and eggplant, plus garlic, ginger, green onions, and a sprinkling of fresh cilantro. The other featured a trio of lamb, chicken, and prawns, the last dyed a near-neon pink with paprika”).

Adam Gopnik, “Fresh Paint,” April 14, 2025 (“Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open”).

Louis Menand, “Strong Opinions,” June 2, 2025 (“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”).

Elizabeth Kolbert, "Seeds of Doubt," June 30, 2025 ("The new tools and the new threats are bound up in each other—two sides, as it were, of the same leaf. If it is reasonable to imagine that we will, somehow or other, find ways to feed ten billion people, it is also reasonable to fear how much damage will be done in the process").

Best Illustration

Gaia Alari’s illustration for Ian Frazier’s “Pigeon Toes” (May 12 & 19, 2025)

Best “Goings On”

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: L&L Hawaiian Barbecue,” March 3, 2025 [“L&L’s food hits with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and that’s exactly the point. There are leavening notes here and there: a jazzy sliver of cruciferousness from the cabbage that comes with the kalua pork, or the sharp whistle of vinegar that runs through the thin, sweet sauce drizzled over the juicy, panko-crisped chicken katsu (my clear favorite of the proteins). When making your selection, skip the loco moco, made with plain hamburger patties doused in flavorless brown gravy and topped with two fried eggs. You can also pass on the saimin, the restaurant’s take on Hawaiian ramen—made with a dashi broth and whatever meaty toppings your heart might desire—which is so salty as to be near-inedible. Get a musubi or two, which is marvellous, the squishy pillow of rice, the ineffable Spamminess of Spam, the sweet smear of teriyaki”].

Sheldon Pearce, “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”).

Rachel Syme, “Local Gems: Fountain Pen Hospital,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“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”).

Marella Gayla, “Bar Tab: Liar Liar,” May 26, 2025 (“There was a looser scene on a weeknight, when a round of frosty Martinis, a sampling of cloudy, tart orange wines, and a peppery bottle of red, shared with two colleagues, seemed less like a life-style statement and more like a bold recommitment to the very act of living”).

Best Poem

Arthur Sze, “Mushroom Hunting at the Ski Basin,” March 24, 2025 (“Driving up the ski-basin road, I spot purple asters / and know it is time”).

Best “Shouts & Murmurs”

Josh Lieb, “Bagels, Ranked,” April 21, 2025 [“Dances with, rather than fights against, the cream cheese and the lox. (Or whitefish, if that’s your thing. I don’t judge)”].

Best “Takes”

Elizabeth Kolbert, “Takes: John McPhee’s ‘Encounters with the Archdruid,’ ” April 7, 2025 (“Much of the art of ‘Encounters with the Archdruid’ lies in the way that McPhee manages to be both there and not there. He bathes his aching feet in the water. He recalls other trips he has taken with Brower and, separately, with Park. He searches for copper-bearing rocks, and, when he finds them, gets excited. But he never reveals whose side he is on. When it comes to the great question of the piece—to mine or not to mine—he gets out of the way”).

Best Photo

Malike Sidibe’s portrait of Lorna Simpson, for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025)

Best Sentence

Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open. – Adam Gopnik, “Fresh Paint” (April 14, 2025)

Best Paragraph

The medal ceremony that night was a surreal sight: more than three thousand band members crowded onto the field in candy-striped rows. Bourbon County ended up placing second in its class—a triumph under the circumstances—just behind another Kentucky band, from Murray High School. But my favorite moment was earlier in the evening. Deep beneath the stands, in the vast tunnels and rehearsal rooms around the field, half a dozen bands were warming up—drumming, stretching, tossing rifles, and playing arpeggios as they waited for their turn to perform. Walking from room to room, I passed wooden ships, Victorian cages, and giant Day-Glo flowers in the hall. A trio of Elmer Fudds was hunched in conversation over here, two orange bunnies giggling in a corner over there. Some strays from the “Menagerie” show came wandering down the hall, past a pair of water sprites from Broken Arrow and a few butterfly girls from Cypress, Texas. It was like the world’s biggest costume party. – Burkhard Bilger, “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025) 

Best Detail

Its main entrance, at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, is marked by an imposing brownstone Gothic Revival structure, the Arch, where a pandemonium of monk parakeets has long kept an elaborate nest. – Paige Williams, “Still Life” (June 9, 2025)

Best Description

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. – Nick Paumgarten, “Guitar Heroes” (May 26, 2025)

Best Drink

An espresso Martini with a creamy glug of banana liqueur – Rachel Syme, “Bar Tab: Monsieur” (April 7, 2025)

Credits: (1) photo by Hannah Whitaker, from Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes”; (2) photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin, from Hannah Goldfield’s “Home Slice”; (3) illustration by Patricia Bolaños, from Marella Gayla’s “Bar Tab: Liar Liar.”

June 30, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Vince Aletti, in his mini-review of “Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, describes Arbus’s work as “tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark.” I agree. He also says that Arbus “isn’t easy to love.” This is also true. Aletti’s note reminded me of Susan Sontag’s great essay on Arbus – “Freak Show” [The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973; included in her brilliant On Photography (1977) under the title “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”]. It contains one of my favorite Sontag sentences: “Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.”

2. Hilton Als’ “Goings On” review of Gagosian Gallery’s “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” is illustrated with a reproduction of de Kooning’s “Suburb in Havana” (1958). It’s one of my favorite de Koonings. I first saw it in a piece by T. J. Clark called “Frank Auerbach’s London” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2015). Clark writes, 

If I’d been able to glimpse a de Kooning landscape from ten years earlier – say, Suburb in Havana from 1958 – lurking under Autumn Morning, I might have been a little less at sea. But the problem would only have shifted ground. I would still have had to sort out why and how de Kooning’s elegant, lavatorial graffiti – his Cuban-blue depth, the lavish decisiveness of his foreground ‘V’ – were turned in the Auerbach into a kind of waterlogged storm-streaked slipperiness. 

"Elegant lavatorial graffiti"? Ouch. Clark has thrown a barb. Is he right? 

3. A shout-out to photographer Heami Lee for her delectable pizza shot in Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Cactus Wren.”

4. And let’s give a huzzah for Alena Skarina’s wonderful, eye-catching illustration for Elizabeth Kolbert’s disconcerting “Seeds of Doubt.”

 

Robert Macfarlane's Brilliant "The Living River"

I’ve just finished reading Robert Macfarlane’s “The Living River” – Part III of his new book Is a River Alive? What an extraordinary piece! It’s about a kayak trip that Macfarlane and four others took across the immense Lac Magpie and down the wild Mutehekau Shipu River to its mouth at the sea.  It’s in a class with John McPhee’s great “The Encircled River.” That’s the highest compliment I can pay a piece of writing. 

I relish it for two reasons: (1) its subject (river trip); (2) its writing style (first person, present tense). Is anyone writing a more vivid, imagistic prose than Macfarlane right now? I don’t think so. He’s a master of both short and long lines. His sentence fragments are almost haiku-like:

Spruce, pine, alder, rowan. Waxwings on the rowan.

A single star. A thin line of orange light to the east, smudged by rain. Three loons on the water, calling now and then. A strong northerly wind.

Bronze of the rivers, gold of the sandbanks, red-green sphagnum tapestry.

Water blue-black and glossy in the deeper, calmer runs; peat-brown where it is stretched towards and away from the rapids; churning green, gold and cream in the rapids and falls.

Lacustrine calm. The kayaks wrinkling the smoothness. Everything mirrored. Double the trees, double the cliffs. Clouds crossing the water before us with huge slowness.

Scent of pine resin in the cool air.

He also writes gorgeous stream-of-consciousness passages. Consider this riveting 460-word beauty:

And then I’m into the rapid, hard into it, the water now vinyl-tight under my boat, and I’m accelerating as the river enters the channel before the block, the golden rocks on the bed of the river are fleeting beneath me, and time is stretching in the way it does at certain moments of terror and exhilaration, so that in the thirty or so century-long seconds it takes to run the rapid, I can see in isolated and shining detail each water droplet and boiling pool, and I slip nose-first over the sill and skim like a ball-bearing on a metal slide down the slope of the tongue and – bang! – straight into that big polar-bearish standing wave, and the nose of my craft crashes into its snowy front face which fills it and me with river, and I must surely be flipped or buried by the wave, but somehow, perhaps because I have hit it so straight, the nose of the kayak shakes itself free of the impact, and the boat bucks beneath me and begins to rise right up and over first the point and then the ridge of the big wave, and surely I must fall backwards out of the boat or be flipped, and then I am punched full in the face by a fist of water but it is in the standing wave’s valediction and I’m through and upright and the elastic curve of the current pulls me round the 150-degree bend and I can hear Danny yelling something behind me and Wayne is whooping, great belts of sound that rise over the roar of the rapid, and I’m thumping over the smaller green-cream-bronze waves and then I’m under the flat-faced rock wall – goddammit but this last wave isn’t going to flip me if the biggest one didn’t – and I plant the paddle as Danny told me and pull on it like I’m trying to uproot an iron fence post and the pull boosts me into the last standing wave, the sneak-wave right under the rock wall, But I don’t hit it at the perpendicular as I had the biggest one and so it shrugs me off its right-hand slope and the boat cants sideways but some amygdalan part of my brain tells me to lean uphill not down and I re-right and then I’m over the blast-wall and into the long black pool below the rapid where the Boss and the Bear already wait, grins on their faces and shouts of congratulations, and Wayne is through too without flipping, and the Salmon swims up to us and my heart is piston-block pumping and Wayne says something like, Living right, my friend, living right! with a manic smile on his face, shocked and exhilarated and enlivened. 

Wow! Macfarlane’s writing puts me right there with him as he runs the rapid. It’s an amazing passage! And there are more in this piece that are just as thrilling. I’m still savoring “The Living River.” I’ll write about it in more detail later. For now, I just want to ring the gong for a species of masterpiece.