Interpretation Is All

Versions. I love to play versions of songs I like. Take one of my favorites – Billy Strayhorn’s exquisite “Day Dream.” There are as many versions of it as there are musicians who play it. Bill Charlap, Ellis Larkins, John Hicks, George Cables, Roland Hanna – all marvelous, all different. It’s fun to stack them up, listen to them back-to-back, and compare them. No two are alike – different tempos, different notes, different interpretations. 

And then I think of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”: “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world.” I can only shake my head. To be fair, she’s talking about literary criticism, not jazz. She says, “Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Rilke, Lawrence, Gide ... one could go on citing author after author, the list is endless of those around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold.”  

Instead of interpretation, Sontag wants transparence: “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art – and in criticism – today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” Okay, I get it. She’s arguing for a fresh approach, one that scrapes away the barnacles of old interpretation and tries to see “the thing in itself.” Nothing wrong with that. Don’t reduce great artworks to standard interpretations. Seek new ones. All great art is open to new discovery. That’s what John Hicks does in his version of “Day Dream” – blows away the dreaminess and plays it hard, fast. It’s a brilliant interpretation. I love it. 

August 18, 2025 Issue

I love pancakes. Helen Rosner’s “Three Plays on the Pancake,” in this week’s newyorker.com issue, is pure bliss. She says, “Three relatively new takes on the pancake have captured my attention recently, as modern classics of the brunch canon very much worth seeking out.” The three takes are: the heirloom-masa pancakes at Hellbender; a modern-classic stack at S&P Lunch; and the pancake soufflé at Pitt’s. Her pancake descriptions are crazy-good. Of the heirloom-masa pancakes, she writes, 

These are true, literal pancakes: made not on a griddle but in individual cast-iron pans, which define the pancake’s shape, constraining its boundaries and creating a distinct crispiness to the outsides that plays in beautiful counterpoint to the soft, almost meltingly creamy insides. A serving of two pancakes arrives under a brutalist slab of butter so substantial that I thought, at first, it was a thick slice of cheese.

That “brutalist slab of butter” made me smile. When was the last time you saw butter described as brutalist? My guess is never.

Rosner’s description of the pancake soufflé is delectable:

Here, as in a proper pancake, the round, custardy flavor of egg is a keypiece of the over-all story, along with white-sugar sweetness and an edge of buttery-toasty flour. Upon arrival at the table, a server dramatically slashes into the top of the quivering soufflé and pours maple syrup into the crevasse, letting it seep into all the airy puffs and bubbles of the tender interior.

Mmm, I’ll have one of those, please. 

Postscript: A shoutout to Janice Chung for her vivid pancake photos illustrating Rosner’s piece. They're the visual equivalent of Rosner's sensuous prose. There's even a shot of the "brutalist slab of butter."

Inspired Sentence 5

Years ago I found myself in Indonesia, in Djakarta, which was once called Batavia, sitting at a table in a restaurant in the heart of the Chinese quarter of Glodok – near Kota, to anyone who knows this city, immense in extent, where the long streets change their names every two or three blocks, causing the visitor to go mad.

That’s one of my all-time favorite sentences. It’s the opening line of Aldo Buzzi’s brilliant essay “Travels to Djakarta, Gorgonzola, Crescenzago, London, Milan,” included in his slim, exquisite 1996 collection Journey to the Land of the Flies. I love it for its exoticism – “Indonesia,” “Djakarta,” “Batavia,” “the Chinese quarter of Glodok,” “Kota.” I love the “I found myself” – indicating an element of chance or drift. And I love the hinged, irregular construction joined together by a relative pronoun (“which”) and a relative adverb (“where”). What an original assemblage! 

Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses": Five Interpretations

Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” (The New Yorker, August 9, 1947) is my favorite poem. I love it for two reasons: (1) its unconventional sense of beauty; (2) its movement from description to epiphany.

1. Unconventional Beauty

Not everyone sees beauty in fish scales and fishing shacks. Bishop did. In “At the Fishhouses,” she wrote, 

The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Note the repetition of “iridescent.” That’s a change from the New Yorker version. That version says “creamy iridescent flies.” When Bishop reprinted the poem in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Cold Spring collection, she doubled the iridescence, describing the wheelbarrow as “plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail, / with small iridescent flies crawling on them.” She calls the fish scales “the principal beauty” (“He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, / from unnumbered fish with that black old knife”). 

Eleanor Cook, in her Elizabeth Bishop at Work (2016), says of “At the Fishhouses,”

The scene is not a conventional thing of beauty, but Bishop’s eye sees the working tools and the iridescent patterns of countless fish scales as if in a painting.

2. Description/Meditation

“At the Fishhouses” is beautiful in another way. It shifts from description to meditation – one of my favorite literary moves. You don’t see it very often. It’s not a procedure; it’s more of a happening. In the first two-thirds of the poem, Bishop describes the harbour scene: the fishhouses, the old man, the wheelbarrows, the lobster pots, the herring scales, the wooden capstan, the black old knife, the long ramp descending into the water, the water itself (“cold dark deep and absolutely clear”). Details accrete; a scene is evoked. This is standard literary procedure; Bishop executes it masterfully. But in the poem’s last stanza, she does something extraordinary. She takes a big leap:

The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark-gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Seamus Heaney said of these lines: 

What we have been offered, among other things, is the slow-motion spectacle of a well-disciplined poetic imagination being tempted to dare a big leap, hesitating, and then with powerful sureness actually taking the leap. [The Government of the Tongue, 1989] 

The leap, Heaney said, is from “the observed world” to “the world of meditated meaning.” Bonnie Costello, in her Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), calls it a “shift from description to meditation.” But she also says “the poem’s description prepares for a “visionary leap.” She refers to the “visionary thrust” of the poem. She says, “In this passage, in which the phrase “above the stones” is repeated four times, particulars are finally overwhelmed by a visionary flood.” To me, meditation is one thing; vision is another. Costello seems close to calling Bishop’s leap an epiphany. In fact, she says it: “Bishop seems to have yielded her consciousness fully to this epiphany.” But then she backs off: “This is hardly the certain rhetoric of epiphany.”

3. Description/Epiphany

As for me, I think “epiphany” is the right word. I find support for this in Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop (2015), in which he brilliantly compares the ending of “At the Fishhouses” with the ending of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” He writes, 

This method, the movement from very detailed and exact description to a moment that is totalizing and hallucinatory in its tone, which moves above the scene and attempts in its cadences both to wrest meaning and create further mystery from the scene below, occurs also in the very final passage of Joyce’s “The Dead,” which, in describing the snow, also takes a leap.

The ending of “The Dead” is a famous example of literary epiphany: see Florence L. Walzl, “Gabriel and Michael, The Conclusion of ‘The Dead,’ ” (in Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, eds., Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, 1969 (“Dubliners as a collection and “The Dead” as a narrative both culminate in the great epiphany of Gabriel Conroy, the cosmic vision of a cemetery with snow falling on all the living and the dead”).

4. Baptism

Is there an alternative to the Heaney/Tóibín/Costello epiphanic “big leap” line of construction? Yes, there’s at least one – April Bernard’s “baptism” interpretation. In Bernard’s view, there’s no visionary leap. Instead, there’s a slow, steady descent to the water: 

We first look down, with the speaker, from a slight height to take in the scene—“All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly as if considering spilling over” and the five fishhouses, an old fisherman, fish tubs, lobster pots, the trees—before making our way downward, and then pausing. “The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. / He was a friend of my grandfather.” Then we proceed, down the boat ramp to the water itself, where, our narrator tells us, she often encounters a seal, to whom she sings “Baptist hymns” because they both believe “in total immersion.

We have swooped now, slowly down, and down, and are on our knees, as the poet urges us into the water, telling us, “If you should dip your hand in, / your wrist would ache immediately, / your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn / as if the water were a transmutation of fire.” [“Elizabeth Bishop 1: Nova Scotia” (books.substack.com, April 4, 2024]

She concludes:

The ending sends us off, as if we’ve been dunked into the water for our own transformation, our own baptism, and perhaps our own death, into the cold “element” that is thrillingly, and maybe terribly, our true home. Her confiding voice here whispers us into the deep.

Bernard eschews the epiphanic for the baptismal. Her interpretation is quite persuasive, taking its cue from what Bishop says about the seal: “He was interested in music; / like me a believer in total immersion, / so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.” But I resist it. I’m not religious. I resist interpreting this great poem religiously. 

5. Reality 

I prefer a realist interpretation. I think I’ve found one. Zachariah Pickard, in his excellent Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Description (2009), points out that, even though the poem’s last stanza does “shift gears,” its description of water (and the knowledge derived from it) is still concrete: it tastes “bitter, / then briny,” and makes “your wrist” and “bones” “ache” and “your hand” and “tongue” “burn.” He says, “Far from other-worldly, this knowledge comes from “the cold hard mouth / of the world.” I agree. This great poem is grounded in reality. 

August 11, 2025 Issue

I’m delighted to see Dan Chiasson back in the magazine. He’s been gone four years. I’ve missed his perceptive, original reviews. He’s a protégé of Helen Vendler. Like her, he’s keenly attentive to style. In this week’s issue, he reviews Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other, a biography of poet James Schuyler. Chaisson likes the book. He calls it a “filigreed and astute presentation" of Schuyler's life.

Chiasson is a fan of Schuyler’s work. He says that several of Schuyler’s poems “rank among the glories of twentieth-century American literature.” He writes,

Schuyler worked in two primary verse modes, ostensibly opposites: we could call them blips and loop-the-loops. The blips are short, ribbonlike lyrics, trimmed to the moment, their sharp enjambments inspired by the Renaissance-era poet Robert Herrick; the loop-the-loops follow long Proustian arcs in margin-busting lines reminiscent of Walt Whitman. 

My favorite line in Chiasson’s piece is his comment on Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem”: 

Schuyler’s celebration of the damaged body and its persistent joys, including a free jukebox inside the brain and a soft-core-porn channel that we call the imagination, made “The Morning of the Poem” the best keep-profane-the-Sabbath poem since Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”

Chaisson has written about Schuyler before. In “ ‘A Hat off a Yacht ...’ ” (The New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010), he reviewed Schuyler’s posthumous Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems. In that piece, he said,

Schuyler’s brilliant trick was to translate things, even throwaway things, as little as possible, as though testing the innate power of disposable reality to withstand the test of time. 

In the earlier review, it’s the seeming artlessness of Schuyler’s poems that fascinates Chaisson. In his new piece, Chaisson praises Schuyler for his “brilliant use of embodied attention to contour time, when everything off the page was turbulence.”

The Art of Quotation (Part VII)

I’ve always admired the “fishnet” image that Robert Lowell used to describe his poetic endeavour. In his poem “Fishnet” (included in his 1973 collection The Dolphin), he wrote,

I’ve gladdened a lifetime

knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;

the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,

nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

Helen Vendler cherished these lines, too. She quoted them in two essays – “A Difficult Grandeur” (included in her 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us) and “Images of Subtraction: Robert Lowell’s Day by Day” (in her 2010 collection Last Looks, Last Books). In the first piece, she quoted the above lines and offered this interpretation: 

The subjects of these poems will eventually become extinct, like all other natural species devoured by time, but the indelible mark of their impression on a single sensibility will remain, in Lowell’s votive sculpture, bronzed to imperishability.

I like how she reused Lowell’s “bronze,” converting it to “bronzed” – “bronzed to imperishability,” a wonderful phrase.

In the second essay, Vendler provided this interpretation of Lowell’s beautiful lines:

The poet’s net of forms in The Dolphin will remain, in his hammered phrase, “nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.”

Note the way she builds on Lowell’s “fishnet” and “bronze” metaphors – “the poet’s net of forms,” “his hammered phrase” – deepening their meaning. 

Credit: The above portrait of Helen Vendler is by Stephanie Mitchell. 

Acts of Seeing: Trinity

Photo by John MacDougall

May 18, 2012, a brilliant day in Trinity, Newfoundland. Walking around this spruced-up, freshly painted fishing village, I felt like I was in a movie set of a fishing village. There was hardly anyone around. The sun was shining through a spattering of white clouds. The light was clear as could be. I love those white picket fences. There are four of them – two in the foreground, and two farther down the street. I love the bundle of wooden poles leaning against the shed. I love the dab of red on the belfry of the church steeple. Look behind the church. You can see a tiny slice of sea. 

10 Best Personal History Pieces: #3 Leslie Jamison's "A New Life"

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 Leslie Jamison’s superb “A New Life” (January 22, 2024).

In this memorable piece, Jamison writes about two tightly interwoven experiences – the birth of her daughter and the death of her marriage. It begins,

The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet. At a certain point, I’d run out of suitcases.

Note the specificity – “garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet.” It’s a hallmark of Jamison’s pungent, vivid style.

The piece is beautifully structured, unfolding in month-by-month stages of the baby’s development: the first few weeks (“Life was little more than a thin stream of milk connecting my body to hers, occasionally interrupted by a peanut-butter sandwich”); two months old (“Three, four, five days a week, we walked to the Brooklyn Museum. Going to the museum was a way to saturate our endless hours with beauty”). When the baby is three months old, Jamison takes her on a book tour. Her mother goes with them:

Four weeks, eighteen cities. We stood at curbside baggage stands in Boston, Las Vegas, Cedar Rapids, San Francisco, Albuquerque, with our ridiculous caravan of suitcases, our bulky car seat, our portable crib. The baby in her travel stroller. The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin. Everywhere we went, I brought a handheld noise machine called a shusher. It was orange and white, and it calmed my baby down better than my own voice.

That “The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin” is inspired.

The “book tour” description also contains this wonderful passage:

In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library.

When the baby is six months old, Jamison takes her to a writing workshop she’s conducting. Her husband stays with the baby in a hotel a block away from where the class is being held. Jamison gets so caught up in the workshop (“I felt intensely, almost ferociously present”), she forgets that at a certain point she’s supposed to call a break and get back to the hotel to breast-feed her baby:

When my phone buzzed with the third text from my husband, She really needs to nurse, I called our break early and ran, breasts hard and heavy as stones, my flip-flops slapping against the hot asphalt. I began to feel the dizzying vertigo of role-switching, draining and propulsive at once, flicking back and forth between selves: I’m a teacher. I’m tits. I’m a teacher. I’m tits.

My favorite part of “A New Life” is the scene at a reading in Toronto in which Jamison is being interviewed on a stage directly across from the room where a publicist is watching her baby. The walls are glass. Jamison can see them (“It was like watching a silent movie in which another woman was actually the mother of my child”). She writes,

At first, my daughter was happily slamming her fists against a wooden conference table, but then she started to get fussy. Put her in the carrier, I thought. The woman picked her up and started bouncing her around the room. Nope, I thought. You gotta use the carrier. My daughter started crying. But the glass was thick! I couldn’t hear a thing. It was as if someone had pressed the Mute button on her. The woman picked up the carrier, clearly confused by it. You have to clasp the buckle around your waist before you do the shoulder straps, I thought. The woman interviewing me asked a question about how I excavated profundity from banality. No, the big buckle, I thought, watching the woman in the glass room try to put my daughter in the carrier before she had the waistband fully cinched. I had to force myself to look away, and when I looked back my daughter was settled in the carrier. She looked peaceful.

Jamison’s account of becoming a parent is the main strand. But there’s a secondary thread – her disintegrating marriage and the question of whether she should try to save it. At one point, she writes,

The idea that we both felt so many of the same painful things didn’t help me believe that the marriage was more possible to save. It became harder and harder to convince myself that our good months in the beginning mattered more than all the friction that followed. It seemed like the good place we were trying to get back to was just a small sliver of what we were.

In the piece’s final section, an account of a friend’s wedding she’s attending, she resolves the issue:

At the ceremony, I gave a speech to the assembled crowd. Marriage is not just about continuing but reinventing. Always being at the brink of something new. Delivering this ode, I felt like a fraud. I had reached the end of reinventing. A voice inside me said, You are a liar. You have not done enough. A week later, I would tell C—in our basement therapy—that I was done. At that wedding in the mountains, the words I’d offered as a homily had been an elegy hidden in plain sight.

My summary of this great piece fails to do it justice. I’ve omitted so many glorious details – the smell of oranges, the blue mesh hospital underwear, the Saskatchewan Shuffle, Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party,” on and on. It’s one of the best “Personal History” pieces ever to appear in The New Yorker.

Credit: The above illustration is by Bianca Bagnarelli, from Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (The New Yorker, January 22, 2024).    

August 4, 2025 Issue

Burkhard Bilger has a knack for riveting my attention on subjects I have absolutely no interest in. Recall his “Open Wide” (November 25, 2019), on baby food. Baby food? Come on! But then I read the first sentence, then the next, and the next, and before you know it, I’d devoured the whole damn thing. Same goes for his “Word of Mouth,” in this week’s issue. It’s about dentistry. Dentistry? Good god, is there anything more boring? But, because it’s Bilger, I decided to at least read the first paragraph:

On weekday mornings in late winter, they start to arrive before dawn. They drive in from Arizona or California, catch a shuttle from Yuma, or park their car in a lot in the Sonoran Desert and cross the border on foot. The path for pedestrians follows State Route 186, past a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses offering free Bible courses, along a twisting corridor of razor wire and chain-link fence, through passport control, and into Los Algodones. By noon, more than a thousand people will have walked from the United States to Mexico, in the shadow of the thirty-foot wall that divides them. They come on bicycles and in wheelchairs, pushing walkers and leaning on canes. They come to be healed or transformed or to put an end to their pain, preferably at deep-discount prices.

I read on. Bilger describes Los Algodones, also known as Molar City, as “part Lourdes and part Costco.” More than a thousand dentists have set up shop there. Their patients are mostly Americans who can’t afford the U.S.’s dental care. Bilger visits the place. He writes,

When I first arrived, on a Sunday evening in March, the clinics were all closed. At the Quechan Casino, on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation just across the border, the slot machines were thronged with patients killing time before their appointments or flights home. Myron Arndt, a former tire-shop owner from Minnesota, was hunched over a Rich Little Piggies machine. He was scheduled to get four new front teeth the next day. Mike Sherer, a tinsmith from Michigan, was having some dentures and implants put in, and Terry Bussard, a retired magnesium-plant foreman from Utah, was sporting two new plates of dentures. One of the few without an appointment was Conny Everett, who runs a pretzel stand at local fairgrounds. She needed a cavity filled but couldn’t bring herself to go. She has a tendency to gag during procedures, she told me. “Last year, I got in the chair—it was all paid for—and I just chickened out. I’m, like . . .” She put her fist in her mouth and widened her eyes.

I relish that “hunched over a Rich Little Piggies machine.” 

Bilger stays at the Hacienda Los Algodones (“Every morning at the Hacienda Los Algodones, guests gather over breakfast to trade stories about their teeth”). He visits a Los Algodones dental clinic called Sani Dental:

The glass door to Sani Dental was outlined by a giant tooth. Stepping inside from the clattering street felt like a jump cut in an action film, with a subtitle saying “Miami” or “Dubai.” The lobby was hushed and spacious, with two eager young receptionists in matching polo shirts. A long arched corridor stretched behind them, soothingly lit like an undersea passage. There were seventeen examination rooms on one side and a row of white leather couches on the other, with waiting patients. The clinic’s thirty-five dentists and sixty-six support staff see more than nine thousand clients a year. (Sani also has branch offices in Cancún and Playa del Carmen, as well as a plastic-surgery and hair-transplant clinic in Los Algodones called Sani Medical.) At its newly built, three-story laboratory, teams of designers create digital models of implants and dentures, then fabricate the molds with 3-D printers. The finished products are cast in ceramic, gold, titanium, steel, or chromium cobalt, then glazed by local artisans to match the patient’s teeth and gums.

He gets his own teeth examined: “Being a patient at Sani Dental is a bit like being a car chassis at a Ford factory. For the next three days, my teeth and I would get passed from scheduler to diagnostician to clinician to lab tech, then back to the clinician, and finally to an accountant to settle the bill.”

Diagnostician, Dr. Miranda Villa, delivers the assessment:

To stay healthy, he said, my teeth would need ten fillings, mostly to plug the gaps exposed by receding gums. Straightening them out would take a little more work. All but four of my teeth—twenty-eight in total—would need to be reshaped. This meant grinding them down to little nubs of enamel, like pegs on a cribbage board, then capping them with crowns. The Sani lab would cast the crowns out of white zirconia, a ceramic much harder than stainless steel, tint them to my specifications, and shape and size them to fit my jaw. Then a clinician would cement them into place.

And the cost? Bilger writes,

The ten fillings would be seven hundred dollars—about a fourth of the going rate in Brooklyn. The full treatment would cost fourteen thousand. Before I made my decision, though, Sani Dental would mock up some plastic crowns that could fit over my existing teeth. “Smile Design,” Miranda Villa called it. “It’s like trying on a suit before you buy it,” he said.

Bilger opts for the fillings and undergoes the “smile design” procedure (“Terrazas spent the next twenty minutes chiselling off any rough edges and seams. It was an oddly claustrophobic experience: I felt like a statue trapped inside a piece of marble, slowly getting released by a pick and a drill”). Then he makes an interesting journalistic move. Before he decides on whether to go through with the teeth-straightening, he visits a famous Beverly Hills dentist, Dr. Kevin Sands, for a second opinion. The result is the same: “twenty-eight crowns and one implant. The only difference was in cost. Sands wanted a hundred and nineteen thousand dollars for the work—more than eight times the Sani Dental price.” 

In the end, Bilger decides not to have his teeth straightened. I love the way he puts it: “Still, there’s something to be said for staying crooked. The more I looked at the Smile Design picture from Sani Dental, the more I knew that I’d miss my old biters.”

In summarizing this great piece, I’ve omitted many wonderful details, e.g., the x-ray of Bilger’s skull (“What stuck with me, instead, was the sight of my skull. It looked like something unearthed by paleontologists in Tanzania: ancient, battered, encrusted with minerals”), the guy who is in Los Algodones not to have his teeth fixed but to get his truck customized (“ ‘I want leather bucket seats and pearlescent paint with metal flakes on the bodywork,’ he said. ‘It’ll have live flames in front that taper into ghost flames’ ”).    

“Word of Mouth” immersed me in the Molar City dental experience. I enjoyed it immensely. 

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #7

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Land of Cockaigne (1567)

This is the seventh 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 splendid “Bruegel in Paradise,” included in his great 2018 collection Heaven on Earth. It’s a description of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Land of Cockaigne (1567):

At bottom left, especially, grass gives way to earth. But again, whatever upset and instability the tilt of the land may bring on is more than counteracted – this is my answer to the idea of Cockaigne as the world in the negative – by the painting’s relish for things, details, textures, contours. All the contents of the world’s full stomach.

There is no good way of repeating the relish in words. Pointing out and enumerating are what language is designed to do, whereas what is glorious in Cockaigne is just pointless endless proliferation. Look at the airholes in the cheese! Look at the excellent ironwork on the flail. Or the fine silver clamps on the Bible. How exquisite the man of letters’ face – pink cheeks and nose, glinting eyes, delicate nostrils and lips. Look at the flayed-flesh pink of his tunic and leggings, the latter like exposed tissue. Compare the furred lightness of the soldier’s chainmail. How beautiful the drawing of the young man’s shirt, especially its neckline and long liquid folds. Notice the roots of the tree by the mountain of gruel – a typical Bruegel interest here in the character of a particular root system, plus a specific kind of spreading into the surrounding earth, and a set of outrider saplings.

Two of the cactus loaves are half sunk in the grass, like tombstones. The peasant has a thick mane of hair. The soldier’s lance is steel-tipped, glinting even in the shadow. The egg in the foreground has yolk spilling down the right side of its shell!

I find this passage ravishing. Why? What makes it so? There’s poetry in it. Clark takes his cue from the picture: “the painting’s relish for things, details, textures, contours. All the contents of the world’s full stomach.” The key word here is “relish.” Clark, in describing Cockaigne, doubts whether he can convey Bruegel’s “relish for things, details, textures, contours.” He says, “There is no good way of repeating the relish in words.” But he tries anyway, and he magnificently succeeds, noting detail after vivid detail: “the airholes in the cheese”; “the excellent ironwork on the flail”; “the fine silver clamps on the Bible”; “the man of letters’ face – pink cheeks and nose, glinting eyes, delicate nostrils and lips”; “the flayed-flesh pink of his tunic and leggings, the latter like exposed tissue”; “the furred lightness of the soldier’s chainmail”; “the drawing of the young man’s shirt, especially its neckline and long liquid folds”; “the roots of the tree by the mountain of gruel”; “a set of outrider saplings”; “the cactus loaves ... half sunk in the grass, like tombstones”; the peasant’s “thick mane of hair”; the soldier’s steel-tipped lance, “glinting even in the shadow”; the egg in the foreground, “yolk spilling down the right side of its shell.”

Note the exclamation marks (“Look at the airholes in the cheese!” “The egg in the foreground has yolk spilling down the right side of its shell!”). Clark is excited. He relishes Bruegel’s “endless proliferation” of “things, details, textures, contours.” It’s double relish – Bruegel’s and Clark’s. 

July 28, 2025 Issue

Stephen Colbert, in this week’s issue, writes about one of my all-time favorite New Yorker profiles – Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” (February 20, 1978), an indelible portrait of Johnny Carson. Colbert delivers some great lines, most of which mock the twenty-thousand-word length of Tynan’s piece. For example:

My doctor says the words were clogging my carotid, and, after reading “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” I need a statin.

That article is twenty thousand words. Let me repeat that: words. Can anyone read that much Tynan without adopting his native tongue wag?

And Tynan liberally salts his voluminous causerie (!) with references unassociated with current (and what he might deem intellectually jejune) late night: Keats, Rabelais, Ezra Pound, and Hieronymus Bosch, though one can imagine H.B. appreciating the earthly delights of Floyd Turbo, Art Fern, and Carnac the Magnificent.

Where now is the audience for ten verbal tons on the King of Late Night? Where is that Kingdom? 

Here is something Kenneth could have learned from Johnny: fewer words.

Fewer words? No way! Tynan’s piece is perfect as is. Colbert acknowledges this (“Tynan is a great writer, and it’s a great read”), but then asks “Was he right for the job?” It seems that Colbert prefers one-liners to extraordinary essays. He says, “Tynan bakes a tasty meringue, but I prefer the Good Humor Man.”

Well, I’m here to say that Tynan provides both. Example of the tasty meringue:

He [Fred de Cordova, Carson’s producer] is a large, looming, beaming man with horn-rimmed glasses, an Acapulcan tan, and an engulfing handshake that is a contract in itself, complete with small print and an option for renewal on both sides.

Example of the Good Humor Man:

“Another time, he asked Fernando Lamas why he’d gone into movies, and Lamas said, ‘Because it was a great way to meet broads.’ I loved Johnny’s comeback. He just nodded and said, ‘Nietzsche couldn’t have put it more succinctly.’ ” [Quote from interview with Ed McMahon]

It also contains brilliant descriptions of Carson’s cool, quick-witted, comedic style:

Tone of monologue is skeptical, tongue-in-cheek, ironic. Manner: totally relaxed, hitting bull’s-eyes without seeming to take aim, TV’s embodiment of “Zen in the Art of Archery.” In words uttered to me by the late screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, “Carson has a delivery like a Winchester rifle.” Theme: implicitly liberal, but careful to avoid the stigma of leftism. The unexpected impromptus with which he rescues himself from gags that bomb, thereby plucking triumph from disaster, are also part of the expected pleasure. “When it comes to saving a bad line, he is the master”—to quote a tribute paid in my presence by George Burns. Carson registers a gag’s impact with instant, seismographical finesse. If the laugh is five per cent less than he counted on, he notes the failure and reacts to it (“Did they clear the hall? Did they have a drill?”) before any critic could, usually garnering a double-strength guffaw as reward. Whatever spoils a line—ambiguous phrasing, botched timing, faulty enunciation—he is the first to expose it. Nobody spots flaws in his own work more swiftly than Carson, or capitalizes on them more effectively. Query: Is this becoming a dangerous expertise? In other words, out from under how many collapsed jokes can you successfully climb?

Colbert, in his piece, shows himself to be an excellent writer. I love this line:

From Hollywood to the Hasty Pudding, we waft like smoke from an unfiltered Pall Mall through Carson’s worlds, most of which are gone. 

Carson’s world is gone, but if you want to revisit it, read Tynan’s superb “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” – ten verbal tons of pure pleasure. 

Postscript: “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” is collected in Tynan’s 1980 Show People, a wonderful compendium of his New Yorker profiles, including his masterpiece “The Girl in the Black Helmet” (on Louise Brooks). Curiously, his later, much more comprehensive collection Profiles (1989) includes all his New Yorker work, except “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale.”  

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Point of View

This is the eighth 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 point of view.

The point of view in The Meadowlands and On the Rez is first person major. The books are like personal journals: 

One day I drove across the Meadowlands to Newark to find Seth Boyden’s grave.

One spring, I flew to Newark, rented a car, and checked into a hotel with the idea of touring around and just seeing where events would lead me.

One afternoon I drove back through a field of abandoned cars and walked along the edge of a garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that owed its topography to the waste of Newark.

I was on the road by 6:45 in the morning. 

As I approached the reservation, I imagined I could feel the life expectancy drop, as palpable as a sudden drop in temperature.

At dawn, I took a back road from Hermosa to the reservation.

I went into the powwow grounds, passing through a gate in the chain-link fence that surrounded it.

A while ago I visited the site on Interstate 80 where SuAnne and Chick’s car accident occurred.

I relish sentences like these. Active, personal, experiential – they keep me reading. 

McPhee’s The Pine Barrens has its share of such sentences, but not as many as in the other two books. It’s written in the first person minor. There are stretches when McPhee’s “I” doesn’t appear – when he’s telling the history of industry in the pines, for example, and when he's telling its history of fire. It's all interesting, but my favorite parts are when his “I” is present, e.g., his visit to 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.

We notice in accordance with who we are. McPhee notices the wrapping string running “through eyelets across the ceiling.” He’s amazingly observant. He notices things that other writers (lesser writers) overlook or disregard. Frazier and Sullivan are gifted observers, too. In my next post, I’ll highlight some of their most inspired details.