Jed Perl's "Impassioned Ferocity" (Part II)

Jed Perl, in his "Impassioned Ferocity" (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2025), says,

Much if not most of what is today thought of as criticism is just nonfiction writing with a distinctive personal voice, attitudes and opinions without any underlying idea. My impression is that among younger nonfiction writers the central focus is on developing that distinctive voice, with less focus on what’s actually said. Janet Malcolm and Dave Hickey, whose work apprentice writers in BA and MFA programs are likely to encounter, are striking essayists who leave you in no doubt as to who they are and what interests them, but neither of them has what I would call an aesthetic position. Malcolm produced a kind of personal reportage, with readers invited and expected to be alert to the sharp edges of her personality. 

No “underlying idea,” no “aesthetic position” – does this describe Janet Malcolm? I’m not concerned with Hickey. I’m not sufficiently familiar with his work to be able to comment on it. But Malcolm is one of my heroes. Her work is one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on her name in the “Labels” section and you will find eighty-four posts that discuss her writing. This post will be the eighty-fifth. 

Malcolm described herself as a deconstructionist. In the Preface to her great 1992 essay collection The Purloined Clinic, she says,

I have chosen the title of one of the pieces, a review of Michael Fried’s Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, as the title of the collection, because in Fried I recognized another sort of double: a critic whose imagination I found uncannily familiar and congenial, and who caused me to see that I had been thinking like a deconstructionist for a long time without knowing it, like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who discovered that he had been speaking in prose all his life.

Writers aren’t necessarily their own best critics, but, in this case, I think Malcolm was right. She was a deconstructionist. In her brilliant “J’appelle un Chat un Chat” (The New Yorker, April 20, 1987), she reviews an anthology called Dora’s Case: Freud – Hysteria – Feminism (1985), edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane. She says,

These new writings—feminist, deconstructive, and Lacanian, for the most part—have a wild playfulness and a sort of sexual sparkle that flicker through their academic patois and give them an extraordinary verve.

Right there, I think, is a glimpse of Malcolm’s governing aesthetic – her delight in analysis that is performed with “extraordinary verve.” It’s a description of her own work. 

Deconstruction is one way into Malcolm’s underlying aesthetic. Another is psychoanalysis. She wrote extensively about it: see, for example, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981) and In the Freud Archives (1984). Like a good psychoanalyst, Malcolm took nothing at face value. “Was the incident like a screen memory that hides a more painful recollection?” she asks in her superb “The Window Washer” (The New Yorker, November 19, 1990). “My arrival in Yalta was marked by an incident that rather dramatically brought into view something that had lain just below my consciousness”: “Travels with Chekhov” (The New Yorker, February 21, 2000). 

She had a psychoanalyst's distrust of narrative:  

We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative. [“Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” The New Yorker, May 3, 2010]

Even her photography writing has a psychoanalytical aspect. In her excellent “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979), she wrote,

Hare takes the camera’s capacity for aimless vision as his starting point and works with it somewhat the way a psychoanalyst works with free association. He enters the universe of the undesired detail and adopts an expectant attitude, waiting for the cluttered surface to crack and yield an interpretation.

To deconstruction and psychoanalysis, I would add another bedrock aesthetic idea that Malcolm believed in – decontextualization. She not only praised it, she practiced it in her own photography: see Burdock, 2008, in which she says,

What I have done with the burdock leaves is, of course, part of the enterprise of decontextualization that received its awkward name in the late twentieth century and was a fixture of that century’s visual culture. Patchwork quilts hung on the walls of museums, African tribal masks used to decorate orthodontists’ waiting rooms, ship propellers displayed on coffee tables—these are some familiar forms of the practice of taking something from where it belongs and that has a function, and putting it where it doesn’t belong and merely looks beautiful. It looks beautiful in a particular way, to be sure, the way of modernist art and architecture and design. When I remove a burdock leaf from its dusty roadside habitat, I anticipate the stylized aspect it will assume when it is set upright against the clean white walls of my attic studio, its lineaments refined by sunlight coming from above.

I think I’ve said enough to at least cast doubt on Perl’s assertion that Malcolm lacked an “aesthetic position.” Her delight in analysis – deconstruction, psychoanalysis, decontextualization – runs all through her splendid oeuvre.

Credit: The above photo is Janet Malcolm's Burdock No. 1 (2005-07).  

October 27, 2025 Issue

Helen Rosner, in her delectable "Tables for Two: Chateau Royale,” in this week’s issue, describes a wonderful variation on my favorite cocktail – the Kir Royale. She writes,

I recommend ending your meal with a splash of Champagne poured from a silver ewer over a garnet-hued sphere of cassis sorbet – a thrilling riff on a Kir Royale, providing a bit of fizz and lightness at last.

I had my first Kir Royale at the Canadian Grill in the Chateau Laurier, Ottawa, on the evening of March 16, 1981. I remember the date because the next day I made my first appearance in the Supreme Court of Canada. I was there with my law partner, David MacLeod, and our bookkeeper, Marion MacCallum. It was Marion who ordered the Kir Royale. She didn’t call it that. She asked the waiter to bring us three glasses of Champagne with cassis. I’d never heard of cassis. The drink was elegant and delicious, a fitting way to celebrate our arrival in the nation’s capital. Here’s to you, Mare! 

Jed Perl's "Impassioned Ferocity" (Part I)

Jed Perl, in his absorbing “Impassioned Ferocity” (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2025), reviews three recent books of criticism: Andrea Long Chu’s Authority; Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess; and T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. 

Perl asserts that Chu, in her book, misunderstands the nature of a critic’s power. He quotes her as saying that “the critic has consistently been understood as embodying a key political figure: in the eighteenth century, an enlightened king; in the nineteenth, a free citizen; in the twentieth, a state bureaucrat.” In response, Perl says,

The problem, as I see it, is that critics, at least the ones who matter, aren’t anything like kings, ordinary citizens, or state bureaucrats. They operate at an angle to society. They’re closer to street fighters than to kings. They’re self-invented. They see things their own way. They make their own rules. They’re tough, willing to commit murder, at least metaphorically, as Randall Jarrell did in his takedowns of poets whose work infuriated him.

I think Perl is right. The critics I admire definitely see things their own way. They resist orthodox interpretation. They’re always probing, questioning, arguing. They don’t take things at face value. 

Perl argues brilliantly for the critic’s right to be deeply and totally subjective. He writes,

Criticism isn’t a search for truth but for a particular person’s truth. I’ve heard critics say they approach each new experience without preconceptions. But criticism involves deep, personal conceptions, what Greenberg referred to as “homemade esthetics,” the title he had in mind for a book he never finished. (It became the title of a posthumous essay collection.) Those homemade esthetics are only the beginning of what a critic needs. Formidable critics are engaged in a dynamic or dialectic, the experience of the moment approached not without preconceptions but with an open mind, and tested against some underlying belief or beliefs, which are aesthetic beliefs. Over time those beliefs may change or evolve. Criticism isn’t a search for an absolute, what some might regard as perfect taste. It’s an experiment in aesthetic experience. This is why we can be excited by critics with whom we have fundamental disagreements. We see how their minds work, and that helps us see how ours work.

I like Perl’s emphasis on “aesthetic beliefs” and “aesthetic experience.” To me, the best criticism is aesthetic criticism. Helen Vendler defined it as follows:

The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration. [Introduction to The Music of What Happens, 1988]

That, to me, is the essence of criticism. It’s a formalist definition. It’s interested in the elements of a particular artwork’s style – in how and why it is what it is.   

The second book considered by Perl is Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. Perl says, 

What Rothfeld has that I find missing in many other writers of her generation is an abiding critical vision, some rock-solid belief that informs everything she does. 

According to Perl, Rothfeld’s “rock-solid belief” is that “artistic experience parallels, mirrors, extends, and magnifies our most visceral experiences.” Perl compares her to Kael. He says, 

Reading her sometimes reminds me of what it felt like, many years ago, to first encounter Pauline Kael’s work. The title of Kael’s earliest collection, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), was as brash as Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small. With both writers the bravado and slangy conversational tone are grounded in an aesthetic of amplitude, a view that art touches on life in multiple ways. Rothfeld would surely agree with Kael when she wrote of movies that they can “affect us on so many sensory levels that we become emotionally accessible, in spite of our thinking selves.”

I haven’t read enough of Rothfeld to say whether this is true or not. Her review of James Wood’s Serious Noticing disappointed. She described his writing as “sensuous,” “lush,” and “novelistic.” No. Wood is cutting. His sentences are like scalpels. He dissects texts and shows their inner workings. Rothfeld seriously misdescribes him.

The only other Rothwell piece I’ve read is her personal essay “All Good Sex Is Body Horror” (newyorker.com, February 17, 2024), in which she ingeniously connects David Cronenberg, Kafka, and sex. It’s a strange and intriguing piece. It contains at least one inspired sentence: “Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies.” But it also contains passages like this:

From Cronenberg’s fever dreams, we can surmise that there is a further reason to reject the decision-theoretic model of consent: not only is it impossible for us to know what we will become if an erotic encounter is transformative but we should not want to. To determine in advance what a transformative experience will churn into existence is to sap its power, for the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to stand on the precipice of metamorphosis, but unless we are willing to assume genuine risk we cannot be undone and remade.

I’m not sure what Kael would make of that. She’d probably relish the reference to “Cronenberg’s fever dreams.” She’d probably laugh at the idea that hopping into bed with someone is like being “on the precipice of metamorphosis.” Then again, she might not. She might think of what she wrote in her superb “Tango” (The New Yorker, October 28, 1972):

He brings into this isolation chamber his sexual anger, his glorying in his prowess, and his need to debase her and himself. He demands total subservience to his sexual wishes; this enslavement is for him the sexual truth, the real thing, sex without phoniness. And she is so erotically sensitized by the rounds of lovemaking that she believes him. He goads her and tests her until when he asks if she’s ready to eat vomit as a proof of love, she is, and gratefully. He plays out the American male tough-guy sex role—insisting on his power in bed, because that is all the “truth” he knows.

That kind of sexual battle would be hard to shake off. It would be transformative all right, but not in a good way. It would be degrading and dehumanizing. Is that the risk Rothwell is referring to? Or is it just the risk of going through life without ever experiencing wild, weird Cronenbergian sex? I don’t know. I’m not going to worry about it.

The third book reviewed by Perl is T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. As Perl points out, Clark’s abiding belief is Marxism. Perl says,

While I entirely disagree with Clark that there is some inextricable link between art and politics, in some of the essays in the new collection, many written for the London Review of Books, he holds me because he allows his elegantly nuanced Marxism to be challenged by the immediacy of his responses. This Marxist is a hedonist. And a formalist. The result is some exhilarating reading.

I totally agree. It’s Clark’s hedonism – the deep, sensuous pleasure he takes in light, color, shape, and texture – that redeems him. I find his political writing too abstract. I relate to his “politics in a tragic key,” but terms like “relations of production” and “historical materialism” have always escaped my grasp. Unlike Clark, I don’t believe in class. “Nobody better, better than nobody” is my motto. His contempt for capitalism and “bourgeois society” strikes me as hypocritical. His life and work are made possible by that very system. His exceedingly beautiful books are a product of it. So is their availability to people like me out here in the sticks of Prince Edward Island. Thank you, Indigo. Thank you, Amazon.     

Perl says that the strongest essay in Clark’s book is “Art and the 1917 Revolution.” I don’t think so. My favorite piece is “Madame Matisse’s Hat,” a study of Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905). Clark writes,

The puzzle is the pose, and the nature of the woman’s costume. In a sense we are back to the jeering fellow-painters and their demand for literal truth. What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

Clark is a connoisseur of color. He describes it exquisitely: “halo of indigo,” “curlicue of purple,” “aureole of pink.” That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! This is quintessential Clark – surprising, original, delightful.

For me, delight is a key ingredient of critical writing. Perl values belief. But I think delight is just as important. 

Postscript: This is the first part of a two-part post on Perl’s stimulating piece. Part II will take issue with Perl’s comment that Janet Malcolm lacked an “aesthetic position.”  

Acts of Seeing: Middelburg

John MacDougall, Middelburg (2025)

I took a ton of pictures on our recent trip to the Netherlands. It’s a very photogenic country. I love Dutch canals, Dutch architecture, and Dutch boats. This photo contains all three of those ingredients. The location is Middelburg, one of my favorite Dutch cities. I love the russet color of the boat and the way it matches the door of the building on the far left. Those buildings, with their tall, white window frames and auburn roof tiles – so beautiful! The whole scene is beautiful. I wish I was back there, cycling along the canal, looking, looking, looking. 

October 20, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Alexandra Schwartz says that Joan Acocella’s “The Frog and the Crocodile” is one of her favorite Acocella pieces. It’s one of mine, too. Schwartz writes, 

Acocella’s essay deals with the improbable five-year affair between the Left Bank philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and the tough-guy Chicago writer Nelson Algren—its title comes from their pet names for each other—and was occasioned by the posthumous publication of Beauvoir’s love letters. Acocella begins with a block quote from one of the letters, a rarely attempted flex that may be the critic’s equivalent of opening a song with the bridge. We hear Beauvoir, unimpeded, as she professes her love and confesses her insecurity: Will Algren hate her if she cannot devote her life to him? Then, where Algren should answer with sweet reassurance, we get Acocella, shining the bright light of truth in our eyes. “He will hate her,” she writes. Talk about cutting to the chase.

That last line made me smile. Acocella was known for “cutting to the chase.” She talked very straight. In “The Frog and the Crocodile” she shows us a Beauvoir who was both offering herself as Algren’s love slave and asserting her independence. Acocella says of her, “From letter to letter, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph, she zigs and zags from submission to dominance.” Acocella’s history of the relationship is fascinating. And, as Schwartz points out, “Acocella doesn’t plead on Beauvoir’s behalf or condemn her. Instead, she reads the work and life in light of each other, and the results illuminate our understanding of both.” 

Schwartz’s tribute to “The Frog and the Crocodile” is excellent. I enjoyed it immensely. 

2. I also enjoyed Maggie Doherty’s “Rambling Man,” a review of Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen. Matthiessen wrote one of my favorite books, The Snow Leopard (1978). It’s not an easy book for me to like. As Doherty says, “The spirit of Zen infuses The Snow Leopard.” For many years, I resisted it for that very reason: too cosmic for my taste. But last year, I gave it another try. It’s an account of a trek that Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller made in 1973 high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. I relish its use of first-person present tense, its chronological, diaristic structure, and, most of all, its magnificent descriptions of those wild, exotic snow mountains. For example:

At each stupa on the canyon points, the prayer stones are lit by fire-colored lichens; in the shine of thorn and old carved stones, the print of leopard and thick scent of juniper, I am filled with longing. I turn to look back at Tsakang, at the precipices and deep shadows of Black Canyon, at the dark mountain that presides over Samling, which I shall never see. Above the snowfields to the west, the Crystal Mountain thrusts bare rock into the blue; to the south is the sinuous black torrent that comes down from Kang La, the Pass of Snows. And there on the low cliff above the rivers, silhouetted on the snow, is the village that its own people call Somdo, white prayer flags flying black on the morning sun.

Doherty, in her piece, says, “It’s tempting to read The Snow Leopard as a work of confessional writing, in which Matthiessen details his weak points as a husband and a father.” I can see where it might be tempting. The book contains several introspective passages in which Matthiessen mourns the death of his wife. But it’s also a thrilling travel adventure. That’s the way I read it. 

Postscript: Jonathan Lear 1948 - 2025

Jonathan Lear (Photo from The New York Times)

I see in the Times that Jonathan Lear died: “Jonathan Lear, Philosopher Who Embraced Freud, Dies at 76.” Over the years, I’ve dipped into a few of his books [e.g., Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (2000), Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), and, most recently, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022)]. Lear is a great analyst. I enjoy watching him make his moves on the page. Sample: 

This looks like a dilemma: Either one accepts that Aristotle made a logical error in the opening sentence of his fundamental ethical work or one must make coherent sense of what he is saying. Rather than choose, however, I should like to shift the question away from what Aristotle is saying and ask instead what he is doing. I would like to suggest that Aristotle is here participating in a peculiar kind of inaugural instantiation. He is attempting to inject the concept of “the good” into our lives – and he thereby changes our lives by changing our life with concepts. [Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life]

I love that passage, especially the refusal to choose and the shifting of the question. I have no idea what “inaugural instantiation” means. But I’ve never forgotten it. 

Lear was never satisfied with orthodox interpretations. He always sought deeper considerations. For example, in his absorbing Radical Hope, he analyzed the meaning of a statement made by the last great chief of the Crow nation, Plenty Coups. Here's what Plenty Coups said:

I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.

After this nothing happened – what could Plenty Coups' utterance mean? As Lear points out, a psychological interpretation suggests that Plenty Coups was depressed, or that he was giving voice to the depression that engulfed his tribe. For Lear, this interpretation is too easy. He asks, “Might he not be giving utterance to a darker thought, one that is more difficult for us to understand? If so, then the psychological interpretation is in too much of a rush."

I relish that last line. When interpreting, take your time, never rush to judgment – that’s my takeaway from Lear, one of them, anyway.

Lear goes on to propose an even darker take on Plenty Coups' words. As usual, he expresses it in a string of brilliant questions: 

But what if his remark went deeper? What if it gave expression to an insight into the structure of temporality: that at a certain point things stopped happening? What would he have meant if he meant that?

For Lear, there was never an analytical endpoint. There was always another question, and another, and another. He had a subtle, original mind. He’s gone now. But he lives on in his thought-enriching books.  

October 13, 2025 Issue

Who is Jane Bua and what does she mean by “quasi-sexual stank face”? I’m quoting from her superb “Talk” story “Shedding,” in this week’s issue. It’s a mini-profile of pop star Charlie Puth, as he prepares for his first jazz residency at the Blue Note Jazz Club. The piece is loaded with vivid details: “A lonely employee “rolling forks into navy-blue napkins by the bar”; Snare hits ringing out “like paintball shots”; Puth’s “wavy brown hair and a crescent-moon scar through one eyebrow (the legacy of a dog bite).”

And this:

At 8 p.m., the band slunk onstage, the house lights cut out, and Puth trotted up in a baggy Elastica T-shirt. He parked at the fake Rhodes, and the set began. At every keys solo and drum rip, he put on a goofy grin or a quasi-sexual stank face.

“Stank face” is interesting; “quasi-sexual stank face” even more so. I’m trying to imagine it. Whatever it looks like, it’s inspired description. More Bua, please. 

10 Best Personal History Pieces: #1 Aleksandar Hemon's "Mapping Home"

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 past nine months I’ve chosen nine of my favorites (one per month). Today I conclude the series with my #1 pick – Aleksandar Hemon’s great “Mapping Home” (December 5, 2011).

This is a tale of two cities – Sarajevo and Chicago. Hemon is Sarajevan to the tips of his fingernails. He was born and grew up there. Of his 1991 self, age 26, when he was writing a newspaper column called “Sarejevo Republika,” he writes, 

Fancying myself a street-savvy columnist, I raked the city for material, absorbing impressions and details and generating ideas for my writing. I don’t know if I would’ve used the word back then, but now I am prone to reimagining my younger self as one of Baudelaire’s flâneurs, as someone who wanted to be everywhere and nowhere in particular, for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city. Sarajevo was a small town, viscous with stories and history, brimming with people I knew and loved, all of whom I could monitor from a well-chosen kafana perch or while patrolling the streets. As I surveyed the estuaries of Vase Miskina or the obscure, narrow streets in the hills, complete paragraphs flooded my brain; not infrequently, and mysteriously, a simple lust would possess my body. The city laid itself down for me; wandering stimulated my body as well as my mind. It probably didn’t hurt that my daily caffeine and nicotine intake bordered on stroke-inducing—what wine and opium must have been for Baudelaire, coffee and cigarettes were for me.

Hemon’s sensibility is intensely flâneurial. For example: 

I entered buildings just to smell their hallways. I studied the edges of stone stairs rounded by the many soles that had rubbed against them in the past century or two. I spent gameless days at the Željo soccer stadium, eavesdropping on the pensioners—the retirees who were lifelong season-ticket holders—as they strolled in circles within its walls, discussing the heartrending losses and unlikely victories of the past. I returned to places I had known my whole life in order to capture details that had been blurred by excessive familiarity. I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and its physiognomies. I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul. Physically and metaphysically, I was placed. 

And then, in 1992, the most devastating thing happens – the Bosnian War. Hemon is in Chicago on a cultural exchange when it starts. He’s supposed to return to Sarajevo on May 1. His father advises him to stay away. Nothing good is going to happen at home, he says. Daily, Hemon wrangles with his conscience: should he stay or return home? Much of that wrangling he does while incessantly roaming the streets of Chicago, “as though I could simply walk off my moral anxiety.” He writes,

I’d pick a movie that I wanted to see—both for distraction and out of my old habits as a film reviewer—then locate, with my friend’s help, a theatre that was showing it. From Ukrainian Village, the neighborhood where I was staying, I’d take public transportation a couple of hours before the movie started, buy a ticket, and then wander in concentric circles around the movie theatre. 

He calls himself “a tormented flâneur”: 

A tormented flâneur, I kept walking, my Achilles tendons sore, my head in the clouds of fear and longing for Sarajevo, until I finally reconciled myself to the idea of staying. On May 1st, I did not fly home. On May 2nd, all the exits out of the city were blocked; the longest siege in modern history began. In Chicago, I submitted my application for political asylum. The rest is the rest of my life.

In Chicago, he experiences “anxiety of displacement.” He copes by walking. He takes a job canvassing for Greenpeace. It takes him all over the city:

So, in the early summer of 1992, I found myself canvassing in the proudly indistinguishable, dull western suburbs (Schaumburg, Naperville); in the wealthy North Shore ones (Wilmette, Winnetka, Lake Forest), with their hospital-size houses and herds of cars in palatial garages; and in the southern working-class ones (Blue Island, Park Forest), where people invited me into their homes and offered me stale Twinkies. But my favorite turf was, predictably, in the city: Pullman, Beverly, Lakeview, and then the Parks—Hyde, Lincoln, Rogers. Little by little, I began to sort out the geography of Chicagoland, assembling a street map in my mind, building by building, door by door. Occasionally, I slacked off before canvassing, in a local diner, struggling to enjoy the burned-corn taste of American coffee, monitoring the foot traffic, the corner drug trade, the friendly ladies. A few times, I skipped work entirely and just walked and walked in the neighborhood assigned to me. I became a low-wage, immigrant flâneur.

He moves to a rough neighborhood called Edgewater, on Chicago’s North Side. He develops a set of ritualistic practices:

Before sleep, I would listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, and occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.

Gradually, gradually, Chicago enters him. He begins to know it “in his body” the way he knew Sarajevo. He becomes a local:

Little by little, people in Edgewater began to recognize me; I started greeting them on the street. Over time, I acquired a barber and a butcher and a movie theatre and a coffee shop with a steady cast of colorful characters (the chess players). I discovered that in order to transform an American city into a personal space you had to start in a particular neighborhood. Soon, I began to claim Edgewater as mine; I became a local. It was there that I understood what Nelson Algren meant when he wrote that loving Chicago was like loving a woman with a broken nose: I fell in love with the broken noses of Edgewater. On the AiR’s ancient communal Mac, I typed my first attempts at stories in English.

I love this piece. It describes the anxiety of displacement that many of us feel when we move to a new place, and it prescribes an antidote – walk, wander, look, collect sensations, internalize the architecture. In other words, be a flâneur. 

Credit: The above illustration by Riccardo Vecchio is from Aleksandar Hemon’s “Mapping Home” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011).

October 6, 2025, Issue

Maybe, just maybe, the rotten Communist government in Cuba is about to crumble. The country is living a nightmare right now. No food. No medicine. No gas. Disintegrating electrical grid. The tourist industry is in free fall. Sugar production, which was once among the highest in the world, is so bad that the country now has to import sugar. Most alarming is the mass exodus of people. Jon Lee Anderson, in this week’s New Yorker, reports,

The exodus began in 2021, when anti-government rallies filled the streets, protesting oppressive policies and the lack of medicine and food. Castro had died five years before, but the Communist Party retained its grip on power, and it put down the protests harshly, jailing and beating hundreds of demonstrators. Since then, an estimated eighteen per cent of Cubans—as many as two million residents—have left. This represents the largest outflux in the sixty-six-year span of the tumultuous Revolution.

The government is ripe for overthrow. But this has been said many times before. Is this time any different? Anderson, who visited the country recently, senses it might be. He writes,

Critics have been predicting that the regime in Havana is about to collapse since the demise of the Soviet Union, thirty-five years ago. During my recent visit, though, the situation felt unusually tenuous. It is as if the convergence of penury, incapacity, and decline has finally become impossible to ignore. Cuba has many chronic problems, but the essential one is that its economy doesn’t provide for its people. After Fidel Castro stepped down as President, in 2008, he made a rare admission of his government’s inability to run the economy: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” Castro had been in office for forty-nine years. His brother Raúl succeeded him for nine years more, and an acolyte of theirs named Miguel Díaz-Canel has led for the past six. None of them has been able to reverse the slide.

I hope Anderson is right. One of the most beautiful islands in the world, populated by an incredibly resourceful, resilient, spirited people – Cuba is shackled by a horrible, oppressive system of government. It’s not going to be easy to get free of it. But that is what Cubans have to do – rise up and overthrow the bastards who control them. They did it before; they can do it again. 

September 29, 2025, Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Another sensational “Tables for Two” by Helen Rosner in this week’s issue. It’s a review of Bong, a new Cambodian restaurant in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. Rosner calls it “absolutely electrifying.” She says,

For the three evenings a week that it’s open, the whole operation, in a modest storefront on a residential corner, is shimmeringly alive. The cooks are half dancing in the open kitchen as they slice and stir-fry. The customers all seem wildly in love with one another. Inside, the light bouncing off the acid-green walls makes everyone’s faces appear traced with neon. The thumping bass of the hip-hop playlist reverberates through the dining room and rolls out through the open door to reach the diners seated at bistro tables out front. Even a half block away, the air smells sweet and bright, like seared shellfish, sharp vinegar, and the blistery green of sizzling herbs.

That “blistery green of sizzling herbs” is inspired! Rosner is a brilliant describer. Dig her description of Bong’s lobster dish:

Mama Kim’s namesake lobster (listed with the minimal description “IYKYK”) is a magnificent mountain of crustacean legs and claws, the pieces stir-fried with oodles of slivered ginger and a sweet-spicy herbaceous paste, made by Mama Kim, that clings, slurpably, to the meat and drips juicily onto a pile of rice below. (Lanna Apisukh’s photo of this dish is equally succulent.)

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Bong"

Here's another succulent sample:

Almost everything on the menu is thrilling. Even what fails to be thrilling, such as a fairly floppy green salad that I tried on one visit, manages to be at least interesting. (The dressing on that salad was afire with Kampot peppercorns, a hard-to-find Cambodian variety that has a tealike flowery astringence.) Another salad of chewy-crisp pork jowl and sliced melon is zingy with garlic and pickle-tart. The round sweetness of squid, fried in a light-as-air batter, is magnified by intensely floral curry leaves and a salty snowfall of shaved cured egg yolk. A bone-in pork chop, thick as a dictionary, tender as can be, and drowning in a luscious mess of charred tomatoes marinated in a sugar-lime-fish-sauce concoction, features every shade of sour and sweet.

Wow! What a feast! I devour it. 

2. Zadie Smith, in her “On the Impersonal Essay,” describes the tone of her essays as “impersonal” (“But my tone? Controlled. Impersonal”). Is she right? I don’t think so. I haven’t read all her essays, but I’ve read quite a few. “Dead Man Laughing,” “Generation Why?,” “Northwest London Blues,” “Man vs. Corpse,” “Love in the Gardens,” “Find Your Beach,” “Through the Portal” – I love them. What I love about them is their personal nature. They’re subjective to the bone. Later, in her “On the Impersonal Essay,” she says, “Aside from the fact that I never meant to be an essayist in the first place, one detail that has surprised me most during the past twenty years is that I have, in fact, written more personally in the essay form than I ever expected or intended.” That seems to contradict her earlier statement. To me, Smith is a personal essayist par excellence. Her pieces brim with the ardent energy of her own exquisite sensibility.

3. Dana Goodyear’s “Fire Season” is a vivid account of the loss of her home in the devastating Palisades Fire that killed twelve people and burned down six thousand eight hundred and thirty-one structures, including schools, churches, grocery stores, shops, banks, restaurants, and more than fifty-five hundred homes. She writes, 

Every house on my block burned to the ground. It got so hot that the water boiled in our small swimming pool, turning the concrete pink. The birds-eye view, captured by news helicopters, looked like the aftermath of an aerial bombardment, all gray.

In the course of the piece, Goodyear draws a parallel between Los Angeles and Pompeii. At one point she asks “Were we witnessing the beginning of an irreversible decline?” To me, the answer seems obvious: Yes. Just ask Elizabeth Kolbert (Field Notes from a Catastrophe) and Bill McKibben (The End of Nature).

4. Anthony Lane triumphs again. This time with his wonderful “Cinema Paradiso.” It’s an account of Lane’s recent attendance at a film festival in Bologna called Il Cinema Ritrovato. This is no ordinary film festival. As Lane explains, “it specializes in the shock of the old: films that have been forgotten, overlooked, undervalued, truncated by studios, or damaged by time, and that are asking to be brought back into the light.” For example, one of the festival’s films that Lane views is a recently restored version of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925). Lane writes, “Such was the lustre of the results, at the evening showing, that there was no sense of our being in the presence of the antique; for all practical purposes, we were watching a new release.” This piece is pure pleasure – the pleasure of old movies, the pleasure of watching them at night in the warm open air of the Piazza Maggiore, the main square of Bologna’s historic center. Lane describes the scene:

There, beside the shiplike hulk of the Basilica of San Petronio—which is a work in progress, the foundation stone having been laid in 1390, and which somebody really should get around to finishing one of these days—was a vast white screen. Rows of ticketed seating were ranged before it, like pews in a nave. Alternatively, you could lounge, for free, on the marble steps of the basilica, or grab a table outside at one of the restaurants on the opposite side of the piazza. The best ice-cream parlor, around the corner, stayed open till midnight, allowing you to cool your throat with an almond-milk granita. (It comes with a spoon and a straw, so that you can slurp it up as it softens. Pleasure, in these parts, is a serious business.) In short, here was a halcyon arena for a thoroughly normal experience: going out to the movies.

Perfetto. I wish I was there. 

Photo by Matteo de Mayda, from Anthony Lane's "Cinema Paradiso"

September 22, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The Maira Kalman cover is brilliant! Titled “Stéphane Mallarmé with Shawl,” it shows the poet all in gray, wearing a vivid red-and-white patterned scarf and an opulent pink bowtie. Kalman is one of the preeminent colorists of our time. It’s great to see her still doing New Yorker covers.

2. One of my favorite “Talk of the Town” writers is Robert Sullivan. He relates (as I do) to quirky individuals who do things solely for their own sake. His “Manhattan's Springs,” in this week’s issue, is a perfect example of his own idiosyncratic work. It’s about a Brooklyn-based photographer named Stanley Greenberg, who walks through upper Manhattan and the Bronx, posting copies of James Reuel Smith’s photos of old springs and wells near the spots where they originally existed. Sullivan writes,

On a recent summer day, Greenberg moved through the Bronx with the brisk authority of a biker who has little time for automobiles, methodically checking the map on his phone, pulling copies of Smith’s photos from his backpack, watching for construction sheds. “The city will take the photos down, and so will landlords, but they seem to last longest on these sheds,” he said. Many of the photographs have already disappeared, though a friend recently spotted one that had been posted in June, at Broadway and 108th Street, outside a closed bagel shop. “I don’t care,” Greenberg said. “I just want to post them all.”

It's a curious project, charting the disappearance of old water sources. Greenberg has a deep sense of transience. So does Sullivan. I enjoyed this piece immensely.

3. Another enjoyable piece is Lauren Collins’ “The Unicode.” It’s a profile of a giant clothing company based in Tokyo called Uniqlo. Until I read this piece, I’d never heard of it. Collins visits the company’s headquarters. She visits a newly renovated Uniqlo store in the Tokyo neighborhood of Asakusa. She visits the Uniqlo store in Paris. She visits the Uniqlo offices in London, where she talks with Uniqlo’s creative director Clare Waight Keller. She attends an event at Tate Modern, in London, in which people around the world vie to design a Uniqlo shirt. In Paris, she meets and talks with Uniqlo’s founder, Tadashi Yanai, who still serves as its C.E.O., and who is now the second-richest man in Japan. It’s quite a tour! My favorite part is Collins’ description of Uniqlo’s factory:

The employees were working on a batch of women’s chocolate-brown 3D Knit Soufflé Yarn Skirts (size M) and forest-green 3D Knit polo shirts (size XL). After the machines pumped out the items, the clothes were sent, ten at a time, to be examined for flaws. At an inspection station, a woman in pigtails and a surgical mask was in the process of checking a green polo. She draped it over two upright illuminated cones—think lightsabres mounted on a lazy Susan—scrutinizing the fabric for snags and holes. As we watched, a chimelike tune filled the room. “Five minutes until break,” Tomoya said. 

Collins is excellent at conveying the culture of complex corporations. Her “House Perfect” (The New Yorker, October 3, 2011), a portrait of IKEA, is masterly. “The Unicode” is every bit as good. 

4. Yet another absorbing piece in this week’s issue is D. T. Max’s “The Behemoth.” It tells about Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, an immense unfinished church in Barcelona, begun in 1882, and the amazing construction work currently underway to complete it. The Sagrada Família is an unusual church. Max describes it as "a head-spinning mixture of morphing geometrical forms, many inspired by nature. Its conical Art Nouveau pinnacles have the lumpy beauty of sandcastles." He visits the construction site and describes the activity. He’s guided by Jordi Faulí, the project’s ninth and current chief architect. The two of them ride rickety construction elevators, crawl through small passageways, climb vertical catwalks. The views are stunning. Here’s a sample:

Suddenly, we were standing inside the Mary tower, which is four hundred and fifty-two feet tall. Its walls were white—the color of purity—and the interior was brightly illuminated by eight hundred triangular windows of translucent white glass. The windows, Faulí later explained, were a scaled-up version of ones Gaudí had made for the sacristy, a section of Sagrada Família for which the architect had made a complete model.

The tower was a cone that narrowed to a point as it ascended. At the center of its circular base was a glimmering white hyperboloid, a gigantic stone object that looked like a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. The hyperboloid had no top or bottom—it was a skylight that opened onto the nave below. Through this aperture, sunlight could filter all the way down to the church floor.

“The Behemoth” is a fascinating tour of an astonishing architectural work of art. I devoured it.

5. Beautiful architecture is also the subject of Adam Gopnik’s “Making a Move,” a tour of Philadelphia’s new Calder Gardens. Gopnik writes,

As one enters and descends, the space unfolds in a purposefully whimsical range of materials. Volcanic-seeming black rock lines a catacomblike stairway, punctuated by a single glass window framing a lone Calder. Tiered seats lead down into a viewing area that doubles as an amphitheatre for lectures or performances. Though buried, the sometimes monumental forms of the exhibition space rise convexly, lifting upward, while light from the Parkway pours in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Even underground, one feels enlarged, not entombed. And there’s nothing tomblike about the constant rumble of traffic from the boulevard outside.

Uniqlo factory, Sagrada Família, Calder Gardens – all transfixing places you can visit vicariously in this week’s splendid New Yorker. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Nature

This is the tenth 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 wonderful nature descriptions. 

These books always keep contact with nature. That’s one of the things I love about them. Canoeing the rivers of the Pine Barrens, John McPhee notes the color of the water: 

The characteristic color of the water in the streams is the color of tea – a phenomenon, often called “cedar water,” that is familiar in the Adirondacks, as in many other places where tannins and other organic waste from riparian cedar trees combine with iron from the ground water to give the rivers a deep color. In summer, the color is ordinarily so dark that the riverbeds are obscured, and while drifting along one has the feeling of being afloat on a river of fast-moving potable ink. For a few days after a long rain, however, the water is almost colorless. At these times, one can look down into it from a canoe and see the white sand bottom, ten or twelve feet below, and it is as clear as an image in the lens of a camera, with sunken timbers now and again coming into view and receding rapidly, at the speed of the river.

Paddling a Meadowlands marsh, Robert Sullivan sees two carp: 

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

Driving the Red Shirt Table Road, Ian Frazier sees a pheasant: “A pheasant stepped from the grass, set his white-ringed neck forward like a gearshift lever, and ran across the road.” Traveling the dusty back road from Oglala to Chadron, he describes the prairie grasses (“pale ginger-brown just the color of antelopes”) and the cottonwoods (“The big cottonwoods standing here and there by themselves in the fields lose every leaf in winter and then you can see how contorted their branches really are; they look as if they had decided never to grow leaves again and were tormented by the decision”). He sees an eagle: 

Once, in the sky just west of the road I saw, two or three hundred feet up, a bald eagle holding almost motionless. The white band of its tail was visible when it turned, and gently turned again. It flew offhandedly, with careless, recreational ease, the way a winged human might fly.

These books brim with birds: “The whippoorwills dust themselves in the sand roads, and when they are approached at night their eyes blaze red” (The Pine Barrens). “We saw more carp, more muskrats, mudflats covered with sandpipers, and the frozen-in-time remains of a snapping turtle that appeared to be decapitated by a train just as it has crawled up out of the marsh” (The Meadowlands). “Black cows topped with snow stood breathing steam in the whitened fields while hawks sat in cottonwoods above, their feathers so fluffed out against the cold they looked like footballs” (On the Rez).

There’s an abundance of wildflowers:

Wherry pointed out rattlesnake ferns, cinnamon ferns, papery blueish-gray marsh ferns, bold and lacy royal ferns. Before the outing was over, the group had found Indian shoestrings, Turk’s-cap lilies, some rare pogonias, swamp azaleas, swamp hyacinths, wild magnolias, cassandras, and prickly pears – the only cactus that is native east of the Mississippi River. [The Pine Barrens]

In the spring of 1819, John Torrey, the father of American botany, toured the Jersey meadows and reported patches of white, yellow, and purple violets. In other springs around that time, there was yellow floating arum, blue veronica, and white saxifrage. In summers, botanists reported seeing blue iris, pink meadowsweet, pink marshmallow, pale purple wild hibiscus, white ladies’ tresses, purple snake’s mouth, and green and purple orchids. In the fall, there were yellow goldenrod, bright red cranberries, and the tops of the cattails turned a dark, burned-out-looking brown, anticipating future area land uses. [The Meadowlands]

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

The culminating paragraph of Frazier’s magnificent elegy for Suanne Big Crow is all about nature:

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

That is one of my favorite passages in all of literature. Note the vivid figuration in the last sentence – “like knots on a rope ladder rising out of sight.” Figuration is a prime tool of all three of these writers. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.