tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88286493080016310312024-03-28T19:01:00.528-07:00The New Yorker & MeUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1453125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-25102659561233808072024-03-27T04:52:00.000-07:002024-03-27T14:39:31.721-07:00March 25, 2024 Issue<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRHocguMc9J0scpXXeI1ivTYXadudFtD47hwF9qgOii4sL-Bsk_qSNuMGa8dQtNjI2ttzQe4a-i8fWd6MqpQfB2VuFNao0UrftIrXearOBCoSu4HAPsdCfThx-21RvSb56HCf-yOBZawE-R62a8c9dL0KHfxX-THz1Y6KEFGZQ_ypdkq5w4m4qeaVREM_M/s819/2024_03_25.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="819" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRHocguMc9J0scpXXeI1ivTYXadudFtD47hwF9qgOii4sL-Bsk_qSNuMGa8dQtNjI2ttzQe4a-i8fWd6MqpQfB2VuFNao0UrftIrXearOBCoSu4HAPsdCfThx-21RvSb56HCf-yOBZawE-R62a8c9dL0KHfxX-THz1Y6KEFGZQ_ypdkq5w4m4qeaVREM_M/s320/2024_03_25.gif" width="234" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Jackson Arn, in his <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/the-art-world/03/25/klimt-landscapes-art-review">“All That Glitters,”</a> in this week’s <i>New Yorker</i>, calls T. J. Clark “the most eloquent Klimt hater.” What’s that based on? I had to dig to find out. It turns out that, in 2010, Clark wrote a letter to the <i>London Review of Books</i>, responding to correspondence generated by Michael Hofmann’s <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n02/michael-hofmann/vermicular-dither">“Vermicular Dither”</a> (<i>London Review of Books</i>, January 28, 2010), a review of Stefan Zweig’s <i>The World of Yesterday</i>, in which he (Hofmann) refers to Klimt as “the <i>Kitschmeister</i>.” Clark writes,</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>I have no dog in the ring as regards Stefan Zweig; but as Gustav Klimt has come up in your correspondence, and even been claimed as ‘one of the greatest painters ever’, I do want to say that when I read Michael Hofmann’s verdict on the artist I found myself breathing a sigh of relief (Letters, 11 February). At last someone had dared state the obvious. As for ‘greatest painters ever’, there is a special place in the hell of reputations for those who tried hardest for the title in the first years of the 20th century: the Frank Brangwyns, the Eugène Carrières, the Anders Zorns, the John Singer Sargents, the Giovanni Segantinis. Not that these artists are uninteresting. Someone with a strong stomach and a taste for tragic irony should write a book about large-scale and mural painting in the two decades leading to Mons and Passchendaele. But taken at all seriously – compared with their contemporary Akseli Gallen-Kallela, for example, let alone the last achievements of Puvis de Chavannes – the greats of Edwardian Euro-America strike me as Kitschmeisters through and through: early specialists in the new century’s pretend difficulty and ‘opacity’, pretend mystery and profundity, pretend eroticism and excess. Klimt has a place of honour in their ranks.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Arn is right. There's no love there. By the way, I wasn't doubting Arn's word. I just couldn't recall ever reading anything by Clark about Klimt. And I've read a lot of Clark. I devour him.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Postscript:</b> Just as an off-set to Clark’s acid verdict, consider what Peter Schjeldahl said about Klimt’s “Adele”:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>With the best of will—and I have tried—“Adele” makes no formal sense. The parts—including the silky brushwork of the young lady’s face and hands, which poke through the bumpy ground as through a carnival prop—drift, generating no mutual tensions. The size feels arbitrary, without integral scale in relation to the viewer: bigger or smaller would make no difference. The content of the gorgeous whatsit seems a rhyming of conspicuously consumed wealth with show-off eroticism. She’s a vamp, is Adele; and for whom would she be simpering but the randy master, Herr Klimt? The effect is a closed loop of his and her narcissisms. They’re them, and we aren’t. I think we are supposed to be impressed. And let’s be. Why not? Our age will be bookmarked in history by the self-adoring gestures of the incredibly rich. Aesthetics ride coach. </i>[<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/changing-my-mind-about-gustav-klimts-adele">"Changing My Mind About Gustav Klimt's 'Adle' "</a>]</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I love that “gorgeous whatsit.” Can kitsch be beautiful? Schjeldahl said yes. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-60143442852486264922024-03-22T03:00:00.000-07:002024-03-22T04:13:25.157-07:00On the Horizon: "Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb 'New Yorker' Essayists"<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP0kpqRjN-fU6T2c4857qRDRG3RZ786MibzJzAw7JlvJRSN1vyVwDxeyOC4FEr-ISvbIqwvKuzrSjk_md3CqClCjefVWfNhTrwymvEUDIyGN8iD6sPiF4K33A_unCOqI4fDNuanxmORMEEQIY6xaDdLmWrCx6-l6KgEBs1RnZtF9Rzqo3D-w9V0BTrtpxL/s4032/IMG_0841.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP0kpqRjN-fU6T2c4857qRDRG3RZ786MibzJzAw7JlvJRSN1vyVwDxeyOC4FEr-ISvbIqwvKuzrSjk_md3CqClCjefVWfNhTrwymvEUDIyGN8iD6sPiF4K33A_unCOqI4fDNuanxmORMEEQIY6xaDdLmWrCx6-l6KgEBs1RnZtF9Rzqo3D-w9V0BTrtpxL/w400-h300/IMG_0841.jpeg" width="400" /></a></span></div><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Judith Thurman’s <i>A Left-Handed Woman</i> (2022) and Jill Lepore’s <i>The Deadline</i> (2023) are two of the great <i>New Yorker </i>essay collections of the last twenty years – where “great” means original, acerbic, perceptive, evocative, analytical, passionate, illuminating, stylish. To celebrate them, I’m going to select four of my favorite pieces from each book (one per month, for the next eight months) and try to express why I like them so much. A new series then – “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb <i>New Yorker</i> Essayists” – starting April 15, 2024.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-39866228495704491652024-03-19T03:52:00.000-07:002024-03-19T03:52:15.734-07:00March 18, 2024 Issue<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVbhyokUqfM8SluKbIk-aOGunmrnJfX5Igl5GtxPGbaR5OGFxksKZFuiPhp7YYl2C1Me_8jBFteluB5uZyaKQlWZwtO7oxvQmoV2RBq7yAG-TMzxk2RF5ixQmMaLrXvm5qiNf7Dy68M6H8_apfDHR7qfRJmiZsElA2bOiNqMsJ2dp0mU-qS6FHJq0mxXZK/s1037/2024_03_18.jpg.webp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1037" data-original-width="760" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVbhyokUqfM8SluKbIk-aOGunmrnJfX5Igl5GtxPGbaR5OGFxksKZFuiPhp7YYl2C1Me_8jBFteluB5uZyaKQlWZwtO7oxvQmoV2RBq7yAG-TMzxk2RF5ixQmMaLrXvm5qiNf7Dy68M6H8_apfDHR7qfRJmiZsElA2bOiNqMsJ2dp0mU-qS6FHJq0mxXZK/s320/2024_03_18.jpg.webp" width="235" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">My fascination with the two versions of Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” continues. This week she <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-food-scene/missy-robbinss-lowest-key-pasta-paradiso-misipasta">reviews </a>Misipasta, a Williamsburg market that sells fresh pastas and sauces, and is also a restaurant. In the print version, she writes, “There are about twenty counter stools, and the air smells like Parmigiano and butter.” In the extended newyorker.com version, she says,</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>There are about twenty seats indoors, all of them counter stools, and one or two are nearly always empty. The lights are just dim enough to soothe, the tidy menu of cocktails and bitter Italian sodas ready to offer a bit of relief. The air smells like Parmigiano and butter, the sound system is playing the Pointer Sisters. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">What fascinates me is (1) the artful economy of the magazine column, and (2) the ravishing extra details of the web version. Here’s another example: in the magazine, she writes, </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Have a slice of crispy farinata, a lacy-edged chickpea-flour pancake aromatic with rosemary. Have an artichoke sandwich, one of the city’s great secret sandwiches – an enormous mess of grilled artichoke hearts and hot chili peppers, barely held together by oozing provolone cheese. Bring home a pound of pasta – frilly lumache, or long, flat tubes of paccheri – and a jar of thirty-clove sauce. You won’t make pasta nearly as good as Robbins’s – even with the same ingredients, some things just have to get all the way into your bones—but it doesn’t hurt to try. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Here's the web version:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Have an espresso, fruity and bitter. Have a slice of crispy farinata, a lacy-edge chickpea-flour pancake aromatic with rosemary. Have one of the city’s great secret sandwiches, an enormous mess of marinated and grilled artichoke hearts, spiked with hot chilis and barely held together by oozing provolone cheese. Buy a pint of Robbins’s satiny hazelnut gelato. Get a pound of pasta—frilly lumache, or long tubes of paccheri—and a jar of thirty-clove sauce, heady with garlic. You won’t make pasta nearly as good as Robbins’s at home—even with the same ingredients, even with the same tools, some things just have to get all the way into your bones—but it doesn’t hurt to try.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Who would not want such delectable writing to go on forever? The print version is wonderful. But the expanded newyorker.com version is divine. To have them both is double bliss! </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-84986366122528868632024-03-14T03:21:00.000-07:002024-03-14T03:21:02.891-07:00Acts of Seeing: Birch Chandelier<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWtlK0yUXQiJP8QlJ71jRqC6nR2SRdJXajeRqtl-yGJu5unyMeo5wtvM4kZmHEdFNmrrzDHd_lfyksYWKK0qaSpi_SlLrtrichpTvANqAggauFaRRC90AU8y2_ufJx_uD3nvWBNfWHhb-46Z2llxeStu-qk8Th7UZv9MKmXgoIbi4IZpYANJB40N4xlwdT/s4032/IMG_0317.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWtlK0yUXQiJP8QlJ71jRqC6nR2SRdJXajeRqtl-yGJu5unyMeo5wtvM4kZmHEdFNmrrzDHd_lfyksYWKK0qaSpi_SlLrtrichpTvANqAggauFaRRC90AU8y2_ufJx_uD3nvWBNfWHhb-46Z2llxeStu-qk8Th7UZv9MKmXgoIbi4IZpYANJB40N4xlwdT/w300-h400/IMG_0317.jpeg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by John MacDougall</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Rained yesterday. Temperature dropped below zero. Everything encased in ice. This morning the sun came out. Woods turned to crystal. There’s a path that runs along the edge of John Arch’s Pond to the beach. I went in there. Bent-over birches like fabulous chandeliers. Branches fused in cascading luminosity. What a scene! I couldn’t get enough of it. By afternoon the ice melted. Trees dripped water. Scene dissolved. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-74056731959398343192024-03-13T04:12:00.000-07:002024-03-13T04:20:12.425-07:00March 11, 2023 Issue<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMKUeCMfqKwoGeu-Mc4KB1-YdlWXEAtFfn488Yo3GVNKSBsCrE4FYBH1uIRx7FiI4l5Pa9z1I-J_UrtYyb-mck3fJYcEvHLO8Pv6ACooz-p2nCW64Ku7FS9QXnaQbm0sxC92toqC38d3fWmZ24_q4Dp3Y14t5eEfpL4LPq_BWwRKNDhJG235PyDo0CASfe/s1037/2024_03_11.jpg.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1037" data-original-width="760" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMKUeCMfqKwoGeu-Mc4KB1-YdlWXEAtFfn488Yo3GVNKSBsCrE4FYBH1uIRx7FiI4l5Pa9z1I-J_UrtYyb-mck3fJYcEvHLO8Pv6ACooz-p2nCW64Ku7FS9QXnaQbm0sxC92toqC38d3fWmZ24_q4Dp3Y14t5eEfpL4LPq_BWwRKNDhJG235PyDo0CASfe/s320/2024_03_11.jpg.webp" width="235" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Jackson Arn, in his absorbing <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/11/radiant-the-life-and-line-of-keith-haring-brad-gooch-book-review">“The Boy Who Cried Art,”</a> in this week’s issue, says of graffiti artist Keith Haring, “His chalk drawings are almost always very crude, so as not to interfere with the whooshing immediacy of the performance or the nervous allure of the performer.” That “whooshing immediacy” is brilliant. I wonder if it was inspired by Norman Mailer’s great “The Faith of Graffiti” (included in Mailer’s 1982 essay collection <i>Pieces and Pontifications</i>). Mailer wrote, </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Yes, the graffiti had not only the feel and all the super-powered whoosh and impact of all the bubble letters in all the mad comic strips, but the </i>zoom<i>, the </i>aghr<i>, and the </i>ahhr<i> of screeching rails, the fast motion of subways roaring into stations, the comic strips come to life.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Arn mentions Mailer’s essay in his piece. I think Mailer’s appreciation of graffiti was deeper than Arn’s is. Arn calls it “Business Art.” He calls Haring a “Business Artist.” What do those terms mean? Arn writes,</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Even in its infancy, there was something in New York graffiti that smacked of Business Art. You can see it in Basquiat, who put a copyright symbol on his creations well before they hung in galleries. Or watch “Stations of the Elevated,” Manfred Kirchheimer’s ecstatic M.T.A. documentary. Pay attention to the way he cuts between spray-painted trains and signs for Burger King and Coppertone. When people watched the film in 1981, they may have sensed aesthetic deadlock: commercial art and street art face to face, without much of anything to say to each other. But you might also interpret these scenes as street art competing with commercial art, trying to match its bigness and brightness—and, the moment you do, Haring seems less the artist who betrayed graffiti and more the artist who made its guilty dreams come true.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">"Guilty dreams"? I don’t see anything guilty about graffiti. I see it as our version of cave painting, an exuberant assertion that we exist in this time and place. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-28480243915142919352024-03-10T03:20:00.000-07:002024-03-10T03:20:29.368-07:00Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #8 "Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' "<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixBy1EymVeXuKZsjzb0-TzjnIUYJRrAcFF-0atmJKlfBxJpgWFUni6nhaDinV6cepS3fhRIbkvlKNLa_fji9xwZnwbGE6cg9ILRtZlgu8ph1fOdd2cUfsdfsGXxelKrB41XsGNhtCMaJFKikBxTfYioiym0sCDR2dI9B0ooGiF8evIK9UTmrXBcudJtbRO/s320/Eric%20Nyquist,%20_Henry%20David%20Thoreau_.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="319" data-original-width="320" height="319" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixBy1EymVeXuKZsjzb0-TzjnIUYJRrAcFF-0atmJKlfBxJpgWFUni6nhaDinV6cepS3fhRIbkvlKNLa_fji9xwZnwbGE6cg9ILRtZlgu8ph1fOdd2cUfsdfsGXxelKrB41XsGNhtCMaJFKikBxTfYioiym0sCDR2dI9B0ooGiF8evIK9UTmrXBcudJtbRO/s1600/Eric%20Nyquist,%20_Henry%20David%20Thoreau_.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Illustration by Eric Nyquist, from Kathryn Schulz's "Pond Scum"</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div>This is the third post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten <i>New Yorker & Me</i>,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is <a href="https://thenewyorkerandme.blogspot.com/2015/10/kathryn-schulzs-pond-scum.html">"Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' "</a> (October 27, 2015):</span><p></p><p><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: georgia;">Kathryn Schulz, in her virulent <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum">"Pond Scum" </a>(<i>The New Yorker</i>, October 19, 2015), calls Henry David Thoreau "self-obsessed," "narcissistic," "fanatical," "parochial," "egotistical," "disingenuous," "arrogant," "sanctimonious," "hypocritical," and a “thoroughgoing misanthrope.” She says, “The poor, the rich, his neighbors, his admirers, strangers: Thoreau’s antipathy toward humanity even encompassed the very idea of civilization.” Reading her evisceration of Thoreau’s character, I was reminded of John Updike’s comment on Lord Byron: he “was a monster of vanity and appetite, with one possibly redeeming quality: he could write.” Schulz doesn’t spend much time on Thoreau’s writing ability. She’s too busy excoriating him for, among other things, shunning coffee (“I cannot idolize anyone who opposes coffee”). </span></p><p><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: georgia;">“Pond Scum” contains a number of original poison-tipped barbs. My favorite is Schulz’s description of Walden as “less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.” </span></p><p><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: georgia;">Granted, Schulz does praise Thoreau’s gift for nature description. She says,</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><span style="color: #38761d;">Although Thoreau is insufferable when fancying himself a seer, he is wonderful at actually seeing, and the passages he devotes to describing the natural world have an acuity and serenity that nothing else in the book approaches. It is a pleasure to read him on a battle between black and red ants; on the layers of ice that form as the pond freezes over in winter; on the breeze, birds, fish, waterbugs, and dust motes that differently disturb the surface of Walden.</span></i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: #38761d;">Yes, it <i>is</i> a pleasure to read him on those things, and many more besides. So what’s Schulz’s point? Robert Sullivan, in his wonderful <i>The Thoreau You Don’t Know </i>(2009), says, “A central theme that anyone considering Thoreau must face early on is the jerk factor. Was Thoreau a jerk?” Well, we know where Schulz stands on that question. According to her, he was a jerk <i>par excellence</i>. But if he hadn’t been a jerk, maybe he wouldn’t have written the way he did. Somewhere in his letters, Van Gogh says, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t paint.” Similarly, Thoreau could say, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t write.” Who cares if Thoreau was a jerk? Most of us are jerks one way or another. But not many of us can write like Thoreau.</span></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-21382670612170685432024-03-08T03:02:00.000-08:002024-03-10T03:27:04.175-07:00On the Horizon: Ian Frazier's New Book "Paradise Bronx"<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGb2IxSBD3AuJVq8mJjaBxzIUHS9l2Hns_eFwK0Dp8RgsMmlSsj0nZB0qxbvEOmpWpPvvAPk9fzvJSqGpzS37RdS-xw42eZIi30jGSIGbPNcTy3oz43d6AYa0vfsWeVzuICUG6XYI31iMNsG7fwb6KSxLbJnekMyV7ESwDy7pp0V95AWWr8tilNd2K2ZeD/s1500/Paradise%20Bronx.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGb2IxSBD3AuJVq8mJjaBxzIUHS9l2Hns_eFwK0Dp8RgsMmlSsj0nZB0qxbvEOmpWpPvvAPk9fzvJSqGpzS37RdS-xw42eZIi30jGSIGbPNcTy3oz43d6AYa0vfsWeVzuICUG6XYI31iMNsG7fwb6KSxLbJnekMyV7ESwDy7pp0V95AWWr8tilNd2K2ZeD/s320/Paradise%20Bronx.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I see that Ian Frazier has a new book coming out. It’s called <i>Paradise Bronx</i>. His publisher, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374280567/paradise-bronx">promotes</a> it as his magnum opus (“Ian Frazier’s magnum opus: a love song to New York City’s most heterogeneous and alive borough”). Frazier is among the <i>New Yorker</i> greats, right up there with Liebling, Mitchell, Kael, and McPhee. His <i>Great Plains</i>, <i>On the Rez</i>, and <i>Travels in Siberia</i> are among my favorite books. For me, the release of <i>Paradise Bronx</i>, scheduled for August 20, 2024, is one of the major literary events of the year. I avidly look forward to it.</span><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-84359661141217940882024-03-07T04:10:00.000-08:002024-03-19T03:55:01.059-07:00On the Horizon: 5 McPhee Canoe Trips<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRXeWnz9ETdyBFgnYc-ui1FJko-2wp_r9IbsqK75n_GMDxHvxO9bQR9351G2CTeGrR36OwJgj_559URT8bU5G8NBe2ZLW21FtZwFPo94xYdVh5cWPure-Vf9a6kkubIATmBIceg7LR979q6x77ot7zG_pjj0ZMpHz01OmbgQmKneE2rLyPnLlnlHJ6ZlcA/s6050/5%20McPhee%20Canoe%20Trips%201.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2646" data-original-width="6050" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRXeWnz9ETdyBFgnYc-ui1FJko-2wp_r9IbsqK75n_GMDxHvxO9bQR9351G2CTeGrR36OwJgj_559URT8bU5G8NBe2ZLW21FtZwFPo94xYdVh5cWPure-Vf9a6kkubIATmBIceg7LR979q6x77ot7zG_pjj0ZMpHz01OmbgQmKneE2rLyPnLlnlHJ6ZlcA/w400-h175/5%20McPhee%20Canoe%20Trips%201.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Illustration based on photo from <i>Canoeguy's Blog</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In homage to one of my all-time favorite </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">New Yorker</i><span style="font-family: georgia;"> writers, John McPhee, I’m launching a new series – an appreciation of five of his best pieces, each of which is about a canoe trip he took.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The five pieces are <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/02/24/the-survival-of-the-bark-canoei">“The Survival of the Bark Canoe”</a> (February 24 & March 3, 1975), <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1976/05/03/the-keel-of-lake-dickey">“The Keel of Lake Dickey” </a>(May 3, 1976), <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1977/05/02/the-encircled-riveri">“The Encircled River” </a>(May 2 & 9, 1977), <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/09/27/farewell-to-the-nineteenth-century">“Farewell to the Nineteenth Century” </a>(September 27, 1999), and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/15/paddling-after-henry-david-thoreau">“Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” </a>(December 15, 2003). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I’ll focus on one piece each month, examining what it’s about, how it’s made, and why I’m drawn to it. A new series then – “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – starting April 7, 2024. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-17588751757594597562024-03-06T03:27:00.000-08:002024-03-06T11:39:58.287-08:00March 4, 2024 Issue<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDkAhGZ2fVvOmBlFJmGrfhsohgafjslXnOHISz_eEBx5Lxw0n7iXothh6VDDmKkUW0Fx78g_QBF4XxFEZkrm3yYf8oqpRyAGbF3tDskv50zUYeAc0IHuXVtdV4HTPKaaceop_TeeHLjYa336lVGGUg2ppOOWCgz7Bh6u3NEZv2mGIoDUuYcHgftH71PHFw/s1037/2024_03_04.jpg.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1037" data-original-width="760" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDkAhGZ2fVvOmBlFJmGrfhsohgafjslXnOHISz_eEBx5Lxw0n7iXothh6VDDmKkUW0Fx78g_QBF4XxFEZkrm3yYf8oqpRyAGbF3tDskv50zUYeAc0IHuXVtdV4HTPKaaceop_TeeHLjYa336lVGGUg2ppOOWCgz7Bh6u3NEZv2mGIoDUuYcHgftH71PHFw/s320/2024_03_04.jpg.webp" width="235" /></a></div>I love these sentences:<p></p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">1. <i>Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works. </i>[Helen Rosner, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-food-scene/velvet-hauteur-at-angie-mars-le-b">“Tables for Two: Le B.”</a>]</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">2. <i>In 2005, Goswick sliced his suit going through the windshield of a car that went off the old Tappan Zee Bridge.</i> [Ben McGrath, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/thirty-thousandths-of-a-league-under-the-hudson">“Where’s My Car?”</a>]</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">3. <i>Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and others like it (all products, probably, of an offstage cloud-making machine), vividly captured beams of light from above the stage that came down in vertical shafts, suggesting interrogation lamps, the columns of a courthouse, or the bars of a prison cell. </i>[Ian Frazier, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/an-opera-for-the-wrongfully-convicted">“Uncaged Birds”</a>]</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">All three are from this week’s <i>New Yorker</i>. Which one’s my favorite? Well, all three are great. And I don’t actually have to choose. But if I did, I’d pick Frazier’s surreal “cloud” description – such a surprising, delightful combination of words: “performance,” “cloud,” “off-stage,” “cloud-making machine,” “beams of light,” “vertical shafts,” “interrogation lamps,” “columns of a courthouse,” “bars of a prison cell.” You’d wonder how their combination makes sense. But it does, in the context of Frazier’s excellent Talk story about an opera for the wrongfully convicted. Bravo, Ian Frazier!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Postscript:</b> I see the magazine has a new film critic – Justin Chang. Is this just for this issue, or is it permanent? Chang’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/about-dry-grasses-movie-review">review </a>of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses” intrigues me, particularly its exotic setting (eastern Anatolia). If I get a chance, I’ll check it out.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-57159826802261220912024-03-04T02:48:00.000-08:002024-03-04T02:49:45.403-08:00Acts of Seeing: Calçada da Glória<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLzkj-k7E3QqNgQlTaM6NZI7HbayUI8KXx3ZA8d8Gu1yV4OBsNQHOd0htIb36XMnTBBSijyfDL2g3IEeWoKSZQCgGG2kbWRQEbYYM82cQjIN-1DZKKLBdmEfjupJNHys8GvnV3X9neCFu91U9ZI2KyXGYZ27P_6k16LaM7jnD7LebYbTS3Vsf9h5ewkUre/s4032/IMG_0027.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLzkj-k7E3QqNgQlTaM6NZI7HbayUI8KXx3ZA8d8Gu1yV4OBsNQHOd0htIb36XMnTBBSijyfDL2g3IEeWoKSZQCgGG2kbWRQEbYYM82cQjIN-1DZKKLBdmEfjupJNHys8GvnV3X9neCFu91U9ZI2KyXGYZ27P_6k16LaM7jnD7LebYbTS3Vsf9h5ewkUre/w400-h300/IMG_0027.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Calçada da Glória,</i> 2024 (Photo by John MacDougall)</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I’m never sure about my choice of photos. For some reason I’m drawn to this one. I took it last month when we were in Lisbon. I love this old street. Its name is Calçada da Glória. We walked it up and down and took many pictures. But it’s this one that speaks to me. Of course I relish the receding, curving, downhill perspective, and the mash-up of walls and buildings, and the rails and cobblestones, and the overhead funicular railway wires. But what I like most, what makes the photo distinctive (for me, at least) is the graffiti-painting session going on in the yard at left. I love the juicy colors of the graffiti on that immense dingy white wall. What a canvas! Dan Chiasson once wrote, “Reduced to its bluntest purpose, all writing is a form of graffiti, an assertion that we exist in this time and place.” I think this is true. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-68974089438224389302024-03-01T11:35:00.000-08:002024-03-03T03:46:39.075-08:003 for the River: Tim Butcher's "Blood River"<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXLiaBjSjQRVljtbbLbVBsT1sYrGRY8bcwMvNNcldNMUlrjB6Myqz2aZ6MMO1cX4dvZigtDFVUQPN_xuWO3zrvXwHIuTriwiW22VDL59EUOpx94SC7yIaF-dP3JdbLawuuywCNx6dqfh3SYrz6weSC5o_9sCY1mA8vuHzo-aibCVQqGyzXEaSvapEOfXWP/s3885/3%20for%20the%20River.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2132" data-original-width="3885" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXLiaBjSjQRVljtbbLbVBsT1sYrGRY8bcwMvNNcldNMUlrjB6Myqz2aZ6MMO1cX4dvZigtDFVUQPN_xuWO3zrvXwHIuTriwiW22VDL59EUOpx94SC7yIaF-dP3JdbLawuuywCNx6dqfh3SYrz6weSC5o_9sCY1mA8vuHzo-aibCVQqGyzXEaSvapEOfXWP/w400-h220/3%20for%20the%20River.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;">This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s <i>Dangerous River</i> (1953), Jonathan Raban’s <i>Old Glory</i> (1981), and Tim Butcher’s <i>Blood River </i>(2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review <i>Blood River</i>. </span><p></p><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div><div>In this great book, Tim Butcher chronicles his harrowing forty-four-day, three-thousand-kilometer journey through the Congo in 2004 – “great” because it’s vivid, detailed, and unforgettable; “harrowing” because of the many dangers he faces. </div><div><br /></div><div>His trip follows the historic route of journalist-explorer Henry Morton Stanley, when he mapped the Congo River, 1874-1877. It unfolds in eight stages: (1) Kalemie to Kasongo by motorbike (500 km); (2) Kasongo to Kindu by motorbike (200 km); (3) Kindu to Lowa by UN patrol boat (150 km); (4) Lowa to Ubundu by pirogue (200 km); (5) Ubundu to Kisangani by motorbike and pirogue (150 km); (6) Kisangani to Mbandaka by UN push-boat and barge (1000 km); (7) Mbandaka to Kinshasa by UN helicopter (600 km); (8) Kinshasa to Boma by jeep (400 km). </div><div><br /></div><div><b>1. Kalemie to Kasongo</b></div><div><br /></div><div>This is the riskiest leg of Butcher’s journey. He says, “I knew the river descent would be hard, but the thing that worried me most was this overland section.” The terrain is impenetrable jungle, and the trail is narrow and overgrown. To make matters worse, rebel soldiers roam the bush. Butcher recruits a man from an aid group called Care International. His name is Benoit Bangana. Benoit has a colleague named Odimba. They have two Yamaha 0ff-road bikes. Benoit advises that “Motorbikes are the only way to travel” from Kalemie to Kasongo. The plan is that Butcher would ride with Odimba on one bike, and Benoit would ride on the other one with all their luggage. But then another man, Georges Mbuyu, a member of a pygmy rights group called <i>La Voix des Minoritiés</i>, agrees to join the expedition. Georges travels regularly in the bush. However, he doesn’t have a motorcycle. If Georges is to accompany them, they need a third bike. They find one owned by a man named Fiston Kasongo. For a price, Fiston agrees to go with them and drive Butcher on his bike. </div><div><br /></div><div>And so, one morning in August, 2004, the journey begins. Butcher writes,</div><div><br /></div><div><i>I love starting a journey very early in the day. It offers the comforting sense that if something goes wrong, there is still the whole day to sort it out. As we left Kalemie before dawn that August morning, I felt a strong sense of well-being. The track was overhung with dew-drenched branches and twigs, and within a few minutes my wet clothes showed why Benoit and Odimba were wearing waterproofs. But the fact that I was soaked did not dim my spirits. After all the planning and worry, I was finally on the track of Stanley in the Congo, picking my way from Lake Tanganyka across the ridges and valleys that he had traversed in 1876. I can remember feeling excitement. And I can remember just how the euphoria began to ebb a few kilometres down the track when we had our first flat tire.</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div><div>That first flat is on Odimba’s bike. Odimba fixes it expertly. The next three flats are on Fiston’s bike. His rear inner tube is a disaster, patches on patches. It’s decided that Fiston can’t go on. After fixing his tire one more time, he and Georges leave the group and head back to Kalemie. Butcher, Benoit and Odimba continue toward Kasongo on the Yamahas. They overnight in a bush settlement called Mukumbo. Butcher describes his lodgings:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Benoit returned to lead me to the hut that the chief had had prepared for me. It had walls of dried mud on wattle, a roof of heavy thatch and a door panel made of reeds woven across a wooden frame. Without a hinge, it worked by being heaved across the doorway, which I soon found had been cut for people quite a bit shorter than me. There was nothing modern in the room whatsoever. On the beaten-earth floor stood a bed – a frame of branches, still in their bark, lashed together with some sort of vine. The springs of the bed were made of lengths of split bamboo anchored at only one point halfway along the bed, so that when I put my hand down on them they bent horribly and appeared close to collapse. But the design was ingenious because when my weight was spread across the entire structure, the bamboo screen supported it easily, giving and moving with the contour of my shoulders and hip. It was a Fred Flintstone orthopaedic bed and I found it amazingly comfortable.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>The next day, rising at 3:00 AM, the trio continue their travel. Butcher suffers from dehydration (“The bottles I had drunk the day before were simply not enough, and I had not had a drop of water overnight, leaving me with a whopping headache and a pain behind my eyes”). He also has a sore ass (“My backside had stopped being numb and had moved into a painful phase, each buttock screaming to be relieved of the pressure of being squashed against the plastic of Odimba’s motorbike seat. I learned to lean on one side and then the other to alleviate the pressure, but it was agony”). Whenever they encounter soldiers, they speed up, and though the soldiers jump up, grab their weapons and shout at them, they’re too late; the bikers are already by them, disappearing down the trail into the bush.</div><div><br /></div><div>Finally they reach Kasongo. Butcher writes,</div><div><br /></div><div><i>I remember little about the arrival, apart from the vast jug of filtered water that I gulped down and the smell of the previous night’s hut on my mosquito net, in which I wrapped myself before collapsing.</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>2. Kasongo to Kindu</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Benoit stays in Kasongo. Butcher and Odimba continue on by motorcycle to Kindu, on the upper Congo River. Butcher describes his first sighting of the great river:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>We simply turned a corner and there, unheralded, in front of me, lay one of the natural wonders of the world. The object of so much mystery for generations of outsiders, and the thing that had fired my imagination through years of research, oozed lazily downstream between two thickly forested banks almost a kilometre apart. The midday sun was directly overhead, my least favourite time of day in the Congo when all the colours of the trees are washed out and the heat is at its most suffocating. In the flat light, the river appeared viscous and still.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Butcher, Odimba, and their loaded motorbike cross the Congo River in a pirogue:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Eventually its bow slid onto our bank with the lightest of kisses. The dreadnought was heavy and the river too inert to make it swing downstream, so it just sat there like a compass needle pointing in the direction I needed to go, straight across the Congo River. A dozen or so passengers disembarked, carrying bundles of fruit wrapped in banana leaves trussed up with cords made from vines. One man had with him a type of home-made bicycle where part of the frame, the front forks, were made of rough branches of wood still in their bark. There was brief moment of negotiation between Odimba and the oldest paddler, before a tariff was agreed and our motorbike, still laden with luggage, was picked up bodily by four men and dropped into the canoe. The hull was deep enough for one of the paddlers to sit on the bike and freewheel it down to the lowest and most stable point.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>It takes Butcher and Odimba another two days of hard biking to reach the port of Kindu.</div></div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>3. Kindu to Lowa</b></div><div><br /></div><div>In squalid Kindu, Butcher struggles to find a way downriver. Eventually, after five frustrating, uncomfortable days, he hitches a ride on a UN river patrol boat. The region is in its dry season; the river is low. The helmsmen drive the boat slowly, nosing it through sand banks, searching for a navigable channel. The slow pace affords Butcher the opportunity to look around and study his surroundings in detail. Here, for example, is his description of some of the rusting wrecks of old boats that used to ply this stretch of river, but which now line the left bank for well over a kilometre:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>One ship had been completely overrun by a reed bank and its old smokestack could just be seen poking from the vegetation with ivy, not smoke, spewing out of the top. Another hulk was lying on its side clear out of the water, the panels eaten away by rust to reveal bulkheads like ribs in a whale carcass. But my favourite was an old stern-paddler, a rust-red X-ray image of the Mississippi steamboats of my imagination. The panels were all gone, but the superstructure remained in skeletal form. At the stern was the octagonal tubular frame on which the wooden blades of the paddle once stood.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>The boat takes him 150 kilometres downriver, at which point its patrol in that direction ends. Butcher decides to go it alone from there. He’s deposited on shore near the village of Lowa.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>4. Lowa to Ubundu</b></div><div><br /></div><div>This is my favorite section of the journey. In Lowa, Butcher hires a pirogue and four paddlers to take him to Ubundu. This move brings him just about as close to the Congo River as he can get without swimming in it. You can tell from the beauty of his descriptions that he relishes the experience. For example:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their long-handled wooden paddles. About three metres long, they were shape of spades from a deck of cards, only stretched out to mansize, with shafts that were thin and shiny, polished by years of being slid through calloused hands.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>But no pleasure lasts for long in the Congo. As Butcher nears Ubundu, his sense of unease begins to build. What’s his next step? The river is navigable only as far as Ubundu, at which point he will have to continue overland for 100 kilometres around a series of rapids and cataracts known as Stanley Falls, until he reaches Kisangani, the large port city built at the bottom of the seventh and final set of rapids. Butcher writes, “All in all, I knew Ubundu was always going to be one of the major troublespots on my journey.” </div></div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>5. Ubundu to Kisangani</b></div><div><br /></div><div>But it turns out Unbundu isn’t that bad. Butcher finds lodging in the church of St. Joseph’s. And three motorbike drivers from the aid group International Rescue Committee volunteer to take him to Kisangani. His description of the trip is superb. Here’s a sample:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>There was absolutely no work taking place on the road. The advancing jungle had choked it to a single-track footpath, snaking around mature trees growing up from the centre of the old carriageway and past vast mudslides and dramatic rockfalls. Bridges had been washed away, making us pick our way down to the bottom of water courses and then charge up the other side. Recent rains made the whole exercise a dirty and dangerous one as the bikes slithered in the glutinous mud time and again, often pitching me onto the deck. One fallen tree caused a twenty-minute delay as the only route for our convoy of three bikes was up and over the top. This meant unloading everything, carting it over to the other side and then heaving the bikes over the fallen trunk, all the time sliding in mud that stood no chance of drying out because the dense leaf cover kept out any direct sunlight. The sticky heat felt as if we were toiling inside a hothouse.</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>6. Kisangani to Mbandaka</b></div><div><br /></div><div>This section contains one of the book’s most memorable lines. Butcher is aboard a UN pusher traveling 1000 kilometres downriver to Mbandaka. He says, “To pass the time I would drag out my daily ablutions, taking perverse pleasure in the slow process of boiling water for a meticulous, slow shave, before taking one of the world’s most dangerous showers.” He explains that the water for the shower comes straight from the river. He says,</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Against the creamy ceramic of an old shower cubicle, the water ran brown like tea. It reminded me of Scottish hill water tainted with peat, only it was much warmer and the chemicals that leached brown into the Congo River were more terrifying than those found in Highland soil. Somewhere to our north ran the Ebola River, a tributary of a tributary of the Congo River, but a name that is associated with a horrific medical condition. It was near this river that a virus was first discovered that caused its victims to die in a spectacularly horrible way, bleeding to death from every orifice. Several of the world’s other spectacularly horrible haemorrhagic fevers were first discovered in the Congo. I kept my mouth shut whenever I showered.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Nevertheless, whether it’s from the shower or some other source, Butcher becomes sick. By the time he gets to Mbandaka, it’s all he can do to climb off the boat and back onto terra firma.</div></div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>7. Mbandaka to Kinshasa</b></div><div><br /></div><div>In Mbandaka, feeling too ill to face another delay of unknown duration, Butcher decides to travel the 600 kilometres to Kinshasa by UN helicopter. He says, “The shame I felt at temporarily abandoning Stanley’s route was more than outweighed by a growing sense of relief that my ordeal was nearing its end.”</div></div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>8. Kinshasa to Boma</b></div><div><br /></div><div>In Kinshasa, Butcher enters the world of the Congo super-elite. He stays at the headquarters of a cobalt-mining company, “a brand-new, luxury villa built on a prime piece of city-centre real estate fronting directly onto the Congo River.” It’s only after two days of “sleeping in a bed with laundered sheets, drinking clean water, eating healthy food and dosing myself with antibiotics” that he feels strong enough to undertake the final leg of his journey. Using a jeep loaned to him by the mining company, he and two others drive the 400 kilometres to Boma, on the Congo River estuary. </div><div><br /></div><div>As he rides in the jeep, Butcher reflects on his 3000-kilometre Congo journey. He says, “In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken.”</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Blood River</i> is one of my favorite books. The above outline doesn’t come close to doing it justice. Maybe in future posts I can do better, explore it more deeply. My next post in this series will be on structure. </div></div></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-79914882859709592372024-02-27T03:37:00.000-08:002024-02-27T03:37:00.471-08:00February 26, 2024 Issue<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_RExRYWhyphenhyphenCd87mchFfmx7dnx9F4-giEllzwfoiTW0yh8Vin5eQjP02aMxeo4A2_qZZ8BtwHE6dqaOHLvTw9zAEiQQ4s5HXr5yk7t-xsoCMuoF1fHLfmDy2a9azkug3Rn53uIuVvtkMzbASGuaSa8I-q6u-SmHV1XdTN5Vi_ITXdXwXu7TrCPdqSSqdAms/s1037/2024_02_26.jpg.webp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1037" data-original-width="760" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_RExRYWhyphenhyphenCd87mchFfmx7dnx9F4-giEllzwfoiTW0yh8Vin5eQjP02aMxeo4A2_qZZ8BtwHE6dqaOHLvTw9zAEiQQ4s5HXr5yk7t-xsoCMuoF1fHLfmDy2a9azkug3Rn53uIuVvtkMzbASGuaSa8I-q6u-SmHV1XdTN5Vi_ITXdXwXu7TrCPdqSSqdAms/s320/2024_02_26.jpg.webp" width="235" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Art is where you find it. This week Nick Paumgarten finds it in a hotel-room singing session of the vocal trio Tiny Habits. Paumgarten writes,</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Still, with a couple of hours to kill, they were determined, or maybe just habituated, to make and post one of their signature short videos. They try to put out two a week. The space was snug, and, sitting cross-legged on the bed together in their socks, they exuded conviviality and ease. Rae and Khan wore parachute-y pants. Mayowa, the shy one, had a head scarf holding back all but a few of his dreadlocks.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Mayowa had chosen “Misty,” the Erroll Garner classic, with lyrics reluctantly furnished by Johnny Burke. First, they listened to Ella Fitzgerald’s version, then got to work arranging it into three parts.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Mayowa often takes the lower register, and Rae the highest, though they seem to weave around one another. On “Misty,” the melody fell to Rae. Sometimes they make a Google Doc, color-coding the parts, but this time they winged it.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i></i></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Look at me</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">And I feel like I’m clingin’ to a cloud I can’t understand;</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">I get misty, just holding your hand</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That last line made me smile. Paumgarten’s account of the session continues for several more delightful paragraphs. It ends with a description of the group making a video of their performance:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>They set up an iPhone on some pillows and scrunched together at the foot of the bed. Ten takes later, they still hadn’t got it.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>They went at it again, making their singing faces. They nailed it this time, and Rae shouted, “That’s the one!” The process had taken an hour. They tinkered with the reverb, and then got ready to post.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>“What’s a misty emoji?” Rae asked. They settled on an umbrella, then titled the vid “misty . . . in manhattan.” It was time to get ready for a big dinner out with their agent.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Paumgarten’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/26/the-prodigies-of-harmonies">“Misty in Manhattan” </a>is another in his ongoing series of music-related Talk stories: see, for example, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/15/man-of-two-thousand-tracks">“Skin in the Game,”</a> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/11/stewart-copelands-police-diaries-bang-on">“Banger,”</a> and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/self-care-rock-and-roll-division">“Nice Things.”</a> </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">I enjoy them immensely. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-41125110439403090732024-02-24T03:15:00.000-08:002024-03-09T03:37:01.428-08:00Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #9 "Minimal Realism: Pawel Pawlikowski's 'Ida' "<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRgFh6Qom5en8SPwGP2KEYoIK30jMAK-hR0MPMEeI0u3o7k2X2Zg5NYGyZBFmpz1LuKt25P11PJJadrXyayFp4gTrl1qa3fvOGtx4e1gwLf6GEyDnvPu_Rvg0B4vLcv_jSu87RTaavauc9EEU1lKgzFZK9fzECDwMsxMLOMzUUYXTDgxz8RUrDMI6C2uhm/s580/Ida.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="580" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRgFh6Qom5en8SPwGP2KEYoIK30jMAK-hR0MPMEeI0u3o7k2X2Zg5NYGyZBFmpz1LuKt25P11PJJadrXyayFp4gTrl1qa3fvOGtx4e1gwLf6GEyDnvPu_Rvg0B4vLcv_jSu87RTaavauc9EEU1lKgzFZK9fzECDwMsxMLOMzUUYXTDgxz8RUrDMI6C2uhm/w400-h276/Ida.webp" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still from Pawel Pawlikowski's <i>Ida</i> (2013)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">This is the second post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten <i>New Yorker & Me</i>,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is <a href="https://thenewyorkerandme.blogspot.com/2014/08/minimal-realism-in-pawel-pawlikowskis.html">"Minimal Realism: Pawel Pawlikowski's 'Ida' "</a></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"> (August 6, 2014):</span></div><div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: #38761d;">I like the look of Pawel Pawlikowski’s <i>Ida</i>, and the feel of it. Pawlikowski has a poet’s gift for using objects, landscapes, and people expressively, so that they all become part of his vision. It’s this gift, I think, that makes <i>Ida</i> a rich, emotionally charged experience.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: #38761d;">The best description of Pawlikowski’s technique that I’ve read is found in David Denby’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/ida-a-film-masterpiece">" 'Ida': A Film Masterpiece"</a> (“Culture Desk,” newyorker.com, May 27, 2014):</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><span style="color: #38761d;">The director and his fledgling cinematographer, Lukasz Zal, shot the movie in hard-focus black and white; they have produced images so distinct and powerful that they sharpen our senses. “Ida” might be called static were it not for the currents of emotion from shot to shot, which electrify the women’s relation to each other throughout. Clearing away clutter, Pawlikowski almost never moves the camera; many of the scenes are just long-lasting shots, fed by a single light source that often puts the faces in partial shadow (what we understand of these two women will always be limited). Sometimes the figures are positioned at the bottom of the frame, with enormous gray Polish skies above them, as if the entire burden of a cursed country weighed on its people. Both beautiful and oppressive, the bleakness of the landscape in winter suggests something uncanny in the air, as if we were watching a horror film without ghouls.</span></i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><span style="color: #38761d;">One can trace possible influences—Carl Theodor Dreyer, very likely, and Robert Bresson, and European art films from the sixties and early seventies like François Truffaut’s “The Wild Child,” and also Polish movies made in the period in which “Ida” is set. But I can’t recall anything major that looks quite like this movie. Pawlikowski is not after commonplace realism but something you would have to call minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention to what remains almost rapt: the clinking of the nuns’ spoons at a silent convent dinner, some gentle country sounds, the transfixing boredom of long drives through the flat landscape.</span></i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: #38761d;">That “minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention almost rapt,” is an excellent description of Pawlikowski’s style. I prefer it to, say, “stylistic austerity,” and variations thereof, which some critics are using to describe <i>Ida</i>’s form. See, for example, Dana Stevens, <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2014/05/ida-review-pawel-pawlikowskis-hauntingly-beautiful-road-movie-is-finally-here-dont-miss-it.html">"Ida"</a> (<i>Slate</i>, May 2, 2014): “In many ways, <i>Ida</i> feels like a film that might have been made anytime in the past 50 years. It’s set in the early 1960s, and its stylistic austerity and interest in theological questions often recall the work of Robert Bresson (though Pawlikowski lacks, I think, Bresson’s deeply held faith in salvation).”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: #38761d;">The comparison of <i>Ida</i> with Bresson’s work is, I think, a mistake. Bresson’s films, particularly <i>Diary of a Country Priest</i> (1950), are austerely beautiful. But they’re also intolerably pious and inhumanly pure. In her capsule review of <i>Diary of a Country Priest</i>, Pauline Kael says of the young priest whose faith is neither understood nor accepted by his parishioners, “Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is? The priest’s austere spirituality may give the community the same sort of pain that Bresson’s later movies give some of us in the audience” (<i>5001 Nights at the Movies</i>, 1991). <i>Ida</i> is brief; it is spare; it is shot in black-and-white; it is dominated by the color gray, not because Pawlikowski wants to be austere, but because he wants to be true to the times (“What was that lovely city beneath Communism’s gray casing?” Adam Zagajewsky asks, in his memoir <i>Another Beauty</i>). But <i>Ida</i> also has jazz in it, and sex, and vitality. There’s a young naïve, pious Catholic nun in it, but there’s also a worldly, cynical, hard-drinking, nicotine-addicted aunt known as Red Wanda.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: #38761d;"><i>Ida</i> is, as Anthony Lane says, in his <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/road-trips-3">"Road Trips"</a> (<i>The New Yorker</i>, May 12, 2014), “a road movie, of sorts” (“Thus to our surprise, this small tale becomes a road movie, of sorts, and a journey back into a divisive past”). That “of sorts” is crucial. Most road movies (e.g., <i>Thelma & Louise</i>, <i>The Motorcycle Diaries</i>, <i>Sideways</i>) are wild rides. <i>Ida</i> is more solemn (Denby calls it a “spiritual journey”). But it’s still a thousand times wilder than Bresson’s painstakingly tedious and offensively holy <i>Diary of a Country Priest</i>. In <i>Ida</i>, two women – tough, wry Wanda and her young niece, Ida, a Catholic nun – set off by car to discover how Ida’s parents died. Their vehicle, a white Wartburg, has almost as much presence as the Norton motorcycle (“the Mighty One”) in <i>Motorcycle Diaries</i>. At one point, we see an intoxicated Wanda driving it, and in the next moment, we see it being hauled back onto the road by a handsome team of workhorses. I leaned forward to absorb this remarkable scene, but it vanished in an instant – just one example of <i>Ida</i>’s many wonderful, understated details.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: #38761d;">Road movie landscapes are often ravishing (e.g., the gold-and-green Santa Ynez Valley in <i>Sideways</i>, the soaring Andean vistas in <i>Motorcycle Diaries</i>); not so in <i>Ida</i>. Well, let me qualify that. <i>Ida</i>’s landscape <i>is</i> ravishing if you relish, as I do, the beauty of bleakness – “the moon-gray landscape of eastern Poland,” as Lane describes it (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/ida-2">"Ida,"</a> newyorker.com). This is a landscape soaked in repressed memory, and <i>Ida</i> is an opening to it, an excavation of horrific memory buried in the Polish ground.</span></span></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-25077627416682574452024-02-23T03:04:00.000-08:002024-02-23T03:04:49.743-08:00February 12 & 19, 2024 Issue<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-0CNpskANYwJ_GRx1DUUo0jSoivZqkjMFr6fKI4VzMlLAjMx3rbBDg-9WzTPuxbrI-Rk58ZOK6h3-VMq0ag-yUdfLQMXpym83Y6xE5zcE9RF1M1jAvqcngDvFkAVizqf7RYByw5ie2gzlfTJKIx3ywwEnruB5dUH8XcHU4UzZA9SNhXT8qXJfkincnZL9/s1038/2024_02_12.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1038" data-original-width="760" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-0CNpskANYwJ_GRx1DUUo0jSoivZqkjMFr6fKI4VzMlLAjMx3rbBDg-9WzTPuxbrI-Rk58ZOK6h3-VMq0ag-yUdfLQMXpym83Y6xE5zcE9RF1M1jAvqcngDvFkAVizqf7RYByw5ie2gzlfTJKIx3ywwEnruB5dUH8XcHU4UzZA9SNhXT8qXJfkincnZL9/s320/2024_02_12.gif" width="234" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">One of the magazine’s most inspired recent moves was the creation of the new Hannah Goldfield column “On and Off the Menu.” Goldfield is one of my favorite writers. Her new column gives her more space to explore subjects that interest her. For example, in this week’s issue, in a piece titled <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/12/the-offbeat-indulgence-of-handmade-vinegar">“Pucker Up,”</a> she writes about handmade vinegar. She says,</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Many vinegars taste overwhelmingly of acid, which might seem like the point—until you try Crawford’s, which are more flavorful than sharp. You can sip them without wincing; they’re as suited for spiking soda water or cookie icing as they are for finishing a soup or a salad. A young batch we tasted, made from fresh bay leaves, could convert the staunchest skeptic of that herb: it was powerfully earthy but also citrusy and a bit sweet. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Crawford is a former restaurant chef who is the founder and sole employee of a company called Tart Vinegar. Goldfield visits her at her “factory” – a single room, situated on a high floor of a building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, “equipped with an induction burner, a microscope, and a big sink, plus bouquets of lemon verbena and whole persimmons hanging from the ceiling to dry. About half the room is occupied by tall shelving units, lined with hundreds of large plastic pails.” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In my favorite passage, Goldfield goes “foraging” with Crawford at the Union Square Greenmarket:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>On the day I spent with her, we stopped at the Union Square Greenmarket, where she goes at least once a week, foraging for what could become vinegar—Vermont maple syrup, lavender grown on Long Island, perilla from the Catskills. “If it doesn’t taste good raw, it won’t taste good fermented,” she said—and, if it tastes good raw, turning it into vinegar is like preserving it in edible amber. At the factory, she plunged her arms elbow-deep into her newest batches, swishing around the pungent matter, nudging it toward its next life.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That “and, if it tastes good raw, turning it into vinegar is like preserving it in edible amber” is delightful! The whole piece is delightful. I enjoyed it immensely.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Postscript:</b> <i>The New Yorker</i>’s other food writer, Helen Rosner, also has a piece in this week’s issue. Her <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-food-scene/the-secret-ingredient-behind-a-breakfast-taco-pop-up-border-town">“Tables for Two: Border Town at the Screen Door”</a> reviews a breakfast-taco pop-up in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint. It contains this delectable passage:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>On one visit to Border Town, I devised a test: I scarfed down one potato-and-chorizo taco almost the instant Rosa handed me my bag: terrific. Back at home, I unwrapped another one, after the tortilla and its filling had been steaming inside their foil blanket for close to an hour. Sure enough, the taco was extra warm and yielding, and the flavors—the flour and the char, the faint and sweet minerality of the potato, the spice and fat of the chorizo—all blurred together, a perfect harmonic chord.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Hannah Goldfield <i>and</i> Helen Rosner in the same issue: double bliss. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-68273659772695498052024-02-22T02:46:00.000-08:002024-02-22T02:50:34.812-08:00February 5, 2024 Issue<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGFki1grvrDcghLl2sRc7A6ozOR6D0x7Cg3Cf3woWZZX0bqRmMNWdDrDoK2WCvNY1JwMebCPLwfW1Wcc_YgHXfYYpkOaOfVYqbxeP_1BRPOclpg83eNoq3q0xbC9NUauq9wQM8rvANl1RlbWdAhUPoeo0LkaJ-HtQORD8bIUZPjRXwGdw0ZHFdkv323ypg/s1037/2024_02_05.jpg.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1037" data-original-width="760" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGFki1grvrDcghLl2sRc7A6ozOR6D0x7Cg3Cf3woWZZX0bqRmMNWdDrDoK2WCvNY1JwMebCPLwfW1Wcc_YgHXfYYpkOaOfVYqbxeP_1BRPOclpg83eNoq3q0xbC9NUauq9wQM8rvANl1RlbWdAhUPoeo0LkaJ-HtQORD8bIUZPjRXwGdw0ZHFdkv323ypg/s320/2024_02_05.jpg.webp" width="235" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">This week’s issue contains a disturbing, depressing report by Elizabeth Kolbert. Titled <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/the-perverse-policies-that-fuel-wildfires">“Burn Notice,”</a> it’s a survey of recent books on the wildfire crisis. Kolbert asks what’s fuelling it. Her answer is climate change. She writes,</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Another recent report, from the Federation of American Scientists, observed that the world is warming so fast that the models firefighters rely on to predict how blazes will behave have become obsolete. “Climate change is drying fuels and making forests more flammable,” the report said. “As a result, no matter how much money we spend on wildfire suppression, we will not be able to stop increasingly extreme wildfires.”</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And, as Kolbert explains, these megafires are increasingly extreme because of the "CO2 feedback loop”:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>When trees burn, they release the carbon they took up while growing. This carbon contributes to warming, which increases the likelihood of wildfires, which release more carbon, and so on. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">This cycle seems impossible to reverse. We’re fated to a flame-filled future. What happened in Canada last year (loss of nearly forty-six million acres to wildfire) is just a taste of what's coming. It's hard to avoid the feeling that we're doomed. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Postscript:</b> It's still winter here in Canada, but already there are over fifty wildfires burning in Alberta. The 2024 wildfire season is off to an early start. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-83721655470679248272024-02-21T02:39:00.000-08:002024-02-21T02:52:24.674-08:00January 29, 2024 Issue<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifUUDlk3qS5yBgdxaNO2wl5CnmWflYzP34vrDjd2Gzm7Qo0In2wwXl8bC9U1GCdlv4TXHezYBQeS-s5rj0SXwfr8N0VrAlp91hHH3UpEXDRNvGTmmKmaOimLXvD_JDpp3PsowJp44sgW87a7rt1bT-Uj_h3jkXFVsCDTj5JmrMlXlCnZgUnbHMgrQKIcx8/s1037/2024_01_29.jpg.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1037" data-original-width="760" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifUUDlk3qS5yBgdxaNO2wl5CnmWflYzP34vrDjd2Gzm7Qo0In2wwXl8bC9U1GCdlv4TXHezYBQeS-s5rj0SXwfr8N0VrAlp91hHH3UpEXDRNvGTmmKmaOimLXvD_JDpp3PsowJp44sgW87a7rt1bT-Uj_h3jkXFVsCDTj5JmrMlXlCnZgUnbHMgrQKIcx8/s320/2024_01_29.jpg.webp" width="235" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I love art description. There are two wonderful examples of it in this week’s issue – both by Jackson Arn. In his absorbing <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/29/the-thunder-hurried-slow-art-review">“Tone Control,”</a> a review of an exhibition of works by the abstract painter Emily Mason, Arn writes,</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>I enjoy her paintings most when she makes an unlikely pair of colors scrape against each other and then smooths things over with a third. In “Greener Lean” (1978), the odd couple are a thick, too sugary green and a sickly yellow, and the deus ex machina is a drizzle of red in the lower right, which gives the yellow a little life and the green a little nuance. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That “the deus ex machina is a drizzle of red” is excellent! Even better is Arn’s description of Mason’s “Like Some Old Fashioned Miracle” (1972-74):</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Working your way from the left to the right side of the small, square “Like Some Old Fashioned Miracle” (1972-74), you first find bright yellow and blue cheek to cheek with hunter green, simple as two plus three equals five. In the center, everything goes wonky. The blue ripens, the shade of green switches from hunter to rusty penny, and the yellow disappears altogether, only to emerge on the other side bearing a little penny rust itself. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Translating painting into words is itself an art - one that Arn seems quite adept at. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ9No_nJRp-Ep4xF7LkiylsV2EfNzk7RPi7abECrprq1l7aSHaGDXhlm3v2FIc2XzuXIrS8DPpbHB0gu-g6H9uf64lfNKMOx0GhtYmhKrsyrZ7Vlzadccc0JBp8RE2uHcxF5o7oRl-JUXoGwz8wUtYHQFZtd0Cq8q6yzJBIbfLENSppAqnBL9dFFqIEXox/s1615/Emily%20Mason,%20%22Like%20Some%20Old%20Fashioned%20Miracle%22%20(1972-74).jpg.webp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1615" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ9No_nJRp-Ep4xF7LkiylsV2EfNzk7RPi7abECrprq1l7aSHaGDXhlm3v2FIc2XzuXIrS8DPpbHB0gu-g6H9uf64lfNKMOx0GhtYmhKrsyrZ7Vlzadccc0JBp8RE2uHcxF5o7oRl-JUXoGwz8wUtYHQFZtd0Cq8q6yzJBIbfLENSppAqnBL9dFFqIEXox/s320/Emily%20Mason,%20%22Like%20Some%20Old%20Fashioned%20Miracle%22%20(1972-74).jpg.webp" width="317" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Emily Mason, <i>Like Some Old Fashioned Miracle</i> (1972-74)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /> </span><p></p><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-10867437340591686112024-02-20T03:54:00.000-08:002024-02-20T04:00:12.902-08:00January 22, 2024 Issue<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfFbDPzA5t8CUhOYy5G8IPCMEzW6waHVi4HhrperLVkiQIS9JYwgEomqeBRUsOBWLVxgXuKvy7MGXwFUwGqF7nUInBtOlGuL10b9PQLHJeGLWuRG_bFPiI1BPOtwADWVAmmWFULWFbAYBPmTUCBxybmaAeUwNmozIQlgVvbFH_hTNjJw-hqOOMlMx0mLI5/s1037/2024_01_22.jpg.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1037" data-original-width="760" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfFbDPzA5t8CUhOYy5G8IPCMEzW6waHVi4HhrperLVkiQIS9JYwgEomqeBRUsOBWLVxgXuKvy7MGXwFUwGqF7nUInBtOlGuL10b9PQLHJeGLWuRG_bFPiI1BPOtwADWVAmmWFULWFbAYBPmTUCBxybmaAeUwNmozIQlgVvbFH_hTNjJw-hqOOMlMx0mLI5/s320/2024_01_22.jpg.webp" width="235" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Pick of the Issue this week is Leslie Jamison’s extraordinary personal essay <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/22/the-birth-of-my-daughter-the-death-of-my-marriage">“A New Life.”</a> It’s about becoming a parent and ending a marriage – both experiences tightly interwoven. The piece brims with thisness – “blue mesh hospital underwear,” “garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers,” “zipped pajamas with little dangling feet,” “diapers patterned with drawings of scrambled eggs and bacon.” </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Jamison is a superb describer – direct, specific, concrete. For example:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>In April, I took the baby on a book tour. She was three months old. My mother came with us. 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.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Another:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Up in the mountains, I ran out of baby-food pouches the day before the ceremony. So I walked into town to buy more, the baby snug against me in her carrier, bundled in an eggplant-purple snowsuit, swivelling her head like an owl to look at all the snowy trees. On the walk back, she cried because her cheeks were red and burning from the cold. Why hadn’t I packed more pouches? Every time something went wrong, it was only my fault. I wanted a life that was ninety per cent thinking about the complexities of consciousness, and just ten per cent buying pouches of purée. But this was not the life I’d signed up for.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Jamison’s imagery is astounding. On falling in love, she writes, “It was like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth.” On nursing her baby: “When my phone buzzed with the third text from my husband, <i>She really needs to nurse</i>, 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>I’m a teacher. I’m tits. I’m a teacher. I’m tits</i>.” On divorce: “When I was very young, I thought divorce involved a ceremony, the couple moving backward through the choreography of their wedding, starting at the altar, unclasping their hands, and then walking separately down the aisle.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">There are dozens of other quotable passages. The whole piece is quotable! It’s a masterpiece of personal history writing. Highly recommended.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Postscript:</b> The unfurling clementine-peel illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli that accompanies Jamison’s piece is brilliant.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwNSihoCYPut9LAnQjsD_XuC6oPp6dZPSf7DCcjk4kABCCTlwvPABMGozx95UH-v_3TE0yQIsRHq3YuTNylvf2rUAMw6xb7ZmPq54Pj21N9-wtRlnpCqlTgPqNAPeb6z8WaW7-4IFHmAKe8wI7n_q4RdUNGqoTgwGWdOp1XFx6HvOBQb36IRVzmkHZ3R1l/s2240/Bianca%20Bagnarelli,%20%22A%20New%20Life%22.jpg.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="749" data-original-width="2240" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwNSihoCYPut9LAnQjsD_XuC6oPp6dZPSf7DCcjk4kABCCTlwvPABMGozx95UH-v_3TE0yQIsRHq3YuTNylvf2rUAMw6xb7ZmPq54Pj21N9-wtRlnpCqlTgPqNAPeb6z8WaW7-4IFHmAKe8wI7n_q4RdUNGqoTgwGWdOp1XFx6HvOBQb36IRVzmkHZ3R1l/w400-h134/Bianca%20Bagnarelli,%20%22A%20New%20Life%22.jpg.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-77780982841415016662024-02-19T03:31:00.000-08:002024-02-19T03:31:28.568-08:003 for the River: Jonathan Raban's "Old Glory"<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUTz65ibg4ASqZpPypj54DwgzohiEz7E1UYoxtR6FOjeKOeHPvjpt13xhhF3AT0j8hYNDua8sKpF2SYkSwHutW3toWOecr01MydJ-1jFAo65qMUxfn635t8R5wdpHGrLuQKr1vu5TrSHD-VN_TKoAnvncoicjzCr5x_oqlyNgi2J7LWqvB9NCuTQKTcYje/s3885/3%20for%20the%20River.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2132" data-original-width="3885" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUTz65ibg4ASqZpPypj54DwgzohiEz7E1UYoxtR6FOjeKOeHPvjpt13xhhF3AT0j8hYNDua8sKpF2SYkSwHutW3toWOecr01MydJ-1jFAo65qMUxfn635t8R5wdpHGrLuQKr1vu5TrSHD-VN_TKoAnvncoicjzCr5x_oqlyNgi2J7LWqvB9NCuTQKTcYje/w400-h220/3%20for%20the%20River.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;">This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s <i>Dangerous River</i> (1953), Jonathan Raban’s <i>Old Glory </i>(1981), and Tim Butcher’s <i>Blood River</i> (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review <i>Old Glory</i>. </span><p></p><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div>This extraordinary book chronicles the two-thousand-mile journey down the Mississippi River that Raban made in 1979, piloting a sixteen-foot, mustard-colored aluminum motorboat, powered by a fifteen horsepower Johnson outboard motor. For a big, dangerous river like the Mississippi, the boat seems small and frail. The typical reaction of river people when they see it is “Shit, you came all the ways down in this?” Time and again during the trip, Raban is warned to be careful. A lockmaster in Minneapolis tells him, “You going to ride the Mississippi, you better respect her or she’ll do you in.” The dangers are many: sloughs, chutes, towboats, stumps, waves, eddies, boils, wing dams, hidden bank supports, pipes, cables, wrecks, wind, rain, and fog. Here, for example, is Raban’s description of Boulanger Slough:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>The bluffs widened, and the Mississippi spread itself into a great islanded pool, two miles from shore to shore. It was Boulanger Slough. Two nights before, sitting in the restaurant in Minneapolis, I had crossed it on the charts as casually as if I’d been planning a country stroll. Boulanger Slough in life, though, looked horribly different from Boulanger Slough on paper.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>So this was what a stump field was: a barbered forest. For as far as one could see, the rotten tree trunks stood up, some just below, some a few inches above the water. It had been, perhaps, a hundred years since they’d been cut down, and they looked as if they were already halfway to being coal. The river slurped around their blackened roots and boles. The channel here swung out and east through this waste of water, bog and timber. The wind was bowling long gusts from the right-hand shore, where it began as a riffle on the edge of the stump field, then built up a rolling swell as it came north across the mile or so of peaty water.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>By the time it reached me, it had accumulated a frightening height and weight: lines of chocolate combers ran straight up and down the channel. They took hold of the boat and rocked it over on its gunwales. I had to find a diagonal course into the rollers, and kept on trying to tack against the grain of the wind. Black to red and red to black ... but the buoys were mostly hidden by the high waves. Suddenly lifted on a crest, I’d see them, then get pitched down again into the slop. Riding a wave top for a moment, I looked for the two shores. They were both getting farther away.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>That “The river slurped around their blackened roots and boles” is excellent. One of the great pleasures of this book is reading its many wonderful river descriptions. Here’s another:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>On this windless morning, the water of Big Slough looked as viscous as thick machine oil. It was blackened by the decomposing forest that lay under it. Miles of it were so shallow that the stump fields on either side of the channel were exposed right down to their spreading roots. Wedded to their own immobile reflections, the stumps, in their hundreds of thousands, made arabesque patterns of flattened hexagons. Away across the slough there was the rigid outline of a man in a punt, fishing for his image, and the image casting back. Not a sound, not a ripple fractured the great, empty symmetry of the place. With the motor killed, I was part of it: doubled in water, I was as lifeless a component of the scheme as a carboniferous stump.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>And one more:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>There were sharp rips and creases in the current now, as if the Mississippi were trying to tear itself apart; but the most scary change was the succession of great waxy boils. I could see them coming from a long way off. Most of the river was lightly puckered by the wind, but there were patches of what looked like dead-calm water: circular in shape, a hundred yards or so across. I took them for quiet millponds, good places to light a pipe or unscrew the cap of a thermos flask. Delighted to find that the Mississippi now afforded such convenient picnic spots, I drove straight for one. I hit its edge, the boat slewed sideways and I was caught on the rim of a spinning centrifuge. I had mistaken it for calm water because its motion was so violent that no wind could disturb it. I could see the cap of the boil far away in the middle, a clear eighteen inches higher than the rest of the river. From this raised point, the water was spilling around and down the convex face, disappearing deep into the crack in which my boat was caught. Running the engine at full speed, I yanked myself out easily enough, but I had felt the river trying to suck me under, boat and all, and I was tense with fright. </i></div><div><br /></div><div>Raban’s journey starts in Minneapolis, September 3, 1979, and ends three-and-a-half months later in the river delta near Morgan City, Louisiana. Along the way, he visits more than forty river towns, including Red Wing, Wabasha, Winona, La Crosse, Lansing, Prairie du Chien, Guttenberg, North Buena Vista, Dubuque, Galena, Bellevue, Savanna, Moline, Davenport, Andalusia, Muscatine, Oquawka, Burlington, Dallas City, Nauvoo, Hannibal, St. Louis, Sainte Genevieve, Chester, Grand Tower, Cape Girardeau, Hickman, New Madrid, Caruthersville, Osceola, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, New Orleans, Lockport, and Houma. He roams these places, drinking in bars and pool halls, eating in restaurants and cafes, staying in hotels and motels, crashing community picnics and pig roasts, attending church services (even though he’s not a believer), touring local businesses (meat packing plant, cotton warehouse, grain terminal). He occasionally goes on a date (Ms. Alpine, in Dubuque; Judith, in Muscatine). In Savanna, he participates in a nighttime raccoon hunt. In St. Louis, he has a brief relationship with a woman named Sally. In Memphis, where there’s a mayoral election happening, he follows the campaign of Reverend Judge Otis Higgs. He rides two towboats – the <i>Frank Stegbauer</i>, from Memphis to Vicksburg, and the <i>Jimmie L.</i>, from Natchez to New Orleans. In a Houma bar, he nearly gets knifed. </div><div><br /></div><div>Everywhere he goes, he talks with people – people in bars, restaurants, and hotels; business people; river people; towboat people. None of it is planned. To me, that’s the allure of his approach. As he says early on, the whole idea of the journey is "to follow the current of things.” He writes, </div><div><br /></div><div><i>The book and the journey would be all of a piece. The plot would be written by the current of the river itself. It would carry me into long deep pools of solitude, and into brushes with society on the shore. Where the river meandered, so would the book, and when the current speeded up into a narrow chute, the book would follow it. Everything would be left to chance. There’d be no advance reservations, no letters of introduction. I would try to be as much like a piece of human driftwood as I could manage. Cast off, let the Mississippi take hold, and trust to whatever adventures or longueurs the river might throw my way. It was a journey that would be random and haphazard; but it would also have the insistent purpose of the river current as it drove southward and seaward to the Gulf of the Mexico. </i></div><div><br /></div><div>I find this approach irresistible. Raban carries it out magnificently. <i>Old Glory</i> is one of his masterpieces. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>Postscript:</b> In future posts, I’ll discuss various specific aspects of <i>Old Glory</i>, e.g., its structure, action, and point of view. But first I want to introduce the third book of my trio – Tim Butcher’s superb <i>Blood River</i>. That will be the subject of my next post in this series. </div></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-78855699391718406652024-01-26T03:33:00.000-08:002024-01-26T03:33:38.702-08:00Taking a Break<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk1X-K4unGjO7z4lCglZL9GvKk6uJ58yg8H-OMS-AkkizEDx5LLLLBDU6DDGjEjnjb0pWmFACByJb4_WkUB3_qQyL2xBh-VTV_5-DsR7mjtFmQ-ZFQ35T0Mz4Vany8rTJ-6OtTEcJVKP_K04gXNQKPtG_loq3LwRBbRmZTICb5BDILKE44mCN2-rYHoJlO/s838/tavira-vila-algarve-portugal.jpg.webp" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="580" data-original-width="838" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk1X-K4unGjO7z4lCglZL9GvKk6uJ58yg8H-OMS-AkkizEDx5LLLLBDU6DDGjEjnjb0pWmFACByJb4_WkUB3_qQyL2xBh-VTV_5-DsR7mjtFmQ-ZFQ35T0Mz4Vany8rTJ-6OtTEcJVKP_K04gXNQKPtG_loq3LwRBbRmZTICb5BDILKE44mCN2-rYHoJlO/w400-h276/tavira-vila-algarve-portugal.jpg.webp" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tavira (Photo from portugalresident.com)</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Tomorrow, Lorna and I travel to Tavira, Portugal, for three weeks to do some cycling. I’m taking the January 22 <i>New Yorker</i> with me. I’ll post my review when I return. <i>The New Yorker & Me </i>will resume on or about February 19. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-53099156505384921452024-01-25T02:52:00.000-08:002024-01-25T02:52:56.481-08:00Postscript: Joan Acocella 1945 - 2024<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgadS1CfEA3jW68SqoiRtZUeL6xfHXlywh_9XEFH1BZyictMWj7vOLTYdSwwUsILkVr5TImmGuF0cSvGd5jPN0r008jJaBXMlGpwtew2tPYN62yBs-eKO7TZoApydT0THFWfX0vwMHIBvy3hj4egcFmND0czltddk20e-y3WbjaD0jBVgprNCKDrk9KX8E6/s631/Joan%20Acocella%20(Bob%20Sacha).webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="631" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgadS1CfEA3jW68SqoiRtZUeL6xfHXlywh_9XEFH1BZyictMWj7vOLTYdSwwUsILkVr5TImmGuF0cSvGd5jPN0r008jJaBXMlGpwtew2tPYN62yBs-eKO7TZoApydT0THFWfX0vwMHIBvy3hj4egcFmND0czltddk20e-y3WbjaD0jBVgprNCKDrk9KX8E6/w400-h190/Joan%20Acocella%20(Bob%20Sacha).webp" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Joan Acocella (Photo by Bob Sacha)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></i></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>New Yorker</i> critic Joan Acocella died January 7, 2024, age 78. She was primarily a dance critic. But she also wrote many wonderful book reviews, several of which are included in her 2007 essay collection <i>Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints</i>. Acocella appreciated candor. She says of Susan Sontag, “She talked very straight” (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/03/06/the-hunger-artist-susan-sontag-profile">“The Hunger Artist”</a>). This applies to Acocella, too. Here, as a form of tribute, are some of my favorite lines from her work:</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Butler’s chapter on Cather is not a chapter on Cather; it is an essay on politics in which Cather’s text lies bound and gagged.</i> (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/11/27/cather-and-the-academy">“Cather and the Academy”</a>)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Always plainspoken, she became more so.</i> (“Feasting on Life”)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>These are superb letters – long, meaty, intimate, conversational. You can practically hear her breathing. And they remind us of her faithfulness to reality, her ability to let things stay mixed and strange – to let them grow at the edges and stay loose in the center.</i> (“Feasting on Life”)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>We also needed more footnotes. But never mind. This is a priceless book: a whole life, a serious life, eighty-four years long.</i> (“Feasting on Life”)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The grand cascading sentences ... </i>(“Finding Augie March”)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>One must love the book on artistic grounds – for its comedy, its generosity, its density, its linguistic miracles – and also, still, for its hopefulness.</i> (“Finding Augie March”)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>We never find out why Guillermo got arrested, or even who he is, but this little exchange is a perfect introduction to Bedford’s style: speed, omission, the sharp bite of event, without the tedious explanation.</i> (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/18/piecework-2">“Piecework”</a>)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Her sentences are frequently incomplete, her grammar nonstandard, her chapter titles a brazen lie. </i>(<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/18/piecework-2">“Piecework”</a>)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>In Bedford’s world, nobody is going to get ahead, or nobody nice, but meanwhile there is mercy, free hors d’oeuvres. </i>(<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/18/piecework-2">“Piecework”</a>)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>I don’t know of any novel about the early twentieth century that feels more real, as if you could reach out and touch the things in it.</i> (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/18/piecework-2">“Piecework”</a>)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>She should stop apologizing. If </i>Quicksands<i> is a sort of rummage sale, what of it? </i>(<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/18/piecework-2">“Piecework”</a>)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>We all know these words, and use them to account for our lives. The cells are something else: hallucinations, the meat locker of the mind. </i>(<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/02/04/the-spiders-web">“The Spider’s Web”</a>)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Down this road we can scarcely go in words. But we can accept an image, a metaphor. I have seen photographs of Russian children, in front of the Hermitage, staring up at Maman in wonder. They like it, presumably because it says something true.</i> (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/02/04/the-spiders-web">“The Spider’s Web”</a>)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Don’t laugh – Fitzgerald believes the same thing. She combines an old-world faith with a completely modern pessimism. </i>(“Assassination on a Small Scale”)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>And the writing was marvelous – high-toned, Brahmin, but full of zest and the pleasure of performing. Her openers were always thrown down with a great flourish. </i>(<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/03/06/the-hunger-artist-susan-sontag-profile">“The Hunger Artist”</a>)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Whatever she felt was fed back into her argument, a short, violent conflagration at the end of which any idea that illness is a mark of ennoblement or of shame—something that the victim caused or, by virtue of personality, was doomed to—lies like a burnt cinder at the bottom of Sontag’s rhetorical furnace.</i> (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/03/06/the-hunger-artist-susan-sontag-profile">“The Hunger Artist”</a>)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>But the montage is not surreal – it’s real, it’s New York City – and the objects don’t fly around in that self-important, </i>dérèglement des sens<i> way. They stay put, and honk the way they should. Waterfalls pour from the sky, but they’re really there, on a billboard. In the city O’Hara found his own, more modest version of Surrealist hallucination.</i> (“Perfectly Frank”)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>O’Hara loved things that lived in time, things that moved – ballet, movies, Action painting, New York – and he made himself the partner of time.</i> [“Perfectly Frank”]</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>But the poems were manifesto enough. With their colloquialism, with their empirical record of daily events, with the friends wandering in and out – “Jap” (Jasper Johns) waiting at the train station, “Allen” (Ginsberg, hung over) throwing up in the bathroom – and, above all, with their craft so lightly worn, the poems constituted a clear refusal, if not of the high mission of poetry, then any duty to kneel before the throne.</i> (“Perfectly Frank”)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>In her novels, Mantel is unflinching, and I like her that way. </i>(“Devil’s Work”)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>I have stressed the </i>dramatis diaboli<i>, but in most of mantel’s novels there is a regular English reality going on that might make you wish for Hell instead. </i>(“Devil’s Work”)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Ugly families, though, are only a subspecialty. Mantel is a master of ugliness in general.</i> (“Devil’s Work”)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Art redeems us from time: in Hadrian’s case, by shaping his life into a meaningful curve (ambition to mastery to exaltation to disaster to reconciliation); in Yourcenar’s case, by enabling her to do the shaping, and in the process to write her first great novel, save her own life.</i> (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/14/becoming-the-emperor">“Becoming the Emperor”</a>)</span><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></div><div><br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-1231690394830898422024-01-23T17:03:00.000-08:002024-01-25T11:06:19.496-08:00On David Salle's Excellent "Follow the Light"<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWEuTRsvQq6YpHqKXJ1U3-g-abCPv11sdJHXEGp7mKGw_SKZ4Qgr3KIasvgYl_fgGyYfSbp0djh9DFUekm0BBHJlYXF6CWIYxkV4NG8m819_Atmx0bqK-heiWKJtXa8rdDmjbH7Euy7oleSvHbEHDCZ0h_xHRPtyW5EEgHzKIfZItM9ueMKs7qWzDlOSVR/s2065/Alex%20Katz,%20%22Sharon%20and%20Vivien%22%20(2009).jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="2065" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWEuTRsvQq6YpHqKXJ1U3-g-abCPv11sdJHXEGp7mKGw_SKZ4Qgr3KIasvgYl_fgGyYfSbp0djh9DFUekm0BBHJlYXF6CWIYxkV4NG8m819_Atmx0bqK-heiWKJtXa8rdDmjbH7Euy7oleSvHbEHDCZ0h_xHRPtyW5EEgHzKIfZItM9ueMKs7qWzDlOSVR/w400-h233/Alex%20Katz,%20%22Sharon%20and%20Vivien%22%20(2009).jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alexx Katz, <i>Sharon and Vivian</i> (2009)</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It’s early yet, but already there's an essay out that will surely be considered one of 2024’s best. I’m referring to David Salle’s wonderful <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/01/18/follow-the-light-alex-katz-gathering/">“Follow the Light”</a> (<i>The New York Review of Books</i>, January 18, 2024). It’s a review of <i>Alex Katz: Gathering</i>, an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City, October 21, 2022 – February 20, 2023. Salle loved the show. He writes,</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>As you made your way up the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp, it was one goddamned masterpiece after another, triumphs of point of view, of touch and color and composition. Of image. Of </i>style<i>.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Salle analyzes that style as follows: </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Katz took the conventions of realism and merged them with the flatness and scale associated with Pop Art. Unlike his Pop contemporaries, he eschewed the black outline of cartooning. His subject is not the mediated imagery of advertising but things seen in the here and now.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">This view of Katz’s art as a merger of realism and Pop appeals to me much more than the view that it’s straight realism. To me, Katz’s images lack the specificity that is characteristic of great realist painting. Too many details are left out. They’re more Pop than realist. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Katz is a great colorist. It’s that aspect of his art that I relish most. Salle appreciates it acutely. Consider his description of Katz’s <i>Sharon and Vivian</i> (2009):</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>There are maybe twelve or thirteen distinct colors, some blended a bit to make secondary tones. A good 80 percent of the painting is covered by five colors that are close together on the spectrum: mustard yellow, pink, peach, orange, light brown. The painting creates an atmosphere of golden, enveloping warmth, tempered by the women’s detached stares: warm plus cool. Against the large expanse of yellow, the tiny quantities of blue—the cobalt irises of one, a patch of ultramarine dress with pale blue figures in it, a blue-black dress strap—work like visual punctuation. A few reddish highlights backed by some umber shadows in the light brown hair mark the middle darks, and the enormous, nearly solid black of the sunglasses is like a tuba or bassoon giving heft to the oboes and French horns that carry the melody. The painting is jaunty, forthright, witty, highly musical, and unhedged; it’s matter-of-fact and stringent at the same time.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That “Against the large expanse of yellow, the tiny quantities of blue—the cobalt irises of one, a patch of ultramarine dress with pale blue figures in it, a blue-black dress strap—work like visual punctuation” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Postscript:</b> Something Salle says in “Follow the Light” that I don’t quite agree with: “The people who appear in Katz’s paintings attest to his lifelong commitment to poetry and modern dance, and to a sophistication that has nothing to do with fashion or money.” I don’t know about that. Katz’s people seem pretty damn well-off to me. I’m not the only one who thinks this. Julian Bell, in his <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n21/julian-bell/in-margate">“In Margate: Alex Katz”</a> (<i>London Review of Books</i>, November 8, 2012), refers to “Katz’s swift, slick images of wealthy Brooklynites on holiday in Maine.” He sees Katz’s paintings as, among other things, an “affirmation of moneyed style.” </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-13527711690050676222024-01-18T05:39:00.000-08:002024-01-18T09:01:20.571-08:00January 15, 2024 Issue<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNSBu5PpRlrWHes1q4skHOiQU-r-oq6wa382QzgIooEkGknAJ1Z-6i7ZPs7gq_Pj7c_VdfSyZ12v1LQr-Flzcg-5dpvZR60k3wCuBq_fcL0elSJMgdD9wZwfRf7mYz4a_Gb6jlyyR4jn2jBPgwZ_E6KWTOBowveEkArp6dol39_OLi7RLRQ7Ce4sCjh8AL/s1037/2024_01_15.jpg.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1037" data-original-width="760" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNSBu5PpRlrWHes1q4skHOiQU-r-oq6wa382QzgIooEkGknAJ1Z-6i7ZPs7gq_Pj7c_VdfSyZ12v1LQr-Flzcg-5dpvZR60k3wCuBq_fcL0elSJMgdD9wZwfRf7mYz4a_Gb6jlyyR4jn2jBPgwZ_E6KWTOBowveEkArp6dol39_OLi7RLRQ7Ce4sCjh8AL/s320/2024_01_15.jpg.webp" width="235" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I’m fascinated by the differences between the two versions of Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” – one in the magazine, the other on newyorker.com. I know I’ve written about this before. I’ll probably write about it again. The situation is similar to the days when Pauline Kael provided two different versions of her movie reviews – one a long-form essay, the other a capsule review for the “In Brief” section of the magazine. It was interesting to see how she performed the reduction - </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">what she cut, what she kept. It’s the same with Rosner. I take it she writes the long piece first. That’s the one that appears on newyorker.com. Then, for the print version of the magazine, she trims it down to fit the smaller space.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">For example, the newyorker.com version of her <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-food-scene/the-best-diners-are-still-just-diners-old-johns">“Tables for Two: Old John’s Diner,”</a> in this week’s issue, begins,</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>I always read the whole menu at a diner, but I don’t really need to. My order is both predictable and unremarkable: a cup of soup, a cheeseburger with fries. Sometimes I’ll switch things up and have a Greek salad, with extra feta cheese, or corned-beef hash and scrambled eggs, though the side of fries always remains. A cup of coffee—lots of milk—and a slice of pie. If I were to scroll back through my life, tallying every diner meal, every fat ceramic mug of watery coffee, I think they might number in the thousands. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">For the print version, she cuts the first four sentences. The piece begins, “If I were to scroll back through my life, tallying every diner meal, every fat ceramic mug of watery coffee, I think they might number in the thousands.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Another example: when she describes Old John’s lemon pie in the website version, she says, “The lemon-meringue pie is unimpeachable, with a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue.” In the print version, this is changed to “the lemon-meringue pie was impeccable, a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty meringue.” I devour both versions, but the web version’s “snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue” is slightly more delectable.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The piece has a great theme: the diner as time machine. The web version says, “Diners, as a rule, are time machines; whether through the formica sheen of the nineteen-forties, the chromium optimism of the fifties, or the pastel geometries of the eighties, a diner traffics in nostalgia for past decades and past selves.” In the print version, this is reduced to “diners, as a category, are time machines, fuelled by memory of past decades and past selves.” Again, both versions are excellent, but the web version is more detailed. Comparing the two affords a peek at Rosner’s compositional process, or at least her editorial process, which is a form of composition. Also, if you read only the print version, you’re missing out on many wonderful, delicious details. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-45158293156656458502024-01-15T02:58:00.000-08:002024-01-17T03:43:32.236-08:00Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #10 "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' "<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw1s-tCyoxugsmUxZ9axZn1Dy6gfkoAiKnGnTGUZnY1dLqr-f7kOwmZHwipp1HFqvEPcMb5bfWXsM_i_djd7n_ASr5oLg4os7I7HR2ur06EHp-_x17tqnWIUrNR97rGNPrIdT9free88ncPcV_U8Wcx54KT7fqZLkmxnt_apkLEOiO39eHwncGgm9AikkM/s1200/Stag%20at%20Sharkey's.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="897" data-original-width="1200" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw1s-tCyoxugsmUxZ9axZn1Dy6gfkoAiKnGnTGUZnY1dLqr-f7kOwmZHwipp1HFqvEPcMb5bfWXsM_i_djd7n_ASr5oLg4os7I7HR2ur06EHp-_x17tqnWIUrNR97rGNPrIdT9free88ncPcV_U8Wcx54KT7fqZLkmxnt_apkLEOiO39eHwncGgm9AikkM/w400-h299/Stag%20at%20Sharkey's.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">George Bellows, <i>Stag at Sharkey's</i> (1909)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Time to kick off my “Top Ten </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">New Yorker & Me</i><span style="font-family: georgia;">” archival series. Each month I’ll look back and choose what I consider to be one of this blog's best posts. Today’s pick is </span><a href="https://thenewyorkerandme.blogspot.com/2012/07/george-bellowss-stag-at-sharkeys-and.html" style="font-family: georgia;">"George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' "</a><span style="font-family: georgia;"> (July 26, 2012):</span></div><div><br /><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: georgia;">George Bellows’s great boxing paintings <i>Stag at Sharkey’s</i> (1909) and <i>Both Members of This Club </i>(1909) have always been regarded as realist pictures, pitiless depictions of boxing’s viciousness. Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/25/young-and-gifted">"Young and Gifted" </a>(<i>The New Yorker</i>, June 25, 2012), describes <i>Stag at Sharkey’s</i> as follows:</span></div><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: georgia;"><div><br /></div><div><i>The fighters at Sharkey’s collide in no way that I’ve ever seen in the ring: each with a leg lifted far from the floor, as one man jams a forearm into the bloody face of the other, while cocking a blow to the body. Their livid flesh, radiating agony, is a marvel of colors blended in wet strokes on the canvas. The picture is at once a snapshot of Hell and an apotheosis of painting. It evinces sensitive restraint by muting the expressions of the riotous ringsiders. Almost as good, though flawed by overly indulged caricature, is “Both Members of This Club” (1909), in which a black fighter reduces a white one to a howling incarnation of pain.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>David Peters Corbett, in his <i>An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters</i> (2011), says of <i>Both Members of This Club</i>:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>The prominent bone of the left-hand fighter’s raised forearm, his sharp ribcage above the meaty drop of his belly, his raw, red face and ribs, call to mind the unforgiving realism of Rembrandt’s </i>Carcass of Beef<i>.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>“Livid flesh, radiating agony,” “snapshot of Hell,” “howling incarnation of pain,” “raw, red face and ribs,” “unforgiving realism” – descriptions that reflect the standard realist reading of Bellows’s boxing paintings.</div><div><br /></div><div>But Joyce Carol Oates, in her “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings” [included in her 1989 essay collection<i> (Woman) Writer</i>], takes a slightly different view. She writes: “<i>Stag at Sharkey’s</i> and <i>Both Members of This Club</i>, realistic in conception, are dreamlike in execution; poetic rather than naturalistic.”</div><div><br /></div><div>What does Oates mean by “poetic”? Is she suggesting that Bellows’s boxing paintings are, somehow, nonrealist? I recall George Segal’s comment on Edward Hopper: “What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world” (quoted in John Updike’s <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/08/10/hoppers-polluted-silence/">“Hopper’s Polluted Silence,”</a> <i>Still Looking</i>, 2007). Is Oates saying that Bellows’s <i>Stag at Sharkey’s </i>and <i>Both Members of This Club</i> depart, in some way, from “the real world”? I don’t think so. I think what she’s referring to is the way Bellows has painted them so as to emphasize the blood. She says, “However the eye moves outward it always circles back inward, irresistibly, to the center of frozen, contorted struggle, the blood-splattered core of life.” She contrasts <i>Stag at Sharkey’s</i> and <i>Both Members of This Club</i> with Bellows’s bloodless <i>Dempsey and Firpo</i> (1924), in which “Bellows makes no attempt to communicate what might be called the poetic essence of this barbaric fight.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Reading Oates’s “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” I was reminded of what she said in her great <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/10/20/the-treasure-of-comanche-county/">"The Treasure of Comanche County"</a> (<i>The New York Review of Books, </i>October 20, 2005) about McCarthy’s <i>Blood Meridian</i>: “<i>Blood Meridian</i> is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s <i>Iliad</i>; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence.” Oates relishes works of art that unflinchingly show “the blood-splattered core of life.” Interestingly, she describes McCarthy’s prose as “poetic.” For her, it seems, blood and poetry are synonymous.</div></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-21354188930501610512024-01-13T11:42:00.000-08:002024-01-23T17:15:24.527-08:00Factual Writing Is Just As Immersive As Fiction (Contra Nathaniel Rich)<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5ln__Yk_Wx2OPc2lHK7tRH84riIMsA4MhtUsrgFtdvYslp-5a4lj8EkPHOKrJBPdlN9VrKx-epMxmd92wzNTylUT1oANcR_t0rJmYYI4lSmVtlq0hI_vfKA8qz3fB4ypg11kCIO7TdIkdclVU3WoggYQpcOhP43LEB7pOmuuuYcAmeg8RloVGFyjs150_/s1000/Old%20Glory.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="648" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5ln__Yk_Wx2OPc2lHK7tRH84riIMsA4MhtUsrgFtdvYslp-5a4lj8EkPHOKrJBPdlN9VrKx-epMxmd92wzNTylUT1oANcR_t0rJmYYI4lSmVtlq0hI_vfKA8qz3fB4ypg11kCIO7TdIkdclVU3WoggYQpcOhP43LEB7pOmuuuYcAmeg8RloVGFyjs150_/s320/Old%20Glory.jpg" width="207" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Nathaniel Rich, in his recent review of James A. W. Heffernan’s <i>Politics and Literature at the Dawn of WW II</i>, argues that, as a reading experience, factual writing is less immersive than fiction. He says, </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>There is one dark art, however, that nonfiction cannot fully replicate: the ability of immersive narrative literature, and especially fiction, to blur, or even eradicate, the boundary between reader and subject. Readers of a history are reminded on every page, with every footnote and dutiful scholarly reference and contextual aside, of one’s distance from the action. The reader even of a memoir or a diary can never fully suspend disbelief, since the dramatic stakes of the narrative rely on its authenticity—on the assertion that the events described really happened and that the people depicted really experienced them.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Novelists don’t tend to bother about that. A novel’s success depends not on its faithfulness to reality but on the author’s ability to beguile the reader into empathizing with its hero and, for a brief time, exchanging the reality of the world for the reality of the novel.</i> (<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/21/writing-under-fire-politics-and-literature-at-the-dawn-of-world-war-ii/">“Writing Under Fire,”</a> <i>The New York Review of Books</i>, December 21, 2023)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I strongly disagree. I’m currently reading Jonathan Raban’s <i>Old Glory</i> (1981), an account of his two-thousand-mile journey down the Mississippi River, piloting a sixteen-foot aluminum motorboat, and I couldn’t be more immersed. I’m right there with him as he tries to navigate sloughs, chutes, towboats, stumps, eddies, boils, locks, and wing dams. It’s one of the most immersive books I’ve ever read. Same goes for his <i>Passage to Juneau</i> (1999) and Ian Frazier’s <i>Travels in Siberia </i>(2010)<i> </i>and Edward Hoagland’s <i>Notes from the Century Before </i>(1969). There’s no boundary between me and the worlds described in them. I’m there. <i>These events really happened. No suspension of disbelief is necessary. Just sink in and experience them</i> – that's the promise these great books gloriously fulfill. Rich underestimates the power of factual writing. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8828649308001631031.post-6875130994861080942024-01-06T18:53:00.000-08:002024-01-08T04:08:48.303-08:00January 1 & 8, 2024 Issue <p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYNbokp0CYFcMNYBON7BpiNmx1NlBXuRWHdrIBy2TXRp6AA5pUqcPwobiM4c2MI_ayPEokhGfVdcg8VMQ1cYz9MCf-4aJ1vVwKZsfIu3dRcjfXopZbrbxulI-Vrp51w1QrK4vrRNgfUgc_iUJxAZFP6cVHU3ZwfkuBN66zQK-ucvFbX9QH0L47z2CxL1FZ/s1037/2024_01_01.jpg.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1037" data-original-width="760" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYNbokp0CYFcMNYBON7BpiNmx1NlBXuRWHdrIBy2TXRp6AA5pUqcPwobiM4c2MI_ayPEokhGfVdcg8VMQ1cYz9MCf-4aJ1vVwKZsfIu3dRcjfXopZbrbxulI-Vrp51w1QrK4vrRNgfUgc_iUJxAZFP6cVHU3ZwfkuBN66zQK-ucvFbX9QH0L47z2CxL1FZ/s320/2024_01_01.jpg.webp" width="235" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Adam Gopnik’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/01/camille-pissarro-the-audacity-of-impressionism-anka-muhlstein-book-review">“Winter Sun,”</a> in this week’s issue, is ostensibly a review of Anka Muhlstein’s <i>Camille Pissarro: The Audacity of Impressionism</i>. But after saying a few kind words about the book (e.g., it “invites us to head to the museums to look at the work again”), he embarks on his own interpretation of Pissarro’s life and work. Mulstein is rarely heard from again. I find this annoying. When I read a review, I want to know if the subject book is worth reading. I want to know what it’s about and, just as importantly, I want to know about the quality of its writing. Is it flat, clichéd</span><span style="font-family: georgia;">, and boring, or is it sharp, vivid, and specific? A sample quotation would be appreciated so that I can judge for myself. Gopnik fails to do any of this. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">He also makes at least one questionable judgment of Pissarro. He says that until Pissarro reached his final decade, he was a mediocrity. My favorite Pissarro, <i>Cabbage Field, Pontoise</i>, was painted in 1873, thirty years before he died. Is it mediocre? Not in the eyes of this beholder. Not in the eyes of T. J. Clark, either. Clark writes,</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Can we agree that the light in </i>Cabbage Field<i>, which is immediately breathtaking, is some kind of high-summer gloaming, maybe with moisture in the early evening air? (Of course, the painting is equivocal about clock time. It isn't a Monet sunset. It could be that the peasants are taking advantage of the coolness of the morning. But the overall colour balance seems to look forward to dusk). Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Things emerge from the evening light only gradually: it is the light that is striking, not the ghosts of trees. The edge of visibility is a world of its own. Push towards the unnoticeable in vision, therefore, and if necessary the unpaintable: that seems to be Pissarro’s self-instruction. Look at the dark leafless tree in the picture’s left foreground, drawn dark on dark against the hill and the house. How did Pissarro do it? How did he see it as paintable in the first place? Or look at the light caught in the trees on top of the hill, and the final flourish of touches that establish the sparser tree standing on its own between the houses, its dark greens scrawled liquid on pink.</i> [<a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n19/t.j.-clark/strange-apprentice">“Strange Apprentice,”</a> <i>London Review of Books</i>, October 8, 2020; retitled "Pissarro and Cézanne" in Clark’s superb 2022 collection <i>If These Apples Should Fall</i>]</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Now that’s more like it. Attentive, descriptive, analytical, exquisite – my idea of great critical writing. Pissarro was in the front rank of artists long before his final decade. Gopnik doesn't do him justice. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0