Joseph Mitchell - The New Yorker's Long-Line Champ

There’s a line in Joseph Mitchell’s "A Place of Pasts" (The New Yorker, February 16, 2015) that is a startling 1,183 words long. I believe this is a New Yorker record. The sentence is as follows (take a deep breath):

And I should also say that when I say the past I mean a number of pasts, a hodgepodge of pasts, a spider’s web of pasts, a jungle of pasts: my own past; my father’s past; my mother’s past; the pasts of my brothers and sisters; the past of a small farming town geographically misnamed Fairmont down in the cypress swamps and black gum bottoms and wild magnolia bays of southeastern North Carolina, a town in which I grew up and from which I fled as soon as I could but which I go back to as often as I can and have for years and for which even at this late date I am now and then all of a sudden and for no conscious reason at all heart-wrenchingly homesick; the pasts of several furnished-room houses and side-street hotels in New York City in which I lived during the early years of the Depression, when I was first discovering the city, and that disappeared one by one without a trace a long time ago but that evidently made a deep impression on me, for every once in a while the parlor or the lobby of one of them or my old room in one of them turns up eerily recognizable in a dream; the pasts of a number of speakeasies, diners, greasy spoons, and drugstore lunch counters scattered all over the city that I knew very well in the same period and that also have disappeared and that also turn up in dreams; the pasts of a score or so of strange men and women—bohemians, visionaries, obsessives, impostors, fanatics, lost souls, gypsy kings and gypsy queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks—whom I got to know and kept in touch with for years while working as a newspaper reporter and whom I thought of back then as being uniquely strange, only-one-of-a-kind-in-the-whole-world strange, but whom, since almost everybody has come to seem strange to me, including myself, I now think of, without taking a thing away from them, as being strange all right, no doubt about that, but also as being stereotypes—as being stereotypically strange, so to speak, or perhaps prototypically strange would be more exact or archetypically strange or even ur-strange or maybe old-fashioned pre-Freudian-insight strange would be about right, three good examples of whom are (1) a bearded lady who was billed as Lady Olga and who spent summers out on the road in circus sideshows and winters in a basement sideshow on Forty-second Street called Hubert’s Museum, and who used to be introduced to audiences by sideshow professors as having been born in a castle in Potsdam, Germany, and being the half sister of a French duke but who I learned to my astonishment when I first talked with her actually came from a farm in a county in North Carolina six counties west of the county I come from and who loved this farm and started longing to go back to it almost from the moment she left it at the age of twenty-one to work in a circus but who made her relatives uncomfortable when she went back for a visit (“ ‘How long are you going to stay’ was always the first question they asked me,” she once said) and who finally quit going back and from then on thought of herself as an exile and spoke of herself as an exile (“Some people are exiled by the government,” she would say, “and some are exiled by the po-lice or the F.B.I. or the head of some old labor union or the Mafia or the Black Hand or the K.K.K., but I was exiled by my own flesh and blood”), and who became a legend in the sideshow world because of her imaginatively sarcastic and sometimes imaginatively obscene and sometimes imaginatively brutal remarks about people in sideshow audiences delivered deadpan and sotto voce to her fellow-freaks grouped around her on the platform, and (2) a street preacher named James Jefferson Davis Hall, who also came up here from the South and who lived in what he called sackcloth-and-ashes poverty in a tenement off Ninth Avenue in the Forties and who believed that God had given him the ability to read between the lines in the Bible and who also believed that while doing so he had discovered that the end of the world was soon to take place and who also believed that he had been guided by God to make this discovery and who furthermore believed that God had chosen him to go forth and let the people of the world know what he had discovered or else supposing he kept this dreadful knowledge to himself God would turn his back on him and in time to come he would be judged as having committed the unforgivable sin and would burn in Hell forever and who consequently trudged up and down the principal streets and avenues of the city for a generation desperately crying out his message until he wore himself out and who is dead and gone now and long dead and gone but whose message remembered in the middle of the night (“It’s coming! Oh, it’s coming!” he would cry out. “The end of the world is coming! Oh, yes! Any day now! Any night now! Any hour now! Any minute now! Any second now!”) doesn’t seem as improbable as it used to, and (3) an old Serbian gypsy woman named Mary Miller—she called herself Madame Miller—whom I got to know with the help of an old-enemy-become-old-friend of hers, a retired detective in the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad, and whom I visited a number of times over a period of ten years in a succession of her ofisas, or fortune-telling parlors, and who was fascinating to me because she was always smiling and gentle and serene, an unusually sweet-natured old woman, a good mother, a good grandmother, a good great-grandmother, but who nevertheless had a reputation among detectives in con-game squads in police departments in big cities all over the country for the uncanny perceptiveness with which she could pick out women of a narrowly specific kind—middle-aged, depressed, unstable, and suggestible, and with access to a bank account, almost always a good-sized savings bank account—from the general run of those who came to her to have their fortunes told and for the mercilessness with which she could gradually get hold of their money by performing a cruel old gypsy swindle on them, the hokkano baro, or the big trick; and, finally, not to mention a good many other pasts, the past of New York City insofar as it is connected directly or indirectly with my own past, and particularly the past of the part of New York City that is known as lower Manhattan, the part that runs from the Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge and that encompasses the Fulton Fish Market and its environs, and which is part of the city that I look upon, if you will forgive me for sounding so high-flown, as my spiritual home.

What an extraordinary construction! Mitchell has written other long lines. For example, there’s a 435-word beauty in his "Street Life" (The New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2013). But none of them come close to the length of his “A Place of Pasts” creation. Is it the longest sentence ever to appear in The New Yorker? I can’t think of any that are longer. There’s one in Ian Frazier’s great "Authentic Accounts of Massacres" (The New Yorker, March 19, 1979; included in his 1997 collection Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody). But when I counted up the words, it came to 354 – not even in the ballpark. Another candidate that came to mind is the remarkably long sentence in Roger Angell’s "Here Below" (The New Yorker, January 16, 2006), in which he observes his mother at the dinner table and imagines her “immediate deep concerns.” I just finished checking it; it contains 458 words. Therefore, to the best of my knowledge, information, and belief, Mitchell’s amazing 1,183-word assemblage is the longest sentence in New Yorker history. I hereby declare Joseph Mitchell to be the magazine’s long-line champ.

Credit: The above photo of Joseph Mitchell is by Therese Mitchell; it appears in the February 16, 2015 New Yorker as an illustration for Joseph Mitchell’s “A Place of Pasts.”

February 16, 2015 Issue

Sunday’s blizzard dumped a humongous load of snow here. Roads are impassable; mailboxes are either buried or decapitated by the plow; there’s been no mail delivery. As a result, this week’s New Yorker hasn’t arrived. I’m not crazy about reading the magazine’s electronic version. I prefer the old-fashioned paper-and-ink version, which I can underline and make notes on. But I don’t want to get too far behind in my New Yorker reading. In the circumstances, I’ve decided to pick one short piece from the online edition. My choice is Ian Frazier’s Talk story "Russophilia." It’s Frazier’s first piece of the new year, and it’s a beauty. Writing in the third person (in accordance with Talk custom), he calls himself  “the Russophile” and describes a Russian gala concert he recently attended at Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. Frazier is indeed a Russophile, as anyone who's read his great Travels In Siberia (2010) well knows, and in “Russophila” he savors the details of the Russian crowd – their clothes (“The men wore dark coats and hats, and the women came in furs of every description”), their pocketbooks (“The pocketbooks they set down for guards to inspect were of shiny leather, studded, strapped, embossed, metallic-looking, with black-and-white checkerboard patterns, zebra stripes, and paisley swirl”), their perfume (“When undone, scarves with modernistic prints sent out gusts of international perfume”). His description of the performers contains this wonderful line: “Enter an equally blond woman in a Gypsy-ish outfit who sang a song with a mariachi rhythm while legions of silhouetted saguaro cacti and purple skulls with pinwheel eyes advanced across the screens.” The best part of “Russophilia” is its vivid conclusion:

Almost nobody left the gala concert early. When, after three hours, all was done, and Krutoi and company had withdrawn to sincere, dignified applause, the place took forever to empty out. It made no difference if you turned right or left; both directions were packed. Finally, the crowd began to reach the street, and many immediately lit cigarettes. The night had become even colder. Snow crunching underfoot, nostril-freezing air, and heavy cigarette smoke: all at once, an exact duplication of a midwinter night in Russia, there on Flatbush Avenue.

That “The night had become even colder. Snow crunching underfoot, nostril-freezing air, and heavy cigarette smoke: all at once, an exact duplication of a midwinter night in Russia, there on Flatbush Avenue” is marvelously fine. It contains echoes of one of my favorite passages in Travels In Siberia, a description of Frazier and his friend Luda leaving St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater after a ballet performance:

Afterward, Luda and I jostled through the remarkably long and slow line of people returning their rented opera glasses, and the equally full line at the coat check, and then we were outside in the cold among dissipating perfumes and faint cigarette smoke, and snow was falling steadily straight down. It was billowing in the streetlights overhead and making cones of the lights of the waiting taxicabs, and as we stood deciding whether to walk or take a cab, snowflakes came to rest among the fibers of fur in her hat. Each flake was small but unbroken, and detailed as a cutout snowflake made in school.

What is the Russian word for “exquisite”? Google Translate says it’s “изысканный.” Very well then – изысканный!

5th Anniversary

The New Yorker & Me is five years old today. To celebrate, I want to single out a few highlights. My first post, dated February 20, 2010, was a review of the February 8, 2010, New Yorker. That’s the one with the great Ana Juan cover – nine pampered pooches swaddled in winter garb - called “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The issue contains, among other notable items, John McPhee’s brilliant "The Patch," a personal history piece that ingeniously and movingly blends pickerel fishing with McPhee’s hospital visit with his dying father.

My most popular post – the one that’s received the most page views – is a review of the April 19, 2010, “Journeys” issue, perhaps the best New Yorker to appear in the past five years. In my post, I compare reading it to “gobbling up (say) five bowls of Haagen Dazs dulce de leche ice cream, one right after the other.” The issue features three superb pieces: Elif Batuman’s "The Memory Kitchen"; Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision"; and Burkhard Bilger’s "Towheads." Looking at my review, I see that I focused mainly on Batuman’s and Collins’s articles. Bilger’s “Towheads,” a “Reporter At Large” piece about the far-flung adventures of a tugboating family, deserves greater consideration. Someday I’ll get to it, maybe as part of a broader “Burkhard Bilger Retrospective.”

Speaking of Bilger, his great "The Egg Men" (The New Yorker, September 5, 2005) is the subject of an appreciation I posted on January 30, 2011 (see here). Of all my posts, I found it to be the most satisfying to write. It concludes, “Reading ‘The Egg Men,’ I experience double bliss: the subject is tremendously interesting and the writing is intensely pleasurable.”

I think my most negative post was my response to Richard Brody’s " 'Shoah' at Twenty Five" (newyorker.com, December 7, 2010), in which he came perilously close to calling Pauline Kael’s "Shoah" review anti-Semitic. Brody said, “Pauline Kael’s misunderstandings of Shoah are so grotesque as to seem willful.” In my post, I noted that Kael faced this type of criticism back in 1985 when she wrote the piece. Borrowing a line from Craig Seligman’s defense of Kael, in his Sontag & Kael (2004), I called Brody’s charge “an accusation of astonishing coarseness.” But Brody is such a thrillingly passionate, stylish writer, I couldn’t stay cross at him for long. And he’s helped his own case by occasionally including one or more of Kael’s classic capsule reviews in his “Goings On About Town” movie column.

Kael’s writing is, for me, a touchstone. In the “Author’s Note” of her wonderful Deeper Into Movies (1973), she says that she writes “because I love trying to figure out what I think about what I feel and why.” Right there is the rationale for why I write this blog – to get at the many ways The New Yorker affords me such supreme pleasure.

And now to conclude, I’m going to pretend for a moment that I live in New York City. I’m imagining myself dropping into Nitecap for one of those Key Lime Fizzes with a candle suspended in its froth that Jiayang Fan wrote about so vividly in "Bar Tab" a few weeks ago. I want to propose a toast: Here’s to the greatest magazine in the world, a constant source of pleasure in my life – New Yorker without end, Amen!

February 9, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week's issue:

1. I like a good argument. Kelefa Sanneh, in his absorbing "Don't Be Like That," takes issue with a new anthology called The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, edited by Orlando Patterson (with Ethan Fosse), which faults black culture for, among other things, “suboptimal cultural traits,” such as devaluation of traditional coparenting and eschewal of mainstream styles of childrearing. Sanneh sees this as a form of “victim-blaming.” The real culprit, he says, is racism. He says of Patterson’s approach, “He contends that black culture can and must change while conceding, less loudly, that ‘thoroughly racist’ whites are likely to remain stubbornly the same.” In the aftermath of Ferguson, Sanneh’s conclusion – “If we want to learn more about black culture, we should study it. But, if we seek to answer the question of racial inequality in America, black culture won’t tell us what we want to know” – seems irrefutable.

2. Last year, Amelia Lester, in her review of Wallflower, wrote one of my favorite lines: “If you feel like eating a carrot-and-black-trumpet-mushroom salad with your second tequila cocktail, you’re in luck, and perhaps it’s the right call—the windows frame an obnoxiously bright Equinox gym, where Lululemoners reading Us Weekly on the elliptical pedal through the night in silent rebuke” ("Bar Tab: Wallflower," The New Yorker, March 31, 2014). This week, she scores another wonderful description, a representation of a Cosme dessert: “a corn-husk meringue with its own hashtag, possessed of an intensely milky taste from the mousse of mascarpone, cream, and corn purée that spills out like lava from its core.” "Tables For Two: Cosme is ravishing; every line surprises and delights.

3. Not to be outdone, Emma Allen, in her terrific "Bar Tab: Winnie's," constructs this verbal wunderkammern: “One evening in Chinatown, a young woman in a Nirvana T-shirt took a break from mixing Hawaiian punches—a juggling act involving eight kinds of liquor, pineapple juice, and grenadine—to pull out a giant laser disk, grab a mic, and perform ‘Santeria,’ by Sublime.” Her review features a great opening line, too: “The narrative arcs of nights spent drinking are sometimes self-imposed (pub crawl begins here, ends there), sometimes forced upon us (I woke up in Ronkonkoma!).”

4. Alex Ross’s "Eyes and Ears" describes a marvelous effect – the way seventeenth-century music played amid Caravaggios brings the paintings alive. He writes,

Throughout the evening, I couldn’t escape the uncanny feeling that the people in the paintings were listening in, as in some spooky Victorian tale of portraits come to life. In the presence of the music, their eyes possibly glowed a little brighter, their flesh a little warmer. In Gallery 621, the effect was all but electric: chaste religious figures seemed on the verge of jumping out of the chiaroscuro shadows and joining the women of TENET, who, in turn, looked ready to step through the frames into the other world. Then, with the applause, the spell was broken: the living walked away, and the pictures fell silent for the night.

Ross’s piece is accompanied by a luminous, delicately hued Riccardo Vecchio illustration, the newyorker.com version of which beautifully shimmers on my computer screen.

Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

February 2, 2015 Issue

“We navigate via the stars of details,” James Wood says, in his How Fiction Works. I agree. It’s how I read The New Yorker. Perusing this week’s issue, I was struck by a detail in John Seabrook’s wonderful Talk story, "Free," about an Inuit throat singer, Tanya Tagaq, visiting the Museum of the American Indian. Seabrook writes, “Tagaq, who is thirty-nine and has jet-black hair and a girlish face, had removed her sealskin boots and was sitting barefoot on the floor of the Diker Pavilion, a large oval space on the museum’s ground level.” Those sealskin boots caught my eye. I’ve long been an admirer of such footwear. In Iqaluit, Nunavut, where I lived for nearly ten years, they’re called kamiks. Bleached sealskin soles, shaved sealskin vamps, stovepipe-shaped leg sections, contrasting fur colors (white, silver, gray, black), tightly stitched, patterned with geometric designs such as diamonds, chevrons, circles, triangles, or stripes - they’re an Inuit art form. One of my favorite books is Our Boots: An Inuit Women’s Art (1995) by Jill Oakes and Rick Riewe. Seabrook’s noticing of Tagaq’s kamiks is inspired!

Michael Hofmann's "Where Have You Been?"

This is just a quick note to say how much I’m enjoying Michael Hofmann’s new essay collection, Where Have You Been?. Hofmann isn’t a New Yorker writer. But his dazzling, delicious book connects with the magazine in several interesting ways. For example, it contains two excellent essays on Elizabeth Bishop, who contributed more than fifty poems and five short stories to The New Yorker. In “Bishop/Lowell Correspondence,” a review of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Hofmann catalogues the differences between the two poets:

Bishop is acute, Lowell obtuse; Bishop sensitive, solicitous, moody, Lowell dull, sometimes careless, rather relentlessly productive; she is anxious, he when not shockingly and I think genuinely self-critical, insouciant; she is open to the world, whereas with him—and this is an understatement—"sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing"; her poems in her account of them are fickle, small-scale, barely worth pursuing—and how many of them seem to get lost in the making—whereas his are industrial-scale drudgery and then quite suddenly completed.

At one point, Hofmann says, “Bishop likes strong Brazilian coffee, Lowell drinks American dishwater coffee (or tea, sometimes he's not sure).” In comparing Bishop’s and Lowell’s letters, Hofmann pulls no punches; he likes Bishop’s better: “Bishop is so prodigal with sympathy, attention, interest; Lowell, by contrast, seems to endow even people quite close to him (even Elizabeth Bishop, as we will see) with very little reality. It comes down to something like focal length—his is about a foot.”

For a kinder view of Lowell’s letter writing, see Dan Chiasson’s "Works On Paper" (The New Yorker, November 3, 2008),  in which he calls Lowell’s recovery letters “among the most brilliant letters ever written, for the simple reason that the writing of them operates against such tragic stakes.”

Another piece in Hofmann’s collection that links with The New Yorker is “James Schuyler.” Schuyler contributed at least a dozen poems to The New Yorker and was the subject of a wonderful essay, called “Whatever Is Moving,” by longtime New Yorker poetry editor, Howard Moss. Hofmann mentions Moss’s piece in his essay. Regarding Schuyler, Hofmann says he is “at once a painterly poet, descriptive and objective, and at the same time he uses all the subliminal, microbial quirks of language.”

A third New Yorker connection came to mind when I read Hofmann’s piece on Zbigniew Herbert. The New Yorker published a number of Herbert’s poems, including the John and Bogdana Carpenter translation of "Mr. Cogito on a Set Theme: 'Friends Depart,' " (June 28, 2004), which Hofmann quotes, using the Alissa Valles translation. Hofmann rips Valles’s translation of Herbert, calling it, among other things, “slack, chattersome, hysterical, full of exaggeration, complacency, and reaching for effect.”

And fourthly, reading Hofmann’s absorbing piece on Max Beckmann, I recalled Peter Schjeldahl’s New Yorker review of Saint Louis Art Museum’s “Max Beckmann and Paris” ("The French Disconnection," March 8, 1999; included in Schjeldahl’s 2008 collection, Let’s See), which contains this memorable description of Beckmann’s great Quappi in Blue: “In Quappi’s bone-white face, her red lips assume a sweetly wry expression while visually exploding like a grenade.” Hofmann, in his “Max Beckmann," also notes the detonative character of Beckmann’s work. He says, “In its drama and clutter and burstingness, it regularly challenges the very idea of what can be done in a painting.”

All of these connections are worth exploring further. Where Have You Been? is a rich, spirited collection. I’m enjoying it immensely.

January 26, 2015 Issue

The tagline of Jill Lepore’s brilliant "The Cobweb," in this week’s issue – “Can the Internet be archived?” – struck me as dry and theoretical. Not my cup of tea, I thought. But I read the first paragraph, which begins, “Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam at 10:31 A.M. G.M.T. on July 17, 2014, for a twelve-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur.” I read the next line and the next line. The paragraph is anything but dry and theoretical; it’s vividly specific and real. It tells about the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in a field outside Donetsk, Ukraine, and about a Ukrainian separatist leader known as Strelkov posting a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: “We just downed a plane, an AN-26.” I went on to the next paragraph, conscious of being hooked by the story and by the prose, which is crisp, direct, and factual. The second paragraph reports that two weeks before the crash, Anatol Shmelev, the curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, had submitted to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in California, a list of Ukrainian and Russian Web sites and blogs that ought to be recorded as part of the archive’s Ukraine Conflict collection, and that Strelkov’s VKontakte page was on that list. It also tells that the Internet Archive’s collections are stored in its Wayback Machine, in San Francisco. I moved to the third paragraph, fascinated by the linkage of the downed Malaysian Airlines plane, which I knew about from reading news reports, with the Internet Archive, which I had no clue existed. The third paragraph begins, “On July 17th, at 3:22 P.M. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of Strelkov’s VKontakte post about downing a plane.” It continues,

Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message “Grab of Donetsk militant Strelkov’s claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.” By then, Strelkov’s VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine.

The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine – and with that remarkable revelation, the utility of archiving the Internet suddenly becomes clear. But it’s the next two sentences, the superb opening lines of the fourth paragraph – “The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days. Strelkov’s 'We just downed a plane' post lasted barely two hours” – that form the lynchpin of the piece, ushering in its main subject, what Lepore calls “the overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web.”

“The Cobweb” reads like a streak. I especially enjoyed the part where Lepore visits the home of the Wayback Machine, in San Francisco, and meets its inventor, Brewster Kahle, who is one of the most interesting characters to appear in The New Yorker in a long time. Here’s Lepore’s description of him:

Kahle is long-armed and pink-cheeked and public-spirited; his hair is gray and frizzled. He wears round wire-rimmed eyeglasses, linen pants, and patterned button-down shirts. He looks like Mr. Micawber, if Mr. Micawber had left Dickens’s London in a time machine and landed in the Pacific, circa 1955, disguised as an American tourist.

Lepore tells this memorable anecdote about Kahle:

I was on a panel with Kahle a few years ago, discussing the relationship between material and digital archives. When I met him, I was struck by a story he told about how he once put the entire World Wide Web into a shipping container. He just wanted to see if it would fit. How big is the Web? It turns out, he said, that it’s twenty feet by eight feet by eight feet, or, at least, it was on the day he measured it. How much did it weigh? Twenty-six thousand pounds. He thought that meant something. He thought people needed to know that.

I relish Lepore’s emphasis on “meant” and “know” in the above passage. It allows me to hear the wonder in her voice.

The variegated material that “Cobweb” comprehends is transfixing: Malaysia Airline Flight 17, Ukrainian separatist leader, Russian social-media site, Hoover Institution, Ukraine conflict collection, Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, San Francisco, Britain’s Conservative Party, Andy Borowitz, link rot, content drift, Harvard Law School, United States Supreme Court, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the footnote, Brewster Kahle, the Library of Alexandria, hyper-text, M.I.T., petabytes, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Sweden, the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, copyright, Web crawlers, legal-deposit laws, Europeana, Google Books, Harvard Library Innovation Lab, Perma.cc, Herbert Van de Sompel, Memento. All of which coheres in a compelling narrative frame.

“The Cobweb” ends beautifully:

One day last summer, a missile was launched into the sky and a plane crashed in a field. “We just downed a plane,” a soldier told the world. People fell to the earth, their last passage. Somewhere, someone hit “Save Page Now.”

Where is the Internet’s memory, the history of our time?

“It’s right here!” Kahle cries.

The machine hums and is muffled. It is sacred and profane. It is eradicable and unbearable. And it glows, against the dark.

This is great writing. I enjoyed ‘The Cobweb” immensely.

January 19, 2015 Issue

This week’s issue contains an extraordinary piece of reporting called "When the Fever Breaks" by Luke Mogelson. It’s a firsthand, front-lines account of how communities in Liberia and Sierra Leone are fighting the spread of Ebola. Mogelson visits slums, hospitals, holding centers, jungle villages. He talks to “survivors” (people who catch Ebola and don’t die), local organizers, health officers, social workers, ambulance drivers. At one point, he accompanies a county burial team to the Liberian village of Jene-Wonde. “Ebola victims are most contagious when they are no longer alive,” Mogelson says, “and in West Africa—where burial rituals, for both Christians and Muslims, entail anointing the deceased—many people have contracted the virus from a corpse.” The wife of Jene-Wonde’s chief has died of Ebola. Her body is inside the village general store. The chief gives permission to retrieve her body. Mogelson describes the procedure:

The sprayers went first—a pair of minesweepers clearing a path. Then the others entered with the bag and the stretcher. They emerged several minutes later and loaded the corpse into the back of the truck. As the truck made its way across the square, women and children spilled out of their houses, sat down in the dirt, and keened. I followed on foot, along with a few locals, all of whom turned back when the truck stopped at a wall of trees. The team filed down a narrow trail, carrying the stretcher through dark jungle. After about a hundred yards, unmarked mounds of rich orange soil rose here and there from the grass. Beside a shallow, rectangular hole, an elderly man in flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a white skullcap leaned on the handle of an old spade. He had dug all the graves. No one else from the village, he told me, was willing to tread in that place.

The team lowered the imam’s wife into the grave. On top of her, they dropped a heap of freshly hacked branches and leaves. Then they stripped off their suits, gloves, and masks and deposited them in the grave as well.

Mogelson’s writing style is factual, unostentatious – well suited to the hard reality he describes. But it has its artful aspects. At one point, describing a trip in Tonkolili District, Sierra Leone, he says, “To get there, we followed barely discernible tire tracks, for miles, through grass so tall and close you feel as if you were in a car wash.”

“When the Fever Breaks” can be read as a companion to Richard Preston’s brilliant "The Ebola Wars" (The New Yorker, October 27, 2014), which describes the work of scientists at the Broad Institute to sequence Ebola’s genome and track its mutations. But the two pieces differ from each other. “The Ebola Wars” is written in the third person; “When the Fever Breaks” is a first-person narrative. It abounds with sentences like “One day in early November, I followed several young men down a warren of sand alleyways, veined by rivulets of sullage, that wound through West Point, the slum to which Fahnbulleh and her husband had been taken,” and “When I visited the quarantine center, in Monrovia, a group of children sat in plastic chairs inside the gate, near a metal seesaw.” I relish such sentences: the observer becomes a participant; reporting becomes experience.

Postscript: I delight in thisness, i.e., “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (James Wood, How Fiction Works, 2008). Thisness is palpability, specificity, concreteness. New Yorker writing brims with it. For example, in this week’s issue, it’s there in the description of the Goldschmied & Chiari mirrors on show at Lorello Gallery: “Composite photographs of billowing smoke transferred to reflective glass, have been tinted petal pink or storm-cloud gray” (“Goings On About Town: Art”). It’s there in Amelia Lester’s representation of the Via Carota’s pumpkin-and-sage ravioli: “fluffy, beautiful, and fleeting, an exercise in virtuosity equivalent to a concert pianist running up and down a scale very fast” ("Tables For Two"). It’s there in Jiayang Fan’s description of Nitecap’s Key Lime Fizz “with a lit candle suspended in its froth” ("Bar Tab"). It’s brilliantly there in Sarah Larson’s capture of Bill Murray’s line to the waitress at Tao when she brought him two rum-and-waters: “He took one and said of the other, ‘You give that to the kids at the orphanage’ ” ("Cinephiles"). Sometimes thisness can be in the form of a piquant fact, e.g., “KidZania has its own currency, kidzos, which can be used in branches around the world, or deposited in the central bank and accessed with a realistic-looking credit card” (Rebecca Mead, "When I Grow Up"); “Recently, researchers at the University of Southern California built a prototype 'virtual human' named Ellie, a digital therapist that integrates an algorithm similar to Affdex with others that track gestures and vocal tonalities” (Raffi Khatchadourian, "We Know How You Feel"). It’s hard to say how useful all this is. But in terms of writing as pure writing, I devour it. My favorite example of thisness, in this week’s issue, is Sasha Frere-Jones’s description of the Sleater-Kinney band’s guitar tones: “fuzzed, doubled into octaves, thin, then soaked, overloading” ("Sister Saviors"). “Sleater-Kinney” is itself an inspired bit of thisness. It comes, Frere-Jones says, from the name on a highway exit ramp in Olympia, Washington.

January 12, 2015 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Julia Ioffe’s "Remote Control," a profile of the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. It isn’t as good as Ioffe’s "The Borscht Belt" (The New Yorker, April 16, 2012), in which she memorably describes, among other things, the use of a pech, a traditional Russian brick oven (“Still, the oven’s three little compartments provided enough room for frequent rotation of pans and traditional cast-iron pots – fat-bellied, with narrow bottoms – and its warm roof, about a foot below the kitchen’s ceiling, became a favorite for the three young chefs in the kitchen”), and the making of samogon (Russian moonshine). But it does contain some interesting observations by Khodorkovsky on life in a Siberian prison. For example:

“The penal colony isn’t scary,” he observed. “It’s full of average people, and your place in that world depends on you, and more on will than on strength. You can’t be scared. The result is a vile and filthy life that is worse than death. And death, well, what is death? The risk is low, just two or three per thousand inmates a year.

It’s going to take this kind of steeliness to overthrow Putin. Maybe Khodorkovsky is the man for the job. Would he be an improvement? His track record as a ruthless exploiter of Russian state capitalism isn’t encouraging. But maybe his prison experiences have humanized him.

Photo by Davide Monteleone

The Davide Monteleone photo of Khodorkovsky that accompanies Ioffe’s piece is transfixing. I can’t make up my mind about it. It crops off about a fifth of Khodorkovsky’s face, including part of his left eye. Why? What aesthetic is in play here? The photo draws attention to Khodorkovsky’s eyes. They are hard, determined-looking eyes. It’s not a blasé shot. It’s not a “no style” portrait, that’s for sure. It’s eye-catching. I guess that’s its point. But it’s incomplete. That’s what bugs me about it.  

"Boyhood": An Unsentimental Story of Tough Survivorship (Contra Richard Brody)

Finally, Richard Brody provides his reasoning for including Boyhood on his “Negative Ten” list (see "The Best Movies of 2014," newyorker.com, December 11, 2014). Today, in his "The 2015 Oscar Nominations: Selma Snubbed and Wes Anderson Triumphant," newyorker.com), he says,

But for all the performers and directors in the Academy who may have received bad reviews, there’s another category that absolutely everyone within it shares, and that accounts, I think, for the movie that will clean up at the February 22nd ceremony. They were all children, and they will vote for “Boyhood,” which is an audacious movie in the sole regard of Richard Linklater’s sheer tightrope nerve in keeping the production going a couple of weeks a year for twelve years. The very fact of pulling off “Boyhood” deserves praise, but the movie’s absurd sentimentalization of childhood and adolescence, its vision of a boy and teen without a spark of ferocity, without an evil thought, without energies to tame or impulses to master—without any wildness at heart—could satisfy the old studio system. Even Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy had more spunk. Linklater’s version of the best little boy in the world will, I think, win the Oscar. Having nothing to apologize for means never having to say you’re sorry.

What Brody construes as “absurd sentimentalization,” his New Yorker colleague Anthony Lane views as a depiction of “a tough, daily quest to refloat and sail on” ("Balancing Acts," The New Yorker, July 21, 2014). Lane says,

So many of the men in “Boyhood” seem like losers, or bullies, or both, minds and mouths locked tight with disapproval and denial, and the challenge for Mason—and, you feel, for any kid—is not just to survive the squalls of youth but somehow to grow from boy to man without suffering a death of the spirit.

Michael Wood, in his "At the Movies" (London Review of Books, August 16, 2014), shares Lane’s view:

There is also a sense in Boyhood that ordinariness is not what happens anyway but what happens if you’re lucky. The film invites us to conjugate the messed-up and far from happy lives of so many adults (and of the historical world around them) with the modest, mildly stubborn sanity of the children. They are lucky but luck isn’t all they have. Broken marriages, drunken husbands, desperate mothers, violent school bullies, drugs, temptations to drop out, break-ups with boyfriends and girlfriends: the children survive all these because they know when to stop, because they can’t be lured into the follies of their elders and so many of their peers.

Wood goes on to say:

At moments you think they are not going to make it. The alcoholic husband is thoroughly out of control, as are the school bullies practising throwing circular saws at their victims. Something bad has to happen here, you think. Because it often does in life, and because it always does in the movies, once the possibility has been announced. In movies where it isn’t going to happen the violent alcoholics and the flying sawblades don’t even show up. Still, what is guiding Linklater’s story here is not easy optimism but something like a best-case scenario when the odds are bad – a refusal of the odds as destiny.

Wood and Lane express my view. Boyhood isn’t a sentimental picture of “the best little boy in the world,” as Brody alleges. It’s an intricate portrait of a kid who, through luck and caution, manages to survive the psychological wreckage happening all around him. Brody’s criticism of Boyhood seems flimsy, disregarding the film’s many strengths – its brilliant use of elision, its naturalism, its intimate scale, its “twin sense of continuity and interruption” (Lane’s words), its miraculous ability to make time’s flow visible, its discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary. Brody’s listing Boyhood  as a “Negative Ten” is hard to comprehend. He probably thinks it's a provocative move. It is. It's also a disservice to a great movie.