On the Horizon: 10 Best "Personal History" Pieces

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces have appeared there. Over the next ten months, I’m going to pick ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. A new series then – “10 Best 'Personal History' Pieces” – starting December 15, 2024. 

November 11, 2024 Issue

David Remnick, in this week’s issue, says something that needs saying: the elements of Trump’s authoritarianism are “all there.” He says,

No small part of Trump’s authoritarian campaign is his insistence on dominance. And, though his aides and supporters are dismissive of comparisons to previous embodiments of fascism, the elements are all there: the identification of “vermin” and “the enemy within”; the threat to deploy the military against dissenters; the erasure of truth, the “big lie.” The MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden last Sunday did not feature starched gray uniforms, swastikas, or disciplined salutes. Lee Greenwood is no Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. But the rhetoric was rife with scapegoating, racism, and lies.

I agree. I applaud Remnick for having the guts to say it. 

Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb "New Yorker" Essayists (Part VIII)

This is the eighth and final post in my series “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists,” a celebration of Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023), in which I select four of my favorite pieces from each collection (one per month) and try to say why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Lepore’s marvelous “The Cobweb” (January 26, 2015), in which she travels to San Francisco to visit an Internet archive called the Wayback Machine. 

What I love about this piece, what sticks in my mind, is the riveting way Lepore introduces her subject – not by describing the Wayback Machine, or even mentioning it, but by chronicling the crash of an airliner. Here’s her opening paragraph:

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. Not much more than three hours later, the plane, a Boeing 777, crashed in a field outside Donetsk, Ukraine. All two hundred and ninety-eight people on board were killed. The plane’s last radio contact was at 1:20 p.m. G.M.T. At 2:50 p.m. G.M.T., Igor Girkin, a Ukrainian separatist leader also known as Strelkov, or someone acting on his behalf, posted a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: “We just downed a plane, an AN-26.” (An Antonov 26 is a Soviet-built military cargo plane.) The post includes links to video of the wreckage of a plane; it appears to be a Boeing 777.

This is a strange way to start a piece about Internet archiving, is it not? Actually, it turns out to be quite ingenious. Lepore reports that two hours after Strelkov’s message was posted, it was deleted. The evidence was destroyed. But, hold on, not so fast. Check the Wayback Machine. Boom! There it is. The Wayback Machine saved it. Lepore writes,

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. 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.

Lepore’s use of the deleted Strelkov post to show the value of the Wayback Machine is brilliant! 

My favorite part of “The Cobweb” is Lepore’s account of her visit to the Internet Archive, at 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, where the Wayback Machine is housed. She describes the place:

At 300 Funston Avenue, climb a set of stone steps and knock on the brass door of a Greek Revival temple. You can’t miss it: it’s painted wedding-cake white and it’s got, out front, eight Corinthian columns and six marble urns.

Inside, she meets the inventor of the Wayback Machine – Brewster Kahle:

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. 

Kahle is quite a cat. Lepore tells of the time he put the entire World Wide Web in 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.

Lepore points out that Kahle’s Wayback Machine has archived more than four hundred and thirty billion Web pages. What does such a machine look like? Lepore tells us:

At the back of the chapel, up a short flight of stairs, there are two niches, arched alcoves the same shape and size as the stained-glass windows. Three towers of computers stand within each niche, and ten computers are stacked in each tower: black, rectangular, and humming. There are towers like this all over the building; these are only six of them. Still, this is it.

Each unit has flickering blue lights. “ ‘Every time a light blinks, someone is uploading or downloading,’ Kahle explains. Six hundred thousand people use the Wayback Machine every day, conducting two thousand searches a second. ‘You can see it.’ He smiles as he watches. ‘They’re glowing books!’ He waves his arms. ‘They glow when they’re being read!’ ”

The way Lepore joins the dots – from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to reference rot to hyper-text to Brewster Kahle to the Internet Archive to the Wayback Machine – is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of her best. 

Acts of Seeing: Quickstop

John MacDougall, Quickstop, Iqaluit (2007)

I relish the “service station” shots of Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and others. Many years ago, in Iqaluit, Nunavut, I tried my hand at taking a picture of the gas bar in our neighborhood. The low Arctic sun was shining just right on the pump island, sort of spotlighting it. There was a snowmobile there, gassing up, which added a distinctive northern element. I love the colors – the greens and blues and dabs of red. You can see a hill of snow-covered tundra in the background. The scene has a certain cold beauty – at least to my yearning southern eyes. I miss the place. 

November 4, 2024 Issue

I’m embarrassed to say that of all the worthwhile subjects in this week’s issue – aid workers in Gaza, the remaking of J. D. Vance, Joe Biden’s economic policies – the one that caught and held me is Cocina Consuelo’s grilled cheese sandwich. Helen Rosner knows how to pleasure me. She writes,

A dish understatedly called “grilled cheese” has undeniable star power: made on, of all things, a croissant, it features tangy orange cheddar and is squashed on a griddle until the cheese and pastry are crisp. It’s liberally spread with a similarly sharp-textured salsa macha, a Veracruzan condiment akin to chile crunch, made with toasted hot peppers, garlic, and toasted pepitas and sesame seeds.

Yes, yes, yes! I’ll have one of those, please.

Photo by Evan Angelastro, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Cocina Consuelo"

October 28, 2024 Issue

Best sentence in this week’s issue? For me, it’s the opening line of Ray Lipstein’s “Bar Tab: Kelly’s Tavern”: “On a recent Wednesday night down in Bay Ridge, where the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge looms gorgeously overhead, a millennial with a dead phone stepped into a bar looking for the gym.” I read that and just kept going. The final sentence is very good, too: “To say more would be to kill some mystique; we may have said too much already.” Lipstein, who is new to me, seems a natural “Bar Tab” writer. I look forward to seeing more of his work in the magazine.

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #8 Wayne Koestenbaum's "The Inner Life of the Palette Knife"

Forrest Bess, Untitled (The Crown) (1949)

This is the third post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Wayne Koestenbaum’s brilliant “The Inner Life of the Palette Knife,” which originally appeared in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “My painting is tomorrow’s painting. Watch and see”: Forrest Bess (Christie’s, 2012), and is included in Koestenbaum’s great 2013 collection My 1980s & Other Essays. It’s Koestenbaum’s attempt to describe and comprehend Bess’s strange abstractions. 

Koestenbaum begins by suggesting that we should not so much read Bess’s paintings, as experience them. To do that, he recommends close looking. He writes,

The light in this room – where I’m looking at his paintings, one by one – shines irregularly on his black paint. Sometimes the black, arrested by light, seems matte; at other instants, light causes the black paint to glisten. These modest oscillations – matte one moment, glistening the next – are not the size of Texas. You need to stand very close to the painting to see these incremental changes, nuances so minor that it seems a culpable exaggeration to call attention to them, even if these delicate effects of light and texture are Bess’s major contribution to the philosophy of transgendered affect, to American abstract art, to the erotics of fear.

He says that to really appreciate Bess’s paintings, we must be willing to “waste time” looking at them, “without the certainty that it will reward you with ecstasy, knowledge, or satisfaction.” He goes on, 

In one of my favorite Bess paintings (untitled, like most of them), composed of oil and painted foil on canvas, I lose myself – I waste time – looking at a blue foil triangle’s nearness to a brown-black dot. That dot’s placement has no clear or verbalizable meaning; I can’t explain why the dot is near the triangle, though not too near. The dot belongs in the triangle’s vicinity, but the two entities – dot, triangle – have no fixed relationship. In that same painting, the background is composed of black swirls or blobs. The black blobs – gesso-like? – are separate from one another but also sometimes joined or interacting. Their edges – to the extent that the blobs cluster together in a community – are at once stable and unstable; the edges ululate, but don’t sing a clear melody.

To pay attention to these black blobs, or to pay attention to the blue foil triangle’s nearness to a specific dot, I must pledge allegiance to abstract art’s Bill of Rights, which contains, unlike the United States’, only one provision: the right to look, for unstructured amounts of time, at migrant and unspecific forms, and at the relation between them, without demanding that the forms have a single meaning, and without demanding that whatever significance I ascribe to these forms be defensible, explicable, or based on any evidence but my own sensations.... I have the right to find supreme significance in Bess’s blobs and lines, and to spend as long as I wish in a state of torpid yet ecstatic surrender to them.

That formulation of “abstract art’s Bill of Rights” is inspired!

Koestenbaum responds intensely to Bess’s palette-knife marks. In one of my favorite passages, he writes,

These experiences of transport, keyed to painterly moments almost too small to mention, I call jabs of intensification – microscopic illuminations, inner shudders, tiny spurts of “oh my God!”, as if a joy-bringing bubble were suddenly to open up a new hallway in my brain, or as if suddenly I were to become Keats reading Homer for the first time and standing proud on a silent peak to view the wild Pacific. But in Bess’s case, the wild Pacific is merely an edge mark made by a palette knife, where yellow gets divided into adjacent, parallel mini-panels of companionate yellows.

He says of Bess’s Mandala (1967), “The black paint surrounding the mandala has gorgeous gouge marks that awaken in me (the urge never went to sleep) a desire to make texture my god.” Koestenbaum’s expression of his love of texture makes me smile. It’s my love, too.

Koestenbaum’s main theme is the need to pay close attention. In his closing paragraph, he writes,

Bess’s hieroglyphic semiabstractions suggest not only that he was a remarkable artist but that abstract – or near-abstract – art, hovering on the edges of codes we’ll never comprehend, teaches us to pay fine-grained, undogmatic attention to the blobs and lines and curves we encounter in everyday life. Pay attention to scratches. Pay attention to the textured, importuning marks of a silent palette knife. Use Bess’s paintings to understand the difficult art of human attentiveness. In a would always willing to truncate the possibilities for closely noticing what occurs, allow attentiveness to flower, however private and inscrutable its flowering, however seemingly impractical, minor, puzzling, and antisocial its procedures of self-nourishment. 

Sage advice for these distracted times.