10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #9 Leslie Jamison's "Other Voices, Other Rooms"

Illustration by Eleanor Davis, from Leslie Jamison's Other Voices, Other Rooms

This is the second post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Leslie Jamison’s superb “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2020).

This piece is a wonderful celebration of my favorite subject – the everyday. It ingeniously links two seemingly unrelated topics – Jamison’s baby and the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Private Lives Public Spaces.” The piece unfolds in seven sections. 

In section one, Jamison tells about how being with her baby heightened her awareness of everything around her. She writes,

Being with my baby every hour of every day demanded close attention, not just to her—whether her fluttering eyelids meant she was waking up or just dreaming, how close she’d rolled to the edge of our bed—but also to everything else, because the alternative to paying attention was growing bored out of my mind. My hunger for stimulation meant my gaze was sensitized, the way your eyes can see more after you’ve spent a few minutes in the dark.

She says, “Those newborn months made the everyday visible again. It was all suddenly there.”

Section two introduces the MoMA exhibition:

An exhibition called “Private Lives Public Spaces” comprises a collection of home movies showing everyday scenes: one child pushes another in a sled as the day darkens around them. Lace curtains billow in a breeze. A woman mock-proposes to another woman at a lawn party, kneeling on the grass and laughing. A middle-aged man in a suit and tie rides piggyback on the shoulders of another middle-aged man in a suit and tie. Boys take furtive sips of Manischewitz at someone’s bar mitzvah, their glasses glinting in the ballroom light.

Jamison describes one of the movies:

An anonymous movie called My Dream Trip consists primarily of vacation footage shot on a train—the café car and narrow aisles, a pale water tower visible through a rain-streaked window—with voiceover from a man whose voice sounds like Kermit the Frog after twenty years of pack-a-day smoking. Smoker Kermit is thrilled by everything he sees. “So beautiful,” he keeps saying at the sight of the St. Louis Arch, “so gorgeous.” His gaze is humid with enthusiasm. And when he sees the automated gate at the entrance to an underground parking garage, he says, “Hello hello HELLO,” as if greeting a long-lost friend. Tenderness saturates the footage of his wife wearing her white camisole in their sleeping cabin, or eating potato chips and drinking beer out of a plastic cup in the dining car; his nighttime footage of the red-light district in New Orleans feels like a feral fever-dream, blurred by unspoken desire.

That “Hello hello HELLO” makes me smile. I, too, have experienced that heightened state of consciousness when, like Smoker Kermit, I’m thrilled by everything I see. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s bliss. 

In sections three and four, Jamison describes some of the moments in the MoMA home movies that most affected her. She writes,

One sequence in the Jarret family movies shows a small group of people dancing in a living room. It looks less like an organized party than a spontaneous eruption of festivity on a regular weeknight: three women doing the twist between the coffee table and the couch, one in linen slacks with a cigarette between her lips; folks with furrowed brows playing cards at a table behind them; a baby in a lace dress propped against a corner couch cushion; a boy in a red bathrobe and one in black suspenders, both clasping their hands together and swimming downward like fish, checking their feet occasionally, not sure if they are doing the steps right. It’s an ordinary evening brimming with the extraordinary condition of being alive, and watching gives me a sense of vertigo, as if I’m falling through cracks in the surface of experience—witnessing the secret of what it feels like to be this person, in this moment. Something rises inside me, as if it could touch these strangers just beneath their skin. Something in me wants to.

Now comes section five – the core of Jamison’s meditation. For her, she says, fascination with the grace of ordinariness “began in twelve-step meetings, listening to the voices of strangers in other basements in distant cities – riveted by stories or clichés that my literary training had taught me to understand as banal.” She says, “Recovery was teaching me that every life held profundity. Banality was just a call to look harder.”

That brilliant last line – “Banality was just a call to look harder” – went straight into my personal anthology of great epigrams. Change “was” to “is” and the line could serve as my personal credo. Section five ends with another inspired line: “Meaning is happening Now! Now! Now!”

In sections six and seven, Jamison expands her meditation on beauty to include other artworks she sees at MoMA, e.g., Albert Bierstadt’s A Storm in the Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, and photographs documenting the artist Lea Lublin’s 1968 Mon Fils (My Son). But, for me, the high point of the piece is section five. “Meaning is happening Now! Now! Now!” are words to live by. 

Acts of Seeing: View from Dublin Coastal Trail

Photo by John MacDougall

Tourism Ireland might be puzzled by this choice. Why a picture of a desolate stretch of railway track when there are scenes so much more “picturesque” to pick from? Ireland is a photographer’s dream. On our recent bike trip, we took hundreds of photos. But this shot appeals to me for some odd reason. It’s a view from the Dublin Coastal Trail. I love the gleaming rails, the touches of pink in the green vegetation, the vine climbing the mesh attached to the steel post supporting the electrical wires, the green fencing, the deep indigo of the graffiti on the old stone wall. And beyond – Irish sea, sky, clouds, island. I love it all.

Postscript: Luis Tiant 1940 - 2024

Luis Tiant (Photo by Rich Pilling)

I see in the Times that the great Cuban baseball pitcher Luis Tiant died: see “Luis Tiant, Crowd-Pleasing Pitcher Who Baffled Hitters, Dies at 83.” Tiant figures centrally in Roger Angell’s brilliant “Agincourt and After” (The New Yorker, November 17, 1975), an account of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Angell wrote,

Conjecture thickened through most of the opening game, which was absolutely close for most of the distance, and then suddenly not close at all. Don Gullett, a powerful left-hander, kept the Red Sox in check for six innings, but was slightly out pitched and vastly outacted over the same distance by Tiant. The venerable stopper (he is listed as being thirty-four and rumored as being a little or a great deal older) did not have much of a fastball on this particular afternoon, so we were treated to the splendid full range of Tiantic mime. His repertoire begins with an exaggerated mid-windup pivot, during which he turns his back on the batter and seems to examine the infield directly behind the mound for signs of crabgrass. With men on bases, his stretch consists of a succession of minute downward waggles and pauses of the glove, and a menacing sidewise, slit-eyed, Valentino-like gaze over his shoulder at the base runner. The full flower of his art, however, comes during the actual delivery, which is executed with a perfect variety show of accompanying gestures and impersonations. I had begun to take notes during my recent observations of the Cuban Garrick, and now, as he set down the Reds with only minimal interruptions (including one balk call, in the fourth), I arrived at some tentative codifications. The basic Tiant repertoire seems to include:

(1) Call the Osteopath: In mid-pitch, the man suffers an agonizing seizure in the central cervical region, which he attempts to fight off with a sharp backward twist of the head.

(2) Out of the Woodshed: Just before releasing the ball, he steps over a raised sill and simultaneously ducks his head to avoid conking it on the low door frame.

(3) The Runaway Taxi: Before the pivot, he sees a vehicle bearing down on him at top speed, and pulls back his entire upper body just in time to avoid a nasty accident.

(4) Falling Off the Fence: An attack of vertigo nearly causes him to topple over backward on the mound. Strongly suggests a careless dude on the top rung of the corral.

(5) The Slipper-Kick: In mid-pitch, he surprisingly decides to get rid of his left shoe.

(6) The Low-Flying Plane (a subtle development and amalgam of 1, 3, and 4, above): While he is pivoting, an F-105 buzzes the ballpark, passing over the infield from the third-base to the first-base side at a height of eighty feet. He follows it all the way with his eyes.

That is one of the most inspired baseball descriptions ever written. It makes me smile every time I read it. Tiant is gone now, but he lives on in Angell’s classic piece. 

Postscript: Lore Segal 1928 - 2024

Lore Segal (Photo by Ellen Dubin) 

I see in the Times that Lore Segal has died. She wrote one of my all-time favorite New Yorker memory pieces – “Spry for Frying” (April 18, 2011; included in her The Journal I Did Not Keep, 2019). It’s only three pages long, but it’s unforgettable. Perhaps its brevity contributes to its indelibility. It’s a recollection of Segal’s arrival in America, when she was twenty-three. It’s an attempt to remember. Not everything is clear. Segal begins, 

In memories of journeys past, some portions remain stubbornly unavailable to recollection. I can call up no mental picture of my mother and me boarding the plane in Santo Domingo—in those days it was called Ciudad Trujillo—nor do I remember arriving in New York. (I’ve always intended to Google the airport at which we must have landed. This was May 1, 1951.) And then did we take the bus, the subway, a taxi? Did Paul, my uncle, come to pick us up?

One thing she does recall is the “Spry for Frying, Spry for Baking” sign “blinking on and off from the New Jersey shore.” She writes,

While my mother, on that first evening in New York, stayed in the apartment with my grandmother, Paul walked me the one block to Riverside Drive. The advertisement laid shivering paths of light across the black water of the Hudson River and turned the American sky purple. “This would be prettier than the Thames Embankment if it weren’t all so commercial,” I pronounced. At twenty-three, I had many opinions, and that America was commercial was one I had imbibed in England. It was to England that I had longed, during the drag of the years in the Dominican Republic, to return.

That “The advertisement laid shivering paths of light across the black water of the Hudson River and turned the American sky purple” is wonderful. Segal’s memory coalesces around the sign. Then one day the sign disappears. She says,

There must have been a particular day when I looked across the Hudson and there was no “Spry for Frying, Spry for Baking” in the New Jersey sky. I felt surprised, and deprived. True, I hadn’t seen the brand name on any product—hadn’t looked for or missed it in the supermarket. (Google “Spry.” When had it changed its name, merged with another brand, gone belly up?) Again and yet again, and still I look across the Hudson River, surprised, by now, that I am surprised at the naked sky and unable to complete the picture in my mind: Was the second element “Spry for Cooking” or was it “Spry for Baking”? Do I remember correctly that it blinked?

The sign becomes a symbol of life’s transience. The piece ends poignantly:

The refugee in me still tends to feel displaced when I leave New York. It’s not in America, not in the United States, that I’ve put down my new-grown roots. It is in Manhattan. And I have a plan for the completion of my naturalization: I would like my compliant ashes to be strewn—I hope it’s not illegal—on Riverside Drive. Let me blow across the Hudson, and go where Spry is gone. 

That last line is inspired! Segal embraces her own ephemerality. 

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

This is the seventh 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’ll 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 Thurman’s dazzling “Darkness Wearable” (titled "Dress to Thrill, when it appeared in the May 16, 2011 New Yorker). 

Thurman is a master fashion writer. “Darkness Wearable” is one of her best pieces. It’s a review of a 2011 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum called Savage Beauty – a retrospective of Alexander McQueen’s two decades in fashion. Thurman writes,

Even if you never bother with fashion shows, go to this one. It has more in common with “Sleep No More,” the “immersive” performance of “Macbeth” currently playing in Chelsea, than it does with a conventional display of couture in a gallery, tent, or shop window. Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, has assembled a hundred ensembles and seventy accessories, mostly from the runway, with a few pieces of couture that McQueen designed at Givenchy, and he gives their history and psychology an astute reading. McQueen was an omnivore (literally so; he always struggled with his weight), and the richness of his work reflects a voracious consumption of high and low culture. He felt an affinity with the Flemish masters, Gospel singing, Elizabethan theatre and its cross-dressing heroines (a line from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was tattooed on his right biceps), contemporary performance art, punk, Surrealism, Japan, the ancient Yoruba, and fin-de-siècle aestheticism. In most particulars, however—including his death—he was an archetypal Romantic.

Her description of the show is superb. For example:

Alienation often accounts for a macabre sense of the marvellous. At the entrance to “Savage Beauty,” there is an evening gown conjured entirely from razor-clam shells. Antelope horns sprout from the shoulders of a pony-skin jacket, and vulture skulls serve as epaulettes on a leather dress. There are angel wings made out of balsa wood, and worms encased in a bodice of molded plastic. “I’m inspired by a feather,” McQueen said of all the duck, turkey, ostrich, and gull plumage in his clothing—“its graphics, its weightlessness, and its engineering.” One of his most demented masterpieces is a glossy black-feathered body cast that transforms its wearer into a hybrid creature—part raptor, part waterfowl, and part woman.

And:

The second gallery is an ornate, spooky hall of mirrors consecrated to McQueen’s gothic reveries about bondage and fetishism. One of the loveliest dresses—with a lampshade skirt of swagged jet beading—has a necrotic-looking jabot of lace ivy that reminds you what a fetish mourning was to the Victorians. Leather abounds, masterfully tortured into submission, as in a zippered sheath with fox sleeves latticed by an elaborate harness. 

And:

Beyond the hall of mirrors is a “Cabinet of Curiosities,” where inventive instruments of consensual torture in the form of jewelry, headgear, footwear, and corsets are displayed like talismans. Videos from selected runway shows flicker high on the black walls, and the animal sounds of a cheering crowd and a woman moaning issue from hidden speakers. In a clip from one of McQueen’s most radical collections (Spring/Summer 1999), an homage to the German artist Rebecca Horn, the model Shalom Harlow revolves on a turntable, cringing in mock horror as two menacing robots spray her white parachute dress with paint guns. The most striking artifact from this collection is a pair of exquisitely hand-carved high-heeled wooden prostheses that McQueen designed for Aimee Mullins, a bilateral amputee and American Paralympic athlete. She modelled them on the runway with a bridal lace skirt and a centurion’s breastplate of molded leather, sutured like Frankenstein’s skull.

And then there’s this extraordinary passage: 

In “Highland Rape” (1995), the breakthrough collection that earned McQueen, at twenty-six, his notoriety as a bad-boy wonder, bare-breasted dishevelled girls staggered down the runway in gorgeously ravaged lace, sooty tartan, and distressed leather. 

You can tell from the piquancy of Thurman’s descriptions that she relishes McQueen’s “macabre sense of the marvelous.” It’s her sensibility, too.    

September 30, 2024 Issue

My fascination with the two versions of Helen Rosner’s "Tables for Two" column continues. This week, she reviews the Taiwanese restaurant chain Din Tai Fung’s first New York location. The print version of her piece contains this wonderful description:

Runners zip and zag among the tables, bearing teetering stacks of bamboo steamer trays, including dessert dumplings filled, not unappealingly, with chocolate ganache, or smooth, warm, sweet black sesame paste. The grid of tables and their identical accent lamps recede into the distance with mathematical regularity, the lighting somehow both overdim and overbright. Din Tai Fung is a machine, but a notably delicious one.

I love the imagery – “Runners zip and zag among the tables, bearing teetering stacks of bamboo steamer trays”; “The grid of tables and their identical accent lamps recede into the distance with mathematical regularity, the lighting somehow both overdim and overbright.” I can’t imagine how it could be improved. Then I read the digital version on newyorker.com, and voilà! It’s even more vivid:

Runners zip and zag among the tables, bearing teetering stacks of bamboo steamer trays, shedding the vertical layers table by table. Servers swing by to ask if you’re interested in some boba tea (they make it in-house), or a cocktail (see that enormous U-shaped bar all the way over there?), or another round of cucumbers, or maybe some dessert—dumplings, naturally, filled not unappealingly with chocolate ganache, or smooth, warm, sweet black-sesame paste. Time flows quickly, and also slowly; the walls are black, and far away; there are no windows. The transparent walls of the kitchen echo the uncanny fishbowl effect of the street-level entrance far above. The grid of tables and their identical accent lamps recede into the distance with mathematical regularity, the lighting somehow both overdim and overbright. More than once, I was struck with the disorienting feeling that I was hovering at the edge of the void. You could be deep below the streets of midtown Manhattan, or you could be on the ninth floor of a casino in Vegas, or you could be on a space station, or in Taipei, or in a shockingly real-feeling, slightly uncanny, notably delicious dream.

So many additional delectable details! Rosner’s enhancement of the first sentence with “shedding the vertical layers table by table” is inspired. To fully appreciate the beauty of her writing, I recommend reading (and comparing) both versions. 

3 for the River: Figuration

This is the tenth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favourite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their many vivid figures of speech.

In Dangerous River, Patterson writes, “After an hour or two’s travel a dirty, yellowish-looking ball climbed up out of the trees on the right bank and hung suspended in the sky, glowing feebly like a badly cleaned lantern.” He says of the wind, “The raving wind was whipping the tall spruce around like fishing rods.” Of wind and snow: “In the small hours of December 2, the wind rose to a gale and swung into the northwest, and from there it blew all day long, a searing blast of cold out of a cloudless sky, drifting the snow down the river with a hissing, scratching sound like that of driven sand.” He compares the canoeing prowess of his friend Albert Faille to that of a “fine swordsman”: 

The Nahanni has probably never seen a finer canoeman, and to watch Faille search out the weak spot in a riffle and plant his canoe’s nose exactly there, and neither to the right nor to the left by even a hand’s breadth, is like watching a fine swordsman seeking for an opening, feeling out his adversary. 

And in one of his most lyrical lines, Patterson writes, “The seed heads of the long, dry grass shone like silver against the low October sun: the meadows were wind rippled and from them came a new sound – a sound that is never heard in the dark forests of the North – the song of the west wind in the wild standing hay.”

Raban’s Old Glory brims with figuration:

The afternoon was rank and sweaty, and the Mississippi here drifted in a listless sweep between two bridges, a mile north of the end of commercial navigation. It looked as tame as a fishpond in a civic park. 

Rising fish left circles on the water here, and the current squeezed them into narrow ovals, before they faded into the scratched wax polish of the top of the river. 

The tow went by, dragging the river in creases behind it like a trailed skirt. 

Big tows lounged on the current, thrashing the water around their tails, their engines farting loudly as they turned. They maneuvered lugubriously around each other, honking and grumbling, heaving their ridiculous bulk about like hippopotami at a water hole. 

Once, when I seesawed ineptly over a breaker, the propeller was lifted clear of the water and the engine made a vile sound like the squeal of a stuck pig. 

In front of the boat, the water had the gleaming consistency of molasse; behind, it lay smashed and buckled by my wake. 

Just beside my boat, a fish jumped. It was a big carp, and as it turned in the air and walloped back, it looked as if someone had chucked a block of gold bullion into the lake.

Still and brown, gleaming faintly in the thin, diffuse light, the lake had the vacant gaze of an enormous animal’s eye. 

As I reeled them in from under the boat, they changed from one metal color to another, coming up, struggling, through the peaty water: first an indeterminate flash of dull pewter, then a powerful glow of polished brass, finally a brilliant threshing of pure silver as they came wallowing to the net.  

The water felt as hard and fibrous as muscle tissue, and the whole structure of the boat throbbed as it hit each successive wave.  

The river stayed wide – four thousand yards from bank to bank – but the islands thickened until they lay as dense as the pieces of a disturbed jigsaw puzzle.

All I needed to watch was the scratched-glass surface ahead of the bow and the sun as it began to settle in the sky behind me. 

Wharves, cranes and smokestacks were going by in a blur of black type. 

At least I could see a reason for these eddies and learn to predict them before they swallowed me, but I couldn’t explain the boils. They came sprouting up from the river bottom, often in mid-channel, miles from any tongue of sand or rock. Their mushroom tops gleamed nastily, like patent leather. 

The junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio was a confluence of thick machine oil and rosewater. 

It was like riding a long slide on a children’s playground. The boat streamed with the current. 

By nine, the sky had gone blue, the wave points glittered, and I could feel the wind on my cheeks, coming in long warm gusts like the breath of a panting dog. 

I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak. 

Tim Butcher’s Blood River contains at least a dozen evocative figures of speech. He says of his guide Benoit Bangana, “He was wearing a bright-yellow plastic raincoat, with heavy gloves, kneepads, goggles and black shiny wellington boots. He looked like a ninja North Sea trawlerman.” A wreck of an old boat has “panels eaten away by rust to reveal bulkheads like ribs in a whale carcass.” The coarse hull of a pirogue feels like “a rough-hewn braille, charting the history of a river nation both blessed and cursed by this great natural phenomenon.” The limbs of his sleeping river guides are “all folded together for warmth like the blades on a Swiss Army knife.” Their wooden paddles are “shape of spades from a deck of cards.” Rainforest trees have trunks “pleated into great sinews that plunged into the earth, as massive and solid as flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral.” And this wonderful sentence: “As I ran back to the bikes, the ants were so thick on my trousers I brushed them off like soot.” To evoke the Congo, Butcher borrows an image from Joseph Conrad: “And there was the river. Conrad’s uncoiling serpent grew fatter and fatter each day that we descended.”

Figuration is one tool these three great writers use to describe their travels. Another is detail. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.