Taking a Break

Via Claudia Augusta (photo from www.suedtirolerland.it)

This afternoon, Lorna and I fly to Italy to cycle the Via Claudia Augusta. We’ll be gone three weeks. As mentioned earlier, I’m taking the April 14 New Yorker with me. I’ll post my review when I return. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about June 1. Ciao!

Acts of Seeing: Daffodil

Photo by John MacDougall

Many years ago, I randomly planted a bunch of daffodil bulbs on our property, including in the woods and along the driveway. This one popped up a couple of days ago, its yellow harmonizing with the colors of my old lobster buoy collection. I don’t do anything to nurture the daffodils. They’re completely on their own. Yet every May they manage to appear, pushing up through the undergrowth to shout hello, it’s spring. 

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #5

This is the fifth post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his superb “Madame Matisse’s Hat” (London Review of Books, August 14, 2008). It’s a description of Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905):

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

This is Clark musing out loud. He lets us in on his thoughts as his omnivorous eyes scan the painting, absorbing its details. The passage exemplifies a key aspect of his approach – his use of questions. He proceeds interrogatively – nine questions in this one paragraph alone:

What sort of dress is Parayre wearing?

What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder?

How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it?

Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper?

How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms?

It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves.

What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?

Or is it a great limp flower?

In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

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

Credit: The above illustration is Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905).

10 Best "Personal History" Pieces: #6 Danielle Allen's "American Inferno"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Danielle Allen’s searing “American Inferno” (July 24, 2017).

In this extraordinary piece, Allen tells about her fifteen-year-old cousin’s descent into crime, prison, and eventual death, notwithstanding her considerable efforts to save him. It’s a powerful blend of elegy, argument, analysis, and anger. It’s also beautifully crafted. Consider the opening paragraph:

What sets the course of a life? Three years before my beloved cousin’s murder—before the weeping, before the raging, before the heated self-recriminations and icy reckonings—I awoke with the most glorious sense of anticipation I’ve ever felt. It was June 29, 2006, the day that Michael was going to be freed. Outside my vacation condo in Hollywood, I climbed into the old white BMW I’d bought from my mother and headed to my aunt’s small stucco home, in South Central. On the corner, a fortified drug house stood like a sentry, but her pale cottage seemed serene, aglow in the morning sun. Poverty never looks quite as bad in the City of Angels as it does elsewhere.

All the key ingredients of Allen’s approach are here: inquiry, tragedy, feeling, specificity. This passage immediately drew me in. I entered Allen’s world – a starkly contrasting place, divided between her own successful life as dean of humanities at the University of Chicago and that of her cousin, Michael, struggling to start over after spending eleven years in prison for attempted carjacking. Michael, age fifteen, was sentenced to eleven years in adult prison. That is the central, sorry, horrific fact of this piece. How could that be? Allen writes,

The narrative so far is familiar. A kid from a troubled home, trapped in poverty, without a stable world of adults coördinating care for him, starts pilfering, mostly out of an impatience to have things. In Michael’s first fourteen years, his story includes not a single incidence of violence, aside from the usual wrestling matches with siblings. It could have had any number of possible endings. But events unfold along a single track. As we make decisions, and decisions are made for us, we shed the lives that might have been. In Michael’s fifteenth year, his life accelerated, like a cylinder in one of those pneumatic tubes, whisking off your deposit at a drive-through bank. To understand how that acceleration could happen, though, another story is needed.

That story is the sad, rotten history of California’s Three Strikes and You’re Out Law, which took discretion out of the judges’ hands and replaced it with harsh mandatory sentencing. Allen says,

The legislators who voted to try as adults sixteen-year-olds, and then fourteen-year-olds, were not interested in retribution. They had become deterrence theorists. They were designing sentences not for people but for a thing: the aggregate level of crime. They wanted to reduce that level, regardless of what constituted justice for any individual involved. The target of Michael’s sentence was not a bright fifteen-year-old boy with a mild proclivity for theft but the thousands of carjackings that occurred in Los Angeles. Deterrence dehumanizes. It directs at the individual the full hatred that society understandably has for an aggregate phenomenon. But no individual should bear that kind of responsibility.

So fifteen-year-old Michael spent the next eleven years of life in prison, including the notoriously tough Chino. What was that like? Allen tells us:

The years between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six are punctuated by familiar milestones: high school, driver’s license, college, first love, first job, first serious relationship, perhaps marriage, possibly a child. For those who pass adolescence in prison, some of these rites disappear; the ones that occur take on a distorted shape. And extra milestones get added. First long-term separation from family. First racial melee. First time in solitary, formally known as “administrative segregation.” First time sodomized.

When, on June 29, 2006, Michael is released from California Rehabilitation Center-Norco, his family, including Allen, is there to meet him. With their support, his chances of successfully restarting his life seem promising. Allen writes,

Driving back to South Central, my mood was all melody. I imagined Michael felt the same. Little more than a month out and here he was, with a driver’s license, a bank account, a library card, and a job. He was enrolled in college, with a clean, safe, comfortable place to live. This was a starter set for a life, enabling him to defy the pattern of parolees.

But Michael has changed. While in prison he’d fallen in love with another inmate, a relationship that continued, unbeknownst to Allen, after they were released from prison. The relationship was violent. It ended in Michael’s murder. He was just twenty-nine. But for Allen’s potent memoir of him, he likely would’ve disappeared into oblivion like most of the other thousands of black youths incarcerated under Three Strikes who went on to violent death. Allen’s “American Inferno” rescues him from oblivion. It’s a magnificent piece.

Credit: The above illustration is by Mike McQuade.  

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #2 Patricia Lockwood's "Malfunctioning Sex Robot"

This is the ninth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Patricia Lockwood’s savage “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019).

Savage? Oh yes. John Updike’s work has been panned before, but never to this extreme. Lockwood slaughters him. Her first sentence warns of her intent:

I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.

It is a bloodbath. The piece is divided in seven sections. In the first section, Lockwood says,

In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has learned to read. Today, he has fallen even further, still in the pantheon but marked by an embarrassed asterisk: DIED OF PUSSY-HOUNDING. No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter. 

That last sentence went straight into my personal anthology of great critical zingers. 

Section 1 also contains a striking metaphor – “Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965) light up section by section, like a countryside freshly wired for electricity” – that shines a beam throughout the piece. (Subsequent sections on Rabbit, Run and The Centaur each begin with the word “flash.”) 

In the second section, Lockwood analyzes Updike’s youth – his relationship with his mother (“She throws her voice and her atmospheres through his keyholes; it is his mother’s eye that examines his characters’ wives, to see whether they are good enough for him”), the traumatic move from Shillington to the farm in Plowville [“The solitude there verged on quarantine; the close harmonies of his four elders (his mother’s parents lived with them) repeated, turned dissonant, and set his teeth on edge; the place almost certainly made him a writer”]. 

Section 3 continues the examination of his life and then, at the mention of Rabbit Redux, turns bitingly sarcastic:

If you were worried that somewhere in this sweeping tetralogy Rabbit wasn’t going to ejaculate all over a teenager and then compare the results to a napalmed child, you can rest easy.

Section 4 is a wonderful capsule review of the first book of the Rabbit quartet – Rabbit, Run (“The writing sounds like the inside of an athlete’s head: clipped, staccato, strategic, as nearly empty as a high-school gym, with only himself inside it”). Lockwood says of Updike’s writing, “When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning.” Of Rabbit, Run’s female characters, she comments,

He paints and paints them, but the proportions are wrong. He is like a God who spends four hours on the shading on Eve’s upper lip, forgets to give her a clitoris, and then decides to rest on a Tuesday.

Section 5 considers Updike’s The Centaur (“The senses move through the scenes in full galloping integration, along with the tick and weight of actual time”). Here, Lockwood conjures one of her most inspired descriptions, riffing on a line from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin: 

Winding through The Centaur is a highway that will carry us into the future: the scenery of Updike’s childhood, immensely beautiful in his eyes, penetrates the automobile, drives the car.

In section 6, Lockwood restates her argument:

After Rabbit, Run, the books cease to be interesting primarily for their art but become essential recordings of American life. They continue to be speedily readable – the present tense works on Updike the way boutique transfusions of young blood work on billionaires – and perfectly replicate the experience of eating a hot dog in quasi-wartime on a lush crew-cut lawn that has been invisibly poisoned by industry, while men argue politics in the background and a Nice Ass lurks somewhere on the horizon, like the presence of God.

Section 7 is the ugliest part, referring to “Updike’s homophobia,” “his racism,” his “misogyny,” “his burning need to commit to print lines like ‘Horny, Jews are.’ ” But it also contains a remarkable passage – Lockwood imagining Updike reading what she’s written:

Why is it so tempting to grade him on a curve? He is so attended by the shine of a high-school star, standing in a spotlight that insists on his loveability, that presents him as a great gold cup into which forgiveness must be poured. It extended even to me: as I underlined passages and wrote ‘what the … WHAT’ next to paragraphs, I felt him sad in the clouds on my shoulder, baffled, as if he had especially been hoping that I would get it. I aimed it at you, he tells me: you were that vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

The first time I read this piece, I was shocked. Updike is my hero. He’s one of this blog’s lodestars. Click on his name in the “Labels” list, and you’ll open eighty-eight posts that either discuss or quote his work. But with subsequent readings, the shock wore off, replaced by a deep admiration for Lockwood’s art of evisceration.  

Credit: The above illustration is based on Thomas Slack’s photo of Patricia Lockwood (left) and Brigitte Lacombe’s photo of John Updike (right). 

Jed Perl on Arlene Croce

Arlene Croce and George Balanchine, 1981 (Photo by Dominique Nabokov)

It’s interesting to read about a view of art that totally differs from mine. Arlene Croce, New Yorker dance critic for twenty-three years (1973-1996), believed that art-making is the process by which raw experience is transformed into aesthetic experience. “Croce was perfectly willing to go to the theater and witness the most agonizing scenes of pain, suffering, and death, but only with the understanding that the ‘realism-idealism equation’ was engaged, that real life had in some way been transformed.” I’m quoting from Jed Perl’s wonderful tribute to Croce, “Echoes of Eternity,” in the March 27, 2025, The New York Review of Books. Perl’s defence of this view is curious. He writes,

You can disagree with Croce, but to do so you must argue that art is little more than a frame through which to observe the lives we’re living—or to launch theories or even polemics about the meaning of our lives. That’s the position of the social realists who dominated Soviet culture through the Stalinist years and of some in the arts community today, but Croce didn’t see it as a plausible approach for either an artist or an audience in a free society. 

Well, I disagree with Croce, but it has nothing to do with social realism or Soviet culture. It has everything to do with literary journalism, street photography, and documentary work. I relish art and writing that bring me as close to reality as possible. Show me life as is, warts and all. To hell with transformation. That’s for escapists and ballet fans. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Action

This is the fifth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their action.

By “action” I mean narrative action – physical movement through time and space. It’s an important ingredient. Without it, narrative is static. To hell with mental journeys! Give me the real thing. These three great books do exactly that. John McPhee, in The Pine Barrens, drives the undulating sand roads of the pine forest and canoes its rivers. He visits fire towers, pine towns, and factory ruins. He visits Fred Brown’s home in Hog Wallow. He observes the cranberry harvest, “when the bogs are flooded an inch or so over the vines, and the cranberries, which float, are batted free by motorized water rakes until they form a great scarlet berry boom – hundreds of thousands of cranberries bobbing and drifting with the wind or on a slow drainage current to a corner of the bog, where they are hauled in.” He accompanies the Philadelphia Botanical Club on its summer field trip in the pines:

Mrs. Evert called out to her husband, “Brooks, keep your eyes open and see if you can see the adder’s tongue fern over there.” Someone else found an adder’s tongue fern, and all the others assembled around it, on their hands and knees, as they did, moments later, around an orchid called Loesel’s twayblade. This was in Martha, and the orchid was growing on the site of the mansion that had stood in the middle of the now vanishing town. Overhead, crowded down by the pines, were the strangely twisted catalpa trees that had been planted by the people of Martha in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In one of my favorite passages, McPhee attends a tribute to the Mexican pilot Emilio Carranza, who, in 1928, was attempting a solo flight from Mexico City to Washington, when he fatally crashed in the Pine Barrens.  Each year a ceremony is held at the Carranza Memorial, which marks the crash site.  Here’s an excerpt:

Three hundred people were there, half of them Mexican. The Mexicans came from as far away as Chicago, but most of them were from New York, northern New Jersey, or Pennsylvania. They were in costume, in the main, and before the ceremony began they played strident arrangements of Mexican songs, like “Mi Patria Es Lo Primero” and “Mi Lindo Monterrey,” on a record player that was set on the tailgate of a Chevrolet station wagon. Girls in florid skirts and white blouses took thirty minutes to make up, combing and spraying one another’s hair and swaying to the sound of the phonograph. Little boys wore frilled shirts and straw hats. One man wore a green-white-and-orange sombrero, a red bandanna around his neck, and a black shirt. A Mexican colonel, tall and trim in a deep-green uniform, walked through the crowd and took a seat in a folding chair under a canopy, where people from Chatsworth and other places in the pines sat quietly in the heat, waiting. Two trucks from the state Forest Fire Service arrived, a bus and a truck from Fort Dix, and an ambulance. A fire warden came out of the woods carrying a six-foot-pine snake. Mexican children formed a circle around him, and he told them that a group of Boy Scouts had cut the head off a rattlesnake in that same part of the woods three days before. An army band from Fort Dix put the Mexican phonograph to shame with a soft and beautiful flow of Mexican melodies, notably “La Paloma” and the “Zacatecas March.” There were thirty-five men in the band, including a blonde soldier with a bowl haircut who had the touch of Granada with a pair of castanets. American Legionnaires with red-veined, waxy faces walked around saying, “Where’s the beer?” The beer was on ice in a large blue garbage can under a pitch pine, and the Legionnaires – who came from the Mt. Holy area, outside the pines – shared it with the Tabernacle Township police, one of whom was so heavy that he could not reach down into the garbage can. Brigadier-General William C. Doyle, of Fort Dix, gave an address, and said, “Here in New Jersey’s pine country, the gallant airman was grounded forever. He was not dess-tined to complete his mission.” The Honorable Donald E. Johnson, Immediate Past National Commander of the American Legion, said in the course of his speech that he had recently spent “an unprecedented hour with the President of Mexico.” He also spoke about the war in Vietnam, saying, “Any one who tells you this is a civil war is either ill-informed or uninformed or deliberately deceptive.” There was no discernible reaction from either the Mexicans or the pineys. Finally, he mentioned Emilio Carranza, saying, “Had Captain Carranza lived, his name might be forgotten today – such are the imponderables of life and death.” Another Legionnaire informed the crowd that men of the American Legion had hacked a trail twenty-five miles through the wilderness to carry Carranza’s body out to Mt. Holly. Actually, Carranza crashed beside a sand road, and his body was removed easily to Chatsworth. What the Mt. Holly Legionnaires have done, though, is to organize and maintain the annual ceremony. Ten large floral wreaths were placed around the memorial. Six United States soldiers raised rifles, a second lieutenant said, “Sergeant of the firing squad, prepare to salute the dead,” and three rounds were fired. A soldier played “Taps.” From the two flagpoles, the flags of Mexico and the United States descended. There was a contrail fifty thousand feet above the scene, and at a lower altitude a Navy jet fighter passed over it as well. A young man named Antonio Huitron, who had a child in his arms, and who lived on 176th Street in New York and had been in the United States for six years, said to me at this moment, “It was very sad, because everyone in Mexico was expecting him to come back.” 

Wow! What a marvelous passage – the surreal reality of a Mexican celebration going on deep within the wilderness of the Pine Barrens. McPhee captures it magnificently – castanets, beer, speeches, wreaths, flags, jet fighter, pine snake – the whole bizarre, exuberant show in one brilliant, concentrated six-hundred-and-sixty-four-word paragraph. 

There’s plenty of action in The Meadowlands, too. Sullivan hikes to Snake Hill. He canoes across Kearney Swamp. He canoes Berry’s Creek and Berry’s Creek Canal. He drives to Point-No-Point to wander around beneath the Pulaski Skyway. Sullivan does a lot of wandering around. It’s one of the book’s key actions. I love tagging along with him as he pokes around the Meadows, visiting places. He says, 

I like to think of the Meadowlands as an undesignated national park, where you can visit all the sites, or as a more classic tourist destination, like Paris, where instead of roaming through old streets and wandering aimlessly through cafes and shops I wander along the edges of the swamps. One spring, I flew to Newark, rented a car, and checked into a hotel with the idea of touring around and just seeing where events would lead me.

One of the book’s highlights is the canoe trip that he and his friend Dave take across the Meadowlands. Here’s a taste:

We entered our second marsh, which was similar to the first, except perhaps more reed filled. I later learned that these small bodies of impounded water were formed at random, by the construction of railroad lines and the new and old turnpikes, but from the vantage point of our canoe at that moment, this seemed as natural a way to form a body of water as any. It was here, in the second swamp, that we came upon our first stumps from the Meadowlands old cedar forest. The stumps floated like corpses, their roots disappearing in the dark water. We poked at their tentacles with our oars, as a couple of red-winged blackbirds looked on suspiciously. A few minutes later, in a spot far from roads and highways, we discovered little islands, composed wholly of reeds. One island was surrounded by bright yellow police emergency tape: CAUTION, the tape said. Another island was inhabited by a lonely six-foot stepladder. In the next marsh, before an audience of terns, we canoed past a submerged control room of a radio transmission station, its giant antenna felled in the water like a child’s broken toy. In the water below our canoe, we could just make out fences topped with barb wire. I knew this to be the remains of one of the oldest radio antennae in the Meadowlands, thought to be the first to ever broadcast the voice of Frank Sinatra. When we approached Belleville Turnpike, we pulled our canoe and all our gear up over a four-foot-wide pipe that carried the water supply of Jersey City, and then, with the boat on our shoulders, we ran, timing our dash across the highway with the break in the waves of cars and trucks. 

The action in On the Rez is similar to that in the other two books – lots of driving, walking, nosing around places, seeing what there is to see. It’s my kind of action – laidback, easygoing. But there’s one sequence that is very dramatic, in which Frazier’s life is actually at risk. It’s February; Frazier is driving the I-90, on his way home to Missoula from Pine Ridge. “Snow was thick in the air and the road had become a hard-polished white.” His car goes out of control. Frazier describes the moment:

I was suddenly skidding at 55 miles an hour backwards in the left-hand lane, then into the center divider, back across the right-hand lane, off the right-hand shoulder, and down the embankment, with plumes of snow blowing past. I crashed sideways through the freeway fence, snapping the barbed wire like string, rolled completely over, and landed on the passenger side in a ditch by an access road. 

Frazier describes the aftermath of this crash in detail – the arrival of a highway patrolman, and then, shortly after that, the arrival of a Billings Gazette reporter, who takes photos of Frazier’s damaged Blazer. Then the tow truck guy arrives and hauls the Blazer to a Sinclair station by the interstate. Frazier tells about the repairs that guys at the Sinclair do to the Blazer – raising the crumpled roof, duct-taping the cracks in the windshield, taping a piece of heavy cardboard “with a few lug-soled boot prints on it” over the broken passenger-side window. And then Frazier gets in the Blazer, drives back on the road, and continues his trip. This is where the trip gets really hairy. Frazier writes,

By now the snow was coming down so hard I could see only a short distance ahead, and when semis passed me, I could see almost nothing but the snow they swirled. The road was a dim blowing world in which headlights suddenly appeared in the rearview mirror and red taillights suddenly flew by and disappeared. The tape holding the windshield to the frame quickly came apart, and the windshield hung loose like a drapery, bouncing with every jolt and letting snow in to pile up on the dash. The car made a strange noise at speeds above thirty miles an hour and refused to go much faster than thirty-five. I anticipated the start of a skid in every shimmy and gust of crosswind. Ragged breaks in the snow berms showed where other vehicles had skidded off the road. After about forty-five miles and ninety minutes of this, I pulled off at Columbus, Montana, and went to a Super 8 Motel right by the exit. The motel had a lot of trucks in its parking lot and a long line at the check-in desk. When I finally got to the head of the line, the lady there said she had just a few rooms left. She said there had been a wreck with fatalities on the interstate some miles to the west and the truckers had heard about it on their radios and had decided to quit for the day.

But that’s not the end of the story. Frazier gets up at three in the morning and decides to get back on the road. This time he travels as far as Livingston when a driver flags him over to tell him his left rear wheel is wobbling as if it is about to come off. He goes to a nearby Tire-Rama, where they tell him his left-rear axle is bent. They don’t have the part, but they call the Tire-Rama in Bozeman, which has it. Frazier wobbles twenty-six miles over the pass to Bozeman. At the Bozeman Tire-Rama they say they can have the axle fixed by late afternoon. The story of this wild ride ends with Frazier at the Bozeman Tire-Rama leafing through a newspaper when he suddenly sees a photo of his car:

On page 1 of the B section of the Billings Gazette was a large full-color photo: my car’s intricate underside against the white of a snowscape, the winch cable connecting the capsized vehicle to the tow truck, the happy tow truck driver in the foreground. I took the page with the photo and hurried back into the Tire-Rama work bays past the CUSTOMERS KEEP OUT signs and showed it to the man working on the axle. When he finally understood what I was talking about, he was unimpressed to be working on a famous car featured on page 1 of the Gazette’s B section.

I relish this account of Frazier’s hazardous trip back home from Pine Ridge. It has nothing to do with life on the reservation. But it’s part of Frazier’s experience writing about the place. He tells it marvellously.

My next post in this series will be on how these three great books convey sense of place. 

April 21, 2025 Issue

The best line in this week’s anemic issue is Josh Lieb’s description of the pumpernickel bagel: 

The king. Strong flavor, but not too strong. Dances with, rather than fights against, the cream cheese and the lox. (Or whitefish, if that’s your thing. I don’t judge.)

His note on the blueberry bagel is pretty good, too:

O.K., you’ve been alive for a thousand years. You were cursed by God after stepping on a butterfly or something. You’ve seen multiple generations of your descendants grow up and live and die, painfully. You watched Rome burn. You made love to Mona Lisa. You killed Kennedy. There is nothing in this world your jaded senses haven’t experienced and become weary of. Finally, you’ve come to this.

That bit about making love to Mona Lisa made me smile. 

Karl Ove Knausgaard's "Private Eye"

I want to return to a piece that appeared in the February 3, 2025, New Yorker – Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Private Eye.” It’s a profile of the British painter Celia Paul. Knausgaard visits her at her London studio and writes about it. He says,

When I followed her into the flat on this early-autumn day, it was therefore a little like stepping into a painting. I recognized the floor, worn and dark and made of linoleum, I recognized the plain, white walls, I recognized the window facing the museum, the light that fell through it. And Paul’s face was so familiar that it might have belonged to one of my close friends. But—and this struck me at once—reality is always much more than that which can be fixed in images, infinitely more. The other’s face continually changing, one’s own thoughts in constant flux. The various surfaces, the way light is reflected off each of them, always shifting. The history of objects, and what they signal about status, class, the personality of their owner. Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it. So what we do is look for patterns, for whatever can be fitted into a stable structure. It is a way of managing reality: we must be able to pull out a chair and sit without expending time on the chair itself. And why should we spend time on a chair, anyway? What point would there be in taking a closer look at it, in seeing what it is really like?

That “Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it” seems to me to express something fundamental – a key to art and writing. Close looking unlocks the significance of even the most banal-seeming objects. Writing about Knausgaard, James Wood puts it this way:

Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary—the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”)—is steadily retreating; in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back to the soccer boots and to the grass, and to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Old Spice and Ajax. [“Serious Noticing”]

How I love that “adventure of the ordinary.” The whole passage is brilliant. Knausgaard’s “Private Eye” reminded me of it. 

Postscript: The above portrait of Celia Paul is by Alice Zoo.

Inspired Sentence #3

On Mondays, Eugène or Julia would yank a rabbit out of its hutch, kill it with one brisk corkscrew twist of the neck, flay it to its blueish plum-colored stretch of newborn baby skin, and hang it next door to a twist of bluebottle-encrusted flypaper until Sunday, when it would be jugged and slowly cooked with prunes, its liver either eaten as a starter or added to the stew to deepen it up. 

This is from Patrick McGuinness's Other People's Countries (2014), which I'm currently reading. What a wonderful book! It’s an evocation of the ancient Belgian town of Bouillon, where McGuinness has a house, inherited from his mother’s side of the family. Eugène is his grandfather. Julia is his great-grandmother. I relish the specificity of the description (“blueish plum-colored stretch of newborn baby skin,” “twist of bluebottle-encrusted flypaper”) and the vivid, active verbs (“yank,” “flay,” “hang”). “Jugged” is inspired! The whole sentence is inspired – a surprising, delightful, original combination of words and images. 

10 Best "Personal History" Pieces: #7 Gary Shteyngart's "My Gentile Region"

Illustration by Javier Jaén

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Gary Shteyngart’s brilliantly excruciating “My Gentile Region” (October 11, 2021).

It doesn’t get much more personal than this. Shteyngart tells about a “genital bonfire” he recently experienced, the legacy of a botched circumcision performed on him when he was seven. The operation left him with a “skin bridge” on his penis. Curious to know what that looks like? Shteyngart tells us:

After the infection had subsided, the shaft of my penis was crowded by a skyline of redundant foreskin that included, on the underside, a thick attachment of skin stretching from the head to the shaft of the genital, a result of improper healing that is called a skin bridge. A small gap could be seen between this skin bridge and the penis proper. In texture and appearance, the bridge reminded me of the Polly-O mozzarella string cheese that got packed in the lunchboxes of my generation. 

Forty years later, on August 24, 2020, attempting to urinate, he feels a tightness on the underside of his penis. A tiny hair had wrapped itself around the skin bridge. He tries unsuccessfully to remove it himself. His primary-care doctor refers him to a surgeon, whom Shteyngart calls Dr. Funnyman. Funnyman takes out a pair of forceps and “in a matter of seconds had cut the hair tourniquet from the skin bridge.” But the skin bridge is irreparably damaged. Two days later, it breaks into two parts, “ ‘a minimal stump distally with a larger stump proximally,’ according to the doctor’s notes, the latter of which was an unsightly piece of skin flapping in the summer wind.” 

On September 8, 2020, Shteyngart returns to Dr. Funnyman for corrective surgery – a second circumcision. It doesn’t go well. Shteyngart says,

The afflicted area improved slowly, but peeing was now painful. A part of the redundant foreskin that had always resembled two flaps was becoming more swollen. Two weeks after the surgery, as I was finishing an hour-long walk, it felt as if hot clothespins had been attached to the areas where the skin bridge had been excised and were pulling ever downward. Whenever any clothing came into contact with the affected area, a Klaxon of pain would sound across my central nervous system.

He says further,

My condition began to take over my daily life, like a game of Twister but with each wrong move resulting in a jolt of groin pain. To get out of my car without the affected organ scraping unduly against my underwear, I began to propel myself from the seat in one quick motion, until one day I hit my head hard on the doorframe, and spent weeks nursing a headache. Eventually, I quit driving. Lifting grocery bags became impossible. Sitting on a hard chair excruciating. Drying my groin with a towel unbearable. Wearing jeans unbelievable (only sweatpants would do). Playing hide-and-seek with my son out of the question. Even sleeping required a fort of pillows placed in strategic locations to keep my penis airborne through the night. I had been advised to use numbing lidocaine jelly, and to wear soothing Xeroform gauze held in place by an improvised bandage. My wife, upon seeing the shaft of my organ covered in bandage and gauze, sadly compared it to the Elizabethan collar worn by dogs (not that I was in danger of licking myself). Erections became dangerous, and at night I turned away from my wife so that I would not smell the deliciousness of her hair. I began to wonder: Was this the rest of my life?

Shteyngart consults other doctors. Nothing they prescribe alleviates his pain. He says,

I’ve always had a rational fear of dying, but when I imagined a life without being able to walk or swim or have sex or travel or do anything without pain or an Elizabethan collar, I wondered what it would be like to kill myself. 

Eventually, he’s introduced to a doctor who prescribes “an ingenious compound cream containing amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant.” 

Near the end of the piece, Shteyngart writes, 

What am I left with in the end? I hope I will continue to get better, though I doubt I will ever be completely right again. I may have to slather my genital with ointments for the rest of my life. There are new associated complications from the various medications, and the treatment of my post-traumatic stress will continue. Even with excellent insurance, I have spent many thousands of dollars for medical care and will continue to spend more.

“My Gentile Region” is powerful testimony against circumcision. Its pain and suffering are palpable. I mentally flinched several times as I read it. Is it perverse of me to confess that many of its sentences also gave me pleasure? Well, they did. This one, for example:

I have always imagined that beyond its pleasurable utility the penis must be an incomprehensible thing to most heterosexual women, like a walrus wearing a cape that shows up every once in a while to perform a quick round of gardening. 

And this:

After the razzle-dazzle of Cornell, this doctor’s office felt more familiar in a urological context, smaller and lower ceilinged, its walls festooned with quotes from Maimonides and a waiting room populated with older Rothian Jews huddled over copies of the Post while waging a final battle with their prostates.

Shteyngart is a superb writer – where “superb” means original, perceptive, specific, funny, and vivid. “My Gentile Region” is one of his best pieces.

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #4

This is the fourth post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his brilliant “A Horse’s Impossible Head: Disunity in Delacroix” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019). It’s a description of Eugène Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855):

Take the horse’s head. It is first and foremost a picture of a creature looking death in the face; and if one goes on to think about it, the face of death – the face the horse seems to fix with its desperate glare – is most likely that of the fallen rider, the man in the turban, his fingers still clutching the horse’s mane. The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity. It must have been painted with the same pigment, at the same moment, as the wild red of the horseman’s turban, which itself has the look of a bleeding bald skull. Maybe the plume of blue tassels issuing from the red like a tuft of hair is meant to evoke a scalping. The two reds – the turban-scalp and the boiling nostril – insist on the beauty of blood. The choice of supporting colours is a stroke of genius. The dry green and gold bridle of the horse intensifies the red’s oiliness and carnality, so that even the fleck of red in the horse’s eye makes a spectator flinch. The cold gold of the horseman’s tunic, again with its exquisite green filigree, is a kind of deathly counterpoint to the yellows and pinks all round, still fighting for breath: the lion’s thick fur, the horse’s hide, the soft pillow of warmer gold just visible down in the shadows.

Zero in on the word “carnality” (“The dry green and gold bridle of the horse intensifies the red’s oiliness and carnality, so that even the fleck of red in the horse’s eye makes a spectator flinch”). Clark is a carnal writer. He apprehends through his senses. He’s a thinker, too. But his descriptions are intensely sensuous: “The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity”; “the lion’s thick fur, the horse’s hide, the soft pillow of warmer gold just visible down in the shadows.” He devours color: “the wild red of the horseman’s turban”; “the cold gold of the horseman’s tunic ... with its exquisite green filigree”; “the yellows and pinks all round, still fighting for breath.” The passage enacts the painting it describes; it’s a sensation delivery system. 

Credit: The above illustration is Eugène Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855).