Acts of Seeing: Robinson's Island

Photo by John MacDougall

I took this picture a few days ago on Robinson’s Island – one of my favorite places. I biked there from our home in Stanhope. There’s a beautiful trail that takes you there across marsh, along dunes, until you get to the island, which is connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway. No vehicles are allowed, just walkers and cyclists. The day I was there, I had the place to myself. The beach on the north side of the island was strewn with wrecked lobster traps – one of my favorite camera subjects. They’re like found sculptures made of wood, net, and rope – smashed by the waves into unique configurations. They don’t last. The tide comes in, moves them around on the rocks, and breaks them apart. I see them as symbols. This is the way life goes. 

Megahn O'Rourke on Anne Carson's "Nox"

Anne Carson (Photo by Einar Falur Ingólfsson)

Congratulations to Anne Carson for winning the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature. She’s been contributing to The New Yorker since 1997. See, for example, “Father’s Old Blue Cardigan” (November 10, 1997), “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” (December 3, 2001), “Short Talk on Herbology” (April 22, 2013), “Clive Song” (August 7 & 14, 2017), “Life” (June 28, 2021), “What Happened to New York” (May 5, 2025). I confess I’m not a fan. I find her too metaphysical. That’s my problem, not hers. I’ll have to give her a second look.

Carson is the subject of one of The New Yorker’s best poetry reviews – Megahn O’Rourke’s “The Unfolding” (July 12 & 19, 2000). It’s a review of Carson’s Nox. O’Rourke describes it as follows:

“Nox” is as much an artifact as a piece of writing. The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson. The reproduction has been done painstakingly, and conjures up an almost tactile sense of the handmade original. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook’s physicality—bits of handwriting, stamps, stains—add testimonial force: this person existed.

That is a brilliant description! I’ve never forgotten it. 

O’Rourke wrote one of my favorite poems – “My Aunts” (The New Yorker, July 20, 2009). Here it is:

Grew up on the Jersey Shore in the nineteen-seventies.
Always making margaritas in the kitchen,
always laughing and doing their hair up pretty,
sharing lipstick and shoes and new juice diets;
always splitting the bills to the last penny,
stealing each other’s clothes,
loving one another then complaining
as they walked out the door. Each one with her doe eyes,
each one younger than the last,
each older the next year, one year
further from their girlhoods of swimming
at Sandy Hook, doing jackknives off the diving board
after school, all of them
being loved by one boy and then another,
all driving further from the local fair, further from Atlantic City.
They used to smoke in their cars,
rolling the windows down and letting their red nails
hang out, little stoplights:
Stop now, before the green
comes to cover up your tall brown bodies.

That “doing jackknives off the diving board after school” is inspired! The whole poem is inspired! It has the breath of life.

Peter Matthiessen's Magnificent "The Snow Leopard"

If you are interested in the ways and means of factual writing, as I am, Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard is a must read. Yet for many years, I resisted reading it. Why? Because it has the reputation of being about a spiritual quest. I’m not a spiritual person. I consider myself a realist. I’m allergic to magical thinking. 

There is a lot of Zen in The Snow Leopard. But it’s only one strand in the book’s rich fabric. Other strands are nature, travel, and adventure – all of which I relish. The Snow Leopard is an unforgettable account of a gruelling expedition that Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller undertook, in 1973, into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard.

Four things I love about The Snow Leopard:

1. It’s written in the first person major.

The book is an account of personal experience, which, for me, is the most real form of writing. Apparently Matthiessen’s use of “I” in The Snow Leopard was a departure from his usual approach. Maggie Doherty, in her “Rambling Man” (The New Yorker, October 20, 2025), says,

But what truly distinguishes the book is its personal nature. From early in his journalistic career, Matthiessen had abhorred the use of the first person, which he associated with a “National Geographic style of expedition writing,” sensational and unserious. In “The Snow Leopard,” however, he lets the “I” lead the way, offering access to his inner life, even as he questions the entire concept of the self. 

2. It’s written in the present tense.

No verb form conveys immediacy better than present tense. Matthiessen’s use of it in The Snow Leopard is inspired! Here are some examples:

I sit back in straw and dung warmth against the sunny stones. A brilliant black-red beetle comes, and a husky grasshopper, rubbing its fiery legs. A crow flaps to a cedar by the river, and the crow’s wings, too, are filled with the hard silver light of the Himalaya.

GS lingers and I keep on climbing, then pause to drink and wash in a mountain brook. Greenfinches come, and a hawk flies down the valley. Asters and everlasting, lavender and white; the soft humming of a bumblebee consoles me. Sitting awhile on a warm rock, I enjoy the view of Yamarkhar as it comes into the sun. At this season, the flat roofs are bright with the fire colors of the harvest, which will sustain the inhabitants through the long winter – yellow squash, red peppers, bronze tobacco, a red millet, maize, and hemp, which is used for twine and cooking oil as well as marijuana. 

The path enters a narrowing ravine that climbs to a higher cleft between boulders, and the cleft is reached at the strike of the rising sun, which fills this portal with a blinding light. I emerge in a new world and stare about me. A labyrinth of valley mounts toward the snows, for the Himalaya is as convoluted as a brain.

3. It’s structured as a diary.

Each chapter is a day in the journey, beginning on September 28 and ending on December 1. I love this type of structure – chronological, sequential. The journey determines the shape of the narrative. To me it’s the most natural (and real) form of narrative – much preferable to thematic structure. 

4. It brims with wonderful descriptions of nature.

This, for example:

At a canyon bend stands the headman of Tarakot, who wears Hindu puttees and carries no pack of any kind. He is pointing at the bouldered slopes across the stream. “Na!” he cries. “Na!” Then he goes on. A pale form jumps across a gully, followed quickly by six more; the animals move up a steep slope to a haze of green between the rocks and snow. I watch them climb until, at snow line, they are swept up and consumed by clouds that have rushed up the valley from the south: this wonderful silver-gray-blue creature in the bharal, the blue sheep of the Himalaya – in Tibetan, na – that we have come so far to see.

And this:

Higher, where the snow has melted, a hill fox jumps from tussock grass and runs to a group of rocks, then turns to watch. Its black points and rich red coat are set off by a frosty face and chest and an extraordinary long thick tail, dark brown and black with a white fluffy tip; the tip remains visible long after the creature’s glowing colors sink among the stones.

Joy Williams, in her “ ‘A Fury of Dark Energies’ ” (The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2026), says that Matthiessen’s “greatest attribute as a writer” was his “keen attention to the natural world.” Based on my reading of The Snow Leopard, I’d say she’s right.

Credit: The above portrait of Peter Matthiessen by Andrea Ventura is from Joy Williams' " 'A Fury of Dark Energies' " (The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2026). 

Kogonado's Brilliant "Columbus"

Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho in Columbus (Photo by Elisa Christian)

Richard Brody’s wonderful “Revisiting Columbus, A Thrilling Drama of Growing Up Modernist” (newyorker.com, June 20, 2026) inspired me to revisit it, too. I watched it last night. What a great movie! I first saw it in 2017, when it came out. I liked it then. I like it even more now. It’s a coming-of-age story set in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is home to a remarkable collection of renowned works of modern architecture. (I didn’t know this until I saw this movie.) The protagonist, a recent high-school graduate named Casey, seems stuck in place. Instead of leaving for college, she’s living with her mother and working at the local library. It turns out she’s staying home to help her mother (Michelle Forbes), a recovering drug addict who works two jobs (at a factory and as an office cleaner) to keep afloat. 

But Casey is something of a closet prodigy – growing up in Columbus, she’s become a connoisseur of its architectural treasures. When Casey meets Jin (John Cho), the son of an elderly Korean architect, a friendship soon develops despite their difference in age and experience, and Casey, “finding an intellectual peer, unleashes her enthusiastic architectural insights, reveals her prodigious intellect, and reignites long-dormant ambitions” (from Brody’s earlier “Highlights from the 2017 Sundance Film Festival” (newyorker.com, January 25, 2017).  

What I love about this movie is the way it blends architecture with story. It’s almost as if the director, Kogonada, set out to make a documentary about Columbus’s architecture and decided to tell a story at the same time. Brody writes, “The locations aren’t just picturesque settings for action but part of the subject—as if the film were both a fictional drama and a documentary about the locale.” Yes, exactly. 

Better than any other film I can think of, Columbus captures what it means to respond to something aesthetically. Brody says, “From the movie’s engaging story to its very texture, Kogonada has crafted a singular and startlingly original cinematic vision.” I agree. I think Columbus is destined to become a classic. 

Is Writing Just Technology? (Contra Louis Menand)

Louis Menand, in his absorbing “The Curious Power of Punctuation” (newyorker.com, September 21, 2026), says, “In the end, writing is just technology. There is nothing magical about it.” Is Menand just being provocative, or does he really mean it? His piece is a review of two books – Florence Hazrat’s On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World and Sarah L. Kaufman’s Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. It moves from a witty discussion of punctuation (“But she doesn’t seem to know the semicolon’s correct usage. She thinks it’s a big comma, when it’s actually a small period”) to a consideration of the future of writing (“These books are reminders that we are in the middle of a revolution in the phenomenology of reading, a major change in what it is like to consume writing”). Menand predicts, “Soon, people will no longer make a distinction between writing made by a human and writing made by a machine. It will all simply be writing.” It’s here that he makes his extraordinary statement: “In the end, writing is just a technology. There is nothing magical about it.” 

To which the only possible response is “Oy!” Writing is not technology; it’s communication – communication of stories, events, ideas, actions, sorrows, pleasures, reflections, observations, journeys, battles, arguments, explorations, on and on. It’s the art of representing life in words. I love reading great writers, not just for what they say, but how they say it – the rhythm, tone, texture of their prose, their choice of words, their use of metaphor, their point of view, the way they structure their narratives. They use all the tools in their extensive tool kits. It’s a treat to watch them do it. And yes, there is something magical about it – the transmutation of world into words. 

Menand himself occasionally works that magic. One of my favorite pieces by him is “Drive, He Wrote” (The New Yorker, October 1, 2007). It’s a consideration of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Movement. Most of it is cultural history – the background to On the Road, how it came to be written, the road trips, the celebrated scroll, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, a comparison of On the Road with Lolita (“Nabokov showed writers how to squeeze a morality tale inside a Fabergé egg; Kerouac showed how to stretch a canvas across an entire continent”), and so on. But in the last paragraph Menand shifts gears. He describes a personal experience. There’s feeling in it; the piece suddenly flares to life. Here’s the passage:

Books like “On the Road” have a different kind of influence as well. They can, whether we think of them as great literature or not, get into the blood. They give content to experience. Many years after my encounters with Ginsberg around the department water fountain, I took a job in Boston, two hundred miles from New York, and I ended up commuting there by car. I drove at night, so that the trip would not eat up the workday, and I often stopped for gas at a service area on the Mass Pike about fifty miles from Boston. It’s fairly high above sea level there, in the lower ranges of the Berkshires, and I would stand at the pump in the dark looking at the stars in the cold clear sky as the semis roared past and with the wind in my hair, and I liked to imagine that I was a character in Kerouac’s novel, lost to everyone I knew and to everyone who knew me, somewhere in America, on the road. Then I would get in the car, and, bent over the wheel, while the trucks beat on past me, and the radio crackled, the sound going in and out, with oldies from the seventies, I began the long drop down to the lights of Boston, late in the night, late in my life, alone.

It’s an extraordinary passage. On the Road is no longer just a cultural artifact – something interesting to write about. Menand gives it personal meaning. It’s an inspired way to end his review, and I doubt Generative AI could ever “write” it. The passage is personal to Menand. Only he could conceive it. 

Credit: The above illustrstion by Abraham Lule is from Louis Menand's "The Curious Power of Punctuation" (newyorker.com, September 21, 2026).

Colin Burrow on Helen Vendler's "Inhabit the Poem"

I want to respond to Colin Burrow’s “Good Weird or Bad Weird” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2026). It’s a review of Helen Vendler’s Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays (2025). Vendler is one of my heroes. I’ve posted over forty notes about her on this blog. She’s written some of my favorite books – Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980), The Music of What Happens (1988), Soul Says (1995). These are works of literary criticism – collections of critical essays – some of the best ever written. 

My response to Burrow’s piece is mixed. I laud him for choosing to write about Vendler. I’m pleased that he appreciates her greatness. At the end of his review he says, “She was as good as it gets.” I agree. But he also says things about her that I question. For example, he says she tends to mention other critics “only when she thinks they’re wrong.” Well, Vendler was a formidable polemicist. It’s one of the reasons I read her. She often took issue with other critics’ views. Recall her brilliant “Lionel Trilling and Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode” (included in The Music of What Happens), in which she strongly argues that Trilling’s Freudian reading of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode neglects its aesthetic power – it’s invention of “a daring language of disorientation.” 

However, Vendler also praised other critics. In the Introduction to her The Odes of John Keats, she writes,

One book very valuable to me – John Jones’s John Keats’s Dream of Truth – has approached Keats phenomenologically, examining his poetry of sensation in terms of its extraordinary empathetic power, and the struggle of this diction of sensation with Keats’s “dream” of truth. No one interested, as I am, in Keats’s language in its smallest units of phrasing can have failed to be influenced by Jones’s uncanny grasp of Keats’s way of feeling and seeing, and by his flexible shaping of an intellectual way of examining such elusive phenomena.

Other critics Vendler wrote admiringly about include Harold Bloom, Theodor Adorno, Geoffrey Hartman, Roland Barthes, and Seamus Heaney. She calls Heaney’s essays on Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Yeats “bravura pieces of characterization, the best in recent memory”: “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me,” in Soul Says (1995).

Another questionable statement Burrow makes is that “her use of the critical 'we' often carries the supra-personal authority of someone who doesn’t have reason to doubt her entitlement to the plural form.” Vendler seldom used “we.” Burrow cites an example from her essay on A. R. Ammons (“The Snow Poems and Garbage: Episodes in A. R. Ammons’s Poetics,” in her The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, 2015). But Vendler’s personal pronoun of choice was “I.” She used it extensively.

Burrow makes another statement about Vendler that I question. He says her view of lyric “is distinctly para-religious.” I don’t think so, not “distinctly.” There’s an element of “soul” (“To me, what soul says seems convincing,” she says in the Introduction to her superb Soul Says), but it’s part of a deeper consideration. The word I would use to describe her view of lyric, the word that she used over and over, the word that is curiously missing from Burrow’s piece is “aesthetic.” Vendler wrote aesthetic criticism. This is why I love her work. “The aim of aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration”: Introduction to The Music of What Happens. This was her purpose. This was her credo. She got away from it a bit in her last book – Inhabit the Poem. But I love the title. It comes from a wonderful passage in Chapter 2 (“The Enigmatical Beauty of Each Beautiful Enigma”) on Wallace Stevens’s “The Bird with the Coppery Keen Claws”: “What was the work the poet was demanding of me? It was to inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world.”  

Burrow, in his piece, spends a thousand words defining literary criticism. Why? All he needed to do was quote the above lines from Inhabit the Poem. To his credit, he eventually does.   

Four Essays on Fairfield Porter

One of this year’s best essays is Dan Chiasson’s “Where the Meanings Are” (The New York Review of Books, August 20.2026). It’s a review of the exhibition “Fairfield Porter: What Everyone Knows” at the Art Students League, New York City. It’s not only a superb analysis of Porter’s painting, it’s a travel piece, too! Chiasson is excellent on Porter’s painting style. He says,

Porter’s brushstrokes seem at times still wet to the touch, trailing off like vapor before suddenly detonating a bluster of peach or indigo. Paint plays out luxuriously and abstractly within the idea of summer things like Bermuda shorts, clay courts, lawns, and tablecloths, as it does for other painters only in a stormy sea or roiling sky.

I’m interested in Porter. He first came to my attention many years ago when I read John Updike’s great “Violence at the Windows” (included in his 1989 Just Looking). It’s a review of the 1983 show “Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The title derives from Updike’s observation “Sunlight explodes with terrific violence at the windows of his hushed interiors.” Updike gave the show a mixed review. He says, “There are perhaps six superb paintings and two dozen more that well reward contemplation. The rest are tainted to a greater or lesser degree by a quality one might call amateurism.” Ouch! One of the paintings he liked is Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969). He wrote,

Interior with a Dress Pattern, the most closely worked painting in the show, describes a domestic interior so lovingly that the viewer feels invited to come in and take a chair; its range of reds and dark golds compares with the sumptuous calm of Matisse’s Red Studio and Piero della Francesca’s stately explorations of perspective.

A reproduction of Interior with a Dress Pattern illustrates Updike’s piece. I’d never seen it before. It struck me as wonderful. Still does. 

Chiasson doesn’t mention Interior with a Dress Pattern. He focuses on Porter’s “Schuyler” paintings, e.g., Jimmy and John (1957-58), A Day Indoors (1962), and The Screen Porch (1964). One of Chiasson’s best passages is his description of A Day Indoors:

A third view of Schuyler, A Day Indoors (1962), hangs beside the ugly people. Schuyler has again commandeered the best seat: on this cold summer day in Maine, he warms himself by the roaring hearth in “the big house” on Great Spruce Head Island. Three figures, Schuyler and the two girls, are smaller, and somewhat indistinct, and seem included partly for scale and contrast; the star of the painting is the room, with its poppy-red painted floor and deteriorating, high-kitsch New England decor, including a model sloop and, above the fire, a reproduction of one of the Elgin Marbles. The accent is on a colorful, braided oval rug, a standard L.L. Bean item, so familiar you can almost smell the must. The chairs and furniture in the room jut at sharp angles and form a visual chute that creates a measure of suspense about the closed door at its terminus. (Ominous music: Is Anne Porter about to enter?) The details in the painting seem to hang on the vertical axis, like buoys in a fishing net. But the area rug is perfectly flush with the frame in the lower-right corner, where a mapmaker would locate his key. This summer cottage staple, repeating the spectrum of colors in the overall composition, is a kind of palette: you could imagine Porter dipping a brush into one of those vivid stripes to touch up Schuyler’s khakis or pale red button-down. Or, with its suggestion of dynamic, spiraling depth, perhaps it’s a drain, threatening to suck this moody group back out to sea, like bilge.

I love that “The accent is on a colorful, braided oval rug, a standard L.L. Bean item, so familiar you can almost smell the must.”

The New Yorker’s Zachary Fine also reviewed the Art Students League’s exhibition. At first, Fine appears not to be a Porter fan. He says in his opening paragraph, “I think if you saw a lone painting of his in a junk shop, unsigned and unframed, you’d find it perfectly pleasing and mediocre.” But it turns out he likes the show. He writes,

Porter studied at the League under Thomas Hart Benton—one of his classmates was a fellow named Jackson Pollock—and the experience of seeing his work here, as students hustle by with their backpacks and the perfume of turpentine wafts through the air, feels organic and just right. The gallery is evenly and fluorescently lit, and all thirty-five or so of Porter’s featured paintings are in a single room, concentrating his palette of lime greens and creamy yellows and oxblood reds into one bright, soul-cleansing burst.

Fine says, “Let the paintings breathe for a while, let them interact with one another and with your thoughts, and they’ll meld together with salt breeze and summer light.”

Reading these delightful pieces, I recalled another excellent essay on Porter – Peter Schjeldahl’s “Stern Beauty” (The New Yorker, April 17, 2000; included in his 2008 collection Let’s See). It contains this pithy observation: “For Porter, the ordinary was an urgent ideal.” As usual, Schjeldahl nailed it.

Chiasson’s piece ends beautifully with an account of his visit to Porter’s summer home on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine. This place figures centrally in many of Porter’s best paintings. Chiasson writes,

Approaching “the big house,” a child bounded out to greet us, reporting with some satisfaction that there were no waffles left. The interior depicted in A Day Indoors remains unchanged from Porter’s depiction of it, down to the poppy-colored floors. (Floors in several bathrooms in houses on the island are done in the same color: there was “surplus paint,” David conjectured.) Upstairs, “Jimmy’s room” is just as it was the day Schuyler wrote “Buried at Springs,” his elegy for Frank O’Hara, while fending off a hornet. The poem is partly about writing O’Hara’s tribute at the desk where O’Hara himself had sat eleven years before, and “saw and heard it all.” It’s all still there, the desk, the bed, the spruces and sound of lapping water, as both poets saw and heard it; before we left, I sat down in Schuyler’s rocking chair, still positioned closest to the hearth.

I love it when a critic steps away from his desk and goes out into the world, seeking personal experience of the subject he’s writing about. Chiasson’s visit to Porter’s house on Great Spruce Head Island provides an inspired conclusion to a splendid review. I enjoyed it immensely.  

Credit: The above illustration is Fairfield Porter's Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969).

On Matisse's "Woman with a Hat": Fine vs. Clark

Zachary Fine, in his absorbing “Matisse’s Ugliest Painting” (newyorker.com, August 31, 2026), says of Henri Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” (1905), “The painting looks like a box of melted saltwater taffy that’s been churned together and encouraged to express itself as a chic fungus.” He says that he still can’t reconcile himself to “the shock of its ugliness.”

Fine tells us why he finds it ugly. He says,

The painting is filled with inconsistencies and bizarre compensatory moves. Its attitude can be summarized by a single square inch at the base of Amélie’s neck, where one finds eight colors in competition: orange, yellow, blue, white, teal, apricot, pale brown, and some black, as underdrawing.

He goes on,

Matisse takes every opportunity to disturb passages of chromatic balance. The red hair that connects with the green of Amélie’s temple? It’s interrupted by a few strokes of magenta, to increase the tension. The blue of the hat’s brim? A splash of teal agitates its roundness. While some of the color contrasts do articulate planar shifts, such as the candy-stripe lips (red for upper, pink for lower), many of the touches are arbitrary splotches that neither bolster a shape nor set another off. I have to imagine that Matisse was tickled by his decision to put a large tract of green in front of Madame’s face and, instead of extending it all the way to her throat, suddenly introduce a purple goatee.

He says,

The aspect of the painting that troubles me most, though, is the sleeve of Amélie’s dress. Fauvism was supposedly characterized by the phasing out of the Neo-Impressionist tache, or uniformly pointillist stroke—abundant in “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” and “The Port of Abail”—in favor of broader patches of color, but the green sleeve, with its cobra-headed cuff, is a creepy disturbance to the brushwork elsewhere. Compared with the thick smudges of white on the fan that Amélie is holding, or the broad, lush strokes of the background, the sleeve is fidgety. None of its marks seem to maintain their integrity for more than an inch or two without being fretted or spoiled. There’s a slight air of death around it, as if the arm is deteriorating in front of us.

This is good provocative criticism. Some of the descriptions make me smile, e.g., “chic fungus,” “anxious smear job.”  

But is Fine right? Is “Woman with a Hat” ugly? T. J. Clark, in his brilliant “Madame Matisse’s Hat” (London Review of Books, August 14, 2008; included in his great 2025 collection Those Passions), says no. He doesn’t say so expressly, but it’s implicit in his ravishing descriptions of the painting. Consider this passage:

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?

That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! Clark is amazed by the colors. He doesn’t dismiss them as “arbitrary splotches” as Fine does. Instead, he attempts to interpret them: 

All the same, some colours occur only once, at crucial junctures. Look at the purple curlicue I pointed to earlier, between the hand and cane; or the exact shade of green chosen for the bar of shadow (if that is what it is) across Parayre’s brow; or the kind of purpled mauve, more opaque and decisive than any of its many near relatives, that opens up the space at the front of her throat. The painter wants us to see the subtlety, and also the wilfulness, of his variations on a theme, or his seeing of different things in the same light; but then he also expects us to register the decisive leap out of the established scale. He wants us to notice, and to gasp at, his suddenly seeing how to fix, or transfix, a singular optical fact. Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it. Nothing could be more hardworking, more investigative and empirical, than the way her mouth is drawn. First there were two plain strips of red and pink – bars at the top of an abstract ladder of colour, pink for the chin, green for the recession above it, pink again for the underlip, and flaring red for the upper one. But then this abstraction of sensuality had to be made into a particular mouth. A tentative, half-transparent line of greyed mauve was put over the red to the left, as if trying to inscribe on top of it more of a Cupid’s bow. And a bolder, more opaque dab of mauve was put next to the pink of the lower lip, giving the left side of the mouth a shape. And was this the point at which the amazing, inorganic green of the shadow under the nose was strengthened, so as to intensify the play of complementaries? Did the pear drop of yellow occur as part of this process? Was it maybe thrown up by the business of getting the other greens and yellows to keep the mouth – the mouth’s wounded sensuality – from running away from the rest of the face? (Of course the mouth runs away with the picture. The picture turns on it. But for that very reason it had to be held down, and held back. It had to be intensely, naively correct.)

I love that “Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it.” Clark is clearly entranced by this painting. He says he finds it both “chilling” and “exhilarating.” 

Clark mainly focuses on Madame Matisse’s face and body. Of the hat, he says,

The hat is splendid, but slightly crushing. It casts an implacable green shadow straight along Parayre’s forehead, and its blue all but annihilates the red of her hair. But the hat is abstract: the painter does not seem interested in making its extravagance palpable.

Fine accords more significance to the hat than Clark does. He sees it as the embodiment of Matisse’s “project.” He says, 

In “Femme au Chapeau,” at least a third of the composition is chapeau—and this particular hat is more of a mangled fruit basket, in which nothing is decipherable. The purple tongue sticking out of the top might belong to an iris, and the lobes of reddish orange could be an apple, but they likely aren’t. We’re looking through the eyes of someone who doesn’t want to actually see the hat. Matisse’s project was to wrench the appearance of things, particularly their colors, away from reality, and to let them entertain a new internal correspondence guided by his expressive whims.

Fine calls the hat “a mangled fruit basket.” Clark calls it “a crazy bird’s nest of pleasures and promises.” Both images wonderfully express the sensuousness that, for me, is the essence of this great painting. 

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

Love Rekindled, Subscription Renewed

Illustration by Diego Mallo

Is there life without The New Yorker? Yes, of course, but it’s a pallid, diminished life. 

And so today, after a long month of no New Yorkers, I renewed my subscription. Gradually I’ll begin to blog about the magazine again, maybe not every issue, just the pieces that really grab me. 

I’m still angry at Trump for trying to crush the Canadian economy. Nevertheless, there are many wonderful aspects of American life. The New Yorker is one of them. I was crazy to think I could live without it.

Postscript: Cassandra Wilson 1955 - 2026

Cassandra Wilson (Photo by Hiroyuki Ito)

I see in the Times that Cassandra Wilson has died. She’s one of my favorite jazz singers. What a voice! Low and smoky. Gary Giddins, in his New Yorker review of her superb 2008 album Loverly, said this:

Wilson has always thrived on rhythmic complexity, but her best work, including “Loverly,” balances it with melodic, harmonic, and verbal nuances that transform evergreens into personal deliberations, frequently underscored with an ironic eroticism. 

Giddins identified three of her attributes as a singer: “the husky timbre, which favors her lower register; an affinity for melodic embellishments replete with sighs and moans; and a canny back-of-the-beat rhythmic attack.”

I’d add a fourth: interpretive genius. Her renditions of “Skylark,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Last Train to Clarksville,” “Wichita Lineman,” “O Sole Mio,” “Black Orpheus,” to name just a few, are brilliant. Her version of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” is magic. Once heard, never forgotten. She’s gone now – way too soon. Her albums will live on. She joins Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald as one of the greatest jazz singers of all time. 

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: First Person

[I’m posting this note out of love for the three books that are the subject of my series “3 Great Thematic Travelogues.” I wrote it about a month ago before the U.S. escalated its attack on Canada. This is likely my last post in the series.]

This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of the first person. 

One aspect of these three great books that I relish immensely is their subjectivity. All three are written in the first person major. All three are accounts of personal experience, which, for me, is the most real form of writing. All three are suffused with the personalities of their authors. Who are they? What are they like? How do they represent themselves?

They don’t expressly describe themselves. I have no idea from their writing what they look like. There’s a tiny photo of Osborne on the back cover of The Wet and the Dry. He looks a bit like Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris. Of the three, he’s the most psychologically complex. He’s a drinker and a brooder and a loner. That’s his core identity. He reveals more of his personal background than the other two – his alcoholic mom, whom he loves, his alcoholic great-uncle, who “stormed around the world on ‘business’ liquoring himself at a thousand bars,” his girlfriend Elena “in all her blonde and oddly Nordic magnificence.” He describes growing up in the English suburb of Haywards Heath (“Alcohol hovered in the air as an independent presence”). He shows himself in unflattering circumstances such as the time he woke up in his room at the Fairmont Bab al Bahr, in Abu Dhabi, in the same clothes he’d been wearing for weeks, and “with a headache so severe that I had to lie there for some time and try to remember where I had been the night before.” It turns out the night before he’d been so intoxicated he’d dived fully clothed into the hotel pool. The staff had to fish him out and carry him to his room.  

Deakin and Macfarlane aren’t nearly as wild as that. In The Old Ways, Macfarlane has a drink of whisky or gin when he’s with friends, but we never see him totally wasted. In Waterlog, Deakin drinks tea or hot chocolate. I don’t ever recall him imbibing an alcoholic drink. I say they’re not wild, but they do take risks. Deakin swims in rivers and pools where there are eels and pike. He also descends into Hell Gate – one of the book’s most memorable scenes: 

Courage up, I returned to the turbulent rim of the gorge and did what I knew might be an unwise thing. I couldn’t help it. I began to slide into the mouth of the abyss itself. I found myself in the first of a series of smooth limestone cups four or five feet in diameter and anything between three and five feet deep, stepped at an acute angle down a flooded gulley of hollowed limestone that spiralled into the unknown. In the low light, the smooth, wet walls were a beautiful aquamarine, their shining surface intricately pock-marked like the surface of the moon. All my instincts were to hold on, but to what? The ice and the water had polished everything perfectly. The torrent continually sought to sweep me with it, and so I slithered and climbed down Hell Gill’s dim, glistening insides, through a succession of cold baths, in one long primal scream.

Macfarlane takes risks, too. He walks ancient footpaths in the West Bank of Palestine where there’s danger of both Palestinian and Israeli gunfire. On a mountain in Scotland, he follows a trail of footprints in the snow that lead him and his companions into grave trouble:

Then the ledge narrowed to no ledge at all; just heather and rock, perhaps twenty degrees off the vertical. By now we had stopped speaking, concentrating on each handhold and foothold. Below was the fall, behind us an almost irreversible route, and ahead of us apparently untraversable ground – across which the footprints padded; the same regular spacing, the same enticing trail. I stopped. The others stopped in turn behind me. I felt sick. The slop and douse of adrenalin, panic spliced with moments of calm, pinpricks of fright in my temples. In the valley below us I could see normal life continuing: the flash of sun from a car’s windscreen as it moved along the road, a walker on the loch-side path, a gull banking over birch trees.

Deakin and Macfarlane are naturalists – brilliant describers of birds, animals, trees, flowers, insects, sunlight. Osborne is not. His topography consists of bars, the darker the better. He’s very much at home there. Here’s his description of the Cap d’Or in Cairo:

I love the tables here piled with nutshells, the smell of dogs and oily ful, and the sinister bar with its filthy bottles. The floors crunchy with the same pistachio shells. The men dishevelled and worn-down looking, in their cheap leather jackets and woolly hats. There is no question that Cap d’Or is a great bar of a certain kind because there is no sexuality, no women, no flirting, no frivolity, no beauty, no cuisine on the side, no clocks, no well-dressed bohemians and pretty young men with nothing to do. It’s a place of quiet but pungent pessimism, where the drinker at best can divert himself with a backgammon board but where he usually sinks sweetly into his own meditations.

Macfarlane is a connoisseur of light:

Those early-day miles were magical, up and down hills, through beech and coppice hazel woods, with a marine light in the beech woods that gave the feeling of walking in cool water.

A scorching band of low white light to seaward; a thin magnesium burn-line.

The light had modified again, from nacreous to granular to dense.

Light quibbling on the swell.

Each dip of the oars set loose a storm of light: a swarm of fireflies, a wind-curl of fire-leaves outlighting the vortices.

The sunlight fell hard as timber.

A gold-grey flutter of light from the fire.

Sunlight, sifted by foliage, cross-hatched the path.

The understorey of the forest was thickened with rhododendron, whose leaves shone bronze where the full light caught them. 

Heaps of old black oily snow by the sides of the roads; the sky low and overcast; a hidden sun shedding a weak and eely light.

The paths of the Downs compelled Ravilious’s imagination, and so did the light: falling as white on green, distinctive for its radiance, possessing the combined pearlescence of chalk, grass blades and a proximate sea.

Sunlight curled and pooled on the shell of a blue-black beetle dragging and bumping itself towards the monastery. 

Deakin is a connoisseur of water:

Breast-stroking up and down the thirty yards of clear, green water, I nosed along, eyes just at water level. The frog’s-eye view of rain on the moat was magnificent.

Water rushed about everywhere here, and amongst the remains of a settlement I found a spring inside a kind of stone temple covered in ferns. I went down to drink from it, and felt its atmosphere and power.

I hastened into the deliciously soft, warm water and set about swimming my mile: 56 lengths of the 30-yard pool. 

I was welcomed by the superintendent, changed in an enclosure where everyone just left their clothes trustingly on a peg or a wooden bench, and went off the springboard for a long swim in the glassy, sweet-smelling springwater. 

Diving naked into a clear, black river pool off old-fashioned coconut-matted boards is not a pleasure that comes along every day.

The Fowey River is 40 feet deep at high tide, and I began to feel the depth of the water beneath me.

Once in the sea, though, you begin to relax and lose yourself in the rhythm, feeling the texture of the water, opening up your lungs and breathing deeper, becoming aquatic. 

The water was grained with silt, like an old photograph. 

I stripped and dived in. It was so cold, I might have flung myself into a bed of nettles. Then came the heady rush of the endorphins, or “endolphins” as a friend once called them, the natural opiates with which the body anaesthetises itself against the cold, and the adrenaline.

The sleek, black water tasted fresh and peaty as I leant into the shuddering current with each new stroke in the deep, high-sided cauldron.

Feeling no modesty before the deer, I entered the ineffable softness of Lochan Mic-a-phi and crossed straight over it. If some of the Fen rivers were gin clear, this was like swimming through single malt whisky. It was deep and refreshing, but by no means cold; somewhere in the mid-sixties Fahrenheit. The loch turned my body to the dull gold of a carp, and bore me up as if in water-wings, as I returned across two hundred yards of the finest water in the world, tasting it at intervals. To feel its balmy softness in every limb, at every stroke, was a kind of heaven.

When swimmers talk of fast or slow water, this is the sort of thing they mean. The absence of wavelets, or other bathers, means you can breathe and move in perfect rhythm, so the music takes over. Mind and body go off somewhere together in unselfconscious bliss, and the lengths seems to swim themselves. The blood sings, the water yields; you are in a state of grace, and every breath gets deeper, more satisfying. You hunker down and bury yourself in the water as though you have lived in it all your life, as though you were born in it, and thoughts come lightly and easily as you swing up and down in the blue. 

I swam through the cold, polished water, each stroke a perfect arc of tiny bubbles, everything in equilibrium. 

Deakin and Macfarlane have similar sensibilities. Both love nature. Both spend substantial portions of their days exploring it. Osborne isn’t a naturalist. His natural milieu is the bar, the hotel, the café. He loves wandering the back alleys of ancient cities – Beirut, Istanbul, Cairo. He’s a connoisseur of alcohol:

In Milan that summer, as the temperature reached almost ninety-five every day in the deserted streets and squares around the hotel, I forced myself to stop dreaming of the fjords of Norway and the ice hotels of the Arctic Circle and, gritting my teeth, went instead to the lounge where gin and tonics were served to the guests of the Town House Galleria from a moving tray equipped with buckets of ice, lemon rinds, and glass stir sticks. I liked to go at an hour when I knew the place would be empty, and this movable bar would be for me and me alone. The tall windows would be opened an inch, the gauze curtains flapping, the flowers wilting on the restaurant tables. The drinks trolley had stoppered crystal flagons of unnamed cognac, a bowl of marinated olives, Angostura bitters, and bottles of Fernet. It was like being in a luxury hospital where, because you are paying so much, you are entitled to drink yourself to death privately. You go right ahead, because you are human and drink is sweet.

Deakin has more humour in him than the other two. The above quip about “endolphins” is a good example. I’ve used it myself a few times when I’ve been out swimming with friends in cold water and it never fails to get a laugh. Another example – his story about two guys in a pub:

Another of the swimmers’ tales was about Jeffrey Bernard and the actor John Le Mesurier. They were old drinking companions and would invent ever more absurd private games to amuse themselves secretly in company. A long-running favourite was to see which of them could casually insert the most outrageous clichés into a conversation undetected by anyone else. They had entered a pub in a small Devon seaside resort, and remarked to the landlord how inviting the sea looked that day. “Ah yes,” he said, “but it can be treacherous. Only last week, a young boy went swimming out there and drowned.” Everyone in the pub fell into a respectful silence, and, after a pause, Le Mesurier said, “Well, it just goes to show, you can’t be too careful,” at which Bernard snorted loudly into his glass, burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter, and the pair were obliged to leave, never to return. 

Are these books self-portraits? Yes, of course. They’re chronicles of personal experience. Each book is a form of journal, recording what the authors see and do in detail after glorious detail. Along the way, stuff happens that reveals aspects of their character: Macfarlane’s bike accident (“I had cracked a rib, possibly two, but this seemed a minor impediment to walking”); Macfarlane at his grandfather’s funeral (“I nearly cried, and could not tell why I didn’t”); Macfarlane in danger on the icy slope of a mountain in Scotland (“I felt sick. The slop and douse of adrenalin, panic spliced with moments of hovering calm, pinpricks of fright in my temples”); Deakin’s fear of unknown things in the deep (“Swimming up to the tangle of tree roots in deep water, I experienced one of those sudden intimations of dread, known to all wild swimmers, about what could be lurking beneath the surface”); Deakin in a wild, dark mood after sweating traffic for hours on the way down through Somerset (“It was one of several moments when I began seriously to question the whole outlandish project”); Osborne with his girlfriend (“Elena crawled on top of me and said, ‘Drink or amore? Which one first?’ Amore, then, but soon after the drink”); Osborne in Islamabad (“In one of the most dangerous and alcohol-hostile countries in the world, I wondered what it would be like to intoxicate oneself”); Osborne alone in his room at the Windsor Hotel in Cairo, remembering his mother (“I made a silent toast to my mother, who would have enjoyed drinking it with me in that fusty, darkened room where the shutters were falling off their hinges”). 

One thing all three authors have in common: their voices on the page are mesmerizing. I enjoy their company immensely. 

Postscript, August 27, 2026: I've started a new blog called Acts of Attention.

A Message to Americans

Photo from The New York Times

I’m angry. Yesterday, Trump escalated his attack on Canada, signing orders to impose a 50 percent tariff on a wide range of Canadian goods such as wine, hockey sticks, cement, dairy products, plywood, paper and furniture. This is in addition to the punitive tariffs he’s already imposed on Canadian steel, aluminum, lumber, autos, and many other products – all in direct violation of the free trade agreement between the two countries. Trump is trying to crush us. 

The response of many Canadians, including myself, is to boycott American products. I don’t buy anything American-made. Yet, here I am still blithely blogging about The New Yorker, an American publication. Yes, The New Yorker is fiercely anti-Trump. If it wasn’t, I’d have boycotted it a long time ago. But now, in light of Trump’s latest aggression towards Canada, I find it unconscionable to be blogging about anything American. 

Americans, your country is a cess pool. Recently, Ian Frazier described it as a “hell pit.” He’s right. Until you rise up and take back your country from this tyrant who is ruling you and gaming you like a gangland mobster, I don’t want to have anything more to do with you. 

The new tariffs that Trump ordered yesterday go into effect in 30 days. If they do, I’m discontinuing this blog. To hell with The New Yorker! To hell with everything American! You are such a putrid country!

Postscript, August 22, 2026: I cancelled my New Yorker and New York Review subscriptions today. I no longer want to support American magazines. Call it an act of patriotism, if you want. I’m done with the U.S.