October 31, 2011 Issue

The New Yorker is a great traveling companion. I took the October 31st issue with me to Cuba. It was a constant source of pleasure during my two-week visit there. There are so many delectable items in it: Lizzie Widdicombe’s description of The Leopard At Des Artistes’ zabaione with berries (“egg yolks and Marsala wine, beaten tableside over an open flame, until it reaches the consistency of a sugary alcoholic cloud”); Richard Brody’s representation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “architectural precision” (“he presses his lovers into hard-edged industrial, corporate, and domestic spaces by way of graphically etched, high-contrast camera work that emphasizes the coldly thrilling modernism of tall buildings, progressive urbanism, and avant-garde design”); the poetry of the vegetable names in Burkhard Bilger’s excellent “True Grits” (“He set aside a bag of Whippoorwill peas and another of Zipper cream peas – the ones speckled brown and black, the others bright pink, like magic seeds from ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’”); Dan Chiasson’s analysis of Tomas Tranströmer’s style (“Tranströmer seeks not the ‘deep image’ but the elusive surface of things”); James Wood’s assessment of Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving Atocha Station (“Lerner is attempting to capture something that most conventional novels, with their cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and ‘conflict,’ fail to do: the drift of thought, the unmomentous passage of undramatic life”); Peter Schjeldahl’s close look at an African wooden sculpture (“The figure is all palpably moving parts: mouth open, eyes raised, knees bent, weight shifted to the right leg, and breasts swaying. She wields a rattle. A pattern of bold striations repeats in the coiled hair, a necklace, and anklets”). I loved all these things. Most of all I loved Emily Eakin’s “Celluloid Hero.” I’m a sucker for descriptions of the creative process. “Celluloid Hero” contains a beauty – a description of how Tacita Dean made “FILM” for exhibition at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. In a beautifully crafted, intensely engaging narrative, Eakin reports the various technical obstacles Dean encountered (e.g., the difficulty involved in fashioning “masks” thin enough to convincingly create the illusion of a filmstrip with sprocket holes) and the ways they were solved (e.g., using a digital laser device to produce a 3-D plastic mask that was less than a millimetre thick). Along the way, Eakin provides gorgeous descriptions of Dean’s art. Here is one of my favorites: “Her carefully layered shots had a sculptural quality; the glass-matte ostrich egg, appearing more than twenty feet tall, protruded from the screen as if it had been hurled right through it.” Eakin is new to me. As far as I know, “Celluloid Hero” is her first New Yorker piece. I look forward to many more.