January 28, 2013 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Adam Gopnik’s “Music to Your Ears.” What a cabinet of wonders it is: plasma rocket engines, Elvis Presley’s private jet, 3-D sound, nonfigurative Greek vases, Antiochian Orthodox, Appalachian snake handlers, ancient Arabic freestyle rap, Bach’s Mass in B Minor, Cyclops, XTC wave, BACCH filter, Victrola recording, St. Catherine Street, McGill faculty club, Darwin, auditory Chimera, Blue Öyster Cult, Nashville harmonics, Yamaha Disklavier, Kate Smith tremelo, psycho-acoustics, Gershwin, MP3s, Bell Labs, Stereo Purifier, Jambox, on and on – all strung on a personal narrative of meetings, interviews and lunches that Gopnik has with various “sound scholars” in New York and Montreal. It’s a terrific piece and it contains several inspired quasi-surreal sentences (e.g., “The poignant C-major seventh saves your life when your emotions are already pitched somewhere around a hard-edged, unresolved G-7”). Gopnik’s most brilliant move is his use of the rippling, sparkling, serene playing of the great jazz pianist Ellis Larkins as a metaphor for music’s meaning-making (“The answer to Bregman’s question ‘Why do we like music?’ isn’t this thing or that thing but many things at once pressing down hard, and then lightly, on our minds, as Ellis Larkins presses on the keyboard”). For a wonderful profile of Larkins, see Whitney Balliett’s “Einfühlung” (The New Yorker, December 18, 1978; included in Balliett’s 1983 collection Jelly Roll, Jabbo & Fats).

The Compositional Value of Ephemera

It’s interesting to read Nathan Heller’s “Hello Laptop, My Old Friend” (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, January 18, 2013) and learn how he composed the beautiful opening section of his “Semi-Charmed Life” (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013). Heller refers to “the evocative power of cast-off material.” He says,

In a recent issue of the magazine, I wrote about people in their twenties and some books that focus on their plight. The piece begins with an account of some weeks I spent in Iceland, in my own early twenties, and in working on that passage I relied on both memory and record. I’m a pack rat when it comes to correspondence and ephemera: I still have every substantive note or e-mail I’ve sent or received since the start of college—perhaps even earlier—plus pamphlets, birthday cards, maps, Playbills, boarding passes, brochures, brittle magazines, and fancy hardbound notebooks that I’ve started in the hope of reinventing myself as someone who writes in fancy hardbound notebooks. Who’d have thought that a map of businesses in pre-crash Reykjavík would one day help me write a book review? Not my twenty-two-year-old self, certainly. And yet that map, like many notes and e-mails from those weeks, was crucial in reëntering a particular experience years later—not just to tell the story to readers but to reclaim it as a memory of my own.

Reading Heller’s post, I recalled Ian Frazier’s description of his approach to composing his great Family (1994): “My method in writing this memoir was to look for artifacts that suggested narrative” (“Looking for My Family,” included in Inventing the Truth, edited by William Zinsser, 1998).

Frazier’s and Heller’s approach shows the compositional value of ephemera – “the evocative power of cast-off material.”

Credit: The above illustration is from Nathan Heller’s “Semi-Charmed Life” (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013). 

January 21, 2013 Issue

James Wood, in his “Reality Effects” (The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011) says, “The contemporary essay has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction.” I agree. The essay is the ideal medium of expression. Some of the best writing appearing right now is in the essay form (e.g., Zadie Smith’s “North West London Blues,” Elif Batuman’s “The View from the Stands,” John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Unknown Bards,” Aleksandar Hemon’s “Mapping Home,” Jeremy Denk’s “Flight of the Concord,” Peter Hessler’s “Identity Parade,” Iain Sinclair’s “Upriver,” Chang-Rae Lee’s “Magical Dinners,” Geoff Dyer’s “Poles Apart,” Keith Gessen’s “Polar Express,” Nicholson Baker’s “Painkiller Deathstreak,” Colson Whitehead’s “A Psychotronic Childhood,” on and on, a surging river of extraordinary writing). Wood himself is handsomely contributing to the essay’s renaissance. His “The Fun Stuff” (The New Yorker, November 29, 2010; included in his great 2012 collection The Fun Stuff) and “Shelf Life” (The New Yorker, November 7, 2011); retitled “Packing My Father-in-Law’s Library” in The Fun Stuff) are wonderful personal essays. Parul Sehgal, in her appreciative review of The Fun Stuff, describes “Packing My Father-in-Law’s Library” as a “self-portrait at slant angle” (“The Wayward Essay,” The New York Times, December 28, 2012). This week’s New Yorker contains a new piece by Wood, called “Becoming Them.” It, too, is a “self-portrait at slant angle.” The angle is Wood’s mirror view of himself as a reflection of his father. He writes,

Sometimes I catch myself and think self-consciously, You are now listening to a Beethoven string quartet, just as your father did. And, at that moment, I feel a mixture of satisfaction and rebellion. Rebellion, for all the obvious reasons. Satisfaction, because it is natural to resemble one’s parents, and there is a resigned pleasure to be had from the realization. I like that my voice is exactly the same pitch as my father’s, and can be mistaken for it. But then I hear myself speaking to my children just as he spoke to me, in exactly the same tone and with the same fatherly melody, and I am dismayed by the plagiarism of inheritance. How unoriginal can one be?

Noting one’s familial resemblance may not be original, but some of Wood’s particulars are remarkable (e.g., “I sneeze the way he does, with a slightly theatrical whooshing sound”). His description of his aging mother’s deteriorated living conditions, when his father had to be hospitalized, includes this memorable detail: “the carpet under the dining table was littered with oats, like the floor of a hamster’s cage.”

In his personal essays, Wood appears more relaxed, less forceful than he is in his critical pieces. His lines are shorter; his syntax simpler; his style plainer. Also, reality, realism, the real, the really real, etc., which so preoccupy his criticism, don’t figure in his personal pieces. It seems that, writing his personal history, he’s content to let reality speak for itself. What we’re seeing, I think, is a great writer in the process of adjusting his style to represent the felt texture of his personal experience. 

January 14, 2013 Issue

One of the key elements of John McPhee’s superb writing style is its expressiveness of structure. As William L. Howarth says, in The John McPhee Reader (1976), “Structural order is not just a means of self-discipline for McPhee the writer; it is the main ingredient in his work that attracts his reader.” In his wonderful “Structure,” in this week’s issue, McPhee shows how he discovered this “main ingredient.” The pivotal development occurred in 1966, after he’d completed all his research for a piece on the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. He says, “I had assembled enough material to fill a silo, and now I had no idea what to do with it.” After two weeks struggling with writer’s block, “fighting fear and panic,” he finally hit on an organizing principle. He says,

At last it occurred to me that Fred Brown, a seventy-nine-year-old Pine Barrens native, who lived in a shanty in the heart of the forest, had had some connection or other to at least three-quarters of those Pine Barren topics whose miscellaneity was giving me writer’s block. I could introduce him as I first encountered him when I crossed his floorless vestibule – “Come in. Come in. Come on the hell in” – and then describe our many wanderings around the woods together, each theme coming up as something touched upon it. After what turned out to be about thirty thousand words, the rest could take care of itself. Obvious as it had not seemed, this organizing principle gave me a sense of a nearly complete structure….

The piece he wrote is the classic “The Pine Barrens” (The New Yorker, November 25 & December 2, 1967), a work I fondly recall first encountering in 1976, when I bought a slim paperback edition of it. I have it with me now as I write this. Its subtle craftsmanship gives no hint that it caused McPhee such compositional angst. But “Structure” confirms “The Pine Barrens”’s centrality in the development of McPhee’s technique (“Structure has preoccupied me in every project I have undertaken since”).

Of “Structure”’s many pleasures – cool diagrams of some of McPhee’s finest pieces (“A Roomful of Hovings,” “A Forager,” “Travels in Georgia,” “A Fleet of One,” “Tight-Assed River”), practical writing tips (“If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were”), an illuminating discussion of chronology versus theme – the most piquant is the chance to partake again, from another angle, of the joys I’ve experienced within McPhee’s resplendent oeuvre, in the presence of a voice and mind I’ve come to love.

Postscript: Another piece in this week’s issue that deserves a special shout-out is Nathan Heller’s absorbing “Semi-Charmed Life,” a survey of books on “twentysomething culture.” I particularly enjoyed the opening section, a limpid remembrance of a month Heller spent in Reykjavik when he was twenty-two (“My life at that time was full of passing relationships: people I knew for days, or even hours, and who posed for Polaroid-like snapshots in my memory which outlast many of the long-exposure images I’ve collected since”). I like the way Heller moves from personal history to critical analysis and back again. His method generates several gorgeous lines (e.g., “The skin above her collarbone had the clean, smoky, late-October smell of candle wax”). Writing this descriptive, personal, and sensuous infuses criticism with fresh potential. 

January 7, 2013 Issue

Pieces about Scandinavian TV, Greek antiquity, theatrical pickpocketing, and “civil society,” whatever that is, aren’t my cup of tea. And so, at first glance, this week’s issue of the magazine, with its bland Chris Ware cover, appeared most unpromising. But there’s always something to fire the imagination, even if it’s just a detail. Sure enough, that “Gintonic” in Amelia Lester’s "Tables For Two" on La Vara does the trick (“The best ‘Gintonic,’ though, is the one that comes with the peel of an entire lemon wrapped around the top of the glass, to be inhaled, like a bouquet, with every sip. It’s a drink so light and fragrant that it makes summer seem not just possible but imminent”). Delightful! I propose a toast. Here’s to Amelia Lester! Long may she write so sensuously! 

Best of 2012

Here are my “Top Ten” picks of 2012:

FACT PIECES 

1. Raffi Khatchadourian, “Transfiguration” (February 13 & 20, 2012)
2. Robert A. Caro, “The Transition” (April 2, 2012)
3. Nick Paumgarten, “Deadhead” (November 26, 2012)
4. Ian Frazier, “Out of the Bronx” (February 6, 2012)
5. Jill Lepore, “Battleground America” (April 23, 2012)
6. Dexter Filkins, “Atonement” (October 29 & November 5, 2012)
7. Ian Parker, “High Rise” (September 10, 2012)
8. Lauren Collins, “Bread Winner” (December 3, 2012)
9. Keith Gessen, “Polar Express” (December 24 & 31, 2012)
10. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Recall of the Wild” (December 24 & 31, 2012)

CRITICAL PIECES

1. James Wood, “Late and Soon” (December 10, 2012)
2. Dan Chiasson, “The Body Artist” (November 12, 2012)
3. James Wood, “Broken Record” (May 21, 2012)
4. James Wood, “Total Recall” (August 13 & 20, 2012)
5. Dan Chiasson, “The Child In Time” (October 8, 2012)
6. Peter Schjeldahl, “Young and Gifted” (June 25, 2012)
7. Anthony Lane, “Out of the Frame” (September 3, 2012)
8. Lorrie Moore, “Canada Dry” (May 21, 2012)
9. Joanna Kavenna, “Things Fall Apart” (September 3, 2012)
10. Dahlia Lithwick, “Extreme Makeover” (March 12, 2012)

TALK STORIES

1. Lizzie Widdicombe, “Rush” (September 3, 2012)
2. Rebecca Mead, “Right-Hand Man” (September 3, 2012)
3. Alec Wilkinson, “Indigenous” (October 1, 2012)
4. Nick Paumgarten, “Hello, Dolly” (October 1, 2012) 
5. Ian Frazier, “Lost and Found” (July 23, 2012)
6. Alec Wilkinson, “Tag Team” (July 23, 2012)
7. Ian Frazier, “Bunkers” (January 9, 2012)
8. Ian Frazier, “Neighbors” (October 1, 2012)
9. Ben McGrath, “Zone A-Plus” (November 12, 2012) 
10. Tad Friend, “Hit Parade” (December 24 & 31, 2012)

Credit: The above artwork is by Laurent Cilluffo; it appears in The New Yorker (November 26, 2012) as an illustration for “On The Horizon.”

Louise Glück's "Still Life"

Louise Glück (Illustration by Jorge Arevalo)

I enjoy reading analyses of photographs. One of my favorites is Louise Glück’s poem “Still Life”:

Father has his arm around Tereze.

She squints. My thumb

is in my mouth: my fifth autumn.

Near the copper beech

the spaniel dozes in the shadows.

Not one of us does not avert his eyes.

Across the lawn, in full sun, my mother

stands behind her camera.

That “Near the copper beech / the spaniel dozes in the shadows” is marvelously fine. Dan Chiasson, in his “Forms of Narrative in the Poetry of Louise Glück” (One Kind of Everything, 2007), says of “Still Life”:

Only the barest descriptive resources are here employed: “objective” adjectives (a “copper” beech, my “fifth” autumn, “full” sun); simple verbs (only “dozes,” the dog’s action, conveys any affect at all); and an emblematic cast and location. That the poem is manifestly a “photograph” seems appropriate enough, given such a style, but the metaphor should be carefully parsed.

By “carefully parsed,” Chiasson means that the distinction between “snapshot” and “photographic portrait” should be kept in mind:

Where the “snapshot” records “fact” (since its subject moves unselfconsciously through the world), the photographic portrait – the sort of photograph that interests Glück – tries (as much as possible given its medium) to erase fact: the family’s ordinary comings and goings are frozen into conventionality, into a pose that is emblematic, but not documentary, of “family.” The irony of any such portrait is that the conventionality of the family pose only heightens and offsets individual affect: the gloating and furtive and distracted looks that might disappear in an idealized portrait painting are here, in a portrait photograph, exaggerated.

In his piece, Chiasson treats “Still Life” as a metaphor for Gluck’s “photographic style.” He says, “As a metaphor for her poetics, then, Gluck’s photographic “Still Life” captures her interest in generic diction, as well as her belief that the personal life is irretrievably conventional, and most conventional precisely where it seems most personal.” But if “Still Life” is a “photograph,” it’s an unusual one in that it includes the photographer (“Across the lawn, in full sun, my mother / stands behind her camera”). I think a more compelling interpretation is that “Still Life” is Glück’s descriptive analysis of a family photo. The first six lines describe the photo; the last two introduce a psychological dimension – the mother, who can't get her family's attention (“Not one of us does not avert his eyes”). Chiasson comes closer to this interpretation in his recent New Yorker piece, “The Body Artist” (November 12, 2012), a review of Gluck’s Poems 1962-2012, in which he again considers “Still Life.” He writes,

This is family life depicted twice: by the mother through her camera, and by Gluck, through this poem. Both “takes” depend on an observer who leaves herself out of the picture: the photograph effaces the mother, since she takes it; the poem, in painstakingly avoiding all commentary, hides its author as best it can, though there she is, sucking her thumb. Gluck seems to revile, though she cannot help resembling, the mother so central to the picture that omits her.

This strikes me as slightly more persuasive than the poem-as-family-portrait reading that Chiasson advances in his earlier piece. It allows for the existence of two “photographs” (one embedded in the other) – the mother’s group shot framed within Glück’s poem, which shows the mother taking the shot. But it still sees “Still Life” as a “take” rather than as an analysis. In “The Body Artist,” Chiasson describes Glück as a “poet of first-person forensics: her autobiography is dissected rather than expressed, almost as though the facts of her life belonged to someone else.” In my opinion, Glück’s great “Still Life” is closer to a forensic report (albeit a brief one) than it is to a photograph.

Credit: The above artwork is by Jorge Arevalo; it appears in The New Yorker (November 12, 2012), as an illustration for Dan Chiasson’s “The Body Artist.”