June 25, 2018 Issue

In this week’s “Goings On About Town,” Peter Schjeldahl shoots a poison-tipped dart at Damien Hirst’s Colour Space Paintings, currently showing at Gagosian Gallery, New York City. He writes,

Superabundant multicolored dot paintings, randomly composed in sizes from smallish to giant, are as perfectly dead as a trisected shark in formaldehyde-filled glass cases, which is also on view. There’s no formal structure or even optical dazzle, except by occasional accident. These aren’t active pictures. They’re passive slabs, yielding nothing to contemplation that they don’t impart at first glance. Neither good nor bad, they maintain an imperturbable, mortuary dignity—Hirst’s cynosure. He creates visual curios that look like art while dispensing with art’s pesky demands on thought, feeling, and perception. His works are aesthetic cryptocurrency. There are worse things in the world.

Wow! I’ve rarely seen Schjeldahl so negative. But it’s not unexpected. He’s been on Hirst’s case for years. In his “Spot On” (January 12, 2012), he called him “a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth.” I agree. 

Schjeldahl’s “Goings On About Town” note is even more dismissive of Hirst’s dot paintings than “Spot On” is. In the earlier piece, he memorably describes them as ‘intellectual formaldehyde.” But he also said, “Tastiness applies, too, in the pleasantly disorienting effects of colors that appear to be distributed at random: bright or muted or warm or cool, all ajumble.” Well, there’s no tastiness now. They’re “aesthetic cryptocurrency” – a brilliant description of bad art that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker criticism. 

June 18, 2018 Issue

Rebecca Mead’s “Meal Ticket,” in this week’s issue, combines the disgusting and the sublime. It’s a fascinating account of Mead’s dining experience at Koks, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the Faroe Islands, specializing in extreme cuisine such as gannet-and-whale-blubber sandwiches, razorbill Wellington (“The pancake-wrapped seabird was topped by a lumpy, bloody-looking sauce made from beet, elderberry, and rosehip”), and crème brûlée infused with red seaweed. 

Mead is a superb, sensuous describer. She says of Koks’s fermented lamb, “Wind and time bestow on the meat a layer of greenish mold, and a pungency somewhere between Parmesan cheese and death.” Lamb drying in a shed looks “less like the wares in a butcher shop than like shards of granite patterned delicately with lichen.” Of a plate of aged lamb with rutabaga, she writes, “The aged lamb on my plate looked like shreds of an automobile tire, and it tasted like something I wouldn’t be able to wash out of my hair for a week.” Her details delight (“A carafe of coffee was delivered to the table with a dried salmon skin wrapped around its neck, as a holder”).

Notwithstanding the gross nature of most of the food, I enjoyed “Meal Ticket” immensely. I especially liked the last section in which the guests assess the experience they’ve had dining at Koks. Mead concludes:

With repletion came dissatisfaction: a hunger for something more, or for something different. Everyone felt a bit drained. Ducking under the rafters by the door, then taking care not to slide on the mud that the workers had not entirely remediated, we straggled out into the all-consuming darkness, and began the long passage home across the sea.

Postscript: A special shout-out to the magazine’s designers for “Goings On About Town” ’s new look. I like the sky-blue, serif-font titles. I like the cohesive way the “Art,” “Theatre,” “Classical Music,” “Night Life,” “Dance,” “Movies,” and “Readings and Talks” sections flow into each other. I applaud the elimination of GOAT-writer anonymity. In the new model, the writer’s name appears at the end of each note. This is as it should be. Some of the magazine’s best writing is in GOAT. Now we can tell who writes it. 

Pauline Kael's Classic "Underground Man"

Robert De Niro, in Taxi Driver (1976)

I’m pleased to see that newyorker.com has included Pauline Kael’s “Underground Man” (The New Yorker, February 9, 1976) in its “Nights at the Movies” series. It’s one of her best. But I want to flag an error in the newyorker.com version. The punctuation after “hallway” in the following passage should be a comma, not a period:

One can pass over a lingering closeup of a street musician, but when Travis is talking to Betsy on a pay phone in an office building and the camera moves away from him to the blank hallway. It’s an Antonioni pirouette.

The correct version (from the original review) is all one sentence:

One can pass over a lingering closeup of a street musician, but when Travis is talking to Betsy on a pay phone in an office building and the camera moves away from him to the blank hallway, it’s an Antonioni pirouette. 

“Underground Man” is included in Kael’s 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down, a book Renata Adler adjudged “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless” (“The Perils of Pauline,” The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980). To which the only possible response is “Oy!”

Kael wrote a capsule version of “Underground Man” for use in “Goings On About Town” ’s “In Brief” section, condensing the two-thousand-seventy-four-word original to a hundred and fifty-three words. It reads as follows:

Robert De Niro is in almost every frame of Martin Scorsese’s feverish, horrifyingly funny movie about a lonely New York cab-driver. De Niro’s inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions. He’s Travis Bickle, an outsider who can’t find any point of entry into human society. He drives nights because he can’t sleep anyway; surrounded by the night world of the uprooted – whores, pimps, transients – he hates New York with a Biblical fury, and its filth and smut obsess him. This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground. Scorsese achieves the quality of trance in some scenes, and the whole movie has a sense of vertigo. The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness. From Paul Schrader’s script; with Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks, Leonard Harris, Harry Northrup, Joe Spinell, Diahnne Abbott, and Scorsese himself. [Collected in Kael’s great 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991]  

It’s interesting to see how Kael composed this “In Brief” note, picking words and phrases from the original piece and combining them to make new, more concentrated sentences. For example, the line “This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground” is sourced in three separate sentences in the original: “ferociously” in “This picture is more ferocious than Scorsese’s volatile, allusive Mean Streets”; “powerful” in “No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying”; and the rest of the sentence in “Taxi Driver is a movie in heat, a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground.” 

For me, the “In Brief” note’s most quintessentially Kaelian line is “The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness,” a choice fragment of the original sentence: “Scorsese’s Expressionism isn’t anything like the exaggerated sets of the German directors; he uses documentary locations, but he pushes discordant elements to their limits, and the cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness” (my emphasis). 

Forty-two years after it appeared in The New Yorker, “Underground Man” still thrives. Hail Kael! 

Two Interesting New Critics

Alberto Savinio, "Self-Portrait as an Owl" (1936)

I enjoy critical writing immensely. “The Critics” is my favorite section of The New Yorker. It’s always a pleasure to discover new critics – new to me, that is. Two such discoveries I’ve made recently are Lidija Haas and Gini Alhadeff. Haas’s “The Disbelieved” (The New Yorker, June 4 & 11, 2018) is a brilliant review of Porochista Khakpour’s “Sick,” a chronicle of Khakpour’s experiences with Lyme disease. Haas says that Khakpour “resists the clean narrative lines of many illness memoirs—in which order gives way to chaos, which is then resolved, with lessons learned and pain transcended along the way.” I like the way Haas makes a theme of this resistance. She quotes Susan Sontag’s warning in Illness as Metaphor that “nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one,” then takes issue with it: “This idea implies an injunction against interpretation and against narrative shaping that’s all but impossible for a writer on the subject to obey.” She sees this longing for narrative logic and simultaneous distrust of it as a function of illness itself: “Pain and suffering are what they are – they resist meaning and the narratives that make it.” She talks about Sick’s “paranoid logic and spiralling, dizzying structure.” The more she says about this intriguing book, the more I want to read it – a sure sign of a great review.

Another sign is a review that seduces me to read about an artist I didn’t even know existed. Such a piece is Gini Alhadeff’s “Against Seriousness” (The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2018), a review of an exhibition of Alberto Savinio’s paintings at the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York City. The piece begins magnificently:

Alberto Savinio, the hidden spring of metaphysical modernism, lives on in his Self-Portrait as an Owl (1936). His face, with its marked eyebrows, dark eyes, thin lips, and air of melancholic diffidence, sketched in swirling feathers, resembles that of his brother, Giorgio de Chirico, who did a pencil drawing of the two siblings—or Dioscuri, as they liked to call themselves, after the mythical twins Castor and Pollux—at the start of their working life in Paris, one as a musician, the other as an artist. In Self-Portrait, Savinio wears a dark suit, and his shapely hand, the thumb hooked over a waistcoat button, takes up one fifth of the image. The scarf wound around his neck partly conceals a feathered chest. 

I read that and just kept going right to the end, devouring Alhadeff’s wonderful descriptions of Savinio’s surrealism. For example:

In one of these, My Parents (1945), his mother and father have become stone armchairs, very expressive ones, with just one eye each. The mother’s chest looks pubescent above an exposed ribcage, her arms replaced by a rolled upholstery trim, her head the skull of a camel or a horse. The father is headless, an expansive chest grafted onto an armchair with one immense, powerful eye staring out of it. The shadows they cast consist of dense handwritten lines that narrate a brief story of their lives: “My mother was called Gemma, she sang with a beautiful mezzo-soprano voice.”

“Against Seriousness” brims with such descriptions. I enjoyed it enormously.

Lidija Hass and Gini Alhadeff – two critics I look forward to reading more of. 

Postscript: I see Alhadeff has a piece on William Eggleston in the June 7 New York Review of Books. It’s tempting to read it online. But I’ll wait for the print version. 

June 4 & 11, 2018 Issue

Rivka Galchen has two excellent pieces in this week’s issue – “The Teaching Moment” and “Mum’s the Word.” “The Teaching Moment” is about a recent teachers’ walkout in Oklahoma, protesting low pay and cuts to education spending. As Galchen points out, Oklahoma is a deep-red Republican state. She reports, 

Oklahoma has essentially been under single-party rule for about a decade. The state legislature is eighty per cent Republican, and in the most recent midterm elections the Democrats didn’t field a candidate in nearly half the races. Governor Fallin is in her eighth year, and during her tenure nearly all state agencies have seen cuts of between ten and thirty per cent, even as the population that those agencies serve has increased. 

But, according to Galchen, the teachers’ walkout might be a political turning point: 

The walkout mostly failed to secure more funding for classrooms, but it was a baptism by fire for a movement of politically literate and engaged Okies. In the 2014 elections, eighty-seven Democrats ran for legislative office in Oklahoma; for this fall’s elections, the number has more than doubled. 

Galchen puts us squarely there with the teachers in the packed visitors’ gallery of the Oklahoma House of Representatives as they watch the Republicans vote down three proposed tax reforms that would generate new revenue. She writes:

As the session continues, Democrats try, within the constraints of parliamentary procedure, to bring to the floor a discussion of education funding. After all the scheduled bills for the day have been dealt with, the Republican floor leader asks the members of the House to stand at ease—take a break without adjourning—because of “some ongoing discussions between the majority and minority parties.” It seems impossible to me, I confess, having been among the teachers at the capitol, that the legislature won’t pass something.

I relish that last sentence. Galchen’s reporting style is at once factual and personal. You can tell she identifies with the teachers. I do, too. 

“The Teaching Moment” is one of the most heartening political pieces I’ve read this year. I enjoyed it immensely. 

The other Galchen piece in this week’s New Yorker is “Mum’s the Word,” a delightful personal essay on her four-year-old daughter’s preoccupation with death. It contains a fascinating passage in which Galchen appears to liken her daughter’s thinking on death to a cluttered kitchen drawer. She says,

A few weeks later, we have dinner at a friend’s house. The friend’s brother has just died. I don’t think my daughter knows. There’s a giant boxer-faced dog there, under the table, gnawing on rawhide. “Did you ever give a dog a bone, Mama?”

I said that as a little girl I had a dog who loved bones. I had another dog in college who—

“Are they died now, those dogs?”

Fair enough. I have a strong childhood memory of my mother removing the cluttered kitchen drawer from under the Kermit the Frog telephone; she removed that drawer and shook its entire contents into a garbage bag. Terrible! I was fond of opening that drawer, knowing that anything could turn up: a pink auto-insurance key chain, a plastic watch (not ticking), a scrap of paper that read “bears—robinhood.” I will always let the clutter live, I thought. I will always be open to these surprises.

These days I love an empty drawer.

I’ve read that passage at least a dozen times. I’m not sure I get it. The daughter’s question (“ ‘Are they died now, those dogs?’ ”) triggers Galchen’s memory of her mother cleaning out a cluttered kitchen drawer. From that memory, Galchen draws a moral: don’t mess with your kids’ thoughts, “let the clutter live,” “always be open to these surprises.” Is that what it means? It’s one of the damnedest things I’ve ever read. Kafka would’ve loved it.

Amis v. Wood

Martin Amis, in his “Bellow: Avoiding the Void,” included in his superb new essay collection The Rub of Time, compliments New Yorker book reviewer, James Wood, calling him “one of Bellow’s most well-attuned critics.” Both writers admire Bellow immensely. Amis says, “Bellow is sui generis and Promethean, a thief of the gods’ fire: he is something like a super-charged plagiarist of Creation.” Wood, in his “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style” (The Irresponsible Self, 2005), writes, “Saul Bellow is probably the greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth century–where greatest means most abundant, various, precise, rich, lyrical.”

But there are at least two writers Amis and Wood disagree on – Nabokov and Updike. Amis loves their work; Wood, not so much. Of Nabokov, Amis writes, “I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius” (“Vladimir Nabokov and the Problem from Hell”; included in The Rub of Time). In “John Updike’s Farewell Notes” (also in The Rub of Time), Amis calls Updike “perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov.” 

Wood’s view differs. In his How Fiction Works (2008), he says, “Nabokov and Updike at times freeze detail into a cult of itself. Aestheticism is the great risk here, and also an exaggeration of the noticing eye.” Of Nabokov, he says: “Bellow notices superbly; but Nabokov wants to tell us how important it is to notice. Nabokov’s fiction is always becoming propaganda on behalf of good noticing, hence on behalf of itself” (How Fiction Works). He’s even more critical of Updike. In John Updike’s Complacent God” (The Broken Estate, 1999), he says, “Updike is not, I think, a great writer; and the lacuna is not in the quality of the prose but in the risk of the thought.”

Are these criticisms valid? Do Nabokov and Updike “freeze detail into a cult of itself”? Do they “exaggerate the noticing eye”? Is Updike too serene? Amis doesn’t address these points. He faults some of Nabokov’s and Updike’s late work. In “Vladimir Nabokov and the Problem from Hell,” he calls Nabokov’s Ada “a waterlogged corpse at the stage of maximal bloat.” In “John Updike’s Farewell Notes,” he says of Updike’s My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, “Updike’s prose, that fantastic engine of euphony, of first-echelon perception, and of a wit both vicious and all-forgiving, has in this book lost its compass.” But, overall, he passionately embraces their writing. Here, for example, is his assessment of Nabokov’s Letters to Véra:

It is the prose itself that provides the lasting affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children (wholly unsinister, though the prototype of “Lolita,” “The Enchanter,” dates from 1939); the way that everyone he comes across is minutely individualized (a butler, a bureaucrat, a conductor on the Metro); the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather (he is the supreme poet of the skyscape); and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his divine energy. [“Véra and Vladimir: Letters to Véra,” The Rub of Time]

That “unresting responsiveness” is inspired – a powerful counterclaim to Wood’s provocative charges.