November 26, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Antony Huchette's snowy illustration for “Goings On About Town” ’s “Celebrating the Holidays” is delightful.

Antony Huchette, "Celebrating the Holidays" (2018)

2. Also in GOAT, Steve Futterman’s note on Carol Sloane at Birdland caught my eye, reminding me of Whitney Balliett’s 1987 Sloane profile, in which he describes her singing as “conversation put to music” (“Carol Sloane and Julie Wilson,” The New Yorker, April 6, 1987).

3. Frédéric Bazille’s gorgeous “Young Woman with Peonies” (1870), illustrating Hilton Als’ “At the Galleries: ‘Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse to Today’ ” helps offset Janet Malcolm’s startling opinion, expressed in her recent “Six Glimpses of the Past,” that open peonies are “blowsy and ugly.”

Frédéric Bazille, "Young Woman with Peonies" (1870)

4. Peter Schjeldahl’s GOAT note on Dike Blair is a beauty, and is worth quoting in full:

Blair has been painting coolly beautiful little still-lifes of ordinary things in ordinary places for so long that, by now, they seem almost to paint themselves, for their own enjoyment. A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life.

5. Richard Brody reprises his brilliant capsule review of Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby” in this week’s “Goings On About Town,” and why not? It’s one of his best pieces. The last line is sublime: 

And Hawks brought to fruition his own universe of hints and symbols to conjure the force that rules the world: she tears his coat, he tears her dress, she steals his clothes, she names him “Bone,” and the mating cries of wild animals disturb the decorum of the dinner table, even as a Freudian psychiatrist in a swanky bar gives viewers an answer key.

6. Raffi Khatchadourian’s absorbing “Degrees of Freedom” tells about an extraordinary neuroscientific experiment in which a paralyzed woman’s brain is directly connected to a robotic arm. Khatchadourian is a superb describer of complex technological devices and procedures. His description of the implanting of the microelectrodes in the woman’s brain is unforgettable. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth.

Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” is every bit the equal of his great “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012). I enjoyed it immensely.