March 25, 2019 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Kathryn Schulz’s “The Stack” and Joshua Rothman’s “What Lies Beneath.”

Schulz’s piece is a memoir of her father’s love of books. She writes,

Some people love books reverently—my great-aunt, for instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined to open any volume beyond a hundred-degree angle, so tenderly did she treat their spines. My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s. 

Her father sounds like my kind of guy. I, too, find “respite” in library reading rooms. Books are for me, as they were for him – “transportive and salvific.” And I share his awareness of life’s fragility. Schulz says,

Although he seemed to embody the ideal of the self-made man, my father was not terribly rah-rah about the bootstrap fantasy of the American Dream; he was too aware of how tenuous his trajectory had been, how easily his good life could have gone badly instead, how many helping hands and lucky breaks and second chances he had had along the way.

It’s a pleasure to read the profile of a book-lover – coffee stains, pistachio dust, and all. I totally identify with him. 

Joshua Rothman’s “What Lies Beneath” is a profile of the painter Peter Sacks. What I relish about it is its attentive first-hand observation of Sacks making a painting. Rothman puts us right in the room with Sacks as he sets fire to his creation:

Sacks bent down and selected another strip of linen. Using his brush, he glued it to the wooden shingle, half obscuring its red eyes. The fabric flowed vertically down the canvas. Leaning in, he used his fingers to adjust its path, creating ridges and folds so that it would be open to oxygen. Then, from a nearby worktable, he retrieved a box of kitchen matches. He struck one of them and set fire to the linen. The flames rippled upward, serpentine. He watched them climb, then, after a few seconds, used his brush to snuff them out. Some of the linen was gone. We stood looking at the materials, colored by smoke, now joined by a scar.

That passage is part of a fascinating section describing Sacks’s “ritualized form of art-making – creating, burying, burning, uncovering.” I enjoyed it immensely.