Dan Kois' "How I Learned to Cycle Like a Dutchman"

Photo by Martin Parr (from Dan Kois' "How I Learned to Cycle Like a Dutchman"

On September 13, 2019, two days before Lorna and I departed for a three-week cycling holiday in the Netherlands, Dan Kois’ “How I Learned to Cycle Like a Dutchman” appeared on newyorker.com. Perfect timing! Needless to say, I read it avidly. It’s an account of Kois and his family’s three-month stay in Delft in 2017. He writes,

While our family was in Holland, Alia and I decided, we would take a break from driving cars. Cycling was the norm in the Netherlands, and fulfilled the dream of every American rider who wished she could rule the road. It was a country with more bikes than people, and we were eager to slip into the two-wheeled flow.

Slipping into the dense “two-wheeled flow” of Dutch cycle traffic was Lorna’s and my goal, too. But we were apprehensive about the risk of accident. We weren’t used to crowded bike lanes. As it turned out, our concerns were groundless. Holland is immensely bike-friendly. And the Dutch are natural cyclists. As long as you keep alert to what’s happening around you, obey traffic lights, signal turns, and don’t make sudden stops in the lanes, you’ll be fine. Kois quotes an official in the Dutch cyclist’s union: “Cyclists move like a swarm of sparrows,” he said. “There are thousands of them moving in chaos, but there are no collisions. They turn a little bit; they change their speed. You must do the same.”

Describing Nazi and Soviet Prison Camps: Frazier and Gorra

Photo by Igor Mikhalev (from Ian Frazier's "On the Prison Highway")

I’m currently reading Michael Gorra’s The Bells in Their Silence (2004), an account of his travels in Germany. In Chapter 1, he writes about “the difficulty of describing” Buchenwald. He says, “None of the ways in which I customarily described a place seemed as if they could apply to a concentration camp.”

Reading Gorra’s words, I immediately thought of Ian Frazier’s “On the Prison Highway” (The New Yorker, August 30, 2010), an extraordinary description of a deserted Stalin-era labor camp. Frazier writes,

The lager lay in a narrow valley between sparsely wooded hills. The gray, scraggly trees, which did not make it to the hills’ higher slopes, grew more thickly near the lager and partly surrounded it; a few small birches had sprung up inside what had been the camp’s perimeter. Their bare branches contrasted with the white of the snow on the roof of the barracks building, whose wall, set back under the eaves, was dark. In the whiteness of an open field a guard tower tilted sideways like someone putting all his weight on one leg. A ladder-like set of steps still led up to it, and two eye-like window openings added to the anthropomorphic effect. In the endless and pristine snow cover I saw no tire tracks, road ruts, abandoned oil drums, or other sign that any human had been here since the camp was left to the elements, half a century before.

At first view, the camp looked as I’d expected. There were the fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s, the ink-black barbed wire, the inch-long barbs shaped like bayonets. Some of the posts leaned in one direction or another, and the barbed-wire strands drooped or fell to the ground; the fencing, and the second line of fence posts, several metres beyond, and the low, shameful barracks, with its two doors and three windows, fit exactly with the picture of a Siberian prison camp that one has in the mind. Sergei had drifted off to the left to videotape the lager from the side. I went in by the front gate, which was standing open. When I was inside the perimeter, the camp lost its generic-ness and became instead this particular Russian structure of its own.

To begin with, the whole place was as handmade as a mud hut. The fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s weren’t factory stock that had been produced elsewhere but plain logs, peeled and smoothed, with narrow boards atop them to complete the L. And the side of the barracks wall, which from a distance had appeared to be stucco, was actually a daubed plastering over thin strips of lath that crossed each other diagonally, like basketwork. I broke a piece of the plastering off in my hand; at one time it had been painted a pale yellow and it crumbled easily. It seemed to be nothing more than a spackle of mud and river sand.

Aside from the nails and the barbed wire, I could see almost no factory-made product that had been used in the construction. Next to the windows were white ceramic insulators that had probably held electrified wire; no trace of mullions or window glass remained. The roof beam ran parallel to the building’s length, and along the slope of the roof at each end a facing board about five inches wide had been nailed. These boards covered the raw edge of the roof and extended from beam to eaves, and at the end of each board a very small swirl of scrollwork had been carved. The embellishment was so out of place it caught the eye. I wondered what carpenter or designer had thought to put a touch of decoration on such a building.

He describes the barracks’ interior:

The floor of the barracks was worn planking, tightly joined and still sound. I saw nothing on it but a few twists of straw and the wooden sole of a shoe. A short, cylindrical iron stove rusted near a corner. Its stovepipe was gone and the hole for it in the plank roof above had been covered over. Prisoners who had lived in barracks like this reported that the stove usually heated a radius of five to six metres. As this building was maybe ten metres from end to end, areas of it must always have been cold. From inside you could see the logs that the walls were made of. The cracks between the logs had been chinked with moss. The barracks space had been divided into several rooms, with bunks set into the walls. The bunks also were made of bare planks—some planed on both sides, some planed on only one. Planks with the bark still on them had been fitted into the bunks so that the bark side faced down.

This interior offered little to think about besides the limitless periods of suffering that had been crossed off here, and the unquiet rest these bunks had held. Often prisoners in places like this had to sleep on the unimproved planking, or on thin mattresses stuffed with sawdust. For covering they might have had a single blanket, or nothing besides the clothes they wore during the day. Mornings began as early as 4 a.m., when the guards would awaken them by pounding with a hammer on a saw blade. That wakeup alarm and the screeching of the guard dogs’ chains on the wires stretched between the watchtowers as the dogs ran back and forth were characteristic sounds of the camps. Before the prisoners went out to work, they were given breakfast—usually soup with a small piece of fish or meat, and bread. Even in 1977, not a lean time, the diet in Soviet strict-regime camps provided only twenty-six hundred calories per prisoner per day, and less in the punishment blocks and sick wards. The international standard for a person actively working is thirty-two hundred to forty-two hundred calories per day. Like almost all labor-camp prisoners, the ones in this barracks would have been hungry almost all the time.

He says,

What struck me then and still strikes me now was the place’s overwhelming aura of absence. The deserted prison camp just sat there—unexcused, untorn-down, unexplained. During its years of operation, it had been a secret, and in some sense it still was. Horrors had happened here, and/or miseries and sufferings and humiliations short of true horrors. “No comment,” the site seemed to say.

He concludes that the camp doesn’t just evoke Stalin; it is Stalin. He writes,

Stalin never saw this or any other Siberian gulag with his own eyes. Once he attained power, he seldom left western Russia, preferring to stay in or near the Kremlin most of the time. Perhaps the unhappy fate of almost every Russian ruler who set foot in Siberia gave him pause. Although he had passed through western Siberia often as a young man (he claimed six escapes), neither then nor afterward was he ever east of Baikal. His underlings must occasionally have shown him charts of this Topolinskaya road and its system of prison camps, and maybe they even showed him photographs. But for him this camp would have been only a point on a map, a detail of a plan. The strange feeling of absence that prevailed in the frozen silence here had to do with the secrecy and evil of the place’s conception, and with its permanent abandonment, in shame, after its author was gone. Now the place existed only nominally in present time and space; the abandoned camp was a single preserved thought in a dead man’s mind. 

That last line is unforgettable.

Describing Buchenwald presents a challenge that Frazier didn’t have to face: it’s a memorial site; visiting it is a mediated experience. Gorra says,

Yet even as one walks through its gate and begins to experience the camp as a physical place, a piece of land, a set of rooms – even here one cannot escape the question of mediation, of the way in which the camp has been presented, the story it has been made to tell.

He finds his way into his description through the camp’s crematorium. He writes,

For me the most affecting part of the camp was its small crematorium. I didn’t count its separate bays or ovens – four, six? – but it could not have handled many bodies at once, maybe no more than a funeral complex in a large city. Even so it represented an enormous increase in the scale of death at Buchenwald: at first the camp had simply used Weimar’s municipal crematorium. The building I saw went up in 1941, and its ovens, made by the Erfurt firm of Topf and Söhne, provided the prototype for those that would later be used at Auschwitz. But it wasn’t just a place to burn bodies – the courtyard outside was regularly used for executions, and so was the basement, where corpses were stacked while waiting their turn for the incinerator. It must have ben convenient, to kill on site that way, a thousand people and more in the basement room, with an elevator to take the cadavers to the fire upstairs. The ovens themselves were roughly cylindrical and nothing about them announced their purpose. They look industrial and inscrutable, and if I hadn’t known otherwise I might have thought they were used for making charcoal or firing a steamship, for any factory process that required flames and a chimney.

Two teenagers came in, a boy and a girl with their hands in each other’s pockets, and stuck their heads inside one of the ovens, calling out to test its echo. I flinched and stepped away from them into the room next door, and then flinched again, for there was nothing inscrutable here. Old yellow tiles on the walls; a display case of rusty surgical instruments and a faucet over a large deep sink; a table, also covered in tiles, that sloped in from the sides to a central channel, and that sloped as well from the head to the drain at the floor. My throat felt as though it were shrinking inside me, shrivelling tight and parchment dry. I have never been in a morgue; I know them only from televised detective shows. But I could recognize a dissecting table, and I knew what kinds of things had been done in this room. It was called the “Pathology Department,” but it didn’t look as though complicated medical tests could be performed here, and there weren’t the refrigerated lockers I’d seen on TV, in  which a corpse might be stored until the coroner was ready. Here there had been no need for either tests or cold storage. The doctors who worked at Buchenwald already knew what their subjects had died of, and they knew as well that there was no need to preserve any particular body for long. There would always be another one ready.

November 18, 2019 Issue

Anthony Lane says of James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari, “it may be his strongest film” (“Wheels Within Wheels,” in this week’s issue). I don’t think so. It isn’t nearly as strong as his great Walk the Line (2005). If you want to see snazzy editing, I recommend Ford v Ferrari. But be prepared for a sentimental, family-oriented picture in the Disney mold. Richard Brody, in his “The Airbrushed Racing History of Ford v. Ferrari” (newyorker.com, November 18, 2019), describes the racing in it as “sanitized.” That strikes me as just the right word for the whole movie.  

November 11, 2019 Issue

Three pieces in this week’s issue that I enjoyed immensely: Johanna Fateman's “Goings On About Town: Art: Howardena Pindell”; Nick Paumgarten’s “The Symptoms”; and Dan Chiasson’s “Make It Old.” 

Fateman’s note contains a wonderful description of Howardena Pindell’s paintings:

Punctuating the surfaces of these handsome abstractions are seams—fissures, really—bridged by stitches resembling little teeth, and fragments of photographs and postcards. They lend the paint-toughened surfaces a pieced-together fragility and form their swirling and fanning interior structures. The found imagery, emerging from dense areas of acrylic color, includes disembodied hands, a frog, and a statue of Shiva. Neither random nor coherent, the fragments seem to represent the impressionistic puzzle pieces of partial recollection, which the compositions dynamically integrate into a meaningfully illogical whole.

Paumgarten, in his “The Symptoms,” writes about three concussions he suffered playing “beer league” hockey. Here’s his description of the first one:

I didn’t lose consciousness, or even my footing. When it was over, I skated away, with a ludicrous grin but without every item of my equipment or all of my wits. I had a sudden headache and a sense already of an alteration in the fabric of the world beyond the confines of my skull. Teammates leered at me. Aluminum rink light glinted off a thicket of surfaces: ice, plexiglass, helmets, sticks. The referee bent to report the infractions to the timekeeper, through a slot in the glass. In the penalty box, I fought the urge to lie down.

That “Aluminum rink light glinted off a thicket of surfaces: ice, plexiglass, helmets, sticks” is excellent.

Chiasson’s piece reviews Charles Wright’s new collection Oblivion Banjo. Chiasson says of Wright’s poetry, 

Within the repetitive cycles of his verse we find the loveliest surprises: an afternoon in the cupola at Emily Dickinson’s house, the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, the “sizzle like E.T.’s finger,” the “afternoon undervoices” of kids playing red rover.

Adorning the piece is a delightful portrait of Wright by Tom Bachtell, who for many years illustrated “Goings On About Town.” It’s great to see him back in the magazine. 

Tom Bachtell, "Charles Wright"

Susan Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism": Wolcott v. Malcolm

Susan Sontag (Photo by Richard Avedon)

Two recent contrasting views of Susan Sontag’s powerful 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism” (The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975; included in Sontag's great 1980 collection Under the Sign of Saturn):

1. James Wolcott, in his “All That Gab” (London Review of Books, October 24, 2019), a review of Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life, says, 

“Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag’s dismantling of the cult, canonisation and revisionist whitewashing of Leni Riefenstahl, struck like lightning when it first appeared in the New York Review with its bravura last sentence – ‘The colour is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death’ – but reprinted in book form, the parallels Sontag drew between the Nazi aesthetic and the physique of Nubian tribespeople seemed unpersuasive, leaned on, and the rhetoric overdone.

2. Janet Malcolm, in her “The Unholy Practice” (The New Yorker, September 23, 2019), also a review of Moser’s book, refers to 

Sontag’s thrillingly good essay “Fascinating Fascism,” published in The New York Review of Books in 1975 and reprinted in the book Under the Sign of Saturn, in which she justly destroyed Leni Riefenstahl’s newly restored reputation, showing her to be a Nazi sympathizer in every bone.

I agree with Malcolm. Sontag’s essay isn’t just good; it’s thrillingly good. It’s riveting. It deconstructs Riefenstahl’s book of splendid colour photographs and shows it for what it really is – not a lament for a vanishing tribe (its ostensible subject), but a continuation of Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetic.

Here’s a sample:

The introduction, which gives a detailed account of Riefenstahl’s pilgrimage to the Sudan (inspired, we are told, by reading Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa “one sleepless night in the mid-1950s”), laconically identifies the photographer as “something of a mythical figure as a film-maker before the war, half-forgotten by a nation which chose to wipe from its memory an era of its history.” Who but Riefenstahl herself could have thought up this fable about what is mistily referred to as “a nation” which for some unnamed reason “chose” to perform the deplorable act of cowardice of forgetting “an era”—tactfully left unspecified—“of its history”? Presumably, at least some readers will be startled by this coy allusion to Germany and to the Third Reich.

If you relish painstaking analysis, passionate argument, and vigorous writing, as I do, you’ll likely enjoy Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism.” It’s one of the most memorable essays I’ve ever read.  

Roger Angell's Elegiac Impulse

Roger Angell (Illustration by David Levine)

Time pours through Roger Angell’s baseball writing. He’s acutely conscious of transience. In his superb “The Flowering and Subsequent Deflowering of New England” (The New Yorker, October 28, 1967), he pauses near the end of his account of Boston’s pennant-clinching victory against the Twins and says of Carl Yastrzemski, 

There was something sad here – perhaps the thought that for Yastrzemski, more than for anyone else, this summer could not come again.

In his wonderful “Days and Nights with the Unbored” (The New Yorker, November 1, 1969), his report on the Mets’ stunning 1969 World Series win, he writes:

Nothing was lost on this team, not even an awareness of the accompanying sadness of the victory – the knowledge that adulation and money and the winter disbanding of this true club would mean that the young Mets were now gone forever. In the clubhouse (Moët et Chandon this time), Ron Swoboda said it precisely for the TV cameras: “This is the first time. Nothing can ever be as sweet again."

In the opening paragraph of his masterpiece, “Agincourt and After” (The New Yorker, November, 1975), a thrilling account of the 1975 World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox, he says,

Tarry, delight, so seldom met…. The games have ended, the heroes are dispersed, and another summer has died late in Boston, but still one yearns for them and wishes them back, so great was their pleasure.

Of his writings’ many brilliancies, the one I love most is the tinge of elegy.

Interesting Emendations: Jonathan Franzen's "The End of the End of the World"

Blexbolex's illustration for Jonathan Franzen's "The End of the End of the World"

Jonathan Franzen’s “The End of the End of the World” (The New Yorker, May 23, 2016) is one of the best New Yorker pieces to appear in the last ten years. It’s both an account of a three-week trip Franzen took to Antarctica on board the National Geographic Orion, and a tribute to his uncle Walt whose bequest made the trip possible. The piece is included in Franzen’s great 2018 collection The End of the End of the Earth. Comparing the magazine piece with the book version, I noticed a few changes. 

In the New Yorker piece, penguin chicks are downy, whereas in the book they’re fluffy. Here’s the book version of the description:

Fluffy gray chicks chased after any adult that was plausibly their parent, begging for a regurgitated meal, or banded together for safety from the gull-like skuas that preyed on the orphaned and the failing-to-thrive.

In the New Yorker piece, Franzen writes,

I’d never before had the experience of beholding scenic beauty so dazzling that I couldn’t process it, couldn’t get it to register as something real. 

In the book, he adds another eight words that strike me as unnecessary (but who am I to question the moves of a master writer):

I’d never before had the experience of beholding scenic beauty so dazzling that I couldn’t process it, couldn’t get it to register as something real that I was really in the presence of. [My emphasis]

In the magazine, he writes,

Immanuel Kant had connected the sublime with terror, but as I experienced it in Antarctica, from the safe vantage of a ship with a glass-and-brass elevator and first-rate espresso, it was more like a mixture of beauty and absurdity.

In the book, he puts it slightly differently:

Immanuel Kant had defined the Sublime as beauty plus terror, but as I experienced it in Antarctica, from the safe vantage of a ship with a glass-and-brass elevator and first-rate espresso, it was more like a mixture of beauty and absurdity.

It’s interesting to see Franzen making these subtle adjustments – a glimpse into his compositional process. I prefer the New Yorker piece. Both versions are brilliant. 

Patricia Lockwood on John Updike

John Updike (Photo by Brigette Lacombe)

I’ve just finished reading Patricia Lockwood’s “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019). What an extraordinary review! John Updike’s work has been panned before, but never to this extreme. Lockwood savages him. Her first sentence warns of her intent:

I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.

It is a bloodbath. The piece is divided in seven sections. In the first section, Lockwood says,

In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has learned to read. Today, he has fallen even further, still in the pantheon but marked by an embarrassed asterisk: DIED OF PUSSY-HOUNDING. No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter. 

That last sentence went straight into my personal anthology of great critical zingers. 

Section 1 also contains a striking metaphor – “Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965) light up section by section, like a countryside freshly wired for electricity” – that shines a beam throughout the piece. (Subsequent sections on Rabbit Run and The Centaur each begin with the word “flash.”) 

In the second section, Lockwood analyses Updike’s youth – his relationship with his mother (“She throws her voice and her atmospheres through his keyholes; it is his mother’s eye that examines his characters’ wives, to see whether they are good enough for him”), the traumatic move from Shillington to the farm in Plowville [“The solitude there verged on quarantine; the close harmonies of his four elders (his mother’s parents lived with them) repeated, turned dissonant, and set his teeth on edge; the place almost certainly made him a writer”]. 

Section 3 continues the examination of his life and then, at the mention of Rabbit Redux, turns bitingly sarcastic:

If you were worried that somewhere in this sweeping tetralogy Rabbit wasn’t going to ejaculate all over a teenager and then compare the results to a napalmed child, you can rest easy.

Section 4 is a wonderful capsule review of the first book of the Rabbit quartet – Rabbit, Run (“The writing sounds like the inside of an athlete’s head: clipped, staccato, strategic, as nearly empty as a high-school gym, with only himself inside it”). Lockwood says of Updike’s writing, “When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning.” Of Rabbit, Run’s female characters, she comments,

He paints and paints them, but the proportions are wrong. He is like a God who spends four hours on the shading on Eve’s upper lip, forgets to give her a clitoris, and then decides to rest on a Tuesday.

Section 5 considers Updike’s The Centaur (“The senses move through the scenes in full galloping integration, along with the tick and weight of actual time”). Here, Lockwood conjures one of her most inspired descriptions, riffing on a line from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin: 

Winding through The Centaur is a highway that will carry us into the future: the scenery of Updike’s childhood, immensely beautiful in his eyes, penetrates the automobile, drives the car.

In section 6, Lockwood restates her argument:

After Rabbit, Run, the books cease to be interesting primarily for their art but become essential recordings of American life. They continue to be speedily readable – the present tense works on Updike the way boutique transfusions of young blood work on billionaires – and perfectly replicate the experience of eating a hot dog in quasi-wartime on a lush crew-cut lawn that has been invisibly poisoned by industry, while men argue politics in the background and a Nice Ass lurks somewhere on the horizon, like the presence of God.

Section 7 is the ugliest part, referring to “Updike’s homophobia,” “his racism,” his “misogyny,” “his burning need to commit to print lines like ‘Horny, Jews are.’ ” But it also contains a remarkable passage – Lockwood imagining Updike reading what she’s written:

Why is it so tempting to grade him on a curve? He is so attended by the shine of a high-school star, standing in a spotlight that insists on his loveability, that presents him as a great gold cup into which forgiveness must be poured. It extended even to me: as I underlined passages and wrote ‘what the … WHAT’ next to paragraphs, I felt him sad in the clouds on my shoulder, baffled, as if he had especially been hoping that I would get it. I aimed it at you, he tells me: you were that vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

My response to Lockwood’s piece is shock. Updike is my hero. He’s one of this blog’s lodestars. Click on his name in the “Labels” list, and you’ll open sixty-two posts that either discuss or quote his work. But here’s the rub: I’m allergic to fiction. The Updike I love isn’t the novelist and short story writer; the Updike I love is the author of Assorted Prose, Picked-Up Pieces, Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, More Matter, Due Considerations, Higher Gossip, Just Looking, Still Looking, and Always Looking – collections of essays and reviews that, for me, are touchstones. Lockwood doesn’t consider any of these works. (Hugging the Shore is on her short list of Updike “delights.”) Her focus is on Updike’s fiction, particularly his four early novels – The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit Run, The Centaur, and Of the Farm – and on the other Rabbit novels. 

Does her criticism of Updike’s novels apply to his critical writings? No, I don’t think so. Lockwood herself describes his criticism as “not just game and generous but able, as his fiction is not, to reach deeply into the objectives of other human beings, even to see into the minds of women.” 

One of Lockwood’s main contentions is that, after the early novels, there was a serious falling off in the quality of Updike’s fiction. She says, “Either way, some absolute angel lifts and moves on in the late 1960s.” I don’t think that applies to Updike’s criticism. The pieces in his posthumous collections Higher Gossip (2011) and Always Looking (2012) are every bit as strong and brilliant and delightful as the pieces in his first collection, Assorted Prose (1965).

If I were defending Updike’s fiction against Lockwood’s charges, I think I’d start with an observation Martin Amis makes in his recent The Rub of Time:

But we are addressing ourselves to John Updike, who was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov – who, in his turn, was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Joyce.

November 4, 2019 Issue

Is Arthur Krystal’s opposition to death softening? In his great “Death, It’s What Ails You” (Harper’s Magazine, February, 2001; included in his 2002 essay collection Agitations), he writes, “I am appalled at the prospect of my own extinction, outraged at the impending loss of someone I know so well.” Now, in his absorbing “Old News,” in this week’s issue, he appears to have second thoughts. He says,

Yes, we should live as long as possible, barring illness and infirmity, but, when it comes to the depredations of age, let’s not lose candor along with muscle tone. The goal, you could say, is to live long enough to think: I’ve lived long enough.

Krystal no longer rages against the dying of the light. He accepts the idea that “life is slow dying.” He says, “Why rail against the inevitable—what good will it do? None at all.”

It’s quite a turnaround – the scrapper who has “a bone to pick with death – two hundred and six, to be precise, all of which will soon enough be picked clean by time and the elements" becomes a pacifist (“We should all make peace with aging”). 

I agree with what Krystal says in “Old News.” But I miss the spark of his earlier piece.  

Becka Viau's "Young Farmers"

Becka Viau, "Kyle Jewell, Cornwall, P.E.I." (2009)

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Becka Viau’s great Young Farmers project, a series of fourteen large, color portraits, each a frontal encounter with a young person in a farm setting. Also included is an audio piece combining the voices of her subjects talking about farming and their hopes for the future. The project was carried out in late 2008, early 2009, and first exhibited at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, April – May, 2009, and then in August, 2009, at Charlottetown’s Old Home Week Exhibition. It’s currently on view at beckaviau.com. 

Young Farmers is notable for the natural look of its portraits. Often when subjects face the camera they’ll alter their self-presentation. But Viau’s young farmers seem to gaze at the lens matter-of-factly, straightforwardly, unselfconsciously. They appear not so much to be posing as just being themselves. 

How did Viau accomplish such a natural look? The key seems to be the interview she conducted with each subject before she photographed him/her. She told me, “I interviewed them first. So they had a basic idea of what I had in mind. But there really wasn't any collaboration; we just rolled with it. I would pick a good spot or location on the farm and they would then stand as they normally do, just in that space. I wanted them to be unposed.”

Another key to Viau’s approach was her use of whatever light happened to be available at the scene. She didn’t use a flash or any other form of photographic lighting. In a sense, the light she used was “natural”; it’s what was there in the sheds, barns, and pens – whether it’s window light (“Carson Smith,” “Sarah Greenan,” “Soleil Hutchinson”), florescent tubes (“Kyle Jewell”), naked light bulb (“Mark Bernard,” “Nelson Smith”), a heat lamp reflecting off a feeder (“Mathias Drake”), or outdoor winter sun (“Ryan Weeks”) – where she took the pictures. No one would describe the light in these photos as radiant, dazzling, or golden. But it is distinctive. 

Look at “Kyle Jewell,” for example. The lighting is florescent. The light source is visible – florescent rods on the ceiling. The light is white. You can see it spread out on the ceiling around the rods. The light irradiates the whitewashed shed. It illuminates the cattle – predominantly white, with contrasting black patches. The dominant colors are white, off-white, and the cream-yellow of the sawdust-strewn floor.  

A third key to Viau’s naturalism is her use of the actual rooms and spaces in which her subjects live and work. Again, she appears to have used whatever conditions she found present when she arrived with her camera. She didn’t alter the scene. One of her subjects, Soleil Hutchinson, told me that she asked Viau whether she wanted her to move her vacuum cleaner so it wouldn’t be in the picture. Viau said no, don’t change a thing. And so the vacuum cleaner remains where it will forever exist, in the corner behind the chair, amidst the many other quotidian details that compose this arresting photograph: laptop, coffee mug, wine bottle candle holders, greeting cards on the windowsill, light-flooded window, raspberry-colored curtain, and – most significantly – the “New Farmers Gathering” poster.

Looking and looking at these superb Young Farmers portraits, I always feel I’ve only begun to look. 

October 28, 2019 Issue

I enjoyed Rachel Felder’s Talk story “Avocado Al Dente,” in this week’s issue. It’s about an avocado vendor named Miguel Gonzalez who hand-delivers perfectly ripe avocados to restaurants and private citizens. I especially like the passages that show him making his deliveries. For example:

At 7:30 A.M., he made his first drop-off, at a nearby deli, then headed into Manhattan. He stopped at a white brick building in midtown and handed a brown bag, labelled in Sharpie, to a doorman. He headed to the Upper West Side for another doorman handoff, then took the West Side Highway down to the restaurant Perry St. Inside the gleaming kitchen—in lunch-prep mode, the smell of roasting garlic in the air—Gonzalez put down a heavy case and chatted with Cédric Vongerichten, the chef, who told him about a new mushroom dish and the nuanced avocado texture that it demanded.

Felder’s piece reminded me of another great Talk story – Nick Paumgarten’s “Home at Carnegie Hall” (August 13, 2007), containing this wonderful avocado detail:

Astor led the way up some stairs to the fourteenth floor, then across the building and down some more stairs to the eleventh, to a studio occupied by the writer and radio host Jonathan Schwartz, who was eating an avocado, under a framed print that read “AVOCADO.”