The New Yorker & Me: Robert Macfarlane's "The Crapola Sublime"

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Robert Macfarlane's "The Crapola Sublime"

Photo by Stephen Shore, from Robert Macfarlane's "The Crapola Sublime"

One of the most absorbing reviews I’ve read recently is Robert Macfarlane’s “The Crapola Sublime” (The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2020), a consideration of Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s Traces of J. B. Jackson: The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America. Until I read this piece, I’d never heard of Jackson. According to Macfarlane he was a “pioneering American cultural geographer.” He calls Jackson “an unorthodox observer, whose ways of seeing ran against the grain of midcentury American landscape conventions, with their attachments to the picturesque and the sublime.” He says Jackson was “nerdily fascinated by that degraded phylum of Americana that the artist Philip Guston once referred to as 'crapola': junkshops, edgelands, strip malls, and trailer parks.” He says,

There is a tenderness to Jackson’s engagement with “crapola.” By studying what he called “the commonplace landscape,” he sought to invest mundane places of work and dwelling with a value at least comparable to venerated landscape sites such as Yellowstone or Yosemite.

All of which is catnip to me. I’m drawn to such places and to the artists and writers who celebrate them (e.g., Joseph Mitchell, Ian Frazier, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Hopper, Agnès Varda, Garry Winogrand).

In his piece, Macfarlane mentions three essay collections by Jackson: Landscapes (1970), The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (1980), and A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (1994). I think I’ll try to find at least one of them, and check it out.