Taking a Break

Fido Nesti, "Eat, Drink & Be Literary"

I’ve decided to take a break from blogging about The New Yorker. My recent posts lack inspiration. I’m not doing justice to the magazine. The truth is I feel jaded. Ten years is a long time to be writing about the same subject. I’m not terminating the blog – not yet, anyway. I’m just not going to post as frequently as I have in the past. I’ll continue to read The New Yorker, of course. How could I not? It’s one of life’s great pleasures. If a piece appears that really grabs me, I’ll post my response.  

September 14, 2020 Issue

James Wood, in his How Fiction Works (2008), says, “Is specificity in itself satisfying? I think it is.” I think it is, too. I think it’s one of the key elements of effective writing. In this week’s New Yorker, Wood elaborates his theory of specificity, focusing on its opposite – cliché. He says,

Cliché is our original sin, the thing we all try to escape, but the offense is not merely aesthetic or musical; it is epistemological—cliché blocks our apprehension of reality. In place of singularity, it substitutes commonality; in place of the private oddity, it offers the shared obviousness. [“Reward System”]

That “cliché blocks our apprehension of reality” is inspired. How do you avoid cliché? Seek specificity.

September 7, 2020 Issue

It’s fascinating to see a great critic grapple with a complex, experimental work, trying to describe it, analyze it, extract meaning from it. That’s what Dan Chiasson does in his superb "Suspended Pleasures," in this week’s issue. The object of his study is Bernadette Mayer’s 1971 “crazy-headed journal” (Mayer’s words) Memory. He considers it variously as an exploration of the layers of what a person thinks they remember firsthand”; as nostalgia (“Nostalgia—for the carnal, improvised mood of 1971, but also for the halcyon days of, say, last summer, before we were afraid of communal life—has become the work’s dominant key”); as “a database of half-captured meals, barns, bodies—a kind of analog Internet”; as “a time capsule” ("Mayer wanted 'Memory' to serve as a time capsule, its meaning deferred until a future, or a range of futures, that she couldn’t have foreseen"); and as elegy (“Elegy always has a way of creeping into art that documents the once teeming, now empty past”). 

Of Chiasson’s many brilliant analytical moves, my favorite is his “reanimation” of some of Mayer’s subjects. He writes,

The Airstreams and roadsters, the delis and coffees are there whenever and wherever we want to experience them, and they can be reanimated on demand. Reading “Memory” with a phone handy, I followed Mayer and her crew along the back roads of the Berkshires to Nejaime’s, a local liquor store, which, I learned, stayed open this spring, deemed an essential business. In the city, Mayer took a photograph of a New York storefront: Casa Moneo. The business closed in 1988, but Google reveals its old address, on Fourteenth Street, in a building that once housed Marcel Duchamp’s studio. When I came across mysteries in the text—a forgotten restaurant, a long-gone landmark—I posed my questions to the Internet, and got answers from the hive mind. Though “Memory” is a famous work, it has been experienced firsthand by relatively few people: it is still a choose-your-own-adventure—uncharted, wide open. Finding a path through “Memory” seems like both a highly personal lark and a spur to collaborate.

That “The Airstreams and roadsters, the delis and coffees are there whenever and wherever we want to experience them, and they can be reanimated on demand” is thrillingly good! The same goes for the whole piece. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Tim Butcher's Great "Blood River"

I’ve just finished reading Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007), an account of his 2004 journey through the Congo, following the Victorian explorer H. M. Stanley’s 3000-kilometre original route from one side of the country to the other. What a trip! Butcher calls it “ordeal travel.” But it’s not an ordeal to read. Quite the opposite – Butcher put me squarely there with him, on the motorbike as he and his driver grind their way toward the Congo River; on a Uruguayan patrol boat; in a pirogue paddling down the Congo (“The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their long-handled paddles”); and, most memorably, on “Pusher Number Ten,” a Congolese diesel-engine boat pushing a massive barge “red with rust and slightly scraped and battered at each end.” 

Butcher is a superb describer. Here’s his depiction of the hut in Mukumbo, where he slept overnight on his way to the Congo River:

It had walls of dried mud on wattle, a roof of heavy thatch and a door panel made of reeds woven across a wooden frame. Without a hinge, it worked by being heaved across the doorway, which I soon found had been cut for people quite a bit shorter than me. There was nothing modern in the room whatsoever. On the beaten-earth floor stood a bed – a frame of branches, still in their bark, lashed together with some sort of vine. The springs of the bed were made of lengths of split bamboo anchored at only one point halfway along the bed, so that when I put my hand down on them, they bent horribly and appeared close to collapse. But the design was ingenious because, when my weight was spread across the entire structure, the bamboo screen supported it easily, giving and moving with the contour of my shoulders and hips. It was a Fred Flintstone orthopaedic bed and I found it amazingly comfortable.

Here’s his description of the rusting wrecks of old boats lining the left bank of the Congo at Kindu:

Some were huge, others more modest, but all were in ruins. One ship had been completely overrun by a reed bank and its old smokestack could just be seen poking from the vegetation with ivy, not smoke, spewing out of the top. Another hulk was lying on its side clear out of the water, the panels eaten away by rust to reveal bulkheads like ribs in a whale carcass. But my favourite was an old stern-paddler, a rust-red X-ray image of the Mississippi steamboats of my imagination. The panels were all gone, but the superstructure remained in skeletal form. At the stern was the octagonal tubular frame on which the wooden blades of the paddle once stood.

Here’s his description of the rainforest:

There were trees so high I could not make out any detail of the leaf canopy tens of metres over my head. Some of the trunks were pleated into great sinews that plunged into the earth, as massive and solid as flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral. And high above my head, but beneath the gloomy leaf canopy, I could make out boughs as square and broad as steel girders.

And here’s his description of taking “one of the world’s most dangerous showers” while he was on board “Pusher Number Ten”:

The water for the shower came straight from the river. Against the creamy ceramic of an old shower cubicle, the water ran brown like tea. It reminded me of Scottish hill water tainted with peat, only it was much warmer and the chemicals that leached brown into the Congo River were more terrifying than those found in Highland soil. Somewhere to our north ran the Ebola River, a tributary of a tributary of the Congo River, but a name that is associated with a horrific medical condition. It was near this river that a virus was first discovered that caused its victims to die in a spectacularly horrible way, bleeding to death from every orifice. Several of the world’s other spectacularly horrible haemorrhagic fevers were first discovered in the Congo. I kept my mouth tight shut whenever I showered.

Butcher says of his time on “Pusher Number Ten,” 

I entered a zone of mental torpor. Normally I am the sort of person who needs to be doing something constantly. I am not a napper. But on the river passage, there was nothing I could do to influence our progress. We would reach our destination when we reached our destination and not a moment sooner, so I took off my wrist watch and let my days flow with the rhythm of the river.

How I love that last line – and let my days flow with the rhythm of the river. I let my days flow with the rhythm of this great book. I enjoyed it immensely.

Interesting Emendations: Stanley Crouch's Great "The Duke's Blues"

Stanley Crouch (Photo by Martine Bisagni)

Stanley Crouch, who died September 16, 2020, wrote a great New Yorker piece called “The Duke’s Blues” (April 29 & May 6, 1996). It’s a celebration of Duke Ellington’s music. Crouch said,

Ellington maintained such a commanding touch with his art and the world that his fifty years of development constitute what just might be the most impressive evolution in the American arts. The blues was the key, and Ellington was surely the greatest manipulator of blues form and blues feeling that jazz has ever known. He understood the blues as both music and mood. He knew that those who thought of the blues as merely a vehicle for primitive complaint had their drawers or their brassieres on backward. The blues knows its way around. It can stretch from the backwoods to the space shuttle, from the bloody floor of a dive to the neurotic confusion of beautifully clothed woman in a Manhattan penthouse. The blues – happy, sad, or neither – plays no favorites.

That “He knew that those who thought of the blues as merely a vehicle for primitive complaint had their drawers or their brassieres on backward” is pure Crouch; it makes me smile every time I read it. 

An interesting variation on “The Duke’s Blues,” called “Duke Ellington: Transcontinental Swing,” appears in Crouch’s wonderful 2006 essay collection Considering Genius. In this piece, the above-quoted New Yorker passage reads as follows:

Considering himself “the world’s greatest listener,” Ellington maintained such commanding touch with his craft and the culture of the world at large that his fifty years of development constitute what is perhaps the single most comprehensive evolution in all of American art. Much of this has to do with something as American as the bandleading composer himself. Ellington was the greatest manipulator of blues form and blues feeling. He understood it as music and as mood. He knew that those who thought of the blues as merely a vehicle for primitive complaint had their drawers or brassieres on backward. The blues always knows its way around. It can stretch from the backwoods to the space shuttle, from wet blood on the floor of a dive to the neurotic confusion of a beautifully clothed woman in a penthouse overlooking the very best view of Manhattan. The blues, happy or sad or neither, plays no favorites.

The New Yorker version seems tighter, but the book version strikes me as slightly bluesier. Both pieces swing, enacting the rhythm of the music they describe. 

August 31, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Peter Schjeldahl’s delightful “The Great Outdoors,” an account of his recent visit to Storm King, “the marvellous sculpture park—or, better, landscape with sculptures in it—about fifty miles north of Manhattan, in Cornwall, New York.” The piece exudes bliss. Schjeldahl writes, 

In lockdown times, there’s euphoria in going much of anywhere, not to speak of a journey to a tract of paradise. You could say that I was primed for giddiness on this occasion. I noticed unaccustomed intensity in my responses to the art works that I encountered, taking them in like gulps of air after escaping a miasma. It was a gift of refreshed aesthetic innocence, which I think awaits us all when we are set free in even non-curated environs—I’ve been feeling apologetic to certain trees, near my home, for my past indifference to their beauty—and a lesson in joys that we used to take for granted. We will have peeled eyes. 

His descriptions of the sculptures are superb. He says of Louise Bourgeois’s “Eyes,”

Louise Bourgeois’s writhing cluster of silvered-bronze eyeball shapes that electrically light up from within now and then—“Eyes” (2001)—requires a bit of a climb to be viewed properly. You may then be reluctant to move along, so engrossing is the work’s rambunctious grotesquerie and smack-on-the-ground adamancy at the edge of a lovely wood. That’s a happenstantial quality of the finest things at Storm King: art that, beyond looking good, feels keenly aware of where it is and what it’s doing there. 

That “smack-on-the-ground adamancy at the edge of a lovely wood” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely.

Landscape and Specificity

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (1896-99)

Mark Strand, in his “Landscape and the Poetry of Self” (included in his 2000 essay collection The Weather of Words), said, “The reality of landscape has little to do with accuracy of depiction or representation.” He said that in seeing a landscape, “What is usually experienced is something general and atmospheric, an impulse to identify with certain light or the look of a terrain.” He said that landscape painting “represents an escape from particularity.” 

Is he right? I don’t think so. The landscape paintings I admire brim with specificity. See, for example, the many inspired accuracies of Cézanne’s Pines and Rocks (1896-99) – the shimmering areas “where the green of the pines shows against the blue of the sky,” “the parts of the ochre trunks where shadows outline and intermix,” “the foreground, rendered in parallel diagonal strokes, of earth and grass” (I’m quoting here from John Updike’s wonderful description of Pines and Rocks in his Just Looking, 1989).

See also the exhaustive specifics of color and shape in Van Gogh’s The Plain of Auvers (1890).

Vincent Van Gogh, The Plain of Auvers (1890)

Look at what Van Gogh said about painting it:

I am totally absorbed by that immense plain covered with fields of wheat which extends beyond the hillside; it is wide as the sea, of a subtle yellow, a subtle tender green, with the subtle violet of a plowed and weeded patch and with neatly delineated green spots of potato fields in bloom. All this under a sky of delicate colors, blue and white and pink and purple. For the time being I am calm, almost too calm, thus in the proper state of mind to paint all that. [from Van Gogh’s letter to his mother, July, 1890]

Such words do not evince the sensibility of a generalist. Quite the opposite – they show an artist intent on capturing the subtlest qualities of the Auvers landscape.

One more example: Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm (1650-51). 

Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm (1650-51)

T. J. Clark, in his brilliant The Sight of Death (2006), says of it, “The details are exquisite and singular.” Details such as the two birches, of which Clark notes, 

Poussin has put a lot of effort separating the two birch trees and having the leaves of the right-hand one be closer to us, overlapping and partly obscuring the others, and certainly catching the light differently – catching it full on, seemingly, and reflecting more of it back. So that this tree is more a flimsy three-dimensional substance, to the other’s pure silhouette.

These are only three examples, but they’re sufficient, I submit, to cast doubt on Strand’s view. Far from escaping particularity, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Poussin immersed themselves in it. 

First Person Perfect

Photo by Alice Zoo, from Rebecca Mead's "Going for the Cold"

There’s a type of narrative sentence I find irresistible. Example: “One day, I went to Athens and met Joe Corn, a senior wildlife biologist for SCWDS, who has trapped and studied thousands of wild hogs” (Ian Frazier, “Hogs Wild”). Now, that might strike you as fairly mundane. You were probably expecting something with a bit more pizazz. But pizazz is not what this kind of sentence is about. Here’s another one: “Later that day, I crowded, together with what seemed like the entire remaining population of Reykjavik, into Ingólfstorg square to watch the Iceland-Austria match” (Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running”). That’s a shade more exotic than Frazier’s “wild hogs” line, but it still has the three main ingredients I relish: first-person pronoun (“I”), active verb (“crowded”), and specific nouns (“Reykjavik,” “Ingólfstorg square,” “Iceland-Austria match”). Often one or more of the nouns is a place name. As a means of jump-starting an account of an interesting experience, such sentences are unbeatable. I read them and think, Let’s go! Here are a few examples from recent New Yorker pieces:

Not long after sunrise on a gray Halloween morning, I joined the members of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association for a celebratory swim and breakfast. – Rebecca Mead, “Going for the Cold”

A little after midnight, while Hunter was still in jail, I swung by Thirty-eighth and Chicago, where people were still congregating. – Luke Mogelson, “The Uprising”

On a cool Monday morning in May, I met Fidel at the Church of the Good Shepherd, an austere gray stone building with red doors on the corner of Fourth Avenue and the Bay Ridge Parkway. – Jonathan Blitzer, “Higher Calling”

One crisp, bright morning in February, I walked along a brook just outside the center of Davos, toward the headquarters of the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research. – James Somers, “Cold War”

In November, just before the first snows shut down access to the Whites, I made a final trip to the Schulman Grove. – Alex Ross, “The Bristlecones Speak”

Falling Behind

Photo by Justine Kurland, from Peter Schjeldahl's "The Great Outdoors"

I’m falling behind in my New Yorker reading. The mail is slow. I suppose I could read the online versions, but I prefer the print editions. They’re easier on my eyes, and I like to underline notable passages. I’ll just have to be patient. The magazines will eventually get here. Pieces I’m looking forward to are Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Great Outdoors,” Dan Chiasson’s “Suspended Pleasures,” and James Wood’s “Reward System.”

Roy Foster's "On Seamus Heaney"

Reading Roy Foster’s absorbing On Seamus Heaney (2020), I was pleased to see The New Yorker mentioned. Foster writes,

Nearly twenty years later, I read “At the Wellhead” in the New Yorker, tore it out, and pinned it to the noticeboard in my Oxford study; slightly yellowed but enduringly magical, it was still there when I moved out after another twenty-odd years.

The New Yorker published thirty-eight Heaney poems. Foster refers to at least ten of them: “Casualty” (April 2, 1979), “Crossings” (April 17, 1989), “Keeping Going” (October 12, 1992), “At the Wellhead” (March 28, 1994), “Tollund” (October 3, 1994), “The Sharping Stone” (October 23, 1995), “The Perch” (January 18, 1999), “Electric Light” (June 19 & 26, 2000),  “The Turnip-Snedder” (March 20, 2006), and “In the Attic” (February 9 & 16, 2009). Of these, my favorite is “The Perch” (“Perch on their water perch hung in the clear Bann River / Near the clay bank in alder dapple and waver”). Foster calls it “a short and perfect poem of microscopic observation.” He’s right.

August 24, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. “On a cool Monday morning in May, I met Fidel at the Church of the Good Shephard, an austere gray stone building with red doors on the corner of Fourth Avenue and the Bayridge Parkway.” I find such first-person sentences seductive. To me, they’re the essence of great journalism. That one is from Jonathan Blitzer’s excellent “Higher Calling” in this week’s issue. It’s a profile of renegade priest Juan Carlos Ruiz, who helps undocumented immigrants survive the pandemic. Blitzer is a first-rate immigration reporter: see, for example, his superb “Juan Sanabria” (The New Yorker, April 20, 2020). “Higher Calling” is one of his best.

2. Anthony Lane’s 1994 “Goings On About Town” note on François Girard’s ingenious Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, reprised in this week’s issue, is worth quoting in full:

Glenn Gould, as scorned and as revered as any figure in modern music, died in 1982. François Girard’s movie, from 1994, honors Gould’s strong-willed, idiosyncratic genius with a suitably offbeat approach: a bunch of little films, none lasting more than a few minutes, all angling for a new take on the pianist’s life and work—thirty-two ways of looking at Glenn Gould. Scenes from his boyhood and professional career are neatly dramatized; the Canadian actor Colm Feore plays the adult Gould, though he never, thank goodness, tries to reproduce his manner at the keyboard. In between come interviews, dashes of animation, and even a sequence shot in X-ray. The whole enterprise is designed to skirt the traditional traps of the music movie; instead of a laborious bio-pic, we get a sly, quick-witted meditation on a character always likely to elude our grasp. The finale—a Gould recording of Bach is carried into deep space by a Voyager spacecraft—leaves you gawking.

That “x-ray” reference made me smile. I remember that sequence vividly. Lane describes it in more detail in his “The Gould Variations” (The New Yorker, April 18, 1994; included in his 2002 collection Nobody’s Perfect):

You can sense the end coming, as Gould himself did. The astounding sequence of a pianist filmed in x-ray – spectral feet tapping at the pedals, finger bones flying, skull nodding along in time – is both a guide to the wonders of the human machine and a pitch-black joke about its eventual breakdown.

3. Rebecca Mead is a master of those seductive first-person sentences I mentioned above. Her “Nature and Nurture,” in this week’s issue, contains this beauty: “On a gloriously sunny day in June, my husband and I went to visit the Stuart-Smiths at the Barn garden, where they had spent most of their time since the lockdown began.” It also features a beautiful description of foxtail lilies:

We entered an area where trees planted thirty years ago had created a shady canopy. In the dense bed of plants before us, thin stems topped with clinging bursts of delicate pastel flowers—orange, pink, yellow—had grown to twice the height of their neighbors, looking like slender sticks of licorice dipped in sherbet.

 “Nature and Nurture” is about the therapeutic power of gardening. I enjoyed it immensely.

Best of the Decade: #4 Raffi Khatchadourian's "Transfiguration"

Photo by Dan Winters, from Raffi Khatchadourian's "Transfiguration"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #4 pick – Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012).

“Transfiguration” is an extraordinary account of a ground-breaking surgical operation – “a full face transplant, something that had never been done before.” What do I mean by “extraordinary”? Consider this passage:

Pomahac walked back to the Tupperware container and gently took the transplant out. His movements were clinical and measured, as if he were handling a delicate piece of art. The face was the same color as his surgical gloves: latex beige, pale, glistening with ice water. It was slightly unshaven, as if the beard had grown in transit. The rubbery-looking skin supported an inch or so of cartilage, vessels, fat, and nerves – a red mash of tissue – beneath it. Spread out in Pomahac’s hands, the face was massive, about the circumference of a hubcab.

I read that eight years ago, when the piece first appeared, and I’ve never forgotten it. Khatchadourian’s depiction of the face color (“latex beige, pale, glistening with ice water”) is transfixing. The detail about it being “slightly unshaven” is inspired. His description of the whole complex, intense operation, consisting of two procedures (removal of the donor’s face; replacement of the recipient’s face with the donor’s face), is spellbinding. Over the years, I’ve read some great New Yorker action descriptions (McPhee on canoeing, Angell on baseball, Paumgarten on skiing, Buford on cooking), but this piece on surgery is – I’ll say it again – absolutely extraordinary.

Khatchadourian is an excellent noticer of details. Here’s his description of the surgeon Bohdan Pomahac transferring the face:

Pomahac carefully swiveled from the trolley to the operating table, placing the donor’s face where Wien’s own face had been. “It’s going to go twice around his,” he observed dispassionately. During the dissection, Pomahac had cut the skin far beyond the hairline, to transplant part of the scalp as well. The donor’s hair was slightly lighter than Wiens’s – it had some gray in it – and some of Wiens’s hair poked out from underneath, as if he were wearing an ill-fitting mask.

That “some of Wiens’s hair poked out from underneath, as if he were wearing an ill-fitting mask” is superb.

It’s not clear whether Khatchadourian actually witnessed the face transplant first hand, or whether his descriptions are reconstructions based on videos, transcripts, interviews, etc., but it doesn’t matter. His account of the operation appears totally authentic, completely accurate, and positively riveting.

Not only is Khatchadourian a great describer; he’s also a brilliant quoter. “Transfiguration” is a rich, beautifully interwoven assemblage of quotation from multiple first and secondary sources. Khatchadourian appears to have sought out and directly talked to most of the people principally involved, including Dallas Wiens, the incredibly brave, resilient, tolerant recipient of the face transplant; Jeffrey Janis, the reconstructive surgeon who oversaw Wiens’s miraculous recovery at Parkland Hospital; Bernard Devauchelle, chief of maxillofacial surgery at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire d’Amiens, who conducted the first face transplant; Bohdan Pomahac, America’s “leading specialist in face transplants,” and leader of the surgical team that performed Wiens’s operation; Elof Eriksson, chief of plastic surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who was a key member of Pomahac’s team; and various members of Wiens’s family.

Reviewing this piece back in 2012, I wrote, “Khatchadourian’s ‘No Secrets’ and ‘The Gulf War’ are brilliant, but ‘Transfiguration’ is his masterpiece (so far). It’s an unforgettable piece of writing. It moves Khatchadourian to the front rank of New Yorker writers.”