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.