Jerome Strauss's Exquisite "Cherry Trees"

Jerome Strauss, Cherry Trees, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (2021)

A special shout-out to Jerome Strauss for his exquisite “cherry trees” photo in the April 19, 2021 “Goings On About Town.”

This isn’t the first time Strauss’s work has appeared in the magazine. Four of his photos are featured in last year’s brilliant “April 15, 2020,” including this pink-blossomed beauty:

Jerome Strauss, 5:47 P.M., Upper East Side (2020)

Although there’s still another eight months to go before I post my “Best of 2021: Photos,” I have to say if I were picking that list now, Strauss’s wonderful “cherry trees” shot would be on it. 

April 19, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s delightful “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2,” a continuation of what he calls, in Volume 1 (January 13, 2020), his “old man project.” It’s purpose? “To keep the old writer alive by never coming to an end.” Volume 2 consists of six individually configured segments: “Sloop to Gibraltar”; “December 19, 1943”; “The Dutch Ship Tyger”; “Ray Brock”; and “Writer.” Each is a miniature story, a shard chipped from McPhee’s long life. For example, “December 19, 1943” tells about a tragic incident that occurred when he was twelve. His friend Julian Boyd, age thirteen, asked him to go skating with him on the Millstone River. McPhee’s mother wouldn’t let him go, insisting he attend the church Christmas pageant. He “howled and moaned and griped and begged.” But his mother was adamant. In the end, McPhee obeyed his mom, and went to the pageant. Meanwhile, Julian and another friend, Charlie Howard, skated the river, broke through the ice, and drowned. McPhee writes, 

I did not know Charlie Howard well, and the impact of his death stopped there. Not so with Julian, whose future has remained beside me through all my extending past. That is to say, where would he have been, and doing what, when? From time to time across the decades, I have thought of writing something, tracing parallel to mine the life he would have lived, might have lived. A chronology, a chronicle, a lost C.V. But such, of course, from the first imagined day, is fiction. Actually, I have to try not to think about him, because I see those arms reaching forward, grasping nothing.

Reading this touching piece, I thought of the philosopher Galen Strawson’s observation: “In the end, luck swallows everything” (Things That Bother Me, 2018).

My favorite section of “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2” is “The Dutch Ship Tyger.” I like its branching effect – the way it starts out in one place (the Dutch merchant vessel Tyger anchored in the Hudson River, Manhattan, 1613) and ends up in a completely different time and space (the office of Leo Hofeller, executive editor of The New Yorker, 25 West Forty-third Street, Manhattan, 1964). How do you connect those dots? Well, the line runs through McPhee, through his aspiration to be a New Yorker writer. McPhee says,

In short, I was in high school when I decided that what I wanted to do in life was write for The New Yorker, in college when I first sent a manuscript to the magazine, and in college when I filed away that first rejection slip and the second and the sixteenth, then on through my twenties and into my thirties, when the whole of that collection of rejection slips could have papered a wall.

The piece is really about how McPhee at long last realized his goal. I found it fascinating. One of the turning points was the magazine’s acceptance of his “Basketball and Beefeaters” (March 16, 1963; included in his great 1975 collection Pieces of the Frame). McPhee describes the moment:

Depressed, thirty-one years old, I recklessly sent it to Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker simultaneously. A few weeks went by, another freelanced book review, and then my phone rang at Time. The New Yorker was buying the piece. Oh, my God.

That “Oh, my God” made me laugh. It’s an interesting form of indirect speech – McPhee inflecting his present-day recollection with the actual reaction he had sixty years ago. There’s more to the story. It involves a grouchy Sports Illustrated editor named Jack Tibby; it involves basketball great Bill Bradley; it involves McPhee’s brilliant profile of Bradley, “A Sense of Where You Are” (The New Yorker, January 23, 1965). The publication of that piece marks the beginning of McPhee’s amazing run of extraordinary New Yorker work, including “The Pine Barrens,” “Travels in Georgia,” “The Survival of the Bark Canoe,” “The Encircled River,” “Rising from the Plains,” “Atchafalaya,” “Coal Train,” “Season on the Chalk,” “The Orange Trapper,” right up to the appearance of this wonderful second installment of his ongoing “Tabula Rasa.” McPhee without end, amen! 

Is Photography Mimetic?

Paul Graham, Little Chef in Rain, St. Neots, Cambridgeshire, May 1982

A. D. Nuttall, in his A New Mimesis (1983), said a couple of questionable things about photography. Firstly, he said, “The camera is very good at mimesis.” This, to me, is a misunderstanding of photography. Photography records; it transcribes. Mimesis is imitative; it describes. Stanley Cavell, in his “What Photography Calls Thinking” (Raritan 4, Spring 1985), put it this way: 

A representation emphasizes the identity of its subject, hence it may be called a likeness; a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, recording it, hence it is that it may be called a transcription.

Secondly, Nuttall claimed, “Human art is naturally more interesting than photographic images.” By “human art,” he meant art produced by the mind and hand, e.g., painting. Photos are not human art? No, he said, they’re produced by machine, namely, the camera. But, in saying so, he overlooked an important point: the role of the eye. Mary Price, in her The Photograph: A Strange Confining Place (1994), says, “The eye is dominant in the way a photograph is conceived.” She goes on to say, “I would argue that the photographer’s mind operates significantly in formation of the picture.” This seems to me to be irrefutable. It follows that Nuttall’s conception of photography is seriously flawed.  

But I don’t want to be too hard on old Nuttall. I love his phrase “mimetic accuracy.” Vermeer is his example par excellence of mimetic accuracy. He says, “The great paintings of Vermeer can almost be described as seventeenth-century photographs.” Here, Nuttall seems to be saying Vermeer’s work is so mimetically accurate that it almost looks like photography. I agree. Interestingly, Andrew O’Hagan made a similar point recently. Reviewing the photos of Paul Graham, he praises their “Vermeer-like precision” (“On the A1,” London Review of Books, March 4, 2021). 

In Praise of the Decorative Impulse: Gopnik v. Updike

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 79 (1975)

I found Adam Gopnik’s praise of the decorative impulse, in his recent “Fluid Dynamics” (The New Yorker, April 12, 2021), refreshing. Too often abstraction is condescended to as merely decorative. Recall John Updike’s famous putdown of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park No. 79 (1975): “Meeting a painting like this, so beautiful in its balanced tones and enigmatic nervousness, not in our reductive pages but on a suitably large wall, we accept it as ‘art,’ an expensive variety of wallpaper” (Just Looking, 1989). 

I read that many years ago and never forgot it. Is that what abstraction is – “an expensive variety of wallpaper”? Gopnik provides a tonic counter-perspective: “For her fond biographer, Frankenthaler’s art delights the eye, as it was designed to, and that’s enough. Enough? It’s everything.”

April 12, 2021 Issue

Reviewing Alexander Nemerov’s Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, in this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik says that Nemerov “is underequipped to make people and pictures live on the page. No one could pick a picture out from all the others after reading his description of it.” I’m not sure this is entirely fair. In his book, Nemerov describes Frankenthaler’s early The Sightseers (1951) as follows:

A spread of thick sweeping black lines structures the picture, the artist keeping them loose and open. The lines move and vibrate, making a syncopated visual field, alive with scribbled crayon color, like a flashing neon sign caught in the pulsing moment when images and afterimages are the same.

And here’s his description of Frankenthaler’s great Mountains and Sea (1952):

The shapes in it remain stable – a bouquet of pastel colors anchors it at the center, alsmost as if the picture were a massive floral still life – but they also rise and float. Too turpentine-soaked to be opaque, each color refuses to be dense. Lightness comes into being, so the painting implies, precisely in its precariousness. Lightness is fugitive – it is always falling away, as Helen’s choice to suspend the whole floral array on the single blue line above the pink ball implies.

That “Too turpentine-soaked to be opaque, each color refuses to be dense” is very fine. Gopnik’s criticism of Nemerov’s ekphrasis is a shade harsh.

The best description of Frankenthaler’s work that I’ve read is by Peter Schjeldahl: 

Yellow Caterpillar, 1961, and Seascape with Dunes, 1962, feature rhythmical lollops of intense color as fresh as cold water and hanging together with the vernacular rightness of great jazz. 

That’s from Schjeldahl’s “ ‘Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective’ ” (in Schjeldahl’s The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990), a review that also contains this memorably cutting line: “But the upshot for pleasure-seeking eyes is that her paintings aren’t only not beautiful, they aren’t even pretty.”

April 5, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ian Frazier’s “Guns Down,” a profile of anti-gun advocate Shaina Harrison. Working with high school students, Harrison teaches that “fear, racism, and powerlessness are at the root of gun violence.” She’s an employee of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence (N.Y.A.G.V.). Frazier points out that this organization began as the result of a shooting twenty-eight years ago. He writes,

On a spring afternoon in Brooklyn in 1993, four teen-agers from Crown Heights tried to steal a new off-road bicycle from a man named Allyn Winslow on a hill in Prospect Park. Winslow resisted and pedalled away, and one of the boys shot him twice with a .22-calibre pistol. One of the bullets hit his heart, and at the bottom of the hill he fell off his bicycle and died.

I remember this case. Frazier wrote about it in his elegy “To Mr. Winslow” (The New Yorker, November 29, 1993; included in his great 2005 collection Gone to New York), in which, over a period of days, weeks and months, he visits and revisits the spot where Winslow died, noting the gradual disappearance of the many markers (“Timberland shoe box with a bouquet of flowers in it, and a glass wine carafe with more flowers”; American flag; “a blue-and-white striped ribbon, a ceramic pipe, a bike rider’s reflector badge in the image of a peace sign”; “a cross made of wood, bound with red ribbon and draped with a string of purple glass beads”; to name just a few) that people had placed there in tribute. The last paragraph begins, “Just now – a bright, chilly, fall day – I went by the place again,” and ends,

At first, I could find no trace of the memorial at all: grass and clover have reclaimed the bared dirt. I got down on one knee, muddying my pants. Finally, I found a wooden stake broken off about half an inch above the ground: the base of the memorial cross, probably – the only sign of the unmeasured sorrows that converge here.

The memorials faded away. But Frazier didn't forget. Twenty-eight years later, in “Guns Down,” he rescues Allyn Winslow from oblivion. 

March 29, 2021 Issue

Carnal sentences are a particular fetish of mine, as you likely know, if you follow this blog. A line such as this one, from Hannah Goldfield’s delectable “Tables For Two: Peter Luger Steak House,” in this week’s New Yorker, delights me immensely:

At my table, in the shadow of the historic Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, I ordered another wedge salad (rapture, again) and a burger, a beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun.

That “whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun” is ravishing! 

Goldfield’s food descriptions are not the only literary source of carnal satisfaction. Judith Thurman’s clothing depictions do it for me, too. This one, for instance, from her excellent “Eye of the Needle,” also in this week’s issue: 

One of the earliest garments with an “Ann Lowe” label is now at the Met Costume Institute: a sublime wedding dress from 1941, with the silhouette of an Erté Tanagra. Embroidered trapunto lilies, bedewed with seed pearls, cascade down the bodice; molten satin bubbles at the hem like a pool of candle wax.

A special shout-out, as well, to Naila Ruechel, for her wonderful photos of Lowe dresses, illustrating Thurman’s piece. I think my favourite is this beauty:

In Praise of Texture: Philip Guston and Frank Auerbach

Philip Guston, Ride (1969)

For me, one of the most enjoyable art reviews of 2021 (so far) is Susan Tallman’s “Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone” (The New York Review of Books, January 14, 2021). I’m not a fan of Guston’s cartoon imagery. His potato-head creatures and convertible-riding Klansmen do nothing for me. But what I do like is Tallman’s description of it. For example:

So how is it that Philip Guston, dead these forty years, is still pushing our buttons? Until a few months ago, he seemed to conform to the anticipated arc—early show of talent, challenging departure from status quo, posthumous popularity. An eminent Abstract Expressionist, he had flummoxed the art world in 1970 with a late-career tack into figuration, nudging paint into the shapes of bottles and bricks and comical, conical white hoods with oversized hands and the creepy softness of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Between lovely painterly passages, the patched and dowdy hoods smoked cigars, drove around town, worked at easels, and beat themselves up, in both senses. 

Note that “lovely painterly passages.” To me, that’s the key to enjoying Guston’s late work. My first exposure to his crazy Klansmen was the cover of Sanford Schwartz’s great 1990 essay collection Artists and Writers. It shows a close-up detail of Guston’s Untitled (Two Hooded Figures in a Car). What grabbed me wasn’t the bizarre imagery; it was the rich, thick texture of the paint. In one of the book’s essays, “Polk’s Dots, or, A Generation Comes Into Focus,” Schwartz compares Guston’s paint strokes to butter: “These marks – they’re the size of pats of butter, and have a buttery texture.” Yes, they do. That “buttery” description has stayed with me down through the years, and influenced my personal aesthetic. I love the buttery texture of thickly applied paint. I love the work of painters who paint this way. 

I thought of Schwartz’s “buttery” description when I read his recent “A Painter’s Performances” (The New York Review of Books, March 11, 2021), a marvelous review of an exhibition of Frank Auerbach’s “head” paintings. Like Guston’s Klansmen, these Auerbach images aren't to my taste. Schwartz describes them as “mangled,” and that seems exactly right. In a delightful passage, he says, 

They are pictures in which Auerbach, looking at people straight on, from the side, or from below, continually outdoes himself in delectable color choices and displays of seemingly impromptu, brilliantly zigzaggy brushwork—displays that can leave a head resembling a piece of hacked wood, a wad of chewing gum, bodies wrestling, or an abstract shape recalling a bird’s nest.

Frank Auerbach, Head of J.Y.M. (1978)

Auerbach’s heads, especially the early ones, e.g., Head of J.Y.M. (1978), are thickly painted. “Thick and luscious” is how Schwartz describes them. That’s the quality I relish. My eyes devour them, not as strange imagery, but as delicious texture. 

3 for the Road: Structure

This is the fourth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their structure. 

All three of these books have strong backbones. But each is structured differently. Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before is that most straightforward, least artificial of all literary forms – a journal. Starting on June 2, 1966 and ending on August 3, 1966, it’s an exuberant day-by-day account of Hoagland’s experiences roaming the wild Stikine country of British Columbia (“this gigantic ocean of heaped-up land almost too enormous to comprehend”). Its structure is chronological. There are no flashbacks, jump cuts, or other literary devices. Hoagland just gets up every morning, plunges into his extraordinary surroundings, and starts looking, filling his journal with detail after immersive detail. Here, for example, is the opening passage of his entry for June 27:

Glorious, blue and balmy. Caught a ride this morning to Eddontenajon. The mountains stood close and steep, with silver runnels and pockets of snow and passes going off in every direction, as if the country were still full of sourdoughs and mystery trips. Plank bridges have been laid across a creek that bisects the village beside the church, which is another log cabin. On the low hill backing the whole, a cemetery is already getting its start, picket fences around the few graves. I walked up and down, pretending to have business to do at the opposite end from wherever I was, practically sifting the place through my hands like a miser. The cabin foundations sit edgily on the ground, as though on an unbroken horse. Initials are cut on some of the doors to tell who lives where, and fuzzy fat puppies play in front, next to the birch dog sleds which are seven or eight feet long and the width of a man’s shoulders, weathered to a chinchilla gray. The grown dogs sleep in a fog of hunger. Swaying and weak, they get up and come to the end of their chains, like atrocity victims, hardly able to see. Snowshoes hang in the trees, along with clusters of traps.

How I love that “practically sifting the place through my hands like a miser.” There’s nothing fancy about Notes from the Century Before’s structure. It’s just a journal – but what a journal! 

In contrast, John McPhee’s Coming into the Country is built; structure is part of its style. It’s divided into three “books” – each separately configured. Book I, titled “The Encircled River,” has an ingenious circular design, enacting the cyclical nature of the Arctic world it describes. It begins, in the present tense, on day five of a nine-day canoe-and-kayak trip down the Salmon River: “My bandana is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head, and now and then dip it into the river.” It then proceeds chronologically through the events of the last four days of the trip, then flashes back, and, in the past tense, recounts chronologically the first four days, ending where it began: “My bandana, around my head, was nearly dry. I took it off, and trailed it in the river.”

There’s a practical point to such artifice. If the piece is narrated sequentially, the dramatic high point – a grizzly bear encounter that happens on the first day of the trip – comes at the beginning. That’s a hard act to follow. McPhee’s structure puts it three-fifths of the way along, thereby creating a classic narrative arc. 

Here’s a taste of McPhee’s transfixing grizzly bear encounter:

We passed first through stands of fireweed, and then over ground that was wine-red with leaves of bearberries. There were curlewberries, too, which put a deep-purple stain on the hand. We kicked at some wolf scat, old as winter. It was woolly and white and filled with the hair of snowshoe hare. Nearby was a rich inventory of caribou pellets and, in increasing quantity as we moved downhill, blueberries – an outspreading acreage of blueberries. Fedeler stopped walking. He touched my arm. He had in an instant become even more alert than he usually was, and obviously apprehensive. His gaze followed straight on down our intended course. What he saw there I saw now. It appeared to me to be a hill of fur. “Big boar grizzly,” Fedeler said in a near-whisper. The bear was about a hundred steps away, in the blueberries, grazing. The head was down, the hump high. The immensity of muscle seemed to vibrate slowly – to expand and contract, with the grazing. Not berries alone but whole bushes were going into the bear. He was big for a barren-ground grizzly. The brown bears of Arctic Alaska (or grizzlies; they are no longer thought to be different) do not grow to the size they will reach on more ample diets elsewhere. The barren-ground grizzly will rarely grow larger than six hundred pounds. “What if he got too close?” I said. Fedeler said, “We’d be in real trouble.” “You can’t outrun them,” Hession said. A grizzly, no slower than a racing horse, is about half again as fast as the fastest human being. Watching the great mound of weight in the blueberries, with a fifty-five-five inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around. I had difficulty imagining that he could move with such speed, but I believed it, and was without impulse to test the proposition. 

He appeared to me to be a hill of fur – that is very fine. The entire description of the grizzly encounter, of which the above is just a portion, is excellent. Reading it, you can see why McPhee wanted it at the heart of his piece, and why he structured the piece accordingly. (McPhee describes the process of writing “The Encircled River,” among other pieces, in his superb Draft No. 4.) 

Book I of Coming into the Country is chronological (with a flashback). Books II and III are thematically structured. Each is an artful arrangement of narrative segments; each segment reports an aspect of the story. Book II, “What They Were Hunting For,” consists of seventeen segments; Book III, “Coming into the Country,” has thirty-six. Some segments are only three or four paragraphs; others are much longer. The segments are separated by white spaces. The governing aesthetic is montage. 

For example, in Book III, there’s a segment on the Gelvin family (“Stanley Gelvin grew up in the country, and therefore has no capacity to see it exotic”), followed by a segment describing McPhee’s interactions with the Gelvins (“One summer day, Ed and I made a two-hundred-and-fifty mile run in the pickup to collect a shipment of dogfood in Fairbanks”), followed by a segment on a friend of the Gelvins named Joe Vogler (“He picked up and tossed idly in his hand a piece of dry wolf feces with so many moose hairs in it that looked like a big caterpillar”), followed by a segment telling about Vogler and McPhee’s visit with a man named Fred Wilkinson, which leads, in the same segment, to McPhee accompanying Wilkinson on his visit with a man named Henry Speaker (“The skin of his face was hickory brown – tight skin, across sharp peregrine features, wrinkled only with a welcoming grin”). Speaker operates a hydraulic mine. McPhee observes it in action:

The nozzle opening was five inches, less than the spread of a hand. At a hundred and twenty-five pounds of pressure per square inch, though, the column of water shooting out of it had the hard, compact appearance of marble. Its great arc of power, as it trajectoried over the stream, seemed to subdivide into braided pulse units hypnotic to the eye. And where it crashed at the end of its parabola it sounded like a storm sea hammering a beach.

McPhee not only observes, he experiences: 

He said the horsepower of a D9 Cat was about half the horsepower he had coming out of that hose – look out, you could burn your fingers on the water. To be burned by water seemed irresistible. I put my fingers on the solid ice-cold projectiling cylinder a few inches from the nozzle tip, and pulled them away in an instant, burned.

In this way, thematic segment by thematic segment, Books II and III proceed, creating a rich, fascinating montage of Alaskan action, images, and characters.

Ian Frazier’s Great Plains is also structured thematically. It’s divided into eleven chapters, each on a different topic or set of topics. Each chapter is divided into sections separated by a white space. Each section presents an aspect of the chapter’s main theme. For example, Chapter 1, introducing the book’s subject, consists of two sections: the first vividly depicts the Great Plains (“The Great Plains are like a sheet Americans screened their dreams on for awhile and then largely forgot about”); the second describes Frazier’s project (“Eventually, over several summers, I drove maybe 25,000 miles on the plains – from Montana to Texas and back twice, as well as many shorter distances. I went to every Great Plains state, dozens of museums, scores of historic sites, numerous cafes”). 

Chapter 3 is my favorite. It consists of two sections on hitchhikers that Frazier met along his way. Section two describes a wonderful adventure in the company of a hitchhiker named Jim Yellow Earring. Frazier picks up Yellow Earring south of the town of McLaughlin, South Dakota, on a gravel road on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. He tells Yellow Earring that he’s been trying to find the site of Sitting Bull’s cabin on the Grand River. Yellow Earring says, “I’ll take you right to him.” He directs Frazier from the gravel road to a one-lane dirt road. Frazier writes, 

Soon a strip of grass growing between the wheels brushed under the car. Then we were on no road at all, just prairie with faint wheel tracks across it. Then we bounced into a road with deep ruts, and red dust came up through the holes in the floor. Nowhere up ahead did I see anything that looked like a river valley. Jim Yellow Earring said to keep going.

Frazier continues,

The road now led down a gully so steep that Jim Yellow Earring was thrown forward. His handprints were still in the red dust on the dashboard months later. I said I wasn’t going any farther. I put the car in reverse and tried to back up. Nothing happened. So we headed on down, with bushes now scraping the side. A branch came through the open window and caught me on the side of he head. Jim identified it as a branch of the wild plum tree. He said that wild plums were delicious. The high grass bent down under the front bumper and then sprang up when we passed. In the river bottom, where we finally stopped, the grass was above the door handle.

That “His handprints were still in the red dust on the dashboard months later” is marvelous. The whole passage is marvelous. The spot where they finally stop is where Sitting Bull’s cabin once stood. The site is surrounded by a woven-wire fence with a swinging gate. “Inside the fence is a stone obelisk, and a metal plaque erected by the South Dakota State Historical Society.” 

Chapter 3 is typical of the way Great Plains is structured: central narrative themes divided into various facets – each containing a piece of Frazier’s personal experience.

To sum up, Notes from the Century Before is chronological; Coming into the Country is partly chronological (Book I), partly thematic (Books II and III); and Great Plains is thematic. All three structures contain an immense amount of action. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.