March 24, 2025 Issue

I’m struck by the first line of Arthur Sze’s “Mushroom Hunting at the Ski Basin,” in this week’s issue: “Driving up the ski-basin road, I spot purple asters.” Purple asters – my favorite wildflower. You don’t often see them mentioned in poems. They appear late in the fall – among the last wildflowers to bloom before winter arrives. I like the matter-of-factness of Sze’s first line. I like his use of first person-present tense. It’s a journal-like poem. There’s another line that appeals to me, too: “I step on dry topsoil but sense moisture beneath.” It’s a poem about mushroom-picking, obviously. I’m tempted to read more into it, read it as a call for awareness of our relationship with nature – our connection to the “unseen web of mycelium / connecting all roots and branches.” But no, leave it as is – a wonderful description of mushroom-hunting. 

Sze wrote another excellent New Yorker poem – “Looking Back on the Muckleshoot Reservation from Galisteo Street, Santa Fe” (May 26, 2008). It, too, features an inspired first sentence: “The bow of a Muckleshoot canoe, blessed / with eagle feather and sprig of yellow cedar, / is launched into a bay.” I love that line – so simple, yet so vivid, specific, natural. Sze is a great poet. 

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #3

This is the third post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his superb Picasso and Truth (2013). It’s a description of Pablo Picasso’s Nude on Black Armchair (1932):

Touch – the imagination of contact and softness and curvature – is consumed in the Nude on Black Armchair by something else: a higher, shallower, in the end more abstract visuality, which will never be anyone’s property. The nude’s near hand, holding on to the clawlike white flower, is an emblem of this: fingers and petals become pure (predatory) silhouette. The body’s pale mauve is as otherworldly a color – as unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone – as the yellow and orange in the sky. Maybe in the picture night is failing. The blue wall to the left is icy cold. The woman’s blonde hair is sucked violently into a vortex next to her breast. Blacks encase her as if for eternity. The rubber plant tries to escape through the window.

I’ve chosen this passage to make a point. The word “imagination” in the first line is key. Clark is an imaginative responder to painting. He feels and thinks imaginatively. I relish his definition of “touch” – “the imagination of contact and softness and curvature.” Nude on Black Armchair is not a painting that invites your imagination to touch it, he says. Touch is “consumed by something else” – “a higher, shallower, in the end more abstract visuality, which will never be anyone’s property.” He sees the nude’s hand holding the white flower. He describes the flower as “clawlike.” This is imaginative description. Not everyone would see it like that. But Clark does. He’s trying to imagine his way into Picasso’s imagination. He calls the “clawlike white flower” an “emblem” of the nude’s sexual unavailability. She will “never be anyone’s property.” Fingers and petals appear “predatory.” Her body’s pale mauve is “otherworldly,” “unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone.” “The blue wall to the left is icy cold.” The woman’s blonde hair is “sucked violently into a vortex next to her breast.” Wow! Clark’s imagination is on a heater. He’s not done. “Blacks encase her as if for eternity.” And then this – the clinching line, the most inspired of all – “The rubber plant tries to escape through the window.” That line makes me smile every time I read it. It’s true, too. Look at the rubber plant. Clark says it’s a rubber plant. I believe him. Look at it. It does appear to be escaping through the window – escaping from the sleeping naked monster. It’s a strange interpretation of a strange painting. I love it. 

Credit: The above illustration is Pablo Picasso’s Nude on Black Armchair (1932).   

March 17, 2025 Issue

I’m enjoying The New Yorker’s “Takes” series. This week, Louisa Thomas revisits John Updike’s “Hub Fan’s Bid Kid Adieu” (October 22, 1960). It’s a wonderful celebration of this brilliant piece on Ted Williams’ last game, in which, in his last at-bat, he hits a homerun. Updike describes it:

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

I love that “It was in the books while it was still in the sky.” And I love what Thomas does with it in her piece:

“It was in the books while it was still in the sky,” Updike wrote, and it is still in the sky, sixty-five years later, because of the arresting vividness of his depiction. 

Yes, exactly. Updike did what all great artists do. He caught and preserved the moment. 

March 10, 2025 issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant “Dreams and Nightmares.” It’s an account of his experience in New Orleans, attending Super Bowl LIX and some of the parties and promotions leading up to it. “Eagles plus the Big Easy: I had to be there,” he says. The piece is part personal history and part reporting. Paumgarten reflects on his love of football (“I love the sport itself, the complexity of it, the variety of bodies and roles, the grace amid the peril, the sacrifice, the story lines, the religious devotion to the fate of the team and a city that’s not even my own”), his love of the Philadelphia Eagles (“The sight of the Kelly-green jerseys, against the sickly inchworm green of Veterans Stadium’s diabolical artificial turf, got its talons in me”), and his conflicted view of the Super Bowl. At times, he seems to relish the event (“It’s hard to think of anything that comes close, unless you count Christmas”). At other times, he seems to detest it (“The vulgarity and rot were palpable then, as they seem to have been, come to think of it, even when Hunter S. Thompson was in Houston for Super Bowl VIII, in 1974”). 

Paumgarten visits Media Row at the convention center (“I saw a man in a green Saquon Barkley jersey, green Eagles overalls, and green-and-silver face paint—bald but for a tight green Mohawk”). He meets up with a wealthy friend and they go to a night club called Empire (“Bouncers ushered us past the line and through the throngs inside to a table near the front”). He attends and Eagles-fan party in the Garden District (“cheesesteaks from Yinzer’s, soft pretzels, and Tastykakes”). His description of game day is detailed and vivid:

Tributaries of fans—from Bourbon and Baronne, Tchoupitoulas and Magazine—poured into Poydras Street and flowed toward the Dome. The doomsday prophets and kooks along the way brought to mind the streetside hubbub in John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces.” You had your born-agains bearing signs: “God Hates Your Idols” (possible), “Free Will Is a Satanic Lie” (true enough), “God Hates Drunks” (no, He does not), “God Hates Fags” (no), “God Hates You” (me?). A vender evaded the constabulary with his pushcart of “Donald Fucking Trump” and “Bitch I’m an Eagle” T-shirts. A group of gentlemen dressed in white, in white cowboy hats, with patches of presumably fake blood over their privates, led a protest against male circumcision, with a sign that read “Nobody Wants Less Penis.” It seemed right-wing-coded, but I couldn’t be sure. The Black Israelites, meanwhile, were out on Canal Street. Scalpers offered tickets: for a man bearing a notebook, the price was “face value.” (The average price of a ticket, on the secondary market, was sixty-five hundred dollars. The cheapest ticket was twenty-six hundred.) But there were some bargains around: you could get your face painted with your team’s colors for twenty bucks, and a Coors Light for eight.

The piece brims with wonderful, original, quasi-surreal sentences. This one, for example:

George Kittle, the San Francisco 49ers tight end, wearing a Little Caesars T-shirt adorned with pizza-slice icons, showed up with his mother at the Sports Illustrated booth—a sad little Wayne-and-Garth-calibre nook, reflective perhaps of the diminishment of both a medium and a “brand”—with boxes of Crazy Puffs.

And this:

At the Bounty House of Wingman, the hype guys lined up for free boxes of chicken wings to go with a roll of paper towels, while on a nearby patch of artificial turf civilians and pros took turns attempting to throw green Nerf footballs through downfield targets. 

“Dreams and Nightmares” is a tour de force of personal journalism. I enjoyed it immensely.

Interesting Emendations: Ian Frazier's "Paradise Bronx"

Sometimes a New Yorker piece appears that's been carved out of a larger work. Ian Frazier’s wonderful “Paradise Bronx” (The New Yorker, July 22, 2024) is such a piece. It comes from his recent book of the same name. Comparing the two versions, I found a number of interesting differences – some minor, some more substantive. For example, in the New Yorker piece, Frazier writes, 

Walking on Bruckner Boulevard one morning, I was stunned by the loudness of the trucks. (No other borough has truck traffic like the Bronx’s, partly because its Hunts Point market, for produce, meat, and fish, is the largest food-distribution depot in the world.) I also heard cars, vans, motorcycles, an Amtrak train, airplanes, and, on the lower Bronx River nearby, the horn of a tugboat pushing a barge. 

In the book version, Frazier combines the three sentences into one:

Walking on Bruckner Boulevard one morning, stunned by the loudness of the trucks (no other borough has truck traffic like the Bronx’s, partly because its Hunts Point market, for produce, meat, and fish, is the largest food-distribution depot in the world), I also heard cars, vans, motorcycles, an Amtrak train, airplanes, and, on the lower Bronx River nearby, the horn of a tugboat pushing a barge. 

Which do you prefer? The New Yorker version is more concise, less rambling. Nevertheless, the book version appeals to me. It’s less honed, more spontaneous. 

Here’s another example. In the New Yorker version, Frazier writes,

On the heights above the Hudson River, in Riverdale, I found the white stucco Moorish-Dutch-style mansion, empty and in disrepair, that John F. Kennedy moved into with his family in 1927, when he was ten. 

Here's the book version:

On the heights above the Hudson River, in Riverdale, I found the white stucco Moorish-Dutch-style mansion, now empty and in disrepair, which John F. Kennedy moved into with his family in 1927, when he was eleven.

The New Yorker version deletes “now” and substitutes “that” for “which.” It seems slightly smoother. But what I find startling is the change in Kennedy’s age – ten in The New Yorker, eleven in the book. Which is correct? I’m betting on the New Yorker version. It’s had the benefit of the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking.

Here's another example. In the New Yorker version, Frazier writes,

From the former Kennedy mansion, one can walk 4.7 miles to 825 East 179th Street, in the East Tremont neighborhood, where a thirteen-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald lived with his mother in 1953. The building that Oswald lived in no longer exists, and there is no historic marker.

Here's the book version:

From the former Kennedy mansion, one can walk 4.7 miles to 815 East 179th Street, in the East Tremont neighborhood, where a twelve-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald lived with his mother in 1952. Not only is there no historic marker, but the building that Oswald lived in no longer exists, and the address itself seems to have been abolished.

Again, the New Yorker version is smoother and more concise – more Strunk-and-White-compliant. But the book version’s extra “and the address itself seems to have been abolished” serves to emphasize the total vanishing of the Oswald address. What’s startling are the factual discrepancies: “825 East 179th Street” in the New Yorker version; “815 East 179th Street” in the book; “thirteen-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald” in The New Yorker; “twelve-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald” in the book; “1953” in The New Yorker; “1952” in the book. 

One more example. In the New Yorker version, Frazier writes,

You could swim in the Bronx River and in the East River, climb the beech trees in Van Cortlandt Park, sit on your fire escape and hear your neighbors’ different accents and languages, smell five different culinary traditions wafting through your building’s stairwell at suppertime: Paradise.

It's one of my favorite sentences in the piece. Checking the book version, I find it’s been lengthened to include additional details:

You could see the zoo animals over and over until you knew them by heart, swim in the Bronx River or the East River, climb the beech trees in Van Cortlandt Park, spend afternoons in a branch of the New York Public Library, sit on your fire escape and hear your neighbors’ different accents and languages coming from nearby apartments, smell five different culinary traditions wafting through your building’s stairwell at suppertime: Paradise.

Both versions are delightful. I relish the extra details in the book version. 

There are at least a dozen differences between the two texts. The New Yorker version reflects the style of New Yorker editing, with its emphasis on concision. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The New Yorker version is probably more accurate, too, due to the magazine’s rigorous fact-checking. But I also like the book version. It might be closer to Frazier’s actual voice – the singular way he thinks and expresses himself. Both versions are superb. It’s fascinating to compare them. 

March 3, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s fascinating “Shadow Warrior.” It tells about Ukrainian spy Roman Chervinsky and some of his audacious exploits. Yaffa starts with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. That story alone makes this piece worth reading. Yaffa writes,

In November, 2023, a suspect emerged. A joint investigation by Der Spiegeland the Washington Post, citing sources in both “Ukrainian and international security circles,” identified Roman Chervinsky, a former Ukrainian intelligence officer, as the operation’s alleged lead organizer. By then, Chervinsky, who had spent two decades directing secret operations for Ukraine’s intelligence services, including assassinations and multiple acts of sabotage, was under house arrest in a suburb of Kyiv. He had been charged in two separate criminal investigations, for extortion and abuse of authority, both of which he denies. Neither case, at least formally, had anything to do with Nord Stream. When I visited him recently, at his apartment, he was unequivocal about his involvement in the Nord Stream attack. “I didn’t do it,” he told me.

Note that “two decades directing secret operations for Ukraine’s intelligence services, including assassinations and multiple acts of sabotage.” Chervinsky is a bold and formidable operative, who, in person, appears to be quite ordinary. Yaffa describes him:

Chervinsky, who is fifty, with a slight frame and a head of thinning hair, wore a loose-fitting polo. An electronic monitor was affixed to his ankle. He made a pot of tea, and we sat at his kitchen table. “You look at him and see this absolutely ordinary person you could imagine standing next to on the bus that morning,” one person who has collaborated with him told me. “Then you come to understand who he is and what he’s capable of.”

Yaffa recounts a number of Chervinsky’s adventures. One of the most memorable is the assassination of a vicious pro-Russian militant named Arsen Pavlov in an elevator in a Donetsk apartment-building. How did he do it? Yaffa tells us:

Chervinsky had another idea. He had enlisted an agent to wear a pizza-delivery uniform and to sneak into Pavlov’s building. The agent reported that Pavlov was usually accompanied by a security guard who stood watch outside Pavlov’s apartment, which was on the seventh floor. But there was one place where the pair were confined and usually alone: the elevator. Chervinsky sent two other agents—a Donetsk local and a former special-forces soldier—to Chernobyl, where, in an abandoned apartment building, they practiced the basics of the operation: prying open the doors to the elevator shaft, jumping down to the compartment’s roof, placing an explosive packet on top and a surveillance microphone in the ventilation slats, and making a quick exit. The whole sequence took about a minute. “They were motivated,” Chervinsky said. “They knew what they were doing and why.”

Back in Donetsk, the pair took up a position down the street from Pavlov’s entryway. When one of Pavlov’s guards came outside for a smoke break, the local agent—“He looked like the most peaceful guy, you’d never suspect him of anything,” Chervinsky said—caught the door before it closed. He and his partner got into the elevator shaft and out of the building without being noticed. A week later, Pavlov arrived at his building and walked inside. The agent from Donetsk called Pavlov’s cell phone and heard, via the hidden microphone, that it was ringing inside the elevator. Pavlov picked up. “Is this Arsen Pavlov?” the agent asked.

“Yes,” Pavlov replied.

“This is the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper—we’d like to interview you.” The agent pressed a button, detonating the explosives. S.B.U. officers in Kyiv had tapped Pavlov’s wife’s phone, and listened in as she frantically called her husband, who didn’t pick up.

Yaffa tells about other Chervinsky operations that are equally daring. I’m allergic to spy fiction. But Yaffa’s “Shadow Warrior” isn’t fiction. It’s real life. I found it riveting. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #4 James Wood's "Serious Noticing"

This is the seventh post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is James Wood’s “Serious Noticing,” which originally appeared in the Fall 2010 Michigan Quarterly Review. A substantially revised version is included in two of Wood’s essay collections: The Nearest Thing to Life (2015) and Serious Noticing (2019). I’ll refer to the revised version here. 

In this great piece, Wood formulates one of the most compelling theories of literature I’ve ever read. He fuses three concepts – detail, looking, and rescue. Wood relishes detail: “I think of detail as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them.” He quotes from Chekhov’s “The Kiss” and Henry Green’s Loving, and says,

Like Ryabovich [in “The Kiss”] and Edith [in Loving], we are the sum of our details. (Or rather, we exceed the sum of our details; we fail to compute.) The details are the stories; stories in miniature. As we get older, some of those details fade, and others, paradoxically, become more vivid. We are, in a way, all internal fiction writers and poets, rewriting our memories.

To exemplify what he means, Wood dips into his own memory:

I was born in 1965, and grew up in a northern English town, Durham, home to a university, a majestic Romanesque cathedral, and surrounded by coalfields, many of them now abandoned. Every house had a hearth and fire, and coal, rather than wood, was used as domestic fuel. Every few weeks, a truck arrived, piled with lumpy burlap sacks; the coal was then poured down a chute into the house’s cellar – I vividly remember the volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar, and the drifting, bluish coal-dust, and the dark, small men who carried those sacks on their backs, with tough leather pads on their shoulders.

That “volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar” is wonderfully evocative.

Wood praises Chekhov’s eye for detail. He says Chekhov “appears to notice everything.” He calls him a “serious noticer.” For Wood, serious noticing is a key aspect of serious writing. He says, “In ordinary life, we don’t spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography.” 

He invokes John Berger’s distinction between seeing and looking:

You could say, following John Berger, that civilians merely see, while artists look. In an essay on drawing, Berger writes that “to draw is to look, examining the structure of experiences. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being looked at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree being looked at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking.

Interestingly, Wood links noticing with metaphor. He says,

Just as great writing asks us to look more closely, it asks us to participate in the transformation of the subject through metaphor and imagery. Think of the way D. H. Lawrence describes, in one of his poems, ‘the drooping Victorian shoulders” of a kangaroo; or how Nabokov describes a piece of tissue paper falling to the ground with “infinite listlessness,” or how Aleksandar Hemon describes horseshit as looking like “dark, deflated, tennis balls,” or how Elizabeth Bishop describes a taxi meter staring at her “like a moral owl,” or how the novelist and poet Adam Foulds notices a blackbird “flinching” its way up a tree.

These are superb examples. I agree with Wood’s main point – metaphor is an aspect of close noticing. But is it “transformation of the subject”? I don’t think so. Metaphor is descriptive. It calls up a picture. It helps us see the subject more clearly. It makes the subject more vivid. But it doesn’t transform it.

The third element of Wood’s theory – the most profound, in my opinion – is rescue. He says,

What do writers do when they seriously notice the world? Perhaps they do nothing less than rescue the life of things from their death – from two deaths, one small and one large: from the “death” that literary form always threatens to impose on life, and from actual death. I mean, by the latter, the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us – the memories of our childhood, the almost-forgotten pungency of flavors, smells, textures: the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention.

He refers to the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary – the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”) – is steadily retreating: in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back in the most ordinary things – to soccer boots and grass, to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Old Spice and Ajax.

That, to me, is the golden key – art’s germinating principle. Wood beautifully sums it up in his penultimate paragraph: “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself.”  

The Ugly Americans

Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times

America, America, shame on you! 

Yesterday, I watched the video replay of the meeting between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky in the Oval Office. Trump and Vance yell at the Ukrainian President, calling him “disrespectful” of the U.S., berating him for not signing a peace deal on whatever terms they dictated. It was a disgraceful, nauseating, ugly spectacle. But it did make one thing crystal clear: Trump has sided with Putin. Evil has triumphed. One dictator has embraced another. America has turned ugly.

I want no part of American culture right now. That’s my gut reaction. I hold Americans responsible for what happened yesterday – all Americans, including Democrats. Trump is a product of your sick bipolar politics. Whether you like it or not, he represents all of you. The New Yorker is about as anti-Trump as you can get. I realize that. Nevertheless, I’m tired of reading about him in your pages. I’m sick of the cartoon covers, too. Trump loves attention, good or bad. The New Yorker lavishes it on him.

Once again, I, a Canadian, find myself questioning why I should continue a blog that celebrates an American magazine, American literature, American art. A couple of weeks ago I went through this same soul-searching when Trump threatened Canada with punishing tariffs and suggested we’d be better off joining the U.S. as the 51st state. He even referred to our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, as Governor Trudeau. But I got over it. Did I want to terminate a fifteen-year-old blog, which I love writing, just because of Trump’s bullshit? I decided no, and resumed blogging. But now, after seeing the way Trump and Vance bullied Zelensky in the Oval Office yesterday, I don’t want to have anything to do with America. America has turned ugly, ugly, ugly. I don’t recognize it anymore. 

So I’m back in the same quandary I was in a few weeks ago. I want to go on, but I don’t want to go on. I’m going to take a few days to think about it. In the meantime, The New Yorker & Me is suspended.  

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Ian Frazier's "On the Rez"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review On the Rez.

This great book is a portrait of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation located in southwestern South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux. The area is part of the Great Plains. The book can be considered sort of a sequel to Frazier’s wonderful Great Plains (1989), which I reviewed in my series “3 for the Road” a few years ago (see here). Both books share a love of the prairie and the Indian way of life. Frazier’s longtime friend Le War Lance figures centrally in both.

But there are differences, too. On the Rez is edgier. The first chapter sets the tone:

Walking on Pine Ridge, I feel as if I am in actual America, the original version that was here before and will still be here after we’re gone. There are wind-blown figures crossing the road in the distance who might be drunk, and a scattering of window-glass fragments in the weeds that might be from a car accident, and a baby naked except for a disposable diaper playing in a bare-dirt yard, and an acrid smell of burning trash – all the elements that usually evoke the description “bleak.” But there is greatness here, too, and an ancient glory endures in the dust and the weeds. The way I look at it, this is the American bedrock upon which the society outside its borders is only a later addition. It’s the surviving piece of country where “the program” has not yet completely taken hold.

On the Rez is also darker than Great Plains. How dark? Check out this passage from near the end of the book, after it deals with the tragic death of Frazier’s Pine Ridge hero – nineteen-year-old star basketball player SuAnne Big Crow:

So much is so wrong on Pine Ridge. There’s suffering and poverty and violence and alcoholism, and the aura of unstoppability that repeated misfortunes acquire. But beneath all that is something bigger and darker and harder to look at straight on. The only word for it, I’m afraid, is evil. News stories emphasizing the reservation’s “bleakness” are actually using this circumlocution for that plain, terrible word. For journalistic reasons the news cannot say, “There is evil here.” And beyond a doubt there is. A bloody history, bad luck, and deliberate malice have helped it along. Sometimes a sense of it comes over me so strongly that I want to run home to bed – for example, when I walk down the row of almost-new child-size bicycles in a local pawnshop, or when I see a bunch of people the police have recently evicted from White Clay staggering back to it, or when I’m driving on a deserted reservation road at night and there’s a large object suddenly up ahead, and I skid to a stop a few feet in front of it, and it’s the hulk of a car so completely incinerated that it has melted the asphalt around it; it’s just sitting there with no warning, with no other cars on the scene, empty and destroyed and silent in the middle of nowhere. At such moments a sense of compound evil – that of the human heart, in league with the original darkness of this wild continent – curls around me like shoots of a fast-growing vine.

But good exists on Pine Ridge, too. Everywhere he goes, Frazier looks for it. He finds it in the life of SuAnne Big Crow. What a story that is! Frazier stumbles on it quite accidentally. One day, he and Le War Lance are driving on Highway 18 in Pine Ridge, and Frazier notices a single-story factory-style building across a weedy field. A sign by the highway says it is the Su Anne Big Crow Health and Recreation Center, and below that are the words “Happytown, USA.” Frazier asks Le if he knows who SuAnne Big Crow is. He says, “She was a basketball star for Pine Ridge High School who helped ’em win the state championship and died in a car wreck a few years back. It was when I was living in New York, though, so that’s about all I know.” A day or two later, Frazier visits the building, and the rest is literary history. He discovers one of his greatest subjects:

At the end of the hallway on the right was a smaller room with glass trophy cases along the walls. The trophies all were from the athletic career of SuAnne Big Crow, the teenage girl in the photos, the person for whom the center was named. I looked at the trophies, I watched a short video of playing on a VCR in the room, I read some framed news stories about SuAnne Big Crow, and a sense of discovery came over me. Here was a hero – not a folk hero, a sports hero, a tribal hero, or an American hero, but a combination of all these. I had thought that Oglala heroes existed mostly in the past. But a true Oglala hero appeared in the late 1980s, while the rest of the world was looking the other way, in suffering Pine Ridge, right under everyone’s noses: SuAnne Big Crow. 

Frazier digs into her history. He talks with her mother Chick Big Crow. He talks with her high school basketball coach Charles Zimiga. He talks with members of the basketball team that SuAnne played for – the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes. He describes the Lakota shawl dance that SuAnne spontaneously did at center court in a pre-game warm-up in the town of Lead. She was fourteen at the time. Lead fans were yelling at the Lady Thorpes, calling them “squaws” and “gut-eaters.” SuAnne ran out onto the court, “unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance.” She also began to sing in Lakota, “swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl.” The crowd went completely quiet. Frazier writes,

In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.” 

Most memorably, Frazier reconstructs the 1989 state Class A championship game in Sioux Falls between the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes and the Milbank Lady Bulldogs, in which SuAnne scored the winning basket in the last second of play. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s a scramble, Milbank has it for an instant, loses it; and then, out of the chaos on the floor: order, in the form of SuAnne. She has the ball. She jumps, perfectly gathered, the ball in her hands overhead. Her face lifts toward the basket, her arched upper lip points at the basket above the turned-down O of her mouth, her dark eyes are ardent and wide open and completely seeing. The ball leaves her hand, her hand flops over at the wrist with fingers spread, the ball flies. She watches it go. It hits inside the hoop, at the back. It goes through the net. In the same instant, the final buzzer sounds.

Frazier also recounts how SuAnne died. She and Chick were driving to Huron, South Dakota. At Kadoka, SuAnne took the wheel so that her mother could have a nap. About six miles past the exit for the town of Murdo, on a long, gradual upgrade, SuAnne apparently fell asleep. The car went off the road to the right and hit a delineator post. The car rolled twice. The driver’s-side door came open as the car rolled, and SuAnne was flung from it.  

In an unforgettable scene, Frazier visits the site on Interstate 90 where SuAnne and Chick’s car accident occurred. He finds the fatality marker erected by the state:

After a few minutes I walked back down the incline to the fatality marker and sat beside it in the grass out of sight of traffic. When I did, I noticed wildflowers – little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins. Mid-June must be these flowers’ peak season: among the roadside grasses, lost hubcaps, and scattered gravel, the spiderwort and creeping jenny grew abundantly.

It's a beautiful, lyrical passage – a wonderful tribute to SuAnne. At this point, Frazier seems in a state of heightened consciousness. In his head, he composes the text for a SuAnne Big Crow historic marker. He notices a grove of cottonwoods and walks to it:

Perhaps because of the rolling topography, I could hardly hear the traffic here. Just a couple of hundred yards away, the twenty-four-hour-a-day noise of the interstate had disappeared into its own dimension. The cottonwoods stood in a grove of eight or ten, all of them healthy and tall, around a small pool of clear water bordered with cattail reeds and dark-gray mud. Herons, ducks, raccoons, and dear had left their tracks in the mud not long before. From the cattails came the chirring song of red-winged blackbirds, a team whose colors no other team will ever improve on. Old crumpled orange-brown leaves covered the ground around the trees, and false morel mushrooms of a nearly identical shade grew in the crotches of the roots. The cottonwoods had appeared a deep green from the highway, but seen from underneath, their leaves were silvery against the blue sky. High above the trees bright white cumulus clouds piled one atop another. They went on and on, altitude upon altitude, getting smaller as they went, like knots on a rope ladder rising out of sight.

It's an extraordinary passage – beautiful, exact, epiphanic. It brings tears to my eyes every time I read it.

Over a four-year period, 1995-99, Frazier visits the rez many times. He roams its landscape, logging his impressions as he goes. His eye is for the overlooked and disregarded – that’s one of the things I love about his writing. “A man collecting empty cans in a big plastic sack walked across a vacant lot with the cans crinkling in the sack and the grasshoppers rising around his legs in such numbers that they collided with each other in the air.” “A pale bunch of teenagers sits on the curb outside Big Bat’s licking ice cream cones, making a row of white knees.” “Black cows topped with snow stood breathing steam in the whitened fields while hawks sat in cottonwoods above, their feathers so fluffed out against the cold they looked like footballs.”   

 

Meaning is where you find it. Frazier finds it in the most unlikely places – Big Bat’s Texaco, the Red Shirt Table Road, PTI Propane, the Red Cloud School, Bill’s Bar, the Arrowhead Inn, the Oglala Tribal Council room, the Cohen Home, and, as we’ve seen, the SuAnne Big Crow Health and Recreation Center. He finds it in the star quilt that Florence Cross Dog makes for him (“The quilt was like a map of the reservation, with the gravel roads and dirt lanes and one-water-tower towns and little houses in the middle of nowhere stitched together and made shiningly whole”). He finds it in the litter on the ground (“At the picnic area by the powwow grounds, a litter of bitterroot rinds covered the usual flooring of Budweiser shards”). He finds it in people: Le War Lance, Floyd John, Florence Cross Dog, Aurelia Two Crow, Chick Big Crow, Charles Zimiga, Doni De Cory, to name but a few. Most of all, Frazier finds inspiration in the life of SuAnne Big Crow: “SuAnne Big Crow, though gone forever, is unmistakably still around. The good of her life sustains this place with a power as intangible as gravity, and as real.” 

On the Rez is one of the most profound, moving explorations of place I’ve ever read. My review doesn’t come close to doing it justice. Maybe in future posts I can do better. My next post in this series will be on structure.

Postscript: Gene Hackman 1930 - 2025

Gene Hackman, in The French Connection

I see in the Times that Gene Hackman has died. He was 95. He’s one of my favorite actors. He appeared in at least three cinematic classics – Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The French Connection (1971), and Unforgiven (1992). I first saw him in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, in which he played Clyde’s older brother Buck. It was only a supporting role, but Hackman was superb. Reviewing the movie, Pauline Kael said his performance was “beautifully controlled,” “the best in the movie.” Then four years later, he played the lowlife police detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedkin’s The French Connection, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor. But perhaps his greatest role was as the sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s magnificent Unforgiven for which he won another Academy Award – this time for Best Supporting Actor. What I loved about Hackman’s acting is its naturalness. He seemed not just to play his roles, but to live them.   

Writing Red

Jackson Arn, in his wonderful “Royal Flush” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2025), says, “Look at Warhol’s Red Lenin or STIK’s Liberty (Red) and feel the wet raspberry splatter you.” I love that line. Some of my favorite art descriptions involve red. For example:

In Quappi’s bone-white face, her red lips assume a sweetly wry expression while visually exploding like a grenade. – Peter Schjeldahl, “The French Disconnection” (The New Yorker, March 8, 1999)

In the flesh, a single beautifully judged swipe of washed-out Indian Red, tracing the collar of the child’s T-shirt, jumpstarts the picture into succulent immediacy. – Julian Bell, “At the Whitechapel: Wilhelm Sasnal" (London Review of Books, January 5, 2012)

The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity. It must have been painted with the same pigment, at the same moment, as the wild red of the horseman’s turban, which itself has the look of a bleeding bald skull. Maybe the plume of blue tassels issuing from the red like a tuft of hair is meant to evoke a scalping. The two reds – the turban-scalp and the boiling nostril – insist on the beauty of blood. – T. J. Clark, “A Horse’s Impossible Head” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019)

“Red is the first color, the strongest color, the one that stands for color itself,” Arn says. He’s right. He claims some people are scared of it. He’s probably right about that, too. I’m not one of them. I love red. There’s a strange red painting by N. H. Pritchard called Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69. Do you remember it? The New Yorker used it to illustrate one of Peter Schjeldahl’s last pieces – “All Together Now” (April 11, 2022). Schjeldahl said of it, “Red Abstract / fragment is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms.”

Red is a rich, fascinating subject. Arn explores it beautifully. 

Credit: The above illustration is N. H. Pritchard's Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69).

February 17 & 24, 2025 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It’s the 100th Anniversary Issue, packed with reporting pieces, personal essays, and reviews. The digital version is even richer, containing five additional articles. It’s a sumptuous literary banquet, featuring three of my favorite writers – Jill Lepore, Nick Paumgarten and Burkhard Bilger.  

I love Lepore’s “War of Words.” It’s a look at some of the writer-editor battles that shaped The New Yorker. For example, Edmund Wilson vs. Harold Ross:

Many have balked at The New Yorker’s bruising editing, never mind Ross’s rule that the more they kvetched, the less he thought of them. “Can’t we have some signed agreement about my copy not being changed by other people?” Edmund Wilson asked Ross. (The answer was no. “He is by far the biggest problem we ever had around here,” Ross wrote, greatly regretting having hired Wilson not only as a writer but as an editor. “Fights like a tiger, or holds the line like an elephant, rather. Only course is to let him peter out, I guess.”)

And Vladimir Nabokov vs. Katherine White:

In a letter to Katharine White, Nabokov drew a line not so much in the proverbial sand as with the underline key on his typewriter: “I shall be very grateful to you if you help me to weed out bad grammar but I do not think I would like my longish sentences clipped too close, or those drawbridges lowered which I have taken such pains to lift.” White later wrote to Updike, “Nabokov’s the best writer in English but sometimes he’s maddening and I do not like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.” 

Lepore’s piece brims with memorable comments on the editorial process. My favorite is John Bennet’s “A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back. An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.”

Another captivating piece in this excellent anniversary New Yorker is Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents.” It’s about a team of scientists who uses a microlight aircraft to teach a flock of endangered northern bald ibises to migrate. How do they do it? Paumgarten tells us:

The birds left Bavaria on the second Tuesday in August. They took off from an airfield, approximated a few sloppy laps, and then, such are miracles, began to follow a microlight aircraft, as though it were one of them. The contraption—as much pendulum as plane—reared and dipped as its pilot, a Tyrolian biologist in an olive-drab flight suit and amber shooting glasses, tugged on the steering levers. Behind him, in the rear seat, a young woman with a blond ponytail called to the birds, in German, through a bullhorn. As the microlight receded west into the haze, the birds chasing behind, an armada of cars and camper vans sped off in pursuit.

It's a fascinating endeavour. The birds are often stubborn. Paumgarten hangs out with a camera crew filming the project:

I retreated with one of the producers to a patch of scrub grass, out of sight of the birds and the cameras. We lay down in the stubble, at the edge of a sunflower plot, the fallen heads strewn in the arid soil like abandoned hornet’s nests. A light breeze kicked up. The sunflower stalks rattled. As the sun warmed the field, the flies got to work.

He describes the action:

The birds began to fly, as Helena called out to them. “Here she comes,” the producer said. Helena began running across the field, toward the microlight. She took big but uneven strides, on account of the knee. Fritz, in the microlight, was waving his arms like a bird. Helena reached the microlight, adjusted her ponytail, and then climbed into the back seat, as the birds flew in ragged circles nearby. Fritz revved the engine, a desperate, needling whine, and the vessel lurched down the airstrip, the chute billowing awake behind him. And then, just like that, the craft was airborne, and Fritz throttled down, and for a moment it hung there, almost ludicrously slow, appearing to swing like a plumb beneath the chute, before turning toward the east, where the rising sun flashed off the sea. You could hear Helena’s keening singsong through the megaphone, a kind of Teutonic muezzin. “Komme, komme, Waldi!” Come, come, Baldies. Two tones, up-down up-down, like a crowd chanting, “Let’s go, Rang-ers!”

The birds wheeled over the aviary while Fritz circled. Komme, komme, Waldi: the song receded as the microlight got farther away and then swelled as it neared. This rise and fall, its approaching and distancing, was at once a cheer, a prayer, and a lament, and it induced in me—and, I somehow believed, in everyone else, too—a kind of heartache, like the longing for loved ones or the pain of their aging away. The microlight’s distant motor echoing off the hangar’s corrugated shell sounded like a deranged string section. An old sailboat was propped against the tin. Swallows darted around, feeding on the flies. A commercial jet passed soundlessly overhead.

This is superb writing! It gets even better. Here’s my favorite passage:

Lying in the desiccated grass, amid the dead sunflower stalks and the barrage of flies, the heat rising—the scorching of the sun, the wheedling of the engine—I had an uncommonly intense sense of our implacable need to bend nature to our will, for both good and ill. The air stank of fertilizer, of the excrement we spread to grow food for ourselves. The miracle of flight, the cycle of poop and protein, our elaborate efforts to undo harm: what creatures we are. Fritz made laps, orbits passing like days.

What creatures we are, and what a writer Paumgarten is. “Helicopter Parents” is a fascinating look at the incredible lengths scientists will go to try to save a species from extinction. I enjoyed it immensely. 

The 100th Anniversary Issue also contains a wonderful piece by Burkhard Bilger called “Stepping Out.” It’s about America’s spectacular new marching-band culture. No longer just about marching in formation, marching band has become both a dazzling art and a fierce sport. Bilger writes,

The top bands have dozens of staff, budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and fleets of trucks for their instruments, props, costumes, and sound systems. They don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers, playing full symphonic scores. They don’t call it marching band anymore. They call it the marching arts.

Bilger visits Bourbon County High School, in eastern Kentucky, home of the Marching Colonels. He goes to Indianapolis and spends time with two of America’s most successful marching bands – the Avon High School Marching Black and Gold, and the Carmel High School Marching Greyhounds. He attends America’s preeminent marching-band contest – the Grand National Championships in Indianapolis. He talks with band directors, band members, and band parents. Everywhere he goes, he logs his impressions. Here’s his description of a rehearsal by the Carmel High School Marching Greyhounds:

Carmel High School is north of Indianapolis, across Interstate 465, in a suburb of lamplit streets and posh boutiques. It was close to 7:30 p.m. when I arrived. Temperatures were in the eighties and the sun had slid to the horizon like a drop of melted wax, but the band was still practicing. The students were lined up outside the school stadium, in a parking lot painted with yard lines and numbers like a football field. They stood at attention for a moment, their arms bent in front of them in various positions, as if holding invisible instruments. Then a voice rang out: “Check! Adjust!” A metronome sounded, and the band began to march.

The voice belonged to Chris Kreke, the band’s director. He was standing on the roof of an observation tower four stories above us, leaning over the railing with a microphone in hand. When I went up to join him, I could see the band’s choreography unfolding below: lines crossing and reversing course, squares collapsing and turning inside out, circles exploding into smaller circles like fireworks in slow motion. The patterns were so complex that the drill designer, Michael Gaines, had to use a 3-D program called Pyware to choreograph them. The coördinates for each player’s movements could be loaded onto a smartphone or printed onto a spiral-bound dot book—one page for each movement—then drilled until they were pure muscle memory. “Look at me!” Kreke said, his voice reverberating below. “That was really good until the end. When we come into page 13, we have to have a much stronger direction change. That is twelve counts, and you have to get a really energetic step-off. Yes?”

“YESSIR!”

And here’s a delightful description of some of the shows he saw at the Grand National Championships:

If the event’s structure seems proof of its military roots, its content is a riot of invention, like a French garden overrun by exotics. A band from Newburgh, Indiana, came out in black cloaks and purple berets, like characters from “The Matrix” headed to a poetry reading. Then they flitted around the field like bats. A group from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, reënacted a solo sailing trip around the world, with the band tossing itself about like waves and rocking on skeletal ships. A show called “The Cutting Edge,” by a band from Cedar Park, Texas, doubled down on the title’s pun, with music from “Sweeney Todd” and Samuel Barber, and the band marching around giant barber poles. Some shows were earnest and philosophical, others sentimental or goofy. In “Menagerie,” from a school in Kingsport, Tennessee, the color guard were caged like animals in a zoo, clad in polka-dot bodysuits. In “Shhhh . . . It’s Rabbit Season,” by a band from Mason, Ohio, the musicians marched out in caps and hunting jackets, like Elmer Fudd, while the color guard wore neon-orange rabbit suits. Then the musicians chased the rabbits around to “The Barber of Seville” and the “William Tell” Overture.

And here’s another splendid passage:

The medal ceremony that night was a surreal sight: more than three thousand band members crowded onto the field in candy-striped rows. Bourbon County ended up placing second in its class—a triumph under the circumstances—just behind another Kentucky band, from Murray High School. But my favorite moment was earlier in the evening. Deep beneath the stands, in the vast tunnels and rehearsal rooms around the field, half a dozen bands were warming up—drumming, stretching, tossing rifles, and playing arpeggios as they waited for their turn to perform. Walking from room to room, I passed wooden ships, Victorian cages, and giant Day-Glo flowers in the hall. A trio of Elmer Fudds was hunched in conversation over here, two orange bunnies giggling in a corner over there. Some strays from the “Menagerie” show came wandering down the hall, past a pair of water sprites from Broken Arrow and a few butterfly girls from Cypress, Texas. It was like the world’s biggest costume party.

"Stepping Out" takes us inside the agonizing, ecstatic, operatic, surreal world of marching band. It's a brilliant piece - one of Bilger's best. 

There’s a fourth article in this marvellous Anniversary Issue that I want to celebrate – Jackson Arn’s “Royal Flush.” But I’ll do that in a separate post.  

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #2

This is the second post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his marvellous “Masters and Fools: Velázquez’s Distance” (London Review of Books, September 23, 2021). It’s a description of Diego Velázquez’s Aesop (1640):

The pucker and ripple of the grey and white fabric, with its visceral trace of pale red (a strange rhyming of the folds here with those on Aesop’s chest) – what are they, these folds? Is the dark material on top of the white another strip of leather? But what is the shape that seems to be holding it down? A weight of some sort? An opened shackle? One historian thought it a pasteboard crown. Did he mean as used in some court buffoonery? I don’t understand the trace of bright red at Aesop’s left ear, and the clamp of dark metal seemingly attached to the ear’s cartilage. Is it a mark of slave ownership?

Here we see many of the same elements contained in the Bosch passage that we looked at previously: the many questions (seven of them); the attention to color, especially red (“visceral trace of pale red,” “trace of bright red”); the attention to detail (“the clamp of dark metal seemingly attached to the ear’s cartilage”). The new ingredient here – the main reason I chose this passage (aside from its beauty, which is exquisite) – is Clark’s attention to the folds of Aesop’s sash: “The pucker and ripple of the grey and white fabric, with its visceral trace of pale red (a strange rhyming of the folds here with those on Aesop’s chest) – what are they, these folds?” Clark is a connoisseur of folds. Three examples: 

Let me start from a typical transfixing Leonardo detail, the unfolded yellow lining of the Virgin’s cloak. In the Paris picture (whatever the changes brought on by time) there was a connection, I am sure, between the yellow fold and the light in the sky. The lining, spellbinding as it is – separate from and superior to its being a condition of some stuff in the sun – is a dream condensation of the yellows of late afternoon. In Paris the lining still has softness: it is conceivable as folded, touched by human fingers. The yellow emerges, at first quite gradually, from under the stretched canopy of blue. It is the inside of a garment spilling out. We may see it as a concentration of the landscape light, but also as a way of bringing that far light closer – optically, seemingly accidentally – in a manner that viewers can accept as actually happening, here among the rocks. [“The Chill of Disillusion”]

Most great painters use folds and intersections of forms, especially of drapery, for purposes of exposition, laying out the world before us, turning the contours and edges of things slowly through space, having light modulate across a shifting but comprehensible surface. Rubens is a good example. Delacroix very often does the opposite. He folds and refolds things, filling every inch with colour, until a shape becomes a scintillation. (In Lion Hunt, the glimpse of crumpled green cloak beneath the lion’s midriff is a good example of such horror vacui. Or the billow of black, red and orange in the painting’s bottom left corner.) ["A Horse’s Impossible Head”]

Let’s turn aside from the questions of tipping and tilting in Cézanne for the moment and look at the question of folds. It is just as fundamental. The way man-made material, or even the continuous surfaces of the natural world – a screen of foliage, for instance, or the surface of the sea – the way such surfaces are folded and crinkled in order to catch the light: this is painting’s life blood. [“Cézanne’s Material,” included in Clark's great If These Apples Should Fall, 2022]

Clark’s sentence is worth quoting again: “The pucker and ripple of the grey and white fabric, with its visceral trace of pale red (a strange rhyming of the folds here with those on Aesop’s chest) – what are they, these folds?” Note the structure. We saw it in the Bosch passage, too: “The wandering lines of white on his costume, delicate even by Bosch’s standards, and dramatized by little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces – what do they do?” Description, dash, question – a quintessential Clarkian combo. I love it.

Credit: The above illustration is Diego Velázquez’s Aesop (1640). 

Rachel Aviv and Anne Enright on Alice Munro

Alice Munro (Photo by John Reeves)

I see that Jane Mayer and Rachel Aviv won George Polk Awards this year. Mayer won for her “Pete Hegseth’s Secret History” (newyorker.com, December 1, 2024). Aviv won for her “You Won’t Get Free of It” (The New Yorker, December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025). Congratulations to both of them. I confess I only skimmed Mayer’s piece. Political writing is not my bag. Aviv’s piece is a different matter. I read every word. It blew me away. It’s a deep dive into decades of Alice Munro’s family history and correspondence, along with her personal writing and published fiction, in order to recount her daughter Andrea’s sexual abuse and Munro’s subsequent use of that story for her own work. It shook my admiration for Munro’s writing right to its foundation. See my comment here. 

A few weeks after reading Aviv’s piece, I encountered another absorbing assessment of the Munro controversy – Anne Enright’s “Alice Munro’s Retreat” (The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2024). She writes,

As with many revelations, all this realigns what we already knew about Munro’s life in a way that makes more sense. It also throws a sharp light on Munro’s later fiction, throughout which elements of Andrea’s experience, and all that came after it, can be found. Some people may choose not to read the later stories: they may find it egregious that Munro both dismissed the damage done to her daughter and used it to fuel her work. Yet the tug of this long-kept secret is there on the page and, as with many unpleasant discoveries, once you see it, you find it everywhere.

Enright analyzes several of Munro’s key stories. She concludes: “I have read Munro all my life, and reading her again in light of these revelations, I find that I cannot take back my great love for her work; it was too freely given.”

I feel the same way.  

February 10, 2025 Issue

I just finished reading Erich Lach’s “Leaning Tower,” in this week’s issue. What a nightmare! It tells about a Manhattan condominium project called 1 Seaport that went horribly wrong. Lach writes,

The building’s contractors had recently completed the tower’s superstructure. The imposing gray mass was at that point among the hundred tallest structures on the city’s skyline, six feet taller than Trump Tower. “The slab edges on the north side of the building are misaligned by up to 8 inches,” the developer disclosed. 1 Seaport was six hundred and seventy feet tall, and leaning.

Just reading Lach’s piece made me anxious. What would it be like to be the owner of this flawed monstrosity? What would it be like to be the builder? Lach reports that at least a quarter of a billion dollars have been spent on the place. Yet it’s been derelict since July, 2020. Lach writes,

When the sun sets, the tower takes on a menacing quality, with its concrete terraces jutting out like spikes on a club. Later at night, when the construction lights are on, it’s possible to imagine that the building is inhabited—that people are up there drinking wine, slipping into the infinity pool, looking down on the city at their feet. Before it started leaning, 1 Seaport was designed to withstand hundreds of years of wind off the harbor. Until someone figures out what to do with it, it’ll hang there, the tallest eyesore on the skyline.

It's an eyesore now. But who knows? It could become an iconic landmark - Manhattan's version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Acts of Seeing: Praia de Tavira

Photo by John MacDougall

Praia de Tavira, Portugal, February 6, 2024. We came out onto the magnificent beach, and there she was to greet us: fish net plumage, mannequin legs, one lime green high heel shoe, shiny CD eye, mesh crab pot head and beak, and spiky green reed hair. The coolest beach sculpture I’d ever seen. I took her picture, the intense blue Portuguese sky showing through her fine mesh basket head. I thought of you, Picasso. 

10 Best "Personal History" Pieces: #8 Rivka Galchen's "Better Than a Balloon"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Rivka Galchen’s wonderful “Better Than a Balloon” (February 15 & 22, 2021).

What’s it like living in a section of Manhattan that resembles the 1970s hellscape shown in Taxi Driver? Galchen tells us. First, she defines it:

For ten years, I have lived in a neighborhood defined by the Port Authority Bus Station to the north, Penn Station to the south, the Lincoln Tunnel to the west, and, to the east, a thirty-one-foot stainless-steel sculpture of a needle threaded through a fourteen-foot button. Though there are many, many people here, the neighborhood is not a people place. It is better suited to the picking up and dropping off of large pallets. Within this homey quadrilateral are a methadone clinic, a parole office, liquor shops with cashiers behind thick plastic screens, a fancy Japanese clothing store, plenty of pawnshops, the Times Building, drumming studios, seven subway lines, and at least four places to get your sewing machine repaired. A young runaway, emerging from one of the many transit hubs, might find herself—after maybe buying a coffee-cart doughnut and being shouted at for hesitating at a crosswalk, and being nearly hit by a bus—sheepishly deciding to give it one more go back home. There is, though, a lot of office space here. To walk north on Eighth Avenue in order to get to the subway entrance on Fortieth Street is to know what it is to be a migrating lemming.

Galchen says this area is unloved. The tagline of the piece is “Life in an unloved neighborhood.” She says, “Almost no one likes this neighborhood or wants to live here. It would be O.K. to cheer for it, if I could learn how to.” Interestingly, as the piece unfolds, she appears to do just that. Certain aspects of the place appeal to her. For example, the Two Bros pizzeria:

The Two Bros pizza at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street sells a fresh, hot slice of cheese pizza for a dollar. There are other Two Bros in the city—there are other Two Bros in the neighborhood—but this one is the best. It is nearly always busy, and it has a fast-moving and efficient line. I fell in love with Two Bros when I was pregnant. I would sometimes step out to have a slice there an hour or two after dinner. You could eat the slice at a table in the back and feel companioned and alone at once. The lighting is like that of a surgical theatre. The Mexican pop music is a reliable endorphin generator. And though the ingredients that go into a dollar slice of pizza do not come from a family farm in the Hudson Valley, these slices are supreme. The clientele, those evenings, was a mix of transgender prostitutes, thin young men, and quiet immigrant families, often with suitcases, headed I have no idea where.

And Esposito’s butcher shop:

A handful of businesses have been in this neighborhood for decades, and the butcher shop has been here since 1932. When I go in there, the staff ask me about my kids. They ask everyone about their kids, or their dogs, or their parents, or whatever there is to ask about. In the ten years I’ve lived here, the owner has been there every operating day, six days a week, working alongside his staff. One of the butchers is strikingly handsome. He always smiles and says it’s nice to see me. He says that to everyone and gives everyone that smile. Still, it retains its power. It took me years to realize that the floor on the butchers’ side of the glass display case is elevated by about six inches; the butchers look like gods on that side.

And the Emerald Green apartment complex:

It was my daughter’s reaching toddler age that began to alter my relationship to this neighborhood. For the first years, my heart had been open to it. I had been proud of its lack of charm, as if this were a consequence of its integrity. I had gone so far as to mildly dislike the perfectly clean and inoffensive “short-term luxury-rental” building that went up on this otherwise rough block—the Emerald Green. The complex planted ginkgo trees all along the block’s sidewalk. The trees were thin and pathetic and nearly leafless at first. In winter, the building’s staff lit up the trunks of the trees by wrapping them with white Christmas lights. In summer, they planted tulips in the enclosures in front of the entrance. As it grew cold, they planted some sort of hearty kale. We don’t need this! I remember thinking. This is even less charming than the lack of charm! Now I worship that building. My daughter and I both wait with anticipation for the November day when they wrap the ginkgo trees in those white lights. In fall, the ginkgo leaves tumble down as elegant yellow fans. The Emerald Green employee who hoses down the sidewalks every single morning, always pausing as we approach—he has my heart.

Galchen is a superb describer. She says of Esposito’s take-a-number ticket dispenser, “The slips of paper come out like interlocking Escher frog tiles.” 

My favorite part of “Better Than a Balloon” is Galchen’s description of walking the neighborhood with her young daughter:

I know the neighborhood so well—know the old Hartford Courant building, the countless vape shops, the Hamed Fabric, with its clearance sale, the Money Change/Weed World/NY Gift & Luggage, and Daytona Trimming, with its boas—on account of the carrying, and then the strollering, and then the very slow walking, and then the normal-paced walking of these same streets year and again with this child of mine. When she was a baby, the only way to reliably get her to fall asleep was to push her round and round these blocks in her stroller. Amid the honking, shouting, and backfiring, and the music coming from the Wakamba bar, her eyes would close, then stay closed.

Galchen’s daughter changed Galchen’s view of her neighborhood. She says, “For my daughter, this neighborhood is dense with magic and love. This is her childhood.” Credit Galchen for her openness to her child’s viewpoint, for her ability to see her neighborhood through her daughter’s eyes. It’s an inspired perspective. It enables her to give her gritty neighborhood its beautiful due.  

Credit: The above illustration by Jorge Colombo is from Rivka Galchen’s “Better Than a Balloon.”