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.”

February 3, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is M. R. Connor’s “Line of Fire,” an account of her embedment with a crew of wildland fire-fighters battling the deadly Los Angeles wildfires. Connor participates in an operation called cold trailing:

We began to hike along the edge of the burn scar, the charred area that a fire leaves behind. Our job was to cold trail—to scour the boundary where the fire had stopped, looking for hot spots that could reignite. Walking side by side, we marched into drainage ditches, scaled chain-link fences, crossed culs-de-sac, and passed through back yards that sloped steeply upward, toward the mountains. Each of us was responsible for scanning the ground for anything that might hold heat. At one end of the line, a crew member shouted, “Feel all white ashes! Don’t pass the person on your left!” Each firefighter repeated the message, one person to the next, as though it were an echo.

Another day, she helps create a containment line:

From our position, more than a mile above sea level, we could see that the Eaton Fire was alive below us, wafting smoke from the low points between the mountains and creating an ethereal haze. Those steep canyons were too treacherous to hike into—a broken ankle would require an air evacuation—so the crew’s assignment was to create a mile-long containment line in the peaks west of Mount Wilson Observatory. We would remove a forty-foot swath of vegetation to insure that, even if winds energized the fire and it made another run, “we don’t get anything in Canada,” as a member of the incident command had put it. (Canada wasn’t in danger, but there were hundreds of miles of dry forest to our north.) There was also the risk that Santa Anas would blow the fire into another densely populated part of Los Angeles. The crew spread out, and sawyers began to cut the chaparral with their saws. Their partners, known as swampers, grabbed at underbrush and dragged it away.

She describes the diversity of the crew she’s with:

Some of its members had learned wildland firefighting in prison. One had heard about it from a cousin; another had seen a recruitment flyer. A rookie firefighter had just finished a year as a conscript in the Finnish military. The crew’s lead E.M.T. was a member of the Hopi Tribe. A man who’d worked for a hot-shot crew—essentially the special forces of firefighting—had been the first Black firefighter to be named its Rookie of the Year. Unusually, one of the sawyer teams was all-female.

She describes the roar of the chainsaws; the yellow shirts made of Nomex that the crew members wear (“fire-resistant up to seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit”); the thump of a Chinook helicopter’s rotors as it dumps water on the trees; the backpacks that she and the crew carry, containing “silver, cocoonlike fire shelters that we could deploy if we were overtaken by flames”; burned suburbs (“these areas appear bombed out”); the relentless Santa Ana winds that drive the fire (“A sudden gust hit us and we all hunched our shoulders, bracing ourselves”).

"Line of Fire" takes us inside the reality that wildland firefighters inhabit. It’s a remarkable piece. 

January 27, 2025 Issue

Is it true that spending too much time on the Internet rots your brain? Daniel Immerwahr, in his absorbing “Check This Out,” in this week’s issue, suggests that it isn’t. He surveys a whole slew of books on the subject, e.g., Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nir Eyal’s Indistractable, Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus; Cal Newport’s Deep Work, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, Chris Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call; Natalie M. Phillips’ Distraction, Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants, Neil Verma’s Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession. He refers to, among others, Plato, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Johnson, Lawrence Sterne, Paul Lafargue, Bill McKibben, Alex Ross, Donald Trump, and Greta Thunberg. He discusses “fragmentation of consciousness,” “multifocality,” “the right to be lazy,” “attention capitalism,” “obsession culture.” He mixes all these variegated ingredients into his composition and – voilà! – produces a dazzling, coherent argument. It’s quite a performance! 

I like the way Immerwahr pushes back against conventional opinion. For example, he says of TikTok,

Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers.

The Internet doesn’t shred our attention spans; it stokes our obsessions. Immerwahr writes,

The nightmare the alarmists conjure is of a TikTok-addled screen-ager. This isn’t a full picture of the present, though, and it might not reveal much about the future, either. Ours is an era of obsession as much as distraction, of long forms as much as short ones, of zeal as much as indifference. To ascribe our woes to a society-wide attention-deficit disorder is to make the wrong diagnosis.

I think he’s right.  

Postscript: A special shout-out to David Plunkert for his vivid illustration of Immerwahr’s piece. 

Svetlana Alpers's "Is Art History?"

Svetlana Alpers's The Art of Describing (1983) is one of my touchstones. It’s a study of Dutch art in the 17th century. It argues that central aspects of that art can best be understood as being an art of describing as distinguished from the narrative art of Italy. It’s basically a defence of description: “Meaning resides in the careful representation of the world,” Alpers says. I read that over forty years ago; it’s been part of my personal credo ever since.

Alpers has a beautiful new book out – Is Art History? (2024). It’s a collection of her essays, including the great “Describe or Narrate? A Problem in Realistic Representation” (1976), in which she plants the seed that later burgeons into The Art of Describing. Is Art History? surprises in that it contains not only essays on old masters like Bruegel, Velázquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt, but also pieces on modern artists such as Alex Katz, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Catherine Murphy, and Shirley Jaffe. One of my favorites is “Rebecca Horn: Chorus of the Locusts I and II,” a delightful account of Alpers’s discovery of two of Horn’s installations in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. It begins wonderfully: “I came upon this pair of works by Rebecca Horn on a miserable rainy day in late winter in Hamburg.” Alpers explores the main floors of the museum and finds several “singular things” (e.g., “a dark vertical canvas filled to the top with a flower bed lit from the front – an alternative to a still life painted, surprisingly, by the young Renoir”). She finds herself in a happy and receptive mood – “happy because I was enjoyably involved in looking.” Then she happens on the two Horns. She writes,

Near the top of the building there was another staircase, as if to an attic. Worth the effort? I went up anyway and emerged in an odd room. I’d never seen anything quite like it. The ceiling was lined with rows of typewriters, neatly arranged. Monumental, out-of-date office machines hung upside down. Here and there and now and then one or two typed away for a time and then stopped. The beat was kept (was that the point?) by a blind man’s stick, white and hanging loosely down. The ribbon spewed out from one machine (had something gone wrong? could it be fixed?) onto the bare gallery floor. There was no real reason to bother with something like this, but I was intrigued and stayed on, attending to the erratic noise and trying to connect it to the movements that were going on. It took time. I never succeeded in getting it quite right.

Turning, I saw another room, companion to the first. This time the ceiling was bare, but the floor was covered for no apparent reason with row upon row of empty wineglasses – four thousand of them, Horn has noted – carefully set in place. The rims and bowls were glistening, reflecting the available light. Were they meant to contrast with the dull, black metal of the suspended typewriters next door? Perhaps seeing them this way, as still lifes grown to the size of a room, comes from looking at photographs of them after the fact. But there and then something moved ever so slightly. From the midst of many glasses certain ones struck their neighbors to make a distinctive, dull clink. The movement and the sound brough the objects to life. As in the first room, this put one in the mood for some attentive looking, the essential museum mood, one might say. The intermittent chatter of tapping keys and now, in addition, the occasional chatter of clinking glasses continued. Otherwise isolated objects or beings had been brought together and began to perform some odd ritual of their own. It was a clever construct, but also a melancholy one. 

I love Alpers’s description of the two installations. I love that she doesn’t strain to extract a meaning from them. She asks questions, and that’s enough. The pleasure of looking is the point (“happy because I was enjoyably involved in looking”). 

Susan Tallman, in her absorbing “The Occupation of Looking” (The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2024), a review of Is Art History?, praises Alpers’s “habits of slow looking.” She says, “It’s fun to watch her question her own responses, take things apart, look again.” The title of Tallman’s piece perfectly encapsulates Alpers’s approach.

Confessions of a Conflicted Blogger

Illustration by Jon Han

The New Yorker has produced a wonderful 100th Anniversary Issue. I want to blog about it. I suppose I could do it on my new blog The Driftwood Almanac. But doesn’t it make more sense to celebrate The New Yorker right here at my old home – The New Yorker & Me? I think so. 

It's been only eight days since I published my “Last Post” on The New Yorker & Me. But already I’m having second, third, and fourth thoughts. Politics triggered the stoppage. I’m a Canadian. Trump’s tariff war and his musings about making Canada the 51st State infuriate me. Nevertheless, I now see that allowing politics to interfere with literary pleasure is crazy.

The New Yorker & Me has been a labor of love for fifteen years. Do I want to let it go just because of Trump? I don't think so. There’s plenty of life left in The New Yorker & Me. I’m going to resume writing it. 

The Driftwood Almanac has potential, I think. I’ll put it on hold for now. I’ll re-post the note on Svetlana Alpers to The New Yorker & Me. I apologize for my inconsistency over the last eight days. I think I’ve got it together now. The path is clear. The New Yorker & Me lives on. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #5 Namwali Serpell's " 'She's Capital!' "

Taylour Paige as A'Ziah "Zola" King in Janicza Bravo's Zola

[I wrote this piece before I decided to stop blogging. I’ve decided to post it. I enjoy writing this series. I think I'll complete it. - J.M.] 

For me, one of the most transfixing movies of the 21st century so far is Janicza Bravo’s Zola (2021). It’s about a part-time Detroit stripper named Zola and the crazy, dangerous road trip she takes to Florida with another young stripper (Jessica), whom she’s only just met. The film pulses with unhinged action and has a jumpy, jazzy, spangled look. A title card near the beginning explains that Zola originated as a Twitter thread.

When I first saw Zola, I was stunned. What an extraordinary movie! Did others feel the same way? I sought reviews that might help me understand my response. Some were effusive in their praise. But they didn’t quite satisfy. Then I read Namwali Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” (The New York Review of Books, July 21, 2022). Boom! A great movie finds its ideal critic. Or, put it the other way, a great critic finds her ideal movie. 

Serpell approaches Zola obliquely. She starts not with the movie, but with various artistic conceptions of whoredom, including Emile Zola’s novel Nana and Édouard Manet’s Olympia. She quotes Marx: “Prostitution is only the specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer.” She’s not sure Marx is right. “Is the prostitute a canny producer or a rapacious consumer?” she asks. All of this is interesting. But, for me, it’s only when Serpell turns her attention to Zola that her piece really takes off. And, man, does it take off! She writes about the movie’s vivid gas station restroom scene:

The effect of Olympia’s maid lives on. Stefani, the white sex worker, is thin and blonde and all-American, but her voice and manner—she combs her baby hairs, twerks her ass, raps along to hip-hop—are infused with blackness. This is meant to reverse some stereotypes. At one point on the road trip, Stefani exaggeratedly mocks a black stripper for being “nasty” and “dirty,” when we’ve just seen Stefani herself being exactly that during a pit stop. In the gas station bathroom, the camera floats above the stalls (the chamber pot again), dividing the screen between Stefani’s stall (she sits; she doesn’t wipe; her urine is an unhealthy egg-yolk yellow) and Zola’s (she hovers; she asks for some toilet paper; her urine barely tinges the water). The white woman, not the black one, is the “dirty ho.”

Okay, Serpell, you’ve got my attention. Never before have I read a comparative analysis of urine in a movie review. But Zola calls for it. Pee color is relevant to its meaning. As Serpell points out, it shows that “The white woman, not the black one, is the ‘dirty ho.’ ”

The centerpiece of Zola – it’s climax, so to speak – is the extended scene at the second motel. Serpell describes it superbly:

Stefani changes into an innocent-schoolgirl outfit straight out of Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time” video. A bearded middle-aged white man arrives. As soon as Zola opens the door, he complains: “I ordered a white chick.” Zola rolls her eyes, negotiates the transaction, then turns away from the bed as her voiceover deadpans, “They start fucking, it was gross.” When the sex is over and Zola hears how little money he has paid, she’s aghast: “Pussy is worth thousands, bitch.” She takes a new picture of Stefani to advertise her services on BackPage, and raises the prices. Soon, as in Nana, the men are practically lined up at the door. For some reason (aren’t we in Florida?), they’re all white.

The film highlights the johns’ interchangeability in their turns with Stefani: they take off their clothes; they manipulate her body; they climax. These shots appear in horizontal rows so we see a sliding blazon of male chests, stomachs, crotches. We seem to be scrolling through them as if we’re on Tinder or Instagram, bestowing exploding heart emojis over pecs and dicks. The grotesquerie of the images is meant to interrupt what pleasure the scene might otherwise prompt. It’s, again, a reversal—men rather than women divided into parts, turned into a series.

My favorite part of Serpell’s review is her description of Zola’s style. She writes,

Its aesthetic, like other films produced by A24, has an air of gentrified graffiti, a palette like a neon bruise. But Bravo beautifully contains the sun-shot pastels of Florida in the manner of a David Hockney painting, and the film deftly references its origins on social media. With a camera-shutter sound, the screen freezes into a snapshot that shrinks into a corner, like on an iPhone; with a cha-ching of change, hearts flash or rise up the screen, like in an Instagram Live; with clickety-clicks and emoji bursts, texts are typed into being; the date and time appear at the top of the screen in a thin white font, then vanish—both with a click; and we occasionally hear the Twitter whistle, as the screenplay explains, “to pay homage when a line in the script is identical to one of @_zolarmoon’s tweets.”

That “palette like a neon bruise” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – every bit as artful and brilliant as the movie it describes. 

Last Post

Photo by Todd Hido

Time to pack it in. I’ve lost my appetite for all things American, including The New Yorker. Thank you to all my followers. It’s been quite a journey. I enjoyed it immensely. But it’s time for me to do something else. Maybe in a few months, I’ll start another blog. But for now, I’m done.

Postscript: Since writing the above, I've started a new blog. It's called The Driftwood Almanac. You can find it here. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Robert Sullivan's "The Meadowlands"

This is the second 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 The Meadowlands.

The subtitle of this great book is “Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of the City.” That’s exactly what it is. Sullivan immerses us in a thirty-two-square-mile marsh that is just five miles from the Empire State Building. The area is known as the Meadowlands. It’s not as pastoral as it sounds. It used to be the largest garbage dump in the world. It’s full of abandoned junkyards, polluted canals, and anonymous factories. It’s crossed by a web of highways, bridges, overpasses, culverts, cloverleafs, railroads, and unmarked trails. Sullivan calls it “the world’s greatest industrial swamp.” He loves the place. He drives it, hikes it, canoes it, explores it. He even digs in it. Why? What draws him to it? Early in the book, he hints at an answer:

I marvel that the land before me was called “a swampy, mosquito-infested jungle ... where rusting auto bodies, demolition rubble, industrial oil slicks and cattails, merge in unholy, stinking union” by the authors of a 1978 federal report, and that now it is a good place to see a black-crowned night heron or a pied-billed grebe or eighteen species of ladybugs, even if some of the waters these creatures fly over can often times be the color of antifreeze. 

I think it’s the blend of first and second nature that grabs Sullivan. One of the environmentalists he speaks with has a term for it – urban nature. It certainly grabs me. I love his descriptions of it. This one, for example:

The very idea of being in a canoe in the waters off the New Jersey Turnpike was viscerally thrilling, but this thrill was counterbalanced by a gnawing consideration of the toxicity of the environment, the end result being a kind of nervous tension that gripped us as we paddled through the marshes. Dave was the first to voice concern; he spoke after we inhaled a dank, sewery smell that seemed to have been stirred up by our paddles. “I feel like I just knocked a couple of years off my life,” Dave said. But as we spotted more and more birds, we grew more at ease, even if many of the birds seemed as anxious as we were. We began to notice the tail ends of muskrats as they paddled for cover in their huts. In addition to the traffic sounds of the turnpike, we soon heard splashing sounds, which we eventually determined to be spawning carp. Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires.

And this:

Around us there were green hills of grass-covered garbage dumps. We saw more carp, more muskrats, mudflats covered with sandpipers, and the frozen-in-time remains of a snapping turtle that appeared to have been decapitated by a train just as it had crawled up out of the marsh. We also saw a Thermos, three unopened cans of Pepsi, a beach chair sitting on another island, and a Seven Seas Red Wine Vinegar salad dressing spill. Passing over more underwater fences, we felt as if we were paddling just above Atlantis. At precisely one hour and fifty-two minutes into our trip, we saw our first abandoned appliance, a refrigerator.

The book abounds with the kind of active first-person narrative sentence I devour:

One day I drove across the Meadowlands to Newark to find Seth Boyden’s grave. 

One spring, I flew to Newark, rented a car, and checked into a hotel with the idea of touring around and just seeing where events would lead me

One day, while meandering along the edge of an area in the Meadows known as the Kingsland Marsh, I knocked on the door of the rectangular-shaped control room of the broadcasting facility for WINS, a New York news radio station.

I strapped the canoe to my rental car and started out early on the morning of our first adventure.

One afternoon I drove back through a field of abandoned cars and walked along the edge of a garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that owed its topography to the waste of the city of Newark.

One day I went out in Leo’s canoe and we were specifically hunting for treasure.

I met Sheehan for a boat ride in Carlstadt one day, at the dock behind the Golf center that he calls his home port.

That “with the idea of touring around and just seeing where events would lead me” captures Sullivan’s approach to his subject perfectly. He’s sort of a Meadowlands flaneur. For example, he reads in an old guidebook that the Kearny Library is home to the world’s largest collection of foreign translations of Gone with the Wind. He visits the library, hoping to see the collection. While there, he views an exhibition on Kearny’s world-renowned reputation for soccer. This leads him to Kearny’s Scottish American Club, where he meets “a Scottish gentleman who was sitting on a stool at the bar with a half-gone pint of ale and who promptly and amiably discussed the secret of Kearny’s soccer success with me.” Sullivan can’t make out what the Scottish guy is saying. He writes,

This was simply because I don’t speak either Scottish or drunk Scottish. During our chat, I picked out the words television and Kearny and soccer. He punctuated his remarks with the phrase “Thaws sheet!”

“Thaws sheet!” he said.

“I’m sorry?” I said, begging his pardon and indicating that I hoped he would repeat himself.

“Thaws sheet!” he said again.

I nodded and ordered up a beer.

Sullivan talks with all sorts of Meadowlands people: Dan McDonough, Secaucus historian; Anthony Just, mayor of Secaucus; Tom Marturano, Director of Solid Waste for the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission (HMDC); Chris Dour, solid waste engineer for HMDC; Anthony Malanka, operator of the Malanka Mall Landfill, on the shore of the Hackensack River in Secaucus; Leonard Soccio, chief inspector in the mosquito control division of the Bergen County Department of Public Works; Victor Deserio, mosquito inspector; Steve Pavel, mosquito inspector; Leo Koncher, a Kearny resident, whom Sullivan describes as “an unofficial poet laureate of the Meadowlands”; Jeanette Abels, operations manager of the remediation program at PJP landfill; Harry J. McNally, Pennsylvania Railroad’s chief engineer, now retired and living in Florida; Paul Amico, former mayor of Secaucus; John Watson, retired detective from Kearny; Bill Sheehan, founder of the Hackensack Estuaries and River Tender Corporation (HEART); Don Smith, naturalist with the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission.

My favorite chapter of The Meadowlands is “Walden Swamp,” an account of two canoe trips that Sullivan and his friend Dave take across the Meadowlands. The first trip is across the broad, almost impenetrable Kearny Marsh. Here’s an excerpt:

We entered our second marsh, which was similar to the first, except perhaps more reed filled. I later learned that these small bodies of impounded water were formed at random, by the construction of railroad lines and the new and old turnpikes, but from the vantage point of our canoe at that moment, this seemed as natural a way to form a body of water as any. It was here, in the second swamp, that we came upon our first stumps from the Meadowlands old cedar forest. The stumps floated like corpses, their roots disappearing in the dark water. We poked at their tentacles with our oars, as a couple of red-winged blackbirds looked on suspiciously. A few minutes later, in a spot far from roads and highways, we discovered little islands, composed wholly of reeds. One island was surrounded by bright yellow police emergency tape: CAUTION, the tape said. Another island was inhabited by a lonely six-foot stepladder. In the next marsh, before an audience of terns, we canoed past a submerged control room of a radio transmission station, its giant antenna felled in the water like a child’s broken toy. In the water below our canoe, we could just make out fences topped with barb wire. I knew this to be the remains of one of the oldest radio antennae in the Meadowlands, thought to be the first to ever broadcast the voice of Frank Sinatra. When we approached Belleville Turnpike, we pulled our canoe and all our gear up over a four-foot-wide pipe that carried the water supply of Jersey City, and then, with the boat on our shoulders, we ran, timing our dash across the highway with the break in the waves of cars and trucks. 

The second expedition is via Berry’s Creek and its manmade tributary, Berry’s Creek Canal, to Walden Swamp in the northwestern part of the Meadowlands. Sullivan writes,

The day was hot and clear. We put in our canoe on the Hackensack River on the northern end of Secaucus between an apartment complex and a cement plant. While we were gearing up, a man in his late fifties parked his car next to us and tried to convince me to leave my car keys on top of my front tire. He assured me they would be perfectly safe there but I kept my keys in my pocket and watched the man mutter and pace back and forth on shore as we began paddling south – passing ducks, the backs of outlet stores, and a set of Hess oil tanks, both protected by floating yellow link-sausage-shaped oil spill containment devices. Once again there were roads all around us but the river was quiet. We passed beneath a highway interchange and lay on our backs admiring the sky as it was outlined by three elevated highways: I saw an arrowhead, Dave saw the pointer that you move around with a mouse on a computer screen. When we turned off the Hackensack and onto Berry’s Creek Canal and began our trip into the north-west, we steered the canoe toward the banks and secretly observed the migratory patterns of the cars.

One of the great pleasures of The Meadowlands is the writing – specific, concrete, vivid. Examples:

The water was chocolate brown; I saw bits of wood and Styrofoam, two juice bottles, and clump after clump of broken reeds.

The current was quiet but ferocious; it swirled around our oars as we fought against it to cross under a railroad bridge with a charred-steak black frame.

The old dump had been capped with clay, sand, and soil; the vents of a gas ventilation system dotted the surface of the rolling hill like periscopes.

We continued to hike through the dumps, on unmarked, reed-hidden trails, through jittery groves of garbage-supported aspen.

Smith grew up in Little Ferry, on the north end of the meadows, eating meals with pig farm-salvaged silverware that had the Waldorf-Astoria’s markings on it.

But after a while, he let me look into the big wicker basket he carried on his back: it was filled with muskrats. The muskrats had long thick black tails and long yellow teeth that were curved like uncut fingernails.

The Meadowlands is a superb exploration of a vast, complex industrial swamp. In future posts, I’ll discuss it in more detail – its action, structure, description, and so on. But first I want to review the third book in my trio – Ian Frazier’s extraordinary On the Rez. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.