Is Writing Just Technology? (Contra Louis Menand)

Louis Menand, in his absorbing “The Curious Power of Punctuation” (newyorker.com, September 21, 2026), says, “In the end, writing is just technology. There is nothing magical about it.” Is Menand just being provocative, or does he really mean it? His piece is a review of two books – Florence Hazrat’s On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World and Sarah L. Kaufman’s Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. It moves from a witty discussion of punctuation (“But she doesn’t seem to know the semicolon’s correct usage. She thinks it’s a big comma, when it’s actually a small period”) to a consideration of the future of writing (“These books are reminders that we are in the middle of a revolution in the phenomenology of reading, a major change in what it is like to consume writing”). Menand predicts, “Soon, people will no longer make a distinction between writing made by a human and writing made by a machine. It will all simply be writing.” It’s here that he makes his extraordinary statement: “In the end, writing is just a technology. There is nothing magical about it.” 

To which the only possible response is “Oy!” Writing is not technology; it’s communication – communication of stories, events, ideas, actions, sorrows, pleasures, reflections, observations, journeys, battles, arguments, explorations, on and on. It’s the art of representing life in words. I love reading great writers, not just for what they say, but how they say it – the rhythm, tone, texture of their prose, their choice of words, their use of metaphor, their point of view, the way they structure their narratives. They use all the tools in their extensive tool kits. It’s a treat to watch them do it. And yes, there is something magical about it – the transmutation of world into words. 

Menand himself occasionally works that magic. One of my favorite pieces by him is “Drive, He Wrote” (The New Yorker, October 1, 2007). It’s a consideration of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Movement. Most of it is cultural history – the background to On the Road, how it came to be written, the road trips, the celebrated scroll, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, a comparison of On the Road with Lolita (“Nabokov showed writers how to squeeze a morality tale inside a Fabergé egg; Kerouac showed how to stretch a canvas across an entire continent”), and so on. But in the last paragraph Menand shifts gears. He describes a personal experience. There’s feeling in it; the piece suddenly flares to life. Here’s the passage:

Books like “On the Road” have a different kind of influence as well. They can, whether we think of them as great literature or not, get into the blood. They give content to experience. Many years after my encounters with Ginsberg around the department water fountain, I took a job in Boston, two hundred miles from New York, and I ended up commuting there by car. I drove at night, so that the trip would not eat up the workday, and I often stopped for gas at a service area on the Mass Pike about fifty miles from Boston. It’s fairly high above sea level there, in the lower ranges of the Berkshires, and I would stand at the pump in the dark looking at the stars in the cold clear sky as the semis roared past and with the wind in my hair, and I liked to imagine that I was a character in Kerouac’s novel, lost to everyone I knew and to everyone who knew me, somewhere in America, on the road. Then I would get in the car, and, bent over the wheel, while the trucks beat on past me, and the radio crackled, the sound going in and out, with oldies from the seventies, I began the long drop down to the lights of Boston, late in the night, late in my life, alone.

It’s an extraordinary passage. On the Road is no longer just a cultural artifact – something interesting to write about. Menand gives it personal meaning. It’s an inspired way to end his review, and I doubt Generative AI could ever “write” it. The passage is personal to Menand. Only he could conceive it. 

Credit: The above illustrstion by Abraham Lule is from Louis Menand's "The Curious Power of Punctuation" (newyorker.com, September 21, 2026).

Colin Burrow on Helen Vendler's "Inhabit the Poem"

I want to respond to Colin Burrow’s “Good Weird or Bad Weird” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2026). It’s a review of Helen Vendler’s Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays (2025). Vendler is one of my heroes. I’ve posted over forty notes about her on this blog. She’s written some of my favorite books – Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980), The Music of What Happens (1988), Soul Says (1995). These are works of literary criticism – collections of critical essays – some of the best ever written. 

My response to Burrow’s piece is mixed. I laud him for choosing to write about Vendler. I’m pleased that he appreciates her greatness. At the end of his review he says, “She was as good as it gets.” I agree. But he also says things about her that I question. For example, he says she tends to mention other critics “only when she thinks they’re wrong.” Well, Vendler was a formidable polemicist. It’s one of the reasons I read her. She often took issue with other critics’ views. Recall her brilliant “Lionel Trilling and Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode” (included in The Music of What Happens), in which she strongly argues that Trilling’s Freudian reading of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode neglects its aesthetic power – it’s invention of “a daring language of disorientation.” 

However, Vendler also praised other critics. In the Introduction to her The Odes of John Keats, she writes,

One book very valuable to me – John Jones’s John Keats’s Dream of Truth – has approached Keats phenomenologically, examining his poetry of sensation in terms of its extraordinary empathetic power, and the struggle of this diction of sensation with Keats’s “dream” of truth. No one interested, as I am, in Keats’s language in its smallest units of phrasing can have failed to be influenced by Jones’s uncanny grasp of Keats’s way of feeling and seeing, and by his flexible shaping of an intellectual way of examining such elusive phenomena.

Other critics Vendler wrote admiringly about include Harold Bloom, Theodor Adorno, Geoffrey Hartman, Roland Barthes, and Seamus Heaney. She calls Heaney’s essays on Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Yeats “bravura pieces of characterization, the best in recent memory”: “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me,” in Soul Says (1995).

Another questionable statement Burrow makes is that “her use of the critical 'we' often carries the supra-personal authority of someone who doesn’t have reason to doubt her entitlement to the plural form.” Vendler seldom used “we.” Burrow cites an example from her essay on A. R. Ammons (“The Snow Poems and Garbage: Episodes in A. R. Ammons’s Poetics,” in her The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, 2015). But Vendler’s personal pronoun of choice was “I.” She used it extensively.

Burrow makes another statement about Vendler that I question. He says her view of lyric “is distinctly para-religious.” I don’t think so, not “distinctly.” There’s an element of “soul” (“To me, what soul says seems convincing,” she says in the Introduction to her superb Soul Says), but it’s part of a deeper consideration. The word I would use to describe her view of lyric, the word that she used over and over, the word that is curiously missing from Burrow’s piece is “aesthetic.” Vendler wrote aesthetic criticism. This is why I love her work. “The aim of aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration”: Introduction to The Music of What Happens. This was her purpose. This was her credo. She got away from it a bit in her last book – Inhabit the Poem. But I love the title. It comes from a wonderful passage in Chapter 2 (“The Enigmatical Beauty of Each Beautiful Enigma”) on Wallace Stevens’s “The Bird with the Coppery Keen Claws”: “What was the work the poet was demanding of me? It was to inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world.”  

Burrow, in his piece, spends a thousand words defining literary criticism. Why? All he needed to do was quote the above lines from Inhabit the Poem. To his credit, he eventually does.   

Four Essays on Fairfield Porter

One of this year’s best essays is Dan Chiasson’s “Where the Meanings Are” (The New York Review of Books, August 20.2026). It’s a review of the exhibition “Fairfield Porter: What Everyone Knows” at the Art Students League, New York City. It’s not only a superb analysis of Porter’s painting, it’s a travel piece, too! Chiasson is excellent on Porter’s painting style. He says,

Porter’s brushstrokes seem at times still wet to the touch, trailing off like vapor before suddenly detonating a bluster of peach or indigo. Paint plays out luxuriously and abstractly within the idea of summer things like Bermuda shorts, clay courts, lawns, and tablecloths, as it does for other painters only in a stormy sea or roiling sky.

I’m interested in Porter. He first came to my attention many years ago when I read John Updike’s great “Violence at the Windows” (included in his 1989 Just Looking). It’s a review of the 1983 show “Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The title derives from Updike’s observation “Sunlight explodes with terrific violence at the windows of his hushed interiors.” Updike gave the show a mixed review. He says, “There are perhaps six superb paintings and two dozen more that well reward contemplation. The rest are tainted to a greater or lesser degree by a quality one might call amateurism.” Ouch! One of the paintings he liked is Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969). He wrote,

Interior with a Dress Pattern, the most closely worked painting in the show, describes a domestic interior so lovingly that the viewer feels invited to come in and take a chair; its range of reds and dark golds compares with the sumptuous calm of Matisse’s Red Studio and Piero della Francesca’s stately explorations of perspective.

A reproduction of Interior with a Dress Pattern illustrates Updike’s piece. I’d never seen it before. It struck me as wonderful. Still does. 

Chiasson doesn’t mention Interior with a Dress Pattern. He focuses on Porter’s “Schuyler” paintings, e.g., Jimmy and John (1957-58), A Day Indoors (1962), and The Screen Porch (1964). One of Chiasson’s best passages is his description of A Day Indoors:

A third view of Schuyler, A Day Indoors (1962), hangs beside the ugly people. Schuyler has again commandeered the best seat: on this cold summer day in Maine, he warms himself by the roaring hearth in “the big house” on Great Spruce Head Island. Three figures, Schuyler and the two girls, are smaller, and somewhat indistinct, and seem included partly for scale and contrast; the star of the painting is the room, with its poppy-red painted floor and deteriorating, high-kitsch New England decor, including a model sloop and, above the fire, a reproduction of one of the Elgin Marbles. The accent is on a colorful, braided oval rug, a standard L.L. Bean item, so familiar you can almost smell the must. The chairs and furniture in the room jut at sharp angles and form a visual chute that creates a measure of suspense about the closed door at its terminus. (Ominous music: Is Anne Porter about to enter?) The details in the painting seem to hang on the vertical axis, like buoys in a fishing net. But the area rug is perfectly flush with the frame in the lower-right corner, where a mapmaker would locate his key. This summer cottage staple, repeating the spectrum of colors in the overall composition, is a kind of palette: you could imagine Porter dipping a brush into one of those vivid stripes to touch up Schuyler’s khakis or pale red button-down. Or, with its suggestion of dynamic, spiraling depth, perhaps it’s a drain, threatening to suck this moody group back out to sea, like bilge.

I love that “The accent is on a colorful, braided oval rug, a standard L.L. Bean item, so familiar you can almost smell the must.”

The New Yorker’s Zachary Fine also reviewed the Art Students League’s exhibition. At first, Fine appears not to be a Porter fan. He says in his opening paragraph, “I think if you saw a lone painting of his in a junk shop, unsigned and unframed, you’d find it perfectly pleasing and mediocre.” But it turns out he likes the show. He writes,

Porter studied at the League under Thomas Hart Benton—one of his classmates was a fellow named Jackson Pollock—and the experience of seeing his work here, as students hustle by with their backpacks and the perfume of turpentine wafts through the air, feels organic and just right. The gallery is evenly and fluorescently lit, and all thirty-five or so of Porter’s featured paintings are in a single room, concentrating his palette of lime greens and creamy yellows and oxblood reds into one bright, soul-cleansing burst.

Fine says, “Let the paintings breathe for a while, let them interact with one another and with your thoughts, and they’ll meld together with salt breeze and summer light.”

Reading these delightful pieces, I recalled another excellent essay on Porter – Peter Schjeldahl’s “Stern Beauty” (The New Yorker, April 17, 2000; included in his 2008 collection Let’s See). It contains this pithy observation: “For Porter, the ordinary was an urgent ideal.” As usual, Schjeldahl nailed it.

Chiasson’s piece ends beautifully with an account of his visit to Porter’s summer home on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine. This place figures centrally in many of Porter’s best paintings. Chiasson writes,

Approaching “the big house,” a child bounded out to greet us, reporting with some satisfaction that there were no waffles left. The interior depicted in A Day Indoors remains unchanged from Porter’s depiction of it, down to the poppy-colored floors. (Floors in several bathrooms in houses on the island are done in the same color: there was “surplus paint,” David conjectured.) Upstairs, “Jimmy’s room” is just as it was the day Schuyler wrote “Buried at Springs,” his elegy for Frank O’Hara, while fending off a hornet. The poem is partly about writing O’Hara’s tribute at the desk where O’Hara himself had sat eleven years before, and “saw and heard it all.” It’s all still there, the desk, the bed, the spruces and sound of lapping water, as both poets saw and heard it; before we left, I sat down in Schuyler’s rocking chair, still positioned closest to the hearth.

I love it when a critic steps away from his desk and goes out into the world, seeking personal experience of the subject he’s writing about. Chiasson’s visit to Porter’s house on Great Spruce Head Island provides an inspired conclusion to a splendid review. I enjoyed it immensely.  

Credit: The above illustration is Fairfield Porter's Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969).

On Matisse's "Woman with a Hat": Fine vs. Clark

Zachary Fine, in his absorbing “Matisse’s Ugliest Painting” (newyorker.com, August 31, 2026), says of Henri Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” (1905), “The painting looks like a box of melted saltwater taffy that’s been churned together and encouraged to express itself as a chic fungus.” He says that he still can’t reconcile himself to “the shock of its ugliness.”

Fine tells us why he finds it ugly. He says,

The painting is filled with inconsistencies and bizarre compensatory moves. Its attitude can be summarized by a single square inch at the base of Amélie’s neck, where one finds eight colors in competition: orange, yellow, blue, white, teal, apricot, pale brown, and some black, as underdrawing.

He goes on,

Matisse takes every opportunity to disturb passages of chromatic balance. The red hair that connects with the green of Amélie’s temple? It’s interrupted by a few strokes of magenta, to increase the tension. The blue of the hat’s brim? A splash of teal agitates its roundness. While some of the color contrasts do articulate planar shifts, such as the candy-stripe lips (red for upper, pink for lower), many of the touches are arbitrary splotches that neither bolster a shape nor set another off. I have to imagine that Matisse was tickled by his decision to put a large tract of green in front of Madame’s face and, instead of extending it all the way to her throat, suddenly introduce a purple goatee.

He says,

The aspect of the painting that troubles me most, though, is the sleeve of Amélie’s dress. Fauvism was supposedly characterized by the phasing out of the Neo-Impressionist tache, or uniformly pointillist stroke—abundant in “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” and “The Port of Abail”—in favor of broader patches of color, but the green sleeve, with its cobra-headed cuff, is a creepy disturbance to the brushwork elsewhere. Compared with the thick smudges of white on the fan that Amélie is holding, or the broad, lush strokes of the background, the sleeve is fidgety. None of its marks seem to maintain their integrity for more than an inch or two without being fretted or spoiled. There’s a slight air of death around it, as if the arm is deteriorating in front of us.

This is good provocative criticism. Some of the descriptions make me smile, e.g., “chic fungus,” “anxious smear job.”  

But is Fine right? Is “Woman with a Hat” ugly? T. J. Clark, in his brilliant “Madame Matisse’s Hat” (London Review of Books, August 14, 2008; included in his great 2025 collection Those Passions), says no. He doesn’t say so expressly, but it’s implicit in his ravishing descriptions of the painting. Consider this passage:

What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! Clark is amazed by the colors. He doesn’t dismiss them as “arbitrary splotches” as Fine does. Instead, he attempts to interpret them: 

All the same, some colours occur only once, at crucial junctures. Look at the purple curlicue I pointed to earlier, between the hand and cane; or the exact shade of green chosen for the bar of shadow (if that is what it is) across Parayre’s brow; or the kind of purpled mauve, more opaque and decisive than any of its many near relatives, that opens up the space at the front of her throat. The painter wants us to see the subtlety, and also the wilfulness, of his variations on a theme, or his seeing of different things in the same light; but then he also expects us to register the decisive leap out of the established scale. He wants us to notice, and to gasp at, his suddenly seeing how to fix, or transfix, a singular optical fact. Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it. Nothing could be more hardworking, more investigative and empirical, than the way her mouth is drawn. First there were two plain strips of red and pink – bars at the top of an abstract ladder of colour, pink for the chin, green for the recession above it, pink again for the underlip, and flaring red for the upper one. But then this abstraction of sensuality had to be made into a particular mouth. A tentative, half-transparent line of greyed mauve was put over the red to the left, as if trying to inscribe on top of it more of a Cupid’s bow. And a bolder, more opaque dab of mauve was put next to the pink of the lower lip, giving the left side of the mouth a shape. And was this the point at which the amazing, inorganic green of the shadow under the nose was strengthened, so as to intensify the play of complementaries? Did the pear drop of yellow occur as part of this process? Was it maybe thrown up by the business of getting the other greens and yellows to keep the mouth – the mouth’s wounded sensuality – from running away from the rest of the face? (Of course the mouth runs away with the picture. The picture turns on it. But for that very reason it had to be held down, and held back. It had to be intensely, naively correct.)

I love that “Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it.” Clark is clearly entranced by this painting. He says he finds it both “chilling” and “exhilarating.” 

Clark mainly focuses on Madame Matisse’s face and body. Of the hat, he says,

The hat is splendid, but slightly crushing. It casts an implacable green shadow straight along Parayre’s forehead, and its blue all but annihilates the red of her hair. But the hat is abstract: the painter does not seem interested in making its extravagance palpable.

Fine accords more significance to the hat than Clark does. He sees it as the embodiment of Matisse’s “project.” He says, 

In “Femme au Chapeau,” at least a third of the composition is chapeau—and this particular hat is more of a mangled fruit basket, in which nothing is decipherable. The purple tongue sticking out of the top might belong to an iris, and the lobes of reddish orange could be an apple, but they likely aren’t. We’re looking through the eyes of someone who doesn’t want to actually see the hat. Matisse’s project was to wrench the appearance of things, particularly their colors, away from reality, and to let them entertain a new internal correspondence guided by his expressive whims.

Fine calls the hat “a mangled fruit basket.” Clark calls it “a crazy bird’s nest of pleasures and promises.” Both images wonderfully express the sensuousness that, for me, is the essence of this great painting. 

Credit: The above illustration is Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905)

Love Rekindled, Subscription Renewed

Illustration by Diego Mallo

Is there life without The New Yorker? Yes, of course, but it’s a pallid, diminished life. 

And so today, after a long month of no New Yorkers, I renewed my subscription. Gradually I’ll begin to blog about the magazine again, maybe not every issue, just the pieces that really grab me. 

I’m still angry at Trump for trying to crush the Canadian economy. Nevertheless, there are many wonderful aspects of American life. The New Yorker is one of them. I was crazy to think I could live without it.

Postscript: Cassandra Wilson 1955 - 2026

Cassandra Wilson (Photo by Hiroyuki Ito)

I see in the Times that Cassandra Wilson has died. She’s one of my favorite jazz singers. What a voice! Low and smoky. Gary Giddins, in his New Yorker review of her superb 2008 album Loverly, said this:

Wilson has always thrived on rhythmic complexity, but her best work, including “Loverly,” balances it with melodic, harmonic, and verbal nuances that transform evergreens into personal deliberations, frequently underscored with an ironic eroticism. 

Giddins identified three of her attributes as a singer: “the husky timbre, which favors her lower register; an affinity for melodic embellishments replete with sighs and moans; and a canny back-of-the-beat rhythmic attack.”

I’d add a fourth: interpretive genius. Her renditions of “Skylark,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Last Train to Clarksville,” “Wichita Lineman,” “O Sole Mio,” “Black Orpheus,” to name just a few, are brilliant. Her version of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” is magic. Once heard, never forgotten. She’s gone now – way too soon. Her albums will live on. She joins Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald as one of the greatest jazz singers of all time.