10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #1 T. J. Clark's "Strange Apprentice"

This is the tenth and concluding post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is T. J. Clark’s exquisite “Strange Apprentice” (London Review of Books, October 8, 2020).

In this great piece – one of the subtlest, most delectable, enthralling studies of style I’ve ever read – Clark opened my eyes to the genius of Camille Pissarro. He begins by telling about the mentor-mentee relationship between Pissarro and Paul Cézanne. In the mid 1870s, Cézanne visited Pissarro and painted with him. Clark says, “Cézanne came to Pissarro to unlearn his first style.” Cézanne considered Pissarro a master. Clark tries to see Pissarro’s art through Cézanne’s eyes. He wants to avoid the usual contrasts between Pissarro and Cézanne – simple/complex, dull/interesting. He takes Pissarro’s seeming simplicity, seeming dullness, and opens them up, illuminating their beauty and depth. He does this by focusing on two of Pissarro’s paintings – Paysage à Pontoise (1872) and Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873). He says of Paysage à Pontoise,

So the true intensity of the new painting, Pissarro proposes, will inhere in its showing us what, after all, of beauty – of emphasis, of the suddenness of things seen – is there inthe dullness, not ‘punctuating’ it, not coming out of it. This is Pissarro’s painting’s triumph: the complete steadiness of its hold on a single plain state of the light; the subduing of every separate entity to that state; and the peculiar beauty of that submission. Granted, certain episodes in the scene are on the edge of becoming ‘things in themselves’. The pale grey of the tree trunk at left is one such, done in a single smear. Or the path with its rustle of uncut dry grass, and then the path losing its way by the fence and going on into distance, across the rough fields, as a tentative green smudge. The pale blotted saplings on the other side of the fence; the flattened horizon way off to the right; the small square darker cloud. These are astonishments – the mind and eye can feast on them. But they do not disturb the sense of the whole. They are fine tunings of a single song.

I love that “These are astonishments – the mind and eye can feast on them.” For me, it’s the ultimate critical compliment. But Clark is only getting started. His description of Le Champ de choux, Pontoise is extraordinary:

Can we agree that the light in Le Champ de choux, which is breathtaking, is some kind of high-summer gloaming, maybe with moisture in the early evening air? (Of course the painting is equivocal about clock time. It isn’t a Monet coucher de soleil. But early evening seems reasonable.) Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders.

I nominate that as one of the great passages in all of art writing. “The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth” is inspired! We are approaching mid-point in Clark’s essay. Where is he going with it? Is it possible he’s arguing for a reconsideration of Pissarro, one that rates him even greater than Cézanne? Yes and no. Yes to reconsideration; no to higher rating. For in the end – in the second half of the essay – Clark returns to Cézanne. He compares Cézanne’s copy of Louveciennes (c.1873) with Pissarro’s original:

The difference between the two Louveciennes is summed up by what happens to the mother and child. Cézanne’s human beings do not really cast shadows: the mother’s shadow slides away from her, thick on the surface, and disappears into a rut. (In the Pissarro the rut carries a little rivulet of rainwater. Cézanne has no time for such traces of weather.) Space in Cézanne, we already begin to see, is not a reality inhabited by others besides ourselves, beings with an equal claim on the landscape. His two figures are groundless ghosts: they’re about to go around the corner into the abyss. Space in Pissarro is essentially containment, a form of surrounding: it can in the end be metaphorised, as here, by a holding of hands, the reaching up of a child to its mother. In Cézanne the gesture is the first thing to go. There need be no green gate at far left in the copy, leading out to other people’s property – marks of ownership are not part of seeing for Cézanne. No real light comes over the copy’s horizon – just a theatrical backlighting, which splashes crudely against the houses on the hill, breaking them into facets. There is no evening glow under the arches of the aqueduct. And of course no agriculture to speak of, no field system, no raked earth in peasant plots, no lines of new planting. Pissarro liked to call himself ‘a painter of cabbages’. Cézanne’s seeing does not divulge identities of this kind.

Clark finds the comparison of the two Louveciennes telling. He says, “The interest of the copy is not that Cézanne couldn’t do these many things that Pissarro could, but that the failures turn out to have their own coherence, their own aesthetic dignity: they shadow forth the Cézanne we know.” 

Clark also compares Cezanne’s Maison et arbre, quartier de l’Hermitage (1874) with Pissarro’s Maison bourgeoise à l’Hermitage (1873). He remarks on the “sheer strangeness” of the Cézanne – its “weird electricity.”  Strangeness is Clark’s governing aesthetic. Earlier in the piece, he calls it “the marker of modernity.” Cézanne is strange; Pissarro isn’t. This determines Clark’s ultimate judgment: “Cézanne was the greater artist.”

In the essay’s concluding paragraph, Clark makes one more inspired comparison:

Put Jas de Bouffan next to Inondation à Saint-Ouen-L’Aumône. The latter is dated 1873. (Saint-Ouen was a few miles downstream from Auvers, a village just beginning to be a suburb.) Look at the stretch of land in Saint-Ouen leading off between the trees to the village ... and the awkward pomposity of the house and chimney in the centre ... the factory smokestack just visible through branches to the left ... the birds battling the wind, the clouds still threatening rain ... the reflection in the water of the fruit tree’s supports. Humble and colossal. Every observation solid as a rock. A social world. The earth emerging after the flood. What must it have been like to have discovered, under such painting’s spell, that Pissarro’s feeling for time and place – his anarchist confidence in history beginning again – could not be one’s own?

Pissarro’s solidity versus Cézanne’s strangeness. It’s no contest. Cézanne wins. Or does he? Clark’s final paragraph gives Pissarro his beautiful due: “Humble and colossal”; “Every observation solid as a rock”; “Pissarro’s feeling for time and place.” My takeaway from this magnificent piece is Pissarro’s rich simplicity. Yes, Cézanne is the star. But Pissarro quietly steals the show. 

Credit: The above illustration is Camille Pissarro’s Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873).

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #2 Patricia Lockwood's "Malfunctioning Sex Robot"

This is the ninth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Patricia Lockwood’s savage “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019).

Savage? Oh yes. John Updike’s work has been panned before, but never to this extreme. Lockwood slaughters him. Her first sentence warns of her intent:

I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.

It is a bloodbath. The piece is divided in seven sections. In the first section, Lockwood says,

In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has learned to read. Today, he has fallen even further, still in the pantheon but marked by an embarrassed asterisk: DIED OF PUSSY-HOUNDING. No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter. 

That last sentence went straight into my personal anthology of great critical zingers. 

Section 1 also contains a striking metaphor – “Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965) light up section by section, like a countryside freshly wired for electricity” – that shines a beam throughout the piece. (Subsequent sections on Rabbit, Run and The Centaur each begin with the word “flash.”) 

In the second section, Lockwood analyzes Updike’s youth – his relationship with his mother (“She throws her voice and her atmospheres through his keyholes; it is his mother’s eye that examines his characters’ wives, to see whether they are good enough for him”), the traumatic move from Shillington to the farm in Plowville [“The solitude there verged on quarantine; the close harmonies of his four elders (his mother’s parents lived with them) repeated, turned dissonant, and set his teeth on edge; the place almost certainly made him a writer”]. 

Section 3 continues the examination of his life and then, at the mention of Rabbit Redux, turns bitingly sarcastic:

If you were worried that somewhere in this sweeping tetralogy Rabbit wasn’t going to ejaculate all over a teenager and then compare the results to a napalmed child, you can rest easy.

Section 4 is a wonderful capsule review of the first book of the Rabbit quartet – Rabbit, Run (“The writing sounds like the inside of an athlete’s head: clipped, staccato, strategic, as nearly empty as a high-school gym, with only himself inside it”). Lockwood says of Updike’s writing, “When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning.” Of Rabbit, Run’s female characters, she comments,

He paints and paints them, but the proportions are wrong. He is like a God who spends four hours on the shading on Eve’s upper lip, forgets to give her a clitoris, and then decides to rest on a Tuesday.

Section 5 considers Updike’s The Centaur (“The senses move through the scenes in full galloping integration, along with the tick and weight of actual time”). Here, Lockwood conjures one of her most inspired descriptions, riffing on a line from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin: 

Winding through The Centaur is a highway that will carry us into the future: the scenery of Updike’s childhood, immensely beautiful in his eyes, penetrates the automobile, drives the car.

In section 6, Lockwood restates her argument:

After Rabbit, Run, the books cease to be interesting primarily for their art but become essential recordings of American life. They continue to be speedily readable – the present tense works on Updike the way boutique transfusions of young blood work on billionaires – and perfectly replicate the experience of eating a hot dog in quasi-wartime on a lush crew-cut lawn that has been invisibly poisoned by industry, while men argue politics in the background and a Nice Ass lurks somewhere on the horizon, like the presence of God.

Section 7 is the ugliest part, referring to “Updike’s homophobia,” “his racism,” his “misogyny,” “his burning need to commit to print lines like ‘Horny, Jews are.’ ” But it also contains a remarkable passage – Lockwood imagining Updike reading what she’s written:

Why is it so tempting to grade him on a curve? He is so attended by the shine of a high-school star, standing in a spotlight that insists on his loveability, that presents him as a great gold cup into which forgiveness must be poured. It extended even to me: as I underlined passages and wrote ‘what the … WHAT’ next to paragraphs, I felt him sad in the clouds on my shoulder, baffled, as if he had especially been hoping that I would get it. I aimed it at you, he tells me: you were that vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

The first time I read this piece, I was shocked. Updike is my hero. He’s one of this blog’s lodestars. Click on his name in the “Labels” list, and you’ll open eighty-eight posts that either discuss or quote his work. But with subsequent readings, the shock wore off, replaced by a deep admiration for Lockwood’s art of evisceration.  

Credit: The above illustration is based on Thomas Slack’s photo of Patricia Lockwood (left) and Brigitte Lacombe’s photo of John Updike (right). 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #3 Geoff Dyer's "The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg"

This is the eighth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Geoff Dyer’s “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs” (The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016), retitled “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg,” in Dyer’s superb 2021 essay collection See/Saw: Looking at Photographs.

In this masterful piece, Dyer probes the mysterious heart of a great photograph – Eli Weinberg’s Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19 December 1956. He first saw it at the photography exhibition The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, at the Museum Africa, Johannesburg, in 2014. Dyer unfolds his commentary in seven dazzling analytical moves. First, he describes the photo:

Lines of black people, three or four deep. In the foreground, to the left of the frame, a man whose armband marks him out as some kind of steward, his old and very worn jacket sagging from his shoulders. Women are in the front, holding placards reading, “WE STAND BY OUR LEADERS.” There’s a range of ages, the youngest looking like they might be in their late teens. So almost all of them would now be either dead or in their late seventies.

Dyer notes the way the demonstrators fill the frame:

The demonstrators fill the frame so that - in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras - the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute. Beyond the frame of the picture lies the apparatus of the apartheid state with its immense resources of physical intimidation, bureaucratic control and psychological coercion: the police and soldiers making sure that the opposition stand in — and know — their place. (In a picture taken the following day you can see Peter Magubane - best known for his photographs of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 - being arrested, his face pushed up against the wall.) Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.

Then he springs his first surprise:

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy with a pudding-bowl haircut. I’m guessing he’s about thirteen. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left - a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly - and he’s white. He is there, that is the fact of the matter - his watch might even enable us to tell the time he was there, the exact moment the picture was taken. We look at the photograph and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question it insists on our asking: what is he doing there?

Hoping to find out more about the boy in the photo, Dyer contacts the co-curator of the exhibition, Rory Bester. Bester tells him he’s “90 percent sure it’s the photographer’s son. [Mark] often accompanied him while he was working ... both when he was a trade unionist and when he was a photographer.” Dyer digs deeper. He writes,

A 2014 investigation on a South African news website, in which friends of the Weinberg family and fellow activists who were present that day were asked if they could identify the boy in the picture, casts doubts on this score - some were certain it was Mark; some didn’t recognize him. When I checked back with Bester he said that “No more information has come to light about E.W.’s son, except that nobody has contradicted the ‘belief’ that it is indeed his son.”

Then Dyer introduces a new element in his analysis. He says,

Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence, sixty years on, in our remote-ish future. We want to hear his version of what happened. According to Bester, several people in photographs in the show came by to identify themselves and to be re-photographed in front of the old pictures. This has been done in other situations, by other people photographed in the midst of historical events. It’s often illuminating, partly because of the way people’s memories are contradicted, reinforced or even created by the existence of a photograph.

This leads Dyer to another connection:

Consider, for example, a picture that is in some ways the mirror image of this one, taken less than a year later, by Will Counts in Little Rock, Ark. Instead of a solitary white boy surrounded by crowds of peaceful, welcoming black people, there is a solitary black girl surrounded by a baying mob of whites. The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine African-American students who were supposed to be entering Little Rock Central High School together at the start of desegregation. At the last moment, she found herself walking alone, being abused by the crowd. One snarling white face, that of 15-year-old Hazel Bryan, became the symbol of intransigent racial bigotry.

Commenting on Counts’ picture, Dyer says that Bryan later apologized to Eckford and that Eckford accepted it and “In 1997, on the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women met in person - at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness.”

This is followed by yet another revelation:

Except it wasn’t the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering them. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

That last sentence is inspired! A great line to end on, but Dyer isn’t done. He pivots back to Weinberg’s photo and unfurls yet another surprise:

Let’s go back to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather from almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

We’re near the end of the piece now. One paragraph left, and … two more revelations! Dyer writes,

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he died in 1965 at twenty-four - so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident, Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! Who said photographs aren’t narrative? You just have to know how to unpack them. Dyer is a genius at it. He takes us deeper and deeper into meaning.

Credit: The above photo is Eli Weinberg's Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19 December 1956.

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.”  

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. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #6 Joanna Biggs' "Sylvia"

Sylvia Plath, letter to Aurelia Plath, November 22, 1962

This is the fifth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Joanna Biggs’ brilliant “Sylvia.” It first appeared in the December 20, 2018, London Review of Books under the title “ ‘I’m an intelligence.’ ” A revised version called “Sylvia” is included in Biggs’ excellent 2023 A Life of One’s Own. That's the one I’ll consider here. 

“Sylvia” is a review of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vols. I & II (edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil). It’s one of the most passionate, intensely personal book reviews I’ve ever read. Biggs uses Plath’s life and work to understand her own life. And she uses her own life to understand Plath’s life and work. Her identification with Plath is near total. It began when she was seventeen:

At seventeen, she had told her journal: “I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.’ ” And she would retain this intensity across her whole career. I’m sure this is one of the things I found liberating about her when I was seventeen, that she wanted so much and so baldly, so unashamedly. I looked at my own depressed English coastal town, and I wanted more, and didn’t want to feel so guilty about it. Plath’s ambition, though it was stranger and wilder and more antique than mine, legitimized the things I wanted. I uselessly longed and hoped and wrote instead of dating, writing fiction and applying for summer schools. I didn’t think I was allowed to live the life of a writer, although that was what I wanted. Who did I think I was? I should aim for something I could get. But in reach were things I didn’t want. My longing was punctuated with bursts of desire that lasted long enough to complete the form for Oxford. In those moments, I had some Plath in me. I wasn’t waiting for permission that would never come.

Biggs also remembers feeling at seventeen that “I was liking something it was a cliché for me to like. I thought she was for girls like me who were told that they thought too much, who scribbled their feelings in a spiral-bound notebook they hid in the drawer of their bedside table. As well as a reminder that being like that was dangerous.” 

Why dangerous? Because Plath’s life is psychologically fragile, and her attempts to deal with it “take her to one mental hospital after another, one psychiatrist after another, and finally to the electroshock chamber, where they grease her temples and let blue volts fly.” Biggs reports that on August 24, 1953, Plath attempted suicide “and was found barely alive, two days later.” 

Plath recovers. The following summer finds her on the beach at Cape Cod. This, for Biggs, is a key moment in Plath’s life. She calls it Plath’s Platinum Phoenix Summer: “blonde hair, red lipstick, and white bikini on creamy Massachusetts sand, alive when she could have been dead.” There’s a photo from that summer, showing Plath and her boyfriend Gordon Lameyer walking the beach. It figures centrally in Biggs’ piece:

In summer 2021, Plath’s daughter Frieda put a tranche of her mother’s possessions up for auction, including the tarot deck Ted gave Sylvia, their love letters, and their wedding rings. I was tempted by nothing – those are charged objects – apart from one thing: a snap from July 1954, right in the middle of the Platinum Summer. It is mostly of the sea and sky, but Sylvia is in the bottom left corner, smiling out of her blonde bob. She is walking toward Gordon in a halter-neck, high-waisted white bikini, and her left hand swings out loose. She really does look happy. I planned to frame it in white wood under conservation glass and hang it above my desk. Rise again, rise again, rise again. And I bid on it, and even seemed to be winning on my own birthday in July. I don’t know that I’m sad, really, to have lost it (it went for multiples of what I could afford) but I know that if I was ever guardian of a part of Plath’s life, it would be something from that summer, that Platinum Phoenix Summer. 

“Rise again” echoes through Biggs’ piece. She says it when she describes her return to Plath’s writing after her own marriage ends: “This time around, her efforts to rise again seemed clearer to me.” And she says it regarding Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, and Ariel, the collection of poems she completed before her death: they are “as much about rising again as they are about oblivion.” 

For me, the most absorbing part of Biggs’ intricate review is her analysis of the Plath-Hughes relationship. It begins, “When she meets Ted – which is not the same as saying it is his fault – her death comes into view.” She calls the marriage “fusional”: “Theirs was a fusional marriage: emotionally, physically, editorially.” She says, “They were mutually nurturing in their shoptalk, on which we can eavesdrop in the letters.” She says that Hughes’s affair shattered Plath’s idea of herself. But she also says this:

With the blow came exhilaration, and electroshock The Bell Jar-era imagery: “It broke a tight circuit wide open, a destructive circuit, a deadening circuit & let in a lot of pain, air and real elation. I feel elated.”

Biggs mirrors off the Plath-Hughes break-up. She writes, “The idea of a shared life, a place I could live, where I would be believed in and valued, crumbled. After twelve years together, my marriage was over in less than a year of raising the questions. I was thirty-four, stunned and exultant.” She says, “During my divorce, I remember thinking: am I victim or beneficiary? Sylvia’s late poems suggest: always both.”

Biggs quotes Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” and says,

The Lazarene woman is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi slaughter, a sinner-survivor of Lucifer’s fire, but mostly I like to think of Sylvia steeling herself against coming face to face with her rival, her ex, and all the gossipers, with the drumbeat of these fuck-you lines in her head: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” 

Biggs’ piece ends unforgettably. She imagines that Plath still lives. She imagines meeting her:

I sometimes like to imagine that Sylvia Plath didn’t die at all: she survived the winter of 1963 and she still lives in Fitzroy Road, having bought the whole building on the profits of The Bell Jar and Doubletake, her 1964 novel about “a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter & philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful and perfect.” She wears a lot of Eileen Fisher and sits in an armchair at the edge of Faber parties, still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet. She is baffled by but interested in #MeToo. She still speaks Boston-nasally, but with rounded English vowels. She stopped writing novels years ago, and writes her poems slowly now she has the Pulitzer, and the Booker, and the Nobel. She is too grand to approach, but while she’s combing her white hair and you’re putting on your lipstick in the loos, you smile at her shyly in the mirror and she says: “What are you looking at?”

That “still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet” is inspired! The whole essay is inspired – one of the most creative critical pieces I’ve ever read.  

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #7 Zadie Smith's "Through the Portal"

Deana Lawson, Sharon (2007)

This is the fourth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Zadie Smith’s “Through the Portal” (The New Yorker, May 7, 2018). 

In this marvelous piece, Smith unpacks the meaning of Deana Lawson’s diaspora photos. She begins with a riff on Lawson’s transfixing “Sharon” (2007):

Imagine a goddess. Envision a queen. Her skin is dark, her hair is black. Anointed with Jergens lotion, she possesses a spectacular beauty. Around her lovely wrist winds a simple silver band, like two rivers meeting at a delta. Her curves are ideal, her eyes narrowed and severe; the fingers of her right hand signal an army, prepared to follow wherever she leads. Is this the goddess of fertility? Of wisdom? War? No doubt she’s divine—we have only to look at her to see that. Yet what is a goddess doing here, before these thin net curtains? What relation can she possibly have to that cheap metal radiator, the chipped baseboards, the wonky plastic blinds? Where is her kingdom, her palace, her worshippers? Has there been some kind of mistake?

These are great questions. They focus on the exact details I’m interested in – “thin net curtains,” “cheap metal radiators,” “chipped baseboards,” “wonky plastic blinds.” But first Smith interprets the magnificent nude at the picture’s center:

Deana Lawson’s work is prelapsarian—it comes before the Fall. Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory, in which diaspora gods can be found wherever you look: Brownsville, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa. Typically, she photographs her subjects semi-nude or naked, and in cramped domestic spaces, yet they rarely look either vulnerable or confined. (“When I’m going out to make work,” Lawson has said, “usually I’m choosing people that come from a lower- or working-class situation. Like, I’m choosing people around the neighborhood.”) Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.

Lawson’s photos are staged – not normally my bag. I prefer the real thing. But Lawson’s pictures are different. As Smith points out,

Circumstances are in no way hidden or removed from the shot; nothing is tidied up or away, and everything is included. Dirty laundry is aired in public (and appears on the floor). Half-painted walls, faulty wiring, sheetless mattresses, cardboard boxes filled with old-format technology, beat-up couches, frayed rugs, curling tiles, broken blinds. 

I relish Lawson’s make-something-out-of-nothing aesthetic. I think Smith does, too. In my favorite passage, she says,

Paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone: cheap curtains, net curtains, curtains taped up—or else hanging from shower rings—curtains torn, faded, thin, permeable. Curtains, like doors, are an attempt to mark off space from the outside world: they create a home for the family, a sanctuary for a people, or they may simply describe the borders of a private realm. In these photographs, though, borders are fragile, penetrable, thin as gauze. And yet everywhere there is impregnable defiance—and aspiration. There is “kinship in free fall.”

Smith discusses several Lawson photos, including “Living Room” (2015), “Kingdom Come” (2014), and “Mama Goma” (2014). Here’s her take on “Living Room”:

In “Living Room” (2015), taken in Brownsville, Brooklyn, all the scars are visible: the taped-up curtain, the boxes and laundry, the piled-up DVDs, that damn metal radiator. At its center pose a queen and her consort. He’s on a chair, topless, while she stands unclothed behind him. They are physically beautiful—he in his early twenties, she perhaps a little older—and seem to have about them that potent mix of mutual ownership and dependence, mutual dominance and submission, that has existed between queens and their male kin from time immemorial. But this is only speculation. The couple keep their counsel. Despite being on display, like objects, and partially exposed—like their ancestors on the auction block—they maintain a fierce privacy, bordered on all sides. They are exposed but well defended: salon-fresh hair, with the edges perfect; a flash of gold in her ear; his best bluejeans; her nails on point. Self-mastery in the midst of chaos. And the way they look at you! A gaze so intense that it’s the viewer who ends up feeling naked.

Those last two sentences are inspired! The whole piece is inspired – every bit as artful as the photographs it describes. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #8 Wayne Koestenbaum's "The Inner Life of the Palette Knife"

Forrest Bess, Untitled (The Crown) (1949)

This is the third post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Wayne Koestenbaum’s brilliant “The Inner Life of the Palette Knife,” which originally appeared in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “My painting is tomorrow’s painting. Watch and see”: Forrest Bess (Christie’s, 2012), and is included in Koestenbaum’s great 2013 collection My 1980s & Other Essays. It’s Koestenbaum’s attempt to describe and comprehend Bess’s strange abstractions. 

Koestenbaum begins by suggesting that we should not so much read Bess’s paintings, as experience them. To do that, he recommends close looking. He writes,

The light in this room – where I’m looking at his paintings, one by one – shines irregularly on his black paint. Sometimes the black, arrested by light, seems matte; at other instants, light causes the black paint to glisten. These modest oscillations – matte one moment, glistening the next – are not the size of Texas. You need to stand very close to the painting to see these incremental changes, nuances so minor that it seems a culpable exaggeration to call attention to them, even if these delicate effects of light and texture are Bess’s major contribution to the philosophy of transgendered affect, to American abstract art, to the erotics of fear.

He says that to really appreciate Bess’s paintings, we must be willing to “waste time” looking at them, “without the certainty that it will reward you with ecstasy, knowledge, or satisfaction.” He goes on, 

In one of my favorite Bess paintings (untitled, like most of them), composed of oil and painted foil on canvas, I lose myself – I waste time – looking at a blue foil triangle’s nearness to a brown-black dot. That dot’s placement has no clear or verbalizable meaning; I can’t explain why the dot is near the triangle, though not too near. The dot belongs in the triangle’s vicinity, but the two entities – dot, triangle – have no fixed relationship. In that same painting, the background is composed of black swirls or blobs. The black blobs – gesso-like? – are separate from one another but also sometimes joined or interacting. Their edges – to the extent that the blobs cluster together in a community – are at once stable and unstable; the edges ululate, but don’t sing a clear melody.

To pay attention to these black blobs, or to pay attention to the blue foil triangle’s nearness to a specific dot, I must pledge allegiance to abstract art’s Bill of Rights, which contains, unlike the United States’, only one provision: the right to look, for unstructured amounts of time, at migrant and unspecific forms, and at the relation between them, without demanding that the forms have a single meaning, and without demanding that whatever significance I ascribe to these forms be defensible, explicable, or based on any evidence but my own sensations.... I have the right to find supreme significance in Bess’s blobs and lines, and to spend as long as I wish in a state of torpid yet ecstatic surrender to them.

That formulation of “abstract art’s Bill of Rights” is inspired!

Koestenbaum responds intensely to Bess’s palette-knife marks. In one of my favorite passages, he writes,

These experiences of transport, keyed to painterly moments almost too small to mention, I call jabs of intensification – microscopic illuminations, inner shudders, tiny spurts of “oh my God!”, as if a joy-bringing bubble were suddenly to open up a new hallway in my brain, or as if suddenly I were to become Keats reading Homer for the first time and standing proud on a silent peak to view the wild Pacific. But in Bess’s case, the wild Pacific is merely an edge mark made by a palette knife, where yellow gets divided into adjacent, parallel mini-panels of companionate yellows.

He says of Bess’s Mandala (1967), “The black paint surrounding the mandala has gorgeous gouge marks that awaken in me (the urge never went to sleep) a desire to make texture my god.” Koestenbaum’s expression of his love of texture makes me smile. It’s my love, too.

Koestenbaum’s main theme is the need to pay close attention. In his closing paragraph, he writes,

Bess’s hieroglyphic semiabstractions suggest not only that he was a remarkable artist but that abstract – or near-abstract – art, hovering on the edges of codes we’ll never comprehend, teaches us to pay fine-grained, undogmatic attention to the blobs and lines and curves we encounter in everyday life. Pay attention to scratches. Pay attention to the textured, importuning marks of a silent palette knife. Use Bess’s paintings to understand the difficult art of human attentiveness. In a would always willing to truncate the possibilities for closely noticing what occurs, allow attentiveness to flower, however private and inscrutable its flowering, however seemingly impractical, minor, puzzling, and antisocial its procedures of self-nourishment. 

Sage advice for these distracted times.

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #9 Leslie Jamison's "Other Voices, Other Rooms"

Illustration by Eleanor Davis, from Leslie Jamison's Other Voices, Other Rooms

This is the second post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Leslie Jamison’s superb “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2020).

This piece is a wonderful celebration of my favorite subject – the everyday. It ingeniously links two seemingly unrelated topics – Jamison’s baby and the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Private Lives Public Spaces.” The piece unfolds in seven sections. 

In section one, Jamison tells about how being with her baby heightened her awareness of everything around her. She writes,

Being with my baby every hour of every day demanded close attention, not just to her—whether her fluttering eyelids meant she was waking up or just dreaming, how close she’d rolled to the edge of our bed—but also to everything else, because the alternative to paying attention was growing bored out of my mind. My hunger for stimulation meant my gaze was sensitized, the way your eyes can see more after you’ve spent a few minutes in the dark.

She says, “Those newborn months made the everyday visible again. It was all suddenly there.”

Section two introduces the MoMA exhibition:

An exhibition called “Private Lives Public Spaces” comprises a collection of home movies showing everyday scenes: one child pushes another in a sled as the day darkens around them. Lace curtains billow in a breeze. A woman mock-proposes to another woman at a lawn party, kneeling on the grass and laughing. A middle-aged man in a suit and tie rides piggyback on the shoulders of another middle-aged man in a suit and tie. Boys take furtive sips of Manischewitz at someone’s bar mitzvah, their glasses glinting in the ballroom light.

Jamison describes one of the movies:

An anonymous movie called My Dream Trip consists primarily of vacation footage shot on a train—the café car and narrow aisles, a pale water tower visible through a rain-streaked window—with voiceover from a man whose voice sounds like Kermit the Frog after twenty years of pack-a-day smoking. Smoker Kermit is thrilled by everything he sees. “So beautiful,” he keeps saying at the sight of the St. Louis Arch, “so gorgeous.” His gaze is humid with enthusiasm. And when he sees the automated gate at the entrance to an underground parking garage, he says, “Hello hello HELLO,” as if greeting a long-lost friend. Tenderness saturates the footage of his wife wearing her white camisole in their sleeping cabin, or eating potato chips and drinking beer out of a plastic cup in the dining car; his nighttime footage of the red-light district in New Orleans feels like a feral fever-dream, blurred by unspoken desire.

That “Hello hello HELLO” makes me smile. I, too, have experienced that heightened state of consciousness when, like Smoker Kermit, I’m thrilled by everything I see. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s bliss. 

In sections three and four, Jamison describes some of the moments in the MoMA home movies that most affected her. She writes,

One sequence in the Jarret family movies shows a small group of people dancing in a living room. It looks less like an organized party than a spontaneous eruption of festivity on a regular weeknight: three women doing the twist between the coffee table and the couch, one in linen slacks with a cigarette between her lips; folks with furrowed brows playing cards at a table behind them; a baby in a lace dress propped against a corner couch cushion; a boy in a red bathrobe and one in black suspenders, both clasping their hands together and swimming downward like fish, checking their feet occasionally, not sure if they are doing the steps right. It’s an ordinary evening brimming with the extraordinary condition of being alive, and watching gives me a sense of vertigo, as if I’m falling through cracks in the surface of experience—witnessing the secret of what it feels like to be this person, in this moment. Something rises inside me, as if it could touch these strangers just beneath their skin. Something in me wants to.

Now comes section five – the core of Jamison’s meditation. For her, she says, fascination with the grace of ordinariness “began in twelve-step meetings, listening to the voices of strangers in other basements in distant cities – riveted by stories or clichés that my literary training had taught me to understand as banal.” She says, “Recovery was teaching me that every life held profundity. Banality was just a call to look harder.”

That brilliant last line – “Banality was just a call to look harder” – went straight into my personal anthology of great epigrams. Change “was” to “is” and the line could serve as my personal credo. Section five ends with another inspired line: “Meaning is happening Now! Now! Now!”

In sections six and seven, Jamison expands her meditation on beauty to include other artworks she sees at MoMA, e.g., Albert Bierstadt’s A Storm in the Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, and photographs documenting the artist Lea Lublin’s 1968 Mon Fils (My Son). But, for me, the high point of the piece is section five. “Meaning is happening Now! Now! Now!” are words to live by. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #10 Ethan Iverson's "Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City"

This is the first post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Ethan Iverson’s “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City” (newyorker.com, August 17, 2017) is one of the coolest, most original, most memorable pieces of comparative analysis I’ve ever read. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Since the nineteen-sixties, there have not been jazz musicians as artistically significant and generally popular as Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, or Bill Evans. Today, jazz music is a miscellaneous collection of wide-ranging and disputed genres that stands to the side of American culture. How did the train go off the tracks? A listen to Ellington and Evans both playing an Ellington standard, “In a Sentimental Mood,” on the same hot Thursday night in New York City—August 17, 1967—offers a few clues. Here is Ellington’s version, at the Rainbow Grill, with the tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, along with John Lamb on bass and Steve Little on drums. And here is Evans’s version, at the Village Vanguard, with Eddie Gomez on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums.

That enticing introduction shines a brilliant beam of light down through the rest of the piece – illuminating its theme (jazz isn’t what it used to be) and setting up a fascinating contrast (Ellington vs. Evans). At the heart of it: two versions of Ellington’s great “In a Sentimental Mood” performed at different venues on the same night in New York City. What a wonderful subject! Iverson uses it as a springboard into an argument about the negative influence of “scalar thought” on jazz education. But first he describes the two performances. He says of Ellington,

Ellington packs a whole history of composition into only two and a half choruses. The first chorus is piano in D minor/F major, the “old style,” fairly close to the first 1935 recording. After the “old-style” chorus, Duke modulates to Bb minor/Db major for Gonsalves’s entrance, the same key used for the “new-style” version of “In a Sentimental Mood” tracked with John Coltrane, in 1962. Gonsalves’s greatest fame was authoring twenty-six choruses of shouting blues on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” at the Newport Jazz Festival, in 1956, a moment that many credit with revitalizing Ellington’s career. However, Gonsalves was also one of the greatest ballad players, and his silky, furry, almost murky legato here is pure delight.

Gonsalves’s mastery is only to be expected, but the sixty-eight-year-old Ellington is still full of surprises. Playing with Coltrane, Ellington’s “new-style” arrangement had a mournful raindrop piano part that was dramatic and distinctive. At the Rainbow Grill, Ellington doesn’t play many of the raindrops but goes all out in rhapsodic style: heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs. It would be hard to find ballad accompaniment this busy anywhere else.

This is descriptive analysis at its finest. I devoured it. And what a treat to be able to click on the text’s embedded hyperlinks and hear the actual music that Iverson is writing about. 

Iverson then shifts his focus to Evans’s performance. He writes,

The current Evans trio was a mix of new and old. Eddie Gomez was a fresh firebrand in the tradition of Scott LaFaro (the extraordinary bass virtuoso on “Sunday at the Village Vanguard”). The drum great Philly Joe Jones was a familiar Evans associate from their Miles Davis days and the swinging 1958 trio session “Everybody Digs Bill Evans.”

Bill Evans recorded “In a Sentimental Mood” a few times over the years, usually as a ballad, but at the Vanguard that night it was a medium swinger. There are three different takes from three different sets on August 17th and 18th, but the piano part is consistent. Gomez and Jones make all the rhythmic hits and substitute changes with the pianist, but they are also free to offer tasteful commentary. Over all, this is a much more modern and interactive approach to the rhythm section than Lamb and Little with Ellington at the Rainbow Grill. Unlike Ellington’s unwinding scroll, conventional small-band jazz practice dictated an identical “melody in” and “melody out.”

Note that word “conventional.” It’s the first hint of Iverson’s argument. In his next paragraph, he makes his point explicit: “It’s all very hip for 1967, but there was, nonetheless, a faintly homogenous and predictable air from Evans at this point.”

Iverson then makes another interesting analytical move. He looks at “The Real Book.” He says,

During the mid-seventies, a lead sheet of “In a Sentimental Mood” appeared in “The Real Book,” the most widely disseminated jazz manual ever made, a “fake book” of tunes and chord changes produced by students in the powerful jazz program at Berklee College of Music, in Boston.

If a student wanted to sound like Bill Evans on “In a Sentimental Mood,” he or she could quickly start getting close with the help of a chart in “The Real Book.” The sheet begins with four versions of D minor, “D-, D-(maj7), D-7, D-6.” These aren’t wrong, exactly, but they are far closer to Evans than Ellington, and suggest ways of articulating harmony in a blocky and unmusical fashion, one divorced from the idea and emotion of the original song.

Far closer to Evans than Ellington – right there is Iverson’s crucial point. For him, Evans represents homogeneity; Ellington represents avant-gardism. He puts it this way: 

If a student wants to sound like Ellington, there’s no point in looking at “The Real Book.” Ellington’s performance is too mysterious and detailed. Each of Ellington’s chords is its own universe. Some chords have added-tone harmony that fit a scale; some do not.

That “Each of Ellington’s chords is its own universe” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – a masterpiece of comparative analysis.

Credit: The above photo of Duke Ellington is by Marty Lederhandler.

On the Horizon: "10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature"

Illustration by Jon Han

I’m inspired by The New York Times’ recent “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” to compile my own list. Except my list will be much narrower and more specialized, focusing on my favorite form of writing – essays on art and literature. Each month I’ll pick an essay and try to get at what I respond to and why. A new series then – “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature” – starting September 7, 2024.