April 18, 2016 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I relished this "Goings On About Town" detail plucked from National Museum of the American Indian’s “Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains”: “Plains artists, short on paper, used to draw on discarded ledger books. So does Dwayne Wilcox: in one drawing, a woman, resplendent in a Lakota robe, holds a smartphone that reads ‘r u at da pow wow.’ ”

2. And I enjoyed this line from “Goings On About Town” ’s note on Haris Epaminonda: “Think of her wooden fish regarding itself in the mirror as one of our primordial ancestors, contemplating evolution in our era of selfie-drenched narcissism.” (This is the newyorker.com version; the magazine version erroneously refers to “his rubber” fish.)

3. And I loved this “Goings On About Town” comment on photographer Scott Alario: “Alario reveals marvels in life’s minutiae, whether it’s steam curling up from a forkful of pasta or coolant streaming into a car’s radiator.”

4. Perhaps the most sheerly pleasurable sentence in this week’s issue is found in Wei Tchou’s "Bar Tab: Tomi Jazz": “On a recent Saturday night, as oil lamps flickered throughout a full house, a woman in a light-blue kimono nodded her head to the Standard Procedures, featuring the L.A.-based saxophonist Ray Zepeda, which was closing its set with a lively rendition of Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘A Night in Tunisia.’ ”

5. My takeaway from Elizabeth Kolbert’s absorbing "Unnatural Selection" is the notion of “assisted evolution” – human intervention in natural processes with the aim of improving corals’ and trees’ chances of survival. Kolbert’s description of donning a wetsuit made me smile: “The only suit in my size was an extra-thick one; getting into it made me empathize with any animal that’s ever been eaten alive by a boa.”

6. I was pleased to see Wayne Koestenbaum quoted in Hilton Als’s "Immediate Family." Koestenbaum is one of my favorite writers. I’m looking forward to his new book Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations.

7. Ariel Levy’s "Beautiful Monsters," an account of artist Niki de Saint Phalle's wild life, contains this gorgeous surreal line: “Walk downhill along the path that leads away from the Sphinx, and you are confronted by a voluptuous golden skeleton—Death—riding a blue horse over a mirrored green sea, from which disembodied arms stretch up to cling to the world of the living.”

8. I’m allergic to TV, but I read Clive James’s "Thrones of Blood" anyway because … well, because it’s by Clive James, one of the great essayists of our time. “Thrones of Blood” is terrific! Here’s a sample:

From Homer until now, and onward to wherever the creaking fleet of “Battlestar Galactica” may go in the future, there never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism. And, when we click on Play All and settle back to watch every season of “The Wire” all over again, we should try to find a moment, in the midst of such complete absorption, to reflect that the imagined world being revealed to us for our delight really is an astounding achievement, even though we will always feel that we need an excuse for doing nothing else except watch it.

I could quote this piece endlessly. Savor this strange beauty: “John Hurt as Caligula in ‘I, Claudius’ ate the baby from his sister’s womb, whereas all Joffrey does is shoot a prostitute with his crossbow.”

9. I’m a fan of Dan Chiasson’s criticism. His "Mind the Gap," a review of Rosemarie Waldrop’s Gap Gardening, in this week’s issue, is excellent. In one of its best passages, Chiasson quotes a section of Waldrop’s “Hölderlin Hybrids” and beautifully analyzes it:

Waldrop’s poems aren’t “visual” in the sense that paintings are visual, but they feel as though they had been applied to paper, not simply written down, and they reward the kind of scrutiny we give to discrete visual surfaces. In a section from “Hölderlin Hybrids”:

Monet writes a friend he’s painting “the instant.” Succession stopped at success. A light his palette gives off. And color subdivided into into. On the retinal surface. Ground so fine. In each ray of light. Move motes of dust.

The passage is slyly mimetic of the painter’s process, his “succession” of brushstrokes suspended, like the word “succession,” when he reaches “success.” The halting sentence fragments are like synaptic flashes as the image passes from “palette” to “color,” from color transformed (“into” this or “into” that) to the eye and then to the gallery, where, aeons later, dust motes intervene.

That last sentence is inspired!

November 18, 2013 Issue

The tagline for Ariel Levy’s "Thanksgiving In Mongolia," in this week’s issue, is “Adventure and heartbreak at the edge of the earth.” It’s open to question whether Ariel’s Mongolian experience constitutes adventure. She calls it “black magic,” and that’s probably more accurate. But as for “heartbreak” – that’s the perfect word for it. “Thanksgiving In Mongolia” is utterly, absolutely heartbreaking. It’s about a miscarriage that Levy had while she was in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, reporting a story. The baby was still alive after he left her womb:

He was translucent and pink and very, very small, but he was flawless. His lovely lips were opening and closing, opening and closing, swallowing the new world. For a length of time I cannot delineate, I sat there, awestruck, transfixed. Every finger, every toenail, the golden shadow of his eyebrows coming in, the elegance of his shoulders—all of it was miraculous, astonishing. I held him up to my face, his head and shoulders filling my hand, his legs dangling almost to my elbow. I tried to think of something maternal I could do to convey to him that I was, in fact, his mother, and that I had the situation completely under control. I kissed his forehead and his skin felt like a silky frog’s on my mouth.

Levy experienced motherhood for the precious “ten or twenty minutes” of life that her baby was allotted here on earth. “Thanksgiving In Mongolia” is a blood-filled memoir of trauma. I found myself deflecting its tragedy by referring back to an early passage in the piece, containing this delightful description of a herdsman and conservationist named Tsetsegee Munkhbayar: “Munkhbayar was dressed in a long, traditional deel robe and a fur hat with a small metal falcon perched on top. It felt like having a latte with Genghis Khan.” That “small metal falcon” is superbly noticed. Levy may, in her anguish, feel like “a wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone” (as she says near the end of her piece). But she writes like an angel. In “Thanksgiving In Mongolia,” she’s cast a lasting memorial to her son’s brief life.

August 6, 2012 Issue

Paragraphs may be “the units of composition” (Strunk & White, The Elements of Style), but sentences are the indicia of style. Sanford Schwartz, in his brilliant “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book” (The New Yorker, August 28, 1978), says of Hemingway, “He takes the anonymity out of language, and shows how personal and three-dimensional the use of words can be, how a sentence can have a profile and be as contoured as a carving.” Reading The New Yorker, I’m always on the look out for creative, evocative, stylish sentences – sentences that “have a profile” and are “as contoured as a carving.” I found four in this week’s issue:

Just don’t arrive hungry, and leave any frumpy totes – or friends – behind, and you may enjoy the novelty of a Savage Detective (a mescal Old Fashioned with sherry, maple syrup, and charred pineapple) amidst the buzzy blend of flirting, texting, and social climbing that is Abramcyk’s signature dish. (Ariel Levy, “Tables For Two: Super Linda”)

Siodmak makes performance his subject, with scenes of an orchestra playing Wagner (her ecstacy) and Beethoven (her fate), lovers singing at a piano in a parlor, and a society band at a swank café, where, in a cunning crane shot of a saunter down a staircase – with Kelly’s leonine grace and Durbin’s homely footfalls – he condenses the drama to a thwarted dance. (Richard Brody, “Critic’s Notebook: Screen Fright”)

His black jeans puddle around white sneakers that looked like they were cut from blocks of foam. (Lauren Collins, “The Question Artist”)

When I met Aung Min this spring in Rangoon, he had about him a Brylcreem crispness that evoked an Asian Robert McNamara. (Evan Osnos, “The Burmese Spring”)