September 28, 2020 Issue

Dan Chiasson makes an interesting observation in his “Critical Distances,” in this week’s issue. He says, “Reduced to its bluntest purpose, all writing is a form of graffiti, an assertion that we exist in this time and place.” Is this true? I recall Ian Frazier saying something similar a few years ago. In his “Carving Your Name on the Rock” [included in The Art and Craft of Travel Writing (1991), edited by William Zinsser], he writes, “What the travel writer is doing, in essence, is carving his name on the rock. He is saying, ‘I passed this way, too.’ ” Is that what I’m doing when I write this blog – asserting my existence? Blogito, ergo sum. I blog, therefore I am. No, I don’t think so. Blogging is too ephemeral and insubstantial for that.

Roger Angell, in his “This Old Man” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2014), writes, “I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window.” That’s a perfect metaphor for blogging, conveying both its freedom and its ephemerality.

These last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my motive for blogging. Last week, I was close to winding things up. Then along came the September 7th New Yorker containing Jay Ruttenberg’s wonderful “Goings On About Town” note on Bettye LaVette, and I felt rejuvenated. I listened to LaVette’s raw, croaky rendition of “Blackbird,” and I loved it, and wanted to say why. Right there, I think, is at least one reason I blog – to figure out why I’m drawn to a particular writing or artwork.

Bettye LaVette's Soulful "Blackbird"

Thanks to Jay Ruttenberg’s recent “Goings On About Town” note on Bettye LaVette (The New Yorker, September 7, 2020), I discovered a terrific rendition of one of my favorite songs – Lennon and McCartney’s “Blackbird.” Ruttenberg says of LaVette’s version, "She trades the song’s delicacy for gravity, flipping it into first person: 'All of my life, I have waited and waited and waited for this moment to be free.' " Beautifully put. LaVette’s “Blackbird” went straight into my personal anthology of great jazz songs.

November 15, 2010 Issue

Alec Wilkinson’s “Long Time Coming” is easily Pick of the Issue this week. It wasn’t a sure thing until, about fifteen hundred words into the piece, I encountered this dandy line: “‘I was the first person in my family to make a hundred dollars a day,’ LaVette said when I visited her in West Orange recently.” I read that and instantly could feel myself relaxing, slowing down, to savor the writing. “Long Time Coming” is about Bettye LaVette, “the last great vernacular black singer,” whose career has been plagued by “buzzard luck, which is bad luck that won’t end.” LaVette is a curious amalgam of toughness and sadness. As a singer, she is adept at expressing anguish. I’d never heard of her before I read Wilkinson’s piece. When I finished it, I went to iTunes and downloaded her Kennedy Centers Honors performance of “Love Reign O’er Me.” Her “raspy, full-throated cry” (Wilkinson’s accurate description) is electric. But it’s Wilkinson’s writing that I’m mainly interested in. The intricately worked plainness of it often brings it to the edge of poetry. Consider for example this memorable passage from “Long Time Coming”:

“After the final night of the tour, in Miami, LaVette came back to the hotel with a paper place mat signed by Plant and members of his band and a plastic dinner box that had four shrimp and a chicken leg in it. She extended the dinner box toward me and said, “You hold this,” then she went up to her room and changed and came back to the bar and ordered champagne.”

How fine those acutely seen details (“paper place mat signed by Plant and members of the band,” “plastic dinner box that had four shrimp and a chicken leg in it,” “came back to the bar and ordered champagne”) are! If beauty lives in the harmonious excitement of particulars, as John Updike said it does, that passage is sublime.

Postscript: The vivid, red-tinged Eric Ogden photo of LaVette that illustrates “Long Time Coming” is terrific. Ogden is rapidly becoming the magazine’s premier photographer.