Stephen Jay Gould's Brilliant "Curveball"

Stephen Jay Gould (Portrait by Andrea Ventura)

I just finished reading Gideon Lewis-Krauss’s "Force of Nature," a profile of psychology professor Kathryn Paige Harden, who works in the field of behavior genetics. Harden thinks that in predicting life outcomes, we should pay more attention to our genes. I agree. But I have a question? What does Harden mean by “intelligence”? Does she talk in terms of “high IQ” and “low IQ,” and, if so, what does she mean? I like the idea of multiple intelligences. Howard Gardner, in his classic Frames of Mind (1983), identifies seven: linguistic, personal, spatial, musical, bodily, logical, and artistic. A kid may struggle at school but excel at the hockey rink. What is his or her IQ? Charles A. Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994) espouses a single, general measure of mental ability. Here’s what Stephen Jay Gould, writing in The New Yorker, had to say about that:

However, if Herrnstein and Murray are wrong about IQ as an immutable thing in the head, with humans graded in a single scale of general capacity, leaving large numbers of custodial incompetents at the bottom, then the model that generates their gloomy vision collapses, and the wonderful variousness of human abilities, properly nurtured, reemerges. We must fight the doctrine of The Bell Curve both because it is wrong and because it will, if activated, cut off all possibility of proper nurturance for everyone’s intelligence. ["Curveball," November 28, 1994]

Gould demolished The Bell Curve. I wish he were here to assess Harden’s new theory. 

Nick Thorpe's "The Danube"

I relish writing composed in the present tense and written from the first-person perspective. It’s a rare combination. The only New Yorker pieces written this way that I can think of are Whitney Balliett’s “Ecstasy at the Onion” (October 10, 1969), John McPhee’s “The Search for Marvin Gardens” (September 9, 1972), Anthony Bailey’s “Outer Banks” (May 25, 1987), and Cynthia Zarin’s “An Enlarged Heart” (August 18 & 25, 2003). The first part of McPhee’s great “The Encircled River” (May 2 & 9, 1977) is composed in the first-person-present-tense. Books written in this style include Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme (1994), Eva Hoffman's Exit into History (1993), Gideon Lewis-Krauss's A Sense of Direction (2012), Morten Strøksnes’s Shark Drunk (2017), and the one I’m currently reading – Nick Thorpe’s The Danube (2013). 

Thorpe’s book brims with sentences like these:

Here on the fraying fringes of Europe, between the Greek and Roman ruins of Histria and the rising waters of the Black Sea, I begin my journey up the River Danube.

As I drive towards the delta from the west I see my first wind turbines, spaced out across the hills like dandelions, or the advance guard of a Roman army.

On a Sunday morning in Tulcea, I go in search of the imam at the mosque a little way up the hill towards the museum.

I leave Galați at lunchtime, closely following the Danube on the road to Brăila, my head humming with the red wine from the Greek reception.

I drive through sparse deserted villages which feel as though they have been unpopulated since the Romans withdrew, and reach the Danube in time to watch a blood-red sun sink through vineyards among the forested islands of the river.

On a wide meadow, a headland overlooking a sweeping bend in the Danube, just before the Romanian-Bulgarian border at Silistra, I catch sight of a man striding purposefully beside a line of blue and yellow beehives, evenly spaced like floats on a net across the river.

I arrive late in the evening in Ruse, and the first three hotels are full.

I see the camels of the Koloseum Circus first, then the big tent as I speed past on the main road.

I go there, I do this. What could be simpler? Yet such lines have the breath of life: personal experience recorded with the immediacy of an inspired snapshot. I devour them.  

Gideon Lewis-Krauss's "What We See When We Look at Travel Photography"

Robert Frank, "Santa Fe" (1955)

A special shout-out to Gideon Lewis-Krauss for his terrific “What We See When We Look at Travel Photography,” in this week’s New York Times Magazine, a delicious essay connecting Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature,” Paul Fussell’s Abroad, Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, Edward Hopper’s Gas, Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, Janet Malcolm’s Diana and Nikon (a collection of her New Yorker photography pieces), Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station” (The New Yorker, December 3, 1955) with transfixing “road” photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, and Gary Winogrand. The core of the piece’s combinational delight is Lewis-Krauss’s multilayered interpretation of his friend David’s Instagram image of a nighttime gas station. “ ‘What is it,’ his caption asked, ‘about #gasstationsatdusk?’ ” Lewis-Krauss’s answer is brilliant:

It wasn’t an act of representation at all, and it certainly wasn’t private. It was the expression of affect he wanted to communicate in that moment — something a little smart, and a little sad, and a little funny, and all in all very David. The image, an internet square of labyrinthine self-referentiality — a photograph that recalled a painting that was at home in a poem — recalled for me a different line of Geoff Dyer’s, where he quotes John Berger on Paul Strand’s portraits: They arrested a moment “whose duration is measured not by seconds, but by its relation to a lifetime.”

The “lifetime” Berger is referring to is, I think, the lifetime of Strand's subjects. Berger, in his superb essay, writes, “Strand’s photographs suggest his sitters trust him to see their life story.” Lewis-Krauss, in his piece, seems to be saying that David’s gas station photo is self-referential - “the expression of affect he wanted to communicate in that moment.” I agree with both writers. Photographs have a double aspect, as much that of a mirror as of a lens.

Gideon Lewis-Krauss's "A Sense of Direction"

The New Yorker’s "Briefly Noted" assessment of Gideon Lewis-Krauss’s brilliant A Sense of Direction strikes me as just about perfect. It says,

Always worried that he was missing some other, better party, Lewis-Kraus moved from San Francisco to Berlin and then set out on a series of pilgrimages: Camino de Santiago, in Spain; Shikoku, in Japan; and Uman, in Ukraine. He makes the three treks—Catholic, Buddhist, and Jewish, respectively—as a secularist, hunting for clarity while nursing his blistered feet: “In my terror of stasis I had chosen motion; in my total absence of stability or routine I felt both electrified and panicked.” Perhaps by design, the writing—beautiful and often very funny—frequently mimics the setting: during the Berlin segment it’s restless, and, on the circular route of Shikoku, sometimes lacks direction. But on the Camino Lewis-Kraus weaves a story that is both searching and purposeful, one that forces the reader, like the pilgrim, to value the journey as much as the destination. [“Briefly Noted,” The New Yorker, May 28, 2012]

My only quibble with this review is that it seems to consider the Camino section to be the book’s best part. For me, the Shikoku segment is the most absorbing. It contains Lewis-Krauss’s most descriptive writing, and his most reflective. Here are four excerpts:

A pilgrimage like this is an old and corporeal kind of shock therapy, a structure that is maintained and promoted to help inspire an embodied sense of gratitude and wonder at the variety and generosity of the world, a world much bigger than our petty fears and desponds and regrets. It’s gamed for you to have the experience, and then the memory, of finding an unclaimed one-thousand-yen note in an insulated shack in some middle of nowhere between remote mountain temples.

It’s a Saturday night and the traffic never let’s up, but I find a piece of plywood to block the door, and that keeps the worst of the rain out. I drift in and out of sleep, dreaming of the Camino. At first light I rise to look for an open convenience store for a rice ball and a can of coffee.

The descent is sharply pitched and I can barely see the towers of cedar through the motionless sulk of cloud, but I know I’ve got a place to stay ahead and I feel as though I’ve begun to get the hang of this. I pick my way with care between the slick rocks. Across the valley gray panes of mountain stack flat against the late horizon; a dense brume of smoky white gives depth to the ridges.

The next twenty kilometers follow a serpentine road along a high, rolling, hillocked ridge of peninsula, and the air is warm and clear, and off to our right are glimpses of an emerald inlet, and to our left and a few hundred meters below, sharp crimped spines of steep jetty shear and buckle into the silver sea, their steeps felted in dark cedar, unruly lime feathers of bamboo, and the occasional pink bursts of new-blossoming cherry. In the little bays the water pools in absinthe clouds, the beaches pebbled black.

Note the use of first-person, present tense (my favorite combination) and the attentiveness to both inner and outer reality. When he’s really on, really noticing, as he is in the Shikoku part, Lewis-Krauss thinks with all his senses. He seems alert to everything: experience, memory, “dense brume of smoky white,” rice ball and can of coffee, “steeps felted in dark cedar, unruly lime feathers of bamboo, and the occasional pink bursts of new-blossoming cherry.” Ravishing!