April 17, 2023 Issue

Andrea K. Scott, in her “At the Galleries,” in this week’s issue, tells about an exhibition at The Drawing Center titled “Of Mythic Worlds.” She says that the show features fifty-three works, “mostly on paper, dating from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.” What caught my eye is her mention that Janet Malcolm is among the show’s featured artists. Scott says, “Readers of this magazine may be especially enticed by Janet Malcolm’s gnomic collages.” Well, yes, I am enticed. A few years ago Granta magazine published a collection of Malcolm’s collages called “The Emily Dickinson Series” (Granta, Issue 126, Winter 2014). The works are strange combinations of photos and documents. Scott’s “gnomic” perfectly describes them. Reading Scott’s review, I wondered what the Malcolm collages at The Drawing Center looked like. I visited drawingcenter.org to see what I could see. Several works in “Of Mythic Worlds” are shown, but none by Janet Malcolm. However, the contents of the exhibition catalogue, Drawing Papers 151: Of Mythic Worlds: Works from the Distant Past to the Present, are viewable at issuu.com. If you flip through the pages to “Notes on the Artists,” you’ll find an entry on Malcolm. It identifies the collages selected for the show, namely, Ermine and Cleopatra, both from her Emily Dickinson Series (2013). Both works are shown in the “Plates” section of the publication. 

Someday maybe I’ll write a piece tracing Malcolm’s collage-making impulse in her writings. The obvious starting point is her collage-like “Forty-one False Starts” (The New Yorker, July 11, 1994).  

Janet Malcolm, Ermine (2013)

 

 

April 17, 2017, Issue

I see in the “Briefly Noted” review of Richard Holmes’s new book, The Long Pursuit, in this week’s issue, that Holmes “swears by what he calls the ‘Footsteps principle,’ which entails going everywhere that ‘the subject had ever lived or worked, or travelled or dreamed.’ ” Reading this, I recalled Geoff Dyer, in Granta’s recent “Journeys” issue, describing travel writing that follows “in the footsteps of …” as “the literary equivalent of package tours in which destination and experience are so thoroughly predetermined that one is reluctant to make a booking.” I’m curious what Dyer would make of Holmes’s “Footsteps principle.” It seems to me that The Long Pursuit is worthy of more than just a “Briefly Noted” review. I wish The New Yorker would ask Dyer to review it. He’s a superb critic. He’d be an excellent sub for James Wood.

Other notes on this week’s issue:

1. The Maureen Gallace painting, “Sandy Road” (2003), in “Goings On About Town,” brought to mind Peter Schjeldahl’s wonderful “America at the Edges” (The New Yorker, October 19, 2015), in which he describes Gallace’s art:

Gallace’s means are narrow: she employs uniformly quick, daubed brushwork and colors kept to a mid-range of tones that makes whites jump out. Her end is description, not of how things look but of how they seem. What is a breaking ocean wave like? Gallace answers with stabs of creamy off-white and gray-blue shadow. It’s her best guess, as is the specific blue of the sky on the given day. In one picture, single blue strokes approximate tidal pools. Elsewhere, a slight touch of green in the sea hints at fathomless deeps. Qualities of light, too, feel gamely speculative. (To me, they tend to evoke morning hours, when the visible world, well rested, has something almost eager about it.) The houses often lack doors and windows. Gallace is plainly shy of anyone or anything that might even seem to return her gaze. She conveys a vulnerable aloneness wholly given over to absorption in appearances. Looking at the paintings, I feel that I am always just beginning to look.

2. The William Mebane photograph, illustrating Jiayang Fan’s delectable “Tables For Two: Tim Ho Wan,” is one of his finest. I’m a Mebane fan. His photo for Silvia Killingsworth’s “Tables For Two: Babu Ji” was #6 on my “Best of 2016: Photos.” His “Tim Ho Van” is sure to be a candidate for “Best of 2017.”

3. I find “Bar Tab” drink descriptions irresistible. There’s a dandy in David Kortava’s “Bar Tab: Skinny Dennis”:  “If you are going to stay and drink, Willie’s Frozen Coffee—a decadent caffeine-and-whiskey sludge named for Willie Nelson—is a must.”

Postscript: I want to add that Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985) is, for me, a touchstone, particularly the first section, titled “1964: Travels,” in which he tells how his youthful journeys through the Cévennes, following the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson, led him towards biography.

Granta's Great "Journeys" Issue

I’m enjoying the hell out of Granta’s “Journeys” issue (Winter 2017). It poses the question, “Is travel writing dead?” and provides responses from thirteen writers, including New Yorker contributors Geoff Dyer and Samanth Subramanian.

Subramanian, in his reply, calls travel writing “the most fundamental kind of literary work.” I agree, especially if a broad definition of the genre is adopted, e.g., Bill Buford’s “pre-eminently a narrative told in the first person, authenticated by lived experience” (“Editorial,” Granta 10: Travel Writing, 1983).

One of the most interesting responses is Colin Thubron’s. He says travel writing contains a vital ingredient that computer programs like Google Earth can't substitute for, namely, “experience on the ground, the traveller’s raw intimacy with the sensuous texture of place: its smells and tastes, its street life and conversation.”

That’s what I hunger for, not just in travel writing, but in all writing – “experience on the ground,” “raw intimacy with the sensuous texture of place.” Classic New Yorker examples of it are John McPhee’s “Coming into the Country” (June 13, 20 & 27, 1977) and Ian Frazier’s “Great Plains” (February 13, 20 & 27, 1989).  

Robert Macfarlane on John McPhee's "Sunset" Description

In an interesting piece in the current issue of Granta, Robert Macfarlane compares three “sunset” descriptions, one of which is from John McPhee’s “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, April 25 & May 2, 1977; Book I in his great Coming into the Country, 1977). Here’s the description:

The air was cool now, nearing fifty . . . We sat around the campfire for at least another hour. We talked of rain and kestrels, oil and antlers, the height and the headwaters of the river. In the night the air and the river balanced out, and both were forty-six at seven in the morning.

Macfarlane comments,

Then there is McPhee’s sunset – in which the sun doesn’t feature at all, eclipsed from the scene as it is by facts. McPhee’s prose here concerns balance, and is balanced: note how carefully those three pairs of nouns match each other (singular noun, plural noun; rain, oil, height; kestrels, antlers, headwaters), preparing for the equalized temperature relationship of air and river at exactly “seven in the morning.” McPhee – a New Yorker staff writer for more than half a century – is a man committed to accuracy and to metrics. Coming into the Country, like his other books, carries an astonishing density of detail: his non-fiction, as David Remnick has observed, emulates the “freedom” of fiction but not its “license.”

Macfarlane’s noticing how “those three pairs of nouns match each other (singular noun, plural noun; rain, oil, height; kestrels, antlers, headwaters), preparing for the equalized temperature relationship of air and river” is superb. McPhee’s prose enacts the balance he describes. But I question Macfarlane’s suggestion that McPhee is, in this passage, describing a sunset. Maybe McPhee is implying one, but even that, for me, is a stretch.

It should also be noted that Macfarlane’s “sunset” quotation isn’t entirely accurate. It’s actually a merger of four sentences from three separate paragraphs. The middle two lines belong together; the first and last are grafts.

But Macfarlane’s larger point, that Coming into the Country is a landmark travel book, “an intricately patterned enquiry into America’s relationship with the idea of wilderness, braced by an awesome integrity of observation,” is incontrovertible.

Samanth Subramanian's "Following Fish"

I see Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish is mentioned in Simon Winchester’s excellent travel book "roundup," in this week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review. Subramanian is an occasional New Yorker contributor. See, for example, his terrific "The Agitator" (The New Yorker, September 2, 2013). Following Fish is one of my favorite books. Last year, I posted a review of it here. I also recommend Subramanian’s "Breach Candy" (Granta, Winter 2015), about an old colonial Mumbai club and a legal challenge to its “arch commandment” that only Europeans are allowed to be trust members. Here’s a taste:

He [Gerry Shirley, one of the litigants] remained alert even through the otherwise slackening texture of a day in court: the buzz of the first hour, then the settled keenness, the post-lunch torpor, the gradual straying of eyes to clocks, the dense energy of a system at work dissipating through the afternoon.

Anyone who’s spent a day in court will relate to that “gradual straying of eyes to clocks.”