March 25, 2019 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Kathryn Schulz’s “The Stack” and Joshua Rothman’s “What Lies Beneath.”

Schulz’s piece is a memoir of her father’s love of books. She writes,

Some people love books reverently—my great-aunt, for instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined to open any volume beyond a hundred-degree angle, so tenderly did she treat their spines. My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s. 

Her father sounds like my kind of guy. I, too, find “respite” in library reading rooms. Books are for me, as they were for him – “transportive and salvific.” And I share his awareness of life’s fragility. Schulz says,

Although he seemed to embody the ideal of the self-made man, my father was not terribly rah-rah about the bootstrap fantasy of the American Dream; he was too aware of how tenuous his trajectory had been, how easily his good life could have gone badly instead, how many helping hands and lucky breaks and second chances he had had along the way.

It’s a pleasure to read the profile of a book-lover – coffee stains, pistachio dust, and all. I totally identify with him. 

Joshua Rothman’s “What Lies Beneath” is a profile of the painter Peter Sacks. What I relish about it is its attentive first-hand observation of Sacks making a painting. Rothman puts us right in the room with Sacks as he sets fire to his creation:

Sacks bent down and selected another strip of linen. Using his brush, he glued it to the wooden shingle, half obscuring its red eyes. The fabric flowed vertically down the canvas. Leaning in, he used his fingers to adjust its path, creating ridges and folds so that it would be open to oxygen. Then, from a nearby worktable, he retrieved a box of kitchen matches. He struck one of them and set fire to the linen. The flames rippled upward, serpentine. He watched them climb, then, after a few seconds, used his brush to snuff them out. Some of the linen was gone. We stood looking at the materials, colored by smoke, now joined by a scar.

That passage is part of a fascinating section describing Sacks’s “ritualized form of art-making – creating, burying, burning, uncovering.” I enjoyed it immensely. 

May 18, 2015 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that most absorbed me is Joshua Rothman’s "Anatomy of Error." It’s a review of neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s memoir, Do No Harm. Medical writing is, for me, a relatively new interest. I trace my appetite for it to a quartet of elegant Jerome Groopman pieces that appeared last year: “How Memory Works” (The New York Review of Books, May 22, 2014); “The Transformation” (The New Yorker, September 15, 2014); “When Doctors Admit They Went Wrong” (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2014); “Print Thyself” (The New Yorker, November 24, 2014). Groopman writes a graceful, plain-English-style prose. Judging from the quotations in Rothman’s piece, it seems that Marsh’s style is similar – plainspoken, eloquent. Rothman calls Marsh “the Knausgaard of neurosurgery: he writes about his errors because he wants to confess them, and because he’s interested in his inner life and how it’s been changed, over time, by the making of mistakes.” I find Marsh’s willingness to confess and explore his errors fascinating. I applaud his factuality. Groopman, in his excellent “When Doctors Admit They Went Wrong,” a review of Terrence Holt’s Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories, criticizes Holt for not recounting recollections of exact events. Holt offered “parables,” i.e., “assemblages drawn from a variety of sources, compiled from multiple cases, transformed according to the logic not of journalism but of parable, seeking to capture the essence of something too complex to be understood any other way” (Holt’s words). Groopman says,

I was taken aback by Holt’s assertion that only the form of parable can “capture the essence to something too complex to be understood any other way.” Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is an illuminating parable, as are the medical tales of Chekhov, Turgenev, and Kafka. But the nonfiction stories of Oliver Sacks, Robert Coles, Richard Selzer, and Sherwin Nuland, as well as potent new voices of young doctors like Danielle Ofri, Leah Kaminsky, and Christine Montross, certainly capture the essence and complexity of the clinical world.

Add Henry Marsh to the list. Rothman says, “Do No Harm is an act of atonement, an anatomy of error, and an attempt to answer, from the inside, a startling question: How can someone spend decades cutting into people’s brains and emerge whole?”      

Seamus Heaney's Sensual Apprehension of Life

Seamus Heaney, who died two days ago at age seventy-four, had a close New Yorker connection. Over the years, he contributed thirty-eight poems to the magazine, including his great elegy, “Casualty” (“Rained-on, flower-laden / Coffin after coffin / Seemed to float from the door / Of the packed cathedral / Like blossoms on slow water”) (The New Yorker, April 2, 1979; included in his superb 1979 collection, Field Work). New Yorker poetry critic, Helen Vendler, an ardent champion of Heaney’s work (he dedicated The Spirit Level to her) wrote four pieces on him: “The Music of What Happens” (September 28, 1981); “Echo Soundings, Searches, Probes” (September 23, 1985); “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me,” (May 13, 1989), and “Choices” (April 15, 1991). They are among the glories of New Yorker critical writing. 

Yesterday, I was pleased to see The New Yorker pay eloquent tribute to Heaney. Dan Chiasson, commenting on Heaney’s sequence of poems called “Squarings,” says, “The work of these poems is to make as real as possible the represented sensory experiences of the child, conveying their aromas and textures as though at first hand” ["Postscript: Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)," “Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, August 30, 2013]. This gets at what I most prize in Heaney’s poetry – his gift for ravishing, sensual, tactile description. Vendler, in her brilliant Seamus Heaney (1998), says, “Heaney’s senses often transmit themselves in language with an ecstatic acuteness.” Here is a yellow curd of butter “weighting the churned up white, / heavy and rich, coagulated sunlight / that they fished, dripping, in a wide tin strainer, / heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl” (“Churning Day”). And here is the sweet flesh of a blackberry “Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it / Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for / Picking” (“Blackberry-Picking”). And here is the exhumed cadaver called the Grauballe Man (from the extraordinary poem of the same name):

The grain of his wrists

is like bog oak,

the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.

His instep has shrunk

cold as a swan’s foot

or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge

and purse of a mussel,

his spine an eel arrested

under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,

the chin is a visor

raised above the vent

of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.

The cured wound

opens inward to a dark

elderberry place.

                        

Chiasson is right when he says, in “Postscript,” that Heaney’s “poems about peat bogs and what they preserve are probably the most important English-language poems written in the past fifty years about violence.” [Incredibly, James Fenton dissents on this point; in his “The Orpheus of Ulster” (The Strength of Poetry), he says, “I don’t much care for what he fishes out of bogs.”] But if Grauballe Man represents atrocity, he’s also, as Vendler points out, “in the plainness of his utter amalgamation of all being (tar, water, wood, basalt, egg, swan root, mussel, eel, mud, armor, leather), a figure of incomparable beauty” (“The Music of What Happens”). Beauty runs through all that Heaney wrote, including his incomparable criticism. His Preoccupations (1980) and The Government of the Tongue (1988) are, for me, touchstones. In “Feeling Into Words” (in Preoccupations), Heaney provides this unforgettable definition of technique:

Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of existence within the jurisdiction of form.

Regarding the importance of rhythm, he says, “A new rhythm, after all, is a new life given to the world, a resuscitation not just of the ear but of the springs of being” (“Sounding Auden,” in The Government of the Tongue). In “Lowell’s Command” (The Government of Tongue), he quotes the concluding lines of three of Robert Lowell’s poems and says, “Closing lines like these would tremble in the centre of the ear like an arrow in a target and set the waves of suggestion rippling.” On Wordsworth’s poetic voice, he says, “As his poetic feet repeat his footfalls, the earth seems to be a treadmill that he turns; the big diurnal roll is sensed through the poetic beat and the world moves like a waterwheel under the fall of his voice” (“The Makings of a Music,” in Preoccupations). On and on – as a poet and as an essayist, Heaney is endlessly quotable. Vendler called his pieces on Bishop, Lowell, Plath, and Auden “the best in recent memory” (in “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me”). She said that twenty-four years ago. It still applies today.

Credit: The above photo of Seamus Heaney, by Richard Franck Smith, illustrates Joshua Rothman’s "Seamus Heaney in The New Yorker" (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, August 30, 2013).

Retrospective Review: The Food Issue, September 5, 2005

To sharpen my taste buds for the feast that The New Yorker’s Food Issue is serving up next week, I revisited what is, for me, the greatest Food Issue of them all – the September 5, 2005 issue (with Wayne Thiebaud’s delectable, painterly “Food Bowls” on the cover), containing, among other succulent items, Judith Thurman’s “Night Kitchens,” John Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men.”

Thurman’s piece is about Japan’s artisanal-tofu masters. She says, “When a tofu master offers you a slice of bean curd he has just unmolded, he is inviting you to partake, insofar as a stranger can, of what it means to be Japanese.” “Night Kitchens” brims with superbly noticed details – “the accoutrements – even the sink – are handmade of cedar,” “the stove is a slab of lava,” “adobe walls of clay mixed with rice straw are sheathed in bamboo,” “the ceiling is tented in thatch,” “the floor is cobbled with sea stones,” “a ginkgo counter with ten seats,” “parchment walls decorated in drippy ink by an inebriated artist,” “pottery on which breakfast is served – rust-and-ash-colored vessels with a dark under-glaze and a primal beauty,” “an ivory-colored attar of bean curd that arrives on a turquoise plate, with a coral drop of sea-urchin (uni) purée.” My favorite sentence in the piece is the simple, sensuous, “The windows of the shed were open, and the sea breeze carried a scent of rain, wildflowers, and algae.” “Night Kitchens” is included in Thurman’s splendid Cleopatra’s Nose (2007).

Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears” is about arboreal archeology – “the pursuit and recovery of old varieties of fruit”– as practiced by Umbrian agronomist, Isabella Dalla Ragione. Of its many pleasures – a trip to a Perugian mountain valley to visit an old pear tree (“Its black bark had deep crevices, and the trunk and lower branches were covered with scabrous white lichen”), a visit to a villa near Florence to view the fruit paintings of Bartolomeo Bimbi (1648-1729), attendance at a fruit show staged by Dalla Ragione in an old palazzo (“The seeds rattled inside some of the apples, like natural castanets”) - the most piquant is Seabrook’s sketch of Dalla Ragione’s eighty-four-year-old father, Livio, the “genius loci” of the Dalla Ragione orchard (“Livio has a long white fringe of hair around his bald, speckled. Shakespearian dome, and he has the hopeful expression that very old men get in their eyes. He is gruff and blustery, and Isabella treats him as she does the fruit trees – tenderly but firm”). My favorite sentence in “Renaissance Pears” is a description of the flavor of one of Livio’s winter pears: “The taste was so clean – not buttery, which is the standard by which the commercial pear is bred – that it was almost metallic.” Seabrook is like the Medici still-life painters he mentions in his piece - a wonderfully precise, sensuous describer of fruit: see also his excellent "Crunch" in last year’s Food Issue, and his brilliant “The Fruit Detective” (in Flash of Genius, 2008).

Bilger’s “The Egg Men” is about Las Vegas short-order cooks. I’ve extolled its abundant pleasures before (see my post "Retrospective Review: Burkhard Bilger's 'The Egg Men,'" January 30, 2011). I think it’s destined to be a New Yorker classic, ranking with such masterpieces as John McPhee’s “Atchafalaya,” Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” and Arthur Lubow’s “This Vodka Has Legs.” I’m pleased to see that Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker’s new Archive Editor, recently named it one of his favorites ("Staff Favorites From The Archive," “Double Take,” newyorker.com, November 26, 2012). Suffice it to say here, it’s one of my favorites, too.

All three of these pieces are gloriously subjective. Pursuit of the story is part of the narrative: “So at five o’clock one morning, I rolled off my futon in a lovely old ryokan, the Yoyokaku, near the beach in Karatsu, ready for research” (Thurman); “Earlier this summer, I accompanied Isabella on a trip to visit the old pear tree” (Seabrook); “On early mornings, well before the first rush, Gutstein would let me work at the over-easy station for an hour or two” (Bilger). It’s one of the ingredients I’ll be looking for when I’m devouring next week’s Food Issue. I can hardly wait to get started.