Inspired Sentence #1

Almost every day, it seemed, my drawing improved a tiny bit, guided by the shadowy anchovies of subtlety and shadow that swam their way up through the paper immediately under my pencil.

Wow! What a delightful sentence! It’s by Nicholson Baker. I encountered it last night, reading his wonderful Finding a Likeness (2024). It made me smile. Why? It’s original. It’s creative. Most of all, it’s surprising – the surprising word choices (“anchovies,” “subtlety,” “shadow,” “swam," "paper") and the delightful, surprising way they’re combined (“the shadowy anchovies of subtlety and shadow that swam their way up through the paper immediately under my pencil”). It’s like listening to jazz and suddenly hearing a gorgeous, shimmering combination of notes never heard before. Baker’s sentence is like that – beautiful, lyrical, beating with the creative impulse.  

Lisa Borst on Nicholson Baker

I want to compliment Lisa Borst on her excellent "Ways of Seeing," in the current issue of Bookforum. It’s a review of Nicholson Baker’s new book Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art. Borst writes, 

Finding a Likeness chronicles two years in which Baker took a break from fiction and literary journalism to teach himself “how to draw and paint on the far side of sixty,” recasting his interest in figurative language as a new focus on figurative art. The mechanics of getting “somewhat better at art”—the mimetic skill that drawing demands, the “erasefully slow” temporality imposed by shading a landscape or still life, the robust universe of instruments and tools (longtime Bakerian subjects) available to the amateur artist—echo many of his lifelong literary concerns. But the essential irony of the book—one Baker is way too humble to name—is that we spend much of it watching one of the best describers alive struggle with the basics of representation.  

“Figurative language,” “mimetic skill,” “one of the best describers alive,” “basics of representation” – these are words that immediately catch my attention. The art of description is one of my main interests. Baker’s book appears to be one that I’d enjoy enormously. Borst says of it,

Long before he turned to visual art, Baker was writing images. (There’s a generally synesthetic quality to much of his prose—blurbs on the back cover of my copy of Vox compare the novel to both Chagall’s drawings and Ravel’s Bolero—but the dominant mode, the sensory system to which he defaults, is the visual.) Baker’s exhilarating similes belong to a larger project of capturing how everyday things look in ultra-high-resolution detail; his sensibility, he admits in the early memoir U and I, is “image-hoarding.” Also in that book, in which Baker reflects on his literary indebtedness to John Updike, he refers to Updike’s image-forward style as “Prousto-Nabokovian,” one of many admiring epithets in the memoir that could equally apply to Baker himself. (I just don’t believe Baker, who in his previous book had described a woman’s pregnant belly as “Bernoullian,” and her pubic hair as “brief,” when he claims to envy Updike’s “adjectival resourcefulness.”) Nabokov’s crisp molecular comedy, his tendency toward anthimeria and dryly upcycled technical language, his cliché-demolishing descriptive precision; Proust’s luxuriant digressiveness, his great subject of time, and above all his sublime animation of psychological riffs by visual cues: already, by 1991, it was clear that these were Baker’s gifts too. 

Wow! That “cliché-demolishing descriptive precision” is superb! The whole passage is superb. Borst is on my wavelength. Nabokov and Updike are consummate describers. And she’s right; Baker is in their league (see, for example, his brilliant New Yorker pieces "A New Page" and "Painkiller Deathstreak"). His Finding a Likeness is a book I want to read. Thank you to Borst for bringing it to my attention. 

John Updike's Secular Vision (Contra Christian Lorentzen)

Juan Gris, Breakfast (1914)

John Updike’s art essays are among the glories of modern literature. Of the many adjectives I’d choose to describe them – “sensuous,” “subtle,” “stylish,” “original,” “analytical,” “perceptive,” “inspired,” “addictive,” “delightful,” “detailed” – “religious” would not be among them. Yet this is the very word, the only word, that Christian Lorentzen uses to characterize Updike’s art pieces. Lorentzen, in his "All he does is write his novel" (London Review of Books, June 5, 2014), says Updike “never tired of writing about painting and sculpture in religious terms.” To my knowledge, of Updike’s roughly one hundred writings on art, only two discuss art in religious terms: his wonderful memory piece, “What MoMA Done Tole Me” (Just Looking, 1989), in which he reminisces about his youthful visits to the Museum of Modern Art, and "Invisible Cathedral" (The New Yorker, November 15, 2004; Due Considerations, 2007), an account of his 2004 visit to the new, expanded MoMA.

In “What MoMA Done Tole Me,” Updike says of the Museum of Modern Art, “I walked here often, up Fifth Avenue, to clear my head, to lift my spirits. For me the Museum of Modern Art was a temple, though my medium had become words.” Later in the piece, he says that the Museum “formed a soothing shelter from the streets outside” and that, “Within the museum, Brancusi’s statues were grouped in a corner room … and emanated an extraordinary peace and finality.” “These pet shapes,” he says, “had acquired, in the decades of the sculptor’s obsessed reworking of them, a sacred aura, which I imbibed as in a chapel, in that softly lit corner space from which one could only turn and retreat…. I was looking for a religion, as a way of hanging on to my old one, in those years, and was attracted to those artists who seemed to me as single-minded and selfless as saints.”

“What MoMA Done Tole Me” ’s most explicit expression of Updike’s religious feeling toward art occurs when he describes his encounter with Juan Gris’s Breakfast:

Breakfast, though a less sunny and matinal work than Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room, tasted more like breakfast: a stark but heartening outlay of brown coffee and thick white china, with a packet of mail and piece of newspaper at its edges. The yellowing scrap of jOURNal, which wittily includes the artist’s name in headline type, fascinated me: like the cracked green of Matisse’s Piano Lesson, the scrap was showing the chemical effects of time; it was aging away from the white of the tablecloth toward the grained brown of the table. On the table, the impudent yet somehow earnest use of commercial paper imitating wood-grain moved me, echoing here in this palace of high art the kitschy textures of my childhood exercises in artifice; and the perfect balance and clarity of this crayoned collage, together with the short life testified to by Gris’s dates on the frame (1887 – 1927), exuded the religious overtone I sought. A religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life, in an atmosphere of gaiety and diligence: this was what I found in the Museum of Modern Art, where others might have found completely different – darker and wilder – things.

What a gorgeous passage! The way Updike describes the scrap of newspaper (“aging away from the white of the tablecloth toward the grained brown of the table”) is very fine. It brings to mind Nicholson Baker’s comment about how much more Updike can do with a piece of reality than he can (U and I, 1991). Baker speaks for most of us on this point.

Updike’s moments of art religiosity seem to have been most intense when he visited MoMA. But by the time he wrote "Invisible Cathedral" (2007), his feeling appears to have waned. He says, “After seventy-five years, a life is a stretch and a cathedral may have sprouted too many chapels.”

To say, as Lorentzen says, that Updike “never tired of writing about painting and sculpture in religious terms” is a shade misleading. Only in “What MoMA Done Tole Me” and “Invisible Cathedral” did he do so expressly. Perhaps he sublimated his religious feeling towards art in his other pieces. That may account, in part, for their greatness. But Updike’s sensual apprehension of life (“Flesh is delicious,” he says, eyeing Lucas Cranach’s Eve) is also a key ingredient of his criticism – one that’s totally secular.  

Best of 2013

Okay, New Yorkerphiles, here we go. The year is over; the crop is in. What a fabulous, cornucopian, prismatic harvest it is! Now the fun begins – skimming off the crème de la crème. Among 2013’s highlights are: (1) pieces by New Yorker greats Joseph Mitchell (“Street Life,” February 11 & 18), John McPhee (“The Orange Trapper,” July 1), Janet Malcolm (“Nobody’s Looking At You,” September 23), and Calvin Trillin (“Mozzarella Story,” December 2); (2) powerful “Personal History” by Meghan O’Rourke (“What’s Wrong with Me?,” August 26) and Ariel Levy (“Thanksgiving In Mongolia,” November 18); (3) three features (“The Toll,” February 11 & 18; “Form and Fungus,” May 20; and “Hidden City,” October 28) and at least four Talk stories (“Tree Person,” March 4, 2013; “School’s Out,” July 8 & 15, 2013; “By the Numbers,” August 26, 2013; “The Mountain,” December 23 & 30) – all terrific – by my favorite New Yorker writer, Ian Frazier; (4) wonderful pieces by two Nabokovian wizards -  Gary Shteyngart (“O.K., Glass,” August 5) and Nicholson Baker (“A Fourth State of Matter,” July 8 & 15); (5) two extraordinary critical pieces – Anthony Lane’s “Names and Faces” (September 2), a review of the Met’s Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition, and Dan Chiasson’s “All About My Mother” (November 11), a review of a new Marianne Moore biography. I could go on and on.

Compressing these riches into a “Ten Best” list is excruciating. There’s no doubt in my mind as to which piece is my favorite - Ben McGrath’s “The White Wall” (April 22, 2013). This article has it all – action (competitive mushing), vivid description (“The mushers ate like sled dogs, scarfing double and triple helpings of roast moose and potatoes, which they washed down with coffee and Tang - the Gatorade of the Iditarod”), inspired detail (black-bear Stroganoff, dogsled constructed from sawed-off Easton hockey sticks, a finish line marked by Kool-Aid poured over snow, a house insulated with clothes from the Salvation Army, etc.). It’s my #1 pick.

For #2, I’m going with Ian Frazier’s “The Toll.” It contains one of the year’s most haunting lines: “Standing in a soggy no man’s forest near a beach, with invasive Japanese honeysuckle and bittersweet and greenbrier vines dragging down the trees, and shreds of plastic bags in the branches, and a dirty snow of Styrofoam crumbs on the ground, and heaps of hurricane detritus strewn promiscuously, and fierce phragmites reeds springing up all over, I saw the landscape of the new hot world to come.”

My #3 pick is Gary Shteyngart’s superb “O.K., Glass.” This piece has so many great lines – surprising, surrealistic, specific, all at once. Here’s one example: “As the man walks into the frigid subway car, he unexpectedly jerks his head up and down. A pink light comes on above the right lens. He slides his index finger against the right temple of the glasses as if flicking away a fly. The man’s right eyebrow rises and his right eye squints. He appears to be mouthing some words. A lip-reader would come away with the following message: ‘Forever 21 world traveler denim shorts, $22.80. Horoscope: Cooler heads prevail today, helping you strike a compromise in a matter you refused to budge on last week.’ ”

Time to insert a critical piece. I devour critical writing. This year, Dan Chiasson, James Wood, Peter Schjeldahl, Anthony Lane, and David Denby were all at the top of their game. For my #4 pick, I choose Anthony Lane’s absorbing “Names and Faces” (“Though the backdrop may by sepia and moody, the subject is alert in her modernity and ravenous for experience. You could post her on Instagram right now”).

Rounding out my top five is the piece that, for me, contains the year’s most memorable image. No, I’m not referring to Ariel Levy’s heart-breaking depiction of her miscarriage in “Thanksgiving In Mongolia.” Actually, if I could, I’d delete that horrific scene from my memory. The image I have in mind is this one, from Lizzie Widdicombe’s marvelous “The Bad-Boy Brand” (April 8, 2013): “We took a water taxi through the canals, past crumbling buildings and water-stained walls, and arrived at San Marco just as the floodwaters were rising. The area was swarming with tourists, and a narrow pathway of raised wooden planks was threaded precariously through the square. As the waters rose, the tourists crossed the square on the planks, shuffling in a long, two-person-wide line, like animals boarding Noah’s Ark.”

In the #6 slot is John McPhee’s dandy “The Orange Trapper.” This piece shows the Master in excellent form. It brims with bright, original, delightful description (e.g., “This is not on one of my biking routes, but on solo rides I have been there, and returned there, inspired by curiosity and a longing for variety and, not least, the observation that in the thickets and copses and wild thorny bushes on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence are golf balls – Big Bank golf balls, Big Pharma golf balls, C-level golf balls (C.E.O., C.O.O., C.F.O. golf balls), lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay”). I enjoyed “The Orange Trapper” immensely.

For #7, I think I’ll pick another critical piece - Dan Chiasson’s wonderful “All About My Mother” (November 11, 2013). Sample passage: “These unlikely applications of empathy – to a mussel shell, a fan, a fish condemned to wading through stone – all enter through the unmarked portal of ‘description’; only later do we realize that what has been described is not what Moore saw but what Moore felt on seeing what she saw.”

Room on the list is getting tight; we’re down to my final three choices. There are at least a dozen more pieces deserving inclusion. For my #8, I pick Nicholson Baker’s brilliant “A Fourth State of Matter” (July 8 & 15). Baker’s writing appears so effortless and natural. This piece is a beauty. Sample: “Each glass sheet shuddered slightly as it was turned this way and that, in the impossibly fragile manner of airborne soap bubbles, and my own arms kept going out toward it, as if to save the sheet from crashing to the floor – but, of course, no glass crashed.”

Okay, two to go. #9 has to be Alec Wilkinson’s “Cape Fear” (September 9), doesn’t it? Hard not to include it, containing as it does one of the year’s most interesting characters, Ocearch co-captain Brett McBride, who, at the climax of this exciting piece,

barefoot and in his jeans and a T-shirt, jumped into the water and climbed onto the submerged platform. Pulling hard on the cable, he steered the shark into the cradle. As she arrived, he leaped over a railing like a rodeo clown. When she passed him, he jumped back in and grabbed her tail and turned her on her side so that her glistening white belly appeared again. It was milky white, the color of the moon, with the water rippling off it.

That last line is marvelously fine.

And now here we are at #10, the toughest pick of all because it means excluding all the remaining candidates. After close consideration, I choose Calvin Trillin’s great “Mozzarella Story” (December 2). I’m fond of elegy. This piece rues the closing of Joe’s Dairy, a thirty-five year old cheese shop in Lower Manhattan. The place was a regular stop on what Trillin calls his “noshing strolls.” Of the many pungent details in this great piece, I think my favorite is Ro’s short-order version of Trillin’s request for a smoked mozzarella: “ ‘One smokie,’ Ro, the woman who took care of the counter in recent years, would say, as she went over to a tray to pick one out.”  

And now that I’m finished, I notice there’s only one female on my list. I apologize for that. There could’ve been at least three more, I suppose, in addition to Widdicombe: Meghan O’Rourke (“What’s Wrong with Me?,” August 26), Lauren Collins (“Fire-Eaters,” November 4), and Ariel Levy (“Thanksgiving In Mongolia,” November 18). But when it comes right down to it, I let pleasure be my guide. Accordingly, these are the ten that stick in my mind:

1. Ben McGrath’s “The White Wall” (April 22, 2013) 
2. Ian Frazier’s “The Toll” (February 11 & 18, 2013) 
3. Gary Shteyngart’s “O.K., Glass” (August 5, 2013) 
4. Anthony Lane’s “Names and Faces” (September 2, 2013) 
5. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The Bad-Boy Brand” (April 8, 2013) 
6. John McPhee’s “The Orange Trapper” (July 1, 2013) 
7. Dan Chiasson’s “All About My Mother” (November 11, 2013) 
8. Nicholson Baker’s “A Fourth State of Matter” (July 8 & 15, 2013)
9. Alec Wilkinson’s “Cape Fear” (September 9, 2013) 
10. Calvin Trillin’s “Mozarrella Story” (December 2, 2013)

What a pleasure it is to look back and savor all these great pieces. Thank you New Yorker for another wonderful year of reading bliss. 

Credit: The above artwork is by Simone Massoni; it appears in The New Yorker (August 26, 2013), as an “On The Horizon” illustration for “Jean Renoir’s French Cancan at MOMA.”

July 8 & 15, 2013 Issue

Nicholson Baker’s “A Fourth State of Matter,” in this week’s issue, does something very cool, very inspired. It takes an item most of us use, but have no clue about, namely, the ubiquitous LCD screen, and traces it to the source of its production, in South Korea. It’s essentially a “visit” piece, sort of like a long Talk story, about Baker’s attendance at the International Meeting on Information in Seoul. It’s absolutely brilliant! I devoured every line. Baker is an LCD poet. He says, “Liquid crystal’s aim is basically peaceable – it wants to give eyes what eyes want to look at.” In another memorable line, he says, “This was a liquid that could make light perform a pirouette.” My favorite part of “A Fourth State of Matter” is Baker’s splendid description of his visit to LG Display’s factory in Paju:

We gazed through the glass at the Piranesian vastitude of one part of the factory – an ultra-clean metropolis of automated modules, silver ducts, and rectilinear interconnections, all lit by a straw-colored light, in the midst of which a multiply jointed robot the size of a tree was nimbly sliding six-foot-long slabs of almost paper-thin mother glass into and out of the narrow inlets in something that looked like a pizza oven, except much bigger. The robot arm, fitted with what seemed to be faintly hissing suction cups, never hesitated, never paused to consider its next move. Inside the pizza oven, the glass received its subpixel matrix of color filters, using a photolithographic process of masking and deposition and removal. Each glass sheet shuddered slightly as it was turned this way and that, in the impossibly fragile manner of airborne soap bubbles, and my own arms kept going out toward it, as if to save the sheet from crashing to the floor – but, of course, no glass crashed. This was the place that made all Best Buys possible.

“A Fourth State of Matter” beautifully displays Baker’s awesome descriptive powers. Reading it is rapture. 

August 9, 2010 Issue

I don’t know whether I would’ve read Nicholson Baker’s “Painkiller Deathstreak” (in this week’s issue), if I hadn’t previously read his “A New Page” (The New Yorker, August 3, 2009). I enjoyed that piece so much I thought I’d give “Painkiller Deathstreak” a try, even though it’s about a dubious cultural phenomenon, namely, video games. They’re dubious, in my opinion, because they’re inhuman and denatured. Have I ever played them? No. But I’ve witnessed others playing them, and the games they were playing seemed to consist of one long dark killing spree after another conducted in various bombed-out, war-torn environments. The accuracy of my impression is, in fact, confirmed by Baker’s piece. For example, regarding the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Baker says, “Here’s what it’s about. It’s about killing, and it’s about dying. Also, it’s about collecting firearms. And it’s modern warfare, which means it’s set in places like Afghanistan.”

Baker really gets into the games, their controls (“The PlayStation 3’s blue X button is in a different place than the Xbox 360’s blue X button – madness”), their beauty (“You’ll see an edge-shined, light-bloomed, magic-hour gilded glow on a row of half-wrecked buildings and you’ll want to stop for a few minutes just to take it in”), the “weird camaraderie” among the players, including his sixteen-year old son (“There’s a lot of wild laughing”). I confess I enjoyed the piece immensely. Baker is a great writer. There’s an amazing passage in “Painkiller Deathstreak” – it begins “In order to give me a taste of multi-player madness, as I practiced my shooting and sprinting skills …” – and finishes with a flourish of description so specific that you almost forget that what’s being described is virtual reality and not the real thing. Actually, you know it’s virtual reality, but you marvel at the depth of Baker’s immersion in it, so deep that it excites him to write prose that really zings. Here are the concluding sentences of that great passage:

There were thick-budded poppies growing in the sun, with PVC irrigation pipes over them. Again I heard my son’s sprinting footsteps – he had a multiplayer perk that allowed him to run forever without tiring. He knew a way to get up on the fuselage – I could hear him running down the metallic skin – and onto the tail, and from there up onto a high cliff. I’d spray bullets in a semicircle, and then there would be a single quick sniper shot and I’d be dead. Then he’d apologize. “Sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to kill, only to maim.” I died often enough that I received a temporary health boost called a "painkiller deathstreak."

How cool that “I could hear him running down the metallic skin”! Is “Painkiller Deathstreak” as good as “A New Page”? I don’t think so, because “A New Page,” besides being an inspired piece of description (e.g., “The Kindle 1’s design was a retro piece of bizarrerie – an unhandy, asymmetrical Fontina wedge of plastic”), is a glorious tour de force argument in favor of newspapers – the paper-and-ink print kind, not the electronic version:

The Kindle Times lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography – and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.

How fine that “spinnakered typographical elegance and variety”! Baker nails his case for newspapers with this assertion: “The Kindle DX doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them – it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.” I was sort of hoping, when I started reading “Painkiller Deathstreak,” that Baker would roast video games over the red-hot fire of his blazing intellect the way he brilliantly roasted The Kindle in “A New Page.” Instead, he’s written a celebration of the damn things – and a gorgeous one at that! There’s a father-son bonding element going on in “Painkiller Deathstreak” and I think it softened Baker’s normally sharp-edged critical faculty. At bottom, what he likes best about video games is the opportunity to interact with his son. He doesn’t come right out and say this, but I think it’s implicit in that wonderful “We went off to dinner full of weird camaraderie.”