September 14, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The Michigan noise trio Wolf Eyes may favor “blisteringly loud and astoundingly inaccessible textures” (Benjamin Shapiro, "Into the Woods"), but I certainly don’t. Much more to my liking is the Bill Charlap Trio, which "Goings On About Town: Night Life" calls “the premier mainstream piano trio of its day,” and says, “the suave interplay between the group’s leader and his longtime partners—Kenny Washington, on drums, and Peter Washington (no relation), on bass—is always a pleasure to hear.” I agree. Charlap is a remarkable improviser. Here’s what Whitney Balliett said about him:

His ballad numbers are unique. He may start with the verse of the song, played ad lib, then move into the melody chorus. He does not rhapsodize. Instead, he improvises immediately, rearranging the chords and the melody line, and using a relaxed, almost implied beat. He may pause for a split second at the end of this chorus and launch a nodding, swinging single-note solo chorus, made up of irregularly placed notes – some off the beat and some behind the beat – flowed by connective runs, and note clusters. He closes with a brief, calming recap of the melody. His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists. He constantly reins in his up-tempo numbers. He has a formidable technique, but he never shows off, even though he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, racing upper-register tintinnabulations, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines; each note is rounded. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us. [“The Natural,” The New Yorker, April 19, 1999].

2. I enjoyed Richard Brody’s capsule review of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (“Revealing the catastrophic impact of seemingly minor events on people who are struggling to subsist, De Sica endows slender side business and incidental pictorial details with high suspense and tragic grandeur. With a keen succession of tracking shots amid crowds at a market and a church, he transforms the sheer scale of the city and the vast number of residents in similarly desperate straits into a symphonic lament for the human condition”). But the title Bicycle Thieves is new to me. I’ve always known it as The Bicycle Thief. That’s what Pauline Kael called it (see her 5001 Nights at the Movies).

3. That “a paddle of shiso, whole and flat like a beautiful leaf pressing” in Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Ganso Yaki" is superb.

4. Atul Gawande’s "Postscript: Oliver Sacks" is a wonderful tribute. Gawande says of Sacks, “He wanted to see humanity in its many variants and to do so in his own, almost anachronistic way—face to face, over time, away from our burgeoning apparatus of computers and algorithms. And, through his writing, he showed us what he saw.”

5. Sack’s "Filter Fish" is immensely enjoyable. The detail of the fishmonger delivering the fish alive, “swimming in a pail of water,” is inspired.

6. John McPhee’s "Omission" is another piece in his excellent “The Writing life” series. This one focuses on deletion of material, what McPhee calls “the principle of leaving things out.” How does a writer decide what to omit? McPhee proposes the following criterion: “You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in – if not it stays out.” It sounds straightforward. But it’s not. McPhee illustrates the problem with a story about riding in a limo with Louis Marx, the toy manufacturer:

So this is the situation: Two-thirds of a century later, I am describing that ride to New York City in an article on the writing process that is focussed on the principle of leaving things out. I am with Mr. and Mrs. Monarch of Toys, whose friends a few years ago led various forms of the invasion of Europe. Do I leave that out? Help! Should I omit the lemony look on General Smith’s face the day he showed up late for lunch after his stomach was pumped? I am writing this, not reading it, and I don’t know what to retain and what to reject. The monarchical remark on being greater than the sum of Lionel and Gilbert—do I leave that out? I once saw Mr. Marx toss a broiled steak onto a rug so his bulldog could eat it. How relevant is that? Do I leave that out? Will it offend his survivors? In a recent year, his great-granddaughter was a sophomore in my college writing course. Her name was Barnett, not Marx. I did not know her beforehand, and had not even learned that my old roommate’s grandniece was at Princeton when her application for a place in the course came in. “You gave my grandmother her first kiss,” it began. How relevant is that? Should I cut that out? Mrs. Marx—Idella, stepmother of my roommate—was rumored among us Princeton sophomores of the time to be the sister of Lili St. Cyr. In the twenty-first century, in whose frame of reference is the strip dancer Lili St. Cyr? Better to exclude that? Best to exclude that Idella danced, too? This is about what you leave out, not what you take off. Writing is selection.

That “This is about what you leave out, not what you take off” made me smile. But the passage doesn’t really solve the question of whether that bit about Louis Marx tossing a broiled steak onto a rug so his bulldog could eat it should go in or stay out. Earlier in his piece, McPhee proposes “interest” as his main criterion for determining selection. But in the above passage he appears to use “relevance” as his guide. I prefer “interest.” Some details, such as that insouciant steak-toss to the bulldog on the rug, can be relished for their own sake. Of course, the true artist finds a way of making the interesting relevant. That’s what McPhee does in “Omission.”

Best of 2014

Well, the end of the year approaches. Time now to compile my “Best of 2014” list. I know there are skeptics who consider such lists pointless. But I enjoy the process. It’s a way of deliciously prolonging my 2014 New Yorker reading experience.

Here then is a selection of my favorite 2014 New Yorker pieces (with a choice sliver from each in parenthesis):

Talk Stories

1. Sophie Brickman, "Say Cheese," January 6, 2014 (“He was trying to capture the perfect shot of a pumpkin muffin with his Nokia phone”)

2. Nick Paumgarten, "Reunion," February 3, 2014 (“His upper lip was mottled, like a bruised fruit – a life in brass”)

3. Lizzie Widdicombe, "Table Talk," March 17, 2014 (“ ‘If I talk, you gotta drink the vodka’ ”)

4. Ian Frazier, "Bus Ride," April 14, 2014 (“To ride the B-46 north on Utica Avenue is to feel the city accumulate and intensify on both sides”)

5. Ian Frazier, "Do Not Cross," June 2, 2014 (“but give these objects a few minutes of contemplation and a minor visitation of the sublime may occur”)

6. Mark Singer, "Risky Business," July 21, 2014 (“ ‘As soon as they started moving the bulls out of the pens into the bucking chutes, I could see Bushwacker go from docile to this’ – he pantomimed a bull pawing the ground – ‘and I thought, This bull knows’ ”)

7. Mark Singer, "Meritorious," August 11 & 18, 2014 (“Afterward, Angell says softly, ‘Jim Leyland coming by. That’s really something.’ ”)

8. Tad Friend, "Rembrandt Lighting," November 10, 2014 (Gilroy is “as thin and pale as dental floss”)

9. Ian Parker, "Oldies But Goodies," November 10, 2014 (“As Thiebaud put it, there are still mornings that start with the thought: This morning, I’d like to paint a pie”)

10. Oliver Sacks, "Night of the Ginkgo," November 24, 2014 (“tough, heavy Mesozoic leaves such as the dinosaurs ate”)

Reporting

1. Tad Friend, "Thicker Than Water," February 10, 2014 (“They hung there for five seconds – their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air – as if time were taking a breath”)

2. Raffi Khatchadourian, "A Star in a Bottle," March 3, 2014 (“I put on goggles and looked at the cylindrical reactor core, its dense crush of parts, rendered in bright colors, seeming to float in a vast gray horizonless space”)

3. Peter Hessler, "Revolution On Trial," March 10, 2014 (“I was sitting next to the cage, and after a while Mohamed el-Beltagy, one of the accused, began gesturing to me through the bars”)

4. Nick Paumgarten, "Berlin Nights," March 24, 2014 (“The music was churning, hypnotic, almost psychedelic, and I abandoned myself to it”)

5. Ian Frazier, "Blue Bloods," April 14, 2014 (“throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks”)

6. Burkhard Bilger, In Deep," April 21, 2014 (“Now he stood at the shore of a small, dark pool under a dome of sulfurous flowstone”)

7. Lizzie Widdicombe, "The End of Food," May 12, 2014 (“With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad”)

8. Dana Goodyear, "Paper Palaces," August 11 & 18, 2014 (“He looks clicked together, like a Lego figurine”)

9. Richard Preston, "The Ebola Wars," October 27, 2014 (“By looking at a few genomes of Ebola, the scientists hoped to grasp an image of the whole virus, which could be conceived of as a life-form visible in four dimensions, as vast amounts of code flowing through time and space”)

10. Ben McGrath, "The Ice Breaker," December 15, 2014 (“Slow it down now, and watch carefully: Subban’s skate blades reëstablish contact with the ice a second before he one-times a laser beam into the upper right corner”)

Criticism

1. Peter Schjeldahl, "The Outlaw," February 3, 2014 (“But there’s no gainsaying a splendor as berserk as that of a Hieronymus Bosch painting”)

2. Louis Menand, "Imitation of Life," April 28, 2014 (“Updike is a highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being”)

3. James Wood, "The World As We Know It," May 19, 2014 (“as in Naipaul’s work, the pages seem scarred with remembered wounds”)

4. Dan Chiasson, "Mother Tongue," June 2, 2014 (“the book’s strong effect of having been written, unlike most prior poetry about having kids, under the conditions it describes”)

5. Alex Ross, "Blockbuster," June 23, 2014 (“Plaintive strands of near-tonal melody floated in an eerie, wide-open space defined at its edges by groaning bass timbres, wayward piano figures, and the rustlings of maracas, vibraslap, snare drum, and other percussion. It felt like an encampment encircled by watchful eyes”)

6. Anthony Lane, "Balancing Acts," July 21, 2014 (“We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process; that is why the Mason with the earring from whom we take our leave, on his first, blissed-out day of college, both is and is not the affable imp of seven, or the mumbler who bumped his way through puberty, and that twin sense of continuity and interruption—of life itself as tracking shot and jump cut—applies to everyone. Just like the final fade.”)

7. James Wood, "Away Thinking About Things," August 25, 2014 (“His experiments in vernacular Scots push and twist the language, sometimes to breaking points”)

8. Alex Ross, "Under the Stars," August 25, 2014 (“One great pleasure of the Bowl is the sense of a spell being cast, and it happened here: in the third movement of the Mahler, when a ghostly klezmer band files by, seven thousand leaned in, their red wine and grilled chicken neglected, their motionless heads etched by the light pouring off the stage”)

9. David Denby, "Lasting Impressions," September 1, 2014 (“But the ‘plot’ is no more than the men’s thorny emotional connection and their mutual fixation on death”)

10. James Wood, "Fly Away," December 8, 2014 (“Within a paragraph or two, the reader senses an attentive purity in the narrator’s prose. She seems alert to everything”)

Thank you New Yorker for another great year of blissful reading.

Postscript: Today (January 3, 2015), I amended the above list, deleting Dana Goodyear’s “Élite Meat,” and inserting her "Paper Palaces." Goodyear had a great 2014, producing four wonderful pieces, all of which could’ve made my list. I decided to go with one. I’ve finally settled on “Paper Palaces” as my favorite.

Credit: The above artwork is by Jacob Escobedo; it appears in the March 3, 2014 New Yorker as an illustration for Raffi Khatchadourian’s “A Star in a Bottle.”

November 24, 2014 Issue

Pleasures abound in this week’s issue (“The Tech Issue”): “the easy, cheesy thrills of the appetizers” at Upland (“Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two”); the “in-process” feel of Bryan Graf’s photograms, “as if the fabric were still moving, refracting and layering gossamer passages of magenta, rose, and acid green” (“Goings On About Town: Art”); the “razor-sharp pulp efficacy” of the action scenes in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies”); the “subtle but staggeringly delicious truffle pasta with grated yak cheese” at Aldo Sohm Wine Bar (“Sarah Larson, “Bar Tab”); the “heavy, golden, fan-shaped leaves” of New York City’s ginkgoes (Oliver Sacks, “Night of the Ginkgo”); the 10xers on the roof of Altay Guvench’s “hacker mansion,” finishing their drinks in the fog (Lizzie Widdicombe, “The Programmer’s Price”); Sean Parker, in his Plaza Hotel apartment, “dressed in jeans and rust-colored high tops, drinking tea from a white china cup” (John Seabrook, “Revenue Streams”); the sound of a Wyss Institute 3-D printer “clacking and clattering like a busy riveting machine” (Jerome Groopman, “Print Thyself”); the roar of the crowd in Lincoln Theatre, “as it saw Scarlett plant a hatchery – a pulsing, cloudy blue blob – down in the corner, next to PartinG’s home base” (Ben McGrath, “Good Game”); the “jagged music” of Penelope Fitzgerald’s prose – “each sentence is a little different from its predecessor; nothing is allowed to settle into the familiar” (James Wood, “Late Bloom”). I enjoyed it immensely. 

April 23, 2012 Issue

I crave subjectivity, an element that, until recently, Jill Lepore’s New Yorker writing has lacked. In most of her previous pieces, she’s kept herself in the background. But recently her “I” has begun to emerge and, as a result, her work has gained in interest. Her “Battleground America,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s about the gun debate – the barriers that impede gun control, the fight over the meaning of the Second Amendment, the conservative use of gun-control as a vote-getter, and so on. I support gun regulation. In Canada, where I live, gun control recently suffered a grievous setback when the Harper government abolished the long-gun registry. So, when I read Lepore’s piece, I was hoping it would expose the irrationality of the conservative argument for less, rather than more, gun regulation. And I was also hoping it would be more than just a third-person narrative of American firearms history. I’m pleased to say that “Battleground America” does not disappoint. The piece is grounded in the here-and-now. Its opening section grabbed me with an account of the shootings at Ohio’s Chardon High School on February 27, 2012. Its second section, more typical of Lepore’s usual historical approach, is a statistical overview of the rates of gun ownership in the United States. But the third section is an eye-opener; it’s where, for me, this piece really takes off. I read its opening line (“The day after the shooting in Ohio, I went to a firing range”), and then immediately and pleasurably reread it, savoring the appearance of the “I,” and the impending description of her experience. In we go, Lepore leading the way, inside the American Firearms School. I devour description such as this:

Inside, there’s a shop, a pistol range, a rifle range, a couple of classrooms, a locker room, and a place to clean your gun. The walls are painted police blue up to the wainscoting, and then white to the ceiling, which is painted black. It feels like a clubhouse, except, if you’ve never been to a gun shop before, that part feels not quite licit, like a porn shop. On the floor, there are gun racks, gun cases, holsters, and gun safes. Rifles hang on a wall behind the counter; handguns are under glass. More items, including the rifles, come in black or pink: there are pink handcuffs, a pink pistol grip, a pink gun case, and pink paper targets. Above the pink bull’s-eye, which looks unnervingly like a breast, a line of text reads, “Cancer sucks.”

In “Battleground America,” Lepore remembers her journalistic duty to make us see and feel the reality of things. What’s it like to be inside a shooting range? Lepore’s prose tells us, and a slice of present-day, real-life, gun-obsessed America springs into being. The piece is beautifully structured; passages on the Chardon High School shootings, the Second Amendment, the National Rifle Association, the Trayvon Martin shooting, and the shootings at Oakland’s Oikos University are interleaved with Lepore’s accounts of her shooting lesson at the American Fire Arms School and her attendance at a gun show in West Springfield, Massachusetts. And, in passages such as the following one, it powerfully argues the need for gun control:

Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would habe been better, they suggest, if the faculty of Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

This point seems to me to be irrefutable.

Postscript: I relate to weeds and other humble plants. And I enjoy reading writers who relate to them (e.g., John Updike, Joseph Mitchell, William Carlos Williams, Oliver Sacks). Stephen Burt’s “Flooded Meadow,” in this week’s issue, went straight into my personal anthology of great “weed” writings. It’s a delightful poem, in which weeds connote urban development (“Low dandelion leaves are zoned commercial, / with their promise of puffballs to come”; “Round oniongrass stalks are monuments / to persistence in hard times”). My favorite line in it is “Tall sprigs of goldenrod patrol / the blown-down city line.” I’m a fan of Burt’s critical writing. This is my first encounter with his poetry. In his essay on William Carlos Williams, Burt says that Williams’s “social conscience and his desire to depict new births merged in brilliant, emblematic poems about small, scrappy, flowery things …” ("William Carlos Williams: They Grow Everywhere,” Close Calls with Nonsense, 2009). This helps me understand why I’m drawn to weeds. It’s their scrappy nature I admire. As Burt’s lovely “Flooded Meadow” makes clear, he’s obviously struck by their scrappiness, too.

August 1, 2011 Issue

The most enjoyable piece in this week’s issue is Oliver Sacks’ Talk story, “Hunting Horsetails.” It’s about a field trip Sacks makes to the High Line to view a median “covered in horsetails.” Horsetails are plain-looking plants. Sacks says he has “a special, tender feeling” for them. He remembers in England, before the war, his favorite aunt taking him on woodland walks, pointing them out to him. He says, “I like their shape, their jointedness, like tiny bamboos.” The piece brims with shimmering, exact details (“The sporangia are getting tense and ripe, and by midsummer they will dehisc, bursting open to release millions of tiny green spores, their posterity, into the air”), and concludes with this inspired sentence: “All too soon, the High Line’s island of horsetails came to end, and after a dream of deep time, I was back in the noisy bustle of the twenty-first century.” “Hunting Horsetails” is not the first fern-related Talk story that Sacks has written. A few years ago, The New Yorker ran his great “Botanists On Park” (August 13, 2007). It, too, abounds with wonderfully precise descriptions (e.g., “ebony spleenwort, Asplenium platyneuron, densely covered the trestle between 104th and 105th Streets”). “Hunting Horsetails” may represent something of a breakthrough at The New Yorker. In compliance with the magazine’s long-standing practice, most, if not all, Talk of the Town stories are written in the first person plural. Interestingly, Sacks has been allowed to depart from that custom. “Hunting Horsetails” is written in the “I.” Time will tell whether this is a new development or merely an indulgence exclusively accorded to Sacks in deference to his greatness. Personally, I hope it represents change. I’ve always found Talk’s “we” perspective artificial.

The New Yorker in The New York Review of Books

New Yorker readers know that the magazine’s content is very strong. But if proof is needed, check out the January 13, 2011, issue of The New York Review of Books, which contains four New Yorker-related articles:

• Sue Halpern’s “How Do We Know What We Know?” – a review of Oliver Sacks’s book The Mind’s Eye, which is primarily a collection of pieces published over the past few years in The New Yorker;

• Christian Caryl’s “Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything” (“Raffi Khatchadourian on the New Yorker website speculates that the aim of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ‘is not to reveal a single act of abuse …, but rather to open up the inner workings of a closed and complex system, to call the world in to judge its morality’”);

• Gordon S. Wood’s “No Thanks for the Memories” – a review of New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History;

• Dan Chiasson’s “‘Rude Ludicrous Lucrative’ Rap,” which refers to Kelefa Sanneh’s “now-classic New Yorker piece on Jay-Z [“Word,” December 6, 2010].”