The Art of Quotation (Part VIII)

My favorite form of quotation is the parenthetical extract. I learned it from reading Helen Vendler. It’s an effective way of illustrating a point. Here’s an example from Vendler’s “ ‘Oh I Admire and Sorrow,’ ” a review of Dave Smith’s poetry collection Cumberland Station (1977), included in her great Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980). She’s commenting on the poem “On a Field Trip at Fredericksburg”:

There are many daring flashes: the demotic beginning (“maybe / fifteen thousand got it here”); the surrealistic fantasy (“If each finger were a thousand of them / I could clap my hands and be dead / up to my wrists”); the dismissive meiosis for the atomic bomb (“one silly pod”); the substitution of birds for the soldiers in blue and gray uniforms (“a gray blur preserved / on a blue horizon”); the unobtrusive symbols (the drummers, “rigid as August dandelions,” yield to “one dark stalk snapped off,” and the hint of death in the “drift of wind / at the forehead, the front door”). 

I love this form of quotation. It embeds fragments of the subject text in the commentary. When done well, it’s the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine. 

November 17, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I enjoyed Hannah Goldfield’s “Takes” tribute to Anthony Bourdain’s “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” She says,

The voice he introduced in “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” is not just brash and ballsy; it reverberates with style and poetry, from its tantalizing opening lines: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish.”

Yes, I agree. Bourdain’s voice is transfixing. I first encountered it in The New Yorker’s great September 6, 2021 “Food & Drink” archival issue. The essay is called “Hell’s Kitchen.” It originally appeared in the April 17, 2000 New Yorker. What a piece of writing! It's a first-person-present-tense account of a day in Bourdain’s life as chef at the Manhattan restaurant Les Halles. Here's a sample:

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.

“Prick,” “grab,” “throw,” “heat,” “throw,” “heat,” “take,” “place,” “spin,” “pour,” “sear,” “sauté,” “slide,” “deglaze,” “add,” “sauté,” “deglaze,” “give,” “put,” “heat,” “load” – over twenty action verbs. Bourdain's writing thrillingly enacts the kinetic reality of his Les Halles kitchen.

2. The title of Hilton Als’ piece (the newyorker.com version) caught my eye: “Robert Rauschenberg’s Art of the Real.” I thought to myself, Real? What’s real about it? Rauschenberg’s art isn’t real. It’s about as unreal as you can get. The art of the real is a matter of seeing things as they are. Rauschenberg fails this test. But after reading the piece, I get what Als is saying. He’s referring to Rauschenberg’s use of real materials – real tires, real quilts, real chairs, real bicycles. “Art is more powerful when it incorporates the real,” Als says. Okay, but look what Rauschenberg does with these real things. He combines them, daubs them with paint, and makes them his own. Look at Monogram (1955-59). A stuffed Angora goat girdled with a tire. Als describes it: 

The goat had a goatee, horns, and a long-haired silver torso. Its head and neck were streaked with several colors of paint, as though it had put on makeup while drunk. Not only that—there was a black-and-white rubber tire around its middle.

Als describes his youthful encounter with Monogram as “one of the more destabilizing experiences of my life.” I’m sure it was. Monogram is an unforgettable artwork. But it’s not realism – not even close. Some critics have suggested that it signifies anal sex: see, for example, Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1981). Leo Steinberg found this interpretation too reductive. He saw the imposition of the tire as “an act of appropriation.” In his great Encounters with Rauschenberg (2000), he wrote,

As the artist would later encircle a car key with paint and a bicycle with neon tubing, so here – to make it his own. The goat alone – even with signature paint on its muzzle – did not look Rauschenbergian enough, until joined with its tire in definitive incongruity. 

Als, in his piece, also refrains from extracting any specific meaning from Monogram. The closest he comes is by asking these questions: 

I thought about “Monogram” ’s layers for years. I knew that goats in mythology were often mischievous, symbols of randiness and disorder—“queer” animals. Was that goat a combination of the real, the queer, and the mythic? Was I?

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram (1955-59)

October 7, 2019 Issue

Dana Goodyear is a superb describer. Remember her description of eating a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts at a secret Los Angeles sushi bar?

We ate the beef, we ate the crab, we ate gumball-size baby peaches, olive green and tasting like a nineteen-forties perfume. There was slippery jellyfish in sesame-oil vinaigrette, and a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts, meant to be slurped together in one viscous spoonful. That one—quiver on quiver on quiver—was almost impossible to swallow, but it rewarded you with a briny, primal rush.[“Beastly Appetites”]

That “quiver on quiver on quiver” is inspired!

Goodyear’s absorbing “The Ends of the Earth,” in this week’s issue, a profile of eccentric photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, contains this delightful line:

At Point Mugu, a conical hunk of rock where car commercials are often filmed, Cooper set up on a crumbling asphalt promontory, with one toe of the tripod hovering midair. 

God that’s brilliant! What makes it brilliant is the coupling of so many unlike words (“Point Mugu,” “conical,” “commercials,” “Cooper,” “crumbling,” “toe,” “tripod,” “midair”). And yet the whole delicious thing coheres. It’s the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine. I devour it.

Ian Frazier's "A Vast and Terrifying Saga"

Iqaluit Beach, 2007 (Photo by Lorna MacDougall)

Ian Frazier, in his wonderful “A Vast and Terrifying Saga” (The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2017), a review of Annie Proulx’s new novel Barkskins, writes,

“Brokeback Mountain” and Proulx’s other Wyoming stories, many of them found in her collection Close Range, get their power from the [western] myth’s dependable high-lonesome twang, but they stay in the mind because of the details. Nobody, old-timer or otherwise, has a better eye for the physical, geographic, geologic, flotsam-strewn American West.

This is a considerable compliment from a writer whose own eye for “physical, geographic, geologic, flotsam-strewn” places is extraordinary: “spavined barns, bladeless windmills, crumpled stock tanks, tree-sheltered homeplaces with home missing, fallen-down corrals, splintered stock chutes, rusting farm machinery” (Great Plains); “an armchair, a pink plastic bottle in the shape of a baby’s shoe, a pile of shingles, an old-fashioned TV antenna, beer cans, a rusting John Deere swather” (On the Rez); “crumpled-up Caterpillar treads, school bus hulks, twisted scaffolding in rats’-nest heaps, rusted gold dredges, busted paddle wheels, crunched pallets, hyperextended recliner chairs, skewed all-terrain vehicle frames, mashed wooden dogsleds, multicolored nylon exploded to pompoms, door-sprung ambulance vans, dinged fuel tanks, shot clutch plates, run-over corrugated pipe, bent I beams, bent rebars, bent vents” (Travels in Siberia). 

I relish these junky lists. I, too, am drawn to such stuff. When I lived in Iqaluit, Nunavut, I used to walk the beach, marveling at the mishmash of plywood shacks, torn tents, broken-up boats, twisted tarps, frayed ropes, cannibalized snowmobiles, decaying caribou skins, scattered tools and engine parts, on and on. What accounts for their attraction? For me, it’s the sheer chaotic randomness of it all, what Leo Steinberg, in his description of Robert Rauschenberg’s great Washington’s Golden Egg, called “disjunction by juxtaposition” (Encounters with Rauschenberg, 2000).

But for Frazier, I think the attraction is deeper. I think it’s an aspect of his elegiac impulse – his intense awareness of and lament for life’s ephemerality. There’s a tinge of this in “A Vast and Terrifying Saga” when he notes that the western myth is

always looking back to what’s been lost: to the days of the buffalo before white men came, to the fur-trapper rendezvous blowouts of the 1820s, to the open cattle range of the 1870s, to the unplundered plains of recent memory before strip-mining for coal and fracking for natural gas and oil – all of it lost and gone forever and mourned, as Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar spend the rest of their lives mourning the summer when they were young and in love in their sheep camp on Brokeback Mountain.

In “A Vast and Terrifying Saga,” Frazier salutes a fellow western elegist.

December 13, 2010 Issue

This week’s “Goings On About Town” (GOAT) is a cornucopia of verbal and visual pleasure, brimming with succulent details such as English Beat’s “punky edge,” Angie Wang’s stunning “Nellie McKay” portrait, “neo-fusion mashup” at Iridium, Warhol’s “tossed-off party pics,” Giacometti’s Montparnasse studio “overflowing with plaster dust,” a beautiful color picture of Rauschenberg’s 1955 “Short Circuit (Combine),” Joan Acocella’s “battle of the ‘Nutcracker’s,” Richard Brody’s memorable “depicts to the limits of consciousness” in his eloquent “Critics Notebook” tribute to “Shoah,” Andrea Thompson’s impeccably rhythmed “Whitewashed brick walls and green patterned wallpaper have the spare beauty of a homestead” in her superb “Tables For Two” review of Northern Spy Food Co., Bruce Diones on Cher (“her voice still has the roughness that can sandpaper the dullest lines to sharp finish”), and Laurie Rosenwald’s ingenious “On The Horizon” illustration, “Picasso’s guitars, at MOMA.”

Some of these great GOAT details triggered pleasant memories of past New Yorker pieces. For example, Joan Acocella’s mention of the possibility that the mice in Ratmansky’s “Nutcracker” will be “truly nasty-looking, with red eyes and yellow teeth” called to mind Arlene Croce’s “Baryshnikov’s ‘Nutcracker’” (The New Yorker, January 17, 1977), in which she describes the mice in Nureyev’s “Nutcracker”: “His mice were rats who tore off the heroine’s skirt.” Croce’s piece is included in her 1982 collection, Going to the Dance.

The illustration of Rauschenberg’s “Short Circuit (Combine)” took me back to Calvin Tomkins’ Robert Rauschenberg profile “Moving Out” (The New Yorker, February 29, 1964). I first read it twenty years ago in Tomkins’ 1965 collection The Bride and the Bachelor. It contains some great descriptions of Rauschenberg working, including this detail: “From time to time he paused to replenish a tall glass of vodka and orange juice.”

And Richard Brody’s powerful “Critic’s Notebook” on Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” in which he says the film “has transcended the cinema to become the primary record of the extermination of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War,” brought to mind Pauline Kael’s controversial 1985 “Shoah” review (The New Yorker, December 30, 1985), in which she dares to criticize Lanzmann’s technique, e.g., “Lanzmann’s closeups can be tyrannically close – invasions of the face.” Kael’s review is included in her 1989 collection Hooked.

Last week at newyorker.com, Brody posted a scathing critique of Kael’s “Shoah” review (see “‘Shoah’ At Twenty-Five,” December 7, 2010). In his piece, Brody comes perilously close to calling Kael’s review anti-Semitic. He says:

So when Kael charges that the movie ‘doesn’t set you thinking’ and adds ‘When you come out, you’re likely to feel dazed, and confirmed in all your worst fears,’ it’s clear that she simply doesn’t know what to think about it – and so, falls back on her own prejudices.

He also says, “Pauline Kael’s misunderstandings of “Shoah” are so grotesque as to seem willful.”

Kael faced this type of criticism back in 1985 when she wrote the review. According to Craig Seligman, in his book Sontag & Kael (2004), Alfred Kazin considered Kael’s objections to the film and found her "incapable of responding to the material.” Seligman says that Leon Wieseltier also strongly objected to Kael’s review. He quotes Wieseltier as saying that her dissenting view of the film is a “dissenting view about the film and the catastrophe.” And Seligman quotes another angry objector, the film critic J. Hoberman, as saying, “Imagine, he [Lanzmann] actually found anti-Semitism in Treblinka. If he’s not tied up again, he could probably find it in The New Yorker.”

Seligman correctly points out that “Kael was reviewing a film – she wasn’t reviewing the Holocaust.” He says that Kazan and Wieseltier “ignore the core of Kael’s argument, which is that “Shoah” fails as a film.” He says, “To deduce from her misgivings about “Shoah” that she viewed the Holocaust with insufficient gravity is malignantly unfair. (And, by the way, untrue.)” Regarding the implications of Hoberman’s statement, Seligman says, “That sentence has haunted me ever since I first read it, in 1986. Could it possibly mean what it appears to mean – that Kael’s review is anti-Semitic?” Seligman concludes that Hoberman’s charge is “an accusation of astonishing coarseness.”

I agree with Seligman. Richard Brody’s statement against Kael falls into the same category as J. Hoberman’s; to borrow Seligman’s words, it is an accusation of astonishing coarseness.

Credit: The above portrait of Nellie McKay is by Angie Wang; it appears in “Goings On About Town” in this week’s New Yorker.