Rivka Galchen's Wonderful "Flight Risk"

Photo by Ash Adams, from Rivka Galchen's "Flight Risk"

I want to take a quick look back at a piece that appeared in the September 21, 2026 New Yorker. I didn’t give it any attention at the time due to my boycott of all things American, including The New Yorker. I want to rectify that now. The piece is Rivka Galchen’s “Flight Risk.” It’s a report on an amazing shorebird called the Hudsonian godwit. It begins,

On a sunny June morning, in a bog outside Beluga, Alaska, I met a Hudsonian godwit. She had inky eyes and a long, slightly upturned beak that was pinkish-orange at its base and brownish-black at its tip. The feathers on her back were of mottled sepia tones, and those on her belly were rusty brown and painterly white. Her legs reminded me of the slender inserts of spring-loaded ballpoint pens, and her feet were refined pterodactyl claws. Her name (among humans) was A34, and she was about the size of a city pigeon. She was in the hands of Nathan Senner, a conservation biologist, who removed and replaced her geotag; measured her head, beak, wing, and leg; weighed her; and took two tail feathers and a sample of her blood. From that small number of data points, he can deduce where she’s been, how her feathers have grown, what genetic subgroup she belongs to, and her degree of exposure to mercury.

What a wonderful lede! I read it and just kept going all the way to the end. Along the way, I learned that Hudsonian godwits make the longest non-stop migration in the bird world - 10,000 miles from Patagonia to Alaska. That’s an astounding distance for a little bird to fly, especially when you consider that godwits cannot soar like hawks or glide like albatrosses. Galchen writes, “They migrate by continuously flapping their wings. They must navigate crosswinds and headwinds, storms and maybe an occasional hurricane, continuing on day after day, night after night.”

My favourite part of Galchen’s piece is her description of actually holding a Hudsonian godwit in her hand:

She was warmer than I expected a bird to be. I could feel her heartbeat. When I was in elementary school, I briefly shared an elevator with the actor Robert Wagner, whom I recognized from the TV show “Hart to Hart.” He caught my eye and said hello. The encounter was otherworldly and wondrous. Holding A34 felt something like that. Then I opened my hands and she took off, back to her clutch of eggs, which, if not eaten by a coyote or a sandhill crane or another hungry creature, would soon hatch. 

What a rare, vital, pulsing, elating moment! One of the loveliest things I’ve read this year.

October 26, 2026, Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Zachary Fine’s “Double Vision,” a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous. Fine loves it. He says it’s “probably, canvas for canvas, the best painting show in America this year.” He provides an excellent capsule history of the Krasner-Pollock relationship, including Pollock’s creation of his now famous drip paintings. Fine says of them, 

The frozen velocity of paint whipped across a canvas suggested a new visual metaphor for intensity, aggression, violence, virility, force, energy, music, and ecstasy, a more efficient representation than any previous word or picture had managed.

I love Pollock’s “drips,” particularly One: Number 31, 1950. In November, 2000, I was in Rankin Inlet, a remote Inuit hamlet on the western shore of Hudson Bay, for a meeting. I was staying at the Siniktarvik Hotel. In the lobby, next to the reception desk, there was a post card rack. The rack was empty except for one card. I looked at it. The front of it was very strange - splatters of white, mauve, and pink on a purple background. Printed on the back was a reproduction of Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 with a caption underneath: “Jackson Pollock, United States, 1912-1956, One: Number 31, 1950. Note card © 1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.” I was surprised and elated to find this bit of modernism so far from its source. I bought it immediately. It’s one of my favourite possessions. I have it here with me as I type this. 

Reading Fine’s wonderful piece, I was delighted by his description of encountering One: Number 31, 1950 at the Met show. He writes,

Standing just two feet away from “One,” I felt the wonderful disorientation that comes from looking at a Pollock: the disruption of a horizontal image by the memory of its vertical process. The frenzy of black, white, and turquoise fills your gaze with a completely weightless and floating image, just as you notice how every rope and droplet of paint has been pulled down by gravity into the fabric. Your mind’s eye is standing on the wall, but you’re still here, on the ground.

That “frenzy of black, white, and turquoise fills your gaze” is very good. Pollock’s “drips” are not easy to describe. I’m not sure what the front of my postcard has to do with One: Number 31, 1950. The colours don’t match the painting. That’s okay. The back definitely shows One: Number 31, 1950. It’s one of my touchstones. I'm pleased to see Fine mention it.

Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950

However, Fine’s main focus is not Pollock; it’s Krasner, as well it should be. Her paintings are amazing! Her Bald Eagle (1955) is a masterpiece. Fine reports an interesting fact about it: 

The most provocative move is in “Bald Eagle” (1955), with fragments cut right out of a Pollock drip painting and packed into a mosaic—Krasner reclaiming her husband’s free-form mark with a blade. 

My favourite Krasner is The Seasons (1957). Fine says of it,

Filled with magnified pink and green foliate shapes, it’s like pressing your face into a basket of flowers or ripe fruit; the painting doesn’t turn inward to mourn but rather outward to nature. 

Fine concludes his piece beautifully:

At the Met, one gets the impression that Pollock was a fascinating passenger whom Krasner picked up, travelled with for fifteen years, and kept talking to even once he was gone. After all, they were painters in love. They poured themselves into each other, and the show makes it impossible to think of them apart. 

A perfect ending to a perfect review. 

Lee Krasner, The Seasons (1957)

October 19, 2026, Issue

No one writes sentences like Kevin Barry. Not even Cormac McCarthy. That’s my highest praise. I thought this as I read his brilliant Night Boat to Tangier (2019). And I thought it again last night as I read his new short story “Chuck Murphy’s Last Ride,” in this week’s issue. What a transfixing piece of writing! Quickly I’ll say what it’s about, and then I want to consider Barry’s extraordinary style.  

Six aging Irish bikers travel to Strandhill, on the coast of County Sligo, to scatter the cremains of a member of their gang, a guy named Chuck (Boyo) Murphy. The story is about growing old and how these “old men on hogs” handle it. There’s an aggressive encounter  with some surfers (“those blithe assholes”), a flashback to Chuck Murphy on his deathbed (“all asunder in the face and his eyes like a frightened bird’s”), a bar scene in which one of the bikers, Barney, lets out some emotion. The narrative unfolds in sixteen unnumbered segments. Section nine describes the ash-scattering on the beach:

We huddled against the storm-break wall in a black-leather cluster and grimly smoked a doobie or several. We gathered ourselves as best as we could. And then, without the moment even being announced, Tall Paul fell to his knees, as if called to prayer, but actually he was just cradling the cremains with his back to the snapping gusts—this was very tender. With some difficulty he peeled off the Gorilla tape and took the little plywood box from the plastic bags and we were all instantly in puddles then, six grown men weeping loudly as we ferried our fallen hero across the sands. There was really no point in trying to read the wind—the surfers toppled and flipped, the gulls were flung about madly—and we just thought, Ah, fuck it, and Tall Paul held the box aloft, like a sacrificial offering, and it was Barney, I think, whose trembling fingers reached up and tipped back the lid’s hinge, and at once Chuck (Boyo) Murphy was on the Strandhill air, rising as if by dark magic from the box as a single eminence, like a twisting and twirling genie of bone-white ashes, like a djinn or laughing sprite of the shoreline, turning and twisting away from us in the grainy afternoon light, and now he was risen, and now he was gone.

Wow! I nominate that as one of the best paragraphs to appear in The New Yorker this year - where “best” means vivid, specific, perceptive, memorable, inspired. The story features many other wonderful lines. This, for example:

The road was slick after showers and slid out and twisted like a long black tongue. 

And this:

We turned our snouts seaward, saw the long, billowing green ribs of the Atlantic from a rise above Collooney, and I could feel the hot gushes of emotion surging through the pack. 

And this:

We snarfed down some egg sandwiches on the tragic forecourt of a Circle K station somewhere in deepest Offaly. 

Barry’s word choices are amazing. His metaphors are original. His rhythm is impeccable. His syntax is delicious. Consider this beauty: “Frenchpark, Roscommon town, Boyle we rode through.” "Chuck Murphy's Last Ride" gets at the raw emotions of a surprisingly introspective, lyrical motorcycle gang mourning the death of one of its members. It's a masterpiece.  

October 12, 2026, issue

I want to respond to a couple of photography pieces in this week’s issue.

Vince Aletti, in his “Goings On: Justine Kurland,” reviews an exhibition of Kurland’s photos at Osmos gallery in Manhattan’s East Village. He likes the show. He calls Kurland “one of the most arresting, provocative, and unpredictable photographers around.” I confess I’m not a fan. A lot of her work seems posed. This doesn’t bother Aletti. He writes,

The show opens with two pictures from the color series that introduced Kurland to the world and became known as the “Girl Pictures”—cinematic shots of adolescent girls playing at being runaways. Under the photographer’s rapt gaze, theatricality melts away and we’re caught up in the sweet, casually intimate camaraderie of girls on an adventure. 

“Playing at being runaways” - right there is the problem. The girls are acting. The scenes are staged. And no, the theatricality doesn’t “melt away.” It’s right there in the deadness of the images. Peter Schjeldahl, commenting on Thomas Struth’s staged “Pergamon Museum” photos, said, “There is a subtle but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.” This applies to Kurland’s photos, too. 

Justine Kurland, Blood Sisters (2000)

Contrast Kurland’s images with the work of Joseph Szabo. He’s the subject of Margaret Talbot’s “Photo Booth: The Era of Teen-Age Freedom,” also in this week’s issue. Talbot says,

The photographer Joseph Szabo’s pictures in the new book “American Teen” look timeless in certain ways—the crisp black-and-white of the images, the stately framing, the instantly recognizable, casual but charged, proximity of teen-agers hanging out, arms slung over their friends’ shoulders, heads tipped together, close enough to smell one another’s shampoo. Here they are, crammed together in the random corners they stake out on a big high-school campus, or thigh to thigh on a patchwork of beach towels, or whispering in one another’s ears, thick as thieves, magnetized by one another as by nobody and nothing else.

Joseph Szabo, American Teen

She goes on,

But there is also a sense in which these images belong, ineluctably, to the time in which most of them were made, the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, after Szabo had begun teaching photography and photographing students at Malverne High School, on Long Island. It’s not just the styles his subjects favor—abundant, feathered hair, high-waisted, slouchy jeans, ringer T-shirts, platform shoes, puka-shell necklaces. (In any case, some of their looks would read as hip today.) It’s not even the fact that the photos frequently show kids smoking cigarettes (though that’s certainly striking to see). The adolescent subjects of Szabo’s photos project something else: nearly all, even the ones who look shy or awkward or sidelined by their peers, have a kind of spontaneous presence, the loose-limbed, insouciant grace, even swagger, of subjects who have not been making and curating images of themselves and one another for as long as they can remember. 

Szabos subjects don’t look posed. They seem natural; they're just being themselves.

October 5, 2026, Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It contains five excellent pieces: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Ugly Baby”; Ryan Gellis’s “Bar Tab: Mash Inn”; Nick Paumgarten’s “Ice Ages”; Anthony Lane’s “Borderlands”; and Peter Hessler’s “Danger Drive.”

Rosner, in her piece, visits the Thai restaurant Ugly Baby in Williamsburg. She loved it. She calls it “a place of unbearable sensory chaos.” She says,

I dived right into the deep end, ordering without fear: a soft stir-fry of ground pork belly, umami-charged with shrimp paste and garnished with slivers of tomato-red hot peppers, whose heat crackled and blossomed against a caramel sweetness in the sauce. A salad of whole strawberries and bird’s-eye chilies, in a glaze-like dressing of sugar and fish sauce, was uncannily dessert-like—Would I like this on ice cream? I kept wondering—and yet certainly not a dessert, with all its thunderous layers of sourness and fishy-breathed complexity. I wished that I was in a quieter room when I took a bite of the pad ped, a dry curry of hanger steak and slippery tripe: it was rich and deep as nighttime, with a holy-basil brightness swaddled in some of the most violent heat I’ve ever experienced.

Gellis’s piece tells about his recent visit to a beer bar in South Slope called Mash Inn that was formerly a laundromat. Gellis says, “Inside, people were still dealing in suds, albeit of a different kind.” He has a few beers, including a “Cultivar: Cascade, from Wayward Lane Brewing, a hazy pale ale whose tiny bubbles effervesced so vigorously as to mist the upper lip” and “a wild ale by the name of Arietta, from Fox Farm Brewery, floral and largely flat, had a pleasing barnyard funk.” He also drinks something called a “Subglitch sour” – great name, but he doesn’t describe it other than to say that he and “the malt maestros” he’s drinking with rechristened it “Jolly Rancher light.” When Gellis leaves the bar, he stops at the outside window (“its sliding partition reminiscent of a Mister Softee’s”) and buys another drink. He concludes, “A growler of stout makes for pleasant company on the walk home.”

Paumgarten’s “Ice Ages” is a “Personal History” piece about his life in minor hockey – first as a kid and then as a father. It’s a vivid meditation on hockey and parenting. Here’s a sample:

It wasn’t long before Oli joined a travel-hockey program. Day One was at a rink in a mall up the pike, in New Rochelle. This was mini-mites, five- and six-year-olds, mostly, the smallest of the small. We drove up at daybreak, Oli in back, still in a booster seat. When we got to the rink and he started dressing, I could see the trepidation and doubt in his eyes. Older kids strutted around in their pads. Their dads made a caffeinated ruckus. I tried, in Oli’s presence, to convert the boisterousness and swagger of the others into cheerfulness, but I could sense that he knew I was forcing a mood. This never worked with him. Something gave way, some dismay set off by the jersey he was given or the number he’d chosen or the bravado of the other children or the merrymaking of the parents or the nervous exhilaration of his dad—those first-day heebie-jeebies, one’s own memory of which persists deep in the bones. He refused to go on the ice, and he wept. My moonfaced boy, wrecked somehow by a disconnect between what he’d wanted and what this was, dug in. Other dads sidled up and tried to coax and reassure him, but, if I couldn’t, they didn’t stand a chance. We sat awhile. Limbo. My heart ached for the boy, yet the task at hand was to get him onto the ice and into the program. The striving, the striving. He sat on a bench, his tiny legs not even reaching the floor. I left him alone for a while and stood at the glass watching the session, my soul a twist of sympathy, frustration, embarrassment, and even something like fear—that he might be too sensitive for this world, too soft—and the realization that I might feel this way about sensitivity, about the proper mettle in a boy, made me ashamed, too, so the brain, the self-justifying cortex, whichever lobe that is, got to work formulating arguments on behalf of my impatience and stipulations, to override the shame. 

There are wonderful descriptions of minor hockey reality. This one, for example:

Before practice, as the Zamboni made its rounds, the boys piled up behind the door to the ice, jostling for position. After a moment—the sanctified fermata of waiting for the new layer of water to freeze—a coach unlatched the door and they tumbled onto the ice, not one remaining on his skates. The pads, the helmets, the sticks, the bounded ring: it was all a pretext for roughhousing. No one discouraged it.

And this:

My participation, as driver, dad, coach, manager, crank, and fan, sucked the strength out of me, like going overboard in a wintry sea. The rank refrigerated air, the burnt coffee, the Tastykakes, the cross-chop of excitement and stress and boredom and disgruntlement. By Monday, I was saturated by it all, sallow and hoarse.

My favorite scene takes place in Paumgarten’s apartment. His five-year-old son Oli suits up for hockey for the first time:

In the apartment, I helped him tug on gear and tighten straps with the brisk tenderness of a veterinarian tending to a sedated pet. His excitement, visible behind the lattice of the face mask, was intoxicating, the pride of a novitiate. The extent to which even this kind of innocent dress-up is a means of indoctrination—the knottiness of this early gender programming—is leavened or perhaps obscured by its adorableness. He bumped around the house, proud and almost delirious with his transformation, and with the cognizance that he might be pleasing his father. The armor both emboldened him and somehow sapped him of strength, as though the plastic exoskeleton had drawn starch from his bones. After a few minutes, he lay on the floor with arms out and legs splayed, and looked up at the ceiling, daydreaming of who knows what. Every frozen pond has one, a distrait child squinting into the sky, making angels of the ice shavings. Here, in the one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment, was ours.

That “Every frozen pond has one, a distrait child squinting into the sky, making angels of the ice shavings” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of Paumgarten’s best.

Anthony Lane’s “Borderlands” is a profile of the Polish film director Pawel Pawlikowski. Lane not only sketches Pawlikowski’s personal history, he talks with him, has lunch with him, and meets him in Sarajevo to visit a location that figures centrally in Pawlikowski’s documentary Serbian Epics (1992). For me, the best part of Lane’s piece is his review of Pawlikowski’s films, including Ida (2013) – one of my favorite movies: see my “Minimal Realism in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida” (August 6, 2014). How did Pawlikowski create that minimal realism? What was his approach? Lane provides an insight. He writes,

Ida’s stillness is shared by the whole film, which seems more confidently rooted than anything in Pawlikowski’s previous endeavors. “For the first time, I was really on firm ground with what I wanted,” he said. He was back on home turf, in Poland, with a narrow budget, discarding inessentials. “When you limit the elements and actors and locations and props, then you can drill in,” he told me. “Limit yourself, and that frees you up.” Objects become loaded with intent; a skull is unearthed and bundled inside a silk scarf. Pawlikowski describes all this as “a big breakthrough,” though it sounds more like an epiphany. “I also had this moment of rejection of cinema, you know? I said, ‘Fuck cinema.’ ” Part of the rejecting was what he calls “this radical decision not to move the camera, and to frame things in a very amateurish way, with a lot of headroom.” The aim was “to make things happen within the shot.”

Lane’s stimulating piece kindled my interest in seeing Pawlikowski’s latest film Fatherland. 

Peter Hessler’s “Danger Drive” has a terrific subject – a highway that has made lists of both the most dangerous and the most appealing roads in America. It’s called the Million Dollar Highway. Hessler describes it in his opening paragraph:

In the valley where I live, along a quiet stretch of the Uncompahgre River, in southwestern Colorado, there is only one paved road, and, like most people around here, I don’t drive it south without a good reason. In that direction, the road—U.S. Highway 550—passes through the small mountain town of Ouray, and then it climbs more than two thousand feet in the span of six miles. This section of the two-lane road has been carved directly into the red-quartzite cliffs of the Uncompahgre Gorge, and almost none of it has a shoulder; in some places, the highway is only twenty-three feet wide. The speed limit is twenty-five miles an hour, and one way to identify locals is that they often drive faster than that. This is because they worry about what can happen above the road. Rockfalls are common, and so are avalanches. 

Hessler tells about the highway’s history and the many accidents and fatalities that have occurred on it. The piece is beautifully structured. One accident in particular draws Hessler’s close attention – a Honda Civic that inexplicably stops, reverses, and backs off the road, plunging three hundred and twenty feet to the bottom of a gorge. Here’s his description of what happened:

Last year, early on the morning of August 5th, a tourist from Oregon named Adam Hynes was approaching one of the most treacherous sections of the gorge when he looked ahead and saw a silver Honda Civic moving in reverse. Hynes found it strange that somebody would be driving backward in such a spot, but then his view was obscured as he went around a sharp bend. By the time Hynes came out of the turn, the Honda was gone.

Hynes dropped a pin on his phone. There was no signal, so he continued down the highway until he was able to call 911. Then he circled back and parked at a pullout not far from the pin. The gorge was so precipitous that Hynes couldn’t see the bottom, but he had a DJI Mavic 3 drone. He set the machine aloft, and its camera captured the Honda, which had fallen three hundred and twenty feet—about the height of a thirty-story building. The silver vehicle lay upside down in the Uncompahgre River, crumpled like an aluminum can.

Hessler’s account of this accident and the ensuing rescue of one of the car’s occupants, a ten-year-old girl named Rachelle, is riveting. It’s amazing what he does to pursue the story. He climbs down into the gorge and crosses it on a rope known as a Tyrolean traverse to get to a ledge that affords a good view of the Honda crash site. He also drives the Million Dollar Highway on his way to visit Rachelle at her home in Bloomfield, New Mexico. 

“Danger Drive” is a superb piece of literary journalism. I enjoyed it immensely.

Megahn O'Rourke on Anne Carson's "Nox"

Anne Carson (Photo by Einar Falur Ingólfsson)

Congratulations to Anne Carson for winning the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature. She’s been contributing to The New Yorker since 1997. See, for example, “Father’s Old Blue Cardigan” (November 10, 1997), “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” (December 3, 2001), “Short Talk on Herbology” (April 22, 2013), “Clive Song” (August 7 & 14, 2017), “Life” (June 28, 2021), “What Happened to New York” (May 5, 2025). I confess I’m not a fan. I find her too metaphysical. That’s my problem, not hers. I’ll have to give her a second look.

Carson is the subject of one of The New Yorker’s best poetry reviews – Megahn O’Rourke’s “The Unfolding” (July 12 & 19, 2000). It’s a review of Carson’s Nox. O’Rourke describes it as follows:

“Nox” is as much an artifact as a piece of writing. The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson. The reproduction has been done painstakingly, and conjures up an almost tactile sense of the handmade original. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook’s physicality—bits of handwriting, stamps, stains—add testimonial force: this person existed.

That is a brilliant description! I’ve never forgotten it. 

O’Rourke wrote one of my favorite poems – “My Aunts” (The New Yorker, July 20, 2009). Here it is:

Grew up on the Jersey Shore in the nineteen-seventies.
Always making margaritas in the kitchen,
always laughing and doing their hair up pretty,
sharing lipstick and shoes and new juice diets;
always splitting the bills to the last penny,
stealing each other’s clothes,
loving one another then complaining
as they walked out the door. Each one with her doe eyes,
each one younger than the last,
each older the next year, one year
further from their girlhoods of swimming
at Sandy Hook, doing jackknives off the diving board
after school, all of them
being loved by one boy and then another,
all driving further from the local fair, further from Atlantic City.
They used to smoke in their cars,
rolling the windows down and letting their red nails
hang out, little stoplights:
Stop now, before the green
comes to cover up your tall brown bodies.

That “doing jackknives off the diving board after school” is inspired! The whole poem is inspired! It has the breath of life.

Is Writing Just Technology? (Contra Louis Menand)

Louis Menand, in his absorbing “The Curious Power of Punctuation” (newyorker.com, September 21, 2026), says, “In the end, writing is just technology. There is nothing magical about it.” Is Menand just being provocative, or does he really mean it? His piece is a review of two books – Florence Hazrat’s On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World and Sarah L. Kaufman’s Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. It moves from a witty discussion of punctuation (“But she doesn’t seem to know the semicolon’s correct usage. She thinks it’s a big comma, when it’s actually a small period”) to a consideration of the future of writing (“These books are reminders that we are in the middle of a revolution in the phenomenology of reading, a major change in what it is like to consume writing”). Menand predicts, “Soon, people will no longer make a distinction between writing made by a human and writing made by a machine. It will all simply be writing.” It’s here that he makes his extraordinary statement: “In the end, writing is just a technology. There is nothing magical about it.” 

To which the only possible response is “Oy!” Writing is not technology; it’s communication – communication of stories, events, ideas, actions, sorrows, pleasures, reflections, observations, journeys, battles, arguments, explorations, on and on. It’s the art of representing life in words. I love reading great writers, not just for what they say, but how they say it – the rhythm, tone, texture of their prose, their choice of words, their use of metaphor, their point of view, the way they structure their narratives. They use all the tools in their extensive tool kits. It’s a treat to watch them do it. And yes, there is something magical about it – the transmutation of world into words. 

Menand himself occasionally works that magic. One of my favorite pieces by him is “Drive, He Wrote” (The New Yorker, October 1, 2007). It’s a consideration of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Movement. Most of it is cultural history – the background to On the Road, how it came to be written, the road trips, the celebrated scroll, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, a comparison of On the Road with Lolita (“Nabokov showed writers how to squeeze a morality tale inside a Fabergé egg; Kerouac showed how to stretch a canvas across an entire continent”), and so on. But in the last paragraph Menand shifts gears. He describes a personal experience. There’s feeling in it; the piece suddenly flares to life. Here’s the passage:

Books like “On the Road” have a different kind of influence as well. They can, whether we think of them as great literature or not, get into the blood. They give content to experience. Many years after my encounters with Ginsberg around the department water fountain, I took a job in Boston, two hundred miles from New York, and I ended up commuting there by car. I drove at night, so that the trip would not eat up the workday, and I often stopped for gas at a service area on the Mass Pike about fifty miles from Boston. It’s fairly high above sea level there, in the lower ranges of the Berkshires, and I would stand at the pump in the dark looking at the stars in the cold clear sky as the semis roared past and with the wind in my hair, and I liked to imagine that I was a character in Kerouac’s novel, lost to everyone I knew and to everyone who knew me, somewhere in America, on the road. Then I would get in the car, and, bent over the wheel, while the trucks beat on past me, and the radio crackled, the sound going in and out, with oldies from the seventies, I began the long drop down to the lights of Boston, late in the night, late in my life, alone.

It’s an extraordinary passage. On the Road is no longer just a cultural artifact – something interesting to write about. Menand gives it personal meaning. It’s an inspired way to end his review, and I doubt Generative AI could ever “write” it. The passage is personal to Menand. Only he could conceive it. 

Credit: The above illustrstion by Abraham Lule is from Louis Menand's "The Curious Power of Punctuation" (newyorker.com, September 21, 2026).

Four Essays on Fairfield Porter

One of this year’s best essays is Dan Chiasson’s “Where the Meanings Are” (The New York Review of Books, August 20.2026). It’s a review of the exhibition “Fairfield Porter: What Everyone Knows” at the Art Students League, New York City. It’s not only a superb analysis of Porter’s painting, it’s a travel piece, too! Chiasson is excellent on Porter’s painting style. He says,

Porter’s brushstrokes seem at times still wet to the touch, trailing off like vapor before suddenly detonating a bluster of peach or indigo. Paint plays out luxuriously and abstractly within the idea of summer things like Bermuda shorts, clay courts, lawns, and tablecloths, as it does for other painters only in a stormy sea or roiling sky.

I’m interested in Porter. He first came to my attention many years ago when I read John Updike’s great “Violence at the Windows” (included in his 1989 Just Looking). It’s a review of the 1983 show “Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The title derives from Updike’s observation “Sunlight explodes with terrific violence at the windows of his hushed interiors.” Updike gave the show a mixed review. He says, “There are perhaps six superb paintings and two dozen more that well reward contemplation. The rest are tainted to a greater or lesser degree by a quality one might call amateurism.” Ouch! One of the paintings he liked is Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969). He wrote,

Interior with a Dress Pattern, the most closely worked painting in the show, describes a domestic interior so lovingly that the viewer feels invited to come in and take a chair; its range of reds and dark golds compares with the sumptuous calm of Matisse’s Red Studio and Piero della Francesca’s stately explorations of perspective.

A reproduction of Interior with a Dress Pattern illustrates Updike’s piece. I’d never seen it before. It struck me as wonderful. Still does. 

Chiasson doesn’t mention Interior with a Dress Pattern. He focuses on Porter’s “Schuyler” paintings, e.g., Jimmy and John (1957-58), A Day Indoors (1962), and The Screen Porch (1964). One of Chiasson’s best passages is his description of A Day Indoors:

A third view of Schuyler, A Day Indoors (1962), hangs beside the ugly people. Schuyler has again commandeered the best seat: on this cold summer day in Maine, he warms himself by the roaring hearth in “the big house” on Great Spruce Head Island. Three figures, Schuyler and the two girls, are smaller, and somewhat indistinct, and seem included partly for scale and contrast; the star of the painting is the room, with its poppy-red painted floor and deteriorating, high-kitsch New England decor, including a model sloop and, above the fire, a reproduction of one of the Elgin Marbles. The accent is on a colorful, braided oval rug, a standard L.L. Bean item, so familiar you can almost smell the must. The chairs and furniture in the room jut at sharp angles and form a visual chute that creates a measure of suspense about the closed door at its terminus. (Ominous music: Is Anne Porter about to enter?) The details in the painting seem to hang on the vertical axis, like buoys in a fishing net. But the area rug is perfectly flush with the frame in the lower-right corner, where a mapmaker would locate his key. This summer cottage staple, repeating the spectrum of colors in the overall composition, is a kind of palette: you could imagine Porter dipping a brush into one of those vivid stripes to touch up Schuyler’s khakis or pale red button-down. Or, with its suggestion of dynamic, spiraling depth, perhaps it’s a drain, threatening to suck this moody group back out to sea, like bilge.

I love that “The accent is on a colorful, braided oval rug, a standard L.L. Bean item, so familiar you can almost smell the must.”

The New Yorker’s Zachary Fine also reviewed the Art Students League’s exhibition. At first, Fine appears not to be a Porter fan. He says in his opening paragraph, “I think if you saw a lone painting of his in a junk shop, unsigned and unframed, you’d find it perfectly pleasing and mediocre.” But it turns out he likes the show. He writes,

Porter studied at the League under Thomas Hart Benton—one of his classmates was a fellow named Jackson Pollock—and the experience of seeing his work here, as students hustle by with their backpacks and the perfume of turpentine wafts through the air, feels organic and just right. The gallery is evenly and fluorescently lit, and all thirty-five or so of Porter’s featured paintings are in a single room, concentrating his palette of lime greens and creamy yellows and oxblood reds into one bright, soul-cleansing burst.

Fine says, “Let the paintings breathe for a while, let them interact with one another and with your thoughts, and they’ll meld together with salt breeze and summer light.”

Reading these delightful pieces, I recalled another excellent essay on Porter – Peter Schjeldahl’s “Stern Beauty” (The New Yorker, April 17, 2000; included in his 2008 collection Let’s See). It contains this pithy observation: “For Porter, the ordinary was an urgent ideal.” As usual, Schjeldahl nailed it.

Chiasson’s piece ends beautifully with an account of his visit to Porter’s summer home on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine. This place figures centrally in many of Porter’s best paintings. Chiasson writes,

Approaching “the big house,” a child bounded out to greet us, reporting with some satisfaction that there were no waffles left. The interior depicted in A Day Indoors remains unchanged from Porter’s depiction of it, down to the poppy-colored floors. (Floors in several bathrooms in houses on the island are done in the same color: there was “surplus paint,” David conjectured.) Upstairs, “Jimmy’s room” is just as it was the day Schuyler wrote “Buried at Springs,” his elegy for Frank O’Hara, while fending off a hornet. The poem is partly about writing O’Hara’s tribute at the desk where O’Hara himself had sat eleven years before, and “saw and heard it all.” It’s all still there, the desk, the bed, the spruces and sound of lapping water, as both poets saw and heard it; before we left, I sat down in Schuyler’s rocking chair, still positioned closest to the hearth.

I love it when a critic steps away from his desk and goes out into the world, seeking personal experience of the subject he’s writing about. Chiasson’s visit to Porter’s house on Great Spruce Head Island provides an inspired conclusion to a splendid review. I enjoyed it immensely.  

Credit: The above illustration is Fairfield Porter's Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969).

On Matisse's "Woman with a Hat": Fine vs. Clark

Zachary Fine, in his absorbing “Matisse’s Ugliest Painting” (newyorker.com, August 31, 2026), says of Henri Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” (1905), “The painting looks like a box of melted saltwater taffy that’s been churned together and encouraged to express itself as a chic fungus.” He says that he still can’t reconcile himself to “the shock of its ugliness.”

Fine tells us why he finds it ugly. He says,

The painting is filled with inconsistencies and bizarre compensatory moves. Its attitude can be summarized by a single square inch at the base of Amélie’s neck, where one finds eight colors in competition: orange, yellow, blue, white, teal, apricot, pale brown, and some black, as underdrawing.

He goes on,

Matisse takes every opportunity to disturb passages of chromatic balance. The red hair that connects with the green of Amélie’s temple? It’s interrupted by a few strokes of magenta, to increase the tension. The blue of the hat’s brim? A splash of teal agitates its roundness. While some of the color contrasts do articulate planar shifts, such as the candy-stripe lips (red for upper, pink for lower), many of the touches are arbitrary splotches that neither bolster a shape nor set another off. I have to imagine that Matisse was tickled by his decision to put a large tract of green in front of Madame’s face and, instead of extending it all the way to her throat, suddenly introduce a purple goatee.

He says,

The aspect of the painting that troubles me most, though, is the sleeve of Amélie’s dress. Fauvism was supposedly characterized by the phasing out of the Neo-Impressionist tache, or uniformly pointillist stroke—abundant in “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” and “The Port of Abail”—in favor of broader patches of color, but the green sleeve, with its cobra-headed cuff, is a creepy disturbance to the brushwork elsewhere. Compared with the thick smudges of white on the fan that Amélie is holding, or the broad, lush strokes of the background, the sleeve is fidgety. None of its marks seem to maintain their integrity for more than an inch or two without being fretted or spoiled. There’s a slight air of death around it, as if the arm is deteriorating in front of us.

This is good provocative criticism. Some of the descriptions make me smile, e.g., “chic fungus,” “anxious smear job.”  

But is Fine right? Is “Woman with a Hat” ugly? T. J. Clark, in his brilliant “Madame Matisse’s Hat” (London Review of Books, August 14, 2008; included in his great 2025 collection Those Passions), says no. He doesn’t say so expressly, but it’s implicit in his ravishing descriptions of the painting. Consider this passage:

What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! Clark is amazed by the colors. He doesn’t dismiss them as “arbitrary splotches” as Fine does. Instead, he attempts to interpret them: 

All the same, some colours occur only once, at crucial junctures. Look at the purple curlicue I pointed to earlier, between the hand and cane; or the exact shade of green chosen for the bar of shadow (if that is what it is) across Parayre’s brow; or the kind of purpled mauve, more opaque and decisive than any of its many near relatives, that opens up the space at the front of her throat. The painter wants us to see the subtlety, and also the wilfulness, of his variations on a theme, or his seeing of different things in the same light; but then he also expects us to register the decisive leap out of the established scale. He wants us to notice, and to gasp at, his suddenly seeing how to fix, or transfix, a singular optical fact. Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it. Nothing could be more hardworking, more investigative and empirical, than the way her mouth is drawn. First there were two plain strips of red and pink – bars at the top of an abstract ladder of colour, pink for the chin, green for the recession above it, pink again for the underlip, and flaring red for the upper one. But then this abstraction of sensuality had to be made into a particular mouth. A tentative, half-transparent line of greyed mauve was put over the red to the left, as if trying to inscribe on top of it more of a Cupid’s bow. And a bolder, more opaque dab of mauve was put next to the pink of the lower lip, giving the left side of the mouth a shape. And was this the point at which the amazing, inorganic green of the shadow under the nose was strengthened, so as to intensify the play of complementaries? Did the pear drop of yellow occur as part of this process? Was it maybe thrown up by the business of getting the other greens and yellows to keep the mouth – the mouth’s wounded sensuality – from running away from the rest of the face? (Of course the mouth runs away with the picture. The picture turns on it. But for that very reason it had to be held down, and held back. It had to be intensely, naively correct.)

I love that “Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it.” Clark is clearly entranced by this painting. He says he finds it both “chilling” and “exhilarating.” 

Clark mainly focuses on Madame Matisse’s face and body. Of the hat, he says,

The hat is splendid, but slightly crushing. It casts an implacable green shadow straight along Parayre’s forehead, and its blue all but annihilates the red of her hair. But the hat is abstract: the painter does not seem interested in making its extravagance palpable.

Fine accords more significance to the hat than Clark does. He sees it as the embodiment of Matisse’s “project.” He says, 

In “Femme au Chapeau,” at least a third of the composition is chapeau—and this particular hat is more of a mangled fruit basket, in which nothing is decipherable. The purple tongue sticking out of the top might belong to an iris, and the lobes of reddish orange could be an apple, but they likely aren’t. We’re looking through the eyes of someone who doesn’t want to actually see the hat. Matisse’s project was to wrench the appearance of things, particularly their colors, away from reality, and to let them entertain a new internal correspondence guided by his expressive whims.

Fine calls the hat “a mangled fruit basket.” Clark calls it “a crazy bird’s nest of pleasures and promises.” Both images wonderfully express the sensuousness that, for me, is the essence of this great painting. 

Credit: The above illustration is Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905)

Love Rekindled, Subscription Renewed

Illustration by Diego Mallo

Is there life without The New Yorker? Yes, of course, but it’s a pallid, diminished life. 

And so today, after a long month of no New Yorkers, I renewed my subscription. Gradually I’ll begin to blog about the magazine again, maybe not every issue, just the pieces that really grab me. 

I’m still angry at Trump for trying to crush the Canadian economy. Nevertheless, there are many wonderful aspects of American life. The New Yorker is one of them. I was crazy to think I could live without it.

Postscript: Cassandra Wilson 1955 - 2026

Cassandra Wilson (Photo by Hiroyuki Ito)

I see in the Times that Cassandra Wilson has died. She’s one of my favorite jazz singers. What a voice! Low and smoky. Gary Giddins, in his New Yorker review of her superb 2008 album Loverly, said this:

Wilson has always thrived on rhythmic complexity, but her best work, including “Loverly,” balances it with melodic, harmonic, and verbal nuances that transform evergreens into personal deliberations, frequently underscored with an ironic eroticism. 

Giddins identified three of her attributes as a singer: “the husky timbre, which favors her lower register; an affinity for melodic embellishments replete with sighs and moans; and a canny back-of-the-beat rhythmic attack.”

I’d add a fourth: interpretive genius. Her renditions of “Skylark,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Last Train to Clarksville,” “Wichita Lineman,” “O Sole Mio,” “Black Orpheus,” to name just a few, are brilliant. Her version of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” is magic. Once heard, never forgotten. She’s gone now – way too soon. Her albums will live on. She joins Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald as one of the greatest jazz singers of all time. 

July 20, 2026 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:

1. Taran Dugal’s “Bar Tab: Folk.” Here’s a sample: 

The guests ordered the Mangalorean, named after the chef Jay Kumar’s birthplace, an Indian city on the Arabian Sea: a sublime, sweet, velvety mix of rum, pineapple, lime, and coconut cream infused with amchur, a tangy spice made from unripe mangoes. 

2. Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Fro-Yo Fever.” Here’s a taste:

You’ll do far better if you walk to Eighty-eighth and Madison and dip into the small, cool Madison Fare, a specialty-foods-and-candy storefront opened, in 2022, by the chef Amin Kinana, whose frozen-yogurt creations are, by my estimation, unreserved works of art. The yogurt itself is dense and almost puckeringly sour, and oh, my God, the toppings. They’re some of the most spectacular toppings I’ve ever encountered, an array of ritzy, globe-spanning garnishes that evoke the posh worldliness of peak-era Dean & DeLuca: snowy cubes of Turkish delight, cinnamon-dusted pecans, bitter cocoa nibs, pistachio knafeh, vibrant edible flowers, honey on the comb, actual honest-to-goodness raspberry coulis.

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Fro-Yo Fever"

3. Dan Chiasson’s “One Last Thing,” a review of Franz Wright’s posthumous Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments. Chiasson writes,

Celan’s shattered “neversongs” taught Wright important elements of his own style: the lines narrowing as they approach silence, like water disappearing down a drain; the clauses and multisyllabic words split like cordwood by line breaks; the pressurized neologisms picking up where available vocabulary runs out of road; the rich, sometimes asphyxiating details that make a beeline into the senses.

4. Zachary Fine’s “Go East,” a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition “Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy.” Fine’s commentary on the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme is excellent. Here’s a sample:

Gérôme is the rare artist who’s easy to like and to hate. Every painting is a model of academic crispness and polish, filled with visual cues and prearranged emotional payoffs. “The Snake Charmer,” on loan from the Clark, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, shows a naked boy wrapped in an enormous snake while an old man plays a flute. We’re brought into the scene via the boy’s illuminated buttocks, and conducted to the background, where a crew of ten soldiers gawk at the spectacle. To the right, there’s a guy with a beatific smile who seems to be enjoying more than the snake, an enormous gun propped vertically between his legs. Tabulate the number of stiff objects in the painting (gun, stick, flute, sabre, etc.) and you’ll see that the whole thing is a festival of phallic abundance. Just in case you forget to feel aroused, Gérôme reminds you to.

And another:

How do we account for the beauty of “Bashi-Bazouk” (1868-69)? The subject is just a man with a colorful headdress. Bashi-bazouks were a feared paramilitary outfit in the Ottoman Army, known for cracking skulls, and yet the sitter is a paragon of calm, not violence. He’s almost certainly a civilian whom Gérôme put in a costume. There’s a rifle on his shoulder, but it’s not shooting anytime soon; if anything, the mouth of the gun feels like a chimney inside the painting, letting out invisible puffs of psychological smoke. All the exquisite details—the man’s glowing salmon-pink tunic, the cherrylike tip of his headdress, the fluffy tassels—are an excuse for pure visual stimulation. 

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk (1868-69)

Rachel Aviv's New Book "You Won't Get Free of It"

I see in the Times that Rachel Aviv has a new book out – You Won’t Get Free of It. It’s a collection of Aviv’s New Yorker writings, including her unforgettable piece on the revelations by Alice Munro’s youngest daughter that she'd been sexually abused by her stepfather as a child, and that Munro stayed with the abuser even after he was convicted of the assault. That piece, from which the book takes its title, is one of the most rigorous dissections of family trauma that I’ve ever read. The Times’ reviewer, Melanie Thernstrom, asks, “Can a profile of the writer Alice Munro and her troubled family life be as rich, as complicated, as real as Munro’s own stories are?” She answers,

The stunning title essay in Rachel Aviv’s new collection, “You Won’t Get Free of It,” shows it can. Munro’s stories often feature family secrets that are hiding in plain sight, glimpsed and forgotten, divulged and disavowed. Aviv reveals the shocking autobiographical root of this motif: Munro’s second husband, Gerry, abused her youngest daughter, Andrea, starting when she was 9. (He steadfastly maintained that his stepdaughter was a “Lolita” who had a crush on him.) When Andrea finally told Munro as a young adult, her mother stayed with Gerry, sacrificing her relationship with her daughter.

Yes, the piece is stunning. I was stunned by it when I read it in The New Yorker (see my post here). It’s a meticulous, sensitive, brilliant analysis – well worth preserving between hard covers. 

July 6 & 13, 2026, Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is William Finnegan’s absorbing “No Return.” It’s an account of the trial of Thomas Plamberger, held in February of this year, at the Innsbruck Regional Court, in western Austria. Plamberger was charged with homicide by gross negligence in the death of his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, during an attempt to climb Grossglockner, Austria’s tallest mountain. 

I like reporting pieces about trials. This Plamberger case is a strange one. What makes it strange is the trial procedure. Finnegan calls it “oddly simple” and he’s right. Perhaps it’s too simple. There’s a judge, a prosecutor, a defendant, and a defense lawyer – the four basic elements of almost any civilized trial. But the judge in this case, Norbert Hofer, who is a specialist in “mountain, avalanche, climbing, cable-car, and ski accidents,” appears to have imposed on himself a curious limitation. He wants to run the trial in a single day. That is, he wants to hear all the evidence, render his verdict and, if necessary, impose sentence all in one single day. Why the rush?

The second weird aspect of this trial is the way the evidence is presented. Witnesses are not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It seems the judge does most of the questioning. Sometimes his questions were not as probing as they should’ve been. At one point, Finnegan writes,

There were many disturbing parts of Kerstin’s story left unpursued. The autopsy had yielded an official cause of death: hypothermia. There were signs of a viral infection, and she had taken ibuprofen. But nothing was said about her injuries, even though Thomas had mentioned them. Mathias had described bloodstains. Whose? From what wound? Why had Thomas and Kerstin taken the Stüdlgrat? That was a central question, never asked. Where were their headlamps after midnight? Extreme cold drains batteries, but at least one headlamp was back on at 1:30 a.m. How did Kerstin end up where she was found? Did Thomas lead her there or find her there? Why on earth was she still wearing her backpack?

There were many disturbing parts of Kerstin’s story left unpursued – why? A young, inexperienced climber was left on a brutal mountain to die. Every effort should be made to determine what happened. A trial is a search for truth in a welter of contradictions and inconsistencies. That’s what makes them so fascinating. But in this case, inexplicably, the judge seemed to be in a hurry. Yes, in the end, he zeroed in on the most telling pieces of evidence – Plamberger’s failure to turn back when the weather turned nasty, his failure to make an emergency call, his leaving Gurtner tied to a near-vertical gray rock on a steep part of the mountain – and found Plamberger guilty. But his sentence – a five-month suspended sentence and a fine of nine thousand six hundred euros – was woefully inadequate. 

Finnegan, in his piece, does the job that Judge Hofer should’ve done. He methodically reviews all the evidence. His point about the bivouac bag strikes me as particularly damning: 

Why didn’t Thomas unpack the bivouac bag from her backpack, the thermal blanket? His explanation was that he’d forgotten in the stress of the moment: “I didn’t even think about the bivouac bag.” He added, “I don’t know why she didn’t say anything to me about it.” So the oversight was her fault. She was hypothermic, but she should have said something.

Based on Finnegan’s report, the evidence overwhelmingly points to Plamberger’s gross negligence. He should’ve been sentenced to time in prison. Instead, he received a love tap from a judge who was part of the Austrian climbing fraternity.

Christoph Niemann's Jazzy Cityscapes

I love this drawing by Christoph Niemann. I first saw it in the June 7 & 14, 2025, New Yorker, in a feature titled “Sketchbook: An Artist’s View of New York City.” To me, it’s one of the most original, beautiful, arresting artworks the magazine has ever published. I love the semi-abstract way the city is evoked – exquisite vertical and horizontal strokes of purple and gray ink saturating brilliant white paper. It’s a new form of drawing, is it not? It seems spontaneous, I could be wrong. Maybe it took days or even weeks to complete. But it has the look of fluidity, spontaneity, jazz. Yes, that’s it. It’s the visual equivalent of jazz. 

Niemann’s “Sketchbook” collection includes several other drawings that are almost as good, e.g., the marvelous green-and-gray “Scaffolding in lower Manhattan” and the stunning gray-and-white “Downtown Brooklyn.” But for sheer visual pleasure (arousal of eyesight), that gorgeous purple-gray-white cityscape can’t be beat. 

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #2 Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Geoff Dyer’s superb “Poles Apart” (April 18, 2011). 

In this great piece, Dyer tells about his visit to two remote land-art sites – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” near Quemado, New Mexico, and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah. He structures his piece in two parts with an “Intermission” in between, consisting of four brief notes. 

The first part, titled “New Mexico,” describes Dyer’s “Lightning Field” experience. He’s at the site with his wife Rebecca, plus four others – Steve, Anne, Ethan, and Cristina. Here’s the first paragraph:

We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere. The windmill must have been turning, because the wind was sprinting across the plateau. The sky was not just clear or blue. It was as if we’d ended up in a future where there was no atmosphere, no sky—nothing to insulate earth from cosmos. Scrub extended into the distance and in the distance were mountains, but even the things that were near were far off. The land was camouflage-colored, the dust reddish brown. Near the cabin but still quite distant, almost invisible, were sticks stuck randomly in the ground—some in the far distance as opposed to the near distance, but none in the very far distance, where we could not have seen them even if they had been there.

I find that an appealingly weird beginning – almost as if Dyer is pretending to be an alien from outer space, trying to make sense of this strange place where he’s landed. He’s divested himself of all preconceptions, all prior knowledge. “We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere.” Seemed – key word. What are those sticks stuck in the ground? Dyer’s next paragraph brings us closer:

The air was thin, cold; the sun was hot on our faces. When the wind subsided, as it did every few minutes, it was still and quiet. As we walked toward the sticks, it became clear that there were more of them than we’d realized, though it was difficult to say how many, because many were hard to see and some were not seeable at all, and it is probably only in retrospect, once we understood that their being invisible was part of their function, that we knew they were there. The sticks, it became evident, once we got close to them, were not sticks but poles: polished steel, shining in the sun, three times my height, and as sharply pointed as javelins. They were two inches in diameter and cold to the touch. If they had been wooden sticks, they could have been stuck there thousands of years ago, but because they were stainless steel they were obviously of more recent provenance. Hundreds of years from now they would still gleam like the promise of a future.

What are these poles? What’s their purpose? Do they have meaning? Where are we? Dyer still hasn’t named the place. He and his companions convene at the cabin:

I was the last man in and could see the other members of our expedition sitting on the wooden porch in wooden rockers and on wooden benches, getting drunk on champagne, watching me walk toward them. It was the kind of hut you see people inhabiting in photographs from the nineteen-thirties by Walker Evans. What had seemed noble but squalid then seemed idyllic now, a boutique hotel, practically, especially with the champagne and laughter.

There’s that word “seemed” again. I love the infusion of champagne and laughter into the narrative. It comes as a relief. These guys are human! The reference to Walker Evans made me smile. Dyer is a fan of his work (see his brilliant The Ongoing Moment), and so am I. 

In the evening, Dyer continues to observe the poles. He writes,

As the sun began to drop toward the horizon, the poles sprouted shadows and the tips sparkled as if stars were perched on them. There were so many competing perspectives that they complicated each other and cancelled each other out. The poles were still slender, but they’d acquired bulk, solidity. There were far more of them than we had thought, and it became obvious that they were not scattered randomly but had been planted in rows. If you positioned yourself next to one and looked past it, you could see a dozen more, glowing, like a fence that let everything through—everything being the sunlight and the wind. The sun was sinking fast and everything began to change. The silver poles glowed goldly. There was a clear demarcation now between the area where there were poles and the area where there were none, even though the poles were arranged so sparsely as to have made the distinction imperceptible at first.

For the first time, Dyer mentions religion: “There was a sense—all the more palpable in such a remote and empty place—of something gathering. Absence had given way to presence. We were in the midst of what may once have been considered a variety of religious experience.”

The next two paragraphs are among my favorites of the piece:

The sky blackened after only a few minutes and we retreated indoors. We ate quesadillas and drank dark wine and looked at the flames of the pellet-burning stove as if it were a television. The vastness outside made the interior of the cabin seem the coziest place on earth, like an igloo.

Later, we went outside again, into the huge night. The poles were gone, but we knew they were there. The sky was nothing but a dome of stars. We were no strangers to the firmament, but none of us had seen anything like this. The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight.

That “The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away” is inspired. The last line – “The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight” – is among the most beautiful that Dyer has ever written.

Next morning, at sunrise, “the tips of the poles began to twinkle.” And then, as the sun emerged into view, “the poles stood stark and golden, even more sharply defined than they had been the evening before.” Dyer considers their meaning:

Places like Stonehenge had been designed with the solstice in mind, may even have been celestial calendars, attempting to synch man’s experience on earth with the heavens. None of that was relevant here. The placement of poles referred to nothing other than itself. Thousands of years of study would confirm that there was no intended relation between the poles and the equinox, the transit of Venus, or lunar eclipses. What was here was entirely man-made and appealed only to man.

I relish that last line. Dyer is grappling with the meaning of the place. At this point, he drops the “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees” approach and names the place he’s experiencing:

We were—as many of you will have guessed by now—near Quemado, New Mexico, at “The Lightning Field,” by Walter De Maria (completed in 1977). The answer prompts another question—why the subterfuge of inconceivable ignorance?—which can best be answered with further questions. Most visitors who come to see De Maria’s masterpiece these days know roughly what they are in for. But what if we came to “The Lightning Field” and had to try to work it out for ourselves, with no art-historical backup? Asked about the consequences of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai is said to have replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” That’s the response that comes to mind when pondering the significance of the great land-art projects of the late nineteen-sixties and seventies.

The key word here, for me, at least, is “response.” Dyer is trying to get at how he responds to “The Lightening Field.” He’s working through his responses:

There’s a lot of space, but, even as a figure of speech, there’s no room for God. “The Lightning Field” offers an intensity of experience that for a long time could be articulated only—or most conveniently—within the language of religion. Nothing about “The Lightning Field” prompts one to genuflect. Rigorously atheistic, geometrically neutral, it takes the faith and the vaulting promise of modernism into the wilderness. Part of the experience of coming here is the attempt to understand and articulate these responses.

Near the end of the “New Mexico” segment, Dyer describes how he and his companions accessed the “Lightning Field” site:

You leave your cars at Quemado and are taken up, in a van, at two-thirty in the afternoon. The drive takes half an hour, so you arrive at the least impressive time of the day. As we approached, a groan of disappointment swept through our party: we didn’t know exactly what we were expecting, but we expected more. And then you get it, but gradually, in an experience of space that unfolds over time. A narrative is at work.

“An experience of space that unfolds over time” is an excellent description of Dyer’s response to “The Lightning Field.” His writing enacts it. 

The next section of “Poles Apart” is called “Intermission.” It consists of four brief notes on landscape. In Note 1, Dyer remembers an area in a recreation park called the Hump, where he played when he was a kid. He says, “It was the first place in my personal landscape that had special significance.”

In Note 2, he considers how certain places in the landscape “develop a special quality.” He offers the example of a piece of land that becomes a fertility site, how it eventually falls into disuse and ruin, and how, even as a ruin, it retains “what D. H. Lawrence called ‘nodality.’ ” This idea of nodality appears again in the piece’s third section on the “Spiral Jetty.” 

In Note 3, Dyer remembers a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he saw a painting by Elihu Vedder called “The Questioner of the Sphinx” (1863), showing “a dark-skinned traveller crouched by the head of a sphinx that emerges from the sand in which it has been submerged for centuries.” Dyer describes it as “an early depiction of the post-apocalyptic world: one could easily imagine that it’s not the head of the sphinx poking above the sand but the torch of the Statue of Liberty, “Planet of the Apes” style.” He says, “We study the painting closely: a depiction of the effort to work out what certain marks on the landscape mean; what they are trying to tell us; what we go to them for.” 

Note 4 tells about D. H. Lawrence’s experience of New Mexico – “ ‘the greatest experience from the outside world’ that he had ever had.” Note 4 functions as a segue to Part 2 of “Poles Apart” – “Utah.” Dyer writes,

In the American West you can travel hundreds of miles and calculate your arrival time almost to the minute. We turned up for our rendezvous in Quemado at two o’clock on the dot. From Quemado, we drove four hundred and sixty miles to Zion, Utah, and got there exactly in time for our dinner reservation at eight-thirty. Our itinerary was as precise as De Maria’s measuring.

From Zion, we were going to drive north to the “Spiral Jetty.”

Part 2 differs conceptually from Part 1. In Part 1, Dyer’s focus is on the experience of “The Lightning Field.” The journey to the site is secondary and is covered in a few lines near the end of the piece. In contrast, Part 2 is a road trip that ends at “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We drove north—Rebecca and I—toward Salt Lake City. No need for a compass. Everything screamed north: the gray-and-white mountains looming Canadianly in the distance, the weather deteriorating by the hour. Opting for directness instead of scenery, we barrelled up the featureless expanse of I-15. Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder. Then Salt Lake City, doing its level best to come and meet us before we got anywhere near it—and reluctant to say goodbye even when we were well beyond. 

That “snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder” is inspired! I read it fifteen years ago when the piece appeared in The New Yorker. It’s stayed with me ever since. Every time I see a piece of tire on the road, I think of Dyer’s vivid phrase – “snakeskin shreds of tire.” 

They spend the night in Ogden, Utah. Dyer rereads Lawrence’s essay on Taos, New Mexico. He quotes a passage which begins “Taos pueblo still retains its old nodality.” Dyer comments, “Like Vedder’s painting, this bit of writing—analytical, hypnotic, profound—tells us much about the power that some places exert. In their different ways, both De Maria and Smithson were attempting to create nodality.”

The next day, Dyer and Rebecca continue their pilgrimage to “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We had been given enigmatically precise directions on how to find the “Spiral Jetty”—“Another .5 miles should bring you to a fence but no cattle guard and no gate”—only to find that the route was discreetly signposted. The gravel road was corrugated, washboarded. We jolted and rattled at fifteen miles an hour, past calves the size of big dogs, and cows the size of cows, all of them black and resigned-looking. The sky slumped over a landscape that gave constant reminders of Britain, that Dartmoor feeling of worn-down ancientness. Seagulls, too. Wordsworth might have had this place in mind when he coined the phrase “visionary dreariness.” Suddenly, there was a single brown cow and, to the south, in a gap between low, dull hills, a pale glow. Light bouncing off the salt flats? That was where we were headed.

We drove more and more slowly as the potholes and trenches increased in width, depth, and frequency. The road continued to deteriorate until it finally gave up any claims to being a road. We left the cocoon of the car and began walking. There’d been no signs for a while, but there were, allegedly, three things to look out for as markers: an abandoned trailer, an old Dodge truck, and—interestingly—an amphibious landing craft. No sign of any of them. But that glow we’d noticed earlier? It wasn’t just the reflection on the lake; the sky itself was brightening. To our left, the lake looked congealed, like a dead ocean on a used-up planet. There was a faint smell of sulfur. It was the kind of location that might have been scouted for the closing scenes of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” where the shining sea turns out to be just a further extent of desolation. Protruding from the lake’s edge were the remains of some kind of enterprise, long since aborted. Was that the “Spiral Jetty”? If it was, then it was in far worse shape than we’d anticipated, not exactly a spiral and barely a jetty at all. I remembered that there had recently been a certain amount of debate on this score: whether to try to preserve the jetty, to raise it up and stop it from disappearing again, or just to leave it to its own devices, to gracefully decay and commend itself to the shallow-looking deep. But, no, it couldn’t be that far gone. We kept walking in that state of foiled uncertainty: had we already had the experience we were eagerly anticipating?

No. Because there it was, a ring of black rocks—not white, and far smaller than expected, but exuding unmistakable “Spiral Jetty”-ness.

I’m tempted to keep quoting. I think I will. This is an eminently quotable piece:

We walked toward the circles of stone and could see that these circles were actually part of an unbroken spiral. We were no longer coming to the “Spiral Jetty.” We were at the “Spiral Jetty,” waiting for the uplift, the feeling of arrival—not just in the getting-there sense but in the way Lawrence experienced it at Taos Pueblo. And it sort of happened. The weather had been quietly improving. The sky, in places, had turned from lead to zinc. Patches of blue appeared. And now, for the first time that day, the sun came out. There were shadows, light, a slow release of color.

We clambered down to the jetty—there was no path—through a slope of black rocks, where someone had fly-tipped an exhausted mattress. The jetty extended in a long straight spur before bending inward. The water was plaster-colored, slightly pink, changing color as it was enfolded by the spiral, at its whitest in the middle of the coil.

Dyer’s response to “Spiral Jetty” is fascinating. He says,

Compared with Angkor and the Pyramids, the jetty has aged at the rate of housing projects put up in a hurry. It had existed for only forty years and already it looked ancient. Which, actually, is the best thing about it. It’s fast-tracked to become a contemporary incarnation of Vedder’s sphinx. “The Lightning Field” looks perpetually sci-fi; in next to no time the “Spiral Jetty” had acquired the bleak gravity, the elemental aura, of prehistory. 

He invokes Lawrence’s notion of nodality:

The sky continued to open up. With the sound of birds and lapping water, it was lovely now—in a subdued, melancholy sort of way. It felt desolate, but this was not a place of abandoned meaning. It had retained—or generated—its own dismal nodality.

“Poles Apart” shows Dyer extracting meaning from two great works of land art – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field” and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty.” It’s one of his best essays. 

Postscript: “Poles Apart” is included in Dyer’s excellent 2016 collection White Sands. Part 1 “New Mexico” is titled “Space in Time”; Part 2 “Utah” is titled “Time in Space.”