September 19, 2011 Issue

Of the many different types of fact pieces that appear in The New Yorker, the ones I find most irresistible concern the nature of the creative process - how life is made into art. That’s why I found the tagline of Michael Schulman’s “King’s Speech” (“Katori Hall spins theatre from a moment in history”), in this week's issue, so alluring. I immediately followed it into the story and read blissfully, raptly, without stop, right to the end. What a wonderful piece! It’s about the sources of Hall’s play The Mountaintop. I like how Schulman begins, plunging directly into the historical facts out of which the play springs:

On April 3, 1968, as thunderstorms soaked the city of Memphis, Carrie Mae Golden asked her mother if she could go out. Golden was fifteen years old and lived in a three-bedroom house on Allen Street with nine siblings and two small children of her own. There were tornado warnings across western Tennessee that night, but they didn’t deter Golden, who desperately wanted to catch a ride to Mason Street, where Martin Luther King, Jr., was due to speak.

And I like Schulman’s selection of material and the way he’s woven it together. “King’s Speech” comprehends the sanitation workers’ strike, the Poor People’s Campaign, King’s assassination, an overview of Hall’s work, a visit with Hall at her home in Southaven, attending Sunday morning service at Brown Missionary Baptist Church, a drive through the Goldens’ old neighborhood in Memphis, a viewing of the Lorraine Motel, and attendance at a rehearsal of The Mountaintop in a studio near Times Square.

I also like Schulman’s selection of details, e.g., Hall’s hair is “a spaghetti plate of dreadlocks,” the parking lot at Brown Missionary Baptist Church is so big that “we had to take a golf cart from our parking spot,” Hall’s comment, “All this history, just floatin’ away,” as she drives by some of Memphis’s numerous weed-covered lots.

Most of all, I like Schulman’s subject, a spirited playwright who has endeavored to enter into a great man’s mind, heart, and skin for the purpose of “humanizing him.” “King’s Speech” is a memorable piece. I enjoyed it enormously.

September 12, 2011 Issue

Of the dozen Talk stories in this week’s 9/11-commemoration issue, the one I like most is Ian Frazier’s "Passengers." It’s about a bus driver, Salvatore Siano, known as Sal. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Sal was driving his bus into New York City. As he approached the city on Route 3,

he saw the smoke rising from downtown. By the time he reached the tunnel, it had been closed, and Sal had received a call from another driver telling him about the first plane. Wedged in heavy traffic, Sal managed to back the bus onto an entrance ramp, turn around, and retrace his route, dropping the passengers at their stops and returning their tickets or cash fares along the way.

Before this incident, Sal was known for his colorful, outgoing personality. As Frazier says,

When he drove, Sal reconfigured his bus as his living room, lining the dashboard with toy ducks, chatting over his shoulder with passengers, and sometimes keeping snowballs handy to throw at policemen through the open door. He used to caution children, “I am not a role model!” His travel-guide monologues upon arrival at the Port Authority Bus Terminal – “Welcome to sunny Aruba! Don’t forget your sunblock! Cha-cha-cha!” – won him minor fame.

For a while after September 11, Sal “stopped joking around on the bus.” Frazier says, “When asked why, he grew sad and dispirited, and said that he was too emotionally caught up in the tragedy. Eventually, he began to joke again.”

Frazier has written about Sal before. In his great “Route 3” (The New Yorker, February 16 & 23, 2004; included in Frazier’s terrific 2005 collection Gone To New York), he describes him as follows:

Sal is short and has a boyish (though graying) shock of hair. His movements are more antic than usual for a bus driver. Sal is the only bus driver I know of who seems to notice what’s along the road. When he sees something that interests him, he takes up the microphone and announces it to the passengers. Colorful Halloween displays, Christmas lights, a yard full of yellow and purple crocuses, the Goodyear blimp over Giants stadium – all rate an excited mention by Sal, followed by his usual exclamations: “Oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy!”

In “Route 3,” Frazier talks about September 11’s impact on Sal:

For a while after September 11, Sal quit doing his antic announcements. His bus pulled into the station in silence, with the passengers waiting to expectantly but in vain. The loss of Sal’s announcements, minor as it was, saddened me out of proportion. Without some silliness, what is life for? Later, though, to general relief, Sal went back to giving what he calls his “spiels.”

In “Passengers,” Frazier visits Sal at his apartment in Clifton. Sal is now retired. He talks to Frazier about 9/11. He says:

“The other day, I was remembering this one passenger from Upper Montclair who always got on at the Norwood Avenue stop, by the public library. After the attacks, I read in the paper – someone must have told me his name – that this man had passed away. He was such a pleasant human being. A man about my height, wore glasses. I had seen him just the week before. The obituary in the Times said this man volunteered to work in homeless shelters, and sometimes slept in them to experience what they were like.” (Here Sal began to cry.) [I confess, I felt emotion starting to well up inside me, too.] “When I read that, I knew that my instincts about him had been right. I remember him whenever I go by Norwood and the library.”

Most writers would’ve been content to end their story on that note. But Frazier isn't "most writers." He shifts his focus to the passenger, and says:

The passenger’s name was Howard L. Kestenbaum. Along with the names of nearly three thousand other people who died that day, his is inscribed on a granite wall at the edge of the memorial garden in Eagle Rock Reservation, a county park in nearby West Orange, at the top of a ridge with a clear view of Lower Manhattan. “He had a wife and daughter, and they are special people, too,” Sal continued. “I still see them around Montclair on a regular basis. When ever I do, I embrace them and give them a kiss on the cheek.”

“Passengers” is a marvelous piece – a touching tribute to Siano and Kestenbaum, and a wonderful companion to Frazier’s brilliant “Route 3.”

September 5, 2011 Issue

From the moment I saw the online table of contents of this week’s issue, I’ve been anticipating the magazine’s arrival in the mail. Now it’s finally here. Of course, I want to immediately turn to Ian Frazier’s “The March of the Strandbeests” and devour it. In preparation, I’ve already viewed and re-viewed the Photo Booth slideshow of Lena Herzog’s ravishing black-and-white Strandbeest photographs. But, I decide to delay the pleasure of my reading of Frazier’s piece, and go first to Rebecca Mead’s “Better, Faster, Stronger,” a profile of “Silicon Valley’s self-help guru," Timothy Ferriss. First sentence of the third paragraph, my interest in the piece catches fire. Mead writes:

I didn’t know anyone, so I went out of my comfort zone to talk to a young man named Courtney Reum, who told me that he had left a job at Goldman Sachs to start a company that makes and sells Veev – an organic, kosher, gluten-free, carbon-neutral açai liquor, bottled in recycled glass, with labels printed in soy ink.

Great sentence! The combination of all those interesting, piquant words - organic, kosher, gluten-free, carbon-neutral, açai liquor, recycled glass, soy ink – is exquisite. And I like the way Mead picks up on Ferriss’s use of the self-help jargon term “comfort zone” in the previous paragraph and weaves it into the above-quoted line. Ferriss is a colorful character in a New-Age-Silicon Valley-self-help sort of way (e.g., weighing his feces, sumo wrestling, tagging tiger sharks, inducing 15-minute orgasms in female bedmates). I laughed when I read his “clenched vagina” line. Mead writes some humorous lines of her own (e.g., her reaction to Ferriss’s speaking Japanese and Mandarin: “although to see him doing so brings irresistibly to mind Mike Myers speaking Cantonese in ‘Wayne’s World’”). And do I detect a glint of a good journalist’s healthy skepticism running through the piece? I think so, and I’m pleased to see it. For example, at the end of a sentence telling us about Ferriss’s plan to offer investment advice via Facebook and Twitter, she archly says, “assuming that sufficient numbers of people will opt for the appeal of digital connectivity over the allure of recreational shark-tagging, competitive tango dancing, or any of the other activities that one might pursue in the hundred and sixty-four hours of free time in a four-hour workweek.” I enjoyed “Better, Faster, Stronger” immensely. Its prose enacts the fizzy, kinetic world it describes.

And now I turn to a completely different world where giant beasts made of plastic tubing stalk the beach near Delft. Ian Frazier’s “The March of the Strandbeests” is brilliant - where brilliant means vivid, precise, rich, poetic. It contains a number of inspired passages, e.g.:

The northeast wind skimmed the waves along the beach like pinwheel blades, the giant wind turbine above the harbor rotated, the para-surfers’ chutes twisted this way and that, the ropes on the masts of the catamaran in drydock beside the dunes snaked back and forth and banged their metal parts on the hollow aluminum with a racket that could frighten off wicked spirits. In shoreline indentations, heaps of sea foam accumulated and shivered, and clumps of foam kept blowing free and spinning across the sand, assuming corkscrew shapes and in the next instant abrading themselves away.

A terrific aspect of Frazier’s approach to writing is his inclusion of incidentals, i.e., experiences that most journalists would consider too marginal to be included in their stories. But, for Frazier (and for me, as reader), the incidental experiences are often the ones that make the story. For example, in “The March of the Strandbeests,” he mentions that Theo Jansen, the ingenious creator of the Strandbeests, had trouble finding his car in the airport parking garage. Frazier says:

At first, he couldn’t find his white Volvo in the airport parking garage, and I set down my suitcase while he listened for the dog. Theo has a small, wool-colored dog of a French Madagascar breed who goes almost everywhere with him and is named Murphy. In a minute, he picked up Murphy’s bark and we homed in on it. The dog barked more encouragingly the closer we got to the car.

“The March of the Strandbeests” abounds with such succulent details. Here’s another one:

In a vitrine, a leather-bound sketchbook of Gerard ter Borch the younger lay open to a black-chalk drawing of a tangled patch of a brush on a hillside. Such a no-count, lovely piece of ground!

That “Such a no-count, lovely piece of ground!” is great! It’s so typical of Frazier to notice and appreciate such a “no-count, lovely” detail.

My favorite passage of “The March of the Strandbeests” comes at the end. Frazier is describing one of the smaller Strandbeests, Animus Longer. He says, “From a distance, it looked like one of those folding pole-and-clothesline contraptions you hang laundry on.” Then he concludes the piece as follows:

This Strandbeest stood there for awhile, unnoticed. The shiny, wet sand held its reflection. Some new customers arrived and sat at one of the restaurant’s outdoor tables. A minute later, a stronger gust came up, and the apparent clothes drying rack suddenly went tiptoeing across the sand. The people at the table did a triple take and began pointing and laughing, and talking in Dutch. “Dat ding is aan het lopen!” (“That thing is walking!”) they cried.

What a delightful ending! I laughed when I read it.

Before concluding, I want to briefly comment on one more piece in this week’s issue, namely, James Wood’s “Cabin Fever,” a review of Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams. It’s one of the best pieces Wood has written for the magazine. I’m a fan of Wood’s writing. But I confess I’ve harbored a suspicion that he doesn’t really get (or like) American fiction. “Cabin Fever” dispels that suspicion forever. Wood says of Johnson’s writing in Train Dreams, “The hard, declarative sentences keep their powder dry for pages at a time, and then suddenly flare into lyricism.” “Cabin Fever” shows a deep appreciation for “the exactitude of Johnson’s language.” It’s filled with inspired quotations from Johnson’s work. The second-to-last paragraph, which begins, “The protagonist of ‘Train Dreams’ is not privy to stoned visions, but he is a steady noticer of the natural world, and the novella’s prose follows his eye with frequent exhalations of beauty,” is gorgeous.

Thank you New Yorker for these three excellent pieces. They’re a tremendous source of reading pleasure.

Postscript: Is Louis Menand changing his tune regarding the old New Yorker’s anticommercialism? He says, in “Browbeaten,” in this week’s issue, that Dwight Macdonald “believed completely in the official dogma of Ross and Shawn’s New Yorker, which was the absolute separation of the magazine’s business side (the side concerned with advertising and circulation) from the editorial side.” He says, “The New Yorker did not cater to any class of reader, in its self-accounting; it simply published what its writers and editors wanted to publish. It was blind to the marketplace.” That “official dogma” and “self-accounting” are interesting. Is Menand implying the reality was otherwise? There was a time – 1990, to be exact – when Menand believed in The New Yorker’s anticommercial nature. In “A Friend Writes: The Old New Yorker (The New Republic, February 26, 1990; included in his 2002 essay collection American Studies), he says:

In 1985, soon after the New Yorker was sold, Shawn wrote a “Notes and Comment” piece designed to defend the magazine’s editorial position against possible encroachments by the new ownership, and to reassure the magazine’s readers. “We, the editorial people,” he explained, “knew by instinct that to be able to make the New Yorker the magazine we wanted it to be we had to separate ourselves from the business side of the venture…. In this atmosphere of freedom, we have never published anything in order to sell magazines, to cause a sensation, to be controversial, to be popular or fashionable, to be ‘successful.’" The analysis is entirely correct, and it explains the true commercial genius of the New Yorker.

Now, it would appear, according to Menand’s latest take, that Shawn’s view, far from being “entirely correct,” was just “official dogma,” a “self-accounting.” This is unfair to Shawn and to the magazine. I believe Menand had it right the first time around. Shawn was true to his principles. The New Yorker's separation of art from commerce was real, and not mere window dressing, as Menand now seems to suggest.

George Ault's "Russell's Corners" Paintings

I want to post my response to Sanford Schwartz’s wonderful review of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition “To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America" (“The Drama of the World at Night,” The New York Review of Books, August 18, 2011). But in order to do so I’m going to have stretch the jurisdictional boundaries of my blog because the connection between Ault and The New Yorker is, shockingly, almost non-existent. As far as I can determine, in the magazine’s entire history, Ault is mentioned just twice. Robert Coates, in a review of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum called “The Precisionist View in American Art” (“Camera Eye,” The New Yorker, February 4, 1961), writes:

Though the better-known figures constitute the main body of the collection, they by no means take up the whole of it, and one of the great values of the affair is the number of less well-known or now overlooked artists who have been sought out for inclusion. I’d cite especially such pieces as Elsie Driggs’ fine “Pittsburgh,” with its smoky-gray cluster of roofs and chimneys; the George Ault “From Brooklyn Heights,” a harbor view, and his “Sullivan Street Abstraction;” and, almost in toto, the small group of abstractions by Morton Schamberg, but most particularly his “Still Life, Camera Flashlight” and “Machine.”

And, in a follow-up to his piece on the Whitney show (“Backward, O Time,” The New Yorker, February 18, 1961), Coates says:

In the face of all this it was a pleasure, at the Whitney, to see revived such once familiar but now lost-in-limbo figures as Charles Demuth, George Ault, Niles Spencer, and Joseph Stella.

That’s it - that’s the full extent of The New Yorker’s notice of George Ault. On the other hand, Sanford Schwartz has been a long-time admirer of Ault’s work. In 1989, he wrote a piece about him called “Summer Nights at Russell’s Corners.” It’s included in his great 1990 essay collection Artists and Writers, which is where I first read it. I loved it, still do. “Summer Nights at Russell’s Corners” introduced me to Ault’s four great nighttime Russell’s Corners paintings: Black Night at Russell’s Corners (1943), Night at Russell’s Corners (1946), Bright Light at Russell’s Corners (1946), August Night at Russell’s Corners (1948). Schwartz included two reproductions, Bright Light at Russell’s Corners and August Night at Russell’s Corners, in his book. Even though they’re in black-and-white, they clearly show the thin lines of light on the power lines that are, as Schwartz points out, an aspect of Ault’s “great theme – a piercing, seemingly sourceless light.” Schwartz says, “He gives us the light that’s reflected on telephone or power lines at night – light that resembles strands of a necklace.” Schwartz’s “Summer Nights at Russell’s Corners” ends memorably:

Ault fine-tunes your eyes. He makes you aware of delicate light effects that happen, as it were, behind your back. When you drive down a country road at night and see, from the lights of a distant oncoming car, telephone wires turning into thin white lines, you may say to yourself, “An Ault!”

Schwartz’s new Ault piece, titled “The Drama of the World at Night,” is a beauty. It evinces the same deep appreciation for the way Ault depicts light that Schwartz’s earlier piece showed. Schwartz describes Ault as an “artist whose feeling for light is unlike anybody else’s.” Again, he draws our attention to the thin gleams of reflected light in the Russell’s Corners pictures. He says:

In his most mysterious and extraordinary works – four canvases of Russell’s Corners, a crossroads with some barns and a single hanging light in Woodstock – Ault does justice to that moment we have all experienced at night (and surprisingly few artists have shown) when overhead power lines, reflecting light from somewhere, become what might be called sky drawings.

But, in “The Drama of the World at Night,” Schwartz’s focus is not so much on Ault’s representation of light as it is on his representation of darkness. He says, “His [Ault’s] richest theme is the world at night.” In a superb passage of descriptive analysis, he says:

Made between 1943 and 1948 – and all, thankfully, in the Smithsonian’s exhibition – the Russell’s Corners paintings present a black nighttime setting, with no one around, touched here and there with areas of red and white (for the barns and light). Each painting shows the Corners from a different vantage point, and as Ault returned to the theme over the years, he eliminated more of the details, so that the last painting is primarily black. Yet no one picture feels finer or deeper than the others. They are in part about darkness but they aren’t emotionally “dark.” They express, rather, the wonder of there being this shifting drama of piercing light and enveloping obscurity happening in the middle of nowhere, without anyone’s having quite planned it. If he made no other works Ault would still be a remarkable figure.

That “they express, rather, the wonder of there being this shifting drama of piercing light and enveloping obscurity happening in the middle of nowhere, without anyone’s having quite planned it” is brilliant! It gets at why I find these Russell’s Corners paintings so affecting. Russell’s Corners is for most of us the type of nondescript intersection we barely register as we zoom by on our way to somewhere else. Ault saw it differently. Reading Schwartz’s stimulating pieces, looking at the Russell’s Corners pictures (there’s an excellent slideshow of Ault’s work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s website), I’m reminded of something John Updike said in the Foreword to his The Early Stories 1953-1975: “My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me – and to give the mundane its beautiful due.” That’s exactly what George Ault did in his marvelous Russell’s Corners paintings; he gave the mundane its beautiful due.

Credit: The above artwork is George Ault's Bright Light at Russell's Corners (1946); it appears in The New York Review of Books (August 18, 2011) as an illustration for Sanford Schwartz's "The Drama of the World at Night."

Interesting Emendations: Edward Hoagland's "Calliope Times"

I see one of my favorite writers, Edward Hoagland, has a new essay collection out titled Sex and the River Styx. It’s received mixed reviews. Phillip Lopate, in The New York Review of Books (August 18, 2011), says, “Side by side with such tiresome crochets, there are passages in these late essays as good as any Hoagland ever wrote.” Tara McKelvey, in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (August 14, 2011), says, “While these essays are full of elegiac writing, the sex stuff (where people are involved) is a disaster.” Both reviewers focus on Hoagland as essayist. Lopate calls him a “master personal essayist.” He says in passing that Hoagland “wrote excellent accounts of travel in British Columbia and Africa.” Neither Lopate nor McKelvey mention by name Hoagland’s masterpiece, Notes from the Century Before (1969). This is like writing about Joyce without mentioning Ulysses. Notes from the Century Before is a journal of Hoagland’s trip to Telegraph Creek in northern British Columbia. It's a great, exuberant, rhapsodic, sensual diary written in a tumbling, precise, powerhouse prose. I love every word of it. Hoagland has what Joyce had: a love of the supreme juices of everyday life.

Only three of Hoagland’s many pieces have appeared in The New Yorker: a short story, “The Final Fate of the Alligators” (October 18, 1969), and two essays, “Hailing the Elusory Mountain Lion” (August 7, 1971), and “Calliope Times” (May 22, 2000). Of these, my favorite is “Calliope Times,” which engagingly starts out:

In the spring of 1951, when I was eighteen and finishing my freshman year at Harvard, I wrote to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus to ask for a job, spurred in particular by my fascination with animals.

“Calliope Times” was later published as chapter three of Hoagland’s 2001 memoir Compass Points. The two versions differ in a number of interesting ways. For example, here is a passage from the magazine piece:

The elephant men rode, too, from the train, in a more august procession, sitting like mahouts on the elephants’ necks, and they were slow-fuse types, tall-legged, barrel-bodied.

And here is the book version:

The elephant men rode, too, from the train, in a more august procession, sitting on the elephants’ heads, with a leg hanging down on each side of its right eye; and they were slow-fuse types, tall-legged, barrel-bodied.

Note, in the book version, the deletion of “like mahouts,” the repositioning of the riders from the elephants’ necks to the elephants’ heads, and the addition of “with a leg hanging down on each side of its right eye.”

Here’s another example. In the New Yorker version, the main circus tent (the “big top”) is described as follows:

The sea-colored canvas, eleven hundred and forty feet in circumference, mounted in hammocky waves from a hundred and sixteen side poles toward the sixty-five quarter poles, and then higher and higher, with the immensity and serenity of surf, to the baling rings on the center poles, about seventy feet up.

Here’s the Compass Points version:

The sea-colored canvas, eleven hundred fifty feet in circumference, mounted in hammocky waves from a hundred sixteen side poles – each one like a Bactrian hump – toward the sixty-five quarter poles (elephants pulled each of these up), and then higher and higher, with the immensity and serenity of surf, to the bale rings on the center poles, about seventy feet high.

Note, in the book version, the increased tent circumference, the addition of “each one like a Bactrian hump,” the addition of the parenthesis, the change of “baling rings” to “bale rings,” and the change of “up” to “high.”

The Compass Points version contains dozens of such changes. My favorite passage in the piece is this haunting description of what Hoagland heard when he slept out on the flatcars:

Crossing Indiana and Iowa, you could hear the lions sniff at their ventilation slats for the smells of the veldt and roar to see if a lion out there on the prairie would answer; they thumped the walls when they scented the Mississippi, or the forests of Minnesota, or the Platte River in Nebraska. When the train slowed, I was sometimes tempted to open their cages so they could go find a life for themselves in the wild, however abbreviated. These were glory nights, vivid nights.

I recall reading that passage when it appeared in The New Yorker and being bowled over by it. I identified with Hoagland’s urge to let the big cats loose. Reading the Compass Points version, I noticed the passage is slightly different:

Crossing Indiana and Iowa, you could hear the lions sniff for the smells of the veldt at their ventilation slats and roar to see if a lion out there on the prairie answered; then thump the walls when they scented the Mississippi; or the forests of Minnesota; or the Platte, in Nebraska. When the train slowed, I was sometimes tempted to open their cages so they could go find a life for themselves in the wild, however abbreviated. These were glory nights, vivid nights.

I think I prefer the New Yorker version. The semi-colons in the Compass Points passage make the rhythm a little too choppy. The magazine version is smoother.

As usual with these New Yorker “emendations” (see my previous “Interesting Emendations” posts), I’m not sure if the magazine piece was carved out of the much larger block of writing that appears later in book form, or if the book version represents a fleshing out of the original New Yorker article. In Hoagland’s case, I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s the former. His style, with its many digressions and pile-ups of “gorgeously angled syntaxes and frank admissions” (Lopate’s excellent description), clashes with the New Yorker’s Strunkian (“Omit needless words!” “Be concise!”) approach to writing. Readying the piece for publication, the magazine’s editor(s) excised large chunks of Hoagland’s prose. For example, here’s a passage (one among many) that appears in the book, but not in the magazine:

They [seasoned female stars] could scuttle, dragging heavy rigging through a cloudburst in a hand-me-down Chaplinesque overcoat, but then do front flips on a galloping horse down the hippodrome track, and let an elephant lift them up high by gripping a shapely thigh in its mouth and wrapping its trunk around their midriffs.

What a word combination! When was the last time you saw “scuttle,” “rigging,” “cloudburst,” “hand-me-down,” “Chaplinesque,” “horse,” “hippodrome,” “elephant,” “thigh,” “wrapping,” and “midriffs” strung together in the same sentence? I’ll bet never. Therein lies Hoagland’s genius. Passages like that pour out of him. It’s too bad, in the case of The New Yorker’s “Calliope Times,” that so many were cut. If you want to read the full, rich version of the piece, check out chapter three of Compass Points.

Credit: The above photo of Edward Hoagland is by Bob Wagner. It appears in The New York Review of Books (August 18, 2011), as an illustration for Phillip Lopate’s “‘Life Is an Ecstasy.’”

August 29, 2011 Issue

Last night I perused this week’s issue of the magazine. I found myself resisting its contents. Dogs, judges, Charles Dickens, the Middle East – they’re just not my cup of tea. But when I woke up this morning, I found myself thinking about those Ramadan treats (“fruit juice and crisp deep-fried pancakes drizzled with grape syrup”) that Wendell Steavenson mentions in her “Roads To Freedom.” So I took a second look at Steavenson’s article. It is a terrific piece of writing. I like its subjectivity. I delight in reading sentences like these:

I arrived in Damascus on a Friday at the end of July, a few days before the start of Ramadan, and five months into a grimly repetitive series of protests and crackdowns in towns and cities across Syria.

I walked through the Old City – the Christian quarter and the Shia quarter, the Sufi mosques and the souks of Sunni merchants, the labyrinthine passages and hidden courtyards.

Late one evening, I went with a friend to see a well-known artist named Youssef Abdelke. We met him in his studio, and he ushered us into a tranquil, whitewashed courtyard paved with geometric tiles. He keeps pigeons, and they flapped and cooed, and little bells on their feet rang as they walked.

One lunchtime, I drank whiskey with an acquaintance who had hoped that Bashar would be given the opportunity to reform.

I like the way Steavenson describes Syrian reality as it comes to her. Yes, she has a nose for politics, violence, and the despicable tactics of the Assad regime. But she also takes time to give Damascan daily life its due. Soup, traffic, taxis, whiskey, lunch – these things are, to me, every bit as significant as, say, protests, demonstrations, and crackdowns. Such mundane details are the stuff of life. By including them in her piece, Steavenson humanizes what has heretofore been for me a very forbidding, baffling Other.

August 15 & 22, 2011 Issue

Question: What do the following places have in common? North Greenland Ice-core Project, Caernavon Freshwater Diversion Project, Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, the ballroom of New Orleans’ Sheraton Hotel, the Alaskan village of Shishmaref, Fort McMurray, and Fort Chipewyan.

Answer: They’re all places that figure in Elizabeth Kolbert’s marvelous writings on science and the environment, e.g., “Ice Memory” (The New Yorker, January 7, 2002), “The Climate of Man – I” (The New Yorker, April 25, 2005), “Watermark” (The New Yorker, February 27, 2006), “Unconventional Crude” (The New Yorker, November 12, 2007). And, by extension, they’re all places that I feel I’ve visited (albeit vicariously) through the medium of her marvelous, sharp-eyed, intelligent prose.

Now, as a result of reading her excellent “Sleeping with the Enemy” in this week’s issue of the magazine, I can add Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig Zoo, Auerbachs Keller (a Leipzig bar), La Ferrasie (an archeological site in the Dordogne) and Grotte des Combrelles (a cave, also in the Dordogne) to the list. Reading Kolbert is like going on a stimulating field trip led by a nervy, sophisticated, but unpretentious guide, who talks in clear language about complex scientific issues. I particularly like her paragraphs that contain lines like “One morning, I went to the zoo, hoping to watch an experiment in progress,” or, “One evening, though, he offered to knock off early and show me around downtown Leipzig,” or, “Over the summer, a team that included one of Pääbo’s colleagues was excavating at La Farrassie, and I decided to go down and have a look,” or “On my last day in the Dordogne, I decided to visit a nearby human site known for its extraordinary images.” I devour lines like those. I read them and I inwardly shout, “Yes! I'm with you! Let’s go!” “Sleeping with the Enemy” is a great piece. I enjoyed it immensely.

August 8, 2011 Issue

Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden,” in this week’s issue, is enormously impressive. It consists of three strands: the run-up to the bin Laden raid, the raid itself, and the raid's aftermath. The piece lacks a subjective element, and that’s normally a problem for me. But in this case, it isn’t. The facts are so fascinating, I’m willing to overlook the absence of the writer’s “I.” I wanted to know what happened that night in Abbottabad, and “Getting Bin Laden” told me in vivid detail. In fact, I wanted to know so badly that I nearly skipped the long flashback in the piece’s middle. But I’m glad I didn’t because it contains some amazing images (e.g., the assault team practicing the raid in the Nevada desert). The best part of “Getting Bin Laden” is Schmidle’s description of the raid. It contains several inspired sentences, including these beauties:

During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered.

The Americans’ night-vision goggles cast the scene in pixilated shades of emerald green.

“Getting Bin Laden” is definitely this week’s Pick of the Issue; it may also be the magazine's top story of the year.

"Richard Serra Drawing"

If I lived in New York City, I’d definitely check out the Met’s “Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective.” Back in May, Peter Schjeldahl wrote a “Critic’s Notebook” piece about it (“Drawing Room,” The New Yorker, May 16, 2011), in which he says, “By brutal means – mainly, heavily layered oil stick on paper, canvas, or linen – the works deliver physical sensations that engage thought and stir feelings.” But Schjeldahl’s best line is this one: “The light-killing blackness makes for delicate balances of impenetrable guck and infinite depth.” 

Another excellent review of Serra’s show is David Hansen’s “At the Met” (London Review of Books, June 30, 2011). It abounds with sensual, tactile description:

The first of these heavily worked, concrete abstracts is a startling untitled work, a vertiginous trapezium of greasy shadow, edged with a pitted, pebbly strand where masking tape has been pulled off the paper.

After this the drawings soon settle into a more rectilinear and symmetrical, more nine-to-five pattern, some on paper, many on canvas, all covered with – or rather consisting in – a rich, fat, deep, serious, oily, coaly, steely black.

The surfaces are quite extraordinary. In some, the paintstick has an organic smoothness, like that of a combed animal pelt, or a hairy tweed, or like the squeegee drag and blur found in Gerhard Richter’s abstract canvases. Others are thickly granulated, pitted and bubbled like roughly screeded concrete or rust-encrusted steel. In a few, the artist has heated the paintstick until it becomes almost viscous, and has really loaded up the paper, enlivening the resulting sugary black morass with faint traces of bootprints, or teasing it up into relief maps, reptile skin, leaves.

Who would not want such delicious writing to continue forever? “At the Met” is the first piece by Hansen that I’ve read. It’s definitely whetted my appetite for more.

Credit: The above artwork is Richard Serra’s “Untitled” (1973); it appears in the May 16, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, as an illustration for Peter Schjeldahl’s “Critic’s Notebook: Drawing Room.”

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #1: Helen Vendler's "A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me"

I wonder what Susan Eilenberg means when she says, in her recent review of Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (“Emily v. Mabel,” London Review of Books, June 30, 2011), “And yet, as I read the commentaries, one after another, I begin to feel as if I am listening to a scholar talking to what she suspects may be an empty room." Reading Vendler, I’ve never felt that way. Quite the opposite, in fact; I’ve always felt she was talking to me and to like-minded appreciators of close reading, subtle analysis, and superb writing. I’ve yet to read Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. But, over the years, I’ve read and reread many of her other works. I count her Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980), The Music of What Happens (1988), and Soul Says (1995) among my favorite books. When I traveled in the Arctic, I always carried something by her in my pack. Her slim books of lectures, e.g., Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (1984), The Given and the Made (1995), The Breaking of Style (1995), Coming of Age as a Poet (2003), Poets Thinking (2004), and Invisible Listeners (2005), are very portable and – this is my point - companionable. As I say, reading her, I never got the feeling that she was "talking to an empty room." If that’s the feeling her new book conveys, it strays substantially from the effect she said she aimed for in Part of Nature, Part of Us:

When I was in school I read, besides anthologies, books about poets to find new poets and new poems and to reassure myself that there were people in the world who, to paraphrase Auden, “exchanged messages” about poetry. I did not care, or even notice, who had written those books. But I was glad they existed. In agreeing to collect these pieces, I remembered my younger self in the library; it is for her counterparts today that this volume is intended.

But I was glad they existed. I’m glad Vendler’s writings exist. In homage (albeit, quite inadequate) to her, I want to place one of her New Yorker pieces at the head of my “Top Ten.” Deciding which of her reviews to choose hasn’t been easy. She’s written, by my rough count, thirty-four pieces for the magazine, beginning in 1978 and ending in 2001. After careful consideration, I’ve decided to pick her memorable “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1989; collected in Soul Says), a review of Seamus Heaney’s brilliant 1988 essay collection The Government of the Tongue. I choose it for the following seven reasons:

1. It brought me news of the existence of Heaney’s wonderful book. As a result of reading Vendler’s review in the magazine, I immediately went out and obtained a copy. The Government of the Tongue has been (and continues to be) a tremendous source of reading pleasure.

2. Its praise of Heaney’s writing (“bravura pieces of characterization, the best in recent memory”; “he observes, with an insight impossible to anyone but a poet”; “one is moved to profitable thought by his metaphorically vivid judgments”) confirmed my own opinion of Heaney’s greatness. (I’ve been a passionate admirer of Heaney’s work ever since the day, back in the early eighties, when a friend of mine read aloud from Heaney’s Field Work as we drove to Halifax.)

3. Its assertion of sensitivity to “the art of language” as a critical touchstone.

4. Its marvelous description of Heaney’s critical writing: “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act, the texture of the lines on the page.”

5. Its critique of Heaney’s view that George Herbert “surrendered himself to a framework of belief and an instituted religion.” Vendler responds (rightly, in my opinion) that “Herbert deserves better praise than the ‘felicity or correctness of a work’s execution,’ which is all that Heaney allows the Renaissance poet working within the Christian consensus.” She says, “We need a better theory of what it means to an artist to struggle with an ideology from within, as a believer.”

6. Its unforgettable definition of “the morality of style”: “The writing self does not have to be virtuous in the ordinary sense of the word; but it does have to be extraordinarily virtuous in its aesthetic moves. It must refuse – against the claims of fatigue, charm, popularity, money, and so on – the idée reçue, the imprecise word, the tired rhythm, the replication of past effects, the uninvestigated stanza.”

7. Its equally unforgettable quotation of Heaney’s interpretation of Jesus’ silent writing in the “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone” passage in the Gospel of St. John. Heaney construes Jesus’ silent writing as an allegory for poetry. He says, “In the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.” Vendler calls this “Gospel of St. John” passage “the most original moment of this very original book.” (Interestingly, Vendler revisits Heaney’s interpretation of the Gospel of St. John in her Seamus Heaney (1998), wherein she says, “Heaney’s emphasis here is that of lyric: ‘a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.’”)

I pay Helen Vendler’s “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me” my ultimate compliment when I say that, reading it, I experience double bliss: the subject is tremendously interesting; the writing is intensely pleasurable.

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

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.

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #2: John Updike's "Dutchmen and Turks"

Today, I’m pleased to name another of John Updike’s extraordinary book reviews to my “Top Ten.” Updike is the only New Yorker book critic to have two pieces listed. This is as it should be because Updike is the greatest of all book reviewers – where greatness means analytical, appreciative, perceptive, poetic, subtle, sensitive. As Sanford Schwartz says of him, in “The Kid Who Got Straight A’s” (Artists and Writers, 1990), “No critic passes finer, more specific judgments on so many aspects of a book, right down to its merits as a piece of craftsmanship.” I confess I’ve struggled with the question of which Updike review to choose. There’s such a richesse of remarkable pieces. Here, for example, are three that I short-listed: “The Cuckoo and the Rooster” (The New Yorker, June 11, 1979; included in Updike’s 1983 collection Hugging the Shore), a review of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, in which Updike, a passionate admirer of both Nabokov’s and Wilson’s work, finds “Nabokov’s letters the more alive and giving, certainly the more poetic and dense”; “Card Tricks” (The New Yorker, April 18, 1977; also included in Hugging the Shore), a review of Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies, wherein Updike nervily and fascinatingly shows Calvino “breaking the rules of his own game”; and “A Natural Writer” (The New Yorker, September 22, 2003; included in Updike’s 2007 collection Due Considerations), a peppery, prickly review of Geoffrey Wolff’s The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O’Hara, in which Updike ably defends O’Hara against Wolff’s “pushy and presumptuous” approach.

But in the end, I opted for what Updike called a “medley,” i.e., a review in which he addresses two or more books together, seeking common threads. My choice is the wonderful “Dutchmen and Turks” (The New Yorker, January 6, 1986; included in Updike’s 1991 collection Odd Jobs), a review of two novels, Harry Mulisch’s The Assault and Yashar Kemal’s The Sea-Crossed Fisherman. I chose it because of one particular passage that, when I first read it twenty-five years ago, engraved itself so incisively on my consciousness that I never forgot it. The passage comes at the end of the review, which up to that point has been mostly critical of Kemal’s novel. For example, Updike says, “Where Mulisch’s story keeps cinching tighter around its opening incident of violence, rendering it ever more intelligible, Mr. Kemal’s expands so that things make less and less sense.” Then, in his concluding remarks, Updike says of The Sea-Crossed Fisherman:

The prose remembers its novelistic duty to show, to make us see and feel the texture of things, only now and then, as when Zeynel, eluding a police hunt dreamlike in its inefficiency, patronizes a çöp kebap-vendor. And what is a çöp kebap? The prose tells us, and something of present-day, real-life Istanbul springs into being:

“Right away,” the vendor said, pleased. He was a very old man with a short white beard, a long sallow face, shrivelled pouches under his eyes and a knife scar on his forehead. His wide shoulders were hunched, giving him a lopsided gait. Sprinkling the tiny little cubes of skewered lamb with salt and pepper, he laid them over the embers which he fanned with a piece of cardboard adorned with the picture of a naked woman. In a moment the odour of burning fat spread through the square and thick fumes smoked greenly in the neon lighting. Dextrously the man slipped the meat cubes off the sixteen skewers into a bread loaf and added half a tomato and a sprig of parsley. “Here you are, sir,” he said.

How I love that “And what is a çöp kebap? The prose tells us, and something of present-day, real-life Istanbul springs into being.” Updike’s use of Kemal’s çöp kebap passage to illustrate the carrying out of “the novelistic duty to show, to make us see and feel the texture of things” is brilliant. In a way, it’s Updike’s version of James Wood’s “thisness” – any detail that centers our attention with its palpability, specificity, directness or concretion.

Interestingly, the New Yorker version of “Dutchmen and Turks” concludes with the above quotation from Kemal’s novel, whereas the Odd Jobs version ends with Updike commenting, “And that is how we make a çöp kebap.” I like that additional line. It seems to convey a larger meaning; it seems to say, “And that is how we effectively represent life in words.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.