April 16, 2012 Issue

There are four items in this week’s issue that I want to briefly comment on: Julia Ioffe’s “The Borscht Belt,” Basharat Peer’s “Modern Mecca,” Lauren Collins’s “The British Invasion,” and David Wagoner’s “On the Road to Damascus.”

Julia Ioffe’s “The Borscht Belt”

It takes a while for new New Yorker writers to impinge on my consciousness. Even though Julia Ioffe has been contributing to the magazine for a couple of years, “The Borscht Belt” is the first piece by her that I’ve read closely from beginning to end. This article attracted me because it’s about one of my favorite subjects – food. I enjoyed it, particularly the closely observed details about the Golden Rus chefs’ use of a pech, a traditional Russian brick oven (“Still, the oven’s three little compartments provided enough room for frequent rotation of pans and traditional cast-iron pots – fat-bellied, with narrow bottoms – and its warm roof, about a foot below the kitchen’s ceiling, became a favorite for the three young chefs in the kitchen”) and the wonderful description of Syrnikov’s troubles making samogon (Russian moonshine) while being filmed by a Russian television crew. I especially like the subjective note on which this passage concludes: “In the end, Syrnikov made around two litres of samogon, and we drank it all that night. They say that unlike vodka, samogon doesn’t give you a headache the next morning. It’s not true.” I wish “The Borscht Belt” contained more subjectivity. I craved some hint of Ioffe’s presence in the Golden Rus kitchen and during the banquet. I was pleased when, near the end of the piece, she briefly appears, commenting, “The vatrushka, thick with sweetened farmer’s cheese, was the best I’d ever eaten.”

Basharat Peer’s “Modern Mecca”

Curiously, I felt very close to the style of this piece. I say “curiously” because the subject matter – Islamic religion, pilgrimage to Mecca, rituals of the hajj, etc. – is not my cup of tea. But I found Peer’s style – his glorious subjectivity (e.g., “After the final lap, I retreated to the taps, where a Pakistani man passed around recyclable cups of Zamzam water to fellow-pilgrims”), his superb details (“Pilgrims raised smart phones above their heads to record the moment”), and his preference for “flat” description (i.e., plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity) – to be immensely attractive. I see Peer has written a book, Curfewed Night. I think I’ll check it out.

Lauren Collins’s “The British Invasion”

I know I’ve just finished extolling the virtues of plain, simple, orderly, sincere writing. But I also have a love for wild, juicy, labyrinthine sentences, too. Lauren Collins’s “The British Invasion” contains a beauty:

They had been cautioned about nudity (“We hope you have an incredible, stupendous, pant-wettingly, unforgettable week,” but “for heaven’s sake KEEP YOUR CLOTHES ON MAN!!” read a brochure), and about body paint (“The damage caused by body paint numbers into tens of thousands of euros every year”), but the twenty buses – charabancs for social networkers – disgorged swaying centurions, singing pirates, men wearing drinking helmets, men not wearing shirts, a girl with a blow-up doll slung over her shoulder, and a guy wearing something that looked like a diaper.

That “incredible, stupendous, pant-wettingly, unforgettable week” quote is inspired! So is “charabancs for social networkers.” The whole construction is a miniature masterpiece of combinational and syntactical wizardry.

David Wagoner’s “On the Road to Damascus”

Reading David Wagoner’s “On the Road to Damascus” in this week’s issue was like encountering an old friend. His “The Death of a Cranefly” (The New Yorker, October 13, 1980) is one of my all-time favorite New Yorker poems. “On the Road to Damascus” is a different kind of poem; it has a political feel that doesn’t appeal to me. However, the line about the “windowless, riddled, wind-scarred storage sheds” is very fine and shows the master hasn’t lost his touch.

April 9, 2012 Issue

Over the years, The New Yorker has run a number of excellent critical pieces on Albert Camus, including A. J. Liebling’s “The Camus Notebooks” (February 8, 1964), John Updike’s “In Praise of the Blind, Black God” (October 21, 1972), and V. S. Pritchett’s “Albert Camus” (December 20, 1982). Now, Adam Gopnik’s “Facing History,” in this week’s issue, joins the distinguished list. It’s interesting to compare them. Liebling’s review is the most admiring (“He was not only a great writer but a great man, almost before he ceased being a boy”). Updike’s is the most analytical and, to me, the most interesting [“Technically, the third-person method of A Happy Death, frequently an awkward vehicle for alter egos (see the sensitive young man light his cigarette; now let’s eavesdrop on his thoughts), becomes the hypnotic, unabashed first-person voice of The Stranger”]. Pritchett’s piece is the most biting (“He was entangled in the fierce and barren quarrels about political and moral commitment during and after the Second World War, and allowed himself to appear as a hero of the Resistance from the beginning, though in fact he did not join it until eight months before the liberation”). Gopnik’s “Facing History” is the most normalizing (“Responsibility, care, gradualness, humanity – even at a time of jubilation, these are the typical words of Camus”). Gopnik says, “His watchwords were anxiety and responsibility.” Contrast this with Pritchett’s quotation from Patrick McCarthy’s biography Camus: “‘Anonymity’ and ‘amputation’ remain, McCarthy writes, ‘the watchwords of Camus’ art.’” For Updike, Camus’s watchwords were “Love, despair, silence, mother, nature.” I agree with Updike. The silence he refers to links with what Camus described as his “profound indifference.” Both Updike and Pritchett concentrate on Camus's indifference. Curiously, it appears to escape Gopnik’s notice.

Gopnik’s description of Camus as “the Don Draper of existentialism,” contrasts with Pritchett’s observation: “His famous novel L’Étranger (The Outsider) seemed to put the bleak halo of existentialism above his head, although, as he said and Sartre feelingly agreed, he was no existentialist.”

Gopnik appears to downplay Camus’s tuberculosis. He refers to it as merely “a bout of tuberculosis” (“he was a strong swimmer and, until a bout of tuberculosis sidelined him, an even finer football player”). However, Pritchett, in his piece, assigns Camus’s illness major significance. He says, “The tuberculosis seems to have been responsible for his euphoric excesses, his sexual promiscuity, his gallows humour, and his obsession with death.” He further comments: “At the age of sixteen, he had become tubercular. The disease never left him; it is at the heart of his ‘indifference,’ and the almost too vivid sense of the instants of hope.”

I crave stylistic analysis. Unfortunately, except for a brief description of the tone of Camus’s Combat editorials (“He struck a tone not of Voltarean Parisian rancor but of melancholic loft”), Gopnik provides very little of it. He seems much more interested in Camus’s ideas than he is in the way Camus expresses those ideas. But, as Gopnik himself points out, many of the principles that Camus believed in (e.g., liberty, equality, fraternity) weren’t new. It’s Camus’s unique way of expressing them that was new. That’s what I respond to when I read him, and want to understand. What I’m saying isn’t new either. It’s a variation on Alexander Pope’s clear-eyed remark, “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” For example, consider this line from Camus’s beautiful “Summer in Algiers” (1936):

And when, having suddenly interrupted the cadenced beat of the double paddle’s bright colored wings, we glide slowly in the calm water of the inner harbor, how can I fail to feel that I am piloting through the smooth waters a savage cargo of gods in whom I recognize my brothers?”

This is an expression of fraternity with his “brothers,” the Algierian youth, many of them Arab, with whom he grew up. All his life, he felt near them. But what delights me about this sentence is its surprising combination of "cadenced beat," "bright colored wings" and "savage cargo of gods." How did Camus conceive it? Liebling, in his excellent “The Camus Notebooks,” offers a clue. He points out that the spoken language of Camus’s people in Algiers “took over not only words but constructions from Italian and Spanish and, most of all, the colloquial Arabic of North Africa. Liebling says:

Camus savored and cherished this language; “Carnets” is full of examples affectionately jotted down, so the book has almost a bilingual flavor – lost, naturally, when it is turned into English. Camus had from the first – in addition to a remarkably pure, poetic French style, learned at school and from reading – a command of this street language of Algiers, learned in the street. That gave him an arresting change of pace.

I find this fascinating. That Camus's style is at least partially sourced in Algierian street language is a point well worth developing. Perhaps there's a study already in existence. If so, I would appreciate knowing about it.

Knife-Fight / Tire-Change: The Elegiac Impulse in Cormac McCarthy's "Cities of the Plain"

The most memorable scene in Cormac McCarthy’s great Cities of the Plain is, without a doubt, the blood-soaked knife fight between Eduardo and John Grady Cole. Joyce Carol Oates describes it as “a brilliantly choreographed knife-fight sequence … stylized and ritualistic as a Japanese Noh play” (“The Treasure of Comanche Country," The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005). If you choose to understand Cities of the Plain solely in terms of its violence, you’ll likely focus on the knife fight. But if you’re more inclined, as I am, to interpret McCarthy’s novel as an elegy for a vanishing way of life, you may want to consider some of the book’s less dramatic passages.

One such scene is the tire-change: Billy and Troy are in a pick-up, driving through the desert night, heading back to the ranch. They meet “a truckload of Mexicans pulled off onto the grass. They stood almost into the road waving their hats.” Billy drives past them. But then he stops. Against Troy’s objections (“You’re fixin to get us in a jackpot here we won’t get home till daylight”), Billy puts the truck in reverse and backs down the highway to the Mexicans’ location. The Mexicans’ truck has a flat tire. Billy speaks to the Mexicans in Spanish. They need a jack. Billy loans them one from the back of his truck. The Mexicans jack up the front end of their truck. “They had two spares and neither of them would hold air. They spelled each other at the antique tirepump. Finally they raised up and looked at Billy.” Billy gets his tire tools, patch kit, and flashlight from his truck. He removes the inner tube from one of the spares, patches it, puts it back inside the spare, and laboriously pumps it up. When it’s fully inflated, the Mexicans install it on the truck.

My rough summary of the tire-change makes it seem mundane and ordinary – hardly worth bothering with, you’d think. Most writers probably wouldn’t even mention such a routine matter. If they did mention it, they’d likely just sketch it, in a line or two, and quickly move on. But McCarthy lingers over the scene, lavishing more than a thousand exact, luminous words on its description, detailing everything from the inner tube (“The innertube that he snaked out of the tire’s inner cavity was made of red rubber and there was a whole plague of patches upon it”) to the wrench (“made from a socket welded onto a length of heavy pipe”). The precision and vividness of his imagery are amazing! Consider this extraordinary passage, for example:

Billy took the stub of chalk from the patchkit and circled the leaks in the tube and they unscrewed the valvestem from the valve and sat on the tubes and then walked it down till it was dead flat. Then they sat in the road with the white line running past their elbows and the gaudy desert night overhead, the myriad constellations moving upon the blackness subtly as sealife, and they worked with the dull red shape of rubber in their laps, squatting like tailors or menders of nets. They scuffed the rubber with the little tin grater stamped into the lid of the kit and they laid on the patches and fired them with a match one by one till all were fused and all were done. When they had the tube pumped up again they sat in the road in the quiet desert and listened.

That image of the men sitting in the road “with the white line running past their elbows and the gaudy desert night overhead, the myriad constellations moving upon the blackness subtly as sealife” is very fine.

Why does McCarthy concentrate the full force of his immense descriptive power on something as tedious as a tire-change? My theory is that McCarthy deeply admires the craftsmanship of Billy’s work. He wants us to appreciate it, too, because he sees it as an aspect of a way of life that’s rapidly disappearing. That’s why he describes it so precisely, in such scrupulous detail. He sees cowboys like John Grady Cole and Billy Parham as craftsmen and, as such, endangered species that modernization is rapidly wiping out. Note, in the above quotation, McCarthy’s reference to two other types of craftsmen, namely, tailors and menders of nets (“they worked with the dull red shape of rubber in their laps, squatting like tailors or menders of nets”). And note the careful detail of another work-related scene that McCarthy describes later in the novel:

He waited until the calf had bucked itself into a clear space among the creosote and then he put the horse forward at a gallop. He paid the slack rope over the horse’s head and overtook the calf on its off side. The calf went trotting. The rope ran from its neck along the ground on the near side and trailed in a curve behind its legs and ran forward up the off side following the horse. John Grady checked his dally and then stood in one stirrup and cleared his other leg of the trailing rope. When the rope snapped taut it jerked the calf’s head backward and snatched its hind legs from under it. The calf turned endwise in the air and slammed to the ground in a cloud of dust and lay there.

This is skillful, specialized ranch work that’s been closely observed and precisely rendered. The writing enacts the craftsmanship of the work it describes.

My “craftsman” interpretation is one way of considering the tire-change scene, but not the only one. The New Yorker’s brief review of Cities of the Plain suggests another approach. The anonymous reviewer writes:

This tragic last volume of the Border Trilogy sees the American West enter the modern world, as the cowboy John Grady looks down from a rock bluff at the city lights “strewn across the desert floor like a tiara laid out upon a jeweller’s blackcloth.”

McCarthy’s language carries a brooding, evolutionary sense of time and labor – in his hands the changing of a tire on an old truck becomes a mythic deed.

The weight of history rests on the shoulders of John Grady, too, and he’s doomed to learn that “when things are gone they’re gone. They ain’t comin back.” [“Briefly Noted,” The New Yorker, August 10, 1998]

This is an excellent description of Cities of the Plain, distilling the book’s elegiac theme into three swift paragraphs. But I’m perplexed by that second paragraph. In what way is the tire-change mythic? James Wood, in his stimulating “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 5, 2005), a review of McCarthy’s work, says that “McCarthy’s novels are deeply engaged with founding American myths, in particular those of regeneration through violence, Southern pastoral, the figure of the sacred hunter, and the frontiersman’s conquest of the endless Western spaces.” None of these myths appear to apply to the tire-changing scene. In my opinion, when McCarthy wrote the scene, he was not mythologizing. He was memorializing an instance of Billy’s craft of experience in action. Joyce Carol Oates, in her “In Rough Country 1: Cormac McCarthy,” says that the Border novels (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) are “elegies to a vanishing, or vanished frontier world.” I submit that the tire-change scene is best understood as an aspect of that elegiac impulse.

Credit: The above portrait of Cormac McCarthy is by David Levine.

April 2, 2012 Issue

Of the many great writers who have contributed to The New Yorker during its eighty-seven year history, one of the greatest is Robert A. Caro. I base my opinion solely on the eight portions of Caro’s extraordinary biography of Lyndon Johnson that have been published in the magazine. I haven’t read The Power Broker (1974), his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Robert Moses, which was excerpted in four parts in The New Yorker. This week, Caro’s ninth Johnson piece, “The Transition,” appears in the magazine. It is riveting! It puts the reader directly inside the Vice-Presidential convertible, one car away from the Presidential limousine, at the moment President Kennedy is shot (“The loud, sharp sound, the hand suddenly grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down; now he was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him, pressing him down – Lyndon Johnson would never forget 'his knees in my back and his elbows in my back'"). It puts the reader directly inside the curtained cubicle in Parkland Hospital at the moment Johnson is told that Kennedy is dead (“As he stood in front of that blank wall, the carnation still in his buttonhole, there was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been seen very much during the previous three years”). And, unforgettably, it puts the reader directly inside Air Force One as Johnson is sworn in as President (“The Judge held out the missal. He put his left hand up – the hand, mottled and veined, was so large that it all but covered the little book – and raised his right hand, as the Judge said, ‘I do solemnly swear …’”).

I can’t remember when I last read as intensely as I read Caro’s “The Transition.” I devoured it. I wished it wouldn’t end. I didn’t look up from the pages until I finished it. And when I was finished, I felt dazed, almost as if I’d been in Dallas that fateful Friday, November 22, 1963, and experienced firsthand those bewildering, nightmarish events.

March 26, 2012 Issue

This week, in the magazine, Judith Thurman and John Lahr revisit the subjects of two of their finest New Yorker pieces. Judith Thurman, in her “Radical Chic” writes about a Prada and Schiaparelli joint retrospective that opens in May at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and John Lahr, in his “Lives In Limbo,” reviews Mike Nichols’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Thurman previously wrote about Schiaparelli in her “Mother of Invention” (The New Yorker, October 27, 2003; included in her 2007 collection Cleopatra’s Nose). Lahr wrote about Death of a Salesman in his “Making Willy Loman” (The New Yorker, January 25, 1999; included in his 2000 collection Show and Tell). It’s interesting to compare their earlier pieces with what they’ve written now.

In “Radical Chic,” Thurman executes a number of minor variations on her earlier “Mother of Invention.” For example, “vagina-shaped fedora” is now “cocktail hats in the shape of a lamb chop, a high-heeled shoe, and a vagina.” “Tree bark rayon” has become “barklike crumpled silk.” And “swagger,” which was previously used in the phrase “racy swagger of the stars,” is repurposed in the new piece to form part of Thurman’s description of Schiaparelli’s “hard chic” (“the swagger of her broad-shouldered suits, the rawness of her furs and embroidery, and a tough attitude toward any simpering or mincing in fashion”). The most interesting variance between the two pieces is Thurman’s redeployment of “scarlet-clawed.” In “Mother of Invention,” “scarlet-clawed” occurs in this delightful line:

Joan Crawford brought her Schiaparellis back to Hollywood and threw them like a gauntlet at Adrian, who made their linebacker shoulders and lavish embellishment his own trademarks, and those of nearly every sinewy, flat-hipped, chain-smoking, man-eating, social-climbing, scarlet-clawed screen temptress of the thirties.

In “Radical Chic,” “scarlet-clawed” is clipped from Joan Crawford and attached to Wallis Simpson:

Dali had painted the skirt with a bright-red lobster, which matched its cummerbund, and Cecil Beaton photographed the future Duchess wearing it serenely, despite – or perhaps to mock – her reputation as a scarlet-clawed predator.

Comparing the two pieces, I think I prefer “Mother of Invention,” mainly because it contains that great “sinewy, flat-hipped, chain-smoking, man-eating, social-climbing, scarlet-clawed screen temptress of the thirties” line. Both articles are beauties.

Turning now to Lahr’s two “Death of a Salesman” pieces, I remember reading “Making Willy Loman,” when it first appeared in the magazine, and finding it fascinating. It describes how Miller came to write Death of a Salesman, the cabin he wrote it in, and his notebook for the play that “soon becomes an expansive, exact handwritten log of Miller’s contact with his inner voices.” I devoured Lahr’s quotations from the notebook and his descriptions of Miller’s use of them, e.g., “Here, as in all his notes for the play, Miller’s passion and his flow are apparent in the surprising absence of cross-outs; the pages exude a startling alertness.”

In “Making Willy Loman,” Lahr shows Miller’s method of composition. He traces the origins of Death of a Salesman back to Miller’s youth. He shows the use Miller made of seemingly stray material (e.g., the moment in 1947 when Miller’s uncle Manny Newman accosted him in the lobby of a theatre). But his interpretation of the play, as a dissection of “cultural envy in action,” strikes me as too brutally reductive. I much prefer the construction he puts forward in his new piece, “Lives In Limbo,” in which he says:

The revelation of this production – drawn out by Nichols’s seamless and limpid orchestration of Willy’s disconcerting flights of imagination (Miller’s original title for the play was “The Inside of His Head”) – is that Willy, for all his fervent dreams of the future and his fierce argument with the past, never, ever, occupies his present. Even as he fights, fumes, and flounders, he is sensationally absent from his life, a kind of living ghost. It is existence, not success, that eludes him. He inhabits a vast, restless, awful, and awesome isolation, which is both his folly and his tragedy.

A kind of living ghost. This is an interpretation of Willy Loman’s character that speaks to me. Lahr’s “Lives In Limbo” is a wonderful companion to his memorable “Making Willy Loman.” Both pieces are brilliant!

March 19, 2012 Issue

Anthony Lane is starting to sound like Adam Gopnik, and that’s not good. One Proustian prose charmer on staff is enough. There was a time when Lane expressed himself clearly. Remember what he said about The Saint? “I’ve eaten bowls of spaghetti that were more tightly structured than this picture” (“The Saint,” The New Yorker, April 14, 1997). Okay, well, at least we know where he stands. Compare this with his comment on The Kid with a Bike in this week’s issue: “I will say nothing of what happens there, except that for every viewer who thinks that the film-makers are pushing their luck, another will claim, as I would, that they have earned the right to step across the threshold of transcendence” (“Not Child’s Play”). I think Lane likes the movie. But in what way are the Dardenne brothers “pushing their luck,” and does earning “the right to step across the threshold of transcendence” mean they’ve produced a film worth seeing? I suppose just saying “I really like this movie” would be too simple. Pauline Kael didn’t shy away from expressing herself simply (and bluntly). Remember her “Malick is a gifted student, and Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it” (“Sugarland and Badlands,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1974)? It’s not subtle, but, by god, it’s got rhythm, and it lets you know exactly what she thought of the film. Granted, Lane clarifies his position in the next paragraph of his review, when he says: “The real reason to see ‘The Kid with a Bike' is that it offers something changelessly rare and difficult: a credible portrait of goodness.” Still, all this talk about “threshold of transcendence,” “changelessly rare,” and “portrait of goodness” seems blandly abstract. Interestingly, these words are deleted from Lane’s capsule review of The Kid with a Bike that appears in “Goings On About Town” in next week’s issue (which can be accessed at newyorker.com). Lane’s GOAT review is completely rewritten; I much prefer it. For example, instead of “portrait of goodness,” Lane writes: “De France fulfills the daunting task of making goodness look plausible, instinctive, and down-to-earth, rather than lofty or pharisaical; her nature merely instructs her to do the right thing.”

















It’ll be interesting to see if Lane’s GOAT review makes it into the magazine’s online movie review archive “The Film File.” Currently, the capsule review of The Kid with a Bike that Richard Brody wrote a few of months ago is on file there. It contains this wonderful line: “The directors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, track the young perpetual-motion machine through his small Belgian city, where he pedals, runs, scampers, dives, and climbs past all clutches, and, when cornered, fights with an animal ferocity.” The Kid with a Bike deserves the three New Yorker notices it’s received. I saw it about a month ago. I admired its calm, matter-of-fact style immensely.

Credit: The above artwork is by Annette Marnat; it appears in The New Yorker (March 19, 2012) as an illustration for Anthony Lane's "Not Child's Play."

Fact/Truth/Creativity

A special shout-out to Lee Gutkind for his observation yesterday in the Los Angeles Review of Books that “it’s possible to write terrific nonfiction narrative and stay steadfast to both truth and fact. One can be creative and truthful simultaneously. It just takes a lot more work” (“Doing A D’Agata,” March 19, 2012). Yes, factual writing is the more challenging art form. It’s refreshing to see this point being made. Writing a fact piece is, in a way, like writing a sonnet: the rule of the form must be obeyed. And the rule that governs factual writing is that the facts can’t be messed with. Everything else – design, voice, perspective, syntax, choice of detail, etc. – is fair game. As the great New Yorker writer John McPhee said in his Paris Review interview: “With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read” (The Paris Review, Spring, 2010).

Credit: The above artwork is by Henrik Kubel; it appears in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (February 26, 2012), as an illustration for Jennifer B. McDonald's "In the Details."

Translation, Interpretation, Distortion

I see in this week’s Times Sunday Book Review that Robin Robertson’s idea of translation is not only to simplify the original, but to insert details of his own creation (see David Orr, “Versions,” March 11, 2012). For example, in his translation of Tomas Transtromer’s poem “Calling Home,” he adds a knife-fight that isn’t in the original. I think this takes translation too far. While I realize there’s no such thing as a definitive translation, I think a translator has to be true to the original. Richard Pevear, translator (in partnership with his wife Larissa Volokhonsky) of The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina, among other classics, compares translation to music interpretation: “It’s like a musical composition and a musician, an interpretation. If your fingers are too heavy or too light, the piece can be distorted” (quoted in David Remnick’s “The Translation Wars,” The New Yorker, November 7, 2005). Orr, in his piece, makes a similar analogy. He says:

But translating a poem is like covering a song. We can savor the liberties someone is taking with, say, “Gin and Juice” in a way we couldn’t understand similar variations on songs written by Martians. And Transtromer, however popular he is among poets, remains largely unknown to readers eager to see work from the new Nobel laureate. In this instance, even a sincere imitation probably isn’t the most helpful form of flattery.

I agree, except I’d put it more strongly. It appears that Robertson’s interpretation of Transtromer constitutes distortion.

Credit: The above photograph of Tomas Transtromer is by Ulla Montan; it appears in The New York Times Sunday Book Review as an illustration for David Orr’s “Versions.”

March 12, 2012 Issue

I devoured Dahlia Lithwick’s “Extreme Makeover,” in this week’s issue. It’s a review of Dale Carpenter’s Flagrant Conduct, which Lithwick wonderfully describes as “a chronicle that peels the Lawrence case [Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 United States Supreme Court decision, striking down anti-sodomy laws] back through layers of carefully choreographed litigation and tactical appeals, back to the human protagonists we never really get to know, and back again through centuries of law criminalizing 'unnatural' sexual activity.” I’m a sucker for “behind-the-scenes” analysis of court cases, for reportage that sets out to show what “really” happened. One of my all-time favorite New Yorker pieces is Leonard Garment’s detailed backstage account of Times, Inc. v. Hill, a privacy dispute that the Supreme Court decided on constitutional grounds (“The Hill Case,” The New Yorker, April 17, 1989).

Lithwick’s article centers on a very interesting legal phenomenon – the way cases are converted to “vehicles” for the argument of weighty constitutional issues. For example, with respect to Lawrence v. Texas, Lithwick says, “In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story.” Lithwick seems to think that storytelling is an important aspect of legal argument. In “Extreme Makeover,” she says:

As Carpenter’s nuanced exploration of what worked in Lawrence v. Texas makes clear, the Supreme Court is both supremely open to and supremely closed off from the world around it. That’s why we come to the Court, play by its rules and tell the Justices stories they like to hear about people who remind them of themselves.

I think Lithwick overemphasizes the role that narrative plays in legal argument, especially legal argument at the Supreme Court level. There’s a distillation process that occurs as a case makes its way through the appellate process. By the time it arrives in the highest court, it’s been reduced to a question of pure law. The argument at that stage turns on precedent, and consists of interpretation and comparative analysis.

Lithwick isn’t the only writer who views law in terms of narrative. Janet Malcolm, in her great “Iphigenia In Forest Hills” (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010) says, “If we understand that a trial is a contest between competing narratives, we can see the importance of the first appearance of the narrators.” By “narrators,” she means the prosecutor and the defense attorneys. Later in her piece, she says,

We go through life mis-hearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

I think it’s misleading to describe trials and appeals solely as matters of storytelling. Trials are evidentiary processes. Offences are broken down into their constituent elements; the key issue at trial is whether the prosecution has proved each ingredient beyond a reasonable doubt. Appeals are arguments of legal issues. Narrative has little role to play at trial, and even less so on appeal. Law should be understood not as a matter of competing narratives, but as a matter of competing arguments. That’s one of the main reasons I admire Leonard Garment’s piece; it beautifully lays out the competing arguments in Time, Inc v. Hill.

Notwithstanding Lithwick’s narrative-based concept of law, I enjoyed her review immensely. It brought me news of an interesting new book, and it did so in a lively, vivid manner. I look forward to seeing more of her work in the magazine.

Renata Adler's "The Perils of Pauline": Classic Low Snark

Last year, I posted an article in which I said there’d never been a more wrong-headed interpretation of Pauline Kael’s work than Louis Menand’s “The Popist: Pauline Kael.” I was wrong. That distinction belongs to Renata Adler’s vile "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980; included in Adler's 2001 collection Canaries in the Mineshaft under the title "House Critic"). I’d forgotten about Adler’s piece. However, as a result of reading a couple of reviews of Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (2011), namely, Nathan Heller’s "What She Said" (The New Yorker, October 24, 2011) and Richard Schickel’s "Hell To Sit Next To" (Los Angeles Review of Books, November 30, 2011), which mention Adler’s article, my memory of it was quickly rekindled.

I recently reread “The Perils of Pauline.” It’s a lengthy review of Kael’s 1980 collection When The Lights Go Down. Its basic approach is a snarky attempt to reduce Kael’s work to caricature. It asserts that Kael “has, in principle, four things she likes,” that she “has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words,” that her writing consists of a “repertory of devices,” e.g., “the mock rhetorical question,” “the hack carom,” “the structure of spite,” and so on. Most of her claims have been ably rebutted by, among others, Craig Seligman, in his Sontag and Kael (2004). Seligman quotes Adler’s “four things she likes” passage and calls it “grotesque.” I agree. He says her “prissiness is embarrassing.” I agree. But when he writes, “Despite the occasional shoddiness of Adler’s tactics, I wouldn’t accuse her of the bad faith she imputes to Kael,” I demur. Adler knows exactly what she’s doing. Like an overzealous prosecutor, she twists the evidence, quotes out of context, and exaggerates the alleged crime. And what exactly, in Adler’s view, is the alleged crime? It’s that Kael is profane, raucous, lewd and loud. These are the very qualities I admire about her writing. I’m not alone in liking them. Laurie Winer, in her excellent “Taste is the Great Divider” (Los Angeles Review of Books, December 2, 2011) writes:

Adler’s slam echoed the complaints of critic John Simon, who described Kael as a Russian count might describe a clever serf: “She is a lively writer with a lot of common sense, but also one who, in a very disturbing sense, is common.” Adler complained of Kael’s “vulgarity,” and she listed what she thought of as Kael’s worst phrases, among them, “tumescent filmmaking” and “plastic turds.” It’s hard not to laugh now at Adler’s discomfort, at her long lists of Kael’s crimes. It’s also hard not to see this attack as the age-old battle between the keepers of good taste and the antic comic spirit, with Adler taking the role of Margaret Dumont and Kael appearing as Groucho Marx. In the long run, of course, Groucho always wins.

Kael, in her wonderful review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (“The Greening of the Solar System,” The New Yorker, November 28, 1977; collected in When The Lights Go Down), says, “Close Encounters is so generous in its feelings that it makes one feel maternal and protective; there’s also another side of one, which says, ‘I could use a little dirty friction.’ ” Right there is the side of Kael I love.

Credit: The above portrait of Renata Adler is by David Levine.

March 5, 2012 Issue

We’re only in March, but Nick Paumgarten has already written what’s sure to be one of the year’s best pieces. I’m referring to his great “The Ring and the Bear” (The New Yorker, January 30, 2012). The question is can he score two hits in a row? Alas, the answer is no. His “Magic Mountain,” in this week’s issue, is damn near unstomachable. It’s about his attendance at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. So intolerable is it, so full of wealthy, élite, globe-trotting, class-conscious, status-seeking, full-of-themselves windbags, pedants, and egotists (mostly male) that I had to force myself to keep reading. When I came to the sentence “The stratification begins with badges,” I closed the magazine and went for a walk. I finished the thing later, persisting only because it’s by Paumgarten, one of my favorites. Over the years, his writing has taken me on some memorable excursions, e.g., Inwood Hill Park (“The Mannahatta Project,” The New Yorker, October 1, 2007), Governors Island (“Useless Beauty,” The New Yorker, October 31, 2009). But this Davos trip – what a bummer!

February 27, 2012 Issue

One of the pleasures of reading a new piece by a favorite New Yorker writer is the recognition of certain echoes from his or her earlier work. Such was my experience when I read Burkhard Bilger’s superb “Beware of the Dogs” in this week’s issue. It’s about New York City’s police dogs, the way canine police think about them (they describe them as tools or technology), and “build” them through the use of operant conditioning. In the opening section of the piece, Bilger says, “I’ve never been much good around dogs.” In the course of describing being chased by dogs when he was a kid, he says, “In the town where I grew up, about an hour north of Oklahoma City, every other house seemed to be patrolled by some bawling bluetick or excitable Irish setter, and the locals liked to leave them unchained.” His mention of “bawling bluetick” reminded me of the wonderful piece he wrote about coonhounds (“Send in the Hounds,” collected in his Noodling for Flatheads, 2000), in which expert coon hunter, Sondra Beck, is quoted as saying: “Those old black and tans and blueticks, they might pick a trail three days old and howl and boohoo over it for hours. I don’t have any time for that. I need my dog to move that track.”

Another passage in “Beware of the Dogs” that triggered an association with a previous Bilger piece is the description of the bluegrass band Ebony Hillbillies playing a tune in the Times Square subway station as the canine squad files through: “The bass and banjo lines skittered from run to run while the washboard chattered underneath, mimicking the commuters around us.” I smiled when I read that, recalling with pleasure Bilger’s great blues piece “The Last Verse” (The New Yorker, April 28, 2008), which contains this memorable description of folk revivalist Art Rosenbaum singing and playing the banjo:

Rosenbaum sang it in his usual, oddly endearing bray. Then he grabbed a banjo from beside the couch and played a ballad about a shipwreck. With his hat off, he looked like a figure out of Melville: bald pate, hooked nose, long, shaggy sideburns. He played in the clawhammer style, whanging the bottom string with his thumb, and strumming or plucking the other strings with his forefinger.

That “oddly endearing bray” is very good, and “whanging” is inspired.

“Beware of the Dogs” contains some inspired lines, too. This one, for example: “A leash can be like a faulty phone line.” And it brims with interesting details (e.g., “At Auburn, a dog that can’t cut it as a bomb detector could find work as a fungus hound, sniffing out growths that attack and kill the roots of pine trees in the Southeast”). I think my favorite passage in the piece is the description of a black Lab named Ray, trained as a Vapor Wake, trailing a decoy who's carrying “seven pounds of ammonium nitrate, wrapped in black panty hose and stuffed in a backpack” through crowded Grand Central Terminal:

The decoy walked beneath the arch and down the corridor, heading toward a set of stairs that led to the subway. Ray cut zigzags across his trail, zeroing in on the scent. Soon, she was only about ten feet away, pulling so hard on the leash that her legs were splayed like a lizard’s, claws scrabbling on the tile. She was about to catch up when a middle-aged woman sauntered by with three toy dogs on a leash beside her. Ray stopped and glanced at them – a little hungrily, I thought – then shook her head and continued. But by then the trail had drifted, and the decoy was down the stairs.

I find that “pulling so hard on the leash that her legs were splayed like a lizard’s, claws scrabbling on the tile” marvelously evocative. And Bilger's reading of Ray's glance (“a little hungrily, I thought”) is a neat touch. For a guy who’s “never been much good around dogs,” Bilger sure writes beautifully and perceptively about them. I enjoyed "Beware of the Dogs" immensely.