September 23, 2013 Issue

The New Yorker’s new look, unveiled this week, consists of, among other stylistic changes, a revamped Table of Contents (the writers’ names are now in bold, black, sanserif script; the titles of their pieces are in a thinner, bold, black sanserif; and the departmental names, e.g., Profiles, The Wayward Press, The World of Fashion, are omitted), a new “Goings On About Town” title page (gone are the notes about upcoming events; the all-most full-page photo dominates; at the foot of the page there’s a tiny sanserif-printed note related to the event that’s illustrated by the photo; and in the lower left and right corners there are clasping, jaw-like heavy bars of black ink in the shape of right-angles), “Night Life”’s “Critic’s Notebook” now receives full page treatment (with “Night Life” events printed on the next page in tiny, black serif script that lacks the grace of the old “Night Life” typeface), capsule reviews of movies are now crammed into three columns per page instead of two (and are printed in the same ugly script as the “Night Life” notes), Richard Brody’s “Critic’s Notebook” is reduced to a lower-left corner blurb printed in a thin, anemic-looking sanserif font, “Dance” also has one of those pointless Art-Deco-ish black right-angle decorations (like a piece of swastika) and is printed minutely in a dumbed-down version of The New Yorker’s classic serif typeface, “Tables For Two” is now allotted almost a full page (and there’s a new column called “Food & Drink, printed in tiny, thin sanserif), Andrea K. Scott’s “Critic’s Notebook” is expanded to a full page (including illustration), the art gallery notes are, like the movie notes, squished three abreast down the page (titled in soulless, bolded sanserif), ditto re the “Theatre” notes, Alex Ross’s “Critic’s Notebook” on classical musical is expanded to a full page (plus illustration), and “Above and Beyond” receives, in place of an illustration, one of those hideous, useless black corner brackets. The overall effect of these changes is that the magazine looks a little less like its old self and a bit more like Vanity Fair.

Fortunately the content is as rich and stimulating as ever, and continues to be printed in The New Yorker’s elegant, textured serif font. Pick of the Issue this week is Janet Malcolm’s terrific “Nobody’s Looking At You,” a profile of clothing designer, Eileen Fisher. I particularly enjoyed Malcolm’s parenthetical observation about women wearing scarves: “Eileen knows how to wear scarves the way women in Paris know how to wear them and American women almost touchingly don’t.” That “almost touchingly” is pure Malcolm. 

Second Thoughts: Let’s begin again. Rereading my above rant on The New Yorker’s “new look,” I’m struck (and embarrassed) by its petulance. I’ll not delete it just yet; let it stand as evidence of my first reaction to the magazine’s attempt at stylistic refreshment. But now that I’ve had a few days to think about it, I want to post a cooler appraisal. I applaud the expansion of two of my favorite “Goings On About Town” columns: “Tables For Two” and “Art.” I’m a fan of Andrea K. Scott’s writing, and I welcome her increased presence in the magazine. I’m only lukewarm about the print reduction of “Art” and “Movies” capsule reviews. I find the tiny, pinched typeface off-putting. It reminds me of the small print of The New York Review of Books’ “Galleries and Museums,” which, I think, repels reading. Design shouldn’t get between the reader and the magazine. This leads me to my main complaint: the erosion of The New Yorker’s classic, elegant, easily readable serif typeface. I’m not talking about the Rea Irvin-designed font. I like it, too. I’m referring to the wonderful serif letterform that the entire magazine (with the exception of illustration and photo credits) was heretofore printed in. Maybe sanserif is considered more legible on the computer screen. But on paper, whether in magazines or books, serif strikes me as more textured, more readable, more beautiful than sanserif, and I much prefer it. I detect in The New Yorker’s new look a move away from serif typeface. This is regrettable. I realize that stylistic changes are part of The New Yorker’s vibrant history. But certain changes strike at the heart of the magazine’s identity. The shift from serif to sans is one of them.

September 16, 2013 Issue

Writing this blog, tracking my New Yorker reading experience, my effort is mainly one of appreciation. Even on those rare occasions when the magazine seems, at first glance, totally uninteresting, which is the case this week, I find there’s always something – a line, a detail, a note – that attracts my attention. In this week’s “Goings On About Town,” for instance, I saw, under “Jazz and Standards,” that “the whip-smart pianist Frank Kimbrough released a fine trio album recorded at this night spot [Jazz at Kitano].” I love piano jazz. I wasn’t aware of this particular Kimbrough album. I went online to iTunes and purchased several tracks, including Duke Ellington’s great “Single Petal of a Rose.” Kimbrough plays it exquisitely. It went straight onto my “Best of Piano Jazz” playlist. 

September 9, 2013 Issue

Alec Wilkinson is a superb noticer. He seems particularly sharp-eyed when he’s in a commercial fishing environment. His early masterpiece, “The Blessing of the Fleet” (The New Yorker, June 9, 1986), is an accretion of innumerable fine details, e.g., the description of a priest (“He held a plate with both hands in front of his chest. It made a circle of white against his black suit, and he tapped his fingers on the bottom of it”), fish cullers (“The fish cullers stand up to go, and often slip on the fish scales while they are crossing to the door. The stairs leading to the office are steep and shallow and slick as grease”), windows (“The windows of the living room face the street but are high above it, so that a person sitting on the couch does not see it, only hears it. In many of the windows on the first and second floors, there are statues of fishermen”). His excellent “The Lobsterman” (The New Yorker, July 31, 2006), a profile of lobsterman and historical ecologist Ted Ames, contains several vivid descriptions of lobster fishing. For example:

When I went out with him one day last fall, it took us about ten minutes to reach the first of his traps. Traps are attached to a line of rope held to the surface by a buoy; the arrangement is called a string. When Ames drops a string, he enters its location on a computer. The traps and the route among them show up on the screen in a curving purple line like a kite tail. “You can see how powerful the technology is,” he said. “You don’t need a plan anymore. You just need to be able to play a computer game.” He collected the string with a gaff. Then he wrapped it around the rim of a turning wheel the size of a hubcap which was mounted on the cabin wall. The wheel was attached to a winch. Most lobstermen raise the trap quickly, which leaves rope piled at their feet. Ames has learned that if he raises the trap slowly, the line comes off the wheel in a neat circle.

Wilkinson’s depictions of lobster fishing are marvelously fine, but they pale in comparison to his kinetic descriptions of white-shark fishing in his terrific “Cape Fear,” in this week’s issue. Consider this passage:

On the third pass, McBride, barefoot and in his jeans and a T-shirt, jumped into the water and climbed onto the submerged platform. Pulling hard on the cable, he steered the shark to the cradle. As she arrived, he leaped over a railing like a rodeo clown. When she passed him, he jumped back in and grabbed her tail and turned her slowly on her side so that her glistening white belly appeared again. It was milky white, the color of the moon, with the water rippling off it. McBride yelled for the cradle to be raised. When it was out of the water, someone threw him a towel, and he placed it over the shark’s eyes. She grew still. Others jumped on the cradle with the hoses. Someone lifted her snout, and McBride removed the hook, which was lodged in her jaw, while the hoses were put in her mouth. Water began pouring from her gills. Twice, her tail flipped up ponderously in an arc, and McBride stepped back.

That “It was milky white, the color of the moon, with the water rippling off it” is inspired! And so is this description of taking samples of the shark’s blood: “On the shark’s side, Skomal had left a handprint, in her blood, while stitching the incision. The wind began to dry her skin.” “Cape Fear,” particularly its final two sections, is exhilarating. I enjoyed it immensely. 

September 2, 2013 Issue

“The thing itself,” as Edward Weston called the object of his quest for realism, is what I seek when I look at photographs. Before I read Janet Malcolm’s great “The Genius of the Glass House” (in her recent collection Forty-five False Starts) I didn’t see it in Julia Margaret Cameron’s work, at least not in her posed costume dramas, what she called her “fancy subject pictures.” They seemed to me to be as artificial as fashion photos. But Malcolm’s piece showed me the way. In “The Genius of the Glass House,” she says,

But it is precisely the camera’s realism – its stubborn obsession with the surface of things – that has given Cameron’s theatricality and artificiality its atmosphere of truth. It is the truth of the sitting, rather than the fiction that all the dressing up was in aid of, that wafts out of these wonderful and strange, not-quite-in-focus photographs. They are what they are: pictures of housemaids and nieces and husbands and village children who are dressed up as Madonnas and infant Jesuses and John the Baptists and Lancelots and Guineveres and trying desperately hard to sit still.

How I love that steely “They are what they are.” Malcolm scans Cameron’s “fancy subject pictures” searching for hard reality. She excepts one picture from her reality test: Cameron’s The Passing of Arthur, of which she says,

Yes, the broomsticks and the muslim curtains are there, but they are insignificant. For once, the homely truth of the sitting gives right of place to the romantic fantasy of its director. The picture, a night scene, is magical and mysterious.

I thought of Malcolm’s reading of The Passing of Arthur as I read Anthony Lane’s wonderful “Names and Faces,” in this week’s New Yorker. It’s a review of the Met’s Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition. His response to Cameron’s work differs from Malcolm’s. He doesn’t look for the “reality” traces. He doesn’t notice the misery of the costumed sitters “trying desperately hard to sit still.” He does see the romance and the comedy. He says her “concocted scenes of myth and legend” are “suffused with sincerity and play alike.” Lane himself is a playful critic, more so than Malcolm is. He appears to approach Cameron on her own terms and to submit to whatever spell she’s trying to cast. Regarding her King Lear Alotting His Kingdom to his Three Daughters, he says,

Charles, complete with coronet, is in position, keeping a laudably straight face and grasping what is meant to be a regal scepter, or staff, but may well be the fireplace poker. The outcome, despite everything, is not wholly absurd; there is a distracted magic to its air of ceremony.

I enjoyed Lane’s piece immensely. His description of Cameron’s 1867 masterpiece, Julia Jackson, is inspired (and witty): “Though the backdrop may be sepia and moody, the subject is alert in her modernity and ravenous for experience. You could post her on Instagram right now.”

And yet … “they are what they are.” Reality is the base. I find Malcolm’s realist approach persuasive. Both pieces are brilliant; both expand our appreciation of Cameron’s intriguing art. 

Seamus Heaney's Sensual Apprehension of Life

Seamus Heaney, who died two days ago at age seventy-four, had a close New Yorker connection. Over the years, he contributed thirty-eight poems to the magazine, including his great elegy, “Casualty” (“Rained-on, flower-laden / Coffin after coffin / Seemed to float from the door / Of the packed cathedral / Like blossoms on slow water”) (The New Yorker, April 2, 1979; included in his superb 1979 collection, Field Work). New Yorker poetry critic, Helen Vendler, an ardent champion of Heaney’s work (he dedicated The Spirit Level to her) wrote four pieces on him: “The Music of What Happens” (September 28, 1981); “Echo Soundings, Searches, Probes” (September 23, 1985); “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me,” (May 13, 1989), and “Choices” (April 15, 1991). They are among the glories of New Yorker critical writing. 

Yesterday, I was pleased to see The New Yorker pay eloquent tribute to Heaney. Dan Chiasson, commenting on Heaney’s sequence of poems called “Squarings,” says, “The work of these poems is to make as real as possible the represented sensory experiences of the child, conveying their aromas and textures as though at first hand” ["Postscript: Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)," “Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, August 30, 2013]. This gets at what I most prize in Heaney’s poetry – his gift for ravishing, sensual, tactile description. Vendler, in her brilliant Seamus Heaney (1998), says, “Heaney’s senses often transmit themselves in language with an ecstatic acuteness.” Here is a yellow curd of butter “weighting the churned up white, / heavy and rich, coagulated sunlight / that they fished, dripping, in a wide tin strainer, / heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl” (“Churning Day”). And here is the sweet flesh of a blackberry “Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it / Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for / Picking” (“Blackberry-Picking”). And here is the exhumed cadaver called the Grauballe Man (from the extraordinary poem of the same name):

The grain of his wrists

is like bog oak,

the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.

His instep has shrunk

cold as a swan’s foot

or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge

and purse of a mussel,

his spine an eel arrested

under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,

the chin is a visor

raised above the vent

of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.

The cured wound

opens inward to a dark

elderberry place.

                        

Chiasson is right when he says, in “Postscript,” that Heaney’s “poems about peat bogs and what they preserve are probably the most important English-language poems written in the past fifty years about violence.” [Incredibly, James Fenton dissents on this point; in his “The Orpheus of Ulster” (The Strength of Poetry), he says, “I don’t much care for what he fishes out of bogs.”] But if Grauballe Man represents atrocity, he’s also, as Vendler points out, “in the plainness of his utter amalgamation of all being (tar, water, wood, basalt, egg, swan root, mussel, eel, mud, armor, leather), a figure of incomparable beauty” (“The Music of What Happens”). Beauty runs through all that Heaney wrote, including his incomparable criticism. His Preoccupations (1980) and The Government of the Tongue (1988) are, for me, touchstones. In “Feeling Into Words” (in Preoccupations), Heaney provides this unforgettable definition of technique:

Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of existence within the jurisdiction of form.

Regarding the importance of rhythm, he says, “A new rhythm, after all, is a new life given to the world, a resuscitation not just of the ear but of the springs of being” (“Sounding Auden,” in The Government of the Tongue). In “Lowell’s Command” (The Government of Tongue), he quotes the concluding lines of three of Robert Lowell’s poems and says, “Closing lines like these would tremble in the centre of the ear like an arrow in a target and set the waves of suggestion rippling.” On Wordsworth’s poetic voice, he says, “As his poetic feet repeat his footfalls, the earth seems to be a treadmill that he turns; the big diurnal roll is sensed through the poetic beat and the world moves like a waterwheel under the fall of his voice” (“The Makings of a Music,” in Preoccupations). On and on – as a poet and as an essayist, Heaney is endlessly quotable. Vendler called his pieces on Bishop, Lowell, Plath, and Auden “the best in recent memory” (in “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me”). She said that twenty-four years ago. It still applies today.

Credit: The above photo of Seamus Heaney, by Richard Franck Smith, illustrates Joshua Rothman’s "Seamus Heaney in The New Yorker" (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, August 30, 2013).