March 13, 2017, Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Jake Halpern’s absorbing “A New Underground Railway,” in which he visits a refugee safe house known as Vive on the east side of Buffalo, talks with some of the migrants staying there, talks with some of the staff, attends a “house meeting” in Vive’s basement cafeteria, meets a young Columbian man named Fernando who is preparing to sneak across the U.S.-Canada border, and drives him to the location (“a corridor of fields surrounded on both sides by thick forest”) where he wants to attempt his crossing. Halpern writes the kind of specific, direct, unadorned prose I relish. For example, here’s his account of driving Fernando to his drop-off point:

We drove on in silence. It was near midnight, and there were no other cars on the road. We approached the point where he wanted to be dropped off. On Google Earth, the fields had looked trimmed, but the ones in front of us were wildly overgrown. There was no moon, so it was impossible to distinguish the fields from the forests on either side.

I stopped in the middle of the road. On the right side, the route north, there was a steep embankment leading down to the fields. Fernando grabbed his backpack and opened his door; in the blackness, the car’s overhead light seemed glaringly bright. I told him to call me when he made it, or if he felt that he was in serious danger. He nodded goodbye, scurried down the embankment, and disappeared into the brambles.

“A New Underground Railway” puts us squarely there with Fernando, Tita, and other asylum-seekers, showing us their desperation. It’s a powerful argument for a more humane, empathetic approach to immigration.    

March 6, 2017, Issue

Do we need to know about Elizabeth Bishop’s private life in order to appreciate her poetry? Claudia Roth Pierpont, in her absorbing “The Island Within,” a review of Megan Marshall’s new biography, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, in this week’s issue, appears to answer no. Discussing the lines “The name of seashore towns run out to sea, / the names of cities cross the neighboring / mountains / – the printer here experiencing the same / excitement / as when emotion too far exceeds its cause,” in Bishop’s “The Map,” she mentions that Bishop’s previous biographer, Brett C. Millier, linked them to thoughts that Bishop confided to her notebook (“Name it friendship if you want – like names of cities printed on maps, the word is much too big, it spreads all over the place, and tells nothing of the actual place it means to name”). But then Pierpont says, “Of course, any such biographical explanation is a cheat: the reader cannot be expected to supply these facts; the poem means what it means, on its own.” I agree. My sense of who Bishop was arises from her meticulous poetic details. Take, for example, her exquisite description of fog in “The Moose”:

The bus starts. The light

is deepening; the fog

shifting, salty, thin,

comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals

form and slide and settle

in the white hens’ feathers,

in gray glazed cabbages,

on the cabbage roses

and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling

to wet white string

on the whitewashed fences;

bumblebees creep

inside the foxgloves,

and evening commences.

Pierpont discusses “The Moose” in terms of its meaning. She says, “Despite the passengers’ lack of anything remotely resembling expressive language (“Sure are big creatures.” / “It’s awful plain”), they are overcome with joy, lifted from their narrow selves for a luminous moment, before the bus rolls on.” But, for me, the beauty of “The Moose” is in those “cold, round crystals” of fog, forming, sliding, and settling “in in the white hens’ feathers, / in gray glazed cabbages, / on the cabbage roses / and lupins like apostles.” Such ravishing description indicates who Bishop was more revealingly than any letter or notebook could possibly show.

In her piece, Pierpont calls Marshall’s biography “lively and engaging, charged with vindicating energy.” This sharply contrasts with Dwight Garner’s verdict in The New York Times: “Marshall’s biography is dull and dispiriting” (“ 'Elizabeth Bishop' Details a Poet’s Life. An Author’s, Too,” January 31, 2017). Pierpont says,

Marshall, an aspiring poet in her youth, writes from a deep sense of identity with her subject: she studied with Bishop at Harvard, in 1976, and her biographical chapters are interspersed with pages of her own memoir, also centered on family, poetry, and loss. It’s an odd but compelling structure, as the reader watches the two women’s lives converge, and it allows for some closeup glimpses of Bishop as a teacher.

Garner differs:

Marshall’s attempts at memoir are painfully earnest. “I’d taken him a loaf of banana bread I baked one week, in lieu of a poem,” she reports about her interactions with one Harvard professor. Each of these reveries, some of which include samples of the biographer’s own verse (“Take flight, larks with a freedom earthbound creatures/Can’t know”), is about three slices short of a loaf and has no place here.

Who’s right – Pierpont (“odd but compelling structure”) or Garner (“thee slices short of a loaf”)? The only way to decide, I guess, is to read Marshall’s book.

Ian Frazier's "A Vast and Terrifying Saga"

Iqaluit Beach, 2007 (Photo by Lorna MacDougall)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 27, 2017, Issue

McKenna Stayner’s “Bar Tab” sentences are amazing mashups of unexpected words and images. Her “The crawlers, finishing a hot whiskey cider that tasted like the dregs of an overly honeyed tea, passed through a teensy smokers’ patio and into the booze-soaked main bar, attracted by a glowing yellow counter, its surface like the cracked crust of a crème brûlée,” in “Bar Tab: Sycamore,” was one of last year’s highlights (see “Best of 2016: GOAT”). Her “Bar Tab: Super Power,” in this week’s issue, contains another dandy: “Visiting Super Power, with the gentle glow of a blowfish lamp, the fogged windows dripping hypnotically with condensation, and the humid, coconut-scented air, was exactly like being on a cruise, but everyone was wearing wool.” That sensuous conjunction of light (“gentle glow of a blowfish lamp”), steam (“fogged windows dripping hypnotically with condensation”), smell (“humid, coconut-scented air”), and texture (“everyone was wearing wool”) is ravishing!

Interesting Emendations: Dana Goodyear's "Anything That Moves"

One of Dana Goodyear’s most memorable descriptions is of eating a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts at a secret Los Angeles sushi bar called Yamakase. There are two versions of it. The first is in her “Beastly Appetites” (The New Yorker, November 4, 2013):

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

The second version is in her Anything That Moves (2013):

We ate the beef, we ate the crab, we ate gumball-size baby peaches, olive-green and tasting like a 1940s perfume. There was slippery jellyfish in sesame-oil vinaigrette, and a raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts, meant to be slurped together in one viscous spoonful. That dish—quiver on quiver on quiver—epitomized the convergence of the disgusting and the sublime typical of so much foodie food. It was almost impossible to swallow it, thinking ruined it, and submission to its alien texture rewarded you with a bracing, briny, primal rush.

Comparing the two versions, I find three interesting differences: (1) “dish” in the New Yorker piece appears to refer to “raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts,” whereas in the book version it seems to include the jellyfish in sesame-oil vinaigrette, as well; (2) the book version contains more detail of Goodyear’s response (“That dish … epitomized the convergence of the disgusting and the sublime typical of so much foodie food”; “thinking ruined it”; “alien texture”); (3) the magazine version’s “briny, primal rush” becomes, in the book, “bracing, briny, primal rush.” 

Both versions contain the inspired “quiver on quiver on quiver,” so intensely evocative it almost makes me gag. This is meant as a compliment. Goodyear's phrase brilliantly enacts the sensation it describes.

Robert Macfarlane on John McPhee's "Sunset" Description

In an interesting piece in the current issue of Granta, Robert Macfarlane compares three “sunset” descriptions, one of which is from John McPhee’s “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, April 25 & May 2, 1977; Book I in his great Coming into the Country, 1977). Here’s the description:

The air was cool now, nearing fifty . . . We sat around the campfire for at least another hour. We talked of rain and kestrels, oil and antlers, the height and the headwaters of the river. In the night the air and the river balanced out, and both were forty-six at seven in the morning.

Macfarlane comments,

Then there is McPhee’s sunset – in which the sun doesn’t feature at all, eclipsed from the scene as it is by facts. McPhee’s prose here concerns balance, and is balanced: note how carefully those three pairs of nouns match each other (singular noun, plural noun; rain, oil, height; kestrels, antlers, headwaters), preparing for the equalized temperature relationship of air and river at exactly “seven in the morning.” McPhee – a New Yorker staff writer for more than half a century – is a man committed to accuracy and to metrics. Coming into the Country, like his other books, carries an astonishing density of detail: his non-fiction, as David Remnick has observed, emulates the “freedom” of fiction but not its “license.”

Macfarlane’s noticing how “those three pairs of nouns match each other (singular noun, plural noun; rain, oil, height; kestrels, antlers, headwaters), preparing for the equalized temperature relationship of air and river” is superb. McPhee’s prose enacts the balance he describes. But I question Macfarlane’s suggestion that McPhee is, in this passage, describing a sunset. Maybe McPhee is implying one, but even that, for me, is a stretch.

It should also be noted that Macfarlane’s “sunset” quotation isn’t entirely accurate. It’s actually a merger of four sentences from three separate paragraphs. The middle two lines belong together; the first and last are grafts.

But Macfarlane’s larger point, that Coming into the Country is a landmark travel book, “an intricately patterned enquiry into America’s relationship with the idea of wilderness, braced by an awesome integrity of observation,” is incontrovertible.

At the Archive: Nick Paumgarten's "Tables For Two: Tony Luke's"

Today, I’m in the Archive devouring Nick Paumgarten’s “Tables For Two: Tony Luke’s” (April 11, 2005). Early in his New Yorker career, Paumgarten wrote a slew of “Tables For Two” pieces. “Tony Luke’s” is one of his most inspired, featuring this memorable description of a Tony Luke’s cheesesteak:

The cheesesteaks here are about a foot long, and they are served without the benefit of being cut in half. As a result, as you eat one, the structural integrity starts to go; well-cheesified clumps of steak ooze out the sides. Quick flanking bites along the roll’s perimeter don’t much help, and soon you find yourself pushing the thing into your mouth like a log into a chipper.

That last line makes me smile every time I read it. 

February 13 & 20, 2017, Issue

For me, the most interesting item in this week’s issue is Jane Wilson’s 1957 portrait of Jane Freilicher, illustrating Peter Schjeldahl’s “Goings On About Town” piece, “Down and In,” on NYU Grey Art Gallery’s “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965.” Seeing it, I was reminded of Freilicher’s great The Painting Table (1954), a painting that John Ashbery, in his Reported Sightings (1991), describes as “a little anthology of ways of seeing, feeling and painting, with no suggestion that any one way is better than another.” I’ve written about The Painting Table before (see here). It’s one of my touchstones.

Luke Mogelson's "The Avengers of Mosul": A Masterpiece of War Reportage

Photo by Victor J. Blue

Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017), is a brilliant, brutal, immersive account of his experience traveling with an Iraqi police unit called the Nineveh Province SWAT team, made up almost entirely of native sons of Mosul, as they fight to liberate their city from ISIS occupation. The piece is divided into four sections: (1) “Up the Tigris”; (2) “Entering the City”; (3) “A Respite from Battle”; and (4) “Urban Combat.”

The first section, “Up the Tigris,” opens with the SWAT team located in the village of Kharbardan, anxiously awaiting orders to join the assault on ISIS-held Mosul. The orders come, and the SWAT team moves up the eastern bank of the Tigris River, helping the Ninety-first Brigade of the Iraqi Army’s 16^th Division clear half a dozen villages of ISIS occupants. The Brigade halts outside the village of Salahiya. The SWAT team continues into town on its own. Mogelson writes,

We accelerated into the lead, hurtling down alleys and whipping around corners. I was impressed that the driver could steer at all. The bulletproof windshield, cracked by past rounds, looked like battered ice, and a large photograph of a recently killed SWAT-team member obstructed much of the view.

In the second section, “Entering the City,” the SWAT team is stationed in Shaymaa, a neighborhood on Mosul’s southeastern edge. Mogelson travels to an aid station set up outside Shaymaa by the 9^th Division. He describes the arrival of injured soldiers:

A Humvee belonging to an infantry unit that was working with the 9th Division parked outside the aid station and unloaded a soldier whose left arm was open to the bone. His face was raw with burns; he was unconscious, and snorting loudly through his nose.

After several days at the aid station, Mogelson catches a ride to a SWAT-team position inside Shaymaa. He writes,

Upstairs, we found First Lieutenant Omar Ibrahim hunched below a shattered window. An oblong hole gaped in the cinder-block wall behind him, where a rocket-propelled grenade had exploded the day before. Omar was one of the only men in the unit whom I’d never heard raise his voice—he rarely spoke at all—and he recounted the grenade incident with sangfroid.

“They’re very close,” he said.

Peeking over the windowsill, we could glimpse dense blocks of identical-looking houses with water tanks on their roofs, the domes and minarets of mosques scattered here and there. One of the houses belonged to Dumbuk’s uncle and cousins; another held Hadi’s wife and daughter. ISIS and the men’s loved ones were in the same place, but ISIS was too close and their loved ones were too far away.

That night, gunmen attacking the SWAT team’s line approached so near that we could hear them crying “Allahu Akbar!” Bullets whistled overhead; red tracers arced and disappeared. In the morning, rounds smacked against the walls of the house occupied by Mezher [Major Mezher Sadoon, the SWAT team’s deputy commander], and a mortar rattled the windows. To the east, two enormous blasts preceded two enormous plumes.

The 9^th Division asks the SWAT team to help it capture the adjoining neighborhood of Intisar, where ISIS resistance is fierce. The SWAT team enters Intisar and is nearly decimated. Mogelson reports,

Of the forty-odd men who’d been in Intisar, twenty-two had been seriously injured and two killed. Nearly everyone else was hurt to some degree. Four of the swat team’s seven Humvees had been destroyed and abandoned on the battlefield. Two others were out of commission. Later that night, I met Rayyan [Lieutenant Colonel Rayyan Abdelrazzak, commander of the SWAT team]] in the house where he was staying, by himself. His eyes downcast, his voice almost a whisper, he said, “They defeated us.”

In the third section, “A Respite From Battle,” the SWAT team is given a week off. Mogelson visits the father and siblings of a SWAT-team member named Souhel Najem in a camp for internally displaced people (I.D.P.s), “a vast grid of white tents enclosed by cyclone fencing,” in a village called Hassan Sham. The next day, he visits Corporal Bilal, a forty-year-old member of the SWAT team, at a private acute care hospital in Erbil. Bilal’s hand had been nearly severed by a suicide truck explosion in Intisar. Mogelson writes,

I found Bilal in an electrically reclining bed. The air in the room smelled mildly of rot. His left hand was splinted and bandaged; long metal pins protruded from it. His thumb, his ring finger, and his little finger were black. I asked the obvious question. When would the fingers be amputated?

“They were supposed to do it three days ago,” Bilal said. “The problem is, I don’t have the money because our salaries are late.”

The next afternoon, Bilal’s doctor agrees to perform the surgery, with the understanding that Bilal will pay at a future date. Mogelson says, “The black fingers were amputated successfully. By then, however, the necrosis had spread, and another operation was required to remove the entire hand.”

The last section, “Urban Combat,” chronicles Mogelson’s experience as he follows the SWAT team back into battle, this time in a part of Mosul known as Gogjali. Mogelson writes,

To reach the SWAT team’s new positions, my interpreter and I drove down Highway 2 until we reached a berm that had been heaped across the lanes, and then turned left onto an unpaved road with a decapitated corpse lying in the middle of it. Stray dogs picked at the body; children played nearby. The unpaved road paralleled the cemetery, which lay behind a row of houses. At the end of the row, a perpendicular alley offered a sight line to the brown field of tombstones and, beyond it, the buildings in Al Quds. The SWAT team was in a house on the other side of the alley.

ISIS snipers shoot at the house:

The snipers eventually quit for the night, but they resumed with gusto in the morning. The SWAT-team members who were not stationed on the roof went to the road behind the house. Bullets zinged up the alley leading to the cemetery. Every now and then, the men backed a Humvee into the alley and aimed a few bursts from the Dushka at Al Quds; they also launched grenades from a turret-mounted MK19. The moment the Humvee pulled back behind cover, more bullets hit the house and the houses around it. They kicked up dirt and slapped against walls. They pierced an empty fuel tanker. They shook the branches of a tree and cut down leaves. They ricocheted off power-line poles, ringing them like bells.

The SWAT team is deployed to Aden, a neighborhood west of Gogjali. One of its positions is a school. Mogelson writes,

The school was a large two-story building that jutted into the clearing—and therefore was exposed on three sides. We had to duck low while climbing an exterior staircase. A corridor ran the length of the second floor, ending at an open doorframe that gave onto a landing. A bedsheet had been hung from the frame, but you still had to hew to the corridor walls, because the snipers in Akha [a nearby neighborhood] sometimes shot through the sheet.

Mogelson crawls on his stomach under the bedsheet. He describes what he sees:

Outside, two machine guns were propped, on bipods, in front of small holes in a waist-high wall. The floor was covered with spent ammunition. Peering through a hole, I could see the houses across the clearing and, behind them, the yellow dome of a mosque. Souhel [a SWAT-team member] drew my attention to a house with a corrugated-tin roof and several square windows missing their panes.

“There are three ISIS in there,” he said.

While Mogelson is in the school, a mortar lands “so thunderously that we thought, mistakenly, that it had hit the building.” He reports,

People were screaming. I followed Basam downstairs and outside. A crater gaped in the street; a metal cistern raised on stilts was spewing water. The screams came from a house around the corner. We pushed through a gate and found a man in a tracksuit lying in the driveway. Before we could attend to him, a woman came out and yelled that more seriously wounded people were inside. She led us into the living room, where an older, shirtless man sat on a couch. Blood smeared his torso and was splattered all over his pants. People were holding sopping red cotton pads to both sides of his face. He was having trouble breathing. When he saw us, he pitched forward, as if to say something. Instead of words, blood spilled from his mouth.

A young boy lay at the man’s feet. He was also shirtless and bleeding heavily from wounds on his torso and his legs.

It was a challenge to focus. The living room was crowded with screaming relatives and neighbors. While we worked on the boy, a woman began shaking my shoulder and shouting in my ear. I had to push her away. My interpreter later told me what she’d been saying: “Don’t let my son die!”

Note that “we.” Mogelson is more than an observer; he’s a participant, helping dispense first aid.

Also in this section, Mogelson visits another I.D.P. camp, this one in Khazer. He goes there to see a SWAT-team member nicknamed Dumbuk (his real name is Mohammad Ahmed), who is recovering from a leg wound suffered in the fighting in Aden. Mogelson writes, “As we ate, Dumbuk told me that as soon as his leg and arm healed he planned to rejoin the swat team. He was happy to see his relatives, but he missed the front line.” This line reminded me of something A. J. Liebling said in the Foreword of his great Mollie & Other War Pieces (1964):

I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war.

“The Avengers of Mosul” is an extraordinary piece of writing, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. In summarizing it, I’ve cherry-picked a few incidents to convey its vividness. I relish the way it unfolds sequentially without flashbacks. I relish its factual style. I relish its focus on the SWAT-team members. Most of all, I relish its details, e.g., a Humvee’s interior (“I crammed into Mezher’s vehicle, sharing a seat with a corporal in a black balaclava. We were wedged in amid ammo boxes, ammo belts, and the feet of another policeman, who stood in the turret behind a Dushka, a Russian heavy machine gun”); a medic’s cigarette ash (“He spoke excellent English, and worked with calm efficiency, often while smoking a cigarette, the ash falling on his patients”); the SWAT team’s deputy commander sitting on the edge of a bed “casually flipping a hand grenade around his finger”; inside a new aid station (“The fake-gold pages of a Koran, draped with a garland of plastic roses, were mounted on the wall, above bags of saline hanging from protruding screws”); the way a soldier puts his foot on a prisoner’s head (“The soldier in the cap twisted his boot back and forth, as if putting out a cigarette”); the ringtone of the Swat-team commander’s phone (“His phone kept ringing: the tone was the theme song from the movie ‘Halloween’ ”); a woman suturing a boy’s face with needle and thread (“It looked as if she’d dipped her hands in a bucket of red paint. I cut the thread and tried to shoo her off. A minute later, while attending to the wounds on the man’s legs, I looked up and saw that she was stitching him again”).

Edward Hoagland, in his review of John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), said, “It is a reviewer’s greatest pleasure to ring the gong for a species of masterpiece.” Today, I’m pleased to ring that gong for Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul.” 

February 6, 2017, Issue

Peter Schjeldahl says there’s poetry in David Salle’s paintings. He says they’re “a distillation of the poetic powers that are essential to painting” (“Fresh Paint,” in this week’s issue). He’s said this before. In his “David Salle” (The Hydrogen Jukebox, 1991), he wrote, “Salle’s unabashedly literary intelligence and playfulness – his way of pushing around the meanings of images much as poets push around those of words – appeal to me mightily.” Schjeldahl’s poetry analogy suggests an approach to Salle’s enigmatic art. I’m not sure I buy it. The best poetry, for me, springs from more than just “pushing around” words. Clive James, in his Poetry Notebook (2014), writes, “There is a notion of bedrock throughout Shakespeare’s work almost to the end: a notion that the essential meaning, the deeper consideration, has to be protected against all transient distortions, including the poet’s own gift for … words.” It seems to me that Salle’s paintings lack this sense of a “deeper consideration.” They lack bedrock. Take his Sextant in Dogtown (1987), for example, which is used to illustrate Schjeldahl’s piece. Schjeldahl describes it as follows:

Here, three abutted panels present grisaille images, clearly from photographs, of a woman awkwardly posing in a bra, with and without panties. (Offensive? Sure, and plainly on purpose, but smoothly at one with Salle’s attitude toward all his subjects.) A small inset panel pictures a dead bird. Above them, in acrid colors, are images of antique clown dolls and a cartoon of a top-hatted seafarer wielding a sextant.

It’s an intriguing combination of images and colors. Viewed as an abstract, it’s almost ravishing. Perhaps that’s the way it should be considered. Forget meaning. Seek bedrock elsewhere.

Postscript: This week's issue also contains Luke Mogelson's extraordinary "The Avengers of Mosul." I'm still absorbing it. I'll post my comment in the next day or so.