December 21, 2020 Issue

I love the way Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Fix We’re In,” in this week’s issue, moves from intriguing specificity (“What unites Rashid Johnson’s grease-stick abstraction, conjuring a state of alarm in a pigment that he has invented and dubbed Anxious Red; Cecily Brown’s pencilled carnage of game animals after a seventeenth-century still-life by Frans Snyders; and a meticulous, strikingly sombre self-portrait by R. Crumb?”) to gorgeous abstraction (“When time is a trackless waste, escapes from the aridity detonate”), and then back to the concrete (“But here we are, and '100 Drawings from Now' vivifies the situation for me”). It’s a wonderful rhythm. No one does it better than Schjeldahl. 

December 14, 2020 Issue

Anthony Lane, in his “Plotting the Course,” a review of Steven Soderbergh’s new movie “Let Them All Talk,” in this week’s issue, asks one of the great questions of 2020: “Could Susan be the first person on record to discuss her distant sexual history while playing Monopoly and Scrabble, and, if so, does a threesome count as a triple-word score?” I read Lane’s piece avidly. I saw “Let Them All Talk” last week on Crave, and enjoyed it immensely. But I found myself struggling to say why. Yes, there’s the treat of watching Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen, and Dianne Wiest interact. But I feel there’s more to it than that. Lane says, “Much of the tale has a noodling and speculative air.” “Noodling” is an apt description of this film. It has an easy, improvisatory air, like a Bill Charlap or Joe Lovano riff. Soderbergh has taken the slightest of storylines – a famous author goes on a cruise trip with her friends and nephew – and spun it into something beautiful and absorbing. 

There's More to Law Than Just Storytelling

Tarpley Hitt, in her “I Read Court Documents for Fun. Hear Me Out” (The New York Times Magazine, December 1, 2020), says, “Trial lawyers are storytellers, and competitive ones at that. Each side accumulates details supporting their arc, explaining away those that don’t, editing along the strict stylization of law.” I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Janet Malcolm takes the same view. In her great “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010, she 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.” Well, I don’t understand trials that way. For me, they’re contests of competing arguments. Trial lawyers are arguers. They argue evidence. They argue issues. They argue law. Yes, facts are important in a trial case. And yes, facts are often packaged in a narrative – I’ll concede that much. But the most thrilling cases, for me, at least, are the ones in which facts fall away, and the case becomes a contest between competing interpretations of the law. 

One such case that comes immediately to mind is R. v. Laviolette, [1987] 2 S.C.R. 667, in which a priest was clubbed to death in his parish home. Three men were charged. One of them, Stephen Laviolette, pleaded guilty. The other two were tried for constructive murder. Under the doctrine of constructive murder, a person who doesn’t actually commit murder, but who is involved in a crime (e.g., break-and-enter) that results in murder, can be convicted of it. It’s a highly controversial concept because it means that a person can be found guilty of murder even though he or she didn’t intend it. 

I represented the younger of the two accused, Brian Laviolette, who was only about seventeen at the time, if I remember correctly. Brian hadn’t entered the parish house that night. Stephen was the only one of the three who entered. He broke a window at the back of the property and climbed inside. As soon as he was in, he turned, pointed outside to a length of iron pipe on the ground, and told Brian to pass it to him. Brian did so, not knowing he was handing Stephen the murder weapon.

Brian was convicted at trial under the doctrine of constructive murder. Between his trial and his appeal, Parliament enacted the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. At Brian’s appeal, I argued that constructive murder violated Charter section 7, which guarantees an accused’s right not to be deprived of his freedom except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. One of those principles of fundamental justice, I submitted, was that a person should only be convicted of murder if he or she had the intent to do so. The Prince Edward Island Court of Appeal rejected my argument. We appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, and on December 3, 1987, the Court struck down constructive murder. 

I mention all this to show how a case based on the most grisly facts can become a vehicle for an exhilarating argument of pure law. In a sense, transforming the lead of facts into the pure gold of constitutional argument is a form of decontextualization, a process that Malcolm herself writes about in her wonderful essay “Burdock” (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2008). Someday I’ll write more about the analogous relationship between legal process and the art of decontextualizing. But for now, suffice it to say, there’s more to law than storytelling. That may be the least of its ingredients.  

On the Horizon: My "Best of 2020" Lists

Illustration by Min Heo, from Hua Hsu's "My Year of Making Lists"

It’s time to start making my “Best of 2020” lists. Each year at this juncture, I like to pause, look back, and take stock of my New Yorker reading experience. I find listing is a good way to do it.

I’m not going to reveal my pick for best reporting piece just yet. But I’ll give you a hint. It has nothing to do with COVID-19. It has nothing to do with Trump. It’s about an object in the “the shape of a bulging briefcase, with a protruding bulb at the bottom.” That’s all I’m going to say for now. As it is, I’ve probably given it away. Besides, the year isn’t over. There are still three more New Yorkers to come. Who knows what delightful surprises they might contain? 

Ian Frazier on the Meaning of "American carnage"

Ian Frazier (Photo by Sara Barrett)

I’ve pretty much given up on political reporting as a source of inspired writing. But when I saw Ian Frazier’s name among the contributors to The New York Review of Book’s recent series “On the Election” (November 19, 2020), I thought to myself, This is one I’ve got to read. I wasn’t disappointed. Unlike most political writing, Frazier’s piece has the breath of life. It deals in particulars. Its words call up images. For example:

In 2017 I went to Washington to see the inauguration. I wandered around with no purpose and did not get very close to the Capitol steps, where the swearing-in ceremony appeared as a tiny cluster of people among a larger crowd. Fewer onlookers gathered in the vicinity of the Reflecting Pool, where the regiments of portable johns shoulder to shoulder outnumbered the humans, and a lone hawk watched from atop a tree. I was standing by a loudspeaker when I heard the phrase “American carnage.” In that relatively abandoned area, it came out of the loudspeaker during Trump’s speech and seemed to hang in the air in 3D.

That sentence about the “regiments of portable johns shoulder to shoulder” and the “lone hawk” is amazing! As is the description of Trump’s words (“American carnage”) seeming “to hang in the air in 3D.” 

“American carnage” has specific meaning for Frazier. Hearing it, he thinks about “small towns in Ohio, near where I’m from, that used to be flourishing and now are half-deserted and boarded up.” He says,

Today the emblematic image of the former small town is a pillar that once held an oval-shaped plastic sign for some local business like a muffler shop or a feed store, and the plastic is mostly broken and gone, and just the frame of the sign is still there.

Note Frazier’s use of definite, specific, concrete language. The whole piece is like that. Frazier concludes with a plea to Democrats to “start paying more attention, FDR-style, to the less populated places.” It’s a practical suggestion. I totally agree with it. I wish more writers would write this way about politics. 

December 7, 2020 Issue

Johanna Fateman’s absorbing “Art: Luigi Ghirri,” in this week’s “Goings On About Town” introduced me to a photographer I’d never heard of before. She says,

In his signature faded color palette, Ghirri captured signage, murals, and ads layered onto the surfaces of a city; his frontal, symmetrical compositions often flatten three-dimensional space, an effect that might be described as trompe l’oeil in reverse. In the dreamy, sunlit factory scene “Ferrari Automobili,” from 1985-88, an upright, glossy-red car hood recedes on an assembly-line track—but the view is oddly cropped by a metal archway. Some of Ghirri’s works might be easily mistaken for photomontage. 

Maybe “found photomontage” might describe Ghirri’s style? Check out the fascinating online exhibition of his work at matthewmarks.com. My favorite is this luminous night shot, “San Maritino Vallo Caudino” (1990):

November 30, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Burkhard Bilger’s excellent “Building the Impossible,” a profile of New York carpenter Mark Ellison – “a man who gets hired to build impossible things.” Bilger says of him,

He is a big man with heavy, sloped shoulders. He has thick wrists and meaty paws, a bald head and fleshy lips that protrude over a ragged beard. There is a bone-deep competence about him that reads as solidity: he seems built of denser stuff than other people. With his gruff voice and wide-set, watchful eyes, he can seem like a character out of Tolkien or Wagner: the clever Nibelung, fabricator of treasures. He loves machines and fire and precious metals. He loves wood and brass and stone. He bought a cement mixer and was obsessed with it for two years—couldn’t stop using it. What draws him to a project, he says, is the potential for magic, the unexpected thing. The glimmer of gems that veins the mundane.

Ellison renovates luxury New York apartments. Bilger visits several of them, including a gutted nineteenth-century townhouse (“Above him, joists, beams, and electrical conduits crisscrossed in the half-light like a demented spider’s web”), a ten-room triplex (“It was like stepping into a water lily. The door to the great room was shaped like a curling leaf, framing a swirling oval staircase behind it”), a five-story penthouse atop the Woolworth Building called the Pinnacle (“The ceiling was two stories high; the windows gave vaulting views across the city on every side. You could see the Palisades and the Throgs Neck Bridge to the north, Sandy Hook and the shores of Galilee, New Jersey, to the south. It was just a raw white space with some steel girders stretched across it, but it was still astonishing”), and, most memorably, a four-story penthouse known as the Sky House (“full of splintered, refracted spaces, as if you were walking inside a diamond”). 

Bilger’s description of Sky House is superb:

Yet the apartment feels less cerebral than exuberant, full of little jokes and surprises. The white floors give way to glass panels here and there, suspending you in the air. The steel girder that holds up the living-room ceiling is also a climbing pole, with a harness so guests can rappel down. The walls in the master bedroom and bath have tunnels hidden behind them, so the owners’ cats can crawl around and pop their heads through small openings. And all four floors are connected by a huge tubular slide, made of polished German stainless steel. At the top, cashmere blankets are provided to insure a fast, frictionless ride.

My favourite passage in "Building the Impossible" is Bilger’s description of Sky House’s staircase:

Built of white nanoglass—an opaque and extremely hard synthetic stone—it twists up through the building in precisely organized shards, offering sudden glimpses through the rooms unfolding around it.

That “twists up through the building in precisely organized shards” is delightful! The whole piece is delightful – as artfully crafted as the interiors it describes. 

November 23, 2020 Issue

Three striking artworks in this week’s issue:

1. Sergiy Maidukov’s portrait of Grace Jones for Sarah Larson’s “Podcast Dept.”

2. Naila Ruechel’s photos for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: EMP To Go."

3. Andrea Ventura’s portrait of Paul Celan for Ruth Franklin’s “A Word, a Corpse.”

Maidukov and Ventura are established New Yorker illustrators. I’ve long admired their work. But Ruechel’s bold, color-drenched photography is new to me. I look forward to seeing more of it in the magazine. 

November 16, 2020 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl is the most original New Yorker stylist since Pauline Kael. His tone, rhythm, texture, diction, syntax are instantly recognizable. One of his favorite words is “drench.” It figures in some of his most ravishing lines. This one, for example:

Kiefer’s Pollockian machines - with heart-grabbing yellows, blacks, and browns that affect like tastes, sounds, and smells and their incorporation of photographs that drench the mind in tones of memory – evoke a quasi-religious feeling of delicious melancholy, slightly masochistic abasement before sheer ancientness. [“Our Kiefer,” The Hydrogen Jukebox, 1991]

In this week’s issue, he deploys it again, to marvelous effect:

Gilliam broke ranks with the movement—or extended it—in the mid-sixties, when he began draping vast unstretched paint-stained and -spattered canvases from walls and ceilings, creating undulant environments that drenched the eye in effulgent color. [“Off the Wall,” a review of Sam Gilliam’s “Existed Existing,” at Pace Gallery, New York]

3 for the Road: Intro

My three favorite travel books are John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1976), Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989), and Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969). But I feel I don’t I know them well enough, especially at the formal level. Over the next year, I propose to reread them – immerse myself in them, if that’s possible. And I’ll blog about it as I go. So a new series then – “3 for the Road,” starting January 1, 2021. 

Best of the Decade: Alternate List

Photo by Marcin Gala, from Burkhard Bilger's "In Deep"

I had fun doing “Best of the Decade.” But skimming the crème de la crème off ten years’ worth of New Yorker reporting pieces wasn’t easy. Narrowing the list to just twelve was agony. I was forced to discard many wonderful articles, including some personal favorites. To atone for my ruthless selection process, I’ve decided to compile a second list – twelve more excellent pieces that could easily have made the first list, if there’d been room. Here are my picks, with a choice quotation from each in brackets:

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Deadhead,” November 26, 2012 (“In the pavilion, the tapers had set up a cityscape of microphone stands, like minarets, and through them there was the sight of Jerry Garcia, fat and hunched, virtually immobile in a haze of his own cigarette smoke”). 

2. Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep,” April 21, 2014 (“One passage led back to the beginning of the sump, another to the loop behind them, a third to a dead end they’d explored earlier. That left one unexplored passage. It took them up a short corridor, along a rising slope of terraced mustard-colored flowstone, and into a small domed chamber. There was an air bell at the top about the size of a car trunk, so they swam up and took off their helmets and neoprene hoods to talk. They seemed to be at a dead end. They were cold, tired, and disoriented, and their air ration had nearly run out. There was no choice but to head back”). 

3. Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016 (“I walked into the site, through smooth gray-brown gravel mounds, serene and raked as Zen gardens, graded to the angle of repose, so that no rocks slide. Like blast shields, the mounds blocked the view; their shapes, which can be seen in whole only from the air, form a coded alphabet of charm stone, dog bone, cross, and adze. A ramp sloped up to the east, to the top of a bulwark, against which leaned massive ceramic stelae”).

4. William Finnegan, “Silver or Lead,” May 31, 2010 (“To check out La Familia’s claim to be driving cristal addiction from Michoacán, I went to Zamora, a midsized city in the northwestern corner of the state. La Familia was doing some vivid social messaging there. Two days before my arrival, and some weeks earlier, groups of flagellants had appeared on the roads around Zamora—men with their shirts pulled up or off and their backs whipped raw. The men chanted and carried placards denouncing themselves as thieves and rapists. Some of the placards were signed ‘La Familia’ ”).

5. Aleksandar Hemon, “Mapping Home,” December 5, 2011 (“I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements”).

6. Peter Schjeldahl, “The Flip Side,” November 29, 2010 (“But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color”).

7. Geoff Dyer, “Poles Apart,” April 18, 2011 (“The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight”).

8. Alexandra Schwartz, “Bounty Hunters,” November 25, 2019 (“You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart”).

9. Dexter Filkins, “Atonement,” October 29 & November 5, 2012 (“Lobello might not have felt that he needed to apologize, but he was haunted by what had happened, traumatized, maybe even ruined. He wanted to know that the survivors understood why he had done what he had, even if it was not entirely defensible. And he wanted them to know that he felt their suffering in his own. Lobello did not quite say it, but when I left his apartment I felt that what he was really looking for was absolution”).

10. Rebecca Mead, “Sole Cycle,” March 23, 2015 (“Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped”).

11. Gabrielle Hamilton, “The Lamb Roast,” January 17, 2011 (“Then the sun started to set and we lit the paper-bag luminarias, and the lambs were crisp-skinned and sticky, and the root beer was frigid, and it caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat”).

12. Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running,” July 11 & 18, 2016 (“A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: ‘Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . .’ The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible”).

Best of the Decade: #1 Ian Frazier's "Blue Bloods"

Illustration by Owen Freeman, from Ian Frazier's "Blue Bloods"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #1 pick – Ian Frazier’s "Blue Bloods" (April 14, 2014).

This wonderful piece is about Frazier’s fascination with horseshoe crabs, an animal that, as he points out, has “been around at least two hundred times as long as human beings.” But now they’re in decline, he reports. Humans may be driving these tough little creatures to extinction. He says, “Sea-level rises may cause shoreline reinforcement that wipes out their habitat.” 

There’s an unforgettable scene near the end of “Blue Bloods” that illustrates Frazier’s point. He’s on the shore of Delaware Bay, driving a gravel road that “skirted the bay so closely that it required a barrier wall of riprap for protection.” He writes,

The crumbling brittle of horseshoe-crab parts under the car wheels now became so thick it was unnerving, with uncrushed, whole horseshoe crabs all over the road as well. I pulled onto the left-hand berm to investigate. When I climbed up on the riprap wall, I saw throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks. The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks.

That description of horseshoe-crab carnage, likening it to “the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg,” is inspired! It’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen “Blue Bloods” as my #1. 

Another reason is that it’s so quintessentially Frazerian. Frazier is a superb describer. “Blue Bloods” brims with delightful description. Here, for example, is his portrait of a horseshoe-crab person named Diane SanRomán:

On that morning, she wore knee-high rubber boots, a bright-pink cotton shirt, and complicated turquoise earrings: an in-the-field style that became familiar. “My life was good before I discovered horseshoe crabs, but now it’s even better!” she announced to me, adding that she was raising a thousand horseshoe-crab eggs in the bathroom of her apartment, in Manhasset, and that her husband, a doctor who specializes in clinical nutrition, kindly put up with them. Along with playing conga drums, she throws pots and is pursuing her second M.A., in experimental psychology with a focus on marine biology. She looks enough like the late Bea Arthur, the star of the nineteen-seventies sitcom “Maude,” that it would be negligent not to say so.

And here’s his depiction of the Dupont Nature Center viewing deck:

Bird-watchers lined its railings with emplacements of telescopes and cameras. Some of the bird-watchers were talking on their cell phones and leaving excited messages for other bird-watchers. When the other bird-watchers called back, the ring tones were birdcalls. Jeffery Davis, a birder from near Philadelphia, offered me a look through his well-positioned 30-power Kowa telescope. Oystercatchers, stilts, dowitchers, willets, black-bellied plovers, dunlins, royal terns, ruddy turnstones, semipalmated sandpipers—along the sand and in the shallows, thousands of heads were going up and down as long, thin bills plucked up what probably were horseshoe-crab eggs. A single horseshoe crab swam nearby on the surface, on its side. Lenses turned to the odd swimmer for half a minute, then went back to the birds.

Conga drums, “complicated turquoise earrings,” birdcall ring tones – I love Frazier's details. He notices stuff most people overlook or disregard. "Blue Bloods" is one of his finest acts of attention.