My Favorite Book of 2021: Geoff Dyer's "See/Saw"

My favorite book of 2021 is Geoff Dyer’s brilliant See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. Dyer is to photography what Pauline Kael was to movies – its greatest critic. Kael’s memory was a bottomless reservoir of movie associations. She could watch, say, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and see reflections of, among other films, William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), and John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). William Shawn, in his Foreword to Kael’s superb 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), said, “It is unlikely that anyone in the world carries around in his or her head more information about movies.” The same goes for Dyer; his head is packed with photographic precedents; he looks at a picture and sees countless allusions and influences – what he calls “visual echoes.” In almost every one of See/Saw’s fifty-two essays (including the excellent Introduction), he traces the echoes. For example, in his review of a Zoe Strauss exhibition, he writes,

It’s obvious, to anyone who visits this show that Strauss is an artist with a distinctive visual style; and it’s equally obvious that this distinction is impossible to separate from the way that so many threads of American photographic history seem to have found their way into the tightly bound forms of her pictures. The tattooed girl—Monique—with a beaten face and a black eye recalls a self-portrait made by Nan Goldin after she’d been battered. There’s a lot of Eggleston—most notably a green version of his famous red ceiling—and a lot of Stephen Shore too. And there are traces of Walker Evans—how could there not be?—everywhere. No sooner have these influences—or presences—been registered, however, than one becomes conscious of how Strauss’s relationship to photography and to the world adds to or alters them. She never simply ‘does’ an Evans or an Eggleston. Take Goldin, for example. The pictures in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are frank, intimate, beautiful and profoundly narcissistic. They are advertisements for a life being led: a bohemia that was longing to be recognised, a bunch of people whose poverty was a form of indulgence, who believed they were artists—even if there was no chance of their ever creating works of art. Except they were justified in their belief after all because they ended up in works of art, in Nan’s pictures. It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia, where the poverty is as matter-of-fact as it is in an Evans photograph of rural Alabama. The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted. By the time she began ranging further afield—in Vegas, say—she was able to take this home-grown familiarity and confidence with her. As she puts it, rather beautifully, in a Facebook exchange with a friend (included in the catalogue for the Philadelphia/ICP exhibition): “I just always let everything in and keep everyone who’s ever mattered as a part of myself.” To which the friend replies, rightly: “Wow… That is a phenomenal outlook on life.” [“Zoe Strauss”]

This is quintessential Dyer. Note the move from identifying the “presences” (Goldin, Eggleston, Shore, Evans) to analyzing the differences (“It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia …”) to distinguishing Strauss’s work from Evans’s and Arbus’s (“The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted”). That delightful Facebook quote at the end is inspired!

Zoe Strauss, Monique Showing Black Eye, Philadelphia, 2006

“Zoe Strauss” is one of See/Saw’s best pieces. Another one is “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg.” I first read it when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016. It blew me away then; it blows me away now. It’s an essay on a remarkable photo by Eli Weinberg called “Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg December 19, 1956.” Dyer describes it in detail, providing context and history, noting the way “the demonstrators fill the frame so that – in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras – the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute.” He says, “Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.” That seems to end the matter: nothing more to build on there. Instead, it’s just the overture. The next paragraph raises a fascinating question: 

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy. I’m guessing he’s about 13. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left, a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly. And he’s white. We look at the photograph, and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question that it insists on our asking: What is he doing there?

Eli Weinberg, Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956

The essay now becomes a work of detection. Dyer makes inquiries and finds out that it’s highly likely the boy is Eli Weinberg’s son, Mark. Dyer then wonders why Weinberg included Mark in the picture. He says, “In a sense, then, Weinberg could be said to have staged the picture, to have worked on its magic.” He further observes, “Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence. We want to hear his version of what happened.”  

This line of thought causes Dyer to remember another photo – Will Counts’ 1957 shot of a solitary black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by an angry mob of whites, including a young woman named Hazel Bryan. Dyer says, 

In 1997, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women [Eckford and Bryan] met in person – at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness. They became friends, spoke in public about the need for harmony and — the apotheosis! — appeared on Oprah together. A wonderful ending and an advertisement for the long-deferred, much broken promise of racial equality.

But that’s not the end of this story either. Dyer provides a coda: 

Except that this wasn’t quite the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering Eckford and Bryan. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

Dyer then refocuses on the Weinberg photo and concludes with these two extraordinary paragraphs:

Let’s go back in history to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather than almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he had died in 1965 at the age of twenty-four – so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! What an amazing unpacking of a photograph that, at first glance, seems strictly documentary! The whole book is like that. If you relish close readings of photos, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Geoff Dyer’s masterly See/Saw. 

November 1, 2021 Issue

Shauna Lyon, in her delectable “Tables For Two: Le Pavillon,” in this week’s issue, describes the location of her table in Le Pavillon as slightly evoking “a Hilton Hotel in Toronto.” Why Toronto? Is that her idea of restaurant Siberia? Never mind. Her piece is delightful, starting with a wonderful decorative detail (“A fanciful blown-glass chandelier, by the artist Andy Paiko, drips from the room’s cathedral ceiling”), and ending with a delicious description of Le Pavillon’s Noisette Chocolat (“controlled whimsy, precise geometry, silken mousse, flawless chocolate coating, a crumbly, nutty praline croustillant, and a strong hit of salt”). Mm, I’ll have a piece of that, please. 

Ben Lerner's "The Storyteller"

W. G. Sebald (portrait by Yann Kebbi)

What to make of Ben Lerner’s “The Storyteller” (The New York Review of Books, October 21, 2021)? Well, for one thing, it’s one of the best reviews of W. G. Sebald’s work I’ve ever read, right up there with James Wood’s “Sent East” (London Review of Books, October 6, 2011) and Anthony Lane’s “Higher Ground” (The New Yorker, May 29, 2000). For another, it’s an eloquent defence of the novelist’s right to repurpose facts. Lerner says,

How do you acknowledge—not just in an acknowledgments page but in the structure of the work itself—that you have models and that you’ve departed from them? Here Sebald’s purposeful destabilization of fact and fiction, and his dramatic alteration of the facts in question, within his four great books of prose fiction is a moral and aesthetic necessity, not some sort of failing: it foregrounds artifice, constructedness; it proclaims that Sebald is experimenting with making sense, making pattern, that he is weaving out of disparate materials an artwork that will not live or die according to fact-checkers.

I love that last line. I just want to emphasize that it’s also possible to make literary artworks purely from facts. Fiction isn’t an essential ingredient of literary art. I wish Sebald’s brilliant The Rings of Saturn were factual. It’s so good at creating the illusion of a real account of an actual journey that I have to keep reminding myself that not one word of it is reliable. 

I read Sebald for his exquisite melancholy. This, for example:

As usual when I go down to London on my own, a kind of dull despair stirred within me on that December morning. I looked out a the flat, almost treeless landscape, the vast brown expanse of ploughed fields, the railway stations where I would never get out, the flock of gulls which makes a habit of gathering on the football pitch on the outskirts of Ipswich, the allotments, the crippled bushes overgrown with dead traveller’s joy on the embankments, the quicksilver mudflats and channels at Manningtree, the boats capsized on their sides, the Colchester water-tower, the Marconi factory in Chelmsford, the empty greyhound track at Romsford, the ugly backs of the terraced houses past which the railway line runs in the suburbs of the metropolis, the Manor Park cemetery and the tower blocks of flats in Hackney, sights which are always the same and flit past me whenever I go to London, yet remain alien and incomprehensible in spite of all the years that have passed since my arrival in England. I always feel particularly apprehensive on the last stretch of the journey, where just before turning into Liverpool Street station the train must wind its way over several sets of points through a narrow defile, and where the brick walls rising above both sides of the track with their round arches, columns and niches, blackened with soot and diesel oil, put me in mind once again that morning of an underground columbarium. [Austerlitz]

As Lerner says, Sebald sees death everywhere. On Sebald's obsession with ruins, Lerner writes,

More generally, if history is one long catastrophe returning in new guises, the work of historical reckoning can pass into a transhistorical fatalism. This is why I can lose patience with Sebald’s narrators’ tendency to see only ruins, which is a way of not seeing forms of life and meaning-making that have sprung and might spring up in their midst. It’s not that it’s depressing; it’s that it’s leveling.

This is a good point. We need artists like Sebald to remind us of life’s transience. But we also need artists with a more balanced vision, who remind us that even in the midst of death there’s life – “the green weed breaking through the stone” (Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson, 2020). 

3 for the Road: Details

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their quality of observation – their details.

What an astonishing density of detail there is in these three books! Everything is noted, named, and particularized. For example, in Notes From the Century Before, Hoagland, roaming around the town of Wrangell, meets totem-pole carver Tom Ukas. Ukas takes Hoagland to a shed in back of his house and shows him a totem pole he’s created. Hoagland describes it in detail: 

The totem is made of a fresh, beautiful, pale yellow wood. I’m amazed by it. Completely filling the shed, lying on several supports, it thrusts like a rocket, many times taller than me. Carving from the bottom upwards, he has finished all but the hat at the top, even the long Raven beaks which attach separately. The little tools rest on a bench. He walks back and forth, touching the segments with a certain humility, this probably being the last totem pole he will have enough energy for and the last anybody in Wrangell will carve. He is delaying finishing – an hour’s chipping at the hat would take care of it. The wood is red cedar, and it will stand in front of the post office, a marvellous huge piece with six succinct figures. At the top sits the hatted, ruling Raven. At his feet is the Power Box (like a box), holding the Tide Control and the Daylight Control for the moon and the sun. Under the box is the Raven again, though only his head, with a bright halo disk around it – this representing the Raven in his special capacity as Creator. Below the Creator Raven, scrunched up, is a kewpie-doll Man, and underneath Man is the Raven Mother, whose beak is carved to lie on her chest, not stick out grandly like the Raven Creator’s. At the bottom, under the Raven Mother, sits the Tide Control, who escaped from his box and triggered the flood and is personified by a big beaver. It’s all magnificently bright and incisive, as I try to tell him mainly by my excitement.

Details accrete and a marvellous totem pole is bodied forth. McPhee, in his Coming into the Country, works the same way, adding detail after animate detail until a bear or a river or a cabin or a mountain is re-created on the page. Here’s his memorable depiction of prospector Joe Vogler’s truck: 

Vogler travels the mining district in a big three-axle truck so much the worse for wear it appears to have been recently salvaged after a very long stay at the bottom of the Yukon. He drives it on what roads there are and, where roads do not exist, directly up the beds of rushing streams. Lurching, ungainly, it is a collage of vehicular components – running gear from one source, transmission from another – that Vogler selected and assembled to be “good in the brush.” The front wheels are directly under the cab, and the engine mount (high off the ground) is cantilevered a full eight feet forward to become a projecting snout, probing the way toward gold. The cab and engine are military fragments, artifacts of the Second World War. The frame was taken from a twenty-five-year-old tractor trailer. The long flatbed reaches out behind and is towered over by a winch and boom. There are no fenders. Much of the engine’s cowling is gone. The headlights, far out front by themselves, suggest coleopteran eyes. Enfeebled as the rig looks, it has six-wheel drive and, thunking up ledges and over boulders, is much at home in a stream.

That “The headlights, far out front by themselves, suggest coleopteran eyes” is pure McPhee. No one could've thought of that analogy but him.

Many of McPhee’s details are inspired! This one, for example:

We collected a marten that had climbed up a pole-set for a grouse wing and was now hanging by a leg in a life-like pose, frozen stiffer than taxidermy, its forepaws stretched as if leaping for prey, its eyes, at fifteen below zero, like white chick-peas.

And this:

On his head was a brown Stetson – the only Stetson I’ve ever seen that was made of hard plastic. It had a crack in it that was patched with grout. 

And this:

On the stove is a tin can full of simmering tea, under a sheet-metal lid that is a piece of a fuel can with a scorched clothespin clipped to it as a handle.

One of the most memorable details in Frazier’s Great Plains is the tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick that he finds in the front yard of an abandoned house near Wellington, Texas, a house that figures in the legend of Bonnie and Clyde:

In front of the house was an old slippery-elm tree – once a friendly tree in a yard, now just a tree – with big roots knuckling up through te ground. The roots were skinned and smooth from people sitting on them, and on the bare dirt in between I spotted a silver-and-purple tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick. The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges, of a shade of reddish-pink which its manufacturer calls Fuchsias Pearl. I thought about the kids who dropped it. They probably come here sometimes to park and make-out. Bonnie Parker would have been happy to find this lipstick. She would have opened it and sniffed it and tried the color on the back of her hand. As I examined it, my own hand seemed for a moment as ghostly as hers. I made a mark on a page of my notebook with the lipstick, recapped the tube, and put it back on the ground.

That “The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges” is brilliant! The whole book is like that – an extraordinary feat of attention. 

In next month’s post, the last in this series, I’ll try to sum up my experience rereading these three great books.

On Chance

George Harrison, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney, in Liverpool, in 1958 (Photo by Mike McCartney)

Paul McCartney, in his wonderful “Writing ‘Eleanor Rigby’ ” (The New Yorker, October 25, 2021), talks about the role chance played in the founding of the Beatles. He says,

To this very day, it still is a complete mystery to me that it happened at all. Would John and I have met some other way, if Ivan and I hadn’t gone to that fête? I’d actually gone along to try and pick up a girl. I’d seen John around—in the chip shop, on the bus, that sort of thing—and thought he looked quite cool, but would we have ever talked? I don’t know. As it happened, though, I had a school friend who knew John. And then I also happened to share a bus journey with George to school. All these small coincidences had to happen to make the Beatles happen, and it does feel like some kind of magic. It’s one of the wonderful lessons about saying yes when life presents these opportunities to you. You never know where they might lead.

So true! I’m always amazed at how chance defines our lives. In my own case, I’m thinking of how I ended up living on Prince Edward Island. It all began on a spring day in 1976. I’d just finished writing my last exam of the term. I left the classroom, walked out into the sunshine, but instead of going down the school’s front steps and heading home, as I normally did, I paused on the landing. Maybe I was still mulling over my answer to the last exam question. I was standing there when I heard my name called. A student in my class, Wayne MacLean, came up to me. “What did you think of that?” he asked. I told him I thought I might’ve blown the last question. We discussed the exam for a few minutes. Then Wayne asked me if I had any plans for the summer. I said no, nothing yet. I told him I’d looked for an articling job in Halifax, but no luck so far. He said he was going to PEI for the summer. His girlfriend lived there and he’d got an articling position with a firm in Charlottetown. He said, “Why don’t you come with me? You could probably catch on with a firm there, too. Summers are great there, beaches, girls – it’ll be a blast!" I laughed. I’d never been to PEI, knew nothing about it other than the usual clichés – Land of Anne of Green Gables, Million Acre Farm, Cradle of Confederation. I didn’t know anyone there – no connections whatsoever. But it was an intriguing offer. I told Wayne I’d think it over and get back to him. That night, I discussed it with my parents (I was still living at home at the time). They were totally supportive of the idea. My mother said she’d even loan me her car for the summer. That clinched it. I decided to go to PEI. I got an articling job in Charlottetown and had a great summer. The next year, after graduating, I went back. For the next twenty-four years, I lived there, worked there, married, and raised a family. It’s where I live today. It’s my home. All this flowing from that moment of pure happenstance, on the steps of the Weldon Law Building, when Wayne MacLean called my name.   

October 25, 2021 Issue

Wow! Peter Schjeldahl is on fire! In this week’s issue, he rips MOMA PS1’s “Greater New York” for its “obeisance to supposedly unexceptional opinions.” He pens a truculent manifesto for our conformist times: 

Only doing things that one is not supposed to do and saying things that one is not supposed to say promise relief from a climate of stagnating sensibility. Being disreputable beckons. Open up. Reinstate surprise. ["Who's We?"]

Hah! I love it.

Speaking of saying things that one is not supposed to say, recall the 2017 controversy in which the artist Hannah Black requested that the Whitney remove Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Tilll’s body, Open Casket, from its Biennial show. Not only remove it; destroy it (see Calvin Tomkins, “Troubling Pictures,” The New Yorker, April 10, 2017). Black’s letter was widely condemned as an incitement to action that infringes artistic freedom. That was my own view of the matter, too. But recently I read a piece that changed my perspective. Charlotte Shane, in her review of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Songs of Care and Constraint, in the current Bookforum, writes,

I, for one, found Black’s letter exhilarating, not because it filled me with vengeful glee but because it pushed against the status quo with exactitude and moral clarity. It expanded my sense of social possibility. It offered “magic—magic hard to come by elsewhere, and which can make life feel more worth living,” as Nelson writes of the art she implores us to leave alone. ["Free Fallin' "]

I don’t agree with Black’s request, but I admire her for having the ovaries to make it. Is this the kind of subversiveness that Schjeldahl has in mind? Probably not. He’s seeking “gratuitous transcendence,” “unforced pleasure.” But he is advocating “being disreputable,” and that’s what I relate to. Something Norman Mailer wrote many years ago (I’m quoting it from memory): “Better to expire a devil in the fire than an angel in the wings.” 

October 18, 2021 Issue

David Remnick’s “Let the Record Show,” a profile of Paul McCartney, in this week’s issue, has an interesting structure. It begins in the third person, describing a party at McCartney’s East Hampton home. The first two paragraphs are thrillingly good:

Early evening in late summer, the golden hour in the village of East Hampton. The surf is rough and pounds its regular measure on the shore. At the last driveway on a road ending at the beach, a cortège of cars—S.U.V.s, jeeps, candy-colored roadsters—pull up to the gate, sand crunching pleasantly under the tires. And out they come, face after famous face, burnished, expensively moisturized: Jerry Seinfeld, Jimmy Buffett, Anjelica Huston, Julianne Moore, Stevie Van Zandt, Alec Baldwin, Jon Bon Jovi. They all wear expectant, delighted-to-be-invited expressions. Through the gate, they mount a flight of stairs to the front door and walk across a vaulted living room to a fragrant back yard, where a crowd is circulating under a tent in the familiar high-life way, regarding the territory, pausing now and then to accept refreshments from a tray.

Their hosts are Nancy Shevell, the scion of a New Jersey trucking family, and her husband, Paul McCartney, a bass player and singer-songwriter from Liverpool. A slender, regal woman in her early sixties, Shevell is talking in a confiding manner with Michael Bloomberg, who was the mayor of New York City when she served on the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Bloomberg nods gravely at whatever Shevell is saying, but he has his eyes fixed on a plate of exquisite little pizzas. Would he like one? He narrows his gaze, trying to decide; then, with executive dispatch, he declines.

I smiled at the understated way Remnick introduces McCartney, one of the most famous persons in the world, as Nancy Shevell’s husband, “a bass player and singer-songwriter from Liverpool.” And that detail about Bloomberg eyeing the pizzas, narrowing his gaze, trying to decide, “then with executive dispatch, he declines,” is very fine.

I read those two passages and I was hooked, in spite of myself. I’m normally allergic to celebrity profiles. 

In the second section, in which Remnick reflects on the way songs are “emotionally adhesive,” he tells a story about his father and him attending the opening of the 1973 Newport Jazz Festival at Carnegie Hall, where, backstage, they meet one of his father’s heroes – jazz pianist Teddy Wilson.

The third section, my favourite, is written in the first person. It describes Remnick’s meeting with McCartney at McCartney’s Manhattan office. It contains this inspired detail:

We reached a large sitting room, and, as he plopped down on the couch, a hearing aid sprang out of his right ear. He rolled his eyes and, with a complicit smile, used his index finger to push the wormy apparatus back in place. 

The fourth section reviews the evolution of the Beatles. Sample: “The development from album to album—from three-chord teen-age love songs to intricate ballads to the tape loops and synthesizers of their psychedelic moment—both caught the Zeitgeist and created it.”

The fifth covers the band’s breakup (“All these stress fractures could be felt in 1969 when the Beatles gathered at Twickenham after the New Year’s holiday”).

The sixth describes the aftermath of the breakup (“The crackup was raw and public. Lennon, who was undergoing Arthur Janov’s primal-scream therapy, was not prepared to muffle his pent-up grievances”).

The seventh reports Lennon’s murder and its impact on McCartney (“McCartney was hamstrung; how could he respond? Lennon was now a martyr. People gathered outside the Dakota to sing ‘Imagine’ and leave behind flowers or a burning candle”).

The eighth is a commentary on McCartney’s post-Beatles work. It includes this curmudgeonly assessment: “In truth, McCartney often seems inclined to issue everything that he has had occasion to record, and much of it is undercooked and sentimental.” Ouch! I wonder what McCartney thought of that.

The ninth is a curio: Remnick returns to that Newport Jazz concert that he and his father attended in 1973, but this time his focus is on drummer Gene Krupa. Remnick writes,

When I watch McCartney perform, I can’t help thinking about that Newport Jazz concert my father and I attended in 1973. When we were backstage, Gene Krupa, the drummer for Benny Goodman’s band, sat slumped in a chair, silent, staring at a space in the carpet between his shoes. He seemed racked with dread and very old. Then, onstage, he shook off whatever weighed on him and came alive to the sound of his old friends: Goodman’s sinuous clarinet, Hampton’s glowing vibes, Wilson’s liquid runs on the piano. Just before “Avalon,” the customary closer, Krupa had his moment, beating his mother-of-pearl tomtom to open “Sing, Sing, Sing,” a standard that Goodman and Krupa had made into an extended improvisational set piece. Krupa was a runaway train. The hall throbbed to his foot at the bass drum. There was something ominous, even frightening, about the spectacle of this sickly man, now come dangerously alive, at the edge of abandon. When Krupa was done, and the applause rained over him, you could see that his shirt was drenched.

After the show, we waited by the stage door on Fifty-sixth Street, hoping to see Teddy Wilson and thank him. The door banged open and an immense security guard burst onto the sidewalk. He was carrying an old man, seemingly unconscious, in his arms. It was Krupa, wrapped in towels. A cab pulled up, and the guard funnelled him into the back seat. Less than four months later, we read in the paper that Krupa had died, after struggling for years with leukemia. He was sixty-four.

Sorry, the analogy between McCartney and Krupa escapes me (perhaps it’s that McCartney, like Krupa, seems determined to keep performing right to his life’s end), but those passages on Krupa are among the liveliest and most memorable of the piece.

The tenth section artfully circles back to the scene of the party that began the piece. Now, it’s the day after and Remnick is at McCartney’s house. It begins with one of those great simple narrative sentences that always grab me: “The morning after the party, I returned to McCartney’s house on the beach.” In this final part, McCartney contemplates the future (“McCartney sat down to talk on a screened porch. Projects lay ahead, some of which he’d be completing as he hit eighty”).

“Let the Record Show” is a brilliant review of an incredible life. It’s all the more impressive when you consider that it’s written as a sideline to Remnick’s main job - editor-in-chief of The New Yorker. He’s a genius editor and a wonderful writer. Long may he continue in both roles. 

October 11, 2021 Issue

I’ve had my share of urological issues over the years, but nothing compared to Gary Shteyngart’s “genital bonfire,” as described in his excruciating, brilliant “My Gentile Region,” in this week’s issue. Shteyngart was circumcised when he was seven years old. The operation was botched. He was left with what’s called a “skin bridge” on his penis. Shteyngart describes it:

After the infection had subsided, the shaft of my penis was crowded by a skyline of redundant foreskin that included, on the underside, a thick attachment of skin stretching from the head to the shaft of the genital, a result of improper healing that is called a skin bridge. A small gap could be seen between this skin bridge and the penis proper. In texture and appearance, the bridge reminded me of the Polly-O mozzarella string cheese that got packed in the lunchboxes of my generation. 

Forty years later, on August 24, 2020, attempting to urinate, he feels a tightness on the underside of his penis. A tiny hair had wrapped itself around the skin bridge. He tries unsuccessfully to remove it himself. His primary-care doctor refers him to a surgeon, whom Shteyngart calls Dr. Funnyman. Funnyman takes out a pair of forceps and “in a matter of seconds had cut the hair tourniquet from the skin bridge.” But the skin bridge is irreparably damaged. Two days later, it breaks into two parts, “ ‘a minimal stump distally with a larger stump proximally,’ according to the doctor’s notes, the latter of which was an unsightly piece of skin flapping in the summer wind.” 

On September 8, 2020, Shteyngart returns to Dr. Funnyman for corrective surgery – a second circumcision. It doesn’t go well. Shteyngart says,

The afflicted area improved slowly, but peeing was now painful. A part of the redundant foreskin that had always resembled two flaps was becoming more swollen. Two weeks after the surgery, as I was finishing an hour-long walk, it felt as if hot clothespins had been attached to the areas where the skin bridge had been excised and were pulling ever downward. Whenever any clothing came into contact with the affected area, a Klaxon of pain would sound across my central nervous system.

He says further,

My condition began to take over my daily life, like a game of Twister but with each wrong move resulting in a jolt of groin pain. To get out of my car without the affected organ scraping unduly against my underwear, I began to propel myself from the seat in one quick motion, until one day I hit my head hard on the doorframe, and spent weeks nursing a headache. Eventually, I quit driving. Lifting grocery bags became impossible. Sitting on a hard chair excruciating. Drying my groin with a towel unbearable. Wearing jeans unbelievable (only sweatpants would do). Playing hide-and-seek with my son out of the question. Even sleeping required a fort of pillows placed in strategic locations to keep my penis airborne through the night. I had been advised to use numbing lidocaine jelly, and to wear soothing Xeroform gauze held in place by an improvised bandage. My wife, upon seeing the shaft of my organ covered in bandage and gauze, sadly compared it to the Elizabethan collar worn by dogs (not that I was in danger of licking myself). Erections became dangerous, and at night I turned away from my wife so that I would not smell the deliciousness of her hair. I began to wonder: Was this the rest of my life?

Shteyngart consults other doctors. Nothing they prescribe alleviates his pain. He says,

I’ve always had a rational fear of dying, but when I imagined a life without being able to walk or swim or have sex or travel or do anything without pain or an Elizabethan collar, I wondered what it would be like to kill myself. 

Eventually, he’s introduced to a doctor who prescribes “an ingenious compound cream containing amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant.” Near the end of the piece, Shteyngart writes, 

What am I left with in the end? I hope I will continue to get better, though I doubt I will ever be completely right again. I may have to slather my genital with ointments for the rest of my life. There are new associated complications from the various medications, and the treatment of my post-traumatic stress will continue. Even with excellent insurance, I have spent many thousands of dollars for medical care and will continue to spend more.

“My Gentile Region” is powerful testimony against circumcision. Its pain and suffering are palpable. I mentally flinched several times as I read it. Is it perverse of me to confess that many of its sentences also gave me pleasure? Well, they did. This one, for example:

I have always imagined that beyond its pleasurable utility the penis must be an incomprehensible thing to most heterosexual women, like a walrus wearing a cape that shows up every once in a while to perform a quick round of gardening. 

And this:

After the razzle-dazzle of Cornell, this doctor’s office felt more familiar in a urological context, smaller and lower ceilinged, its walls festooned with quotes from Maimonides and a waiting room populated with older Rothian Jews huddled over copies of the Post while waging a final battle with their prostates.

Shteyngart is a superb writer. His “O.K., Glass” (August 5, 2013) is one of my all-time favourite New Yorker pieces. “My Gentile Region” is right up there with it.

Thomas Meaney's "The Antagonist"

Neo Rauch (Photo by Lena Kunz)

I find I’m not quite done with the October 4, 2021, issue. There’s another piece in it I want to comment on, namely, Thomas Meaney’s “The Antagonist.” It’s a profile of the German painter Neo Rauch. I relish Meaney’s first-person perspective, beautifully established in his opening sentence: “I first met the German painter Neo Rauch shortly before Christmas last year, in Leipzig.” Meaney attends a Rauch exhibition at the gallery Eigen + Art (“As I walked around, a small, puckish man fell into step beside me and started to talk to me about Rauch and the Leipzig art scene”). He visits Rauch at his home in Leipzig (“When I visited him at home in July, he looked haggard, having had a particularly disturbed sleep, but on this occasion there was an additional factor: a techno party nearby”). He visits Rauch’s studio (“I rode a freight elevator up to the top floor and went through a pair of unmarked metal doors”). He goes with Rauch to Aschersleben, where there’s a permanent museum dedicated to his work (“I met him at his house, and we lowered ourselves into his 1992 Porsche 911. ‘Brewster green,’ he commented. You have to special-order the color’”). He has lunch with Rauch (“Over ox cheeks in rich red-wine sauce, potatoes, and beer, I asked Rauch if he wasn’t exaggerating the confrontation between abstraction and figuration in the nineties”). I devoured all these scenes. The problem is that Rauch doesn’t come across as particularly likeable. “The Antagonist” is one of those pieces – Janet Malcolm’s profile of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is another one that quickly comes to mind – in which the subject comes across negatively. Yes, Meaney calls Rauch “the unrivalled German painter of his generation.” But he also quotes the art critic Wolfgang Ullrich: “What are we to think when Rauch compares feminists to the Taliban?” What are we to think when we’re told Rauch is a fan of Ernest Jünger, an ideologue of authoritarianism and a glorifier of war? Meaney has chosen an unpalatable subject – an extreme right-winger artist. He must’ve known this going in. He must’ve known that he was going to inveigle himself into Rauch’s good graces, eat and drink with him, hang out with him, and ultimately betray him in print. I admired “The Antagonist,” but I didn’t enjoy it. “Betrayal” pieces always make me squirm. I feel embarrassed for both writer and subject.

October 4, 2021 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. A special shout-out to Steve Futterman for alerting me to the Bill Charlap Trio’s upcoming album “Street of Dreams.” I love this trio’s work. I have all its albums. Futterman writes, 

The pianist Bill Charlap, united as a working unit with the bassist Peter Washington and the drummer Kenny Washington for nearly a quarter century, has pulled off a very neat hat trick. By blending two unrelated strains of popular piano-trio traditions—the spit-and-polish drive of Oscar Peterson and the probing lyricism of Bill Evans—the Charlap triumvirate has established its own distinct voice, smoothly morphing into the premier mainstream jazz-piano trifecta. [“Goings On About Town: Music: Bill Charlap Trio”]

2. I relish this line in James Wood’s excellent “Connect the Dots”:

Every so often, a more subtle observer emerges amid these gapped extremities, a writer interested merely in honoring the world about him, a stylist capable of something as beautiful as “the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin,” or this taut description of an Idaho winter: “Icicles fang the eaves.”

3. Alexandra Schwartz’s absorbing “Tell Me What You Want” contains this wonderful quote from Amia Srinivasan’s essay “The Right to Sex”: 

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or toward someone we never thought we would lust after, or love.

I know exactly what she means.

3 for the Road: Figuration

This is the tenth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their many original, beautiful figures of speech.

One of the tools these three great writers use to describe their subjects is figuration, i.e., metaphor and simile. In Notes From the Century Before, Hoagland says of a band of wild horses, “They have the corrupt, gangster faces of mercenaries.” He describes a mountain range as “a thicket of peaks, like a class holding up their hands.” A wolf’s mouth is “like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” A man stands in his garden, “bent in the wind like an oyster shell as he looked at his beans.” A woman has “eyelids like poplar leaves.” Old-timers “pull the human language like a sticky taffy out of their mouths.” Of thousands of salmon trapped in a river canyon, he says, “I thought of shark fins, except that there was a capitulation to it, a stockade stillness, as if they were prisoners of war waiting in huddled silence under the river’s bombarding roar.” A fence “squanders the cleared trees in a zigzag course end to end and atop one another like clasped fingers.” The rib cage of a butchered cow “looked like a red accordion.” The smell inside a tent “curled, as violent as a fire, lifting my hair, quite panicking me, and seemed to be not so much that they didn’t bathe as it was the smell of digestion failing, of organs askew and going wrong.” How about this beauty, a description of the interior of a smokehouse: “The smoke comes from small piles of fireweed burning under two washtubs with holes punched in them, but the red fish make the whole barn seem on fire – salmon from floor to ceiling, as thick as red leaves.” And this: “His lips are so swollen from the sun that he can’t adjust them into an expression. They’re baked into testimonial form, or a sort of art form, like the curve of a fishbone on a beach.” One more: “The dog shambles off like a huge bottled genie with a bland, soapstone face.”

Hoagland’s words call up vivid pictures, as do McPhee’s and Frazier’s. In Coming into the Country, McPhee describes a map of Alaskan mountains as looking “like calves’ brains over bone china.” He says of a grizzly, “His teeth would make a sound that would carry like the ringing of an axe.” He likens salmon to zeppelins (“Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins”). He says of caribou antlers: “Bleached white, the antlers protruded from the tundra like the dead branches of a buried tree.” Of a fisherman: “With his bamboo rod, his lofted line, he now describes long drape folds in the air above the river.” Of the sound of a river: “In a canoe in such a river, you can hear the grains of mountains like sandpaper on the hull.” Of Labrador tea: “The leaves of Labrador tea, crushed in the hand, smelled like turpentine.” Of a bear getting ready to hibernate: “On a bed of dry vegetation, he lays himself out like a dead pharaoh in a pyramid.” Of arctic char: “They were spotted orange and broad-flanked, with lobster-claw jaws.” Of a grizzly: “His brown fur rippled like a field under wind.” Of Mount McKinley: “The mountain is a sky of rock, seemingly all above you.” He describes a river with “so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep.” He says, “People throng the post office like seagulls around a piling, like trout at the mouth of a brook.” Great floes coming on from upriver “roll, heave, compile; sound and surface like whales.” He describes riverborne ice: “big masses pounding into one another with the sound like faraway thunder, or, often, like faraway surf.” I love this one: “He picked up and tossed idly in his hand a piece of dry wolf feces with so many moose hairs in it that it looked like a big caterpillar.” And this: “On a cold, clear aurorean night with the moon and Sirius flooding the ground, the sound of the sled on the dry snow is like the rumbling cars of a long freight, well after the engine has passed.” And this amazing image:

A butchered grizzly: Burgundy is the color of the grizzly’s flesh. With the coat gone, its body is an awesome show of muscular anatomy. The torso hangs like an Eisenhower jacket, short in the middle, long in the arms, muscles braided and bulging. The claws and cuffs are still there. A great deal of fat is on the back. The legs, still joined, suggest a middle linebacker, although the thought is flattering to football. The bear was two years old.

Like an Eisenhower jacket? That’s an arresting, quasi-surreal point of reference. I guess we all remember who Eisenhower was. But did we know he wore jackets “short in the middle, long in the arms”? Who but McPhee could imagine the torso of a butchered grizzly resembling an Eisenhower jacket? No one. It’s an extraordinary simile conjured by an extraordinary writer.

Speaking of extraordinary, consider these gorgeous figures of speech from Frazier’s Great Plains: 

Away to the skies of sparrow hawks sitting on telephone wires, thinking of mice and flaring their tail feathers suddenly, like a card trick! 

The Great Plains are like a sheet Americans screened their dreams on for a while and then largely forgot about. 

Beyond the road were foothills, clear-cut of timber in patches, like heads shaved for surgery, and beyond the hills were mountains. 

This one is crazy-good:

The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks.

And this:

A moth glanced off the edge of the windshield, and in the sunset the dust its wings left sparkled like mascara.

This one makes me smile every time I read it:

Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain.

And this:

Along a straightaway, a coyote raced the truck, his tongue flapping beside him like a tie.

And this:

Maybe you’ll hear a good bluegrass song, like “Blue-Eyed Darlin’,” by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, that comes at you like a truckload of turkey gobblers.

Here’s an ingenious one:

Up ahead, in North Dakota, storm clouds came all the way down to the ground like an overhead garage door.

I love this:

Canvas tipis as white as water-cooler cups stood among the trees.

And this:

From the wooden floor came a dust that smelled like small towns.

How about this beauty:

Then the road twists to follow a river valley, and cottonwood leaves pass above, and someone has been cutting hay, and the air is like the inside of a spice cabinet.

Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier are masters of figuration. Another aspect of their art is their keen eye for detail. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.

September 27, 2021 Issue

Talk about triggers! One paragraph into John Seabrook’s superb “Zero-Proof Therapy,” in this week’s issue, and I found myself craving a cold zero beer. By the time I finished the fourth paragraph – 

I swirled the beer and admired the lacery of foam, as the bubbles slid slowly down the side of the glass. I took a deep whiff—the Cascade hops, from the Pacific Northwest, had notes of pineapple and hay. I brought the glass up to my lips, and took a long swallow. A tingle of good cheer seemed to spread through my hand up my right arm and into my chest.

- I was on my way to the fridge to get a can of Libra, my favorite N.A. beer. It’s produced by a craft beer company called Upstreet, located in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. And it’s damn tasty – a crisp pale ale with a tropical aroma, and a refreshing amount of citrus hoppiness. I pulled the tab and took a few swigs. Ah, fucking delicious! With my Libra in hand, I went back to Seabrook’s piece and devoured the rest of it. What a great piece of writing – where greatness means clear, vivid, evocative, absorbing, entertaining, perceptive. It’s about two things: Seabrook’s “raging non-alcoholism,” and his discovery of a great zero-alcoholic beer called Run Wild made by the Athletic Brewing Company in Stratford, Connecticut. He says of Run Wild,

Though lacking the depth and complexity of an alcoholic craft beer, Run Wild offers a breadth of flavors that partly makes up for alcohol’s absence, along with the mouthfeel of real beer: frisky, foamy, pillowy. I wanted to know how Athletic had figured this out.

“Zero-Proof Therapy" is a perfect blend of the personal and the reportorial. I enjoyed it immensely.