June 9 & 16, 2014 Issue

I skimmed the stories in this week’s “Summer Fiction” issue. Nothing grabbed me. I readily admit that I’m biased in favor of factual writing. Fiction’s photoshopped renditions of reality turn me off. But there’s always something in each issue to appreciate. This week, I found it in Emma Allen’s “Bar Tab” on Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden, the final sentence of which made me smile: “Finally, a patron was allowed to sample the Rhapsody. ‘It tastes like Busch Light,’ the drinker said, before tossing out another comparison, to a different liquid, of a similar hue.” Allen’s piece brought to mind an earlier New Yorker review of Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden – Nick Paumgarten’s great May 16, 2006, “Tables For Two,” which describes the place as “variegation meets fermentation,” and memorably concludes, “Maybe our graveyards should be beer gardens.”  

June 2, 2014 Issue

This week, in his wonderful Talk story “Do Not Cross,” Ian Frazier does with a particular kind of urban barricade what I’ve always dreamed of doing with a certain type of Arctic canoe. He traces it back to its source. Regarding Friedrichs Mfg. Inc.’s crowd-control barricade, Frazier writes,

Art critics sometimes describe objects as being of such overwhelming beauty that it is impossible to look at them without a sharp intake of breath. With Friedrichs Mfg. Inc.’s barricades, the sharp intake of breath may not occur at first glance, or ever, but give these objects a few minutes of contemplation and a minor visitation of the sublime may occur.

I feel that I know exactly what Frazier is talking about, because I’ve experienced that “minor visitation of the sublime” whenever I eye one of Nor-West Canoes Inc.’s wood-and-canvas beauties. They’re a common sight in Nunavut hamlets. The circular logo on their high-curved bows shows a moose head and the words “Canots Nor-West Canoes Inc. Prevost. P.Q. Canada.” I’ve always wanted to visit Prevost, Quebec, and see where they’re manufactured. That’s precisely what Frazier does in his “Do Not Cross.” The “small silver label” on the barricade says “Friedrichs Custom Mfg. Inc., 303 Butterworth St., New Orleans, LA 70121.” Characterizing himself as “the vacationer” (Frazier complies with Talk’s banishment of “I”), he travels to 303 Butterworth Street, New Orleans:

The vacationer followed the Jefferson Highway a long way out, via two buses and some walking. Butterworth Street lies close by the Mississippi River and almost underneath the Huey P. Long Bridge, a structure so vaulting and high that it seems to extend from one white, towering Gulf coast cloud to the next. Low industrial buildings and idling semis and gray mud puddles in the shape of tire tracks compose the scene back on earth. The Friedrichs factory is made of corrugated metal painted white on the street side and not painted on the others. Dim and echoing, it opens its bay doors to the daylight. The vacationer walked in. Not unexpectedly, hundreds of barricades lay or leaned in piles on the factory floor. Nobody seemed to be about.

In a back office, Frazier (“the vacationer”) finds the company’s secretary and talks with her. The whole piece is inspired! Frazier has a knack for finding stories in overlooked places and under-appreciated things. “Do Not Cross” is one of his best. I enjoyed it immensely. It makes me want to jump in my car and drive to Prevost. Maybe this summer I’ll do it.

May 26, 2014 Issue

Notes on this week's issue:

1. I suppose the use of a 1950s Saul Steinberg baseball drawing for a cover on this week’s issue is meant as a homage to Steinberg, creator of perhaps The New Yorker’s most famous cover – the 1976 view of the world westward from Ninth Avenue. But the grayish, crudely sketched baseball cover, which shows a catcher crouched in front of an umpire, each with a masked head that looks like the caged top of a lighthouse, strikes me as somewhat dismal. For a much sunnier, more vivid, natural rendition of the summer game, see Richard Merkin’s great April 5, 1993 New Yorker cover, titled “The Changing of the Guard in the House That Ruth Built.”

2. Richard Brody’s syntax is delicious. Thought, in his pieces, flows in jazzy runs of blended description and perception joined with the adroit use of dashes, semi-colons, and brackets. This week’s GOAT contains three excellent examples:

With the bright colors of new urban landscapes (built up in the wake of wartime destruction) and the brazen clash of calmly assertive compositions, Ozu captures the ordinary desolation at the natural heart of things – and contemplates his own place on the edge of the precipice.

The cast and crew of a politicized costume drama are holed up in a Spanish villa while awaiting their star, their equipment, and their money; meanwhile, they drink joylessly and engage in provocative sexual escapades, subtly Machiavellian manipulations, and cruel displays of power that threaten the film with emotional sabotage.

The druggy and drunken parties, games of truth or dare, casual sex, and violent amusements are recklessness-by-number; the catalogue of petty derelictions and frustrated yearnings is anchored by no inner world, framed by no context, and there’s nothing distinctive in the twenty-six-year-old Gila Coppola’s direction.

3. Adam Gopnik has a piece in this week’s issue. But I didn’t read it. I’m boycotting his work in protest against his appallingly wrong-headed characterization of Duke Ellington’s compositional process as “theft” ("Two Bands," The New Yorker, December 23 & 30, 2013).

May 19, 2014 Issue

I know I should be more interested in Michael Specter’s subjects. But science has never been my strong suit. And his style – mostly third-person with the occasional first-person-minor passage thrown in – didn’t grab me. But recently, his authorial “I” has begun to bloom. For example, in his excellent "Climate By Numbers" (The New Yorker, November 11, 2013), he visits the Climate Corporation in San Francisco:

I picked up a cranberry-flax-oatmeal cookie and a bottle of coconut water, and was led to the Ptolemy Room, one of many glass-walled conference areas, all named for famous scientists, many of whom had some theoretical connection to the work of the Climate Corporation.

And in his "The Gene Factory" (The New Yorker, January 6, 2014), his style has moved to about midway between first-person minor and first-person major (“While I was in Shenzhen, I saw a display that described B.G.I’s plans,” “I arrived in Shenzhen the day after Typhoon Usagi had shut down much of Southeast Asia,” “I saw no lava lamps, nobody wore headphones or Crocs or moved through the building on a skateboard, a pogo stick, or a unicycle,”  “At lunch, Zhang pushed a small pot of yogurt toward me,”  “While I was in Boston, I met with Flatley”).

Specter’s absorbing "Partial Recall," in this week’s issue, continues the trend. The piece is about Daniela Schiller’s research into emotional memory. Specter visits Schiller in her office:

We were sitting in her office, not far from the laboratory she runs at Mount Sinai, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was an exceptionally bright winter morning, and the sun streaming through the windows made her hard to see even from a few feet away.

“Partial Recall” describes various forms of memory (“procedural memories,” “emotional memories,” “conscious, visual memories”); it talks about “consolidation” (the process by which new experiences become “imprinted onto the circuitry of the brain”) and “reconsolidation” (under certain circumstances, as a result of recall, old memory undergoes changes as it retraces the pathways in which it originated). But, for me, the most enjoyable parts are Specter’s journal-like entries, e.g., “On a particularly harsh winter morning in February, I joined Schiller and one of her postdocs, Dorothee Bentz, at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Brain Imaging Core”; “Not long after my fear test, I took the train to Philadelphia to speak with Edna Foa, who is the director of the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School”; and most memorably, “I had come to his [Sigmund Schiller’s] house, in this sunny spot between Ben Gurion Airport and the Mediterranean coast, for an unlikely reason: not long ago, after decades of unwavering silence, Schiller spoke about his Holocaust experience.”

Specter’s journalistic “I” isn’t in the category of such first-person major stylists as John McPhee and Ian Frazier. But it appears to be moving in that direction. And that’s a positive development. For me, the presence of the authorial “I” brings the page alive. The observer becomes a participant; reporting becomes experience. 

Postscript: Two other pieces in this week’s issue that I enjoyed enormously are Alec Wilkinson’s "A Voice from the Past" and James Wood’s "The World As We Know It." Wood’s piece touches on the homelessness theme of his brilliant “On Not Going Home” (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014), which is the subject of a review I'm currently working on for this blog. I’ll post it in the next week or so.

May 12, 2014 Issue

The pleasures of this week’s issue are many: Peter Schjeldahl on “No Problem: Cologne/New York, 1984-1989” (“Nostalgia-stirring photographs, which appear in the show’s catalogue, find many of the glamorous names achingly young and, often, conspicuously plastered”); Richard Brody on Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (“His painterly framings have a teeming simplicity, with action spilling in from the margins and up from the background, entangling the characters in a web of conflicting forces”); Hannah Goldfield on Bunker (“But these slips, like the strip club, are forgiven in light of the restaurant’s other charms, including the creamy tapioca pudding, spooned over coconut, palm seed, and jackfruit, and the skateboard propped up against the bathroom sink”); Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The End of Food” (“With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad”); Sean O’Brien’s “Café de l’Imprimerie” (“All night I wait for you at the Café de l’Imprimerie”); Lee Siegel’s “Pure Evil” (“Nesbø’s books stand out for their blackness”); Keith Gessen’s “Waiting for War” (“One person’s little old grandfather fought in the Red Army to liberate Ukraine from the Nazis; another person’s little old grandfather fought in the U.P.A. to liberate Ukraine from everyone, Nazis and Soviets both. These historical narratives are very difficult to reconcile, and neither side has done a good job trying”); D. T. Max’s “Green Is Good” (“The silver Patagonia fleece jacket he wore accentuated the perception that he was someone you were more likely to meet on the chairlift at Telluride than chained to a power-plant fence”); Riccardo Vecchio’s exquisite wallpaper-and-naked-old-women illustration for Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive”; Jill Lepore’s “Away From My Desk” (“Leisure may be over, but that’s only because when your office is a cloud it follows you everywhere”); Joan Acocella’s “Selfie” (“Because Blackburn’s positions are so clear, his prose is clear. It is also unostentatious”); Anthony Lane on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (“We expect its austerity to fend us off, but no; it gathers us in and forbids us to look away”). In its sheer intelligence, wit, and craft, this is a brilliant New Yorker. I enjoyed it immensely.