Taking A Break

I’m traveling to Italy tomorrow for a two-week break. I plan to do some cycling around Lake Garda. The New Yorker & Me will resume June 1o^th. Ciao!

Credit: The above artwork is a detail from Jacques de Loustal’s cover for the April 18, 2011 New Yorker (“The Journeys Issue”).

James Wood's "The Nearest Thing to Life"

James Wood has a new book out – The Nearest Thing to Life, a collection of four pieces, one of which, "Why?," originally appeared in the December 9, 2013 New Yorker. Wood is one of this blog’s central figures. His definition of “thisness” (“any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion”) is a touchstone. I want to devour The Nearest Thing to Life now. But I’ve decided to save it for a trip I’m taking on May 24. I’ll read it on the flight. I’ll post my review of it when I return (June 9).

May 11, 2015 Issue

Of the many pleasures in this week’s issue – Richard Brody’s capsule review of Elaine May’s 1976 gangster movie Mikey and Nicky  (“Cassavetes, his head down, his forehead like the prow of a near-wreck, and Falk, with his canny nervousness, blaze a trail of trouble that, in its emotional extremes, distills a lifetime of frustrated energy into a single deadly night”); Peter Canby’s description of sleeping out in Central African Republic’s Dzanga-Ndoki National Park (“I spent a long, cold night on an underinflated air mattress with only a thin sheet covering me, my sleep repeatedly interrupted by trumpeting elephants close by, louder than any Manhattan garbage truck”); Dan Chiasson’s review of Terrance Hayes’s new poetry collection How to Be Drawn (“I have no idea how he works, but the poems give the impression of spontaneity; even if he labors over them, the result is a wild ride without an off switch, an unbroken verbal arc propelled by his accelerating actions of mind”) – the most piquant, for me, is Mark Singer’s superb Talk story, "All-Nighter," an irreverent account of Singer’s attendance at “A Night of Philosophy,” a marathon series of “twenty-minute lectures by academics, mostly French and American, who are addressing such topics as ‘Can You Decide to Believe in God?’ and ‘Must Intellectual Life Be Boring?’ and ‘Will This Be Worthwhile?’” The event causes Singer to question the meaning of “philosophy”:

Does it connote great ideas by celebrated thinkers who, by their elegance of presentation, illuminate for us the most profound questions? Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?

That “because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?” made me smile. I enjoyed “All-Nighter” immensely.

Helen Vendler's "The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar": "Stevens and Keat's 'To Autumn'"

Reading Helen Vendler’s excellent new essay collection, The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, I encountered an old friend – her great “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn.’” I first read this piece thirty-five years ago when it appeared in her wonderful 1980 collection, Part of Nature, Part of Us. “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn’” is quintessential Vendler – intensely descriptive, powerfully analytic. It’s a detailed study of the ways Wallace Stevens reworked the materials of John Keats’s ode “To Autumn.” Vendler says, “It seems, as we read Stevens, that each aspect of the autumn ode called out to him to be reinterpreted, reused, recreated into a poem.”

Comparing The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar’s “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn,’” with the version in Part of Nature, Part of Us, I notice at least a dozen changes. For example, the Part of Nature version says, “The end of ‘Sunday Morning’ is a rewritten version of the close of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’; such risk-taking in a young poet argues a deep engagement with the earlier poem.” In the Ocean, Bird and Scholar version, this is changed to “The end of ‘Sunday Morning’ is a rewritten version of the close of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’; such obvious and unashamed risk taking in a young poet argues a deep engagement with the earlier poem” (my emphasis). One alteration puzzles me. In the earlier Part of Nature version, Vendler says of Stevens,

His attempts to go “beyond” Keats in various ways – to take the human seasons further, into winter, into boreal apocalypse, into inception; to find new imagery of his own, while retaining Keats’s crickets and bees and birds and sun and fields; to create his own archaic forms in the landscape – define in their evolution Stevens’ own emerging originality. (My emphasis)

In the Ocean, Bird and Scholar version, this is changed to

His attempts to go “beyond” Keats in various ways – to take the human seasons further, into winter, into boreal apocalypse, into inception; to find new imagery of his own, while retaining Keats’s crickets and bees and birds and sun and fields; to create his own archaic forms in the landscape, defining in their evolution Stevens’ own emerging originality. (My emphasis)

In the first passage, the words within the break marked by the dashes appear to refer to (and amplify) the ways Stevens attempts to go “beyond” Keats; the verb “define” after the second dash picks up the point (interrupted by the first dash) that Stevens’s attempts to go “beyond” Keats in various ways “define in their evolution Stevens’ own emerging originality.” But the deletion of the second dash in the Ocean, Bird and Scholar version, the insertion of a comma in its place, and the conversion of “define” to “defining” seems to me to break the sentence’s logic. The words “defining in their evolution Stevens’ own emerging originality” now appear to refer only to one of the ways that Stevens attempts to go “beyond” Keats.    

Perhaps the most significant change in the Ocean, Bird and Scholar version of  “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn’” is the revision of its description of Stevens’s late poem “The Hermitage at the Centre.” In the Part of Nature version, Vendler says,

Nonetheless I close not with this last successful meditation but instead with a poem that in its own relative failure shows Stevens’ stubborn ambition, even at the expense of violent dislocation of form, to have plenitude and poverty at once, to possess Keats’s central divine figure opulently whole and surrounded by her filial forms, while at the same time asserting the necessary obsolescence of her form and of the literature about her. (My emphasis)

In the Ocean, Bird and Scholar version, this passage now reads,

Nonetheless I close not with this last successful meditation but instead with a poem that in its own interlacing of lines shows Stevens’ stubborn ambition, even at the expense of violent dislocation of form, to have plenitude and poverty at once, to possess Keats’s central divine figure opulently whole and surrounded by her filial forms, while at the same time asserting the necessary obsolescence of her form and of the literature about her. (My emphasis)

The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar shows a master stylist tweaking one of her finest essays. I find the changes fascinating.

Helen Vendler's "The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar": Ten Favorite Passages

Helen Vendler's new essay collection, The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, brims with brilliant observations on poets and poetry. Here are ten of my favorites:

On Charles Wright: “His images, changing with the season, set the musical tone for each poem, and they are conceived in a manner that never ceases to astonish. One can never guess what word will come next on the page in a poem by Wright” (“The Nothing That Is”).

On Allen Ginsberg: “Ginsberg’s poetry gains much of its power from a cinematically detailed immersion in present-tense immediacy. You are there (as in any Ginsberg poem) when, in ‘Manhattan May Day Midnight,’ Ginsberg goes out at night to buy the newspapers and sees workmen tracking down a gas leak. He notices the bullet-shaped skull of the man in the manhole, he remarks the conjunction of asphalt and granite, he registers the presence of an idling truck” (“American X-Rays”).

On A. R. Ammons: “The attempt to protect what is beloved, knowing the certainty of its destruction, is beneath all of Ammons’s poetry” (“The Snow Poems and Garbage”).

On Amy Clampitt: “Immersion in landscape seemed to return Clampitt to that presubjective moment of joy before self and object became two things. Consequently, nothing made her happier as a writer than the challenge to make the physical world appear to others as it seemed to her” (“All Her Nomads”).

On James Merrill: Merrill enjoys the wit of finding ‘bath to’ as a rhyme for ‘Matthew,’ or ‘décor’ as a rhyme for ‘war,’ but his real genius, in terms of form, is to write rhyming narrative stanzas that ripple effortlessly down the page” (“Ardor and Artifice”).

On Wallace Stevens: “It seems, as we read Stevens, that each aspect of the autumn ode called out to him to be reinterpreted, reused, recreated into a poem” (“Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ ”).

On John Ashbery: “Nothing in ordinary life is alien to his democratic and comprehensive and indulgent eye” (“The Democratic Eye”).

On Jorie Graham: “In the poem ‘Pollock and Canvas,’ Graham, searching for a nontranscendent vertical which will be comparable to her earthly ‘desiring’ horizontal, finds a metaphor for her line in the fluid drip of Pollock’s paint between the body of the artist and his canvas spread on the ground” (“Jorie Graham”).

On Mark Ford: “Ford’s unobtrusive but careful tending to his sound chains – audible everywhere in these poems – makes his lines cohere, attract each other magnetically, no matter their content” (“Mark Ford”).

On Lucie Brock-Broido: “She memorializes moments at once unforgettable and inconspicuous. Of all the vignettes of her childhood tucked into the poems, my favorite remains the one recounting the absurd safety procedures in the ‘bomb shelters’ of elementary schools” (“Notes from the Trepidarium”).

Helen Vendler's "The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar": "The Democratic Eye"

It wasn’t until I read Helen Vendler’s wonderful “The Democratic Eye,” in the March 29, 2007 New York Review of Books, that I developed an appreciation for John Ashbery’s poetry. Prior to that I found his work damned near impenetrable. Vendler’s essay – it’s a review of Ashbery’s A Worldly Country: New Poems – provided me with a path into its inexhaustible precincts. In her piece, Vendler calls A Worldly Country “another installment of the strange diaries regularly appearing from the poet over the last fifty years.” She says,

I think of Ashbery’s shorter poems as “diaries” because so many of them have the dailiness, the occasional inconsequentiality, the fragmentary quality, the confiding candor, and the obliquity we associate with the diary form. The diarist, careless of communication (since he already has all the information necessary for the decoding of his own private pages), may remain indifferent to explicitness, to “message,” to “statement,” to “meaning.” The diary has, at its off-the-cuff best, a kind of intriguing charm: its vicissitudes (digressions, interruptions, unexplained allusions) keep later annotators busy; the elliptical text can end up occupying less space than its commentaries.

“The Democratic Eye” changed the way I approached Ashbery’s poetry. The piece went straight into my personal anthology of great book reviews. I’m pleased to see that it’s included in Vendler’s new essay collection, The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar.

May 4, 2015 Issue

When did Colin Firth’s nose turn terra cotta? Why is the area above his left eye teal-colored? Why are Meredith Monk’s cheeks bandaged with strips of coral, lemon chiffon, puce, and aquamarine? When did Helen Mirren’s face develop all those cracks and fissures? What is the meaning of that turquoise dab under Penelope Fitzgerald’s left nostril? These are just some of the questions that run through my mind as I gaze at Connor Langton’s beguiling, eye-catching, delectable New Yorker illustrations. Consider his arresting “Thomas Cromwell,” an illustration for Emily Nussbaum’s "Queens Boulevard," in this week’s issue: fractured alabaster visage daubed with clay paints; subtle backdrop of pastel Tudor imagery and pattern. Langton’s portraits are among the most strikingly original artworks to appear in the magazine in the last five years.

Conor Langton, "Thomas Cromwell"

Postscript: The two pieces in this week’s issue I found most absorbing are Dana Goodyear’s "The Dying Sea" and James Wood’s "Circling the Subject." Goodyear’s piece is about California’s shrinking Salton Sea, “one of the last significant wetlands remaining on the migratory path between Alaska and Central America.” It’s sort of a companion to Goodyear’s great "Death Dust" (The New Yorker, January 20, 2014). Wood’s piece is a review of Amit Chaudhuri’s novel Odysseus Abroad. It touches on a couple of Wood’s preoccupations – the representation of undramatic life (“there is no obvious plot, no determined design, no faked ‘conflict’ or other drama”), and homelessness (“Each immigrant deals with the loss of his home, and the quest for a new one, in his own way”). 

Helen Vendler's "The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar"

This is just a quick note to say that Helen Vendler’s new essay collection The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar is out. Its publication is, for me, a major literary event. I treasure Vendler’s criticism. Her previous collections – Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980), The Music of What Happens (1988), and Soul Says (1995) – are among my favorite books. Each contains a number of her great New Yorker reviews. The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar includes two New Yorker pieces, “American X-Rays” (November 4, 1996) and “Ardor and Artifice” (March 12, 2001). But there’s much in this book that’s new to me. I look forward to exploring it and blogging about it here. 

April 27, 2015 Issue

Charles McGrath’s "The People You Meet," in this week’s issue, helps me resolve my feelings about the recent revelation that Joseph Mitchell’s “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956), heretofore considered a classic fact piece, is partially fiction. Janet Malcolm, in her "The Master Writer of the City" (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015), defends Mitchell, saying,

Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

I find this unpersuasive. It breaches journalism’s prohibition against messing with the facts.

McGrath's argument is slightly more appealing. He says, “Mitchell’s best defense is that he wrote what he did out of affection and empathy for his subjects, not a wish to deceive.”

McGrath focuses on Mitchell’s “doctored” quotes. But it seems to me, based on my reading of Malcolm’s piece, the most objectionable fabrications in “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” are (1) the encounter with Mr. Brock in the St. Luke’s cemetery, and (2) the interview with Mr. Hunter at his house. Malcolm says,

The piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.

Malcolm is untroubled by Mitchell’s inventions. She says they are what give his pieces “their electric force.” I don’t see it that way. For me, the essence of Mitchell’s art is his allegiance to fact. I agree with McGrath when he says “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” “gains immeasurably from being presented as factual, an account of scenes and conversations that really took place. If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.”

Postscript: I enjoy travel pieces. There's an excellent one in this week's issue - D. T. Max's "A Cave with a View." It’s about the Italian hilltop town of Matera, “one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.” Max calls it a “palimpsest in stone.” He walks the Via Madonna delle Virtù, which follows the edge of a thousand-foot cliff (“Rows of vacant caves looked like giant skulls, with the empty doorways as eyes. The limestone walls were pockmarked, rain-streaked, and sun-bleached, and they varied in hue, from gray to yellow, as the light moved across them”). In the company of Materan resident Vito Festa, he tours the Sassi, the pile-up of cave-dwellings in the town’s ancient center [“He showed me the outlines of old cisterns and called up the names of farmers who had cultivated the olive and fig trees that now grew wild. Many of his memories were about struggling to get enough to eat: he pointed to a parapet where he had put down bird traps (‘I never caught any’), and to the roofs where his family had left almonds to dry”]. My take-away from this fine piece is a sense of Matera's “severe beauty” - “like a pile of tarnished gold thrown down by a careless giant.” 

Garner Endorses Adler's Snark

Renata Adler (Photo by Ron Galella)

Dwight Garner, in his "'After the Tall Timber,' Renata Adler's Collected Nonfiction" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 23, 2015), says of Adler’s “House Critic,” “That essay holds up in large part, and I say this as a Kael admirer.” What does that mean? In what way does it “hold up”?

“House Critic,” originally titled "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980), is Adler’s attempted evisceration of Pauline Kael’s great 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down. It’s full of false charges, e.g., “The degree of physical sadism in Mr. Kael’s work is, so far as I know, unique in expository prose,” “She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favourite words,” “She has, in principle, four things she likes.” Its basic approach is the reduction of Kael's work to caricature. To say that it “holds up” is to endorse the nasty, bullying, ridiculing smear tactics of low snark. Garner says he's a Kael admirer. Praising Adler's execrable “House Critic” is a bizarre way of showing it.

Postscript: I'm not alone in finding “House Critic” toxic. David Denby, in his “Pauline Kael: A Great Critic and Her Circle” (included in his 2012 essay collection Do The Movies Have a Future?), calls “House Critic” “a notoriously wrongheaded piece.” Craig Seligman, in his Sontag & Kael (2004), calls it a “poisonous assessment.”

April 20, 2015 Issue

William Finnegan’s reality hunger is voracious. It drives his stories. For example, in his great "Silver or Lead" (The New Yorker, May 31, 2010), he travels to the dangerous Mexican town of Zitácuaro, controlled by the vicious La Familia Michoacana crime syndicate, “to ask the police some questions.” This week, in his excellent "Tears of the Sun," he journeys to the Peruvian pueblo La Rinconada, “the highest-elevation human settlement in the world,” to report on artisanal gold-mining. Not content to just describe the mines (“The dark mouths of mines now hove into view, in all sizes and states of dilapidation. Some were big enough to drive a truck into, with guard shacks and fat electrical cables and compressed-air hoses. Others were smaller than I am, crumbling, trash-strewn. All looked forbidding”), Finnegan, in the company of miner Josmell Ilasca, enters one:

The tunnel entrance was twenty feet wide, maybe ten feet high. Ilasaca produced two hard hats and a miner’s lamp from a backpack, and we headed in. “I used to work in here,” he said. “There’s enough oxygen, from old shafts that go to the surface.” He gestured toward the depths of the mountain. As the tunnel narrowed, the air got musty and the darkness, within fifty yards of the entrance, was absolute. Ilasaca was careful to light my way. He showed me mineralized veins in the walls, glittering between rough slabs of black Ordovician slate. When the quijo angled upward, he said, so would the tunnel, and it did. This had all been dug with hand tools and dynamite, he said. “Maybe two metres a day.” Back then, the lamps had been carbide, he said, burning acetylene gas. These nice bright electric headlamps we had, with battery packs that attached to your belt, were relatively new. He stopped to listen to my breathing, which was getting ragged. The tunnel ceiling had been dropping, obliging me to crouch. My thighs were burning from the effort. I was O.K., I said, just altitude weary. More coca, Ilasaca said. I had bought coca leaves that morning, from an old woman on the street in La Rinconada. Everybody here chewed them, I was told, to stave off exhaustion and hunger. I stuffed a wad in my cheek. The leaves were stiff and bitter. Ilasaca also took a wad. The quartz vein in the tunnel wall turned downward, the tunnel followed it, and at a certain depth we found our progress halted by an icy-looking pond. Ilasaca studied the vein, tapping it with his fingertips. I wondered what he saw in its fissures and glints.

“Tears of the Sun” abounds with absorbing facts, but it’s also subjective to the bone. It’s about Finnegan’s experience of La Rinconada – where he sleeps (“My unheated hotel room in La Rinconada overlooked a muddy corner where long-distance minibuses arrived and departed, and all night long the touts shouted, ‘Juliaca! Juliaca! Juliaca!’ ”), what he eats (“We were eating dinner in a tiny, freezing second-floor restaurant in La Rinconada. I was having the Cuban plate—rice and a hot dog and a fried banana—and hot, sweet yerba-maté tea”), what he sees (e.g., female gold miners, known as pallaqueras, wearing “great jumbles of skirts, vests, sweaters, trousers, improvised balaclavas, striped traditional blankets known as llicllas, dust masks, aprons, work gloves”), who he meets [miners, doctors, gold buyers, even an undertaker (“Martín Ccari, an undertaker from across the street, told me that some mine deaths could be blamed on slow response to cave-ins and other accidents”)]. And … it ends beautifully, with Finnegan descending the mountain, returning to sun, warmth, greenery:

I left La Rinconada at dawn, squeezed in the back row of a crowded minibus, bumping down the mountain. The trashed, poisoned mine country gave way slowly to hills with actual grass on them. Then there were small farms, cattle, trees. Sunshine with some warmth to it. People not bundled against the cold. The world was flooding with color. And oxygen. I found it a bit overwhelming.

Superbly vivid, vital, and real – “Tears of the Sun” is terrific. I enjoyed it immensely.