March 26, 2018 Issue

In her wonderful poem “Giraffe,” in this week’s issue, Lucie Brock-Broido, who died earlier this month, muses on reincarnation. In the opening sentence, she says of the giraffe, “In another life, he was Caesar’s pet, perhaps a gift from Cleopatra / When she returned to Rome / Her hair salty and sapphire / From bathing, the winged kohl around her eyes smudged / From heat.” Her next sentence continues the theme: “In another life, he was from Somalia / Where he spent hours watching clouds / In shapes of feral acrobats tipping along their tightropes / Spun of camels’ hair and jute.” Several lines later, she writes, “Once, in another life in the Serengeti, he stretched his neck / To feed on the acacia twigs, mimosa, wild apricot.” Further on, she writes, “If you come back from the other world, to this— / The sky in Denmark, in its reticulated weathers, is inky / On most days in February now.” There are a couple of other lines implying a form of reincarnation, as well: “In the Copenhagen Zoo they only name the animals who grow / Old there, and, in this life, they called him / Marius but he was just a two-year-old,” and “In that moment was he looking at a gray, cobbled / Steeple in the middle distance of a dome / Or thinking of a time when his life was circled by a mane / Of warmth in a bright Numidian sun?” I find these lines ravishing. That “clouds / In shapes of feral acrobats tipping along their tightropes / Spun of camels’ hair and jute” is inspired. The whole poem is brilliant, a perfect illustration of what Dan Chiasson meant when he said, “From her very first poems, collected in A Hunger (1988), Brock-Broido has shown how to bring maximum dazzle to every detail” (“The Ghost Writer,” The New Yorker, October 28, 2013).

March 19, 2018 Issue

“The architects Louise Harpman and Scott Specht began collecting takeout-coffee lids when they were in college, in the nineteen-eighties, and continued the practice as graduate students at Yale.” So begins Anna Russell’s excellent Talk story “Caffeinated,” in this week’s issue. Reading it, I instantly thought of Robert Sullivan. In his great Cross Country (2006), Sullivan chronicles, among other things, his fascination with plastic coffee lids. At one point, he says,

Plastic coffee lids represent an area in the cross-country world where stream-lined uniformity has not yet prevailed – they are the last vestiges of differentiation. I don’t like to think that we would ever be a one-lid nation, though that day may come.

He even mentions Louise Harpman and Scott Specht:

In their seminal essay on lid design, Louise Harpman and Scott Specht, two lid collectors, identified what they called the “pucker” as the next developmental step in the to-go lid: a plastic lid with a hole, the hole being in that portion of the lid that is constructed in an elevated, mountain-range-like shape.

Russell’s piece tells about some fieldwork Specht and Harpman conducted recently in SoHo. They visit a number of cafés, including Lafayette, La Colombe, Think Coffee, and Gasoline Alley. Russell writes,

In Think Coffee, a man in a blazer, holding two hot drinks, waited while the pair examined the dimples on the compostable lids. “Decaf, cream, and black—that’s all,” Specht said.

“Caffeinated” artfully conveys Specht and Harpman’s crazy world of coffee lid collecting. I enjoyed it immensely.

On Lucie Brock-Broido: Chiasson and Vendler

Lucie Brock-Broido (Photo by Karen Meyers)

Hannah Aizenman, in her “The Enchanting Poems of Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018), From The New Yorker Archive” (newyorker.com, March 8, 2018), refers to two New Yorker reviews of Brock-Broido’s work: Helen Vendler’s “Drawn to Figments and Occasion” (August 7, 1989) and Dan Chiasson’s “The Ghost Writer” (October 28, 2013). It’s interesting to compare them.

Both pieces are admiring. Vendler says of Brock-Broido’s “Elective Mutes,” “The rhythmic momentum of this piece of Americana and the audacity of throwing it into a poem about mad English twins suggest the drivenness of Brock-Broido’s imagination, which at other times can be delicate and lyrical.” Chiasson writes, “Brock-Broido’s poems can be baffling, but because of their stylish spookiness (some combination of Poe and Stevie Nicks) they are never boring.” Note that “stylish spookiness”; Vendler calls Brock-Broido’s “Heartbeat” “spookily lyrical.”

Both pieces are also critical. Vendler writes,

Some of the hazards of Brock-Broido’s enterprise are easily seen: preciousness, exaggeration, a histrionic use of the more sensational edges of the news. Other hazards, less immediately apparent, take an insidious toll in the long run – chiefly the persistent use of a few obsessive words, among them the adjectives “small,” “little,” “tiny,” “frail,”, “fragile”; the nouns “child” and “girl”; the verb “curl.”

Chiasson says Brock-Broido’s poems have a “blurted quality, as though long-roiling tumult finally blew off the stopper.” He continues:

The thrill of improvisation is precisely that it cannot be isolated from the risk of mere looniness or doodling. I don’t like everything in Brock-Broido’s work, but, to steer clear of tour de force, a style like this one has to fail some of the time; it has to find some subject that suits it badly.

I like that “thrill of improvisation.” It gets at the quality in Brock-Broido’s work I most enjoy – its combinational wizardry. Vendler catches this quality when she says of Brock-Broider’s “I Wish You Love,”

A broken heart, death, the exhumed body of Mengele, ecological disaster, commercial slaughter, the humdrum, the extravagant, the technological, the distorted, the lyric all lurch together into an eclectic postmodern elegy.

That “lurch” is inspired. It exactly captures the wayward dream logic of Brock-Broido’s dazzling art.

March 12, 2018 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue I enjoyed most is Jiayang Fan’s “The Spreading Vine,” an account of her recent wine tour in China’s Ningxia region. Fan drives along the Helan Mountain Grape Culture Corridor (“Billboards advertising various wineries—housed in faux-French châteaux, sleek modernist structures, giant pagodas—appeared, like fast-food signs along a highway”), visits wineries (“The château has stone towers with conical roofs, in imitation of the châteaux of the Loire Valley, and cherub-adorned fountains recalling the ones at the Boboli Gardens, in Florence”), talks with winemakers (“Zhang mentioned that rosés were relatively new to the Chinese market; she suspected that they’d catch on, thanks to their juicelike color and clean, slightly sweet taste”), eats grapes (“I crouched down, picked a grape, and popped it into my mouth. It was astonishingly sweet, less like fruit than like jam or sticky nectar”), and tastes wine (“A 2014 Cabernet blend I tasted bore out what Robinson had said: medium-bodied and somewhat floral, it seemed like a Bordeaux”).

My favorite part comes near the end, when Fan describes drinking bootleg wine with her driver, Liu, and his friend, Fatty:

Being in possession of contraband wine put the men in a giddy mood, and, not long after we left, Fatty pulled over and Liu fetched one of the jugs of wine from the trunk. Having driven me to at least half a dozen wineries, they took me for an expert and were eager to get my opinion. As Liu produced some grimy plastic cups from the recesses of the car, I remembered a tasting at Silver Heights, where wines were daintily paired with Camembert imported from Normandy, via Shanghai. The bootleg wine was warm, and, when I raised my cup, I could see thick sediment dancing inside. The security guard had mentioned that the wine hadn’t yet been filtered, but Liu and Fatty didn’t seem bothered. We took a sip, and Fatty’s mouth puckered. The wine was harsh, sweet but astringent, and the taste seemed to register in the esophagus as much as in the mouth. As the men drained their cups, Liu reflected that at least it hadn’t cost them anything.

“The Spreading Vine” is a pleasurable read – Fan’s best piece since her superb “The Accused” (The New Yorker, October 12, 2015). 

March 5, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s delightful “Direct Eye Contact,” in which he tells about his yearning to see a bear in his Princeton backyard (“While I flossed in the morning, looking north through an upstairs bathroom window, I hoped to see a bear come out of the trees”). McPhee is a bear writer extraordinaire: see, for example, his classic “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977) and his superb “A Textbook Place for Bears” (The New Yorker, December 27, 1982). Compared to these masterpieces, “Direct Eye Contact” is slight, only twenty-three hundred words long. But it contains many of McPhee’s signature moves: vivid imagery [“In Manchester Township (Ocean County), a wild black bear went up a back-yard tree in a neighborhood called Holly Oaks, where it tried to look like a black burl weighing two hundred and fifty pounds”]; geological description (“Kittatinny is actually a component of one very long mountain that runs, under various names, from Alabama to Newfoundland as the easternmost expression of the folded-and-faulted, deformed Appalachians”); interesting facts (“In the past three years, twenty-one bears have entered New Jersey homes, with no human fatalities”). My favourite passage in the piece is a description of a fallen oak:

In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, there was enough bear shit around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show. 

That last line made me smile. “Direct Eye Contact” is an excellent addition to McPhee’s bear oeuvre. I enjoyed it immensely.

Is Photography Transformative?

Benjamin Lowy, "Latham Smith" (2010)

John Berger, in his “Understanding a Photograph” (included in his 2012 essay collection of the same name), wrote, “There is no transforming in photography. There is only decision, only focus.” In contrast, Janet Malcolm, in her “Burdock” (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2008), says, “Taking a picture is a transformative act.” Here are two major photography critics disagreeing on a fundamental photographic issue. Who’s right?

I’m drawn to Berger’s view. I relish photographs that show people, places, and things exactly as they are – unaltered, unfiltered, undistorted. My idea of a great photograph is Benjamin Lowy’s portrait of tugboat captain Latham Smith (see above), which appeared in the April 19, 2010, New Yorker, as an illustration for Burkhard Bilger’s superb “Towheads.” Lowy’s photo brims with raw reality – rope, cables, water, rust, a nearly sunken barge, and Smith himself, leaning forward against a yellow railing, wearing a dark green shirt and navy watch cap, giving the camera a hard-eyed stare.  

In his essay “Appearances,” Berger said, “Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.” I agree. Photography is an art of quotation, taking images directly from reality. Lowy’s Latham Smith photo exemplifies the art brilliantly.

In her essay “Burdock,” Malcolm describes the way she photographs burdock leaves. She doesn’t photograph them in situ. She snips them off the plants, takes them to her studio, props them in small glass bottles, and photographs them head on, “as if they were people facing me.” The process, she says, is a form of decontextualization:

What I have done with the burdock leaves is, of course, part of the enterprise of decontextualization that received its awkward name in the late twentieth century and was a fixture of that century’s visual culture. Patchwork quilts hung on the walls of museums, African tribal masks used to decorate orthodontists’ waiting rooms, ship propellers displayed on coffee tables – these are some familiar forms of the practice of taking something from where it belongs and that has a function, and putting it where it doesn’t belong and merely looks beautiful. It looks beautiful in a particular way, to be sure, the way of modernist art and architecture and design. When I remove a burdock leaf from its dusty roadside habitat, I anticipate the stylized aspect it will assume when it is set upright against the clean white walls of my attic studio, its lineaments refined by sunlight coming from above.

Janet Malcolm, "Burdock No. 1" (2005-07)

Malcolm’s method is sourced in Irving Penn’s decontextualized photography: see, for example, his photos of artificially posed Peruvian Indians, Spanish gypsies, and San Francisco Hell’s Angels in his 1974 collection, Worlds in a Small Room. Interestingly, thirty years before she started taking her burdock pictures, Malcolm wrote a piece, titled “Certainties and Possibilities” (The New Yorker, August 4, 1975), criticizing Penn’s approach. She quotes a passage from Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room, in which he says, “Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them.” Malcolm comments,

Penn removes people from their own context and treats them like botanical or zoological specimens. He lures them into his studio, sits them on cloth-draped structures, subjects them to a north light that shadows half of each face, and sometimes literally pushes them into a corner that his brutal direction has put them emotionally.

She says of Penn’s enormously enlarged photographs of cigarette and cigar butts,

Penn’s pictures of butts exhibit all the rough oddity of the found art object that emerges from the enlargement of a murky detail in a torn, unregarded snapshot or of a quaintly drab illustration in an old textbook; they partake of the transformation that quilts and ship propellers and industrial tools undergo when they are wrested from their functional context and put on show for their aesthetic qualities. And they suffer from the same paradoxical devitalization that comes over useful objects when they are no longer in use. The tacky machine-made synthetic comforter on the bed has more connection with life – is more genuine, in its way – than the handsome antique quilt that hangs on the wall as if it were a painting, and in this respect Penn’s sleek pictures of clothes and caviar in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, far from paling before the rough vigor of his pictures in the museum show, present a kind of rebuke to the latter’s false vernacularism.

Irving Penn, "Cigarette No. 86" (1972)

In a line I’ve never forgotten, she says, “Unlike Weston’s peppers and cabbages, which celebrate Weston’s religion of 'the thing itself' and permanently alters one’s vision of these vegetables, Penn’s butts efface reality.”

Is photography transformative? Yes, it can be, in the decontextualizing sense that Malcolm describes. Does photography have to be transformative in order to be artful? No, it doesn’t. Lowy’s striking “Latham Smith” portrait is proof of that. It doesn’t transform reality; rather, it precisely and vividly quotes from it. For me, the art of photography is, in Berger’s words, “the art of quotation.”

February 26, 2018 Issue

In this week’s issue, in a piece called “Ocular Proof,” a review of A. J. Finn’s thriller The Woman in the Window, Joyce Carol Oates likens the mystery novel to a Shakespearean tragedy or sonnet. She says, “If the mystery genre does not abide much reality, it should be recalled that no Shakespearean tragedy or sonnet—no work of art in which the constraints of form are exacting—is likely to withstand the bracing winds of common sense.”

Oates has made this comparison before. In her “Earthly Delights” (The New Yorker, February 5, 2001), a review of Michael Connelly’s crime novel A Darkness More Than Night, she writes,

The most talented of crime writers, like Michael Connelly, work with genre formula as poets work with “fixed” yet malleable forms like sonnets and sestinas; they affix their signatures to the archetype. It’s an art of scrupulous realism conjoined with the abiding fantasy of a resolution in which the terrifying mysteries of mankind’s inhumanity to man, suffering, dying, death are explained and dispelled.

It’s an interesting analogy. I don’t have much basis for questioning it. The only crime novels I’ve read are George V. Higgins’ three early works, The Friends of Eddy Coyle (1970), The Diggers Game (1973), and Cogan’s Trade (1974) – all superb. They aren’t formulaic. And there’s no “abiding fantasy of a resolution” in them. They’re among the grittiest, most realistic novels I’ve ever read. I’m not sure Oates’ “sonnets and sestinas” comparison applies to them.

John McPhee's New Bear Piece - "Direct Eye Contact"

Yesterday, visiting newyorker.com, I was delighted to find a new piece by my all-time favorite New Yorker writer – John McPhee. Called “Direct Eye Contact,” it appears in the magazine’s March 5, 2018, issue with the tantalizing tagline, “The most sophisticated, most urban, most reproductively fruitful of bears.” Ah, a bear piece – one of McPhee’s great specialties (see my post “Bears, Bears, Bears”). I wanted to read it immediately. But I managed to resist, opting to wait for the print version. As soon as it arrives, I’ll devour it faster than a bear eats a honeycomb, and post my response here.  

Credit: The above artwork, by Tamara Shopsin, appears on newyorker.com as an illustration for John McPhee’s “Direct Eye Contact.” 

On Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose”

Francisco de Zurbarán, Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633) 

Peter Schjeldahl, in his absorbing “Brotherhood,” in this week’s issue, reviews The Frick Collection’s Francisco de Zurbarán exhibition, Jacob and his Twelve Sons – thirteen portraits depicting life-size figures from the Old Testament. He notes that in one of the portraits, Asher (1640-45), the subject is “carrying a basket of bread loaves that display Zurbarán’s subtle mastery of still-life.” I smiled when I read that, recalling Schjeldahl’s superb “Bearing Fruit” (The New Yorker, April 6, 2009), in which he beautifully describes Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633):

“Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” (1633), the artist’s only signed and dated still-life, amounts to three pictures, side by side, in one: a silver plate holding four citrons (baggy, nubbly cousins of lemons); several oranges with stems, leaves, and blossoms, heaped in a basket; and a two-handled gray ceramic cup, apparently filled with water, on another silver plate, with a pale-pink rose facing it from the plate’s lip. The objects rest on an oxblood-brown table against a pitch-black ground; sunlight rakes them from the left. Scholars speculate that they allegorize virtues of the Virgin Mary (citrons for faithfulness, water for purity, and so on—allegory bores me). Certainly, there is a sense of conceptual rigor in the work’s rebuslike presentation, which invests ordinary comestibles on a piece of domestic furniture with the gravitas of a sacrificial altar. I was overwhelmed when I saw the citrons in the picture, many years ago, at the Simon, in Pasadena, California (inch for inch, the finest collection of European paintings west of the Mississippi). Ever since, they have served me as a touchstone of painterly potency. I was pleased to discover, at the Frick, that my mental image of them had been close to photographic. No nuance of the dusky russet shadows and tiny green inflections, in the fruit’s soprano yellow, surprised me. But the other objects registered with a jolt: I didn’t remember any oranges, basket, cup, or rose. My recollection had amputated two-thirds of a tour de force.

That passage is wonderfully memorable. The moment I read it, Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose became a “touchstone of painterly potency” for me, too.

February 12 & 19, 2018 Issue

David Grann’s “The White Darkness,” in this week’s issue, is a riveting account of Henry Worsley’s extraordinary solo attempt to achieve what his hero, Ernest Shackleton, failed to do a century earlier: trek on foot from one side of Antarctica to the other, a journey of more than a thousand miles, passing through the south pole, traversing “what is arguably the most brutal environment in the world.” The key word is “solo.” Grann says,

And, whereas Shackleton had been part of a large expedition, Worsley, who was fifty-five, was crossing alone and unsupported: no food caches had been deposited along the route to help him forestall starvation, and he had to haul all his provisions on a sled, without the assistance of dogs or a sail. Nobody had attempted this feat before.

Grann’s piece is an impressive reconstruction of Worsley’s venture, based mainly on Worsley’s diary and his audio broadcasts (via satellite phone). It puts us squarely there with Worsley on the ice (“It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked”), slogging through blizzards (“Trudging uphill, with his head bowed against a fusillade of ice pellets, he moved at less than a mile per hour”), engulfed in obliterating whiteouts (“At times, he could not even discern the tips of his skis through the murk, which, he wrote, was as ‘thick as clotted cream’ ”). Once, in the poor visibility, he nearly falls into a crevasse (“He felt himself slipping into the hole, which was widening around him. He grabbed the edge and clung to it, dangling over an abyss, before he hauled himself up”). Another day, he blindly skis over a ridge:

His head and back and legs slammed against the ice. The sled flipped over twice, dragging him for twenty yards. He lay splattered on the ice, cursing. When he got to his feet, he nervously checked his fuel cannisters. One crack and he would be doomed, but there were none, and, conscious of time slipping away, he untangled his harness and set off again.

The brutal journey takes its toll. Early January, Worsley climbs the Titan Dome. Grann describes his condition:

Yet, as he climbed the Titan Dome, he found the ascent to be “a killer.” He had lost more than forty pounds, and his unwashed clothing hung on him heavily. “Still very weak—legs are stick thin and arms puny,” he noted in his diary. His eyes had sunk into shaded hollows. His fingers were becoming numb. His Achilles tendons were swollen. His hips were battered and scraped from the constantly jerking harness. He had broken his front tooth biting into a frozen protein bar, and told A.L.E. that he looked like a pirate. He was dizzy from the altitude, and he had bleeding hemorrhoids.

Soon afterwards he’s afflicted by stomach pain so bad he starts taking painkillers. Grann writes,

On January 19th, after man-hauling through another storm, Worsley was too tired to give a broadcast, and with his frozen hand he scribbled only a few words in his diary, the writing almost illegible: “Very desperate . . . slipping away . . . stomach . . . took painkillers.” He was incontinent, and repeatedly had to venture outside to squat in the freezing cold. His body seemed to be eating itself.

Keep going or call it quits? What would Shacks do? Never give up, is Worsley’s first thought. And here, at this pivotal moment, is where Grann writes his most inspired passage, shifting into free indirect style, inhabiting Worsley’s perspective:

But maybe that was wrong. Hadn’t Shackleton survived because he had realized that, at a certain point, he had no more moves and turned back? Unlike Scott and others who went to a polar grave, Shackleton reckoned with his own limitations and those of his men. He understood that not everything, least of all the Antarctic, can be conquered. And that within defeat there can still be triumph—the triumph of survival itself.

On January 22, 2016, after seventy-one days and a trek of nearly eight hundred nautical miles, Worsley calls for help. Two days later, in a Punta Arenas hospital, he dies of peritonitis.

“The White Darkness” is an unforgettable story of courage and endurance. Grann tells it magnificently.