April 23, 2018 Issue

Wow! Here’s a New Yorker (the “Travel & Food Issue”) that deserves not a review but a party. Four of the magazine’s best writers are present – Ian Frazier, Dan Chiasson, Nick Paumgarten, and Burkhard Bilger. 

Ian Frazier’s “The Maraschino Mogul” is a fascinating story about red bees, a cherry factory owner named Arthur Mondella, and a secret hydroponic marijuana farm in the cherry factory’s basement. Frazier tells the story masterfully, reporting one intriguing fact after another, visiting the factory (“The smell of maraschino cherries, not unpleasant but eye-wateringly strong, fills the factory, and the floors remain sticky even though they’re constantly mopped”), talking with Mondella’s daughters (“ ‘My father was just a very, very smart man,’ Dominique told me. ‘He wasn’t an engineer, he wasn’t a mechanic, but the guys on the floor said that he could fix any machine himself’ ”), attending a factory-employee barbecue (“Most of the workmen wore sleeveless shirts, and all were red-spattered and generally a sunburn shade of maraschino red”). This piece has so many interesting elements – red bees, cherry factory, Italian family, police raid, suicide, lawsuits. It would make a terrific movie! I devoured it.

Dan Chiasson’s “Anybody There?” is a “Critic at Large” piece on Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Chiasson says, “The power of the movie has always been unusually bound up with the story of how it was made.” He refers to Michael Benson’s new book, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece. Is 2001 a masterpiece? I’m not sure. It’s a little too cosmic for me. I remember its long psychedelic Jupiter passage. In one of his best lines, Chiasson likens it to “travelling through a birth canal in which someone has thrown a rave.” And I remember HAL, the rogue computer. Chiasson writes, 

HAL is a child, around nine years old, as he tells Dave at the moment he senses he’s finished. He’s precocious, indulged, needy, and vulnerable; more human than his human overseers, with their stilted, near robotic delivery. The dying HAL singing “Daisy,” the tune his teacher taught him, is a sentimental trope out of Victorian fiction, more Little Nell than little green man.

My favourite sentence in “Anybody There?” is this beauty:

On Giphy, you can find many iconic images from “2001” looping endlessly in seconds-long increments—a jarring compression that couldn’t be more at odds with the languid eternity Kubrick sought to capture. 

Nick Paumgarten’s “Water and the Wall” tells about a four-day canoe trip (“a commercial guided float trip, cosseted and catered”) he recently took through Boquillas Canyon, one of the Rio Grande River’s most protected sections. The trip has a political purpose – “to begin to articulate, in an informal but pertinent setting, a response to Trump’s wall.” But the parts I relish most are the nature descriptions. For example:

And here we were. The walls closed in—steep, streaked limestone cliffs with a terra-cotta tinge, pocked high and low with dark openings big and small, made by waterfalls during an era, post-Ice Age, when these precincts were lush. The water, clearer here, took on the colors of the cliffs, and of the salt cedars that crowded the shore. The air had a prehistoric hush, except for the dip of paddles in the current and the tuneful descending song of the canyon wren.

A stunning George Steinmetz photo of the Rio Grande enhances the text. (Several more of Steinmetz’s shots are featured in the newyorker.com version of the piece.) If you love river writing, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Nick Paumgarten’s “Water and the Wall.”

Burkard Bilger’s “Bean Freaks” is about Mexican heirloom beans. It profiles Steve Sando, founder of Rancho Gordo, the U.S.’s largest retailer of heirloom beans. Bilger accompanies Sando on a trip to Mexico in search of Flor de Durazno, the Flower of the Peach, “a dainty, pinkish-brown bean of uncommon taste and velvety texture.” 

Bilger is an artful describer. At an outdoor market in in the town of Ixmiquilpan, he notes, “It was a Thursday morning in May, and the stalls were full of women gossiping and picking through produce: corn fungus and cactus paddles, purslane and pickling lime, agave buds and papalo leaf that smelled of mint and gasoline.” He describes the Vallarta bean as “a greenish-yellow thing with a red-rimmed eye, like a soybean with a hangover.” He says cow’s foot soup has “a deeply funky flavor and a mucilaginous texture that was off-putting at first—it was like sipping a whole cow—then weirdly addictive.” Moro beans are “speckled black and gray, like a starling’s belly.” His combinations of Mexican bean names and Mexican place names are ravishing: “Icatone white beans from the Tarahumara peoples in Chihuahua, or pearl-gray Frijolon de Zimatlán from Oaxaca, or, best of all, the Rosa de Castilla from Michoacán.” 

Bilger is a superb food writer. “Bean Freaks” is one of his best. 

So there you have it: maraschino cherries, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Rio Grande River, heirloom beans – just some of the ingredients in this year’s excellent “Travel & Food Issue.” I enjoyed it immensely. 

April 16, 2018 Issue

For me, the most absorbing piece in this week’s issue is James Wood’s “Long Road Ahead,” a review of Walter Kempowski’s novel All for Nothing. To say that I’m a fan of Wood’s criticism is an understatement. I’m crazy about it. Of the seven hundred and thirty-six posts I’ve written for this blog, one hundred are tagged with his name, more than any other writer. The next closest is Ian Frazier, with eighty-nine. Wood is a formalist; he analyzes style. That’s what I like most about his work. That he prefers fiction to fact is an annoyance I’ve learned to live with. Many of his critical points are applicable to fiction and nonfiction alike (e.g., his theory of detail). In “Long Road Ahead,” he provides an interesting variation on his notion of “free indirect speech”:

One reason that Kempowski’s interrogative prose has a strange air of detachment is that the words have indeed detached themselves from the characters. Two people bend over the map, each with different anxieties, but who is thinking these thoughts about the Russians? Hirsch, Katharina, Kempowski, or all three? Most of “All for Nothing” is written in free indirect discourse, which is to say that the novelist’s prose closely identifies itself with the perspective and the language of a particular character. But here the questions appear to be voiced by a chorus. The effect is a kind of uncertain omniscience, which allows the novelist not only to move easily among his characters but to blend their thoughts, when need be, into a collective anxiety. It’s a modern epic style. 

Wood has written about free indirect speech before: see, for example, his great How Fiction Works (2008). And I’ve found examples of it in fact pieces (see my post on Lizzie Widdicombe’s “Happy Together,” The New Yorker, May 16, 2016). But in the above-quoted passage, he identifies a new form of it – free indirect speech “voiced by a chorus.” I can’t think of a nonfiction example of it. But from now on, I’ll definitely be watching for it.   

April 9, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John Seabrook’s “Six Skittles,” a fascinating personal account of what it’s like to be the victim of a black-ice accident. Seabrook puts us squarely there behind the wheel with him (and his nine-year-old daughter, Rose, in the backseat), as he loses control of both steering and brakes, and becomes “the passenger in a two-ton object now driven by the physics of inertia and friction, with a front-row seat to your own demise.”

Seabrook is very good on the science of what happened, describing the type of black ice he encountered (“Mine was garden-variety black ice. It formed the same way that the clear ice on my windshield formed. Even at higher elevations, where raindrops could be five degrees below freezing, they don’t crystallize into sleet or snow, which would be less slippery; instead, they remain in a liquid, ‘supercooled’ state, until they ‘nucleate’—become ice—on striking anything hard, such as the road surface or a car”), and his heightened awareness as his vehicle spun and left the road (“Neuroscience has a pretty good explanation for what happened in my head during those several seconds. A close encounter with extreme danger led to abnormal neuro-electric activity in the limbic system and temporal lobes of my brain, which sent signals to my adrenal medulla, located on top of the kidneys, and told them to secrete adrenaline”). 

He’s even better when he describes the dynamics of the experience itself:

We were now sliding backward at about fifty-five miles per hour, while also drifting slightly east, because that was the last steering move I had made before losing control. I studied the vectors as though they’d been drawn in marker on the windshield. It appeared that our present course and speed would carry us across the path of the propane truck before it hit us, and we would slide off the east side of I-91 North, facing south, where there was a width of shoulder, and also, I noted with newly enhanced peripheral vision, a snowy, uphill bank that would absorb the impact on my side of the truck. At this point, about two seconds had passed since I had lost control.

“Six Skittles” is a brilliant mixture of variegated ingredients – black ice, Emily Dickinson, “heuristic trap,” “crystalline array,” Skittles, Ambrose Bierce, Albert Einstein, near-death experience, depersonalization, Buddhism, to name a few. It shows a great journalist writing at the peak of his power, concentrating on his black-ice experience, extracting meaning after meaning, even verging on the cosmic:

The traction system of social life is good at getting us going, and keeping us on the road, but it fails when we hit the figurative black ice—death—as eventually we all do. It may be true, as Buddhism teaches, that only when we calmly accept that everything ends, including our selves—“profound acceptance,” in Heim’s phrase—can we see the miracle of this world for what it really is.

I enjoyed this piece immensely.

Feinstein's Fine Line

Frank Sinatra (Photo by W. Eugene Smith)

Is politics taking over The New Yorker?

I’m not just talking about Trump, although the magazine’s Trump coverage verges on the excessive. I’m talking about sexual politics. This, for example, from a recent “Night Life” note on Michael Feinstein:

Feinstein is going to have to walk a very fine line as he celebrates the sexist, boozing, and crass-as-they-wanted-to-be kings of the Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. It’s fortunate that each was a masterly singer who embraced some of the most durable standards still heard today. [April 2, 2018]

I take it that the line Feinstein has to walk is the separation between the artist and his art. He’s allowed to sing Rodgers’ great The Lady Is A Tramp, a song that Sinatra swung magnificently, as long as he doesn’t say anything that could be construed as admiration for Sinatra’s playboy lifestyle. I’m sure Feinstein is capable of pulling this off. But it strikes me as a shade hypocritical, because Sinatra’s life and music are inseparable. Somewhere in his letters, van Gogh says, “If I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t paint.” The same applies to Sinatra. If he’d lived another way, he wouldn’t have been the singer he was.

April 2, 2018 Issue

For me, the most sheerly pleasurable writing in this week’s issue is the opening paragraph of Anthony Lane’s “Unusual Suspects,” a review of Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane and Aaron Katz’s Gemini. Lane writes,

There is a lovely photograph of James Mason and Eva Marie Saint on the set of “North by Northwest” (1959). They are clad for the auction scene; he wears a pale-gray suit, and her dress is rich in roses. He holds her lightly by the arm, smiling, as she stands behind the camera on which the sequence will be filmed. And what a formidable beast that camera is: as big as a motorbike but far less streamlined, bearing on its broad flank the legend “VistaVision”—the wide-screen format in which Hitchcock also shot “To Catch a Thief” (1955), “The Man who Knew Too Much” (1956), and “Vertigo” (1958). James Wong Howe, a king among cinematographers, used VistaVision on “The Rose Tattoo” (1955), and there’s a portrait of him with a similar camera, which towers above him on its wheeled crane, and which he holds by a cable, as if leading a velociraptor through Jurassic Park. Howe, like Hitchcock, knew that the cumbersome effort was worthwhile, for the result would be a rolling expanse of fine-grained images, filling the audience’s gaze. Such beauty could be summoned by the beast.

That “and there’s a portrait of him with a similar camera, which towers above him on its wheeled crane, and which he holds by a cable, as if leading a velociraptor through Jurassic Park” is brilliant. The whole passage is superb, an ingeniously contrastive way to highlight a distinctive aspect of Soderbergh’s Unsane – his use of an iPhone 7 Plus to film it.

Lane isn’t impressed with Unsane’s iPhone cinematography. He says, “I found it as coarse as canvas, though you have to admire Soderbergh for adding a new vista to his vision.”

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.