August 20, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man,” an extraordinary profile of an extraordinary man – Virgin Galactic’s ace pilot, Mark Stucky. Schmidle puts us squarely there, in the cockpit of SpaceShipTwo, with Stucky and his co-pilot, Dave Mackay, as they fly into space:

Ten seconds into the burn, SpaceShipTwo was supersonic. Stucky began trimming the h-stabs, steadily increasing the vehicle’s pitch until it reached sixty-eight degrees. He and Mackay were travelling at Mach 1.8—about twice as fast as a Tomahawk cruise missile. Outside the vehicle, the light was draining from the sky, turning it a deep, muddy blue.

He describes what Stucky sees:

The Earth’s bright-blue surface filled his porthole. It was a stupendous sight: the outer edge of the atmosphere was dancing with wispy tendrils. The spaceship was now at eighty-four thousand feet—higher than he’d ever been. He could now testify to the awesome power of the “overview effect.”

He shows us Stucky’s poised reaction to an in-flight emergency (Schmidle calls it “a vertiginous surprise”): 

Hurriedly, Stucky attempted to right the ship by blasting thrusters of high-pressure air, which was stored in the wings and was used to orient the vehicle in low-gravity environments. Then he instructed Mackay to unlock and raise the feather. As it went up, the spaceship righted itself, just as it had on Stucky’s harrowing glide flight seven years earlier. The same innovation that had contributed to the 2014 crash was, when properly deployed, a godsend.

That 2014 crash haunts Schmidle’s piece. He describes it magnificently:

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo zoomed off the runway. They flew about a hundred and fifty miles northeast, alongside a craggy mountain range streaked with purple and green mineral deposits. After reaching Death Valley, and still ascending, they looped back toward the release point. Stucky, in mission control, was watching the cockpit video and listening over the radio as Siebold and Alsbury ran through their checklists.

Alsbury: “Seat belts and shoulder harnesses?”

Siebold: “Snug.”

Alsbury: “Rocket burn timer?”

Siebold: “Set and verified.”

Alsbury: “Stick?”

Siebold: “Stick is forward.”

The pilots flooded their masks with oxygen, in case of an emergency. Neither was wearing a pressure suit.

Alsbury armed the release switch, and the spaceship dropped from WhiteKnightTwo. He fired the rocket. “Good light,” Siebold said, his voice reedy from the onset of g-forces. A moment later, following Stucky’s protocol, Alsbury announced their airspeed: Mach 0.8. They were in the transonic zone. Everything was going well.

“Yeehaw!” Siebold cried out.

Then Alsbury did something inexplicable. “Unlocking,” he said. He began reaching for a lever that controlled the locks on the feather.

Stucky hoped that he’d either misheard Alsbury or failed to notice that the spaceship had passed the transonic zone. He checked the Machmeter on the main display screen, and saw that the speed was still below Mach 1. His body seized: without the locks in place, aerodynamic forces would push the feather up, creating a tremendous amount of drag and shredding the spaceship in midair.

He lunged at the call button, intending to scream, “Don’t!”

Siebold grunted in agony. The audio feed stopped, and the video froze mid-frame. An engineer looked up from his console and gave Stucky a searching look.

Stucky said, “They’re gone.”

“Rocket Man” begins and ends with Stucky’s successful piloting of SpaceShipTwo into space. In between, it chronicles his personal history and how he became involved in Virgin Galactic’s amazing quest to make commercial space travel a reality. It brims with fascinating details – the way SpaceShipTwo is “attached like a marsupial to the belly of a mother ship, WhiteKnightTwo”; the labor-intensive construction of SpaceShipTwo’s frame (“you had to bind together sheets of honeycombed carbon by applying resin, cut the sheets into shapes with laser-guided precision, and bake each piece in a Celotex oven”); the technique suggested by Virgin Galactic’s flight doctor for avoiding passing out while experiencing extreme gravitational forces: “‘Pretend like you’re squeezing a walnut down there,’ she said, referring to my glutinal muscles.”

Schmidle's “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011) and “In the Crosshairs” (June 3, 2013) are New Yorker masterpieces. Now he's produced a third - “Rocket Man.” He's become one of the magazine's best writers.

Updike's Exquisite Word Paint (Contra Christine Smallwood)

Christine Smallwood, in her “State of Affairs” (Bookforum, Summer 2018), says of John Updike, “He could describe a barn well enough, but to what end?” If you have to ask that about Updike, chances are you’re not going to appreciate his art. For Updike, things are interesting in themselves. Like Dürer and Vermeer, artists he admired immensely, he describes the physical world in close avid detail: 

Shed needles from the larches had collected in streaks and puddles on the tarpaper and formed rusty ochre drifts along the wooden balustrade and the grooved aluminum base of the sliding glass doors.

The lilac leaves, flourishing, flowerless, had reached the height of Nancy’s window and, heart-shaped, brushed her screen.

Her brown eyes, gazing, each held in miniature the square skylight above them.

Treading lightly upon the rime-whitened grass, ice to his bare soles, he finally located, southward above the barn ridge with its twin scrolled lightning rods, a constellation gigantic and familiar: Orion.

He was sitting on the brittle grass, his feet in their papery slippers stinging. 

He called; she held still in answer, and appeared, closer approached, younger than he had remembered, smoother, more finely made – the silken skin translucent to her blood, the straight-boned nose faintly paler at the bridge, the brown irises warmed by gold and set tilted in the dainty shelving of her lids, quick lenses subtler than clouds, minutely shuttling as she spoke. 

These lines are all from Updike’s Couples (1968), a novel that Smallwood calls smug, pompous, and silly. She doesn’t get Updike’s writing. His art is the art of description. Claudia Roth Pierpont, in her “The Book of Laughter” (The New Yorker, October 7, 2013), calls him “a painter in words.” This seems exactly right.

Andrew O'Hagan's Brilliant "The Tower"

For me, one of this year’s literary highlights is Andrew O’Hagan’s “The Tower” (London Review of Books, June 7, 2018), a massive report on the Grenfell Tower fire that killed seventy-two people. O’Hagan is a superb writer. His The Atlantic Ocean (2013) is one of my favorite essay collections. His The Secret Life (2017) was one of the best books of 2017. His “Imaginary Spaces” (The New Yorker, March 28, 2016) was one of the best New Yorker pieces of 2016 (see here).

“The Tower” has a fascinating dialectical structure, evincing a deep distrust of simplistic black-and-white narrative.

Divided into seven sections, it describes what happened, sketches the lives of some of the victims and survivors, considers various causes of the disaster, meets with activists, attends the memorial service for the victims, covers the rabid finger-pointing, political fallout, and scapegoating of the council that owned the tower – all the while weaving its own compelling narrative around “the complications of truth.” O’Hagan writes,

In an effort to politicise this, activists and media observers, both engaged on a prolonged mission to simplify, speak of the council as if it were the only organisation involved, and speak of the ‘cladding’ as if it were the only issue. Yet, of all the organisations, the council was the only one happy to spend (rather than to make) money. It was the least involved in nuts and bolts decisions about the refurbishment, as we have seen, and all the big decisions came quite appropriately from the TMO, which commissioned the project; from Rydon, the builders; from Artelia UK, the project managers; from Studio E Architects, the principal designers; and IBI Group, which acted as planning consultants. These organisations between them made the tower what it became in the early hours of 14 June, when fire escaped from a kitchen and was funnelled rapidly upwards through the wide cavities and across the unstopped boundaries between the flats, combusting the Celotex insulation which in turn combusted the Reynobond aluminium panels. (The insulation was made by Saint Gobain UK and the panels were made by Arconic.) This pile of names will no doubt irritate the simplifiers during the several years it takes for the inquiry to provide an answer. But their existence supplies us with one answer now: the tower’s vulnerability lay in a network of negligence that was beyond the capacity of any one man, and beyond the failings of any one material. Some truths are just too long to put in a headline.

He says of the media,

And journalism, hour by hour and day by day, showed by its feasting on half-baked items that it had lost the power to treat reality fairly. You saw it everywhere. Channel 4 News, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Sky News, the New York Times: from the middle of that night, they began to turn the fire into the story they wanted it to be. Reality wasn’t good enough, the tragedy wasn’t bad enough, it had to be augmented, it had to be blown up, facts couldn’t be gleaned quickly enough, and stories went without investigation, research, tact or even checking. In a world of perpetual commentary in which everyone and anyone is allowed their own facts, accusation stands as evidence.

O’Hagan’s “The Tower” is one of the most damning indictments of rushing to judgment I’ve ever read. 

"Not Parasitic, But Primary": On the Art of Criticism (Contra Brody and Robbins)

Garry Winogrand, "Gas Pumps, Santa Fe, New Mexico" (1955)

Michael Robbins, in his Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music (2017), says, “Criticism is parasitic literature.” Richard Brody said the same thing a few years ago: “Criticism is a parasitical operation” (“How To Be A Critic,” newyorker.com, August 22, 2012). I can see why they think so: critical writing is a response to other people’s work. The critic appropriates the work of another in a work of his own. But I object to likening this process to that of a parasite. Great critics don’t suck life out of their subjects; they breathe it into them. For me, criticism isn’t parasitic; it’s symbiotic. T. J. Clark analyses Picasso’s The Blue Room as a vision of space (“Space is intimate. The rug heads off abruptly into infinity, but the sheet on the unmade bed laps over it and leaps toward us and asks to be touched”) and I see it with new eyes. James Wood writes, “Saving the dead – that is the paradoxically impossible project of Austerlitz,” thereby providing a key to Sebald’s broody masterpiece. Geoff Dyer reads a Garry Winogrand photo of seemingly nothing (it’s a picture of gas pumps near Santa Fe, New Mexico), noting “the red and white of Coke machine and T-shirt; the Mobil gas pumps and lights; the red-lettered ‘HUNTER’ against the white background of the billboard; and, framed by blue sky, the ‘LISTERINE’ sign in the stripey colours of toothpaste,” and suddenly I’m marvelling at Winogrand’s ingenious eye for colour. I could list dozens of such examples – criticism that is as creative and original and stimulating as the work it examines. Laura Kipnis speaks for me when she says (quoting A. O. Scott), “Criticism is an art in its own right. Wait, not just an art, one that may supersede all other arts! It’s larger and more encompassing – ‘not parasitic, but primary’ ” (“Critical Condition,” Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2016). 

August 6 & 13, 2018 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue I enjoyed most is David Kortava’s “Bar Tab: Mehanata,” a vivid account of what it’s like to don a “vintage Eastern Bloc military overcoat,” step inside a “glass-walled ice cage,” and attempt to knock back six shots of vodka in two minutes. Kortava writes,

After downing four shots each, the financier and his associates egressed the cage, divested themselves of their ideologically laden attire, and stumbled over to some stripper poles, where they permitted themselves to dance, clumsily and with inane delight, to “Celebration,” by Kool & the Gang. Nearby, a graffiti portrait of Karl Marx had no choice but to take in the scene. 

July 30, 2018 Issue

If you enjoy reading ekphrasis, as I do, you’ll surely appreciate Zadie Smith’s “Promiscuous Painting,” in this week’s issue, a consideration of Henry Taylor’s paintings, including his brilliant Cicely and Miles Visit the 
Obamas (2017), which Smith describes as follows:

Yet to speak of this painting as I have—conceptually—is to pass over the difference between thinking with language and thinking in images, and no narrative explanation of the relation between these two pictures is as compelling as the horizontal line that marks the credenza in the photograph and the edge of the White House gardens in the painting, or the verticality of the white man in the photo’s top-right corner—with his squared-off shoulders—and his painterly analogue: a blue flagpole, with its crossbar and absence of flag. Taylor thinks primarily in colors, shapes, and lines—he has a spatial, tonal genius. Form responds to form: the negative space around Cicely and Miles in the photograph suggests the exact proportions of the White House, yet in the transition the abstract sometimes becomes figured, and vice versa, as if the border between these things didn’t matter. A burst of reflected light in the photo decides the height and placement of the windows in the painting, while two round signs at the movie première—one for Coca-Cola, the other for “Orange”—which can have no figurative echo in the painting, turn up anyhow on the White House façade as abstraction: a red sphere and an orange sphere, tracking the walls of what, in reality, now belonged to Trump. Like two suns setting at the same time.

This is very beautiful, and what makes it beautiful is the color, shape, and line that Smith blends into her analysis (e.g., “the horizontal line that marks the credenza in the photograph and the edge of the White House gardens in the painting”; “the verticality of the white man in the photo’s top-right corner—with his squared-off shoulders—and his painterly analogue: a blue flagpole, with its crossbar and absence of flag”; “a red sphere and an orange sphere, tracking the walls of what, in reality, now belonged to Trump”). The whole passage is inspired! I devoured it.

“Promiscuous Painting” is the latest in a trio of recent New Yorker art pieces by Smith. The others are “A Bird of Few Words” (June 19, 2017) and “Through the Portal” (May 7, 2018). I’ve enjoyed them all immensely.  

July 23, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. David S. Allee’s radiant “Naumburg Orchestral Concerts” night shot for “Goings On About Town” is transfixing. And what makes it transfixing is that raccoon sitting in a tree fork, looking at Allee as he takes the picture. Allee is a superb photographer. I admired his “Domino Sugar Factory” series immensely: see Jessie Wender, “Inside the Domino Sugar Factory,” newyorker.com, May 19, 2014.

David S. Allee, "Naumburg Orchestral Concerts" (2018)

2. And let’s give a huzzah for Neima Jahromi’s excellent “Bar Tab: Gilligan’s at Soho Grand,” containing this sparkling line: “On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut.”

  

3. “Talk of the Town” ’s new illustrator, João Fazenda, debuts this week with three images, including a dandy double portrait of Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short. It’s too early to say whether Fazenda is as good as Tom Bachtell. Bachtell is a master. He illustrated “Talk” for over twenty years. I’m going to miss him.

João Fazenda, "Catherine O'Hara and Martin Short" (2018)

4. The passage in Sam Wasson’s Talk story “Yes, And” in which Eugene Levy impersonates a “lugubrious rabbi” and says, “What a place to lose a cow,” made me laugh. The whole piece is terrific. It’s spurred my interest in Wasson’s writing. I think I’ll take a look at his Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (2011).

5. I found David Remnick’s “Left Wing of the Possible” a refreshing change from the magazine’s usual Trump-bashing. Yes, the bastard deserves it. But it’s also important to spotlight politicians who offer a positive alternative to him. That’s what Remnick does in his absorbing piece, profiling twenty-eight-year-old democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, Remnick says, is “almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.” In the Democratic primary, she soundly defeated the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, on a platform of “Medicare for all, a tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.” I like the cut of her jib. I hope she wins.

6. I’ve previously commented on the connection between “journey” and “journalism.” They both share the same sematic root, “jour,” which is French for “day” – a day’s travel, the record of a day’s experience. But the connection is more than just sematic. The best journalism, for me, involves travel – an excursion of some sort. Such a piece is Jiayang Fan’s “Delivering Modernity,” a report on how Chinese tech companies like JD.com are transforming rural China. Fan visits a JD depot in Xinhuang, in the far west of Hunan Province.  She accompanies a JD courier as he makes deliveries to nearby villages (“We got stuck behind a truckload of squealing pigs whose rickety pen threatened to spill them onto our windshield”), visits a restaurant in Xinhuang (“I asked the proprietor, an aproned woman in her forties, if there was a menu, and she nodded, moving to the back of the room, past baskets of unwashed leafy vegetables. She yanked open a refrigerator door to display plastic containers of pig intestines, ears, and other offal. A pig’s head rolled slightly on the bottom shelf”), visits JD headquarters in Beijing (“Outside, in the parking lot, the company tests its fleet of self-driving cars”), talks with JD’s founder and C.E.O., Liu Qiangdong (“Fashion is among the company’s fastest-growing areas, and when Liu extended his hand I glimpsed a watch by Audemars Piguet, which recently partnered with JD to launch its first online boutique”), watches a drone arrive at a JD landing pad (“As it drew closer, the first thing I could make out was a red box under the belly of the drone. A minute later, I saw three spinning propellers, which seemed improbably small for the size of their load, like the wings of a bumblebee”), visits a training center for drone pilots (“The screens displayed animations of quadcopters that looked vaguely drunk as they wove through the sky toward landing pads”), and accompanies a “white-glove courier” on his rounds (“Shang makes his deliveries in a small electric car painted with bursts of JD red”). Drones, squealing pigs, expensive watches, self-driving cars, white-glove couriers – just some of the ingredients of Fan’s absorbing piece. I enjoyed it enormously. 

7. John Lanchester is a brilliant critical writer. I enjoy reading his arguments. In his “Doesn’t Add Up,” he takes on three recent economics books, contending that they “overreach,” i.e., extend their theories further than they usefully go. For example, he says of Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, “There is something thrilling about the intellectual audacity of thinking that you can explain ninety per cent of behavior in a society with one mental tool.” I relish Lanchester’s succinctness (e.g., “Our motives are often not what they seem: true. This explains everything: not true”). “Doesn’t Add Up” shows him in bracingly sharp form. 

Mark Ulriksen - "New Yorker" Cover Artist Extraordinaire

Mark Ulriksen, "Strike Zone" (2017)

Mark Ulriksen has created some of The New Yorker’s greatest covers – where great means bold, beautiful, cool, kinetic, witty, original, color-drenched. San Francisco’s Modernism gallery is currently showing twenty of his paintings and works on paper, including the terrific “Strike Zone,” my choice for 2017’s Best Cover of the Year (see here).  

Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman

Wayne Thiebaud, "Nine Jelly Apples" (1964)

A special shout-out to Johanna Fateman for her “Goings On About Town: Art: Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman” (The New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2018), which begins, “Oil paint lends itself to Thiebaud’s canvases like buttercream to cake, and his works on paper are every bit as delectable.” That’s a great opener, perfectly evoking the thick luscious texture of Thiebaud’s iconic cakes, pies, and ice-cream cones. He’s the creator of at least eight New Yorker “Food Issue” covers, including the superb “Food Bowls” for the September 5, 2005 issue – my choice for the best single New Yorker of the last twenty years. It contains, among other gems, Judith Thurman’s “Night Kitchens,” John Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men.” 

   

Fateman’s note tells of a new exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, titled “Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman,” exploring Thiebaud’s works on paper, from quick sketches to pastels, watercolors, and charcoal drawings. Some of these items are on display at the Morgan’s website, including the deliciously colored “Nine Jelly Apples” (1964) shown above.  

July 9 & 16, 2018 Issue

Four excellent “Talk of the Town” stories in this week’s issue: Nicolas Niarchos’s “Cartography”; Anna Russell’s “Leafy Greens”; Betsy Morais’ “Debrief”; and Lauren Collins’s “Invitation.”

Nicolas Niarchos’s “Cartography” is about a guy named David Goren who’s obsessed with pirate radio stations. Niarchos immediately snares my attention with the sort of found detail I relish: 

With one hand, he tuned an FM dial connected to a directional antenna. With the other, he jotted frequencies onto a notepad advertising Ortho Tri-Cyclen. (“That’s my wife’s,” he said. “She’s a nurse-practitioner.”)

Only certain writers notice stuff like that. It may not be much, just a notepad advertising a contraceptive, but it catches Niarchos’s eye. He must’ve asked Goren about it, or Goren noticed him noticing it – hence Goren’s explanation in parenthesis.

The notepad isn’t mentioned again. Niarchos goes on to describe Goren tuning in various pirate radio stations. We listen in as a Caribbean religious pirate hails a man in Toronto: “ ‘Good evening, Mr. Junior,’ a man’s voice said, addressing a listener. ‘Mr. Junior up there in Toronto, Canada.’ ”

In Anna Russell’s “Leafy Greens,” chef Alex Guarnaschelli visits Farm.One, Manhattan’s largest hydroponic farm, located “deep underground beneath the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary and the Michelin-starred restaurant Atera.” Guided by the farm’s creator, Rob Laing, Guarnaschelli tastes some of the plants – anise hyssop, micro-dill, mizuna, mint flower, bronze-fennel fronds. My favourite passage is a description of her encounter with a row of marigolds:

A row of marigolds caught her eye. “The taste of a marigold is one I deeply associate with my first tomato,” she said. She recalled how her grandmother would plant marigolds next to tomatoes because they keep the bugs away.

Laing was collecting a sample from a top shelf. “We’ve seen more people using it for desserts,” he said. “Like with chocolate, even.”

“Oh, that’s so fucking Swedish,” Guarnaschelli said. 

That last line made me laugh, although it’s hard to say why – maybe the emphasis on “Swedish,” maybe its profane gusto. Whatever the reason, it’s a terrific line. Russell captures it perfectly. She has a great ear. 

In Betsy Morais’ “Debrief,” Eugene Thacker, a philosopher who teaches a course on pessimism, meets up with a few of his former students at a Williamsburg bookstore. Morais writes,

A sign on the front door said, “Come on in,” but the store’s grate was pulled down. “Uh-oh,” said Aaron Newman, who recently completed his master’s degree in liberal studies. It had been raining, and there was still mist in the air. Rachelle Rahmé, another recent graduate, said, “I love this kind of weather.” Soon, the sun peeked out, the shopkeeper arrived, and the group was ushered into a pleasant back yard. Thacker, who is from the Seattle area, told them that he takes comfort in a gloomy sky: “It’s contemplative.”

I like the easy-going atmosphere of this piece. For a bunch of pessimists, Thacker and his group seem almost cheerful. Morais catches this paradoxically positive vibe in her final paragraph:

If pessimism is about futility, what’s the point of writing about it? Thacker’s not sure, but he thinks that there’s something interesting about “undertaking the practice anyway.” He added, “Maybe it means next time around, the only students who get A’s are the ones who don’t turn in a paper.” The alums laughed. Humor can be helpful to pessimists. “I went through a phase of watching a lot of standup comedy,” Thacker said. “I love George Carlin. He takes no political side. Everyone deserves our spite.”

Lauren Collins is the veteran in this quartet, with a number of Talk classics to her credit, including, “Sideline” (June 19, 2017), “Dog’s Dinner” (February 8 & 15, 2016), and “Bird’s-Eye View” (July 6, 2015). Her “Invitation,” in this week’s issue, tells the story of a French count who tracked down descendants of an American army doctor who bivouacked at his family’s estate in 1944. The count’s name is Aymeric de Rougé, “the proprietor of Baronville—a twenty-four-hundred-acre estate, an hour southwest of Paris”; the army doctor’s name is Frank Inserra, who “had been particularly kind to de Rougé’s father, Bertrand.” Inserra died in 1990. The nub of this absorbing piece is a Skype conversation between de Rouge and Inserra’s son, Francis, in Rockville, Maryland, and Inserra's daughter, Donna, in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Collins writes,

On a recent Wednesday, Aymeric de Rougé was at Baronville, where he manages ventures related to the estate, including a line of champagne. He sat in front of a laptop in the dining room, beneath a huge chandelier.

“O.K., I have you blasted through the speakers,” he said to Francis and his sister Donna. De Rougé had invited them to visit Baronville, but for now they were Skyping.

My favourite part of “Invitation” is the conclusion, when de Rouge uses his computer to show Francis and Donna the room he’s in:

Toward the end of the conversation, Donna, tearing up, said that it had made her feel as if her father were a little closer. Then Francis addressed the Count. “I have to tell you,” he said, “I’m looking at your house—”

“ ‘House’ doesn’t seem like the right word,” Donna said.

De Rougé lifted his laptop so that the Inserras could get a better look at the room’s pistachio-colored moldings. Then he turned around so they could see all the way down the gallery—a two-hundred-and-thirty-foot view.

“Oh, my heavens,” Donna said. “Can you imagine what that would’ve been like for Dad?”

It’s an inspired ending to a touching story, which Collins beautifully tells in a mere 933 well-chosen words.

Michelle Dean on Pauline Kael: Not Sharp

Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (2018) contains at least nine questionable statements about Pauline Kael:

1. Dean describes Kael’s writing as “consistently inconsistent, tending to passionate riffs, insisting that the only principle worth defending was pleasure.” This makes Kael sound almost irrational – more expressive than logical. It underrates the “thinking” in her criticism. Kael’s thinking process often took the form of argument. She was an exhilaratingly powerful arguer. Many of her best pieces are arguments. In “Circles and Squares,” she argues against the auteur theory. In “Bonnie and Clyde,” she argues in favor of movie violence. In “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” she argues against “high culture.” In “Raising Kane,” she argues against the widespread view that Citizen Kane is the sole creation of Orson Welles. These pieces are as intellectual in their light as they are passionate in their heat, and they insist on a lot more than just pleasure. 

2. Dean says, “In ‘Trash, Art, and the Movies,’ Kael argues at length for erotics in the place of hermeneutics. As ever, she is interested in reaction, not aesthetics.” I’m not sure what’s being said here. Kael argued for erotics, but not in “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” The movies discussed in that great essay – “Wild in the Streets,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “Petulia,” “The Graduate” – aren’t especially erotic. Kael’s strongest argument for movie eroticism is her brilliant “Tango.” And in that piece, she doesn’t argue for it “in the place of hermeneutics.” If by “hermeneutics,” Dean means interpretation, she’s wrong to say that Kael argued for its replacement. Interpretation was one of her main critical tools. She was a superb interpreter: see, for example, her construal of the dark-and-light contrast in The Godfather (“The contrast is integral to the Catholic background of the characters: innocence versus knowledge – knowledge in this sense being the same as guilt”). And to say that Kael isn’t interested in aesthetics is crazy. No critic was more responsive to the look of a film – it’s light, color, texture, pattern, and design – than she was. Recall her description of the colors in Last Tango in Paris: “The colors in this movie are late-afternoon orange-beige-browns and pink – the pink of flesh drained of blood, corpse pink.” Or how about this inspired bit from her “Movieland – The Bums’ Paradise,” a review of Robert Altman’s The Long Good-Bye: “When Nina van Pallandt thrashes in the ocean at night, her pale-orange butterfly sleeves rising above the surf, the movie becomes a rhapsody on romance and death.” There you have aesthetics and hermeneutics in the same sentence. 

3. Dean says, “Sontag had written that there was a kind of pleasure in analysis, in the taking apart and putting back together of things, something that Kael could never abide.” This misrepresents Kael’s critical approach. She was a phenomenal analyst. She had a vast mental storehouse of movie associations. Her great strength was looking at a movie and noticing subtle echoes of other movies. For example, in “Bonnie and Clyde,” she wrote,

The showpiece sequence, Bonnie’s visit to her mother (which is a bit reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart’s confrontation with his mother, Marjorie Main, in the movie version of “Dead End”), aims for an effect of alienation, but that effect is confused by all the other things attempted in the sequence: the poetic echoes of childhood (which also echo the child sliding down the hill in “Jules and Jim”) and a general attempt to create a frieze from our past—a poetry of poverty. Penn isn’t quite up to it, though he is at least good enough to communicate what he is trying to do, and it is an attempt that one can respect. In 1939, John Ford attempted a similar poetic evocation of the legendary American past in “Young Mr. Lincoln;” this kind of evocation, by getting at how we feel about the past, moves us far more than attempts at historical re-creation. When Ford’s Western evocations fail, they become languorous; when they succeed, they are the West of our dreams, and his Lincoln, the man so humane and so smart that he can outwit the unjust and save the innocent, is the Lincoln of our dreams, as the Depression of “Bonnie and Clyde” is the Depression of our dreams—the nation in a kind of trance, as in a dim memory. In this sense, the effect of blur is justified, is “right.” Our memories have become hazy; this is what the Depression has faded into. But we are too conscious of the technical means used to achieve this blur, of the attempt at poetry. We are aware that the filtered effects already include our responses, and it’s too easy; the lines are good enough so that the stylization wouldn’t have been necessary if the scene had been played right. A simple frozen frame might have been more appropriate.

There’s more analysis packed into that one passage than most critics provide in an entire review. Its intelligence has at least three registers: it notices the poetic effect of Bonnie’s-visit-with-her-mother sequence; it compares that effect with John Ford’s similar “poetic evocation” in Young Mr. Lincoln; and it criticizes the effect for being too stylized. 

4. Dean says, “In fact, for the rest of her life she [Kael] never again wrote anything like “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” eschewing these kinds of broader essays for the most part.” I can’t let this go by without pointing out that, in addition to her weekly New Yorker reviews, Kael wrote at least eight superb essays for the magazine: “Raising Kane,” “Numbing the Audience,” “On the Future of Movies,” “Notes on Heart and Mind,” “The Man From Dream City,” “Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences,” “Fear of Movies,” and “Why Are Movies So Bad?” – all of which came after “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”

5. Dean calls Kael’s “Raising Kane” a “career disaster.” Really? Kael’s great essay stirred controversy. In it, she argued Citizen Kane isn’t the one-man show that many people (including its director, Orson Welles) believe it to be. She was criticized for failing to provide Welles’s viewpoint, particularly on the issue of the authorship of the script, which Kael attributed solely to Herman J. Mankiewicz. But the controversy didn’t hurt her in the least. The New Yorker didn’t fire her. She kept right on writing. Her career continued to rise. Two years after “Raising Kane,” she won a National Book Award for Deeper into Movies. 

6. Dean says, “She [Kael] attributes much of the film’s [Citizen Kane’s] genius not to the much-laureled Welles, but rather to the relatively forgotten screenplay writer, Herman Mankiewicz.” This isn’t true. Kael argued that Mankiewizc was the sole author of the script and the creator of the movie’s central character, the newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane. But she was very clear on who was responsible for the film’s “magic.” She wrote, “Though Mankiewicz provided the basic apparatus for it, that magical exuberance which fused the whole scandalous enterprise was Welles’.” And to underscore the point, she further says, “Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show.”

7. Dean says of Kael’s “Raising Kane,” “Kael was not a reporter or researcher by trade. She didn’t have the kind of systematic mind it required. So there were holes.” This is another of Dean’s condescending remarks on Kael’s intelligence. The only “hole” in “Raising Kane” that Dean reports is Kael’s failure to consult Welles, never mind that his position on the question of who wrote Citizen Kane’s script was well known. As far as he was concerned, the script was his and Mankiewicz’s jointly. Dean uncritically adopts Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Kane Mutiny” as the correct version of the facts, notwithstanding that it’s based almost entirely on Welles’s self-serving testimony. She says, “Bogdanovich landed the attack that truly stuck it to Kael.” A few paragraphs later, she says it again: “It stuck to her.” Is this true? No, not according to Kael’s biographer, Brian Kellow: “ ‘The Kane Mutiny’ did surprisingly little damage to Pauline’s reputation” (Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, 2011). 

8. Regarding Renata Adler’s hatchet job, “The Perils of Pauline,” Dean says, “She [Adler] had clearly declared war on Kael. And she made a decent case.” Adler’s essay reviews Kael’s 1980 collection, When the Lights Go Down, calling it “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” Adler’s technique of “counting the number of words and turning them back on a subject to make them look foolish” impresses Dean. She says, “Against Kael, who had so much copy available to analyze – all of it written in the structure of movie reviews – it was devastating.” But what Dean doesn’t comment on is Adler’s use of exaggeration. For example, Adler says of Kael,

She has, in principle, four things she likes: frissons of horror; physical violence depicted in explicit detail; sex scenes, so long as they have an ingredient of cruelty and involve partners who know each other either casually or under perverse circumstances; and fantasies of invasion by, or subjugation of or by, apes, pods, teens, bodysnatchers, and extraterrestrials. Whether or not one shares these predilections—and whether they are in fact more than four, or only one—they do not really lend themselves to critical discussion. It turns out, however, that Ms. Kael does think of them as critical positions, and regards it as an act of courage, of moral courage, to subscribe to them. The reason one cannot simply dismiss them as de gustibus, or even as harmless aberration, is that they have become inseparable from the repertory of devices of which Ms. Kael’s writing now, almost wall to wall, consists.

I remember my reaction when I first read that: Only four things Kael likes? Come on! Adler’s gross simplification of Kael’s movie taste is easy to refute. Think of Kael’s praise of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (“a beautiful pipe dream of a movie – a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been”). Think of her praise of Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (“You experience the elation of using your mind – of evaluating the material, and perceiving how it’s all developing, while you’re storing it up”). Think of her love of Jean Renoir’s work (“At his greatest, Jean Renoir expresses the beauty in our common humanity – the desires and hopes, the absurdities and follies, that we all, to one degree or another, share”). Think of her love of thirties screwball comedy (“Love became slightly surreal; it became stylized – lovers talked back to each other, and fast”). Kael’s catalogue of movie love is endless, and completely unrelated to Adler’s nasty little list. This is typical of everything Adler’s scabrous essay alleges against Kael. It is, line by line, and without interruption, a grotesque distortion of Kael’s work. David Denby, in his Do the Movies Have a Future? (2012), calls it a “notoriously wrongheaded piece.” Dean’s treatment of it as a “decent case” is a major flaw in her book.

9. Dean says, “Adler’s words about Kael’s work would appear in every obituary when Kael died in 2001.” Well, there’s at least one obituary in which they don’t appear – David Denby’s tribute in the September 17, 2001, New Yorker. Denby says of Kael’s New Yorker writing, “In both abundance and quality, it was a performance very likely without equal in the history of American journalism.” 

July 2, 2018 Issue

What’s it like to undergo a brain scan while being burned, poked, prodded, and electrically shocked? Nicola Twilley’s absorbing “Seeing Pain,” in this week’s issue, tells us, and a marvellous bit of medical technology springs to life:

During the next couple of hours, I had needles repeatedly stuck into my ankle and the fleshy part of my calf. A hot-water bottle applied to my capsaicin patch inflicted the perceptual equivalent of a third-degree burn, after which a cooling pack placed on the same spot brought tear-inducing relief. Each time Tracey and her team prepared to observe a new slice of my brain, the machine beeped, and a small screen in front of my face flashed the word “Ready” in white lettering on a black background. After each assault, I was asked to rate my pain on a scale of 0 to 10.

Pain is notoriously indescribable. Twilley’s piece is about a neuroscientist, Irene Tracey, who uses a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to produce “blob maps.” Twilley writes, “Watching a succession of fiery-orange jellyfish flaring up in my skull, she had seen my pain wax and wane, its outlines shifting as mild discomfort became nearly unbearable agony.”

Twilley’s prose is clear and concrete. I relish her descriptions:

As the cryogenic units responsible for cooling the machine’s superconducting magnet clicked on and off in a syncopated rhythm, the imaging technician warned me that, once he slid me inside, I might feel dizzy, see flashing lights, or experience a metallic taste in my mouth. 

Near the end of her piece, she writes,

Over the phone, Segerdahl talked me through my scans. “That map is actually really difficult to make sense of,” he said. “Your brain is really, really, really lit up—there’s just a lot going on.” But then he showed me a sequence of images that had been processed in such a way that the color coding appeared only in regions that had elevated blood flow while I endured the prolonged pain of the capsaicin cream. The characteristic pattern of pain began to emerge, and Segerdahl recited the names of the active regions like old friends.

That last sentence is inspired. Strange to say, even though it’s about pain, I enjoyed “Seeing Pain” immensely.