Janet Malcolm and the Meaning of "Gesamkunstpatchwork"

Janet Malcolm (Illustration by Jillian Tamaki)

Janet Malcolm’s “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” (The New Yorker, October 20 & 27, 1986) is an idiosyncratic profile of Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy. I recently reread it after I saw it listed in Erin Overbey’s “Sunday Reading: A Cultural Review of the Eighties (newyorker.com, March 22, 2020). Of its many oddities – its preoccupation with interior décor, its oblique approach to its subject (Sischy doesn’t appear until about 7000 words in), its distaste for the art world in which Sischy circulates – the most piquant for me is the bravura analytical move at the end, revealing and attempting to resolve Malcolm’s “disappointment” with her subject.

Oh yes, and another oddity – that strange, ugly word “Gesamkunstpatchwork” in what is perhaps the piece’s most striking sentence:

She is the Ariel of the art world, darting hither and yon, seeming to alight everywhere at once, causing peculiar things to happen, seeing connections that others cannot see, and working as if under orders from some Prospero of postmodernism, for whose Gesamtkunstpatchwork of end-of-the-century consciousness she is diligently gathering material from every corner of the globe as well as from every cranny of the East Village. 

It’s a play on “Gesamkunstwerk,” which the dictionary defines as “total artwork, where painting, sculpture, and architecture are combined together in a single, unified, and harmonious ensemble.” Malcolm’s variation on it is a sarcastic pun, another indication of her distaste for the flashy, grungy art of eighties New York.

April 27, 2020 Issue

I love bread pudding. Hannah Goldfield, in her “Tables For Two: Junzi Kitchen’s Distance Dining,” in this week’s issue, describes bread pudding “soaked in coconut cream and studded with golden raisins.” Mmm, I’ll have some of that.

Francis Luta's "Alone Across the Arctic"

I just finished watching Francis Luta’s Alone Across the Arctic on iTunes. It’s a documentary companion to Adam Shoalts’ terrific Beyond the Trees (2019). It’s not nearly as absorbing (or as detailed) as the book, but it gives a taste of Shoalts’ amazing 2017 trans-Arctic canoe journey. It’s certainly a tremendous testament to Shoalts’ skill, determination, and endurance. And it’s a great ad for that tough, gorgeous red Nova Craft canoe that he paddled, poled, sailed, and dragged over nearly four thousand kilometres, from his starting point on the mighty Mackenzie River to his endpoint at Baker Lake. I enjoyed the film immensely. Someday I’ll post my review of the book. It’s one of my favourite travelogues.

April 20, 2020 Issue

My favourite sentence in this week’s issue is Hannah Goldfield’s “I ate my paneer makhani with a thrillingly bitter lime pickle; with yellow shahi rice, steamed in chicken stock and turmeric; with gobi ka keema, a mix of minced cauliflower and bell peppers cooked down until it’s sweet and pastelike, punctuated by the gentle crunch of freshly ground whole spices” (“Tables For Two: Jalsa Grill & Gravy”). That “thrillingly bitter” is inspired.

The online version of Goldfield’s piece is illustrated by four striking Kyoko Hamada photos, including this eye-catcher:

Best of the Decade: #8 Joseph Mitchell's "Street Life"

Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell)

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #8 pick – Joseph Mitchell’s wonderful “Street Life” (February 11 & 18, 2013).

This piece is Mitchell’s paean to walking as a way of becoming part of the city. He says, “What I really like to do is wander aimlessly in the city.” What makes the piece memorable for me are its many long, flowing sentences – almost stream-of-consciousness-like. This one, for example:

At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets, some well known and some obscure, from one end of the city to the other—on the upper part of Webster Avenue, up in the upper Bronx, for example, which has a history as a dumping-out place for underworld figures who have been taken for a ride, and which I go to every now and then because I sometimes find a weed or a wildflower or a moss or a fern or a vine that is new to me growing along its edges or in the cracks in its pavements, and also because there are pleasant views of the Bronx River and of the Central and the New Haven railroad tracks on one side of it and pleasant views of Woodlawn Cemetery on the other side of it, or on North Moore Street, down on the lower West Side of Manhattan, which used to be lined with spice warehouses and spice-grinding mills and still has enough of them left on it to make it the most aromatic street in the city (on ordinary days, it is so aromatic it is mildly and tantalizingly and elusively exciting; on windy days, particularly on warm, damp, windy days, it is so aromatic it is exhilarating), or on Birmingham Street, which is a tunnel-like alley that runs for one block alongside the Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge and is used by bums of the kind that Bellevue psychiatrists call loner winos as a place in which to sit in comparative seclusion and drink and doze and by drug addicts and drug pushers as a place in which to come into contact with each other and by old-timers in the neighborhood as a shortcut between Henry Street and the streets to the south, or on Emmons Avenue, which is the principal street of Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, and along one side of which the party boats and charter boats and bait boats of the Sheepshead Bay fishing fleet tie up, or on Beach 116th Street, which, although only two blocks long, is the principal street of Rockaway Park, in Queens, and from one end of which there is a stirring view of the ocean and from the other end of which there is a stirring view of Jamaica Bay, or on Bloomingdale Road, which is the principal street of a quiet old settlement of Negroes called Sandy Ground down in the rural part of Staten Island, the southernmost part of the city.

And this:

I never get tired of gazing from the back seats of buses at the stone eagles and the stone owls and the stone dolphins and the stone lions’ heads and the stone bulls’ heads and the stone rams’ heads and the stone urns and the stone tassels and the stone laurel wreaths and the stone scallop shells and the cast-iron stars and the cast-iron rosettes and the cast-iron medallions and the clusters of cast-iron acanthus leaves bolted to the capitals of cast-iron Corinthian columns and the festoons of cast-iron flowers and the swags of cast-iron fruit and the zinc brackets in the shape of oak leaves propping up the zinc cornices of brownstone houses and the scroll-sawed bargeboards framing the dormers of decaying old mansard-roofed mansions and the terra-cotta cherubs and nymphs and satyrs and sibyls and sphinxes and Atlases and Dianas and Medusas serving as keystones in arches over the doorways and windows of tenement houses.

Mitchell’s depth of observation in this piece is astonishing. His love of lists – a sure sign of true interest in real reality – is everywhere present. Consider this beauty:

Pretty soon my obsessive curiosity began to dominate me, and I went to a succession of Masses in St. Patrick’s that encompassed seven Sundays, the Easter-cycle Masses; and then I went to Masses in some representative Eastern Catholic churches that are in union with Rome, Syrian-rite churches and Byzantine-rite churches and Armenian-rite churches; and then I went to Masses or Liturgies in some Orthodox churches, Greek Orthodox churches and Russian Orthodox churches and Carpatho-Russian Orthodox churches and Ukrainian Orthodox churches and Albanian Orthodox churches and Bulgarian Orthodox churches and Serbian Orthodox churches and Romanian Orthodox churches; and then I went to Liturgies in two so-called Old Catholic churches, one that I found in a Polish neighborhood in Manhattan and another that I found in a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn. 

Helen Vendler says, “Finally, the only test of a poem is that it be unforgettable.” The same applies to essays, in my opinion. Joseph Mitchell’s splendid “Street Life” easily passes the test.  

The New Yorker's Extraordinary "April 15, 2020"

Joan Wong's illustration for "April 15, 2020"

I see on newyorker.com that the digital edition of the May 4, 2020, issue is out, and that it contains an extraordinary reporting piece called “April 15, 2020: A Coronavirus Chronicle,” written by twenty-five New Yorker writers and illustrated by the work of at least seventeen photographers. This is an epic, unprecedented piece that fills the entirety of the magazine. As soon as the print edition arrives, I’ll plunge in. I can hardly wait.

Gabrielle Hamilton on the Closing of Prune

Gabrielle Hamilton (Photo by Phillip Montgomery)

Even though I’ve never met Gabrielle Hamilton, nor dined at her restaurant Prune, I feel I know her. I know her through her marvelous “The Lamb Roast” – one of my favorite New Yorker “Personal History” pieces. Hamilton is an excellent writer. When her “My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?” appeared in The New York Times Magazine yesterday, I immediately sat down and read it. It’s a moving, frustrated, worried, reflective response to the coronavirus-mandated closing of Prune. The romance of owning and operating a small Manhattan bistro is still there:

Even after seven nights a week for two decades, I am still stopped in my tracks every time my bartenders snap those metal lids onto the cocktail shakers and start rattling the ice like maracas. I still close my eyes for a second, taking a deep inhale, every time the salted pistachios are set afire with raki, sending their anise scent through the dining room. I still thrill when the four-top at Table 9 are talking to one another so contentedly that they don’t notice they are the last diners, lingering in the cocoon of the wine and the few shards of dark chocolate we’ve put down with their check.

But the reality behind that romance is stark:

There used to be enough extra money every year that I could close for 10 days in July to repaint and retile and rewire, but it has become increasingly impossible to leave even a few days of revenue on the table or to justify the expense of hiring a professional cleaning service for this deep clean that I am perfectly capable of doing myself, so I stayed late and did it after service. The sludge of egg yolk seeped through the coverall, through my clothes to my skin, matted my hair and speckled my goggles as my shock registered: It has always been hard, but when did it get this hard?

Will Prune survive? The situation is fragile, the answer unclear. Hamilton says,

For restaurants, coronavirus-mandated closures are like the oral surgery or appendectomy you suddenly face while you are uninsured. These closures will take out the weakest and the most vulnerable. But exactly who among us are the weakest and most vulnerable is not obvious.

Of the many writers’ responses to the pandemic that I’ve read over the past six weeks or so, Hamilton’s piece on the closing of Prune is one of the most memorable.

Interesting Emendations: Lawrence Joseph's "A Fable"

Lawrence Joseph’s "A Fable" is one of my favorite New Yorker poems of the last decade. I remember reading it when it originally appeared in the January 25, 2016 issue. Like a great jazz solo heard for the first time – Coleman Hawkins’ “The Man I Love,” say, or Gerry Mulligan’s “Lonely Town” – it blew me away. It’s like a gorgeous double helix – a strand of city beauty (“a bench in the shadows / on a pier in the Hudson”) wrapped around a strand of abstract dystopia (“the flow of data / since the attacks has surged”). And the colors – “great bronze doors of Trinity Church,” “a red / tugboat pushes a red-and-gold barge / into the narrows” – are exquisite, right down to that final inspired, delightful touch (“Gauguin / puts a final green on the canvas // of the Self-Portrait with Yellow / Christ, to complicate the idea”), so surprising that it makes me smile every time I read it.

Interestingly, the “A Fable” included in Joseph’s 2017 collection So Where Are We? (2017) subtly differs from the version that appeared in The New Yorker. For example, the comma after “now” in the lovely “The café / on Cornelia Street, the music, / now, whose voice might that be?” is deleted from the later version, slightly changing its rhythm and meaning. In fact, a total of seven commas are deleted from the second version. I like it slightly better without all the commas.

Another notable change is the dropping of “the” from “The future, the past, cosmogonies, // the void, are in whose vision?” The line now reads, “Future, past, cosmogonies, // the void, are in whose vision?”

I find such changes fascinating – a glimpse into Joseph’s compositional process. To my eye (and ear), the rhythm of the So Where Are We? version is a shade more free-flowing. Both versions are brilliant!

April 13, 2020 Issue

There’s an abundance of great writing in this week’s issue. Samples:

The Navy hospital ship Comfort went under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge at about nine-twenty last Monday morning. Trucks on the bridge blew long blasts of welcome on their horns. The ship appeared suddenly in the overcast day as if out of nowhere; the medical-clinic white of her hull and superstructure blended in with the sea and the sky. In Von Briesen Park, on Staten Island, ship-watchers had set up cameras on tripods six feet or more apart on a bluff overlooking the Narrows. The MarineTraffic mobile app told them what time the ship would arrive. Four McAllister tugboats awaited the Comfort just north of the bridge, their bows pointing toward her. As she passed, they swung around and escorted her in. Another tug, carrying film crews, veered among a wider entourage of police and Coast Guard boats, and private craft practicing police-enforced nautical distancing, all under a small, hovering flock of helicopters. [“Ian Frazier, “Bringing in the Comfort”]

We moved on, put the car in Park, and scrutinized the kit’s simple instructions as if our lives depended on them. My wife swabbed her mouth and sealed the test stick in a tube—not as simple as it sounds: the stick was too long and had to be broken on the edge of the tube, but it was yoga-ishly bendy rather than brittle—before sealing the tube in a plastic bag, which she then sealed in a bubble-wrap bag before returning it to the box. We crawled forward, broke the seal on the window, and tossed the box into a blue bin indicated by a final hazmat-suited sentinel, who waved us on. We drove out past the huge and patient cemetery. All the time in the world, it seemed, resided there. The sky was its usual expectant blue. [Geoff Dyer, “Home Alone Together”]

By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands. [Bill Buford, “Good Bread”]

Later that afternoon, I think, although it might have been the next day, I walked with my wife down Flatbush Avenue, toward her mom’s house, where we’d pick up some packages and wave hello. It’s normally a twenty-five-­minute walk, but now it seemed interminable. Walking outside these days requires too much geometry, too much spatial intel­ligence. Older men, apparently untroubled by the dictates of distancing, were seated, as they always are, at folding tables and on the hoods of sedans. They played cards, made jokes, drank from Styrofoam cups, blasted music. I toggled swiftly between annoyance at how they clogged the sidewalk, concern for their health, and then—probably foremost—envy at what looked like a good time. We took sweeping, parabolic detours around their tight huddles, sometimes slipping between parked cars and walking in the street. One persistent, petty worry is how much of a dweeb I feel like when I’m thinking about infectious disease. [Vinson Cunningham, “Eightyish”]

When I rode my bike down Regent Street’s dramatic curve on the afternoon of Sunday, March 22nd, all the stores were shuttered. Apart from a couple of guys in track pants eying the Rolex display at Mappin & Webb, the upscale jewelry store, the sidewalks were empty. We’re accustomed to reach for the phrase “post-apocalyptic” to describe an urban landscape devoid of life, and the Christian preacher with the microphone and the amp who was haranguing an almost deserted Piccadilly Circus added to the dystopian atmosphere. [Rebecca Mead, “Avenue of Superfluities”]

This week’s New Yorker also contains several wonderful illustrations, including this one by Leo Espinosa for Bill Buford’s “Good Bread”:

Robert Macfarlane's "The Crapola Sublime"

Photo by Stephen Shore, from Robert Macfarlane's "The Crapola Sublime"

One of the most absorbing reviews I’ve read recently is Robert Macfarlane’s “The Crapola Sublime” (The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2020), a consideration of Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s Traces of J. B. Jackson: The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America. Until I read this piece, I’d never heard of Jackson. According to Macfarlane he was a “pioneering American cultural geographer.” He calls Jackson “an unorthodox observer, whose ways of seeing ran against the grain of midcentury American landscape conventions, with their attachments to the picturesque and the sublime.” He says Jackson was “nerdily fascinated by that degraded phylum of Americana that the artist Philip Guston once referred to as 'crapola': junkshops, edgelands, strip malls, and trailer parks.” He says,

There is a tenderness to Jackson’s engagement with “crapola.” By studying what he called “the commonplace landscape,” he sought to invest mundane places of work and dwelling with a value at least comparable to venerated landscape sites such as Yellowstone or Yosemite.

All of which is catnip to me. I’m drawn to such places and to the artists and writers who celebrate them (e.g., Joseph Mitchell, Ian Frazier, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Hopper, Agnès Varda, Garry Winogrand). 

In his piece, Macfarlane mentions three essay collections by Jackson: Landscapes (1970), The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (1980), and A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (1994). I think I’ll try to find at least one of them, and check it out.  

Verlyn Klinkenborg and the Art of Description

Husqvarna Viking Automatic Type 21E

Verlyn Klinkenborg is a machinery rhapsodist extraordinaire. Recall his brilliant description of a 1979 International Harvester 230 windrower in his great Making Hay (1986). This week, in NYR Daily’s excellent “Pandemic Journal” series, he posted a piece on making face masks that contains a wonderful description of a Husqvarna Viking 21A sewing machine: 

The Husqvarna Viking 21a is a sleek, tubular machine the color of the 1950s—a pale, aqueous turquoise. I press the foot pedal and the electric motor begins to hum, and then the needle moves up and down. I know, from having taken it apart, how elaborate the inner workings of this machine are—belts, cogs, shafts, and gears shuttling round and round and back and forth in perfect synchrony. It is really a world of its own, a miniature factory. The internal light gleams down upon the arm, the feed dogs pull the cloth along, upper and lower threads intertwine in a stitch, and there is the harmonious sound of elaborate integration. At low speeds, the 21a sounds a little like a railroad engine moving slowly over the tracks. At higher speeds, it begins to whir. It does exactly what it was engineered to do, and it does it brilliantly.

That “The internal light gleams down upon the arm, the feed dogs pull the cloth along, upper and lower threads intertwine in a stitch, and there is the harmonious sound of elaborate integration” is inspired. The whole passage is inspired – a superb example of the art of description. 

CBC Gem's Excellent "High Arctic Haulers"

I have a new hero – Captain Michel Duplain, commander of the massive sealift ship Sedna Desgagnés, in the superb documentary series High Arctic Haulers, currently streaming on CBC Gem. Duplain and his crew battle ice bergs, growlers, treacherous tides, storms, high winds, pounding waves, and punishing cold to deliver their vital cargo to remote Arctic communities. Of its many pleasures – the action of ships, icebreakers, cranes, tugs, barges, loaders; the resilient, resourceful character of the crew members; the magnificent Arctic scenery – the most piquant for me are the vivid glimpses of life in Kangirsuk, Chesterfield Inlet, Igloolik, Hall Beach, Grise Fiord, and the other communities where the ships of the Desgagnés fleet make their stops. High Arctic Haulers put me squarely there – on the ships, in the communities. I enjoyed it immensely.