Three striking artworks in this week’s issue:
1. Sergiy Maidukov’s portrait of Grace Jones for Sarah Larson’s “Podcast Dept.”
2. Naila Ruechel’s photos for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: EMP To Go."
3. Andrea Ventura’s portrait of Paul Celan for Ruth Franklin’s “A Word, a Corpse.”
Maidukov and Ventura are established New Yorker illustrators. I’ve long admired their work. But Ruechel’s bold, color-drenched photography is new to me. I look forward to seeing more of it in the magazine.
Kiefer’s Pollockian machines - with heart-grabbing yellows, blacks, and browns that affect like tastes, sounds, and smells and their incorporation of photographs that drench the mind in tones of memory – evoke a quasi-religious feeling of delicious melancholy, slightly masochistic abasement before sheer ancientness. [“Our Kiefer,” The Hydrogen Jukebox, 1991]
In this week’s issue, he deploys it again, to marvelous effect:
Gilliam broke ranks with the movement—or extended it—in the mid-sixties, when he began draping vast unstretched paint-stained and -spattered canvases from walls and ceilings, creating undulant environments that drenched the eye in effulgent color. [“Off the Wall,” a review of Sam Gilliam’s “Existed Existing,” at Pace Gallery, New York]
My three favorite travel books are John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1976), Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989), and Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969). But I feel I don’t I know them well enough, especially at the formal level. Over the next year, I propose to reread them – immerse myself in them, if that’s possible. And I’ll blog about it as I go. So a new series then – “3 for the Road,” starting January 1, 2021.
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| Photo by Marcin Gala, from Burkhard Bilger's "In Deep" |
I had fun doing “Best of the Decade.” But skimming the crème de la crème off ten years’ worth of New Yorker reporting pieces wasn’t easy. Narrowing the list to just twelve was agony. I was forced to discard many wonderful articles, including some personal favorites. To atone for my ruthless selection process, I’ve decided to compile a second list – twelve more excellent pieces that could easily have made the first list, if there’d been room. Here are my picks, with a choice quotation from each in brackets:
1. Nick Paumgarten, “Deadhead,” November 26, 2012 (“In the pavilion, the tapers had set up a cityscape of microphone stands, like minarets, and through them there was the sight of Jerry Garcia, fat and hunched, virtually immobile in a haze of his own cigarette smoke”).
2. Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep,” April 21, 2014 (“One passage led back to the beginning of the sump, another to the loop behind them, a third to a dead end they’d explored earlier. That left one unexplored passage. It took them up a short corridor, along a rising slope of terraced mustard-colored flowstone, and into a small domed chamber. There was an air bell at the top about the size of a car trunk, so they swam up and took off their helmets and neoprene hoods to talk. They seemed to be at a dead end. They were cold, tired, and disoriented, and their air ration had nearly run out. There was no choice but to head back”).
3. Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016 (“I walked into the site, through smooth gray-brown gravel mounds, serene and raked as Zen gardens, graded to the angle of repose, so that no rocks slide. Like blast shields, the mounds blocked the view; their shapes, which can be seen in whole only from the air, form a coded alphabet of charm stone, dog bone, cross, and adze. A ramp sloped up to the east, to the top of a bulwark, against which leaned massive ceramic stelae”).
4. William Finnegan, “Silver or Lead,” May 31, 2010 (“To check out La Familia’s claim to be driving cristal addiction from Michoacán, I went to Zamora, a midsized city in the northwestern corner of the state. La Familia was doing some vivid social messaging there. Two days before my arrival, and some weeks earlier, groups of flagellants had appeared on the roads around Zamora—men with their shirts pulled up or off and their backs whipped raw. The men chanted and carried placards denouncing themselves as thieves and rapists. Some of the placards were signed ‘La Familia’ ”).
5. Aleksandar Hemon, “Mapping Home,” December 5, 2011 (“I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements”).
6. Peter Schjeldahl, “The Flip Side,” November 29, 2010 (“But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color”).
7. Geoff Dyer, “Poles Apart,” April 18, 2011 (“The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight”).
8. Alexandra Schwartz, “Bounty Hunters,” November 25, 2019 (“You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart”).
9. Dexter Filkins, “Atonement,” October 29 & November 5, 2012 (“Lobello might not have felt that he needed to apologize, but he was haunted by what had happened, traumatized, maybe even ruined. He wanted to know that the survivors understood why he had done what he had, even if it was not entirely defensible. And he wanted them to know that he felt their suffering in his own. Lobello did not quite say it, but when I left his apartment I felt that what he was really looking for was absolution”).
10. Rebecca Mead, “Sole Cycle,” March 23, 2015 (“Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped”).
11. Gabrielle Hamilton, “The Lamb Roast,” January 17, 2011 (“Then the sun started to set and we lit the paper-bag luminarias, and the lambs were crisp-skinned and sticky, and the root beer was frigid, and it caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat”).
12. Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running,” July 11 & 18, 2016 (“A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: ‘Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . .’ The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible”).
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| Illustration by Owen Freeman, from Ian Frazier's "Blue Bloods" |
“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 #1 pick – Ian Frazier’s "Blue Bloods" (April 14, 2014).
This wonderful piece is about Frazier’s fascination with horseshoe crabs, an animal that, as he points out, has “been around at least two hundred times as long as human beings.” But now they’re in decline, he reports. Humans may be driving these tough little creatures to extinction. He says, “Sea-level rises may cause shoreline reinforcement that wipes out their habitat.”
There’s an unforgettable scene near the end of “Blue Bloods” that illustrates Frazier’s point. He’s on the shore of Delaware Bay, driving a gravel road that “skirted the bay so closely that it required a barrier wall of riprap for protection.” He writes,
The crumbling brittle of horseshoe-crab parts under the car wheels now became so thick it was unnerving, with uncrushed, whole horseshoe crabs all over the road as well. I pulled onto the left-hand berm to investigate. When I climbed up on the riprap wall, I saw throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks. The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks.
That description of horseshoe-crab carnage, likening it to “the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg,” is inspired! It’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen “Blue Bloods” as my #1.
Another reason is that it’s so quintessentially Frazerian. Frazier is a superb describer. “Blue Bloods” brims with delightful description. Here, for example, is his portrait of a horseshoe-crab person named Diane SanRomán:
On that morning, she wore knee-high rubber boots, a bright-pink cotton shirt, and complicated turquoise earrings: an in-the-field style that became familiar. “My life was good before I discovered horseshoe crabs, but now it’s even better!” she announced to me, adding that she was raising a thousand horseshoe-crab eggs in the bathroom of her apartment, in Manhasset, and that her husband, a doctor who specializes in clinical nutrition, kindly put up with them. Along with playing conga drums, she throws pots and is pursuing her second M.A., in experimental psychology with a focus on marine biology. She looks enough like the late Bea Arthur, the star of the nineteen-seventies sitcom “Maude,” that it would be negligent not to say so.
And here’s his depiction of the Dupont Nature Center viewing deck:
Bird-watchers lined its railings with emplacements of telescopes and cameras. Some of the bird-watchers were talking on their cell phones and leaving excited messages for other bird-watchers. When the other bird-watchers called back, the ring tones were birdcalls. Jeffery Davis, a birder from near Philadelphia, offered me a look through his well-positioned 30-power Kowa telescope. Oystercatchers, stilts, dowitchers, willets, black-bellied plovers, dunlins, royal terns, ruddy turnstones, semipalmated sandpipers—along the sand and in the shallows, thousands of heads were going up and down as long, thin bills plucked up what probably were horseshoe-crab eggs. A single horseshoe crab swam nearby on the surface, on its side. Lenses turned to the odd swimmer for half a minute, then went back to the birds.
Conga drums, “complicated turquoise earrings,” birdcall ring tones – I love Frazier's details. He notices stuff most people overlook or disregard. "Blue Bloods" is one of his finest acts of attention.
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| Camille Pissarro, Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873) |
I want to note the recent appearance of two extraordinary essay-reviews by two of my favorite writers: Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “Wendell Berry’s High Horse” (The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2020) and T. J. Clark’s “Strange Apprentice” (London Review of Books, October 8, 2020).
Klinkenborg’s piece is a biting critique of Wendell Berry’s collected essays What I Stand On. “All too often,” Klinkenborg says, “I’m disturbed, to the point of physical unease, by the involuted, strangely patristic way his writing and thinking move.” He says that Berry “often fails to do the first important job of a writer – ‘even’ a nonfiction writer – which is to make sentences that breathe with the life of the body, even when that body happens to be thinking.” He notes “the extraordinarily high degree of abstraction and generalization” in Berry’s prose. Klinkenborg’s close analysis of Berry’s sentences is thrilling. So is his skewering of the way Berry uses metaphor:
There’s also a kind of skittering in The Long-Legged House that reminds me of Thoreau – an uncannily quick movement from local to universal and back again, as if the writer were just waiting to slip an abstraction through a gap in the hedge. You can hear a version of this in the way that Thoreau – like Berry – uses metaphor. The instantaneous fusion of resemblance and dissonance that I hope to find in a good metaphor – the suddenness of perception – isn’t much use to Thoreau, because he it’s hard to moralize one that works that way. Every actual thing in his prose seems to quiver with the desire to become metaphorical or symbolic, like the dead horse in Walden whose strong scent causes Thoreau to think of the myriads of creatures squashed and gobbled and “run over in the road,” ending in a vision of “universal innocence.” It’s a relief when things remain merely themselves.
That “an uncannily quick movement from local to universal and back again, as if the writer were just waiting to slip an abstraction through a gap in the hedge” is brilliant! The whole piece is brilliant – a vigorous application of the dictum that Klinkenborg set out in his great Several short sentences about writing (2012): The goal is “To get your words, your phrases, as close as you can to the solidity of the world your noticing.”
T. J. Clark’s “Strange Apprentice” is a wonderful comparative analysis of Pissarro and Cézanne. It brims with delicious description. Clark says of Pissarro’s Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873),
Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders.
Yes, and there are many such wonders in Clark’s piece, too. Here’s another – a comparison of Pissarro’s Louveciennes (1871) with Cézanne’s Louveciennes (c.1873):
Colour in the Cézanne is not primarily an aspect – a felt reality – of an atmosphere: it adheres somewhat perfunctorily to things. Look, for example, at the yellows and oranges on the old bulwark at the side of the road, or the yellows and browns making the screen of trees to the right of the two figures, over the low wall. Equally, space in Cézanne’s copy is not a filled emptiness. It is not something grounded and contained. It does not approach the viewer along the modest dirt road, across a solid proximity, offering us a way into the illusion. ‘Way’ is a notion foreign to Cézanne’s vision. Where in general we might be in space is an enigma in the copy: the houses in the distance in the original enter a kind of non-distance, or anti-distance, when Cézanne redoes them – not that that means they are nearer, more tangible. The highest house is an epitome of this. Cézanne takes Pissarro’s gentle indications of a road climbing the hill to the house and zigzagging left towards it, and turns the whole collocation into a crisp folding of edges and collision of overlapping planes.
Who would not want such sublime writing to continue forever? Reading “Strange Apprentice,” I found myself slowing down to prolong the pleasure. I didn’t want it to end.
Both these splendid pieces went straight into my personal anthology of great criticism.
Amis is relentless in his documentation of Stalin’s barbarity. For example, he writes, “Imagine the mass of the glove that Stalin swiped across your face; imagine the mass of it.” To this he appends a searing footnote:
It will be as well, here, to get a foretaste of his rigor. The fate of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a famous Red commander in the Civil War, was ordinary enough, and that of his family was too. Tukhachevsky was arrested in 1937, tortured (his interrogation protocols were stained with drops of “flying” blood, suggesting that his head was in rapid motion at the time), farcically arraigned, and duly executed. Moreover (this is Robert C. Tucker’s précis in Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-41): “His wife and daughter returned to Moscow where she was arrested a day or two later along with Tukhachevsky’s mother, sisters, and brothers Nikolai and Alexander. Later his wife and both brothers were killed on Stalin’s orders, three sisters were sent to camps, his young daughter Svetlana was placed in a home for children of ‘enemies of the people’ and arrested and sent to a camp on reaching the age of seventeen, and his mother and one sister died in exile.”
Koba the Dread is a powerful indictment of Stalinism, written in fierce unforgettable prose. Samples:
Your chair is never softer, your study never warmer, your prospect of the evening meal never more secure than when you read about the gulag: the epic agony of the gulag.
The tortures described by Solzhenitsyn are unendurable. This reader has endured none of them; and I will proceed with caution and unease. It feels necessary because torture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin’s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.
Of course, the figures are still not secure, and they vary dismayingly. But these are not the “imaginary” zeros of the millennium, and we we will certainly need seven of them in our inventory of the Soviet experiment. We badly need to know the numbers of the dead. More than this, we need to know their names. And the dead, too, need us to know their names.
Is there a moral difference between the Nazi doctor (the white coat, the black boots, the pellets of Zyklon B) and the blood-bespattered interrogator in the penalty camp of Orotukan?
But Stalin, in the execution of the broad brushstrokes of his hate, had weapons that Hitler did not have.
He would not accept reality. He would break it.
This, perhaps, is the meaning of the Terror-Famine of 1933: the self-cannibalized were destroyed by the self-executed. And this is the surreal moral gangrene of Stalinism.
Congress of Vultures, one might say, after briefly consulting the reality of the countryside – or Congress of Vampires. And Congress of Vaudevillians, too: in January/February 1934 the Party began to absent itself from actuality. It entered the psychotheater in Stalin’s head.For Stalin, power was a thing of the senses and the membranes. And he invariably sought the upper limit.
Nor should we neglect the obvious point – that Stalin did it because Stalin liked it. He couldn’t help himself. The Terror was, in part, an episode of sensual indulgence. It was a bacchanal whose stimulant was power.
And although Hitler’s invigilation of the citizenry was intimidating and persistent, he did not go out of his way, as Stalin did, to create a circumambience of nausea and fear.
Paul Berman, in his “A Million Deaths Is Not a Statistic” (The New York Times, July 28, 2002), says Koba the Dread “carries a punch, artfully delivered.” I agree. It’s the same kind of punch Amis delivers in his literary criticism: see, for example, his brilliant, jabbing, stinging “Don Juan in Hull” (The New Yorker, July 12, 1993), a ferocious defence of Philip Larkin.
Koba the Dread’s punch comes from looking at Stalinism and finding fresh ways to describe its evil: “The shoes: sections of old car tire, secured with wire or an electrical cord”; “A group of prisoners at Kolyma were hungry enough to eat a horse that had been dead for more than a week (despite the stench and the infestation of flies and maggots)”; “The hospitals were themselves deathtraps, but inert deathtraps. A man chopped off half his foot to get in there. And prisoners cultivated infections, feeding saliva, pus or kerosene to their wounds.”
Reading Giles Harvey’s facile comment above, I question whether he actually read Amis’s book.
1. The bright moments—including the fragments of sampled speech, rapidly chopped up, that bracket the album—make up for Lopatin’s overreliance on sad robot voices. – Michaelangelo Matos, “Music: Oneohtrix Point Never”
2. A group of thirtysomethings celebrating a birthday plucked a bunch of eerily fresh-looking calla lilies out of a public trash can. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: The Odeon”
I relish the Matos construction for its surreal elements - "fragments of sampled speech, rapidly chopped up," "sad robot voices." Goldfield's conjures a sweet image of found poetry. Both are marvelous!
I devoured this story. It intrigued me; it excited me; and I found myself mirroring off the character Jack. Does the story prove the rule's validity? Maybe, but it also shows it to be, as Jack says, “so depressingly heteronormative.” The piece brims with wonderful lines. I think my favorite is “She wants his questionnaire to impart some central truth, to give her closure, and, while it’s nice, the niceness pales in comparison with what he said moments after filling it out—‘It’s you specifically’—or the many ardent declarations of devotion in the months that followed.” Sittenfeld’s return to Jack’s questionnaire after the affair suddenly ends is inspired. The whole story is inspired – one of the best I’ve read in a long time.
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| Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz |
I see Richard Brody is at it again – distorting Pauline Kael’s great “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 1971). In his “Herman Mankiewicz, Pauline Kael, and the Battle Over Citizen Kane” (newyorker.com, November 14, 2020), he says that Kael “argued that much of what’s great about Citizen Kane in fact arose not from Welles but from the contributions of Mankiewicz and the rest of the cast and crew.” Wrong! Kael never said that. What she said is this: “Though Mankiewicz provided the basic apparatus for it, that magical exuberance which fused the whole scandalous enterprise was Welles’.” That’s the exact opposite of what Brody says she said. In case there’s any doubt about Kael’s position, she went on to say, “Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he [Welles] took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show.” Where are The New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checkers? Anytime Brody refers to Kael, he should be checked. He seems incapable of accurately stating her views.
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| Jimmy Jim MacAulay (Photo by Lorna MacDougall) |
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