Photo by John MacDougall
In this series, I look at some of my own photos and try to determine their governing aesthetic.
I love fishing boats. I love reflections. And, like my hero Van Gogh, I love yellow. It all came together in this picture, taken on Miscou Island, New Brunswick, October 4, 2022.
Immersion journalism, long-form journalism, literary journalism, investigative journalism, narrative nonfiction: all this was once the open rangeland known simply as “reporting.” No matter what other name you gin up for the work, it has always been the case that the best way to tell a story is to get as close to it as possible and learn as much about it as you can. Whether the result is short or long, shallow or deep, bare-bones or brimming with scenes has nothing to do with how you characterize the process of writing it, and everything to do with familiar constraints: the outlet, the editor, the budget, the nature of the story, the proclivities and abilities of the author.
Note that “gin up.” Schulz thinks “immersion journalism” is just a fancy name for what all good reporters do – get as close to the story as possible and learn as much about it as you can. But she’s wrong. There’s an important element she leaves out: subjectivity. There are certain journalists – John McPhee, Ian Frazier, Nick Paumgarten are three that quickly come to mind – whom I read primarily for the encounter between their sensibility and the world. These writers put themselves inside the frame with their subjects. They write in the first person major. They aren’t egotists. They don’t get in the way of their stories. But they are there, with their subjects; their writing is immersive, whether Schulz likes it or not.
I have another quibble with Schulz’s piece – its lack of quotation from the book (Ted Conover’s Cheap Land Colorado) she’s reviewing. Schulz seems so in love with her own voice and the look of her own prose that she can’t pause even for ten seconds to give the reader a sample of Conover’s writing. She says it’s “consistently interesting to read.” Okay, show me.
This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts on my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), and Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003). Today, I’ll try to sum up my reading experience.
One of my main purposes in launching this series was that I wanted to get to know these books better. I wanted to see how they’re put together, how they work. I feel I’ve accomplished that. But in focusing on their formal aspects – structure, perspective, description, etc. – I see that I’ve neglected their meaning. All three are about vivid personal experience – that’s obvious. But each has a specific meaning, too. Looking for a Ship is about the decline of the U.S. Merchant Marine. It ends, symbolically, with Stella “dead in the water.” Passage to Juneau is about turbulence: “If you want a mirror for your own existence, you need look no further than tumbling rapids or the strings of dying whirlpools downtide of a piling.” Trawler is about fish – the fascinating variety of strange species that live in the wild North Atlantic ((“By the tail, which was not a fish-tail as you might imagine it, but several inches of raw-hide whip, I hoisted the 2-foot-long, huge-headed, slender-bodied, grey-silver, big-scaled, armour-plated, snub-snouted, underslung-mouthed pre-human fish to eye-level – and eye-to-eye it was truly disturbing, because its eyeball was three times the size of mine”).
But to reduce these great books to a single message does them serious injustice. For me, their true meaning resides in their splendid art of description. This, for example:
Albatrosses flew beside us, motionless to the point of impudence, their eyes on our necks, their great wings fixed, their iron momentum matching the ship’s. At bridge level, sixty-five feet above the water, an albatross flew beside us with his right leg up scratching his ear. [Looking for a Ship]
And this:
The only motion was that of the incoming tide, stealing smoothly through the forest at one knot. Where fallen branches obstructed the current near the shore, they sprouted whiskers of turbulence that were steadily maturing into braided beards. The water was moving just fast enough to feel the abrasion of the air against it, and its surface was altering from glassy to stippled with the strengthening flood. Soon the false wind, brushing against the tide, created a trellis-like pattern of interlocked wavelets, their raised edges only a millimetre or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light. [Passage to Juneau]
And this:
At the centre of my field of vision, at the bottom of the steep, inward-angled, stainless-steel panels of the tall container, to the right of four Greenland halibut which lay where they’d slid (just below the lower lip of the open drop-gate to the conveyor), there spread across the slopes of the floor, there swirled around Luke’s yellow sea-boots, a semi-transparent globular mass of brown and purple, a gelatinous colourless shine which you could see right through, a something from another world, a dead creature which, as I stared, resolved itself into far too many long viscid arms studded with white boils, eruptions, suckers to hold you fast … [Trawler]
On and on – these books are endlessly quotable. I love them. I don’t want to let go of them. What is the key to their art? What draws me to them? I think it’s their glorious specificity. Not just an albatross, but an albatross flying by “with his right leg up scratching his ear”; not just waves, but a “trellis-like pattern of interlocked wavelets, their raised edges only a millimetre or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light”; not just an octopus, but a “semi-transparent globular mass of brown and purple, a gelatinous colourless shine which you could see right through.” Every word and line is definite, specific, evocative.
Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three wonderful books. I picture it like this: ropes, nets, red and yellow oilskins; the Norlantean (searchlights blazing in the black winter night); a Greenland halibut; a red Jacobs biscuit-box; a wooden-handled gutting knife; a map of the North Atlantic; a Rabbit fish; a green nylon sleeping bag; a kittiwake; W. D. Hamilton; a Nikon FM2 camera; a thick dry biscuit; a blue rubber glove; a Merchant Marine license; the Stella Lykes (piled high with containers); an albatross; a bunch of bananas; Charles Darwin; the pentimento on Stella’s bows; a pirogue full of pirates; a monocular on a nylon cord; a map of South America’s Pacific coast; Franz Kafka; a red plastic jug; two black balls flying from a mast; a map of the Inside Passage; the Penelope (mainsail up, headsail out to starboard); Franz Boas, a red-and-black-painted Haida canoe; Captain George Vancouver; a whirlpool, a Dall’s porpoise; a lava lamp; a cormorant; HMS Discovery under full sail; a hand compass; an elderly wooden purse-seiner; a tugboat pulling a raft of logs; an orange helicopter lifting a sling containing a log; a painting of a raven’s eye inside an ovoid frame; a Venetian glass trade-bead (the color of a kumquat); a floathouse; a razor-slashed barstool; a cannery built out on stilts over the water; a chum salmon. Overlap these images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and randomly across its surface paint three zigzag blue lines representing the waves of the Pacific, North Atlantic, and Inside Passage. I call my collage “O’Pheeban.”
On the first day in Studio Two, McDonagh, who had just returned from a holiday in the Lake District, told Burwell, “I’ve been humming all the tunes.” His only instruction to Burwell, he said, had been not to write anything that sounded like Irish pub music—“the easy go-to for a film like this.” Burwell’s score features the harp, an instrument so closely associated with Ireland that its image appears on the country’s coins, but there’s nothing publike about the melodies he came up with for it, which often float on a current of strings, in a way that the harpist himself called “dreamy.” The score also features a synthesized celeste, which Burwell played and recorded himself. A real celeste looks like a shrunken upright piano and sounds like tinkling bells, or a child’s xylophone; it’s the most conspicuous instrument in Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” and in John Williams’s “Harry Potter” scores. What Burwell described to me as the “plicky-plucky sounds” of the harp and the celeste created the fairy-tale effect that he was aiming for.
For me, the most interesting aspects of Owen’s piece are his descriptions of Burwell at work. For example:
Toward the end of the morning, Burwell recorded the music for a scene in which Pádraic’s sister, Siobhán, played by Kerry Condon, is riding to the mainland in an open boat. Pádraic watches from the top of a cliff, and they wave to each other. After the musicians had played the passage once, McDonagh asked Burwell to come up to the control room.
“This is a tricky one, Carter,” he said. “We’ve been working with a version where the music ends on the first wave.” In the version Burwell had just conducted, the music stopped ten seconds later. The difference was small, but it affected the emotional tone of the departure, adding emphasis to a moment that McDonagh preferred dissipate in silence. Starting the music earlier solved that problem but created a synchronization issue—a chord now arrived right before a small group of birds took flight from a pier, prematurely signalling their movement.
“It looks like it’s early by a few frames,” Burwell said. “The music can sometimes happen after the picture, but you can’t have it before.” He said that he would adjust the tempos in his hotel room that night but leave the “ink” unchanged—meaning that new scores wouldn’t have to be printed.
Another example:
On a video monitor in his office, Burwell played me a scene from “Banshees” in which Farrell’s character is driving milk to town in a wagon. There’s music but no dialogue. The melody, consisting mainly of flute, harp, and strings, is slow and understated. “My job is to bring you into this world,” he said. “But, if it starts to seem like it’s about the music, that’s another thing.” He showed me the scene again, with a slightly different score: “This was my first version. It’s very similar, but the chords are more definitively major.” McDonagh had found it “too warm” and “too resolved,” he said. “Martin felt—and I agreed with him—that, at this point in the film, it would be better to keep the over-all tone a little gloomier.”
Reading “They Shoot, He Scores,” I found myself wondering what The Banshees of Inisherin’s score actually sounds like. I went to iTunes and downloaded it. I’m playing it as I write this. It’s delightful. Now I want to see the movie.
Photo by John MacDougall
I took this photo November 9, 2021. It shows the dune at Ross Lane Beach, in Prince Edward Island National Park. To take this picture, I stood on the boardwalk that crosses the dune and goes down to the beach. It’s one of my favorite places. In summer the dune is covered with pink wild roses. But I think I like the fall view slightly better. I love the wheat color of the marram grass dotted with bright red rosehips. The beach and ocean are just on the other side. Unfortunately, on September 24 of this year, Hurricane Fiona blew half this dune away. The above picture preserves the way it used to look – a look we may not see ever again.
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| Peter Schjeldahl (Photo by Alex Remnick) |
1. David Salle
2. Wayne Koestenbaum
3. Gini Alhadeff
4. Susan Tallman
5. Johanna Fateman
The best living art writer is T. J. Clark. But his thinking might be a shade too metaphysical for the New Yorker job. The perfect choice is Salle: see his brilliant series of art pieces for The New York Review of Books.
His sharp eye for fashion (a chic red lip, a patterned scarf, a snazzy pair of sandals) can be deceptive. Such details are to Katz what apples were to Cézanne (whom Katz has called “the first artist I understood”): an invitation to eye the interplay of color and light, load a brush with oil, and master the depths of a painting’s surface. [“In the Museums”]
Details? Katz’s paintings have no details, no specificity. They’re massive simplifications. His figures have the blank look of mannequins.
Depth? That’s a laugh. There is no depth in a Katz picture. It’s all surface. Katz is a master of superficiality.
The buzz of a Friedrich occurs when what have seemed mere tints in a tonal composition combust as distinctly scented hues – citron lights, plum darks – and you don’t so much look at a picture as breathe it.
Gradually the slot-eyed, sutured hoods give way to lima-bean-shaped heads as weighty as cannonballs, with cyclopean eyes transfixed by paintings, books, and bottles or staring into comfortless space. Belligerent arms wield garbage-can lids, and legs form grisly chorus lines on red and black killing grounds. Cigarette butts, old shoes, and studio detritus accumulate: junk for the junkman’s son.
But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his picture’s smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color.
The effects serve sharply limned figures whose sculptural roundness, warm flesh, splendid raiment, and distinctive personalities leap to the eye. Anatomical details enthrall: hands that touch and grip with tangible pressures, masses of hair given depth and definition by a few highlighted strands.
At a quiet coast in a world at war, Mondrian reduced a pier, the ocean, and starlight to a digital code: this horizontal a wave, that vertical a gleam. It is not representation. It is a construction, shimmering in the mind.
I’m just in a mood – enhanced, now, by the thought of the inexplicably, inchoately thrilling arc of black paint that slashes Matisse’s Portrait of Olga Merson (1911) from chin to left thigh – to insist on a hierarchy of sensations that favor the experience of being tripped cleanly out of ourselves and into wondering glee.
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