{"id":109413,"date":"2017-03-30T09:11:08","date_gmt":"2017-03-30T13:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109413"},"modified":"2017-03-30T10:11:30","modified_gmt":"2017-03-30T14:11:30","slug":"this-is-the-concourse-to-hell-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/30\/this-is-the-concourse-to-hell-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is the Concourse to Hell, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_109414\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/3065996414_c70c3f1181_b.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-109414\" class=\"wp-image-109414\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/3065996414_c70c3f1181_b.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"669\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/3065996414_c70c3f1181_b.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/3065996414_c70c3f1181_b-300x201.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/3065996414_c70c3f1181_b-768x514.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-109414\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Train to eternal damnation, now boarding at gate four. Photo: Kevin Harber<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If someone published an anthology called <em>Hellscape: Thirty Writers on Why Penn Station Sucks<\/em>, I would buy that thing in hardcover and pay list price for it. I would buy a whole carton and stand at Penn Station\u2019s Amtrak gates, forcing them on beleaguered travelers. Because: everyone hates Penn Station\u2014I\u2019m talking about the New York one\u2014but good writing on the hatred of Penn Station is hard to find. One must be diligent. Julian Rose, in his review of Wendy Lesser\u2019s new book,\u00a0<em>You Say to Brick<\/em>, has made a great discovery: hidden among the pages of this biography of Louis Kahn is an evisceration of Penn. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bookforum.com\/inprint\/024_01\/17556\" target=\"_blank\">In a tour de force of architectural criticism, Lesser excoriates this building as \u2018something like a living hell,\u2019 using an extended comparison to another major East Coast transit hub, Philadelphia\u2019s Thirtieth Street Station, to underscore Penn Station\u2019s many failures<\/a>: urban (the elegant approach to Thirtieth Street along one of Philadelphia\u2019s main arteries versus the ignominious midblock descent into the chasm yawning below Madison Square Garden that constitutes Penn\u2019s main entrance); environmental (the flood of warm natural light that fills Thirtieth Street versus the harsh fluorescent glare of Penn\u2019s underground expanse); spatial (the high ceilings and symmetrical plan of Thirtieth Street, so helpful for visitors to orient themselves, versus Penn\u2019s befuddling catacombs); and even social (the implicit democracy of the benches that limn Thirtieth Street\u2019s main concourse versus the explicit hierarchy of Penn\u2019s isolated waiting rooms, which are reserved for ticket holders and divided by class).\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Some books have indexes, indices, whatever. No one knows why. But there they are, long lists of words with page numbers after them. In my book, the index will be a single page with the words \u201cJust fucking Google it.\u201d But I\u2019m being churlish. Sam Leith argues, convincingly, that indexers\u2014who somehow write indexes for a living\u2014are doing the Lord\u2019s work: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2017\/mar\/30\/in-our-google-era-indexers-are-the-unsung-heroes-of-the-publishing-world\" target=\"_blank\">It would be a clich\u00e9 to say that indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world<\/a>. But unsung they generally are: no indexer usually expects or receives credit by name in books where everyone from the font designer to the snapper of the author photograph tends to get a solemn shout-out. And heroes they are, too: the index is, in any nonfiction book, more useful than almost anything else in the apparatus. It is a map of the text; a cunningly devised series of magical shortcuts that can in the good case save a scholar many hours of work, and in the bad one save a bookshop-browsing cabinet minister from having to buy a former colleague\u2019s memoirs. A good index is, as Harold Macmillan wrote when inaugurating the society sixty years ago, \u2018much more than a guide to the contents of a book. It can often give a far clearer glimpse of its spirit than the blurb-writers or critics are able to do.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In Gerald Murnane\u2019s novel <em>The Plains<\/em>, Ben Lerner recognizes a kind of geological mastery: Murnane, he writes, has captured \u201ca plain\u2019s paradoxical mix of uniformity and mystery\u201d (very much the opposite of Penn Station, above): \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/a-strange-australian-masterpiece?intcid=mod-latest?reload\" target=\"_blank\">The poet-philosophers of the plains (and every plainsman is one) know that the plains are unknowable in their totality, and are therefore charged with possibility<\/a>. This is because what at first appears \u2018utterly flat and featureless\u2019 reveals, as you learn to look, \u2018countless subtle variations of landscape.\u2019 But it is also because there is another plain (or plains) behind this one, \u2018always invisible\u2019 even though you\u2019ve \u2018crossed and recrossed it daily.\u2019 <em>The Plains<\/em> is a book about the planes of the actual and the possible, about their interplay, how one haunts the other.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>In a piece full of astute observations about the Dana Schutz controversy, Coco Fusco addresses a point about mimesis that others have ignored: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/hyperallergic.com\/368290\/censorship-not-the-painting-must-go-on-dana-schutzs-image-of-emmett-till\/\" target=\"_blank\">The most perplexing criticism that\u2019s been bandied about regarding Schutz\u2019s painting, both on social media and in discussions I\u2019ve had, is that some great harm has been inflicted by the act of abstraction, as if the only \u2018responsible\u2019 treatment of racial trauma is mimetic realism<\/a> \u2026 There\u2019s a fundamental misunderstanding at work in damning abstraction by associating it with erasure and irresponsibility. Abstraction, like mimeticism, is an aesthetic language that can be interpreted and used politically in a range of ways. It doesn\u2019t necessarily mean erasure, but it does complicate the connection between perception and intellection\u2014something that deeply thoughtful painters like\u00a0Gerhard Richter\u00a0have taken advantage of in order to make us reflect on how photographic images represent history and structure memory.\u00a0Jacob Lawrence\u00a0\u2018abstracted\u2019 his black figures, not to obscure their humanity but to explore new ways of evoking ethnic identity and communal purpose through color and dynamism.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Denis Johnson\u2019s collection <em>Jesus\u2019 Son <\/em>is twenty-five this month, though it doesn\u2019t look a day over zero. Jenny Offill, Michael Cunningham, Victor LaValle, and others convened to discuss the book\u2019s enduring appeal. John Williams writes of their panel, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/03\/29\/books\/review\/denis-johnson-jesus-son-25th-anniversary.html?_r=0&amp;mtrref=getpocket.com\" target=\"_blank\">All the participants addressed the question of why, to quote Cunningham, \u2018so many people want to write this book over again.\u2019<\/a> They landed on the idea that the collection\u2019s effects are so potent but seamlessly achieved that they inspire authors to try the same magic trick \u2026 LaValle emphasized the way that <em>Jesus\u2019 Son<\/em>\u2014which is often, on its surface, blunt and violent\u2014is suffused with a questing, spiritual tone. He said the stories contained an idea that he misses in much of contemporary literature, which is that \u2018a world beyond this world is something serious to contemplate.\u2019 Offill said: \u2018He\u2019s not afraid to risk going straight toward the sublime.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: an evisceration of Penn Station, a paean to the plains, a salute to indexers, and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[21455,1657,3263,23328,2530,12059,28087,28090,28089,28088,26441,15626,67,18822,28091,28086],"class_list":["post-109413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-abstraction","tag-architecture","tag-ben-lerner","tag-dana-schutz","tag-denis-johnson","tag-gerald-murnane","tag-hellscape","tag-index","tag-indexers","tag-indexes","tag-jesus-son","tag-mimesis","tag-painting","tag-penn-station","tag-plains","tag-wendy-lesser"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Anyone Can Tell You Penn Station Is Awful\u2014It Takes a Writer to Show It<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" 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