August 16 & 23, 2010 Issue

Dana Goodyear is in the magazine twice this week. She has a “California Postcard” in The Talk Of The Town called “Down The Aisle” and she has an “Annals of Gastronomy” piece titled “The Truffle Kid.” Both these items are much better than her “Killer Food,” which appeared in the April 26, 2010, issue. Goodyear kept herself out of “Killer Food,” and as a result, the piece lacked the subjective element that separates great journalism from basic reportage. “Killer Food” features several interesting scenes – the Möet & Chandon party, for example – that are well-described, but would’ve benefited from a few additional words sketching Goodyear herself into the frame, so that we know she’s actually there witnessing everything she’s reporting. This week’s “The Truffle Kid” is a much different piece, peppered with numerous discreet indicators of Goodyear’s personal involvement in the story: “We passed dozens of small towns …”; “Raúl Martín … led us down to a basement dining hall …”; “Adam Carmer, Steve Wynn’s first hotel sommelier and, as he told me, ‘the No.1 maître d’ in town for a decade’ …”; “I heard a story about …”; “I went to see him …”; “When I visited a few months ago …”; “Alessandro Stratta told me ….” Goodyear even provides this wonderful anecdote from her own life: “A relative of mine who lived in Buffalo and went by the name Shorty Plumb used to run booze across the border to Canada in the back of a pickup truck loaded with horse manure, and never got caught.” I smiled when I read that; I felt myself relaxing the way I do when I know I’m in the company of a good story-teller. Goodyear really hits her stride in the last third of “The Truffle Kid.” Here are two sentences I find absolutely inspired:

“Wearing a brown suit, a Bic behind his ear, and a pair of glasses tucked into the neckline of his shirt, and carrying a foam cooler loaded with duck breasts and foie gras, Ottolenghi led Gonzalez across the hectic, dimly lit casino floor and around a corner to a fifteen-foot-tall locked door.”

“He wound his way past giant carnival masks and fixated smokers staring at the slots, and through an unmarked door to the loading dock, where crates of plucked chickens sat waiting next to plastic bags of chili.”

Description like that is art; I eat it up. And consider the ending Goodyear created for her delightful Talk story “Down The Aisle,” also in this week’s issue: “Meanwhile, the streets and courthouses were quiet, as people waited to see if the marriages would be allowed to resume, and bruised purple jacaranda blossoms, rather than wedding confetti, clogged the gutters of Boys Town.” Wow! That last clause – “and bruised purple jacaranda blossoms, rather than wedding confetti, clogged the gutters of Boys Town” – is astounding. However she conceived the joining of quiet courthouses and people waiting to see if their marriages could resume with confetti, jacaranda blossoms, and the gutters of Boys Town, I don’t know – but it’s sheer genius. That closing sentence of “Down The Aisle” is probably the best-written single sentence to appear in the magazine this year.

Interesting Emendations: John McPhee's "Season On The Chalk"

Unlike certain other New Yorker writers (e.g., John Updike), John McPhee rarely changes his magazine pieces when he later collects them into books. However, I found a slight variation in his great “Season On The Chalk,” which is included in his recent collection Silk Parachute. The original article was published in the March 12, 2007, issue of The New Yorker, and contains the following extraordinarily beautiful passage:

Near Épernay, even the cattle are white; and vines like green corduroy run for miles up the hillsides in rows perpendicular to the contours, and the tops of the vines are so accordant that the vines up close look more like green fences, and the storky, long-legged tractors of Champagne straddle rows and run above the grapes.

Here is the book version:

Near Épernay, even the cattle are white. Vines like green corduroy run for miles up the hillsides in rows perpendicular to the contours, and the tops of the vines are so accordant that the vines up close look more like green fences, and the storky, long-legged tractors of Champagne straddle rows and run above the grapes.

The magazine version is one sentence, its clauses joined together by four “ands.” For the book, McPhee revised the passage by deleting an “and,” and breaking it into two sentences. It’s a subtle change. But McPhee is a master writer, and so such subtleties are significant. Why did he make the change? My guess is that it's a matter of sound. The way it’s written, the “vines” part of the passage has a rhythm all its own. So when McPhee was preparing the piece for publication in Silk Parachute, he decided to separate it from the “cattle” bit and make it a sentence. As I say, I'm only guessing. Personally, I prefer the New Yorker version. I like how it goes from Épernay cattle right into Épernay vines with only a semi-colon of a breather. Both versions are gorgeous, displaying one of McPhee’s signature moves: the juxtaposing or near-juxtaposing of precise science-based words like “perpendicular,” “contours,” “accordant” with vivid, textured constructions like “green corduroy,” “green fences,” and “storky, long-legged tractors.”

August 9, 2010 Issue

I don’t know whether I would’ve read Nicholson Baker’s “Painkiller Deathstreak” (in this week’s issue), if I hadn’t previously read his “A New Page” (The New Yorker, August 3, 2009). I enjoyed that piece so much I thought I’d give “Painkiller Deathstreak” a try, even though it’s about a dubious cultural phenomenon, namely, video games. They’re dubious, in my opinion, because they’re inhuman and denatured. Have I ever played them? No. But I’ve witnessed others playing them, and the games they were playing seemed to consist of one long dark killing spree after another conducted in various bombed-out, war-torn environments. The accuracy of my impression is, in fact, confirmed by Baker’s piece. For example, regarding the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Baker says, “Here’s what it’s about. It’s about killing, and it’s about dying. Also, it’s about collecting firearms. And it’s modern warfare, which means it’s set in places like Afghanistan.”

Baker really gets into the games, their controls (“The PlayStation 3’s blue X button is in a different place than the Xbox 360’s blue X button – madness”), their beauty (“You’ll see an edge-shined, light-bloomed, magic-hour gilded glow on a row of half-wrecked buildings and you’ll want to stop for a few minutes just to take it in”), the “weird camaraderie” among the players, including his sixteen-year old son (“There’s a lot of wild laughing”). I confess I enjoyed the piece immensely. Baker is a great writer. There’s an amazing passage in “Painkiller Deathstreak” – it begins “In order to give me a taste of multi-player madness, as I practiced my shooting and sprinting skills …” – and finishes with a flourish of description so specific that you almost forget that what’s being described is virtual reality and not the real thing. Actually, you know it’s virtual reality, but you marvel at the depth of Baker’s immersion in it, so deep that it excites him to write prose that really zings. Here are the concluding sentences of that great passage:

There were thick-budded poppies growing in the sun, with PVC irrigation pipes over them. Again I heard my son’s sprinting footsteps – he had a multiplayer perk that allowed him to run forever without tiring. He knew a way to get up on the fuselage – I could hear him running down the metallic skin – and onto the tail, and from there up onto a high cliff. I’d spray bullets in a semicircle, and then there would be a single quick sniper shot and I’d be dead. Then he’d apologize. “Sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to kill, only to maim.” I died often enough that I received a temporary health boost called a "painkiller deathstreak."

How cool that “I could hear him running down the metallic skin”! Is “Painkiller Deathstreak” as good as “A New Page”? I don’t think so, because “A New Page,” besides being an inspired piece of description (e.g., “The Kindle 1’s design was a retro piece of bizarrerie – an unhandy, asymmetrical Fontina wedge of plastic”), is a glorious tour de force argument in favor of newspapers – the paper-and-ink print kind, not the electronic version:

The Kindle Times lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography – and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.

How fine that “spinnakered typographical elegance and variety”! Baker nails his case for newspapers with this assertion: “The Kindle DX doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them – it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.” I was sort of hoping, when I started reading “Painkiller Deathstreak,” that Baker would roast video games over the red-hot fire of his blazing intellect the way he brilliantly roasted The Kindle in “A New Page.” Instead, he’s written a celebration of the damn things – and a gorgeous one at that! There’s a father-son bonding element going on in “Painkiller Deathstreak” and I think it softened Baker’s normally sharp-edged critical faculty. At bottom, what he likes best about video games is the opportunity to interact with his son. He doesn’t come right out and say this, but I think it’s implicit in that wonderful “We went off to dinner full of weird camaraderie.”

August 2, 2010 Issue

In “The Scales Fall” in this week’s issue, Elizabeth Kolbert advances an argument in the guise of a book review. She runs through a pile of books about our overfished oceans, picking corroborative quotations wherever she finds them for her basic contention that we have harvested wild fish “to the edge of extinction,” yet we do not have the will to stop and do something about it. It’s a damn good argument, and her Exhibit A – the Atlantic bluefin tuna – powerfully illustrates her case. My complaint doesn't have anything to do with her argument; I find her point completely irrefutable. My complaint, such as it is, is with respect to the weakness of her piece as a book review. It’s in the “Books” section of the magazine, and so it should be first and foremost about books. It seems to me that in “The Scales Fall,” Kolbert has too many books under consideration for such a brief review to be able to do justice to any one of them. At least five books are mentioned in her piece. There isn’t an extended quote from any of them. One of the books – Paul Greenberg’s recently published “Four Fish” – I know something about. I read Sam Sifton’s excellent review of it in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (July 29, 2010). Among other things, Sifton says, “Combining on-the-ground and on-the-ocean reporting from the Yukon to Greece, from the waters of Long Island Sound to the Mekong Delta, along with accounts of some stirring fishing trips, Greenberg makes a powerful argument: We must, moving forward, manage our oceans so that the fish we eat can exist both in aquacultural settings and within the ecosystems of wild oceans.” This sounds like the kind of book I like, particularly with regard to the “accounts of some stirring fishing trips.” You’d never know “Four Fish” had this kind of content from the couple of references Kolbert makes to it. I suppose Kolbert would reply that I’m part of the problem if all I want to do is read about fishing stories, because the whole point of her piece is that the time may not be too far off when there will be no fish to fish. Nevertheless, “Four Fish” is a book I intend to acquire and read sometime soon. If Kolbert’s review was the only one I had to go by, I probably would’ve missed it.

Interesting Emendations: Louise Erdrich's "The Painted Drum"

This post marks the first of what I hope will be a series of “Interesting Emendations,” in which I compare articles and stories originally published in The New Yorker with later versions published in books. I find this form of analysis interesting because sometimes it sheds light on the compositional process. Today, I begin with a look at one of my favorite New Yorker short stories, Louise Erdrich’s “The Painted Drum,” which first appeared in the March 3, 2003, issue, and was later published, as chapter two, in Erdrich’s 2005 novel of the same name.

“The Painted Drum” is about an article of American Indian material culture, namely, a large, decorated, painted drum, and the profound effect it has on a woman of partial Ojibwe descent, a specialist in estate sales work, when she encounters it amongst the possessions in an old estate. It’s a fictional first person narrative written so skillfully and realistically that it has the flavor of authentic memoir. The first difference between the magazine version and the book version that you notice is the change from past tense (magazine) to present tense (book). More crucial is the substantive change in the decoration of the drum. In the magazine story, Erdrich describes the drum as follows:

The head of the drum glared out, huge, three feet across at least. The moose that was skinned to make it must have been a giant. Yet there was something delicate about the drum, for it was intricately decorated, with a beaded belt and skirt, hung with tassels of pulled red yarn and sewn tightly all around with small tin cones, ot tinklers. Four broad tabs were spaced equally around the top. Into their indigo tongues, four crosses were set, woven with brass beads. On the face of the drum, at the very center, a small bird was painted, in lighter blue. That was all. But the bird detail, the red flowered skirts, the tinklers, combined with the size of the drum, gave it an unusual sense of both power and sweetness.

Here is the description of the drum in the novel:

The head of the drum glares out, huge, three feet across at least. The buffalo or moose skinned to make it must have been a giant. In spite of its size there is something delicate about the drum, though, for it is intricately decorated, with a beaded belt and skirt, hung with tassels of pulled red yarn and sewn tightly all around with small tin cones, or tinklers. Four broad tabs are spaced equally around the top. Into their beaded tongues of deep indigo four white beaded figures are set. They are abstract but seem to represent a girl, a hand, a cross, a running wolf. On the face of the drum, at the very center, a stripe is painted in yellow. That is all. The figurative detail, the red-flowered skirts, the tinklers, combined with the size of the drum, give it an unusual sense of both power and sweetness.

The two passages are similar, yet they contain significant differences. Note the addition of “buffalo” in the book version as a possible source of the drumhead. Note also the book version’s change of the beadwork from brass-beaded crosses to white-beaded figures that “seem to represent a girl, a hand, a cross, a running wolf.” Of course, the most notable change is in the drum’s painting: in the magazine version, the painting is of a bird; in the book version, it’s of a yellow stripe. I find this change in the painting on the drum very interesting. After all, as is mentioned later in both versions of the story, “A painted drum, especially, is considered a living thing and must be fed as the spirits are fed – with tobacco and a glass of water set nearby, sometimes a plate of food.” In both versions, when the woman (identified as Faye Travers in the novel) mentions the drum to her mother (named Elsie in the novel), her mother asks, “Was it painted?” In the magazine version, Faye replies, “There was a bird. A little blue bird.” In the book version, she replies, “There was a yellow line.” In both versions, Faye’s reply draws the following response from Elsie: “She closed her eyes, pressed two fingers to the space between her eyebrows.” Elsie is then moved to talk “a long time” about the significance of a painted drum in Ojibwe culture.

What accounts for the difference in the painting on the drum in the two versions of the story? Perhaps it’s a matter of The New Yorker’s editorial preference for something a little more specific, a bit more vivid than a yellow stripe? Maybe in the time between the story’s publication in the magazine and its appearance in book form, Erdrich reconsidered her conception of the drum? Later in the novel, she traces the source of the yellow stripe back to Faye’s grandfather, the maker of the drum:

My grandfather put his hand up to test the wind and the sun struck his hand a bright, startling red. He thought of the wolves and of the one that had watched him. He saw pictures. There they were. Little girl. Hand. Wolf. The bowl of reflecting water cut in half by the yellow strip of light would be the design on the head of the drum. All was still in the four directions. He saw the whole thing in his mind.

After you read the novel, it’s difficult to imagine the drum painted in any way other than with the yellow stripe. Even so, that pale blue bird of the original story appeals to me mightily. Both versions are wonderful. I highly recommend them to anyone who is delighted by stories about what Erdrich calls the “afterlife of stuff.”