November 22, 2010 Issue

Of the various thematic issues that the magazine publishes each year – The Money Issue, The Travel Issue, The Fashion Issue, The Technology Issue, etc. – my favorite is The Food Issue. Why? I think it has a lot to do with my love of description – sensual description, description of process, description of place – that is often abundantly present (sometimes in heady combination) in food writing. Here are just a few examples – all from previous issues of The Food Issue – of what I’m talking about:

There were hints of tobacco and molasses in it, black cherries and dark chocolate, all interlaced with the wood’s spicy resin. It tasted like some ancient elixir that the Inca might have made (Burkhard Bilger, “Extreme Beer," The New Yorker, November 24, 2008).

Earlier this summer, I accompanied Isabella on a trip to visit the old pear tree. We drove into a mountainous region above the town of Piertraunga, a land of thick woods with small farms in the valleys. Stone houses where the landowners had once lived, many of them now abandoned, sit on the tops of hills. The old orchards are gone, but the landscape is dotted with a few rugged arboreal survivors: almonds, olives, and pears (John Seabrook, “Renaissance Pears," The New Yorker, September 5, 2005).

With its rustic, nicely browned crust and the crunchy protruding brambles that developed as the dripping baked on, the cut sekacz revealed a buff-gold cake that had seductively dense sweet-smoky and slightly ripe overtones (Mimi Sheraton, “Spit Cake,” The New Yorker, November 23, 2009).

When Joel cracked eggs, his fingers were as loose and precise as a jazz guitarist’s. He held one egg between his thumb and his first two fingers, another curled against his palm. He rapped the first egg on the rim of the pan, twisted it into hemispheres, and opened it as cleanly as if it were a Faberge Easter egg. As the spent shell fell into the trash, he shuttled the second egg into position, as if pumping a rifle. He was proud of this little move. It saved him about a second versus having to grab an egg from the bin. If he cracked six thousand eggs a week, the move saved him about an hour; in a year, it saved him more than a week (Burkhard Bilger, “The Egg Men,” The New Yorker, September 5, 2005).

I provide these examples to give some idea of what I look for, what I appreciate, when I read food writing. I regret to say that I found the servings of it rather meager in this week’s The Food Issue. I confess I merely skimmed Burkhard Bilger’s revolting “Nature’s Spoils.” It appears Bilger has reverted to his pre-New Yorker "Noodling For Flatheads" grossness. I found the introductory paragraphs of “Lauren Collins’s “Burger Queen” unpalatable. Am I the only country hick who doesn’t know who Jay-Z is? Should I be interested in a “gastropub” where the Jay-Zs of this world get special privileges and the great unwashed rest of us have to line up? The Spotted Pig’s elitism turned me off, and I quit reading about it. Later, I reluctantly went back and finished the piece. There are one or two felicitous sentences in it (e.g., “When Bloomfield peels a carrot, she holds it out in the palm of her hand, like sheet music”), but none of the succulent detail about food, kitchen reality, or geographic place that I crave. The New Orleans roadhouse in Calvin Trillin’s “No Daily Specials” is more my speed. But Trillin’s piece lacks zest, seems bland. I would’ve appreciated less information about who sat with him at his table, and more about what Mosca’s Chicken a la Grande actually tastes like. As for Jane Kramer’s “Down Under” – there isn’t an inspired sentence in the whole thing, unless you get your thrills from lines like “Late last spring, I asked Nach Waxman to give me a capsule history of root vegetables.” Laura Shapiro’s “The First Kitchen” is straight history written entirely in the third person, and my eyes could not skim-read it (and be done with it) fast enough.

That leaves Chang-Rae Lee’s memoir “Magical Dinners.” I’m pleased to report that it’s a wonderful piece of writing. Lee’s details – which include the parquet wood flooring in his family’s New Rochelle apartment (“its slick surface faintly lemony and then bitter, like the skins of peanuts”), the light-gray leatherette (“stippled like the back of a lizard”) that covers the seats of their Beetle, the result of prying open the roof of a Hot Wheels car with a hammer (“the enamel paint flaking off from the twisting force and gilding my fingertips”), gu jeol pan (“a nine-compartment tray of savory fillings from which delicate little crêpes are made”) – beautifully accrue; his food descriptions are delectable:

… but always there is a fried egg, sunny-side up, cooked in dark sesame oil that pools on the surface of the bubbled-up white in the pattern of an archipelago; try one sometime laced with soy and sweet chili sauce along with steamed rice, the whole plate flecked with toasted nori. It’ll corrupt you for all time.

“Magical Dinners” is delightful! It has whetted my appetite for more of Chang-Rae Lee’s factual writing. Until now, I’d associated him only with fiction. I hope he continues in the nonfiction vein. He appears to have a knack for it.

Travels In Siberia - Part III

“Because I am interested in ruins, I decided to drive over to the town site.” This is from the astonishing “Nicodemus” chapter (Chapter 9) of Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989), a work I hold dear, one of only three books I took with me in my pack when I headed North a few years ago. (The other two were Seamus Heaney’s Preoccupations and Zbigniew Herbert’s Barbarian in the Garden). I’m pleased to see that Frazier’s interest in ruins continues undiminished in Travels In Siberia. Among the highlights of Part III are his exploration of an abandoned church near his campsite on the Severnaya Dvina River (“One of the lower towers had a broken dome and a good-sized birch tree growing straight up through it”), a look at the vacant lot in Yekaterinburg where the house in which Nicholas II was murdered had been located (“It reminded me of an erasure done so determinedly that it had worn a hole through the page”), and, most memorably, a viewing of a section of the Sibirskii Trakt, which many thousands of exiles had walked in tsarist times (“Longing and melancholy seemed to have worked themselves into the very soil; the old road and the land around it seemed downcast, as if they’d had their feelings hurt by how much the people passing by did not want to be here”). I enjoyed these visits tremendously. Anyone interested in the role of the imagination in factual writing could profit from a study of Frazier’s contemplations of ruins. His imagination doesn’t so much press back against reality; it takes off from it. “In the ruts of the old Trakt,” he says, “I tried to picture its former magnitude.” Here’s what he pictured:

I imagined parties of prisoners tramping along it, chains jingling, and sleighs slipping by in winter, and imperial couriers on horseback bound for Peking, and troops of soldiers, and runaway serfs, and English travelers, and families of Gypsies, and hordes of tea wagons in clouds of dust.

That “hordes of tea wagons in clouds of dust” is very fine. I notice that the New Yorker version of this passage has a semicolon after “jingling.” I question the need for an extra long pause there; it seems to me that the comma in the book version is all that’s needed. It appears that most of the New Yorker text has made it into the book unchanged. But I did spot a couple of subtle amendments. For example, in the “Convicts Road” section of “Travels In Siberia – I” (The New Yorker, August 3, 2009), Frazier says, “I had seen some lonesome roads, but this one outdid them.” Whereas, in Part III of the book, he says, “I had seen some lonesome roads, but this one outdid them all” (emphasis added). In “The Vagon” section of “Travels In Siberia – II” (The New Yorker, August 10 & 17, 2009), Frazier says, “The guys who drive this long-distance shuttle tend to wear muscle shirts, shiny Adidaa sweatpants, and running shoes, and their short, pale haircuts stand up straight in a bristly Russian way.” In the book, “guys” is changed to “entrepreneurs.” The same section of the magazine piece contains this wonderful description of the view from a moving train: “At this speed I could see the trackside weeds, curved like shepherds’ crooks by the spiderwebs attached to them, the frost on the web strands glistening in the sun.” Interestingly, the book version of the foregoing passage deletes the comma after “weeds.” With regard to most changes (as I say, there aren’t many), I think the book version is slightly better.

One aspect of the magazine articles that I really like, which is not included in the book, is the map work by Laszlo Kubinyi. The maps are beautifully tinted and decorated. For example, in the upper left corner of the map illustrating “Travels In Siberia – I,” there’s a miniature of the white Renault step van that Frazier and his two guides traveled in. The tiny picture shows the van with its hood raised and two figures peering in at the engine. This is a witty reference to the frustrating mechanical troubles that plagued the van throughout the five and a half week trip. I take the liberty of reproducing this handsome map here.

Part III was a great source of reading pleasure. It contains the complete nine thousand mile journey. It’s endlessly quotable. I'll conclude with a quotation of my favorite passage, a description of a scene glimpsed through the windshield of that temperamental van:

Vistas kept appearing until the eye hardly knew what to do with them – dark green tree lines converging at a distant yellow corner of the fields, and the lower trunks of a birch grove black as a bar code against a sunny meadow behind them, and the luminous yellows and greens of vegetables in baskets along the road, and grimy trucks with only their license numbers wiped clean, their black diesel smoke unraveling behind them across the sky.

November 15, 2010 Issue

Alec Wilkinson’s “Long Time Coming” is easily Pick of the Issue this week. It wasn’t a sure thing until, about fifteen hundred words into the piece, I encountered this dandy line: “‘I was the first person in my family to make a hundred dollars a day,’ LaVette said when I visited her in West Orange recently.” I read that and instantly could feel myself relaxing, slowing down, to savor the writing. “Long Time Coming” is about Bettye LaVette, “the last great vernacular black singer,” whose career has been plagued by “buzzard luck, which is bad luck that won’t end.” LaVette is a curious amalgam of toughness and sadness. As a singer, she is adept at expressing anguish. I’d never heard of her before I read Wilkinson’s piece. When I finished it, I went to iTunes and downloaded her Kennedy Centers Honors performance of “Love Reign O’er Me.” Her “raspy, full-throated cry” (Wilkinson’s accurate description) is electric. But it’s Wilkinson’s writing that I’m mainly interested in. The intricately worked plainness of it often brings it to the edge of poetry. Consider for example this memorable passage from “Long Time Coming”:

“After the final night of the tour, in Miami, LaVette came back to the hotel with a paper place mat signed by Plant and members of his band and a plastic dinner box that had four shrimp and a chicken leg in it. She extended the dinner box toward me and said, “You hold this,” then she went up to her room and changed and came back to the bar and ordered champagne.”

How fine those acutely seen details (“paper place mat signed by Plant and members of the band,” “plastic dinner box that had four shrimp and a chicken leg in it,” “came back to the bar and ordered champagne”) are! If beauty lives in the harmonious excitement of particulars, as John Updike said it does, that passage is sublime.

Postscript: The vivid, red-tinged Eric Ogden photo of LaVette that illustrates “Long Time Coming” is terrific. Ogden is rapidly becoming the magazine’s premier photographer.

Travels In Siberia - Part II

The best part of Part II begins, “One morning during that January I went on an expedition to Peterhof, the grand palace built by Peter the Great twenty-five miles west of the city on the Gulf of Finland.” On this expedition, Frazier gets on the wrong train and ends up in a village called Little Verevo. I like his description of the village: “eight or ten houses, with no lights showing, and snow draping roofs and fences as if it had been laid on in multiple coats every day since fall." In Little Verevo, he encounters two women (“Both had weathered, wrinkled-shoe faces, multiple worts, and lively pale-blue eyes”) who tell him the right train to take to Peterof. When Frazier finally gets to Peterof, he visits the Cottage Palace. His description of the Morskoi Cabinet on the top floor is very fine, particularly his mention of “a long brass telescope and a speaking trumpet” that he sees on a table. At one point, Frazier uses “crowbar” as a verb. He says, “To me St. Petersburg seems more like a hole in the corner of a sealed-tight packing crate that Peter crowbarred open violently from inside. Once the breach was made, the light flowed in, and it continues to flow.” I recall Frazier saying something similar in his New Yorker article “Invented City” (July 28, 2003): “Oceanic light continues to pour through this opening he crowbarred into the corner of Russia just as he intended.” I think Frazier’s use of “crowbarred” is inspired. Part II contains one other highlight – a flight to Little Diomede in the Bering Strait, which occasions this memorable description of sea ice: “In places where linen-white ice expanses met, the lines of crunched-up ice pieces were the exact same blue as Comet Cleanser.” In Little Diomede, Frazier does exactly what I would’ve done: he walks around looking at stuff, e.g., “a frozen seal on the floor of the vestibule of the tribal health building,” “a polar bear skin hanging on a wooden frame,” and most interestingly, “a walrus-skin boat on a rack near a launching ramp at the bottom of town,” which Frazier says, was a "museum-quality object.” These details alone made Part II worth reading. I ate them up. I also liked Frazier’s drawing of a jumble of sheds that illustrates the beginning of Part II. I’m looking forward to Part III, in which Frazier finally launches his nine-thousand-mile road trip across Siberia.

Interesting Emendations: Whitney Balliett's "A Walk to the Park"

“I went down to the Chelsea Hotel one afternoon a while ago to visit Elvin Jones, the unique and brilliant drummer, whose ferocity and originality and subtlety on his instrument have in the past six or so years changed the entire nature of jazz drumming and, to a degree, the nature of jazz itself.” So begins Whitney Balliett’s superb piece about Jones, which appeared in the May 18, 1968 issue of The New Yorker. A visit – not a journey, not an expedition – just a little visit with a jazz drummer in his hotel room. And I’m more than happy to tag along; this is my kind of outing. I meet the drummer, get a taste of how he lives, hear him talk a bit about his life and music, and, in the process, watch Balliett, a master writer, convert the afternoon’s experience into literature. For that's exactly what “A Walk to the Park” is – one of the greatest profiles ever to appear in The New Yorker, in my humble opinion. And what makes it great is its brilliant, nonchalant, easy-going, no-big-deal, catchy start: “I went down to the Chelsea Hotel one afternoon a while ago to visit Elvin Jones …” Balliett would later delete the “a while ago,” thereby making the thing even more perfect: see the version of “A Walk to the Park” in his classic 1971 collection Ecstasy at the Onion. The Master should’ve quit while he was ahead, though. He improvised one too many variations when, unbelievably, in his 1986 American Musicians: 56 Portraits in Jazz, he changed the beginning of “A Walk to the Park” to “Elvin Jones’ ferocity and originality and subtlety on his instrument changed the nature of jazz drumming. For a time in the late sixties, he lived in a first-floor room at the Chelsea Hotel.” This may be presumptuous, but I think I know what Balliett was up to when he made this startling and misguided change in his classic essay. He was directing the spotlight away from himself and on to Jones and his “bachelor’s nest” of an apartment. This is admirable, but wrong-headed. It’s the unabashed subjectivity of “I went down to the Chelsea Hotel one afternoon to visit Elvin Jones …” that makes the piece the rapturous reading experience that it is. Read the version in Ecstasy at the Onion; it’s perfect.

Travels In Siberia - Part I

This is just a quick progress report on my reading of Ian Frazier’s Travels In Siberia. I finished Part I last night. I enjoyed it immensely. I was surprised by the amount of new material, i.e., material not previously published in The New Yorker. Almost all of Part I is new, except for Chapter 1, which appeared in “Travels In Siberia – I” (The New Yorker, August 3, 2009). Part I of the book covers a couple of Russian trips that Frazier made back in the early nineties before he undertook the epic drive across Siberia that he described so memorably in the magazine. Part I brims with inspired writing. One of my favorite passages is a description of Nome:

It’s irregular waterfront lots accumulate crumbled-up Caterpillar treads, school bus hulks, twisted scaffolding in rats’-nest heaps, rusted gold dredges, busted paddle wheels, crunched pallets, hyperextended recliner chairs, skewed all-terrain vehicle frames, mashed wooden dogsleds, multicolored nylon cable exploded to pompoms, door-sprung ambulance vans, dinged fuel tanks, shot clutch plates, run-over corrugated pipe, bent I beams, bent rebars, bent vents. The pileup at land’s end is almost audible, as if you could hear the echoes of the cascade from the continental closet where all of it once was stored.

For me, Part I’s highlight is Frazier’s account of his trip to a Chukotka fish camp. Frazier provides numerous vivid details, e.g., descriptions of an ancient Yupik camp site (“On the long, grassy expanse above the seaside gravel, many large skulls of bowhead whales they had killed stood in an unevenly spaced line”), the sea’s surface (“Here and there curled white feathers dropped from the passing seabirds sat undisturbed like wood shavings on a shiny floor”), a Yupik village (“Most of the houses were of stucco and lath construction, trim and cozy looking, with salmon hanging all along the eaves to dry, wooden ladders leading to outside attic doors and neat yards”), making tea (“Then he produced a blowtorch, lit it, applied its flame to the blackened teapot, and boiled water for tea”). I devoured this section of the book and wished for more. At the beginning of Chapter 2, Frazier says, “When I was in my early forties, I became infected with a love of Russia.” After reading Part I, I believe I'm becoming infected, too. I'll report further after I’ve finished Part II.

Pauline Kael

This may strike some people as strange, but I still read Pauline Kael - not for her opinions, but for the sheer pleasure of her writing. In a Foreword to Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), William Shawn says, “Her opinions are forceful, convincing, often unexpected, but whether or not one agrees with them one comes away from her writings in a state of exhilaration.” As part of this blog’s ongoing narrative, I want to explore the bliss of Kael’s writing. Today, I begin with a look at a sentence I have chosen for its combinational delight. It’s from her “In Brief” review of Phantom of the Paradise (collected in 5001 Nights at the Movies): “The singer, Beef, is played by Gerrit Graham, who gives the single funniest performance; Harold Oblong, Jeffrey Comanor, and Archie Hahn turn up as three different groups – the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums, and, with black-and-white expressionist faces, the Undeads.” I find the syntax of this sentence delicious. And the names it contains – Beef, the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums, the Undeads - are wonderfully surreal. But it’s the little tucked-in loop “with black-and-white expressionist faces” that’s pure Kael. Her style is, first and foremost, descriptive. Interestingly, if you look for this sentence in the full-length review (“Spieler,” The New Yorker, November 11, 1974), you will find only the part that comes after the semi-colon. And if you look for it in the shortened version of “Spieler” collected in Kael’s For Keeps (1994), you will not find it at all.

November 8, 2010 Issue

The only test of a poem is that it be unforgettable. David St. John’s “Guitar” (The New Yorker, December 18, 1978) easily passes the test. Since reading it in the magazine thirty-two years ago, I have not been able to listen to an acoustic guitar or even look at one without recalling “the swirling chocolate of wood” contained in its exquisite penultimate line. What a ravishing poem! Nineteen rhythmic, sensuous lines rippling their way down the page, moving from one gorgeous image to the next, delightfully combining data (car radio speakers, gypsy cascades, stolen horses, castanets, stars, Airstream trailers, Charlie Christian, “the floors of cold longshoremen’s halls”) never before combined. “Guitar” is on my mind because this week in the magazine there’s another poem by St. John. It’s called “Without Mercy, The Rains Continued.” It’s much different from “Guitar”; it's enigmatic and sombre. It shows St. John responding to an unexpected piece of evidence of something “asked of me [by a lover?] / Across the years & loneliness.” St. John says that his response was “the same barely audible / Silence that I had chosen then.” Indeed, “Without Mercy, The Rains Continued” could be interpreted as an attempt to enact that “barely audible silence” in words. How different this is from the music of “Guitar” – “the music I love scaling its woven / Stairways … the swirling chocolate of wood.” It’s hard to believe that the two pieces are by the same poet. What has happened to St. John “across the years & loneliness” that has turned his poetry from rich, resplendent strumming to “barely audible silence”?

Second Thoughts: Sometimes a musician can let a note slide from sound “to the breathing just below sound.” I’m quoting the great jazz guitarist Jim Hall. Maybe that’s the effect St. John is after in “Without Mercy, The Rains Continued.”

November 1, 2010 Issue

The pickings are slim in this week’s issue. But there’s one item worth mentioning. Frances Hwang’s short story “Blue Roses” engaged me immediately with its simple opening, “A few months ago, I asked my daughter if she would invite my good friend Wang Peisan over for Christmas dinner.” Written in the first person, “Blue Roses” is about the unexpectedly strong bond that develops between two old ladies, Lin Fanghui – the “I” of the story – and Wang Peisan. At first, Lin Fanghui says bluntly, “I had a feeling that a friendship with Wang Peisan would be more trouble than it is worth.” Lin Fanghui’s essence is her brusqueness. She is curt with everyone – her husband, her daughters, her “friend” Wang Peisan – and over the course of the story I found myself enjoying her prickly company. Her bluntness is refreshing. “Blue Roses” contains at least one inspired sentence, a description of Wang Peisan’s eyes: “Her eyes were murky gray, the color of oysters, with the kind of opaqueness you see in the elderly or the blind.” At the story’s end, I felt I’d gained an insight into life’s inherent messiness. Lin Fanghui says, “Perhaps, in the end, we need these small daily irritants, a bit of sediment in our mouths, to keep life interesting.” I think that’s worth pondering.