Retrospective Review: Burkhard Bilger's "The Egg Men"

Photo by Han Gissinger, from Burkhard Bilger's "The Egg Men"

This post marks the first of what I hope will be a series of retrospective reviews of New Yorker stories that I remember with pleasure. Today, I begin with a look at one of my all-time favorite pieces, Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men” (The New Yorker, September 5, 2005).

I’ll structure my review around the following four questions:

1. What is “The Egg Men”?
2. How is it constructed?
3. What is its governing aesthetic?
4. Why do I like it so much?

1. What is “The Egg Men”?

Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men” is a fact piece about egg cooks who work at the Tropical Breeze Café, in the Flamingo hotel, Las Vegas. It’s approximately 8000 words long, divided into nine sections. Here’s a brief summary of each section’s contents:

Section 1 – Describes the Tropical Breeze; tells about Scott Gutstein, the café’s head chef; describes café’s kitchen, as the cook’s “entrench” themselves for Saturday morning breakfast rush.

Section 2 – Tells about Bilger’s experience working as a short-order cook at a Seattle breakfast place called Julia’s; describes a cook named Jack whose cooking “was a seamless sequence of interchangeable tasks reduced to their essential motions: crack, flip, scoop, pour, crack, pour, flip, scoop.”

Section 3 – Returns to the Tropical Breeze kitchen, at seven-thirty, Saturday morning; describes scene (“There were five egg and grill cooks and twenty waiters for close to three hundred diners, and tables were turning over about every thirty-eight minutes; continues with profile of Gutstein.

Section 4 – Describes Tropical Breeze in further detail (“The coffee shop’s kitchen is half the length of a football field, and it’s only the tail end of an intestinal tangle of prep kitchens, washrooms, and walk-in refrigerators that are shared by the restaurants and that coil around and beneath the casino”); tells about Gutstein’s involvement in the kitchen renovations two years ago.

Section 5 – Describes the Tropical Breeze’s “three good egg cooks” – Martin Nañez Moreno (“the omelette man”), Joel Eckerson (“the over-easy man”), and Debbie Lubick (“makes all the poached-egg dishes”); describes the scene in the Tropical Breeze’s kitchen when the morning rush begins (“When I arrived at the line, the heat seared my lungs – the griddle, at about six hundred degrees, was wreathed in steam from cooking pots and egg pans”); describes a sequence in which Eckerson cooks ten pairs of eggs simultaneously; describes a kitchen incident in which a waitress refuses to serve an order of pancakes because they’re cold.

Section 6 – Describes techniques of egg-cracking and egg-flipping; describes short-order cooking as “a feat of timing”; tells about research findings of Warren Meek, a Duke University neuroscientist, who calls short-order cooks “the master interval timers.”

Section 7 – Describes Bugsy’s Backroom, the Flamingo’s employee cafeteria (“deep in the netherworld backstage of the casino”); considers why Las Vegas casino workers seldom quit their jobs; puzzles over why Joel Eckerson, who has worked at the Flamingo for nineteen years, and Martin Nañez Moreno, who has worked there for eleven, are still cooking eggs.

Section 8 – Tells about Bilger’s visit to Las Vegas’s Corsa Cucina restaurant “to see how the other half cooked”; describes Stephen Kalt, Corsa Cucina’s executive chef (“Watching him work is like seeing short-order set to opera”); reports Kalt’s view that the Tropical Breeze short-order cooks are “a different animal” in that they “grew up seventeen generations on a farm in Mexico,” that they are happy where they are “Because that’s the culture, that’s the rhythm – you put seeds in the ground year after year.”

Section 9 – Tells about Bilger’s visit to Gutstein’s home; reports Gutsteins comments regarding his attempts to promote Eckerson (“I’ve given him the opportunity to be a manager, to get out of that bullshit five-hundred-degree heat for eight hours. I’m like, ‘Come on, Joel, you’re better than that!’ But he doesn’t want it. Straight up? He’s in such a comfort zone that it’s hurting him”); reports Bilger’s assessment of Gutstein (“Yet Gutstein wasn’t so different [from Eckerson]. When I asked if he would ever work at Pink Ginger, the Flamingo’s Asian restaurant, his shoulders shook as if a spider had scurried down them. ‘I wouldn’t be able to stand it,’ he said”).

I set out the contents of “The Egg Men” because I want to show the rich combination of ingredients – cooks, kitchens, restaurants, autobiography, neuroscience, Las Vegas, etc. - that Bilger folds into it. He creates quite a literary omelet! And I devour every delicious word of it.

2. How is it constructed?

The core of “The Egg Men” is its description of the Tropical Breeze’s kitchen reality. Five of the story’s nine sections are set in that kitchen. The first section shows us the kitchen “at six o’clock on a recent Saturday morning.” Bilger says, “Saturday morning is zero hour for short-order cooks. The café, which prepares some twenty-five hundred meals on an average weekday, may serve an extra thousand on weekends with the same cooks.” Bilger shows Gutstein to be completely at home in the kitchen’s high-stress environment. He quotes Gutstein as saying, “It gets crazy. I love it. Grown men come out of here crying.” Section 1 sets the theme: Las Vegas short-order cooks, in general, and Tropical Breeze short-order cooks, in particular, are a special breed.

Section 2 of the story cuts away from the Tropical Breeze and takes us back twenty years to Bilger’s days as a short-order cook at Julia’s in Seattle. The flashback from the Tropical Breeze to Julia’s is smoothly executed, and the section is key because it explains Bilger’s fascination with short-order cooks - what makes them tick, their extraordinary multi-tasking ability.

Sections 3, 4, 5, and 6 are located back in the Tropical Breeze. They contain many sharp, precise, vivid descriptions of short-order cooking. For example, here’s Bilger’s wonderful description of Eckerson in action:

“I need a four on two, sunny and scrambled, both wearing sausage!” a grill cook at the next station shouted. Joel nodded. The grill cooks usually made their own eggs to go with steaks or pancakes, but they sometimes needed help: “four on two” meant four eggs on two plates. Joel ripped a spool of new orders from the printer and tucked them under a clamp above the counter, then started cracking eggs into pans two at a time. When he was done, he had ten pairs of eggs cooking: five from previous orders, two from the grill cook’s order, and three from the new orders. He finished the five original orders first. He put a pair of sunnys under a broiler and used his forefinger to break the yolks on a pair that had been ordered over hard. Then he flipped the eggs in that pan and those in three other pans that had been ordered over easy – one, two, three, four. He pivoted back to the counter, set five plates on it, and garnished them all with potatoes and bacon or sausage. He then flipped the over-hards and over-easies again, slid them onto their plates along with the sunnys from the broiler, and placed all the plates under the hot lights above the counter.

That “used his forefinger to break the yolks on a pair that had been ordered over hard” is a superbly noticed detail. Bilger brilliantly crafts sequences of kitchen action. Here’s his description of Eckerson’s egg-cracking technique:

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 Fabergé Easter egg. As the spent shell fell into the trash, he shuttled the second egg into position, as if pumping a rifle.

In section 6 of “The Egg Men,” Bilger makes an audacious move; he describes the workings of short-order cooks’ minds in neuroscience terms. His piece shifts from talk of sunnys, over-hards, and over-easies into scientific terminology – “burst of dopamine,” frontal cortex,” “oscillatory neurons,” etc.

Then, in the article’s final three sections, Bilger shifts again. His narrative moves from the Tropical Breeze in search of even more meaning. Bilger looks for insight into why the egg men at the Tropical Breeze choose to remain egg men, why they refuse to climb the culinary hierarchy, why they seem happy in their work.

Of these final three sections, my favorite is section 7 in which Bilger visits Bugsy’s Backroom. It contains this terrific description:

All around us, groups of other casino workers were hunched over Formica tables in their gaudy uniforms, picking at food or watching TV on overhead monitors. There were crap dealers with gold shirts and flaming-sunset collars and cuffs, middle-aged cocktail waitresses wearing coat dresses with plunging necklines; gangs of of scruffy young waiters from Margaritaville in Hawaiian shirts. In the far corner, under the cool fluorescent lights, a quartet of blackjack dealers with slicked-back hair were playing cards with a distracted air.

Detail by detail, a way of life is being evoked here. Bilger serves us a succulent slice of it. “The Egg Men” is built in stages, focusing first on the egg cooks at the Tropical Breeze, then opening out into other locations – Bugsy’s Backroom, the Corsa Cucina, Scott Gutstein’s home - as it expands its meaning in a setting (Las Vegas) that’s often used to represent meaninglessness.

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

It would be easy to say that the art of “The Egg Men” is in its details. But you could say that about most New Yorker pieces. “The Egg Men” brims with fine details: “nicotine-yellow walls,” “sausagy arms,” “a mixed hash in a tub the size of a baptismal font,” “toast with the texture and density of prairie sod,” "a pale sweet face edged with melancholy,” eggs thrown high in the air “like salsa dancers.” But its art is also in Bilger’s descriptions of the egg cooks in action, e.g., Eckerson cooking ten pairs of eggs simultaneously. Crisp, precise descriptions of short-order technique are essential to this story, the tagline of which is “How breakfast gets served at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas.” Bilger shows us how in writing that enacts the craftsmanship of the cooks he describes.

4. Why do I like it so much?

Reading “The Egg Men,” I experience double bliss: the subject is tremendously interesting and the writing is intensely pleasurable.

I look forward to when Bilger collects “The Egg Men” in a book. I’d snap it up faster than you can say, “I need a four on two, sunny and scrambled, both wearing sausage!”

January 24, 2011 Issue

Did you see the lineup of heavy hitters in this week’s The Talk Of The Town? Wow! Nick Paumgarten, Ian Frazier, Tad Friend, and Mimi Sheraton. First up is Paumgarten. His “Swarm” is about a “handmade analog synthesizer” called the Swarmatron. The surreal reality of the Swarmatron calls out for description; it has the potential to generate some of those surprising collage-like sentences that Paumgarten, a describer par excellence, is able to assemble, and has assembled so memorably in previous Talk stories, e.g., his classic “Little Helper” (June 16 & 23, 2003), which begins: “Where would we be without Valium? Certainly not in Nutley, New Jersey, savoring the soft Klonopin light of a warm spring day.” “Swarm” has a great beginning, too. The first paragraph describes the formation of the word “bassoon” (“The word ‘bassoon’ comes from Pleury de Basseau, a vice-admiral in the French Royal Navy,” etc.). But then, in the second paragraph, Paumgarten says, “Actually, no. ‘Bassoon’ is merely ‘basso’ (Italian for ‘bass’) with an augmentative suffix.” I marveled at the audacity of Paumgarten’s move – the way he undermines the seriousness of his first paragraph. A less confident writer (me, for example) would likely delete the first paragraph and use the second one to form the lead. So “Swarm” begins with an interesting structural twist – one that I hadn’t seen before, one that takes a writer writing with authority to pull off. Not many would do it. Liebling would do it. I can’t think of anyone else. But “Swarm,” interesting though it is, doesn’t produce the transfixing kind of surreal sentence that I was hoping for. Nevertheless, there are some dandy lines, e.g. “the dissonance stretching like taffy,” and this beauty:

A visitor inserted a quarter, twirled some knobs, and had the sensation, partly real, of producing, with his ignorant hands, a marvelously unholy barrage of noise.

Next up in this week’s all-star Talk lineup is Ian Frazier. Frazier is the Talk story master. Last year alone, he produced three pieces that went straight into my personal anthology of Talk favorites: “The Big Shoe” (February 1, 2010), “Lovefest” (March 1, 2010), and “Parade of the Night” (September 20, 2010). And then there’s his great “Dial-A-Tree” (“A man eating a West Indian meat pie comes up to the museumgoer at at 188th Street and asks, ‘Hey, papi, can you help me out? I just got out of jail?’”) in the July 20th, 2009 issue, and, of course, his classic “Bags In Trees” trilogy (collected in his great 2005 Gone To New York). Whoops, I just discovered in the magazine’s online archives that none of the “Bags In Trees” articles are actually Talk stories. “Bags In Trees” and “Bags In Trees II” are “Shouts & Murmurs” pieces and “Bags In Trees: A Retrospective” is an “Our Local Correspondents” item. Nevertheless, I mention them here because they could work as Talk stories and they exemplify the magic that Frazier performs in his Talk stories – in all his writings, for that matter – his ability to notice commonplace things and write about them in such an empathetic way that he converts them into amazing stories. Those bags in trees are a perfect example.

Regarding Frazier’s Talk story “Shower” in the current issue, one sentence into it, I found myself smiling as I read this delightful construction:

On a fortuitously clear night, in the far reaches of the borough, beyond where the Q-16 bus makes its turnaround, on the grounds of old Fort Totten, atop a small hill that once held a mortar battery, two urban park rangers and twenty-five or so shivering visitors scoped the sky.

It’s cool the way that sentence adjusts its focus as it goes, starting wide “in the far reaches of the borough,” then tightening on “the grounds of old Fort Totten,” then tightening even more on “a small hill that once held a mortar battery,” and finally zeroing in on the “two urban park rangers and twenty-five or so shivering visitors.” I also like the way Frazier delays the verb “scoped” until almost the end of the sentence. “Shower” is a terrific little Talk piece. The fact that there are no meteors to see doesn’t crimp Frazier’s style at all. He reports what the rangers say about meteors and what some of the people in the group say. And his descriptions, such as this one, bring the night scene atop that Fort Totten hill vividly to life:

Meanwhile, Ranger Eric Handy gave an impromptu lecture, his blue-white face beneath the broad brim of his ranger’s hat popping into startled visibility when those with flash cameras took pictures of him.

Batting third in Talk’s super lineup is Tad Friend. His “Lenny Again” hooked me immediately with this nifty opener:

Time pares the flesh and nerve from an artist’s reputation, leaving only the barest of bones. Lenny Bruce’s skeletal remains are those of a hipster satirist who got arrested for saying “cocksucker” in a night club so that modern comedians could say it on HBO. Was he funny? Was he even supposed to be?

“Lenny Again” is a mini-profile of Steve Cuiffo, an “actor and magician,” who’s going to re-create Bruce’s infamous 1961 “midnight gig at Carnegie Hall” that, in Friend’s words, “marked Bruce’s free-associative peak.” Cuiffo’s gig will be held at a place called Ann’e Warehouse in Brooklyn. Of the many pleasures of Friend’s piece – the comparison of Cuiffo with Bruce (“he has the same black quiff and confiding eyes”), the names of places where Bruce once played that no longer exist (Village Gate, Café Au Go Go) – the most piquant is Friend’s description of Bruce’s delivery:

Bruce muttered his segues and asides in the ha-ha-ha! Manner of someone that you edge away from on the bus, so Cuiffo had made a phonetic transcription of the concert to get every verbal tic. Often the words didn’t parse: “And conductors, the same idea as, very bourgeois to even fly now, yeah, fifteen years ago, real status symbol, you know. Flying. But, now, any szlubbo, like, can make any fff.” In performance, though, it mostly made sense, as if Cuiffo were simultaneously translating from and annotating the original Synapsese.

Friend is a genius at describing “verbal tics,” which is why he’s so great at profiling comedians, e.g., Steve Carell (see “First Banana,” The New Yorker, July 5, 2010).

Batting clean-up in this all-star Talk line-up is Mimi Sheraton. She delivers a grand slam with “Opera Buffet” – thirteen sharp, tight paragraphs that tell the story of the Peking duck dinners that bass opera singer, Hao Jiang Tian, and his wife, Dr. Martha Liao, serve up after every performance. It’s a light piece, brimming with interesting detail – the metal cones that Liao packs for a concert tour, the green parrot named Luke that likes sunflower seeds and Peking duck, the steamed yeast buns stuffed with “crackling skin, moist duck meat, slivers of cucumbers and scallions, and dabs of fruity hoisin sauce.” It’s a pleasure to read along Sheraton’s lines, watching her craft the piece, joining facts and quotes, to create a concise, swift-moving story. I like how “Opera Buffet” ends in song. It’s perfection! If you want more of Sheraton’s great writing, check out her “Spit Cake” (The New Yorker, November 23, 2009). It’s one of my all-time favorite New Yorker articles.

So there you have it – Swarmatron, Quadrantid meteor shower, Lenny Bruce, Peking duck. Welcome to The New Yorker’s cabinet of wonders, the one and only The Talk Of The Town.

Pauline Kael and "Open Form"

A major strand in Pauline Kael’s governing aesthetic is the “open” approach to the movie frame. This is not an original observation. Louis Menand, in his “The Popist: Pauline Kael” (included in Menand’s essay collection American Studies, 2002), lists a number of movies that Kael cherished (e.g., Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game, Shoeshine), and says:

The technical term for the quality many of these movies … share is “open form.” The camera directs its gaze with equal empathy at every facet of the world viewed. Ordinary things are not scanted or rushed over, since the gods, if there are any, are probably in the details; but grand things are not put into quotation marks, or set up to be knocked down, either, since great emotions are as much a part of life as anything else. The door is opened onto the world “as it is,” without scrims or stage directions; and the world is left at the end, in the same condition, unarranged, and unboxed by moral resolution.

Craig Seligman, in his Sontag & Kael (2004), notes that Kael’s “dislike of being told how to respond was a constant in her criticism, and this was her principal objection to Shoah.” In support of his point, Seligman quotes the following passage from Kael’s great essay “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 20 & 27, 1971; included in Kael, Mankiewicz and Welles’ The Citizen Kane Book, 1971):

In the thirties, Jean Renoir had been using deep focus (that is, keeping the middle range and the background as clear as the foreground) in a naturalistic way. The light seemed (and often was) “natural.” You looked at a scene, and the drama that you saw going on in it was just part of that scene, and so you had the sense of discovering it for yourself, of seeing drama in the midst of life. This was a tremendous relief from the usual studio lighting, which forced your attention to the dramatic action in the frame, blurred the rest, and rarely gave you a chance to feel that the action was part of anything larger or anything continuous.

Seligman also quotes from Kael’s reviews of Harlan County, U.S.A., and Comfort and Joy. But neither Menand nor Seligman mention what I think is Kael’s clearest statement of her “open form” preference. I’m referring to the following passage in her magnificent review of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (see “Alchemy,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1972; collected in Kael’s Deeper Into Movies, 1973, and For Keeps, 1994):

The period details are there – a satin pillow, a modernistic apartment-house lobby, a child’s pasted-together greeting to Grandpa – but Coppola doesn’t turn the viewer into a guided tourist, told what to see. Nor does he go for a lot of closeups, which are the simplest tool for fixing a director’s attitude. Diane Keaton (who plays Michael’s girl friend) is seen casually; her attractiveness isn’t labored. The only character who is held in frame for us to see exactly as the character looking at her sees her is Apollonia (played by Simonetta Stefanelli), whom Michael falls in love with in Sicily. She is fixed by the camera as a ripe erotic image, because that is what she means to him, and Coppola, not having wasted his resources, can do it in a few frames. In general, he tries not to fix the images. In Sunday Bloody Sunday, John Schlesinger showed a messy knocked-over ashtray being picked up in closeup, so that there was nothing to perceive in the shot but the significance of the messiness. Coppola, I think, would have kept the camera on the room in which the woman bent over to retrieve the ashtray, and the messiness would have been just one element among many to be observed – perhaps the curve of her body could have told us much more than the actual picking-up motion. The Godfather keeps so much in front of us all the time that we’re never bored (though the picture runs just two minutes short of three hours) – we keep taking things in. This is a heritage from Jean Renoir – this uncoercive, “open” approach to the movie frame. Like Renoir, Coppola lets the spectator roam around in the images, lets a movie breathe, and this is extremely difficult in a period film, in which every detail must be carefully planted. But the details never look planted: you’re a few minutes into the movie before you’re fully conscious that it’s set in the past.

As an approach to movie-making, I can’t see how “open form” can be improved on. Yet, even today, we see directors constantly forcing our attention to the dramatic action in the frame, always telling us what we should be feeling, seeing, and thinking.

Credit: The above portrait of Pauline Kael is by Edward Sorel; it appears in The New Yorker (October 20, 2003) as an illustration for David Denby’s “My Life As A Paulette.”

Kay Ryan's Democratic Élitism

I’d like to briefly compare two reviews of Kay Ryan’s new poetry collection The Best of It: Adam Kirsch’s "Think Small" (The New Yorker, April 12, 2010) and Helen Vendler’s "The Art of Flamingo Watching" (The New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010). I’m going to focus on the way Kirsch and Vendler treat one of Ryan’s best known poems, “Outsider Art.” This is because “Outsider Art” challenges my belief, based on the poetry of Whitman, Bishop, O’Hara, Heaney, Schuyler, Simic, and others, that almost everything that exists deserves equal reverence and can become the subject of poetry. In “Outsider Art,” Ryan seems to be saying that this is certainly not the case in respect of certain folk art objects, which she describes as follows:

Most of it’s too dreary
or too cherry red.
If it’s a chair, it’s
covered with things
the savior said
or should have said –
dense admonishments
in nail polish
too small to be read.
If it’s a picture,
the frame is either
burnt matches glued together
or a regular frame painted over
to extend the picture.

Ryan couldn’t find the poetry in these objects, but she wrote a poem about them anyway, calling it “Outsider Art,” in which she says, “There never/seems to be a surface equal/to the needs of these people…./We are not/pleased the way we thought/we would be pleased.”

There’s no delight in this poem. “These people” reeks of condescension, affirming superior knowingness in the poet. “Outsider Art” does not effect what Seamus Heaney has called “the redress of poetry.” If Heaney was writing this poem, he would not have flinched from describing the ugliness of this “outsider art,” but he would have gone on to do something positive with the ugliness. Ryan simply looks at the objects, describes them in her bare bones style, and says, “We are not pleased.”

Adam Kirsch, in his New Yorker review, says that, "Reading The Best of It, it becomes clear that Ryan, like all genuinely gifted poets, is a democratic élitist, believing that many are called but few are chosen.” Based on my reading of “Outsider Art,” I would say that “democratic élitist” is an excellent description of Ryan. But it seems that Kirsch considers democratic élitism a poetic virtue, a quality shared by “all genuinely gifted poets.” I strongly disagree. Whitman is a genuinely gifted poet. In his verse, as John Updike has observed, “An ideal equality is extended not only to persons but to things as well” (see “Whitman’s Egotheism” in Updike’s Hugging the Shore, 1983). Just about the last thing you would think to call Whitman would be “élitist.” The same goes for the other poets I named above.

Kirsch, in his review, says Ryan “has no patience for the clumsy sincerity of what she calls, in one poem, ‘Outsider Art.’” I think he’s right. I suppose this is another example of her wonderful “democratic élitism.” What about respect for what she’s seen? It seems to me a better poet, a real poet, would’ve explored the otherness of that picture frame made of “burnt matches glued together.” The details of “Outsider Art” are fascinating, too fascinating to warrant Ryan’s deplorable de haut en bas “we are not pleased” attitude. Kirsch should’ve had the backbone to say so, instead of trying to make a virtue of Ryan’s superiority in relation to her subject matter.

Turning to Vendler’s review, I hoped she would say she disliked “Outsider Art.” After all, she has in the past approvingly described “an American pastoral aesthetic of the found, the cared-for, and the homemade” (see “New York Pastoral” in Vendler’s Soul Says, 1995). However, in "The Art of Flamingo Watching,” Vendler comes out in support of Ryan's elitism. Regarding “Outsider Art,” she says, “But like any aesthete, she is repelled by incompetent creation; and for all her well-wishing she draws back.” “Like any aesthete”? What about the aesthete who cherishes American pastoral? What about Stevens’s Tennessee gray jar and home-sewed, hand-embroidered sheet? What about Bishop’s doilies and hand-carved flute? “Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?” says Bishop’s Crusoe. Right there is the point that Ryan ignores – she’s as home-made as the chair “covered with things/the Savior said …/in nail polish/too small to be read” that she so snobbishly dismisses. In explaining and upholding the elitism of “Outsider Art,” Vendler shows an elitist streak of her own when she says, “Ryan is, despite her desert beginnings, a lover of Satie, a reader of Brodsky and Bishop; she cannot disavow her own talent, her intelligence and achievement.” Oh, please. Bishop was certainly not lacking in talent, intelligence, and achievement, yet she didn’t hold herself out as being superior to the homemade objects in her poems. Quite the opposite. As a poet, she empathized with them. As a poet, Ryan’s powers of empathy appear to be blocked.

Credit: The above portrait of Kay Ryan is by Jody Hewgill; it appears in The New Yorker (April 12, 2010) as an illustration for Adam Kirsch's "Think Small."

January 17, 2011 Issue

Gabrielle Hamilton’s succulent “The Lamb Roast,” in this week’s issue, is an enchanting evocation of her rural Pennsylvania youth, when she lived with her family in a “wild castle built into the ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill.” It centers on an annual party her father threw, featuring a spring-lamb roast. Yes, it’s nostalgia, but it’s exquisite nostalgia, filled with “people and fireflies and laughter.” Some of the details are amazing, e.g., her mother’s breath (“exhale of wine, vinaigrette, and tangerine”), a lion tamer’s ass (“high, round, and firm, like two Easter hams”), a Coke machine that “glowed like something almost religious.”

I relished the specificity of Hamilton’s writing, e.g., the names of local businesses (Smutzie’s, Sam Williams’s Mobil, Cal’s Collision Repair, Black’s Christmas tree farm, the LaRue bottle works, Johnson’s apple orchard). There’s poetry in those names – you can feel it in the way Hamilton uses them; it’s almost as if her memoir emerges from these names. Consider this inspired passage:

The day before the party, we drove out along the winding roads, past Black’s Christmas tree farm and the LaRue bottle works. I rode in the bed of the truck, in a cotton dress and boy’s shoes with no socks, hanging on to the railing, letting the wind blast my face. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell by the little patches of bracing coolness, and the sudden bright warmth, and the smell of manure when we were passing a hay field, a long thick stand of trees, a stretch of clover, or a horse farm. Finally, we got to Johnson’s apple orchard, where we picked up wood for the fire.

In “The Lamb Roast,” Hamilton shows a love of language. She works its colors and textures into lyrical, sensual constructions. Here are two examples:

It was a lush setting. The beer, wine, and soda chilled in the creek, and the weeping willows bent their branches down over the water.

The sun started to set and we lit the paper-bag luminaries, 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.

Writing like that – I devour!

January 10, 2011 Issue

Mike Peed’s “We Have No Bananas” in this week’s issue is interestingly structured. I didn’t really notice its form until near the article’s end when it suddenly jumps from Honduras back to Brisbane. Maybe I’m slow on the uptake, but it was only then I realized that what Peed had done was show (as opposed to tell) the two approaches that the banana industry is taking to combat a devastating blight called Tropical Race Four that’s wiped out the Cavendish banana in Asia and Australia. One approach is genetic modification (inserting a gene into the banana that makes it Race Four resistant), which is being researched at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane; the other approach is traditional plant breeding (growing many different banana varieties in hope of finding a Race Four resistant one), which is being developed at a La Lima research station in Honduras. Obviously, Peed’s piece is not just an exercise in banana appreciation like the article that Berton Roueché wrote for the magazine thirty-eight years ago (“The Humblest Fruit,” The New Yorker, October 1, 1973; collected in Roueché's 1978 The River World). Nor is it solely about the market’s acceptance of genetically modified produce like, say, John Seabrook’s piece about Calgene’s Flavr Savr tomato is (see “Tremors in the Hothouse,” The New Yorker, July 19, 1993; collected in Seabrook’s 2008 Flash of Genius). Nor is it strictly about Tropical Race Four the way, say, Elizabeth Kolbert’s article “Stung” (The New Yorker, August 6, 2007) is about the phenomenon (colony-collapse disorder) that was wiping out the bee population a few years ago. Pead’s article is about all these things – banana, blight, and genetic modification. He does a good job laying it all out in a relatively tight design. His best move is the way he brings Race Four alive on the page. To do this, he leads with an arresting account of a visit he made to a banana plantation in Humpty Doo, near Darwin, Australia. The manager shows him around the plantation. Peed’s report contains this memorable passage, perhaps the most pungent of the piece:

As we walked through the fields, Tropical Race Four seemed abundant as the mosquitoes circling our heads. “There’s one,” Smith said, pointing. “That’s two. You can see that one there? He’s coming out. There’s another one.” Some plants were just turning yellow; others were a desiccated mass of raw umber. At one point, Smith unsheathed a cane knife, which is similar to a machete, but with a shorter, wider blade. An axe is not needed to cut down a banana plant, which is not a tree but, rather, the world’s largest herb. The part that is usually called the trunk is the pseudostem – a barkless staff composed only of leaves waiting to unfurl. In one stroke, Smith sliced through a diseased plant. The inside resembled a crushed-out cigar, and the fetid odor was overwhelming. Smith said, “You smell that, and you think, Ah, fuck.”

There’s a low-key, workmanlike quality to Peed’s writing that I like. There are no flashy metaphors or similes. He knows he’s got an interesting (and important) story to tell; he more or less gets out of the way and lets it tell itself. I like his use of the first-person (e.g. “That afternoon, Dale and I drove east of Brisbane to a state-owned greenhouse”), and I like the sharp, bright dabs of detail (e.g., “Dragon flies buzzed, and a stray cat pawed the dirt”). For all of these reasons, Mike Peed’s “We Have No Bananas” is this week’s Pick Of The Issue.

Interesting Emendations: Anthony Bailey's "Outer Banks"

The variation between New Yorker pieces and subsequent versions of them that appear in books fascinates me. The variation shows that The New Yorker has its own way of doing things, even basic things like punctuation. Take Anthony Bailey’s great book The Outer Banks (1989), for example. It’s about a trip that Bailey took along North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 1985. Written in the first-person singular and in the present tense – a combination I find irresistible - it tells us what Bailey did and saw and heard and ate and felt, in detail after palpable detail, as he walks, drives, camps, and noses his way across the precarious Banks. A portion of the book appeared, in slightly different form, titled “Outer Banks,” in the May 25, 1987, issue of The New Yorker.

Comparing the two versions, I find differences in almost every paragraph. For instance, here’s an excerpt from the magazine piece describing a walk that Bailey takes on the beach:

Then I turn left – north – along the beach. The tide is at half ebb, so I am able to stride easily on firm, damp sand at the water’s edge; higher on the beach, the sand is dry and loose, too soft for comfortable walking. Some people are sitting on porches, or in beach chairs in front of their cottages. A few fishermen are casting into the surf, and several youths on surfboards are floating some way out, waiting for the right wave. Toward the horizon, a small white blob is a solitary sportfishing boat. At the water’s edge, I pass a child swimming and being watched by his father, who gives me an affable nod. I make my turnaround point a structure called the Nags Head Fishing Pier. It is battered-looking, spindly-legged, and wobbly-kneed, yet a number of customers obviously feel secure enough to be angling from it; on the landward end, it has a bar, a luncheonette, and a fishing-tackle store. As I walk back, I observe driftwood; the black egg cases of skate, like dark pouches of ravioli or wonton, sealed as if with a twist at each end; all sorts of shells; and a plastic fork or two.


Here is the same walk as described in the book:

Then I turn left along the beach, northward. The tide is at half-ebb, so I am able to stride along on firm, damp sand at the water’s edge; higher on the beach the sand is dry and loose, too soft for easy walking. Some people are sitting on porches or in beach chairs in front of their cottages. A few fishermen are casting into the surf, and several youths on surfboards are floating some way out, waiting for the right wave. Toward the horizon, a small white blob is a solitary sportfishing boat. I pass at the water’s edge a child swimming and being watched by his father, who gives me an affable nod. I make my turnaround point a structure called Nags Head Fishing Pier – battered-looking, spindly-legged, and wobbly-kneed, though a number of customers obviously feel secure enough to be angling from it. On its landward end the pier has a bar, luncheonette, and fishing-tackle store. As I walk back, I observe driftwood, the black egg cases of skate, like dark pouches of ravioli or wonton, sealed as if with a twist at each end, all sorts of shells, and a plastic fork or two.

Comparing these two passages, I count fifteen differences: (1) The first sentence in the magazine version is “Then I turn left – north – along the beach,” whereas the book version’s first sentence is “Then I turn left along the beach, northward”; (2) the magazine version says “stride easily”; the book version says “stride along”; (3) the magazine version has a comma after “beach”; the book version doesn’t; (4) the magazine version says “comfortable walking”; the book version says “easy walking”; (5) the magazine version has a comma after “porches”; the book version doesn’t; (6) the magazine version says, “At the water’s edge, I pass”; the book version says, “I pass at the water’s edge”; (7) The magazine version has a period after “Nags Head Fishing Pier”; the book version has a dash; (8) the word after “wobbly-kneed” in the magazine version is “yet”; in the book version, it’s “though’; (9) the magazine version has a semi-colon after “angling from it”; the magazine version has a period; (10) “the” before “landward” in the magazine becomes “its” in the book; (11) “it has a bar” in the magazine” becomes “the pier has a bar” in the book; (12) the magazine says “a luncheonette”; the book just says “luncheonette”; (13) the magazine says “a fishing-tackle store”; the book just says “fishing-tackle store”; (14) in the magazine, there’s semi-colon after “driftwood”; in the book, there’s a comma; (15) in the magazine, there’s a semi-colon after “end”; in the book there’s a comma.

These differences – most of them minor syntactical adjustments – show the numerous decisions Bailey faced in structuring his piece. They are typical of the differences that exist between the two texts in almost every paragraph. It’s difficult to say which version is better. Looking at the two versions of the “beach walk” passage, I like that “left – north” in the first sentence of The New Yorker version; it’s a subtle touch, signaling that we’re in the presence of a walker for whom direction is important, so much so that when he says “left,” he immediately wants to be more precise, and so quickly adds “north” in the same breath. Also, I find The New Yorker version’s “At the water’s edge, I pass a child” smoother than the book’s “I pass at the water’s edge a child.” But I question The New Yorker’s use of semi-colons to separate the driftwood, black egg cases of skate, shells, and plastic fork(s) in the last sentence. The book uses commas to mark the separation, and even though there are two additional commas within “the driftwood, black egg cases of skate, shells, and plastic fork(s),” the sentence still makes sense and flows much better than it does when it’s riddled with semi-colons. I also prefer the book’s use of a dash after “Nags Head Fishing Pier” that immediately ushers in the vivid adjectives “battered-looking, spindly-legged, and wobbly-kneed.” In the magazine piece, the use of a period, instead of a dash, delays the occurrence of these adjectives until after the start of the new sentence.

Both versions are great – full of open-air immediacy, fresh and vibrant as Winslow Homer watercolors. I think the New Yorker changes reflect its Strunkian approach to style, particularly Strunk’s well-known injunction, “Omit needless words!” My favorite sentence in The Outer Banks is the simple, but thrilling, “Saturday morning, and I drive northward up the Banks.” It’s the beginning of an excursion, and I’m happy to be along. But what about that "and”? I don't consider it needless, but I'll bet William Strunk would. I check The New Yorker version. Sure enough, Strunk has struck again; “and” is omitted; "northward" is trimmed to "north." The sentence - “Saturday morning, I drive north up the Banks” - is cleaner, but somehow less buoyant and carefree.

Elif Batuman: Why Criticism Matters

Of all the forms of writing, literary criticism is my favorite. Last week, The New York Times Sunday Book Review featured an interesting article titled “Why Criticism Matters: Six Accomplished Critics Explain the Importance of Their Work” (December 31, 2010). One of the six critics is The New Yorker’s Elif Batuman. I avidly read her piece called “From the Critical Impulse, the Growth of Literature.” It contains this amazing sentence: It’s as if, having devoured too many books about evolutionary psychobiology and hard-wired behaviors, Anglo-American culture fell asleep and dreamed a giant dream that Mrs. Dalloway had Gerstmann’s syndrome. I chuckled when I read that. It’s such a delightful, surprising concoction of words and ideas, abstract and specific at once – the verbal equivalent of a miniature Rauschenberg combine. And to think that it resulted from an application of ideological criticism! Who can argue with results like that? Well, I’ll give it a shot. Batuman, in her essay, proposes a Marxist application of Freudian theory to literature. She says, “Aesthetic features almost always indicate a hidden level of meaning, a richness of signification, which is itself the very thing that we perceived as beauty to begin with.” She views the function of criticism as a Freudian search for hidden meaning. But the meaning she’s searching for has nothing to do with sex. She says, A more productive and more faithful (albeit less literal) application of Freud’s theory to literature may be found in Marxist criticism, which searches the work of art for signs not of the writer’s personal sexual history, but of history itself. I’m not sure I find this “hidden level of meaning” stuff very convincing. Art is pure surface. It seems to me that to disregard the story in favor of a presumed story-behind-the-story is to disregard what Helen Vendler has called “the primary sensuous claim of every work of art, the claim made precisely by its ‘surface’ (these words, these notes, and no others)”: see Vendler’s Introduction to her 1988 essay collection The Music of What Happens, which includes a number of her great New Yorker poetry reviews. There’s a passage in Janet Malcolm’s “The Purloined Clinic” (The New Yorker, October 5, 1987) that supports my point. Malcolm proposes Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” as “the quintessential allegory of both psychoanalytic therapy and deconstructive critical theory.” She says, As the detective Dupin went straight for the most negligently obvious place that the government minister could have selected for the “concealment” of the compromising letter, so do the analyst and the deconstructionist know that the secrets of human nature and of works of art lie on the surface and in the margins, and that the metaphors of depth, delving, unearthing, plumbing, penetrating are irrelevant to their work. As an alternative to Batuman’s ideological criticism, I suggest aesthetic criticism. The aim of aesthetic criticism is not primarily to reveal the meaning of an art work. It’s aim is, as Helen Vendler has ably stated, “to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration”: see Vendler’s Introduction to The Music of What Happens, above-said. Vendler, in her essay “The Function of Criticism” (included in The Music of What Happens), also says, “No art work describes itself. Only by repeated casts of the critical imagination is the world around us, including the world of literature, finally described and thereby made known, familiar, and integral.” Batuman has shown herself to be a gifted describer (see, for example, her wonderful “The Memory Kitchen,” The New Yorker, April 19, 2010). I’m hoping that she’ll eventually adopt aesthetic criticism as her raison d’être.

January 3, 2011 Issue

If you delight, as I do, in surprising word combinations verging on the surreal (e.g., “falling chocolate trunk filled with frozen chocolate powder, on a forest floor of lime-and-mint yogurt, with almond praline, puffed quinoa, and green-pistachio streusel”), you will devour Adam Gopnik’s “Sweet Revolution,” in this week’s issue. Gopnik’s charming, sensuous piece begins and ends with soufflé. In between, it takes us to some exotic restaurants in Barcelona, and immerses us in table talk (“This opened us up to the whole question of tiramisù – opened an incredible world to us”) that’s almost as surreal as the avant-garde desserts it describes. Sitting next to the woodstove, looking out at the thickly falling snow, I soaked this piece up the way trifle sponge cake absorbs cognac, and I hungered for more. What a great way to start the year! And it’s proof, at long last, that Gopnik hasn't lost his wonderfully light touch.

Second Thoughts: I’ve decided to revisit this post because I feel I’ve failed to do justice to two other excellent pieces in the January 3rd issue. The two items I’m referring to are John Colapinto’s “Just Have Less” and Jeffrey Toobin’s “Casualties of Justice.” I just want to briefly say that I enjoyed the Colapinto piece immensely, particularly the description of the weaving technique called intrecciato. Regarding the disturbing “Casualties of Justice,” I was impressed by the way Toobin constructed his narrative from myriad interviews and transcripts. The narrative slant against Marsh (“Marsh and his colleagues took an important but fairly routine political corruption investigation in Alaska and tried to leverage it into a prosecution of one of the leading political figures in the country. In doing so, they failed themselves and the Justice Department”) that emerges late in the piece seems at odds with the story’s tagline (“The Justice Department clearly wronged Senator Ted Stevens. Did it also wrong one of his prosecution?”). Toobin appears to answer the tag’s question in the negative on the basis of little more than that Marsh was part of the legal team that botched Stevens’s prosecution. The article leaves me wondering what exactly Marsh did that constituted misconduct.