“No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams wrote,
introducing his long poem Paterson. I enjoy writing that follows this dictum.
This week’s New Yorker brims with things, e.g., Charlie Watts’s “carefully cut
gray suit, a violet shirt, and brown tasseled loafers” (Alec Wilkinson’s “Tag
Team”), the “old bicycle sprouting bundles of bamboo fishing baskets” on
display in a museum in Hanoi’s old market district (Jane Kramer’s “A Reporter
at Odds”), the torturous Apollon’s Wheels barbell that caused Brian Shaw to
“tweak” his left biceps at this year’s Arnold Strongman Classic (Burkhard
Bilger’s “The Strongest Man in the World”), and the intimidating “field hockey
stick, decorated with bright racing stripes” wielded by Brigadier Mahana
Bashir, commander of an S.P.L.A. training camp in the Nuba Mountains (Jon Lee
Anderson’s “A History of Violence”). My favorite “thing” in this week’s issue
is the unbroken white clay pipe with the “irregular tooth marks” at the base of
the stem that the conceptual landscape artist Matthew Jensen found “half buried near a park trail in
Riverdale.” It’s mentioned in Ian Frazier’s dandy little Talk story about
Jensen (“Lost and Found”). Looking at those tooth marks sparks Frazier’s
imagination, inspiring him to write this wonderful line: “Suddenly, the face of
the snaggletoothed smoker seemed to materialize, the café faded out, and a
landscape of old New York sprang up magically all around.”
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