April 8, 2013 Issue

My April 8^th New Yorker is looking pretty battered. It’s been rolled up and stuffed in my backpack for three weeks while I roamed around northern Italy. I read it on my April 15 flight to Florence. It’s a rich, absorbing issue. Six pieces stand out:

1. Sarah Stillman’s “Up in the Air,” a Talk story about a “drone party” (“Druce’s drone, equipped with sonar, did not take flight but wobbled on the pavement like a drunken Jabberwock”);

2. Mark Singer’s “Thar She Blows,” a Talk piece about the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibit “Whales: Giants of the Deep” (“Three days before the exhibition opened, Professor Pou Temara, a specialist in Maori language and culture at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New Zealand, chanted a Maori blessing in a low monotone as he led a procession past displays of toothed and toothless whale skulls …”);

3. Jeremy Denk’s “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” a Personal History piece about Denk’s “piano student” experiences (“I couldn’t believe that, twenty years later, in this land of traffic lights and strip malls, we were both still carrying the memory of those two minutes of Bach”);

4. Hisham Matar’s “The Return,” an account of Matar’s return to Libya and his search for information regarding his father’s disappearance (“I remember the high eucalyptus trees in the front garden, their big and vivid shadows on the earth, black claws on the cars”);

5. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The Bad-Boy Brand,” a profile of Vice Media and its hip C.E.O., Shane Smith (“We took a water taxi through the canals, past crumbling buildings and water-stained walls, and arrived at San Marco just as the floodwaters were rising. The area was swarming with tourists, and a narrow pathway of raised wooden planks was threaded precariously through the square. As the waters rose, the tourists crossed the square on the planks, shuffling in a long, two-person-wide line, like animals boarding Noah’s Ark”);

6. James Wood’s “Youth In Revolt,” a review of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (“But it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present, which is the living reality it conjures on the page at the moment we are reading”).

Of these six, my favorite is Widdicombe’s “The Bad-Boy Brand.” The last section, describing Smith and his crew wading through flooded Piazza San Marco (“The water was filthy, and occasionally a dead pigeon floated past”), is brilliant. Widdicombe’s “Rush” (September 13, 2012) was last year’s best Talk story. Her superb “The Bad-Boy Brand” may well be this year’s best feature. 

Interesting Emendations: Aleksandar Hemon's "Mapping Home"

When Aleksandar Hemon’s "Mapping Home" appeared in The New Yorker (December 5, 2011), I devoured it. I enjoy reading pieces about walking. In “Mapping Home,” walking is used as a way of coping with the “anxiety of displacement.” I used it the same way when I lived in Iqaluit, tramping the dusty gravel roads, the ancient Inuit footpaths, the tundra trails along the Sylvia Grinnell River. Like Hemon in Sarajavo, and later in Chicago, “I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights,” trying to comprehend the place, to know it (in Hemon’s felicitous words) “in my body.” “Mapping Home” is included in Hemon’s excellent new collection The Book of My Lives. It’s now called “The Lives of a Flaneur.” It’s as wonderful in the rereading as in the reading. There are a few differences between this version and the New Yorker original. One of my favorite passages – a description of Hemon’s wanderings when he returned to Sarajevo in 1997 – is slightly altered. Here’s the magazine version:

I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted like burned corn, instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war. Everything around me was both familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant. (Emphasis added)

And here’s the book version:

I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the smell of hard life and sewage – during the siege, people had taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted unlike what I remembered from before the war – it was like burnt corn now. As a Bosnian in Chicago, I’d experienced one form of displacement, but this was another: I was displaced in a place that had been mine. In Sarajevo, everything around me was familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant. (Emphasis added)

Does it matter whether you say “odor” or “smell,” “burned” or “burnt”? Is the substitution of “unlike what I remembered from before the war” for “instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war” significant? For me, it is. It’s fascinating to see a master wrier like Hemon reworking his composition. In another memorable passage, “residents of a nursing home on Winthrop” becomes “drooling residents of a nursing home on Winthrop” (emphasis added). In the original of his description of his weekend chess games at Rogers Park coffee shop, he writes, “I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: ‘Can I have that in writing?’” In the book version this is changed to “I often played with an Assyrian named Peter, who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and I offered to resign, would crack the same joke: ‘Can I have that in writing?’” Comparison of the two versions discloses several other changes as well. But I don’t want to make too much of these variations. Both versions are essentially the same. Both are superb. Both are consummate expressions of what it means to locate “a geography of the soul.”

Credit: The above portrait of Aleksandar Hemon is by Riccardo Vecchio; it appears in The New Yorker (December 5, 2011) as an illustration for Hemon’s “Mapping Home.” 

April 1, 2013 Issue

Steve Coll’s “The Spy Who Said Too Much,” in this week’s issue, is a marvel of concision, logic, and analysis. It’s an account of the chain of events that led to the imprisonment of C.I.A. officer John Kiriakou for disclosing classified information to the press. There’s not much enjoyment in reading about Kiriakou’s downfall. He’s not a clear-cut whistleblower hero. As Coll says, “one person’s whistle-blowing is another’s grandstanding gadfly.” It’s not clear which category Kiriakou falls in. The pleasure of Coll’s piece is in seeing how Coll neatly and clearly structures his narrative, using Kiriakou’s case to illustrate the challenges that the press faces in investigating the Bush Administration’s abusive interrogation methods. What I like most about Coll’s approach is his refusal to judge Kiriakou. After setting out the government’s rationale for prosecuting him, Coll says, in the piece’s most thrilling passage, “But one might ask a different question. Which matters more: Kiriakou’s motives and his reliability, or the fact that, however inelegantly, he helped to reveal that a sitting President ordered international crimes? Does the emphasis on the messenger obscure the message?” Right there, in the posing of those cogent questions, “The Spy Who Said Too Much” separates itself from conventionality (leaker brought to justice) and becomes significantly profounder – an argument for “torture accountability.”