November 25, 2013 Issue

Two of the most interesting sentences in this week’s New Yorker feature the hawkish verb “weaponize,” used in a relatively unhawkish way. Goings On About Town deploys it in an “Art” note on Benjamin Degen: “Degen weaponizes poetic fancy with a secondary palette and lavishly patterned impasto.” And Burkhard Bilger uses it in his brilliant “Auto Correct” to describe Anthony Levandowski’s self-driving Lexus: “It looks like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work.” 

Bilger’s piece brims with wonderful description: Levandowski’s excitable talk is likened to “the bright, electrifying chatter of a processor in overdrive”; the roboticist, Sebastian Thrun, “has a gift for seeing things through a machine’s eyes”: the office of Google’s driverless-car project is “a mixture of the whimsical and the workaholic – candy-colored sheet metal over a sprung-steel chassis”; Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s “scruffy beard and flat, piercing gaze gave him a Rasputinish quality, dulled somewhat by his Google Glass eyewear”; the Google driverless car’s steering wheel has On and Off buttons “lit a soft, fibre-optic green and red”; Levandowski’s laptop screen shows “a Tron-like world of neon objects drifting and darting on a wire-frame nightscape.”

What I relish most about Bilger’s writing is the way he renders facts as personal experience. He doesn’t just describe events; he participates in them. For example, in “Auto Correct,” he visits the headquarters of the Google Car project (“When you walk in, the first things you notice are the wacky tchotchkes on the desks: Smurfs, ‘Star Wars’ toys, Rube Goldberg devices. The next thing you notice are the desks: row after row after row, each with someone staring hard at a screen”); he attends Google Car tech meetings (“The main topic for much of that morning was the user interface. How aggressive should the warning sounds be? How many pedestrians should the screen show? In one version, a jaywalker appeared as a red dot outlined in white. ‘I really don’t like that,’ Urmson said. ‘It looks like a real estate sign.’ The Dutch designer nodded and promised an alternative for the next round”); he test-drives a Volvo equipped with an autonomous safety system (“I contented myself with steering, while the car took care of braking and acceleration”); and, most memorably, he rides in a Google self-driving car:

At first, it was a little alarming to see the steering wheel turn by itself, but that soon passed. The car clearly knew what it was doing. When the driver beside us drifted into our lane, the Lexus drifted the other way, keeping its distance. When the driver ahead hit his brakes, the Lexus was already slowing down. Its sensors could see so far in every direction that it saw traffic patterns long before we did. The effect was almost courtly: drawing back to let others pass, gliding into gaps, keeping pace without strain, like a dancer in a quadrille.

That “drawing back to let others pass, gliding into gaps, keeping pace without strain, like a dancer in a quadrille” is beautiful; it enacts the stunning automated choreography it describes. “Auto Correct” is one of Bilger’s best pieces. I enjoyed it immensely.

Interesting Emendations: John Updike's "The Assassination"

Courtesy International Center of Photography

Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy’s death is the subject of one of The New Yorker’s most memorable Talk of the Town stories – John Updike’s “The Assassination” (December 7, 1963). Here’s an excerpt:

It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved; only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world’s great mingled with the faces of landladies who had happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine; cathedrals alternated with warehouses, temples of government with suburban garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her employer’s quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed a panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares.

That “tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin” is inspired! Updike brilliantly captures the assassination’s surreal reality. Interestingly, the version of “The Assassination” contained in Updike’s 1965 Assorted Prose differs from the New Yorker piece. For example, the last paragraph of the New Yorker story is deleted. But the heart of the piece - the “unsearchably significant dream” passage quoted above - remains the same. As well it should – it’s perfect. 

November 18, 2013 Issue

The tagline for Ariel Levy’s "Thanksgiving In Mongolia," in this week’s issue, is “Adventure and heartbreak at the edge of the earth.” It’s open to question whether Ariel’s Mongolian experience constitutes adventure. She calls it “black magic,” and that’s probably more accurate. But as for “heartbreak” – that’s the perfect word for it. “Thanksgiving In Mongolia” is utterly, absolutely heartbreaking. It’s about a miscarriage that Levy had while she was in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, reporting a story. The baby was still alive after he left her womb:

He was translucent and pink and very, very small, but he was flawless. His lovely lips were opening and closing, opening and closing, swallowing the new world. For a length of time I cannot delineate, I sat there, awestruck, transfixed. Every finger, every toenail, the golden shadow of his eyebrows coming in, the elegance of his shoulders—all of it was miraculous, astonishing. I held him up to my face, his head and shoulders filling my hand, his legs dangling almost to my elbow. I tried to think of something maternal I could do to convey to him that I was, in fact, his mother, and that I had the situation completely under control. I kissed his forehead and his skin felt like a silky frog’s on my mouth.

Levy experienced motherhood for the precious “ten or twenty minutes” of life that her baby was allotted here on earth. “Thanksgiving In Mongolia” is a blood-filled memoir of trauma. I found myself deflecting its tragedy by referring back to an early passage in the piece, containing this delightful description of a herdsman and conservationist named Tsetsegee Munkhbayar: “Munkhbayar was dressed in a long, traditional deel robe and a fur hat with a small metal falcon perched on top. It felt like having a latte with Genghis Khan.” That “small metal falcon” is superbly noticed. Levy may, in her anguish, feel like “a wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone” (as she says near the end of her piece). But she writes like an angel. In “Thanksgiving In Mongolia,” she’s cast a lasting memorial to her son’s brief life.

Interesting Emendations: Peter Hessler's "Walking the Wall"

The opening paragraph of Peter Hessler’s wonderful “Walking the Wall” (The New Yorker, May 21, 2007) is, for me, one of the great, irresistible beginnings in all of New Yorker writing:

When the weather is good, or when I’m tired of having seven million neighbors, I drive north from downtown Beijing. It takes an hour and a half to reach Sancha, a quiet village where I rent a farmhouse. The road dend-ends at the village, but a footpath continues into the mountains. The trail forks twice, climbs for a steep mile through a forest of walnut and oak, and terminates at the Great Wall of China.

This passage, seeded with ravishing ingredients – exoticism (Beijing, Sancha), specificity (“drive north,” “takes an hour and a half,” “dead-ends at the village,” “the trail forks twice,” “steep mile,” “forest of walnut and oak”), first-person experience (“I drive,” “I rent”), and, most crucially, the tantalizing mention of the Great Wall of China - hooked me when I first read it, and I immediately devoured the entire piece, relishing every word.

Interestingly, the opening paragraph of “Walking the Wall,” as it appears in Hessler’s recent Strange Stones, is slightly different from the New Yorker piece. “The road dead-ends at the village, but a footpath continues into the mountains” now reads “The road switchbacks up a steep hillside and dead-ends at the village, but a footpath continues into the mountains” (my emphasis). And “The trail forks twice, climbs for a steep mile through a forest of walnut and oak, and terminates at the Great Wall of China” has been changed to “The trail forks twice, climbs for a steep mile through a forest of walnut and oak, and finally terminates at the Great Wall of China” (my emphasis).

Both these changes are minor. To my eyes, the New Yorker version is a shade more effective. It avoids the repetition of “steep” (“steep hillside,” “steep mile”) and the unnecessary “finally.” Either way, the passage is brilliant, subtly echoing the iconic opening line of Joseph Mitchell’s “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956) – “When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there.”