Best of 2014

Well, the end of the year approaches. Time now to compile my “Best of 2014” list. I know there are skeptics who consider such lists pointless. But I enjoy the process. It’s a way of deliciously prolonging my 2014 New Yorker reading experience.

Here then is a selection of my favorite 2014 New Yorker pieces (with a choice sliver from each in parenthesis):

Talk Stories

1. Sophie Brickman, "Say Cheese," January 6, 2014 (“He was trying to capture the perfect shot of a pumpkin muffin with his Nokia phone”)

2. Nick Paumgarten, "Reunion," February 3, 2014 (“His upper lip was mottled, like a bruised fruit – a life in brass”)

3. Lizzie Widdicombe, "Table Talk," March 17, 2014 (“ ‘If I talk, you gotta drink the vodka’ ”)

4. Ian Frazier, "Bus Ride," April 14, 2014 (“To ride the B-46 north on Utica Avenue is to feel the city accumulate and intensify on both sides”)

5. Ian Frazier, "Do Not Cross," June 2, 2014 (“but give these objects a few minutes of contemplation and a minor visitation of the sublime may occur”)

6. Mark Singer, "Risky Business," July 21, 2014 (“ ‘As soon as they started moving the bulls out of the pens into the bucking chutes, I could see Bushwacker go from docile to this’ – he pantomimed a bull pawing the ground – ‘and I thought, This bull knows’ ”)

7. Mark Singer, "Meritorious," August 11 & 18, 2014 (“Afterward, Angell says softly, ‘Jim Leyland coming by. That’s really something.’ ”)

8. Tad Friend, "Rembrandt Lighting," November 10, 2014 (Gilroy is “as thin and pale as dental floss”)

9. Ian Parker, "Oldies But Goodies," November 10, 2014 (“As Thiebaud put it, there are still mornings that start with the thought: This morning, I’d like to paint a pie”)

10. Oliver Sacks, "Night of the Ginkgo," November 24, 2014 (“tough, heavy Mesozoic leaves such as the dinosaurs ate”)

Reporting

1. Tad Friend, "Thicker Than Water," February 10, 2014 (“They hung there for five seconds – their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air – as if time were taking a breath”)

2. Raffi Khatchadourian, "A Star in a Bottle," March 3, 2014 (“I put on goggles and looked at the cylindrical reactor core, its dense crush of parts, rendered in bright colors, seeming to float in a vast gray horizonless space”)

3. Peter Hessler, "Revolution On Trial," March 10, 2014 (“I was sitting next to the cage, and after a while Mohamed el-Beltagy, one of the accused, began gesturing to me through the bars”)

4. Nick Paumgarten, "Berlin Nights," March 24, 2014 (“The music was churning, hypnotic, almost psychedelic, and I abandoned myself to it”)

5. Ian Frazier, "Blue Bloods," April 14, 2014 (“throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks”)

6. Burkhard Bilger, In Deep," April 21, 2014 (“Now he stood at the shore of a small, dark pool under a dome of sulfurous flowstone”)

7. Lizzie Widdicombe, "The End of Food," May 12, 2014 (“With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad”)

8. Dana Goodyear, "Paper Palaces," August 11 & 18, 2014 (“He looks clicked together, like a Lego figurine”)

9. Richard Preston, "The Ebola Wars," October 27, 2014 (“By looking at a few genomes of Ebola, the scientists hoped to grasp an image of the whole virus, which could be conceived of as a life-form visible in four dimensions, as vast amounts of code flowing through time and space”)

10. Ben McGrath, "The Ice Breaker," December 15, 2014 (“Slow it down now, and watch carefully: Subban’s skate blades reëstablish contact with the ice a second before he one-times a laser beam into the upper right corner”)

Criticism

1. Peter Schjeldahl, "The Outlaw," February 3, 2014 (“But there’s no gainsaying a splendor as berserk as that of a Hieronymus Bosch painting”)

2. Louis Menand, "Imitation of Life," April 28, 2014 (“Updike is a highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being”)

3. James Wood, "The World As We Know It," May 19, 2014 (“as in Naipaul’s work, the pages seem scarred with remembered wounds”)

4. Dan Chiasson, "Mother Tongue," June 2, 2014 (“the book’s strong effect of having been written, unlike most prior poetry about having kids, under the conditions it describes”)

5. Alex Ross, "Blockbuster," June 23, 2014 (“Plaintive strands of near-tonal melody floated in an eerie, wide-open space defined at its edges by groaning bass timbres, wayward piano figures, and the rustlings of maracas, vibraslap, snare drum, and other percussion. It felt like an encampment encircled by watchful eyes”)

6. Anthony Lane, "Balancing Acts," July 21, 2014 (“We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process; that is why the Mason with the earring from whom we take our leave, on his first, blissed-out day of college, both is and is not the affable imp of seven, or the mumbler who bumped his way through puberty, and that twin sense of continuity and interruption—of life itself as tracking shot and jump cut—applies to everyone. Just like the final fade.”)

7. James Wood, "Away Thinking About Things," August 25, 2014 (“His experiments in vernacular Scots push and twist the language, sometimes to breaking points”)

8. Alex Ross, "Under the Stars," August 25, 2014 (“One great pleasure of the Bowl is the sense of a spell being cast, and it happened here: in the third movement of the Mahler, when a ghostly klezmer band files by, seven thousand leaned in, their red wine and grilled chicken neglected, their motionless heads etched by the light pouring off the stage”)

9. David Denby, "Lasting Impressions," September 1, 2014 (“But the ‘plot’ is no more than the men’s thorny emotional connection and their mutual fixation on death”)

10. James Wood, "Fly Away," December 8, 2014 (“Within a paragraph or two, the reader senses an attentive purity in the narrator’s prose. She seems alert to everything”)

Thank you New Yorker for another great year of blissful reading.

Postscript: Today (January 3, 2015), I amended the above list, deleting Dana Goodyear’s “Élite Meat,” and inserting her "Paper Palaces." Goodyear had a great 2014, producing four wonderful pieces, all of which could’ve made my list. I decided to go with one. I’ve finally settled on “Paper Palaces” as my favorite.

Credit: The above artwork is by Jacob Escobedo; it appears in the March 3, 2014 New Yorker as an illustration for Raffi Khatchadourian’s “A Star in a Bottle.”

December 22 & 29, 2014 Issue

If you’re a fan of Peter Schjeldahl’s writing, as I am, you’ll relish his "The Shape We're In," in this week’s issue. It’s a feature-length profile of the sculptor Rachel Harrison. Its approach is more journalistic than Schjeldahl’s art show reviews are. He visits Harrison in her Brooklyn apartment (“On display are many paint-it-yourself, plaster-cast hobby busts of Abraham Lincoln, who interests Harrison as someone whom everybody likes”) and her studio (“From her studio, she can see a lot, which is partly divided into parking spaces. On one of my visits, we noted the comings and goings of an old Mercedes, colored an arrestingly ugly tan”). Together, they tour the Metropolitan, the Frick, and MOMA. Of their visit to the Frick, he says, “I failed to sell her on my enthusiasm for Fragonard’s delirious suite of murals, “The Progress of Love.” She said it made her sick, but wouldn’t say why.” My favorite part of “The Shape We’re In” is when Schjeldahl and Harrison meet “at Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s gilded equestrian statue of General Sherman with an Angel of Victory, across from the Plaza Hotel, on Fifty-ninth Street.” Schjeldahl writes, “I had promised to alert the skeptical Harrison to the work’s virtues, but we found that it is now hidden in a huge beige box, for a restoration of the site. She was thrilled. The box and the picturesquely jumbled rubble and machinery around it looked like an outsized version of one of her own works-in-progress.” Harrison’s “junk” aesthetic – her eye for the overlooked, disregarded, and unwanted – resonates with me. It connects with some of the observations I made a while back in a piece titled “The Humble Actual” (posted here). Schjeldahl’s comment, “As for ‘junk,’ Harrison exposes the arbitrariness of the word, which, like the use of ‘weeds’ to describe ungoverned plants, insults things that are no less particular for being unwanted,” expresses my own view perfectly.

In the Introduction to his great Let’s See (2008), in answer to the question, “So what are your vices as a critic and a writer?,” Schjeldahl answers, “short-windedness.” He says, “My muse won’t play except at standard column lengths. I can manage a bit more with the right subject and a tailwind, but north of two thousand words I start to lose all sense of structure and seize up.” Well, these days, Schjeldahl must be working out. Either that or he’s on steroids. Because his wonderful “The Shape We’re In” is over forty-five hundred words long. The short-winded sprinter has become a zestful long-distance runner.

Photos and Illustrations 2014

Riccardo Vecchio, "The Fugitive" (Detail)

The New Yorker is, of course, a great read. But it’s also an immense pleasure to look at. From 2014’s rich yield of New Yorker photos and illustrations, I’ve chosen twelve favorites:

1. David Black’s “Seu Jorge” (“Goings On About Town,” November 17, 2014)

2. Bendik Kaltenborn’s “The New Music Bake Sale” (“Goings On About Town,” March 17, 2014)

3. Pari Dukovic’s “Scarlett Johansson” (for Anthony Lane’s “Her Again,” March 24, 2014)

4. Michael Gillette’s “Jo Nesbø” (for Lee Siegel’s “Pure Evil,” May 12, 2014)

5. Grant Cornett’s “Jason Mleczko” (for Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water,” February 10, 2014)

6. Riccardo Vecchio’s “Elizabeth Harrower” (for James Wood’s “No Time For Lies,” October 20, 2014)

7. Ethan Levitas’s “Hospitality and Pannonia Quartet” (“Goings On About Town,” February 3, 2014)

8. Leo Espinosa’s “The Office Through the Ages” (for Jill Lepore’s “Away From My Desk,” May 12, 2014)

9. Dan Winters’s “Pardis Sabeti and Stephen Gire” (for Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars,” October 27, 2014)

10. Edwin Fotheringham’s “The Trip to Italy” (for David Denby’s “Lasting Impressions,” September 1, 2014)

11. Carolyn Drake’s “Anya Fernald” (for Dana Goodyear’s “Élite Meat,” November 3, 2014)

12. Conor Langton’s “Magic in the Moonlight” (for David Denby’s “Under the Spell,” July 28, 2014)

December 15, 2014 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ben McGrath’s “The Ice Breaker,” a profile of Montreal Canadiens’ kinetic, charismatic, brilliant defenseman, P. K. Subban. I’m a Toronto Maple Leafs fan. But last year, when the Leafs collapsed in the final month of the regular season and missed the playoffs, I followed the Canadiens’ post-season exploits. Their triumphant series against the thuggish Bruins was, for me, the hockey highlight of the year. Subban was mesmerizing. He scored a goal I’ll never forget. McGrath describes it beautifully:

Yet it was a projectile from Subban’s howitzer that lingers in my mind as one of the enduring images of last spring’s playoffs. This was during Game Five of the Eastern Conference semifinal series between the Canadiens and their hated rivals the Bruins, in which Cherry had accused Subban of “poking the bear”—provoking Cherry’s former team with a low and possibly dangerous hit on the enforcer Shawn Thornton. After the first game, in which Subban scored two goals, including the overtime winner, a disturbing number of Boston fans had used the N-word on social media. (One tweet read, “Tied something for SUBBAN,” and was accompanied by an image of a noose.) And here, four games later, was Subban, occupying the point on the power play, so impatient for the puck that he began bouncing up and down on his skates, like a child without a care. (“He says, ‘Mom, when I’m playing, from my head to my toes, I don’t feel anything,’ ” Maria told me.) He even got airborne, just as a teammate was finally getting around to setting him up with a pass. Slow it down now, and watch carefully: Subban’s skate blades reëstablish contact with the ice a second before he one-times a laser beam into the upper right corner.

That “Slow it down now, and watch carefully: Subban’s skate blades reëstablish contact with the ice a second before he one-times a laser beam into the upper right corner” made me smile, as I mentally replayed Subban’s marvelous goal.

December 8, 2014 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue that I enjoyed most are Burkhard Bilger’s “The Ride of Their Lives,” James Wood’s “Fly Away,” and Dan Chiasson’s “You and Me Both.” In his “Reporter at Large” piece, Bilger visits the Camp of Champions in Sayre, Oklahoma, “a combination rodeo school and revival meeting,” where kids bounce around on sheep and calves in preparation for “the most dangerous organized sport in the world” – bull-riding. He also journeys to the D&H Company cattle ranch on the Washita River in south-central Oklahoma where rodeo bulls are bred (“Tawny, black, mottled, white—rodeo bulls are almost always mutts—they grazed under spreading pecans, in thirteen pastures separated by tall steel fences”). And he attends the Youth Bull Riders World Finals in Abilene, Texas (“Then the gate flew open and the calf charged out, leaping and flexing across the arena like a steel spring shot from an old tractor. He twisted one way and the other, jackknifed in the air and rolled his belly, but could not get the rider off”).

I like Bilger’s feel for Oklahoma. He says, “In the right light, there’s a kind of grandeur to its vast featureless sweep, where every truck stop and water tower can take on totemic power.” But a weird undercurrent runs through the piece. It’s there in the vests that read “Cowkids for Christ” that some of the calf riders wear. It’s there in the parents’ willingness to expose their children to catastrophic injuries (“ ‘I worry about it. I do,’ his father told me. ‘We discuss it all the time. If something serious happens in the arena and God calls his number—if a fatality happens to my son bull riding—it’ll be a struggle. I’m not going to lie to you. But I’ll know that my son will be at peace. That he died happy and enjoying what he was doing’ ”). The story’s clinching quotation is Tuff Hedeman’s comment. Hedeman is a four-time world champion bull-rider. Near the end of the piece, he says, “For me, ninety per cent of it was good. I never had a life-threatening injury. But the last thing I would ever want my son to do is ride bulls. It’s insane.” “The Ride of Their Lives” concludes beautifully. Bilger cuts back to the Camp of Champions, to a cattle trough baptism in a tent. Eight-year-old Jet Erickson, one of the cowkids we’ve been following in the story, volunteers for the ceremony:

Jet, stripped to his swim trunks, climbed in willingly enough but then seemed to change his mind. He pushed his feet up against the end of the trough and gripped the rim tight with his hands. For just a moment, he hung there like a spider perched above a water glass. Then one of the church elders cradled his head and slowly, quiveringly, Jet let himself go under.

It’s a memorable scene, perhaps a metaphor for the crazy culture of religion and rodeo in which these kids are immersed.

  

New Yorker readers are lucky to have regular access to the work of two of the best literary critics in the world – James Wood and Dan Chiasson. Both are in this week’s issue. Wood, in his piece called “Fly Away,” reviews Samantha Harvey’s new novel Dear Thief. Chiasson, in his “You and Me Both,” considers Olena Kalytiak Davis’s recent The Poems She Didn’t Write and Other Poems. “Literature teaches us to notice,” Wood says in his How Fiction Works (2008). He admires perceptive writing immensely. In “Fly Away,” he says of Davis’s novel:

Within a paragraph or two, the reader senses an attentive purity in the narrator’s prose. She seems alert to everything: the “feathered breaths” of her grandmother, how her “exhales were smooth and liquid, which seems to me now the surest sign of a life’s exit—when the act of giving away air is easier than that of accepting it”; the way the dying woman’s skin has “flattened a tone—and I mean it this way, like a piece of music gone off-key.”

That “she seems alert to everything” is perhaps Wood’s ultimate literary compliment. “Attentive purity” could be his watchword.

Chiasson’s descriptive analysis is extraordinary. For example, in “You and Me Both,” he says of Davis’s “Robert Lowell,” “The poem drifts from its altitudes down into the scuffed actual life it briefly sought to transcend.” That “scuffed actual life” is inspired!

I don’t always agree with everything Wood and Chiasson say. For instance, in his piece on Davis, Chiasson claims, “The medium of poetry isn’t language, really; it’s human loneliness, a loneliness that poets, having received it themselves from earlier poets, transfer to their readers.” Is that true of every poet? I think of Seamus Heaney “toasting friendship” in his great poem “Oysters.” Love, vitality, friendship – these are as much the medium of poetry as loneliness. Chiasson’s statement seems too sweeping. Nevertheless, it’s got me thinking. He may not always be right, but he’s unfailingly stimulating.

December 1, 2014 Issue

Recently, I’ve read some amazing New Yorker medical pieces – Jerome Groopman’s “Print Thyself” and “The Transformation,” Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars” – but Emily Eakin’s “The Excrement Experiment,” in this week’s issue, is one of the damnedest things I’ve ever read. It’s about treating disease with fecal microbiota transplants (FMT). It’s the type of subject that’s so novel and arresting that the reporter is well advised to just get out of the way and let the facts speak for themselves. That’s what Eakin does. Along the way, she generates interesting, slightly surreal sentences such as, “In September, Leach gave himself a fecal transplant with the aid of a turkey baster and a bemused Hadza man, who served as his donor.” Eakin’s “Celluloid Hero” (The New Yorker, October 31, 2011) made my “Best of 2011” list. “The Excrement Experiment” may well be a “Best of 2014” contender.

Another piece in this week’s issue that I enjoyed immensely is Joseph Mitchell’s “A Day in the Branch,” a fragment of a memoir found in his papers after he died in 1996. It’s a reminiscence of his time growing up in North Carolina when he spent many of his days roaming a wild swamp river called the Pittman Mill Branch. He says of the river, “I would walk slowly and keep looking into the water, studying it. The water mesmerized me….” Reading that brought to mind the great opening paragraph of his classic “The Rivermen” (The New Yorker, April 4, 1959; included in his 1992 collection Up in the Old Hotel), in which he says, “I often feel drawn to the Hudson River, and I have spent a lot of time through the years poking around the part of it that flows past the city. I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me.” “A Day in the Branch” shows the roots of Mitchell’s deep appreciation of the Hudson – the youthful days he spent pleasurably hanging around the Pittman Mill Branch, walking it, smelling it, fishing it, swimming in it, climbing its trees, sometimes pretending he was a bobcat.    

Vendler On Larkin

“Art, if it knows how to wait, wins out,” Clive James perceptively wrote, twenty-five years ago, in “Somewhere Becoming Rain” (The New Yorker, July 17, 1989; included in his excellent 2002 collection Reliable Essays), an absorbing review of Philip Larkin: Collected Poems. After years of bruising attacks on his personal reputation, it seems Larkin’s art is now beginning to win out. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this turnaround is Helen Vendler’s recent piece, "Why aren't they screaming?" (London Review of Books, November 6, 2014), a review of James Booth’s biography Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love. Vendler says, “Essays on Larkin have proliferated in journals and edited collections, but we lack a variety of impartial books focusing on the poetry itself.” She proceeds to provide brilliant stylistic analysis of two Larkin poems – “Counting” and “The Old Fools.”

As a lead-in to her consideration of “Counting,” Vendler says of Larkin’s poetry, “But the lines he constructs can seem artless, so devoid are they of the visible accouterments of art.” In so saying, she touches on one of the qualities that draws me to Larkin’s work – its rich simplicity. Regarding “Counting,” she says it “austerely allows itself only small words; small lines (of two beats or three); small units (couplets); small rhymes (monosyllables, all but one); invariant and insistent appearances of the baleful word ‘one’; and – a tour de force – the tiny simultaneous appearance and disappearance of the wishful word ‘two.’ ” Here’s the poem:

Thinking in terms of one

Is easily done –

One room, one bed, one chair,

One person there,

Makes perfect sense; one set

Of wishes can be met,

One coffin filled.

But counting up to two

Is harder to do;

For one must be denied

Before its tried.

So good is Vendler’s commentary on “Counting,” I can’t resist quoting another paragraph of it:

It’s only by looking for it that the art can be found: it hides itself in the sinisterly unpartnered and unrhymed line “One coffin filled”; in the way the “co” of “coffin” loops the word immediately to the next line’s “counting” and to the “Counting” of the title; in the magnetic antonymic attraction that clasps together “Thinking” and “Counting,” and “easily” and “harder”; and in the ineluctable logic of the final rhyme as “denied” undoes “tried” – and undoes it without even permitting the trying. Such little links – not omitting the white space between the one coffin and the stifled attempt at “two” – give the sting of aesthetic fulfilment as the prose in the letter doesn’t.

That last line is a reference to a letter that Larkin wrote in 1946, in which he talks about his opposition to marriage. Vendler, in another of her inspired analytic moves, compares the writing in the letter to the writing in “Counting” to highlight the latter’s artful minimalism.

Vendler’s consideration of “The Old Fools” is equally illuminating. At one point, she says of it, “After its amplitude, every stanza flings a knife in its final words, mutilating the expected conclusive pentameter into two beats: ‘Why aren’t they screaming?’ ” That “flings a knife in its final words” is marvelously fine, getting at another aspect of Larkin’s writing that I admire immensely – his cutting frankness. Vendler’s vivid language is a clear sign of her deep engagement with the poem. She not only calls for criticism focusing on the work itself; she shows the way.

Credit: The above portrait of Philip Larkin is by Gerald Scarfe; it appears in the July 12, 1993 New Yorker, as an illustration for Martin Amis’s “Don Juan in Hull.” 

Journeys and Visits

“Journey” and “journalism” share a linguistic root. I often think of this when I read The New Yorker. Each of its fact pieces is a sort of journey, or at least a visit. This year, the magazine took me on some amazing armchair trips: to Delaware Bay to see horseshoe crabs (Ian Frazier, “Blue Bloods); to Oaxaca, Mexico, to explore one of the deepest caves in the world  (Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep”); to the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, in the south of France, to view ITER, “the most complex machine ever built” (“Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Star in a Bottle”); to the Cairo Police Academy to see the trial of twenty-one Muslim Brotherhood leaders (Peter Hessler, “Revolution On Trial”); to Berlin’s Berghain, “the most famous techno club in the world” (Nick Paumgarten, “Berlin Nights”); to a café in Kiev, as Russian tanks mass on Ukraine’s northern and eastern borders (Keith Gessen, “Waiting For War”); to Aspen, Colorado, to view the construction of the Shigeru Ban-designed Aspen Art Museum (Dana Goodyear, “Paper Palaces”); to the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles to visit the Soylent headquarters (Lizzie Widdicombe, “The End of Food”); to a convention center in Villa Park, a western suburb of Chicago, to attend a conference of fast-food workers (William Finnegan, “Dignity”); to the Ebola wards of the Kenema Government Hospital, Sierra Leone (Richard Preston, “The Ebola Wars”); to Washington State University’s Bread Lab, in Mount Vernon, to gain a better understanding of the role of gluten in our diet (Michael Specter, “Against the Grain”); and many more.

I’ll soon be compiling my “Best of 2014” list. Expect to see at least a few of the above-mentioned “travel” pieces on it.

Credit: The above artwork is by Istvan Banyai; it appears in the March 24, 2014 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “Berlin Nights.”

Strand's Solitude

Edward Hopper, Automat (1927)

The recent passing of Mark Strand returned me to his great little book Hopper (1994), a wonderful collection of aesthetic meditations on twenty-three of Edward Hopper’s paintings. So many of Hopper’s pictures – Morning Sun, Automat, Western Motel, Hotel Room, Summer in the City – sway me with their feeling of solitude. Strand identified with them. In Hopper’s concluding piece, he says that the silence of Hopper’s rooms “weighs on us like solitude.” This links with Dan Chiasson’s observation, in his eloquent "Mark Strand's Last Waltz" (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, November 30, 2014): “Strand surveyed his outward circumstances—relative health and prosperity, growing fame, the undeniable good fortune of being alive—from a peephole cut into the exterior wall of his solitude.”