November 23, 2015 Issue

Kathryn Schulz’s "Writers in the Storm," in this week’s issue, tracks what she calls “the over-all decline of weather in literature.” She writes, “While meteorology was advancing, then, the role of weather in literature began to decline.” This doesn’t mesh with my own reading experience. My favorite books brim with weather:

The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. [Ian Frazier, Great Plains, 1989]

The day was growing overcast, and we walked out of the woods and headed toward the Meadowlands despite Victor’s misgivings. [Robert Sullivan, The Meadowlands, 1998]

Woke up in brilliant sunshine in the shaking train, going through the Rocky Mountain Trench, as it is called, a long straight fault valley on the west slopes, with snow ranges on either side, an area where they were building a road in 1960 – but still no road. [Edward Hoagland, Notes from the Century Before, 1969]

The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. [John McPhee, Coming into the Country, 1977]

On sunny, crystal clear mornings in the fall, when it is possible to see into the water, he gets in one of his boats and rows out into the flats and catches some river shrimp. [Joseph Mitchell, The Bottom of the Harbor, 1959]

Afternoon light, clinging to the land, seemed to flee to the snowy sky as twilight drew on. [Verlyn Klinkenborg, Making Hay, 1986]

The wind is steady out of the east, a strong breeze of maybe thirty to thirty-five. [Anthony Bailey, The Outer Banks, 1989]

The cabin emerges silently up ahead in the blowing snow as the storm closes in. [Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams, 1986]

The rising sun shot hard, bright beams straight down the canyon east to west, bleeding in a muscular heat. [Sallie Tisdale, Stepping Westward, 1991]

But the boat was safe here, displaced from the world in its cocoon of fog, and I was glad to stay. [Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau, 1999]

My list could go on and on. Schulz’s theory is too sweeping; her definition of literature is too narrow. She fails to consider the many splendid nature and travel books in which weather is central.

Shapton's Shapes

Even though Leanne Shapton’s blue-and-cream watercolor of two “vintage clothes hangers” appeared in the magazine more than two months ago, (see "Recently Favorited," The New Yorker, September 21, 2015), I find myself still thinking about it. The images are recognizably clothes hangers; likeness hasn’t been abandoned. Yet, they’re also pure shapes, as simply and fluidly painted as Chinese calligraphy. Are clothes hangers beautiful? I didn’t think so until I saw Shapton’s exquisite watercolor. I guess that’s what draws me to it. It embodies what, for me, is one of art’s main purposes – “to give the mundane its beautiful due” (John Updike).

November 16, 2015 Issue

Judith Thurman’s "Silent Partner," in this week’s issue, is the fourth review of Vladimir Nabokov’s Letters to Véra that I’ve read. The others are Michael Wood’s "Dear Poochums" (London Review of Books, October 23, 2014), Martin Amis’s "In 'Letters to Véra,' Vladimir Nabokov Writes to His Wife" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, November 10, 2015), and Stacy Schiff’s " 'His Joy, His Life' " (The New York Review of Books, November 19, 2015). Of course, I want to compare them. Amis’s piece is the most adoring. It focuses on Nabokov’s prose:

It is the prose itself that provides the lasting affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children (wholly unsinister, though the prototype of “Lolita,” “The Enchanter,” dates from 1939); the way that everyone he comes across is minutely ­individualized (a butler, a bureaucrat, a conductor on the Metro); the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather (he is the supreme poet of the skyscape); and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his divine energy.

Schiff concurs: “He sounds unmistakably like himself, if without the polish, the mandarin disdain, the stage-managing. The jewels skitter helter-skelter across the page, from an émigré’s “stoop-shouldered speech” to a 3:00 AM encounter with a “very hungry, very lonely, very professional mosquito,” to a “waiter sweating hailstones.” Wood dissents: “Not much memorable writing though, unless you’re fond of the purpler shades of Nabokov.” Thurman’s opinion is mixed. She says, “The earliest letters, intoxicated with language and desire, are intoxicating to read.” But later in her piece, she writes, “Boyd and Schiff both drew upon these letters for their biographies, so they contain few surprises, except for the revelation—a disconcerting one, for a lover of Nabokov’s fiction—that he could be a bore.”

Of the four reviewers, only Thurman considers what it might’ve been like to actually live with Nabokov. She says,

There is little doubt that Mrs. Nabokov took a keen interest in her husband’s every triumph, toothache, and fried egg. But it is also possible to imagine that, in bleak moments, she tired of his endearments (“my little sunshine”), bridled at his pet names (“lumpikin”), and resented the ostentation of a love that can be hard to distinguish from self-infatuation (“It’s as if in your soul there is a prepared spot for every one of my thoughts”).

Wood, Schiff, and Thurman all note the one-sidedness of the correspondence; Amis seems oblivious to it. Wood writes, “There are no letters from Véra in this book. There are none extant: she got rid of them all.” Schiff says,

In the end all of the correspondence would be his. Somewhere along the line, Véra’s letters disappeared. Dmitri Nabokov maintained that his mother—pathologically private, and well aware who the writer in the household was—destroyed them, although there is no evidence that she did so. It is just as likely that their recipient misplaced them; he was a man in whose hands telephone numbers evaporated, who could lose a book of matches in a tiny room, who might entrust his return ticket to the train conductor. We are left to reconstruct the object of Nabokov’s affection entirely from his side of the correspondence.

Wood and Schiff appear to accept the one-sidedness without question. But Thurman takes a different view. She writes,

At the end of this volume, you have to wonder what Véra’s qualms were as she disposed of her letters. She must have had some. The truth of her past would never be complete without them. Was it the act of a morbidly private woman refusing to expose herself—and thus, consciously or not, enshrining her mystique? Or an auto-da-fé that destroyed the evidence of wifely heresy? These questions reverberate in the echo chamber of “Letters to Véra.” “You are my mask,” Nabokov told her.

I find Thurman’s skepticism refreshing. All four reviews are absorbing. They raise the old question about what bearing, if any, our knowledge of a writer’s private life should have on our appreciation of his or her work. In Nabokov’s case, the answer appears to be that without Véra, he may not have been the writer he was. As Thurman says, “Each of them found a lodestar in the other.”

November 9, 2015 Issue

I’ve previously commented on the connection between “journey” and “journalism.” They both share the same sematic root, “jour,” which is French for “day” – a day’s travel, the record of a day’s experience. But the connection is more than just sematic. The best journalism, for me, involves travel – an excursion of some sort, whether it’s a hike on the Great Wall of China (Peter Hessler’s ("Walking the Wall"), say, or a tour of the Birkenstock factory in Görlitz, Germany (Rebecca Mead’s "Sole Cycle"), or a boat trip in New York Harbor to look for seals (Ian Frazier’s "Back to the Harbor"). Nick Paumgarten has taken me (vicariously, of course) on many a great trip – Atlantic City ("The Death and Life of Atlantic City"), Berlin ("Berlin Nights"), Interlaken ("The Manic Mountain"), Seseña ("The Hangover"), Governors Island ("Useless Beauty"), on and on. His superb "Life Is Rescues," in this week’s issue, travels to Iceland and spends time with the volunteer search-and-rescue team known as Landsbjörg. Paumgarten visits the headquarters of one of Landsbjörg’s crews, accompanies it on a patrol, and camps with it at a highland site called Landmannalaugar:

Bright-colored campers’ tents—say, a hundred—dotted the basin, like so many tulips. At the far edge of the settlement was a pair of old army-green school buses, which had been converted into a makeshift store called the Mountain Mall. Next to them was the Landsbjörg hut, a wooden box of two hundred and fifty square feet, with four bunks, a kitchenette, a card table, and scant remaining floor space. Ten was a tight fit. The crew spent the next several hours unloading supplies, setting up the kitchen tent, and getting the cabin ready. It never got dark.

He also observes a rescue – three people in a car, another perched on its roof, stuck in a river:

Katrin’s first two attempts to drag out the Kia failed. The angle was wrong. She turned the Toyota around, and they let out a winch, which was attached to the front of the truck. Elvar had found a hook. They hitched up the Kia and reeled it in, like a salmon. Water came pouring out, followed by the three soaked Lebanese.

The crew ministered to them, giving them blankets and food, transferring their luggage to the van. The Kia wouldn’t start, so the team pushed it off to the side and called in a tow truck. The electrical system was toast, but they refrained from mentioning this fact, or that the engine might be ruined, too, and that this would probably cost the family upward of ten thousand dollars. The family had been through enough. The team made them some space in the hut. It was nearly midnight by the time the gang got back to their card game.

Paumgarten has a great eye for detail. His noticing of the bananas hanging in the Landsbjörg camp kitchen is inspired:

On a row of plastic hangers someone had hung the team’s bananas. Each hanger held two bunches. I stood looking at this, in admiration and wonder. Iceland.

“Life Is Rescues” is one of Paumgarten’s best pieces. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: The hanging bananas are shown in a wonderful Benjamin Lowy photo illustrating the newyorker.com version of “Life Is Rescues.” It’s my choice for New Yorker photo of the year.

Benjamin Lowy, "Kitchen Tent"

In Praise of John Updike's Poetry (Contra Dan Chiasson)

John Updike (Photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

I’m not sure Dan Chiasson’s "Boston Boys" (The New Yorker, November 2, 2015) does full justice to John Updike’s poetry. Yes, it strongly recommends the new Selected Poems (“a book that anybody who loves Updike, or poetry, or Cape Ann—or, for that matter, golf or sex—should read”). And yes, it calls “Endpoint” “a perfect sonnet sequence.” But it also says things like, “The problem is that all of his poems about strain, discomfort, and regret cheer him, and we don’t associate cheer with great poetry,” and “Updike’s poems level our intrinsic ranking of occasions,” and “Vocabulary is the most overrated element of good writing, or so these poems tempt us to conclude.”

These are questionable criticisms. The claim that “all of his poems about strain, discomfort, and regret cheer him” is easily disproved. Take, for example, his superb "Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth" (The New Yorker, March 16, 2009), in which he pays tribute to his hometown of Shillington (“all a writer needs, / all there in Shillington, its trolley cars / and little factories, cornfields and trees, / leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines”), and concludes, “I had to move / to beautiful New England—its triple / deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets— / to learn how drear and deadly life can be.” I don’t detect any cheer there. In his great “Perfection Wasted” (The New Yorker, May 7, 1990), he contemplates death:

And another regrettable thing about death

is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,

which took a whole life to develop and market—

the quips, the witticisms, the slant

adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest

the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched

in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,

their tears confused with their diamond earrings,

their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,

their response and your performance twinned.

The jokes over the phone. The memories packed

in the rapid-access file. The whole act.

Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;

imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

No cheer there, either. See also the recently published "Coming Into New York" (The New Yorker, October 5, 2015), in which Updike travels to New York City, likening his arrival to an encounter with death:

After Providence, Connecticut—

the green defiant landscape, unrelieved

except by ordered cities, smart and smug,

in spirit villages, too full of life

to be so called, too small to seem sincere.

And then like Death it comes upon us:

the plain of steaming trash, the tinge of brown

that colors now the trees and grass as though

exposed to rays sent from the core of heat—

these are the signs we see in retrospect.

But we look up amazed and wonder that

the green is gone out of our window, that

horizon on all sides is segmented

into so many tiny lines that we

mistake it for the profile of a wooded

hill against the sky, or that as far

as mind can go are buildings, paving, streets.

The tall ones rise into the mist like gods

serene and watchful, yet we fear, for we

have witnessed from this train the struggle to

complexity: the leaf has turned to stone.

Several other examples could be cited, but these three are sufficient to show that Chiasson’s view (“all of his poems about strain, discomfort, and regret cheer him”) is mistaken.

With respect to Chiasson’s argument that Updike’s poems “level our intrinsic ranking of occasion,” it seems to miss Updike’s point, which is that almost anything can be the subject of poetry, including bowel movements, earthworms, and telephone poles, if the poet’s aim is, in Updike’s famous words, “to give the mundane its beautiful due.”  In his piece, Chiasson says, “ ‘The Beautiful Bowel Movement’ and ‘Fellatio’ and ‘Rats’ and the Phi Beta Kappa poem, ‘Apologies to Harvard,’ are not so different from one another, while bowel movements, fellatio, rats, and Harvard in fact are.” Well, yes, of course, they are. But, as Updike shows, they’re all equally worthy as poetry subjects. Chiasson’s argument against “leveling” flies in the face of the great Whitmanesque project of cataloguing the open fields of American experience in which, as Updike observed, in his essay “Whitman’s Egotheism,” “An ideal equality is extended not only to persons but to things as well.”

Chiasson’s most serious criticism of Updike’s poetry is that its vocabulary is “overrated.” He says,

Everywhere, the ingenious adjective turns up to alter its noun, where “adjective” stands for the imagination and “noun” for reality prior to aesthetic transformation. This formula is so consistent as to render its local applications interchangeable. An “unchurched grandma” in a “foursquare house” might as well be a foursquare grandma in an unchurched house. The verbs all seem chosen from a list written in marker on a cinder-block wall, or taken from a word-of-the-day calendar. Vocabulary is the most overrated element of good writing, or so these poems tempt us to conclude.

In this passage, the word “formula” jumps out. Chiasson uses it again, in the next paragraph, when he says, “Updike loved writing so much that he couldn’t help himself from doing it whenever possible. The poems do not slow, or substantially darken, when he learns of his terminal illness, but the formula has a new urgency and poignancy.” To my knowledge, this is the first time Updike has been accused of formulaic writing. The charge takes my breath away. I will attempt to refute it by referring to the diction in three of my favorite Updike poems – the above-quoted “Perfection Wasted,” “Bird Caught in My Deer Netting” (in Endpoint and Other Poems, 2009), and “Bindweed” (The New Yorker, August 26, 1991).

“Perfection Wasted” contains seventeen unmodified nouns: death, magic, quips, witticisms, slant, lip, stage, laughter, tears, heartbeat, response, performance, joke, phone, memories, imitators, descendants. Chiasson alleges, “Everywhere, the ingenious adjective turns up to alter its noun.” Where are they? Well, in “Perfection Wasted,” there are nine nouns modified by adjectives: regrettable thing, whole life, loved ones, soft faces, footlight glow, diamond earrings, warm pooled breath, rapid-access file, whole act. I submit that none of the aforesaid adjectives fall in the category of “ingenious”; they’re all plain, basic words. Let’s look at the verbs and gerunds. There are five of them: is, ceasing, took, do, aren’t. And there are five used as adjectives: adjusted, blanched, confused, twinned, packed. Do these verbs “seem chosen from a list written in marker on a cinder-block wall, or taken from a word-of-the-day calendar”? Most of them are just simple ordinary words – certainly not word-of-the-day calendar material.

Let’s look at the marvelous “Bird Caught in My Deer Netting.” It reads as follows:

The hedge must have seemed as ever,

seeds and yew berries secreted beneath,

small edible matter only a bird’s eye could see,

mixed with the brown of shed needles and earth—

a safe quiet cave such as nature affords the meek,

entered low, on foot, the feathered head

alert to what it sought, bright eyes darting

everywhere but above, where net had been laid.

  

Then, at some moment mercifully unwitnessed,

an attempt to rise higher, to fly,

met by an all but invisible limit, beating wings

pinioned, ground instinct denied. The panicky

thrashing and flutter, in daylight and air,

their freedom impossibly close, all about!

  

How many starved hours of struggle resumed

in fits of life’s irritation did it take

to seal and sew shut the berry-bright eyes

and untie the tiny wild knot of a heart?

I cannot know, discovering this wad

of junco-fluff, weightless and wordless

in its corner of netting deer cannot chew through

nor gravity-defying bird bones break.

This poem contains sixteen unmodified nouns (hedge, seeds, yew berries, earth, nature, net, attempt, daylight, air, freedom, fits, heart, wad, junco-fluff, corner, deer), fourteen modified nouns (small edible matter, bird’s eye, shed needles, safe quiet cave, feathered head, bright eyes, invisible limit, beating wings, ground instinct, starved hours, life’s irritation, berry-bright eyes, tiny wild knot, gravity-defying bird bones), and seventeen verbs and gerunds (seemed, secreted, see, mixed, affords, entered, sought, darting, met, resumed, take, seal, sew, untie, cannot, discovering, break). Again, I don’t see any evidence of the alleged formula. The majority of the nouns are unmodified; where there is modification, the adjectives used are hardly what I’d call “ingenious.” The verbs are mostly ordinary.

One more example – the wonderful “Bindweed”:

Intelligence is sometimes a help.

The bindweed doesn’t know

when it begins to climb a wand of grass

that this is no tree and will bend

its flourishing dependent back to earth.

But bindweed has a trick: self-

stiffening, entwining two- or three-ply,

to boost itself up, into the lilacs.

Without much forethought it manages

to imitate the lilac leaves and lose

itself to all but the avidest clippers.

To spy it out, to clip near the root

and unwind the climbing tight spiral

with a motion the reverse of its own

feels like treachery – death to a plotter

whose intelligence mirrors ours, twist for twist.

It has sixteen unmodified nouns (intelligence, help, bindweed, wand, grass, tree, earth, trick, lilacs, forethought, root, motion, treachery, death, plotter, twist), four modified nouns (flourishing dependent, lilac leaves, avidest clippers, climbing tight spiral), and seventeen verbs and gerunds (is, doesn’t, know, begins, climbs, bend, has, entwining, boost, manages, imitate, lose, spy, clip, unwind, feels, mirrors). Looking at “Bindweed,” I don’t see the formula that Chiasson speaks of. In fact, I would go so far as to say that transformation is not what Updike was trying to achieve in his poetry. Descriptive accuracy was his aim. Clive James, in his excellent "Final Act" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 28, 2009), a review of Updike’s Endpoint and Other Poems, says, “But from the thematic angle there is a strict discipline in operation. Every recollection has to be specific.” Chiasson makes this point, too, I think, when he says, in his piece, that he remembers reading the “Endpoint” poems in The New Yorker and “marveling at their authenticity.” By “authenticity” I think he means realness – the thing itself. That’s the quality in Updike’s poetry that I treasure.

November 2, 2015 Issue (The Food Issue)

This week’s Pick of the Issue – The Food Issue (no less) – is a contest between six pieces: Nicolas Niarchos’s "Bar Tab: Dutch Kills"; Calvin Trillin’s "In Defense of the True 'Cue"; Dana Goodyear’s "A New Leaf"; Nicola Twilley’s "Accounting For Taste"; Michael Specter’s "Freedom From Fries"; and Lauren Collins’s "Who's To Judge?" To help me decide the winner, I’m going to apply the “thisness” test. “Thisness,” you’ll recall, is “any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (James Wood).

First up is Niarchos’s terrific "Bar Tab: Dutch Kills." It’s only two hundred and thirty-two words, but what words! It has the concentration of great poetry. Here are two excerpts:

Behind a brown door on a blasted section of Jackson Avenue, a whip-thin saloon that bears the neighborhood’s name is bringing back a version of the past, with the clink of hand-cut ice in tumblers and the waft of freshly cut orange peel.

“Refreshing? You’ll have a Penicillin”—lemon and ginger layered with Islay Scotch. “This is the Bee’s Knees”—a citrusy gin cocktail—“but I added strawberry juice.”

With the clink of hand-cut ice in tumblers and the waft of freshly cut orange peel – how fine that it is. The best food writing, for me, is grounded in details that appeal to the senses. After all, as Nicola Twilley says, in her excellent "Accounting For Taste," “Alongside sex, eating is one of the most multisensory of our activities.” 

Calvin Trillin would no doubt agree. His superb "In Defense of the True 'Cue" chronicles his visits to a variety of pungent North Carolina barbecue joints, e.g., Stamey’s, Cook’s, the Lexington Barbecue, and Allen & Son. My favorite passage is this description of a smokehouse:

The pitmaster arrives at three or four in the morning to start up the pasteboard boxes normally used as kindling. (More pasteboard boxes, flattened out, cover the meat, in order to keep the heat on and the ashes off.) He has to feed wood into the firebox continually. He has to shovel burning coals out of the firebox and spread them under racks of pork every fifteen or twenty minutes. This goes on for about ten hours. “It ain’t too awfully bad,” Brandon Cook, of Cook’s Barbecue, in Lexington, said of the routine, as we watched him arrange coals under some pork shoulders. To me, it looked bad enough to make me wonder why so many barbecue people, including Cook, choose to join the family business. Watching your father or your grandfather tend a pit for a number of years seems like something that would inspire you to go into, say, insurance sales.

I like that parenthetical “More pasteboard boxes, flattened out, cover the meat, in order to keep the heat on and the ashes off” - thisness par excellence.

Dana Goodyear’s "A New Leaf" is about creating a new cuisine based on seaweed. It’s endlessly quotable. It begins and ends spectacularly. Here’s the beginning:

I stared for a while at the placid face of Long Island Sound before I could make out Bren Smith’s farm. It was a warm, calm morning in September. Sixty buoys bobbed in rows like the capped heads of synchronized swimmers. It wasn’t until Smith cut the engine of his beat-up boat, Mookie, that I knew for sure we had arrived. The farm, a three-acre patch of sea off Stony Creek, Connecticut, starts six feet underwater and descends almost to the ocean floor. From the buoys hang ropes, and from the ropes hang broad, slippery blades of sugar kelp, which have the color and sheen of wet Kodak film.

It ends with Goodyear diving in the kelp:

Now kelp was everywhere, ochre-colored, thirty feet tall, flailing like tube dancers outside a car wash. Three bright-orange Garibaldi fish swam past, then a group of opaleye, then five kelp bass. I came up to the surface and dove down again, plugging my nose with one hand and using the other to pull myself down the length of a plant. The water was milky with kelp slough. Southern sea palms swooshed and swayed as the waves tumbled over them. At the surface, Ford held up a loose piece of kelp, shaggy and decrepit with a small holdfast—it was sporifying. “More spores,” he said. “Go, go, go.”

That kelp description – “ochre-colored, thirty feet tall, flailing like tube dancers outside a car wash” – is inspired.

Nicola Twilley’s "Accounting For Taste," is a report on fizz-enhancing cans, sonic potato chips, and other sensory marketing innovations. This is the first piece by Twilley that I’ve read. She seems right at home in this heavy-hitter Food Issue lineup. I like her use of “I,” particularly near the end, when she says,

I knew this particular trick of Spence’s—I had watched him perform it multiple times—but it still worked on me. With only a change in the background music, the deep-brown beer had gone from creamy and sweet to mouth-dryingly bitter.

Michael Specter’s "Freedom From Fries" is about fast casual dining at places like Sweetgreen, Lyfe Kitchen, Chipotle, Five Guys, and Shake Shack. Specter always gets to me with his “visit” sentences, e.g., “A few weeks ago, I drove from Chicago to the suburb of Oak Brook, where McDonald’s has its global headquarters.” I find such lines addictive. I read them and think, Okay, I’m with you. Let’s go! Over the years, I’ve vicariously accompanied Specter to a lot of interesting places – Luanda, Mount Vernon, Maharashtra, Shenzhen, on and on.

Lauren Collins’s "Who's To Judge?" is an examination of how the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list is compiled. Collins says, “The 50 Best, which is as much about a sort of competitive hedonism as it is about connoisseurship, is the restaurant guide its era demands—edible clickbait, a Baedeker’s for bucket-listers.” The list strikes me as a game for the one percent. I’m not interested. But I read the article because it’s by Collins, author of the extraordinary "Angle of Vision," and such first-rate food pieces as "Fire-Eaters," "Bread Winner," and "The King's Meal." I’m glad I stuck with it, because the last section, in which Collins describes the best restaurant she ever went to, totally redeems the piece. She writes,

The snapper came raw, sliced open and cross-hatched. We pulled chunks from the grid, like puzzle pieces, and dipped them in soy sauce. A waiter wearing a marinière and a sailor’s cap brought Almaza beer in mugs with salt on the rim. We ate hummus, then we swam. We ate sabbidej mtabbal—squid cooked in its ink—and swam again. I have no idea what the restaurant was called, but I can taste it.

And now, as I close the magazine, I ask myself what’s my takeaway? What is the Food Issue afterimage that lingers in my thoughts? I confess I find myself thinking of that layered lemon-and-ginger-Islay Scotch Penicillin cocktail at Dutch Kills. That clinches it. Here’s to you, Nicolas Niarchos! Your tantalizing "Bar Tab: Dutch Kills" is this week’s Pick of the Issue.

Postscript: Also in this week’s issue, Dan Chiasson reviews John Updike’s Selected Poems. I’ll post my comment on this absorbing piece next week.

October 26, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I’m pleased to see André Carrilho back in the magazine after a lengthy absence. His portrait of Jeb Bush for Ryan Lizza’s "What Would Jeb Do?" is an eye-catcher. Carrilho has produced some of the magazine’s most inspired illustrations. See, for example, his portrait of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, for Sasha Frere-Jones’s "Show Runners" (June 27, 2011) and his depiction of Paul Auster for James Wood’s "Shallow Graves" (November 30, 2009) 

2. Dina Litovsky’s photo illustration for Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Timna" beautifully captures the wonderful kubaneh-filled clay flowerpot that Killingsworth mentions in her delectable piece.

3. What to make of Meghan O’Rourke’s "Unforced Error"? Of this much I’m sure – it’s great, even better than her superb "My Aunts" (The New Yorker, July 20, 2009), one of my all-time favorite poems. “Unforced Error” is more complex than “My Aunts.” Like “My Aunts,” it celebrates life. But in “Unforced Error,” failure to see death in the midst of that life is considered a mistake. The combination of disparate images and thoughts is ravishing: “I made a mistake. Now I have a will. It says when I die / let me live. A white shirt, bare legs, bones beneath. / Numbers on a board. A life can be a lucky streak, / or a dry spell, or a happenstance. / Yellow raspberries in July sun, bitter plums, curtains in wind.” That final line is very fine – a form of still life/nature morte. “Unforced Error” is death-haunted. My take-away: Don’t take life for granted.

4. I strongly disagree with the view expressed in Masha Gessen’s "The Memory Keeper" that “the border between journalism and literature is inviolable.” One of this blog’s main premises is that no such boundary exists, and that fact pieces such as Ian Frazier’s "Blue Bloods," Burkhard Bilger’s "Towheads," Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision," William Finnegan’s "Dignity," Raffi Katchadourian’s "Transfiguration," Dexter Filkins’s "Atonement," to name just a few recent examples, are as artful, arresting, and meaningful as any novel or short story.

5. The most absorbing piece in this week’s issue is Nicholas Schmidle’s "Ten Borders," which reconstructs the harrowing, dogged, courageous journey of a Syrian refugee named Ghaith from his hometown of Jdeidet Artouz (“Across the street, a sedan was spewing flames. Body parts littered the road”) to Bar Elias (“Ghaith met the smuggler at a restaurant, and paid him five hundred dollars for the plane ticket and the fake passport”) to Beirut (“The officers discovered Ghaith’s Syrian passport in his backpack and arrested him”) to a Beirut jail (“One day, Ghaith watched, horrified, as a pregnant prisoner fell to the floor, blood pooling around her”), back to Jdeidet Artouz (“He felt imperilled whenever he left the house”), then to Istanbul (“After several days, Turkish smugglers herded Ghaith and the others onto buses”), then to Mersin (“Ghaith hitched a ride to the center of Mersin in the back of a produce truck, among piles of oregano, mint, and parsley”), then to Alanya (“Eventually, they were dropped off late one night at a gas station near Alanya, a tourist town on the Turkish Riviera, two hundred and twenty miles west of Mersin”), then via boat into the Mediterranean (“Water slopped over the gunwales and a gaseous odor filled the cabin”), then back to the Turkish Riviera (“Police officers arrived and stretched crime-scene tape around a swath of the beach”), then to Mersin (“In mid-June, Bilal learned that yet another smuggler from Mersin, known as Abu Omar, was running rubber dinghies from Izmir, on Turkey’s western coast, to Lesbos, a Greek island fifteen miles away”), then to Izmir (“At eight o’clock, Turkish smugglers hustled them onto a bus; along the way, they collected another group of refugees, many of whom had to squat in the aisles”), then via rubber dinghy to Lesbos (“The refugees cut the motor and the raft floated to shore”), then to Moria (“They were dropped off at a refugee center that resembled a prison: high fences, watchtowers, concertina wire”), then on an overnight ferry to Athens (“He and Bahaa stood on the deck, watching the sun set on the terra-cotta roofs of Mytilene, Lesbos’s capital”), then via train to Evzonoi, then by foot to Gevgelija (“The Macedonian police collected Ghaith and his friends in a paddy wagon and took them back to the Greek border”), then, following the railroad tracks, trekking to a village five-stops north of Gevgelija, where he and dozens of other refugees boarded a train going north; then disembarking at the last stop before the Serbian border; then trekking to Preševo; then via bus to Belgrade (“Ghaith took a shower to wash off the mud caked behind his ears”); then via smuggler’s van to Vienna (“Ghaith, Bahaa, and Bilal crouched on the floor, so that they couldn’t be seen through the windows”); then via train to Salzburg; then via taxi to Munich; then via train to Copenhagen, and then to Malmö, crossing into Sweden on the Øresund Bridge. It’s an amazing journey, with many close calls and memorable experiences along the way. Schmidle is to be commended for the skillful, detailed way he’s reported it.

6. I read Leo Robson’s "Delusions of Candor" with interest. James Wood, in his recent Slate interview, mentions Robson as one of the critics he regularly reads. He says Robson is “extremely good on fiction.” “Delusions of Candor” is the first Robson piece I’ve read. It’s a review of two books on Gore Vidal – Jay Parini’s Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal and Michael Menshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal. Robson describes Vidal’s style as “Olympian detachment, patrician hauteur.” This strikes me as exactly right. I’m not a fan of Vidal’s writing. But I did enjoy Robson’s review, especially his argument that Parini “wants to give us the real Gore, but he keeps on falling for the pose.” I like the way he uses passages from Anais Nin’s diary describing Vidal as “lonely,” “hypersensitive,” “insecure,” contrasting her view with the image of the “strapping, self-assured, untouchable Vidal” that Parini presents in his book. Argument, for me, is a key element of a stimulating book review. Robson appears adept at it. I enjoyed his “Delusions of Candor” immensely.