April 25, 2016 Issue

I’ve commented before on the collagist aspect of James Wood’s art – how he selects details from the novel he’s reviewing and assembles them in gorgeous Rauschenbergian constructions (see here). His "Stranger in Our Midst" a review of Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs, in this week’s issue, contains a beauty:

O’Brien sees banal details and lingers over them, viewing them in the shadow of warfare and forced emigration, so that they are no longer banal. She tells us how quickly the workers leave the building when they are released: “In the mornings, after they had clocked out, they ran, recklessly, they ran as if they were fleeing catastrophes. The fear that governed their whole lives was now compressed into this urgency to catch a bus or a train to allow a husband or a mother or a cousin to go to work.” Fidelma is lonely in London, where the Thames has a strange “toffee colour, not like the silvery rivers of home.” Her fellow-workers, like her, long for home; like her, they cannot return. But they carry memories, “and the essence of their first place, known only to them.” (A beautiful phrase!) For Fidelma, Ireland is now becoming a memory, “such a small memory, young grass with the morning sun on it and the night’s dew, so that light and water interplayed as in a prism and the top leaves of an ash tree had a halo of diamond from the rain, the surrounding green so safe, so ample, so all-encompassing.”

Speaking of details, there are some delightful ones in this week’s “Goings On About Town”: a Studio Job lamp “whose base is a golden banana peel” ("Art: Museum of Arts and Design"); Ericka Beckman’s video “Hiatus,” in which “a cyber-heroine battles shock-haired scarecrows and buzzing electrical towers, only to be foiled by a Texas oilman with skin the color of Vishnu” ("Art: Ericka Beckman"); Joan Crawford’s “ferocious stillness and blowtorch stare” (Richard Brody, "Johnny Guitar"); Sofrito’s vanilla flan that comes “delightfully topped with lip-shaped sprinkles” (Nicholas Niarchos, "Tables For Two"); Ocean’s 8’s “eight-ball-embedded floor” (Colin Stokes, "Bar Tab").

My favorite sentence in this week’s issue? It’s a toss-up between Colin Stokes’s “In the cavernous hall, pool aficionados assembled cues that had been brought lovingly from home in leather cases, and a couple shared kisses and onion rings” ("Bar Tab: Ocean's 8") and James Wood’s “O’Brien tumbles into her characters’ voices; the prose has a life-filled, unstopping locomotion: ‘her little Mini, her chariot of freedom’ ” ("Stranger in Our Midst").

April 18, 2016 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I relished this "Goings On About Town" detail plucked from National Museum of the American Indian’s “Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains”: “Plains artists, short on paper, used to draw on discarded ledger books. So does Dwayne Wilcox: in one drawing, a woman, resplendent in a Lakota robe, holds a smartphone that reads ‘r u at da pow wow.’ ”

2. And I enjoyed this line from “Goings On About Town” ’s note on Haris Epaminonda: “Think of her wooden fish regarding itself in the mirror as one of our primordial ancestors, contemplating evolution in our era of selfie-drenched narcissism.” (This is the newyorker.com version; the magazine version erroneously refers to “his rubber” fish.)

3. And I loved this “Goings On About Town” comment on photographer Scott Alario: “Alario reveals marvels in life’s minutiae, whether it’s steam curling up from a forkful of pasta or coolant streaming into a car’s radiator.”

4. Perhaps the most sheerly pleasurable sentence in this week’s issue is found in Wei Tchou’s "Bar Tab: Tomi Jazz": “On a recent Saturday night, as oil lamps flickered throughout a full house, a woman in a light-blue kimono nodded her head to the Standard Procedures, featuring the L.A.-based saxophonist Ray Zepeda, which was closing its set with a lively rendition of Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘A Night in Tunisia.’ ”

5. My takeaway from Elizabeth Kolbert’s absorbing "Unnatural Selection" is the notion of “assisted evolution” – human intervention in natural processes with the aim of improving corals’ and trees’ chances of survival. Kolbert’s description of donning a wetsuit made me smile: “The only suit in my size was an extra-thick one; getting into it made me empathize with any animal that’s ever been eaten alive by a boa.”

6. I was pleased to see Wayne Koestenbaum quoted in Hilton Als’s "Immediate Family." Koestenbaum is one of my favorite writers. I’m looking forward to his new book Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations.

7. Ariel Levy’s "Beautiful Monsters," an account of artist Niki de Saint Phalle's wild life, contains this gorgeous surreal line: “Walk downhill along the path that leads away from the Sphinx, and you are confronted by a voluptuous golden skeleton—Death—riding a blue horse over a mirrored green sea, from which disembodied arms stretch up to cling to the world of the living.”

8. I’m allergic to TV, but I read Clive James’s "Thrones of Blood" anyway because … well, because it’s by Clive James, one of the great essayists of our time. “Thrones of Blood” is terrific! Here’s a sample:

From Homer until now, and onward to wherever the creaking fleet of “Battlestar Galactica” may go in the future, there never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism. And, when we click on Play All and settle back to watch every season of “The Wire” all over again, we should try to find a moment, in the midst of such complete absorption, to reflect that the imagined world being revealed to us for our delight really is an astounding achievement, even though we will always feel that we need an excuse for doing nothing else except watch it.

I could quote this piece endlessly. Savor this strange beauty: “John Hurt as Caligula in ‘I, Claudius’ ate the baby from his sister’s womb, whereas all Joffrey does is shoot a prostitute with his crossbow.”

9. I’m a fan of Dan Chiasson’s criticism. His "Mind the Gap," a review of Rosemarie Waldrop’s Gap Gardening, in this week’s issue, is excellent. In one of its best passages, Chiasson quotes a section of Waldrop’s “Hölderlin Hybrids” and beautifully analyzes it:

Waldrop’s poems aren’t “visual” in the sense that paintings are visual, but they feel as though they had been applied to paper, not simply written down, and they reward the kind of scrutiny we give to discrete visual surfaces. In a section from “Hölderlin Hybrids”:

Monet writes a friend he’s painting “the instant.” Succession stopped at success. A light his palette gives off. And color subdivided into into. On the retinal surface. Ground so fine. In each ray of light. Move motes of dust.

The passage is slyly mimetic of the painter’s process, his “succession” of brushstrokes suspended, like the word “succession,” when he reaches “success.” The halting sentence fragments are like synaptic flashes as the image passes from “palette” to “color,” from color transformed (“into” this or “into” that) to the eye and then to the gallery, where, aeons later, dust motes intervene.

That last sentence is inspired!

April 11, 2016 Issue

There’s a scene in Gay Talese’s extraordinary "The Voyeur's Motel," in this week’s issue, that went straight into my collection of unforgettable New Yorker images. The piece is about a man named Gerald Foos, who, in the sixties, bought a motel in Aurora, Colorado, “in order to become its resident voyeur.” He converted the motel’s attic into a viewing platform. In 1980, Foos contacted Talese, suggesting Talese write his story. Talese decided to meet him. He traveled to Aurora, stayed at Foos’s motel (the Manor House Motel), crawled across the carpeted attic catwalk with Foos, looked down through the specially designed ceiling vents, and watched a naked couple having sex. Here’s the scene:

Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a closer view. As I did so, I failed to notice that my necktie had slipped down through the slats of the louvred screen and was dangling into the motel room within a few yards of the woman’s head. I realized my carelessness only when Foos grabbed me by the neck and, with his free hand, pulled my tie up through the slats. The couple below saw none of this: the woman’s back was to us, and the man had his eyes closed.

It’s a creepy moment, but also whacky – Hitchcock via Woody Allen. I smiled when I read it. Talese’s viewing of the attic catwalk is crucial to his piece. He says, “If I had not seen the attic viewing platform with my own eyes, I would have found it hard to believe Foos’s account.” I would’ve found it hard to believe, too. Talese’s use of “I” is masterful. It authenticates his narrative.

There are two other excellent articles in this week’s issue – James Lasdun’s "Alone in the Alps and Rachel Aviv’s "The Cost of Caring" – but they’re overshadowed by “The Voyeur’s Motel,” which I think is destined to be some sort of oddball classic. 

Interesting Emendations: James Wood's "The Fun Stuff"

I’m curious why James Wood, when he collected his New Yorker pieces in The Fun Stuff (2012), rejected many of the magazine’s edits. For example, in The Fun Stuff’s “Lydia Davis,” commenting on the narrator in Davis’s “Glenn Gould,” Wood writes, “The woman speaks patiently, intelligently, with a slightly fraught lucidity, and it is only by accident, as it were, that one notices the absolute devastation of her sentences” (my emphasis). That “it is only by accident, as it were” is deleted from the New Yorker version, which reads, “The woman speaks patiently, intelligently, with a slightly fraught lucidity, and one does not immediately notice the absolute devastation of her sentences” (my emphasis). The New Yorker version is clearer and more concise. Why reject it in favor of a wordier version containing a parenthetic phrase (“as it were”) indicating that the preceding phrase  (“it is only by accident”) might not be formally accurate?  

Here’s another example. In The Fun Stuff’s “ ‘Reality Examined to the Point of Madness’: László Krasznahorkai,” Wood says of Krasznahorkai’s writing, “The prose has about it a kind of self-correcting shuffle, as if something were genuinely being worked out, and yet, painfully and humorously, the corrections never result in the correct answer” (my emphasis). In the New Yorker version, the superfluous “about it” is deleted and the “the” is dropped in favor of the more specific “these.” The sentence reads, “The prose has a kind of self-correcting shuffle, as if something were genuinely being worked out, and yet, painfully and humorously, these corrections never result in the correct answer” (emphasis added). This is a much cleaner, sharper version. Why revise it to add needless words?

Here’s one more example. In The Fun Stuff’s “Life’s White Machine: Ben Lerner,” Wood quotes a passage from Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, and says, “Again, this is funny and wily, but beneath it runs dread, the dread of nullity” (my emphasis). In the New Yorker version, the first “dread” is deleted, shortening the sentence to “Again, this is funny and wily, but beneath it runs the dread of nullity.”

I could cite dozens of other Fun Stuff passages that restore cuts made by The New Yorker. A few of the revisions are substantive and deepen Wood’s analysis (e.g., the addition of “This antinarrative, this deliberate avoidance of the conventional grammar of ‘realism,’ this reaching for what cannot be disclosed or confessed in narrative” to the last paragraph of “Life’s White Machine: Ben Lerner”). But most of Wood’s Fun Stuff changes restore needless words that The New Yorker had rightly deleted.

Wood has a hairsbreadth sense of words. His rejection of the New Yorker edits when he assembled his Fun Stuff collection has to be taken as deliberate. Why reject changes that make his writing more concise? In his great "The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon," he defines the “ideal sentence” as “a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but disheveled, careful and lawless, right and wrong.” Perhaps that explains his rejection of New Yorker editing. Concision isn't his governing aesthetic. He wants his sentences to be Keith Moon-like – “attired but disheveled, careful and lawless, right and wrong.” 

Robert Sullivan's "A Young Artist Confronts the Sinking of the Titanic"

Illustration by Nico Jaimes

Yesterday, one of my favorite writers, Robert Sullivan, posted a delightful “Culture Desk” piece on newyorker.com titled "A Young Artist Confronts the Sinking of the Titanic." It’s a note on the opening of “The Titanic,” an exhibition of drawings at the Sweet Lorraine Gallery, “a small exhibition space on the third floor of Treasure Island Storage, a self-storage facility in Red Hook, Brooklyn.” The drawings are by ten-year-old artist Nico Jaimes.  Sullivan writes,

Nico answered questions about the drawings, which show the ship from many angles of the disaster—views of the lifeboats, the deck, the hull in various degrees of submersion. “That’s people getting off the Titanic,” he said of one. “I know that the first-class passengers got off first, and the second class got off second, and they made the third class wait for the lifeboats, but then there were no more lifeboats and everybody just panicked.” His drawing of the evacuation emphasized the less orderly aspects. “Yeah, panic,” he said, nodding.

Sullivan’s piece reminds me of some of his great “Talk of the Town” stories, e.g., "Say Cheese," "Super-Soaker," "Rabbit Ears," "Shredding Party," and "The Crossing." He’s a master Talk writer, right up there with Ian Frazier and Mark Singer. But he produces only one or two pieces a year. All the more reason to treasure them when they appear.

Ellsworth Kelly's Photos

Ellsworth Kelly, Barn, Greenbush (1977)

A few weeks ago a wonderful capsule review of Ellsworth Kelly Photographs, an exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York City, appeared in The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town,” stating:

The painter’s first posthumous exhibition—as modest as it is fascinating—consists of thirty-one small black-and-white photographs, which were printed before his death, last December. Taken between 1950 and 1982, they’re quick studies of doors, windows, walls, and barns, all featuring the same strong, graphic shapes that inspired his paintings. Seen through Kelly’s eyes, a raking shadow, a curved barrier, and a tilted screen are found art, no translation necessary. He nods to such great photographers of vernacular architecture as George Sheeler, Walker Evans, and Aaron Siskind, but—no surprise—Kelly had a remarkably clear and particular vision.

I relish that “no translation necessary.” It’s exactly what I most appreciate about photography – its capture of things as they are. Like Kelly, I’m drawn to old doors, windows, walls, and barns, but maybe for a different reason than he was. He saw these things in terms of shape: see Chris Wiley, "Joyful Forms: The Little-Known Photography of Ellsworth Kelly" (“Photo Booth,” newyorker.com, March 30, 2016). Whereas, for me, these eroded, weather-beaten, falling-down structures are all about time – the melancholy manifestation of life’s transiency.

April 4, 2016 Issue

I’ve just finished reading this week’s issue – the Food & Travel Issue – and I’m exhilarated. What a superb New Yorker! All four features are excellent: Lauren Collins’s "Come to the Fair," Dana Goodyear’s "Mezcal Sunrise," Carolyn Kormann’s "The Tasting-Menu Initiative," and Dexter Filkins’s "The End of Ice." I want to consider each one and pick my favorite. To help me decide, I’ll use my old standby “thisness” – “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (James Wood).

Collins’s “Come to the Fair” is about the Salon International de l’Agriculture, “the enormous show that each spring brings the farmers of France together under the eight roofs of the Porte de Versailles convention center, accompanied by nearly four thousand of their bovine, ovine, caprine, porcine, equine, asinine, and canine companions.” Not sure what the “asinine” refers to, unless it’s the politicians who roam the corridors of the exposition halls “playing folksy.” Collins calls the Salon a “political crucible.” She says, “It’s basically an unseated town-hall meeting with tremendous amounts of booze thrown in.” But, for me, it’s the food and the animals, not the politics, that are interesting. I especially like the Seabright chickens (“The Sebrights were crazy-beautiful: proud-looking, with jutting breasts, each of their silver-white feathers edged in black, as though someone had outlined them with a Sharpie”) and the produce-aisle facsimile of the Eiffel Tower with its “soaring midsection of leeks and carrots, topped by a four-layer finial of tomatoes, potatoes, pears, and lemons,” and a burger-and-fries booth where “sauce dispensers—andalouse, mustard, curry, cocktail, barbecue, américaine, poivre—hung from the rafters like udders.”   

My favorite passage in Collins’s piece conveys the rich mishmash of Salon ingredients:

The notaries of France have a stand, as does the national association of drainage. You can buy a beret or a birdcage. You can obtain an I.D. card for your pet. You can subscribe to Pâtre, a monthly magazine for shepherds. Each of the country’s eighteen regions sponsors an area highlighting its gastronomy. Slurp down some oysters in Arcachon, grab some choucroute in Alsace, and then turn a corner and you’re in Martinique, drinking Ti’ Punch. Picture the Iowa State Fair crossed with the Aspen Food & Wine Classic, with the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show going on in a side ring.

How I savor that “Slurp down some oysters in Arcachon, grab some choucroute in Alsace, and then turn a corner and you’re in Martinique, drinking Ti’ Punch”! “Come to the Fair” exudes appetite and pleasure. I devoured it.

Goodyear’s “Mezcal Sunrise” is a search for the ultimate artisanal mezcal. I relish this form of narrative (see my post “Culinary Quests” here). It starts with Goodyear’s visit to Bricia Lopez’s mezcal bar at Guelaguetza in Los Angeles where she tastes Lopez’s prize mezcal (“She poured some into a jícara, the dried hull of a fruit, often used to serve mezcal, and offered it to me. It was tangy and slick, like a dirty Martini, with a whiff of neat’s-foot oil”). Lopez says, “You can’t order this anywhere. You have to go to these places. You have to drink it hot off the still.” With these words, Goodyear’s quest is launched. Goodyear travels to Oaxaca City, Mexico (“Lipstick-red flame trees were in bloom, and the air was filled with the intoxicating smell of gasoline”). She visits a palenque where mezcal is produced (“The palenque was simple and clean, newly built: a pit filled with burning coals; four fermentation barrels brimming with mashed, cooked agave that smelled of apple-cider vinegar; six wood-fired copper stills; two gleaming ten-thousand-litre stainless-steel storage tanks; and a small bottling facility”). She visits Hipócrates Nolasco, the president of the Consejo Regulador del Mezcal (“His office, separated from the lab by glass panels, is a museum of mezcal. Hundreds of bottles—his personal collection—line the walls on mirrored shelves”). Lopez arrives in Oaxaca City and takes Goodyear to El Destilado, “a new spot that focusses on uncertified, nano-batch mezcals.” There they meet El Destilado’s owner, Jason Cox. Cox gives them a drink of his favorite mezcal (“It was wonderfully weird and comforting, salty-sweet and leathery, like Old Spice on a beloved cheek”). He says his source is located in the tiny village of Santa María Ixcatlán. He says he’s going there tomorrow. He agrees to let Goodyear and Lopez tag along. In this serendipitous way, Goodyear eventually meets the twenty-five-year-old mezcalero who made the rare mezcal she’d tasted at Guelaguetza. I love “Mezcal Sunrise” ’s quest-like structure. And I savor its sensuous mezcal descriptions, particularly that “tangy and slick, like a dirty Martini, with a whiff of neat’s-foot oil.”

Carolyn Kormann’s “The Tasting-Menu Initiative” has a great subject – La Paz’s Danish-Bolivian restaurant Gustu. Kormann calls Gustu “both a restaurant and an experiment in social uplift.” The piece talks about Gustu’s proprietor, Claus Meyer, who also owns Noma, in Copenhagen, “named the world’s best restaurant for the third year in a row by a jury of international chefs, critics, and restaurateurs.” It tells about a foundation that Meyer started called Melting Pot, “which taught prisoners in Denmark how to cook.” It tells how Meyer decided to create a Bolivian equivalent of Noma and establish a culinary school for disadvantaged youths. It profiles Gustu’s head chef, Kamilla Seidler, “a thirty-two-year-old Dane who had worked in some of Europe’s top restaurants, including Mugaritz, a two-Michelin-star establishment in northern Spain that is known for such whimsical experiments as edible cutlery.” It describes Kormann’s experience of shopping with Seidler at a market in central La Paz (“Venders—mostly fierce-looking women with long braids and bowler hats—sat in stalls between heaps of Andean produce: watermelons as big as a bulldog’s belly, purple corn with kernels like gumballs, plantains the color of paprika”). It talks about Seidler’s challenges (“Seidler needed to please many kinds of people: prominent Bolivians, the local press, the international press, travel bloggers, food tourists, regular tourists, backpackers, Bolivian ex-pats who are nostalgic for flavors from their childhood, and judges for Latin America’s Fifty Best Restaurants, a ranking started in 2013. She had to come up with a formula that nobody else had”). It describes Gustu’s first menu (“The palmito was on it, along with rabbit confit served with pale kernels of choclo and lime zest; papalisas with beetroot and hibiscus; and a boozy dessert made with tumbo, the fruit she had given me in the market. The food was sculptural, deconstructed, Technicolor”). It profiles Coral Ayoroa, Gustu’s first Bolivian employee, who was put in charge of setting up the culinary school. It describes the difficulties experienced by culinary school students in adjusting to the exacting demands of Gustu’s kitchen (“Then, unexpectedly, eight of them quit. ‘It might have been that the work was too tough for them,’ Ayoroa said. The students had long shifts, sometimes training all day and then helping during dinner service. Another problem was the long commute from the neighborhoods where they lived, in the mostly impoverished city of El Alto, which sits on a dusty plain a thousand feet higher than La Paz”). It tells how Meyer devised a two-tiered system for training employees (“Melting Pot would start a network of entry-level cooking schools in El Alto, where their students lived. The top graduates would be eligible for scholarships to continue their studies at Gustu”). It describes the “uneasy position” that Gustu inhabits in Bolivia’s food revolution. It talks about the response of Bolivian President Evo Morales (“Despite Gustu’s social projects, it can’t be easy for a populist President to credit a European chef with ‘rescuing’ local food and farmers. He is not above a private endorsement, though”).

My favorite part of “The Tasting-Menu Initiative” is Kormann’s detailed account of a dinner she has at Gustu. Here’s a taste:

“First, you will eat cauliflower,” Levin Tøttenborg said. He set down a piece of slate bearing a thin triangular slice of what looked like watermelon, neatly cut to leave a sliver of green along the side. A single rectangular grain of salt sat on top. There was no cauliflower in sight, and yet, when I took a bite, the flavor announced itself unmistakably as cauliflower. A waiter set down bread—a pink hibiscus brioche and a coca-leaf bun, served with coca butter and quinoa tofu. The tofu was bland, but the coca butter was savory, like a grassy crème fraîche.

Kormann’s style is plainer than Collins’s and Goodyear’s. There’s less figuration. But she’s a superb noticer of detail. Her Gustu dinner description is a tour de force of close observation – that “neatly cut to leave a sliver of green along the side,” for example.

In his “The End of Ice,” Filkins accompanies an international group of scientists on an expedition to the Chhota Shigri Glacier in India’s Himalayas. The piece opens magnificently with two paragraphs, the first describing the route to Chhota Shigri, and the second bringing Filkins into the action as participant-observer:

The journey to the Chhota Shigri Glacier, in the Himalayan peaks of northern India, begins thousands of feet below, in New Delhi—a city of twenty-five million people, where smoke from diesel trucks and cow-dung fires dims the sky and where the temperature on a hot summer day can reach a hundred and fifteen degrees. The route passes through a churning sprawl of low-land cities, home to some fifty million people, until the Himalayas come into view: a steep wall rising above the plains, the product of a tectonic collision that began millions of years ago and is still under way. From there, the road snakes upward, past cows and trucks and three-wheeled taxis and every other kind of moving evidence of India’s economic transformation. If you turn around, you can see a great layer of smog, lying over northern India like a dirty shroud. In the mountains, the number of cars drops sharply—limited by government regulation, for fear of what the smog is doing to the ice. The road mostly lacks shoulders; on turns, you look into ravines a thousand feet deep. After the town of Manali, the air cools, and the road cuts through forests of spruce and cedar and fir.

A few months ago, I followed that route with an international group of scientists who were travelling to Chhota Shigri to assess how rapidly it is melting.

I read that, and I was hooked. The piece is riveting! Its subject slightly reminded me of Elizabeth Kolbert’s "Ice Memory" (The New Yorker, January 7, 2002). In that piece, a group of glaciologists drill cores in the Greenland ice sheet. In “The End of Ice,” glaciologists drill cores in the Chhota Shigri. But Filkins’s piece is more exciting. He crosses a river in a sketchy gondola lift:

Near the valley floor, we veered onto a rocky trail that tracked an icy river called the Chandra. Our van halted and a group of men appeared: Nepali porters, who led us to an outcropping on the river’s edge. Chhota Shigri—six miles long and shaped like a branching piece of ginger—is considered one of the Himalayas’ most accessible glaciers, but our way across was a rickety gondola, an open cage reminiscent of a shopping cart, which runs on a cable over the Chandra. With one of the porters working a pulley, we climbed in and rode across, one by one, while fifty feet below the river rushed through gigantic boulders.

He explores Chhota Shigri’s snout:

The opening of Chhota Shigri’s snout was five feet high, large enough for us to enter. Pressing ourselves against the interior walls and shimmying along the narrow banks of the rushing water, we worked our way into a vaulting palace of ice, where ten-foot-long icicles hung from the ceiling like giant fishhooks. Underneath the roar, you could hear the drip of melting ice. In the walls and the ceiling, water and earth streamed behind sheets of clear ice, the sediment tinting the walls orange and pale green. Air bubbled in the water, trapped when the glacier’s ice froze around it, more than two hundred and fifty years ago. “It could collapse at any moment,” Azam said. “When we come back next year, it will be gone.”

He camps on Chhota Shigri’s slope:

The sun was setting behind the peaks as we arrived at the high camp, at nearly sixteen thousand feet, and the horizon glowed deep orange. The porters had set up tents, and were donning headlamps to help prepare the equipment for the next day’s ice core. The temperature was dropping fast, into the teens. We ducked inside the main tent and found the rest of the team huddled in the dark around a stove, drinking cups of salty broth. Ranjan arrived just after the sun went down. “I am so happy to have made it!” he said. The camp was just a handful of tents on the glacier’s slope, connected by a little stairway carved into the snow. The porters had made a dinner of lentils and chapati, but we were too nauseated from the altitude to eat more than a few bites. That night, we slept in a ragged tent with no tarp, its doors flapping open, directly atop the ice, nine hundred and fifty feet thick.

Filkins’s brilliant factual style epitomizes thisness. After agonizing consideration, I choose his terrific “The End of Ice” as my Pick of the Issue. But I want to stress that all four features in this week’s New Yorker are extraordinary. I look forward to more Food & Travel Issues.

Postscript: A special shout-out to Michael Sragow for his wonderful capsule review of Sam Peckinpah’s The Deadly Companions (“Goings On About Town: Movies”). The line, “Wills makes a terrific mangy villain; he sweats corruption through his buffalo-fur coat,” is inspired!

March 28, 2016 Issue

I’ve followed Andrew O’Hagan’s work in the London Review of Books for many years. He’s one of my favorite writers. I’ve often wondered if, some day, he’d appear in The New Yorker. Now, here he is, in this week’s issue, with a brilliant piece called “Imaginary Spaces,” a profile of the set designer Es Devlin. O’Hagan is a superb describer. In "Imaginary Spaces," he evokes behind-the-scene moments with a specificity that puts us squarely there. For example:

There’s nothing emptier than an empty arena. The spotlight operators were being winched up on pulleys, disappearing into a galaxy of lights. The bar staff were preparing drinks. At every entrance, security was speaking into radios and getting ready for an onslaught. U2’s guitarist, The Edge, was up onstage for a final sound check, chopping out chords and testing pedals. The drummer, Larry Mullen, was beating a snare drum at the other end of the long walkway. He stopped to respond to shouts from a sound guy. Willie Williams, the band’s veteran creative director, was talking to a group of technicians just to the side of the stage.

And:

Before the show, I saw her smiling broadly as she walked into the V.I.P. area. Each band member had a curtained-off space named for the Dublin location where he grew up—St. Margaret’s, Glasnevin, Cedarwood Road, and Rosemount—and the group’s respective guests gathered inside each one, drinking Australian Shiraz and sitting on white leather sofas. Personal assistants holding clipboards circled. Devlin went in and spoke with Bono and a couple of others. “O.K.,” she said. “I’ve done my hellos.”

My favorite passage in “Imaginary Spaces” is O’Hagan’s description of the set that Devlin created for a production of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch:

She presented a grand house imbued with a political story from ceiling to skirting boards, a large, deteriorating room where the psychologies of the characters who lived there seemed to be inscribed as shadows on the blue-painted walls. I saw the play twice, and had an increasing sense of psychological disturbance. Devlin had found the key not only to the mood of the play but to the horror of its generational conflict. The set married royal sumptuousness to genocidal mania, littering the palace with taxidermy, glum military portraits, abandoned toys, and deep, shadowy spaces. But in the second half the set turned into a giant heap of dirt—a battlefield had entered the house, and Ophelia climbed over bones and earth to her death. The set was a living organism, emitting turmoil and images of chaos: when an old piano was played, its discordancy seemed to echo through the language; when Cumberbatch, as Hamlet, feigned madness, or became mad, the portraits on the walls seemed to glower at him.

That last sentence is inspired! “Imaginary Spaces” is a compelling argument for set design as art. I enjoyed it immensely.