Michael Crawford's "This Vodka Has Legs" Drawings

Drawing by Michael Crawford

Reading David Remnick’s tribute to Michael Crawford in this week’s issue, I was reminded of Arthur Lubow’s great “This Vodka Has Legs” (The New Yorker, September 12, 1994), which Crawford illustrated. Lubow’s piece is a fascinating inside look at the creation of an ad campaign – Stolichnaya’s “Freedom of Vodka.” Crawford’s drawings sketch scenes of various meetings between the advertising agency (Margeotes, Fertitta, Donaher & Weiss) and the client (Carillon Importers). My favorite shows a presentation of a “comp” (a provisional ad) to Carillon’s president, Michel Roux, and two other Carillon executives, in which one of Margeotes’s presenters says, “I think it’s important that we look at this holistically” (see above). “This Vodka Has Legs” deserves preservation in book form. Maybe someday, it will appear in a collection of Lubow’s journalism. If it does, I hope Crawford’s drawings are included.  

July 25, 2016 Issue

Conservation has always been a significant element of New Yorker river writing: see, for example, John McPhee’s classic “The Encircled River,” and David Owen’s recent “Where the River Runs Dry.” But in George Black’s “Purifying the Goddess,” in this week’s issue, “conservation” seems pallid as a description of what’s required to clean up the Ganges. Black reports, “The Ganges absorbs more than a billion gallons of waste each day, three-quarters of it raw sewage and domestic waste and the rest industrial effluent, and is one of the ten most polluted rivers in the world.” This arresting piece contains some of the grossest descriptions of river pollution I’ve ever read. Here, for example, is Black’s depiction of the river at Varanasi:

When I visited, last October, the garbage and the post-monsoon silt lay thick on the ghats, the four-mile stretch of steps and platforms where thousands of pilgrims come each day to take their “holy dip.” The low water at the river’s edge was a clotted soup of dead flowers, plastic bags, feces, and human ashes.

Note that “When I visited last October.” Black’s piece abounds with the kind of authenticating first-person observation and engagement I relish (e.g., “One evening, I climbed a steep flight of steps from the ghats to the tiny Atma Veereshwar Temple, where I met Ravindra Sand, a Saraswat Brahmin priest who is deeply engaged in the religious traditions of Varanasi and the river”).

Black reports that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has embarked on a Ganges cleanup initiative called Namami Gange. Under this program, the Ganges’ surface will be cleaned with “trash-skimming machines and booms,” and “sewage-treatment plants that are already under construction will be completed.” But the Varanasi sewers and the Kampur tanneries remain an “intractable problem.”

“Purifying the Goddess” ends vividly with Black accompanying Navneet Raman, chairman of the Benares Cultural Foundation, as he walks along the Ganges’ east bank, scattering the purple seeds of a tropical almond known locally as “the sewage tree,” “because it can filter heavy metals and other pollutants out of standing water.”

Black’s piece is an excellent addition to The New Yorker’s long line of great river writing.

Postscript: My favorite sentence in this week’s issue is Jiayang Fan’s sensuous “The delicious budino arrives in a small orange Mason jar with a cloud of cream” (“Tables For Two: Covina”).

Notes on Ian Frazier's "Hogs Wild" - Part IV

Hogs Wild’s title piece is about the wild hog infestation in the American South. Frazier reports that the South is “wild-hog-positive from the Rio Grande in West Texas to the Coast of the Carolinas, with only a few counties still hog-free.” Describing the damage that wild hogs cause, he launches this remarkable construction:

Next question: What do wild hogs do that’s so bad?

Oh, not much. They just eat the eggs of the sea turtle, an endangered species, on barrier islands off the East Coast, and root up rare and diverse species of plants all over, and contribute to the replacement of those plants by weedy, invasive species, and promote erosion, and undermine roadbeds and bridges with their rooting, and push expensive horses away from food stations in pastures in Georgia, and inflict tusk marks on the legs of these horses, and eat eggs of game birds like quail and grouse, and run off game species like deer and wild turkeys, and eat food plots planted specially for those animals, and root up the hurricane levee in Bayou Sauvage, Louisiana, that kept Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the eastern part of New Orleans, and chase a woman in Itasca, Texas, and root up lawns of condominiums in Silicon Valley, and kill lambs and calves, and eat them so thoroughly that no evidence of the attack can be found.

And eat red-cheeked salamanders and short-tailed shrews and red-back voles and other dwellers in the leaf litter in the Great Smoky Mountains, and destroy a yard that had previously won two “Yard of the Month” awards on Robins Air Force Base, in central Georgia, and knock over glass patio tables in suburban Houston, and muddy pristine brook-trout streams by wallowing in them, and play hell with native flora and fauna in Hawaii, and contribute to the near-extinction of the island fox on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, and root up American Indian historic sites and burial grounds, and root up a replanting of native vegetation along the banks of the Sacramento River, and root up peanut fields in Georgia, and root up sweet-potato fields in Texas, and dig big holes by rooting in wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes, and, as the nine-hundred-foot-long pipe advances automatically on its wheeled supports, one set of wheels hangs up in a hog-rooted hole, and meanwhile the rest of the pipe keeps on going and begins to pivot around the stuck wheels, and it continues and continues on its hog-altered course until the whole seventy-five-thousand-dollar system is hopelessly pretzeled and ruined.

This audacious, vivid, delightful passage contains a number of Frazier’s signature moves: the humor of that “Oh, not much,” followed by a proliferation of seemingly endless instances of eye-opening, hog-wild destruction; the incredible specificity of the imagery (not just a yard, but a “a yard that had previously won two ‘Yard of the Month’ awards on Robins Air Force Base, in central Georgia”; not just fields, but “wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes”; the convoy of “ands” (forty of them, no less). What I relish is the way the function of those “ands” changes in the final ten lines from linking examples of wild-hog damage to linking a disastrous sequence of events that starts with wild hogs digging big holes by rooting in wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes and ends six “ands” later with the whole seventy-five-thousand-dollar irrigation system “hopelessly pretzeled and ruined.” The entire ingenious creation enacts the wildness of its subject.

Notes on Ian Frazier's "Hogs Wild" - Part III

Ian Frazier is a consummate writer of figurative speech. I’ve pointed this out before (see “Ian Frazier: The Art of Figuration”). Here, from Hogs Wild, are seven examples of his figurative art:

1. Snow had fallen the night before, re-burdening the trees all the way to the crest of the Swans, whose topmost spruces and pines stood minutely whitened against the sky like fine-edged crystals of frost on a windowpane. [“By the Road”]

2. As usual when there are no clouds over the city, the high, white streaks of jet trails stretched like chalk smears across a blackboard. [“Back to the Harbor”]

3. Beneath the chinaberries their little purple blossoms lay on the gray mud like a pattern on an old dress, sometimes with hog tracks squished in between. [“Hogs Wild”]

4. Seen from miles away on the interstate, the crater suggests a giant bullet hole in the surrounding flatness, with rock lifted and folded back around its edges like curled metal around a puncture in a shot-through stop sign. [“On Impact”]

5. Last summer I was driving along the river in western Illinois thinking how horrible the Mississippi had been lately, with its outsized floods and its destruction of New Orleans, and I noted the recent flooding still in progress along the Illinois shore—the miles of roads and fields submerged, and the ferry landing at Golden Eagle, Illinois, now separated from dry land by seventy feet of mud and water, and low-lying parking lots full of river mud cracked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle curling in the sun. [“Fish Out of Water”]

6. I watched Barack Obama’s speech, closed-captioned above the painfully percussive music, on ceiling TV monitors through a writhing forest of dancers on poles. [“The Rap”]

7. Uncheerful interior, and an air of many people having recently passed through; the floors were like the insides of old suitcases, with forgotten small things in the corners. [“Hidden City”]

Frazier is known for his lists. Hogs Wild contains a dandy:

The B46 passes EZ Pawn Corp., Baby Genius Day Care Center, Miracle Temple Church of God, Cameo Auto Body, Victory Tabernacle of Praise, Tree Stump Barber Shop, Beulah Church of God Seventh Day, Inc., the Lingerie Zone, Sinister Ink Tattoo & Piercing, Brooklyn for Jesus 7th Day Adventist, Rag Top Lounge, Holy Order of Cherubim and Seraphim Movement Church, Grace Church of the Firstborn, Bobby’s Dept. Store, Sneaker King, Saint Jude Religious Items, Tropical Breeze Car Wash, First United Church of Jesus Christ Apostolic, Inc., Yahya Hardware & Discount Store, Plain Truth Temple of Praise, Sunny Corner Restaurant, King Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church, 3-Star Juice Lounge, Eglise de Dieu, Asian Yummy House, Byways and Hedges Youth for Christ Ministry, Pawn Rite, and New Hope Healing Series (Space Available for Worship). [“Bus Ride”]

Frazier is a superb describer. Here, from his brilliant “Blue Bloods,” a report on the decline of one of the earth’s oldest living creatures, the horseshoe crab, is his depiction of throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs on the riprap wall near the Dover Air Force Base fuel dock on Delaware Bay:

The crumbling brittle of horseshoe-crab parts under the car wheels now became so thick it was unnerving, with uncrushed, whole horseshoe crabs all over the road as well. I pulled onto the left-hand berm to investigate. When I climbed up on the riprap wall, I saw throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks. The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks.

My favorite sentence in Hogs Wild: “All the park benches had blankets of snow pulled up over their knees.” [“Back to the Harbor”]

My favorite detail: the bird-watchers’ birdcall ringtones in the wonderful “Blue Bloods”:  “Some of the bird-watchers were talking on their cell phones and leaving excited messages for other bird-watchers. When the other bird-watchers called back, the ring tones were birdcalls.”

My second favorite detail: the type of fly Frazier used to catch his first steelhead: “Joe tells me where to put the fly – a pattern called the Green Butt Skunk – and I begin to cast” (“The One That Got Away”).

My third favorite detail: the shirt location of Professor David M. Lodge’s pen and mechanical pencil: “He wore a yellow tennis shirt with his ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil stuck neatly in the button part of the neck, an innovation I admired, because I was wearing the same kind of shirt and had compensated for its lack of breast pocket by putting my pens in my pants pockets, always an awkward deal” (“Fish Out of Water”).

In his Introduction to Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts (2013), Frazier says of Malcolm, “Over and over she has demonstrated that nonfiction – a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see everyday – can rise to the highest level of literature.” In my opinion, the same can be said about Frazier. 

Notes on Ian Frazier's "Hogs Wild" - Part II

Ian Frazier’s great new collection Hogs Wild consists of twenty-three reporting pieces, eighteen of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. I remember reading the New Yorker articles when they appeared in the magazine. They’re among the glories of New Yorker reportage – in the same league as work by A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, and John McPhee.

However, in this post, I want to focus on one of Hogs Wild’s five non-New Yorker pieces – “The One That Got Away” – which is new to me. It’s an elegy for a forty-eight-year-old fishing guide named Joseph Adam Randolph, also known as Stealhead Joe. Frazier writes, “The misspelling of his self-bestowed moniker was intentional. If he didn’t actually steal fish, he came close, and he wanted people to hear echoes of the trickster and the outlaw in his name.” Stealhead Joe was a guide on Oregon’s Deschutes River; he specialized in catching sea-run fish called steelhead. On or about November 4, 2012, he drove his truck to a gravel pit, parked, ran a hose from the exhaust pipe to the cab, and asphyxiated himself. Two months earlier, Frazier had spent six days fishing with him on the Deschutes. Frazier says he planned to write a profile of him for Outside magazine.

“The One That Got Away” contains a couple of memorable scenes. One is a description of Frazier wading in the Deschutes for the first time:

An hour after we met, we waded out into the middle of the Deschutes in a long, straight stretch above town. The wading freaked me out, and I was frankly holding on to Joe. He was six-five, broad shouldered, with a slim, long-waisted swimmer’s body. I wore chest waders, and Joe had put on his waders, too, in deference to the colder water. I held tightly to his wader belt. Close up, I smelled the Marlboro smell. When I was a boy, many adults, and almost all adult places and pastimes, smelled of cigarettes. Joe had the same tobacco-smoke aroma I remembered from dads of fifty years ago. I relaxed slightly; I might have been ten years old. Joe held my hand.

The other passage that sticks in my mind isn’t really a scene; it’s a blunt (for Frazier) expression of philosophy:

The paths along the river that have been made by anglers’ feet are well worn and wide. Many who come to fish the Deschutes are driven by a deep, almost desperate need. So much of the world is bullshit. This river is not.

“The One That Got Away” is a significant piece in Frazier's oeuvre. Stealhead Joe is one of his most memorable “characters.”

Postscript: The Outside version of “The One That Got Away,” including some excellent photos of Stealhead Joe, can be found here. 

Re-Refreshed

On September 13, 2013, The New Yorker announced “a new look for Goings On About Town, a redrawn update of the classic Irvin font, and other design changes” (see here). Among the design changes was the decoration of Goings On About Town’s page-corners with angular black brackets. I hated those brackets (see my post on the September 23, 2013 issue, in which I called them, among other things, “pieces of swastika”). The magazine eventually toned down the bracket color from black to gray. But their presence still irked me. Now, I see they’ve been dropped. The brackets are gone (hooray!), and so are the art deco-ish emblems that adorned GOAT’s departmental titles (Art, Night Life, Movies, etc.). The look of the pages is subtly cleaner and simpler, with emphasis on the writing, not the design. I applaud the magazine for making these changes.     

July 11 & 18, 2016 Issue

Last year, Adam Gopnik, in his delightful “The Coffee of Civilization in Iceland” (newyorker.com, April 16, 2015), wrote about a trip he took to Reykjavik to attend a literary retreat. The piece is notable for, among other things, Gopnik’s analysis of Icelandic culture – “one part coffee to one part anything else.” Now, in this week’s issue, there’s a sort of sequel, “Cool Runnings,” in which Gopnik returns to Iceland to cover the Presidential election. Gopnik knows the leading candidate, the historian Guðni Jóhannesson. He attends various events (Jóhannesson’s speech in the Höfðatorg, a women’s soccer match, election night in the ballroom of the Reykjavik Grand Hotel), and visits Jóhannesson at his home – all the while logging impressions, noting details, collecting quotations. Here’s his report on the soccer game:

We arrived at the little stadium. There were about thirty or forty people in the stands. Seagulls wheeled and cawed mournfully overhead. We sat alone with Guðni’s Canadian father-in-law, nothing suggesting that six or seven hours later Guðni might well be elected Iceland’s head of state. I did notice a small girl tugging at her father’s shirt and pointing, and in the second half the two came over for a selfie portrait. It had taken about seventy minutes to break past the politeness barrier. The game was excellent, with the Stjarnan side having an edge, in large part owing to one Donna Key Henry, a Jamaican international who has been playing in Iceland. She was running at slant angles, right through and around the earnest, straightforward Icelandic women, with their blond ponytails and square-to-the-play alignments.

I like the way Gopnik takes time to sketch the play on the field, naming a standout player and describing her technique. Nothing is wasted in Gopnik’s art. He makes the most of every experience.

My favorite passage in “Cool Runnings” is the ending, in which Gopnik reports on election night in the ballroom of the Reykjavik Grand Hotel and describes “a hallucinatory moment”:

I have always wanted to be the first to say to someone “Congratulations, Mr. President.” And so I waited for Guðni to come to the ballroom. He arrived at last, buffeted by cameras, and made a speech, with Eliza, in a blue First Lady’s dress, by his side. He was obviously promising to be the President of all Icelanders, the last step in the choreography of candidacy. A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang “Happy Birthday,” in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: “Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . . ” The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible.

That “sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: ‘Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . . ’ ” is inspired! “Cool Runnings” is stylish, perceptive, and entertaining. I enjoyed it immensely.     

July 4, 2016 Issue

This year's harvest of New Yorker photography writings has been particularly rich: “Lev Mendes’s “Philip Larkin’s Life Behind the Camera”; Chris Wiley’s “Joyful Forms: The Little-Known Photography of Ellsworth Kelly”; Anthony Lane’s “In the Picture.” Now, in this week’s issue, comes Hilton Als’s excellent “Dark Rooms,” a consideration of Nan Goldin’s 1986 collection The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Als describes Goldin’s book as “a benchmark for photographers who believe, as she [Goldin] does, in the narrative of the self, the private and public exhibition we call ‘being.’ ” He writes,

In the hundred and twenty-seven images that make up the volume proper, we watch as relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, and women and themselves play out in bedrooms, bars, pensiones, bordellos, automobiles, and beaches in Provincetown, Boston, New York, Berlin, and Mexico—the places where Goldin, who left home at fourteen, lived as she recorded her life and the lives of her friends. The images are not explorations of the world in black-and-white, like Arbus’s, or artfully composed shots, like Mann’s. What interests Goldin is the random gestures and colors of the universe of sex and dreams, longing and breakups—the electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues that are integral to “The Ballad” ’s operatic sweep.

Those “electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues” are among the hallmarks of Goldin’s style. How did she achieve them? Als, quoting curator Elisabeth Sussman, offers this insight: “Goldin 'discovered her color in flashes of electricity. Even when photographing in natural light, she often unconsciously replicated the effect of artificial lighting.'"

My favorite passage in “Dark Rooms” is Als’s description of Goldin’s approach to her art:

Goldin didn’t photograph the so-called natural world. She photographed life business as show business, a world in which difference began on the surface. You could be a woman if you dressed like one. Or you could dress like some idea of yourself, a tarted-up badass woman, say, who struggles to break free from social decorum by doing all the things she’s not supposed to do: crying in public, showing her ectopic-pregnancy scars, pissing and maybe missing the toilet, coming apart, and then pasting herself back together again.

Als’s writing enacts the rawness of Goldin’s aesthetic. You can tell he identifies with it. I do, too. “Dark Rooms” is a superb piece of criticism. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: While I’m on the subject of New Yorker photography writing, I want to pay tribute to Vince Aletti, whose illuminating capsule reviews of photography exhibitions are among my favorite “Goings On About Town” features.   

Mid-Year Top Ten (2016): Talk & GOAT

Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

So far, this year’s crop of Talk of the Town stories his yielded only five favorites:

1. Laura Parker, "Bee's Knees," March 21, 2016 (“She dunked the bee in a tiny bottle containing her special blend of ‘bee shampoo’: a few drops of archival soap and deionized water. She held the bottle up to the light and gave it a firm swirl. One of No. 1’s legs fell off. ‘She’s old, she’s tired—she’s falling apart,’ Doering said.”)

2. Ian Frazier, "Connected," January 25, 2016 (“By design, the Link has no flat surfaces on which you can leave, say, an almost-empty Pabst bottle in a wrinkled paper bag. These Superman booths still have the little shelf beside the phone and always will. Their small privacy will still vibrate, occasionally, with the old lonesome pay-phone emotions of our former lives. The Links, savvier about human entanglements, will not.”)

3. Eric Lach, "Fire Starter," January 18, 2016 (“Hickory will make a house smell like a ski lodge. Cherry is prized for the way it crackles and pops in a fireplace.”)

4. Mark Singer, "Sleight of No Hands," February 8 & 15, 2016 [“Somehow—Jay’s biography, though it comes as close as any source to explaining the how of how, still leaves a reader at the intersection of belief and disbelief—he did magic (specialty: cups-and-balls), played several instruments (dulcimer, trumpet, flute), trick-shot with pistols, demonstrated exquisite ball control at skittles, danced the hornpipe on his leather-encased stumps, married four times, and sired fourteen children (proof, as Jay noted in Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, of ‘one fully operative appendage’).”]

5. Lauren Collins, "Dog's Dinner," February 8 & 15, 2016 (“The proprietor of the café—belly, suspenders, glasses on a cord—sidled up to the table.”)

And now here are my “Top Ten” choices from my favorite section of the magazine – Goings On About Town:

1. Becky Cooper, "Yours Sincerely," “Bar Tab,” June 6 & 13, 2016 (“The taps are porcelain doll heads, which stare like angelic witnesses to the evening’s festivities.”)

2. Michael Sragow, "Movies: Sam Peckinpah's The Deadly Companions," April 4, 2016 (“Wills makes a terrific mangy villain; he sweats corruption through his buffalo-fur coat.”)

3. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: MáLà Project,” May 2, 2016 (“When an adventurous first-timer pointed to the unfamiliar item rooster’s XXX, the handsome Uighur waiter deadpanned, ‘Chicken testicles, ma’am. One order?’ ”)

4. McKenna Stayner, “Bar Tab: Sycamore,” May 2, 2016 (“The crawlers, finishing a hot whiskey cider that tasted like the dregs of an overly honeyed tea, passed through a teensy smokers’ patio and into the booze-soaked main bar, attracted by a glowing yellow counter, its surface like the cracked crust of a crème brûlée.”)

5. “Art: Mark Lyon,” June 6 & 13, 2016 [“Lyon photographs landscapes in upstate New York while standing inside the bays of self-service car washes, boxlike spaces that supply the images with ready-made frames (graced by the occasional hose). The views—gas-station pumps, strip malls, a swatch of unnaturally green lawn—are transformed by Lyon’s keen eye. He works in daylight and darkness alike, regardless of weather, as fog, rain, and falling snow turn the everyday oddly magical.”]

6. Becky Cooper, “Tables For Two: Bar Omar,” June 20, 2016 (“Shatter the shell of blistered sugar into pieces that look like stained glass and try not to smile.”)

7.  Richard Brody, “Movies: Howard Hawkes’s Hatari!,” March 21, 2016 (“A woman-hunting elephant provides a Freudian jolt, set to Henry Mancini’s jaunty music, and Red Buttons is moving as a Brooklyn cabdriver in exile whose heart does a U-turn.”)

8. Peter Schjeldahl, “In the Ink,” April 11, 2016 (“Shapes and atmospheres loom in whites and textured grays from Stygian blackness: sculpted light, with a muscular feel.”)

9. Nicolas Niarchos, “Bar Tab: Berlin,” February 8 & 15, 2016 (“At the bottom of the stairs, in a barrel-vaulted watering hole, long lines of people waited for the bathroom from whence burst ebullient gaggles of young women and a madly coughing guy in a Thrasher hat.”)

10. Matthew Trammell, “Rock Bottom,” June 6 & 13, 2016 (“If Bruner’s lifelong craft as a bassist buries him in the low end, his voice beams goldenrod from a crack in the ceiling.”)

Honorable Mentions: Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: Lowlife,” January 18, 2016; Jiayang Fan, “Bar Tab: Mother’s Ruin,” January 25, 2016; Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Llama Inn,” February 8 & 15, 2016; Emma Allen, “Bar Tab: Flowers for All Occasions,” February 22, 2016; Richard Brody, “Movies: Rebel in Disguise,” May 16, 2016; Richard Brody, “Movies: The Day He Arrives,” June 6 & 13, 2016; Jiayang Fan, “Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong,” “Tables For Two,” June 6 & 13, 2016.

Credit: The above illustration, by Bendik Kaltenborn, is from Matthew Trammell's "Rock Bottom" (The New Yorker, June 6 & 13, 2016). 

Mid-Year Top Ten (2016): Critical Pieces

Illustration by John Gall

The top ten critical pieces are:

1. Anthony Lane, "In the Picture," June 6 & 13, 2016 (“Since her quest for conflict was a natural reflex, bred in the bone, even her most outlandish pictures come to seem like self-portraits: windows transmuted into mirrors.”)

2. James Wood, "Making the Cut," June 6 & 13, 2016 [“It looks like tidied-up Joyce (a version of stream of consciousness), but it is really broken-up Flaubert: heavily visual, it fetishizes detail and the rendering of detail.”]

3. Peter Schjeldahl, "Insurance Man," May 2, 2016 (“He came slowly to a mastery of language, form, and style that revealed a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism.”)

4. Dan Chiasson, "The Tenderness Trap," March 21, 2016 (“It’s a paranoid vision, often an unsettling one, but a huge variety of phenomena enter the poems. From H1N1 to supermarket carnations and the petrified rictus of a lobster (“like a terrible crack / in a wall something worse is coming through”), these poems are interested in everything, possessing a capaciousness that, paradoxically, requires tight control.”)

5. Clive James, "Thrones of Blood," April 18, 2016 (“If I sound dismissive, it’s just because I’m still looking for all the reasons it would have been right not to watch the show, before I get to the more difficult task of specifying the reasons that not watching would have been a loss.”)

6. James Wood, "Stranger in Our Midst," April 25, 2016 (“O’Brien tumbles into her characters’ voices; the prose has a life-filled, unstopping locomotion: ‘her little Mini, her chariot of freedom.’ ”)

7. Peter Schjeldahl, "Laughter and Anger," March 21, 2016 (“Beautifying asphalt would seem to be no cinch, but the naked quiddity of the stuff, after a third or fourth look, turns cherishable.”)

8. Alex Ross, "Stars and Snow," February 22, 2016 (“At the end, the music seems on the verge of resolving to G major, but an apparent transitional chord proves to be the last, its notes dropping out one by one. Underneath is the noise of paper being scraped on a bass drum—“like walking in the snow,” the composer says. At Carnegie, there was a profound silence, and then the ovation began.”)

9. Peter Schjeldahl, "Seriously Funny," May 16, 2016 (“Jumbled heads share a bottle, which a single hand lifts and pours out, under a table that is topped with a stuffed olive, a cigarette emitting an arabesque of smoke, and a huge salami, its sliced end textured with psychedelic dots of color.”)

10. James Wood, "Floating Island," March 21, 2016 (“This is formulaic writing, sprinkled with male sweat: ‘He had never wanted a woman more.’ ”)

Honorable Mentions: Alex Ross, “Piano Theatre” (January 11, 2016); Adam Gopnik, “Little Henry, Happy at Last” (January 18, 2016); Nathan Heller, “Air Head” (February 1, 2016); James Wood, “Unsuitable Boys” (February 8 & 15, 2016); Dan Chiasson, “Luxe et Veritas” (February 8 & 15, 2016); Anthony Lane, “Beauty and Beasts” (March 14, 2016); Jill Lepore, “After the Fact” (March 21, 2016); Alexandra Schwartz, “Blast Radius” (April 4, 2016); Dan Chiasson, “Mind the Gap” (April 18, 2016); Alex Ross, “Embrace Everything” (April 25, 2016); Anthony Lane, “On the Rocks” (May 9, 2016); Laura Miller, “Descendants” (May 30, 2016); Alex Ross, “Cello Nation” (June 6 & 13, 2016); Peter Schjeldahl, “The Future Looked Bright” (June 6 & 13, 2016); Dan Chiasson, “Boundary Conditions” (June 20, 2016); Peter Schjeldahl, “This Is America” (June 20, 2016).

Tomorrow, I’ll post my favorite “Talk of the Town” and “Goings On About Town” pieces.

Credit: The above illustration, by John Gall, is from Peter Schjeldahl’s “Insurance Man” (The New Yorker, May 2, 2016).