Interesting Emendations: Dana Goodyear's "Anything That Moves"

One of Dana Goodyear’s most memorable descriptions is of eating a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts at a secret Los Angeles sushi bar called Yamakase. There are two versions of it. The first is in her “Beastly Appetites” (The New Yorker, November 4, 2013):

We ate the beef, we ate the crab, we ate gumball-size baby peaches, olive green and tasting like a nineteen-forties perfume. There was slippery jellyfish in sesame-oil vinaigrette, and a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts, meant to be slurped together in one viscous spoonful. That one—quiver on quiver on quiver—was almost impossible to swallow, but it rewarded you with a briny, primal rush.

The second version is in her Anything That Moves (2013):

We ate the beef, we ate the crab, we ate gumball-size baby peaches, olive-green and tasting like a 1940s perfume. There was slippery jellyfish in sesame-oil vinaigrette, and a raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts, meant to be slurped together in one viscous spoonful. That dish—quiver on quiver on quiver—epitomized the convergence of the disgusting and the sublime typical of so much foodie food. It was almost impossible to swallow it, thinking ruined it, and submission to its alien texture rewarded you with a bracing, briny, primal rush.

Comparing the two versions, I find three interesting differences: (1) “dish” in the New Yorker piece appears to refer to “raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts,” whereas in the book version it seems to include the jellyfish in sesame-oil vinaigrette, as well; (2) the book version contains more detail of Goodyear’s response (“That dish … epitomized the convergence of the disgusting and the sublime typical of so much foodie food”; “thinking ruined it”; “alien texture”); (3) the magazine version’s “briny, primal rush” becomes, in the book, “bracing, briny, primal rush.” 

Both versions contain the inspired “quiver on quiver on quiver,” so intensely evocative it almost makes me gag. This is meant as a compliment. Goodyear's phrase brilliantly enacts the sensation it describes.

Robert Macfarlane on John McPhee's "Sunset" Description

In an interesting piece in the current issue of Granta, Robert Macfarlane compares three “sunset” descriptions, one of which is from John McPhee’s “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, April 25 & May 2, 1977; Book I in his great Coming into the Country, 1977). Here’s the description:

The air was cool now, nearing fifty . . . We sat around the campfire for at least another hour. We talked of rain and kestrels, oil and antlers, the height and the headwaters of the river. In the night the air and the river balanced out, and both were forty-six at seven in the morning.

Macfarlane comments,

Then there is McPhee’s sunset – in which the sun doesn’t feature at all, eclipsed from the scene as it is by facts. McPhee’s prose here concerns balance, and is balanced: note how carefully those three pairs of nouns match each other (singular noun, plural noun; rain, oil, height; kestrels, antlers, headwaters), preparing for the equalized temperature relationship of air and river at exactly “seven in the morning.” McPhee – a New Yorker staff writer for more than half a century – is a man committed to accuracy and to metrics. Coming into the Country, like his other books, carries an astonishing density of detail: his non-fiction, as David Remnick has observed, emulates the “freedom” of fiction but not its “license.”

Macfarlane’s noticing how “those three pairs of nouns match each other (singular noun, plural noun; rain, oil, height; kestrels, antlers, headwaters), preparing for the equalized temperature relationship of air and river” is superb. McPhee’s prose enacts the balance he describes. But I question Macfarlane’s suggestion that McPhee is, in this passage, describing a sunset. Maybe McPhee is implying one, but even that, for me, is a stretch.

It should also be noted that Macfarlane’s “sunset” quotation isn’t entirely accurate. It’s actually a merger of four sentences from three separate paragraphs. The middle two lines belong together; the first and last are grafts.

But Macfarlane’s larger point, that Coming into the Country is a landmark travel book, “an intricately patterned enquiry into America’s relationship with the idea of wilderness, braced by an awesome integrity of observation,” is incontrovertible.

At the Archive: Nick Paumgarten's "Tables For Two: Tony Luke's"

Today, I’m in the Archive devouring Nick Paumgarten’s “Tables For Two: Tony Luke’s” (April 11, 2005). Early in his New Yorker career, Paumgarten wrote a slew of “Tables For Two” pieces. “Tony Luke’s” is one of his most inspired, featuring this memorable description of a Tony Luke’s cheesesteak:

The cheesesteaks here are about a foot long, and they are served without the benefit of being cut in half. As a result, as you eat one, the structural integrity starts to go; well-cheesified clumps of steak ooze out the sides. Quick flanking bites along the roll’s perimeter don’t much help, and soon you find yourself pushing the thing into your mouth like a log into a chipper.

That last line makes me smile every time I read it. 

February 13 & 20, 2017, Issue

For me, the most interesting item in this week’s issue is Jane Wilson’s 1957 portrait of Jane Freilicher, illustrating Peter Schjeldahl’s “Goings On About Town” piece, “Down and In,” on NYU Grey Art Gallery’s “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965.” Seeing it, I was reminded of Freilicher’s great The Painting Table (1954), a painting that John Ashbery, in his Reported Sightings (1991), describes as “a little anthology of ways of seeing, feeling and painting, with no suggestion that any one way is better than another.” I’ve written about The Painting Table before (see here). It’s one of my touchstones.

Luke Mogelson's "The Avengers of Mosul": A Masterpiece of War Reportage

Photo by Victor J. Blue

Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017), is a brilliant, brutal, immersive account of his experience traveling with an Iraqi police unit called the Nineveh Province SWAT team, made up almost entirely of native sons of Mosul, as they fight to liberate their city from ISIS occupation. The piece is divided into four sections: (1) “Up the Tigris”; (2) “Entering the City”; (3) “A Respite from Battle”; and (4) “Urban Combat.”

The first section, “Up the Tigris,” opens with the SWAT team located in the village of Kharbardan, anxiously awaiting orders to join the assault on ISIS-held Mosul. The orders come, and the SWAT team moves up the eastern bank of the Tigris River, helping the Ninety-first Brigade of the Iraqi Army’s 16^th Division clear half a dozen villages of ISIS occupants. The Brigade halts outside the village of Salahiya. The SWAT team continues into town on its own. Mogelson writes,

We accelerated into the lead, hurtling down alleys and whipping around corners. I was impressed that the driver could steer at all. The bulletproof windshield, cracked by past rounds, looked like battered ice, and a large photograph of a recently killed SWAT-team member obstructed much of the view.

In the second section, “Entering the City,” the SWAT team is stationed in Shaymaa, a neighborhood on Mosul’s southeastern edge. Mogelson travels to an aid station set up outside Shaymaa by the 9^th Division. He describes the arrival of injured soldiers:

A Humvee belonging to an infantry unit that was working with the 9th Division parked outside the aid station and unloaded a soldier whose left arm was open to the bone. His face was raw with burns; he was unconscious, and snorting loudly through his nose.

After several days at the aid station, Mogelson catches a ride to a SWAT-team position inside Shaymaa. He writes,

Upstairs, we found First Lieutenant Omar Ibrahim hunched below a shattered window. An oblong hole gaped in the cinder-block wall behind him, where a rocket-propelled grenade had exploded the day before. Omar was one of the only men in the unit whom I’d never heard raise his voice—he rarely spoke at all—and he recounted the grenade incident with sangfroid.

“They’re very close,” he said.

Peeking over the windowsill, we could glimpse dense blocks of identical-looking houses with water tanks on their roofs, the domes and minarets of mosques scattered here and there. One of the houses belonged to Dumbuk’s uncle and cousins; another held Hadi’s wife and daughter. ISIS and the men’s loved ones were in the same place, but ISIS was too close and their loved ones were too far away.

That night, gunmen attacking the SWAT team’s line approached so near that we could hear them crying “Allahu Akbar!” Bullets whistled overhead; red tracers arced and disappeared. In the morning, rounds smacked against the walls of the house occupied by Mezher [Major Mezher Sadoon, the SWAT team’s deputy commander], and a mortar rattled the windows. To the east, two enormous blasts preceded two enormous plumes.

The 9^th Division asks the SWAT team to help it capture the adjoining neighborhood of Intisar, where ISIS resistance is fierce. The SWAT team enters Intisar and is nearly decimated. Mogelson reports,

Of the forty-odd men who’d been in Intisar, twenty-two had been seriously injured and two killed. Nearly everyone else was hurt to some degree. Four of the swat team’s seven Humvees had been destroyed and abandoned on the battlefield. Two others were out of commission. Later that night, I met Rayyan [Lieutenant Colonel Rayyan Abdelrazzak, commander of the SWAT team]] in the house where he was staying, by himself. His eyes downcast, his voice almost a whisper, he said, “They defeated us.”

In the third section, “A Respite From Battle,” the SWAT team is given a week off. Mogelson visits the father and siblings of a SWAT-team member named Souhel Najem in a camp for internally displaced people (I.D.P.s), “a vast grid of white tents enclosed by cyclone fencing,” in a village called Hassan Sham. The next day, he visits Corporal Bilal, a forty-year-old member of the SWAT team, at a private acute care hospital in Erbil. Bilal’s hand had been nearly severed by a suicide truck explosion in Intisar. Mogelson writes,

I found Bilal in an electrically reclining bed. The air in the room smelled mildly of rot. His left hand was splinted and bandaged; long metal pins protruded from it. His thumb, his ring finger, and his little finger were black. I asked the obvious question. When would the fingers be amputated?

“They were supposed to do it three days ago,” Bilal said. “The problem is, I don’t have the money because our salaries are late.”

The next afternoon, Bilal’s doctor agrees to perform the surgery, with the understanding that Bilal will pay at a future date. Mogelson says, “The black fingers were amputated successfully. By then, however, the necrosis had spread, and another operation was required to remove the entire hand.”

The last section, “Urban Combat,” chronicles Mogelson’s experience as he follows the SWAT team back into battle, this time in a part of Mosul known as Gogjali. Mogelson writes,

To reach the SWAT team’s new positions, my interpreter and I drove down Highway 2 until we reached a berm that had been heaped across the lanes, and then turned left onto an unpaved road with a decapitated corpse lying in the middle of it. Stray dogs picked at the body; children played nearby. The unpaved road paralleled the cemetery, which lay behind a row of houses. At the end of the row, a perpendicular alley offered a sight line to the brown field of tombstones and, beyond it, the buildings in Al Quds. The SWAT team was in a house on the other side of the alley.

ISIS snipers shoot at the house:

The snipers eventually quit for the night, but they resumed with gusto in the morning. The SWAT-team members who were not stationed on the roof went to the road behind the house. Bullets zinged up the alley leading to the cemetery. Every now and then, the men backed a Humvee into the alley and aimed a few bursts from the Dushka at Al Quds; they also launched grenades from a turret-mounted MK19. The moment the Humvee pulled back behind cover, more bullets hit the house and the houses around it. They kicked up dirt and slapped against walls. They pierced an empty fuel tanker. They shook the branches of a tree and cut down leaves. They ricocheted off power-line poles, ringing them like bells.

The SWAT team is deployed to Aden, a neighborhood west of Gogjali. One of its positions is a school. Mogelson writes,

The school was a large two-story building that jutted into the clearing—and therefore was exposed on three sides. We had to duck low while climbing an exterior staircase. A corridor ran the length of the second floor, ending at an open doorframe that gave onto a landing. A bedsheet had been hung from the frame, but you still had to hew to the corridor walls, because the snipers in Akha [a nearby neighborhood] sometimes shot through the sheet.

Mogelson crawls on his stomach under the bedsheet. He describes what he sees:

Outside, two machine guns were propped, on bipods, in front of small holes in a waist-high wall. The floor was covered with spent ammunition. Peering through a hole, I could see the houses across the clearing and, behind them, the yellow dome of a mosque. Souhel [a SWAT-team member] drew my attention to a house with a corrugated-tin roof and several square windows missing their panes.

“There are three ISIS in there,” he said.

While Mogelson is in the school, a mortar lands “so thunderously that we thought, mistakenly, that it had hit the building.” He reports,

People were screaming. I followed Basam downstairs and outside. A crater gaped in the street; a metal cistern raised on stilts was spewing water. The screams came from a house around the corner. We pushed through a gate and found a man in a tracksuit lying in the driveway. Before we could attend to him, a woman came out and yelled that more seriously wounded people were inside. She led us into the living room, where an older, shirtless man sat on a couch. Blood smeared his torso and was splattered all over his pants. People were holding sopping red cotton pads to both sides of his face. He was having trouble breathing. When he saw us, he pitched forward, as if to say something. Instead of words, blood spilled from his mouth.

A young boy lay at the man’s feet. He was also shirtless and bleeding heavily from wounds on his torso and his legs.

It was a challenge to focus. The living room was crowded with screaming relatives and neighbors. While we worked on the boy, a woman began shaking my shoulder and shouting in my ear. I had to push her away. My interpreter later told me what she’d been saying: “Don’t let my son die!”

Note that “we.” Mogelson is more than an observer; he’s a participant, helping dispense first aid.

Also in this section, Mogelson visits another I.D.P. camp, this one in Khazer. He goes there to see a SWAT-team member nicknamed Dumbuk (his real name is Mohammad Ahmed), who is recovering from a leg wound suffered in the fighting in Aden. Mogelson writes, “As we ate, Dumbuk told me that as soon as his leg and arm healed he planned to rejoin the swat team. He was happy to see his relatives, but he missed the front line.” This line reminded me of something A. J. Liebling said in the Foreword of his great Mollie & Other War Pieces (1964):

I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war.

“The Avengers of Mosul” is an extraordinary piece of writing, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. In summarizing it, I’ve cherry-picked a few incidents to convey its vividness. I relish the way it unfolds sequentially without flashbacks. I relish its factual style. I relish its focus on the SWAT-team members. Most of all, I relish its details, e.g., a Humvee’s interior (“I crammed into Mezher’s vehicle, sharing a seat with a corporal in a black balaclava. We were wedged in amid ammo boxes, ammo belts, and the feet of another policeman, who stood in the turret behind a Dushka, a Russian heavy machine gun”); a medic’s cigarette ash (“He spoke excellent English, and worked with calm efficiency, often while smoking a cigarette, the ash falling on his patients”); the SWAT team’s deputy commander sitting on the edge of a bed “casually flipping a hand grenade around his finger”; inside a new aid station (“The fake-gold pages of a Koran, draped with a garland of plastic roses, were mounted on the wall, above bags of saline hanging from protruding screws”); the way a soldier puts his foot on a prisoner’s head (“The soldier in the cap twisted his boot back and forth, as if putting out a cigarette”); the ringtone of the Swat-team commander’s phone (“His phone kept ringing: the tone was the theme song from the movie ‘Halloween’ ”); a woman suturing a boy’s face with needle and thread (“It looked as if she’d dipped her hands in a bucket of red paint. I cut the thread and tried to shoo her off. A minute later, while attending to the wounds on the man’s legs, I looked up and saw that she was stitching him again”).

Edward Hoagland, in his review of John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), said, “It is a reviewer’s greatest pleasure to ring the gong for a species of masterpiece.” Today, I’m pleased to ring that gong for Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul.” 

February 6, 2017, Issue

Peter Schjeldahl says there’s poetry in David Salle’s paintings. He says they’re “a distillation of the poetic powers that are essential to painting” (“Fresh Paint,” in this week’s issue). He’s said this before. In his “David Salle” (The Hydrogen Jukebox, 1991), he wrote, “Salle’s unabashedly literary intelligence and playfulness – his way of pushing around the meanings of images much as poets push around those of words – appeal to me mightily.” Schjeldahl’s poetry analogy suggests an approach to Salle’s enigmatic art. I’m not sure I buy it. The best poetry, for me, springs from more than just “pushing around” words. Clive James, in his Poetry Notebook (2014), writes, “There is a notion of bedrock throughout Shakespeare’s work almost to the end: a notion that the essential meaning, the deeper consideration, has to be protected against all transient distortions, including the poet’s own gift for … words.” It seems to me that Salle’s paintings lack this sense of a “deeper consideration.” They lack bedrock. Take his Sextant in Dogtown (1987), for example, which is used to illustrate Schjeldahl’s piece. Schjeldahl describes it as follows:

Here, three abutted panels present grisaille images, clearly from photographs, of a woman awkwardly posing in a bra, with and without panties. (Offensive? Sure, and plainly on purpose, but smoothly at one with Salle’s attitude toward all his subjects.) A small inset panel pictures a dead bird. Above them, in acrid colors, are images of antique clown dolls and a cartoon of a top-hatted seafarer wielding a sextant.

It’s an intriguing combination of images and colors. Viewed as an abstract, it’s almost ravishing. Perhaps that’s the way it should be considered. Forget meaning. Seek bedrock elsewhere.

Postscript: This week's issue also contains Luke Mogelson's extraordinary "The Avengers of Mosul." I'm still absorbing it. I'll post my comment in the next day or so. 

Tommy Flanagan's Superb "Lady Be Good ... For Ella"

One of my all-time favorite jazz albums is Tommy Flanagan’s 1994 Lady Be Good … For Ella, with Peter Washington on bass and Lewis Nash on drums. Flanagan was a superlative improviser, who respected the melody even as he spun brilliant variations on it. New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett said of him, “It is rare to come away from hearing Flanagan without something new and ingenious” (Night Creature, 1981). Flanagan was Ella Fitzgerald’s accompanist from 1968 to 1978. After that, he went solo (sometimes with bass and drums, or just bass). He died in 2001.

Lady Be Good … For Ella contains eleven beautiful songs, including a dashing “How High the Moon,” an exquisite “Angel Eyes,” and two inventive, completely different versions of Gershwin’s “Oh, Lady Be Good.” The highlight, for me, is Flanagan’s sparkling performance of an arresting, seldom-heard Sammy Cahn tune called “Pete Kelly’s Blues.”

Lady Be Good … For Ella is a superb album by a great jazz poet. 

Janet Malcolm's Perplexing Pomegranates

Henri Matisse, Still Life with Pomegranates (1947)

Nature seldom appears in Janet Malcolm’s writings. Hers is a mental world of transcripts, journals, courtrooms, literature, art, and psychoanalysis. There are exceptions to her denatured outlook. One is her love of burdocks, at least as photographic subjects (see “Burdocks,” The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2008). Another is her apparent fondness for pomegranates. I say “apparent” because the evidence is skimpy. I’ve found four references. The earliest is in her great The Silent Woman (1994):

What Hughes is protesting is being treated as if he were dead. The issue between the Hugheses and the public hostile to them is whether or not the Hugheses are dead. They have compromised their claim to being alive by their financial gains from the dead poet’s literary remains. They have eaten the pomegranate seeds that tie them to the underworld.

In Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011), she quotes from a letter adduced at Borukhova’s sentencing hearing:

I can say that with 100 percent confidence. I remember coming into his office a few days after Michelle was living with him. I remember everything perfectly. Michelle was playing a game with his secretary. Daniel was taking a break. He was sitting in the other room eating a pomegranate. He told me “when I see Michelle playing at school I think back to how much time passed that I wasn’t with her and cry.”

Malcolm comments,

Of course he was eating a pomegranate. Characters in Russian literature are always eating (or offering) fruit at significant moments. (Gurov in The Lady and the Lapdog eats a slice of watermelon after he and Anna have slept together for the first time; Oblonsky in Anna Karenina is bringing Dolly a large pear when she confronts him with his infidelity.) It is in the blood of Russian storytelling to take note of the fruit. The image of Daniel’s pomegranate briefly flickered in the minds of the people sitting in the Queens courtroom and disappeared until, many months later, it leaped out of the trial transcript that one of the spectators was reading.

In Malcolm’s “The Master Writer of the City” (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015), a review of Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, she quotes the following passage from Mitchell’s “Joe Gould’s Secret”:

Like the Baptist preachers the young reporter had listened to and struggled to understand in his childhood, the old man sees meaning behind meanings, or thinks he does, and tries his best to tell what things “stand for.” “Pomegranates are about the size and shape of large oranges or small grapefruits, only their skins are red,” he says…. “They’re filled…with juice as red as blood. When they get ripe, they’re so swollen with those juicy red seeds that they gap open and some of the seeds spill out. And now I’ll tell you what pomegranates stand for. They stand for the resurrection…. All seeds stand for resurrection and all eggs stand for resurrection. The Easter egg stands for resurrection. So do the eggs in the English sparrow’s nest up under the eaves in the “L” station. So does the egg you have for breakfast. So does the caviar the rich people eat. So does shad roe.

And In her Paris Review interview, Malcolm, asked to describe her living room, replies,

My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large ferns, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen. [The Paris Review, Spring 2011]

What to make of these “pomegranate” passages? It’s significant that the pomegranates in the bowl on her coffee table are dried. They’re there to be seen, not eaten. They mean something to her apart from their deliciousness. Malcolm is an analyst, not a sensualist. Perhaps she likes pomegranates for their mythological implications (“They have eaten the pomegranate seeds that tie them to the underworld”). Perhaps they represent Russian literature (“It is in the blood of Russian storytelling to take note of the fruit”). Perhaps they remind her of Joseph Mitchell. Perhaps they “stand for” (to use Mitchell’s words) some sort of personal resurrection. Perhaps their meaning is a combination of all the above, or maybe it’s something else entirely. There’s a subtle pomegranate pattern running through Malcolm’s work (and life); it’s not there by accident. It’s a conscious aspect of her extraordinary art.

January 30, 2017, Issue

Jill Lepore, in her absorbing “Autumn of the Atom,” in this week’s issue, traces the history of the apocalyptic scenario known as “nuclear winter.” She tracks it back to Carl Sagan’s campaign against Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). In 1983, Sagan, in collaboration with four other scientists, wrote an influential paper forecasting, as a consequence of nuclear war, “a nuclear winter that might result in the end of all life on the planet” (Lepore’s words). Intriguingly, Lepore also links nuclear winter with climate change. It’s this aspect of her piece that hooked me. Lepore argues that “the political campaign waged against nuclear winter—against science, and against the press—included erecting a set of structures, arguments, and institutions that have since been repurposed to challenge the science of global warming.” For example, she shows the George C. Marshall Institute, founded in 1984 for the purpose of countering Sagan and defending SDI, turning its attention, four years later, to challenging the science behind global warming.

“Autumn of the Atom” isn’t like other recent Lepore pieces, e.g., “Esmé in Neverland,” “The War and the Roses,” and “Joe Gould’s Teeth.” It’s more an argument than it is a reporting piece, a double argument – Sagan’s subversion of SDI and Lepore’s jab at critics of climate-change science. It’s written entirely in the third person – not my favorite perspective. But I relish argument, especially when it combines such a variety of piquant ideas, people, and events, as this one does. And the magnetism of Lepore’s brilliant, brisk, fluent, intelligent prose draws me on, especially lines like “Nuclear-weapons policy is a body of speculation that relies on fearful acts of faith. Doctrinally, it has something in common with a belief in Hell”; “Talking about warheads seemed like a fabulous way to be famous”; “The nuclear-winter debate has long since been forgotten, but you can still spy it behind every cloud and confusion.” For these reasons, Jill Lepore’s “Autumn of the Atom” is this week’s Pick of the Issue.