April 23, 2018 Issue

Wow! Here’s a New Yorker (the “Travel & Food Issue”) that deserves not a review but a party. Four of the magazine’s best writers are present – Ian Frazier, Dan Chiasson, Nick Paumgarten, and Burkhard Bilger. 

Ian Frazier’s “The Maraschino Mogul” is a fascinating story about red bees, a cherry factory owner named Arthur Mondella, and a secret hydroponic marijuana farm in the cherry factory’s basement. Frazier tells the story masterfully, reporting one intriguing fact after another, visiting the factory (“The smell of maraschino cherries, not unpleasant but eye-wateringly strong, fills the factory, and the floors remain sticky even though they’re constantly mopped”), talking with Mondella’s daughters (“ ‘My father was just a very, very smart man,’ Dominique told me. ‘He wasn’t an engineer, he wasn’t a mechanic, but the guys on the floor said that he could fix any machine himself’ ”), attending a factory-employee barbecue (“Most of the workmen wore sleeveless shirts, and all were red-spattered and generally a sunburn shade of maraschino red”). This piece has so many interesting elements – red bees, cherry factory, Italian family, police raid, suicide, lawsuits. It would make a terrific movie! I devoured it.

Dan Chiasson’s “Anybody There?” is a “Critic at Large” piece on Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Chiasson says, “The power of the movie has always been unusually bound up with the story of how it was made.” He refers to Michael Benson’s new book, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece. Is 2001 a masterpiece? I’m not sure. It’s a little too cosmic for me. I remember its long psychedelic Jupiter passage. In one of his best lines, Chiasson likens it to “travelling through a birth canal in which someone has thrown a rave.” And I remember HAL, the rogue computer. Chiasson writes, 

HAL is a child, around nine years old, as he tells Dave at the moment he senses he’s finished. He’s precocious, indulged, needy, and vulnerable; more human than his human overseers, with their stilted, near robotic delivery. The dying HAL singing “Daisy,” the tune his teacher taught him, is a sentimental trope out of Victorian fiction, more Little Nell than little green man.

My favourite sentence in “Anybody There?” is this beauty:

On Giphy, you can find many iconic images from “2001” looping endlessly in seconds-long increments—a jarring compression that couldn’t be more at odds with the languid eternity Kubrick sought to capture. 

Nick Paumgarten’s “Water and the Wall” tells about a four-day canoe trip (“a commercial guided float trip, cosseted and catered”) he recently took through Boquillas Canyon, one of the Rio Grande River’s most protected sections. The trip has a political purpose – “to begin to articulate, in an informal but pertinent setting, a response to Trump’s wall.” But the parts I relish most are the nature descriptions. For example:

And here we were. The walls closed in—steep, streaked limestone cliffs with a terra-cotta tinge, pocked high and low with dark openings big and small, made by waterfalls during an era, post-Ice Age, when these precincts were lush. The water, clearer here, took on the colors of the cliffs, and of the salt cedars that crowded the shore. The air had a prehistoric hush, except for the dip of paddles in the current and the tuneful descending song of the canyon wren.

A stunning George Steinmetz photo of the Rio Grande enhances the text. (Several more of Steinmetz’s shots are featured in the newyorker.com version of the piece.) If you love river writing, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Nick Paumgarten’s “Water and the Wall.”

Burkard Bilger’s “Bean Freaks” is about Mexican heirloom beans. It profiles Steve Sando, founder of Rancho Gordo, the U.S.’s largest retailer of heirloom beans. Bilger accompanies Sando on a trip to Mexico in search of Flor de Durazno, the Flower of the Peach, “a dainty, pinkish-brown bean of uncommon taste and velvety texture.” 

Bilger is an artful describer. At an outdoor market in in the town of Ixmiquilpan, he notes, “It was a Thursday morning in May, and the stalls were full of women gossiping and picking through produce: corn fungus and cactus paddles, purslane and pickling lime, agave buds and papalo leaf that smelled of mint and gasoline.” He describes the Vallarta bean as “a greenish-yellow thing with a red-rimmed eye, like a soybean with a hangover.” He says cow’s foot soup has “a deeply funky flavor and a mucilaginous texture that was off-putting at first—it was like sipping a whole cow—then weirdly addictive.” Moro beans are “speckled black and gray, like a starling’s belly.” His combinations of Mexican bean names and Mexican place names are ravishing: “Icatone white beans from the Tarahumara peoples in Chihuahua, or pearl-gray Frijolon de Zimatlán from Oaxaca, or, best of all, the Rosa de Castilla from Michoacán.” 

Bilger is a superb food writer. “Bean Freaks” is one of his best. 

So there you have it: maraschino cherries, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Rio Grande River, heirloom beans – just some of the ingredients in this year’s excellent “Travel & Food Issue.” I enjoyed it immensely. 

April 16, 2018 Issue

For me, the most absorbing piece in this week’s issue is James Wood’s “Long Road Ahead,” a review of Walter Kempowski’s novel All for Nothing. To say that I’m a fan of Wood’s criticism is an understatement. I’m crazy about it. Of the seven hundred and thirty-six posts I’ve written for this blog, one hundred are tagged with his name, more than any other writer. The next closest is Ian Frazier, with eighty-nine. Wood is a formalist; he analyzes style. That’s what I like most about his work. That he prefers fiction to fact is an annoyance I’ve learned to live with. Many of his critical points are applicable to fiction and nonfiction alike (e.g., his theory of detail). In “Long Road Ahead,” he provides an interesting variation on his notion of “free indirect speech”:

One reason that Kempowski’s interrogative prose has a strange air of detachment is that the words have indeed detached themselves from the characters. Two people bend over the map, each with different anxieties, but who is thinking these thoughts about the Russians? Hirsch, Katharina, Kempowski, or all three? Most of “All for Nothing” is written in free indirect discourse, which is to say that the novelist’s prose closely identifies itself with the perspective and the language of a particular character. But here the questions appear to be voiced by a chorus. The effect is a kind of uncertain omniscience, which allows the novelist not only to move easily among his characters but to blend their thoughts, when need be, into a collective anxiety. It’s a modern epic style. 

Wood has written about free indirect speech before: see, for example, his great How Fiction Works (2008). And I’ve found examples of it in fact pieces (see my post on Lizzie Widdicombe’s “Happy Together,” The New Yorker, May 16, 2016). But in the above-quoted passage, he identifies a new form of it – free indirect speech “voiced by a chorus.” I can’t think of a nonfiction example of it. But from now on, I’ll definitely be watching for it.   

April 9, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John Seabrook’s “Six Skittles,” a fascinating personal account of what it’s like to be the victim of a black-ice accident. Seabrook puts us squarely there behind the wheel with him (and his nine-year-old daughter, Rose, in the backseat), as he loses control of both steering and brakes, and becomes “the passenger in a two-ton object now driven by the physics of inertia and friction, with a front-row seat to your own demise.”

Seabrook is very good on the science of what happened, describing the type of black ice he encountered (“Mine was garden-variety black ice. It formed the same way that the clear ice on my windshield formed. Even at higher elevations, where raindrops could be five degrees below freezing, they don’t crystallize into sleet or snow, which would be less slippery; instead, they remain in a liquid, ‘supercooled’ state, until they ‘nucleate’—become ice—on striking anything hard, such as the road surface or a car”), and his heightened awareness as his vehicle spun and left the road (“Neuroscience has a pretty good explanation for what happened in my head during those several seconds. A close encounter with extreme danger led to abnormal neuro-electric activity in the limbic system and temporal lobes of my brain, which sent signals to my adrenal medulla, located on top of the kidneys, and told them to secrete adrenaline”). 

He’s even better when he describes the dynamics of the experience itself:

We were now sliding backward at about fifty-five miles per hour, while also drifting slightly east, because that was the last steering move I had made before losing control. I studied the vectors as though they’d been drawn in marker on the windshield. It appeared that our present course and speed would carry us across the path of the propane truck before it hit us, and we would slide off the east side of I-91 North, facing south, where there was a width of shoulder, and also, I noted with newly enhanced peripheral vision, a snowy, uphill bank that would absorb the impact on my side of the truck. At this point, about two seconds had passed since I had lost control.

“Six Skittles” is a brilliant mixture of variegated ingredients – black ice, Emily Dickinson, “heuristic trap,” “crystalline array,” Skittles, Ambrose Bierce, Albert Einstein, near-death experience, depersonalization, Buddhism, to name a few. It shows a great journalist writing at the peak of his power, concentrating on his black-ice experience, extracting meaning after meaning, even verging on the cosmic:

The traction system of social life is good at getting us going, and keeping us on the road, but it fails when we hit the figurative black ice—death—as eventually we all do. It may be true, as Buddhism teaches, that only when we calmly accept that everything ends, including our selves—“profound acceptance,” in Heim’s phrase—can we see the miracle of this world for what it really is.

I enjoyed this piece immensely.

Feinstein's Fine Line

Frank Sinatra (Photo by W. Eugene Smith)

Is politics taking over The New Yorker?

I’m not just talking about Trump, although the magazine’s Trump coverage verges on the excessive. I’m talking about sexual politics. This, for example, from a recent “Night Life” note on Michael Feinstein:

Feinstein is going to have to walk a very fine line as he celebrates the sexist, boozing, and crass-as-they-wanted-to-be kings of the Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. It’s fortunate that each was a masterly singer who embraced some of the most durable standards still heard today. [April 2, 2018]

I take it that the line Feinstein has to walk is the separation between the artist and his art. He’s allowed to sing Rodgers’ great The Lady Is A Tramp, a song that Sinatra swung magnificently, as long as he doesn’t say anything that could be construed as admiration for Sinatra’s playboy lifestyle. I’m sure Feinstein is capable of pulling this off. But it strikes me as a shade hypocritical, because Sinatra’s life and music are inseparable. Somewhere in his letters, van Gogh says, “If I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t paint.” The same applies to Sinatra. If he’d lived another way, he wouldn’t have been the singer he was.

April 2, 2018 Issue

For me, the most sheerly pleasurable writing in this week’s issue is the opening paragraph of Anthony Lane’s “Unusual Suspects,” a review of Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane and Aaron Katz’s Gemini. Lane writes,

There is a lovely photograph of James Mason and Eva Marie Saint on the set of “North by Northwest” (1959). They are clad for the auction scene; he wears a pale-gray suit, and her dress is rich in roses. He holds her lightly by the arm, smiling, as she stands behind the camera on which the sequence will be filmed. And what a formidable beast that camera is: as big as a motorbike but far less streamlined, bearing on its broad flank the legend “VistaVision”—the wide-screen format in which Hitchcock also shot “To Catch a Thief” (1955), “The Man who Knew Too Much” (1956), and “Vertigo” (1958). James Wong Howe, a king among cinematographers, used VistaVision on “The Rose Tattoo” (1955), and there’s a portrait of him with a similar camera, which towers above him on its wheeled crane, and which he holds by a cable, as if leading a velociraptor through Jurassic Park. Howe, like Hitchcock, knew that the cumbersome effort was worthwhile, for the result would be a rolling expanse of fine-grained images, filling the audience’s gaze. Such beauty could be summoned by the beast.

That “and there’s a portrait of him with a similar camera, which towers above him on its wheeled crane, and which he holds by a cable, as if leading a velociraptor through Jurassic Park” is brilliant. The whole passage is superb, an ingeniously contrastive way to highlight a distinctive aspect of Soderbergh’s Unsane – his use of an iPhone 7 Plus to film it.

Lane isn’t impressed with Unsane’s iPhone cinematography. He says, “I found it as coarse as canvas, though you have to admire Soderbergh for adding a new vista to his vision.”