October 22, 2018 Issue

The best writing in this week’s issue is in “Goings On About Town: Art.” Two notes, in particular, stand out: Peter Schjeldahl on the Met’s Delacroix retrospective and Johanna Fateman on the Trish Baga exhibition at Greene Naftali. Schjeldahl’s piece, based on his longer “Performance” (The New Yorker, October 1, 2018), contains this brilliant passage:

A frontal, tumultuous scrum of two big cats, three horses, and five Arabian hunters threatens to burst from the canvas. Claws, hooves, teeth, and scimitars contend. Primary colors blaze. Black resounds. It’s a dazzling picture, but Delacroix’s open competition with Rubens, who was denied a riposte by virtue of being two centuries deceased, gives it the air of an elephantine bagatelle.

Fateman’s capsule review is worth quoting in full:

A motley assortment of enchanting ceramic sculptures fills the first room of Baga’s installation “Mollusca and the Pelvic Floor.” A half-dozen glazed poodle heads accompany melting guitars, volcanic islands, and fossil-like abstractions; two busts—a self-portrait and a deft rendering of RuPaul—house virtual-assistant devices. In a darkened interior room, a video spills off the wall onto clusters of rocks, cardboard file boxes, a bottle of salad dressing, and an oscillating fan. We glean, from the fragmented narrative, that Amazon’s Alexa has been rechristened Mollusca. Baga takes viewers on a strange philosophical journey—an extended hallucination in a messy bedroom—to elucidate her curious relationship with her nonhuman helper.

That “In a darkened interior room, a video spills off the wall onto clusters of rocks, cardboard file boxes, a bottle of salad dressing, and an oscillating fan” is marvelous! The whole passage is inspired.

October 15, 2018 Issue

This week’s issue contains one of the coolest, neatest, most delightful Talk stories I’ve ever read – Michael Schulman’s “Grasshopper.” It’s about a visit that actor Daniel Radcliffe recently paid to The New Yorker’s offices “to try his own hand at fact-checking.” Radcliffe is currently playing a fact-checker in the Broadway play The Lifespan of a Fact, based on Jim Fingal and John D’Agata’s book of the same name. (I haven’t read this book, but I know of it through a memorable review by Jennifer B. McDonald, published in the Times a few years ago, in which she called D’Agata’s championing of belief over fact “hogwash”: see my post here.)

In Schulman’s piece, Radcliffe reports to the office of New Yorker head fact-checker, Peter Canby. Canby gives him “a soon-to-run review of Oxomoco, a Mexican restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn” to fact-check. I smiled when I read that; I recognized the piece – Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Oxomoco,” which appeared in last week’s New Yorker: see my brief comment here.

My favorite part in “Grasshopper” is Radcliffe’s fact-checking phone call to Oxomoco chef, Justin Bazdarich:

He took a breath. “Moving along: you also serve a beef-tartare tostada? (Correct.) “And that has some fried grasshopper on it?” (Actually, the insect is toasted over a wood fire, Bazdarich said. Radcliffe, his pencil trembling, scribbled “toasted.”) “And is that a whole grasshopper you get with each one, or is it sort of segments?” (Whole, but sometimes they break apart.) “Would it be correct to say that meat is a major theme?” Bazdarich seemed skeptical. Radcliffe, panicking, added, “Don’t worry, it is also made mention of that vegetarians or pescatarians can be very, very happy at your restaurants.”

That passage made me laugh out loud. The sentence that Radcliffe fact-checked, changing “fried” to “toasted,” is the very one I selected in my post last week as the only inspired sentence in the entire issue: “Its garnish of identifiable segments of toasted grasshopper was not for the faint of heart, but it rewarded the brave, with a flavor that went from nutty to bitter to honeyed.”

“Grasshopper” ends brilliantly:

Radcliffe hung up and exhaled. “I just fact-checked a fucking article!” he said. “Nothing I do today will be harder than that.” A few days later, a New Yorker fact checker called Radcliffe to verify the above account. “Very meta,” he said. Everything checked out, except that he had been drinking a cappuccino, not a latte, and he has, in point of fact, been to Mexico.

Move over Ian Frazier’s “Russophilia,” Nick Paumgarten’s “Bong Show,” Mark Singer’s “All-Nighter,” Laura Parker’s “Bee’s Knees,” Robert Sullivan’s “Say Cheese,” make room for another Talk classic – Michael Schulman’s superb “Grasshopper.”

Morten Strøksnes’s Wonderful "Shark Drunk"

I want to thank The New Yorker’s Dylan Kerr for recommending Morten Strøksnes’s Shark Drunk
(2015). What a great book! Part memoir, part natural history, part adventure story, it’s an account of Strøksnes’s and his friend Hugo Aasjord’s quest for the Greenland shark in a tumultuous Norwegian fjord called Vestfjorden. I’m about half way through it, and I’m savoring every line. Here, for example, is Strøksnes’s description of a sperm whale:

In front of us is one of the largest of all toothed whales. As we approach, it starts to arch its back. When we’re a hundred feet away, it blows one last time and then lowers its head into the water. The flukes and hind part of the body stick vertically up from the surface, iconic as a rock carving, before the sea closes around them. The whale is gone, as if someone had pulled a string, drawing it down into the abyss.

Here’s his depiction of water: 

All is quiet around me and Hugo, except for a soft, musical sound from invisible currents lapping against the boat. Elsewhere around us the water licks at the underside of its own surface, which gleams above the hollows and high shoals.

That “licks at the underside of its own surface” is inspired! Shark Drunk brims with such descriptions. I’m enjoying it immensely.

October 8, 2018 Issue

Not much of note in this week’s issue. There’s Hannah Goldfield’s description of the taste of toasted grasshopper: “a flavor that went from nutty to bitter to honeyed” (“Tables For Two: Oxomoco”). That’s about it. Maybe it’s time to stop doing this. 

October 1, 2018 Issue

If you relish “road trip” narratives, as I do, you’ll likely enjoy Nick Paumgarten’s “Border Ballads,” in this week’s issue. It’s a profile of singer-song writer Alejandro Escovedo, in which Paumgarten accompanies Escovedo on a three-day drive (“a kind of sentimental journey”) from Dallas to Austin “and beyond, backward through time, down to the border of old Mexico.” In Austin, Escovedo performs at a benefit concert:

Clara the bartender climbed atop a speaker case and began go-go dancing, which seemed to send a current through Escovedo. He has an infectious way of spurring his band, barking “Come on!” and “Let’s go!” with a barrage of guitar chords. Suddenly, what had seemed a local favorite’s perfectly nice presentation of well-made songs to a friendly, graying audience became a raucous, sweaty rock show. Escovedo, who’d appeared wistful and weary toward the end of the drive, seemed to shed decades. 

In Laredo, they attend a baseball game:

Outside the chain-link fence between the lot and the field, Escovedo removed his hat and stood still for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and then, as the Mexican anthem played, we bought, for eight dollars apiece, a pair of third-row seats behind the plate. The Tecos’ uniforms were trimmed in the green and red of the Mexican flag. The visiting team was from Monclova, in Coahuila. The public-address announcements were all in Spanish. By the second inning, the stands had almost filled up, amid the cicada rattle of ratcheted noisemakers known as matracas, and the call-and-response taunts of fans along the first- and third-base lines. Above the visiting dugout, a man in an ape suit made lewd gestures and led chants of “asshole” and “puto,” in an unfolding feud across the field with a chubby güey in a giant sombrero. Between innings, an owl mascot did the merengue. Escovedo, in big square sunglasses and a new Tecos cap, sipped a Tecate and declared that this was the best time he’d had in ages.

That marvellous passage made me smile. Paumgarten is a superb describer. 

Postscript: James Wood, in his “Departure Lounge,” a review of Olga Tokarczuk’s encyclopaedic novel Flights, in this week’s issue, continues to elaborate his wonderful “detail” theory. Wood writes,

Chopin’s heart is information, which anyone can possess; a memory of stove fumes is not information but a particular, personal memory, which is likely to prompt one of our own. There is the utopian theory of mobility and endless curiosity, and there is our daily reality, which is composed of a billion familiar details, most of them indescribable—the rooms we sit in, and the dimmer rooms we were once raised in; the streets we live on, and the old streets we grew up on, which truly exist now only in our heads. There is the desirable horizon, but there is also the furrowed field, which we know so well and which has made us who we are.

Expressing his preference for subjective specifics (“the furrowed field”) over abstract conceptions (“the desirable horizon”), Wood reaffirms his deep love of thisness.