Dana Goodyear is a superb describer. Remember her description of eating a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts at a secret Los Angeles sushi bar?
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.[“Beastly Appetites”]
That “quiver on quiver on quiver” is inspired!
Goodyear’s absorbing “The Ends of the Earth,” in this week’s issue, a profile of eccentric photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, contains this delightful line:
At Point Mugu, a conical hunk of rock where car commercials are often filmed, Cooper set up on a crumbling asphalt promontory, with one toe of the tripod hovering midair.
God that’s brilliant! What makes it brilliant is the coupling of so many unlike words (“Point Mugu,” “conical,” “commercials,” “Cooper,” “crumbling,” “toe,” “tripod,” “midair”). And yet the whole delicious thing coheres. It’s the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine. I devour it.
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