The New Yorker's Extraordinary "April 15, 2020"

Joan Wong's illustration for "April 15, 2020"

I see on newyorker.com that the digital edition of the May 4, 2020, issue is out, and that it contains an extraordinary reporting piece called “April 15, 2020: A Coronavirus Chronicle,” written by twenty-five New Yorker writers and illustrated by the work of at least seventeen photographers. This is an epic, unprecedented piece that fills the entirety of the magazine. As soon as the print edition arrives, I’ll plunge in. I can hardly wait.

Gabrielle Hamilton on the Closing of Prune

Gabrielle Hamilton (Photo by Phillip Montgomery)

Even though I’ve never met Gabrielle Hamilton, nor dined at her restaurant Prune, I feel I know her. I know her through her marvelous “The Lamb Roast” – one of my favorite New Yorker “Personal History” pieces. Hamilton is an excellent writer. When her “My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?” appeared in The New York Times Magazine yesterday, I immediately sat down and read it. It’s a moving, frustrated, worried, reflective response to the coronavirus-mandated closing of Prune. The romance of owning and operating a small Manhattan bistro is still there:

Even after seven nights a week for two decades, I am still stopped in my tracks every time my bartenders snap those metal lids onto the cocktail shakers and start rattling the ice like maracas. I still close my eyes for a second, taking a deep inhale, every time the salted pistachios are set afire with raki, sending their anise scent through the dining room. I still thrill when the four-top at Table 9 are talking to one another so contentedly that they don’t notice they are the last diners, lingering in the cocoon of the wine and the few shards of dark chocolate we’ve put down with their check.

But the reality behind that romance is stark:

There used to be enough extra money every year that I could close for 10 days in July to repaint and retile and rewire, but it has become increasingly impossible to leave even a few days of revenue on the table or to justify the expense of hiring a professional cleaning service for this deep clean that I am perfectly capable of doing myself, so I stayed late and did it after service. The sludge of egg yolk seeped through the coverall, through my clothes to my skin, matted my hair and speckled my goggles as my shock registered: It has always been hard, but when did it get this hard?

Will Prune survive? The situation is fragile, the answer unclear. Hamilton says,

For restaurants, coronavirus-mandated closures are like the oral surgery or appendectomy you suddenly face while you are uninsured. These closures will take out the weakest and the most vulnerable. But exactly who among us are the weakest and most vulnerable is not obvious.

Of the many writers’ responses to the pandemic that I’ve read over the past six weeks or so, Hamilton’s piece on the closing of Prune is one of the most memorable.

Interesting Emendations: Lawrence Joseph's "A Fable"

Lawrence Joseph’s "A Fable" is one of my favorite New Yorker poems of the last decade. I remember reading it when it originally appeared in the January 25, 2016 issue. Like a great jazz solo heard for the first time – Coleman Hawkins’ “The Man I Love,” say, or Gerry Mulligan’s “Lonely Town” – it blew me away. It’s like a gorgeous double helix – a strand of city beauty (“a bench in the shadows / on a pier in the Hudson”) wrapped around a strand of abstract dystopia (“the flow of data / since the attacks has surged”). And the colors – “great bronze doors of Trinity Church,” “a red / tugboat pushes a red-and-gold barge / into the narrows” – are exquisite, right down to that final inspired, delightful touch (“Gauguin / puts a final green on the canvas // of the Self-Portrait with Yellow / Christ, to complicate the idea”), so surprising that it makes me smile every time I read it.

Interestingly, the “A Fable” included in Joseph’s 2017 collection So Where Are We? (2017) subtly differs from the version that appeared in The New Yorker. For example, the comma after “now” in the lovely “The café / on Cornelia Street, the music, / now, whose voice might that be?” is deleted from the later version, slightly changing its rhythm and meaning. In fact, a total of seven commas are deleted from the second version. I like it slightly better without all the commas.

Another notable change is the dropping of “the” from “The future, the past, cosmogonies, // the void, are in whose vision?” The line now reads, “Future, past, cosmogonies, // the void, are in whose vision?”

I find such changes fascinating – a glimpse into Joseph’s compositional process. To my eye (and ear), the rhythm of the So Where Are We? version is a shade more free-flowing. Both versions are brilliant!

April 13, 2020 Issue

There’s an abundance of great writing in this week’s issue. Samples:

The Navy hospital ship Comfort went under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge at about nine-twenty last Monday morning. Trucks on the bridge blew long blasts of welcome on their horns. The ship appeared suddenly in the overcast day as if out of nowhere; the medical-clinic white of her hull and superstructure blended in with the sea and the sky. In Von Briesen Park, on Staten Island, ship-watchers had set up cameras on tripods six feet or more apart on a bluff overlooking the Narrows. The MarineTraffic mobile app told them what time the ship would arrive. Four McAllister tugboats awaited the Comfort just north of the bridge, their bows pointing toward her. As she passed, they swung around and escorted her in. Another tug, carrying film crews, veered among a wider entourage of police and Coast Guard boats, and private craft practicing police-enforced nautical distancing, all under a small, hovering flock of helicopters. [“Ian Frazier, “Bringing in the Comfort”]

We moved on, put the car in Park, and scrutinized the kit’s simple instructions as if our lives depended on them. My wife swabbed her mouth and sealed the test stick in a tube—not as simple as it sounds: the stick was too long and had to be broken on the edge of the tube, but it was yoga-ishly bendy rather than brittle—before sealing the tube in a plastic bag, which she then sealed in a bubble-wrap bag before returning it to the box. We crawled forward, broke the seal on the window, and tossed the box into a blue bin indicated by a final hazmat-suited sentinel, who waved us on. We drove out past the huge and patient cemetery. All the time in the world, it seemed, resided there. The sky was its usual expectant blue. [Geoff Dyer, “Home Alone Together”]

By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands. [Bill Buford, “Good Bread”]

Later that afternoon, I think, although it might have been the next day, I walked with my wife down Flatbush Avenue, toward her mom’s house, where we’d pick up some packages and wave hello. It’s normally a twenty-five-­minute walk, but now it seemed interminable. Walking outside these days requires too much geometry, too much spatial intel­ligence. Older men, apparently untroubled by the dictates of distancing, were seated, as they always are, at folding tables and on the hoods of sedans. They played cards, made jokes, drank from Styrofoam cups, blasted music. I toggled swiftly between annoyance at how they clogged the sidewalk, concern for their health, and then—probably foremost—envy at what looked like a good time. We took sweeping, parabolic detours around their tight huddles, sometimes slipping between parked cars and walking in the street. One persistent, petty worry is how much of a dweeb I feel like when I’m thinking about infectious disease. [Vinson Cunningham, “Eightyish”]

When I rode my bike down Regent Street’s dramatic curve on the afternoon of Sunday, March 22nd, all the stores were shuttered. Apart from a couple of guys in track pants eying the Rolex display at Mappin & Webb, the upscale jewelry store, the sidewalks were empty. We’re accustomed to reach for the phrase “post-apocalyptic” to describe an urban landscape devoid of life, and the Christian preacher with the microphone and the amp who was haranguing an almost deserted Piccadilly Circus added to the dystopian atmosphere. [Rebecca Mead, “Avenue of Superfluities”]

This week’s New Yorker also contains several wonderful illustrations, including this one by Leo Espinosa for Bill Buford’s “Good Bread”:

Robert Macfarlane's "The Crapola Sublime"

Photo by Stephen Shore, from Robert Macfarlane's "The Crapola Sublime"

One of the most absorbing reviews I’ve read recently is Robert Macfarlane’s “The Crapola Sublime” (The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2020), a consideration of Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s Traces of J. B. Jackson: The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America. Until I read this piece, I’d never heard of Jackson. According to Macfarlane he was a “pioneering American cultural geographer.” He calls Jackson “an unorthodox observer, whose ways of seeing ran against the grain of midcentury American landscape conventions, with their attachments to the picturesque and the sublime.” He says Jackson was “nerdily fascinated by that degraded phylum of Americana that the artist Philip Guston once referred to as 'crapola': junkshops, edgelands, strip malls, and trailer parks.” He says,

There is a tenderness to Jackson’s engagement with “crapola.” By studying what he called “the commonplace landscape,” he sought to invest mundane places of work and dwelling with a value at least comparable to venerated landscape sites such as Yellowstone or Yosemite.

All of which is catnip to me. I’m drawn to such places and to the artists and writers who celebrate them (e.g., Joseph Mitchell, Ian Frazier, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Hopper, Agnès Varda, Garry Winogrand). 

In his piece, Macfarlane mentions three essay collections by Jackson: Landscapes (1970), The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (1980), and A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (1994). I think I’ll try to find at least one of them, and check it out.  

Verlyn Klinkenborg and the Art of Description

Husqvarna Viking Automatic Type 21E

Verlyn Klinkenborg is a machinery rhapsodist extraordinaire. Recall his brilliant description of a 1979 International Harvester 230 windrower in his great Making Hay (1986). This week, in NYR Daily’s excellent “Pandemic Journal” series, he posted a piece on making face masks that contains a wonderful description of a Husqvarna Viking 21A sewing machine: 

The Husqvarna Viking 21a is a sleek, tubular machine the color of the 1950s—a pale, aqueous turquoise. I press the foot pedal and the electric motor begins to hum, and then the needle moves up and down. I know, from having taken it apart, how elaborate the inner workings of this machine are—belts, cogs, shafts, and gears shuttling round and round and back and forth in perfect synchrony. It is really a world of its own, a miniature factory. The internal light gleams down upon the arm, the feed dogs pull the cloth along, upper and lower threads intertwine in a stitch, and there is the harmonious sound of elaborate integration. At low speeds, the 21a sounds a little like a railroad engine moving slowly over the tracks. At higher speeds, it begins to whir. It does exactly what it was engineered to do, and it does it brilliantly.

That “The internal light gleams down upon the arm, the feed dogs pull the cloth along, upper and lower threads intertwine in a stitch, and there is the harmonious sound of elaborate integration” is inspired. The whole passage is inspired – a superb example of the art of description. 

CBC Gem's Excellent "High Arctic Haulers"

I have a new hero – Captain Michel Duplain, commander of the massive sealift ship Sedna Desgagnés, in the superb documentary series High Arctic Haulers, currently streaming on CBC Gem. Duplain and his crew battle ice bergs, growlers, treacherous tides, storms, high winds, pounding waves, and punishing cold to deliver their vital cargo to remote Arctic communities. Of its many pleasures – the action of ships, icebreakers, cranes, tugs, barges, loaders; the resilient, resourceful character of the crew members; the magnificent Arctic scenery – the most piquant for me are the vivid glimpses of life in Kangirsuk, Chesterfield Inlet, Igloolik, Hall Beach, Grise Fiord, and the other communities where the ships of the Desgagnés fleet make their stops. High Arctic Haulers put me squarely there – on the ships, in the communities. I enjoyed it immensely. 

April 6, 2020 Issue

That’s a great report from Ian Frazier on the soup kitchen at the Church of the Holy Apostles. He says it’s still operating. Coronavirus hasn’t stopped it. He writes,

Lately, the serving station has been moved outdoors, to the church’s front gate, on Ninth Avenue, near West Twenty-eighth Street. The menu still offers a hot meal but packaged in a to-go sack with recyclable dishes, which are the biggest expense at the moment. [“Still Open”]

He describes the queue of people waiting for a meal:

By ten-fifteen, the line stretched to Twenty-eighth Street, around the corner, and down the long block between Ninth Avenue and Eighth. A soup-kitchen employee in a jacket of high-visibility green was walking along the line and urging those waiting to maintain spaces of six feet between one another. They complied, reluctantly, but somehow the line kept re-compressing itself. A strange, almost taxicab-less version of traffic went by on Ninth—delivery trucks, police tow trucks, police cars, home-health-care-worker vans, almost empty buses. Now and then a dog-walker, masked or swathed in a scarf, passed. The dogs, unconcerned, were enjoying the sunny day. At ten-thirty, lunch service started. The guests (as the soup kitchen refers to them) were admitted to the serving station one at a time, like travellers in airport security. Opening their lunch sacks, they began to eat standing on the sidewalk or leaning against the Citi Bike stands, or they crossed to the courtyard of a public building across the street and sat on benches by a statue of a soldier in the First World War.

Reading Frazier’s piece, I pleasurably recalled his superb “Hungry Minds” (The New Yorker, May 26, 2008; included in his 2016 collection Hogs Wild), in which he refers to the Church of the Holy Apostles soup kitchen as a “work of art” (“There are so many hungers out there; the soup kitchen deals, efficiently and satisfyingly, with the most basic kind. I consider it, in its own fashion, a work of art”).

Based on Frazier’s latest report, I’d say the Church of the Holy Apostles soup kitchen is a work of art that is becoming ever more inspiring. 

Eren Orbey's "A Photographer's Parents Wave Farewell"

Deanna Dikeman, "Leaving and Waving 7" (1991)

Eren Orbey’s “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell” (newyorker.com, March 4, 2020) is one of my favorite newyorker.com posts of the year (so far). It’s a review of Deanna Dikeman’s portrait series “Leaving and Waving,” currently on view at deannadikeman.com. An artfully condensed version of Orbey’s piece appears in this week’s New Yorker (“Goings on About Town: Art: Deanna Dikeman”). It’s worth quoting in full:

In 1990, when this photographer’s parents were in their early seventies, they sold her childhood home, in Sioux City, Iowa, and moved to a bright-red ranch house in the same town. At the end of their daughter’s visits, they would stand outside as she drove away, arms rising together in a farewell wave. For years, Dikeman captured those departing moments; the resulting portrait series, “Leaving and Waving,” compresses nearly three decades of adieux into a deft and affecting chronology. The pair recede into the warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and laugh under the eaves in better weather. In summer, they blow kisses from the driveway. In winter, they wear scarves and stand behind snowbanks. Inevitably, they age. A few pictures, cropped to include the car’s interior, convey the parallel progress of Dikeman’s own life. Early images show the blurred face of a baby, who, in later shots, as a young man, takes the wheel while Dikeman photographs her elderly parents from the passenger seat.

That “The pair recede into the warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and laugh under the eaves in better weather” is wonderful. The entire note is wonderful – a poignant reminder of “time’s relentless melt” (Susan Sontag). 

March 30, 2020 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Peter Hessler’s “Life on Lockdown” and Adam Gopnik’s “Abundance of Caution.” 

Hessler’s piece reports his experience of China’s recent nationwide, forty-five-day coronavirus lockdown – “the most ambitious quarantine in history, with at least seven hundred and sixty million people confined largely to their homes.” He and his family rent an apartment in a nine-building complex in Chengdu. Here’s the opening paragraph:

On the twenty-seventh day of the coronavirus lockdown in Chengdu, in southwestern China, five masked men appeared in the lobby of my apartment building in order to deliver a hundred-inch TCL Xclusive television. It was late morning, and I was taking my nine-year-old twin daughters, Ariel and Natasha, outside to get some air. The three of us also were wearing surgical masks, and we stopped to watch the deliverymen. I had never seen such an enormous TV; it arrived in an eight-foot-long box that weighed more than three hundred pounds. Two of the deliverymen stood inside an elevator with a tape measure, trying to figure out whether the box would fit. Otherwise, it was going to be a long haul up the stairs to the twenty-eighth floor.

That passage hooked my attention completely. I relish descriptions of everyday life. Hessler’s piece is about everyday Chinese life struggling to continue under extraordinary circumstances. He describes the Chengdu subway:

Anybody who arrived at the main gate was greeted by an infrared temperature gun to the forehead. The gun was wielded by a government-assigned volunteer in a white hazmat suit, and, behind him, a turnstile led to a thick plastic mat soaked with a bleach solution. A sign read “Shoe Sole Disinfecting Area,” and there was always a trail of wet prints leading away from the mat, like a footbath at a public swimming pool.

He describes what he sees in his apartment building lobby:

On the thirty-ninth day of the lockdown, the packages in my lobby included a box of houseplants for 3703 and some flowers for 2903. It was now March, and sometimes I saw people on their balconies, tending plants. But it still seemed rare for residents to leave the compound. When women went downstairs to pick up packages, it wasn’t unusual for them to be dressed in pajamas, even in the afternoon. In the lobby, management provided a spray bottle of seventy-five-per-cent-alcohol solution, and sometimes I saw a masked, pajama-clad resident standing in a puddle of the stuff, spraying her hands, packages, shopping bags, whatever.

He uses one of my favourite forms of description – the list:

Masks also make it easier for people to ignore one another. If residents passed me in the courtyard, they avoided eye contact; some wore see-through plastic gloves and surgical booties in addition to the masks. These costumes of the quarantine, along with all the other restrictions, helped turn citizens inward, and people directed their energy toward whatever space was left to them. Among the packages in my lobby, I noticed many home furnishings and cleaning implements: a Pincai-brand storage cabinet for 602, a Deema vacuum cleaner for 2304, a giant carpet, wrapped in tape and plastic, for 303. There was home-office equipment (wireless mouse, 4201; file cabinets, 301). By the forty-fourth day, somebody in 3704 had felt the need to buy an electric footbath machine from Kosaka. (“Powerful by Dreams.”)

I devour such writing. Hessler is a superb noticer of quotidian detail. “Life on Lockdown” is one of his best. 

Gopnik’s “Abundance of Caution” is equally good, but with a twist. It eschews the personal perspective in favour of a cooler, more documentary look. (The Philip Montgomery black-and-white photos that illustrate the piece abet this impression.) It’s a series of “notes on things seen by one walker in the city,” at a time of pandemic, when that city (New York) “became a ghost town in a ghost nation on a ghost planet.”

Gopnik rides the subway, walks the streets, visits J.F.K., scouts supermarkets, visits Grand Central Terminal, on and on. Every where he goes, he makes notes, some of them strikingly beautiful – verbal equivalents of Brassaïs:

On a sparsely peopled 5 train, heading down to Grand Central Terminal on Saturday morning, passengers warily tried to achieve an even, strategic spacing, like chess pieces during an endgame: the rook all the way down here, but threatening the king from the back row.

Walking home down the almost empty avenues, you could see the same silhouette, repeated: dogs straining toward dogs on long-stretched leashes, held by watchful owners keeping their distance, a nightly choreography of animal need and human caution.

On the East Side, outside a Thai restaurant at 7 p.m. on Saturday, a single deliveryman balanced five bags of food hanging from his handlebars. His livelihood hinges on his getting meals to people who are self-isolating, a luxury he doesn’t have. 

He’s attentive not only to sights, but to sounds:

In Grand Central Terminal, what some call “the tile telephone”—the whispering gallery in front of the Oyster Bar, under the beautiful basket weave of arches—has never been so clear. The noise of the station is usually so intense that the tiled ceiling turns mute. Now, for the first time in forever, the abatement in the roar and press of people allows couples’ murmured endearments, spoken into one corner, to race up through the solid Guastavino tile and carry all the way over to the diagonally facing corner.

New York City’s coronavirus state of emptiness and absence is a great subject. Gopnik and Montgomery capture it brilliantly. 

Best of the Decade: #9 Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden"

Photo illustration by John Ritter, from Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #9 pick – Nicholas Schmidle’s extraordinary “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011). 

From the moment I saw the news of bin Laden’s assassination, I wanted to know how it happened. Schmidle’s piece told me in detail after fascinating detail. Here, for example, is his description of James, one of the twenty-three Navy SEALs who carried out the raid:

James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Other SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

The amazing level of specificity in that passage is typical of the entire piece. And it’s all the more impressive when you consider that Schmidle himself didn’t experience any of it. His piece is based entirely on interviews and research. 

Schmidle puts us there with the Navy SEALs in the Blackhawks as they fly towards Abbottabad (“During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered”). 

In a flashback, he puts us with the SEALs in the Nevada desert as they rehearse the mission (“The pilots flew in the dark, arrived at the simulated compound, and settled into a hover while the SEALs fast-roped down”). 

He puts us with President Obama, Vice-President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others, in a small office adjoining the Situation Room, as they watch a video feed “showing real-time footage of the target, which was being shot by an unarmed RQ 170 drone flying more than fifteen thousand feet above Abbottabad.” 

He puts us inside the Blackhawk as it crash-lands inside the walls of bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound (“The pilot jammed the nose forward to drive it into the dirt and prevent his aircraft from rolling onto its side. Cows, chickens, and rabbits scurried”). 

And, most crucially, he puts us inside bin Laden’s bedroom at the moment he’s killed (“The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, ‘For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.’ After a pause, he added, 'Geronimo E.K.I.A.'—‘enemy killed in action’ ”). 

The piece is beautifully structured in nine sections. The first section immediately plunges us into the mission (“Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden”). 

The next two sections are flashbacks, detailing the planning and preparation for the raid. The pivotal fourth section artfully transitions from the grainy black-and-white crash-landing scene that Obama, Biden, et al., are watching on their screen at the White House to the reality of the crash as it’s occurring in bin Laden’s compound. 

Sections 5 and 6 describe the raid as it rapidly unfolds inside the compound, including the killing of bin Laden’s courier (“The Americans’ night-vision goggles cast the scene in pixellated shades of emerald green. Kuwaiti, wearing a white shalwar kameez, had grabbed a weapon and was coming back outside when the seals opened fire and killed him”), bin Laden’s brother, bin Laden’s son, and bin Laden himself. 

Section 7 tells what happened immediately after bin Laden is killed – the placement of bin Laden’s corpse in a body bag, the collection of flash drives, CDs, DVDs, and computer hardware from bin Laden’s house, the extraction of DNA from bin Laden’s body, the destruction of the damaged Blackhawk, and the SEALs’ escape in a Chinook. 

Sections 8 and 9 cover bin Laden’s burial at sea and Obama’s meeting with the SEALs at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. 

Boldly and bravely executed, the raid on bin Laden is one of the most astonishing military feats of our time. Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden" reports it superbly.