Old Favorites

Lately I find myself spending more time re-visiting favorite old books than I do reading new stuff. By “old,” I mean books I acquired back in the seventies and early eighties. For example: Edward Hoagland’s Walking the Dead Diamond River (1973), Whitney Balliett’s Ecstasy at the Onion (1971), Janet Malcolm’s Diana & Nikon (1980), Sanford Schwartz’s The Art Presence (1982), John McPhee’s Pieces of the Frame (1975), M. F. K. Fisher’s As They Were (1982), Helen Vendler's Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980), John Updike's Picked-Up Pieces (1976). I love these books. I love everything about them – their dust jackets, their feel as physical objects, the wonderful writing they contain. If there were a fire, these are the books I’d try to save first.

Dorothea Lange's "A very blue eagle. Along California highway, 1936"

Dorothea Lange, "A very blue eagle. Along California highway, 1936"

Of all the photographs on display in Johanna Fateman’s interesting “A Different Side to Dorothea Lange” (newyorker.com, April 12, 2020), the one that's stayed with me is “A very blue eagle. Along California highway, 1936.” It's an unforgettable image of terrible suffering and eventual death.

Reading Bookforum’s excellent summer issue yesterday, I encountered “A very blue eagle” again. It’s featured in Zack Hatfield’s capsule review of Sam Contis’s Day Sleeper, a collection of lesser-known Lange images. Hatfield describes the picture as showing “an eagle crucified on a barbed-wire fence.” I suppose crucifixion is one way to view it. The outstretched wings caught on barbwire certainly suggest it. But I think the situation was likely more accident than execution. That’s the thing about great photographs; they’re endlessly interpretable. This one by Lange is no exception.  

July 20, 2020 Issue

Reading Andrea K. Scott’s absorbing “Goings On About Town” note on MoMA’s “Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures,” in this week’s issue, in which she mentions Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” I was reminded of Jonathan Raban’s critique of that famous photo in his “American Pastoral” (The New York Review of Books, November 19, 2009; included in his 2010 collection Driving Home).

Raban suggests that “Migrant Mother” can be viewed as a form of pastoral – an idealization of the lives of poor people. He says,

The picture defines the form of pastoral as Empson meant it, and the closer one studies it, the more one’s made aware of just what a queer and puzzling business it is. A woman from the abyssal depths of the lower classes is plucked from obscurity by a female from the upper classes and endowed by her with extraordinary nobility and eloquence. It’s not the woman’s plight one sees at first so much as her arresting handsomeness: her prominent, rather patrician nose; her full lips, firmly set; the long and slender fingers of her right hand; the enigmatic depth of feeling in her eyes. Even after many viewings, it takes several moments for the rest of the picture to sink in: the pervasive dirt, the clothing gone to shreds and holes, the seams and furrows of worry on the woman’s face and forehead, the skin eruptions around her lips and chin, the swaddled, filthy baby on her lap. As one can see from the other five pictures in the six-shot series, Lange posed two older children, making them avert their faces from the camera and bury them in the shadows behind their mother, at once focusing our undistracted attention on her face and imprisoning her in her own maternity. It’s a portrait in which squalor and dignity are in fierce contention, but both one’s first and last impressions are of the woman’s resilience, pride, and damaged beauty.

That last sentence is excellent. “Migrant Mother” is “a portrait in which squalor and dignity are in fierce contention.” But I think Raban is wrong when he says that the woman’s dignity was “endowed” by Lange. I believe this migrant mother was inherently dignified. It’s her dignity in the midst of squalor that makes her portrait so arresting. Lange didn’t endow her dignity; she captured it.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936)

On Joyce Carol Oates's "Acceleration Near the Point of Impact"

Joyce Carol Oates (Photo by Richard Avedon)

I find myself still thinking about Joyce Carol Oates (thanks to Leo Robson’s recent New Yorker piece). I woke this morning with the title of her poem “Acceleration Near the Point of Impact” in my mind. I first read it forty-eight years ago in Esquire. Here’s the poem:

the needles are starved, brown
fire-hazards warned of in the papers
but the yew tree rises miraculous
red and green ornaments
at its peak the hand-sized angel

again the release of dirty snow
the melting rush of sewers
the church bells’ ambitions
a Sunday of parades

rockets, ten-cent bombs
end of summer sales
bins of heaped-up bathing suits
sandals and shoes with cork heels

and tactile November skies
by minutes and inches pushing us
into history

What does it mean? I’m not sure. I think it’s about the onrush of time. I love the title – “Acceleration Near the Point of Impact.” It’s like a phrase from a horrific accident report indicating intent to injure, possibly suicide. Oates repurposes this chilling forensic expression, applying it to time’s current, flowing faster and faster as it sweeps us to our deaths.

July 6 & 13, 2020 Issue

I always enjoy Leo Robson’s book reviews. His “The Art of the Unruly,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s an assessment of Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel Night, Sleep, Death, The Stars. Robson says it’s “enormous and frequently brilliant.” He views it as an instance of what he calls Oates’s “counter-aesthetic” – her style of “rousing roughness.” He says,

Her dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them set in western New York, forgo an air of cool mastery in favor of a kind of cultivated vulnerability, an openness to engulfment. Human existence, in her handling, seems a primarily somatic enterprise, and her greedily adjectival prose can sometimes read like a sort of dramatized phenomenology. Even on a bustling city street, her characters can come across as frontierspeople, or toilers on a polar expedition. As she invokes a world of pounding hearts and thumping ears and watering mouths, she exhibits a refreshing freedom from embarrassment, an indifference to the concept of overkill.

I like that “greedily adjectival prose.” I wish Robson had provided an example of it. He also refers to Oates’s “sentences both snaking and staccato,” but, again, no examples. In one of his best lines, he describes Oates’s introduction of a character as “the syntactic equivalent of a four-car pileup,” and this time he follows up with a quotation to prove his point:

Just a glance at Thom McClaren, tall and rangy-limbed, sandy-haired, handsome face now just perceptibly beginning to thicken, in his late thirties—(Virgil often stared, when [he believed] Thom wasn’t aware of him)—you could see that Thom was one of those persons who feels very good about himself, and his self-estimate is (largely) shared by those who gaze upon him.

As Robson points out, the brackets are Oates's.

I confess I haven’t read any of Oates’s novels. But I devour her book reviews. They brim with artful quotation and illuminating commentary: see, for example, “In Rough Country” (The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2008) and “The Treasure of Comanche County” (The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005).

Robson says that among contemporary American fiction writers, Oates “possesses a strong claim to preëminence.” She’s also one of our best critics.

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" 's Beautiful Marriage of Photos and Text

Photo by Walker Evans, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Jefferson Hunter, in his Image and Word (1987), contends that the photos and text of James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) “work against” each other. He says, “One might, perhaps, think of the text of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as an enormously expanded, limit-defying caption, but it is a caption working against the Evans photographs.”

Hunter isn’t the first to make this point. Janet Malcolm, in her superb “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979; included in her Diana & Nikon, 1980), writes,

This has always been the problem with Agee’s book: the pictures and the text don’t agree. The text is a howl of anger and anguish over the misery of the sharecroppers’ lives. “How can people live like this? How can the rest of us permit it, tolerate it, bear it?” Agee cries. “Don’t listen to him,” the serene, orderly Walker Evans photographs seem to say. “He exaggerates. He gets carried away. It’s not as bad as he says.”

Malcolm attributes the disparity between the testimony of Evans’s photos and that of Agee’s text to “photography’s inadequacy as a describer of how things are.” She says, “The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.”

Anthony Lane, in his brilliant “Eye of the Land” (The New Yorker, March 13, 2000; retitled “Walker Evans” in his 2002 collection Nobody’s Perfect), takes a different view. He says, “Agee’s mission succeeds only when it starts to approach the condition of a Walker Evans photograph.” And what is that condition? The best description of it that I’ve read is by John Szarkowski:

Evans’s work seemed at first almost the antithesis of art: It was puritanically economical, precisely measured, frontal, unemotional, dryly textured, insistently factual, qualities that seemed more appropriate to a bookkeepers ledger than to art. But in time it became clear that Evans’s pictures, however laconic in manner, were immensely rich in expressive content. [Looking at Photographs, 1973]

Agee’s prose is the equivalent of unpacked Evans photos – their expressive content spilled across the page in line after line of exquisite description. For example:

The front porch of oak two-by-twelves so hard they still carry a strong piercing fell of splinters; the four supporting posts which have the delicate bias and fluences of young trees and whose surface is close to that of rubbed ivory; in the musculatures of their stripped knots they have the flayed and expert strength of anatomical studies: and the rest of the house entirely of pine, the cheapest of local building material and of this material one of the cheapest grades: in the surfaces of these boards are three qualities of beauty and they are simultaneous, mutually transparent: one is the streaming killed strength of the grain, infinite, talented, and unrepeatable from inch to inch, the florid genius of nature which is incapable of error: one of the close-set transverse arcs, dozens to the foot, which are the shadows of the savage breathings and eatings of the circular saw; little of this lumber has been planed: one is the tone and quality the weather has given it, which is related one way to bone, another to satin, another to unpolished but smooth silver: all these are visible at once, though one or another may be strongly enhanced by degree and direction of light and by degree of humidity: moreover, since the lumber is so cheap, knots are frequent and here and there among the knots the iron-hard bitter red center is lost, and there is, instead, a knothole; the grain near these knots goes into convulsions or ecstasies such as Beethoven’s deafness compelled; and with these knots the planes of the house are badged at random, and again moreover, these wild fugues and floods of grain, which are of the free perfect innocence of nature, are sawn and stripped across into rigid ribbons and by rigid lines and boundaries, in the captive perfect innocence of science, so that these are closely collaborated and inter-involved in every surface: and at points strategic to structure: and regimented by need, and attempting their own symmetries, yet not in perfect line (such is the tortured yet again innocence of men, caught between the pulls of nature and science), the patternings and constellations of the heads of the driven nails: and all these things, set in the twisted and cradling planet, take the benefit of every light and weather which the sky in their part of the world can bestow, this within its terms being subtly unrepeatable and probably infinite, and are qualified as few different structures can be, to make full use of these gifts. By most brief suggestions: in full symmetry of the sun, the surfaces are dazzling silver, the shadows strong as knives and India ink, yet the grain and all detail clear: in slanted light, all slantings and sharpenings of shadow; in smothered light, the aspect of bone, a relic; at night, the balanced masses, patient in the base world; from rain, out of these hues of argent bone the colors of agate, the whole wall, one fabric and mad zebra of quartered minerals and watered silks: and in the sheltered yet open hallway, a granite gray and seeming of nearly granitic hardness, the grain dim, the sawmarks very strong; in the strength of these marks and peculiar sobriety of the color, a look as if there has been a slow and exact substitution of calcium throughout all the substance: within the rooms, the wood holds much nearer its original colors of yellows, reds, and peasant golds drawn deep toward gray, yet glowing quietly through it as the clay world glows through summer.

Wow! Is it too much? All Agee is describing is a crude sharecropper shack. But that’s just the point. In the knots and nails and boards of this poor no-account dwelling, which many might dismiss as an eyesore, Agee sees beauty – “wild fugues and floods of grain,” “the patternings and constellations of the heads of the driven nails,” “shadows strong as knives and India ink,” “argent bone,” “mad zebra of quartered minerals and watered silks”!  

Maybe Malcolm is right; the pen is mightier than the camera. But I don’t think so. Everything Agee describes is enfolded, concentrated in Evans’s photos. (“They do not illustrate so much as distill,” Lane says.) Agee opens them up, filters their subjects through his own vast, acute, photographic sensibility – so sensitive to light, shadow, and texture.

I don’t buy the view that the photos and text of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men disagree. Yes, their styles differ from each other. Evans’s photos are austere; Agee’s prose is lavish. But they both show a reverence for the humble actual. That, to me, is what matters most.

The Art of Journalism

Ian Frazier (Photo by Sara Barrett)

Brian Dillon says of Cyril Connolly, “His failure as a writer was due not only to the temptations of journalism” (Essayism, 2017). Och, hard to believe that old prejudice – journalism as inferior art – is still hanging around. Dillon isn’t the only one guilty of it. James Wood, in a review of John Updike’s Licks of Love, says, “Every published word – if we mean art rather than journalism – should be as fine as it can possibly be” (“Gossip in Gilt,” London Review of Books, April 19, 2001). Janet Malcolm, in her Diana & Nikon (1980), writes, “If, then, photography is the (uppity) housemaid of painting (as journalism and criticism are the poor relations of poetry and fiction, where does that leave Photo-Realist photography?”

Journalism is the poor relation of poetry and fiction? Not in this eye, among beholders. For me, journalism is as much an art as any other form of writing – maybe even more so because journalism, unlike fiction, must be faithful to fact. That, in my view, makes it more difficult to do.

As a counterweight to Dillon, Wood and Malcolm’s condescension, I offer this:

Early on a recent morning, the sun came down the city’s canyons, hitting the white blooms of the pear trees behind the church. Construction workers walked west from the subway stops and kept going, to the under-construction buildings bordering the Hudson River, and soon the cranes started swinging against the blue sky and the elevators on tracks outside the buildings’ steel frameworks were going up and down. By eight o’clock, most of the staff had shown up, and some were preparing that day’s entrée—baked ham with sweet potato. Seagulls shrieked as they swirled overhead toward the river. First in line, by the church gate, a man in two hooded coats sat with his back against the fence, knees up, reading the News. White vans and box trucks pulled to the curb on Ninth Avenue and unloaded crates of broccoli and olive oil. Christopher Molinari, the head chef and culinary manager, said, “When all the restaurants started closing, some sent us their leftover supplies, and we’re still improvising menus from what we got. The food-service situation in the city changed so fast, some of the potatoes they sent us were already peeled."

That is from Ian Frazier’s wonderful “Still Open” (The New Yorker, April 6, 2020), a “Talk of the Town” piece on the soup kitchen at the Church of the Holy Apostles. Surely such splendid factual writing – so clear, specific, and vivid – ranks with the best that fiction and poetry have to offer.

Johanna Fateman's Excellent "Good as Hell"

Johanna Fateman (Photo from Los Angeles Review of Books)

Johanna Fateman, who reviews art shows in The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town,” has a terrific essay in the current Bookforum. It’s titled “Good as Hell,” an account of her experience listening to an audio version of Philippa Gregory’s The Red Queen (2010) while in coronavirus self-quarantine. Here’s a sample:

Or, sometimes, I wouldn’t completely follow along. I’d instead let Beaufort’s story—her many humiliations and her long, convoluted crawl to victory and vengeance—become a steady nightmare in the background. I’d doze off, losing the thread, then jolt awake at a note of alarm in the reader’s voice, a loud siren outside, or a spike of dread from nowhere. Then I’d put on a mask made from a T-shirt, and orange kitchen gloves, and stand in the doorway of the bedroom—the sickroom—gripping my phone in case it was time to call 911. I’d listen for the rise and fall of a breath, then another, and another, until it seemed safe to take myself back to the couch—to the desolation of Pembroke Castle, that is, or the slaughter at Tewkesbury Abbey. My phone, now held more loosely in my hand, conveyed the medieval horror calmly.

Fateman’s artful blending of her personal situation (“when nights in New York grew more cinematically wretched and scary: sleepless, ambulance sirens nonstop”) with “the intoxicating gloom of Gregory’s medieval Europe” is fascinating. I enjoyed it immensely.  

Memory Piece: Crème de Cassis

Last night, reading Roy Andries de Groot’s wonderful The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth (1973), I encountered this sentence: “One can get dozens of other effects with other white wines, mixed with the usual tablespoon per glass (more or less, to taste) of a first quality Crème de Cassis distilled from the black currants of Dijon.”

De Groot’s mention of crème de cassis immediately triggered a personal memory. I found myself transported back to a moment thirty-nine years ago. David, Marion, and I were at the Chateau Laurier’s Canadian Grill. It was my first visit to Ottawa. I was there to argue the appeal of David Benjamin Ford in the Supreme Court of Canada: see Ford v. The Queen [1982] 1 SCR 231.

Marion asked the waiter if we could have champagne with cassis. He said yes. I had no idea what cassis was. Marion explained that it was a black currant liqueur. A few minutes later the waiter returned to our table with three elegant, shimmering, maroon-colored drinks, each garnished with a blackberry. David proposed a toast: To David Benjamin Ford! We clinked glasses and sipped our cocktails, agreeing this was the perfect way to celebrate our arrival in the Capital.

Van Gogh and the Meaning of "Difficult"

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun (1889)

Wayne Koestenbaum, in his “Punctuation” (included in his delectable new essay collection Figure It Out), notes the absence of a comma in a sentence by Van Gogh:

“Very difficult very difficult,” Vincent van Gogh repeated without a comma, in a letter to his brother Theo. Vincent was in the last year of his life; fresh from the asylum, he busied himself with forecasts. “For there are splendid autumn effects to do … [T]he olive trees are very characteristic, and I am struggling to capture them. They are silver, sometimes more blue, sometimes greenish, bronzed, whitening on ground that is yellow, pink, purplish or orangeish to dull red ochre. But very difficult very difficult.” (“Mais fort difficile fort difficile.”) Is he bragging about the difficulty? Worried about it? Difficult for him, because of his addiction to infelicity, or difficult for anyone, even the most conventionally skilled?

No, I don’ think Vincent was bragging. And I don’t think he was worrying. When he said “But very difficult very difficult,” he was simply saying he found the olive trees of Provence hard to paint. He said this most vividly in a letter to Émile Bernard ten days after he wrote the above-quoted letter to Theo:

My god, it’s a mighty tricky bit of country this, everything is difficult to do if one wants to get at its inner character so that it is not merely something vaguely experienced, but the true soil of Provence. And to manage that one has to work very hard, whereupon the results become naturally a bit abstract; for it’s a question of giving the sun and the sky their full force and brilliance, of retaining the fine aroma of wild thyme which pervades the baked and melancholy earth. It’s the olive trees here, old man, which would be your cup of tea. I haven’t had much luck with them myself this year, but I’ll come back to them, at least I intend to. They are like silver in an orange and purplish landscape under a large white sun…. [October 8, 1889]

That’s what Van Gogh meant by “difficult.”

MId-Year Top Ten 2020

Photo by Paolo Pellegrin, from Ben Taub's "Five Oceans, Five Deeps"

Time for my “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far, with a choice quotation from each in brackets. This year I’ve added a special category, “Responses to the Pandemic,” to include the magazine’s many excellent pandemic pieces. There’ll be overlap, but that’s okay. Let’s roll!

Reporting

1. Ben Taub, “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” May 18, 2020 (“Vescovo switched off the lights and turned off the thrusters. He hovered in silence, a foot off the sediment bottom, drifting gently on a current, nearly thirty-six thousand feet below the surface”).

2. Luke Mogelson, “The Uprising,” June 22, 2020 (“Barricades around the four surrounding blocks impeded traffic and law enforcement. The sidewalk outside the Cup Foods grocery store—where an employee had called the police after suspecting George Floyd of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill—was buried under bouquets, mementos, and homemade cards. Activists delivered speeches between the gas pumps at a filling station; messages in chalk—‘fight back,’ ‘stay woke’—covered the street”).

3. The New Yorker, “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (“The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room”).

4. Bill Buford, “Good Bread," April 13, 2020 (“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”).

5. Alex Ross, “The Bristlecones Speak,” January 20, 2020 (“It looked as though it had been blown over in a storm, but tufts of green needles emerged from a branch on one side. A vein of live bark snaked around the dead trunk and disappeared into the ground. It was like a vine growing on a ruin, except that the ruin was itself”).

6. Jonathan Blitzer, “Juan Sanabria,” April 20, 2020 (“He’d been among the first fatalities. ‘Was he the eleventh person who died? I was trying to figure out if he was the tenth or the eleventh,’ Comerford told me. ‘That made this whole thing very real. Before, the deaths were just statistics. Knowing that one of them was Juan, it gave the thing a face’ ”).

7. Rebecca Mead, “Going for the Cold,” January 27, 2020 (“Turning back, I suddenly realized just how far from the dock I’d come. I didn’t feel weak, or even particularly cold, but I pulsed with existential dread. I was conscious of not knowing how deep the black water below me was. There was nothing to hang on to, and only my own arms and legs to keep me afloat. Nobody was nearby. This would be a really stupid way to go, I thought, then reflected that this was probably the precise thought many people had just before suffering the consequences of an unwise, irrevocable decision”).

8. Nick Paumgarten, “The Altitude Sickness,” March 2, 2020 (“The resort grounds were a bustle of hyperactive, impossibly hale young creatures on holiday. Climbers—the men shirtless, the women in bikini tops—rigged up ropes and slacklines and did pullups and bouldering maneuvers off the villas’ eaves. Such lats, such tats. I kept my shirt on, and cracked a Medalla Light”).

9. Peter Hessler, “Life on Lockdown,” March 30, 2020 (“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”).

10. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Independent People,” June 8 & 15, 2020 (“That evening, the weather was clear and cool—by New York standards, too cool to eat outside, by Reykjavík standards balmy. The outdoor cafés were crowded. Restaurants had been asked to arrange their tables to keep groups two metres apart, but some diners, I noticed, had pushed the tables closer together. Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly. The scene was completely ordinary, which is to say now exotic—just people meeting up with friends for dinner. For a traveller these days, this might be an even better draw, I thought, than glaciers or whale-watching”).

Responses to the Pandemic

Jorge Colombo's illustration for "Dispatches from a Pandemic"

1. The New Yorker, “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (“If you got close enough to the buildings, you could hear various things attached to them humming. Hundreds of yards away, the waves were coming in quietly. As the sun came up, dully brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of the ordinary at the same time. Figures appeared far apart on the boardwalk, each one alone, each making a different exercise motion. One was using a jump rope, another had two small dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. Many wore masks. On the horizon to the left lay the narrow sand spit of the Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown beach below a gray-green line of bushes and trees. To the right loomed the grayish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. In between, a small boat motored slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal train. The ordinary-extraordinary day settled in and locked itself into place. The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room”).

2. Vinson Cunningham, “Eightyish,” April 13, 2020 (“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”).

3. Ian Frazier, “Still Open,” April 6, 2020 (“Early on a recent morning, the sun came down the city’s canyons, hitting the white blooms of the pear trees behind the church. Construction workers walked west from the subway stops and kept going, to the under-construction buildings bordering the Hudson River, and soon the cranes started swinging against the blue sky and the elevators on tracks outside the buildings’ steel frameworks were going up and down. By eight o’clock, most of the staff had shown up, and some were preparing that day’s entrée—baked ham with sweet potato. Seagulls shrieked as they swirled overhead toward the river. First in line, by the church gate, a man in two hooded coats sat with his back against the fence, knees up, reading the News. White vans and box trucks pulled to the curb on Ninth Avenue and unloaded crates of broccoli and olive oil. Christopher Molinari, the head chef and culinary manager, said, “When all the restaurants started closing, some sent us their leftover supplies, and we’re still improvising menus from what we got. The food-service situation in the city changed so fast, some of the potatoes they sent us were already peeled”).

4. Ian Frazier, “Bringing in the Comfort,” April 13, 2020 (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”).

5. Jonathan Blitzer, “Juan Sanabria,” April 20, 2020 (“Walkiris was crying, and pleaded to be allowed inside. Dr. K. held her firmly by the arms, and told her to close her eyes. ‘I want you to visualize a conversation I’m going to have right now with your father,’ the doctor told her. ‘Imagine I’m walking into his room as his doctor, and asking him if he would feel comfortable with you coming in to see him. I’m telling him about the risks to you and your family if you went in there. What would he say? Would he want you to say goodbye to his spirit in there, or out here?’ Walkiris told me later that, in that moment, the doctor may have saved her life”).

6. Geoff Dyer, “Home Alone Together,” April 13, 2020 (“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”).

7. Peter Schjeldahl, “Out of Time,” April 13, 2020 (“Here’s a prediction of our experience when we are again free to wander museums: Everything in them will be other than what we remember. The objects won’t have altered, but we will have, in some ratio of good and ill. The casualties of the coronavirus will accompany us spectrally. Until, inevitably, we begin to forget, for a while we will have been reminded of our oneness throughout the world and across time with all the living and the dead”).

8. Peter Hessler, “Life on Lockdown,” March 30, 2020 (“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”).

9. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Independent People,” June 8 & 15, 2020 (“That evening, the weather was clear and cool—by New York standards, too cool to eat outside, by Reykjavík standards balmy. The outdoor cafés were crowded. Restaurants had been asked to arrange their tables to keep groups two metres apart, but some diners, I noticed, had pushed the tables closer together. Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly. The scene was completely ordinary, which is to say now exotic—just people meeting up with friends for dinner. For a traveller these days, this might be an even better draw, I thought, than glaciers or whale-watching”).

10. Adam Gopnik, “Abundance of Caution,” March 30, 2020 (“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”).

Best Critical Piece

Anthony Lane, “Folies à Deux,” June 1, 2020 (“In one respect, “The Trip to Greece” is unlike any of its predecessors. Rather than saying to yourself, ‘Mmm, those shrimp look good,’ you now think, ‘These guys are dining in restaurants—you know, those old pre-pandemic joints. With other non-family members sitting nearby!’ To see Coogan and Brydon being waited upon by unmasked servers, who carry the plates with bare hands, is to yearn for the touchstones of a mythical past. As one kindly waitress inquires, in a lull between courses, ‘Do you want to continue?’ Yes, if we can. Forever”).

Best Personal History Piece

Seb Agresti's illustration for John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa"

John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa,” January 13, 2020 (“When I was in my prime, I planned to write about a dairy farm in Indiana with twenty-five thousand cows. Now, taking my cue from George Bush, Thornton Wilder, and countless others who stayed hale doing old-person projects, I am writing about not writing about the dairy farm with twenty-­five thousand cows. Not to mention Open Doctors, golf-course architects who alter existing courses to make them fit for upcoming U.S. Opens and the present game—lengthening holes, moving greens, rethinking bunkers. Robert Trent Jones was the first Open Doctor, and his son Rees is the most prominent incumbent. Fine idea for a piece, but for me, over time, a hole in zero. So I decided to describe many such saved-up, bypassed, intended pieces of writing as an old-man project of my own”).

Best Talk Story

Ian Frazier, “Still Open,” April 6, 2020 (“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”).

Best GOAT Piece

Juan Bernabeau's illustration for Brian Seibert's "Argentine Dance"

Brian Seibert, “Argentine Dance,” February 10, 2020 (“The men of Che Malambo charge like a stampede and dance like cowboys—the Argentine kind. Malambo, a centuries-old gaucho style, is competitive and macho. Heads and torsos ride haughtily over legs that buck, twist, and beat out rhythms, often ostentatiously on the rims of boots. Drums slung over shoulders sometimes take up the beat, as do boleadoras, weights attached to ropes that are thrown to ensnare cattle on the run. These tools, swung like lassos or jump ropes or yo-yos, are visually spectacular musical instruments, whipping the air and striking the ground. Imagine a stage full of those whirring implements, some held between teeth, and you get a sense of why the roars of this troupe of twelve sexy, sweaty guys, directed by the French choreographer Gilles Brinas, are usually answered by whoops”).

Best Short Story

Katherine Dunn, “The Resident Poet,” May 11, 2020 (“Draw deeply on the cigar, expand the nostrils to take in oxygen, reach slowly over the side of the tub to flick ash into the toilet”).

Best Poem

Gerald Stern, “Warbler,” January 6, 2020 (“And like all birds / they sing when they’re buried, / in this case in the freezer, / a cold graveyard, / two cartons of ice cream, / one vanilla, one dulce de leche, / to remember him by”).

Best newyorker.com Post

Deanna Dikeman, "Leaving and Waving 7/1991"

Eren Orbey, “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell,” March 4, 2020 (“Each image reiterates the quiet loyalty of her parents’ tradition. They 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”). 

Best Illustration

Leo Espinosa's illustration for Bill Buford's "Good Bread"

Leo Espinosa’s illustration for Bill Buford’s “Good Bread” (April 13, 2020).

Best Photo

Joseph Michael Lopez, "2:53 P.M., West Farms, the Bronx"

Joseph Michael Lopez’s “2:53 P.M., West Farms, the Bronx” for “April 15, 2020: A Coronavirus Chronicle” (newyorker.com, April 27, 2020)

Best Video

Still from Sam Youkilis's "10:13 A.M., Tribeca"

Sam Youkilis’s “10:13 A.M., Tribeca” for "April 15, 2020: A Coronavirus Chronicle” (newyorker.com, April 27, 2020)

Best Cover

Christoph Mueller, "Shelter in Place" (May 11, 2020)

Best Issue

April 13, 2020, containing Geoff Dyer’s “Home Alone Together,” Bill Buford’s “Good Bread,” and “Dispatches from a Pandemic: Twelve Writers on Life in the Time of COVID-19” – all excellent.

Best Sentence

Now, as snow blew sideways in the darkness and the wind, he threw a grappling hook over the South Sandwich Trench and caught a lander thrashing in the waves. – Ben Taub, “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” (May 18, 2020)

Best Paragraph

Bob drove fast, he talked fast, he parked badly. The first stop was L’Harmonie des Vins, on the Presqu’île, a wine bar with food (“But good food,” Bob said). Two owners were in the back, busy preparing for the lunch service but delighted by the sight of their bread guy, even though he came by every day at exactly this time. I was introduced, Bob’s new student, quick-quick, bag drop, kisses, out. Next: La Quintessence, a new restaurant (“Really good food,” Bob said, pumping his fist), husband and wife, one prep cook, frantic, but spontaneous smiles, the introduction, the bag drop, kisses, out. We crossed the Rhône, rolled up onto a sidewalk, and rushed out, Bob with one sack of bread, me with another, trying to keep up: Les Oliviers (“Exceptional food”—a double pump—“Michelin-listed but not pretentious”), young chef, tough-guy shoulders, an affectionate face, bag drop, high-fives, out. – Bill Buford, “Good Bread” (April 13, 2020)

Best Description

Leo’s version comes in a fluted glass tumbler that showcases its appealingly messy striations, as spoonable as pudding. Vanilla angel-food sheet cake is soaked in espresso and a soft spike of rum and amaro. The finished trifle is showered in delicate curls of Askinosie chocolate, and each creamy bite bears an unmistakable vein of salt. – Hananh Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Leo" (February 10, 2020)

Best Detail

Most submarines go down several hundred metres, then across; this one was designed to sink like a stone. It was the shape of a bulging briefcase, with a protruding bulb at the bottom. This was the pressure hull—a titanium sphere, five feet in diameter, which was sealed off from the rest of the submersible and housed the pilot and all his controls. Under the passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich, the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of the viewports, into the blue. It would take nearly four hours to reach the bottom. [My emphasis] – Ben Taub, “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” (May 18, 2020)

Seven Memorable Lines

1. Avalanche country is like bear country. The threat hardly ever comes, but it defines the place, and lends it its grandeur. – James Somers, “Cold War” (March 23, 2020)

2. Musically, the master of this combination was Miles Davis, and so, on the rare occasions that she ventures from her bed, I express my affection in suitably Davisian style: “Keep your distance, motherfucker.”– Geoff Dyer, “Home Alone Together” (April 13, 2020)

3. So sue me: I sometimes find President Trump’s voice reassuring. – Lorrie Moore, “The Nurses Office” (April 13, 2020)

4. Once you’ve seen a Hopper, it stays seen, lodged in your mind’s eye. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Apart” (June 8 & 15, 2020)

5. I don’t mean to downsize the women or their role in all this, but—Mrs. Hall, Mrs. Hambling—they didn’t know a Focke-Wulf 200 from a white-throated sparrow. – John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa” (January 13, 2020)

6. He sneaks whispery formal nuances into works whose predominant effect may be as subtle as that of a steel garbage can being kicked downstairs. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Target Practice” (February 17 & 24, 2020)

7. “Look,” I say. “You are a two-bit shit and I am a two-bit shit. Let’s not compound the stink by speaking to each other anymore.” – Katherine Dunn, “The Resident Poet” (May 11, 2020)