Best of 2021: Reporting

Illustration by Mark Wang, from John Seabrook's "Zero-Proof Therapy"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets): 

1. John Seabrook, “Zero-Proof Therapy,” September 27, 2021 (“I swirled the beer and admired the lacery of foam, as the bubbles slid slowly down the side of the glass. I took a deep whiff—the Cascade hops, from the Pacific Northwest, had notes of pineapple and hay. I brought the glass up to my lips, and took a long swallow. A tingle of good cheer seemed to spread through my hand up my right arm and into my chest”).

2. Gary Shteyngart, “My Gentile Region,” October 11, 2021 (“I have always imagined that beyond its pleasurable utility the penis must be an incomprehensible thing to most heterosexual women, like a walrus wearing a cape that shows up every once in a while to perform a quick round of gardening”).

3. Heidi Julavits, “The Fire Geyser,” August 23, 2021 (“The lava near the path reached out with giant panther paws that seemed to demand petting”). 

4. Rivka Galchen, “Better Than a Balloon,” February 15 & 22, 2021 (“And Pacific Trimming had recently remodelled, so that if you walked by on Thirty-ninth Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, even the least crafty among us might be filled with a desire for rickrack, for zippers in thirty-six colors, for shank buttons”).

5. Nick Paumgarten, “It’s No Picnic,” March 1, 2021 (“At Hamido, the evening was mild, and the curve was still more or less flat; happy to be around people other than our families, we sat at a large table on the sidewalk, in the open air, sharing platters of bran-grilled orate, grilled octopus, fried sardines, baba ghanoush, and beers of our own bringing. Was all of this reckless? Probably”).

6. Ed Caesar, “Only Disconnect,” November 29, 2021 (“The men were making Berber tea, which is the color of rust. They seemed delighted to see a stranger, and came out to greet me. Their grooved, hard faces confirmed a lifetime spent outdoors. Next to them, I looked like a newborn. They gave me bread, a tin of sardines, and a glass of the tea, which was as sweet as a candy cane. I happily devoured all of it”).

7. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2,” April 19, 2021 (“Nothing goes well in a piece of writing until it is in its final stages or done”). 

8. Ann Patchett, “Flight Plan,” August 2, 2021 (I saw the headlights against the garage door and went outside in the rain to meet him with my love and my rage and my sick relief.)

9. M. R. O’Connor, “Towering Infernos,” November 15, 2021 (“The temperature was a hundred degrees, and the Air Quality Index was 368—a ‘hazardous’ rating. An opened but undrunk can of Budweiser sat on the patio of an abandoned house, and the milkweed on the side of the road was drenched in psychedelic-pink fire retardant. We took our breaks sitting inside idling trucks, where we could breathe conditioned air instead of toxic smoke”).

10. Lauren Collins, “Kitchen Confessional,” December 20, 2021 ("In Roman’s world, an admission of effort must be offset by an ungiven fuck"). 

Best of 2021: The Critics

Illustration by Toma Vagner, from Alex Ross's "Grinding Bass"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Who’s We?,” October 25, 2021 (Typically snugged into the cellophane wrappers of packs of cigarettes the artist has smoked, they are singly—and all together—exquisite, achieving feats of formal and coloristic lyricism by way of used chewing gum, scraps of fabric, metal fragments, feathers, thread, and very much whatnot. The works convey a homing instinct for beauty in the humblest of materials, and in the most democratic of citizenly activities: walking in the city”).

2. James Wood, “The Accursed,” April 19, 2021 [“Technically, it’s a combination of free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a specific character) and what might be called unidentified free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a shadowy narrator, or a vague village chorus)”]. 

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Movements of One,” February 1, 2021 (“Morandi drains our seeing of complacency. He occults the obvious”).

4. James Wood, “Connect the Dots,” October 4, 2021 (“Every so often, a more subtle observer emerges amid these gapped extremities, a writer interested merely in honoring the world about him, a stylist capable of something as beautiful as ‘the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin,’ or this taut description of an Idaho winter: Icicles fang the eaves’ ”).

5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Home Goods,” February 15 & 22, 2021 ("As a mot juste for ‘The Progress of Love,’ I nominate ‘silly’ ”).

6. Alex Ross, “Grinding Bass,” December 13, 2021 ("The music is amorphous, engulfing, gelatinous, ferocious. Some passages evoke a subterranean machine revving up, grinding as it ascends toward the surface; others suggest tiny creatures excavating a cavernous space. Climaxes have a rancid beauty, the beauty of catastrophe and collapse").

7. Nathan Heller, “The Falconer,” February 1, 2021 (“Reducing the world, as on the canvas or the page, is a process of foreclosing on its fullness, choosing this way and not that one, and how you make those choices reveals everything about the person that you are”).

8. Rachel Syme, “On the Nose,” February 1, 2021 (“I knew I loved the smell of violets—their chalky, chocolate undertones. Or I thought I knew. Sitting down at my keyboard, I began to waver. Was it more like talcum powder and linden honey? Or like a Barbie-doll head sprinkled with lemonade?”).

 9. Anthony Lane, “Feel the Power,” July 5, 2021 (“The acting is of a soaring ineptitude; the deeper Diesel emotes, the more he resembles a man who dabbed too much wasabi on his tuna roll”). 

10. Adam Gopnik, “Fluid Dynamics,” April 12, 2021 (“For her fond biographer, Frankenthaler’s art delights the eye, as it was designed to, and that’s enough. Enough? It’s everything”).

Best of 2021: Photos

Here are my favorite New Yorker photos of 2021:

1. Jerome Strauss’s photo for “Above & Beyond: The Annual Arrival of Cherry Blossoms,” April 19, 2021 (see above);

2. Amy Lombard's portrait of Jake Paul for Kelefa Sanneh's "Punching Down" (November 8, 2021);

3. Brian Emfinger's photo for Heidi Julavits's "The Fire Geyser" (August 23, 2021);

4. Lakin Ogunbanwo's portrait of El Anatsui for Julian Lucas's “Structure and Flow” (January 18, 2021);

5. Gus Powell's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Smashed NYC" (June 7, 2021);

6. Thomas Prior's portrait of Kate Orff for Eric Klinenberg's "Manufacturing Nature" (August 9, 2021);

7. Naila Ruechel's photo for Judith Thurman's "Eye of the Needle" (March 29, 2021);

8. William Mebane's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Dame" (January 25, 2021);

9. Sofia Yates's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables For Two: Rolo's" (February 8, 2021);

10. Phyllis Ma's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables For Two: The New Carry-Out Cuisine" (June 21, 2021).

Best of 2021: Talk

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Nick Paumgarten's "Bear Cash"

Here are my favourite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets): 

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Lemonland,” August 2, 2021 (“Perhaps you have detected a lemony-fresh scent or a proliferation of odd citrus-inflected selfies in your feeds. Or you might even have found yourself in a plasticine sanctuary of tangerine lemons and Teletubby trees, a contrived oasis where the lemons are yellow and the sky is always blue. Citrovia. Is this a haven on an otherwise soon-to-be-uninhabitable planet? Or another sign of the end?”).

2. Adam Iscoe, “Back at It,” March 15, 2021 (“Quintana, a five-year veteran of the concession stand, wandered behind the candy counter. He found a thirty-five-pound bag of popcorn kernels in a storage closet. ‘At one point during the pandemic, I bought popcorn, just to try to relive the experience,’ he said, as he poured buttery salt powder along with the kernels into a popcorn machine. ‘It wasn’t the same.’ A minute later: pop-pop-pop. ‘Yeah, this is it,’ he said. Pop-pop-pop. ‘This is movie-theatre popcorn!’ ”).

3. Robert Sullivan, “A Two-Hour Tour,” July 5, 2021 (“A quick investigation of the island’s flora and fauna turned up razor clams; moon snails; lots of oyster shells without oysters; mussels, buried just beneath the surface of the island (seemingly held in place by large rocks, a possible geologic key to the island’s tenacity); a red-beard sponge, or Microciona prolifera; and, on the edge of the lee side, green seaweed that had colonized the inside of an automobile tire, a green harbor within a harbour”).

4. Richard Preston, “Hot Tub Drum Machine,” December 20, 2021 (“It took him two weeks of obsessive hammering and regular hot-tub dips to bring thirty-eight chromatic notes to life from the bottoms of two hazmat barrels”).

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Bear Cash,” November 8, 2021 (“Last week, the foundation released a true jackalope, the ‘otoro of this tuna,’ as Bell put it: ‘Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom, April 24, 1968.’ At that time, the Carousel, operated by the Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and others, was a psychedelic dance hall and, effectively, Bear’s sonic laboratory. Whoever passed through got journaled, and dosed”).

6. Adam Iscoe, “The Smell Test,” March 1, 2021 (“A fireball danced on the Jumbotron, and a man holding a big cardboard cutout of Baby Yoda bellowed with something like joy”).

7. David Owen, “Birdlife,” September 20, 2021 [“Late one afternoon this summer, Wolf took a walk in what’s now her principal birding “patch,” the transformed East River piers that constitute Brooklyn Bridge Park. (She and her boyfriend, who is also both a software developer and a birder, live near Red Hook, not far from Pier 6.) ‘I call this the Dark Forest,’ she said, on a shaded path that was maybe two hundred yards from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. ‘There’s a black-crowned night heron that often hangs out here, in this sumac—and there it is.’ A large, hunched bird with a long bill was perched on a branch, camouflaged by foliage. A young man and woman stopped, and the man asked Wolf what she was looking at. ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘How did you even see that?’ ”).

8. Henry Alford, “Cocoon,” January 25, 2021 [“After studying a 2017 cover of Elle that featured Solange Knowles in one of Kamali’s fire-engine-red sleeping-bag coats, he turned his bag inside out (to avoid emblazoning his chest with the jumbo ‘Sportneer’ logo), and cinched it with a red scarf, creating a Michelin Man look in draped dove-gray polyester”].

9. Danyoung Kim, “Splash,” December 6, 2021 (“First stop was North Cove Marina, at Brookfield Place, in the financial district—a mile as the crow flies, two minutes and fifty seconds as the jet skis. No need for coffee on this commute. The Hudson slapping your face will suffice”).

10. Rachel Syme, “Sing Out!,” July 26, 2021 (“The conversation had turned to body glitter. Gardner had some smeared on her cheeks, in a shade called Adult Film”).

Best of 2021: Illustrations

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2021: 

1. Sam Alden's illustration for Ann Patchett's "Flight Plan," August 2, 2021 (see above);

2. Andrea Ventura's portrait of Tom Stoppard for Anthony Lane's "O Lucky Man!" (March 1, 2021);

3. Javi Aznarez's illustration for Ruth Franklin's "Into the Void" (September 13, 2021);

4. Cristiana Couceiro's illustration for Joshua Yaffa's "Five-Month Plan" (February 8, 2021);

5. Javier Jaén’s illustration for Gary Shteyngart’s “My Gentile Region” (October 11, 2021);

6. Pola Maneli's portrait of Pharoah Sanders for Hua Hsu's "The New Thing" (March 29, 2021);

7. Golden Cosmos’s illustration for Daniel Alarcón’s “The Collapse of Arecibo” (April 5, 2021);

8. Jorge Colombo's illustration for Rivka Galchen's "Better Than a Balloon" (February 15 & 22, 2021);

9. Toma Vagner's illustration for Alex Ross's "Grinding Bass" (December 13, 2021);

10. Cecilia Carstedt's portrait of Adele for Carrie Battan's "Imperfect Union" (December 6, 2021).

Best of 2021: GOAT

Photo by Shawn Michael Jones, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: We All Scream for Ice Cream"

Here are my favourite “Goings On About Town” notes of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: We All Scream for Ice Cream,” August 2, 2021 [“There are pints to take home, too; availing myself of an insulated bag outfitted with ice packs ($7), I toted several on the subway, including Panna Stracciatella, flecked with dark-chocolate shards, and Somebody Scoop Phil, the brainchild of the sitcom producer turned food personality Phil Rosenthal, featuring a lightly salted malted milk-chocolate base, dense with chunks of Twix and candied peanuts, plus swirls of fudge and panna caramel that oozed obscenely when I peeled off the lid”].

2. Richard Brody, “Movies: Despair,” August 2, 2021 ("In the crude and vulgar beauty of a society on the edge of violence, Stoppard’s ping-ponging witticisms freeze in the air with a ballistic grimness").

3. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Fan-Fan Doughnuts and El Newyorkino,” March 15, 2021 ["But it’s the basics I crave: Gerson’s yeasted, brioche-style dough, which contains flour, butter, and eggs and is fried to the color of honey, is a marvel in itself, not much heavier than cotton candy, and is perhaps best coated in an inky slick of Valrhona chocolate or braided and lightly lacquered with the simplest white icing. Chocolate comes in hot-beverage form, too: a rich, velvety Belgian-style mix of melted Guittard (both milk and dark), not so thick that you need a spoon, but thick enough that it’s nice to use one, to more easily consume the doughnut croutons and house-made marshmallow bobbing at the top"].

4. Michaelangelo Matos, “Music: LSDXOXO: ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect,’ ” May 24, 2021 ("The Berlin-based d.j. and producer LSDXOXO makes spiky, near-iridescent house music, full of distortion-heavy riffs and buzzing percussion that cuts through a room like a silver suit").

5. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Peter Luger Steak House,” March 29, 2021 ["At my table, in the shadow of the historic Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, I ordered another wedge salad (rapture, again) and a burger, a beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun"].

6. Andrea K. Scott, “At the Galleries: Lee Lozano,” August 2, 2021 ["Lozano blazes through subjects, from the X-ray intensity of charcoal self-portraits, made during her student years, to cartoonish near-Pop (such as the untitled 1961 work pictured here), absurdly priapic gags, and muscular renditions of hardware and tools that strain at the edges of the paper on which they’re drawn, as if to say, Screw this"].

7. Anthony Lane, “Movies: Senna,” ("Asif Kapadia’s 2011 documentary, which should reward the attention even of those who would never dream of watching cars on a track, is filmed as an homage to velocity—it’s stripped of narration, talking heads, and anything else that might threaten to slow it down. What remains is a self-propelling drama, and the abiding image of Senna’s oil-dark eyes, gleaming through the letter box of his helmet").

8. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Becky Kolsrud,” March 8, 2021 ("In another, smaller landscape, bordered by a band of sky blue, a neon-pink skull rests on the curve of a green planet as a lemon moon blares from the corner").

9. David Kortava, “Tables For Two: Bathhouse Kitchen,” December 6, 2021 ("For the lovely butternut-squash salad, Sousa served the squash raw, thinly sliced, and tossed with golden raisins, pecans, onion, tarragon, and blue cheese. It was easily the funkiest dish I’ve ever consumed in a bathrobe").

10. Richard Brody, “What to Stream: Thomasine & Bushrod,” March 8, 2021 ("When, during a shoot-out, Bushrod—in a majestic closeup—reloads his revolver, the whispered click of metal on metal resounds like righteous thunder").

2021 in Review

Illustration from newyorker.com

Begin with a drink. I’ll have one of those Mumbai Mules that Hannah Goldfield mentions in her excellent “Tables For Two: Bollywood Kitchen” (March 1, 2021): “vodka, ginger beer, and fresh lime juice, punched up with ground coriander and cumin and shaken over ice.” Mm, fucking delicious! Okay, let’s roll! 

First highlight: John Seabrook’s “Zero-Proof Therapy.” What a piece! It’s about Seabrook’s “raging non-alcoholism,” and his discovery of a great zero-alcoholic beer called Run Wild. It begins in the bar of the Atlantic Brewing Company, Stratford, Connecticut:

Behind the bar, Bill Shufelt, a thirty-eight-year-old former hedge-fund trader, who co-founded Athletic in 2017, drew me a pint of Two Trellises, one of the company’s seasonal N.A. brews—a hazy I.P.A. that he and the other co-founder, John Walker, Athletic’s forty-one-year-old head brewer, were test-batching. I had not raised a pint drawn from a keg since I quit drinking alcohol, exactly one thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight days earlier. The glass seemed to fit my palm like a key.

That “The glass seemed to fit my palm like a key” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – a perfect blend of the personal and the reportorial. I enjoyed it enormously. 

Highlight #2: John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2.” Great to see the Master still producing at age ninety. This piece is a beauty, containing, among other arresting items, the story of how McPhee became a New Yorker writer. If you’re an aspiring writer racked by self-doubt, you should read this piece. In McPhee’s words, it’s a “chronicle of rejection as a curable disease.” It begins, improbably, with a seventeenth century Dutch ship called the Tyger, and ends in the office of William Shawn. Other ingredients: sand hogs, basketball, the Twin Towers, the Tower of London, Jackie Gleason, Bill Bradley, and lunch with the legendary Esquire editor, Harold Hayes. How does it all connect? You’ll have to read it and see. It’s quite a story!    

Speaking of greats, Janet Malcolm died this year, age eighty-six. She’s one of my lodestars. I love her unique blend of sharp-eyed journalism and sharp-tongued criticism. Many of her pieces are in my personal anthology of great New Yorker writing, including “Depth of Field,” “Performance Artist,” “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” and her extraordinary “The Silent Woman.” I’ll miss her. 

Highlight #3 is the wonderful art criticism of Peter Schjeldahl; seventeen splendid pieces this year. Among my favorites: “Movements of One” (“Morandi drains our seeing of complacency. He occults the obvious”); “Home Goods” (“Ordinary things in the world interested Chardin. That doesn’t sound rare, but, oh, it is”); and “A Trip to the Fair” (“He created this work in the dark with slathered silver nitrate, silver oxide, silver iodide, and silver bromide. Exposed to light, the strokes resolved into a filmy gestural cadenza: quietly ferocious, if such is imaginable, like superimposed eddies in a whipping windstorm”).

And while we’re at it, let’s give a huzzah for my favorite section of the magazine – “Goings On About Town” – a weekly smorgasbord of delectable mini-reviews of, among other things, art shows, movies, music, and restaurants. I devour it! For me, the most challenging “Top Ten” list is always “Best of GOAT”; there's so much to choose from, it’s tough boiling it down.

Other highlights: Rivka Galchen’s “Better Than a Balloon,” Gary Shteyngart’s “My Gentile Region,” Ann Patchett’s “Flight Plan,” Heidi Julavits’s “The Fire Geyser,” and Ed Caesar’s “Only Disconnect” – all crazy good! 

But that’s enough for now. Over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I enjoyed most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another glorious year of reading bliss. 

December 27, 2021 Issue

The New Yorker asked lots of great questions this year, none greater than the three contained in this passage from David Kortava’s delightful “Tables For Two: Tea and Crumpets,” in this week’s issue: 

If Lady Mendl’s takes liberties with the conventions of afternoon tea, Brooklyn High Low detonates the paradigm. Pastrami and Dijon mustard on rye? Guava and blue cheese on gluten-free bread? Twenty-nine tea varieties, including one infused with whole butterfly-pea flowers that turn the liquid a psychedelic indigo?

Susan Sontag's "Pilgrimage" - Fact, Fiction, or Faction?

Portrait of Thomas Mann by Elliott Erwitt, from Erin Overbey’s “Sunday Reading: Personal Reflections”   

Erin Overbey’s “Sunday Reading: Personal Reflections” (newyorker.com, December 19, 2021) is a delightful collection of New Yorker personal essays. It includes one of my favorite Susan Sontag pieces – “Pilgrimage” (December 21, 1987), an account of Sontag’s visit with Thomas Mann in 1947. But I have a question. Is this piece fact, fiction, or faction? It originally appeared in The New Yorker as fiction. It’s included in Sontag’s posthumous collection, Debriefing: Collected Stories (2017). The editor of that book, Benjamin Taylor, in his Foreword, refers to the contents as short stories. He says, “Craving more uncertainty than the essay allowed for, Sontag turned from time to time to a form in which one need only persevere, making up one’s mind about nothing: the infinitely flexible, ever-amenable short story.” Now, in Overbey’s collection, “Pilgrimage” is presented as “personal reflection.” 

Which is it? Does it matter? To me, it matters immensely. Unlike some readers (e.g., James Wood), I’m not comfortable with essays in which there’s a “sly and knowing movement between reality and fiction” (Wood’s “Reality Effects,” The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011). Did Sontag’s friend Merrill really phone Mann’s home in Pacific Palisades and receive an invitation to join him for tea? Did Sontag and Merrill actually go to Mann’s house and have tea and cake with him? Did Mann really talk to them about Wagner, Goethe, and “the value of literature” and “the necessity of protecting civilization against the forces of barbarity”? Did Mann say and do all the things that Sontag says he did? Or is the piece, in whole or in part, fabricated? For me, “Pilgrimage” gains immeasurably when it’s presented as a “personal reflection.” I hope Overbey is right.

December 20, 2021 Issue

Two excellent Talk stories in this week’s issue :

1. Ben McGrath’s “On the Waterfront,” a mini-profile of canoeist Neal Moore:

Moore was inspired to plot a twenty-two-month, seventy-five-hundred-mile journey that will conclude any day now, weather permitting, with a loop around the Statue of Liberty: twenty-two rivers, from the Columbia, near Astoria, Oregon, to the Hudson, with some portaging—or “schlepping,” as Moore likes to call it—over the Continental Divide and alongside the Erie Canal. 

Moore’s journey was inspired by the disappearance of fellow-canoeist Dick Conant. McGrath wrote memorably about Conant in his brilliant “The Wayfarer” (December 14, 20215), one of the best New Yorker reporting pieces of the past ten years. 

2.  Richard Preston’s “Hot Tub Drum Machine,” a wonderful account of the creation of an amazing set of steel drums. Here’s a sample:

After the drum cooled, Dunleavy said, he refined the notes, hitting the steel with an assortment of small hammers while he watched waveforms pulse on the display screen of a strobe tuner. He flipped the drum over frequently, hitting the bubbles alternately from the top and from the bottom: “ ‘I’m gonna get that note,’ you say to yourself.” Once in a while, Dunleavy climbed into the hot tub and soaked his aching deltoids. (“The hot tub is my secret weapon,” he explained.) It took him two weeks of obsessive hammering and regular hot-tub dips to bring thirty-eight chromatic notes to life from the bottoms of two hazmat barrels.

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of the best Talk stories of the year. 

Andrew O'Hagan on Joan Eardley's "Catterline in Winter"

Joan Eardley, Catterline in Winter (1963)

Andrew O’Hagan, in his wonderful “At the Hunterian” (London Review of Books, November 4, 2021), calls Joan Eardley’s Cattlerline in Winter (1963) “her masterpiece.” I agree. I saw it a few years ago at Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in a show titled “Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place.” I found it transfixing. Here’s O’Hagan’s description of it:

In her masterpiece, Catterline in Winter (1963), she brings her eye back to what passes up there for dry land, but the aperture is now widened by the ocean and what she saw there and what that seeing did to her style. The cottages are deliquescent, tilting like a giant wave under the ominous sky and a heartbreaking blob of moon, evoking untold winter nights and natural histories, untold spots of time and human watchings. Here is the night at the end of the world. You can feel the sea-spray overhead and the crunch of frozen grass underfoot. You see a path. But mainly what you see is the scale of the forces ranged around us and the beauty of things we can’t know. 

That “The cottages are deliquescent, tilting like a giant wave under the ominous sky and a heartbreaking blob of moon” is inspired! It catches the picture’s peculiar blend of semi-abstraction and post-impressionism. There’s a splotched, dripped, scraped, scratched rawness to it that I relish. It’s not picturesque, and doesn’t want to be. Some might call it ugly. I don’t. It speaks to me. It depicts a place I’d love to roam, feeling “the sea-spray overhead and the crunch of frozen grass underfoot.” It appeals to my taste for melancholy. 

Interesting Emendations: Bill Buford's "Good Bread"

Bill Buford’s "Good Bread" (April 13, 2020) is one of the most absorbing, entertaining, and beautifully written New Yorker pieces of the last ten years. It’s about his apprenticeship to a Lyon baker identified simply as “Bob.” There’s a version of it in Buford’s recent memoir Dirt (2020). It's interesting to compare them.

In “Good Bread,” Buford writes,

On Sundays, the baker, Bob, worked without sleep. Late-night carousers started appearing at three in the morning to ask for a hot baguette, swaying on tiptoe at a high ventilation window by the oven room, a hand outstretched with a euro coin. 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. Everyone left with an armful and with the same look, suspended between appetite and the prospect of an appetite satisfied. It was a lesson in the appeal of good bread—handmade, aromatically yeasty, with a just-out-of-the-oven texture of crunchy air. This was their breakfast. It completed the week. This was Sunday in Lyon. 

In Dirt, this passage is longer and consists of two paragraphs:

On Sundays, the boulangerie belonged to Lyon, and Bob worked without sleep to feed it. Late-night carousers appeared at two in the morning to ask for a hot baguette, swaying on tiptoe at a high window by le fournil, the oven room, an arm outstretched, holding out a euro coin. By nine, there were so many people going in and out of the door that it never closed, the line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people, and from music (usually salsa) being played at high volume. (Bob fell in love with salsa, and then with Cuba, and then with a Cuban, his wife, Jacqueline.) 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, all cash.

The crowd fascinated me, all strangers, everyone leaving with an armful and with the same look – suspended between appetite and the prospect of an appetite satisfied. I learned something, I got it, the appeal of a good bread – as I was able to find it here, just across the street from our apartment: handmade, aromatically yeasty, with a just-out-of-the-oven texture of crunchy air. No one lingered. This was their breakfast. It completed the week. This was Sunday.

The differences between these two passages fascinate me. Note the change from “three in the morning” to “two in the morning.” They both can’t be correct. Which one is accurate? I vote for the New Yorker version, because I know it’s undergone the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking process. Note also the extra detail in the New Yorker version about the window: it's a ventilation window. Note the additional “le fournil” in the Dirt passage. Note the change from “hand outstretched with a euro coin” to “arm outstretched, holding out a euro coin.” And then there’s the additional “there were so many people going in and out of the door that it never closed,” the parenthetical “Bob fell in love with salsa, and then with Cuba, and then with a Cuban, his wife, Jacqueline,” the “all in cash,” the “The crowd fascinated me, all strangers,” the “I learned something, I got it,” and the “as I was able to find it here, just across the street from our apartment” – all in Dirt. 

One of my favorite passages in “Good Bread” is the description of Bob and Buford making deliveries:

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.

Here’s the Dirt version:

He drove fast, he talked fast, he parked badly. The car, by force of habit, reminded him that he was late and put him in an instant accelerating delivery mode. L’Harmonie des Vins was the first stop , on the Presqu’ile, a wine bar with food (“But good food,” Bob said). Two owners were in the back, busy, preparing the lunch service, but delighted by the sight of their bread guy, as if a friend had popped by unexpectedly, even though he came by every day at exactly this time. I was introduced (“a journalist who is writing about me”), quick-quick, bag drop, kisses, out.

Next: La Quintessence, near the Rhône (narrow street, no place to park, so he hadn’t, cars backing up behind him, none of them honking), a new restaurant (“Really good food,” Bob said, pumping his fist), husband and wife, one prep cook, frantic, but spontaneous smiles, the introduction (“writing about me”), the bag drop, kisses, out. 

We crossed the Rhône, rolled up on to a sidewalk, and rushed out, Bob with one sack of bread, me with another, holding it between two arms like a hug, trying to keep up: L’Olivier (“Exceptional food – a double pump – “Michelin listed but not pretentious”), young chef, tough-guy shoulders, an affectionate face, even if too busy to smile, bag drop, high-fives, out.

Again, the Dirt version is longer, this time divided in three paragraphs. It contains eight additions: “The car, by force of habit, reminded him that he was late and put him in an instant accelerating delivery mode”; “as if a friend had popped by unexpectedly”; “(‘a journalist who is writing about me’)”; “near the Rhône (narrow street, no place to park, so he hadn’t, cars backing up behind him, none of them honking)”; “(‘writing about me’)”; “holding it between two arms like a hug”; and “even if too busy to smile.” 

One sentence in the “Good Bread” passage – “The first stop was L’Harmonie des Vins, on the Presqu’île, a wine bar with food (“But good food,” Bob said)” – is restructured in Dirt: “L’Harmonie des Vins was the first stop, on the Presqu’ile, a wine bar with food (“But good food,” Bob said).”

“Les Oliviers,” in “Good Bread,” is “L’Olivier” in Dirt. “Michelin-listed,” in “Good Bread” is “Michelin listed” in Dirt.

I find all these variations fascinating. Why? Because it shows that nothing in writing is absolute. There’s no one way to say anything. The writer is faced with dozens of choices every word of the way. Contrasting these two versions affords a glimpse of the writing process, or, perhaps more accurately, of the editorial process. My guess is that the Dirt version actually came first (even though it was published after “Good Bread” appeared in The New Yorker). The New Yorker’s editors took the Dirt version and subtly trimmed it. I confess I slightly prefer the more compact New Yorker piece. But I relish Dirt’s extra details, too. For example, that “holding it between two arms like a hug” is very fine, creating a vivid picture of the way Buford carried the sack of bread into L’Olivier. Or is it Les Oliviers? 

December 13, 2021 Issue

I love artful description. There’s a wonderful example of it in Alex Ross’s “Grinding Bass,” in this week’s issue. Reviewing Ash Fure and Lilleth Glimcher’s performance installation “Hive Rise,” at the Geffen Contemporary, in Los Angeles, he writes, 

There are no steady beats, though various kinds of periodicity come into play, including a rat-a-tat flapping noise that Fure elicits by holding a piece of paper over an upturned subwoofer. The music is amorphous, engulfing, gelatinous, ferocious. Some passages evoke a subterranean machine revving up, grinding as it ascends toward the surface; others suggest tiny creatures excavating a cavernous space. Climaxes have a rancid beauty, the beauty of catastrophe and collapse.

Overlaid on the sonic foundation is a theatrical ritual conceived by Glimcher, an interdisciplinary artist and director who has worked in New York, Berlin, and elsewhere. At the Geffen Contemporary, Fure was stationed at one end of the gallery, amid an array of subwoofers. A squad of fourteen black-clad performers circulated through the crowd, vocalizing into bespoke megaphones that had been generated on a 3-D printer. When members of the group were close by, even their slightest whispers had a tactile immediacy, as if they were coming from inside your head. Full-throated cries bounced around the space with thunderous force.

The performers followed an unpredictable, jagged choreography. Sometimes they stood in place, in statuesque clusters; for a while, they were positioned around Fure, on risers. At other times, they whipped their bodies back and forth or moved swiftly from one place to another. The spectators milled about in pursuit of the squad, maneuvering around neoprene sculptural forms that were devised by Xavi Aguirre and stock-a-studio. We had our own choreography—that pandemic-era dance of avoidance we have perfected in crowded supermarket aisles. The mood was one of bliss and angst intermingled.

Bravo! That’s one of the great descriptive passages of the year.

On the Horizon: My "Best of 2021" Lists

Illustration by Min Heo (from The New Yorker)

It’s time to start making my “Best of 2021” lists. Each year at this point, I like to pause, look back, and take stock of my New Yorker reading experience. I find listing is a good way to do it.

I’m not going to reveal my pick for best reporting piece just yet. But I’ll give you a hint. It features a pint of Two Trellises. That’s it, no more clues. As it is, I’ve probably given it away. Besides, the year isn’t over. There are three more New Yorkers still to come. Who knows what delightful surprises they might contain.

December 6, 2021 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his terrific “A Woman’s Work,” in this week’s issue, revisits one of his favourite artworks – Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” (1916). Eight years ago, in a brilliant piece called “Shapes of Things” (The New Yorker, January 7, 2013), he described “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” as follows:

Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the tapestry’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture. 

That’s one of my all-time favourite ekphrases. In “A Woman’s Work,” Schjeldahl adds to his description. He says,

The work’s nubbly, asymmetrically structured bars and swatches in white, black, red, blue, gray, and two browns generate a seemingly effortless majesty. The execution secretes bits of fun that I hadn’t noticed before: a minuscule, eccentric off-colored shape in a brown field; an almost imperceptible checkerboard pattern of alternating horizontal and vertical stitches in a black area (prophetic of the black-on-black paintings of Ad Reinhardt); and a small lump of congested yarn that would seem to be a flaw if it did not so candidly emphasize the work’s tactility. No matter how committed she could be to geometric order, Taeuber-Arp communicated her freedom.

That noticing of the “small lump of congested yarn” is inspired! Schjeldahl’s new piece also dispels a mystery – a mystery to me, at least. When his “Shapes of Things” originally appeared, I devoured it, and immediately searched the Internet for a reproduction of Taeuber-Arp’s  “Vertical-Horizontal Composition.” I couldn’t find it. I found a work by her called “Vertical-Horizontal Composition,” but it didn’t match Schjeldahl’s description. Well, the mystery is now solved. In “A Woman’s Work,” Schjeldahl points out that there is more than one Taeuber-Arp work titled “Vertical-Horizontal Composition.” He says,

Further embroideries and gouaches of hers, also entitled “Vertical-Horizontal Composition,” develop a language of form so fluent that she could seem to have been born to it: intricately balanced, invariably surprising. 

And, to clinch the point, a reproduction of the “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” is included in his piece. Looking at it, I can see the “minuscule, eccentric off-colored shape in a brown field.” But the “almost imperceptible checkerboard pattern of alternating horizontal and vertical stitches in a black area” and the “small lump of congested yarn” elude my eye. So MoMA here I come! I want to see the original. I want to see the stitching. Most of all, I want to see that lump of congested yarn. 

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Vertical-Horizontal Composition (1916)

On the Horizon: 3 for the Sea

I enjoyed doing “3 for the Road” so much that I’ve decided to pick three more of my favorite travelogues – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003)  – and revisit them, blogging about it as I go. So a new series then – “3 for the Sea,” starting January 1, 2022. 

3 for the Road: Conclusion

This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts on my three favourite travelogues – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989). Today, I’ll try to sum up my reading experience.

When I started this project, I said I wanted to get to know these books better. I feel I’ve accomplished that. But I also feel I’ve failed to do them justice. In my concentration on their formal properties – structure, action, imagery, detail – I neglected their meaning. What do these books mean? What is their message? To one degree or another, they’re all concerned with loss. In Notes from the Century Before, it’s loss of wilderness (“It’s as though the last bit of ocean were about to become more dry land, planted and paved … The loss is to people unborn”) and loss of the pioneers who hiked the wilderness trails (“These walks were just about the last go-round – the last exploration of the continent by foot that we’ll ever have”). In Coming into the Country, it’s about preservation versus development (“With the pipeline, however, Alaska suddenly had more development than it could absorb. It suddenly had manifold inflation and a glut of trailer parks. It had traffic jams”; “To be sure, I would preserve plenty of land as well. My own margin of tolerance would not include some faceless corporation ‘responsible’ to a hundred thousand stockholders, making a crater you could see from the moon”). In Great Plains, the underlying theme is massive loss and destruction:

This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up the gold and rebury it in vaults someplace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrants’ dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean, ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and springs, deep-drill for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats.

So each of these books delivers a serious message. They aren’t just description for description’s sake, detail for detail’s sake. But you know what? I love description for description’s sake, detail for detail’s sake. That’s why I read them. I love them for their writing as pure writing, for the sheer pleasure of their sentences. Three examples:

The scow up front is fun to ride because it slides vibrationlessly, but so is the galley of the Judith Ann, where the floor jangles in frenzy and the glasses and plates deafen the floor. [Notes from the Century Before]

To the palate of a travelling Martian – which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye? [Coming into the Country]

I slept beneath the mercury lights of highway rest areas where my lone car was visible for six miles in any direction and the inside of the men’s room looked as if it had been sandblasted with tiny insects, and on the streets of small towns where the lawn sprinklers ran all night, and next to damned-up waters of the Missouri River where the white top branches of drowned trees rose above the waters. [Great Plains]

I’d give my left testicle to have written any one of those three inspired lines. And there are plenty more where they came from. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three great books. I picture it like this: a bright, multi-hued totem pole topped with a hatted ruling raven; a silver-and-purple tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick; a grizzly whirling a salmon around his head; a moose head roasting over a campfire; a de Havilland Twin Otter; a tumble weed; a D9 Caterpillar; a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling; Crazy Horse; a blue mountain slung with white snow; a bleached caribou antler; a double Klepper kayak; a white canvas tipi; a Grumman Goose; a rusty red fifty-five-gallon steel drum. Overlap these images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and across the whole assemblage paint three wide wavy stripes – a gray-green one for the Yukon, a blue-green one for the Stikine, and a tan one for the Missouri. I call my collage “McHoagzier.”