August 22, 2022 Issue

Three excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Laura Preston’s “Pipe Dreams,” Nicola Twilley’s “The Cold Rush” and Hua Hsu’s “My Dad and Kurt Cobain.” 

Preston’s piece is a “Talk of the Town” story about the largest musical instrument in the world, a pipe organ called the Midmer-Losh, located at Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall. Preston describes the work of Brant Duddy, “a ninety-three-year-old master organ technician who comes in twice a week to voice the pipes”:

Duddy, who has a head of white hair and the slow, smooth baritone of a radio broadcaster, was tapping away at the Stentor Sesquialtera rank, then blowing air through the pipes to see how they sang. “Toot-toot-tfffoot,” the G pipe went. “A little foggy,” Duddy said. 

The pieces contains several marvelous descriptive passages, including this:

An organ pipe has a mouth, a foot, a toe, an upper and a lower lip, and a tongue, called the languid. Duddy sounds them one by one, listens, and makes adjustments. The son of a Pennsylvania church organist, he has been servicing organs since he was seventeen. “Organ repair is not really an occupation,” he said. “It’s more of a disease.” He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear.

And this:

“The soft lead pipes have a dark, woodsy flavor,” he said. Zinc pipes pierce the air like a flute. “Listen to that yodel,” he said. “Screaming its little heart out.” The Midmer-Losh’s pipes are arranged in twelve hundred and thirty-five stop tabs, named for the sounds they imitate, among them Viola da Gamba, Tuba d’Amour, Krummhorn, Grave Mixture, and Musette Mirabilis. The sixty-four-foot Diaphone-Dulzian rank is made from enough sugar pine to build a house, and it produces a quintuple low C, a subharmonic tone that sounds like a chopper circling the building.

Twilley’s “The Cold Rush” is a reporting piece on the promise – and the challenges – of establishing “cold chains” in the developing world. A cold chain is “a series of thermally controlled spaces through which your food moves from farm to table.” She calls the cold chain, “the invisible backbone of our food system, a perpetual mechanical winter that we have built for our food to live in.” Her piece is set in Rwanda, where the cold chain doesn’t exist. She accompanies a fish dealer, François Habiyambere, on a five-and-a-half-hour drive to the country’s only flake-ice machine. As they travel, she reports what she sees:

Sometime after 3 a.m., cyclists start to appear. All over rural Rwanda, sinewy young men set out from their homes on heavy steel single-speed bikes that are almost invisible beneath comically oversized loads: bunches of green bananas strapped together onto cargo racks; sacks of tomatoes piled two or three high; dozens of live chickens stacked in pyramids of beaks and feathers; bundles of cassava leaves so massive that, in the predawn light, it looks as though shrubbery is rolling along the side of the road. Over the next four or five hours, as the heat of the day sets in, gradually wilting the cassava leaves and softening the tomatoes, these men will cover hundreds of miles, carrying food from the countryside to sell in markets in the capital, Kigali.

She accompanies a milk collector named Pierre Bizimana:

He pushed a bike, over which were slung two battered steel cans, each capable of carrying a little more than thirteen gallons of milk. For the next two hours, in the gathering humidity, Bizimana, his assistant, and I trudged uphill from one station to another, picking up a gallon here and a half gallon there from a few dozen farmers. Then we headed to the nearby town of Gicumbi, where there is a milk-collection center with an industrial chiller.

She describes a collaboration between the Rawandan and U.K. governments and the U.N. called Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain, or ACES. She accompanies the ACES team on a tour of Rwanda’s existing refrigeration infrastructure:

Our first stop was a pair of cold-storage rooms built with European Union funding, in 2019, thirty miles south of Kigali, on the road to Tanzania. A member of a local farming coöperative walked us over to a low-slung brick structure; inside, the first things that caught my eye were cobwebs lining the walls. One of the rooms was not functioning, our guide said; the other contained two lonely crates of chili peppers, and the cooling seemed to have been switched on purely in honor of our visit. The spotlessly clean floor certainly did not suggest frequent use. It was also made of wood, a poor choice of material because it is hard to sanitize, so any squashed produce lingers, providing a perfect substrate for fungi and bacteria to grow.

Twilley reports two shocking facts: 

1. Between thirty and fifty per cent of all food produced in developing countries is lost—discarded, unsold and uneaten, thanks to weak or nonexistent cold chains. For farmers surviving on less than a couple of dollars a day, the effect of these losses is substantial; for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, they are estimated to add up to hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

2. Cold chains present a double bind; both their absence and their presence have huge ecological costs. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that if global food waste were a country its greenhouse-gas emissions would be the third largest in the world, right behind China and the U.S. On the other hand, the chemical refrigerants and the fossil-fuel energy used to produce cooling already account for more than seven per cent of global emissions—just one per cent less than food loss. As countries like Rwanda refrigerate, those emissions are increasing rapidly. 

Hua Hsu’s “My Dad and Kurt Cobain” is a gracefully written “personal history” piece. Its opening sentence is terrific: “When my father moved back to Taiwan, my family bought a pair of fax machines.” The four nouns – “father,” “Taiwan,” “family,” “fax machines” – turn out to be four of the piece’s five key ingredients. The other ingredient is Kurt Cobain. It all coheres around the fax machines. In the early nineties, Hsu’s father and mother decided that his father should return to Taiwan to become an executive in the semiconductor industry. At this time, Hsu was in in his mid-teens. Father and son communicated with each other across the Pacific Ocean via fax. Hsu writes,

Faxing was cheaper than long-distance calling, and involved far less pressure. The time difference between Cupertino and Taiwan was such that I could fax my father a question in the evening and expect an answer by the time I woke up. My homework requests were always marked “Urgent.”

The piece contains several moving quotations from Hsu’s father’s faxes. Here’s one he sent to Hsu, replying to Hsu’s fax, discussing Kurt Cobain’s suicide that had happened earlier that day:

I agree that it’s a society tragedy, too much pressure. If he felt that it’s beyond his control or creativity or else, it sometimes led to the conclusion of suicide, especially for talented artists. They felt that the sense of living disappeared. So sometimes, the “normal” people is more easy to adapt to the reality which fills with not ideal situation and needs compromise. That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to every one of us. What do you think?

I find that “What do you think?” very moving. Hsu’s father seems like a great guy – not domineering, not condescending. He just wants to communicate with his son, keep the channels open, get him thinking. 

I enjoyed this piece immensely. I see that Hsu has a memoir coming out next month. It’s called Stay True. I pre-ordered it today.  

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Cookie Smell

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Ian Frazier’s superb “Out of the Bronx” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2012) is about the closing of Bronx cookie factory Stella D’oro. It comprehends, among other things, a private-equity takeover, a labour strike, and several protest rallies. Frazier brilliantly covers it all. But, for me, the most memorable aspect of this piece isn’t the labour battles; it’s the cookie smell. Frazier writes,

According to a noted aromachologist, “Bakeries are great community assets, like churches or museums.” In that regard—aromachologically speaking—the Stella D’oro factory was the Notre-Dame and National Gallery of 237th and Broadway. I once saw a schoolboy get off a city bus at 238th and take a breath and shout, “Brownies!” Though Stella D’oro did not make brownies, that was often the smell. Other times, it was “almondy, like when you make the mandelbread,” as an old lady walking down Broadway described it to me once. Many days or nights (the factory usually ran three eight-hour shifts daily), when the anisette toast was baking, the smell became licorice. About a month before Christmas, when the bakery began turning out its seasonal cookies, neighborhood breezes effloresced with cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger.

The baking-cookie smell entered check-cashing places and barbershops and bodegas, it crossed the razor wire into the M.T.A. yards and maintenance sheds west of Broadway, it occupied the loud channel of the Major Deegan Expressway, just to the east; kids dozing in the back seats of their parents’ cars sniffed the air and knew they were almost home. The smell competed with the acridity of hot wax and detergent chemicals at Nice Guys Car Wash, just across the street from the factory, and domesticated the beer fumes and late-night atmosphere at Stack’s Tavern, a shamrock-bedecked bar between 234th and 236th Streets, where a bartender told me, “Sure, I remember the smell—fresh-baked cookies. Nuttin’ wrong with that!”

That “kids dozing in the back seats of their parents’ cars sniffed the air and knew they were almost home” is inspired! The rhythm of the second paragraph is similar to the rhythm of the famous “snow” scene at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain; on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Frazier’s piece contains another wonderful description of the Stella D’oro cookie smell. This one is near the end. Frazier travels to Ashland, Ohio, following the Stella D’oro product line, which is now in the hands of an Ashland cookie factory called Archway. Frazier drives all around Ashland, searching for the cookie smell. He writes,

I headed out Claremont Avenue with the car windows down. Going by the Archway-Stella D’oro factory, I noticed that the flag in the parking lot was flapping in the breeze and pointing straight away from the road. I turned and went in that direction, and suddenly the smell that used to be all around 237th and Broadway enclosed me. I got out of the car. The access road I was on adjoined a field of thistles, timothy grass, wild roses, and joe-pye weed. Across from the field was a scrubby forest of honey-locust trees and pin oaks. I went back into it, stepping around the poison ivy. At a point where I could no longer be seen from the road, I stopped and inhaled. The warm, gingerbready smell was still strong here. To find that old Kingsbridge aroma adrift in an Ohio woods seemed strange. At the far edge of the woods was the lawn of a low-slung office building. The lawn had just been mowed, and there the cookie smell mingled suburbanly with the fragrances of wet earth and cut grass.

Mmm, that “cookie smell mingled suburbanly with the fragrances of wet earth and cut grass” rises off the page. That's how smell is described.

In my next post in this series, I’ll look at a marvelous description of sound. 

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Refrigerant and Relieving

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Dora Zhang’s absorbing Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (2020) inspires me to formulate my own theory of description – one that applies to factual writing. Over the next couple of months, I’ll post a series of notes, in which I’ll analyze a particular passage of description that I relish. What are its elements? How does it work? Why am I drawn to it? These are the some of the questions I’ll address. In the process, I’m hoping that my own theory of description will emerge. 

Today, I’ll start with one of my favorite passages of description – the opening paragraph of John McPhee’s great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977; included in his 1977 masterwork Coming into the Country): 

My bandanna is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head and now and again dip it into the river. The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving. This has done away with the headaches that the sun caused in days before. The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good. Meanwhile, the river – the clearest, purest water I have ever seen flowing over rocks – breaks the light into flashes and sends them upward into my eyes. The headaches have reminded me of the kind that are sometimes caused by altitude, but for all the fact that we have come down through mountains, we have not been higher than a few hundred feet above the level of the sea. Drifting now – a canoe, two kayaks – and thanking God it is not my turn in either of the kayaks, I lift my fish rod from the tines of a caribou rack (lashed there in mid-canoe to the duffel) and send a line flying toward a wall of bedrock by the edge of the stream. A grayling comes up and, after some hesitation, takes the lure and runs with it for a time. I disengage the lure and let the grayling go, being mindful not to wipe my hands on my shirt. Several days in use, the shirt is approaching filthy, but here among grizzly bears, I would prefer to stink of humanity than of fish.

Note the use of the present tense. Note the first-person perspective. Note the extraordinary specificity – bandanna “rolled on the diagonal,” the water “refrigerant and relieving,” the sun, “penetrating, intense,” the fishing rod, lifted “from the tines of a caribou rack (lashed there in mid-canoe to the duffel),” the filthy shirt, stinking of humanity. We are there with McPhee, in that canoe, paddling through grizzly bear country, the Arctic light striking our eyes. This is total immersion. And I am hooked (just like that grayling). 

I love the way temperature in this passage is tangibly indicated. McPhee not only tells us the river is cold (“The water is forty-six degrees”); he puts us in physical contact with it (“Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving.... Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good”). We feel its coldness. This is what I call sensory description. The most common form of it is visual. Zhang, in her Strange Likeness, defines description as “a form of textual visualizing.” But it’s more than just visual, as the above passage shows. It’s also textual touching, smelling, hearing, and tasting. In my next post in this series, I’ll look at a wonderful description of aroma. 

Dora Zhang's "Strange Likeness"

This year my summer read is Dora Zhang’s Strange Likeness: Description and the Modern Novel (2020). Although abstruse in content, it turns out to be the perfect beach book – resistant to water, sand, and sunscreen oil. The University of Chicago Press makes physically durable paperbacks.  

The book is about literary description – a subject I’m keenly interested in. Zhang focuses on three kinds of literary description, all of them strange: atmospheric (exemplified by the work of Henry James); analogical (exemplified by the work of Marcel Proust); and affective (exemplified by the work of Virginia Woolf). 

Zhang’s identification and analysis of these three categories is ingenious. Here’s a sample of her commentary on James: 

If we understand James’s likenesses to be about something other than how things look, they turn out to be in fact quite precise, hardly underdescribed at all. In the case of Lancaster Gates, he does not give us an inventory or spatial plan of sideboards, tables, or footstools, but we know that whatever is there is made of gilt, glass, satin, plush, rosewood, marble, and malachite and that it is scalloped, fringed, buttoned, corded, gilded, drawn, and curled. James’s descriptive mode remains indefinite with respect to individual objects, but it is quite specific with respect to qualities and effects. The general impression of luxurious materials and ornate aesthetics are clear even if the Balzacian inventory has disappeared. The descriptive referent has become an impression on a perceiver that is irreducible to any one of its component parts. Insofar as they issue instructions for imagining acts of perception, I propose that James’s descriptions instruct us above all to imagine what it is like to feel an atmosphere.

That’s the most creative defense of underdescription that I’ve ever read. I’m not convinced. Zhang admits that James’s descriptions “block visualization.” What kind of description is that? To me, the whole point of description is to call up pictures. Description that blocks visualization seems to me pointless.

Zhang is very good on a number of aspects of description. On the classic dichotomy of narrate versus describe, she dissents, arguing that “at the level of the sentence, it is difficult to find anything that is not in some way descriptive, since even verbs – words of action, that preeminent concern of narrative – inevitably contain descriptive connotations.” I agree. I go further: narrative is a subcategory of description; it's the description of action. 

On the possibility of too much description, Zhang says (speaking of Balzac), 

This drive toward descriptive comprehensiveness may be attributed partly to his intention to be the natural historian of French society, but it also stems from something inescapable about description itself: the inability to determine with any intrinsic necessity where to start and where to stop.

Reading this, I recall John McPhee’s “Writing is selection.” What to include, what to leave out? McPhee, in his Draft No. 4 (2017), says,

It’s an utterly subjective situation. I include what interests me and exclude what doesn’t interest me. That may be a crude tool but it’s the only one I have. Broadly speaking, the word “interests” in this context has subdivisions of appeal, among them the ways in which choices help to set the scene, the ways in which choices suggest some undercurrent about the people or places being described, and, not least, the sheer sound of the words that bring forth the detail. It is of course possible to choose too much costume jewelry and diminish the description, the fact notwithstanding that, by definition in nonfiction writing, all the chosen items were of course observed.  

On the pleasure of description, Zhang writes, 

Needless to say, the pleasure of description can take many forms: it can appeal to our appetites and our senses, it can produce the thrill of recognition, and it can lead to the shock of discovery, to name just a few.

I would add another: the bliss of precision in a sentence like “On the stove is a tin can full of simmering tea, under a sheet-metal lid that is a piece of a fuel can with a scorched clothespin clipped to it as a handle” [from John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977)]. To me, that description is worth a hundred of Zhang’s vague, ethereal, nonmimetic, nonrepresentational specimens.

I wish Zhang had more to say on two of my favorite kinds of description – ekphrasis and catalogue. But Zhang’s purpose in Strange Likeness isn’t to survey the art of description in its entirety. Her focus is trained on three esoteric forms of it. I’d welcome a much broader study, one that includes nonfiction description. 

August 15, 2022 Issue

I see in this week’s issue there’s going to be an Edward Hopper exhibition at the Whitney, opening October 19: see Andrea K. Scott, “Art: Fall Preview.” Not many events can pry me from my roost here on the Island. But that Hopper show just might do it. Notice in her preview that Scott describes Hopper as “the bard of American solitude” – solitude, not loneliness. Peter Schjeldahl pretty much shot down that idea a few years ago when he said,  

His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint. (“Ordinary People,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2007)

He hammered the point again recently:

Regarding his human subjects as “lonely” evades their truth. We might freak out if we had to be those people, but—look!—they’re doing O.K., however grim their lot. Think of Samuel Beckett’s famous tag “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Now delete the first sentence. With Hopper, the going-on is not a choice. ("Apart," The New Yorker, June 8 & 15, 2020)

Okay, I get it – solitude isn't loneliness. But that girl sitting at the table in Hopper’s great Automat ((1927) seems pretty damn lonely to me. Can we split the difference? Not solitude, not loneliness – melancholy. Hopper’s paintings seem drenched in exquisite melancholy.

Edward Hopper, Automat (1927)

  

Jerome Groopman's "The Scalpel and the Pen"

Jerome Groopman (Illustration by Joe Clardiello)

Jerome Groopman, in his recent “The Scalpel and the Pen” (The New Yorker, July 25, 2022), claims that storytelling is part of being a good doctor. He says, “By writing stories, we as doctors aim to teach others about our patients while learning about ourselves.” This statement seems innocuous enough, yet I find myself balking at it. Why? It’s that vexed word “stories.” It smacks of fiction, of narrative purposely shaped to convey message or moral. Is that what Groopman means? If so, I disagree. Why fabricate? Why not just say what actually happens?  

A few years ago, Groopman wrote a great review, “When Doctors Admit They Went Wrong” (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2014), in which he faulted Terrance Holt for writing medical “parables.” He says of Holt’s work, 

His stories, though, do not recount recollections of exact events. Rather, Holt offers what he terms “parables.” The patients are not really individuals whom he cared for, but rather composites. 

He further says,

I was taken aback by Holt’s assertion that only the form of parable can “capture the essence of something too complex to be understood any other way.” Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is an illuminating parable, as are the medical tales of Chekhov, Turgenev, and Kafka. But the nonfiction stories of Oliver Sacks, Robert Coles, Richard Selzer, and Sherwin Nuland, as well as potent new voices of young doctors like Danielle Ofri, Leah Kaminsky, and Christine Montross, certainly capture the essence and complexity of the clinical world.

I agree. If you want to “capture the essence and complexity of the clinical world,” or any world for that matter, write fact not fiction. 

August 8, 2022 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Great cover! R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Double-Parked,” showing two bicycles, one blue, one orange, locked to a no-parking sign, is my pick for best cover of the year so far.

2. Calvin Tomkins’s “Becoming Modern,” a profile of painter Salman Toor, provides fascinating background on the evolution of Toor’s “virtuoso personal style.” I’ve been a fan of Toor ever since I saw his wonderful “Sleeping Boy”: see my “Salman Toor’s Sensual Apprehension of Life” (May 8, 2021). Tomkins’s description of that painting is excellent: “In 'Sleeping Boy,' a young man who resembles Toor lies on white sheets so lusciously painted that they look edible, his face and his naked body illuminated by light from an open laptop.”

3. John Seabrook’s “On Alert,” an absorbing report on acoustic car styling, contains several excellent sound descriptions, including this beauty: “Many prospective buyers’ first experience of a car or a truck is the CLICK ker-CHUNK that the driver’s-side door makes when they close it, followed by a faint harmonic shiver given off by the vehicle’s metal skin.” 

4. Speaking of inspired sentences, here’s one from Richard Brody’s capsule review of the 1928 silent film Show People: “Winking cameos abound: Davies takes a second role, as herself; Vidor plays himself, too; Charlie Chaplin, slight and exquisite, brings a Shakespearean grace to his self-portrayal as a humble moviegoer; and a long tracking shot of stars at a studio banquet table plays like a cinematic death row, displaying such luminaries as Renée Adorée, William S. Hart, and Mae Murray, just before they were swept away in waves of sound.”

Joy Williams's "Curran Hatleberg's Florida, Past and Future"

Curran Hatleberg, Untitled (Last Light)

Joy Williams is a sharp photography writer: see her “Curran Hatleberg’s Florida, Past and Future” (newyorker.com, August 5, 2022). I particularly like the point she makes about Hatleberg’s pictures of standing water. She says, 

The standing water in these photographs is its own signifier. The water reflected in Hatleberg’s eye, in the world he is chronicling, is slack, slick with torpor. It lies on the compacted soil of the junk yard and the cement steps of homes. Its oily sheen coats the alleys and the marshes. Only once does it appear fresh, alive, sustaining the figure borne on the river at peace, as if in a dear dream.

I love the rhythm of that passage. And the point about “the standing water in these photographs is its own signifier” strikes me as exactly right. Williams is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers.

August 1, 2022 Issue

After reading this week’s issue, two images stick in my mind. One is the “lush, enormous banana leaf” in Hannah Goldfield’s sublime “Tables For Two: Queens Lanka”:

A lush, enormous banana leaf was folded carefully around a tightly packed pie chart of delights, over rice: slippery, soft curried cashews; dark, crispy snips of zippy batu moju, or fried-eggplant pickle; seeni sambol, a relish of supple tamarind-and-chili-glazed shallots; a fluffy curried-mackerel-and-potato fritter.

The other unforgettable image is “a snail in the shadow of a boot coming down” that comes at the end of this riveting passage in Luke Mogelson’s excellent “Everyone Is a Target”:

Shortly after 11 p.m. that night, back in Bakhmut, I was jolted from bed by what sounded like an airplane colliding into the hotel. The electricity went out. I dived to the floor. A second impact was even louder. Then there came a third and a fourth. Bits of ceiling sprinkled down, and I braced for the roof and the two stories above mine to follow. Close shelling always induces a burst of animal fright, but this was different. It’s one thing to face an indiscriminate bombardment; it’s another to find yourself—or believe that you have found yourself—at the terminus of a warhead’s deliberate trajectory. We tend to think of artillery combat as remote and impersonal, but when you are on the receiving end of a strike it doesn’t feel like that. It feels as intimate and vicious as any other way of killing. For me, curled up in a ball, trying to cover as much of myself as possible, the sensation was one of naked, defenseless exposure, like a snail in the shadow of a boot coming down.

Two memorable images; two completely different realities – hard to reconcile, except in terms of the art of description. Both are brilliant. 

July 25, 2022 Issue

Jill Lepore has a thing for Volkswagons. Recall the ending of her great “Esmé in Neverland” (The New Yorker, November 21, 2016), featuring the glove compartment of a junked Volkswagon Karmann Ghia. Well, in her excellent “Moving Right Along,” in this week’s issue, she explores her VW obsession in full. She attends this year’s New York International Auto Show to view the new Volkswagon Buzz:

Volkswagen displayed its gleaming fleet in a back corner of the main show floor, where the Buzz was parked on a platform behind a plastic half wall and roped off, like a work of art. It was one of the few cars at the show that you couldn’t climb into or touch. People were curious about it, took pictures, pointed it out to their kids. “I think it’s sharp,” they’d say. “Is it a Bulli?” (That’s what the VW bus is called in Germany.) Or, “Oh, a Kombi!” (what it’s called in much of Latin America). Technically, the Buzz is the start of a whole new line, but sentimentally it’s the eighth generation of a very old car.

She compares the Buzz to its iconic predecessor, the VW bus:

The bus was cheap; the Buzz is pricey. (The base U.S. version is expected to cost around forty-five thousand dollars.) Also, the front end of the bus, famously, had a face, a loopy, goofy, smiling face: the eyes two perfectly round, bug-eyed headlights, the nose a swooping piece of chrome trim, the mouth a gently curving bumper. The Buzz has a face, too, but its eyes, hard and angular, look angry, as if beneath a furrowed brow, and its smile is a smirk. 

She visits the Volkswagon factory in Hanover, Germany, where the Buzz is made:

Workers would bike by, eying us a little suspiciously. Parts are moved from place to place not with Plattenwagen but with autonomous vehicles, R2-D2-ish beeping carts—the ugly, clumsy ancestors of a new species of sleeker, prettier driverless cars, the dinosaurs to those birds. They stopped, politely, at every intersection, their cameras looking both ways before crossing the road.

And, in the climax of the piece, she test-drives a new Buzz:

I asked to test it, and, amazingly, the company brought one to me, in my home town. It was loaded onto a semi, along with a 1969 bus, and driven to the parking lot behind Harvard Stadium. Then I was sent a photo, and a message: “Your chariots await.”

She says, 

The difference between driving the bus and driving the Buzz is the difference between beating eggs with a whisk and pressing the On button of a mixer. There’s just very little to do. The accelerator has a triangle on it, a Play button; the brake has two vertical lines on it, for Pause.

My favorite part of “Moving Right Along” is Lepore’s description of her family’s old Volkswagon Vanagon:

It was rusty and brown, with a stick shift, and the locks didn’t work and it smelled like smoke, except more like a campfire than like cigarettes, and we took it camping and pushed down the seats to make a bed and slept inside, with two toddlers and a baby and a Great Dane, and we all fit, even with fishing poles and Swiss Army knives and battery-operated lanterns and binoculars and Bananagrams and bug spray and a beloved, pint-size red plastic suitcase full of the best pieces from our family’s Lego collection. It was, honestly, the dream. If you took it to the beach, you could just slide open the door and pop up the table—the five seats in back faced one another—and eat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches while watching the waves or putting a baby down for a nap. The carpet would get covered with sand and crushed seashells. Weeks later, the whole van would still smell like a cottage by the sea.

“Moving Right Along” is a wonderful Agnès Varda-like blend of the documentary and the personal. I enjoyed it immensely. 

3 for the Sea: First Person

This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of the first person.

All three of these books are written in the first-person major. That, for me, is a compelling aspect of their style. They aren’t second-hand reports (except when they're recounting other people's stories or telling about historical events). McPhee, Raban, and O’Hanlon were actually there – on the Stella Lykes, in Guayaquil, as pirates climb up the anchor chain (McPhee); on the Penelope, as it spins through the “multibillion-gallon turmoil” of Deception Pass (Raban); on the Norlantean, as it wallows deep down in the waves of a North Atlantic hurricane (O’Hanlon). They’re writing from personal experience, which, for me, is the most concrete form of reality. 

But each of them has a distinctive way of “being there.” Their “I”s differ from each other. Raban and O’Hanlon are much more self-revealing than McPhee. Raban writes about his father’s death. He shows his marriage fall apart. He discloses his fears:

I am afraid of the sea. I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension. Rationalism deserts me at sea. I’ve seen the scowl of enmity and contempt on the face of a wave that broke from the pack and swerved to strike my boat. I have twice promised God that I would never again put out to sea, if only He would, just this once, let me reach harbour. I’m not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I’m at sea.

O’Hanlon writes a transfixing form of interior monologue, often in parentheses, constantly revealing his inner thoughts. For example:

(So why hadn’t I noticed that? Why hadn’t I even registered that steel slide – big enough to stand in – leading to the steel gate of the scupper, where the light from the sea outside shone so white, where, I supposed, the gannets and the kittiwakes waited, and whence, as the Norlantean took those violent rolls to starboard, the cold fresh manic sea powered and swept across the deck? It’s OK, I said to myself, stop this nonsense, you’re in another world – you don’t need these self-imposed anxieties; you can’t expect to understand everything at once – relax; because there’s so much time ahead of you, so much genuine, external, comforting real fear – and it’s all coming your way …)

McPhee, in Looking for a Ship, doesn’t share many intimate thoughts. But his fascinating descriptions of life aboard the Stella Lykes sometimes include his personal response. For example:

I remember the first time I appeared in the officers’ dining room for dinner. The captain was there, and Andy Chase, and Bernie Tibbotts. All three had been served and were eating. No one else was present. Tibbotts sat alone at a table, facing the opposite wall. The captain, at his table, sat with his back to a third wall, looking into the room, and into the space between the turned backs of Chase and Tibbotts. Franz Kafka was up in the ceiling, crawling on a fluorescent tube. No one spoke. No one so much as nodded when I came in. I sat down where I was supposed to: at a fourth table, across the room from the captain, I looked at him through the slot between the other men’s backs. I did not have – I’m here to tell you – the temerity to speak.

All three of these books feature the kind of active first-person sentence I devour. Examples:

Sometimes I go on lookout with Peewee, Mac, or Calvin – go forward with a flashlight on the main deck at four, up the ladder to the fo’c’sle deck, around the windlasses and the anchor chains, and past the hawsepipes to the absolute point of the bow, where the lookout station conforms to the requirements of admiralty court, being “as far forward and as low down as conditions allow.” [Looking for a Ship]

At the fairway buoy, I killed the engine and unrolled the headsail, letting the boat drift north on the wind at a speed that could have been comfortably outstripped by a very old lady on a bicycle. [Passage to Juneau]

By the tail, which was not a fish-tail as you might imagine it, but several inches of raw-hide whip, I hoisted the 2-foot-long-huge-headed, slender-bodied, grey-silver, big-scaled, armour-plated, snub-snouted, underslung-mouthed pre-human fish to eye-level – and eye-to-eye it was truly disturbing, because its eyeball was three times the size of mine. [Trawler]

Below the bridge deck is the boat deck, and on the boat deck is Captain Washburn’s office. Nine A.M. I often sit here in the morning drinking coffee, reading manifests, and listening to him. [Looking for a Ship]

Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water, where I let go the anchor, switched off the engine and found my hands were incapable of striking a match to light a cigarette. [Passage to Juneau]

I made my way round to him – hanging on to the edge of the conveyor to the hold, to the curve of the gutting table; I clambered over the hopper-conveyor; and I stood, beginning to slide, like the big slimy fish, port to starboard, starboard to port. [Trawler]

An active verb, a line of specific description, and the indispensable “I” – these are the ingredients of my favourite kind of sentence. These three books abound with them.

Postscript: Another aspect of these great books that I relish is their nature description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.