September 19, 2022 Issue

Delightful “Talk” story in this week’s issue – Adam Iscoe’s "Loyalists." It’s a series of moments in the day of a British specialty store, Myers of Keswick, in the West Village. But it’s not just any day; it’s September 8, the day Queen Elizabeth II died. In the course of making their purchases, customers comment on the Queen’s passing. Example:

2:12 p.m. One exchange: Elena Saldana, an apron-clad woman behind the shop’s counter who has worked at the shop for twenty-five years, said, “What can I get you?” A bespectacled Brit named Harry King, who has been a hairdresser for celebrities and common people in London and New York, replied, “A tissue.” Two almost-laughs. One Scotch egg bought by King. “I haven’t had one in years,” he said. “I’ll sit and have a little cry eating it watching the telly before I go to the gym.”

I like the way Iscoe structures this piece. Each paragraph is like a logbook entry. My favourite passage catalogues the contents of the store’s window display:

2:15 p.m. More than two dozen white roses, hydrangeas, sweet peas, and orchids; lots of Union Jack bunting; a few commemorative plates; and one framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, all placed in the store window—pushing aside a few dozen jars of Haywards Traditional Onions (flavor: Medium & Tangy), Heinz Sandwich Spread (original), Baxters Sliced Beetroot (“suitable for vegans”), Batchelors Bigga Marrowfat peas (“No. 1 in UK”), and Marmite. Not pushed aside: one urn holding Archie’s ashes.

Iscoe is a superb “Talk” writer. “Loyalists” is one of his best. 

September 12, 2022 Issue

It’s time to talk about Leanne Shapton. She has a new series of swimming pool paintings in this week’s New Yorker. That’s one reason to talk about her. Another is the great job she’s doing as The New York Review of Book’s new art editor. She’s enlivened the covers of that excellent publication immensely. And she’s contributed some wonderful illustrations of her own. This one, for example, a portrait of Henry David Thoreau, for Brenda Wineapple’s “New England Ecstasies” (March 10, 2022): 

Shapton is a superb watercolorist. I first encountered her work back in 2012, when I read Jordan Awan’s “Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Pools,” newyorker.com (August 15, 2012). Awan’s piece is accompanied by a slideshow of twelve Shapton swimming pools, including this cream-green abstract beauty, titled “Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre, Brantford, Ontario”:

Now, in this week’s issue, Shapton has a new set of swimming pools, this one called “The Swimming Scene: Sunset Park Pool” – nine exquisite paintings of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park Pool, each representing a view of the pool at a particular time of day, each with a caption describing what is happening at that moment. For example, here’s the “4:05 P.M.” painting and its caption:

4:05 p.m. Twenty people in the pool. Then forty. More families, more small children in swim diapers. With no diving board, the most popular move is running hard to the edge and jumping. Splashing like cymbals.

Shapton's luminous pools are cool and inviting. They make me want to go for a swim.

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Avid Particularizing

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Dora Zhang’s idea of description seems anemic. She says, 

In spite of its wide-ranging forms, our standard conception of description remains quite narrow. Derived from a realist paradigm, it is identified largely with inventories of the material world and often simply synonymous with a “prose of things.” [Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel] 

Well, all I can say is that her conception of description isn’t mine. In this series, I’ve tried to show that description is much more than just inventory. It is sensory, kinetic, analytical, detailed, immersive, and figurative. Even when it is inventory, e.g., Ian Frazier’s marvelous list of contents of the Angler’s Roost (see my previous post), it provides combinational delight. 

But I agree with Zhang on at least one crucial point: description is subjective. She says, “Description is always a form of translation rather than transcription.” She says further that “the seemingly simple, neutral task of describing is determined by a whole host of assumptions about what is worthy of attention, what is relevant and irrelevant, what the salient features are by which objects should be identified and categorized.” I think this is true. We notice and describe in accordance with who we are and what interests us. This, to me, is what makes description fascinating.

For my final example of descriptive art, I want to come full circle (so to speak). I began this series with an excerpt from John McPhee’s magnificent “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977; Book I of his great Coming into the Country). Today, I’ll finish with another passage from it – the paragraph immediately following the one I quoted earlier:

Paddling again, we move down long pools separated by short white pitches, looking to see whatever might appear in the low hills, in the cottonwood, in the white and black spruce – and in the river, too. Its bed is as distinct as if the water were not there. Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and their dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.

Like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins – what an incredible image! A double simile: river like sky; salmon like zeppelins. Looking over the side of the canoe, we see their oval shapes floating there. The sentence is brilliantly visual – the perfect finish to an extraordinarily evocative paragraph.

Time to sum up. I'm struck by a phrase in John Updike’s virtuoso description of Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop that I quoted previously. Updike wrote, “But the illustration is saturated in every corner with an avid particularizing that allows us to forgive the cuteness of the cat and the stagey quaintness of the whole, the idealization of small-town life.” That, for me, is what description is all about: avid particularizing.

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Angler's Roost

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Another of my favorite forms of description is cataloging. One of the best examples of it is found in Ian Frazier’s wonderful “An Angler at Heart” (The New Yorker, April 19, 1982; included in his 2002 collection The Fish’s Eye), a profile of Jim Deren, sole proprietor of a Manhattan fishing-tackle shop called the Angler’s Roost. Midway in his piece, Frazier lists some of the things Deren has for sale:

Deren also has:

thousands of lures designed to imitate live-game fish prey, with names like Bass-Oreno, original Spin-Oreno, Buzz’n Cobra, Chugger, Lucky 13, Crazy Crawler, Hopkins N-Eql, Goo-Goo Eyes, Hula Popper, Jitterbug, Devil’s Horse, Creek Chub Wiggle Fish, Flatfish, Lazy Ike, Red Eye, Dardevle, Fluke Slayer, Ava Diamond Jig, Rapala, Dancing Doll Jig, Rebel Darter, Mirrolure Shyster, Abu-Reflex, Swedish Wobbler, Hawaiian Wiggler, Golden-Eye Troublemaker, Hustler, Al’s Goldfish, Pikie Minnow, Salty Shrimper, Williams Wobbler, Tiny Tad, Tiny Torpedo, Zara (named after Zarragossa Street, the former red-light district in Pensacola, Florida, because of its attractive wiggle);

countless trout flies that imitate mayflies at every stage of their life, with names like Quill Gordon, Hendrickson, March Brown, Red Quill, Grey Fox, Lady Beaverkill, Light Cahill, Grey Fox Variant, Dun Variant, Cream Variant, Blue-Winged Olive, Sulphur Dun, Brown Drake, Green Drake, Pale Evening Dun, Little White-Winged Black;

trout flies that imitate other insects – the Letort Hopper, Jassid, Black Ant, Red Ant, Cinnamon Ant, Black Gnat, Spider, Leaf Roller, Stonefly, Caddis, Caddis Worm, Caddis Pupa, Dragonfly, Hellgrammite, Damselfly;

flies that imitate mice, frogs, and bats;

streamer flies – the Muddler Minnow, Spruce Fly, Spuddler, Professor, Supervisor, Black Ghost, Grey Ghost, Mickey Finn – which are probably meant to imitate minnows;

other flies – the Parmachene Belle, Lord Baltimore, Yellow Sally, Adams, Rat-Faced McDougal, Wooly Worm, Hare’s Ear, Humpy, Royal Coachman, Hair-Wing Royal Coachman, Lead-Wing Coachman, Queen of the Waters, Black Prince, Red Ibis – of which it is hard to say just what they are supposed to imitate, and which are sometimes called attractor flies;

big, colorful salmon flies, with names like Nepisiquit, Abbey, Thunder and Lightning, Amherst, Black Fairy, Orange Blossom, Silver Doctor, Dusty Miller, Hairy Mary, Lancelot, Jock Scott, Fair Duke, Durham Ranger, Marlodge, Fiery Brown, Night Hawk, Black Dose, Warden’s Worry;

flies that he invented himself – Deren’s Stonefly, Deren’s Fox, Deren’s Harlequin, The Fifty Degrees, The Torpedo, The Black Beauty, Deren’s Speckled Caddis, Deren’s Cream Caddis, Deren’s Cinnamon Caddis, Deren’s Grey Caddis;

feathers for tying flies – rooster (domestic and foreign, winter plumage and summer plumage, dozens of shades), ostrich, goose, kingfisher, mallard, peacock, turkey, imitation jungle cock, imitation marabou, imitation wood duck;

fur – Alaskan seal, arctic fox, mink, beaver, weasel, imitation chinchilla, raccoon, ermine, rabbit, fitch, marten, gray fox, skunk, squirrel, civet cat – also for tying flies;

hair – deer, bear, antelope, moose, goat, elk, badger, calf – also for tying flies;

scissors, forceps, pliers, razors, vises, lamps, tweezers, bobbins, bodkins, floss, thread, chenille, tinsel, Mylar, lead wire, wax, yarn – also for tying flies;

chest waders, wader suspenders, wader belts, wader cleats, wader racks, wader patch kits, wading shoes, wading staffs, hip boots, boot dryers, inner boot soles, Hijack brand V-notch boot removers, insulated socks, fishing vests, bug-repellent fishing vests, rain pants, ponchos, head nets, long-billed caps, hunting jackets, thermal underwear, high-visibility gloves, fishing shirts; 

ice augers, dried grasshoppers, minnow scoops, fish stringers, hook disgorgers, rubber casting weights, gigs, spears, car-top rod carriers, rubber insect legs, fish-tank aerators, English game bags, wicker creels, folding nets, hand gaffs, worm rigs, gasoline motor starter cords, watercolor paintings of the Miramichi River, sponge-rubber bug bodies, line straightners, knot-tiers, snakebite kits, hatbands, leather laces, salmon eggs, plastic-squid molds, stuff you spray on your glasses so they won’t fog up, duck and crow calls, waterproof match cases, lead split-shot, collapsible oars, bells that you hook up to your line so they ring when the fish takes your bait, Justrite electric head lanterns, dried mayfly nymphs, rescue whistles, canteens, butterfly nets, peccary bristles, porcupine quills, frog harnesses … 

Wow! That's quite an inventory - 584 words! Is it too much? Not for me. I treasure every word. What better way to describe the Angler’s Roost’s surreal reality? Just lay it all out, item after glorious item – a combination of names and materials the likes of which have never been seen before or since –a vast Rauschenberg assemblage, a giant Cornell tackle box, evincing a fascination with and an appetite for life in all its incredible abundance and variety. 

My next post in this series will be my last, in which I’ll try to sum it all up.  

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Gooseneck Lamp

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Much of description’s pleasure is in its details. Take John Updike’s description of Norman Rockwell’s great Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950), for example: 

The boots and rubbers, for instance, in front of the stove, with its red-hot coals, and, in the diagonally opposite corner, the ghostly row of old shaving mugs in the top cells of the obsolete cabinet, between the ceiling fixture of frosted glass and the little gooseneck lamp. One’s eye, traveling around the edge of the painting, encounters a whisk broom, an Indian-shuttered window frame, a porcelain basin, a rack of comic books, two knobbed chairs, a mullion with parched putty, a carved crack in the corner of a window pane, a spindleback settee, shelves holding old magazines, a gun, fishing tackle, and all along the top, the gilt appliqué letters spelling BARBER. The eye naturally swoops through the front window to the luminous, man-crammed rectangle of the back room, skimming through the shadows of the closed shop, past the listening cat, the magnificent old barber chair, the hairy broom, the little cracked mirror, the wartime poster of a torn flag, into the bright chaste chamber where music is made. The most brilliant passages of painting, perhaps, depict the standing violinist, all but dissolved in light, and the reflections on the foreshortened piece of stove pipe leading into the wall. But the illustration is saturated in every corner with an avid particularizing that allows us to forgive the cuteness of the cat and the stagey quaintness of the whole, the idealization of small-town life. (“Acts of Seeing,” More Matter, 1999)

Overrepresentation? Not in the eyes of this beholder. I relish every detail. Updike has been criticized for his “slather of detail” (see James Wood, “John Updike’s Complacent God”). But in this case, he’s in his element; he’s describing a slather of detail. Updike has found his ideal subject. Or, put it the other way around, Rockwell has found his ideal critic. Updike creates a verbal reproduction of Rockwell’s painting right down to that “little cracked mirror.” And, at the same time, he provides insight into Rockwell’s (and his own) governing aesthetic. That “avid particularizing” is inspired! 

In my next post in this series, I’ll consider another form of avid particularizing – lists.

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Incision-Slashed Torso

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Ekphrasis – sounds like a skin condition. I prefer the plainer “description of art.” It's one of my favorite forms of representation. Example:

The enormously enlarged photograph of the incision-slashed torso was the pivotal image of the show; it compelled immediate, stunned attention, and its presence invaded one’s perception of the other, less overtly horrifying images. Its horror comes from the fact it is not a clinical study of a body on an operating table, or a medical-textbook illustration showing a person enduring photography as he does treatment, but a picture of a beautiful young woman posed in a graceful, even slightly vain attitude. She has put a silver necklace around her neck and a bracelet on one wrist. (The other wrist is encircled by a plastic hospital tag.) Her body has the delicate slenderness of a boy’s, and the photograph subtly evokes Edward Weston’s lovely study of his son Neil’s nude torso – it is similarly cropped at the neck and at the pubes. The two savage arcs of messy black surgical stitches that rip into the right breast and tear down the abdomen are like obscene marks made on a statue by a vandal. The tense clash of imagery – the brutal yoking of the emblems of pain, pathology, mutilation, and inanition with the attributes of health, wholeness, volition, and grace – is paralleled by a conflict of feeling within the viewer, who is both repelled by and drawn to the image: appalled by the way the woman is exposing what it is “normal” to keep out of sight, and yet fascinated by the details thereby revealed. And, oddly, the closer the viewer looks at the incisions, the less distress he feels; finally, his repugnance recedes and is replaced by something akin to awe for the work of the anonymous surgeon, for the neat and clean way the body has been closed, for the small outward signs of damage. 

That’s from Janet Malcolm’s great “The View from Plato’s Cave” (The New Yorker, October 18, 1976; included in her 1980 collection Diana & Nikon). It’s a description of Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein’s photograph Toni, October (1975). I first read it when it appeared in The New Yorker; I’ve never forgotten it. (It clinched my decision to subscribe to the magazine.) It’s both description and analysis. Note three things: (1) the transfixing specificity of Malcolm’s description (“The two savage arcs of messy black surgical stitches that rip into the right breast and tear down the abdomen are like obscene marks made on a statue by a vandal”); (2) the comparative analysis (“Her body has the delicate slenderness of a boy’s, and the photograph subtly evokes Edward Weston’s lovely study of his son Neil’s nude torso – it is similarly cropped at the neck and at the pubes”); and (3), the assessment of why the picture is so “stunning” (“Its horror comes from the fact it is not a clinical study of a body on an operating table, or a medical-textbook illustration showing a person enduring photography as he does treatment, but a picture of a beautiful young woman posed in a graceful, even slightly vain attitude”). 

In my next post, I want to consider description in terms of its closely observed detail. Can there ever be “too much”?  

Bone Meal

Photo by John MacDougall

Last summer I had the strange experience of scattering my father’s ashes. 

It was strange for a number of reasons.

One is that a few days before I scattered them, I’d seen an episode of the TV series The White Lotus, in which Tanya, the lonely alcoholic, who carries around her mother’s ashes in an ornate gilt box, likens the scattering of them to dumping fishmeal into an aquarium. 

I couldn’t get that image out of my head as we – my brother Don, his wife Myriam, my wife Lorna, our daughter Isabel, and our old friend Tim, who owned the boat we were in – traveled Oromocto Lake, visiting Dad’s favorite fishing spots, scattering his ashes.

It’s a big lake, thirteen kilometres long, four-and-a-half kilometres wide, second largest in New Brunswick, and mostly undeveloped.

Our family had a cottage on it for almost sixty years.

A couple of years ago, after Dad was hospitalized, Don and I sold it.

That leads to the second strange aspect of my ash-scattering experience. 

For the occasion, we rented the cottage back from the people we sold it to so that we’d have a place to stay.

But the cottage was changed. 

The new owners had renovated it inside and out. 

Not only were Mother and Dad not there to greet us when we arrived (they died about a year apart, first Mother, age 89, then Dad, age 90), the cottage itself – the one Don and I spent all our summers in when we were kids, and visited many times since – was radically altered. 

The kitchen was ripped out.

The old wood stove, with its white enamel oven door and nickel fittings – gone!

The wide knotty-pine walls – gone!

The old kitchen merged with a bedroom to form a gleaming new space with an island, stainless steel appliances, and eggshell-white walls.

The large picture window in the living room – the one that Dad salvaged from an old Esso service station – gone, replaced by a smaller window.

The living room stripped of all Mother’s collections – her glass insulators, her shells, sea glass, driftwood, old steam irons, and whatnot.

All the old comfy furniture – sofa, armchairs, footstool – gone, replaced by new stuff.

The place had a streamlined, de-cluttered look.

I didn’t hate it

It was done tastefully, in an Ikea sort of way.

I’m not complaining.

It just wasn’t Mother.

It wasn’t us.

One thing the new owners retained was Dad’s long pine dining table.

For me, that table was the center of the cottage.

Not only was it where we ate; it’s where we played countless games of crib and auction forty-five, where we laughed and joked and argued and drank sometimes long into the night.

Another thing I found strange were the ashes themselves.

They weren’t really ashes. 

At least Dad’s weren’t. 

His were like bone meal, like the stuff you sprinkle around the base of a rose bush to help it grow. 

It’s weird to look in a box of this stuff – the blue plastic-lined cardboard box that comes from the crematorium – and think, that’s Dad? 

That’s the guy who drove across the Reversing Falls Bridge with a giant-size sheet of fiberboard on the car roof, holding it with his left hand out his side window, steering with his right, me on the passenger side, reaching out my side window with my right hand, desperately hanging on to it, as the wind tried to rip it from my grip, as we drove across the bridge that crazy night, taking the fiberboard home to our apartment where we planned to prop it up against the wall at the end of the hallway and use at as a backboard for throwing darts?

That’s the guy who taught me how to tie a necktie, how to throw a Frisbee, how to catch a hardball, how to swim, how to ride a bike, how to play horseshoes, how to execute the kill shot in handball? 

That’s the guy who took me to see Bonnie and Clyde and In the Heat of the Night and Cool Hand Luke, who introduced me to the pleasure of movies? 

That’s the guy who supported me, encouraged me, and never judged me, even when I crashed in ’98 and had to get treatment?

Yep, that’s him.

That’s the guy in the box, that’s his remains, as they say at the funeral home.

Life reduced to this – a box full of grit suitable for growing plants.

That’s my father in there – all that’s left of his long, durable, active life, his love of Mother, his love of his kids, his love of the Lake, his love of fishing, his love of birds, his love of campfires, his love of Keith’s India Pale Ale, his love of Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburg Penguins, on and on – the spark of life reduced to … fucking bone meal.

Ah well, what did I expect, for god’s sake? 

No one lives forever. 

Death is part of life, and so on and so forth. 

Still, it’s a shock to see it for real, to hold it in your hand, and feel its texture. 

Bone meal. 

The factuality of it is startling. 

No sense getting sentimental. 

This is all that survives us. 

Back into the earth we go, or, in Dad’s case, into the Lake.

The Lake is calm, the day sunny and warm.

The sky is my favorite kind of sky – sheer blue, the color of Windex.

We gather on the beach in front of the cottage. 

Myriam carries the box of ashes. 

Tim brings his boat to shore; we climb in.

Myriam and Isabel are in the bow; Tim’s at the controls; Don’s in the seat next to him; Lorna and I are at the back.

Tim shoves the throttle forward and off we go, surging through the blue water.

What a day to be on the Lake!

Dad would’ve eaten it up!

First stop, Gull Island.

This is where Don and Myriam scattered Mother’s ashes.

We knew this is what she wanted, because she told us. 

I didn’t attend that ceremony because of the interprovincial travel limits due to the coronavirus. 

But if Dad ever said where he wanted his ashes scattered, I wasn’t aware of it. 

We assumed he’d want them put where Mother’s had been released. 

Pretty safe assumption; he loved her. 

And we decided that while we were at it, we’d scatter some at his favorite fishing holes, too.

Dad loved the Lake.

He knew every inch of it.

He had a boat, a white Boston whaler, with a sixty horsepower Mercury outboard motor. 

He used it to explore and fish that lake.

He poked around in every corner of it, knew its shallows, knew its depths, knew its rocks and inlets and currents, knew its weather, which could be very fickle.

Today, the weather is perfect.

I was going to say “heavenly,” but I’ll steer clear of any religious connotations.

This is a secular occasion.

I’m sure that’s the way Dad would want it.

After Gull Island, we go to Kelly’s Island, Dexter’s Island, Oars Point, Rangers Camp Cove, Rocky Cove, and Bare Ass Beach. 

These are local names known to us lake-dwellers.

You might not find all of them on a map.

At each place, we stop for a while and release scoopfuls of Dad’s ashes into the water.

And this is another strange aspect of the experience.

When the white, powdery “ash” enters the water, it billows, turns key lime colour, and seems to glow.

It dances in the water like a curtain in a breeze.

It reminds me of Northern Lights.

I have no idea what accounts for this effect.

Bone meal has phosphorous in it.

Maybe that’s what makes it glow in the water?

I have no idea.

But the effect is striking.

We lingered at Bare Ass Beach, our last stop before heading back to the cottage.

Lorna, Myriam and Isabel waded ashore and walked the beach.

The luminous blue surface of the water, big old pines, dating back perhaps two hundred years or more, ragged dusky green line of spruce, with patches of lighter green for the pine, the play of light on the water – dazzling! 

Standing in the boat, pouring the last of Dad’s ashes in the water, I inadvertently spilled some on my bare feet.

I’m not sure how that happened.

The boat might’ve lurched.

The scoop might’ve been over-full.

Whatever the reason, there were Dad’s ashes on my feet and on the floor of the boat.

It was strange to feel it on my bare skin.

It was like sand, only grittier.

I stuck my feet out over the side of the boat and brushed them off, apologizing to Tim for making a mess. 

He said don’t worry about it, that he’d vacuum the boat when we got back. 

The surreal image of Dad’s ashes being sucked into Tim’s vacuum cleaner flashed through my mind. 

When we imagine what happens to us after we die, the interior of a vacuum bag is probably not the first image that leaps to mind.

But you know what?

I don’t think Dad would’ve cared.

He didn’t believe in an afterlife, at least I don’t think he did.

What he did believe in was a clean, tidy boat.

He would’ve agreed with Tim: vacuum up those ashes!

September 5, 2022 Issue

Not a whole lot in this week’s issue to get excited about. Richard Brody reviews an old movie, Pretty Poison, that I recall seeing when it first came out in 1968. I can’t remember a thing about it, other than that Pauline Kael liked it, and that’s probably why I went to see it. Brody likes it, too, calling it “a hectic pastiche that takes off from Psycho and grafts tropes from spy thrillers, teen romances, domestic melodramas, and police procedurals onto the highly textured realism of life in a small New England town, complete with its narrow-minded moralism.” I might give it a second look, although that "pastiche" isn't exactly enticing.

There’s a line in Anthony Lane’s review of Fernando León de Aranoa’s The Good Boss that made me laugh. The film stars Javier Bardem. Lane says, 

Think of the parts that Bardem played last year—the expansive Desi Arnaz, lording it over a broadcasting fiefdom in “Being the Ricardos,” and the sapphire-eyed chief of the Frenemy tribe, or whatever it was called, in “Dune.” Bardem has confessed that, in the sequel to the latter, he would very much like to ride a giant sandworm. Wouldn’t we all?

Best sentence in this week’s issue also belongs to Lane: “His hand alone is enough to fill a room, and my favorite shot shows his wandering finger, as big as a canoe, brushing against the keyboard of a laptop, which, with a soft pdoing, powers up” (“What You Wish For”). 

Toward My Own Theory of Description: The Slipper-Kick

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Who is the all-time New Yorker description champ? What’s being asked here? (1) Who is the best describer in the history of the magazine? Or (2), who is the all-time best describer of the magazine? Answer to 1: Roger Angell. You heard me. Not Nabokov. Not Updike. Not McPhee. Not Frazier. Nope. My pick is baseball writer Roger Angell. Sample:

Conjecture thickened through most of the opening game, which was absolutely close for most of the distance, and then suddenly not close at all. Don Gullett, a powerful left-hander, kept the Red Sox in check for six innings, but was slightly out pitched and vastly outacted over the same distance by Tiant. The venerable stopper (he is listed as being thirty-four and rumored as being a little or a great deal older) did not have much of a fastball on this particular afternoon, so we were treated to the splendid full range of Tiantic mime. His repertoire begins with an exaggerated mid-windup pivot, during which he turns his back on the batter and seems to examine the infield directly behind the mound for signs of crabgrass. With men on bases, his stretch consists of a succession of minute downward waggles and pauses of the glove, and a menacing sidewise, slit-eyed, Valentino-like gaze over his shoulder at the base runner. The full flower of his art, however, comes during the actual delivery, which is executed with a perfect variety show of accompanying gestures and impersonations. I had begun to take notes during my recent observations of the Cuban Garrick, and now, as he set down the Reds with only minimal interruptions (including one balk call, in the fourth), I arrived at some tentative codifications. The basic Tiant repertoire seems to include:

(1) Call the Osteopath: In mid-pitch, the man suffers an agonizing seizure in the central cervical region, which he attempts to fight off with a sharp backward twist of the head.

(2) Out of the Woodshed: Just before releasing the ball, he steps over a raised sill and simultaneously ducks his head to avoid conking it on the low door frame.

(3) The Runaway Taxi: Before the pivot, he sees a vehicle bearing down on him at top speed, and pulls back his entire upper body just in time to avoid a nasty accident.

(4) Falling Off the Fence: An attack of vertigo nearly causes him to topple over backward on the mound. Strongly suggests a careless dude on the top rung of the corral.

(5) The Slipper-Kick: In mid-pitch, he surprisingly decides to get rid of his left shoe.

(6) The Low-Flying Plane (a subtle development and amalgam of 1, 3, and 4, above): While he is pivoting, an F-105 buzzes the ballpark, passing over the infield from the third-base to the first-base side at a height of eighty feet. He follows it all the way with his eyes.

This passage makes me smile every time I read it. It’s from Angell’s brilliant “Agincourt and After” (The New Yorker, November 17, 1975; included in his 1978 collection Five Seasons), an epic account of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Is it description? Of course it is. It’s one of the most lyrical descriptions of action I’ve ever read – where lyrical means elegant, vivid, poetic, stylish, inspired, and evocative. It also contains an ingredient I haven’t mentioned to this point – analysis. Zhang doesn’t mention it in her book. Descriptive analysis is a major form of representation, particularly in descriptions of art. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

Oh, and my answer to question #2 above: Anthony Lane. See his wonderful “The New Yorker at 75” (The New Yorker, February 21, 2000; included in his 2002 collection Nobody’s Perfect). Sample:

As it happens, The New Yorker has made matters of fact its business; sticklers for exactitude will agree that, when an employee is packed off to a movie theatre, bearing a copy of the week’s film review, in order to check that the second shirt from the left in the casino scene is woven from purple plaid and not magenta velour, there is not much to stickle about.

Toward My Own Theory of Description: The Battle of Ap Bac

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

There are at least two types of kinetic description: terse and lyrical. Here’s an example of terse: 

Sgt. 1st Class Arnold Bowers, twenty-nine years old, from a Minnesota dairy farm and the 101st Airborne Division, heard the bullwhip crack of the first bullet burst through the aluminum skin of the helicopter while the machine was still fifty feet in the air. Bowers’s helicopter was the second in the flight. Vietnam was his first war. During his previous eight and a half months in the country he had experienced no combat beyond a few skirmishes with snipers. The whip cracked again and again over the din of the H-21’s engines before the wheels of the machine settled into the paddy and Bowers jumped out into the knee-high water with a squad of infantry and the ARVN first lieutenant commanding the company.

God, I love that first sentence. The passage is from Neil Sheehan’s classic “An American Soldier in Vietnam II – A Set Piece Battle” (The New Yorker, June 27, 1988; included in his 1988 A Bright and Shining Lie). Description of war is writing’s ultimate challenge. Sheehan’s piece puts us right in the thick of it, in a rice paddy with three downed ARVN helicopters under withering Viet Cong fire:

The tree line crashed with the opening volley. Bowers did not pause, and Mays controlled his nerves and stayed right behind him despite the cracks of the incoming bullets. Cho’s .50 caliber and the heavy machine gun on the other M-113 slammed like jackhammers in response to the guerrillas’ fire. Mays could make out amid the din the answering drumrolls of defiance from the Viet Cong machine gunner at the right-hand corner of the irrigation dike. 

What I relish here is Sheehan’s use of figuration – “slammed like jackhammers,” “drumrolls of defiance” – to convey the scene’s “din.” The prose is hard-edged, as it should be when all is action, pure adrenaline, and life is on the line. It’s also intensely evocative. It puts us squarely there, with those ARVN soldiers, in that rice paddy, amidst the crack of incoming bullets. 

Is thereness description’s ultimate quality? I think it might be. Another word for it is “immersion.” The writer uses words that bring us as close as possible to the experience he or she is describing. With this in mind, in my next post, I’ll look at an example of lyric kinetic description – this one drawn from the world of baseball. 

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Boogie Time

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

For me, description is the life-blood of writing. I can’t imagine how writing would work without it. It would certainly be a poor, lifeless thing. Zhang seems to think it takes a backseat to narrative. I can’t see it taking a backseat to anything. To me, narrative is just another way of saying description of action. That’s what we’re focusing on today – textual kinesis. My example is from Anthony Bourdain’s riveting “Hell’s Kitchen” (The New Yorker, April 17, 2000):

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.

This isn’t Bourdain describing what he’s seeing. This is Bourdain describing what he’s doing – in detail after glorious detail – first person, present tense. Description doesn’t get more immediate or intense than that. Or does it? In my next post, my example comes from war.

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Horseshoe Crab Carnage

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Five senses. So far I’ve done four. May as well complete the set. Sight – this is the one Zhang privileges, defining description in terms of its “visualizing imperative.” Her interest is in the way James, Proust, and Woolf describe what “hovers on the edge of visibility.” Mine is in description that calls up a vivid picture in the mind’s eye. This one, for example:

The crumbling brittle of horseshoe-crab parts under the car wheels now became so thick it was unnerving, with uncrushed, whole horseshoe crabs all over the road as well. I pulled onto the left-hand berm to investigate. When I climbed up on the riprap wall, I saw throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks. The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks.

That’s from Ian Frazier’s great “Blue Bloods” (The New Yorker, April 14, 2014; included in his 2016 Hogs Wild). I read that description when it first appeared in the magazine; I’ve never forgotten it. Two elements stand out: (1) the auditory “crumbling brittle of horseshoe-crab parts under the car wheels”; and (2) that incredible visual of the horseshoe crab carnage “reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg.” 

There’s action in that passage, too: Frazier pulling “onto the left-hand berm to investigate,” climbing “up on the riprap wall,” seeing “throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks.” And, of course, there’s the horrific sight of some of the horseshoe crabs seemingly still alive, “moving feebly.”

Description of action is a major form of literary description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Pasta and Clams

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

What does toasted grasshopper taste like? Hannah Goldfield, in her “Tables For Two: Oxomoco” (The New Yorker, October 8, 2018), tells us:

On a recent evening, a pair of appetizers made for a thrillingly terrifying spread. A hamachi and peach aguachile, a dish similar to ceviche, was powdered so aggressively in crimson chile puya that it looked almost bloody. “It’s like lava,” commented one diner. “Or surgery!” said another. A beef-tartare tostada was bloody, the raw meat as sweet and juicy as fruit with a slight metallic tang. Its garnish of identifiable segments of toasted grasshopper was not for the faint of heart, but it rewarded the brave, with a flavor that went from nutty to bitter to honeyed.

Description of taste isn’t mentioned in Dora Zhang’s Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (2020). Zhang defines description as “a form of textual visualizing.” But description is much more than that. It’s a form of textual touching, smelling, tasting, and hearing, too. Today, I’ll focus on tasting. One of my favourite descriptions of taste is Bill Buford’s evocation of the flavor of a plate of pasta and clams, prepared in the Manhattan restaurant Babbo: 

This is what happened: Mark, having cooked up a large quantity of linguine for its regulation six minutes and thirty seconds, emptied it into a pan of New Zealand cockle-clams, sloppily dripping lots of that starchy water on them in the process, a big wet heap of pasta on top of several dozen shellfish. He swirled the pan, gave it a little flip, swirled it again, and then left it alone so that it could cook, bubbling away, for another half minute. (This was curious, I thought, watching him – you don’t normally leave a pan of pasta on the flattop.) Then he took a strand and tasted it. He gave me one. It was not what I expected. It was no longer linguine, exactly; it had changed color and texture and become something else. I tasted it again. This, I thought, is the equivalent of bread soaked in gravy. But what was the sauce? I looked at the pan: the cockle-clams had been all closed up a few minutes earlier, as they cooked their shells had opened, and as they opened they released the juices inside. That’s what I was tasting in this strand of linguine: an ocean pungency. “It’s about the sauce, not the little snot of meat in the shell,” Mario told me later. “No one is interested in the little snot of meat!”

What I learned in an Italian kitchen was that a meal is about the pasta, not the sauce. But here, in tasting this strand of linguine, I was discovering that it wasn’t about either the pasta or the sauce; it was about both, about the interaction between a pasta and a sauce, the result – this new thing, this highly flavored noodle – evocative of a childhood trip to the sea.

Pure poetry! It’s from Buford’s superb “The Pasta Station” (The New Yorker, September 6, 2004; included in his 2006 Heat). Again, as in Whitney Balliett's description of Elvin Jones’ drumming, quoted previously, the passage blends two kinds of description: action and taste. We see the dish being prepared; we taste the result: “an ocean pungency,” “evocative of a childhood trip to the sea.” 

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Cymbal Splashes

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

I’m still exploring types of sensory description. In my first post, I considered description of touch (“The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving”). In my second, I looked at description of smell (“About a month before Christmas, when the bakery began turning out its seasonal cookies, neighborhood breezes effloresced with cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger”). Today, I’ll consider description of sound. My example is from Whitney Balliett’s great “A Walk to the Park” (The New Yorker, May 18, 1968; included in his splendid 1971 collection Ecstasy at the Onion), a profile of the extraordinary jazz drummer Elvin Jones:

The first number, built around Jones’ wire brushes, was a fast version of “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise.” Farrell soloed on flute and Greene and Ware followed. Jones handles brushes the way a great chef handles a wire whisk, with fast, circular, loose-wristed motions. He began almost inaudibly, with polishing, sliding, ticking sounds on the snare, broken by silvery cymbal strokes. Slowly he rent this gentle flow with bass-drum beats and with jagged, irregular wire-brush strokes on the snare and the big tomtom. These were multiplied and intensified until it sounded as though he were using sticks, and the solo ended. It was a short, perfectly designed warmup. The group went into “Night in Tunisia.” It started in a high, intense fashion, and by the time Farrell had finished a ten-minute solo Jones had switched to sticks and Pookie’s was ballooning with sound. Then Jones took off. He began with heavy rimshots on the snare, which split notes and split them again, then broke into swaying, grandiose strokes on his ride cymbals, accompanied by lightning triplets and off-beat single-notes on the bass drum. Switching patterns, he moved his right hand between his big and small tomtoms in a faster and faster arc while his left hand roared through geometrical snare-drum figures and his high-hat rattled and shivered. He switched patterns again and settled down on his snare with sharp, flat strokes, spaced regularly and then irregularly. He varied this scheme incessantly, gradually bringing in bass-drum beats and big tomtom booms. Cymbals exploded like flushed birds. Jones had passed beyond a mere drum solo. He was playing with ear-splitting loudness, and what he was doing had become an enormous rolling ball of abstract sound, divorced from music, from reality, from flesh and bone. It trampled traditional order and replaced it with unknown order. It delighted the mind and hammered at the guts. Jones waded through his cymbals again and went into a deliberate, alternately running and limping fussilade between his snare and tomtoms that rose an inch or two higher in volume. Suddenly he was finished. Farrell played the theme and Jones slid into a long, downhill coda that was a variation on the close of his solo, paused, and came down with a crash on his cymbals and bass drum.

Wow! That’s one of the most bravura descriptions of jazz I’ve ever read (I almost said “heard”). That “Cymbals exploded like flushed birds” is inspired! There’s another passage earlier in the piece that’s equally as good:

Farrell started quietly on the blues and Jones set up light tic-tic tic-tic-tic tic tic-i-tic tic-tic strokes on the snare, followed by softer irregular strokes and a shaking roll. The high-hat jiggled unevenly up and down and the bass drum was quiet. Farrell grew more heated, and Jones began throwing in cymbal splashes, bass-drum accents, and complex, charging left-hand figures. His volume rose steadily, though it never eclipsed Farrell, and suddenly one realized that Jones’ quadruple-jointed rhythmic engine was in high gear. Pookie’s was rocking. At the end of Farrell’s solo, Jones abruptly dropped his volume to some sliding cymbal strokes which shimmered below the opening of the piano solo. Jones scuttled and rattled behind the piano. His snare-drum accents were light and loose, and the center of his efforts fell on the ride cymbal, on which he would run softly ahead of the beat, fall exaggeratedly behind then catch up and ride the beat before shooting ahead again. During Ware’s solo, Jones whispered along on the high-hat, dropped occasional bass-drum beats, and made Ware’s tone sound fat and assured. Farrell returned, exchanged some four-bar breaks with Jones, and the number ended with a shuddering rimshot. 

Note the profusion of mimetic verbs and verbal adjectives: “polishing,” “sliding,” “ticking,” “split,” “roared,” “rattled,” “shivered,” “exploded,” “trampled,” “hammered,” “waded,” “shaking,” “jiggled,” “charging,” “rocking,” “shimmered,” “scuttled,” “shooting,” “whispered.” These passages describe both the action of Jones’ drumming and its sound. They blend two types of description: sensory and kinetic. I’ll have more to say about kinetic description in later posts, but first I want to finish my discussion of sensory description. My next post will be on description of taste.

Kevin Barry's "Night Boat to Tangier"

Not often do I post about novels. That’s because I’m generally not a fan. There’ve been exceptions. Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time comes to mind. Now there’s another – Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier. I recognize a brilliant stylist when I see one. Barry is the real deal. Samples:

The years are rolling out like tide now.

His aura is of brassy menace.

I fucken hate ignorance, he says.

From the glare of the arclights, the lingering of pollutants and the refraction of heat left by the late October sun, the air is thick and smoky, and it makes the night glow a vivid thing, and dense.

An attack dog barks a yard of stars.

They exchange a dry look.

The bar awaits grimly beneath the glare of its strip lights. It runs the thread of its voices.

The head waiter looked like a ’tacheless Salvador Dali and drank a ball of coñac and was sustained.

The city ran a swarm of fast anchovy faces.

The hours were heavy and cumbersome and moved by like old horses.

The barman drooped a heavy eye over the football pages. He had the look of a long shift off him.

A dead hotel was chained up, its windows blind.

That’s enough to give you a taste. Oh yes, and this beauty:

He drank Powers whiskey from a naggin clamped between his thighs and slowed for the bends that he knew by touch.

What’s it about? Drugs, sex, violence. Need I say more? Just finished chapter eight, “The Judas Iscariot All-Night Drinking Club.” What an extraordinary piece of writing! Haven’t read anything like it since the knife fight in Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain. Barry’s style crosses McCarthy on Tarantino. Beware! Fucken addictive. 

Postscript: The New Yorker recently ran a terrific Kevin Barry short story – “The Pub with No Beer.” That’s where I first encountered him.

August 29, 2022 Issue

Kenneth Tynan is one of The New Yorker’s all-time greats. What’s amazing is that he achieved this status on the strength of just five pieces, all published in the late 1970s: “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man” (on Mel Brooks); “Withdrawing with Style from the Chaos” (on Tom Stoppard); “At Three Minutes Past Eight You Must Dream” (on Ralph Richardson); “Louise Brooks Tells All” (on Louise Brooks); and “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” (on Johnny Carson). One of those pieces – “Louise Brooks Tells All” – appears in this week’s issue (an “archival issue”) under the new title “The Girl in the Black Helmet.” What a splendid piece! I’d forgotten how good it is.

It’s a profile of the silent screen actress Louise Brooks. The first sentence is a beauty:

None of this would have happened if I had not noticed, while lying late in bed on a hot Sunday morning last year in Santa Monica and flipping through the TV guide for the impending week, that one of the local public-broadcasting channels had decided to show, at 1 p.m. that very January day, a film on which my fantasies had fed ever since I first saw it, a quarter of a century before.

None of what would have happened? It’s almost impossible not to read on. The film on which his fantasies had fed is Georg Pabst’s Pandora’s Box. Tynan watches it on TV. He writes,

On Channel 28, I stayed with the film to its end, which is also Lulu’s. Of the climactic sequence, so decorously understated, Louise Brooks once wrote, in Sight & Sound, “It is Christmas Eve and she is about to receive the gift which has been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac.” When it was over, I switched channels and returned to the real world of game shows and pet-food commercials, relieved to find that the spell she cast was still as powerful as ever. 

The next section of the piece shifts to Rochester, New York, home of the International Museum of Photography. Tynan goes there to see its “hoard of Brooks pictures” – six of them new to him – within a space of two days. On the eve of Day One, he “mentally recaps what I have learned of Brooks’s early years.” What a recap it is, containing several inspired descriptions, including this one:

At fifteen, already a beauty sui generis, as surviving photographs show, with her hair, close-cropped at the nape to expose what Christopher Isherwood has called “that unique imperious neck of hers,” cascading in ebony bangs down the high, intelligent forehead and descending on either side of her eyes in spit curls slicked forward at the cheekbones, like a pair of enamelled parentheses—at fifteen, she left high school and went to New York with her dance teacher. 

In the third and fourth sections of the piece, Tynan is in the Museum’s Dryden Theatre, watching Brooks films. His commentary is brilliant. Sample:

What images do I retain of Brooks in “Love ’Em and Leave ’Em”? Many comedic details; e.g., the scene in which she fakes tears of contrition by furtively dabbling her cheeks with water from a handily placed goldfish bowl, and our last view of her, with all her sins unpunished, merrily sweeping off in a Rolls-Royce with the owner of the department store. And, throughout, every closeup of that blameless, unblemished face.

Section five astonishes. After watching the Brooks films, Tynan leaves the Dryden Theatre, and takes a taxi to an apartment building only a few blocks away. He writes,

I rode up in the elevator to the third floor and pressed a doorbell a few paces along the corridor. After a long pause, there was a loud snapping of locks. The door slowly opened to reveal a petite woman of fragile build, wearing a woollen bed jacket over a pink nightgown, and holding herself defiantly upright by means of a sturdy metal cane with four rubber-tipped prongs. She had salt-and-pepper hair combed back into a ponytail that hung down well below her shoulders, and she was barefoot. One could imagine this gaunt and elderly child as James Tyrone’s wife in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”; or, noting the touch of authority and panache in her bearing, as the capricious heroine of Jean Giraudoux’s “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” I stated my name, adding that I had an appointment. She nodded and beckoned me in. I greeted her with a respectful embrace. This was my first physical contact with Louise Brooks.

Brooks lives! Tynan meets her! For the rest of the piece, we are with them, in Brooks’s austere two-room apartment, as she reminisces about that “halcyon decade” of her life, the twenties, when her career took her to New York, London, Hollywood, Paris, and Berlin, and she hung out with, among others, Herman Mankiewicz, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin. 

“The Girl in the Black Helmet” is a classic New Yorker profile – perhaps the best ever to appear in the magazine’s long history. Its only competitors are the other Tynan pieces listed above, especially “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” my favorite of the series. 

3 for the Sea: Nature

This is the ninth 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 wonderful nature descriptions.

Part of the deep pleasure these books provide is a thrilling contact with first nature:

Albatrosses

Albatrosses flew beside us, motionless to the point of impudence, their eyes on our necks, their great wings fixed, their iron momentum matching the ship’s. At bridge level, sixty-five feet above the water, an albatross flew beside us with his right leg up scratching his ear. [Looking for a Ship]

Plankton

A teaspoonful of Puget Sound water yielded a whole world of Hollywood monsters: copepods; rotifiers; flagellates, their whips flailing on the glass. Each time I dipped the slide in the bucket, the cast changed: new wrigglies waved spiky antennae, inflated their balloon-like luminescent torsos, flexed their cilia, flapped rubbery watery wings, or gazed up at me with vacant soccer-ball eyes. [Passage to Juneau]

Porpoises

A new sound entered the orchestra: the explosive chuff! of a Dall’s porpoise surfacing along side the boat. Chuff! Chuff! Chuff! Six black-and-white torpedoes, in close formation, went scissoring under the bow, came up to exhale, then shot astern, where they wheeled around in unison before launching another mock attack. Bantam weight, pure muscle, they whizzed past on the beam, just a few inches below the surface, in a show-off wriggle of exultant flesh. [Passage to Juneau]

Kittiwakes and Gannets

The kittiwakes and the gannets rose into the wind, banking round towards the cod-end. The Kittiwakes alighted alongside the line of net (and they seemed so light, so delicate, so out of place in all this unremitting violence); they rode the small waves on the big swell with ease; they flicked up their wings as they pecked at the mesh. The gannets, 60 or 70 feet above the surface-hills of the sea, would flip over to one side, half close their 6-foot expanse of wing, and, elbows out, streak down towards the cod-end in one long low oblique-angled dive, folding their wings tight against their bodies, a second before impact, to become a white underwater trace of bird and bubbles. [Trawler]

Waves

Dawn came. The air, Fahrenheit, was sixty-two. There was a head wind at Force 7. The sea was heaping up, and there were whitecaps everywhere, and high spray, and the foam of breaking waves made streaks in the direction of the wind. [Looking for a Ship]

Boils and Eddies

Deception Pass was like a lava lamp on a heroic scale. As the tide entered the funnel, it felt the tightening constraint of the land; the bottom shallowed, and house-sized boulders tripped the water up and made it tumble. With far too much sea trying to escape through far too small an aperture, liquid panic broke out in the pass. The obstructed tide welled up vertically in mushroom-topped boils a dozen yards across or spun impotently around in great saucer-shaped eddies. The surface of the water was pitted with small, traveling whirlpools. Everything was on the move on its own eccentric curvilinear track. [Passage to Juneau]

Rabbit Fish

The monstrous chimera, the mythical freak, two or three feet long, was on its back, its creamy underside shiny with slime, its pectoral fins like wings, and where its neck should have been was a small oval of a mouth set with teeth like a rabbit’s. [Trawler]

Anglerfish

Because six inches from my right shin was a three-foot gape of mouth; and the inside of this mouth was black; the outer lips were black; the whole nightmare fish, if it was a fish, was slimy black. The rim of the projecting lower jaw was set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting. Above them, beneath the drawn-back curve of the upper lip, curling up to a snarl below the centre of the broad black snout, there was a complementary set of masonry nails, points down, waiting. And between the globular black eyes, wide apart, fixed on me, were a couple of long black whips, wireless aerials … And, very obviously, there was only one thing on the mind of this monstrous something – it wanted to eat. And it didn’t look, to me, as if it was a picky eater. Discrimination, taste, haute cuisine, no, that was not its thing. Not at all … [Trawler]

Octopus

At the centre of my field of vision, at the bottom of the steep, inward-angled, stainless-steel panels of the tall container, to the right of four Greenland halibut which lay where they’d slid (just below the lower lip of the open drop-gate to the conveyor), there spread across the slopes of the floor, there swirled around Luke’s yellow sea-boots, a semi-transparent globular mass of brown and purple, a gelatinous colourless shine which you could see right through, a something from another world, a dead creature which, as I stared, resolved itself into far too many long viscid arms studded with white boils, eruptions, suckers to hold you fast … [Trawler]

Snotfish

In his right palm he held a 6-inch-long fat little brown glob of a fish: its small black eyes sat on top of its head, and such a big head, an upward tilted mouth, a huge double chin; yes, a fat-old-man of a head, a glutton of an old man, dribbling a fork-load of spaghetti which had slipped from his lower lip and stuck to his protruding neck. [Trawler]

Glaucous Gulls

The light was thin and white and pure and, somehow, directed upwards – and there, right above us, in this light I had never seen before, hung three gulls from the Arctic ice-cliffs, but their heavy barrel-bodies, their broad wings, their butch heads (they were looking down, straight at me, mildly interested, suspended in this extreme northern world of theirs, a hundred feet above us), seemed to be pink, a dull pink. [Trawler]

Herring Gulls

Out in the middle, a slovenly army of herring gulls was snacking on tidbits thrown up by the flux. They yelled and jostled, fighting over whatever loose body parts had been left behind by such submarine scavengers as the dogfish and squid: an old anemone tubercle, half a flatworm, a bit of decayed starfish arm, a fibrous morsel of rancid crabmeat. [Passage to Juneau]

Rapids

Off Big Bay, great curds of yeasty scum marked the sites of rips and whirlpools that were now nearly extinct. A few logs and uprooted kelp stems continued to revolve in patches of broken water. But the surviving eddies were flaccid, and there was no real heart in their attempts to wrench the steering from my hands. The boat sauntered at eight knots going on nine, through Gillard Passage and Dent Rapids – a scene of spent turmoil, like the tumbled sheets of an empty bed, with an appropriately salty, postcoital smell of bladder wrack drying on the rocks. [Passage to Juneau]

Tide

The only motion was that of the incoming tide, stealing smoothly through the forest at one knot. Where fallen branches obstructed the current near the shore, they sprouted whiskers of turbulence that were steadily maturing into braided beards. The water was moving just fast enough to feel the abrasion of the air against it, and its surface was altering from glassy to stippled with the strengthening flood. Soon the false wind, brushing against the tide, created a trellis-like pattern of interlocked wavelets, their raised edges only a millimetre or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light. [Passage to Juneau]

More Waves

The waves came hissing at the transom. Only a few minutes old, born as wrinkles 800 yards away across the channel, already they were mature and grizzle-bearded. Blocklike, lumpy, they packed a big wallop for their size. Pale ribbons of dissolving foam streaked the inky water, and the boat was being jostled with sufficient force to make me double-up the mooring ropes. [Passage to Juneau]

Wind

I’d just stowed my bucket when a sudden rush of wind came down the funnel of the strait, like an unprovoked punch delivered out of nowhere. The boat corkscrewed. The genoa-sheet, bar-tight, groaned on the drum of the winch. I feared for the stitching of the sail as the fabric swelled under the impact of the wind, which had begun to yodel nastily in the rigging. In no time at all, the ruffled water changed to a short, steep, breaking sea. [Passage to Juneau]

Roundnose Grenadier

And at last, for us, the haul was over … When Luke – so thin, young, wiry, so manic and committed – bent down, quick as a cat-strike, and came up with a yard-long fish of sorts (where had he stored that? Aye, as he might have said, of course, under his stand-on fish-box …): a fish that, in its bulk, was all head, with a short and rounded snout tipped with horny plates, a large underslung mouth – and a thin following body which tapered down to a real look-alike rat-tail, which was all the more convincing because its muscly last few inches were young-rat pink. [Trawler]

Hagfish

Light brown, a foot long, three-quarters of an inch thick, muscular, cylindrical, it appeared to have no fins – unless that narrow keel of wrinkled flesh snaking down the centre of its underside and vertically folded into hundreds of little flags – unless that was a fin? And what were those white pimples – two lines of them, one to either side of the fin, the central fringe of flesh? There were two regular rows of tiny white raised roundels – as if the animal had been-doubled slashed with a razor all the way along the underneath of its bendy shaft of a body, and the twin slits stitched, and it now bore the scars: the entry and exit holes of a fine needle … [Trawler]

Note the many brilliant figures of speech: the lower jaw of an anglerfish “set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting”; a snotfish with “a fat-old-man of a head, a glutton of an old man, dribbling a fork-load of spaghetti which had slipped from his lower lip and stuck to his protruding neck”; rapids – “a scene of spent turmoil, like the tumbled sheets of an empty bed, with an appropriately salty, postcoital smell of bladder wrack drying on the rocks”; on and on. McPhee, Raban, and O’Hanlon create inspired figuration. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.