December 25, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ed Caesar’s “Speed,” an exploration of the fascinating world of hypercars – limited-edition vehicles that go or even exceed 300 m.p.h. and cost millions of dollars. Caesar attends a hypercar jamboree at a resort near Málaga, in southern Spain. He rides in a purple Koenigsegg Regera (“The car’s five-litre engine, along with three electric motors, resulted in instant, unyielding torque—the rotational force that translates into acceleration. When the car sped up, I felt as if I’d been suctioned to the seat by a giant vacuum cleaner”). He visits the Koenigsegg factory in Ängelholm, Sweden (“One car on display is a Gemera, the world’s first four-seater hypercar. The Gemera, a phev—plug-in-hybrid electric vehicle—with a maximum twenty-three hundred horsepower, can accelerate from zero to sixty in less than two seconds”). He visits the headquarters of another hypercar manufacturer, Hennessey, in Texas, where he rides in a deep-blue Venom F5 Coupe:

We did a warmup lap in Sports Mode—or Baby Mode, as Roys called it—hitting 155 m.p.h. Then he switched to something called F5 Mode. Before the final, short straightaway, he asked me if I was ready. When he hit the accelerator, it was like being strapped to a surface-to-air missile. Each gear change provoked the car to ever more noise and aggression. We hit 170 m.p.h., then braked to make the final turn. I stifled the urge to scream, but not to curse.

Caesar talks with hypercar test-pilot Andy Wallace. Wallace tells him about driving Bugatti’s Chiron Super Sport 304.8 m.p.h. on a test track in Germany (“ ‘It seemed a shame to lift off the accelerator, but then you see the wall coming,’ Wallace said”). Caesar, accompanied by former Le Mans winner Pierre-Henri Raphanel, takes a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport for a spin. He writes,

Raphanel reminded me to trust him. The next time, when he said, “Full power”—adding, “Full, full, full!”—I did as told. Other cars flew past the passenger window like blown leaves. My focus narrowed on the lane before me. The speedometer showed an alarmingly high number before Raphanel told me to brake. Evidently, I didn’t brake hard enough: he physically depressed my leg. As we decelerated, the car never veered from a straight line. 

The piece ends vividly. Caesar visits the Rimac Group headquarters outside Zagreb, Croatia. Rimac makes electric hypercars, e.g., the Nevera. Rimac’s chief test-driver, Miro Zrnčević, shows him some of the Nevera’s qualities. Caesar writes,

It accelerates faster than any road car ever made: zero to 60 m.p.h. in 1.74 seconds, and zero to a hundred in 3.21 seconds. By now, I was used to the power of hypercars, but it was my first time experiencing such power so noiselessly. When Zrnčević accelerated from a standing start, my brain struggled to align the speed we accumulated with the near-silence around us. I nearly threw up.

“Speed” is a wonderful tour of an incredibly exotic corner of the car world. I enjoyed it immensely.

December 18, 2023 issue

I applaud the creation of the new Hannah Goldfield column “On and Off the Menu,” in the “Critics” section of the magazine. Goldfield is one of my favorite writers. Her “Tokyo Story,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s a review of several Japanese restaurants in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. One of them is Uzuki. Goldfield writes,

If there is one Japanese restaurant in Greenpoint that best embodies understated luxury, it’s Uzuki, a recently opened temple to soba, also known as buckwheat, that humblest of crops. The chef, Shuichi Kotani, is a master of noodles, which he makes daily from one-hundred-per-cent-buckwheat flour. (Packaged versions are usually cut with wheat.) Firm, slippery, and ever so slightly grainy, they’re served warm—in a glistening hot dashi made with duck bones and topped with medallions of roast duck—or cold, in chilled dashi, layered with thin sheets of raw salmon, pearls of salmon roe, shiso leaves, and daikon radish. Every bowl is finished with a sprinkling of pale buckwheat kernels, simmered until glossy and chewy.

Ravishing!

Postscript: There seems to be a rivalry shaping up between Goldfield and Helen Rosner as to who can write most carnally about food. Rosner takes the contest to a new level this week in her delectable “Tables For Two: Foul Witch.” She writes,

Often, when restaurants are called “sexy,” that means sleek-lined and hard-edged; the food at Foul Witch is sexy, not in the way of a fast car or a low-slung couch but like actual sex: a physical indulgence, a sinking in, an embodied experience of pleasure.

Top that, Goldfield!

On the Horizon: Top Ten "New Yorker & Me"

Photo by John MacDougall

The New Yorker & Me has been around nearly fourteen years. Hard to believe. During that time, I've posted 1,433 notes – over a million words. Blogging is an ephemeral business. Roger Angell compared it to launching paper airplanes from an upstairs window. But thanks to blogspot.com’s archive, all my posts still exist. How long they’ll last is anyone’s guess. Some are better than others. Some were easy to write; others more difficult. I hope it doesn’t seem too self-indulgent if I look back and pick ten favorites. A new series then – “Top Ten New Yorker & Me” – one per month, for the next ten months, starting January 15, 2024. 

December 11, 2023 Issue

What to make of Parul Sehgal’s “Turning the Page,” in this week’s issue? It’s a survey of several recent memoirs by or about critics, including Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet (on life with her father, Peter Schjeldahl), and Robert Boyers’ Maestros & Monsters (on his long association with Susan Sontag and George Steiner). I’m a fan of the work of Schjeldahl, Sontag, and Steiner. The key word here is “work.” I don’t give a damn about their personal lives. Whether they were rotten parents or fickle friends is immaterial to me. It’s their work that matters. That was Flaubert’s belief; it’s mine, too. Occasionally, a memoir appears that is itself a work of art. Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), on his friendship with V. S. Naipaul, is an example that immediately comes to mind. Are Calhoun’s and Boyers’ books in that league? Sehgal doesn’t say. She doesn’t comment; she doesn’t quote. She’s flying at a ridiculously high altitude. Come down to the ground, Sehgal. Get some ink on your hands.

Postscript: As for Sehgal’s notion that the work of critics like Kael, Schjeldahl, and Sontag is a form of “unselfing” – “the ability to channel someone else” – that’s just crazy! Kael would hoot if she read that. She didn’t channel anyone but herself. Same for Schjeldahl and Sontag. That’s what made them such great stylists. To paraphrase Kael, unselfing is for sapheads. 

December 4, 2023 Issue

Funny, I was thinking of April Bloomfield earlier this week as I considered launching a new series on my blog called “Top Ten New Yorker Food Pieces.” One of the pieces I was thinking of including is Lauren Collins’ brilliant “Burger Queen” (November 22, 2010). It’s a profile of Bloomfield when she was chef at the Michelin-starred New York restaurant Spotted Pig. And now this week’s New Yorker arrives, containing Helen Rosner’s delectable “Tables for Two” review of Sailor, a new Fort Greene restaurant. Who is Sailor’s chef? None other than the great April Bloomfield. It appears she hasn’t lost her touch. Rosner describes Bloomfield’s stuffed radicchio:

Slicing into the sphere of wrapped radicchio leaves, I discovered an interior of fragrant rice studded with firm, creamy borlotti beans. Taking a bite of this mixture, bathed in a wine sauce—which was rich and emulsified and, I learned later, vegan—was like sinking into a quicksand of warmth and flavor. The leaves of the radicchio imparted a lingering hint of bitterness, a scalpel through the savory roundness of everything else. This is the dish, I thought to myself—the dish of the restaurant, perhaps the dish of the year.

That’s from the newyorker.com version of Rosner’s review. If radicchio isn’t your thing, try Bloomfield’s roasted chicken:

The roasted chicken for two is excellent, with burnished skin and tender, herb-infused flesh. It is served directly on top of a pile of Parmesan-roasted potatoes and garlicky braised chard, which absorb all the golden drippings and nearly eclipse the pleasures of the bird itself. 

Mm, I’ll have that, please. 

On the Horizon: 3 for the River

I enjoyed doing “3 for the Road,” 3 for the Sea,” and “3 More for the Road” so much that I’ve decided to pick three more of my favorite travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and revisit them, blogging about it as I go. A new series then – “3 for the River” – starting January 1, 2024.  

James Wood's Puzzling Use of "Re-description"

James Wood (Photo by David Levenson)

What does James Wood mean by “re-description”? He mentions it at least six times in the Introduction to his Serious Noticing (2019):

1. “After all, the review-essay involves not just pointing at something, but pointing at it while re-describing it.”

2. “But quotation and re-description are at the heart of the book review and at the heart of that experience that Cavell calls ‘creative.’ ”

3. “This passionate re-description is, in fact, pedagogical in nature. It happens in classrooms whenever the teacher stops to read out, to re-voice, the passage under scrutiny.”

4. “All the critic can hope to do is, by drawing attention to certain elements of the artwork – by re-describing that artwork – induce in his or her audience a similar view of that work.”

5. “It is all here, in this beautiful passage: criticism as passionate ‘creation’ (‘as if for the first time’); criticism as modesty, as the mind putting the ‘understanding’ into abeyance (‘he was baffled’); criticism as simplicity and near-silence (‘It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable’); criticism as sameness of vision and re-description (‘was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there’).”

6. "And let Brendel’s performance on the piano, his inability to quote without also recreating, stand for the kind of criticism that is writing through a text, the kind of criticism that is at once critique and re-description: sameness.” 

Why is the “re” necessary? Why not just “description”? “Re-description” implies do-over – rewriting a previous description. But that isn’t what Wood does in his own work. Take, for example, his review of Tan Twan Eng’s novel The House of Doors, in this week’s New Yorker. He calls it “an assemblage, a house of curiosities.” He refers to its “manner of layering the narratives.” He says,

Eng can write with lyrical generosity and beautiful tact: moths are seen at night “flaking around the lamps”; elsewhere, also at nighttime, “a weak spill of light drew me to the sitting room.” Shadowy emotions are delicately figured: “His eyes, so blue and penetrating, were dusked by some emotion I could not decipher.” Lesley’s account of her affair with Arthur has a lovely, drifting, dreamlike quality—the adulterers almost afloat on their new passion, watched over by the hanging painted doors of Arthur’s house on Armenian Street.

That’s primary description, is it not? Nothing is being re-described or re-voiced. Maybe Wood considers use of quotation a form of re-description. But that doesn’t make sense. Pointing out felicitous passages in a work is a form of descriptive analysis, is it not? How is it re-description? It seems to me Wood’s “re” is redundant. Earlier in his Introduction to Serious Noticing, he does omit the “re”: “Describing one’s experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it” (my emphasis). Maybe he sees the book as description, and his review of it as a form of re-description. In his essay on Virginia Woolf (included in Serious Noticing), he comes close to saying that. He writes, “If the artwork describes itself, then criticism’s purpose is to re-describe the artwork in its own, different language.” That’s a big “if.” Helen Vendler, in the concluding paragraph of her “The Function of Criticism” (collected in her The Music of What Happens, 1988), says, “No art work describes itself.” I agree. 

Description or re-description – does it matter? Yes, absolutely. It goes to criticism’s purpose. Vendler, in the Introduction to The Music of What Happens, writes,

The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique confirmation.

Wood might find that statement too simplistic. But, for me, it’s a touchstone. In comparison, Wood’s notion of re-description seems vague. 

November 27, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rachel Aviv’s “Personal Statement,” a profile of writer Joyce Carol Oates. This piece differs from most New Yorker literary profiles. It has a clear, strong theme, captured in its tagline: “Joyce Carol Oates’s relentless search for self.” Okay, sign me up, I’ll read that. How we become who we are is, for me, one of life’s central mysteries. Aviv does an excellent job exploring it in this piece. It’s fascinating to read about an eighty-five-year-old writer, author of “sixty-three novels, forty-seven collections of short stories, and numerous plays, librettos, children’s novels, and books of poetry” and see how insecure she is about her own identity. Aviv writes,

Many authors grapple with a central preoccupation in the course of a career, until the mystery eventually loses its pull, but Oates, who has long been concerned with the question of personality and says she doubts whether she actually has one, has never exhausted her curiosity. There are only so many ways to dramatize the problem of being a self, one might think, but Oates keeps coming back to it, as if there is something she still needs to figure out.

I confess I haven’t read any of Oates’s fiction. But I devour her book reviews, a number of which have appeared in The New Yorker: see, for example, “Earthly Delights” (February 5, 2001); “Love Crazy” (March 3, 2003); “Rack and Ruin” (April 30, 2007); “The Death Factory” (September 29, 2014); and “Ocular Proof” (February 26, 2018). My favorite Oates reviews are “The Treasure of Comanche Country” (on Cormac McCarthy) and “In Rough Country” (on Annie Proulx), included in her great 2010 essay collection In Rough Country. Oates is an excellent critic – descriptive and analytical. If she’s insecure in her identity, I don’t detect it in her reviews. She appears completely self-assured.

Not that I’m questioning Aviv’s assessment. Her “quest for identity” theme threads her piece from beginning to end: “The persona was perhaps no more real than the ladylike role she inhabited at parties”; “Her short stories from the time, many of which revolve around romantic betrayals, are so precise about the impossibility of trying to cohere as a personality in the world”; “The work had piled up, giving form to aspects of her identity that she couldn’t otherwise see, but the process didn’t seem to have really changed her.” 

My favorite line in “Personal Statement” is “She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal.” That “uniquely incurious” made me smile. In Aviv’s piece, a savvy journalist-detective comes up against a foxy, guarded genius. 

3 More for the Road: Conclusion

This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts on three of my favourite travelogues – Anthony Bailey's Along the Edge of the Forest (1983), Robert Sullivan’s Cross Country (2006), and Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia (2010). Today, I’ll try to sum up my reading experience.

Reading these three great books, I felt I was actually making the journeys they describe. That’s the highest compliment I can pay a piece of writing. Reading them was an immersive experience. Bailey put me right there with him as he drove along the Iron Curtain from Travemünde, on the Baltic Sea, to Trieste, on the Adriatic. Same with Sullivan, as he and his family traveled across the U.S. from Portland, Oregon, to New York City. Same with Frazier, as he and his two Russian guides traversed Siberia from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. 

The books are similar in several ways. For one, they’re all epic road trips. For another, all three are chronologically structured. They read like journals, which is really what they are – wonderful day-by-day journals that tell us what their authors saw, felt, and experienced in detail after vivid detail. It’s my favorite form of writing. A third similarity is that all three exude a deep love of geography. Cities, towns, rivers, lakes, valleys, mountains – everything is noted, named, and particularized. I love rivers; these books brim with them: in Along the Edge of the Forest, the Trave, the Elbe, the Havel, the Spree, the Ecker, the Werra, the Saale, the Regen, the Danube, the Vltava, the Inn; in Cross Country, the Willamette, the Columbia, the Snake, the Clark Fork, the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the Red, the Mississippi, the Fawn, the Maumee, the Black, the Cuyahoga, the Musconetcong, the Passaic, the Hudson; in Travels in Siberia, the Neva, the Barguzin, the Maksimikha, the Severnaya Dvina, the Irtysh, the Ob, the Chulym, the Yenisei, the Mana, the Esaulovka, the Angara, the Ingoda, the Zeya, the Amur, the Bureya, the Khor, the Arseneveka, the Avvakumovo, the Lena, the Aldan, the Olchan. 

Another similarity is that all three books are about incredible man-made phenomena: the Iron Curtain (Along the Edge of the Forest), the interstate highway system (Cross Country), the Toplinskaya Highway (Travels in Siberia: “If most Russian construction looks handmade, this r0ad appeared to have been beaten into the earth by hands, feet, and bodies”). 

The brutality of the Soviet Union figures in two of them. In Along the Edge of the Forest, Bailey writes about the Iron Curtain – not as history, but as a real, existing, visible fact of life (barbed wire, land mines, watch towers, machine guns, guard dogs) that many border people he talked with considered an ineradicable fixture forever dividing East and West. In Travels in Siberia, Frazier visits an abandoned Soviet prison camp, which he describes in unforgettable detail right down to the nails, boards, logs, and barbed wire. 

 

But these books differ substantially from each other, too. For instance, Along the Edge of the Forest is about one journey. Cross Country is also about a single journey, but it includes flashbacks of other trips, most memorably “The Worst Cross-Country Trip Ever.” Travels in Siberia consists of five separate Siberian trips, plus several Alaskan ones. Also, Along the Edge of the Forest is a solo trip. Cross Country is a family trip. Travels in Siberia features a trio of travelers – Frazier and his two Russian guides.

Another difference between these books is their writing styles. The prose in Along the Edge of the Forest is sparer and plainer than it is in Cross Country and Travels in Siberia. This isn’t a criticism. I relish this form of writing. It’s the equivalent of using a great point-and-shoot camera. Sullivan and Frazier are more descriptive than Bailey is. Sullivan creates fascinating compound adjectives, e.g., “in that decent-but-not-great, stereo-in-a-rental car kind of way,” “a smile breaks out across my sunburned-even-through-the-windshield face,” “the more-expensive-than-a-motel-but-not-outrageously-priced Saint Paul Hotel.” Frazier is a master metaphorist (“To me St. Petersburg seems more like a hole in the corner of a sealed-tight packing crate that Peter crowbarred open violently from inside. Once the breach was made the light flowed in, and it continues to flow”). All three writers are great company, where "great" means curious, observant, humorous, perceptive. This, in the end, is what counts most for me. I love spending time with them. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three splendid books. I picture it like this: a 1981 map of Europe, showing Bailey’s route along the Iron Curtain from Travemünde to Trieste; East German watchtower; 1973 Saab station wagon; concrete post painted in chevron stripes of black, red, and gold; metal fence with SM-70 automatic sentry guns mounted on it; a makeshift balloon basket and hot-air heating burner; barbed wire; Soviet radar station (antennae, towers, domes); glass of beer; apple; nylon knapsack; a 2004 map of the U.S. showing Sullivan’s route from Portland, Oregon, to New York City; 2004 Impala sedan with rooftop pack; Lewis and Clark signpost; take-out cup of Kum & Go coffee with plastic lid; squeegee; parrot; Holiday Inn Express sign; tumbleweed; enMotion towel dispenser; a 2001 map showing Frazier’s route across Siberia from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok; Renault step van; mosquitos; satellite phone; fishing rod; crows; birch trees; watermelon; abandoned Soviet prison camp. Overlap these maps and images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and randomly across the surface paint three black stripes representing the Iron Curtain, Interstate-90, and the Sibirskii Trakt. I call my collage “Sulbaizier.”   

November 20, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his absorbing “Made You Look,” in this week’s issue, writes about two immersive experiences he had recently: a viewing of Darren Aronofsky’s “Postcard from Earth,” at the Sphere, in Las Vegas; and a visit to Michael Heizer’s land sculpture “City” in the Nevada desert. Of his Sphere experience, he writes, 

Everything about this place dulls your palate for the natural. You walk under an emoji the size of the Death Star, you wait in lines for holograms, you sit in a state-of-the-art haptic chair, you stare at a screen almost as big as the one that brought you the emoji, and you’re supposed to believe that what’s up there is real ?

Not a great recommendation. His description of “City” is more beguiling:

This is, simultaneously, the quietest place I’ve ever been and one of the loudest—every breath and pebble-crunching step is deafening, in the same way as someone wrestling with a sweet wrapper at the movies. The slanted sides of the trenches suggest ancient ruins, but also the I-15. It’s not always obvious where the art ends and the desert begins. Toward either side of “City,” however, you’ll find big, straight-edged structures: to the west, a flock of concrete fins; to the east, a trapezoidal slab with concrete beams poking out. These objects look plainly more man-made than natural—“man-made” being the strange, polished stuff that refuses to admit that it’s natural, too.

Reading Arn’s piece, I recalled another account of a “City” visit – Dana Goodyear’s brilliant “The Earth Mover” (The New Yorker, August 29, 2016). Goodyear wrote,

In every direction, at every angle, wide boulevards disappeared around corners, to unseen destinations, leading me into depressions where the whole world vanished and all that was left was false horizon and blue sky. Fourteen miles of concrete curbs sketched a graceful, loopy line drawing around the mounds and roads. Ravens wheeled, and I startled at a double thud of sonic boom from fighter jets performing exercises overhead. I sat down in a pit; flies came to tickle my hands. It was easy to imagine myself as a pile of bones. Before no other contemporary art work have I felt induced to that peculiar, ancient fear: What hand made this, and what for?

T. J. Clark's Annoying Class Consciousness

Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid (c. 1657-58)

I’ve always loved the word “bourgeois.” I don’t use it very much. When I do, it’s usually in relation to the great Dutch art of the Golden Age. Vermeer, Hals, de Hooch, Terborch – art that caught the beauty and vitality of Holland’s new bourgeois individualism. T. J. Clark uses “bourgeois” a lot in his art writings, and not in a positive way. To him the bourgeoisie are a scourge, producers and consumers of kitsch. Clark is for the working class. There’s a lot of class content in his work. He sees society divided into at least four categories: the working class, the petty bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy. It’s a Marxist view of life and art. I don’t share it. I don’t see people in terms of class. “Nobody better, better than nobody” is my motto. The doctor, the movie star, the plumber, the hedge fund tsar – we’re all equal. Clark would likely scoff at that as naïve. That’s okay. We don’t have to share political views in order to enjoy art. But I will say this. If it wasn’t for Clark’s wonderful, perceptive descriptions of art, I likely wouldn’t read him. His descriptions show me details and felicities I wouldn’t otherwise see. Descriptions such as this: 

Look at the jester on the branch in the Louvre Ship of Fools: he is one of Bosch’s prime inventions. The pink, grey and white of the young man’s rags, dazzling as they are, don’t seem to be deployed just to dazzle. I think they’re meant to float the figure into a realm of fragility, vulnerability, perhaps even pathos – anyway, somewhere different from the idiocy below. The jester’s smallness is calculated: it moves him away from the group. The wandering lines of white on his costume, delicate even by Bosch’s standards, and dramatised by little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces – what do they do? What are they meant to suggest? Maybe that the costume is threadbare. Maybe that it’s flimsy and transparent. Jesters are beggars, after all. Burghers are not amused by them. Somehow the nature of the grey material draws the young man closer to the natural world (further from the nudities in the foreground). He fits into the frame of leaves; he grows out of the grey tree. The dialogue between his profile and the face on the wand is infinitely touching. [“Aboutness,” London Review of Books, April 1, 2021]

And this:

Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders. [“Strange Apprentice,” London Review of Books, October 8, 2020]

And this:

Look again at the angel in Paris with the pointing finger. There had never been a figure like it before in painting, and there never would be again. It is not just the foot on the grass and the pointing finger that are uncanny: it is the pose as a whole, spreading out laterally, half turning towards us, but meeting our eyes from an utter remoteness; and the roll of the green sleeve and the long pale arm inside its diaphanous puff of drapery; and the astonishing – unthinkable – explosion of rich red, tying the figure to a world of flesh and blood but spreading and unfolding far beyond (it feels like) the mere frame of the illusion. No wonder all this – this overflowing wish-fulfilment – had to be corrected in 1508. The London angel’s drapery is still elusive, but at least now it adheres to a possible anatomy: it does not just seem to occur as the brush tries out a new colour. Colour drains away. The angel’s shoulders come out of their carapace. The figure is clear and coherent (comparatively) but also (comparatively) unfelt. It is as if the invention had been put back inside a box – robbed of its first fairytale unfolding. [“The Chill of Disillusion,” London Review of Books, January 5, 2012]

Who would not want such glorious writing to go on forever? There’s not an ounce of class consciousness in it. That’s the way it should be. 

Acts of Seeing: P'tit Train du Nord

P'tit Train du Nord, 2023 (Photo by John MacDougall)

I love this shot. It captures the essence of that day last month when Lorna and I biked the P’tit Train du Nord from Mont-Tremblant Village to Labelle and back. The trail took us along beautiful Lac Mercier. Red, orange, and yellow leaves. Pale blue-white sky. Excellent paved trail, strewn with leaves. We ate the day!

Frans Hals's Extraordinary "The Laughing Cavalier"

Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier (1624)

Zachary Fine, in his absorbing “The Man Who Changed Portraiture” (newyorker.com, November 3, 2023), reviews the National Gallery’s Frans Hals exhibition. He notes that Hals painted only portraits and calls him “the most talented one-trick pony of the seventeenth century.” He says of him,

His genius boils down to a contradiction: loose, unblended smears of paint that create the flesh-and-blood likeness of a human being. The late works of Titian, Velázquez, and Rembrandt would all head in this direction with their “rough” manner, but Hals achieved a kind of scary immediacy that seemed almost foreign to the medium—a photographer suddenly among painters.

A photographer suddenly among painters – I like that. It gets at Hals’s exquisite precision. See, for example, his famous The Laughing Cavalier (1624) – the intricate pattern of the man’s doublet, the gold buttons, the subtle shades of black in his cloak, the ornate geometric design of his lace cuffs, the rich layering of his white ruff, the gold handle of his rapier. This is incredibly detailed, artful painting. You can almost feel the texture of that ruff and hear the rustle of the sumptuous cloak.

Which is why I question Fine’s conclusion. He writes, “Hals was a painter of fundamentally modest means with a deep intuition for his medium.” Fundamentally modest means? Come on! The Laughing Cavalier is having a good laugh over that one. How about “acutely descriptive”? That’s what Peter Schjeldahl said of Hals’s painting (“Haarlem Shuffle” (The New Yorker, August 1, 2011). I agree with Schjeldahl. 

Postscript: A. S. Byatt 1936 - 2023

A. S. Byatt (Photo by Ozier Muhammad)

I see in the Times that A. S. Byatt has died (“A.S. Byatt, Scholar Who Found Fame With Fiction, Dies at 87,” November 17, 2023). The Times writer, Rebecca Chace, emphasizes Byatt’s achievements as a fiction writer, particularly her Booker prize-winning novel Possession. A friend gave me that book many years ago and urged me to read it. I tried, but never made it very far. Romance in the Victorian Age is not my thing. Maybe someday I’ll give it another shot. But there is a piece by Byatt that I treasure – her brilliant “Van Gogh, Death and Summer,” included in her 1991 essay collection A Passion of the Mind. 

“Van Gogh, Death and Passion” starts out as a review of Tsukasa Kodera’s Vincent van Gogh: Christianity versus Nature (1990). But it soon morphs into something vaster and more profound: an appreciation of Van Gogh’s letters; a consideration of his “sense of the real”; an exploration of his ideas about color. She quotes liberally from his letters. She quotes Bataille, Artaud, Rilke, Freud, Stevens, De Quincey. She praises De Quincey’s concept of the involute – “the way in which the human mind thinks and feels in ‘perplexed combinations of concrete objects’ or ‘compound objects, incapable of being disentangled.’ ” She writes, “De Quincey’s Romantic involute, Stevens’s abstract and sensuous meditation on the relations between sun, earth, mortality, myth and metaphor, have become, with Van Gogh’s letters and paintings, part of a new involute for me.”

It's an extraordinary essay, a ravishing involute of her own making, drenched in Van Gogh’s colors, ending in a meditation on death, and one last quotation from Van Gogh:

Work is going pretty well – I am struggling with a canvas begun some days before my indisposition, a “Reaper”; the study is all yellow, terribly thick painted, but the subject was fine and simple. For I see in this reaper – a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of heat to get to the end of his task – I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is – if you like – the opposite of that sower I tried to do before. But there’s nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold. 

Notes on John McPhee's Wonderful "Tabula Rasa"

1. This new work surprised me. I expected it to be a collection of the “Tabula Rasa” pieces that appeared in The New Yorker: see “Tabula Rasa I” (January 13, 2020); “Tabula Rasa II” (April 19, 2021); and “Tabula Rasa III” (February 7, 2022). All those pieces are in the book – twenty-one of them. It’s great to see them preserved between hardcovers. But here’s the surprise: in addition to the previously published items, there are twenty-nine new ones on such variegated subjects as McPhee’s experience teaching his Princeton writing class during Covid (“students became sixteen pictures in varied levels of light”), the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, sports time-outs (“Time-outs in superabundance violate the spirit of the game”), the outcrops of Princeton’s Washington Road, New Jersey’s Province Line Road, Princeton University’s Joseph Henry House, fish he’s caught on the Upper Delaware River, Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, his mother, the length of time it takes to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” (“Roughly one minute and four seconds”), and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I particularly liked the piece on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Titled “The Delta Islands of the Great Valley,” it contains this wonderful passage:

Small roads ran along the tops of the levees. From them, you looked down on the tops of pear trees in the inverted islands, looked down into the countersunk asparagus, the winter wheat. Now look up. Left. Right, near, or far, you saw ships. They were crossing the delta on the rivers, which flowed between levees and were imperceptibly descending from thirteen feet above sea level (Stockton) and thirty feet above sea level (Sacramento). If you happened to be down in one of the polders among the crops, you might look up and see across a levee the wheelhouse of an oceangoing ship, inbound or outbound, sliding along against the sky. They were really up there. You had to crane your neck.

That “you looked down on the tops of pear trees in the inverted islands, looked down into the countersunk asparagus, the winter wheat” is very fine. I wish McPhee had been able to complete the project. Unfortunately, as he explains, the shipping company that owned the ship on which he planned to travel reneged on its permission. He says, “The disappointment diverted me into other projects. I wasn’t going to do the piece without riding through the delta on the bridge wing of a merchant ship, looking down across the tops of blossoming fruit trees.”

2. One notable aspect of McPhee’s late style is his frequent use of sentence fragments. Tabula Rasa contains dozens of them. For example:

Her blondness. His white beard. Her compactness. His heft. Her smile, and his. Their photogenic faces.

AFC divisional playoff, Raiders 7, Steelers 6, twenty-two seconds to go, no time-outs. Fourth and ten, Steelers on their own forty.

Wood frame. Fish-scale clapboard around the front entrance. Lancet windows down the sides, two stories tall. Cupola. Belfry. Gothic Revival spirelets at the high front corners.

Holyoke Dam. Hooksett Dam. The dam sites of Dickey-Lincoln. The many nameless dams on rural streams in upstate New York.

McKenzie River, in McKenzie boats, in Oregon with Dr. Dick.

Faculty housing. Row housing. Gwyneth King in the parlor with Joe.

Oh, my. Malcolm Forbes. His yacht. A party favor. Party of a-hundred-and-thirty-odd on the yacht to watch the Fourth of July fireworks on the East River. Mick Jagger. People like that. People from all over the news, the media, the world, the city. Lobsters. Smoked salmon. Caviar by the kilo.

Older writers tend to ramble. Their sentences get longer and baggier. Think Henry James. What a windbag! McPhee went the opposite way. He’s shortened up. His sentences are light, speedy. No long lines (or not many), just quick Cézanne-like touches: “In the church. Passing the plate. Mad as hell. Obedient”; “Starfish. Octopuses. Vicious-looking eels”; “And wait. And wait forever, it seemed. More rain.” 

3. Another tool in McPhee’s vast literary toolkit is the catalog. Recall his wonderful cargo lists in Looking for a Ship (1990). Tabula Rasa contains at least two memorable lists – one in “On the Campus,” and the other in “Bourbon and Bing Cherries.” The “On the Campus” list is part of a passage that brilliantly re-creates a slide show of WWII airplanes that McPhee remembers viewing when he was a kid. Here’s an excerpt:

But the course was fun, like some precursive television show, as the black silhouette of an aircraft came up on a large screen and was gone two seconds later while you were writing down its name. Messerschmitt ME-109. Next slide, two seconds: Mitsubishi Zero. Next slide, two seconds: Grumman Avenger. Next slide, two seconds: Vought-Sikorsky Corsair. Yes, the American planes were the only planes we would ever report to regional headquarters, in New York or somewhere, in a cryptic sequence from a filled-in, columned sheet: “one, bi, low,” and so forth—one twin-¬engine plane flying low, often a DC-3 descending to Newark. We saw Piper Cubs, Stinson Reliants, and more DC-3s. We saw Martin Marauders, Curtiss-Wright Warhawks, Republic Thunderbolts, Bell Airacobras, Lockheed Lightnings, Consolidated Liberators. It would be treason to say that we were eager to see Heinkel HE-111s and Dornier DO-17s. We didn’t really know what was going on. We were ten, eleven years old and not regarded as precocious.

“On the Campus” also contains one of my favorite lines in Tabula Rasa: “I don’t mean to downsize the women or their role in all this, but—Mrs. Hall, Mrs. Hambling—they didn’t know a Focke-Wulf 200 from a white-throated sparrow.”

Here's the “Bourbon and Bing Cherries” list:

Driving on, this is what I also learned: Jim Beam, of Clermont, Kentucky, made Knob Creek, Old Grand-Dad, Booker’s, Baker’s, Basil Hayden, and I. W. Harper. Brown-Forman, of Louisville, Kentucky, made Early Times, Old Forester, and Woodford Reserve. Buffalo Trace, of Frankfort, Kentucky, made many other not-well-known brands, including Pappy Van Winkle. Bernheim Distillery, of Louisville, Kentucky, made Rebel Yell. Maker’s Mark, of Loretto, Kentucky, made Maker’s Mark.

This piece also contains an inspired line: “Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses.”

By the way, the first part of “Bourbon and Bing Cherries” differs from the version that appeared in The New Yorker. It incorporates eight paragraphs from the Preface that McPhee wrote in 2000 for a paperback edition of his Oranges (1967), including this delightful sentence: “It was late March and the Valencias, in their overlapping cycle, were in fruit and in bloom, a phenomenon of this tree, which blossoms fourteen months before the fruit is picked, with the beautiful result that a Valencia tree in spring is under a snowy veil punctuated by spots of bright orange against an evergreen field of dark leaves.” 

November 13, 2023 Issue

Helen Rosner, in her superb “Tables for Two: Bronx Sidewalk Clam Heaven,” in this week’s issue, writes, “There’s something unavoidably primal about prying open an oyster or clam and sucking it from its shell—there’s no way to aesthetically refine the act’s essential ferality. It’s fun as hell, a disposal of ritual, a moment of pure sensation.” I agree. And the way she puts it is pure pleasure. The passage in the newyorker.com version is even more delicious:

There’s something unavoidably primal about prying open an oyster or clam and sucking it from its shell—there’s no way to aesthetically refine the act’s essential ferality. All the usual intermediations of human carnivorousness are absent: no slaughter, no butchering, no cooking. It’s fun as hell, a disposal of ritual, a moment of pure sensation. A white-haired gent in a topcoat and fedora throws down a dozen clams shoulder to shoulder with a twentysomething fashion girly in platform sneakers, an eleven-year-old boy in a camo jacket, and a middle-aged food writer: We are animals eating animals, in the middle of the street, in the Bronx.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m fascinated by the newyorker.com variation of “Tables For Two.” Here’s another example from the same piece: Rosner writes, “There’s an array of dressings and hot sauces, including a mouth-puckering homemade mignonette, and the oysters are glorious, a symphony of brine and richness.” Yum! That sentence is double bliss; both form and substance are delectable. The newyorker.com version contains a delightful extra clause:  

There’s an array of dressings and hot sauces, including a mouth-puckering homemade mignonette, and the oysters are glorious, a symphony of brine and richness, especially the Blue Points, mild and rich as salted butter, and the peachy sweetness of the Kumamotos.

Rosner is rapidly becoming one of my favorite New Yorker writers. 

November 6, 2023 Issue

David St. John has a poem in this week’s issue. Titled “Prayer for My Daughter,” it somehow combines Blake, the Thames, the Venice boardwalk, Leadbelly, Nirvana, Hendrix, Arcadia, among various other elements, to make a beautiful tribute (“this belated song”) to St. John’s daughter. 

St. John wrote one of my all-time favorite poems – “Guitar” (The New Yorker, December 18, 1978; included in his 1980 collection The Shore). It’s so good, I want to quote it in full:

I have always loved the word guitar.

I have no memories of my father on the patio
At dusk, strumming a Spanish tune,
Or my mother draped in that fawn wicker chair

Polishing her flute;
I have no memories of your song, distant Sister
Heart, of those steel strings sliding
All night through the speaker of the car radio
Between Tucumcari and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Though I’ve never believed those stories
Of gypsy cascades, stolen horses, castanets,
And stars, of Airstream trailers and good fortune,
Though I never met Charlie Christian, though
I’ve danced the floors of cold longshoremen’s halls,
Though I’ve waited with the overcoats at the rear
Of concerts for lute, mandolin, and two guitars –
More than the music I love scaling its woven
Stairways, more than the swirling chocolate of wood

I have always loved the word guitar.

God, I love that poem! Those last three lines are inspired. The whole gorgeous assemblage is inspired – one of the best poems ever to appear in The New Yorker. 

3 More for the Road: Details

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favorite travel books – Anthony Bailey's Along the Edge of the Forest (1983), Robert Sullivan’s Cross Country (2006), and Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia (2010) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their artful use of detail.  

What an astonishing density of detail there is in these three books! Everything is noted, named, and particularized, even coffee lids:

The least successful design and most rarely seen, in my cross-country experience, is the puncture style, such as David Herbst’s Push and Drink Lid, patented in 1990. This features a raised lid piece, often a kind of plastic sewer grate, that is depressed, thus puncturing the lid and allowing a flow of coffee. In the case of the Dart model, the grate is depressed anew each time the upper lip of the coffee imbiber seeks to gain access to the so-called coffee. I find them to be confusing, causing me to ask myself questions such as “Have I punctured sufficiently”? and “Is the coffee coming through, because I really, really need it to come through?” Often I will take the entire lid off and just admire it on the dashboard. This happened the last time I picked one up in Missoula, Montana, at Finnegan’s, the restaurant over the creek where Lewis and Clark supposedly camped. The coffee, by the way, was very good.

That’s from Sullivan's Cross Country. It's just one paragraph from an analysis that goes on for three pages, and includes a picture of a complicated reclosable lid called the Optima. Sullivan says of it, “I kind of like it, and I am certainly fascinated by it, but I also feel as if it is like the interstate itself – i.e., too much – and so I often take it off, and pour the coffee, for instance, into my porcelain Lewis and Clark mug.” That porcelain Lewis and Clark mug is, in itself, an interesting detail.

Frazier’s Travels in Siberia brims with memorable details. Here, for example, is his description of some of the Cold War relics he saw on display at the Museum of Siberian Communications in Novosibirsk:

The humorous blond woman with Nefertiti eyes who showed me around laughed about the huge old radios, the suitcase-size adding machines, the bulbous green telephone that had come from East Germany, the almost-primitive Yenisei TV set made in Krasnoyarsk, the Brezhnev-era TV that was the size of a desk and that everybody in the 1970s dreamed of owning, and the 1950s TV that many older Russians remember because it had a tiny screen over which was superimposed a large magnifying lens that had to be filled with special distilled water.

Bailey, in his Along the Edge of the Forest, also has a keen eye for detail. Recall, for example, his vivid description of the hitchhiking bag lady he encounters on the road to Wolfsburg:

Just outside the next village of Croya a lumpy human shape was standing rather perilously out in the road, and as I swerved the car around it, it – an elderly woman – waved a hand up and down. I stopped. She approached the car. Then having worked out that she could not get in what she thought was the passenger door, she came around to the other side of my Saab (which has right-hand steering for British roads) and got in. Clearly, I was giving her a lift. She was wearing a sheet of clear plastic over the shoulders of an ancient black dress. (Although the morning was gray, it wasn’t raining.) She began to talk and I didn’t understand a word. I think that even if my knowledge of German had been magnificent, I would not have understood her. She was speaking or rather barking a country dialect, and it may have been that even in that she wasn’t making much sense. Now that she was seated next to me I noticed that she had in her lap an apparently empty shopping bag and wore plastic bags on her hands as if she had been brought up to wear gloves when going out. Bristly black hairs sprouted from her chin and upper lip. Her eyes didn’t seem to focussed on anything external. She was visibly filthy and gave off a strong smell of urine. 

That pungent last detail has stayed with me ever since I first read it, almost forty years ago. The same goes for Frazier’s description of the men’s washroom at the Omsk airport, in Travels in Siberia:

The men’s room at the Omsk airport was unbelievably disgusting. Stepping through the door, or even near the door, was like receiving a blow to the face from the flat of the hand. No surface inside the men’s room, including the ceiling, was clean. There were troughs and stools, but no partitions, stalls, or doors. Everything done was done in full view. The floor was strewn with filth of a wide and eye-catching variety. At the urinal raised cement footprints offered the possibility of keeping your feet out of the flooding mire, but as the footprints themselves were hardly filth-free, the intention failed. Certain of this place’s images that I won’t describe remain inexpungible from my mind. I got out of there as fast as was practical and reeled away into the terminal’s dim lobby.

Once read, never forgotten.

In next month’s post, the last in this series, I’ll try to sum up my experience rereading these three great books. 

October 30, 2023 Issue

It’s interesting to compare Helen Rosner’s “Tables For Two: The Bazaar by José Andrés,” in this week’s issue, with the version that appears on newyorker.com. The electronic version is richer, more detailed. For example, in the magazine, Rosner writes, 

The theme is unsubtle (a towering portrait of a geisha wearing a comb and a mantilla looms over the bar), and it’s all a little ridiculous in a way that could be fun – if the restaurant didn’t seem to be working so hard to deflate any shred of amusement. This is unfortunate, because playfulness is the most generous lens through which to consider the experience. Take the 0-toro tuna wrapped in poufs of cotton candy (total nonsense, with flavors that fight one another), or the dramatically vertical Japanese coffee siphon employed tableside to infuse a mushroom broth for a bowl of ramen – dishes that foreground spectacle over satiety, presented with monklike sombreness by stone-faced servers.

Here's the newyorker.com version:

Playfulness is the most generous lens through which to consider many of the dishes on the menu, which are intricate, kooky, and not always successful. Cotton Candy O-toro is a small pouf of spun sugar on a stick, in the center of which is a morsel of soy-marinated raw tuna and a confetti of crispy rice. The creation is a riff on Andrés’s famous cotton-candy-wrapped foie gras—a brilliant twist on the traditional pairing of the sweet and the fatty. Andrés débuted the dish in the early two-thousands, at his now-closed D.C. restaurant Café Atlántico. Here, run through a Nipponifying algorithm, it becomes total nonsense, with the one-note sugar of cotton candy fighting against the delicate salinity of the fish rather than balancing it. For a bowl of mushroom ramen, the broth is heated tableside in a Japanese coffee siphon, a complexly vertical contraption that looks like lab equipment and is thrillingly, pointlessly dramatic as a vehicle for soup. It’s impossible to take seriously, but if you engaged with it on the level of silly spectacle it could be a delight—if only any of the nervous-seeming servers, lighting the flame and gazing into the roiling liquid with the sombreness of holy monks, looked as if they were allowed to have fun. 

To me, the newyorker.com version, with all those marvellous extra details, is far superior to the print version. 

Here’s another example. In the print version, Rosner writes,

I was grateful for the relief of the cocktail menu. The drinks are unreservedly exquisite – tight, focussed, and beautifully balanced. Though, like the food, which seems priced for people who never look at prices, they are soberingly expensive, twenty to thirty dollars apiece; a few, made with a jamón iberico-infused mezcal, climb to fifty dollars. For the cost of one ham-kissed glass, you can get a lordly portion of actual meat, sliced tableside, precisely arranged in a vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat. It’s funky and ferocious, the righteous king of aged hams. Such severe simplicity is, itself, a type of spectacle. Not another thing on the menu is its equal.

Here's the newyorker.com version:

I’ve eaten at many José Andrés joints over the years, including the original Bazaar, in Los Angeles, an excellent restaurant that knew how to wield its gimmickry. (Sadly, it closed permanently during the pandemic.) My favorite thing, across the whole Andrésverse, is a cocktail: the Salt Air Margarita, a satiny blend of tequila, orange liqueur, and lime juice, under a dollop of salty foam, like the fading head on a beer. I first encountered the drink a decade ago at China Poblano, Andrés’s dumpling-and-taco parlor in Las Vegas (another, more successful exercise in audacious culinary exchange), and was overjoyed to see it pop up here at home, albeit with a pomegranate twist. Andrés and his team have an uncanny knack for drinks; their love of unexpected infusions and trompe-l’oeil textures are more reliably successful behind the bar than in the kitchen. At the Bazaar, a nonalcoholic concoction called the Firefly was one of the most pleasing zero-proof drinks I’ve had in ages.

Like the food, which seems to be priced for people who have no need to look at prices, the drinks are soberingly expensive, at twenty-five to thirty dollars apiece. A few, made with a pricey mezcal that’s been infused with precious jamón ibérico de bellota, have price tags that can climb to fifty. It seems like a pointless flourish—the star ingredient, to my palate, was undetectable in the Andrés y Cooper, though the drink itself, something like a smoky Negroni, was otherwise excellent. Still, for the price of that one ham-kissed glass, you could get a lordly portion of the actual meat: a leg of jamón ibérico crisscrosses the dining room on a wheeled mahogany cart; flag it down to have a serving sliced tableside, each piece carefully arranged in a spiralling vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat. It’s funky and ferocious, the righteous king of aged hams. Such severe simplicity is, itself, a type of spectacle. Not another thing on the menu is its equal. 

Note how “precisely arranged in a vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat,” in the magazine version, becomes, in the newyorker.com version, “carefully arranged in a spiralling vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat.” Both versions are excellent. But, to me, the addition of “spiralling” in the newyorker.com rendering makes it a shade more vivid.

What's the lesson to be learned from this comparison? Simply this: if you enjoy “Tables For Two,” as I do, it pays to check out the newyorker.com version. It provides a much richer reading experience. 

October 23, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his “The French Connection,” in this week’s issue, says of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863-65), “You can’t really appreciate Olympia unless you feel the rude slap of its shortcomings.” I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Peter Schjeldahl had a more memorable response:

Here's a pop quiz: in Olympia, how many things is the model, Victorine Meurent, wearing? Time’s up. Six: a high-heeled slipper (its mate has come off), a ribbon choker with a pearl attached, a pair of earrings, a bracelet with another dangling jewel, and a flower, perhaps a hibiscus, in her hair. Every item renders her more naked, of course, as do the fully clothed black maid proffering a gorgeous bouquet, the bristling black cat, and the sumptuous topography of fringed coverlet, yielding pillows, and wrinkled sheets. Without all those objects, the painting would be a nude. With them, it’s a general-alarm fire.

I love that passage. It’s from Schjeldahl’s great “The Urbane Innocent” (The New Yorker, November 20, 2000). 

Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863-65)

October 16, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s “Under the Carpet Bag,” a fond recollection of his sixty-year friendship with Bill Bradley. Actually, McPhee doesn’t just recollect this friendship, he relives it on the page. For example:

And now, in 1964, at Camp Don Bosco, in Missouri, I was walking up a dirt road with Bill Bradley and Ed Macauley. The road consisted of deep parallel ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. Bradley was in one rut, Macauley in the other, and I was up on the hump between them. I am smaller than most people—about as small as Andrew Carnegie, James Madison, Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Actually, I was five feet seven at my zenith and have lately condensed. The hump was a good foot higher than the ruts. Nonetheless, the three of us in outline formed the letter M.

That “lately condensed” made me smile. The piece brims with humor. One of my favorite passages is a quote from McPhee’s brilliant Draft No. 4, in which he describes William Shawn’s approach to editing new writers, “breaking them in, so to speak, but not exactly like a horse, more like a baseball mitt.” 

Readers of McPhee’s 1965 profile of Bradley, titled “A Sense of Where You Are” (The New Yorker, January 25, 1965), who find its constant adulation of Bradley a bit much (as I do), should read this new piece. It helps explain McPhee’s hagiography. McPhee and Bradley are very close. As McPhee says in “Under the Carpet Bag, “He is the younger brother I never had, and I am the brother he never had.” 

October 9, 2023 Issue

The two pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are Ben McGrath’s “Talk” story “Dystopian Sublime” and Hannah Goldfield’s “Top of the Line.” McGrath’s piece is an account of his attendance at a bizarre opera staged on a barge floating on Newtown Creek in Maspeth, New York City. The creek is grossly polluted. McGrath says of it, “Black mayonnaise is the connoisseur’s name for its sedimentary ooze.” The event is watched by an audience riding in canoes, kayaks, and other types of boats. McGrath writes, “Boating spectators gripped one another’s gunwales to hold position against the southerly breeze. A skein of geese passed overhead in eerie synchronicity with the end of a scene like fighter pilots after “The Star-Spangled Banner.” My favorite line in the piece is this beauty: “A stray horn, a searchlight upwind, a marine radio hissing intermittently about bridge traffic: sometimes, amid this dystopian sublime, it was difficult to distinguish the choreography from the merely urban.”

Goldfield’s “Top of the Line” is a profile of chef Kwame Onwuachi. She tells about his career – his attendance at the Culinary Institute of America, his competing in “Top Chef,” his ownership of the successful restaurant Tatiana, in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, and so on. But, for me, the piece really comes alive in its last part when Goldfield describes Onwuachi in Tatiana’s kitchen, making a corn-bread pudding:

He bloomed curry powder in butter in a pot on the stove, then crumbled in the corn bread and added heavy cream and oat milk. When it had cooked down into a smooth, thick paste, he tasted it. “Fucking great!” he declared. “That’s fun.” Instead of crème fraîche, he decided to top it with the white sauce that he makes for his halal-cart-inspired shawarma chicken. In the finished dish, the gentle heat of the curry and the sweetness of the warm pudding were offset by the cool, tangy white sauce and a salty plink of caviar at the end of each bite.

That last sentence is superb!