January 23, 2023 Issue

Merve Emre, in her "Everyone's a Critic," in this week’s issue, bashes literary scholars. She calls them deformed. She quotes John Guillory’s new book, Professing Criticism: “If there is a thesis that unites the essays in Professing Criticism, it is that professional formation entails a corresponding ‘déformation professionnelle.’ ” She argues that academia has ruined literary criticism. She says that in university, criticism is "more interested in its own protocols than in what Guillory calls 'the verbal work of art.' "  

Well, all I can say in response is that, in a lifetime of reading, some of the best criticism I’ve read is by university scholars. Examples:

Sandra M. Gilbert’s Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1972 (Gilbert taught at Queens College of the City University of New York, at Sacramento State College, at California State College, Hayward, and at St. Mary’s College of California);

Bonnie Costello’s Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 1991 (Costello is Associate Professor of English at Boston University);

Roland Barthes’ New Critical Essays, 1980 (Barthes was professor at the Collège de France);

James Wood’s Serious Noticing, 2019 (Wood is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University);

Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, 2015 (Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University);

B. J. Leggett’s Larkin’s Blues, 1999 (Leggett is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville);

Dan Chiasson's One Kind of Everything, 2007 (Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College);

Bożena Shallcross’s Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky, 2002 (Shallcross is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago);

Eleanor Cook’s Elizabeth Bishop at Work, 2016 (Cook is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Toronto);

Robert Hass's What Light Can Do, 2012 (Hass teaches at the University of California);

Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, 1994 (Wood is Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University).

I'm just scratching the surface here. These literary scholars are interested in the verbal work of art, deeply so. I enjoy their writing immensely. 

Hal Foster on T. J. Clark

It’s been a while since I last fell in love with a writer’s style. I think I’d have to go back to 1998, when I first encountered Peter Schjeldahl’s art writing in The New Yorker. Now I find myself crazy about the style of another art writer – T. J. Clark. Why Clark? What is it about his work that draws me to it? Reading Hal Foster’s recent review of Clark’s latest book, If These Apples Should Fall, helps me answer that question, at least tentatively. 

Foster’s piece, titled “Not Window, Not Wall,” appears in the December 1, 2022 London Review of Books. In it, Foster says, “The book’s primary emphasis is on perception – Cézanne’s, Clark’s and our own – and its distinct translations into paint and prose….” Yes, I think that’s one element for sure. Another is Clark’s “resistance to resolution.” Foster writes, 

Resistance to resolution is what he values most in Cézanne, and in this respect his prose is true to the painting, even mimetic of it. As Cézanne confronts his motif again and again, so Clark confronts Cézanne. 

Foster gets at a third ingredient of Clark’s style when he says that Clark’s attention becomes “almost obsessive.” I think Foster’s most apt description of Clark’s form – the one that speaks to me – is “diaristic.” He says If These Apples Should Fall “returns to The Sight of Death in style, since the new book is also sometimes diaristic….” Right there, I think, Foster nails it. Reading Clark is like reading a great diary, in which we’re privy to the writer's thought processes as they evolve. As Foster says, “Clark invites us in on his reflexive meditations.” 

My favourite passage in Foster’s piece is this one:

Like a passionate friend tugging at one’s sleeve in a museum, he constantly enjoins us to see, to compare, to reconsider, and the intensity of this viewing-and-reviewing can be a bit wearing. 

All true, except the last part – I’ve never found Clark to be wearing. For me, it’s quite the opposite; I find his writing exhilarating.

Postscript: One of these days, I'll post my review of Clark's If These Apples Should Fall. It's one of the best books I've ever read. 

On Proustian Memory

Saul Friedländer, in his absorbing Proustian Uncertainties (2020), calls the concept of involuntary memory in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past “nothing else but a magnificent literary device.” This, it seems to me, is an attempt to trivialize Proust’s core idea, to downgrade it to the status of a MacGuffin. It’s not so much Friedländer’s word “device” that’s telling; it’s his “nothing else but.” Is he right? No way. Recovery of memory, particularly involuntary memory, is Proust’s great subject. Howard Moss, in his classic The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust (1963), identified eighteen occasions in Remembrance of Things Past when Marcel has a memory:

1. The madeleine dipped in tea restores Combray in its entirety.

2. The steeples of Martinville suggest a hidden reality.

3. The mouldy smell of the water-closet in the Champs-Élysées reminds Marcel of his Uncle Adophe’s room at Combray.

4. The three trees at Hudimesnil awaken a memory Marcel cannot identify.

5. Flowerless hawthorns at Balbec bring back his childhood.

6. A steam-heater recently installed in Marcel’s bedroom hiccoughs while he is thinking of Doncières and, forever after, the sound is bound up with, or provokes, memories of Doncières.

7. Unbutttoning his boots, the living reality of his grandmother is restored to Marcel long after her death.

8. Twigs burning in his bedroom fire-place recall himself as a boy and bring back memories of Combray and Doncières.

9. The cold weather releases memories of café concerts he used to go to on the first winter evenings and he sings snatches of the popular songs he heard at the time.

10. The smell of petrol reminds him of excursions he took in the country.

11. The rain brings back the scent of lilac, and this memory proliferates into others: the sun’s rays on the balcony remind him of the pigeons in the Champs-Élysées; the muffling of noise on summer mornings in Paris brings back the taste of cherries; the sound of the wind and the return of Easter revive his longing for Brittany and Venice.

12. Tying his scarf, Marcel remembers Albertine.

13. The streets leading to the new Guermantes mansion, in spite of bad paving, bring back the streets Marcel and Françoise used to take to get to the Champs-Élysées.

14. Stumbling on two uneven paving stones in the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion, Marcel recovers his experience of Venice.

15. The noise of the spoon rattling against a plate reminds him of a railway worker on a train the day before who was tapping the wheels with a hammer.

16. A starched white napkin restores Balbec and the sea.

17. The sound of water-pipes at the Guermantes’s brings back the reality of the marine dining-room at Balbec.

18. Opening a copy of François le Champi in the Guermantes’s library, his childhood is restored.

Not all of these memories are involuntary, as Moss pointed out, but many of them are, none more so than the first, the precursor of all the others:

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shape and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. [Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume I]

January 16, 2023 Issue

I enjoy photography writing. One of the best at it is The New Yorker’s Vince Aletti. He has an excellent “Goings On About Town” note in this week’s issue on Brooklyn Museum’s “Jimmy DeSana: Submission.” He says of DeSana’s pictures, “At once laughable and alarming, playful and lethal, the work still lands like a psychological time bomb.” Aletti’s piece spurred me to visit Brooklyn Museum’s website and check out the exhibition. It includes this striking portrait of William S. Burroughs:

Postscript: Jonathan Raban 1942 - 2023

Jonathan Raban (Photo by Dan Lamont)

I see in the Times that Jonathan Raban has died. This is sad news. Raban is one of my favorite writers. His Old Glory (1981) and Passage to Juneau (1999) are in my personal canon of great books. Passage to Juneau is one of the three travelogues I reviewed in my “3 for the Sea” last year. It contains some of the most exquisite descriptions of water I’ve ever read. Here’s a sample:

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. 

How I love that “just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.”

An excerpt from Passage to Juneau, titled "Sailing into the Sublime," appeared in the August 23, 1999 New Yorker.

Raban is gone now. But he lives on in his books. Open Passage to Juneau almost anywhere and there you’ll find him in the cockpit of his boat, steering through turbulence, studying the waves, savoring the light.

Parul Sehgal's "Bloodlines": Two Objections

Illustration by Anagh Banerjee, from Parul Sehgal's "Bloodlines"

Two objections to Parul Sehgal’s absorbing “Bloodlines” (The New Yorker, January 2 & 9, 2023):

1. Sehgal's definition of literature is too restrictive. She says, “A sturdy consensus long held that the fullest account of 1947 could be found not in facts and figures—not in nonfiction at all—but in texts like “Tamas,” in literature.” That “not in nonfiction … but in literature” grates. Surely we’re at a point now when literature can be given a more capacious meaning, one that includes, say, Thoreau’s Walden, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia – just to name three nonfiction works that quickly come to mind.

2. Sehgal gives novels way too much credence. She overlooks or disregards their fictionality. She says, “This is the work of the novel: to notice, knit, remember, record.” Okay, but what about its most defining ingredient – imagination? Novels are works of fiction. As Peter Brooks says in his Seduced by Story (2022), "One must use fictions always with the awareness of their fictionality." To treat them as fact is a recipe for delusion. It is delusion. 

January 2 & 9, 2023 Issue

The New Yorker starts the new year strong with a riveting war piece by Luke Mogelson. Titled “Trapped in the Trenches,” it’s an account of Mogelson’s experience embedded with a team of Ukraine’s International Legion as they carry out various high risk operations in the Donetsk region, where the trench and artillery warfare is intense and unrelenting.

The team of Legion members is fascinating. Mogelson identifies them by their code names – Doc, Tai, T.Q., Turtle, and Herring. They’re volunteers. They’re there in the hellmouth of war because they want to be there. After a particularly harrowing experience – pinned down in a front-line trench by withering Russian tank fire – Mogelson asks Turtle what’s keeping him there at the front. Turtle says, “In the end, it’s just that I love this shit. And maybe I can’t escape that – maybe that’s the way it’s always gonna be.” 

Mogelson accompanies the team to the front line:

As we headed to the front in two dilapidated vehicles, we passed one building after another that had also been destroyed. Incinerated cars sat on the roadside. Missiles and rockets had lodged in the fields, their protruding metal tubes resembling strange bionic crops. We parked in the dystopian ruins of a coal mine whose silos, conveyors, and concrete warehouses had been severely shelled. Another soldier from the 72nd then transported us in a van to a wide tree line running toward the gray zone, where an air shaft led into underground tunnels.

He describes going on a night mission with them, moving along a tree line in the “gray zone” – the no man’s land between the Russian and Ukrainian fortified positions:

In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon.

And, unforgettably, he describes hunkering down in the root cellar of an abandoned house as the Russians hammer the area with tank rounds, rockets, and artillery:

It was pitch-black in the cellar. Even when three of us sat with our knees drawn up, the fourth person could fit only by standing next to the ladder. In the claustrophobic space, I could feel Herring debating what to do. He was lighting a cigarette when a loud whooshing noise, like a cascade of water, roared toward us. “Down!” Herring barked, though there was nowhere farther down to go. I bowed my head and pressed my palms into the dirt floor, which quaked as three successive impacts left a ringing in my ears.

Mogelson is accompanied by photographer David Guttenfelder. Some of his pictures illustrate the piece. They’re transfixing! The whole piece is transfixing – an early contender for Best Reporting of 2023.

Photo by David Guttenfelder, from Luke Mogelson's "Trapped in the Trenches"

Janet Malcolm's "Still Pictures"

Sorry, I know I said I was taking a break, and I will, I will. But before I do, I just want to flag a significant literary happening: the publication of Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory. Malcolm is one of The New Yorker’s all-time greats. She died in 2021. A new book by her is a major event. There’s an excellent review of it in The New York Times: see Charles Finch’s “Janet Malcolm Remembers,” January 8, 2023. I’ll post my response to Still Pictures in due course. It’s great to have a new book by Malcolm to look forward to. 

Acts of Seeing: Tangle of Ropes and Fishing Gear

Photo by John MacDougall

“I don’t know why you bother with that. It’s ugly,” said Lorna, as I laid on the wet sand of Ross Lane Beach and took a picture of a tangled mass of ropes and fishing gear deposited there by the tide. Is she right? Her remark didn’t deter me. I liked the composition, not just the jumble of ropes and netting, etc., but also the foam and the waves, the cloudy blue sky, and the light – most of all the light, illuminating the multi-colored ropes, making their frayed, braided texture more visible, more palpable. 

Light can transform the most banal material. I was reminded of this the other day. I’d loaded two big paper yard bags full of leaves and twigs into the back of our SUV to take to the corner for pick up by the Island’s waste management service, and was about to close the door, when I noticed the way the sun struck the front of the bags, limning the green and yellow “Kent” logo and the crumpled tan surface of the paper. I was tempted to get my camera and take a picture. But I decided not to. Who takes pictures of yard bags? Am I crazy? Now, I wish I had. It would’ve made an interesting still life, I think.  

Taking a Break

Palm Beach (Photo by Lorna MacDougall)

Lorna and I are heading down to Palm Beach for a couple of weeks to do some cycling. I’m taking the January 2 & 9 New Yorker with me. It appears to have some good reading in it, especially that Luke Mogelson piece. I’ll post my review when I return. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about January 23. 

Stacy Schiff on Judith Thurman's "A Left-Handed Woman"

Stacy Schiff’s “Writing the Furies” (The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2022) is an excellent appreciation of Judith Thurman’s writing. It’s a review of Thurman’s new essay collection A Left-Handed Woman. It contains a number of piquant descriptions of Thurman’s style, including “The voice is so exact it can pinch,” “Her prose has high cheekbones,” and “She clambers past received wisdoms like a mountain goat.” That last one made me laugh. 

Is A Left-Handed Woman as good as Thurman’s previous collection, Cleopatra’s Nose (2008)? Schiff doesn’t say directly, but she does make this interesting observation:

A published essay reads differently when it lands between hard covers. It has aged or matured. Sometimes it has gone stale. Its spark may or may not survive. And it has acquired a family. It exists not only in itself but in its resemblances and distinctions. Its siblings may show it up. Tics and preoccupations reveal themselves, as, to varying degrees, does the author herself. For whatever reason, the “I” of Cleopatra’s Nose is more forthcoming than the “I” of A Left-Handed Woman. With time, Thurman has removed herself to the middle distance.

Schiff may be onto something here. My sense is that Thurman’s New Yorker work over the last dozen years or so isn’t as strong as the writing in Cleopatra’s Nose. But, in fairness, that book sets the bar exceedingly high. It’s one of my all-time favorite essay collections: see my appreciation here. 

In her piece, Schiff describes Thurman’s writing as insouciant. She says, “But it is a sly insouciance that so lights up these pages and that makes Thurman’s voice so distinct.” Right there, I think, Schiff nails it; insouciance is the essence of Thurman’s splendid style. What am I waiting for? A Left-Handed Woman is a significant collection by one of The New Yorker’s finest writers. I’m ordering it today. 

3 More for the Road: Anthony Bailey's "Along the Edge of the Forest"

This is the first in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favourite 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 begin with a review of Along the Edge of the Forest.

The time is 1981. Europe is split in two – East and West. East is totalitarian; West is democratic. The boundary between them is called the Iron Curtain, consisting of concrete walls, barbed wire fences, watchtowers, guards, land mines, machine guns, and guard dogs. Anthony Bailey decides to travel it from one end to the other, to “look as closely as I could at what is still the dividing line between two power blocks and two states formed out of one people, the Germans.” He says, “I meant to look at the ground and at the people living along the border. I was curious about the effects of living close to what might almost seem to be a geological fault line – certainly a geographical and perhaps a metaphysical one.”  

Starting in early autumn, Bailey drives his 1973 Saab station wagon from the Baltic to the Adriatic, over 1,400 kilometres, along the edge of the Curtain, exploring the border country, staying in border towns, walking, hiking, talking to people – always noticing, noticing, noticing. 

Here, for example, he’s hiking along the border near Braunlage, West Germany:

In the next hour I saw a small shed in the woods with chalked graffiti: BRITS RUSKIS AMS OUT; a young couple, sitting on a log, hands interlocked, with their feet just inside the border, oblivious – so it seemed – to a DDR [East German] watchtower a hundred yards away; a little brook, the Bremke, running south; and a road, the former Elenderstrasse, intersected by the border. There were the remains of a bridge that had once carried the road across the Bremke and on to Elend, now in the DDR. Over there, drüben, the road was narrow and deserted. On the West German side it was wider but equally without traffic; it had become a lane on which people could take a Sunday-afternoon stroll out from Braunlage without the exertion of climbing the Wurmberg. Naturally, there were watchtowers here, too – an older type, apparently empty; a newer one, apparently manned. Beyond the fences, outer and inner, two German shepherds were attached by leashes to long wire runs. A man and a woman came walking from Braunlage, guiding a toddler who was pushing his own carriage. They arrived at the striped barrier that ended the road and stood looking at the ruins of the bridge. I had recovered by nerve and felt annoyed that this small family couldn’t keep walking. Hier ist Deutschland nicht zu Ende! Here, however, was a dividing line between two views of the state – on one side, where the state was still seen as a creation of and servant of the people; and on the other, where people were considered to exist for the benefit of the state. And these concepts could be, as I’d seen, a mere quick and sudden jump apart.

Here he’s still in West Germany, driving along the border near the village of Furth-am-Berg: 

Mist hid the border the next morning. Monday morning sounds included blackbirds singing and a cement mixer at the new Gasthof across the way. School buses picked children waiting at the border markers. I drove east for a few kilometres and then followed the border north along a minor road called the Frankenwald Hochstrasse. The road was high in its fashion; the hills, not lofty, were steep and forested. I stopped in one hamlet, which had a Scottish or Vermont feeling, and watched an old man digging a garden plot that abutted the border. The DDR watchtowers were generally of the old type. A Zoll hut had for its sole piece of furniture the back seat from a car. In one lonely area, without watchtowers, it took me several minutes with the binoculars to find a bunker under distant trees, buried almost up to its eye slits in the East German ground.

And here he’s on the Austro-Hungarian border, in the province of Burgenland:

On the gentle slopes leading down to the marshes are the vine fields. In the villages many houses advertise their own wine for sale. I followed the road south from one such village. Morbisch, a pretty place of white-washed houses with outside stairs, bright-painted shutters, and hanging pots of flowers or bunches of dried corn. The road ended in a small parking lot, with a vineyard on the long slope toward the lake, the long hedges of vines hanging from wires suspended between low posts, and the southern edge of the vineyard formed by a rusty barbed-wire fence about two meters tall. This was the Staatsgrenze, the Hungarian border. Here stood several Hungarian watchtowers, more like the Czech than the East German variety, small cabins on tall, outspread legs; one was built on a marshy peninsula by the lake. In a giant field on the Hungarian side two large red-painted combine harvesters were working down the slope toward the lake, which was gray, under low gray clouds. The grapes growing in this Austrian vineyard were small and green, hanging in secretive clusters under the vine leaves. 

Along the Edge of the Forest is essentially a journal – a wonderful day-by-day account of Bailey’s border travels in West Germany, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Italy. It brims with a certain kind of journalistic sentence – specific, active, first-person, experiential, exotic – that I savor. Consider this beauty:

I was on the public jetty next to Travemünde yacht club the following morning to join the West German patrol boat Uelzen for a short voyage in Lübeck Bay.

And this:

The 29 took me to the junction of the Kochstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, and I walked up to Checkpoint Charlie to join a U.S. military patrol for a trip along the wall.

And this:

It was a lovely afternoon as I drove eastward, munching on a Kölnprinz apple that Gabrielle Neugebauer had plucked for me from the Traiskirchen commissariat. 

That “munching on a Kölnprinz apple” is inspired! Bailey’s prose isn’t flashy. He rarely uses figures of speech. But his clarity and particularity are impeccable.

In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Along the Edge of the Forest, including its action, structure, description, point of view, sense of place, and sense of people. But first I want to introduce the other two books in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Robert Sullivan’s great Cross Country. 

Postscript: Portions of Along the Edge of the Forest originally appeared in The New Yorker: “The Edge of the Forest – I” (June 27, 1983) and “The Edge of the Forest – II” (July 4, 1983).

Best of 2022: Reporting

Illustration by Nada Hayek, from Nick Paumgarten's "Five  O'Clock Everywhere"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets): 

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere,” March 28, 2022 (“Men with guitars set up outside someone’s garage, and the golf carts appear out of nowhere. Commence the beer pong. Pool parties, poker nights, talent shows, toga parties, pig roasts. Cigar-club meeting, group renewal of wedding vows, a pub crawl in old St. Augustine. Oktoberfest this fall had a “Gilligan’s Island” theme; “Hoodstock” was hippies, Fireball, and multicolored jello shots. The golf carts zip and swerve”);

2. Luke Mogelson, “The Wound-Dressers,” May 9, 2022 (“Horenka, which bordered Bucha to the east, was the scene of fierce Russian shelling—on our way, as we passed Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles, a mortar exploded on the road ahead of us, rocking the ambulance and obliging us to turn back for a while. It was dark when we finally reached our destination, and bright trails streaked across the night sky. Rockets launched by the Ukrainians flashed in the woods”);

3. Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In,” May 30, 2022 (“I braced myself. The water pressure was intense—almost strong enough to clean a sidewalk. I could taste the salt. The therapist was yelling instructions, but I could hardly hear them over the roar of the spray. She started with my ankles, working methodically up the line: calves, thighs, butt, triceps, shoulders. As she power-washed my back, I fixated on a single thought: Please don’t hit a mole!”);

4. Jill Lepore, “Moving Right Along,” July 25, 2022 (“It was rusty and brown, with a stick shift, and the locks didn’t work and it smelled like smoke, except more like a campfire than like cigarettes, and we took it camping and pushed down the seats to make a bed and slept inside, with two toddlers and a baby and a Great Dane, and we all fit, even with fishing poles and Swiss Army knives and battery-operated lanterns and binoculars and Bananagrams and bug spray and a beloved, pint-size red plastic suitcase full of the best pieces from our family’s Lego collection”);

5. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three,” February 7, 2022 (“Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses”);

6. Rivka Galchen, “Who Will Fight With Me?,” October 3, 2022 (“Whenever there were clearance sales at the Dillard’s at the Sooner Fashion Mall, my mom and I would page through the folded button-up shirts, each in its cardboard sleeve, the way other kids must have flipped through LPs at record stores. We were looking for the rare and magical neck size of 17.5. If we found it, we bought it, regardless of the pattern”);

7. Annie Proulx, “Swamped,” July 4, 2022 (“I stepped out of the boat and felt the ground move in an undulating roll. It was a mat of sphagnum moss, and although some people say it is like walking on a waterbed, its billowy heave seemed to me more like a wave of dizziness before you pass out—a very slow falling sensation although you remain upright.

8. John Seabrook, “Green Giants,” January 31, 2022 (“The pits were a mechanical Pamplona of nitromethane bulls, their belching tailpipes and fiery exhaust wrinkling the air, and their pit crews almost feral with the oddly fruity aroma of the fuel and the acrid stench of the smoking, treadless tires that the guys called slicks”);

9. Ed Caesar, “Seize the Night,” October 3, 2022 (“Reaching the d.j. booth from the street feels like a psychedelic re-creation of the Steadicam shot in “GoodFellas”: after walking past a security guard, you enter a garden filled with sculptures of unicorns, giraffes, and naked women, then follow a winding corridor, lined with red lights, that leads you past a bustling kitchen and mixed-sex bathrooms into the main room of the club, where you pass through the V.I.P. area and, finally, down a small flight of stairs. The loudness is engulfing. Mesmeric hexagonal light panels rise and fall over the dance floor in response to the music, making the club feel like a living organism”); 

10. William Finnegan, “Big Breaks,” May 30, 2022 (“The only time the waves seem to have any heft at all is when the rider gets deeply barrelled. Suddenly, we’re in a blue room with walls of rushing water, and we’re being pursued by a horizontal waterfall and a fire hose of mist”).