On the Horizon: 2024 Year in Review

It’s time to start composing my “2024 Year in Review.” Each year at this point, I like to pause, look back, and take stock of my New Yorker reading. I find listing is a good way to do it. I’m not going to reveal my #1 pick just yet. But I’ll give you a hint. It features a place called Tigre. That’s it, no more clues. As it is, I’ve probably given it away. Besides, the year isn’t over. There are two more New Yorkers still to come. Who knows what delightful surprises they might contain. 

An Inspired Sentence

Almost every day, it seemed, my drawing improved a tiny bit, guided by the shadowy anchovies of subtlety and shadow that swam their way up through the paper immediately under my pencil.

Wow! What a delightful sentence! It’s by Nicholson Baker. I encountered it last night, reading his wonderful Finding a Likeness (2024). It made me smile. Why? It’s original. It’s creative. Most of all, it’s surprising – the surprising word choices (“anchovies,” “subtlety,” “shadow,” “swam") and the delightful, surprising way they’re combined (“the shadowy anchovies of subtlety and shadow that swam their way up through the paper immediately under my pencil”). It’s like listening to jazz and suddenly hearing a gorgeous, shimmering combination of notes never heard before. Baker’s sentence is like that – beautiful, lyrical, beating with the creative impulse.  

Postscript: Victor Brombert 1923 - 2024

Victor Brombert (photo from dailyprincetonian.com)

I see in the Times that Victor Brombert died. He wrote a great little book called Musings on Mortality (2013), in which he traces the theme of death through the works of eight novelists – Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Woolf, Camus, Giorgio Bassani, J. M. Coetzee, and Primo Levi. Of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, he wrote,

Tolstoy’s singular achievement is that he conveys Ivan Ilych’s terror in the face of death not in philosophical or abstract terms but as a subjective and visceral experience.

On Camus’s The Plague:

The horrors of the epidemic – the inguinal fevers, the inflamed buboes, the dreadful agonies, the piles of corpses, the smell of death – should press home a lesson in reality.

On Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis:

Death viewed through the filter of time is the main theme of Bassani’s novel. The prologue unfolds under the triple sign of tombs, mourning, and memory.

Death is one of literature's great themes. Brombert tracked it brilliantly. 

The New York Times Picks "Paradise Bronx" as One of the Best Book Covers of 2024

I commend The New York Times’ Book Review art director, Matt Dorfman, for selecting the cover of Ian Frazier’s Paradise Bronx as one of the best book covers of 2024. Dorfman writes,

If the top half of this cover is all party, the bottom half is all infrastructure. For a celebratory sociopolitical history of one of New York’s most storied boroughs, these tonal opposites of bursting type and sober photography are alive with contradictions, except for one piece of connective tissue: The style of the graffiti tags in the background of the photo is echoed in the top right corner as a graphic element. An extended squint reveals that this element is the author’s name.

Yes, the Paradise Bronx cover, designed by Thomas Colligan, is cool. And so is the book. I’m half way through it. I’ll post my review when I’m finished. I’m enjoying it immensely. 

December 16, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rivka Galchen’s absorbing “Leg Work.” It’s about a new type of prosthesis—one that’s controlled by the brain. Galchen visits Hugh Herr, the director of an M.I.T. laboratory that pursues the “merging of body and machine.” He shows her the new prosthesis. She writes,

The prostheses are being used only for research, since they require more testing to be considered for F.D.A. approval, but research participants have already achieved a “biomimetic gait.” This makes it the first leg design that allows users to walk approximately as quickly and unthinkingly as anyone else—a feat that Herr described as “more than I had expected in my wildest dreams.”

Galchen points out that the M.I.T. prosthesis is “not just about microprocessors, carbon fibre, and titanium.” It “required the engineering of much more familiar materials: muscles, tendons, and bones.” Herr, in close collaboration with Shriya Srinivasan and Tyler Clites, who were then graduate students in Herr’s lab, teamed with plastic surgeon Matthew Carty, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to develop a new approach to amputation. The new approach is called the Ewing amputation, named after Jim Ewing the first patient to undergo the procedure. Galchen describes it:

According to a description of what would become known as the Ewing amputation, the surgeon makes a “stairstep incision” over the shin using a scalpel. The relevant part of the limb is “exsanguinated.” A flap of skin is peeled back to expose the leg muscles. Care is to be taken, the account notes, to isolate the saphenous vein and a nearby nerve. This is only the beginning of what is simultaneously a delicate, gruesome, and revolutionary surgical procedure; one of the required tools is a bone saw.

My favorite sentence in “Leg Work” is Galchen’s description of Carty: “When I first met Matthew Carty, a tall plastic surgeon with gray hair and bright-blue eyes, he had just returned from a twelve-hour breast-reconstruction surgery, and I could still see the imprint of magnification glasses on his face.” That noticing of “the imprint of magnification glasses on his face” is inspired. It’s pure Galchen. 

10 Best "Personal History" Pieces: #10 Ann Patchett's "Flight Plan"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll look back and pick ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s choice is Ann Patchett’s wonderful “Flight Plan” (August 2, 2021).

“Flight Plan” is Patchett’s reflection on how she learned to live with her flight-obsessed husband. It features one of my favorite opening lines: “The three of us were in a 1957 de Havilland Beaver, floating in the middle of a crater lake in the southwest quadrant of Alaska.” No throat clearing. Patchett puts us immediately there, “in a 1957 de Havilland Beaver, floating in the middle of a crater lake in the southwest quadrant of Alaska.” I love the specificity. I love the exoticism. Why is Patchett there in that float plane, in that remote location? Who are the two men she’s with? What’s this all about? Patchett tells us in detail after fascinating detail:

Karl and I were spending a week fishing at a fly-out lodge outside Iliamna, by which I mean nowhere near Iliamna but closer to Iliamna than to anywhere else. Each morning, we and the dozen or so other guests gathered up our neoprene waders and were divided into groups of three or four or five. Along with thermoses and sandwiches and tackle boxes and a guide, we were loaded into a string of warhorse floatplanes bobbing at the dock. The pilots who flew for the lodge struck me as men who would have had a hard time finding work elsewhere. After a flight of twenty or thirty minutes, we would land on a river or a lake, then pile out of the plane and into a small waiting boat. The plane would then taxi off while the guide and the boat took us even deeper into nowhere, the idea being that special fish congregated in secret locations far from civilization. But there was no civilization, and there were plentiful fish in the lake in front of the lodge. Taking a plane to a boat to find an obscure fishing spot seemed to be a bit of Alaskan theatre. After we reached whatever pebbly shoal the guide had in mind for the day, we arranged our flies and waded hip-deep into the freezing water to cast for trout. Despite the significant majesty of the place, wading around in a river for eight hours wasn’t my idea of a good time. Bears prevented me from wandering off. Rain prevented me from reading on the shore. Mosquitoes prevented everything else. 

On the fifth day of their fishing trip, Patchett’s boyfriend, Karl, suggests that they skip the fishing and pay extra to spend the day flying instead. She agrees. She writes,

Flying was what he’d come for, anyway: the early-morning flight out to the fish and the afternoon flight back to the lodge. Karl liked talking to the pilots—who put him in the right seat and let him wear the headset—and they liked talking to him, because he was a doctor, and free medical advice is hard to come by. Karl and I were less than a year into our relationship when we went to Alaska, and I didn’t yet fully understand the centrality of airplanes in his life. After Alaska, I got it.

She got it, but at a cost – the loss of peace of mind when Karl is flying solo and is late calling in or doesn’t call at all. Patchett tells of the time Karl flew a Cessna to Kingston, Ontario, to look at a boat. On the way home, the weather turns bad. He calls from Bowling Green, Kentucky to say that he’d landed because the transponder was out, which meant the plane couldn’t be tracked. Patchett tells him to stay there and she’ll drive up to get him. He says no, maybe he can fix it. Two hours later there’s still no call, and still no answer when she tries his cell phone. She writes,

Around midnight, the clock and I had a conversation. I told the clock that I wanted to wait fifteen minutes before my new life began, the life in which Karl had been killed in a plane crash. I requested fifteen more minutes in this world—which I was quickly coming to see as the past—before figuring out whom to call, whom to wake up. You’ll remember this feeling when the phone rings, I told myself. You’ll remember how scared you were when he calls to tell you he’s fine. And it was true. As many times as I’ve been in exactly this situation, I never forget it, and it never fails to shock me, the flood of adrenaline that does not serve for fight or flight but drowns me. At twelve-thirty, I shifted my perspective again, from wondering what it would be like if he were dead to understanding that he was dead, and I decided that I could wait another fifteen minutes. He would be dead forever, so what difference did it make if I gave myself a little more time? I still had no idea what I was supposed to do.

After I had extended the final cutoff two more times, he walked in the door. That’s how these stories always end, of course, except for the one time when they don’t. I saw the headlights against the garage door and went outside in the rain to meet him with my love and my rage and my sick relief. I wanted to kill him because he had not been killed. I wanted to step into his open jacket and stay there for the rest of my life, for the rest of his life. How had he not called?

I love that “I saw the headlights against the garage door and went outside in the rain to meet him with my love and my rage and my sick relief.” There are so many great lines in this piece. Return to that opening scene for a moment, where Patchett is in the float plane with Karl and the pilot. The pilot asks if Karl would like to try flying the plane. Karl says yes. Patchett describes the experience:

After a demonstration—up, around, down again—the pilot turned over the controls. This was not Lake Michigan. Getting up to speed required circling, but you had to take off straight toward a fixed point on the horizon and into the wind. Karl took off toward the shore, and then we lifted off the lake, flew past the mountains, through the clouds, around the blue sky, back through the clouds and past the mountains, then nose up, plane down, smack into the lake. The pilot was right; it was hard to see it coming. I reminded myself to relax my jaw. The pilot offered Karl some pointers, some praise. There was a quick discussion of how the landing could be improved, and then we were off again, a tighter circle, greater speed, straight up, lake-mountain-cloud-blue-cloud-mountain-lake, the nose up as we came down. The jolt was harder this time—I felt it in my spine—but before I could fully register my relief we were up again: a carnival ride for which no one bothered to take the tickets.

I wasn’t prone to airsickness or seasickness, but the combination of air and water in rapid succession was something new. I turned away from the window to contemplate the floor, stamped metal rusted at the edges, like a service elevator in a hospital. I stared at it while Karl took off, turned above the lake, then dropped back down onto the surface. Repetition was the key to learning. The only thing on hand to throw up in were the pilot’s waders, which seemed better (better?) than throwing up on the stamped-metal floor. I held down my breakfast through sheer force of will. I was angry at both men—especially the one I was sharing a bed with back at the lodge—for not caring about how seriously unpleasant this might be for someone who did not live to fly. But, despite the rage and the nausea pulsing in the back of my throat, I wasn’t afraid. Considering that about half of all small-craft accidents occur during either takeoff or landing; considering that taking off and landing was all we were doing; considering that the plane was rusted and the pilot had struggled with the aftereffects of Agent Orange and my boyfriend had never landed a plane on water before; considering that this lake was somewhere far from Iliamna and no one knew we were there in the first place; considering that if the plane flipped, as it had been established these planes could do, I would probably not be able to swim through the freezing water in my sack of neoprene (which I had stupidly worn against the cold), and that, if I did make it to the shore, my chances of surviving whatever came next were probably zero—I should have been afraid.

That “I turned away from the window to contemplate the floor, stamped metal rusted at the edges, like a service elevator in a hospital” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of my all-time favorite “Personal History” pieces. 

Credit: The above illustration by Sam Alden is from Ann Patchett's "Flight Plan."

On the Horizon: 3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place

I enjoyed doing “3 for the Road,” “3 for the Sea,” “3 More for the Road,” and “3 for the River” so much that I’ve decided to keep it going. This time I’ve chosen three great explorations of place by three of my favorite writers: John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967); Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998); and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000). A new series then – “3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place” – starting January 1, 2025. 

December 9, 2024 Issue

For me, the best piece in this week’s New Yorker is Casey Cep’s “Touch Wood.” It’s a review of Callum Robinson’s Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman. Cep praises the book, calling it a “consistently lovely memoir.” She writes,

Extraordinary precision is Robinson’s forte: a necessary gift for his career, and a boon to his writing. In an account of creating a commissioned rocking chair, he writes, “A pair of one-piece sinuous sides, each built up from several smaller parts but sculpted with templates to feel like one smoothly transitioning component. Linked not by a footrail, but by slim braces and the chair’s angled wooden seat. The backrest, by client request, will be one great swathe of tensioned bridle leather.” He’s conjuring the blues music of Sonny Boy Williamson while sketching with a pencil, trying to imagine the design into being, considering how the materials might come together. “Leather like this will stretch and move over time, softening and slackening as it ages and molds to the client’s back, mellowing like an old shoe. Predicting the right tension, and allowing for adjustment, will be challenging. To tackle this, we have added buckling straps at the back, like corsetry. Something we hope will feel more like saddlery than S&M.”

Cep says of Robinson, “Craft and craftsmen are by far his best subjects, and he is eloquent not only on how he makes the things he makes but on how he himself was made—the tender if thorny relationship between father and son; the stabilizing yet propulsive forces of marriage.”

A well-written memoir on the art of carpentry – what’s not to like? I’m adding Ingrained to my reading list. Thank you to Cep for bringing it to my attention.

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #7 Zadie Smith's "Through the Portal"

Deana Lawson, Sharon (2007)

This is the fourth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Zadie Smith’s “Through the Portal” (The New Yorker, May 7, 2018). 

In this marvelous piece, Smith unpacks the meaning of Deana Lawson’s diaspora photos. She begins with a riff on Lawson’s transfixing “Sharon” (2007):

Imagine a goddess. Envision a queen. Her skin is dark, her hair is black. Anointed with Jergens lotion, she possesses a spectacular beauty. Around her lovely wrist winds a simple silver band, like two rivers meeting at a delta. Her curves are ideal, her eyes narrowed and severe; the fingers of her right hand signal an army, prepared to follow wherever she leads. Is this the goddess of fertility? Of wisdom? War? No doubt she’s divine—we have only to look at her to see that. Yet what is a goddess doing here, before these thin net curtains? What relation can she possibly have to that cheap metal radiator, the chipped baseboards, the wonky plastic blinds? Where is her kingdom, her palace, her worshippers? Has there been some kind of mistake?

These are great questions. They focus on the exact details I’m interested in – “thin net curtains,” “cheap metal radiators,” “chipped baseboards,” “wonky plastic blinds.” But first Smith interprets the magnificent nude at the picture’s center:

Deana Lawson’s work is prelapsarian—it comes before the Fall. Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory, in which diaspora gods can be found wherever you look: Brownsville, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa. Typically, she photographs her subjects semi-nude or naked, and in cramped domestic spaces, yet they rarely look either vulnerable or confined. (“When I’m going out to make work,” Lawson has said, “usually I’m choosing people that come from a lower- or working-class situation. Like, I’m choosing people around the neighborhood.”) Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.

Lawson’s photos are staged – not normally my bag. I prefer the real thing. But Lawson’s pictures are different. As Smith points out,

Circumstances are in no way hidden or removed from the shot; nothing is tidied up or away, and everything is included. Dirty laundry is aired in public (and appears on the floor). Half-painted walls, faulty wiring, sheetless mattresses, cardboard boxes filled with old-format technology, beat-up couches, frayed rugs, curling tiles, broken blinds. 

I relish Lawson’s make-something-out-of-nothing aesthetic. I think Smith does, too. In my favorite passage, she says,

Paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone: cheap curtains, net curtains, curtains taped up—or else hanging from shower rings—curtains torn, faded, thin, permeable. Curtains, like doors, are an attempt to mark off space from the outside world: they create a home for the family, a sanctuary for a people, or they may simply describe the borders of a private realm. In these photographs, though, borders are fragile, penetrable, thin as gauze. And yet everywhere there is impregnable defiance—and aspiration. There is “kinship in free fall.”

Smith discusses several Lawson photos, including “Living Room” (2015), “Kingdom Come” (2014), and “Mama Goma” (2014). Here’s her take on “Living Room”:

In “Living Room” (2015), taken in Brownsville, Brooklyn, all the scars are visible: the taped-up curtain, the boxes and laundry, the piled-up DVDs, that damn metal radiator. At its center pose a queen and her consort. He’s on a chair, topless, while she stands unclothed behind him. They are physically beautiful—he in his early twenties, she perhaps a little older—and seem to have about them that potent mix of mutual ownership and dependence, mutual dominance and submission, that has existed between queens and their male kin from time immemorial. But this is only speculation. The couple keep their counsel. Despite being on display, like objects, and partially exposed—like their ancestors on the auction block—they maintain a fierce privacy, bordered on all sides. They are exposed but well defended: salon-fresh hair, with the edges perfect; a flash of gold in her ear; his best bluejeans; her nails on point. Self-mastery in the midst of chaos. And the way they look at you! A gaze so intense that it’s the viewer who ends up feeling naked.

Those last two sentences are inspired! The whole piece is inspired – every bit as artful as the photographs it describes. 

December 2, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’ absorbing “Wild Side.” It’s about the bear crisis in Lake Tahoe. Williams reports, “Between 2017 and 2020, humans in Tahoe reported, on average, six hundred and seventy-four encounters with bears per year. That number more than doubled between 2021 and 2022.” Williams talks with bear advocates, bear deterrent experts, law enforcement officers, and Tahoe residents. She talks with Sierra County Sheriff Michael Fisher:

Fisher, who grew up in Downieville and has worked for the Sierra County Sheriff’s Office for twenty-four years, was contending with a more intense bear situation than he had ever seen. In June, a bear turned up at a wedding and destroyed a car, ran off with somebody’s luggage, and came back for the reception. Between July 18th and August 2nd, his office received thirty-four calls about one or more bears in Downieville, Sierra City, Loyalton, and other communities in his jurisdiction. Bears were trying to get into homes, and into a resort cabin at Sierra Shangri-La. A caller who reported a bear trapped inside his Chevy Equinox got mad when the 911 dispatcher, who had no available deputies to send, suggested opening the door and letting the bear out. A woman found a bear swimming in a neighbor’s pool. A bear walked up to a barbecue and ran off when someone rang a cowbell. At about three o’clock one morning, a woman fired a rifle at her front door after a bear tried to get inside. “She could see the door being pulled,” the dispatcher noted.

To me, the most alarming aspect of the crisis is that bears are breaking into homes. Williams visits the scene of one of the break-ins. She writes,

Greg, a general contractor in his seventies, lived at the house and among other properties that he and his wife, Kathy, were remodelling. Their dog, which reliably scared bears away, had died over the summer. On Friday, a bear had tried to get into the house. On Saturday, Greg had run a bear off by using bear spray and throwing rocks. This morning, he had come home to find that a bear had finally succeeded. “The kitchen is just strewn,” he told me. “It got a forty-pound bag of cat food, a thing of roasted garlic, my package of cookies. It got into the coffee. It got into a five-gallon bucket that Kathy saves butterscotch and chocolate chips and stuff in. Didn’t eat a lot of those, but it spread them all over the floor. It didn’t get into the honey. It got into the olive oil. I’ve come into houses where a bear has torn the range hood off, torn the microwave off. The shelves are all broken and everything’s collapsed, or the doors are gone and the whole cabinet’s off the wall. Turned over refrigerators. A house here burned down because a bear broke in and knocked the stove over. The electric igniters went off. It tore the gas line open—gas started spewing. I heard this snapping and popping. It’s ten-thirty at night, and I’m going, What the hell? I walked out in the street and could see the flames. By then, the whole house was engulfed. The fire department saved the foundation.” 

The heart of Williams’ piece is the shocking death of Patrice Miller. Williams reports,

Miller routinely walked to the grocery, which a friend owned, to buy alcohol. In early November, the grocer called the sheriff to say that she hadn’t seen Miller in days. The Halls were already wondering why Miller’s porch light no longer came on at night. A sheriff’s deputy, Malcolm Fadden, went to the house on the afternoon of November 8th. On the front steps, he found a punctured garden hose, spurting water. He turned off the spigot and went to the door. When he looked through a window and saw blood on the floor, he drew his service weapon and stepped inside.

In the living room, Fadden found bear scat, a foot in diameter. In the kitchen, he found Miller dead. Her naked body was gashed with claw marks; her left arm and most of her right leg had been eaten down to the bone. The security bars on the window hung by a single bolt. The cabinets were destroyed. In the bedroom, Fadden saw paw prints and soil, and, on the bed, feces and urine. Miller’s laptop was still plugged in and open. Fadden wrote in his report that she appeared to have been dragged off her bed after she was already dead.

The medical officer described Miller’s cause of death as “perforating sharp and blunt force crushing injuries consistent with bear mauling and subsequent predation.” In other words, Miller was killed by a black bear. Williams reaches the same conclusion: “But the bear did kill Miller, according to the autopsy report, even if it hadn’t come for her.”  

3 for the River: Conclusion

This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favourite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll try to sum up my reading experience.

I can sum it up in one word: pleasure. I enjoyed reading these books immensely. I enjoyed being out on the rivers – the Nahanni, the Mississippi, and the Congo. I enjoyed the company of the authors. I enjoyed the adventure. Most of all, I enjoyed the writing. So much so, I can’t stop quoting it. Here is Patterson describing the arrival of a Chinook:

On December 7 there was a ring round the sun and the copper color of a Chinook in the sky, but on the eighth it was still cold, and I crossed the Nahanni to the Prairie Creek bar to lift some frozen traps and to make one or two lynx sets. I built a fire at midday over towards the sheep lick and made tea there, and, as I sat and ate my lunch in the low sunlight, all of a sudden the Chinook broke, “a roaring warm wind – almost it might have been the hot breeze of June. I went through the Prairie Creek Gap on the frozen river – an awe-inspiring place with its overhanging cliffs and its floor of clear, green ice.” Down through feet of ice, the movement of the rushing water beneath would be indicated, once in a while, by the passage of a leaf or twig, and once the shadowy outline of a fish appeared from the depths below. 

Here is Raban describing the interior of a Mississippi lock chamber:

The lock had seemed huge when I’d stood above it four days ago. Inside the chamber, it felt twice as big. I clung to my pair of ropes. The water began to bubble and boil as the lock emptied. The boat edged down the slimy wall, and the faces above my head grew smaller and vaguer. As I dropped to thirty, then forty, then fifty feet down, it was like entering a new element in which the air was dank and cellarlike; I was far out of earshot of the people I had left back up there in the city daylight, their voices lost in the gurgling and sluicing of Mississippi water. The boat tugged and swung on the ropes, and even in a sweater I was shivering. Looking up at the pale pink blotches of Herb, the King and the lockmaster, I felt that this descent was a kind of symbolic induction, a rite of passage into my new state as a river traveler. 

And here is Butcher evoking the feel of a pirogue’s hull:

I ran my wet fingers across the coarse hull of the pirogue, tracing gouges left by the boatmakers’s adze. They felt like a rough-hewn braille, charting the history of a river nation both blessed and cursed by this great natural phenomenon.

The writing in these books is excellent – clear, fresh, specific, vivid. It has the breath of life.

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three great books. I picture it like this: 

A 1927 map of the Northwest Territories of Canada, showing the South Nahanni River; a 16-foot Chestnut Prospector canoe; a moose; northern lights; a Dall sheep ram with massive, curling horns; a campfire; Patterson’s photo of the Falls of the South Nahanni; a black bear; a stone arrowhead; Patterson’s photo of the cabin in Deadman’s Valley; a pair of snowshoes; a .375 Mannlicher carbine; four dogs harnessed to a toboggan; a 1979 map of the Mississippi River from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Morgan City, Louisianna; a 16-foot Mirrocraft motorboat; a turtle; a pool table; Kaber’s Supper Club in Prairie du Chien; a water moccasin; the towboat Jimmie L.; the Redstone cocktail lounge in Dubuque; a butterfly; the Book of Mormon; the derelict Mark Twain Hotel in Hannibal; the Community Baptist Church in Andalusia; a fishing rod; the American Legion in Wabasha; a catfish; a 2004 map of the Democratic Republic of Congo, showing the Congo River; a Yamaha 100cc motorbike; a pirogue; a crocodile; a kingfisher; an abandoned paddle-steamer; a cockroach; a bottle of Primus beer; water hyacinth; Stanley Falls; a pangolin. Overlap these maps and images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and randomly across the surface paint three stripes representing the three rivers – one blue (Nahanni) and two tan (Mississippi and Congo). I call my collage “Rabutchson.”

November 25, 2024 Issue

I enjoyed Ben McGrath’s “Clean Your Pipes,” in this week’s issue. It’s a “Talk of the Town” story about the renovation of the giant pipe organ in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Basilica. McGrath reports that the organ has been disassembled and trucked to an old tobacco warehouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. McGrath visits the warehouse. He writes,

Inside the warehouse, and in a garage behind it, technicians were working on the organ’s innards: applying alcohol to the oxblood-stained wooden pipes, attending to “witness marks” (dried candle wax, pencil notations) on the bellows, which turned out to have been reconfigured during a prior intervention, in 1902.

He says, “To a novice eye, the only clear indication that all this labor was in the service of a musical instrument was the triple-decker keyboard sitting on a table, next to some bubble wrap, on the second floor.”

McGrath’s piece reminded me of another New Yorker “pipe organ” story – Laura Preston’s wonderful “Pipe Dreams” (August 22, 2022). In that piece, Preston visits Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall to see some of the pipes of the massive Midmer-Losh get “voiced.” She watches Brant Duddy, a ninety-three-year-old master organ technician at work in the voicing room: “He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear.”

November 18, 2024 Issue

I’m suffering from chronic Trumpitis. I’m desperate for relief. Rebecca Mead’s “Color Instinct,” in this week’s issue, provides it. What a wonderful piece! It profiles British artist Jadé Fadojutimi, who is an extraordinary colorist. Mead writes, “Fadojutimi’s swirling images seem to capture a state of mind as much as they do a state of nature—they are always energetic, and sometimes ecstatic, blooming into color and motion and light.” Mead visits Fadojutimi in her London studio and is allowed to watch her paint:

Wearing gloves, Fadojutimi seized a dish of neon-pink paint in her left hand and a sponge in her right. She swept the color boldly across the canvas, then called for a bucket of water, into which she dipped two sponges, squeezing their contents over the paint she’d just applied, to create washes of color. With a round brush, she added punches of deep purple to the pink, then took up a flat brush, scraping all the pigment into a hard, tight arc before squeezing water on it again. She then seized a fine brush, applying busy patches of teal; climbing on a step stool, she added lines that clambered up the canvas.

Mead notes that “Fadojutimi often uses oil pastels and pigment sticks to push aside liquid paint on the canvas, creating wormy, convoluted lines that give the color an increased dimensionality.”

My favorite part of “Color Instinct” is the opening paragraph – a vivid description of Fadojutimi’s studio:

The studio of Jadé Fadojutimi, the British artist, is in a warehouse in South East London, with long skylights set into a corrugated-metal roof that reverberates loudly during the city’s frequent autumnal rains. At eight and a half thousand square feet, the space initially appears overwhelming, but at its center Fadojutimi, who is thirty-one, has created a small zone of intimacy. A pair of antique couches—one upholstered in emerald damask, the other in ruby—sit back-to-back, offering opposite vantage points on a dozen or so exuberantly colorful paintings propped against the walls. Some of the canvases are completed; others are works in progress. Vintage armchairs are positioned around a pair of coffee tables, each of which is strewn with the detritus of millennial life: iPads, rolling papers, bowls of fruit, vape pens, books, empty wine bottles, cooling mugs of herbal tea. Nestled in the corner of one couch is a plush panda bear, apparently well loved, its fur tinged with a rogue splash of citrine paint. Scores of potted plants encircle the seating area—spiky snake plants, opulent grasses, thick-leaved rubber plants—and a towering ficus tree filters the light from the skylights overhead.

That detail about the “plush panda bear ... its fur tinged with a rogue splash of citrine paint” is delightful. The whole piece is delightful. I enjoyed it immensely.  

P.S. A special shout-out to Alice Mann for her sublime portrait of Fadojutimi in her studio. Definitely a candidate for best New Yorker photo of the year.

Photo by Alice Mann, from Rebecca Mead's "Color Instinct"

Postscript: Sandra M. Gilbert 1936 - 2024

I see in the Times that Sandra M. Gilbert has died. She wrote one of my favorite literary studies – Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1972). She held that “descriptive attention” is at the heart of Lawrence’s style. She called him “a poet of pure attention.” She said,

For him the poem is a perceptual experience that the poet himself – and the reader along with him – must undergo, an act of attention whose purpose is epistemological: discovery through a certain process of attention, and the process or experience of discovery is as much the subject of the poem as the ostensible subject itself.

The poem as an act of attention is a brilliant notion. Lawrence conceived it. Gilbert explored and developed it. In doing so, she made a valuable contribution to literary criticism. 

On the Horizon: 10 Best "Personal History" Pieces

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces have appeared there. Over the next ten months, I’m going to pick ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. A new series then – “10 Best 'Personal History' Pieces” – starting December 15, 2024. 

November 11, 2024 Issue

David Remnick, in this week’s issue, says something that needs saying: the elements of Trump’s authoritarianism are “all there.” He says,

No small part of Trump’s authoritarian campaign is his insistence on dominance. And, though his aides and supporters are dismissive of comparisons to previous embodiments of fascism, the elements are all there: the identification of “vermin” and “the enemy within”; the threat to deploy the military against dissenters; the erasure of truth, the “big lie.” The MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden last Sunday did not feature starched gray uniforms, swastikas, or disciplined salutes. Lee Greenwood is no Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. But the rhetoric was rife with scapegoating, racism, and lies.

I agree. I applaud Remnick for having the guts to say it. 

Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb "New Yorker" Essayists (Part VIII)

This is the eighth and final post in my series “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists,” a celebration of Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023), in which I select four of my favorite pieces from each collection (one per month) and try to say why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Lepore’s marvelous “The Cobweb” (January 26, 2015), in which she travels to San Francisco to visit an Internet archive called the Wayback Machine. 

What I love about this piece, what sticks in my mind, is the riveting way Lepore introduces her subject – not by describing the Wayback Machine, or even mentioning it, but by chronicling the crash of an airliner. Here’s her opening paragraph:

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam at 10:31 a.m. G.M.T. on July 17, 2014, for a twelve-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Not much more than three hours later, the plane, a Boeing 777, crashed in a field outside Donetsk, Ukraine. All two hundred and ninety-eight people on board were killed. The plane’s last radio contact was at 1:20 p.m. G.M.T. At 2:50 p.m. G.M.T., Igor Girkin, a Ukrainian separatist leader also known as Strelkov, or someone acting on his behalf, posted a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: “We just downed a plane, an AN-26.” (An Antonov 26 is a Soviet-built military cargo plane.) The post includes links to video of the wreckage of a plane; it appears to be a Boeing 777.

This is a strange way to start a piece about Internet archiving, is it not? Actually, it turns out to be quite ingenious. Lepore reports that two hours after Strelkov’s message was posted, it was deleted. The evidence was destroyed. But, hold on, not so fast. Check the Wayback Machine. Boom! There it is. The Wayback Machine saved it. Lepore writes,

On July 17th, at 3:22 p.m. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of Strelkov’s VKontakte post about downing a plane. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message “Grab of Donetsk militant Strelkov’s claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.” By then, Strelkov’s VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine.

Lepore’s use of the deleted Strelkov post to show the value of the Wayback Machine is brilliant! 

My favorite part of “The Cobweb” is Lepore’s account of her visit to the Internet Archive, at 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, where the Wayback Machine is housed. She describes the place:

At 300 Funston Avenue, climb a set of stone steps and knock on the brass door of a Greek Revival temple. You can’t miss it: it’s painted wedding-cake white and it’s got, out front, eight Corinthian columns and six marble urns.

Inside, she meets the inventor of the Wayback Machine – Brewster Kahle:

Kahle is long-armed and pink-cheeked and public-spirited; his hair is gray and frizzled. He wears round wire-rimmed eyeglasses, linen pants, and patterned button-down shirts. He looks like Mr. Micawber, if Mr. Micawber had left Dickens’s London in a time machine and landed in the Pacific, circa 1955, disguised as an American tourist. 

Kahle is quite a cat. Lepore tells of the time he put the entire World Wide Web in a shipping container: 

He just wanted to see if it would fit. How big is the Web? It turns out, he said, that it’s twenty feet by eight feet by eight feet, or, at least, it was on the day he measured it. How much did it weigh? Twenty-six thousand pounds. He thought that meant something. He thought people needed to know that.

Lepore points out that Kahle’s Wayback Machine has archived more than four hundred and thirty billion Web pages. What does such a machine look like? Lepore tells us:

At the back of the chapel, up a short flight of stairs, there are two niches, arched alcoves the same shape and size as the stained-glass windows. Three towers of computers stand within each niche, and ten computers are stacked in each tower: black, rectangular, and humming. There are towers like this all over the building; these are only six of them. Still, this is it.

Each unit has flickering blue lights. “ ‘Every time a light blinks, someone is uploading or downloading,’ Kahle explains. Six hundred thousand people use the Wayback Machine every day, conducting two thousand searches a second. ‘You can see it.’ He smiles as he watches. ‘They’re glowing books!’ He waves his arms. ‘They glow when they’re being read!’ ”

The way Lepore joins the dots – from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to reference rot to hyper-text to Brewster Kahle to the Internet Archive to the Wayback Machine – is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of her best. 

Acts of Seeing: Quickstop

John MacDougall, Quickstop, Iqaluit (2007)

I relish the “service station” shots of Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and others. Many years ago, in Iqaluit, Nunavut, I tried my hand at taking a picture of the gas bar in our neighborhood. The low Arctic sun was shining just right on the pump island, sort of spotlighting it. There was a snowmobile there, gassing up, which added a distinctive northern element. I love the colors – the greens and blues and dabs of red. You can see a hill of snow-covered tundra in the background. The scene has a certain cold beauty – at least to my yearning southern eyes. I miss the place. 

November 4, 2024 Issue

I’m embarrassed to say that of all the worthwhile subjects in this week’s issue – aid workers in Gaza, the remaking of J. D. Vance, Joe Biden’s economic policies – the one that caught and held me is Cocina Consuelo’s grilled cheese sandwich. Helen Rosner knows how to pleasure me. She writes,

A dish understatedly called “grilled cheese” has undeniable star power: made on, of all things, a croissant, it features tangy orange cheddar and is squashed on a griddle until the cheese and pastry are crisp. It’s liberally spread with a similarly sharp-textured salsa macha, a Veracruzan condiment akin to chile crunch, made with toasted hot peppers, garlic, and toasted pepitas and sesame seeds.

Yes, yes, yes! I’ll have one of those, please.

Photo by Evan Angelastro, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Cocina Consuelo"

October 28, 2024 Issue

Best sentence in this week’s issue? For me, it’s the opening line of Ray Lipstein’s “Bar Tab: Kelly’s Tavern”: “On a recent Wednesday night down in Bay Ridge, where the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge looms gorgeously overhead, a millennial with a dead phone stepped into a bar looking for the gym.” I read that and just kept going. The final sentence is very good, too: “To say more would be to kill some mystique; we may have said too much already.” Lipstein, who is new to me, seems a natural “Bar Tab” writer. I look forward to seeing more of his work in the magazine.

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #8 Wayne Koestenbaum's "The Inner Life of the Palette Knife"

Forrest Bess, Untitled (The Crown) (1949)

This is the third post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Wayne Koestenbaum’s brilliant “The Inner Life of the Palette Knife,” which originally appeared in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “My painting is tomorrow’s painting. Watch and see”: Forrest Bess (Christie’s, 2012), and is included in Koestenbaum’s great 2013 collection My 1980s & Other Essays. It’s Koestenbaum’s attempt to describe and comprehend Bess’s strange abstractions. 

Koestenbaum begins by suggesting that we should not so much read Bess’s paintings, as experience them. To do that, he recommends close looking. He writes,

The light in this room – where I’m looking at his paintings, one by one – shines irregularly on his black paint. Sometimes the black, arrested by light, seems matte; at other instants, light causes the black paint to glisten. These modest oscillations – matte one moment, glistening the next – are not the size of Texas. You need to stand very close to the painting to see these incremental changes, nuances so minor that it seems a culpable exaggeration to call attention to them, even if these delicate effects of light and texture are Bess’s major contribution to the philosophy of transgendered affect, to American abstract art, to the erotics of fear.

He says that to really appreciate Bess’s paintings, we must be willing to “waste time” looking at them, “without the certainty that it will reward you with ecstasy, knowledge, or satisfaction.” He goes on, 

In one of my favorite Bess paintings (untitled, like most of them), composed of oil and painted foil on canvas, I lose myself – I waste time – looking at a blue foil triangle’s nearness to a brown-black dot. That dot’s placement has no clear or verbalizable meaning; I can’t explain why the dot is near the triangle, though not too near. The dot belongs in the triangle’s vicinity, but the two entities – dot, triangle – have no fixed relationship. In that same painting, the background is composed of black swirls or blobs. The black blobs – gesso-like? – are separate from one another but also sometimes joined or interacting. Their edges – to the extent that the blobs cluster together in a community – are at once stable and unstable; the edges ululate, but don’t sing a clear melody.

To pay attention to these black blobs, or to pay attention to the blue foil triangle’s nearness to a specific dot, I must pledge allegiance to abstract art’s Bill of Rights, which contains, unlike the United States’, only one provision: the right to look, for unstructured amounts of time, at migrant and unspecific forms, and at the relation between them, without demanding that the forms have a single meaning, and without demanding that whatever significance I ascribe to these forms be defensible, explicable, or based on any evidence but my own sensations.... I have the right to find supreme significance in Bess’s blobs and lines, and to spend as long as I wish in a state of torpid yet ecstatic surrender to them.

That formulation of “abstract art’s Bill of Rights” is inspired!

Koestenbaum responds intensely to Bess’s palette-knife marks. In one of my favorite passages, he writes,

These experiences of transport, keyed to painterly moments almost too small to mention, I call jabs of intensification – microscopic illuminations, inner shudders, tiny spurts of “oh my God!”, as if a joy-bringing bubble were suddenly to open up a new hallway in my brain, or as if suddenly I were to become Keats reading Homer for the first time and standing proud on a silent peak to view the wild Pacific. But in Bess’s case, the wild Pacific is merely an edge mark made by a palette knife, where yellow gets divided into adjacent, parallel mini-panels of companionate yellows.

He says of Bess’s Mandala (1967), “The black paint surrounding the mandala has gorgeous gouge marks that awaken in me (the urge never went to sleep) a desire to make texture my god.” Koestenbaum’s expression of his love of texture makes me smile. It’s my love, too.

Koestenbaum’s main theme is the need to pay close attention. In his closing paragraph, he writes,

Bess’s hieroglyphic semiabstractions suggest not only that he was a remarkable artist but that abstract – or near-abstract – art, hovering on the edges of codes we’ll never comprehend, teaches us to pay fine-grained, undogmatic attention to the blobs and lines and curves we encounter in everyday life. Pay attention to scratches. Pay attention to the textured, importuning marks of a silent palette knife. Use Bess’s paintings to understand the difficult art of human attentiveness. In a would always willing to truncate the possibilities for closely noticing what occurs, allow attentiveness to flower, however private and inscrutable its flowering, however seemingly impractical, minor, puzzling, and antisocial its procedures of self-nourishment. 

Sage advice for these distracted times.

3 for the River: Details

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favourite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their amazing use of detail.

These three great books abound with inspired details: the shaving lather on Patterson’s rifle after he shoots a moose (“I was sitting on a log having my weekly shave when I heard a stone rattle. I looked up, and there was a bull moose by the water’s edge a couple of hundred yards up the Flat. Very quietly I put down my shaving brush and picked up my rifle and fired. Down came the moose, and I wiped the lather off the stock of the rifle and set the weapon back against the log”); the sinister wing dam that Raban momentarily glimpses while fishing for walleye on Lake Pepin (“The wake of a big downstream tow pulled the water away from the wing dam; just for a second it lay exposed, a serrated line of rocks like a jawbone of blackened teeth”); in Butcher’s Blood River, the coil of ivy that the palm-oil trader carries with him on his bicycle to use as a tire patch (“He smiled when I asked him what the loop of ivy was for. ‘That is from a rubber tree. If I have a flat, I break the ivy and a glue comes out that will mend the puncture. It is the repair kit of the forest’ ”).  

Patterson is a superb describer of method, of how he does things – makes a campsite, builds a log cabin, sews a pair of fur mitts. His art is in his precise details. Here’s an excerpt from a brilliant two-and-a-half-page description of how he manages to make a snug campsite in a blizzard: 

It was a dirty night. The roar of the wind could be heard out on the open river: inside the trees one could feel it a little and occasionally there would come the whirring thud of snow dislodged by the gentle movement of the branches. I chose two spruce about ten feet apart, more or less in line with the wind, and with an open space in front of them. I snowshoed quickly around the campsite, sharply striking each overhanging tree twice with the back of the little axe; that fetched down any loose snow that would otherwise fall into camp or on to the fire when the heat from the flames rose among the branches. Then I trimmed the two chosen spruce up to a height of about six feet, laying the small dead branches in a pile to serve as kindling. Next, off came the snowshoes, and one of them was used as a shovel to dig down to ground level, banking the snow up all around, but especially behind the fireplace where it would act as a reflector. Then I laid the kindling in the fireplace, together with a twist of birch bark from my pocket. A match was applied and the little pile burst into flame. I nursed it carefully, adding bigger twigs and then branches and then a log or two – anything I could reach till it became a fire. I got the tea pail and filled it with snow, rammed in and pressed down, for this dry snow is nothing but frost crystals; it has nothing in common with the snow of southern lands, and there is very little water in it. I pushed back the blazing logs and set the tea pail on the ashes, right against the hottest part of the fire – it was safe there and could not overturn. Next, I cut down a tall, dead spruce, about fifteen inches through, that was standing handy. I felled it behind the fire and moved alongside it on snowshoes, trimming the branches and flinging an armful on the fire to get more light to work by; then I cut through the tree and moved forward first one end and then the other of the big log till it lay resting on the snow wall at each end, just above and just back of the fire – between the fire and the big reflector wall of snow. The flames promptly curled around it and soon it would be a glowing, radiant mass of charcoal on the surface, giving out heat all night and ready to burst into flame again at breakfast time.

That “together with a twist of birch bark from my pocket” is wonderful – a real woodsman’s detail.

Raban’s forte is river description. Detail after detail gleams in his depiction of the Mississippi: “I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak”; “I was afloat over a stump field submerged under just a few inches of water. As a roller sucked the river away, it exposed the bed of black-buttery peat, the sawed-off boles like bad teeth, and the boat grounded with a groan and a bang, the motor stalling as it hit a root”; “The current grabbed hold of the boat, flipped it around, and sent it skittering southward out of the city like a puck on an ice rink. I hardly had time to get the motor going before I was swept past the floating depot where the tows refueled and was into the humping, broken water below the highway bridges.”

I could go on quoting forever. Raban’s details are often in his adjectives – not just “peat,” but “black-buttery peat”; not just “boles,” but “sawed-off boles”; not just “water,” but “humping, broken water.” 

My favorite details in Tim Butcher’s Blood River describe his experience traveling down the Congo in a pirogue: “The low wicker seat was smaller than my backside, but it was surprisingly comfortable and as the paddlers began to find their rhythm, I let my fingertips trail in the river water. It was as warm and soothing as a bath.” “I ran my wet fingers across the coarse hull of the pirogue, tracing gouges left by the boatmaker’s adze. They felt like a rough-hewn braille, charting the history of a river nation both blessed and cursed by this great natural phenomenon.” Regarding his guides’ paddles, he writes,

The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their long-handled wooden paddles. About three metres long, they were shape of spades from a deck of cards, only stretched out to mansize, with shafts that were thin and shiny, polished by years of being slid through calloused hands. The leaf-shaped blade spread broad and fat before tapering gracefully to a point. It was no surprise when later on the journey I saw them being used both as trays for food and as weapons for fighting.

He describes the paddlers’ way of drinking from the river: “To drink they would squat down while we were out in midstream, lower their faces over the edge of the pirogue until their lips were suspended maybe ten centimetres above the river and literally throw the water into their mouths with their hands.” 

Butcher even describes what happens on a pirogue when you have to urinate:

They peed over the edge of the boat and were as sure-footed as if they were standing on terra firma. I was more ungainly, so when I tried, the effort of standing up and keeping my balance made me way too tense. Only after hours of discomfort could I build up the pressure required to overcome my nerves, and then only if I kneeled on my rucksack. Standing on the wobbly pirogue was much too nerve-racking ever to enable me to pee. 

Butcher’s immersive details put us squarely there, in the pirogue with him and his paddlers, as they make their way down the mighty Congo. It’s an unforgettable ride.  

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

October 21, 2024 Issue

Humans are not the only animals who can talk. Birds do it, too. They are vocal learners just like us. There are scientists who are starting to decode birdsong. I learned this, and other interesting facts about bird vocalization, from Rivka Galchen’s absorbing “Pecking Order,” in this week’s issue. Galchen writes,

A newer generation of scientists has been trying to understand bird vocalizations. The alarm calls of Siberian jays can be said to have been partially translated. One of their screeches indicates a sitting hawk (which prompts other jays to come together in a group), another a flying hawk (jays hide, which makes them difficult to spot), and a third a hawk actively attacking (jays fly to the treetops to search for the attacker, and possibly flee). When cheery birds known as tufted titmice make a piercing sound, other titmice may respond by collectively harrying an invading predator. Some birds even lie. Fork-tailed drongos—common, innocuous-looking little dark birds that live in Africa—sometimes mimic the alarm calls of starlings or meerkats. Duped listeners flee the nonexistent threat, leaving behind a buffet for the drongo.

My favorite part of Galchen’s piece is her description of a recent trip she and her daughter took to Little Stony Point, in the Hudson Valley, to do some bird-watching in the company of two expert birders. Galchen writes,

We heard the “tea kettle tea kettle” call of a Carolina wren; it sounded like a game of marbles to me. We saw a warbling vireo, a Cape May warbler, a blackpoll warbler, and a black-and-white warbler—birds so small that it was difficult to fathom how far some of them had travelled to be there. We heard little chips that sounded like a window being cleaned; a crickety decrescendo that was not made by crickets; a sound like a trill running into a wall; a high-pitched three-fast-one-slow, like a child playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. We encountered forty-four species by Yang’s able count, and at the very end we saw a Swainson’s thrush, who apparently wasn’t in the mood to show off. Bird-watching, I thought, is a misleading term. So much of the fleeting, present-tense pleasure of it is bird-listening.

I love that last sentence. Galchen’s "Pecking Order" expanded my appreciation of birdsong. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #1 "Retrospective Review: Burkhard Bilger's 'The Egg Men' "

Photo by Hans Gissinger, from Burkhard Bilger's "The Egg Men"

This is the tenth and final post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “Retrospective Review: Burkhard Bilger’s ‘The Egg Men’ " (January 30, 2011):

This post marks the first of what I hope will be a series of retrospective reviews of New Yorker stories that I remember with pleasure. Today, I begin with a look at one of my all-time favorite pieces, Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men” (The New Yorker, September 5, 2005).

I’ll structure my review around the following four questions:

1. What is “The Egg Men”?

2. How is it constructed?

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

4. Why do I like it so much?

1. What is “The Egg Men”?

Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men” is a fact piece about egg cooks who work at the Tropical Breeze Café, in the Flamingo hotel, Las Vegas. It’s approximately 8000 words long, divided into nine sections. Here’s a brief summary of each section’s contents:

Section 1 – Describes the Tropical Breeze; tells about Scott Gutstein, the café’s head chef; describes café’s kitchen, as the cook’s “entrench” themselves for Saturday morning breakfast rush.

Section 2 – Tells about Bilger’s experience working as a short-order cook at a Seattle breakfast place called Julia’s; describes a cook named Jack whose cooking “was a seamless sequence of interchangeable tasks reduced to their essential motions: crack, flip, scoop, pour, crack, pour, flip, scoop.”

Section 3 – Returns to the Tropical Breeze kitchen, at seven-thirty, Saturday morning; describes scene (“There were five egg and grill cooks and twenty waiters for close to three hundred diners, and tables were turning over about every thirty-eight minutes; continues with profile of Gutstein.

Section 4 – Describes Tropical Breeze in further detail (“The coffee shop’s kitchen is half the length of a football field, and it’s only the tail end of an intestinal tangle of prep kitchens, washrooms, and walk-in refrigerators that are shared by the restaurants and that coil around and beneath the casino”); tells about Gutstein’s involvement in the kitchen renovations two years ago.

Section 5 – Describes the Tropical Breeze’s “three good egg cooks” – Martin Nañez Moreno (“the omelette man”), Joel Eckerson (“the over-easy man”), and Debbie Lubick (“makes all the poached-egg dishes”); describes the scene in the Tropical Breeze’s kitchen when the morning rush begins (“When I arrived at the line, the heat seared my lungs – the griddle, at about six hundred degrees, was wreathed in steam from cooking pots and egg pans”); describes a sequence in which Eckerson cooks ten pairs of eggs simultaneously; describes a kitchen incident in which a waitress refuses to serve an order of pancakes because they’re cold.

Section 6 – Describes techniques of egg-cracking and egg-flipping; describes short-order cooking as “a feat of timing”; tells about research findings of Warren Meek, a Duke University neuroscientist, who calls short-order cooks “the master interval timers.”

Section 7 – Describes Bugsy’s Backroom, the Flamingo’s employee cafeteria (“deep in the netherworld backstage of the casino”); considers why Las Vegas casino workers seldom quit their jobs; puzzles over why Joel Eckerson, who has worked at the Flamingo for nineteen years, and Martin Nañez Moreno, who has worked there for eleven, are still cooking eggs.

Section 8 – Tells about Bilger’s visit to Las Vegas’s Corsa Cucina restaurant “to see how the other half cooked”; describes Stephen Kalt, Corsa Cucina’s executive chef (“Watching him work is like seeing short-order set to opera”); reports Kalt’s view that the Tropical Breeze short-order cooks are “a different animal” in that they “grew up seventeen generations on a farm in Mexico,” that they are happy where they are “Because that’s the culture, that’s the rhythm – you put seeds in the ground year after year.”

Section 9 – Tells about Bilger’s visit to Gutstein’s home; reports Gutsteins comments regarding his attempts to promote Eckerson (“I’ve given him the opportunity to be a manager, to get out of that bullshit five-hundred-degree heat for eight hours. I’m like, ‘Come on, Joel, you’re better than that!’ But he doesn’t want it. Straight up? He’s in such a comfort zone that it’s hurting him”); reports Bilger’s assessment of Gutstein (“Yet Gutstein wasn’t so different [from Eckerson]. When I asked if he would ever work at Pink Ginger, the Flamingo’s Asian restaurant, his shoulders shook as if a spider had scurried down them. ‘I wouldn’t be able to stand it,’ he said”).

I set out the contents of “The Egg Men” because I want to show the rich combination of ingredients – cooks, kitchens, restaurants, autobiography, neuroscience, Las Vegas, etc. - that Bilger folds into it. He creates quite a literary omelet! And I devour every delicious word of it.

2. How is it constructed?

The core of “The Egg Men” is its description of the Tropical Breeze’s kitchen reality. Five of the story’s nine sections are set in that kitchen. The first section shows us the kitchen “at six o’clock on a recent Saturday morning.” Bilger says, “Saturday morning is zero hour for short-order cooks. The café, which prepares some twenty-five hundred meals on an average weekday, may serve an extra thousand on weekends with the same cooks.” Bilger shows Gutstein to be completely at home in the kitchen’s high-stress environment. He quotes Gutstein as saying, “It gets crazy. I love it. Grown men come out of here crying.” Section 1 sets the theme: Las Vegas short-order cooks, in general, and Tropical Breeze short-order cooks, in particular, are a special breed.

Section 2 of the story cuts away from the Tropical Breeze and takes us back twenty years to Bilger’s days as a short-order cook at Julia’s in Seattle. The flashback from the Tropical Breeze to Julia’s is smoothly executed, and the section is key because it explains Bilger’s fascination with short-order cooks - what makes them tick, their extraordinary multi-tasking ability.

Sections 3, 4, 5, and 6 are located back in the Tropical Breeze. They contain many sharp, precise, vivid descriptions of short-order cooking. For example, here’s Bilger’s wonderful description of Eckerson in action:

“I need a four on two, sunny and scrambled, both wearing sausage!” a grill cook at the next station shouted. Joel nodded. The grill cooks usually made their own eggs to go with steaks or pancakes, but they sometimes needed help: “four on two” meant four eggs on two plates. Joel ripped a spool of new orders from the printer and tucked them under a clamp above the counter, then started cracking eggs into pans two at a time. When he was done, he had ten pairs of eggs cooking: five from previous orders, two from the grill cook’s order, and three from the new orders. He finished the five original orders first. He put a pair of sunnys under a broiler and used his forefinger to break the yolks on a pair that had been ordered over hard. Then he flipped the eggs in that pan and those in three other pans that had been ordered over easy – one, two, three, four. He pivoted back to the counter, set five plates on it, and garnished them all with potatoes and bacon or sausage. He then flipped the over-hards and over-easies again, slid them onto their plates along with the sunnys from the broiler, and placed all the plates under the hot lights above the counter.

That “used his forefinger to break the yolks on a pair that had been ordered over hard” is a superbly noticed detail. Bilger brilliantly crafts sequences of kitchen action. Here’s his description of Eckerson’s egg-cracking technique:

When Joel cracked eggs, his fingers were as loose and precise as a jazz guitarist’s. He held one egg between his thumb and his first two fingers, another curled against his palm. He rapped the first egg on the rim of the pan, twisted it into hemispheres, and opened it as cleanly as if it were a Fabergé Easter egg. As the spent shell fell into the trash, he shuttled the second egg into position, as if pumping a rifle.

In section 6 of “The Egg Men,” Bilger makes an audacious move; he describes the workings of short-order cooks’ minds in neuroscience terms. His piece shifts from talk of sunnys, over-hards, and over-easies into scientific terminology – “burst of dopamine,” frontal cortex,” “oscillatory neurons,” etc.

Then, in the article’s final three sections, Bilger shifts again. His narrative moves from the Tropical Breeze in search of even more meaning. Bilger looks for insight into why the egg men at the Tropical Breeze choose to remain egg men, why they refuse to climb the culinary hierarchy, why they seem happy in their work.

Of these final three sections, my favorite is section 7 in which Bilger visits Bugsy’s Backroom. It contains this terrific description:

All around us, groups of other casino workers were hunched over Formica tables in their gaudy uniforms, picking at food or watching TV on overhead monitors. There were crap dealers with gold shirts and flaming-sunset collars and cuffs, middle-aged cocktail waitresses wearing coat dresses with plunging necklines; gangs of of scruffy young waiters from Margaritaville in Hawaiian shirts. In the far corner, under the cool fluorescent lights, a quartet of blackjack dealers with slicked-back hair were playing cards with a distracted air.

Detail by detail, a way of life is being evoked here. Bilger serves us a succulent slice of it. “The Egg Men” is built in stages, focusing first on the egg cooks at the Tropical Breeze, then opening out into other locations – Bugsy’s Backroom, the Corsa Cucina, Scott Gutstein’s home - as it expands its meaning in a setting (Las Vegas) that’s often used to represent meaninglessness.

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

It would be easy to say that the art of “The Egg Men” is in its details. But you could say that about most New Yorker pieces. “The Egg Men” brims with fine details: “nicotine-yellow walls,” “sausagy arms,” “a mixed hash in a tub the size of a baptismal font,” “toast with the texture and density of prairie sod,” "a pale sweet face edged with melancholy,” eggs thrown high in the air “like salsa dancers.” But its art is also in Bilger’s descriptions of the egg cooks in action, e.g., Eckerson cooking ten pairs of eggs simultaneously. Crisp, precise descriptions of short-order technique are essential to this story, the tagline of which is “How breakfast gets served at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas.” Bilger shows us how in writing that enacts the craftsmanship of the cooks he describes.

4. Why do I like it so much?

Reading “The Egg Men,” I experience double bliss: the subject is tremendously interesting and the writing is intensely pleasurable.

I look forward to when Bilger collects “The Egg Men” in a book. I’d snap it up faster than you can say, “I need a four on two, sunny and scrambled, both wearing sausage!”