The Art of Quotation (Part V)

A. S. Byatt (Photo by Ozier Muhammad)

A. S. Byatt, in the Introduction to her essay collection On Histories and Stories (2000), wrote,

I should finally like to say something about the style of these essays. I quote extensively and at length. I tell the stories of books, I describe plots. When I first studied English, extensive quotation was a necessary part of the work of the critic. I. A. Richards showed his students that they were not really reading the words as they were written. He diagnosed and exposed stock responses. And whatever Leavis’s faults of dogmatic dismissal, irascibility prescriptiveness, he was a quoter of genius, and I increasingly look on my early readings of – and reading around, and following up of – those quotations as the guarantee, the proof, that we were all indeed engaged in the common pursuit of true judgment. 

She went on to say, “My quotations are like the slides in an art historical lecture – they are the Thing Itself.” 

Byatt was an extraordinary quoter: see, for example, her great “Van Gogh, Death and Summer” (included in her 1991 essay collection Passions of the Mind), in which she quotes passage after glorious passage from Van Gogh’s letters, celebrating his passionate love of color. 

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #4 "Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #1 'Deadhead' "

The Grateful Dead (Photo by Robert Altman)

This is the seventh 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 “Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #1 ‘Deadhead’ ” (October 24, 2019):

Nick Paumgarten’s “Deadhead” (The New Yorker, November 26, 2012) is a deep, funny, perceptive, stylish consideration of his obsession with the rock band Grateful Dead. A bumper sticker quoted in the piece – “Who are the Grateful Dead, and why do they keep following me?” – could stand as its epigraph. 

Paumgarten approaches his subject from at least five angles:

1. The tapes (“Even the compromised sound quality became a perverse part of the appeal”);

2. The music (“The music, even in the standard verse-chorus stretches, often had a limber, wobbly feel to it that struck many listeners as slovenly but others as sinuous and alive, open to possibility and surprise”);

3. The band (“The musicians were not virtuosos, in the sense of technical skill. But each was unique, peerless, sui generis”);

4. The fans (“There is a silent minority, though, of otherwise unobjectionable aesthetes who, as “Grateful Dead” has become a historical record, rather than a living creative enterprise, have found themselves rekindling a fascination with the band’s recorded legacy. These are the tapeheads, the geeks, the throngs of workaday Phil Schaaps, who approach the band’s body of work with the intensity and the attention to detail that one might bring to birding, baseball, or the Talmud”);

5. The shows (“No two shows were the same, although many were similar. Even on good nights, they might stink it up for a stretch, and on bad ones they could suddenly catch fire—a trapdoor springs open. Then, there were the weird inimitable gigs, the yellow lobsters. Variation was built into the music. They played their parts as if they were inventing them on the spot, and sometimes they were”).

But, most of all, it’s about the tapes. Paumgarten is a tapehead. He writes,

Each tape seemed to have its own particular note of decay, like the taste of the barnyard in a wine or cheese. You came to love each one, as you might a three-legged dog.

Later in the piece, he says,

So a drug-addled, rehearsal-averse, error-prone band of non-virtuosos perfected a state-of-the-art sound system that created a taping community that distributed a gigantic body of work that often came to sound as sloppy as some of the performances. Each had a character and odor of its own, a terroir. Some combination of the era, the lineup, the set list, the sound system, the recording apparatus, its positioning in the hall, the recorder’s sonic bias, the chain of custody, and, yes, the actual performance would render up a sonic aura that could be unique.

Paumgarten’s obsession takes him places. In the company of the Dead’s archivist, David Lemieux, he visits Warner Music Group’s giant warehouse, near Burbank, where the Dead’s vault of recordings is located (“There was a smell of vinegar—the disintegration of old magnetic audiotape. We wandered the aisles, tunnelling through music”). He interviews the band’s bass guitarist, Phil Lesh (“Lesh walked in alone. He’s a spry seventy-two, thin as a branch of manzanita, with fierce, appraising eyes, a quiet speaking voice, and the poor hearing of a guy who’s spent half his life standing in front of a stack of amps. He got a liver transplant in 1998. He was wearing jeans and an untucked button-down. He ordered beets”). He attends the performance of a Grateful Dead tribute band called Dark Star Orchestra (“It was embarrassing and pathetic, perhaps, to be going to see a tribute band unironically—my wife calls them the Dork Star Orchestra—yet it was a thrill to hear the music played well in a small room”). He seeks out the Dead’s longtime recording engineer, Betty Cantor-Jackson, and finds her working as a sound technician at a Methodist church in San Francisco (“She had on a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and a pair of reading glasses propped on her head. She has long brown hair parted in the middle, a warm melancholic smile, and an air of broad-mindedness tinged with resentment”).

“Deadhead” brims with inspired sentences. (When I read, I underline noteworthy passages. Almost three-quarters of “Deadhead” is underlined.) I think my favorite is “On one shelf, I found a bunch of hand-labelled cassettes arrayed chronologically on a Stroh’s beer flat, as in the back seat of a Deadhead’s Datsun.”

You don't have to be a fan of the Grateful Dead to appreciate "Deadhead." You can read it, as I do, for the sheer pleasure of its writing.  

July 8 & 15, 2024 Issue

I’ve long been a fan of Vince Aletti’s photography writing. I can trace the beginning back to a “Critic’s Notebook” piece on Walker Evans that he did for the July 29, 2013 New Yorker. He was a regular contributor to the old “Goings On About Town.” When that section was downsized last year, I wondered if I’d ever see him again in the print version of the magazine. But here he is, in this week’s issue, with a wonderful review of Lyle Ashton Harris’s current exhibition at the Queens Museum, “Our First and Last Love.” It contains this alluring description of Harris’s installation piece “Untitled (Cape Coast)”:

I took refuge in the exhibition’s last room, where another video, a 2008 installation piece, “Untitled (Cape Coast),” made in Ghana, was projected on large, loose panels of silk organza that emphasized the work’s breezy sensuality. The images on display pick up on that mood. Over an establishing shot of surf surging up a wide, busy beach, Harris layers swaying palm fronds, rustling trees, and handsome young men skating, lounging, and running toward us. A sequence shot from a car puts us in the position of a tourist, but there’s something at once casual and alert here that makes it feel far from a hit-and-run. “Cape Coast” is a pleasure cruise and a love letter—a sweet way to close a show as tender and touching as it is raspingly raw.

That last line is superb. More Aletti, please. 

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

This is the fourth 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’ll 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 delightful “Buzz” (July 25, 2022).

“Buzz” tells about Volkswagon’s new electric bus, the ID. Buzz. It also salutes the old VW bus, symbol of Sixties counterculture. Lepore attends the New York International Auto Show to see the Buzz: 

Volkswagen displayed its gleaming fleet in a back corner of the main show floor, where the Buzz was parked on a platform behind a plastic half wall and roped off, like a work of art. It was one of the few cars at the show that you couldn’t climb into or touch. 

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

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

She takes the new Buzz for a test drive: 

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

She says, “I drove around the block, gliding, almost floating, noiselessly, effortlessly. I hit Pause.”

Most memorably, she writes about VW buses she and her family have owned. Here’s her description of their twenty-year-old Vanagon:

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

That’s one of my all-time favorite Lepore passages. I love the details, especially that “pint-size red plastic suitcase full of the best pieces from our family’s Lego collection.” 

“Buzz” is a perfect blend of factual reporting and personal experience. It’s one of Lepore’s best pieces. 

Acts of Seeing: Kimmirut

Photo by John MacDougall

September 12, 2007, I was in Kimmirut for a meeting of Qikiqtani Inuit Association. Every chance I got while I was there, I roamed the hamlet, hunting for interesting images. I watched as a boat called the Misty Michelle was launched and loaded for a trip to a soapstone quarry to get some carving stone. What I like about this picture is the clear afternoon light, the human activity (nine people aboard the two boats, including a kid with red boots perched precariously on the deck edge), the silvery water, the brilliant red dot of a buoy, the freshly painted whiteness of the Misty Michelle, and – most of all – that sublimely textured rock backdrop, with its slanted seams and subtle shades of white, gray, black, and ochre. 

The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

I see The New York Times is picking the 100 best books of the 21st century. Readers are invited to submit their own top ten choices. Here’s what I submitted:

Trawler (2005)

Redmond O’Hanlon

Travels in Siberia (2010)

Ian Frazier

Cross Country (2006)

Robert Sullivan

I Curse the River of Time (2010)

Per Petterson

Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011)

Janet Malcolm

The Sight of Death (2006)

T. J. Clark

Uncommon Carriers (2006)

John McPhee

A Terrible Country (2018)

Keith Gessen

The Old Ways (2012)

Robert Macfarlane

The Ongoing Moment (2005)

Geoff Dyer

It pains me to leave out James Wood, Peter Schjeldahl, and Helen Vendler – three of my favorite writers. But when you draw up these lists, sometimes you have to be ruthless. 

The Art of Quotation (Part IV)

Jill Lepore (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell)

Jill Lepore, in her superb “The Shorebird” (The New Yorker, March 26, 2018; included in her 2023 collection The Deadline), makes an interesting move. Quoting from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, she uses the first line as an introduction to the rest of the excerpt. Here’s the passage:

Everything is connected to everything else, she showed. “We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die,” Carson wrote:

We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm-leaf-earthworm cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology.

The result is a neat in-sentence-block-quotation combo. 

5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #4 "Farewell to the Nineteenth Century"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy Blog

This is the fourth post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “Farewell to the Nineteenth Century” (The New Yorker, September 27, 1999; Chapter 4 of McPhee’s fascinating The Founding Fish, 2002). 

In this absorbing piece, McPhee and his friend John McPhedran canoe down a fifteen-mile stretch of Maine’s Kennebec River, from Waterville to Augusta, through a landscape that until only a few days previous had been under water for a hundred and sixty-two years. The trip is McPhee’s way of exploring the subject of dam removal. 

The piece unfolds in three segments. In segment one, McPhee and McPhedran put their canoe in the river. McPhee writes,

With John McPhedran, I carried a canoe around a ballfield in Waterville, Maine, and on into the woods. The terrain fell away there sharply. The boat was heavy but its skin was indestructible, and we dragged it, bumping on roots. So much for the loving care reserved for canvas, bark, and Kevlar canoes. This one had no need of it. Its makers promote its type with pictures that show one being thrown off the roof of their factory in Old Town. So we twitched it downhill like a log. On the threshold of the year 2000, this was just one of the countless ways of saying farewell to the nineteenth century. 

A few days earlier, we would not have had to choose a model so tough. We put it into Messalonskee Stream, which carried us into the Kennebec River, which, in this stretch, had suddenly lost about five million tons of water as a result of deliberate demolition. Fifteen miles downstream, in Augusta, Edwards Dam, two stories high and more than nine hundred feet wide, had been breached on the first of July. 

As they paddle, McPhee describes what they see:

Beside the second rip we came to was a sofa bed, its skirts showing the stains of fallen water. We expected more of the same. We expected grocery carts. This, after all, was not Township 13, Range 11, of the North Woods, where nearly half the State of Maine consists of nameless unorganized townships. This was settled, supermarket Maine, but in the fifteen river miles upstream of Augusta we would see one beer can, no grocery carts, and three tires. Now we saw a mallard, a pewee, goldfinches. We heard song sparrows, a wood thrush, a veery. I wouldn’t know a veery from a blue-winged warbler, but John McPhedran is acute on birds. I had known him since he was seventeen, seventeen years before. Since then, he had become a botanist, a general field naturalist, and a freelance water-quality consultant working for the Maine Department of Transportation. We saw sticking up from a large and newly emergent river boulder an iron bolt fully an inch and a half in diameter and capped with a head like a big iron mushroom. I knew what that dated from – the log drives of the Kennebec, which began in colonial times and came to an end in 1976. Put a chain around that bolt and you could stop a raft of logs.

They come to Six-Mile Falls, a rapid that was covered by the rising impoundment in 1837. McPhee describes the scene:

Six-Mile Falls was a white riverscape of rock and plunge pools, small souse holes, tightly coiled eddies, and noisy, staired cascades. As we approached, we had to stand up and look for the thread of the river. The place was making scenery lifted from the dead. For six, seven, eight generations, it had been as withdrawn from the world as Debussy’s cathédrale engloutie, but now, as in the time long gone, it was making its own music. Its higher rock, in broad, flat segments, was covered with filamentous algae, which under water have the look of long grass, combed straight by the current. These algae were in thick brown mats, opened to the sky by the breaching of the dam and on their way to removal by the wind. We picked what seemed to be the most promising chute. The canoe slipped through it. We spun around and hung in an eddy. From riverbank to riverbank, water was falling in a hundred different ways.

Segment two cuts away from the canoe trip; it flashes back twelve days to July 1, 1999, when Edwards Dam was breached – the first big dam in a major American river to be ordered out of existence by the federal government. McPhee was there. He describes the moment:

On the cofferdam near the west bank sat Reggie Barnes, of Alton, Maine, at the levers of a Caterpillar 345 backhoe with a two-and-a-half-yard bucket and a thirty-nine-foot ground-level reach. Even from across the river, it looked Cretaceous, its head above the trees. Facing east, it swung right, and it bit a few tons of gravel. After swinging farther to the right and dropping the load, it went back for more. It was eating the cofferdam. It ate from south to north, toward the restrained water. Swing left. Bite. Swing right. Drop. Swing left. Bite. The machine was opening a chasm, and the north end of the chasm was becoming a pillar of gravel separating air from water. Bite. The pillar thinned. Frankly, I had not imagined this moment in history to be dramatic – the engineering was so extensive, monumental, and controlled. I mean, a Stuka wasn’t dropping one on the crest and flying off to Frankfurt. But this backhoe, positioned on the very structure it was consuming – swinging to and fro on the inboard end of the cofferdam – was hypnotizing a thousand people. It hadn’t far to go. The bucket had not reached water before water reached the bucket. From a thousand feet away, even through binoculars, not much could be seen yet but occasional splashes in motion, south. They were occasional enough to cause Reggie Barnes to roll his treads and get the big backhoe out of there, fast. It scooted off the cofferdam and partway up a hill. A bottle of champagne had been cracked on the bucket before it all began, and now from beneath a mass of hard hats came a cheer that might have been audible in Portland. While the hard hats watched and the Nature Conservancy watched with the leaders of American Rivers, the licks and splashes increased in frequency and height above the cofferdam, which was now being eaten by the Kennebec River.

Rapidly, it widened and deepened its advantage. It became a chocolate torrent. It shot through the gap in the western end of the dam itself and smashed into the foundation wall of the gatehouse, once the entry to the power canal. The foundation wall of the gatehouse consisted of very large blocks of granite. The liberated currents caromed off it and angled into the lower river. A milky brown plume spread through the clear water there and nearly reached the eastern shore, a thousand feet away. In eight minutes, the Kennebec, completely in charge of everything now, melted down the cofferdam until a channel had opened seventy feet wide. The rage of high water seemed to fly through the air before hitting the granite wall and exploding back into the river. In the Tree-Free Parking Lot, the assembled phalanges of the environmental movement were standing as one, standing on their chairs for a line of sight through a forest of elbows apexed with binoculars, framing Babbitt on a cell phone before the frothing river. The volume of the rapids grew. After the initial blowout of sediments, the thundering water turned white and the slicks were cordovan glass. The Kennebec River in Augusta, after a hundred and sixty-two years in the slammer, was walking.

That “forest of elbows apexed with binoculars” is inspired. The whole passage is inspired – quintessential McPhee action-writing. 

Segment three cuts back to the canoe trip down the liberated Kennebec. Evidence of the breaching is everywhere apparent. McPhee notes a concrete boat launch that had launched its last boat. “Its lower lip was many yards back from the river and much higher than the surface of the water.” “Broad shingle flats had become exposed here and there.” “Small hanging streams and small hanging falls were cutting fresh canyons to the river.” “Standing high in the river now like stockade towers were the rock-filled cribs of the log drives.” “An island, high and elongate, sat up like a warship on its hull of rock, with twenty-three towers leading to it and five away from its downstream end.” 

He points out that, in order for the Kennebec to be completely free, at least another hundred dams in its watershed above Augusta would have to be removed. Nevertheless, the removal of Edwards Dam is significant. He writes,

In the resurrected rapids of this stretch above Augusta, its fifteen miles seemed both modest and momentous. It was about the length of Manhattan Island. A lot of fish could spawn there. In its possibilities as a state park, its beauty and seclusion, it rallied the nineteenth century. From no river in the country of the Kennebec’s size or stature had a dam ever been removed. 

The last paragraph brings both journey and narrative to beautiful conclusion:

On the fresh current, we rounded a final bend. Down the long thoroughfare of water and trees we now saw – three and a half miles away and rising from mid-river like the blade of a gunsight – the bronze and granite Capitol of Maine. To left and right, above the trees, were the spires of two churches. With John’s father, Alexander McPhedran, we had scouted early in the morning for a place to end the trip, and, with some difficulty, had found one, about a quarter of a mile through the woods from a small roadside park. We had left a white-birch log on a rock to mark the spot. Seeing it now, a mile down, John McPhedran rummaged in his pack, removed a cell phone, and asked his father to pick us up. 

July 1, 2024 Issue

This week’s “Talk of the Town” contains an interesting story by Adam Iscoe called "Catamaran." It tells about a hundred-foot-long former racing catamaran from France, retrofitted with solar panels and a hydrogen fuel cell, docked near Wall Street. Iscoe writes,

The vessel, known as Energy Observer, resembled a sperm whale that had been wrapped in roughly ten thousand photovoltaic cells. She made a two-week pit stop during a seven-year, around-the-world voyage, gathering some fresh vegetables, before setting sail again, at dawn.

The craft is battery-powered. Iscoe says,

Just about everything on the vessel—two electric engines, a washing machine, the Starlink satellite hookup, a seawater desalinator, two refrigerators, several MacBooks, a G.P.S. navigation system, lights—is powered by four lithium-ion batteries, which are recharged by a couple of thousand square feet of solar panels, and a hundred and thirty-seven pounds of hydrogen gas. The gas, which is produced using seawater, is stored in eight pressurized tanks.

Iscoe talks with some of the crew and learns how the vessel works:

In the hulls, seawater is desalinized and purified, before an electrolyzer splits H2O into hydrogen and oxygen. After that, the hydrogen gas is converted into electricity, via a custom-built Toyota fuel cell—a version of the technology inside the company’s hydrogen-powered sedan, which emits water vapor instead of exhaust.

Wow! What marvellous green technology! More ships like Energy Observer, please. 

Rereadings: Pauline Kael's "Reeling"

This is the fifth in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Pauline Kael’s splendid Reeling (1976).

Reeling is a collection of over seventy movie reviews that Kael wrote for The New Yorker, 1972-1975. It includes some of her best work: “Tango” (on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris); “Everyday Inferno” (on Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets); “Movieland – The Bum’s Paradise” (on Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye); “Love and Coca-Cola” (on Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us); “Fathers and Sons” (on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II); “Beverly Hills as a Big Bed” (on Hal Ashby’s Shampoo); and “Coming: Nashville” (on Robert Altman’s Nashville). 

Notice that three of those pieces are on Robert Altman. Kael loved Altman’s work. If you want to know what her governing aesthetic is, read her reviews of Altman. She praised him for his “glancing touch,” his “relaxed awareness,” his “organic style of moviemaking that tells a story without the clanking of plot.” “He’s not a pusher.” “He finds his story through the actors” and “through accidents of weather and discoveries along the way.”

There are some undervalued gems in this collection, too. I love her review of Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express. She writes, “Photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, the cars shimmer in the hot sunlight; in the dark, the red lights of the police cars are like eerie night-blooming flowers.”

Her dismissal of Terrance Malick’s Badlands is unforgettable: “Malick is a gifted student, and Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it.” She concludes: 

And there’s a basic flaw in Malick’s method: he has perceived the movie – he’s done our work instead of his. In place of people and action, with metaphor arising out of the story, he gives us a surface that is all conscious metaphor. Badlands is so preconceived that there’s nothing left to respond to.

Reeling also contains two book reviews – both excellent. One is on Arlene Croce’s The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book; the other is on Norman Mailer’s Marilyn. The Marilyn review contains several classic Kael zingers. Example: “Marilyn is a feat all right: matchstick by matchstick, he’s built a whole damned armada inside a bottle. (Surely he’s getting ready to do Norman? Why leave it to someone who may care less?).”

If you are new to Kael’s work and you are wondering where to start, I recommend Reeling. It covers a golden period of American movies, and shows Kael when she was really rolling, trying to get at what she responds to and why. As she says in her Foreword, “I may not have rendered justice to the best, but I’ve done my damnedest.”  

Mid-Year Top Ten 2024

Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart's "A Martini Tour of New York City"

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

1. Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City,” April 24, 2024 (“The highlight of Tigre’s Martini menu is the vodka-based Cigarette, which Platty immediately qualified as ‘smoky as fuck’ ”). 

2. Luke Mogelson, “The Assault,” April 15, 2024 (“In the operations center, Perun yelled into the radio, ‘No! Don’t cross in front of the entrance!’ But Wolf couldn’t hear him. He kept walking until he reached the open door. For several long seconds, everyone in the operations center watched as he stood there, motionless. Then he crumpled”). 

3. Leslie Jamison, “A New Life,” January 22, 2024 (“The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet. At a certain point, I’d run out of suitcases”).

4. William Finnegan, “The Long Ride,” June 10, 2024 ("Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin").

5. Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern,” June 3, 2024 (“Wang lingered over the passage with unaffected tenderness, giving just a twinge of emphasis to its bittersweet chromaticism”).

6. D. T. Max, “Design for Living,” May 6, 2024 (“He happily spends hours poring over blueprints, dividing former fields of cubicles into small but clever residences and reconceiving onetime copy-machine nooks as mini laundry rooms or skinny kitchens”).

7. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Vol. 4,” May 20, 2024 (“I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle”).

8. Eric Lach, “Trash, Trash Revolution,” April 15, 2024 (“Some of the trash bags have burst open, but others are curiously intact, and you can still make out a few pieces of furniture that never got a chance to be fully digested”).

9. Ian Parker, "His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," June 17, 2024 ("In an empty house with no windows, the sound of the ocean filled every room. Underfoot, the original tiles had been hammered out, and so had the cables and pipes that were once embedded beneath. The floor was now rough concrete, covered in cavities and trenches, like a road that had been chewed up by a milling machine ahead of a resurfacing"). 

10. Paige Williams, "Ghosts on the Water," June 24, 2024 ("The pour revealed sea lice, krill, a needlefish, and a bunch of twitchy sticklebacks, as silver as store-bought fishing lures—bycatch, all of which gets returned to the river. Cupping the net from the bottom, the patriarch teased the few glass eels into view and plucked them out, the way you’d pick lint off a sweater").

Best Cover

Klaas Verplancke, “On the Grid” (March 25, 2024)

Best "Talk of the Town" Story

Robert Sullivan, “Find a Grave,” April 8, 2024 (“Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called ‘Sligo Maid.’ Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. ‘That’s Coleman!’ Kelly said”).

Best Illustration

Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli, for Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best "Goings On" Note

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B,” March 4, 2024 (“Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works”).

Best Photo

Photo by Bobby Beasley, for David Means’ “Chance the Cat” (January 22, 2024)

Best newyorker.com Post

Nathan Heller, “Helen Vendler’s Generous Mind,” April 30, 2024 (“What she had was an almost tactile understanding of the ancient practice of creating poems as art, and—running her hands like a dressmaker along the back of their stitching, watching the way they draped and moved and caught the light—she could see not only what poets did but how they did it”).

Best Sentence

Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, the Danish distillery, and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far. – Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024)

Best Paragraph

In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library. – Leslie Jamison, “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best Detail

Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it. – Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan” (February 26, 2024)

Best Description

Of course I got the soup. Plenty of ink has already been spilled over the titillating Soup No. 5, a small tureen of thick brown broth, heavily spiced with sibot (a smoky-tangy blend of Chinese herbs), in which float bits of bull testicles and penis. A bowl is salty and savory, warming and rich; the soup is traditionally consumed as a hangover cure, perhaps owing to the virility of its star ingredients. (One is spongy, the other chewy; I won’t spoil which is which.) I’m not sure if I’d order it on a return visit, though—I’ll save room, instead, for grilled morsels of pork jowl brushed with glossy-sweet barbecue sauce made with banana ketchup, or sticky skewers of eel glazed in lemon-lime soda and ginger. The K.F.C. (Kanto fried chicken), little popcorn nuggets of tender dark meat, arrives with a bowl of dipping sauce that’s so fiery hot, so puckery with fish sauce, that it made me feel wildly alive. – Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Naks” (February 5, 2024)

3 for the River: People

This is the seventh 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 sense of people.

There aren’t many people in Patterson’s Dangerous River. The Nahanni River, when he went up it, in 1927, and again in 1928-29, was remote, wild territory, pretty much empty of humans, except for Indians. On his first trip, he encounters a man named Albert Faille, who is traveling up the Nahanni as far as Flat River. He makes friends with Faille. They camp together. He helps Faille build a log cabin on the Flat. He says of Faille, 

The Nahanni has probably never seen a finer canoeman, and to watch Faille search out the weak spot in a riffle and plant his canoe’s nose exactly there, and neither to the right nor the left by even a hand’s breadth, is like watching a fine swordsman seeking for an opening, feeling out his adversary.

Other people met by Patterson on that first trip are Arthur George, a fur trapper who has a cabin on the Liard River, where Patterson stays overnight on his way back out; Father Gouet, an old priest in Fort Liard; Archie Gardiner, a Fort Nelson guide; Corporal Barber, of the British Columbia Police, stationed in Fort Nelson; and Harry Weaver, captain of the freighter that takes Patterson down the Peace River.  

On his second trip up the Nahanni, Patterson is accompanied by his friend Gordon Matthews. They make a good team – capable, practical, adventurous. Substantial chunks of Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are written in the “we”:

We left la Flair’s post next morning at 5:30 and thrummed up the quiet reaches of the river, almost to the foot of the Splits, without incident. 

In the morning we redistributed the heavy load between the two canoes and poled on into the Canyon.

We started early up the two big riffles. 

We dried the outfit and patched and mended the old freight canoe.

Two or three days later we were poling up a quiet, dreamy snye of the right bank, somewhere above the mouth of the Meilleur River.

There was no sense in going further – and so we made a camp and cooked supper and sat on the soft cushion of the dryas, eating and watching the red light of the sunset on the on the face of the Second Canyon Mountains.

And there was game: in the first hour, as we unloaded the canoes, we saw five moose either swimming or coming down to drink, and in the afternoon, two more. 

A week’s work followed, during which we cleared and levelled a site for a cabin, cut spruce for building timber, taking the trees from the south to let in the sunlight, and painted the canoes.

Two days later we roasted a haunch of that bear, spinning it suspended on a wire from an overhanging branch above a slow fire.

We got the sheep meat down to the canoe in one load, carrying all we could manage ourselves and packing the dogs with the rest; and very disgusted they looked, staggering along each with a heavy load of meat in his little canvas panniers.

They take turns hunting and exploring. One goes out for two or three days, sometimes a week or more; the other stays behind, tending camp. Patterson says of these periods of separation,

I don’t think that either Gordon or myself ever felt lonely in the generally accepted sense of the word, though we were often alone and far apart: there was so much to see and do in this strange new country that we were always far too much occupied and interested to have time for any mawkish feelings of loneliness. Neither of us had any brothers or sisters and that may have had something to do with it – we had never been accustomed to rely on the support of others. But there was also this, that we both took a certain pride in our ability to travel alone into places where most men would hesitate to go in couples.

That “there was so much to see and do in this strange new country” could be this great book’s tagline. There’s activity on every page – climbing mountains, hauling canoes up rapids, portaging, hunting, backpacking in the bush, packing meat into camp, building a log cabin. Patterson evokes Matthews’ vigorous character by describing his action. For example:

Gordon had been busy. The walls of the cabin were partly up and the rest of the logs were cut and lying in the bush; any trees that threatened the safety of the cache and cabin had been cut down, and all the tops and useless timber had been sawed up and split and now made the foundation of our winter wood pile. The clearing was a more open and orderly place than when I had last seen it – and, in addition to this, a lot of trapline had been cut out.

Other people encountered by Patterson on his second trip: Jack la Flair, who runs a trading post at the foot of Nahanni Butte; Albert Faille, who camps with Patterson and Matthews for a few days; Starke and Stevens, who are trying to drive a power scow up the Nahanni; Greathouse, Southard, and Quinlan, who have a cabin on the Nahanni; Ole Lindberg and his wife, who have a cabin on the Liard River; Joseph Marie Cote, who has a cabin on the Liard; Carolus, the young Indian man who guides Patterson through fierce wind and snow on the trail to Fort Simpson; the group of nine Indians who visit Patterson at his cabin, drink a bucket of tea, and give him a present of moose meat. 

Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory teems with people – people in bars; people on the street; people on the river; people in restaurants and hotels; churchgoers; people at a Knights of Columbus picnic; taxi drivers; squirrel hunters; people at the Falling Rocks Walleye Club Annual Pig Roast; people in poolrooms; students at Bellevue’s Lincoln Junior High School; raccoon hunters; workers on strike at the Oscar Mayer Packing Company in Davenport; a gang of Hell’s Angels at a bar in Buffalo; people attending Sunday morning service at the Community Baptist Church in Andalusia; people at a housewarming party in Muscatine; duck hunters; lockmasters; tour guides; waitresses; radio station receptionists; towboat captains; bootleggers; bartenders; on and on.

Some folks are identified, some aren’t. Among the identified are: Herb Heichert, owner of the Minneapolis boatyard where Raban buys his boat; Jim Curdue, who takes Raban fishing for walleyes on Lake Pepin; John Dunlevy, owner of Lansing’s local newspaper, the Allamakee News; Rex Kaber, owner of Kaber’s Supper Club, in Prairie du Chien; Jerry Eiben, Dubuque taxidermist; R. C. Wahlert, owner of the Dubuque Packing Company; Harvey Schwartz, worker at the Oscar Mayer Packing Company, Davenport, who takes Raban with him on a coffee run; Ross Frick, owner of Frick’s bar, in Davenport; Brad Funk, public relations officer at the Grain Processing Corporation, Muscatine, who takes Raban on a tour of the plant; Wayne Oakman, Dallas City fisherman, who lets Raban sleep overnight in his trailer home; Betty Asquith, formerly of England, now living in Hannibal; Rush Limbaugh, “oldest practicing attorney” in Cape Girardeau; P. T. Ferry, who drives Raban into Tiptonville; Reverend Judge Otis Higgs, candidate for mayor of Memphis; Shouphie Habeeb, president of the First Federal Savings & Loan Bank, in Vicksburg; Willy Jefferson, owner of Jefferson Funeral Home, Vicksburg; Bob “Boom-Boom” Kelley, captain of the towboat Jimmie L. that takes Raban from Natchez to New Orleans.

Raban sizes everyone up, sometimes not too charitably. Of the occupants of a St. Paul bar, he says, “My fellow drinkers looked as if they had been purchased in bulk along with the plastic library walls.” Of a woman he meets in Winona: “She looked like a retired lady wrestler. Slack-jawed, her eyes hidden behind the thick lenses of her glasses, she filled her outsize stretch pants to the last stitch.” Of the guys in a club bar in Moline: “These aging jocks with their acrimonious divorces, their giant powerboats and their glowering paranoia.”  

The people he likes best are river people. Of Wayne Oakman, a commercial fisherman and junk collector, he says,

I had never yet met anyone whose obsession with the river so far exceeded mine. Wayne Oakman was an enslaved courtier of the Mississippi. The front of his spruce frame house was a long window, so that the water seemed to fill the rooms and color the walls. You could hear it lapping on the beach under our feet. Wayne’s old basket chair was placed next to the glass so that he could watch the current uncoiling downstream on another westward dogleg. He was inseparable from the water.

In Tim Butcher’s Blood River, people are key to the success of his journey across the Congo. They include: Tom Nyamwaya, the International Care worker who provides Butcher with motorbikes through Katanga; Benoit Bangana and Odimba – the two International Care workers who drive the motorbikes; Georges Mbuya, the pygmy rights advocate, who accompanies Butcher part way to Kasongo; Masimango Katanda, the Anglican archbishop who puts Butcher up while he’s in Kindu; Lieutenant Commander Jorge Wilson, head of MONUC’s Kindu unit, who allows Butcher to hitch a ride on a UN river patrol boat down the Congo as far as the village of Lowa; Malike Bade, leader of the crew of pirogue paddlers that take Butcher down the Congo from Lowa to Ubundu; Adalbert Mwehu Nzuzi, the priest who puts Butcher up while he’s in Ubundu; Michel Kombozi, driver of the motorbike that Butcher rides to Kisangani; Oggi Saidi, Wagenia fisherman who helps Butcher search for a river boat heading downstream from Kisangani; Robert Powell, UN transport boss for Kasangani, who authorizes Butcher’s passage aboard the UN pusher Nganing that takes him to Mbandaka; Mohammed Yusoff Sazali, senior MONUC officer on board the Nganing; Jean Paul Mbuta Monshengo, captain of the Nganing; Pascal Manday Mbueta, the Nganing’s Congolese bowman; Maurice, the Kinshasa representative of Butcher’s cobalt-mining contact, who arranges for Butcher’s stay in Kinshasa and his two-day drive to Boma.

In addition, Butcher meets many interesting people along the way – old Belgian colonists, bicycle haulers, village chiefs, missionaries, priests, river pilots, pirogue paddlers, local historians. Butcher talks to them all, weaving a vivid narrative of the Congo’s human suffering. 

One of Blood River’s most memorable scenes is Butcher’s farewell to his Kisangani contact Oggi Saidi. Butcher is leaving Kisangani. He meets with Oggi to say goodbye. They’re in the bar of the Palm Beach Hotel. After a few beers, Oggi makes a heartbreaking request. Here’s the scene:

Oggi’s fluent English was entirely self-taught. He was tough – he had lost count of the malaria episodes he had survived. And he was resourceful – somehow he fed his family and kept them clothed without any meaningful income. But just like Georges, Benoit and many other Congolese I had met, all his energies, skills and talents were spent on the daily struggle to survive. The failure of the Congo is so complete that its silent majority – tens of millions of people with no connections to the gangster government or the corrupt state machinery – are trapped in a fight to stay where they are and not become worse off. Thoughts of development, advancement or improvement are irrelevant when the fabric of your country is slipping backwards around you.

After enough Primus to make his eyes rheumy, Oggi found the inner strength he had been looking for. He put his hand on my forearm, leaned forward and made the most wretched of pleas.“Please, Mr. Tim. I have a huge favour to ask. My son, my fourteen-year-old, has no future here. There is nothing for him in Kisangani. I know way this city is going. Please will you take him with you to South Africa and give him a new life.”

There was no way I could smuggle a child onto the UN boat with me. I felt wretched having to turn Oggi down. But I felt more wretched that he had to resort to asking me, someone he had known for only a few days, to save his child from the Congo.

People in these three great books can be divided into flat or round. All the people I’ve mentioned so far are flat. They’re quickly sketched, sometimes in a mere sentence or two. To call them “flat” is not meant to be pejorative. They’re flat like photos. Rarely does the travel writer stop long enough to get to know anyone in depth. But each of these books contains at least one "round" person, namely, the writer himself. Everything is processed through his consciousness. His “I” is on almost every page. Are these books self-portraits? That’s the subject of my next post in this series.