2024 Year in Review

Let’s begin with a drink, shall we? How about one of those 1884 Martinis that Gary Shteyngart writes about in his “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024). What a dazzling piece! Great subject, exquisite style. Definitely my favorite piece of 2024. Here’s Shteyngart’s description of the 1884 Martini:

This beast is premade with two types of gin—Boatyard Double Gin, from Northern Ireland, and the New York Distilling Company’s Perry’s Tot Navy Strength Gin—which clocks in at a ridiculous 114 proof. This dangerous concoction is then fat-washed with Spanish Arbequina olive oil, after which it is frozen and the olive oil’s fat removed, while vermouth, lemon liqueur, a house-made vetiver tincture, and a few dashes of lemon-pepper bitters are added. A lemon peel is then showily expressed over the glass tableside and a very briny Gordal olive and a cocktail-onion skewer are plopped in.

Yes, I’ll have one of those, please. Mm, that is beastly! Okay, let’s roll!

Highlight #1: The 2024 Food Issue. This digital-only issue is crammed with delectable writing, including Shteyngart’s brilliant “Martini tour” piece, Adam Iscoe’s “No Reservations,” Helen Rosner’s “Padma Lakshimi’s Funny Side,” Jiayang Fan’s “Another Chinatown,” Patricia Marx’s “Spoiler Alert,” and Hannah Goldfield’s “Holey Grail.” I love sensuous writing. The 2024 Food Issue is pure nirvana. Here’s a sample:

It was easy to see how a Courage bagel could offend, if not enrage, a New York purist. It brings to mind a rustic, crusty baguette: the exterior is dark, craggy, and heavily blistered; the crumb is a little stretchy with a lot of air holes. (Courage bagels are leavened with sourdough starter, rather than commercial yeast.) If you were to scoop it, another move for which a bagel aficionado might make a citizen’s arrest—stay safe out there!—you’d be left with mostly crust. This makes it especially suited to Courage’s main offering: photogenic open-faced sandwiches. Bagel halves are topped with various combinations of cream cheese, jewel-like slices of tomato, thin coins of cucumber, smoked salmon, roe, or sardines, then painstakingly finished with salt, freshly cracked pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, fronds of dill. A Courage bagel is a Los Angeles bagel, ready for its closeup. [Hannah Goldfield, “Holey Grail”]

Highlight #2: Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault” (April 15, 2024). Mogelson is a superb war reporter. In this riveting piece, he tells about his recent experience embedding with Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion in Tabaivka, a settlement in north-eastern Ukraine, less than ten miles from the front line. 

Here’s an excerpt:

For the rest of the day, a steady stream of small groups of Russian infantrymen—between two and six soldiers each—walked to Tabaivka from the east. Few made it across the three-hundred-yard gap. The snow had relented, and Boyko easily stalked the groups with the surveillance drone. Perun bounded between the panel and the radio, shouting himself hoarse, calculating azimuths, and correcting the aim of his stormers, snipers, and machine gunners. It was madness: Russians kept marching down the same paths, to the same spots where their comrades had just died. One 1st Battalion machine gunner later told me he had fired his weapon so much that it had kept him warm in his frigid dugout. He couldn’t see the men he was killing. But since they kept reappearing in certain places, he memorized different branches below which he could point his barrel to hit specific coördinates up to a mile away.

Highlight #3: Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024), a meditation on becoming a parent and ending a marriage – both experiences tightly interwoven. The piece brims with thisness – “blue mesh hospital underwear,” “garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers,” “zipped pajamas with little dangling feet,” “diapers patterned with drawings of scrambled eggs and bacon.” Jamison is a superb describer – direct, specific, concrete. For example:

In April, I took the baby on a book tour. She was three months old. My mother came with us. Four weeks, eighteen cities. We stood at curbside baggage stands in Boston, Las Vegas, Cedar Rapids, San Francisco, Albuquerque, with our ridiculous caravan of suitcases, our bulky car seat, our portable crib. The baby in her travel stroller. The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin. Everywhere we went, I brought a handheld noise machine called a shusher. It was orange and white, and it calmed my baby down better than my own voice.

There are dozens of other quotable passages. The whole piece is quotable – a masterpiece of personal history writing. 

Highlight #4: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two.” This column is a constant source of reading pleasure. I look forward to it every week. There are two versions of it – the short version that appears in the print edition, and the longer version that is published on newyorker.com. I love comparing them. Among my favorite Rosner pieces this year are “Old John’s Diner” (“The lemon-meringue pie is unimpeachable, with a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue”), “Le B.” (“The desserts are quite lovely, including butter-drenched crêpes Suzette, theatrically flambéed tableside, and an obscenely silky chocolate sorbet that conjures licking frosting straight from the bowl”), and “Misipasta” (“The lights are just dim enough to soothe, the tidy menu of cocktails and bitter Italian sodas ready to offer a bit of relief. The air smells like Parmigiano and butter, the sound system is playing the Pointer Sisters”).   

Highlight #5: After a six-year absence, the triumphant return of “Bar Tab.” My favorite New Yorker column is back! See, for example, Jiayang Fan, “Bar Tab: Another Country,” August 5, 2024 (“Disoriented, the pair perused the menu, he choosing C’mon Dad Gimme the Car, a tequila-forward, lip-tickling strawberry-and-jalapeño cocktail named for a Violent Femmes song, she opting for I May Destroy You, a smoky mezcal-and-Aperol number inspired by the HBO show”); Rachel Syme, “Bar Tab: So & So’s," October 14, 2024 (“One twist on a Martini features blood-red beet juice”); Ray Lipstein, “Bar Tab: “Kelly’s Tavern,” October 28, 2024 (“Here, an upside-down shot glass at your place signifies that someone has, with a timeless, Tony Soprano bravura, paid for the next of what you’re drinking”). 

Other top picks of the year:

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”).

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”). 

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”).

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”).

Ian Parker, “His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” June 17, 2024 (“Inside, I was surprised by the loudness of the surf—even in the dim vestibule where the aluminum Ando statue used to stand. 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”).

Paige Williams, “Ghosts on the Water,” June 24, 2024 (“The men were wearing waders, hoodies, and yellow rubber gloves up to their elbows. One of them flicked on a powerful flashlight. From the bridge, I watched them traverse an inhospitable stretch of beach and climb the jagged riprap, moving toward the bridge piling where their fyke net was tethered”). 

Ian Frazier, “Paradise Bronx,” July 22, 2024 (“In another few blocks, on my right, I passed the small but excellent Bronx Museum of the Arts, where I’ve seen shows of graffiti art of the seventies and Gordon Matta-Clark’s chainsaw-cutout sections from floors and ceilings of abandoned Bronx apartment buildings—that crazy turquoise-blue kitchen linoleum!”).

Nick Paumgarten, “Dead Reckoning,” July 29, 2024 (“It’s all tightly choreographed, but the music still feels alive, improvised, viney. A not-unpropulsive jam scored a vista of the desert at night, a gesture toward the group’s 1978 trip to Egypt: a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree view of the Great Pyramids under a lunar eclipse, bats winging in the shadows of the Sphinx. Then, to the delight of the Mayerheads, a wanky “Sugaree,” under a shower of scarlet begonias”).

Ben Taub, “The Dark Time,” September 16, 2024 (“Arakali approached the stratotanker from behind and from slightly below. The tanker filled the P-8’s cockpit windows—four huge jet engines, spanning my peripheral vision. Arakali leaned over the controls and craned his neck upward. His hands shook wildly, compensating for forces that I could not see; in relation to the stratotanker, the P-8 seemed perfectly still. A young woman, lying prone in the stratotanker’s tail, stared back at him, her face framed by a small triangular window, as she guided a fuel line into the top of the P-8. There was a rush of liquid above us—two tons per minute. Then the line detached, and Arakali descended over the Barents Sea”).

Anna Wiener, “Joy Ride,” September 23, 2024 (“Still, before I left, Petersen sent me around the block on a grape-purple Platypus. I cruised past the auto-body shops and a restaurant puffing anise-scented air. The Platypus was agile, and sturdy as a parade float”).

Rachel Syme, “Sniff Test,” September 23, 2024 (“The resulting perfume did not smell edible or organic; it evoked something air-gapped and untouched by human sweat, like a new Porsche that happens to be filled with cotton candy”). 

Elizabeth Kolbert, “When the Ice Melts,” October 14, 2024 (“The boardwalk curled east and then ascended a rocky ridge. From the ridgetop, there was a view directly onto the ice jam: a floating mountain range with slopes of pure white. The reflections of the icebergs quavered in the water, which was blue to the edge of purple. The smaller bergs were the size of a house; the bigger ones, I figured, were the size of Grand Central Terminal”).

Rivka Galchen, “Pecking Order,” October 21, 2024 (“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”).

Rebecca Mead, “Color Instinct,” November 18, 2024 (“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”).

Paige Williams, “Wild Side,” December 2, 2024 (“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”).

Rivka Galchen, "Leg Work," December 16, 2024 ("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").

Anthony Lane, “Stirring Stuff,” December 23, 2024 (“You melt a bit of butter, sauté some chopped onion, add rice, stir it around, add wine, stir, then add hot stock, ladle by ladle, while you stir and stir again. Remove the pan from the heat. Throw in grated Parmesan and more butter. Stir. Wait. Serve. Eat. Feel your immortal soul being warmed and suffused with pleasures both rare and immeasurable. Lick the spoon. Wash the pan. Done”). 

Rachel Aviv, "You Won't Get Free of It," December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025 ("Trauma tends to lead to a kind of unknowing repetition, and, in the second half of her life, Alice reënacted the dynamic with her mother, in new form: she had to trade reality for fiction, her daughter for art"). 

Best “Talk of the Town”

Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan,” February 26, 2024 (“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”).

Ben McGrath, “Where’s My Car?,” March 4, 2024 (“In 2005, Goswick sliced his suit going through the windshield of a car that went off the old Tappan Zee Bridge”).

Ian Frazier, “Uncaged Birds,” March 4, 2024 [“Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and others like it (all products, probably, of an offstage cloud-making machine), vividly captured beams of light from above the stage that came down in vertical shafts, suggesting interrogation lamps, the columns of a courthouse, or the bars of a prison cell”].

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”).

Adam Iscoe, “Catamaran,” July 1, 2024 (“The vessel, known as Energy Observer, resembled a sperm whale that had been wrapped in roughly ten thousand photovoltaic cells”).

Robert Sullivan, “From Philly to Venice,” July 1, 2024 (“The Arkestra practiced and eventually toured the world, the row house filling with gig posters, its plaster walls soaking up decades of music from a band that, under Sun Ra’s leadership, had set out on a course of inter-dimensional travel, using chords and time signatures and equations rather than rocket fuel”).

Ben McGrath, “Clean Your Pipes,” November 25, 2024 (“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”)

Best of “The Critics”

Jackson Arn, “Tone Control,” January 29, 2024 (“I enjoy her paintings most when she makes an unlikely pair of colors scrape against each other and then smooths things over with a third. In “Greener Lean” (1978), the odd couple are a thick, too sugary green and a sickly yellow, and the deus ex machina is a drizzle of red in the lower right, which gives the yellow a little life and the green a little nuance”).

Alex Ross, “Twin Feats,” April 1, 2024 (“The rapid-fire sotto-voce chords that launch the Scherzo went off with purring finesse; the coda of the first movement became an exuberant one-man stampede. Just as impressive was Levit’s ability to sustain tension across spare textures, as at the desolate end of the Funeral March. Acoustical mirages beguiled the ears: in the trio of the Scherzo, brassy E-flat-major triads evoked a trio of hunting horns”).

James Wood, “A Life More Ordinary,” April 8, 2024 (“Kumar’s details have the vitality of invention and the resonance of the real, as if echoing with actual family history”).

Jackson Arn, “Warp Speed,” April 22 & 29, 2024 (“Patterns unfold horizontally, but every so often a twisted pair of vertical threads (it’s called a leno weave) slashes its way out of the grid”).

Amanda Petrusich, “Age of Anxiety,” May 27, 2024 (“ ‘Lunch’ is a weird, pulsing track, vigorous and horny. It’s also my favorite song on the new album, in part because Eilish sounds incredibly free, which is to say, she sounds like herself”).

Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern,” June 3, 2024 (“At the end of the initial passage comes a solitary, exposed C: Wang rendered it with a sudden coldness, signalling the transition to the minor. Such nuances of articulation are essential to persuasive Chopin playing. The oasis of C major returns just before the coda, this time reduced to five pianissimo chords. Wang struck the first of these with a dry, plain tone; then her touch softened, so that the chords subsided into a somnolent haze. After a split-second pause, the coda exploded with concussive force”).

Hannah Goldfield, “Desert Island,” June 3, 2024 (“Inside, Villiatora serves what he calls ‘Hawaii street food’: a refined spin on a Korean-inspired plate lunch, featuring a strip of tender galbi and a meat jun, griddled golden and crisp; a spectacular fried chicken thigh shellacked in a chili-pepper-guava glaze that tastes strikingly of the juicy fruit. A dozen yards away, on the casino floor, animated bison stampede across the screens of digital slot machines, a game called Buffalo Ascension promising gold”).

Kathryn Schulz, “Casting a Line,” July 8 & 15, 2024 (“Like every brilliant author, Maclean simultaneously seems inexplicable and demands explication—some attempt to answer the questions raised by his prose. One of those questions is practical, a matter of craft: How does he do this? But another is ontological: What kind of man could make this work?”).

Maggie Doherty, “Duty Dancing,” September 9, 2024 (“Consider the first lines of ‘Churning Day’: ‘A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast, / hardened gradually on top of the four crocks.’ Each consonant cracks like a peppercorn between the teeth. These are poems you taste”).

Parul Sehgal, “The Mystery of Pain,” September 16, 2024 (“Commas are inserted casually, idiosyncratically. The language is softer, mussed, exploratory. Pain makes a mockery of control; the armor of high style is loosened”).

Jackson Arn, “Eyes Wide Shut,” September 23, 2024 (“The scene is only a few firm details away from abstraction, a Rorschach test tilted sideways—not a thing plus its echo but an unbroken flat-deep surface. If it is still an impression of a lost moment, there is something newly sturdy mixed in; each brushstroke declares, I’m still here”).

Jackson Arn, “It Takes a Village,” October 14, 2024 (“Circular handle joins with square container, apples form pert rows of three and four, individual finds perfection in collective. And look at the stems! Each points straight to Heaven, with no sign of rupture from the tree”).

Casey Cep, “Touch Wood,” December 9, 2024 (“The ‘Mack Chairs’ look, improbably, like industrial flowers: backs standing like stamens, legs curving like tendrils, seats resting on metal cruciforms as bright as tropical petals”).

Best Poem

Robert Hass, “A Sunset,” September 9, 2024 (“In the dark / I thought of a radiant ordinariness / That burned, that burned and burned”).

Best Cover

Hudson Christie, “The 2024 Food Issue”

Best Photo

Landon Nordeman’s photo for Gary Shteyngart’s "A Martini Tour of New York City" (April 24, 2024) 

Best Illustration

Bianca Bagnarelli’s illustration for Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (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 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 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 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)

Thank you, New Yorker, for another great year of reading pleasure.

Credits: (1) Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart’s “A Martini Tour of New York City”; (2) Photo by Maxim Dondyuk, from Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault”; (3) Photo by Adam Whyte, from Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Old John’s Diner”; (4) Photo by Dina Litovsky, from Eric Lach’s “Trash, Trash Revolution”; (5) Photo by Michelle Groskopf, from Nick Paumgarten’s “Dead Reckoning”; (6) Photo by Alice Mann, from Rebecca Mead’s “Color Instinct”; (7) Illustration by João Fazenda, from Robert Sullivan's "From Philly to Venice"; Illustration by Tianqi Chen, from Alex Ross’s “Thoroughly Modern.”

December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025 Issue

Rachel Aviv, in her disturbing “You Won’t Get Free of It,” in this week’s issue, explores the complex psychosexual dynamics of Alice Munro’s family life, including the sexual abuse of her youngest daughter Andrea by her husband Gerry, and Munro's shocking decision to stay with Gerry even after Andrea told her about it. It sounds like a Munro short story, but it’s real life, with real-life consequences.  

I confess I'm struggling with my response to this piece. I'm a fan of Munro's writing. Part of me wants to defend her. Part of me realizes that what she did - "trade her daughter for art," in Aviv's words - is indefensible. I'm conflicted. "She couldn't have done it and she must have done it" - that's what Janet Malcolm said of the defendant Mazoltuv Borukhova in Iphigenia in Forest Hills. That's the way I feel right now about Alice Munro. I need more time to resolve my feelings about what she did. I may never resolve them. 

In the meantime, I'll keep an eye out for other responses to the controversy. I'd love to read Lorrie Moore on it. She admired Munro's work immensely. How is she grappling with Andrea's revelations? 

December 23, 2024 Issue

Anthony Lane writes the most perceptive, sparkling, witty, light-hearted, elegant prose. John Updike compared it to champagne. No matter what his subject, he hooks me with his opening line, and then the next one, and the next, and before I know it, I’ve read an entire essay on Lego or astronauts or John Ruskin or The Sound of Music. It's as easy as quaffing a flute of Prosecco. His piece in this week’s issue, called “Stirring Stuff,” is excellent. It’s about his love of risotto and his quest for the perfect dish of it. He visits Bottega Vini, in Verona, to observe the chefs making risotto all’Amarone:

To judge by what I saw, this is how risotto all’Amarone is summoned into being: Butter, then rice, which toasts for a short while. No onions at all. Two and a half ladles’ worth of wine, which hisses like a serpent as it hits the pan. (The chef exclaimed, “Sempre con un fuoco vivace”—“Always with a lively fire.”) Lean in close enough, inhale, and you might, if your head is weak, begin to get vaporously drunk. As the alcohol boils off, add simmering water, followed by vegetable stock. Do not be startled by the simplicity of the thing. Scrape around the sides. Remove from the stove. A dab more butter, a strewing of Parmesan, and then, unexpectedly, another glug of Amarone, too late to be steamed away. It is there to throw a punch. The result is something to behold: glossy and purplish, darker and deeper than blood. Mark Rothko would have asked for seconds.

He goes to Locarno to see a risotto-making contest:

The climax of Locarno’s celebration is a risotto-making contest, which unfolds over two days in the Piazza Grande. This is an ancient rite, dating back to the mists of 2014, and rivalries have already grown amiably intense. On Friday, August 23rd, in a vast tent, a number of restaurant chefs, backed by sweltering assistants, wrought their magic. What they conjured up was doled out to the public, who stood patiently in line, like genial descendants of the boys in “Oliver Twist,” to be given a helping in a cardboard bowl. Having scarfed down my risotto al pesto di limoni e Merlot bianco con bocconcini di pollo croccanti e pepe Vallemaggia, which took longer to say than it did to eat, I could hardly suppress a plaintive cry: “Please, signor, I want some more.”

I love his description of how risotto is made:

You melt a bit of butter, sauté some chopped onion, add rice, stir it around, add wine, stir, then add hot stock, ladle by ladle, while you stir and stir again. Remove the pan from the heat. Throw in grated Parmesan and more butter. Stir. Wait. Serve. Eat. Feel your immortal soul being warmed and suffused with pleasures both rare and immeasurable. Lick the spoon. Wash the pan. Done. 

“Stirring Stuff” is a delectable tour of Lane's risotto world. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Acts of Seeing: Bombardier Snow Bus

Bombardier Snow Bus, Rankin Inlet, 2006 (Photo by John MacDougall)

I’m partial to ruins and wrecks. September 10, 2006, I was nosing around the town of Rankin Inlet on the west coast of Hudson Bay, when I encountered this rusted hulk of an old Bombardier snow bus. I love its curved shape and four round windows, golden Arctic wheat growing up around it. Most of all, I love the texture of its flayed steel skin. Flecks of yellow paint. Was that its original color? Once upon a time, it was a functioning snow bus, carrying kids to school, miners to work, researchers to field projects – who knows what it was used for? No doubt, it has a story. But I will never know it. I wonder if it’s still there.   

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," "paper") 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.”