December 1, 2025 Issue

The two pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: I’m Donut ?” and Alex Ross’s “Written in Stone.” Rosner’s piece is a review of the new Times Square doughnut shop called I’m Donut ?. Her description of the store’s doughnuts is delectable. Here’s a sample:

There are chocolate and matcha variants, their subtle flavors baked into the dough. Then there are filled doughnuts, whose puffy centers are pumped with flavored creams, all of them vivid and none too sweet: custard, more matcha, fragrant sake gelée with Chantilly, airy peanut-butter cream swirled with tart Concord-grape jelly. There are some New York-exclusive flavors, like a ring doughnut glazed in neon-pink strawberry icing, freckled with bits of freeze-dried berry that crackle and melt on the tongue, or a chocolate variety with a caramel-espresso cream filling that was unexpectedly, thrillingly bitter and complex. The somewhat controversial scrambled-egg doughnut features a sugary original doughnut piped full of soft curds and a squirt of a sweet-savory tomato mayonnaise—a bold and bizarre breakfast manifesto that refuses to be definitively sweet or definitively savory. I loved it unreservedly, though I imagine I might be in the minority.

Mm, I’ll have one of those chocolate ones with the caramel-espresso cream filling, please.

Ross’s “Written in Stone” is a paean to the Orkney Islands. He says, “Orkney is one of those places where the veil over the distant past seems to lift.” He visits various Neolithic ruins: the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, the tomb at Maeshowe. His favorite site is Stenness. He writes,

During a recent visit to Orkney, I kept returning to Stenness, at all hours and in all weather. On drizzly days, with skies hanging low, the stones resemble ladders to nowhere. In bright sun, hidden colors emerge: streaks of blue against gray; white and green spatters of lichen; yellowish stains indicating the presence of limonite, an iron ore. Pockmarks and brittle edges show the abrading action of millennia of wind and rain. I watched as tourists approached the stones and hesitantly touched them, as if afraid. When I put my own hands on the rock, I felt no obvious emanations, though I did not feel nothing. One evening, I leaned on a fence as the sun went down, the horizon glowing orange against a cobalt sky. A whitish mist stole in from the lochs, encircling a nearby house until only its roof and chimneys remained. Spectral shapes caught my eye: sheep were trimming the grass around the site. When they detected my presence, they streamed away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats. The stones loomed as black silhouettes. I felt a sweet shiver of the uncanny.

I love that description of the sheep, “streaming away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats.” “Written in Stone” is a wonderful tour of Neolithic Orkney. I enjoyed it immensely. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Conclusion

This is the sad part of the journey, my final post in this series. Today I’ll try to express what these three great books – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – mean to me.

These books are excellent examples of literary explorations of place. The locations explored – the Pine Barrens, the Meadowlands, Pine Ridge Reservation – are on the margins of society. That’s one of the things I relish. Another is the immersive way they’re explored – the walking, canoeing, driving, and roaming. McPhee climbs a fire tower to get the view:

From the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill, in Washington Township, Burlington County, New Jersey, the view extends about twelve miles. To the north, forest land reaches to the horizon. The trees are mainly oaks and pines, and the pines predominate. Occasionally, there are long, dark, serrated stands of Atlantic white cedars, so tall and so closely set that they seem to be spread against the sky on the ridges of hills, when in fact they grow along streams that flow through the forest. To the east, the view is similar, and few people who are not native to the region can discern essential differences from the high cabin of the fire tower, even though one difference is that huge areas out in this direction are covered with dwarf forests, where a man can stand among the trees and see for miles over their upper-most branches. To the south, the view is twice broken slightly – by a lake and by a cranberry bog – but otherwise it, too, goes to the horizon in forest. To the west, pines, oaks, and cedars continue all the way, and the western horizon includes the summit of another hill – Apple Pie Hill – and the outline of another fire tower, from which the view three hundred and sixty degrees around is virtually the same as the view from Bear Swamp Hill, where, in a moment’s sweeping glance, a person can see hundreds of square miles of wilderness. 

Sullivan and his friend Leo Koncher, age eighty-three, gingerly cross an old railroad bridge forty feet over the Passaic River:

Many of the railroad ties on the bridge were burnt out so that the path was like the smile of a man with no teeth. I was walking slowly in an effort to keep from falling in, and at several points we both had to get on our hands and knees to climb between faraway ties. I expressed concern. “What are you worried about” he finally asked me. I said I was worried about falling into the river. Leo shook his head in bemused disgust. When we got to the end of the bridge, he had me look up to see the elevated span stuck straight in the air like a rusted knife. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” he said. “This is really the best view.” 

Frazier attends a powwow, walks around, observes all the activity, and then suddenly decides he wants to be somewhere quiet and empty:

I maneuvered through the crowd, went by the taco and lemonade stands, out the gate in the chain-link fence, through the field full of parked cars. The carnival had shut down and the rock-and-roll no longer played, and only one generator still purringly ran. I walked to downtown Pine Ridge, past the tribal building, up the hill to the old hospital, and then onto the open field of the Path the Doctors Walk On. I went half a lap around and sat down. The grass was damp; dew had begun to fall. I could hear the amplified voice of the announcer at the powwow. Then his voice stopped, and the only sound was the singing and drumming. It came through the darkness high and strong and wild as if blown on the wind. It could have been ten voices singing or it could have been a thousand. At moments it sounded like other night noises, coyotes or mosquitoes, or like a sound the land itself might make. I imagined what hearing this would have done to me if I were a young man from Bern, Switzerland (say), travelling the prairie for the first time in 1843. I knew it would have scared and thrilled me to within an inch of my life.

Or like the sound the land itself might make – how fine that is! These books are deeply in touch with the land. That’s another thing I love about them. To me, it’s their main message. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three wonderful books. I picture it like this: the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill; Fred Brown’s house in Hog Wallow; an old and weirdly leaning catalpa tree; the ruins of the great paper factory in Harrisville; a wild blueberry bush; Chatsworth General Store; a mud-colored 1948 De Soto; a Ryan monoplane; a pine tree with a splendid green crown and a trunk that is still black from an old fire; a green wood orchid; a whippoorwill; a big red polyethylene canoe; a muskrat; Kearney Library; a carp; stalagmites of pigeon dung; a Muscovy duck; a mosquito; Leo Koncher’s workshop, with salvaged cedar stumps on the roof; the Pulaski Skyway; the PJP landfill; the old Penn Station; the Stadium Restaurant in downtown Secaucus; a catfish covered in slime; an eagle feather on a buckskin thong; portrait of Le War Lance; Big Bat’s Texaco; a sun-dance pole; a star quilt; aerial view of White Clay; page from the Billings Gazette showing full-color photo of Frazier’s car upside down in snow-filled ditch; portrait of SuAnne Big Crow; fatality marker on Interstate 90 where SuAnne’s fatal accident occurred; grove of cotton woods; spiderwort; tumbleweeds. Overlap these images and paste them at crazy angles to each other. I call my collage “Sulpheezier.” 

November 24, 2025 Issue

The Earth is burning up. Science is clear: fossil fuels are to blame. What to do about it? Stop using fossil fuels; use an alternative such as hydroelectricity, nuclear energy, solar power, wind power. These are the alternatives most commonly mentioned. But there’s another one, not often considered, that might be the most promising of all – geothermal power.  Rivka Galchen writes about it in this week’s New Yorker. She tells how it works:

In some ways, the process of harnessing geothermal energy is simple. The deeper you dig, the hotter the temperatures get. For direct heating, you dig relatively shallow wells (typically several hundred metres deep), to access natural reservoirs of hot water or steam, which can be piped into a structure. For electricity, wells are dug farther down, to where temperatures are above a hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. (In Iceland, this temperature is reached at around one thousand to two thousand metres deep.) Pressurized steam spins a turbine that in turn spins a generator. Thermal energy (steam) is translated into mechanical energy (the spinning turbine), which is translated into electrical energy (via the generator). Geothermal energy is essentially carbon-free, it is available at any time of day and in any weather, and it leaves a small—albeit very deep—footprint on the landscape.

Galchen visits the Krafla Geothermal Station in Iceland. She points out that “more than a quarter of the country’s electricity comes from geothermal.” But not every country has Iceland’s hot springs and volcanoes. In landscapes that lack these turbulent geological features, the costs and uncertainties of drilling deep in search of sufficient heat have curtailed development. This, she says, “partly explains why, in the field of clean energy, geothermal is often either not on the list or mentioned under the rubric of ‘other.’ For decades, both private and government investment in geothermal energy was all but negligible.”

But, as Galchen reports, “All this has now changed.” She writes,

In the past five years, in North America, more than a billion and a half dollars have gone into geothermal technologies. This is a small amount for the energy industry, but it’s also an exponential increase. In May, 2021, Google signed a contract with the Texas-based geothermal company Fervo to power its data centers and infrastructure in Nevada; Meta signed a similar deal with Texas-based Sage for a data center east of the Rocky Mountains, and with a company called XGS for one in New Mexico. Microsoft is co-developing a billion-dollar geothermal-powered data center in Kenya; Amazon installed geothermal heating at its newly built fulfillment center in Japan. 

My favorite part of Galchen’s piece is her description of a project that aims to demonstrate the feasibility of an ambitious geothermal system to serve Cornell University’s seven-hundred-and-forty-five-acre campus. She writes,

In the summer of 2022, a rig set up not far from Cornell’s School of Veterinary Medicine drilled for sixty-five days through layers of shale, limestone, and sandstone, passing beyond the geologic time of the dinosaurs to a crystalline basement dating to the Proterozoic eon, more than five hundred million years ago. 

What a marvelous sentence! I think geothermal is the way to go. When Lorna and I built our house here on Prince Edward Island, we installed a geothermal furnace. It heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. I highly recommend it. 

Tables for Two Tango: Hannah Goldfield's "Eyval"

Photo by Cole Wilson, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Eyval"

This is the first post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Goldfield’s ravishing “Tables for Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023).

I love the beginning of this piece – no throat-clearing, just jump right in:

I’ll start with the cocktails at Eyval, a Persian restaurant that opened last year—and so should you. Gin tends not to agree with me, and yet I couldn’t help but steal sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth.

That sensuous passage sets the tone for the rest of the piece. Taste, scent, texture, color, pleasure – all are covered in this first delectable paragraph. The second paragraph continues the theme:

For myself, I ordered a Conference of the Birds—a sour-candy-like mix made with more orange-blossom water and Aperol, plus vodka, lemon, and honey—and the tart, smoky Limoo Margarita, featuring mezcal infused with limoo amani (dried lime), an ingredient used in Iran in soups and stews, the rim of the glass coated in coarse salt and flakes of mild, fruity Aleppo pepper.

Mm, more delicious description. Note the pungent specificity of the drinks’ names and ingredients. Specificity is one of the hallmarks of Goldfield’s style. She lists ingredients; she evokes their flavors (not just “tart,” but “tart, smoky”). Every detail is charged with vividness (“the rim of the glass coated in coarse salt and flakes of mild, fruity Aleppo pepper”). 

The opening sentence of her next paragraph segues beautifully to her main subject – Eyval’s food. She writes, “I’m happy to report that the dynamite drinks portended dynamite food.” With that, she takes off on a flight of glorious food description. Here’s Eyval’s bread:

You can choose between two options for bread or, better yet, get both—an oblong barbari, with grooves like a racetrack and a speckling of nigella and sesame seeds, and a round komaj, a soft, sweet bun made from a dough enriched with milk and eggs and seasoned with turmeric, perforated into quarters, brushed with butter, and adorned with cumin seeds. Both are perfect for scooping up dips, including a sharp whipped feta with walnuts and radish and a broccoli-rabe borani: strained, salted yogurt topped with blanched florets, an herb purée, pistachio, coriander seed, and chili oil and flakes.

Here's Eyval’s salads:

The Green Tahini Salad, a mix of Little Gem, frisée, radicchio, radish, and seasonal fruit (navel and blood orange, recently), is elevated to transcendence by the inclusion of warm medjool dates, a powerful kick from grilled serrano pepper in the tahini dressing (which also contains honey and mint), and a generous sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds. “Kashke Bademjan” appears in quotes on the menu because it’s an interpretation of the traditional appetizer: an eggplant lightly fried and roasted whole, the charred, silky flesh then drizzled with kashk, made from cooked yogurt, and finished with crushed walnuts, fried garlic and onion, mint oil, and fresh mint. Fat crosshatched coins of supple trumpet-mushroom stem, skewer-grilled and served with pickled beechwood mushrooms over beluga lentils simmered in fenugreek-spiked cream, were reminiscent of scallops and even more delicious than the actual scallop kebab, though that was nice, too, four plump bronzed mollusks over a luscious emulsion of tamarind pulp and squid ink.

Who would not want such exquisite description to continue forever? And it does continue! Here’s Goldfield’s concluding paragraph – one of the great finales in all of restaurant-reviewing. Are you ready? Tuck in your bib. Here goes:

There’s also a chicken kebab, as well as a ground-beef-and-lamb iteration, both excellent. (One thing that distinguishes Eyval from Sofreh is inspired riffs on street-food staples.) But, unless you’re ordering the whole menu (a valid choice), I’d prioritize the lamb ribs, sticky-sweet with date and tamarind, scattered with walnut, barberries, and pickled chilies, and the larger dishes, including a kebab-inspired, flawlessly grilled rack of lamb, sliced into beautiful, buttery chops, served with a bowl of perfectly steamed, rose-and-saffron-scented basmati rice. Saboor’s version of ghormeh sabzi is a particular showstopper, a braised veal shank (don’t forget to check the bone for marrow) crowned with a crisp disk of herbed-rice tahdig and rising regally from a rich stew of tender kidney beans and melty greens and alliums, including parsley, spinach, and leeks, plus fenugreek and limoo amani. Plucking out a puckered leathery lime and eating it whole, sticky and sour, left me feeling as lucky as if I’d found the baby in a king cake. Speaking of cake, desserts included a squishy square of it, soaked in cardamom syrup and topped with saffron ice cream, second only to the noon e khamei, ethereal, crackly choux pastry sandwiching dreamy rosewater cream. 

Wow! I’m salivating. That “Plucking out a puckered leathery lime and eating it whole, sticky and sour, left me feeling as lucky as if I’d found the baby in a king cake” is inspired! The whole review is inspired – one of the best “Tables for Two” ever written. The question is: Can Rosner match it, perhaps even top it? We shall see in our next post in this series. 

November 17, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I enjoyed Hannah Goldfield’s “Takes” tribute to Anthony Bourdain’s “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” She says,

The voice he introduced in “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” is not just brash and ballsy; it reverberates with style and poetry, from its tantalizing opening lines: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish.”

Yes, I agree. Bourdain’s voice is transfixing. I first encountered it in The New Yorker’s great September 6, 2021 “Food & Drink” archival issue. The essay is called “Hell’s Kitchen.” It originally appeared in the April 17, 2000 New Yorker. What a piece of writing! It's a first-person-present-tense account of a day in Bourdain’s life as chef at the Manhattan restaurant Les Halles. Here's a sample:

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.

“Prick,” “grab,” “throw,” “heat,” “throw,” “heat,” “take,” “place,” “spin,” “pour,” “sear,” “sauté,” “slide,” “deglaze,” “add,” “sauté,” “deglaze,” “give,” “put,” “heat,” “load” – over twenty action verbs. Bourdain's writing thrillingly enacts the kinetic reality of his Les Halles kitchen.

2. The title of Hilton Als’ piece (the newyorker.com version) caught my eye: “Robert Rauschenberg’s Art of the Real.” I thought to myself, Real? What’s real about it? Rauschenberg’s art isn’t real. It’s about as unreal as you can get. The art of the real is a matter of seeing things as they are. Rauschenberg fails this test. But after reading the piece, I get what Als is saying. He’s referring to Rauschenberg’s use of real materials – real tires, real quilts, real chairs, real bicycles. “Art is more powerful when it incorporates the real,” Als says. Okay, but look what Rauschenberg does with these real things. He combines them, daubs them with paint, and makes them his own. Look at Monogram (1955-59). A stuffed Angora goat girdled with a tire. Als describes it: 

The goat had a goatee, horns, and a long-haired silver torso. Its head and neck were streaked with several colors of paint, as though it had put on makeup while drunk. Not only that—there was a black-and-white rubber tire around its middle.

Als describes his youthful encounter with Monogram as “one of the more destabilizing experiences of my life.” I’m sure it was. Monogram is an unforgettable artwork. But it’s not realism – not even close. Some critics have suggested that it signifies anal sex: see, for example, Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1981). Leo Steinberg found this interpretation too reductive. He saw the imposition of the tire as “an act of appropriation.” In his great Encounters with Rauschenberg (2000), he wrote,

As the artist would later encircle a car key with paint and a bicycle with neon tubing, so here – to make it his own. The goat alone – even with signature paint on its muzzle – did not look Rauschenbergian enough, until joined with its tire in definitive incongruity. 

Als, in his piece, also refrains from extracting any specific meaning from Monogram. The closest he comes is by asking these questions: 

I thought about “Monogram” ’s layers for years. I knew that goats in mythology were often mischievous, symbols of randiness and disorder—“queer” animals. Was that goat a combination of the real, the queer, and the mythic? Was I?

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram (1955-59)

On the Horizon: Tables for Two Tango: Goldfield and Rosner

Hannah Goldfield and Helen Rosner are two of my favorite New Yorker writers. Goldfield used to write “Tables for Two.” Rosner writes it now. I want to compare their work. Over the next twelve months, I’ll pick twelve “Tables for Two” pieces – six by Goldfield, six by Rosner – and review them. I’ll choose one per month, one by Goldfield, then one by Rosner, and so on, alternating back and forth. It’s sort of like a “greatest hits” package of the two writers’ work. A new series then – “Tables for Two Tango: Goldfield and Rosner” – starting November 25.  

Credit: The above portraits of Hannah Goldfield (left) and Helen Rosner (right) are from The New Yorker.

November 10, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Reading Margaret Talbot’s absorbing profile of Joachim Trier, I recalled the strange sequence in Trier’s great The Worst Person in the World, in which the film’s central character Julie is the only person moving; everyone else is frozen still. Why? What is Trier’s point? Talbot mentions this scene. She writes,

In an inventive scene in which Julie runs to find Eivind again, Oslo kindly stops and freezes for her—a sequence shot with extras standing stock still, not with C.G.I.—so that she can capture stolen time with him without having to end things yet with Aksel. 

So she can capture stolen time with him? I don’t know about that. Time stops for everyone else, but Julie keeps moving. Time doesn’t stop for her. Anthony Lane, in his illuminating review of the film, provides a different take. He says,

Or what about the instant at which the surrounding world—humans, vehicles, dogs, the flow of coffee from a pot—freezes in mid-action, allowing Julie, the solitary mover, to run through the motionless streets toward Eivind, whom she badly needs to embrace? How better to illustrate the ecstatic indifference with which, in the throes of a silly love, we obscure everything that is not our object of desire? 

To me, this makes more sense. Julie and Eivind are so absorbed in each other, it’s as if the rest of the world doesn’t register. They see only each other. All else is irrelevant. Trier’s freezing of the action around Julie is his way of showing the obsessive nature of romantic love. 

2. James Wood, in his excellent “Last Harvest,” reviews Georgi Gospodinov’s new novel Death and the Gardener. Wood likes it. He says, “This is inevitably a sad book in places, yet it is lit with remembered warmth, happiness, laughter, and a kind of lightness characteristic of its writer.” My favorite passage in Wood’s piece describes Gospodinov’s exploration of his childhood in the Sovietized Bulgaria of the nineteen-seventies and eighties: “These investigations are meticulous, tender, palpable: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets are all made newly alive in memory.”

3. Hannah Goldfield went to an awful lot of trouble to host a World Series party. She describes it in her wonderful “Tableau Vivant.” Here’s a sample:

On Thursday, the day before the game, I braised the pork shoulder and mixed the crab dip, feeling triumphant in my preparedness. On Friday afternoon, I found myself in an exhilarated fugue state. Doors and drawers flew open and shut as I broiled bananas covered in brown sugar, grilled steaks, and roasted pounds of wings. I chopped scallions, toasted sesame seeds, wrenched lids off of cans of beans and condensed milk. For hours, I thought of nothing but my next move, the narcotic draw of my phone blissfully suppressed. It didn’t go without a hitch. Fifteen minutes before my guests were due, the point at which Pelosi suggested I deep-fry the shrimp, I had failed to so much as set up my dredging station. I noticed that the black T-shirt I’d been wearing since 7 a.m. was smeared with whipped cream. The doorbell rang.

Wow! I hope Goldfield’s guests were appreciative. And I hope they rooted for the Jays. Otherwise, what a waste of great food.  

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #10 Jonathan Franzen's "The End of the End of the World"

Illustration by Blexbolex, from The New Yorker

Let’s begin this series with an account of a luxury cruise to Antarctica – Jonathan Franzen’s brilliant “The End of the End of the World” (May 23, 2016). Franzen tells about inheriting money from his Uncle Walt; about wanting to take his girlfriend to Antarctica; about booking with Lindblad National Geographic for a three-week expedition to Antarctica, South Georgia island, and the Falklands; about his girlfriend backing out and his brother Tom subbing for her at the last minute. Franzen writes, “Tom reported being excited, but my own sense of unreality, of failure to pleasurably anticipate, grew only stronger.” It’s a strange start to such an exotic (and expensive) trip.

Franzen puts us there with Tom and him on board the National Geographic Orion. The ship departs Ushuaia, Argentina. Franzen is a birder. He wants to see birds unique to Antarctica. When the Orion arrives off the coast of the Antarctica Peninsula, the crew arranges a landing on Barrientos Island. Here Franzen sees thousands of gentoo and chinstrap penguins: 

Some of the chicks had fledged and followed their parents back into the sea, which is the preferred element of penguins and their only source of food. But thousands of birds remained. Downy gray chicks chased after any adult that was plausibly their parent, begging for a regurgitated meal, or banded together for safety from the gull-like skuas that preyed on the orphaned and the failing-to-thrive. Many of the adults had retreated uphill to molt, a process that involves standing still for several weeks, itchy and hungry, while new feathers push out old feathers. The patience of the molters, their silent endurance, was impossible not to admire in human terms.

For the first time on the trip, Franzen is happy: “Although the colony was everywhere smeared with nitric-smelling shit, and the doomed orphan chicks were a piteous sight, I was already glad I’d come.” 

The expedition crosses below the Antarctic Circle. Franzen is delighted with the views. In one of the piece’s most beautiful passages, he says,

I’d never before had the experience of beholding scenic beauty so dazzling that I couldn’t process it, couldn’t get it to register as something real. A trip that had seemed unreal to me beforehand had taken me to a place that likewise seemed unreal, albeit in a better way. Global warming may be endangering the continent’s western ice sheet, but Antarctica is still far from having melted. On either side of the Lemaire Channel were spiky black mountains, extremely tall but still not so tall as to be merely snow-covered; they were buried in wind-carved snowdrift, all the way to their peaks, with rock exposed only on the most vertical cliffs. Sheltered from wind, the water was glassy, and under a solidly gray sky it was absolutely black, pristinely black, like outer space. Amid the monochromes, the endless black and white and gray, was the jarring blue of glacial ice. No matter the shade of it—the bluish tinge of the growlers bobbing in our wake, the intensely deep blue of the arched and chambered floating ice castles, the Styrofoamish powder blue of calving glaciers—I couldn’t make my eyes believe that they were seeing a color from nature. Again and again, I nearly laughed in disbelief. Immanuel Kant had connected the sublime with terror, but as I experienced it in Antarctica, from the safe vantage of a ship with a glass-and-brass elevator and first-rate espresso, it was more like a mixture of beauty and absurdity.

But the best is yet to come. In Lallemand Fjord, Franzen sets up a telescope on Orion’s observation deck and immediately glimpses what looks to be an emperor penguin. He tells the ship’s captain. The captain maneuvers the ship for a better view. Franzen’s sighting is confirmed. The crew arranges for a landing. Franzen writes,

I’d already made a quiet, alienated resolution not to take a single picture on the trip. And here was an image so indelible that no camera was needed to capture it: the emperor penguin appeared to be holding a press conference. While a cluster of Adélies came up from behind it, observing like support staff, the emperor faced the press corps in a posture of calm dignity. After a while, it gave its neck a leisurely stretch. Demonstrating its masterly balance and flexibility, and yet without seeming to show off, it scratched behind its ear with one foot while standing fully erect on the other. And then, as if to underline how comfortable it felt with us, it fell asleep.

The expedition continues. The Orion’s route takes Franzen north again and then far east to South Georgia island. South Georgia is the principal breeding site for the king penguin, a species nearly as tall as the emperor and even more dramatically plumaged. Franzen says, “To see a king penguin in the wild seemed to me, in itself, sufficient reason not only to have made the journey; it seemed reason enough to have been born on this planet.” He continues,

When I sat on the ground, the king penguins came so close to me that I could have stroked their gleaming, furlike feathers. Their plumage had the hypercrispness of pattern, the hypervividness of color, that you can normally experience only by taking drugs. 

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of the best travel pieces I’ve ever read. 

Acts of Seeing: Campbell's Pond

Photo by John MacDougall

This is a photo of Campbell’s Pond that I took recently. I love this area – the golden reeds and rushes, the tranquility. It’s part of Prince Edward Island National Park, near Dalvay Lake, not too far from where Lorna and I live. Can the camera catch a feeling? I think so. You have to work at it. I took at least a dozen shots of the pond that day. This one was the last in the series. As soon as I took it, I knew it was the one that came closest to expressing my reverence for the place. 

The Art of the Sentence Fragment

“Four A.M. in the cashmere blackness.” I love that sentence. Well, it’s not really a sentence. There’s no verb. It’s what’s known as a sentence fragment. “Four A.M. in the cashmere blackness.” It’s from John McPhee’s great Looking for a Ship (1990). It’s like an entry in a journal or log book. But it also has the compression and vividness of poetry. What does it mean? For that you need the context in which the fragment is embedded. Here it is:

The four-to-eight ends. The four-to-eight begins. Four A. M. in the cashmere blackness. We have entered Columbian water. 

The fragment embodies a particular moment in time. McPhee is on the bridge of the S.S. Stella Lykes with his friend Andy Chase as they enter Columbian water. “Cashmere blackness” brilliantly evokes the warmth of the tropical air and the darkness of the night.

McPhee uses a similar fragmentary construct in “Coal Train” (The New Yorker, October 3 & 10, 2005): “Black Thunder Junction, 5:45 P.M., nineteen degrees, dark, snowing.”  I love it. Here’s the context:

Traced from a map, the Coal Line has the receme structure of a bluebell or a lily of the valley, as dainty an image as nature can provide for a stem whose flowers are coal mines. Black Thunder Junction, 5:45 P.M., nineteen degrees, dark, snowing.

The juxtaposition of those two sentences is surprising and delightful – the lyricism of “bluebell and “lily of the valley” shattered by the brute reality of “Black Thunder Junction.” 

Consider this exquisite passage from McPhee’s “Season on the Chalk” (The New Yorker, March 12, 2007):

From Breaky Bottom out through Beachy Head, under the Channel, and up into Picardy, and on past Arras and Amiens, the chalk is continuous to Reims and Épernay. To drive the small roads and narrow lanes of Champagne is to drive the karstic downlands of Sussex and Surrey, the smoothly bold topography of Kentish chalk—the French ridges, long and soft, the mosaic fields and woodlots, the chalk boulders by the road in villages like Villeneuve-l’Archêveque. Here the French fieldstone is chalk, and the quarry stone—white drywalls, white barns, white churches. The chalk church of Orvilliers-Saint-Julien. The chalk around the sunflowers of Rigny-la-Nonneuse. The chalkstone walls at Marcilly-le-Hayer. Near Épernay, even the cattle are white; and vines like green corduroy run for miles up the hillsides in rows perpendicular to the contours, and the tops of the vines are so accordant that the vines up close look more like green fences, and the storky, long-legged tractors of Champagne straddle rows and run above the grapes.

Note the sequence of three sentence fragments: “The chalk church of Orvilliers-Saint-Julien. The chalk around the sunflowers of Rigny-la-Nonneuse. The chalkstone walls at Marcilly-le-Hayer.” Each fragment is like a Cézanne brush stroke – quick touches, one following the other, intensifying the scene’s chalkiness. 

You see the same accretion of detail in this passage from McPhee’s “Land of the Diesel Bear” (The New Yorker, November 28, 2005):

After the interstates’ oceanic sameness, the silver tanker in those suburban streets was something like an anadromous fish coming out of the sea and going up a river, suddenly having to pick its way through narrow channels past bridge piers and over ledges up rapids past erratic boulders. Old Howarth Road, Oxford, Massachusetts. The groin vaulting of shade trees. The blind curves. The bouldery suburban houses. Dudley Road. Old Webster Road. The hunkered companies. International Photonics Group. Stop, start—stop sign to stop sign, light to light, the truck was kicking like a mule. 

Eight impressionistic sentence fragments, a montage of images that McPhee sees through the windshield of Ainsworth’s big diesel, as they pick their way through the suburbs. I find the eighth fragment particularly intriguing. It’s the name of a company – “International Photonics Group” – plucked from the countless commercial signs streaming by McPhee’s window. He uses it to evoke the suburban landscape he’s traveling in. Art is where you find it. 

For McPhee, the fragmentary sentence is just one implement in his extensive multi-drawer toolkit. For Iain Sinclair, it’s a defining element of his style. The opening paragraph of his magnum opus, London Orbital (2002), is typical of his approach:

It started with the Dome, the Millenium Dome. An urge to walk away from the Teflon meteorite on Bugsby’s Marshes. A white thing had been dropped in the mud of the Greenwich peninsula. The ripples had to stop somewhere. The city turned inside-out. Rubbish blown against the perimeter fence. A journey, a provocation. An escape. Keep moving, I told myself, until you hit tarmac, the outer circle. The point where London loses it, gives up its ghosts.

Here's another example from London Orbital – a paragraph made entirely of sentence fragments:

Dawn on a wet road. Travelling east into the rising sun; drowned fields, mountains of landfill, ancient firing ranges. Everything smudged and rubbed. With the M25 as your destination, Purfleet and Grays as staging posts. Bridge, river, oil storage tanks. The. Border chain of chalk quarries occupied by Lakeside, Thurrock.

Here's an example from Sinclair’s Ghost Milk (2011):

Rusting metal poles looped with barbed wire. A pebble shore protected by sharp-angled Vorticist obstructions, concrete blocks crusted with orange lichen. Wrecked cars turned on their backs and absorbed into nature. Footpaths doubling into aggregate dunes, dark-shadowed lakes. Refuse dumps dressed in meadow vetchling and rosebay willowherb. Cattle, on strips of land between creeks, might be part of a real farm or target practice. Across the marshes, in the soft haze, smokestacks of constantly belching power stations. 

That’s part of Sinclair’s description of what he sees as he walks a path along the Thames Estuary. Details accrete, one after another, building a picture. The buildup is the action. Some of the fragments are ugly (“Rusting metal poles looped with barbed wire”); some are beautiful (“Refuse dumps dressed in meadow vetchling and rosebay willowherb”).  

Perhaps the most ingenious writer of fragmentary sentences is Robert Macfarlane. Here are a few samples from his superb The Old Ways (2012):

I walked up the avenue, skirted the earthworks of a large Iron Age ring-fort, crossed a road and then entered a wide meadow that rises to the top of a chalk down, whose summit floats 250 feet above sea level. Charcoal trees, a taste of pewter in the mouth.

I glanced back at the sea wall, but it was barely visible now through the haze. A scorching band of low white light to seaward; a thin magnesium burn-line.

Mid-morning departure, Stornoway harbour, which is also known as the Hoil: hints of oil, hints of hooley. Sound of boatslip, reek of diesel. Broad Bay’s wake through the harbour – a tugged line through the fuel slicks on the water’s surface, our keel slurring petrol-rainbows. Light quibbling on the swell. We nosed through the chowder of harbour water: kelp, oranges, plastic milk bottles, sea gunk.

The sun above us, bright and high, but the sky darkening swiftly further out. Black sky-reefs of cloud to the east. The sea: graphite, lightly choppy, white stippled. The wind: a near-southerly, Force 3 or 4, with just a touch of east in it.

A rainless gale rushing out of the east, deer tracks in moor mud, a black sky, gannets showing white as flares above the sea. Dawn on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Lewis. Thin light, cold and watery. Burly clouds at 1,000 feet, the day forming from the dark.

On the mantelpiece and window ledges were dozens of found objects: bird’s eggs, bones, antlers and pebbles. A swan’s wishbone with no central join. A skua’s egg from the Shiants. A pure-white golden plover’s egg, fragile as a bubble. Dark-brown sea beans, floated in from the Caribbean, like little leathery kidneys. 

Creamy waves moshed and milked on the beach and rock, making rafts of floating foam just offshore and sending spray shooting above the level of the tent. Wave-surged infralittoral rock, tide-swept circalittoral rock, micro-terrains of lichen and moss.

Right beneath the north face, where the rock dropped 500 feet sheer to the moor, was a pool called the Dubh Loch – the Black Lake – by whose shore I rested. Tar-black water, emerald reeds in the shallows.

Macfarlane’s latest book, Is a River Alive? (2025), contains dozens of imagistic haiku-like sentence shards. For example: 

Spruce, pine, alder, rowan. Waxwings on the rowan.

A single star. A thin line of orange light to the east, smudged by rain. Three loons on the water, calling now and then. A strong northerly wind.

Bronze of the rivers, gold of the sandbanks, red-green sphagnum tapestry.

Water blue-black and glossy in the deeper, calmer runs; peat-brown where it is stretched towards and away from the rapids; churning green, gold and cream in the rapids and falls.

Lacustrine calm. The kayaks wrinkling the smoothness. Everything mirrored. Double the trees, double the cliffs. Clouds crossing the water before us with huge slowness.

Scent of pine resin in the cool air.

Grey, greasy dawn. The rain has grudgingly stopped.

Hot sun. River glitter.

Long days of hot sun and hard work. Nights crisp, and the moon waned by a sliver each time. 

Sentence fragments are a form of short-hand used to paint word pictures. They convey immediacy and intensify vividness. In the hands of great writers like McPhee, Sinclair, and Macfarlane, they’re a concentrated miniature art form.

Credit: The above illustration is based on photos by Yolanda Whitman (John McPhee), Joy Gordon (Iain Sinclair), and Charlotte Hadden (Robert Macfarlane).

November 3, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nathan Blum’s heartbreaking short story "Outcomes." It’s about two students at a college in Maine – a freshman who grew up nearby and a senior from New York City – who meet and form a connection. The freshman’s name is Nolan Everett and the senior’s is Heidi Lane. They meet at the climbing wall in the college rec center. Nolan works there as a belayer. Heidi registers to use the climbing wall. She’s never climbed before. Nolan teaches her. The relationship evolves. 

The story unfolds in eleven untitled segments, each a moment in the relationship. The first ten segments are told from Nolan’s point of view. The eleventh is told from Heidi’s perspective.

A theme runs lightly through the narrative – teaching. She guides him during sex. He teaches her how to belay. She teaches him about personal finances (she’s an economics major). He teaches her how to drive. Their personalities differ from each other. She knows who she is and what she wants to be. He lacks that kind of certainty. Blum says of him, “He has never really understood how people become who they become. For the most part, it seems like there’s not much you can do, and things just happen.” 

I identified with Nolan. I confess I teared up when I read segment eleven. The situation is truly heartrending. The fish hut scene at the end is inspired. The whole story is inspired – one of the best stories to appear in The New Yorker in the last twenty years. 

On the Horizon: 10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces

The New Yorker is a rich source of travel writing. Over the next ten months I’m going to pick ten of my favorite pieces (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. A new series then – “10 Great New Yorker Travel Pieces” – starting November 14, 2025. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Figuration

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their many vivid figures of speech.

One of the tools these three great writers use to describe their subjects is figuration, i.e., metaphor and simile. In The Pine Barrens, McPhee notes the color of the pineland streams: “In summer, the cedar water is ordinarily so dark that the riverbeds are obscured, and while drifting along one has the feeling of being afloat on a river of fast-moving potable ink.” He continues, 

For a few days after a long rain, however, the water is almost colorless. At these times, one can look down into it from a canoe and see the white sand bottom, ten or twelve feet below, and it is as clear as an image in the lens of a camera, with sunken timbers now and again coming into view and receding rapidly, at the speed of the river.

In The Meadowlands, Sullivan encounters a muskrat trapper in the Kingsland Marsh: 

But after a while, he let me look into the big wicker basket he carried on his back: it was filled with muskrats. The muskrats had long thick black tails and long yellow teeth that were curved like uncut fingernails.

Describing the hundreds of ditches in the Meadowlands, Sullivan says they “intersect all the creeks and rivers like capillaries in a hungover eye.”

Canoeing across a Meadowlands marsh, Sullivan and his friend Dave see carp: 

Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires.

In On the Rez, Frazier sometimes includes two similes in the same sentence, doubling its vividness. For example:

Rows of corn wound around hills in Iowa like threads on a screw; woodlots sat on the prairie horizon suspended on a shimmering, like hovercraft. 

Sometimes when he [Le War Lance] calls, his voice is small and clear, like neat printed handwriting; other times, depending on his mood and how much he’s had to drink, his voice is sprawling and enlarged, like a tall cursive signature with flourishes on the tail letters and ink blots and splatters alongside. 

One problem the Pine Ridge Reservation does not have is light pollution. The stars were like bullet holes, the galaxies like patterns of birdshot. 

Frazier is a superb describer. Note the simile at the end of this beauty:

Black cows topped with snow stood breathing steam in the whitened fields while hawks sat in cottonwoods above, their feathers so fluffed out against the cold they looked like footballs.

In my next post, the last in this series, I’ll reflect on some of the meanings I’ve extracted from these three great books.

Jed Perl's "Impassioned Ferocity" (Part II)

Jed Perl, in his "Impassioned Ferocity" (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2025), says,

Much if not most of what is today thought of as criticism is just nonfiction writing with a distinctive personal voice, attitudes and opinions without any underlying idea. My impression is that among younger nonfiction writers the central focus is on developing that distinctive voice, with less focus on what’s actually said. Janet Malcolm and Dave Hickey, whose work apprentice writers in BA and MFA programs are likely to encounter, are striking essayists who leave you in no doubt as to who they are and what interests them, but neither of them has what I would call an aesthetic position. Malcolm produced a kind of personal reportage, with readers invited and expected to be alert to the sharp edges of her personality. 

No “underlying idea,” no “aesthetic position” – does this describe Janet Malcolm? I’m not concerned with Hickey. I’m not sufficiently familiar with his work to be able to comment on it. But Malcolm is one of my heroes. Her work is one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on her name in the “Labels” section and you will find eighty-four posts that discuss her writing. This post will be the eighty-fifth. 

Malcolm described herself as a deconstructionist. In the Preface to her great 1992 essay collection The Purloined Clinic, she says,

I have chosen the title of one of the pieces, a review of Michael Fried’s Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, as the title of the collection, because in Fried I recognized another sort of double: a critic whose imagination I found uncannily familiar and congenial, and who caused me to see that I had been thinking like a deconstructionist for a long time without knowing it, like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who discovered that he had been speaking in prose all his life.

Writers aren’t necessarily their own best critics, but, in this case, I think Malcolm was right. She was a deconstructionist. In her brilliant “J’appelle un Chat un Chat” (The New Yorker, April 20, 1987), she reviews an anthology called Dora’s Case: Freud – Hysteria – Feminism (1985), edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane. She says,

These new writings—feminist, deconstructive, and Lacanian, for the most part—have a wild playfulness and a sort of sexual sparkle that flicker through their academic patois and give them an extraordinary verve.

Right there, I think, is a glimpse of Malcolm’s governing aesthetic – her delight in analysis that is performed with “extraordinary verve.” It’s a description of her own work. 

Deconstruction is one way into Malcolm’s underlying aesthetic. Another is psychoanalysis. She wrote extensively about it: see, for example, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981) and In the Freud Archives (1984). Like a good psychoanalyst, Malcolm took nothing at face value. “Was the incident like a screen memory that hides a more painful recollection?” she asks in her superb “The Window Washer” (The New Yorker, November 19, 1990). “My arrival in Yalta was marked by an incident that rather dramatically brought into view something that had lain just below my consciousness”: “Travels with Chekhov” (The New Yorker, February 21, 2000). 

She had a psychoanalyst's distrust of narrative:  

We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative. [“Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” The New Yorker, May 3, 2010]

Even her photography writing has a psychoanalytical aspect. In her excellent “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979), she wrote,

Hare takes the camera’s capacity for aimless vision as his starting point and works with it somewhat the way a psychoanalyst works with free association. He enters the universe of the undesired detail and adopts an expectant attitude, waiting for the cluttered surface to crack and yield an interpretation.

To deconstruction and psychoanalysis, I would add another bedrock aesthetic idea that Malcolm believed in – decontextualization. She not only praised it, she practiced it in her own photography: see Burdock, 2008, in which she says,

What I have done with the burdock leaves is, of course, part of the enterprise of decontextualization that received its awkward name in the late twentieth century and was a fixture of that century’s visual culture. Patchwork quilts hung on the walls of museums, African tribal masks used to decorate orthodontists’ waiting rooms, ship propellers displayed on coffee tables—these are some familiar forms of the practice of taking something from where it belongs and that has a function, and putting it where it doesn’t belong and merely looks beautiful. It looks beautiful in a particular way, to be sure, the way of modernist art and architecture and design. When I remove a burdock leaf from its dusty roadside habitat, I anticipate the stylized aspect it will assume when it is set upright against the clean white walls of my attic studio, its lineaments refined by sunlight coming from above.

I think I’ve said enough to at least cast doubt on Perl’s assertion that Malcolm lacked an “aesthetic position.” Her delight in analysis – deconstruction, psychoanalysis, decontextualization – runs all through her splendid oeuvre.

Credit: The above photo is Janet Malcolm's Burdock No. 1 (2005-07).  

October 27, 2025 Issue

Helen Rosner, in her delectable "Tables for Two: Chateau Royale,” in this week’s issue, describes a wonderful variation on my favorite cocktail – the Kir Royale. She writes,

I recommend ending your meal with a splash of Champagne poured from a silver ewer over a garnet-hued sphere of cassis sorbet – a thrilling riff on a Kir Royale, providing a bit of fizz and lightness at last.

I had my first Kir Royale at the Canadian Grill in the Chateau Laurier, Ottawa, on the evening of March 16, 1981. I remember the date because the next day I made my first appearance in the Supreme Court of Canada. I was there with my law partner, David MacLeod, and our bookkeeper, Marion MacCallum. It was Marion who ordered the Kir Royale. She didn’t call it that. She asked the waiter to bring us three glasses of Champagne with cassis. I’d never heard of cassis. The drink was elegant and delicious, a fitting way to celebrate our arrival in the nation’s capital. Here’s to you, Mare! 

Jed Perl's "Impassioned Ferocity" (Part I)

Jed Perl, in his absorbing “Impassioned Ferocity” (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2025), reviews three recent books of criticism: Andrea Long Chu’s Authority; Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess; and T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. 

Perl asserts that Chu, in her book, misunderstands the nature of a critic’s power. He quotes her as saying that “the critic has consistently been understood as embodying a key political figure: in the eighteenth century, an enlightened king; in the nineteenth, a free citizen; in the twentieth, a state bureaucrat.” In response, Perl says,

The problem, as I see it, is that critics, at least the ones who matter, aren’t anything like kings, ordinary citizens, or state bureaucrats. They operate at an angle to society. They’re closer to street fighters than to kings. They’re self-invented. They see things their own way. They make their own rules. They’re tough, willing to commit murder, at least metaphorically, as Randall Jarrell did in his takedowns of poets whose work infuriated him.

I think Perl is right. The critics I admire definitely see things their own way. They resist orthodox interpretation. They’re always probing, questioning, arguing. They don’t take things at face value. 

Perl argues brilliantly for the critic’s right to be deeply and totally subjective. He writes,

Criticism isn’t a search for truth but for a particular person’s truth. I’ve heard critics say they approach each new experience without preconceptions. But criticism involves deep, personal conceptions, what Greenberg referred to as “homemade esthetics,” the title he had in mind for a book he never finished. (It became the title of a posthumous essay collection.) Those homemade esthetics are only the beginning of what a critic needs. Formidable critics are engaged in a dynamic or dialectic, the experience of the moment approached not without preconceptions but with an open mind, and tested against some underlying belief or beliefs, which are aesthetic beliefs. Over time those beliefs may change or evolve. Criticism isn’t a search for an absolute, what some might regard as perfect taste. It’s an experiment in aesthetic experience. This is why we can be excited by critics with whom we have fundamental disagreements. We see how their minds work, and that helps us see how ours work.

I like Perl’s emphasis on “aesthetic beliefs” and “aesthetic experience.” To me, the best criticism is aesthetic criticism. Helen Vendler defined it as follows:

The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration. [Introduction to The Music of What Happens, 1988]

That, to me, is the essence of criticism. It’s a formalist definition. It’s interested in the elements of a particular artwork’s style – in how and why it is what it is.   

The second book considered by Perl is Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. Perl says, 

What Rothfeld has that I find missing in many other writers of her generation is an abiding critical vision, some rock-solid belief that informs everything she does. 

According to Perl, Rothfeld’s “rock-solid belief” is that “artistic experience parallels, mirrors, extends, and magnifies our most visceral experiences.” Perl compares her to Kael. He says, 

Reading her sometimes reminds me of what it felt like, many years ago, to first encounter Pauline Kael’s work. The title of Kael’s earliest collection, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), was as brash as Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small. With both writers the bravado and slangy conversational tone are grounded in an aesthetic of amplitude, a view that art touches on life in multiple ways. Rothfeld would surely agree with Kael when she wrote of movies that they can “affect us on so many sensory levels that we become emotionally accessible, in spite of our thinking selves.”

I haven’t read enough of Rothfeld to say whether this is true or not. Her review of James Wood’s Serious Noticing disappointed. She described his writing as “sensuous,” “lush,” and “novelistic.” No. Wood is cutting. His sentences are like scalpels. He dissects texts and shows their inner workings. Rothfeld seriously misdescribes him.

The only other Rothwell piece I’ve read is her personal essay “All Good Sex Is Body Horror” (newyorker.com, February 17, 2024), in which she ingeniously connects David Cronenberg, Kafka, and sex. It’s a strange and intriguing piece. It contains at least one inspired sentence: “Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies.” But it also contains passages like this:

From Cronenberg’s fever dreams, we can surmise that there is a further reason to reject the decision-theoretic model of consent: not only is it impossible for us to know what we will become if an erotic encounter is transformative but we should not want to. To determine in advance what a transformative experience will churn into existence is to sap its power, for the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to stand on the precipice of metamorphosis, but unless we are willing to assume genuine risk we cannot be undone and remade.

I’m not sure what Kael would make of that. She’d probably relish the reference to “Cronenberg’s fever dreams.” She’d probably laugh at the idea that hopping into bed with someone is like being “on the precipice of metamorphosis.” Then again, she might not. She might think of what she wrote in her superb “Tango” (The New Yorker, October 28, 1972):

He brings into this isolation chamber his sexual anger, his glorying in his prowess, and his need to debase her and himself. He demands total subservience to his sexual wishes; this enslavement is for him the sexual truth, the real thing, sex without phoniness. And she is so erotically sensitized by the rounds of lovemaking that she believes him. He goads her and tests her until when he asks if she’s ready to eat vomit as a proof of love, she is, and gratefully. He plays out the American male tough-guy sex role—insisting on his power in bed, because that is all the “truth” he knows.

That kind of sexual battle would be hard to shake off. It would be transformative all right, but not in a good way. It would be degrading and dehumanizing. Is that the risk Rothwell is referring to? Or is it just the risk of going through life without ever experiencing wild, weird Cronenbergian sex? I don’t know. I’m not going to worry about it.

The third book reviewed by Perl is T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. As Perl points out, Clark’s abiding belief is Marxism. Perl says,

While I entirely disagree with Clark that there is some inextricable link between art and politics, in some of the essays in the new collection, many written for the London Review of Books, he holds me because he allows his elegantly nuanced Marxism to be challenged by the immediacy of his responses. This Marxist is a hedonist. And a formalist. The result is some exhilarating reading.

I totally agree. It’s Clark’s hedonism – the deep, sensuous pleasure he takes in light, color, shape, and texture – that redeems him. I find his political writing too abstract. I relate to his “politics in a tragic key,” but terms like “relations of production” and “historical materialism” have always escaped my grasp. Unlike Clark, I don’t believe in class. “Nobody better, better than nobody” is my motto. His contempt for capitalism and “bourgeois society” strikes me as hypocritical. His life and work are made possible by that very system. His exceedingly beautiful books are a product of it. So is their availability to people like me out here in the sticks of Prince Edward Island. Thank you, Indigo. Thank you, Amazon.     

Perl says that the strongest essay in Clark’s book is “Art and the 1917 Revolution.” I don’t think so. My favorite piece is “Madame Matisse’s Hat,” a study of Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905). Clark writes,

The puzzle is the pose, and the nature of the woman’s costume. In a sense we are back to the jeering fellow-painters and their demand for literal truth. What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

Clark is a connoisseur of color. He describes it exquisitely: “halo of indigo,” “curlicue of purple,” “aureole of pink.” That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! This is quintessential Clark – surprising, original, delightful.

For me, delight is a key ingredient of critical writing. Perl values belief. But I think delight is just as important. 

Postscript: This is the first part of a two-part post on Perl’s stimulating piece. Part II will take issue with Perl’s comment that Janet Malcolm lacked an “aesthetic position.”  

Acts of Seeing: Middelburg

John MacDougall, Middelburg (2025)

I took a ton of pictures on our recent trip to the Netherlands. It’s a very photogenic country. I love Dutch canals, Dutch architecture, and Dutch boats. This photo contains all three of those ingredients. The location is Middelburg, one of my favorite Dutch cities. I love the russet color of the boat and the way it matches the door of the building on the far left. Those buildings, with their tall, white window frames and auburn roof tiles – so beautiful! The whole scene is beautiful. I wish I was back there, cycling along the canal, looking, looking, looking.