April 21, 2025 Issue

The best line in this week’s anemic issue is Josh Lieb’s description of the pumpernickel bagel: 

The king. Strong flavor, but not too strong. Dances with, rather than fights against, the cream cheese and the lox. (Or whitefish, if that’s your thing. I don’t judge.)

His note on the blueberry bagel is pretty good, too:

O.K., you’ve been alive for a thousand years. You were cursed by God after stepping on a butterfly or something. You’ve seen multiple generations of your descendants grow up and live and die, painfully. You watched Rome burn. You made love to Mona Lisa. You killed Kennedy. There is nothing in this world your jaded senses haven’t experienced and become weary of. Finally, you’ve come to this.

That bit about making love to Mona Lisa made me smile. 

Karl Ove Knausgaard's "Private Eye"

I want to return to a piece that appeared in the February 3, 2025, New Yorker – Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Private Eye.” It’s a profile of the British painter Celia Paul. Knausgaard visits her at her London studio and writes about it. He says,

When I followed her into the flat on this early-autumn day, it was therefore a little like stepping into a painting. I recognized the floor, worn and dark and made of linoleum, I recognized the plain, white walls, I recognized the window facing the museum, the light that fell through it. And Paul’s face was so familiar that it might have belonged to one of my close friends. But—and this struck me at once—reality is always much more than that which can be fixed in images, infinitely more. The other’s face continually changing, one’s own thoughts in constant flux. The various surfaces, the way light is reflected off each of them, always shifting. The history of objects, and what they signal about status, class, the personality of their owner. Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it. So what we do is look for patterns, for whatever can be fitted into a stable structure. It is a way of managing reality: we must be able to pull out a chair and sit without expending time on the chair itself. And why should we spend time on a chair, anyway? What point would there be in taking a closer look at it, in seeing what it is really like?

That “Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it” seems to me to express something fundamental – a key to art and writing. Close looking unlocks the significance of even the most banal-seeming objects. Writing about Knausgaard, James Wood puts it this way:

Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary—the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”)—is steadily retreating; in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back to the soccer boots and to the grass, and to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Old Spice and Ajax. [“Serious Noticing”]

How I love that “adventure of the ordinary.” The whole passage is brilliant. Knausgaard’s “Private Eye” reminded me of it. 

Postscript: The above portrait of Celia Paul is by Alice Zoo.

Inspired Sentence #3

On Mondays, Eugène or Julia would yank a rabbit out of its hutch, kill it with one brisk corkscrew twist of the neck, flay it to its blueish plum-colored stretch of newborn baby skin, and hang it next door to a twist of bluebottle-encrusted flypaper until Sunday, when it would be jugged and slowly cooked with prunes, its liver either eaten as a starter or added to the stew to deepen it up. 

This is from Patrick McGuinness's Other People's Countries (2014), which I'm currently reading. What a wonderful book! It’s an evocation of the ancient Belgian town of Bouillon, where McGuinness has a house, inherited from his mother’s side of the family. Eugène is his grandfather. Julia is his great-grandmother. I relish the specificity of the description (“blueish plum-colored stretch of newborn baby skin,” “twist of bluebottle-encrusted flypaper”) and the vivid, active verbs (“yank,” “flay,” “hang”). “Jugged” is inspired! The whole sentence is inspired – a surprising, delightful, original combination of words and images. 

10 Best "Personal History" Pieces: #7 Gary Shteyngart's "My Gentile Region"

Illustration by Javier Jaén

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 choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Gary Shteyngart’s brilliantly excruciating “My Gentile Region” (October 11, 2021).

It doesn’t get much more personal than this. Shteyngart tells about a “genital bonfire” he recently experienced, the legacy of a botched circumcision performed on him when he was seven. The operation left him with a “skin bridge” on his penis. Curious to know what that looks like? Shteyngart tells us:

After the infection had subsided, the shaft of my penis was crowded by a skyline of redundant foreskin that included, on the underside, a thick attachment of skin stretching from the head to the shaft of the genital, a result of improper healing that is called a skin bridge. A small gap could be seen between this skin bridge and the penis proper. In texture and appearance, the bridge reminded me of the Polly-O mozzarella string cheese that got packed in the lunchboxes of my generation. 

Forty years later, on August 24, 2020, attempting to urinate, he feels a tightness on the underside of his penis. A tiny hair had wrapped itself around the skin bridge. He tries unsuccessfully to remove it himself. His primary-care doctor refers him to a surgeon, whom Shteyngart calls Dr. Funnyman. Funnyman takes out a pair of forceps and “in a matter of seconds had cut the hair tourniquet from the skin bridge.” But the skin bridge is irreparably damaged. Two days later, it breaks into two parts, “ ‘a minimal stump distally with a larger stump proximally,’ according to the doctor’s notes, the latter of which was an unsightly piece of skin flapping in the summer wind.” 

On September 8, 2020, Shteyngart returns to Dr. Funnyman for corrective surgery – a second circumcision. It doesn’t go well. Shteyngart says,

The afflicted area improved slowly, but peeing was now painful. A part of the redundant foreskin that had always resembled two flaps was becoming more swollen. Two weeks after the surgery, as I was finishing an hour-long walk, it felt as if hot clothespins had been attached to the areas where the skin bridge had been excised and were pulling ever downward. Whenever any clothing came into contact with the affected area, a Klaxon of pain would sound across my central nervous system.

He says further,

My condition began to take over my daily life, like a game of Twister but with each wrong move resulting in a jolt of groin pain. To get out of my car without the affected organ scraping unduly against my underwear, I began to propel myself from the seat in one quick motion, until one day I hit my head hard on the doorframe, and spent weeks nursing a headache. Eventually, I quit driving. Lifting grocery bags became impossible. Sitting on a hard chair excruciating. Drying my groin with a towel unbearable. Wearing jeans unbelievable (only sweatpants would do). Playing hide-and-seek with my son out of the question. Even sleeping required a fort of pillows placed in strategic locations to keep my penis airborne through the night. I had been advised to use numbing lidocaine jelly, and to wear soothing Xeroform gauze held in place by an improvised bandage. My wife, upon seeing the shaft of my organ covered in bandage and gauze, sadly compared it to the Elizabethan collar worn by dogs (not that I was in danger of licking myself). Erections became dangerous, and at night I turned away from my wife so that I would not smell the deliciousness of her hair. I began to wonder: Was this the rest of my life?

Shteyngart consults other doctors. Nothing they prescribe alleviates his pain. He says,

I’ve always had a rational fear of dying, but when I imagined a life without being able to walk or swim or have sex or travel or do anything without pain or an Elizabethan collar, I wondered what it would be like to kill myself. 

Eventually, he’s introduced to a doctor who prescribes “an ingenious compound cream containing amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant.” 

Near the end of the piece, Shteyngart writes, 

What am I left with in the end? I hope I will continue to get better, though I doubt I will ever be completely right again. I may have to slather my genital with ointments for the rest of my life. There are new associated complications from the various medications, and the treatment of my post-traumatic stress will continue. Even with excellent insurance, I have spent many thousands of dollars for medical care and will continue to spend more.

“My Gentile Region” is powerful testimony against circumcision. Its pain and suffering are palpable. I mentally flinched several times as I read it. Is it perverse of me to confess that many of its sentences also gave me pleasure? Well, they did. This one, for example:

I have always imagined that beyond its pleasurable utility the penis must be an incomprehensible thing to most heterosexual women, like a walrus wearing a cape that shows up every once in a while to perform a quick round of gardening. 

And this:

After the razzle-dazzle of Cornell, this doctor’s office felt more familiar in a urological context, smaller and lower ceilinged, its walls festooned with quotes from Maimonides and a waiting room populated with older Rothian Jews huddled over copies of the Post while waging a final battle with their prostates.

Shteyngart is a superb writer – where “superb” means original, perceptive, specific, funny, and vivid. “My Gentile Region” is one of his best pieces.

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #4

This is the fourth post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his brilliant “A Horse’s Impossible Head: Disunity in Delacroix” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019). It’s a description of Eugène Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855):

Take the horse’s head. It is first and foremost a picture of a creature looking death in the face; and if one goes on to think about it, the face of death – the face the horse seems to fix with its desperate glare – is most likely that of the fallen rider, the man in the turban, his fingers still clutching the horse’s mane. The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity. It must have been painted with the same pigment, at the same moment, as the wild red of the horseman’s turban, which itself has the look of a bleeding bald skull. Maybe the plume of blue tassels issuing from the red like a tuft of hair is meant to evoke a scalping. The two reds – the turban-scalp and the boiling nostril – insist on the beauty of blood. The choice of supporting colours is a stroke of genius. The dry green and gold bridle of the horse intensifies the red’s oiliness and carnality, so that even the fleck of red in the horse’s eye makes a spectator flinch. The cold gold of the horseman’s tunic, again with its exquisite green filigree, is a kind of deathly counterpoint to the yellows and pinks all round, still fighting for breath: the lion’s thick fur, the horse’s hide, the soft pillow of warmer gold just visible down in the shadows.

Zero in on the word “carnality” (“The dry green and gold bridle of the horse intensifies the red’s oiliness and carnality, so that even the fleck of red in the horse’s eye makes a spectator flinch”). Clark is a carnal writer. He apprehends through his senses. He’s a thinker, too. But his descriptions are intensely sensuous: “The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity”; “the lion’s thick fur, the horse’s hide, the soft pillow of warmer gold just visible down in the shadows.” He devours color: “the wild red of the horseman’s turban”; “the cold gold of the horseman’s tunic ... with its exquisite green filigree”; “the yellows and pinks all round, still fighting for breath.” The passage enacts the painting it describes; it’s a sensation delivery system. 

Credit: The above illustration is Eugène Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855). 

April 14, 2025 Issue

This week’s issue is particularly rich in content. It contains at least five pieces I want to read: Elif Batuman’s “Alien Eye”; D. T. Max’s “Life after Death”; Jon Lee Anderson’s “Strongmen”; Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Going Nuclear”; and James Wood’s “Let It Lie.” I’m going to save this New Yorker for a trip to Italy that Lorna and I are taking next month. I’ll read it on the plane. I’ll post my review when I return. 

April 7, 2025 Issue

In this week’s issue, Elizabeth Kolbert revisits John McPhee’s classic “Encounters with the Archdruid” (The New Yorker, March 20, 27 & April 3, 1971). McPhee’s piece pits an environmentalist (Brock Brower) against three developers (Charles Park, a mining geologist; Charles Fraser, a resort developer; and Floyd Dominy, a dam-builder). The piece is divided into three parts – one for each developer. Kolbert, in her piece, focuses on Part I – Brower vs. Park. She writes,

The trail to Miners Ridge wound through some of America’s most spectacular scenery—snow-covered peaks, riffled streams, meadows spangled with wildflowers. Trudging along, Brower and Park admired the view and exchanged shots.

“Geologists go into the field because of love of the earth and of the out-of-doors,” Park says at one point.

“The irony is that they go into wilderness and change it,” Brower retorts. He declares the proposed mine an abomination: “If we’re down to where we have to take copper from places this beautiful, we’re down pretty far.”

“Minerals are where you find them,” Park counters. “It’s criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them.”

Who wins this back-and-forth? It’s hard to say. Though the piece is nominally about Brower—the Archdruid of the title, who returns in subsequent installments in the three-part series—Park is an equally compelling character and, quite possibly, a better debater. Brower is a crusader, Park a pragmatist.

Kolbert praises McPhee for his “evenhandedness.” She says, “He never reveals whose side he’s on.” I think this is true to a degree. He doesn’t reveal it explicitly. But at the end of Part I, he seems to contrast Brower’s generosity with Park’s materialism. The three men are resting on Miner’s Ridge. Park is eating blueberries straight from the bush. Brower is gathering his in a cup. McPhee writes, 

Brower’s cup was up to its brim, and before he ate any himself he passed them among the rest of us. It was a curious and surpassingly generous gesture, since we were surrounded by bushes that were loaded with berries. We all accepted.

“I just feel sorry for all you people who don’t know what these mountains are good for,” Brower said.

“What are they good for?” I said.

“Berries,” said Brower.

And Park said, “Copper.”

Park may have the last word, and he may be an attractive person, but it is Brower who has a sense of the possibilities of our companionship with the earth rather than our control of nature. Near the end of the piece, McPhee describes Brower as a man whose “love of beauty is so powerful it leaps ... [and] lands in unexpected places.” 

Acts of Seeing: John Arch's Pond

John Arch's Pond (Photo by John MacDougall)

This is a photo of one my favorite places – John Arch’s Pond, Prince Edward Island National Park, Canada. I took it a couple of months ago. The pond is not far from our home. Lorna and I walk or bike by it almost every day. The picture could be called “Cattails in Winter.” I love cattails with their brown furry spikes. Those leaning dead spruce in the background on the left were blown down by Hurricane Fiona in 2022. Farther in the background are the dunes that mark the northern edge of the pond. Beyond the dunes is the beach and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #3 Geoff Dyer's "The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg"

This is the eighth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Geoff Dyer’s “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs” (The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016), retitled “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg,” in Dyer’s superb 2021 essay collection See/Saw: Looking at Photographs.

In this masterful piece, Dyer probes the mysterious heart of a great photograph – Eli Weinberg’s Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19 December 1956. He first saw it at the photography exhibition The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, at the Museum Africa, Johannesburg, in 2014. Dyer unfolds his commentary in seven dazzling analytical moves. First, he describes the photo:

Lines of black people, three or four deep. In the foreground, to the left of the frame, a man whose armband marks him out as some kind of steward, his old and very worn jacket sagging from his shoulders. Women are in the front, holding placards reading, “WE STAND BY OUR LEADERS.” There’s a range of ages, the youngest looking like they might be in their late teens. So almost all of them would now be either dead or in their late seventies.

Dyer notes the way the demonstrators fill the frame:

The demonstrators fill the frame so that - in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras - the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute. Beyond the frame of the picture lies the apparatus of the apartheid state with its immense resources of physical intimidation, bureaucratic control and psychological coercion: the police and soldiers making sure that the opposition stand in — and know — their place. (In a picture taken the following day you can see Peter Magubane - best known for his photographs of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 - being arrested, his face pushed up against the wall.) Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.

Then he springs his first surprise:

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy with a pudding-bowl haircut. I’m guessing he’s about thirteen. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left - a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly - and he’s white. He is there, that is the fact of the matter - his watch might even enable us to tell the time he was there, the exact moment the picture was taken. We look at the photograph and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question it insists on our asking: what is he doing there?

Hoping to find out more about the boy in the photo, Dyer contacts the co-curator of the exhibition, Rory Bester. Bester tells him he’s “90 percent sure it’s the photographer’s son. [Mark] often accompanied him while he was working ... both when he was a trade unionist and when he was a photographer.” Dyer digs deeper. He writes,

A 2014 investigation on a South African news website, in which friends of the Weinberg family and fellow activists who were present that day were asked if they could identify the boy in the picture, casts doubts on this score - some were certain it was Mark; some didn’t recognize him. When I checked back with Bester he said that “No more information has come to light about E.W.’s son, except that nobody has contradicted the ‘belief’ that it is indeed his son.”

Then Dyer introduces a new element in his analysis. He says,

Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence, sixty years on, in our remote-ish future. We want to hear his version of what happened. According to Bester, several people in photographs in the show came by to identify themselves and to be re-photographed in front of the old pictures. This has been done in other situations, by other people photographed in the midst of historical events. It’s often illuminating, partly because of the way people’s memories are contradicted, reinforced or even created by the existence of a photograph.

This leads Dyer to another connection:

Consider, for example, a picture that is in some ways the mirror image of this one, taken less than a year later, by Will Counts in Little Rock, Ark. Instead of a solitary white boy surrounded by crowds of peaceful, welcoming black people, there is a solitary black girl surrounded by a baying mob of whites. The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine African-American students who were supposed to be entering Little Rock Central High School together at the start of desegregation. At the last moment, she found herself walking alone, being abused by the crowd. One snarling white face, that of 15-year-old Hazel Bryan, became the symbol of intransigent racial bigotry.

Commenting on Counts’ picture, Dyer says that Bryan later apologized to Eckford and that Eckford accepted it and “In 1997, on the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women met in person - at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness.”

This is followed by yet another revelation:

Except it wasn’t the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering them. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

That last sentence is inspired! A great line to end on, but Dyer isn’t done. He pivots back to Weinberg’s photo and unfurls yet another surprise:

Let’s go back to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather from almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

We’re near the end of the piece now. One paragraph left, and … two more revelations! Dyer writes,

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he died in 1965 at twenty-four - so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident, Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! Who said photographs aren’t narrative? You just have to know how to unpack them. Dyer is a genius at it. He takes us deeper and deeper into meaning.

Credit: The above photo is Eli Weinberg's Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19 December 1956.

March 31, 2025 Issue

Anytime Richard Brody comments on Pauline Kael – beware! He doesn’t like her. His hostility goes back to his “Shoah at Twenty-Five” (December 7, 2010), in which he comes perilously close to calling Kael anti-Semitic because she dared to criticize Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. In this week’s issue, Brody has a “Takes” piece that revisits Kael’s “Notes on Heart and Mind” (January 23, 1971). He appears to praise it. But don’t be fooled. His knife is out. He calls it “something of a manifesto” that “reveals why, despite Kael’s status as the foremost critic of her era, she was also sharply at odds with it.” He notes “the rise of the New Hollywood era that Kael would celebrate as a golden age,” and says, “she was hostile to many of its masterworks.” This is false. For one thing, “Notes on Heart and Mind” is not “something of a manifesto,” not even close. It’s a collection of rants she wrote out of frustration with how bad the movies were at that time. If you want to read her manifesto, read “Trash, Art and the Movies” (1969) – one of the great critical essays of the twentieth century. 

But the main reason Brody’s claim is false turns on his use of “many” (“she was hostile to many of its masterworks”). Okay, name one. Name one masterwork of the New Hollywood era, the so-called golden age of American cinema, that Kael was hostile to. I can think of at least a dozen that she celebrated: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Cabaret, The Godfather, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, Phantom of the Paradise, The Godfather, Part II, Shampoo, Nashville, Carrie, Taxi Driver. Kael wasn’t at odds with these revolutionary new American movies. She loved them!

The “Takes” series invites New Yorker writers to “revisit notable works from the archive.” Brody’s choice of Kael’s “Notes on Heart and Mind” is odd. It’s one of her weakest pieces. She wrote it when she was in a funk. She included it in her final collection For Keeps (1995), but she cut it drastically. With so many great Kael reviews and essays to choose from, why did Brody pick this one? I think it goes back to his hatred of her Shoah review. He’s exacting his revenge. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Structure

This is the fourth 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 structure.

The Pine Barrens and The Meadowlands are structured thematically. On the Rez flows more or less chronologically, with timeouts for historical perspective. The Pine Barrens consists of nine chapters. Each chapter has a particular theme. Here’s a table showing each chapter’s title and subject:

1. The Woods from Hog Wallow	Tells about Fred Brown, a seventy-nine-year-old Pine Barrens native, who lives in a shanty in the heart of the forest. “Come in. Come in. Come on the hell in.” Brown accompanies McPhee on road trips through the pines. “As the car kept moving, bouncing in the undulations of the sand and scraping against blueberry bushes and scrub-oak boughs, Fred kept narrating, picking fragments of the past out of the forest, in moments separated by miles....”
2. The Vanished Towns	Tells about the vanished towns of the Pine Barrens, e.g., Martha Furnace (“With the exception of the furnace mound, there is not a trace of a structure in Martha now. The streets are bestrewn with a green and blue glittering slag, but they are indistinguishable from the sand roads that come through the woods from several directions to the town, and if it were not for the old and weirdly leaning catalpa trees, it would be possible to pass through Martha without sensing its difference from the surrounding woodland”).
3. The Separate World	Tells about the people of the Pine Barrens – their work, their isolation, and their “live and let live” spirit. “The sphagnum-blueberry-cranberry-wood-charcoal cycle was supplemented in other ways as well – most notably in December, when shiploads of holly, laurel, mistletoe, ground pine, green briar, inkberry, plume grass, and boughs of pitch pine were sent to New York for sale as Christmas decorations."
4. The Air Tune	Tells about the Pine Barrens’ distinctive place names, names of plants and flowers, and folktales. “There is a plant in the Pine Barens that has velvety, magical leaves to which water absolutely will not adhere. The pineys call it neverwet.”
5. The Capital of the Pines	Tells about Chatsworth, the principal community in the Pine Barrens. McPhee visits Chatsworth General Store: “When I first stopped in there [Chatsworth General Store], I noticed on its shelves the usual run of cold cuts, canned foods, soft drinks, crackers, cookies, cereals and sardines, and also Remington twelve-gauge shotgun shells, Slipknot friction tape, Varsity gasket cement, Railroad Mills sweet snuff, and State-Wide well restorer. Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a well shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter.”
6. The Turn of Events	Tells about three major events in Chatsworth’s history: the Chatsworth Fire, in 1954; the crash and death in the woods, in 1928, of an aviator who was known as Mexico’s Lindbergh; and a visit, in 1927, by S.E. il Principe Constantino di Ruspoli, an authentic Italian prince who happened to be a native of Chatsworth.
7. Fire in the Pines	Tells about the Pine Barrens’ high susceptibility to fire. “A remarkably common cause of fire in the pines is arson. Standing in all that dry sand, the forests glisten with oils and resins that – to some people – seem to beg for flame.”
8. The Fox Handles the Day	Tells about various animals and plants that are native to the Pine Barrens. “Twenty-three kinds of orchids grow in the Pine Barrens – including the green wood orchid, the yellow-crested orchid, the white-fringed orchid, the white arethusa, the rose pogonia, and the helleborine – and they are only the beginning of a floral wherewithal that botanists deeply fear they will someday lose.”
9. Vision	Tells about a plan to construct a jetport and city in the Pine Barrens. “We moved on to see the site of the jetport, which would cover thirty-two thousand five hundred acres and would eliminate virtually all of the Upper and Lower Plains, several ponds, a lake, an entire state forest, and Bear Swamp Hill.”

The Meadowlands is similarly structured – eleven chapters, each with its own theme. Here’s a table showing each chapter’s title and subject:

1. Snake Hill	Tells about the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall rock that “sticks out of the very middle of the Meadowlands like a geological mistake.” “At the top, I can see for miles. To the north and west, a low ridge contains the area like a bowl with a lip made of little cities and towns. To the east, I can still see the Manhattan skyline, only now it is not shouting but whispering from behind another ridge. To the south, I can see out past the refineries and their towers of smoke and flame, out past the boat-loading cranes that feed along the cargo-containered fields of the Port of Newark like huge dark insects, out toward the Atlantic Ocean.”
2. An Achievement of the Future	Tells about various plans for development of the Meadowlands, e.g., futuristic theme park, industrial city, giant dairy farm. “People were always trying to invent new uses for the Meadowlands; most people felt anything was better than what was there.”
3. Gone with the Wind	Tells about Sullivan’s exploration of the Meadowlands town of Kearny, e.g., his visit to the Kearny Library, where he views the world’s largest collection of foreign translations of Gone with the Wind.
4. Walden Swamp	Tells about two canoe trips into the Meadowlands that Sullivan took with his friend Dave. “Passing over more underwater fences, we felt as if we were paddling just above Atlantis. At precisely one hour and fifty-two minutes into the trip, we saw our first abandoned appliance, a refrigerator.”
5. Valley of the Garbage Hills	Tells about the Meadowlands’ dumps. “One afternoon I drove back through a field of abandoned cars and walked along the edge of a garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that owed its topography to the waste of the city of Newark.”
6. Skeeters	Tells about attempts to control the swarms of Meadowlands’ mosquitoes. “Touring mosquito-infested areas of New Jersey with Victor is like touring a red-light district with a vice squad detective.”
7. Treasure	Tells about canoeing the Meadowlands with Leo Koncher, searching for treasure. “Leo Koncher is always searching for something when he goes out on expeditions into the swamp. One thing he searches for is a relic of one of the old plank roads that once crossed the Meadowlands. Specifically, he looks for remnants of the old road from Jersey City to Belleville.”
8. Digging	Tells about people and things buried in the Meadowlands, e.g., Jimmy Hoffa. “The morning that Dave and I set out to dig for Jimmy Hoffa was beautiful and sunny, and as we drove through Jersey City, we got lost and circled underneath the Pulaski Skyway a couple of times and wondered for a brief moment if a van full of Korean churchgoers might be following us.”
9. Bodies	Tells about exploring the Meadowlands with a retired detective from Kearny named John Watson. “Watson has a voracious appetite for all facts pertaining to the Meadowlands, facts that he is always willing to share.”
10. The Trapper and the Fisherman	Tells about two rival Meadowlands environmentalists – Bill Sheehan and Don Smith. “One day I took one of Sheehan’s eco-tours. I thought it was going to be ponderous and National Geographic special-like, but it had a good-natured feel of an afternoon on a fishing boat and I found myself hankering for a beer.”
11. Point-N0-Point	Tells about a visit that Sullivan made to the very tip of Bayonne, to the bottom of the Meadowlands, to the farthest point down he’d ever been. “On the coast of old Bayonne or in the junkyards that are on the Newark side of the sealike Newark Bay, I can’t seem to find a way in anywhere. I can’t get up the nerve to plunge into the particular breed of junkyard that grows there, through the particular kind of rubble, through the particular fields of weeds.”

On the Rez’s structure differs from the other two books. It’s more chronological. It unfolds sequentially in the order of Frazier’s visits to the Pine Ridge Reservation. It consists of fifteen untitled chapters. Two chapters – 1 and 5 – are historical. They tell the story of the Indians’ resilience in the face of mass destruction. The remaining chapters are an account of Frazier’s visits to the rez over a four-year period (1995-1999). Here’s a table summarizing what each chapter is about:

1.	Tells about Frazier’s admiration for Indians. “Of course I want to be like Indians. I’ve looked up to them all my life. When I was a young man my number-one hero was the Oglala leader Crazy Horse.”
2.	Tells about Frazier’s friendship with Le War Lance. “He calls me every week, it seems, to ask for money. It’s good that he does, I suppose, to keep me from getting sentimental when I think of him. Even now I can feel my words want to pull him in the wrong direction, toward a portrait that is rose-tinted and larger than life, while he is pulling the other way, toward reality. Sometimes when he 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.”
3.	Tells about Frazier’s first visit to Pine Ridge Reservation, August, 1995. “At dawn, I took a back road from Hermosa to the reservation. There was no one else about. I had the radio tuned to KILI, the Pine Ridge radio station, which broadcasts from the reservation near the village of Porcupine. It was playing Lakota singing and drumming. Under an overcast sky, the prairie looked drained of color. Here and there I saw burned patches, the black extending in tongues where the wind had pushed it. In the middle of one burned patch was a car seat, also burned. A wheel rim with shreds of tire still on it hung from a fence post. Two rows of tires lay flat on the roof of a turquoise-colored trailer, anchoring the roof against the wind. I followed the road into a wide valley, crossed a bridge over the Cheyenne River, and was on the reservation.”
4.	Tells about Frazier’s first day on the rez, traveling with Le and Floyd John, visiting various places, e.g., Big Bat’s Conoco and Wounded Knee. “We coasted down the hill to the Wounded Knee junction. Just ahead of us was a Volkswagen bus with oval license plates. It hesitantly turned left, then inched onto the drive that led up to the massacre monument and the site of the Catholic church. The driveway to the monument at America’s most famous massacre site is a deeply rutted single-lane dirt track so unpromising as to give any car owner pause. History here has had little time to reflect; it seems to be waiting for further developments, perhaps Wounded Knee III or IV.”
5.	Tells about the history of various American Indian tribes, e.g., the Kickapoo, Cherokee, Iroquois, and Navajo. “As fighters, the Iroquois were fierce. Their large and far-ranging war parties reduced to misery Indian nations as distant as the Illinois on the shores of the Mississippi, the Huron north of Lake Superior, and the Erie south of the lake that has their name. The Iroquois enjoyed torturing captives. Returning from their conquests, they usually made an event of it, with the women and children joining in. To incapacitate enemy warriors immediately after capture, the Iroquois would break the captives’ fingers with their teeth.”
6.	Tells more about Frazier’s first visit to the rez. He attends a rodeo (“The first event, the folksy rodeo announcer said, would be Mutton Bustin’, a bucking-sheep-riding contest for kids. At an end of the arena the small contestants assembled in a line, many in hats so big and pants so pegged they looked like tacks. One at a time they climbed into the bucking chutes, got aboard, and came out on sheep who flung themselves around more vigorously than I would have believed sheep could move. Some of the kids were quite little and got bucked off quickly. A few began to cry and ran for their dads to the accompaniment of the announcer’s uncomforting folksy commentary. Other kids hung on like burrs until the sheep quit bucking, and a swell of applause and honking car horns rose from the spectators”). Another afternoon, Frazier and Le visit Le’s sister Aurelia Two Crow. Another day, he, Le, and Floyd John drive to PTI Propane, south of Pine Ridge almost to the town of White Clay, to get Le’s propane fuel tank refueled. The filler hose ruptures and propane gas spews out all over. Fortunately, there’s no explosion. Frazier sees Le and Floyd John laughing. When they get in the car, Frazier asks them what they were laughing about. Le tells him they made some joke about almost getting blown up. Frazier says he doesn’t think it’s very funny. Le says, “Well, that’s the Indian way. We’d rather laugh about still being alive than moan about how we almost died.”
7.	Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez, November, 1995. Describes the town of White Clay. “White Clay. White Clay! Site of so many fistfights, and of shootings and beatings and stabbings! Next-to-last stop of so many cars whose final stop was a crash! Junkyard, dusty setting for sprawled bodies, vortex consuming the Oglala Sioux! Sad name to be coupled with the pretty name of Nebraska! White Clay, White Clay!”
8.	Tells about the many old Indian bars in towns and cities across the U.S., many of which have vanished without a trace. Visits some of the bars that still exist, e.g., the Longhorn Saloon, in Scenic, South Dakota (“The wind-scoured South Dakota sky over the badlands was bright blue that afternoon, but in the Longhorn Saloon cigarette smoke hung thick. A column of sunlight slanting through it from a window made a luminous gray shaft above an unoccupied table piled with perhaps three dozen empty Budweiser cans”). Visits the town of Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, where there’s an old bar called the Stockman. Tells the story of the fatal stabbing of an Oglala man named Wesley Bad Heart Bull, at the Stockman (then called Bill’s Bar), January 21, 1973, and the violent intervention of the American Indian Movement in the trial of the man accused of the murder.
9.	Tells about Le’s visit to Frazier’s home in Missoula, late January, 1996. Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez soon after. On his return home, he gets in a car accident. Tells about the accident and his harrowing drive through a blizzard. “By now the snow was coming down so hard I could see only a short distance ahead, and when semis passed me, I could see almost nothing but the snow they swirled. The road was a dim blowing world in which headlights suddenly appeared in the rearview mirror and red taillights suddenly flew by and disappeared. The tape holding the windshield to the frame quickly came apart, and the windshield hung loose like a drapery, bouncing with every jolt and letting snow in to pile up on the dash.”
10.	Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez, summer of 1996. He attends powwow. “The men sat on metal folding chairs in a circle around the drum, hitting it hard with leather-wrapped drumsticks and singing a traditional song in loud, high-pitched unison, above which a single higher voice occasionally rose. Full dark had fallen by now, and the overhead lights had come on, but many corners of the powwow ground were half-lit or in shadow. Shadows made it hard to see all the singers’ faces. In a circle around them, intent white people watched and listened, some holding microphones to catch the sound. The observers’ faces were wide-eyed, but the singers, as they leaned into the light and back out of it, had their eyes screwed shut and their mouths wide open in song. Some of the singers held a hand to one ear to plug it, the way musicians in recording studios do. They sang at full-voice, from deep inside themselves, all of them hitting each note and word with vehemence and exactly the same time. The singing, a survival from hundreds of years ago, filled the arena and echoed to the prairie sky.”
11.	Tells more about Frazier’s 1996 summer visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Tells about his discovery of the SuAnne Big Crow Heath and Recreation Center and the room inside dedicated to the memory of SuAnne Big Crow. “At the end of the hallway on the right was a smaller room with glass trophy cases along the walls. The trophies all were from the athletic career of SuAnne Big Crow, the teenage girl in the photos, the person for whom the center was named. I looked at the trophies, I watched a short video of playing on a VCR in the room, I read some framed news stories about SuAnne Big Crow, and a sense of discovery came over me. Here was a hero – not a folk hero, a sports hero, a tribal hero, or an American hero, but a combination of all these. I had thought that Oglala heroes existed mostly in the past. But a true Oglala hero appeared in the late 1980s, while the rest of the world was looking the other way, in suffering Pine Ridge, right under everyone’s noses: SuAnne Big Crow.”
12.	Tells about the heroic life of SuAnne Big Crow. Frazier talks with her mother, Chick Big Crow. He talks with her high school basketball coach, Charles Zimiga. He talks with members of the basketball team that SuAnne played for – the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes. He describes the Lakota shawl dance that SuAnne spontaneously did at center court in a pre-game warm-up in the town of Lead. She was fourteen at the time. Lead fans were yelling at the Lady Thorpes, calling them “squaws” and “gut-eaters.” SuAnne ran out onto the court, “unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance.” She also began to sing in Lakota, “swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl.” The crowd went completely quiet. Frazier writes, “In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.”
13.	Tells more about SuAnne Big Crow. Tells about the 1989 state basketball tournament held in Sioux Falls, in which SuAnne scores the winning basket for Pine Ridge in the final second of the championship game. “There’s a scramble, Milbank has it for an instant, loses it; and then, out of the chaos on the floor: order, in the form of SuAnne. She has the ball. She jumps, perfectly gathered, the ball in her hands overhead. Her face lifts toward the basket, her arched upper lip points at the basket above the turned-down O of her mouth, her dark eyes are ardent and wide open and completely seeing. The ball leaves her hand, her hand flops over at the wrist with fingers spread, the ball flies. She watches it go. It hits inside the hoop, at the back. It goes through the net. In the same instant, the final buzzer sounds.”
14.	Tells more about SuAnne Big Crow. Tells about her tragic death in a car accident, February 9, 1992. Frazier visits the site on Interstate 90 where the accident occurred. “After a few minutes I walked back down the incline to the fatality marker and sat beside it in the grass out of sight of traffic. When I did, I noticed wildflowers – little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins. Mid-June must be these flowers’ peak season: among the roadside grasses, lost hubcaps, and scattered gravel, the spiderwort and creeping jenny grew abundantly.”
15.	Tells about Frazier’s subsequent visits to the rez, including one in December, a couple of weeks before Christmas. “At lunchtime Le went in the house and brought me out a sandwich made of a quarter-inch-thick slice of bologna on white bread with lots of mayonnaise. The sandwich had a few faint thumbprints of oil on it but was tasty anyway. I sat on an upended stove log in the sun and looked at the stuff in the yard – an armchair, a pink plastic bottle in the shape of a baby’s shoe, a pile of shingles, an old-fashioned TV antenna, beer cans, a rusting John Deere swather. Across the open field to the east, a flock of pheasants flew low and almost in a straight line. I counted twelve of them. Le took a 12-volt auto battery from the trunk of the Celebrity and sat down cross-legged by it on the ground and began to clean the battery posts with a rag. On his back under the car, Floyd John wrenched and tapped. At the side of the house, Gunner, the dog, growled away at a section of deer ribs Le had thrown her. Two kittens, one yellow and one black, chased each other around. A warm wind blew. For a moment, we might have been sitting in front of a tipi in an Oglala camp along the North Platte River 150 years ago, braiding lariats and making arrows and gazing off across the Plains.

All three of these books are artfully structured. I confess I prefer On the Rez’s chronological structure slightly more. It’s more journal-like. For me, the journal structure is the most mimetic of the way real life actually unfolds. 

All three of these books contain an immense amount of action – walking, driving, canoeing. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.