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

Forrest Bess, Untitled (The Crown) (1949)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sage advice for these distracted times.

3 for the River: Details

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 21, 2024 Issue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. What is “The Egg Men”?

2. How is it constructed?

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

4. Why do I like it so much?

1. What is “The Egg Men”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. How is it constructed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

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

4. Why do I like it so much?

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

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

October 14, 2024 issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent “When the Ice Melts.” It’s about the melting of the massive Greenland ice sheet. Kolbert writes,

Since the nineteen-seventies, it has shed some six trillion tons of ice, and the rate of loss has been accelerating. Crevasses are appearing at higher elevations, glaciers are moving at non-glacial speeds, and large parts of the ice sheet appear to be twisting, like a writhing beast.

She visits the ice sheet, staying at the National Science Foundation’s research station, called Summit (“The view from Summit in all directions is pretty much the same: white”). She launches the stations daily weather balloon (“The balloon, filled with helium, flew out of my hands. I tried to follow it as it sailed over the ice, but I soon lost sight of it”). She talks with various scientists (e.g., Felix Schlüter, a German astrophysicist, and Zoe Courville, a snow scientist). She visits the village of Kangerlussuaq, where she meets climate scientist Marco Tedesco. She and Tedesco travel a dirt road to the edge of the Russell Glacier. In one of the piece’s most memorable passages, Kolbert writes,

When Tedesco first travelled the VW road, Russell ended in a dramatic wall of ice. Now the wall is gone, and the glacier looks deflated—more like an ice doormat. Tedesco compared visiting Russell to calling on a friend with a terminal illness. “You have to have the strength to say goodbye,” he said. “You see this and you say, ‘Oh, man, it’s happening really fast.’ ”

In my favorite part of Kolbert’s Greenland excursion, she flies to the town of Ilulissat, “which is sometimes called the ‘iceberg capital of the world.’ ” Ilulissat sits on Disko Bay, at the mouth of a very long fjord. Kolbert says, “Icebergs break off into the fjord and float along until they hit an underwater sill just south of town. The bigger icebergs get stuck on the sill, and other icebergs pile up behind them, in a great glacial traffic jam.” She walks along a boardwalk over a stretch of tundra that leads up to a rocky ridge. Kolbert writes,

From the ridgetop, there was a view directly onto the ice jam: a floating mountain range with slopes of pure white. The reflections of the icebergs quavered in the water, which was blue to the edge of purple. The smaller bergs were the size of a house; the bigger ones, I figured, were the size of Grand Central Terminal. 

This vivid passage reminded me of another “Greenland” piece by Kolbert – her brilliant “A Song of Ice” (October 24, 2016). That piece also contains a wonderful description of the ice jam in the fjord near Ilulissat:

Towers of ice leaned against arches of ice, which pressed into palaces of ice. Some of the icebergs had smaller icebergs perched on top of them, like minarets. There were ice pyramids and what looked to me like an ice cathedral. The city of ice stretched on for miles. It was all a dazzling white except for pools of meltwater—that fantastic shade of Popsicle blue. Nothing moved, and, apart from the droning of the mosquitoes, the only sound was the patter of water running off the bergs.

Kolbert is fascinated by Greenland ice – by its beauty and by its disappearance. In her conclusion to “When the Ice Melts,” she writes,

Once the world’s remaining mountain glaciers disappear, they won’t be coming back. Nor will the coral reefs or the Amazon rain forest. If we cross the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet, we may not even notice. And yet the world as we know it will be gone. 

October 7, 2024 Issue

Helen Rosner’s “Pick Three,” in this week’s issue, is about “three perfect new-classic cookies”: the piecrust cookie at Janie’s Life-Changing Baked Goods; Red Gate Bakery’s Cannibal Cookie; and Agi’s Counter’s rye-caraway-chocolate cookie-chip cookie. The piece is illustrated by a wonderful Scott Semler photo of two scrumptious-looking cookies and a glass of milk on what appears to be a slab of marble. It’s an artful shot. But which of the three cookies described by Rosner does it show? The newyorker.com version of her column tells us. It’s the Cannibal Cookie, featuring “a classic butter dough and pieces of Oreo-style cookies in lieu of chocolate chips.” Mmm, I’ll have one of those, please.

Photo by Scott Semler

  

Postscript: Robert Coover 1932 - 2024

Robert Coover

I see in the Times that Robert Coover died (“Robert Coover, Inventive Novelist in Iconoclastic Era, Dies at 92”). A long time ago (late 60s, early 70s), I used to read novels. I developed a taste for experimental American fiction, e.g., Don DeLillo’s End Zone, Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-Two in the Shade. My favorite was Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968). It’s about an accountant named J. Henry Waugh, who is fascinated by the laws of chance and probability. He invents a baseball game whose every action is determined by a throw of the dice. “I also keep financial ledgers for each club,” he explains. “And a running journalization of the activity, posting of it all into permanent record books. Politics, too. Every four years the Association elects officers. I have to keep an eye on that. And then there are boxscores to be audited, trial balances along the way, seasonal inventories, rewards and punishments to be meted out, life histories to be overseen.... People die, you know.”  

One death, in particular, that of the great rookie pitcher Damon Rutherford, hits Waugh hard, to the point that he appears to lose his grip on reality. It’s a memorable story, a sort of parable illustrating the perils of living too deeply inside one’s own head. 

I bought The Universal Baseball Association when it first came out, in 1968. It’s a first edition. I treasure it – one of my favorite books. 

Credit: The above portrait is by Suzanne DeChillo.