Tables for Two Tango: Helen Rosner's "Bong"

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Bong"

This is the fourth 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 Rosner’s vibrant “Tables for Two: Bong” (September 29, 2025).

In my previous post in this series, I noted that Goldfield is as much at home in a humble food court as she is in a Michelin-starred restaurant. The same goes for Rosner. She delights in the funky vibes of buzzy neighborhood eateries, where having a meal is as much about being part of the scene as it is about savoring the food. Case in point is her wonderful review of Bong. She writes,

Bong, a new, itsy-bitsy, absolutely electrifying Cambodian restaurant in Crown Heights, has more energy even while you’re waiting on the sidewalk for your table to be ready than most spots can muster on their most lit-up nights of the year. For the three evenings a week that it’s open, the whole operation, in a modest storefront on a residential corner, is shimmeringly alive. The cooks are half dancing in the open kitchen as they slice and stir-fry. The customers all seem wildly in love with one another. Inside, the light bouncing off the acid-green walls makes everyone’s faces appear traced with neon. The thumping bass of the hip-hop playlist reverberates through the dining room and rolls out through the open door to reach the diners seated at bistro tables out front. Even a half block away, the air smells sweet and bright, like seared shellfish, sharp vinegar, and the blistery green of sizzling herbs.

Wow! That’s her opening paragraph. She is rolling! I love that “shimmeringly alive.” Her description of Bong’s lobster dish, named after the owner’s mother, Mama Kim, is ravishing:

Mama Kim’s namesake lobster (listed with the minimal description “IYKYK”) is a magnificent mountain of crustacean legs and claws, the pieces stir-fried with oodles of slivered ginger and a sweet-spicy herbaceous paste, made by Mama Kim, that clings, slurpably, to the meat and drips juicily onto a pile of rice below. 

Most pleasurable of all is Bong’s whole fried fish:

Along with Mama Kim’s lobster, a dish about which I have had literal dreams, my favorite thing on the menu was the whole fried fish—dorade, on one visit, the skin crackly and dusted with toasted rice powder—which eyeballs you lasciviously from an oval plate. Its flesh is scored into diamonds, the way you might slice a lattice into the fat end of a pork shoulder; it’s visually striking and functionally quite useful, creating perfect little pull-off morsels ready to be dipped in sour-tamarind sauce and wrapped up in a lettuce leaf with Vietnamese coriander and diếp cá (a punchy herb known as fish mint). Here, perhaps, the chaotic-party energy of the place could have used a little focus, or been channelled into a brief anatomy spiel: I saw way too many tables dive ecstatically into the fried fish—and then, too happily, allow their plates to be cleared away without realizing that, if you flip the creature over, there’s an entire second serving to be found on the other side.

Exhilarating food, vivacious mood – the perfect blend! Rosner captures it brilliantly. 

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Roger Deakin's "Waterlog"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Deakin’s wonderful Waterlog.

“The warm rain tumbled from the gutter in one of those midsummer downpours as I hastened across the lawn behind my house in Suffolk and took shelter in the moat.” Thus begins this magnificent amphibious travel journal – an account of Deakin’s “long swim through Britain.” His moat is where the journey first suggests itself, and where it begins. It’s where he’s bathed for years, “swimming breaststroke for preference.” He says he’s “not a champion, just a competent swimmer with a fair amount of stamina.”

Deakin is inspired by John Cheever’s classic short story “The Swimmer” (The New Yorker, July 18, 1964), in which the hero, Ned Merrill, decides to swim the eight miles home from a party on Long Island via a series of his neighbours’ swimming pools. Deakin says, “One sentence in the story stood out and worked on my imagination: ‘He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the country.’ ”

Deakin’s journey curves across the country, too: Hampshire, Cambridge, Norfolk, Wales, Worcestershire, Dartmoor, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Argyll, Jura, Northumberland, Essex, Kent, Somerset, London. Deakin travels to all these places and more. Everywhere he goes, he seeks out places to swim – beaches, bays, rock pools, rivers, streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos, swimming pools, aqueducts, flooded quarries, canals, even drains. The older and wilder these places are the better. “In wild water,” he says, “you are on equal terms with the animal world around you: in every sense, on the same level.”

The book unfolds in thirty-six chapters, each chronicling at least one of Deakin’s swimming excursions. His first trip, on April 23, 1997, is to the Scilly Isles, where he plunges into the frigid waters of Great Popplestones Bay:

I stripped off and ran naked in the water, screaming inwardly with the sudden agony of it. It was scaldingly cold, and the icy waters kept on tearing pain through me until I got moving and swam a few frantic strokes as children do on their first visit to the deep end, then scrambled out breathless with cold; a mad moment of masochism. So much for the fabled caress of the gentle Gulf Stream. I climbed straight into my wetsuit and swam comfortably out again into the amazing clear water in a flat calm, crossed the little bay, marvelling at the brightness of everything, and swam back again. The sand was white and fine, and shone up through the water. Small dead crabs floated amongst the thin line of shredded bladderwrack and tiny shells oscillating up the beach. The silence was disturbed only by nature’s bagpipes, the incessant gulls. I climbed out onto the rocks that glinted gold with quartz and mica, stripped off the wetsuit, and laydown to dry in the sun. Spread out next to me, it looked like another sunbather.

Deakin’s descriptions of his swims are superb – vivid, sensuous, evocative. Here’s one from Chapter 3 (“Lords of the Fly”). He’s in Winchester, searching along the banks of the River Test for a once-popular bathing place called Gunnar’s Hole. He eventually finds it. Its motionless surface is entirely covered by “a classic duckweed lawn.” He writes,

The massive concrete walls of the pool were in surprisingly good condition, and, on the basis that stolen fruit always tastes sweetest, I climbed through the concrete river inlet sluice to drop in silently at the deep end. Sinking through the opaque green cloak was like breaking the ice. I laboured down the hundred yards of the pool, mowing a path in the lawn which closed behind me as I went. Moorhens scampered off, half-flying over the billiard-baize green. The water beneath was still deep, but no longer the ten feet it used to be below the diving boards. It had silted up to between five and seven feet. Reaching down, I felt soft mud and ancient fallen branches, and sensed giant pike and eels. 

I love that passage. That “Moorhens scampered off, half-flying over the billiard-baize green” is brilliant. Here’s another one, this from Chapter 11 (“Salmon-Runs”). Deakin is in Dartmoor, swimming across the River Dart estuary:

I had crossed to the centre of the wide bay from the Coastguard’s Beach. A little group of surfers clustered waist deep, waiting for the big grey rollers that surged out of the open sea, breaking on a sandbar. I threw myself in with them and swam inland. I felt the incoming tide lock on to my legs and thrust me in towards the distant woods along the shore. Each time a frond of sea-lettuce lightly brushed me, or glued itself around my arms, I thought it was a jellyfish, and flinched. But I soon grew used to it; seaweed was all around me, sliding down each new wave to drape itself around me. I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved, jostled from behind by the swell. Then, as the tide rose higher, the sandy estuary beach came into focus. The woods reached right over the water, and began accelerating past me. I found I was moving at exhilarating speed, in big striding strokes, like a fell runner on the downhill lap. It was like dream swimming, going so effortlessly fast, and feeling locked in by the current, with no obvious means of escape. I was borne along faster and faster as the rising tide approached the funnel of the river’s mouth until it shot me into a muddy, steep-sided mooring channel by some old stone limekilns on the beach. I had to strike out with all my strength to escape the flood and reach the eddy in the shadows. I swam back up to the limekilns and crawled out on the beach like a turtle, but couldn’t resist dropping back into the muscular current for a second ride down the channel. 

I can practically feel that seaweed “sliding down each new wave to drape itself around me.” Deakin’s writing brims with the physical experience of wild swimming. That “I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved” is inspired! At times, it almost seems that Deakin is part fish. But there are limits to what he’s willing to tackle. He loves the water, but he also fears it. We see this in Chapter 23 (“Orwell’s Whirlpool”), where he considers swimming the channel between the Hebridean islands of Jura and Scarba. The channel, called the Gulf of Corryvreckan, contains a menacing whirlpool. Deakin writes,

The whirlpool was clearly visible, three hundred yards offshore towards the western end of the gulf. Inside its circumference was a mêlée of struggling white breakers, charging about in every direction, head-butting one another. Outside, the surface was deadly smooth. The neatly-folded swimming trunks in my rucksack felt somehow irrelevant as I stood by the shore, feeling a very tiny figure, unable to take my eyes away from the epicentre of the vortex. It seemed scarcely credible that a swimmer could have made this crossing from Jura to Scarba.

Deakin wants to swim it. He says, “The whirlpool and the gulf were the quintessence of the wildness of Jura.” The whirlpool both fascinates him and scares him. He decides not to swim it. “I had to face the fact that I wasn’t going to swim the Corryvreckan, at least not on this occasion.” He leaves Jura with his spirits “more than a little dashed.” He resolves to return one day and try again.

Deakin’s spirits soon revive. In one of my favorite parts – Chapter 31 (“A Mill-race”) – he travels to Norfolk in search of a pool on the River Bure. The pool is called John’s Water. He finds it near a solitary mill cottage by a twin-arched red brick bridge. “A vigorous mill-race sped through one of the arches, darting its turbulence far out into a wide black pool which whirled evenly between dense banks of weeds and watercress.” Deakin sheds his clothes, dons his trunks, and wades into the icy water. He writes,

The fine gravel bed was shallow at first, then shelved deeper into the mill-pond. I plunged in and was soon out of my depth, swimming with the eddy up towards the mill-race where it spouted from the bridge. Then I launched myself into it and shot downriver into the weed-carpeted shallows. I swam on, in water that reached halfway up my thighs if I stood up, much as ice reaches halfway up a champagne bottle in a bucket. The river was embroidered with such vivid green braids of water buttercup that I half expected to meet Ophelia lying on the bottom, garlanded unseasonably in its white flowers. I was swimming down an ice-floe, but it was so clear, so sweet, so lush that I soon warmed to the cold and paddled and waded back up through the eddies, gathering watercress as I went. This was of the best crops of wild, untutored cress I had ever seen, let alone picked. It banked up along the dusky river like green cumulus clouds. I circled the pool twice more, shooting the rapids of the mill-race, crazed with the opiate cocktail the brain and body must have sluiced into my frozen veins.

I love that “champagne bottle in a bucket” image. Deakin’s words call up pictures. He’s a great writer – active, direct, specific, vibrant, sensuous. Waterlog is his masterpiece. In future posts, I’ll explore it further. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Lawrence Osborne’s splendid The Wet and the Dry. 

Julian Lucas's "A Real Gas"

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Julian Lucas's "A Real Gas"

This is just a quick note to spotlight Julian Lucas’s delightful “Talk of the Town” story "A Real Gas," in this week’s issue. It’s a mini-profile of Carlita Belgrove, also known as the Famous Stove Lady. She’s an ingenious repairer of old stoves. Lucas visits her at her workshop in Mount Vernon. He writes,

She was sanding down an L-shaped knob for a client in the Hamptons, who’d hired her to modernize his nineteen-thirties Magic Chef. Behind her was an Aladdin’s cave of more than a hundred and fifty venerable gas ranges, some with polished chrome fixtures and others nearly rusted through. There were Chambers, Garlands, Crowns, and a hulking, buttercup-yellow Roper that resembled a muscle car. In a world going electric, the Stove Lady keeps their flames alive: “Nobody—not nobody, anywhere—does what I do.”

Lucas also accompanies her on a house call in Long Island to fix a stove called the Magic Chef, “a six-burner with an extra side oven shaped like a rolltop desk.” Restoration of stoves is a great subject. I enjoyed this piece immensely. 

Are Frankenthalers Beautiful?

Helen Frankenthaler, Mauve District (1966)

Are Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings beautiful? I’m inclined to say yes. Peter Schjeldahl said no: “The upshot for pleasure-seeking eyes is that her paintings aren’t only not beautiful, they aren’t even pretty” (The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990, 1990). 

Schjeldahl’s judgment seems harsh. Is he right? Recently, two New Yorker critics looked at Frankenthaler’s work. They express a more appreciative view. Adam Gopnik, in his “Fluid Dynamics” (April 12, 2021), writes, 

By using the paint to stain, rather than to stroke, she elevated the components of the living mess of life: the runny, the spilled, the spoiled, the vivid—the lipstick-traces-left-on-a-Kleenex part of life. 

Gopnik focuses on Frankenthaler’s “soak-stain” technique. I think he’s right to do so. That was her great discovery – thinning her paints with turpentine and letting them soak into a large, empty canvas. He says, 

What’s impressive about the early soak-stain Frankenthalers, of course, is how unpainted they are, how little brushwork there is in them. Their ballistics are their ballet, the play of pouring, and a Rorschach-like invitation to the discovery of form. Paramecia and lilies alike bloom under her open-ended colors and shapes. 

Zachary Fine, in his “Let It Bleed” (January 12, 2026) takes a similar approach. He writes, 

Instead of treating the “blank” canvas as some heroic arena where a painter goes to battle with predecessors or inner demons, Frankenthaler saw it for what it was: thousands of off-white porous fibres, usually cotton duck or linen, woven together into a deceptively smooth surface. For centuries, painters had primed canvases, building up layers of thick pigment and glaze to create the illusion of luminosity and depth. But Frankenthaler diluted her paints with turpentine, so that they’d stain the raw canvas like blood on a bedsheet. 

Looking at Frankenthaler’s work formally, i.e., in terms of her soak-stain technique, rouses my tactile sense. I want to reach out and touch its paint-soaked skin. Right there, I think, is the source of its beauty.

Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Cove"

Photo by Yael Malka, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Cove"

A special shout-out to Helen Rosner for her delectable “Tables for Two: Cove,” in the January 26, 2026, issue. Her descriptions of Cove’s food are ravishing! This, for example:

The dishes are simply beautiful. I nearly didn’t order a salad of golden beets with smoked yogurt, struggling to muster enthusiasm for yet another beet-and-dairy salad, but my dining companion insisted. It turned out to be amazing, a parade of roots in every shade of yellow, with bursts of brightness from what seemed like a whole bouquet of nasturtiums, orange and vermillion and gloaming purple.

And this:

An oyster is poached in chamomile oil and served with wisps of creamy chestnut. A carrot is roasted to marshmallow sweetness, tempura-fried, and wrapped in charred sweet leaves of caraflex cabbage, then draped in uni and drizzled with spiced quince syrup. Like much of what’s on McGarry’s menu, it has a lot going on, but it doesn’t feel busy or chaotic; McGarry layers ingredients and flavors like washes of watercolor.

The photos that illustrate Rosner’s piece are by Yael Malka. They’re as sensuous as Rosner’s prose. Someday I’ll compile a “Top Ten ‘Tables for Two’ Photos” list. At least one of Malka’s “Cove” pictures will likely be on it. 

January 26, 2026, Issue

Ian Frazier, in his “The Ice Curtain,” in this week’s issue, revisits the Alaskan city of Nome, a place that figures memorably in his masterpiece Travels in Siberia (2010). Nome is less than a hundred and fifty miles from Russia. Back in 1999, when Frazier first visited Nome, travel between the U.S. and Russia was much more open. Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 changed all that. An “ice curtain” descended. 

Frazier, in his new piece, pokes around Nome, talks to some folks, including Jim Stimpfle, whom he first wrote about in Travels in Siberia, and notes some of the changes that have occurred since he was last there. For example:

Fat Freddie’s has closed, and Stimpfle now patronizes the Polar Cub Café, where he sits with friends at the same table almost every morning. Just beyond the café’s broad windows, the waves of the Bering Sea batter the granite riprap frontage. One morning, Stimpfle joined me at a corner table. I’d last seen him twenty-four years ago, an interval that has slowed us both. He wore a brown knit cap with a bill, a zippered jacket, loose knee-length blue shorts over gray sweatpants, and black running shoes. He is tall and strong-looking, and his blue eyes, which used to spark behind his spectacles and sharp nose, have grown mellow.

Not much happens in “The Ice Curtain,” but that’s okay with me. I enjoyed being in Frazier’s company as he nosed around his old haunt. The piece brought back great memories of reading Travels in Siberia – one of my favorite books. 

January 19, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’ absorbing “Call of the Wild.” It’s a portrait of an auxiliary “all hazards” team of elite outdoorsmen who help park rangers at Great Smoky Mountains National Park pull off the most difficult extractions. The team is named BUSAR, for Backcountry Unit Search and Rescue. It was founded by Andrew Harrington. 

Williams describes Great Smoky Mountains Park. She calls it “a Bermuda Triangle of volatile conditions.” She reports, 

Visitors have been known to climb to a high point to watch a sunset, forgetting that they’ll need light to get back down. They don’t think to bring water. They misjudge distances and underestimate the landscape, which isn’t just steep; it’s slippery, snaky, rocky, rooty, humid, buggy, foggy, and misty. Each year in the national park, there are more than a hundred backcountry emergencies.

She profiles Harrington, who is an ardent outdoorsman and homesteader. She says of him,

He ate daylilies, violet greens, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, greenbrier tips, sheep sorrel, thistle stalks. He learned how to make bamboo-pokeweed spring rolls, persimmon ice cream, spicebush muffins, dandelion jelly, pan-fried groundnuts, watercress soup, acorn cookies, roast squirrel glazed with honey and balsamic vinegar. If a wild hog came onto his property, he killed, butchered, and ate it, then freeze-dried the leftovers. He dried stalks of goldenrod and mint on racks.

Williams talks with other members of Team BUSAR. They’re an impressive crew. One of the piece’s most striking passages is a list of their names (and nicknames), together with a line or two on each, indicating their experience and background:

Big Bill is Bill Ivey, a Smokies wildlife ranger and a marine reservist who is six feet six. Jernigan is Jernigator, who, this year, at age fifty-five, left his software career to become a wilderness E.M.T. and a park ranger, the life he’d wanted all along. Captain Morgan is Andrew Morgan, a physician’s assistant and a former member of the Army Special Forces. Superman is Ken Miller, a retired surgeon who serves with nine local, state, and federal SAR organizations but—so goes a joke—assures his wife that he belongs to only one. (Several years ago, when Miller turned eighty, the guys were so excited about throwing him a surprise party that they forgot to invite him.) Lando, Ben Landkammer, grew up in Montana and trains canines. Silkwood, Mark Silkwood, is also ex-Special Forces, and an Army contractor. Cody Watson, BUSAR’s quartermaster, recently retired early from the Air National Guard; he’s an E.M.T., as is John Danner. Zack Copeland, who chairs BUSAR’s board, is a former wildlife biologist turned poultry farmer. Howitzer, Andrew Howe, is a civil engineer and a competitive mountain biker. Kelly Street is a Knoxville lawyer and a former military-intelligence officer. Caleb Edmiston is a chiropractor who, like Herrington, has competed in mixed martial arts. Greg Grieco played football at the University of Tennessee and now runs a nonprofit that rescues bear cubs. Obi-Wad, Jeff Wadley—a pastor, an author, and a former Civil Air Patrol officer who’s been working SAR missions in the Smokies for more than forty-five years—teaches courses on “lost-person behavior” and may be the greatest living expert on airplane crashes in the park. Daz, Andrew Randazzo, started a company that provides continuing education for medical-industry professionals; he did emergency-response work in New York City during the covid-19 outbreak, and near the border of Syria and Turkey after the earthquakes in 2023. Ski is Brian Borkowski, who flies Black Hawk helicopters for the Tennessee Army National Guard.

Williams also vividly describes two rescues that BUSAR successfully carried out.

My favorite part of “Call of the Wild” is the last section, an account of Williams’ experience camping with the BUSARS. Some of them have brought their kids and dogs with them. I relish this passage:

Street built the fire the way Herrington had taught everyone, using tinder, fatwood, and Vaseline-soaked cotton balls, hit with a spark from a ferro rod. Every busarcarries personal fire-starter kits and a twenty-five-pound pack filled with gear: headlamps, extra batteries, survival blanket, chem light, grid reader, pens, hemostatic gauze, trash bag, dry bag, gaiters, gloves, spork, M.R.E.s, flagging tape, two types of tourniquets, HotHands, 550 cord, multi-tool, folding saw, microspikes. Showing me all of this one day, Sharbs held up a small item and told me what Herrington had told him: “This is the best fire starter in the history of man.” It was a Bic lighter.

Williams has a wonderful eye for detail. Consider this delightful passage, for example:

The kids were up at daybreak, congregating beneath the parachute, having already swung on the rope swing, picked on one another, cried a little, and gotten into a cooler of sodas. One was eating sour cream and shredded cheddar for breakfast until a dog slurped it off her plate. Another made a “rifle” out of duct tape and sticks. Two had turned huge dried leaves into “fairy hats.”

“Call of the Wild” is a memorable portrait of an extraordinary group of people. I highly recommend it. 

Postscript: “Call of the Wild” reminded me of another excellent “search and rescue” piece – Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues,” a report on Iceland’s sprawling system of emergency-response volunteers, known collectively as Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg, or, in English, the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue—ICE-SAR. 

Nicola Twilley's "Pour One Out"

Photo by Bobby Doherty, from Nicola Twilley's "Pour One Out"

I find myself still thinking about Nicola Twilley’s excellent “Pour One Out,” in last week’s issue. The piece is about the California wine industry’s quest to save wine from wildfire smoke. Twilley reports that smoke taint is costing the industry billions of dollars. She talks with researchers studying the impact of smoke on wine grapes. She visits their experimental vineyards at Washington State University. She participates in a smoke-tainted wine taste test at Oregon State University. She notes various techniques devised to solve the issue, including spraying grapes with a clay-based powder called kaolin, mixing smoky wines with activated carbon, and extracting smoky compounds from the tainted wine. None are satisfactory. The research continues. 

What sticks in my mind is the last section of the piece, in which Twilley shifts perspective. Instead of treating smoky taste as a flaw, she treats it as part of the wine’s “aeroir.” She talks with vintner Cyler Varnum, who had what she calls a “breakthrough.” She writes,

When people visited Varnum’s tasting room, in the Willamette Valley, they often asked how that year’s vintage had fared, given the wildfires. Varnum decided to take them back to a barrel and pull a sample so they could see for themselves. Some made a face and spat it out; others could taste the smoke but found it curious rather than repulsive; still others loved it. “That was the realization: we don’t dictate people’s tastes,” he told me, as we sat in his tasting room. “I shouldn’t be trying to tell people that it’s a flaw. I’d rather be, like, ‘This was 2020: you might like it, you might not.’ ”

“Still others loved it” – that made me smile. There’s no accounting for people’s taste. Twilley’s last paragraph is a beauty, worth quoting in full:

Varnum, in his tasting room, shared what little remained of his 2020 stock, starting with a traditional sparkling blanc de blanc he’d bottled under the moniker Toast, made entirely from Zolnikov’s Chardonnay grapes and fermented in neutral oak. “It’s interesting, because when you think about champagne, you want toasted-brioche, crème-brûlée notes—that’s actually a quality you’re looking for,” he explained. On first sniff, I was not optimistic: the nose, as Varnum delicately put it, was “more on the burnt side of toast.” But the taste was much more nuanced: light, clean, and bright, with a browned-piecrust quality that never built into the bitter charred note I’d learned to anticipate. Earlier that year, Varnum’s partner, Taralyn, told me, they’d had a bonfire and brought out the glasses. “I think I drank almost a whole bottle,” she said. “Around a campfire, it’s delicious.” 

“Pour One Out” is an interesting take on a challenging "climate change" issue. I enjoyed it immensely. 

The Art of Quotation (Part VIII)

My favorite form of quotation is the parenthetical extract. I learned it from reading Helen Vendler. It’s an effective way of illustrating a point. Here’s an example from Vendler’s “ ‘Oh I Admire and Sorrow,’ ” a review of Dave Smith’s poetry collection Cumberland Station (1977), included in her great Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980). She’s commenting on the poem “On a Field Trip at Fredericksburg”:

There are many daring flashes: the demotic beginning (“maybe / fifteen thousand got it here”); the surrealistic fantasy (“If each finger were a thousand of them / I could clap my hands and be dead / up to my wrists”); the dismissive meiosis for the atomic bomb (“one silly pod”); the substitution of birds for the soldiers in blue and gray uniforms (“a gray blur preserved / on a blue horizon”); the unobtrusive symbols (the drummers, “rigid as August dandelions,” yield to “one dark stalk snapped off,” and the hint of death in the “drift of wind / at the forehead, the front door”). 

I love this form of quotation. It embeds fragments of the subject text in the commentary. When done well, it’s the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine. 

Inspired Sentence 7

A few special conifers such as bristlecone pine can live through sequential, sectorial deaths – compartmentalizing their external afflictions, shutting down, section by section, producing fertile cones for an extra millennium with the sustenance of a solitary strip of bark.

That’s from Jared Farmer’s brilliant Elderflora (2022), a history of ancient trees. I relish the clear scientific precision of it (“sequential,” “sectorial,” “compartmentalizing”). Farmer is explaining how the bristlecone pine works, how it manages to live almost indefinitely. I love that “compartmentalizing their external afflictions.” The final part – “shutting down, section by section, producing fertile cones for an extra millennium with the sustenance of a solitary strip of bark” – is inspired. Note that “for an extra millennium” – not a year, not a decade, not a century. A millennium! All from a “solitary strip of bark”!

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #8 Anthony Lane's "Because the Night" and Berton Roueché’s “Trans Europ Nuit”

Illustration by Christoph Niemann, from Anthony Lane's "Because the Night"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is actually two picks. I originally intended to choose just one – Anthony Lane’s “Because the Night” (May 11, 2020), a wonderful essay on the pleasures of traveling by night train. However, as I was rereading it, I was reminded of another great “night train” piece that I’d read many years ago – Berton Roueché’s “Trans Europ Nuit” (December 28, 1981). The two pieces complement each other beautifully. I’ve decided to consider them together – a rare double combo. Here we go! All aboard!

Lane begins,

If on a winter’s night a traveller is about to board a train, a fortifying drink is of the essence. Thus it was that I stood in line at Burger King, on the concourse at Central Station, in Glasgow, and asked for a hot tea. The only reason that I wasn’t seeking out a dram of whiskey was that I had already done so, dropping into a pub on my way to the station. In short, I was well drammed up—as was the Glaswegian beside me, who leaned on the counter and inquired what I was up to. Taking the Caledonian Sleeper to London, I replied. He fixed me with a canny eye and said, “Are you not afraid o’ the wee virus?”

That passage makes me smile every time I read it. So many interesting elements. As an opening paragraph of a travel piece, it’s almost unbeatable. Lane’s next paragraph is equally good:

The answer, foolishly, was no. I was too excited by the thought o’ catching the wee train to be worried about catching anything else. It was late evening, on February 28th; the year would soon leap into the twenty-ninth, and that touch of temporal rarity added to the occasion. The departure of a night train—by definition, a humdrum event for the station staff—exudes, for all but the most jaded travellers, the thrill of an unfamiliar ritual. By day, if late, you run for a train; if early, you tut and sigh at having to tarry so long. At night, on the other hand, you saunter, and deliberately show up in good time. Why? Not because of security, passport control, or the other chores that affront the airline passenger, shortening tempers and sapping every soul, but because you want to settle in and enjoy the show. Patiently, the train awaits you, with a theatrical air of suspense, and the moment of its leaving is akin to the curtain’s rise. 

Lane’s writing hooks me and reels me in. Part of its allure is his wit. Here’s his description of the interior of his sleeping compartment:

When turning from the window to the door, in my compartment, I had to revolve on the spot, as if roasting on a vertical spit, and, despite my being the sole occupant, both bunks had been let down, locked into place, and joined by a ladder. A printed notice offered advice: “Guests should use the ladders in the traditional manner, by always facing the bed as they climb up and down.” What other manner is there? Had the train recently hosted the cast of Cirque du Soleil, perhaps, who insisted on descending head first, arms outstretched, after crooking one knee over the top rung?

And here’s his description of the food:

No less baffling was the Room Service Menu. Pies, cheeses, broth, smoked venison on a platter, and a parade of wines and spirits: all these, and more, could be ferried to one’s bedside. Caledoniaphiles were urged to dine on “Haggis, Neeps & Tatties”—neeps meaning turnips, tatties meaning potatoes, and haggis meaning all your deepest terrors wrapped up in a sphere of stomach skin, then boiled. Precisely what you want to snack on, in other words, while passing through a tunnel at half past two in the morning. The entire feast could be washed down with a Ginger Laddie. Don’t ask.

At this point, as Lane begins a discussion of the history of the Pullman sleeping car, I think we’ll change trains and board Roueché’s Danish Express. He’s traveling from Copenhagen to Paris:

The train moved, was moving. It moved as silently, as smoothly, as naturally as a ship under sail. The platform slid away. In a moment, in half a moment, we were moving at speed, racing—out of the glare of the sheds and into a dusky daylight, through spreading railroad yards, past factories and warehouses, past blocks of apartment houses, past a deserted suburban station, past another spread of apartment s. Then we were in an open countryside of fields, pastures, hedgerows, an occasional mannered plantation of pine or white birch. Denmark is a small country, and Copenhagen is on two tiny islands, but I had a sense of space that was almost Kansan. There wasn’t a house as far as I could see. Then, suddenly, there were six or eight houses clustered together along a narrow street—little square houses, like doll houses, with steep, red-tiled, pyramidal roofs. American farmers live on the farm. In Denmark, farmers live in the village. The enormous countryside began again. It was a landscape made for snow, for blizzards, for raging winds. The dusk deepened. There was a spark of light in the distance, a spidery glint of water, and then it was dark.

Roueché’s trip is low-event, but if you want to experience the pleasure of night train travel, it’s perfect. He describes his compartment. He talks with the steward. He talks with another passenger. His train crosses the Baltic Sea by ferry. He describes having supper on the ferry. He observes other people in the ferry bistro. He returns to his train compartment. He sleeps. He wakes up around midnight. The train is in Hamburg. There’s joviality coming from the next compartment:

I thought I heard a guitar. I heard shrieks and roars of laughter. I heard glasses and bottles and what sounded like somebody dancing. I looked at my watch: it was almost midnight. I looked out at the station again. There were plenty of people about—walking, waiting, waving, embracing. And a variety of uniforms: brown, blue, green. Two youths were sitting on a bench, gazing at the train, eating ice-cream cones: it might have been noon in a park. They suddenly slid away. We were moving, but moving backward. We moved out of the station, past pillars, past stairs, past benches and people, past signs for Marlboro and Coca-Cola in German, and into a yard, past a string of freight cars on a siding. They were painted bright red, and on each, in white, was the name “Blue Star Lines.” The joviality next door continued. The train stopped, waited, and moved forward again. We pulled in to a platform—a different platform. A woman sat on a bench, slumped in sleep, a cat in a box at her feet. We waited, we moved, we slipped away backward again. I dropped onto my pillow. There were footsteps, running footsteps, in the corridor.

In the morning, Roueché gets up, shaves, and packs his things. He talks with the steward. He watches the French countryside fly past. And then he’s in the Gare du Nord in Paris. He leaves the train and has coffee in the station. Ho hum, you might say. Not at all. It’s total bliss. Lane says the same thing at the end of his piece: “Such was the non-event of the journey. Yet I relished every mile of it.”

Acts of Seeing: Almond Tree

Photo by John MacDougall

January 29, 2024, we were cycling in Portugal. I came around a bend and there was this beautiful old almond tree in full frothy blossom. At least I think it’s an almond tree. Please tell me if it isn’t. I want to know. I love the twisted black trunk. Like great old poets and great old painters and great old movie directors, it’s still producing beauty. What a wonderful day that was! See that cyclist on the road in the distance? That’s Lorna, leading the way, as usual, while I straggle behind, stopping to savor the views and take pictures.