Colin Burrow on Helen Vendler's "Inhabit the Poem"

I want to respond to Colin Burrow’s “Good Weird or Bad Weird” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2026). It’s a review of Helen Vendler’s Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays (2025). Vendler is one of my heroes. I’ve posted over forty notes about her on this blog. She’s written some of my favorite books – Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980), The Music of What Happens (1988), Soul Says (1995). These are works of literary criticism – collections of critical essays – some of the best ever written. 

My response to Burrow’s piece is mixed. I laud him for choosing to write about Vendler. I’m pleased that he appreciates her greatness. At the end of his review he says, “She was as good as it gets.” I agree. But he also says things about her that I question. For example, he says she tends to mention other critics “only when she thinks they’re wrong.” Well, Vendler was a formidable polemicist. It’s one of the reasons I read her. She often took issue with other critics’ views. Recall her brilliant “Lionel Trilling and Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode” (included in The Music of What Happens), in which she strongly argues that Trilling’s Freudian reading of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode neglects its aesthetic power – it’s invention of “a daring language of disorientation.” But Vendler also praised other critics. In the Introduction to her The Odes of John Keats, she writes,

One book very valuable to me – John Jones’s John Keats’s Dream of Truth – has approached Keats phenomenologically, examining his poetry of sensation in terms of its extraordinary empathetic power, and the struggle of this diction of sensation with Keats’s “dream” of truth. No one interested, as I am, in Keats’s language in its smallest units of phrasing can have failed to be influenced by Jones’s uncanny grasp of Keats’s way of feeling and seeing, and by his flexible shaping of an intellectual way of examining such elusive phenomena.

Other critics Vendler wrote admiringly about include Harold Bloom, Theodor Adorno, Geoffrey Hartman, Roland Barthes, and Seamus Heaney. She calls Heaney’s essays on Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Yeats “bravura pieces of characterization, the best in recent memory”: “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me,” in Soul Says (1995).

Another questionable statement Burrow makes is that “her use of the critical 'we' often carries the supra-personal authority of someone who doesn’t have reason to doubt her entitlement to the plural form.” Vendler seldom used “we.” Burrow cites an example from her essay on A. R. Ammons (“The Snow Poems and Garbage: Episodes in A. R. Ammons’s Poetics,” in her The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, 2015). But Vendler’s personal pronoun of choice was “I.” She used it extensively.

Burrow makes another statement about Vendler that I question. He says her view of lyric “is distinctly para-religious.” I don’t think so, not “distinctly.” There’s an element of “soul” (“To me, what soul says seems convincing,” she says in the Introduction to her superb Soul Says), but it’s part of a deeper consideration. The word that I would use, the word that Vendler used over and over, the word that is curiously missing from Burrow’s piece is “aesthetic.” Vendler wrote aesthetic criticism. This is why I love her work. “The aim of aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration”: Introduction to The Music of What Happens. This was her purpose. This was her credo. She got away from it a bit in her last book – Inhabit the Poem. But I love the title. It comes from a wonderful passage in Chapter 2 (“The Enigmatical Beauty of Each Beautiful Enigma”) on Wallace Stevens’s “The Bird with the Coppery Keen Claws”): “What was the work the poet was demanding of me? It was to inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world.”  

Burrow, in his piece, spends a thousand words defining literary criticism. Why? All he needed to do was quote the above lines from Inhabit the Poem. To his credit, he eventually does.   

Four Essays on Fairfield Porter

One of this year’s best essays is Dan Chiasson’s “Where the Meanings Are” (The New York Review of Books, August 20.2026). It’s a review of the exhibition “Fairfield Porter: What Everyone Knows” at the Art Students League, New York City. It’s not only a superb analysis of Porter’s painting, it’s a travel piece, too! Chiasson is excellent on Porter’s painting style. He says,

Porter’s brushstrokes seem at times still wet to the touch, trailing off like vapor before suddenly detonating a bluster of peach or indigo. Paint plays out luxuriously and abstractly within the idea of summer things like Bermuda shorts, clay courts, lawns, and tablecloths, as it does for other painters only in a stormy sea or roiling sky.

I’m interested in Porter. He first came to my attention many years ago when I read John Updike’s great “Violence at the Windows” (included in his 1989 Just Looking). It’s a review of the 1983 show “Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The title derives from Updike’s observation “Sunlight explodes with terrific violence at the windows of his hushed interiors.” Updike gave the show a mixed review. He says, “There are perhaps six superb paintings and two dozen more that well reward contemplation. The rest are tainted to a greater or lesser degree by a quality one might call amateurism.” Ouch! One of the paintings he liked is Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969). He wrote,

Interior with a Dress Pattern, the most closely worked painting in the show, describes a domestic interior so lovingly that the viewer feels invited to come in and take a chair; its range of reds and dark golds compares with the sumptuous calm of Matisse’s Red Studio and Piero della Francesca’s stately explorations of perspective.

A reproduction of Interior with a Dress Pattern illustrates Updike’s piece. I’d never seen it before. It struck me as wonderful. Still does. 

Chiasson doesn’t mention Interior with a Dress Pattern. He focuses on Porter’s “Schuyler” paintings, e.g., Jimmy and John (1957-58), A Day Indoors (1962), and The Screen Porch (1964). One of Chiasson’s best passages is his description of A Day Indoors:

A third view of Schuyler, A Day Indoors (1962), hangs beside the ugly people. Schuyler has again commandeered the best seat: on this cold summer day in Maine, he warms himself by the roaring hearth in “the big house” on Great Spruce Head Island. Three figures, Schuyler and the two girls, are smaller, and somewhat indistinct, and seem included partly for scale and contrast; the star of the painting is the room, with its poppy-red painted floor and deteriorating, high-kitsch New England decor, including a model sloop and, above the fire, a reproduction of one of the Elgin Marbles. The accent is on a colorful, braided oval rug, a standard L.L. Bean item, so familiar you can almost smell the must. The chairs and furniture in the room jut at sharp angles and form a visual chute that creates a measure of suspense about the closed door at its terminus. (Ominous music: Is Anne Porter about to enter?) The details in the painting seem to hang on the vertical axis, like buoys in a fishing net. But the area rug is perfectly flush with the frame in the lower-right corner, where a mapmaker would locate his key. This summer cottage staple, repeating the spectrum of colors in the overall composition, is a kind of palette: you could imagine Porter dipping a brush into one of those vivid stripes to touch up Schuyler’s khakis or pale red button-down. Or, with its suggestion of dynamic, spiraling depth, perhaps it’s a drain, threatening to suck this moody group back out to sea, like bilge.

I love that “The accent is on a colorful, braided oval rug, a standard L.L. Bean item, so familiar you can almost smell the must.”

The New Yorker’s Zachary Fine also reviewed the Art Students League’s exhibition. At first, Fine appears not to be a Porter fan. He says in his opening paragraph, “I think if you saw a lone painting of his in a junk shop, unsigned and unframed, you’d find it perfectly pleasing and mediocre.” But it turns out he likes the show. He writes,

Porter studied at the League under Thomas Hart Benton—one of his classmates was a fellow named Jackson Pollock—and the experience of seeing his work here, as students hustle by with their backpacks and the perfume of turpentine wafts through the air, feels organic and just right. The gallery is evenly and fluorescently lit, and all thirty-five or so of Porter’s featured paintings are in a single room, concentrating his palette of lime greens and creamy yellows and oxblood reds into one bright, soul-cleansing burst.

Fine says, “Let the paintings breathe for a while, let them interact with one another and with your thoughts, and they’ll meld together with salt breeze and summer light.”

Reading these delightful pieces, I recalled another excellent essay on Porter – Peter Schjeldahl’s “Stern Beauty” (The New Yorker, April 17, 2000; included in his 2008 collection Let’s See). It contains this pithy observation: “For Porter, the ordinary was an urgent ideal.” As usual, Schjeldahl nailed it.

Chiasson’s piece ends beautifully with an account of his visit to Porter’s summer home on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine. This place figures centrally in many of Porter’s best paintings. Chiasson writes,

Approaching “the big house,” a child bounded out to greet us, reporting with some satisfaction that there were no waffles left. The interior depicted in A Day Indoors remains unchanged from Porter’s depiction of it, down to the poppy-colored floors. (Floors in several bathrooms in houses on the island are done in the same color: there was “surplus paint,” David conjectured.) Upstairs, “Jimmy’s room” is just as it was the day Schuyler wrote “Buried at Springs,” his elegy for Frank O’Hara, while fending off a hornet. The poem is partly about writing O’Hara’s tribute at the desk where O’Hara himself had sat eleven years before, and “saw and heard it all.” It’s all still there, the desk, the bed, the spruces and sound of lapping water, as both poets saw and heard it; before we left, I sat down in Schuyler’s rocking chair, still positioned closest to the hearth.

I love it when a critic steps away from his desk and goes out into the world, seeking personal experience of the subject he’s writing about. Chiasson’s visit to Porter’s house on Great Spruce Head Island provides an inspired conclusion to a splendid review. I enjoyed it immensely.  

Credit: The above illustration is Fairfield Porter's Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969).

On Matisse's "Woman with a Hat": Fine vs. Clark

Zachary Fine, in his absorbing “Matisse’s Ugliest Painting” (newyorker.com, August 31, 2026), says of Henri Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” (1905), “The painting looks like a box of melted saltwater taffy that’s been churned together and encouraged to express itself as a chic fungus.” He says that he still can’t reconcile himself to “the shock of its ugliness.”

Fine tells us why he finds it ugly. He says,

The painting is filled with inconsistencies and bizarre compensatory moves. Its attitude can be summarized by a single square inch at the base of Amélie’s neck, where one finds eight colors in competition: orange, yellow, blue, white, teal, apricot, pale brown, and some black, as underdrawing.

He goes on,

Matisse takes every opportunity to disturb passages of chromatic balance. The red hair that connects with the green of Amélie’s temple? It’s interrupted by a few strokes of magenta, to increase the tension. The blue of the hat’s brim? A splash of teal agitates its roundness. While some of the color contrasts do articulate planar shifts, such as the candy-stripe lips (red for upper, pink for lower), many of the touches are arbitrary splotches that neither bolster a shape nor set another off. I have to imagine that Matisse was tickled by his decision to put a large tract of green in front of Madame’s face and, instead of extending it all the way to her throat, suddenly introduce a purple goatee.

He says,

The aspect of the painting that troubles me most, though, is the sleeve of Amélie’s dress. Fauvism was supposedly characterized by the phasing out of the Neo-Impressionist tache, or uniformly pointillist stroke—abundant in “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” and “The Port of Abail”—in favor of broader patches of color, but the green sleeve, with its cobra-headed cuff, is a creepy disturbance to the brushwork elsewhere. Compared with the thick smudges of white on the fan that Amélie is holding, or the broad, lush strokes of the background, the sleeve is fidgety. None of its marks seem to maintain their integrity for more than an inch or two without being fretted or spoiled. There’s a slight air of death around it, as if the arm is deteriorating in front of us.

This is good provocative criticism. Some of the descriptions make me smile, e.g., “chic fungus,” “anxious smear job.”  

But is Fine right? Is “Woman with a Hat” ugly? T. J. Clark, in his brilliant “Madame Matisse’s Hat” (London Review of Books, August 14, 2008; included in his great 2025 collection Those Passions), says no. He doesn’t say so expressly, but it’s implicit in his ravishing descriptions of the painting. Consider this passage:

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

That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! Clark is amazed by the colors. He doesn’t dismiss them as “arbitrary splotches” as Fine does. Instead, he attempts to interpret them: 

All the same, some colours occur only once, at crucial junctures. Look at the purple curlicue I pointed to earlier, between the hand and cane; or the exact shade of green chosen for the bar of shadow (if that is what it is) across Parayre’s brow; or the kind of purpled mauve, more opaque and decisive than any of its many near relatives, that opens up the space at the front of her throat. The painter wants us to see the subtlety, and also the wilfulness, of his variations on a theme, or his seeing of different things in the same light; but then he also expects us to register the decisive leap out of the established scale. He wants us to notice, and to gasp at, his suddenly seeing how to fix, or transfix, a singular optical fact. Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it. Nothing could be more hardworking, more investigative and empirical, than the way her mouth is drawn. First there were two plain strips of red and pink – bars at the top of an abstract ladder of colour, pink for the chin, green for the recession above it, pink again for the underlip, and flaring red for the upper one. But then this abstraction of sensuality had to be made into a particular mouth. A tentative, half-transparent line of greyed mauve was put over the red to the left, as if trying to inscribe on top of it more of a Cupid’s bow. And a bolder, more opaque dab of mauve was put next to the pink of the lower lip, giving the left side of the mouth a shape. And was this the point at which the amazing, inorganic green of the shadow under the nose was strengthened, so as to intensify the play of complementaries? Did the pear drop of yellow occur as part of this process? Was it maybe thrown up by the business of getting the other greens and yellows to keep the mouth – the mouth’s wounded sensuality – from running away from the rest of the face? (Of course the mouth runs away with the picture. The picture turns on it. But for that very reason it had to be held down, and held back. It had to be intensely, naively correct.)

I love that “Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it.” Clark is clearly entranced by this painting. He says he finds it both “chilling” and “exhilarating.” 

Clark mainly focuses on Madame Matisse’s face and body. Of the hat, he says,

The hat is splendid, but slightly crushing. It casts an implacable green shadow straight along Parayre’s forehead, and its blue all but annihilates the red of her hair. But the hat is abstract: the painter does not seem interested in making its extravagance palpable.

Fine accords more significance to the hat than Clark does. He sees it as the embodiment of Matisse’s “project.” He says, 

In “Femme au Chapeau,” at least a third of the composition is chapeau—and this particular hat is more of a mangled fruit basket, in which nothing is decipherable. The purple tongue sticking out of the top might belong to an iris, and the lobes of reddish orange could be an apple, but they likely aren’t. We’re looking through the eyes of someone who doesn’t want to actually see the hat. Matisse’s project was to wrench the appearance of things, particularly their colors, away from reality, and to let them entertain a new internal correspondence guided by his expressive whims.

Fine calls the hat “a mangled fruit basket.” Clark calls it “a crazy bird’s nest of pleasures and promises.” Both images wonderfully express the sensuousness that, for me, is the essence of this great painting. 

Credit: The above illustration is Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905)

Love Rekindled, Subscription Renewed

Illustration by Diego Mallo

Is there life without The New Yorker? Yes, of course, but it’s a pallid, diminished life. 

And so today, after a long month of no New Yorkers, I renewed my subscription. Gradually I’ll begin to blog about the magazine again, maybe not every issue, just the pieces that really grab me. 

I’m still angry at Trump for trying to crush the Canadian economy. Nevertheless, there are many wonderful aspects of American life. The New Yorker is one of them. I was crazy to think I could live without it.

Postscript: Cassandra Wilson 1955 - 2026

Cassandra Wilson (Photo by Hiroyuki Ito)

I see in the Times that Cassandra Wilson has died. She’s one of my favorite jazz singers. What a voice! Low and smoky. Gary Giddins, in his New Yorker review of her superb 2008 album Loverly, said this:

Wilson has always thrived on rhythmic complexity, but her best work, including “Loverly,” balances it with melodic, harmonic, and verbal nuances that transform evergreens into personal deliberations, frequently underscored with an ironic eroticism. 

Giddins identified three of her attributes as a singer: “the husky timbre, which favors her lower register; an affinity for melodic embellishments replete with sighs and moans; and a canny back-of-the-beat rhythmic attack.”

I’d add a fourth: interpretive genius. Her renditions of “Skylark,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Last Train to Clarksville,” “Wichita Lineman,” “O Sole Mio,” “Black Orpheus,” to name just a few, are brilliant. Her version of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” is magic. Once heard, never forgotten. She’s gone now – way too soon. Her albums will live on. She joins Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald as one of the greatest jazz singers of all time. 

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: First Person

[I’m posting this note out of love for the three books that are the subject of my series “3 Great Thematic Travelogues.” I wrote it about a month ago before the U.S. escalated its attack on Canada. This is likely my last post in the series.]

This is the eighth 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 focus on their use of the first person. 

One aspect of these three great books that I relish immensely is their subjectivity. All three are written in the first person major. All three are accounts of personal experience, which, for me, is the most real form of writing. All three are suffused with the personalities of their authors. Who are they? What are they like? How do they represent themselves?

They don’t expressly describe themselves. I have no idea from their writing what they look like. There’s a tiny photo of Osborne on the back cover of The Wet and the Dry. He looks a bit like Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris. Of the three, he’s the most psychologically complex. He’s a drinker and a brooder and a loner. That’s his core identity. He reveals more of his personal background than the other two – his alcoholic mom, whom he loves, his alcoholic great-uncle, who “stormed around the world on ‘business’ liquoring himself at a thousand bars,” his girlfriend Elena “in all her blonde and oddly Nordic magnificence.” He describes growing up in the English suburb of Haywards Heath (“Alcohol hovered in the air as an independent presence”). He shows himself in unflattering circumstances such as the time he woke up in his room at the Fairmont Bab al Bahr, in Abu Dhabi, in the same clothes he’d been wearing for weeks, and “with a headache so severe that I had to lie there for some time and try to remember where I had been the night before.” It turns out the night before he’d been so intoxicated he’d dived fully clothed into the hotel pool. The staff had to fish him out and carry him to his room.  

Deakin and Macfarlane aren’t nearly as wild as that. In The Old Ways, Macfarlane has a drink of whisky or gin when he’s with friends, but we never see him totally wasted. In Waterlog, Deakin drinks tea or hot chocolate. I don’t ever recall him imbibing an alcoholic drink. I say they’re not wild, but they do take risks. Deakin swims in rivers and pools where there are eels and pike. He also descends into Hell Gate – one of the book’s most memorable scenes: 

Courage up, I returned to the turbulent rim of the gorge and did what I knew might be an unwise thing. I couldn’t help it. I began to slide into the mouth of the abyss itself. I found myself in the first of a series of smooth limestone cups four or five feet in diameter and anything between three and five feet deep, stepped at an acute angle down a flooded gulley of hollowed limestone that spiralled into the unknown. In the low light, the smooth, wet walls were a beautiful aquamarine, their shining surface intricately pock-marked like the surface of the moon. All my instincts were to hold on, but to what? The ice and the water had polished everything perfectly. The torrent continually sought to sweep me with it, and so I slithered and climbed down Hell Gill’s dim, glistening insides, through a succession of cold baths, in one long primal scream.

Macfarlane takes risks, too. He walks ancient footpaths in the West Bank of Palestine where there’s danger of both Palestinian and Israeli gunfire. On a mountain in Scotland, he follows a trail of footprints in the snow that lead him and his companions into grave trouble:

Then the ledge narrowed to no ledge at all; just heather and rock, perhaps twenty degrees off the vertical. By now we had stopped speaking, concentrating on each handhold and foothold. Below was the fall, behind us an almost irreversible route, and ahead of us apparently untraversable ground – across which the footprints padded; the same regular spacing, the same enticing trail. I stopped. The others stopped in turn behind me. I felt sick. The slop and douse of adrenalin, panic spliced with moments of calm, pinpricks of fright in my temples. In the valley below us I could see normal life continuing: the flash of sun from a car’s windscreen as it moved along the road, a walker on the loch-side path, a gull banking over birch trees.

Deakin and Macfarlane are naturalists – brilliant describers of birds, animals, trees, flowers, insects, sunlight. Osborne is not. His topography consists of bars, the darker the better. He’s very much at home there. Here’s his description of the Cap d’Or in Cairo:

I love the tables here piled with nutshells, the smell of dogs and oily ful, and the sinister bar with its filthy bottles. The floors crunchy with the same pistachio shells. The men dishevelled and worn-down looking, in their cheap leather jackets and woolly hats. There is no question that Cap d’Or is a great bar of a certain kind because there is no sexuality, no women, no flirting, no frivolity, no beauty, no cuisine on the side, no clocks, no well-dressed bohemians and pretty young men with nothing to do. It’s a place of quiet but pungent pessimism, where the drinker at best can divert himself with a backgammon board but where he usually sinks sweetly into his own meditations.

Macfarlane is a connoisseur of light:

Those early-day miles were magical, up and down hills, through beech and coppice hazel woods, with a marine light in the beech woods that gave the feeling of walking in cool water.

A scorching band of low white light to seaward; a thin magnesium burn-line.

The light had modified again, from nacreous to granular to dense.

Light quibbling on the swell.

Each dip of the oars set loose a storm of light: a swarm of fireflies, a wind-curl of fire-leaves outlighting the vortices.

The sunlight fell hard as timber.

A gold-grey flutter of light from the fire.

Sunlight, sifted by foliage, cross-hatched the path.

The understorey of the forest was thickened with rhododendron, whose leaves shone bronze where the full light caught them. 

Heaps of old black oily snow by the sides of the roads; the sky low and overcast; a hidden sun shedding a weak and eely light.

The paths of the Downs compelled Ravilious’s imagination, and so did the light: falling as white on green, distinctive for its radiance, possessing the combined pearlescence of chalk, grass blades and a proximate sea.

Sunlight curled and pooled on the shell of a blue-black beetle dragging and bumping itself towards the monastery. 

Deakin is a connoisseur of water:

Breast-stroking up and down the thirty yards of clear, green water, I nosed along, eyes just at water level. The frog’s-eye view of rain on the moat was magnificent.

Water rushed about everywhere here, and amongst the remains of a settlement I found a spring inside a kind of stone temple covered in ferns. I went down to drink from it, and felt its atmosphere and power.

I hastened into the deliciously soft, warm water and set about swimming my mile: 56 lengths of the 30-yard pool. 

I was welcomed by the superintendent, changed in an enclosure where everyone just left their clothes trustingly on a peg or a wooden bench, and went off the springboard for a long swim in the glassy, sweet-smelling springwater. 

Diving naked into a clear, black river pool off old-fashioned coconut-matted boards is not a pleasure that comes along every day.

The Fowey River is 40 feet deep at high tide, and I began to feel the depth of the water beneath me.

Once in the sea, though, you begin to relax and lose yourself in the rhythm, feeling the texture of the water, opening up your lungs and breathing deeper, becoming aquatic. 

The water was grained with silt, like an old photograph. 

I stripped and dived in. It was so cold, I might have flung myself into a bed of nettles. Then came the heady rush of the endorphins, or “endolphins” as a friend once called them, the natural opiates with which the body anaesthetises itself against the cold, and the adrenaline.

The sleek, black water tasted fresh and peaty as I leant into the shuddering current with each new stroke in the deep, high-sided cauldron.

Feeling no modesty before the deer, I entered the ineffable softness of Lochan Mic-a-phi and crossed straight over it. If some of the Fen rivers were gin clear, this was like swimming through single malt whisky. It was deep and refreshing, but by no means cold; somewhere in the mid-sixties Fahrenheit. The loch turned my body to the dull gold of a carp, and bore me up as if in water-wings, as I returned across two hundred yards of the finest water in the world, tasting it at intervals. To feel its balmy softness in every limb, at every stroke, was a kind of heaven.

When swimmers talk of fast or slow water, this is the sort of thing they mean. The absence of wavelets, or other bathers, means you can breathe and move in perfect rhythm, so the music takes over. Mind and body go off somewhere together in unselfconscious bliss, and the lengths seems to swim themselves. The blood sings, the water yields; you are in a state of grace, and every breath gets deeper, more satisfying. You hunker down and bury yourself in the water as though you have lived in it all your life, as though you were born in it, and thoughts come lightly and easily as you swing up and down in the blue. 

I swam through the cold, polished water, each stroke a perfect arc of tiny bubbles, everything in equilibrium. 

Deakin and Macfarlane have similar sensibilities. Both love nature. Both spend substantial portions of their days exploring it. Osborne isn’t a naturalist. His natural milieu is the bar, the hotel, the café. He loves wandering the back alleys of ancient cities – Beirut, Istanbul, Cairo. He’s a connoisseur of alcohol:

In Milan that summer, as the temperature reached almost ninety-five every day in the deserted streets and squares around the hotel, I forced myself to stop dreaming of the fjords of Norway and the ice hotels of the Arctic Circle and, gritting my teeth, went instead to the lounge where gin and tonics were served to the guests of the Town House Galleria from a moving tray equipped with buckets of ice, lemon rinds, and glass stir sticks. I liked to go at an hour when I knew the place would be empty, and this movable bar would be for me and me alone. The tall windows would be opened an inch, the gauze curtains flapping, the flowers wilting on the restaurant tables. The drinks trolley had stoppered crystal flagons of unnamed cognac, a bowl of marinated olives, Angostura bitters, and bottles of Fernet. It was like being in a luxury hospital where, because you are paying so much, you are entitled to drink yourself to death privately. You go right ahead, because you are human and drink is sweet.

Deakin has more humour in him than the other two. The above quip about “endolphins” is a good example. I’ve used it myself a few times when I’ve been out swimming with friends in cold water and it never fails to get a laugh. Another example – his story about two guys in a pub:

Another of the swimmers’ tales was about Jeffrey Bernard and the actor John Le Mesurier. They were old drinking companions and would invent ever more absurd private games to amuse themselves secretly in company. A long-running favourite was to see which of them could casually insert the most outrageous clichés into a conversation undetected by anyone else. They had entered a pub in a small Devon seaside resort, and remarked to the landlord how inviting the sea looked that day. “Ah yes,” he said, “but it can be treacherous. Only last week, a young boy went swimming out there and drowned.” Everyone in the pub fell into a respectful silence, and, after a pause, Le Mesurier said, “Well, it just goes to show, you can’t be too careful,” at which Bernard snorted loudly into his glass, burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter, and the pair were obliged to leave, never to return. 

Are these books self-portraits? Yes, of course. They’re chronicles of personal experience. Each book is a form of journal, recording what the authors see and do in detail after glorious detail. Along the way, stuff happens that reveals aspects of their character: Macfarlane’s bike accident (“I had cracked a rib, possibly two, but this seemed a minor impediment to walking”); Macfarlane at his grandfather’s funeral (“I nearly cried, and could not tell why I didn’t”); Macfarlane in danger on the icy slope of a mountain in Scotland (“I felt sick. The slop and douse of adrenalin, panic spliced with moments of hovering calm, pinpricks of fright in my temples”); Deakin’s fear of unknown things in the deep (“Swimming up to the tangle of tree roots in deep water, I experienced one of those sudden intimations of dread, known to all wild swimmers, about what could be lurking beneath the surface”); Deakin in a wild, dark mood after sweating traffic for hours on the way down through Somerset (“It was one of several moments when I began seriously to question the whole outlandish project”); Osborne with his girlfriend (“Elena crawled on top of me and said, ‘Drink or amore? Which one first?’ Amore, then, but soon after the drink”); Osborne in Islamabad (“In one of the most dangerous and alcohol-hostile countries in the world, I wondered what it would be like to intoxicate oneself”); Osborne alone in his room at the Windsor Hotel in Cairo, remembering his mother (“I made a silent toast to my mother, who would have enjoyed drinking it with me in that fusty, darkened room where the shutters were falling off their hinges”). 

One thing all three authors have in common: their voices on the page are mesmerizing. I enjoy their company immensely. 

Postscript, August 27, 2026: I've started a new blog called Acts of Attention.

A Message to Americans

Photo from The New York Times

I’m angry. Yesterday, Trump escalated his attack on Canada, signing orders to impose a 50 percent tariff on a wide range of Canadian goods such as wine, hockey sticks, cement, dairy products, plywood, paper and furniture. This is in addition to the punitive tariffs he’s already imposed on Canadian steel, aluminum, lumber, autos, and many other products – all in direct violation of the free trade agreement between the two countries. Trump is trying to crush us. 

The response of many Canadians, including myself, is to boycott American products. I don’t buy anything American-made. Yet, here I am still blithely blogging about The New Yorker, an American publication. Yes, The New Yorker is fiercely anti-Trump. If it wasn’t, I’d have boycotted it a long time ago. But now, in light of Trump’s latest aggression towards Canada, I find it unconscionable to be blogging about anything American. 

Americans, your country is a cess pool. Recently, Ian Frazier described it as a “hell pit.” He’s right. Until you rise up and take back your country from this tyrant who is ruling you and gaming you like a gangland mobster, I don’t want to have anything more to do with you. 

The new tariffs that Trump ordered yesterday go into effect in 30 days. If they do, I’m discontinuing this blog. To hell with The New Yorker! To hell with everything American! You are such a putrid country!

Postscript, August 22, 2026: I cancelled my New Yorker and New York Review subscriptions today. I no longer want to support American magazines. Call it an act of patriotism, if you want. I’m done with the U.S.

July 20, 2026 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:

1. Taran Dugal’s “Bar Tab: Folk.” Here’s a sample: 

The guests ordered the Mangalorean, named after the chef Jay Kumar’s birthplace, an Indian city on the Arabian Sea: a sublime, sweet, velvety mix of rum, pineapple, lime, and coconut cream infused with amchur, a tangy spice made from unripe mangoes. 

2. Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Fro-Yo Fever.” Here’s a taste:

You’ll do far better if you walk to Eighty-eighth and Madison and dip into the small, cool Madison Fare, a specialty-foods-and-candy storefront opened, in 2022, by the chef Amin Kinana, whose frozen-yogurt creations are, by my estimation, unreserved works of art. The yogurt itself is dense and almost puckeringly sour, and oh, my God, the toppings. They’re some of the most spectacular toppings I’ve ever encountered, an array of ritzy, globe-spanning garnishes that evoke the posh worldliness of peak-era Dean & DeLuca: snowy cubes of Turkish delight, cinnamon-dusted pecans, bitter cocoa nibs, pistachio knafeh, vibrant edible flowers, honey on the comb, actual honest-to-goodness raspberry coulis.

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Fro-Yo Fever"

3. Dan Chiasson’s “One Last Thing,” a review of Franz Wright’s posthumous Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments. Chiasson writes,

Celan’s shattered “neversongs” taught Wright important elements of his own style: the lines narrowing as they approach silence, like water disappearing down a drain; the clauses and multisyllabic words split like cordwood by line breaks; the pressurized neologisms picking up where available vocabulary runs out of road; the rich, sometimes asphyxiating details that make a beeline into the senses.

4. Zachary Fine’s “Go East,” a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition “Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy.” Fine’s commentary on the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme is excellent. Here’s a sample:

Gérôme is the rare artist who’s easy to like and to hate. Every painting is a model of academic crispness and polish, filled with visual cues and prearranged emotional payoffs. “The Snake Charmer,” on loan from the Clark, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, shows a naked boy wrapped in an enormous snake while an old man plays a flute. We’re brought into the scene via the boy’s illuminated buttocks, and conducted to the background, where a crew of ten soldiers gawk at the spectacle. To the right, there’s a guy with a beatific smile who seems to be enjoying more than the snake, an enormous gun propped vertically between his legs. Tabulate the number of stiff objects in the painting (gun, stick, flute, sabre, etc.) and you’ll see that the whole thing is a festival of phallic abundance. Just in case you forget to feel aroused, Gérôme reminds you to.

And another:

How do we account for the beauty of “Bashi-Bazouk” (1868-69)? The subject is just a man with a colorful headdress. Bashi-bazouks were a feared paramilitary outfit in the Ottoman Army, known for cracking skulls, and yet the sitter is a paragon of calm, not violence. He’s almost certainly a civilian whom Gérôme put in a costume. There’s a rifle on his shoulder, but it’s not shooting anytime soon; if anything, the mouth of the gun feels like a chimney inside the painting, letting out invisible puffs of psychological smoke. All the exquisite details—the man’s glowing salmon-pink tunic, the cherrylike tip of his headdress, the fluffy tassels—are an excuse for pure visual stimulation. 

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk (1868-69)

Rachel Aviv's New Book "You Won't Get Free of It"

I see in the Times that Rachel Aviv has a new book out – You Won’t Get Free of It. It’s a collection of Aviv’s New Yorker writings, including her unforgettable piece on the revelations by Alice Munro’s youngest daughter that she'd been sexually abused by her stepfather as a child, and that Munro stayed with the abuser even after he was convicted of the assault. That piece, from which the book takes its title, is one of the most rigorous dissections of family trauma that I’ve ever read. The Times’ reviewer, Melanie Thernstrom, asks, “Can a profile of the writer Alice Munro and her troubled family life be as rich, as complicated, as real as Munro’s own stories are?” She answers,

The stunning title essay in Rachel Aviv’s new collection, “You Won’t Get Free of It,” shows it can. Munro’s stories often feature family secrets that are hiding in plain sight, glimpsed and forgotten, divulged and disavowed. Aviv reveals the shocking autobiographical root of this motif: Munro’s second husband, Gerry, abused her youngest daughter, Andrea, starting when she was 9. (He steadfastly maintained that his stepdaughter was a “Lolita” who had a crush on him.) When Andrea finally told Munro as a young adult, her mother stayed with Gerry, sacrificing her relationship with her daughter.

Yes, the piece is stunning. I was stunned by it when I read it in The New Yorker (see my post here). It’s a meticulous, sensitive, brilliant analysis – well worth preserving between hard covers. 

Acts of Seeing: Achill Island

Achill Island, 2024 (Photo by John MacDougall)

September 19, 2024, Lorna and I were biking Achill Island, on Ireland’s west coast. I love the receding perspective of this shot – down the ribbon of old country road to the graveyard way in the distance. If you look closely, you can see Lorna on her bike just past the green tractor on the left. I love everything about this picture – the charcoal gray road, the motley greens of the trees and bushes, the canted telephone pole, the white specks of the gravestones, the island's bare mountain spine showing through its worn olive green carpet, the pure blue sky. It’s a capsule of an exhilarating moment of an exhilarating day – one of the best of my life. Achill is a photographer’s dream. 

July 6 & 13, 2026, Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is William Finnegan’s absorbing “No Return.” It’s an account of the trial of Thomas Plamberger, held in February of this year, at the Innsbruck Regional Court, in western Austria. Plamberger was charged with homicide by gross negligence in the death of his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, during an attempt to climb Grossglockner, Austria’s tallest mountain. 

I like reporting pieces about trials. This Plamberger case is a strange one. What makes it strange is the trial procedure. Finnegan calls it “oddly simple” and he’s right. Perhaps it’s too simple. There’s a judge, a prosecutor, a defendant, and a defense lawyer – the four basic elements of almost any civilized trial. But the judge in this case, Norbert Hofer, who is a specialist in “mountain, avalanche, climbing, cable-car, and ski accidents,” appears to have imposed on himself a curious limitation. He wants to run the trial in a single day. That is, he wants to hear all the evidence, render his verdict and, if necessary, impose sentence all in one single day. Why the rush?

The second weird aspect of this trial is the way the evidence is presented. Witnesses are not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It seems the judge does most of the questioning. Sometimes his questions were not as probing as they should’ve been. At one point, Finnegan writes,

There were many disturbing parts of Kerstin’s story left unpursued. The autopsy had yielded an official cause of death: hypothermia. There were signs of a viral infection, and she had taken ibuprofen. But nothing was said about her injuries, even though Thomas had mentioned them. Mathias had described bloodstains. Whose? From what wound? Why had Thomas and Kerstin taken the Stüdlgrat? That was a central question, never asked. Where were their headlamps after midnight? Extreme cold drains batteries, but at least one headlamp was back on at 1:30 a.m. How did Kerstin end up where she was found? Did Thomas lead her there or find her there? Why on earth was she still wearing her backpack?

There were many disturbing parts of Kerstin’s story left unpursued – why? A young, inexperienced climber was left on a brutal mountain to die. Every effort should be made to determine what happened. A trial is a search for truth in a welter of contradictions and inconsistencies. That’s what makes them so fascinating. But in this case, inexplicably, the judge seemed to be in a hurry. Yes, in the end, he zeroed in on the most telling pieces of evidence – Plamberger’s failure to turn back when the weather turned nasty, his failure to make an emergency call, his leaving Gurtner tied to a near-vertical gray rock on a steep part of the mountain – and found Plamberger guilty. But his sentence – a five-month suspended sentence and a fine of nine thousand six hundred euros – was woefully inadequate. 

Finnegan, in his piece, does the job that Judge Hofer should’ve done. He methodically reviews all the evidence. His point about the bivouac bag strikes me as particularly damning: 

Why didn’t Thomas unpack the bivouac bag from her backpack, the thermal blanket? His explanation was that he’d forgotten in the stress of the moment: “I didn’t even think about the bivouac bag.” He added, “I don’t know why she didn’t say anything to me about it.” So the oversight was her fault. She was hypothermic, but she should have said something.

Based on Finnegan’s report, the evidence overwhelmingly points to Plamberger’s gross negligence. He should’ve been sentenced to time in prison. Instead, he received a love tap from a judge who was part of the Austrian climbing fraternity.

Christoph Niemann's Jazzy Cityscapes

I love this drawing by Christoph Niemann. I first saw it in the June 7 & 14, 2025, New Yorker, in a feature titled “Sketchbook: An Artist’s View of New York City.” To me, it’s one of the most original, beautiful, arresting artworks the magazine has ever published. I love the semi-abstract way the city is evoked – exquisite vertical and horizontal strokes of purple and gray ink saturating brilliant white paper. It’s a new form of drawing, is it not? It seems spontaneous, I could be wrong. Maybe it took days or even weeks to complete. But it has the look of fluidity, spontaneity, jazz. Yes, that’s it. It’s the visual equivalent of jazz. 

Niemann’s “Sketchbook” collection includes several other drawings that are almost as good, e.g., the marvelous green-and-gray “Scaffolding in lower Manhattan” and the stunning gray-and-white “Downtown Brooklyn.” But for sheer visual pleasure (arousal of eyesight), that gorgeous purple-gray-white cityscape can’t be beat.