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. 

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #2 Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

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 Geoff Dyer’s superb “Poles Apart” (April 18, 2011). 

In this great piece, Dyer tells about his visit to two remote land-art sites – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” near Quemado, New Mexico, and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah. He structures his piece in two parts with an “Intermission” in between, consisting of four brief notes. 

The first part, titled “New Mexico,” describes Dyer’s “Lightning Field” experience. He’s at the site with his wife Rebecca, plus four others – Steve, Anne, Ethan, and Cristina. Here’s the first paragraph:

We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere. The windmill must have been turning, because the wind was sprinting across the plateau. The sky was not just clear or blue. It was as if we’d ended up in a future where there was no atmosphere, no sky—nothing to insulate earth from cosmos. Scrub extended into the distance and in the distance were mountains, but even the things that were near were far off. The land was camouflage-colored, the dust reddish brown. Near the cabin but still quite distant, almost invisible, were sticks stuck randomly in the ground—some in the far distance as opposed to the near distance, but none in the very far distance, where we could not have seen them even if they had been there.

I find that an appealingly weird beginning – almost as if Dyer is pretending to be an alien from outer space, trying to make sense of this strange place where he’s landed. He’s divested himself of all preconceptions, all prior knowledge. “We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere.” Seemed – key word. What are those sticks stuck in the ground? Dyer’s next paragraph brings us closer:

The air was thin, cold; the sun was hot on our faces. When the wind subsided, as it did every few minutes, it was still and quiet. As we walked toward the sticks, it became clear that there were more of them than we’d realized, though it was difficult to say how many, because many were hard to see and some were not seeable at all, and it is probably only in retrospect, once we understood that their being invisible was part of their function, that we knew they were there. The sticks, it became evident, once we got close to them, were not sticks but poles: polished steel, shining in the sun, three times my height, and as sharply pointed as javelins. They were two inches in diameter and cold to the touch. If they had been wooden sticks, they could have been stuck there thousands of years ago, but because they were stainless steel they were obviously of more recent provenance. Hundreds of years from now they would still gleam like the promise of a future.

What are these poles? What’s their purpose? Do they have meaning? Where are we? Dyer still hasn’t named the place. He and his companions convene at the cabin:

I was the last man in and could see the other members of our expedition sitting on the wooden porch in wooden rockers and on wooden benches, getting drunk on champagne, watching me walk toward them. It was the kind of hut you see people inhabiting in photographs from the nineteen-thirties by Walker Evans. What had seemed noble but squalid then seemed idyllic now, a boutique hotel, practically, especially with the champagne and laughter.

There’s that word “seemed” again. I love the infusion of champagne and laughter into the narrative. It comes as a relief. These guys are human! The reference to Walker Evans made me smile. Dyer is a fan of his work (see his brilliant The Ongoing Moment), and so am I. 

In the evening, Dyer continues to observe the poles. He writes,

As the sun began to drop toward the horizon, the poles sprouted shadows and the tips sparkled as if stars were perched on them. There were so many competing perspectives that they complicated each other and cancelled each other out. The poles were still slender, but they’d acquired bulk, solidity. There were far more of them than we had thought, and it became obvious that they were not scattered randomly but had been planted in rows. If you positioned yourself next to one and looked past it, you could see a dozen more, glowing, like a fence that let everything through—everything being the sunlight and the wind. The sun was sinking fast and everything began to change. The silver poles glowed goldly. There was a clear demarcation now between the area where there were poles and the area where there were none, even though the poles were arranged so sparsely as to have made the distinction imperceptible at first.

For the first time, Dyer mentions religion: “There was a sense—all the more palpable in such a remote and empty place—of something gathering. Absence had given way to presence. We were in the midst of what may once have been considered a variety of religious experience.”

The next two paragraphs are among my favorites of the piece:

The sky blackened after only a few minutes and we retreated indoors. We ate quesadillas and drank dark wine and looked at the flames of the pellet-burning stove as if it were a television. The vastness outside made the interior of the cabin seem the coziest place on earth, like an igloo.

Later, we went outside again, into the huge night. The poles were gone, but we knew they were there. The sky was nothing but a dome of stars. We were no strangers to the firmament, but none of us had seen anything like this. The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight.

That “The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away” is inspired. The last line – “The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight” – is among the most beautiful that Dyer has ever written.

Next morning, at sunrise, “the tips of the poles began to twinkle.” And then, as the sun emerged into view, “the poles stood stark and golden, even more sharply defined than they had been the evening before.” Dyer considers their meaning:

Places like Stonehenge had been designed with the solstice in mind, may even have been celestial calendars, attempting to synch man’s experience on earth with the heavens. None of that was relevant here. The placement of poles referred to nothing other than itself. Thousands of years of study would confirm that there was no intended relation between the poles and the equinox, the transit of Venus, or lunar eclipses. What was here was entirely man-made and appealed only to man.

I relish that last line. Dyer is grappling with the meaning of the place. At this point, he drops the “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees” approach and names the place he’s experiencing:

We were—as many of you will have guessed by now—near Quemado, New Mexico, at “The Lightning Field,” by Walter De Maria (completed in 1977). The answer prompts another question—why the subterfuge of inconceivable ignorance?—which can best be answered with further questions. Most visitors who come to see De Maria’s masterpiece these days know roughly what they are in for. But what if we came to “The Lightning Field” and had to try to work it out for ourselves, with no art-historical backup? Asked about the consequences of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai is said to have replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” That’s the response that comes to mind when pondering the significance of the great land-art projects of the late nineteen-sixties and seventies.

The key word here, for me, at least, is “response.” Dyer is trying to get at how he responds to “The Lightening Field.” He’s working through his responses:

There’s a lot of space, but, even as a figure of speech, there’s no room for God. “The Lightning Field” offers an intensity of experience that for a long time could be articulated only—or most conveniently—within the language of religion. Nothing about “The Lightning Field” prompts one to genuflect. Rigorously atheistic, geometrically neutral, it takes the faith and the vaulting promise of modernism into the wilderness. Part of the experience of coming here is the attempt to understand and articulate these responses.

Near the end of the “New Mexico” segment, Dyer describes how he and his companions accessed the “Lightning Field” site:

You leave your cars at Quemado and are taken up, in a van, at two-thirty in the afternoon. The drive takes half an hour, so you arrive at the least impressive time of the day. As we approached, a groan of disappointment swept through our party: we didn’t know exactly what we were expecting, but we expected more. And then you get it, but gradually, in an experience of space that unfolds over time. A narrative is at work.

“An experience of space that unfolds over time” is an excellent description of Dyer’s response to “The Lightning Field.” His writing enacts it. 

The next section of “Poles Apart” is called “Intermission.” It consists of four brief notes on landscape. In Note 1, Dyer remembers an area in a recreation park called the Hump, where he played when he was a kid. He says, “It was the first place in my personal landscape that had special significance.”

In Note 2, he considers how certain places in the landscape “develop a special quality.” He offers the example of a piece of land that becomes a fertility site, how it eventually falls into disuse and ruin, and how, even as a ruin, it retains “what D. H. Lawrence called ‘nodality.’ ” This idea of nodality appears again in the piece’s third section on the “Spiral Jetty.” 

In Note 3, Dyer remembers a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he saw a painting by Elihu Vedder called “The Questioner of the Sphinx” (1863), showing “a dark-skinned traveller crouched by the head of a sphinx that emerges from the sand in which it has been submerged for centuries.” Dyer describes it as “an early depiction of the post-apocalyptic world: one could easily imagine that it’s not the head of the sphinx poking above the sand but the torch of the Statue of Liberty, “Planet of the Apes” style.” He says, “We study the painting closely: a depiction of the effort to work out what certain marks on the landscape mean; what they are trying to tell us; what we go to them for.” 

Note 4 tells about D. H. Lawrence’s experience of New Mexico – “ ‘the greatest experience from the outside world’ that he had ever had.” Note 4 functions as a segue to Part 2 of “Poles Apart” – “Utah.” Dyer writes,

In the American West you can travel hundreds of miles and calculate your arrival time almost to the minute. We turned up for our rendezvous in Quemado at two o’clock on the dot. From Quemado, we drove four hundred and sixty miles to Zion, Utah, and got there exactly in time for our dinner reservation at eight-thirty. Our itinerary was as precise as De Maria’s measuring.

From Zion, we were going to drive north to the “Spiral Jetty.”

Part 2 differs conceptually from Part 1. In Part 1, Dyer’s focus is on the experience of “The Lightning Field.” The journey to the site is secondary and is covered in a few lines near the end of the piece. In contrast, Part 2 is a road trip that ends at “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We drove north—Rebecca and I—toward Salt Lake City. No need for a compass. Everything screamed north: the gray-and-white mountains looming Canadianly in the distance, the weather deteriorating by the hour. Opting for directness instead of scenery, we barrelled up the featureless expanse of I-15. Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder. Then Salt Lake City, doing its level best to come and meet us before we got anywhere near it—and reluctant to say goodbye even when we were well beyond. 

That “snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder” is inspired! I read it fifteen years ago when the piece appeared in The New Yorker. It’s stayed with me ever since. Every time I see a piece of tire on the road, I think of Dyer’s vivid phrase – “snakeskin shreds of tire.” 

They spend the night in Ogden, Utah. Dyer rereads Lawrence’s essay on Taos, New Mexico. He quotes a passage which begins “Taos pueblo still retains its old nodality.” Dyer comments, “Like Vedder’s painting, this bit of writing—analytical, hypnotic, profound—tells us much about the power that some places exert. In their different ways, both De Maria and Smithson were attempting to create nodality.”

The next day, Dyer and Rebecca continue their pilgrimage to “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We had been given enigmatically precise directions on how to find the “Spiral Jetty”—“Another .5 miles should bring you to a fence but no cattle guard and no gate”—only to find that the route was discreetly signposted. The gravel road was corrugated, washboarded. We jolted and rattled at fifteen miles an hour, past calves the size of big dogs, and cows the size of cows, all of them black and resigned-looking. The sky slumped over a landscape that gave constant reminders of Britain, that Dartmoor feeling of worn-down ancientness. Seagulls, too. Wordsworth might have had this place in mind when he coined the phrase “visionary dreariness.” Suddenly, there was a single brown cow and, to the south, in a gap between low, dull hills, a pale glow. Light bouncing off the salt flats? That was where we were headed.

We drove more and more slowly as the potholes and trenches increased in width, depth, and frequency. The road continued to deteriorate until it finally gave up any claims to being a road. We left the cocoon of the car and began walking. There’d been no signs for a while, but there were, allegedly, three things to look out for as markers: an abandoned trailer, an old Dodge truck, and—interestingly—an amphibious landing craft. No sign of any of them. But that glow we’d noticed earlier? It wasn’t just the reflection on the lake; the sky itself was brightening. To our left, the lake looked congealed, like a dead ocean on a used-up planet. There was a faint smell of sulfur. It was the kind of location that might have been scouted for the closing scenes of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” where the shining sea turns out to be just a further extent of desolation. Protruding from the lake’s edge were the remains of some kind of enterprise, long since aborted. Was that the “Spiral Jetty”? If it was, then it was in far worse shape than we’d anticipated, not exactly a spiral and barely a jetty at all. I remembered that there had recently been a certain amount of debate on this score: whether to try to preserve the jetty, to raise it up and stop it from disappearing again, or just to leave it to its own devices, to gracefully decay and commend itself to the shallow-looking deep. But, no, it couldn’t be that far gone. We kept walking in that state of foiled uncertainty: had we already had the experience we were eagerly anticipating?

No. Because there it was, a ring of black rocks—not white, and far smaller than expected, but exuding unmistakable “Spiral Jetty”-ness.

I’m tempted to keep quoting. I think I will. This is an eminently quotable piece:

We walked toward the circles of stone and could see that these circles were actually part of an unbroken spiral. We were no longer coming to the “Spiral Jetty.” We were at the “Spiral Jetty,” waiting for the uplift, the feeling of arrival—not just in the getting-there sense but in the way Lawrence experienced it at Taos Pueblo. And it sort of happened. The weather had been quietly improving. The sky, in places, had turned from lead to zinc. Patches of blue appeared. And now, for the first time that day, the sun came out. There were shadows, light, a slow release of color.

We clambered down to the jetty—there was no path—through a slope of black rocks, where someone had fly-tipped an exhausted mattress. The jetty extended in a long straight spur before bending inward. The water was plaster-colored, slightly pink, changing color as it was enfolded by the spiral, at its whitest in the middle of the coil.

Dyer’s response to “Spiral Jetty” is fascinating. He says,

Compared with Angkor and the Pyramids, the jetty has aged at the rate of housing projects put up in a hurry. It had existed for only forty years and already it looked ancient. Which, actually, is the best thing about it. It’s fast-tracked to become a contemporary incarnation of Vedder’s sphinx. “The Lightning Field” looks perpetually sci-fi; in next to no time the “Spiral Jetty” had acquired the bleak gravity, the elemental aura, of prehistory. 

He invokes Lawrence’s notion of nodality:

The sky continued to open up. With the sound of birds and lapping water, it was lovely now—in a subdued, melancholy sort of way. It felt desolate, but this was not a place of abandoned meaning. It had retained—or generated—its own dismal nodality.

“Poles Apart” shows Dyer extracting meaning from two great works of land art – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field” and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty.” It’s one of his best essays. 

Postscript: “Poles Apart” is included in Dyer’s excellent 2016 collection White Sands. Part 1 “New Mexico” is titled “Space in Time”; Part 2 “Utah” is titled “Time in Space.”

Nunavut Day

Arctic Bay, 2006 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Today is Nunavut Day, a public holiday celebrated every July 9 in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. It marks the anniversary of the 1993 passage of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. The day celebrates Inuit self-determination, culture, and tradition.  

Lorna and I lived in Iqaluit, Nunavut, for nine years (2000 – 2009). They were among the best years of our lives – so different from what we’d experienced previously, living in Prince Edward Island. I took countless pictures while we were there – not only of Iqaluit, but of many of the other Nunavut communities that I had the privilege of visiting in my work with Qikiqtani Inuit Association. 

Here’s a half dozen of my favorite Nunavut photos – my way of paying tribute to this magnificent land and the great people who live there. 

Sylvia Grinnell River, 2007 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Kimmirut, 2007 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Iqaluit, 2008 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Rankin Inlet, 2006 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Hall Beach, 2005 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Arctic Bay, 2006 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Tables for Two Tango: BOOM!

Photo by David Williams, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Zauo"

Hannah Goldfield and Helen Rosner are essentially positive critics. They love writing about great restaurants. They rarely write about bad ones. But when they do, look out! They pull no punches. It’s fun to see them in vinegary mode. How do they express distaste? We shall see. Today, I’ll consider two of their most acid reviews – Goldfield’s “Zauo” (November 26, 2018) and Rosner’s “La Boca” (November 9, 2025). 

What do I mean by “acid”? Try this zinger: “Muddy-tasting flounder sashimi had a texture that might be best described as ‘rigor mortis.’ ” That’s from Goldfield’s review of Zauo, a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan, where diners catch their own fish from indoor tanks before having a chef prepare it on the spot. She writes, 

No matter how you feel about eating fish, eating at Zauo is a disaster. Where to begin? The endearing Japanese ritual of restaurant staff emphatically greeting all customers feels perverted here: every time someone catches a fish, employees are required to cheer, chant, and strike a taiko drum, resulting in an endless dystopian cacophony.

She catches a rainbow trout (“I grimaced as it flopped around, taking its last breaths, in the net used to scoop it out of the water”). The kitchen prepares it. Here’s her description of the result:

Did it have “a simple flavor with a touch of sweetness”? It was hard to say after half of it had been simmered in soy sauce to a bony mush, the other half grilled in salt until chewy and served with its head still on, propped up with a wooden stake like a Big Mouth Billy Bass about to sing. 

Goldfield’s concluding paragraph makes me smile:

Not even the supplementary appetizers and sides offered solace: edamame was slimy and saltless; a pile of seaweed salad arrived, for some reason, atop a bed of droopy green lettuce. If Zauo has one redeeming quality, besides a cheerful and accommodating staff, it’s the bathrooms. There are water tanks here, too—atop beautiful Toto toilets, with blissfully heated seats.

The staff and the toilet seats – these are Zauo’s only redeeming features. 

The tagline of Helen Rosner’s “La Boca” review is “The Argentinean chef Francis Mallmann is notorious for his love of cooking over open flames. With his New York début, he fizzles out.” How does he fizzle out? Rosner tells us:

Maybe it’s the lack of heat: La Boca is beautiful, and expensive, and charismatic, but it is also very bad. I ate there on three occasions, marvelling each time at the gulf between the appealing scene in the dining room, which offers live music at dinnertime and floods of sunlight during lunch, and the astonishing insipidity of what was on my plate. Virtually every dish was a disappointment, sometimes disconcertingly so. Empanadas, an essential avatar of Argentinean cuisine, arrive filled either with bland, greasy ground beef studded with slippery hunks of hard-boiled eggs, or with an oregano-infused Vermont cheddar that congeals almost immediately into a waxy blob. Their appeal is marginally lifted by an accompanying llajua sauce, which I know as a fiery, chile-based Bolivian salsa fresca, but which here seems to consist of grated tomatoes—just grated tomatoes, with hardly any salt.

“Virtually every dish was a disappointment, sometimes disconcertingly so.” That’s an abnormally negative comment for Rosner to make. She usually finds something to praise. But not at La Boca. Here’s her next paragraph:

If you’d like a steak—this is an Argentinean restaurant, after all—the options reflect Mallmann’s characteristic preoccupation with scale. There is, for instance, a thirty-two-ounce rib eye for two hundred and thirty-five dollars, and something called the Tower, which a server hyped up as a dramatic vertical assembly of beef-tenderloin slices interleaved with crispy smashed potatoes. Upon arrival, it was the anticlimax of the year, the meat mushy and flavorless, the potatoes so thin as to be nearly translucent, with the chewy toughness of a dehydrated banana peel. And what a tower—three inches high, more broad than tall, slumping glumly in a puddle of oddly oily jus. The menu’s centerpiece is the parrillada, a traditional Argentinean mixed-grill platter, here featuring a carnivorous quartet of lamb chops, branzino fillets, giant prawns, and a plump New York strip served on the grates of a grand, urn-shaped tabletop grill (unlit, purely for the vibes). It’s a nice steak—a solidly nice one. I was so surprised, and relieved, to at last find something at La Boca that was straightforwardly unobjectionable, that I started to laugh, and then nearly aspirated my bite of meat and choked to death, though I can’t fault the restaurant for that. What I can fault it for is the fact that I had requested the meat medium rare—I’d had a pleasant little exchange about it with our server, who shared happily that that’s how the chef prefers it as well—but it arrived medium well. The rest of the parrillada was fine: the lamb chops tender, the branzino crisp-skinned, the prawns gigantic. Despite their technically precise preparation, everything in the array is grossly underseasoned, though the dish does come with a tiny cup of chimichurri, peculiarly un-garlicky and unsalty, and two tiled lines of Mallmann’s famous “domino potatoes.”

Rosner knows something about Mallmann’s domino potatoes. “I’ve cooked these potatoes before,” she says. “The potatoes’ unique shape is achieved by hacking the sides off each one to make a tight-cornered rectangular brick, then slicing it thinly and pressing down to fan the pieces out like Ricky Jay spreading a deck of cards. The potatoes are baked in oodles of clarified butter, until the outsides are golden, the corners of each thin slice crisping and curling, the interiors silken.” But that’s not what she’s served at La Boca. She writes, 

The version served at La Boca—which is available as a stand-alone side dish, as well, with a pouf of arugula—was barely recognizable as the same dish. The slices of potato were thick and pallid; instead of crisp they were sticky with their own starch. Another side dish that Mallmann is famous for—humitas, an Andean preparation of fresh sweet corn slow-cooked with milk—is served in a metal ramekin, which might be why it had the tinny undertones of creamed corn straight from the can. Does the great chef know what’s going on here? Does he like it?

“Mushy and flavorless,” “chewy toughness,” “grossly underseasoned,” “thick and pallid” – these are annihilating descriptions. And that last bit about the corn dish tasting like it came “straight from the can” is the coup de grâce. Rosner obliterates La Boca. And she’s not done:

Every single dish I tried was under-salted—a common complaint, it seems, as I noticed, on my final visit, that saltshakers had been set out on every table. Squat little silver sentries that clashed with the room’s motif of gold, they seemed like quiet admissions of defeat.

Bottom line: “I don’t want to go back to La Boca, and I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone else eat there.” 

Goldfield and Rosner aren’t by nature harsh critics. They seek pleasure and love describing it. They prefer tossing bouquets to lobbing grenades. But on the rare occasion when they do the latter – BOOM! 

Homage to Hoagland: "Tiger Bright"

This is the third post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Tiger Bright” (included in Hoagland’s 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River).

Hoagland loved circuses. He worked in one for a few months in the spring of 1951, when he was eighteen. The experience made a lasting impression: see “Calliope Times” (The New Yorker, May 22, 2000; chapter 3 of his 2001 memoir Compass Points). In “Tiger Bright,” he writes about circus tigers and their trainers. The trainer he most admires is Gunther Gebel-Williams, “who constitutes a circus all by himself.” Hoagland calls him “the best animal trainer alive.” 

Hoagland’s descriptions of Gunther’s tiger act are extraordinary. For example:

Gunther’s tigers are mostly males, because a male, though surly and slow, is bigger – “more tiger,” as he says, measuring with his arms. They smell like rye bread smeared with Roquefort cheese. He chants and sings like Glenn Gould as he works with them, swinging back and forth, drawing murmuring rumbles and air-blast roars. Tigers growl softly but roar far more explosively than lions do. He spreads his arms wide so the animals have both of them to keep track of, as well as watching his face; it’s like having two assistants in the ring. He holds his whips in one hand, butt and lash reversed, and pets tiger chins with the other, grinning like a lapsed angel, a satyr – it’s a lean V face, the flat planes cut for mischief and glee, or a big-eyed lemur’s, a tree-dweller’s face. Singing and chattering, he composes their ladylike lunges into a fluttering of stripes, touching his forehead with his fingers in a Hindu salute to acknowledge applause, and kneels theatrically while the tigers sit. Throwing sawdust on their turds so that he won’t slip, he pitches his whip like a jokester, his crucifix bouncing on his bare chest, his eyes big and round, organizing them into a jungle trot. They look bulky as bulls, but when he bats them they rise into a pussy pose, paws up. “Ziva!” he calls, running to one, mimicking the twitch of her white cheeks and black mouth, and stroking her rump. “Hubblebay!” he says, and they all revolve. The band accelerates into a keynote of victory.

And:

Maybe the loveliest moment is when Gunther simply has them walk: not a feat many trainers would consider exciting or could even achieve by the adversary technique. Two leave their pedestals and promenade as they might alongside a water hole. He induces another pair to join them – but counterposed – the two pairs passing in the center of the cage. Then he gets the other four to join in, crisscrossing as in Chinese checkers before lining up in formation like the spokes of a wheel. Round and round they slink, keeping abreast, looking up at him, delaying behind the band to exercise their claws (tigers never “march”).

And this beauty – my favorite of the piece:

Bidding this group good-bye, he welcomes a middle-aged, equable tiger, redder than most, and fluffing and scratching it, introduces two elephants, an African with tusks and an Indian one without. The Indian voices its aversion in squeals, the African is indifferent to the tiger, having perhaps inherited know feelings about it one way or the other. The tiger springs to the howdah that each of them carries, down to the ground and up again, then leaps between them, back and forth, finally mounting a platform near the roof of the cage, and jumps again onto the African’s back. Gunther directs all this choreography only by words, sitting at his ease on the ring curbing and watching. The elephants and tiger mount three pedestals and rotate quietly as he talks to them; he tugs on the African’s tusks and feeds it a loaf of Italian bread. The band plays traditional Spartan brass, the tiger mounts the African elephant again, and so does Gunther, his face in a Pan-like grin. He sits on the tiger, and leaning over, tugs its tufted chin, rubs his eyes and lips, and has it roar elegantly into his face. Then he and the tiger drop down to the ground, the elephants leave the cage, and he fondles the cat, tickling its black lips and its orange rump. Then he sits lightly astride its hips and rides it across the stage at a lumbering gallop, a sight not often seen.

Wow! Wow! Wow! A tour de force of evocative writing! Hoagland unfurls detail after amazing detail. The explosive roars. The fluttering stripes. Gunther’s crucifix “bouncing on his bare chest.” He even tells us what the big cats smell like: “They smell like rye bread smeared with Roquefort cheese.” Hoagland is an inspired describer. “Tiger Bright” exemplifies his art magnificently.