August 26, 2013 Issue

Of the many pleasures of this week’s New Yorker – Christian Felber’s photograph of my favorite jazz singer, Cécile McLorin Salvant; Shauna Lyon’s description of The Elm’s petits fours (“crazy-good smoky chocolate-chip blondies”); Simone Massoni’s delightful, frilly, concentrated, high-kicking “On The Horizon” illustration for Jean Renoir’s French Cancan; David Remnick’s brilliant use of a journal-entry-style sentence (“Early on a summer morning in the Jordanian desert, driving along an empty road toward the Syrian border”), to open his excellent “City of the Lost”; Ken Auletta’s witty “Bloomberg thinks of himself as a team player, as long as it’s his team,” in his absorbing “After Bloomberg”; the gorgeous, vital ending of Meghan O’Rourke’s memorable “What’s Wrong With Me?” (“And I remember being so lost in the sun and the dog’s joy and my pleasure in these hours of freedom that I had no sense that I lived in a body, except as a thing that could feel the sun and the wind and the dog’s cold nose”) – the most piquant is Ian Frazier’s superb Talk story, “By the Numbers,” about a New York City urban garden study. I love the way this piece unfolds - nine deft paragraphs, each a marvel of compressed specificity (like a Bruegel drawing), the whole combining a delightful assortment of details (tattoo of a New York City harbor map, “forty-foot-long telescoping carbon-graphite pole,” striped T-shirt, blue watering can, garlic, devil’s trumpet) and quotes (“From the start, we wanted no spreadsheets, no clipboards, no people standing with clickers at the garden entrances,” “And each garden is different, each has its own creation myth, its own characters,” “There are chickens in urban gardens now!”), sensuously ending with a cucumber crunch. Inspired!

Postscript: Meghan O’Rourke, in her “What’s Wrong with Me?,” mentions three aunts: “At Christmas, I had lunch with three of my mother’s sisters – humorous, unself-pitying Irish-American women in their fifties – at my grandmother’s condo on the Jersey Shore.” Reading this, I think, Hey, I believe I’ve met these remarkable women before. Aren’t they the ones with red nails who are “always laughing and doing their hair up pretty / sharing lipstick and shoes and new juice diets,” and who did “jackknives off the diving board / after school” in O’Rourke’s wonderful poem “My Aunts” [The New Yorker, July 20, 2009]? I believe they are. It’s great to meet them again. They appear to be in good spirits, even though at least two of them suffer painful afflictions. O’Rourke mirrors off their “humorous, unself-pitying” attitude. In “What’s Wrong with Me?,” she writes, “I thought about my aunts, and the matter-of-fact way they lived with their illnesses – as something to deal with, but not something to fuss over. In order to become well, I would have to temper my own fanatical pursuit of wellness.”

August 12 & 19, 2013 Issue

Is it wrong to read a piece about a fatal kidney disease for pleasure? No, not when the piece is by Elif Batuman, whose art is in her marvelous gift for description. Remember the turkeys “nodding their heads and gurgling like members of a jury,” in her superb “The Memory Kitchen” (The New Yorker, April 10, 2010), and the corn bunting’s distinctive cry (“which resembles jangling keys”), in her wonderful “Natural Histories” (The New Yorker, October 24, 2011)? Her “Poisoned Land,” in this week’s issue, contains a number of pleasurable details, e.g., her depiction of researcher Calin Tatu (“Tatu, who is in his forties, and has a buzz cut and a close-trimmed beard holds a medical degree in immunology but prefers working in the lab to seeing patients. He was wearing tinted glasses and a cargo vest, and had spent the previous week climbing Mont Blanc. At lunch, over double espressos and two Coke Zeros, he told us about his research”), her description of aristolochia (“In the golden afternoon light, I saw the famous plant for the first time, recognizing its heart-shaped leaves, narrow yellow tubular flowers, and the round brown pods that have given rise to one of its local names: priest’s balls. Tatu broke open a pod. Inside, hundreds of seeds were lined up in two rows, like pupils in a schoolhouse”), and this glorious evocation of a Bosnian cornfield:

The cornstalks seemed to be standing around chaotically, like skinny, crazy people, their arms flung in all directions. As we drove past, there was one magical moment when they arranged themselves into rows and it was possible to see clearly all the way to the end, before they dissolved back into disorder.

What a delightful, irresistible passage!

Mike Brodie's Railcar Reality

Mike Brodie, #5060, 2006-2009

Two young men in an empty silver-gray hopper railcar under a pale blue-white sky, wheat-colored grass to the left and the right, a line of hoppers and telephone poles trailing into the distance, a flat body of blue-gray water in the background, the hopper’s aqua-and-black sign (first line: “BSPX 1858”), sunlight slanting in from the left, illuminating the youths’ faces, casting the cars’ angular shadows on the yellow grass. Such are the particulars of Mike Brodie’s arresting photograph #5060 from his brilliant series A Period of Juvenile Prosperity (2006-2009). The image gives you plenty to contemplate and, at the same time, it makes you want to know more. Who are these guys? Where are they going? Why are they travelling this way? Are they on the run? Are they travelling together? What’s their future? It makes you want to know more about Brodie, too. Where was he located when he took this shot? How did he happen to be there? Was he travelling with these youths? Did he know them? The picture’s tilted perspective gives it a fresh, unstudied, snagged-on-the-wing look, a quick capture of railcar reality. Geoff Dyer, in his excellent "Artist in Training" (Bookforum, Summer 2013), a review of Brodie’s A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, says, “The pictures have the day-to-day intimacy and immediacy of a journal.” That’s the way Brodie’s great #5060 strikes me - the photographic equivalent of an inspired journal entry, a fragment of “the real thing,” nimbly caught with the tang, the freshness, still on it.

Postscript: See also Jessie Wender, "Mike Brodie's 'A Period of Juvenile Prosperity' " (“Photo Booth,” newyorker.com, January 29, 2013)

August 5, 2013 Issue

Unquestionably, this week’s Pick of the Issue is Gary Shteyngart’s sublime “O.K., Glass.” It’s about Shteyngart’s experience as a Google Glass Explorer. Google Glass is a futuristic computer – a sort of wearable smart phone (Shteyngart describes his Glass as “a pair of shale-colored architect’s glasses with parts of the frame missing”). It interacts with the Internet via voice commands initiated with the magic words, “O.K., Glass.” Shteyngart won a Twitter contest run by Google to be among “the first batch of Google Explorers” (“@Shteyngart You’re invited to join our #glassexplorers program. Woohoo!”). “O.K., Glass” brims with delightful surreal reality:

A pink light comes on above the right lens. He slides his index finger against the right temple of the glasses as if flicking away a fly. The man’s right eyebrow rises and his right eye squints. He appears to be mouthing some words. A lip-reader would come away with the following message: “Forever 21 world traveler denim shorts, $22.80. Horoscope: Cooler heads prevail today, helping you strike a compromise in a matter you refused to budge on last week.”

“O.K., Glass. Google translate ‘hamburger’ into Korean.”

“Haembeogeo,” a gentle, vowel-rich voice announced after a few seconds of searching, as both English and Hangul script appeared on the display above my right eye. Since there are no earbuds to plug into Glass, audio is conveyed through a “bone conduction transducer.” In effect, this means that a tiny speaker vibrates against the bone behind my right ear, replicating sound. The result is eerie, as if someone is whispering directly into a hole bored into your cranium, but also deeply futuristic. You can imagine a time when different parts of our bodies are adapted for different needs. If a bone can hear sound, why can’t my fingertips smell the bacon strips they’re about to grab?

A few days later, I Glass out. I film a line of tourists waiting for Shake Shack burgers in Madison Square Park. I record an inane Fox Sports reporter on a nearby bench trying to guess the favorite sports team of an office worker: “You’re a vegetarian with yellow toenails and no tattoos and you drink whiskey and you like Jay-Z. Are you a Yankees fan?” As she ends the interview and gets up to leave, the Fox reporter’s mic wire gets caught in the bench and I record her toppling over. At Chelsea Market, I snap a photo of a man shorter than me. Then a gent carrying an oversized steamed lobster. I duck into the Biergarten at the Standard Hotel and take a picture of a plate of currywurst for a German-food-loving friend. “Mmm, currywurst,” I say, adding those words as a caption to the photo I’m about to send. “Mmm, curry vs.” is how Glass interprets my caption.

“O.K., Glass” is endlessly quotable. It’s close to perfection. I enjoyed it immensely.