October 1, 2018 Issue

If you relish “road trip” narratives, as I do, you’ll likely enjoy Nick Paumgarten’s “Border Ballads,” in this week’s issue. It’s a profile of singer-song writer Alejandro Escovedo, in which Paumgarten accompanies Escovedo on a three-day drive (“a kind of sentimental journey”) from Dallas to Austin “and beyond, backward through time, down to the border of old Mexico.” In Austin, Escovedo performs at a benefit concert:

Clara the bartender climbed atop a speaker case and began go-go dancing, which seemed to send a current through Escovedo. He has an infectious way of spurring his band, barking “Come on!” and “Let’s go!” with a barrage of guitar chords. Suddenly, what had seemed a local favorite’s perfectly nice presentation of well-made songs to a friendly, graying audience became a raucous, sweaty rock show. Escovedo, who’d appeared wistful and weary toward the end of the drive, seemed to shed decades. 

In Laredo, they attend a baseball game:

Outside the chain-link fence between the lot and the field, Escovedo removed his hat and stood still for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and then, as the Mexican anthem played, we bought, for eight dollars apiece, a pair of third-row seats behind the plate. The Tecos’ uniforms were trimmed in the green and red of the Mexican flag. The visiting team was from Monclova, in Coahuila. The public-address announcements were all in Spanish. By the second inning, the stands had almost filled up, amid the cicada rattle of ratcheted noisemakers known as matracas, and the call-and-response taunts of fans along the first- and third-base lines. Above the visiting dugout, a man in an ape suit made lewd gestures and led chants of “asshole” and “puto,” in an unfolding feud across the field with a chubby güey in a giant sombrero. Between innings, an owl mascot did the merengue. Escovedo, in big square sunglasses and a new Tecos cap, sipped a Tecate and declared that this was the best time he’d had in ages.

That marvellous passage made me smile. Paumgarten is a superb describer. 

Postscript: James Wood, in his “Departure Lounge,” a review of Olga Tokarczuk’s encyclopaedic novel Flights, in this week’s issue, continues to elaborate his wonderful “detail” theory. Wood writes,

Chopin’s heart is information, which anyone can possess; a memory of stove fumes is not information but a particular, personal memory, which is likely to prompt one of our own. There is the utopian theory of mobility and endless curiosity, and there is our daily reality, which is composed of a billion familiar details, most of them indescribable—the rooms we sit in, and the dimmer rooms we were once raised in; the streets we live on, and the old streets we grew up on, which truly exist now only in our heads. There is the desirable horizon, but there is also the furrowed field, which we know so well and which has made us who we are.

Expressing his preference for subjective specifics (“the furrowed field”) over abstract conceptions (“the desirable horizon”), Wood reaffirms his deep love of thisness.