March 28, 2022 Issue

In this week’s issue, Nick Paumgarten visits a retirement village in Florida and writes about it. Sound exciting? Actually, it’s terrific! One reason is that the community in question – Latitude Margaritaville, in Daytona – turns out to be a genuinely fun place to live. Another is that Paumgarten, as we know from previous pieces, can be witheringly skeptical about man-made paradises: see, for example, his evisceration of Augusta National in “Unlike Any Other” (The New Yorker, June 24, 2019). So when you start reading this piece, you don’t know how it’s going to go. Will it be a scoff or a spree? It turns out to be a bit of both. Along the way, it affords the pleasure of reading Paumgarten at his descriptive best. For example:

Men with guitars set up outside someone’s garage, and the golf carts appear out of nowhere. Commence the beer pong. Pool parties, poker nights, talent shows, toga parties, pig roasts. Cigar-club meeting, group renewal of wedding vows, a pub crawl in old St. Augustine. Oktoberfest this fall had a “Gilligan’s Island” theme; “Hoodstock” was hippies, Fireball, and multicolored jello shots. The golf carts zip and swerve. 

And:

Late in the day, I found McChesney playing cornhole in the village square with some friends. I joined in for a while, and then we loaded up the cornhole boards and got into his golf cart and, beers in hand, hummed down the cart path, in the pink subtropical twilight, pines and palms whizzing by, a whiff of fry grease lingering in the air.

And:

The night went by in a wash of gentle, well-rehearsed and well-worn folk rock, amid video imagery of reefs, coves, beaches, sailboats, cocktails, Jet Skis, cheeseburgers, and resort developments—a kind of subliminal indoctrination into the blurred line between the wild and the tame, the pristine and the industrialized. 

“Five O’Clock Everywhere” is a wonderful exploration of “retirement the Margaritaville way.” I enjoyed it immensely. 

March 21, 2022 Issue

What’s it like to live in Ukraine right now? Joshua Yaffa’s “The Siege,” in this week’s issue, tells us in detail after immersive detail. Here, for example, is his description of conditions at Kyiv’s Ohmatdyt children’s hospital:

The hospital was facing a crisis with its regular patients. Hundreds of children suffering from severe conditions required urgent treatment and operations. Supplies of expensive and rare cancer medicines were running low; flights were grounded and logistics scrambled, making it impossible to get stem cells for bone-marrow transplants. Given the ongoing risk of missile strikes and air raids, most of the children had been moved to a series of basements in the hospital complex. Inside one, dozens of mattresses were arrayed on a concrete floor. The space was dank and drafty. The ceiling leaked. Mothers rocked their crying children or lay silently with them. Pots of food were kept warm on small stoves. One infant needed a shunt implanted to remove fluid from her brain. A six-month-old girl and her mother had checked in to Ohmatdyt for an operation to regulate the baby’s lymphatic system. “We were all ready, and the war started,” the woman told me.

And here’s his depiction of Kyiv’s International Square, “near where the bulk of Russian forces had massed”: 

There had been a firefight the night before. The carcass of a torched military transport truck lay slumped on the asphalt. A shot-up Army bus with deflated tires stood across the square. Shrapnel and bullet casings crunched underfoot. A group of locals had gathered to take a look.

Everywhere Yaffa goes, he talks with people, noting down their comments. For example:

Later that day, I stopped by Dubler, a stylish café co-owned by a local architect named Slava Balbek. It had been closed for days, but I found a dozen young people seated around a long wooden table finishing a late breakfast. Balbek was conducting a planning meeting with volunteers. He had turned the café into a nonprofit kitchen and delivery hub, sending meals to Territorial Defense units, hospitals, and anyone else left behind. “I went straightaway to my local military-recruitment depot, but they told me they were already full”—in the first ten days of the war, a hundred thousand people reportedly enlisted in the volunteer forces—“so I thought, O.K., how else can I be helpful,” Balbek, who is thirty-eight, and an amateur triathlete, told me. “I’m a good trouble-shooter, and if you leave out the particular horrors of war, this is basically organizational work. You need strong nerves and cold reason.”

My take-away from Yaffa’s absorbing piece is that Ukrainians are an amazing people – united and determined to survive Putin’s brutal invasion. The final paragraph says it all:

War has split Shchastia yet again. Dunets, the civil-military-administration head, was recalled back to the Ukrainian Army, and is fighting with the 128th Brigade. Tyurin, his deputy, stayed on in the city administration, albeit under a new flag. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. “I told them to fuck off,” he said.

Photo by Jérôme Sessini, from Joshua Yaffa's "The Siege"

March 14, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s “Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter,” an account of his overnight visit with journalist Kristina Berdynskykk in an underground space of a Kyiv metro station. Every night, Yaffa says, Kyiv metro stations “fill with as many as fifteen thousand civilians, from young families with inflatable mattresses to babushkas who remember wartime stories from their parents many decades ago.” He says of Berdynskykk,

Along with her sixty-seven-year-old mother, Galina, and seventeen-year-old niece, Nastya, she had secured a place inside a train car, which tends to be a few degrees warmer than the concrete platform. On every surface, several dozen people lay in various angles of awkward recline, surrounded by rolling suitcases and plastic shopping bags.

Yaffa puts us squarely there, in the makeshift bomb shelter, when the lights go down for the night:

After ten, the lights in the station dimmed. People packed up their food and rolled out sleeping bags, the white glow of phone screens casting flickering shadows on the walls of the train car. I crawled into my folded-up blanket, and felt the cold floor beneath me. The muffled rumble of nearby snores felt almost reassuring, a reminder of all the humanity gathered so tightly together. A woman offered me a pillow.

That passage is inspired!

Photo by Emanuele Satolli, from Joshua Yaffa's "Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter"

March 7, 2022 Issue

A special shout-out to The New Yorker for its “Days of War,” a portfolio of Mark Neville’s photos, in this week’s issue. Neville’s portraits catch the remarkable strength of Ukrainian character in the face of Russia's vicious invasion. Joshua Yaffa, in his accompanying text, quotes Neville as follows:

“What I find most remarkable is the resilience of the people there,” Neville says. “As a photographer, I’ve been in many places where people are going through incredible trauma. They would reach out to me for help, for money, to get them out, and I would say, ‘The only way I can help is to take your picture and tell your story.’ But with Ukrainians, and with some of the many hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced, no one—not one—has asked me for anything. The only thing they want is to sit me down and tell me what’s happened to them. They have lost people, seen people wounded terribly, seen their streets obliterated. All I want is for people who are looking at these pictures to recognize a version of themselves. Schoolkids taking gymnastics lessons, people just going about their lives despite the shelling and more. For eight years! Can you imagine?”

Mark Neville, "Days of War" (2022)

Postscript: Jonathan D. Spence 1936 - 2021

Jonathan D. Spence (Photo by Misha Erwitt)

I want to pay tribute to Jonathan D. Spence, who died a few months ago, age eighty-five. Spence was an eminent scholar of Chinese history. And he was a great writer. His style was spare and elegant. I’m not a student of Chinese history. But I enjoyed reading his writing, especially his New York Review of Books pieces: see, for example, “A Master in the Shadows” (April 5, 2012); “The Ball and the World” (December 8, 2011); “The Enigma of Chiang Kai-shek” (May 28, 2009); “Portrait of a Monster” (November 3, 2005).

There’s a sentence in the “Acknowledgments” of his wonderful The Question of Hu (1988) that I cherish:

And just in case all that love and caring from so many people might not prove enough, my aged dog Daisy climbed the narrow wooden steps to my summer study countless times a day, and lay across from me during every word, sighing gently in her sleep over my endless attempts to draw some meaning out of the constantly vanishing past.

February 28, 2022 Issue

Rivka Galchen, one of my favorite New Yorker writers, has a medical piece in this week’s issue. Called “Change of Heart,” it’s about the world’s first transplantation of a pig’s heart into a human. Galchen talks with the surgeon, Bartley Griffith, who performed the operation. She talks with the surgeon, Muhammad M. Mohiuddin, who led the surgery that extracted the heart from a year-old genetically modified pig. She describes the transplantation:

The cold pig heart was delivered to the operating room. “Some people like to blast music in an O.R., but I like to hear pins drop,” Griffith said. “I like to hear the sound of the heart-and-lung machine.” Griffith estimates that he has performed more than a thousand heart transplants, but this one called for a different start: before he made the first incision, he suggested that everyone pause for thirty seconds to “think about what this man is entering into.” He described the transplantation as an opportunity to learn. Griffith told me, “We don’t usually take a moment like that. But I think it relaxed everyone. And then we went to work.” The process of transplanting a heart is both brutal and precise. An eight-inch incision is made in the chest. The breastbone is cut in half with a bone saw. The ribs are opened outward to expose the heart. One large vein and one large artery are connected by tubes to a cardiopulmonary-bypass machine; a third tube washes the organ with a heart-stopping fluid. That’s the beginning.

And, most memorably, she describes what happens when the transplanted pig’s heart starts to beat:

When he first pulled the pig heart out of its container, it looked small and pale. “It had an opaqueness that was off-putting,” he said. “I wondered, Did we do something wacky?” He connected the pig heart to the patient’s vessels. He released the clamp, allowing human blood to flow into the organ. “It was as if we’d turned on a light. And it was a red light. The heart just brightened up. And it went from trembling to pumping.” He demonstrated the movement with his hands. “Hearts don’t just squeeze when they beat, they kind of twist, and this heart—it was doing the hoochy-coochy. It was one of the best hearts I’ve ever seen after transplantation.”

Galchen is a superb describer of complex scientific projects: see, for example, her “Green Dream” (on nuclear fusion), and her “The Eighth Continent” (on the race to develop the moon). She writes clearly and vividly. I enjoy her work immensely. 

3 for the Sea: Redmond O'Hanlon's "Trawler"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Trawler.

Strap yourself into your chair. Use belts, rope, bungee cords, whatever you can find, because you’re about to enter the wild, chaotic, alien, manic, exotic world of the Nortlantean, an Orkney commercial trawler (“a 38.5 metre-long deep draught mass of iron”), fishing the freezing North Atlantic, in a storm gusting Force 11 to Category One Hurricane:

It was a black night, but the Norlantean’s main stern searchlight was on, and the black night was a white-out of spray, a chaos of whirling streaks of foam – in patches so thick that at first the lines and spirals seemed almost stationary in the inverted cone of the fierce rays of light. And then, as I withdrew my mesmerized gaze from the furthest penetration of the beam (which was not far – just enough to give me a glimpse of the Norlantean’s starboard gunwhale, now rolling down, down, digging in to the waves I couldn’t see, and would she come up? How could she come up? And why did she have to move her whole stern like that, a fast side-to-side rear-end waggle like a cat about to pounce, and then wallow deep down in, and slew obscenely left-to-right in a movement I’d certainly not felt before … ), as I focused on the very brightest patch of spray and bunched foam a yard or two out from the searchlight, I realized that all this torn-up water was moving so very shockingly fast, and I felt sick, but it was not seasickness – no, it was far worse, it was entirely personal, hidden, the steely stomach-squeeze of genuine all-out fear, that sharp warning you get before you panic and disgrace yourself to yourself forever … 

The “I” in the above passage is O’Hanlon. Trawler is the riveting account of his two-week trip aboard the Norlantean, January, 1999. He’s there with his young friend Luke Bullough, a marine biologist (“a man with a vast experience of the real sea: as a research diver in Antarctica; as a Fisheries Patrol officer in the Falklands; on trawlers and research ships in the North Atlantic”). Luke is O’Hanlon’s guide (“Hey, Redmond! Big style! We’re going to have a grand time, you and I”; “I want you to see everything, every chance we get”). And that’s what happens; he does get to see everything – the bridge, the machinery, the galley, the hold, the fish-room, the hauling of the net, and, most memorably, the amazing fish that are caught in that net  – except, for O’Hanlon, it’s not always a “grand time.” For one thing, he gets seasick:

Smacked left, hard, against the steel plates of the inward bulging port-bow and right, hard, against the steel partition of the rusty shower, I pitched to my knees in front of the seatless bowl and held on to the rim with both hands, hard. On the floor to either side were two big circular iron valves, each stamped SCUPPER DISCHARGE O/BOARD. I lowered my face into the bowl. The head-torch lit up every ancient and modern shit-splatter: one, particularly old and black, in front of my nostrils, was shaped like a heart. And then I said goodbye to all that Guiness, to the pig’s supper at the Royal Hotel (£28 for two) and even, perhaps to a day-old bolus of breakfast at Bev’s Kitchen, Nairn.

For another, he has a hard time keeping his balance due to the Norlantean’s constant pitching, rolling, swaying, heaving, surging, and yawing:

Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva, I worked my way out of my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag and, lying back again on the bunk, I pulled on my pants, my trousers. I found my black socks (three to each foot, against the cold) and, bundling forward like a curled foetus, I lodged into my wooly carapace of a sweater. The effort of it: there was no rest anywhere, nothing would stay still … The mind-emptying noise of the engines faltered, throttled back, dipped like a Lancaster bomber coming into land, and a that moment the siren sounded, a piercingly high BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. Other smaller, straining engines came into life directly beneath me, and the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue, gently, very slowly, prone, through the hanging curtains of Luke’s bunk, over his flat blue sleeping-bag, out the other side – and it tipped me off and down on to his linear collection of red, blue and yellow plastic biscuit-boxes. My buttocks, I’m sorry to say, must have landed on his favourite box, his red Jacobs biscuit-box, because under me its top and sides blew-up, releasing a tight stash of small, empty, plastic screw-lid Marine Lab specimen-bottles all over the floor.

Many of the book’s best scenes are set in the fish-room, where the haul is sorted and gutted. O’Hanlon describes it magnificently:

“Come on, we’ll set up here.” He stepped across to the flat steel shelf beside a conveyor belt which divided the cavernous fish-room into two: a steel-sided, steel-grilled trackway that led from a tall, round, stainless-steel table (down to our left) to a closed hatch at my feet. A slosh of seawater, shin-high, washed across the dark brown swollen slippery wooden floorboards with each roll and, as the ship bent shuddering over to port, a part of the wave of slush and foam ladled itself out via the half-open drop-gate of the port scupper. As she rolled further over and down, fresh white seawater powered in, to toss and curl, as the ship righted herself, straight across to starboard, to repeat the process. “Grand!” said Luke, switching on his scales (a red light appeared to the left of the long calibrated dial). “Magic! It works – even in seas like this!” The steel ceiling of the fish-room was a confusion of pipes and cables (some encased in steel tubes, some simply slung and looped); strip lights; fuse boxes. The stainless-steel sides of the hopper occupied about one-fifth of the space, down in the left-hand corner, and from it another shorter conveyor belt led up to the circular rimmed table. To our right, to the right of the bulkhead door to the galley, lay a wide-diameter ribbed tube, an augur of sorts, a length of giant gut. Directly aft, at the end of the rectangular cavern, another open bulkhead door let dimly through to the net-deck, where the big winches for the bridle stood back-lit by the early morning light streaming in from the stern-ramp, from the bright surface of the heaped-up, following sea. 

The fish-room is where we see the fish, not only Greenland halibut, redfish, Blue ling, and Grenadiers, which are what the Norlantean is hunting, but also strange, extraordinary creatures such as a Rabbit fish:

The monstrous chimera, the mythical freak, two or three feet long, was on its back, its creamy underside shiny with slime, its pectoral fins like wings, and where its neck should have been was a small oval of a mouth set with teeth like a rabbit’s. It slid down, flop, on the tray. Its foot-long-rat-tail whiplashed after it.

And a deep-sea octopus:

At the centre of my field of vision, at the bottom of the steep, inward-angled, stainless-steel panels of the tall container, to the right of four Greenland halibut which lay where they’d slid (just below the lower lip of the open drop-gate to the conveyor), there spread across the slopes of the floor, there swirled around Luke’s yellow sea-boots, a semi-transparent globular mass of brown and purple, a gelatinous colourless shine which you could see right through, a something from another world, a dead creature which, as I stared, resolved itself into far too many long viscid arms studded with white boils, eruptions, suckers to hold you fast …

In one of my favorite scenes, Luke mischievously lures O’Hanlon into a startling encounter with an anglerfish:

Expecting some minor curiosity, I stepped into the stainless-steel hopper, right leg first, over the sill – and stopped. My left leg (despite its outer oilskin protection, its inner high yellow rubber sea-boot complete with steel toe-cap) refused to follow. From my brain it received the down-both-legs forked message before I did. It already knew that my right leg, at the level of the lower shin, was one engulfing snap away from a permanent goodbye to a length of oilskin, one half of a right yellow welly complete with its toe-cap of steel, one still flexible ankle and a perfectly usable right foot.

Because six inches from my right shin was a three-foot gape of mouth; and the inside of this mouth was black; the outer lips were black; the whole nightmare fish, if it was a fish, was slimy black. The rim of the projecting lower jaw was set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch, and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting. Above them, beneath the drawn-back curve of the upper lip, curling up to a snarl below the centre of the broad black snout, there was a complimentary set of masonry nails, points down, waiting. And between the globular black eyes, wide apart, fixed on me, were a couple of long black whips, wireless aerials … And, very obviously, there was only one thing on the mind of this monstrous something – it wanted to eat. And it didn’t look, to me, as if it was a picky eater. Discrimination, taste, haute cuisine, no, that was not its thing. Not at all … 

As you can see, I love quoting O’Hanlon. He’s a brilliant writer – where brilliance means specific, attentive, original, vivid, perceptive, vital, humorous. Trawler is one of his masterpieces. 

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss various aspects of these three great books – their action, structure, point of view, sense of place, sense of people, descriptive art, meaning, humour – in more detail. My next post in this series will be on structure.