On the Horizon: "3 Great Thematic Travelogues"

I enjoyed doing “3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place” so much that I’ve decided to keep it going. For my new series, I’ve chosen three brilliant thematic travelogues – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013). Each is a collection of travel essays threaded with a theme – walking (The Old Ways), swimming (Waterlog), drinking (The Wet and the Dry). The books are beautifully written. I want to study them in detail. A new series then – “3 Great Thematic Travelogues” – starting January 1, 2026.

December 8, 2025 Issue

Jorie Graham, in this week’s issue, interprets Elizabeth Bishop’s great “At the Fishhouses.” She notes, as many readers before her have noted, the poem’s spellbinding shift in register: "The poem has moved from the conversational, the anecdotal, to the divinatory." Seamus Heaney called it "a big leap." But Graham adds something new when she says, 

The final word, “flown,” seems to glide etymologically right off the watery “flowing,” before morphing, as if by miracle—the miracle of language—into the action of a bird. The vision lifts away. Was it a visitation? An annunciation? But it is gone. And we are back in our strange solitude, our individuality—in history.

The vision lifts away – this is interesting. I’ve read and reread this transfixing poem many times. I’ve read many commentaries on it: see my recent “Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’: Five Interpretations.” It never occurred to me that “flown” means the vision departs, flies away. I always thought it referred to Bishop’s idea of knowledge. Consider the poem’s last six lines:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

In other words, we know what is now happening (“flowing”) and we know what has passed away (“flown”). But I’m open to Graham’s take on it. The idea of Bishop’s harbor epiphany suddenly flaring and then vanishing appeals to me. 

The Netflix Documentary "The New Yorker at 100" Is Excellent!

The documentary “The New Yorker at 100” is currently streaming on Netflix. I watched it last night. It’s excellent. It artfully interweaves key publishing moments in the magazine’s vast history – John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” – with segments on what the current staff is up to, including production of the magnificent “100th Anniversary Issue” (February 17 & 24, 2025). As an avid New Yorker fan, I was thrilled to get a look inside the magazine’s offices and see the editorial process in action. I enjoyed the whole thing immensely. Highly recommended. 

Tables for Two Tango: Helen Rosner's "Foul Witch"

Photo by Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Foul Witch"

This is the second post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Rosnor’s deeply sensual “Tables for Two: Foul Witch” (December 18, 2023).

This piece does not start promisingly. Rosner describes Foul Witch’s neighborhood: “feels neither hip nor interesting.” She says, 

The restaurant, too, is oddly short on ambience: the long, narrow, high-ceilinged dining room is like a hallway to nowhere; the rough brick walls and exposed ductwork make the space feel unfinished, rather than artfully gritty; the open kitchen, built into the back of the space, has a startup-garage haphazardness, eschewing any aesthetic grace.

So far, so meh. But the next lines surprise and delight:

Thank goodness, then, for early winter sunsets, and low interior lighting, and food so fascinatingly delicious that you don’t care where you’re sitting to eat it. Every meal at Foul Witch begins with a complimentary portion of bread and butter: a wedge of crisp, oil-slick focaccia; a length of sour baguette, bien cuit; an enormous dollop of yolk-yellow butter, soft as cake frosting, salted like the sea. It’s a struggle not to finish every bite, which would be strategically unwise, given what’s to come. 

Wow! Food so fascinatingly delicious that you don’t care where you’re sitting to eat it – can restaurant praise get any more effusive than that? As a matter of fact, yes. Rosner is just getting warmed up. Here’s her next passage:

Foul Witch is ostensibly an Italian restaurant, though it is seemingly unconstrained by any known definition of that cuisine. The wines are global, and err on the side of bizarre. I was enraptured, one evening, by a Slovenian pinot grigio that my server described (accurately) as “entirely un-green.” On another visit, I fell hard for a gravelly Ryšák, an uncommon Czech blend of red and white grapes. The food, meanwhile, is luscious, almost libidinous; Mirarchi’s motivating principle seems to be the pursuit of suppleness and surrender. For an appetizer, pale rounds of pawpaw, the custard-like North American fruit that tastes like the tropics (and which ought to be a star on far more menus), are served at the bottom of a small, deep bowl, bathed in cream, beneath an obscene, slumping scoop of Golden Kaluga caviar. Tortellini, soft and curvaceous, have a velvet filling of veal sweetbreads; they swim in a golden broth made strange and beautiful by a butterscotch splash of Amaretto. A tender filet of wagyu, grilled over charcoal, comes with an earthy, almost animal, sunchoke béarnaise.

That “The food, meanwhile, is luscious, almost libidinous” makes me smile. Rosner is a voluptuary. Her review of Foul Witch is one of her most voluptuous pieces. Dig her conclusion:

What unites the menu is a concentrated sensuality. Even the kitchen’s more pointed preparations, with piercing flavors that break up the menu’s otherwise relentless rolling softness, are almost unnervingly alive: a needle-sharp salsa verde dressing a plate of yielding Sorana beans; an anchovy-drenched celery salad, the vegetable sliced lengthwise into curling tentacles. Often, when restaurants are called “sexy,” that means sleek-lined and hard-edged; the food at Foul Witch is sexy, not in the way of a fast car or a low-slung couch but like actual sex: a physical indulgence, a sinking in, an embodied experience of pleasure.

That last line is one of my favorites in all of “Tables for Two.” Rosner is a brilliant carnal writer.

December 1, 2025 Issue

The two pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: I’m Donut ?” and Alex Ross’s “Written in Stone.” Rosner’s piece is a review of the new Times Square doughnut shop called I’m Donut ?. Her description of the store’s doughnuts is delectable. Here’s a sample:

There are chocolate and matcha variants, their subtle flavors baked into the dough. Then there are filled doughnuts, whose puffy centers are pumped with flavored creams, all of them vivid and none too sweet: custard, more matcha, fragrant sake gelée with Chantilly, airy peanut-butter cream swirled with tart Concord-grape jelly. There are some New York-exclusive flavors, like a ring doughnut glazed in neon-pink strawberry icing, freckled with bits of freeze-dried berry that crackle and melt on the tongue, or a chocolate variety with a caramel-espresso cream filling that was unexpectedly, thrillingly bitter and complex. The somewhat controversial scrambled-egg doughnut features a sugary original doughnut piped full of soft curds and a squirt of a sweet-savory tomato mayonnaise—a bold and bizarre breakfast manifesto that refuses to be definitively sweet or definitively savory. I loved it unreservedly, though I imagine I might be in the minority.

Mm, I’ll have one of those chocolate ones with the caramel-espresso cream filling, please.

Ross’s “Written in Stone” is a paean to the Orkney Islands. He says, “Orkney is one of those places where the veil over the distant past seems to lift.” He visits various Neolithic ruins: the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, the tomb at Maeshowe. His favorite site is Stenness. He writes,

During a recent visit to Orkney, I kept returning to Stenness, at all hours and in all weather. On drizzly days, with skies hanging low, the stones resemble ladders to nowhere. In bright sun, hidden colors emerge: streaks of blue against gray; white and green spatters of lichen; yellowish stains indicating the presence of limonite, an iron ore. Pockmarks and brittle edges show the abrading action of millennia of wind and rain. I watched as tourists approached the stones and hesitantly touched them, as if afraid. When I put my own hands on the rock, I felt no obvious emanations, though I did not feel nothing. One evening, I leaned on a fence as the sun went down, the horizon glowing orange against a cobalt sky. A whitish mist stole in from the lochs, encircling a nearby house until only its roof and chimneys remained. Spectral shapes caught my eye: sheep were trimming the grass around the site. When they detected my presence, they streamed away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats. The stones loomed as black silhouettes. I felt a sweet shiver of the uncanny.

I love that description of the sheep, “streaming away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats.” “Written in Stone” is a wonderful tour of Neolithic Orkney. I enjoyed it immensely. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Conclusion

This is the sad part of the journey, my final post in this series. Today I’ll try to express what these three great books – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – mean to me.

These books are excellent examples of literary explorations of place. The locations explored – the Pine Barrens, the Meadowlands, Pine Ridge Reservation – are on the margins of society. That’s one of the things I relish. Another is the immersive way they’re explored – the walking, canoeing, driving, and roaming. McPhee climbs a fire tower to get the view:

From the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill, in Washington Township, Burlington County, New Jersey, the view extends about twelve miles. To the north, forest land reaches to the horizon. The trees are mainly oaks and pines, and the pines predominate. Occasionally, there are long, dark, serrated stands of Atlantic white cedars, so tall and so closely set that they seem to be spread against the sky on the ridges of hills, when in fact they grow along streams that flow through the forest. To the east, the view is similar, and few people who are not native to the region can discern essential differences from the high cabin of the fire tower, even though one difference is that huge areas out in this direction are covered with dwarf forests, where a man can stand among the trees and see for miles over their upper-most branches. To the south, the view is twice broken slightly – by a lake and by a cranberry bog – but otherwise it, too, goes to the horizon in forest. To the west, pines, oaks, and cedars continue all the way, and the western horizon includes the summit of another hill – Apple Pie Hill – and the outline of another fire tower, from which the view three hundred and sixty degrees around is virtually the same as the view from Bear Swamp Hill, where, in a moment’s sweeping glance, a person can see hundreds of square miles of wilderness. 

Sullivan and his friend Leo Koncher, age eighty-three, gingerly cross an old railroad bridge forty feet over the Passaic River:

Many of the railroad ties on the bridge were burnt out so that the path was like the smile of a man with no teeth. I was walking slowly in an effort to keep from falling in, and at several points we both had to get on our hands and knees to climb between faraway ties. I expressed concern. “What are you worried about” he finally asked me. I said I was worried about falling into the river. Leo shook his head in bemused disgust. When we got to the end of the bridge, he had me look up to see the elevated span stuck straight in the air like a rusted knife. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” he said. “This is really the best view.” 

Frazier attends a powwow, walks around, observes all the activity, and then suddenly decides he wants to be somewhere quiet and empty:

I maneuvered through the crowd, went by the taco and lemonade stands, out the gate in the chain-link fence, through the field full of parked cars. The carnival had shut down and the rock-and-roll no longer played, and only one generator still purringly ran. I walked to downtown Pine Ridge, past the tribal building, up the hill to the old hospital, and then onto the open field of the Path the Doctors Walk On. I went half a lap around and sat down. The grass was damp; dew had begun to fall. I could hear the amplified voice of the announcer at the powwow. Then his voice stopped, and the only sound was the singing and drumming. It came through the darkness high and strong and wild as if blown on the wind. It could have been ten voices singing or it could have been a thousand. At moments it sounded like other night noises, coyotes or mosquitoes, or like a sound the land itself might make. I imagined what hearing this would have done to me if I were a young man from Bern, Switzerland (say), travelling the prairie for the first time in 1843. I knew it would have scared and thrilled me to within an inch of my life.

Or like the sound the land itself might make – how fine that is! These books are deeply in touch with the land. That’s another thing I love about them. To me, it’s their main message. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three wonderful books. I picture it like this: the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill; Fred Brown’s house in Hog Wallow; an old and weirdly leaning catalpa tree; the ruins of the great paper factory in Harrisville; a wild blueberry bush; Chatsworth General Store; a mud-colored 1948 De Soto; a Ryan monoplane; a pine tree with a splendid green crown and a trunk that is still black from an old fire; a green wood orchid; a whippoorwill; a big red polyethylene canoe; a muskrat; Kearney Library; a carp; stalagmites of pigeon dung; a Muscovy duck; a mosquito; Leo Koncher’s workshop, with salvaged cedar stumps on the roof; the Pulaski Skyway; the PJP landfill; the old Penn Station; the Stadium Restaurant in downtown Secaucus; a catfish covered in slime; an eagle feather on a buckskin thong; portrait of Le War Lance; Big Bat’s Texaco; a sun-dance pole; a star quilt; aerial view of White Clay; page from the Billings Gazette showing full-color photo of Frazier’s car upside down in snow-filled ditch; portrait of SuAnne Big Crow; fatality marker on Interstate 90 where SuAnne’s fatal accident occurred; grove of cotton woods; spiderwort; tumbleweeds. Overlap these images and paste them at crazy angles to each other. I call my collage “Sulpheezier.”