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| Vincent Mahé, “The Tank” (2017) |
There are highlights aplenty. But before we get started,
let’s have a drink – something strong and refreshing. How about a Jonn the
Beachcomber? Remember that one? McKenna Stayner described it as “slurpy and
delicious, with three types of rum, allspice, grenadine, pineapple, lime, and
crushed ice in a goblet the size of a fishbowl, topped with fruit salad and studded
with heart-shaped straws” (“Bar Tab: Super Power,” February 27, 2017). Yes, I’ll have one of those, please.
While we’re on the subject of drinks, I just want to say
that this year’s “Bar Tab” and “Tables For Two” columns were terrific –
tremendous sources of delicious sensual description. My favorite “Tables For
Two” was Becky Cooper’s “Mermaid Spa” (March 6, 2017). It’s so good, I’m going
to quote it in full:
The smell of chlorine emanating from the concrete building
is the first hint that Mermaid Spa, in Coney Island, isn’t Spa Castle. There
are no crystal rooms, no “color therapy” experiences, and, thankfully, no uniforms
reminiscent of a totalitarian regime. This is a Ukrainian-Russian community
center, a blustery twenty-minute walk from the subway, as traditional as banyas
get in New York City, with a clientele that takes its sweating very seriously.
There is, happily, also a restaurant, which serves some solid Russian classics.
The dining room, guarded by golden mermaids, is built around
a hot tub. There are older men in groups; younger, shiny men in groups; and fit
couples throwing back plastic pints of beer. Everyone is wearing towels, and
most are in felt hats that, counterintuitively, help with the heat. Claim a
table—it’s yours for the day—and head into the sauna. Sweat until you can’t
stand it, and escape to the cold shower. Pull the chain and a torrent of ice
water rushes over you. Then go to the steam room and get lost in the fog,
before plunging into the ice pools. Jump out, gasp for breath, and feel your
head pound with shock and relief. Repeat until you’re jelly, and then it’s time
to eat.
Many tables stick with giant bottles of water and platters
of fresh fruit. But you came for the food, so go for it. The large meat
dishes—lamb leg, beef stroganoff, chicken tabaka—are hefty in a way that seems
ill-advised in the setting. The hot appetizers are a better idea. The borscht
is rich and thick. The garlicky French fries, piled on a sizzling iron skillet,
though not exactly what you’d picture eating in a bathing suit, are a banya
staple. Even more traditional are the pelmeni, filled with beef, lamb, and
veal, and topped with mushroom gravy, which are addictive until they congeal at
room temperature. Luckily, the dish is too good to leave for long. The best,
though, are the cold appetizers, especially the pickled herring or, if you
dare, the salo—raw pig lard, frozen and sliced thin. The procedure is half the
fun: Layer it over some brown bread. Salt it. Pick up a raw garlic clove. Salt
that. Bite one, then the other. The sharp fire of the raw garlic gives way to
the sweetness of the bread, and to the soothing fat as it melts. It’s more
bracing than the ice pools.
On the way out, do yourself a favor and stop by the beach,
whose winter charm doesn’t get enough credit. The steam rises off your skin.
The coastline extends as far as you can see, populated by no one.
That is tremendously alive, and it's the knowing sensual
instructions (“Sweat until you can’t stand it,” “Pull the chain,” “Repeat until
you’re jelly,” “Salt it,” “Pick up a raw garlic clove,” “Bite one, then the
other”) that make it so.
For me, the best fact piece of the year was Luke Mogelson’s
“The Avengers of Mosul” (February 6, 2017), a brilliant, brutal, immersive
account of Mogelson’s experience traveling with an Iraqi SWAT team as it fights
to liberate Mosul from ISIS occupation. Here’s a sample:
The snipers eventually quit for the night, but they resumed
with gusto in the morning. The SWAT-team members who were not stationed on the
roof went to the road behind the house. Bullets zinged up the alley leading to
the cemetery. Every now and then, the men backed a Humvee into the alley and
aimed a few bursts from the Dushka at Al Quds; they also launched grenades from
a turret-mounted MK19. The moment the Humvee pulled back behind cover, more
bullets hit the house and the houses around it. They kicked up dirt and slapped
against walls. They pierced an empty fuel tanker. They shook the branches of a
tree and cut down leaves. They ricocheted off power-line poles, ringing them
like bells.
“The Avengers of Mosul” is an extraordinary piece of
writing, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. I relish the way it unfolds
sequentially without flashbacks. I relish its factual style. I relish its focus
on the SWAT-team members. Most of all, I relish its details, e.g., a Humvee’s
interior (“I crammed into Mezher’s vehicle, sharing a seat with a corporal in a
black balaclava. We were wedged in amid ammo boxes, ammo belts, and the feet of
another policeman, who stood in the turret behind a Dushka, a Russian heavy
machine gun”); a medic’s cigarette ash (“He spoke excellent English, and worked
with calm efficiency, often while smoking a cigarette, the ash falling on his
patients”); the SWAT team’s deputy commander sitting on the edge of a bed
“casually flipping a hand grenade around his finger”; inside a new aid station
(“The fake-gold pages of a Koran, draped with a garland of plastic roses, were
mounted on the wall, above bags of saline hanging from protruding screws”); the
way a soldier puts his foot on a prisoner’s head (“The soldier in the cap
twisted his boot back and forth, as if putting out a cigarette”); the ringtone
of the Swat-team commander’s phone (“His phone kept ringing: the tone was the
theme song from the movie ‘Halloween’ ”); a woman suturing a boy’s face with
needle and thread (“It looked as if she’d dipped her hands in a bucket of red
paint. I cut the thread and tried to shoo her off. A minute later, while
attending to the wounds on the man’s legs, I looked up and saw that she was
stitching him again”).
Mogelson’s follow-up piece, “Dark Victory,” (November 6,
2017), on the battle to expel ISIS from Raqqa, is pretty damn good, too. It
features stunning color photos by Mauricio Lima, at least two of which will be
on my “Best of 2017: Photography” list, which I’ll be posting in the next few
days.
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| Mauricio Lima, "Female Fighters for the Syrian Democratic Forces" (2017) |
My favorite New Yorker
writer, Ian Frazier, had a great year, producing three excellent pieces:
“High-Rise Greens” (January 9, 2017), “Drive Time” (August 28, 2017), and
“Clear Passage” (November 13, 2017). “Drive Time,” a personal history piece on
the pleasure Frazier gets from driving in New York City, contains a wonderful
description of an early-morning drive he takes from his New Jersey home, across
the George Washington Bridge, into the Bronx (“The slanted early-morning sun
amid the pillars colors the sides of bread trucks moving slowly on their
deliveries”), across the Harlem River on the Madison Avenue Bridge, into
Manhattan on the F.D.R. Drive (“cruising by the high-rises and the hospitals of
the Upper East Side and under the tower of the United Nations”), across the
Brooklyn Bridge (“maybe the most glorious bridge in the world, its cables
radiating from their junction points at the top of its towers like beams of
light”), into Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, onto the
Belt Parkway to J.F.K. Airport, then, via the Belt Parkway, back to Brooklyn,
up the ramp to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, across the bridge, onto the Staten
Island Expressway, then across the Goethals Bridge and onto the New Jersey
Turnpike, at which point, Frazier writes,
Here is the best part of the route, because when the
landing patterns at Newark Airport are configured in a certain way the planes
coming in fly parallel to the turnpike and directly above it. If everything is
in synch, I can be motoring up the highway among lanes of cars and trucks (the
turnpike is busy at any hour) with the freight-train tracks on the right and
all the earthbound vectors lining up as an incoming jet roars overhead,
outdistances everybody, diverges to the left, and sets down on a shimmery
runway. The music on the radio can be helpful here; I’ve found that a big,
anthemic prog-rock song makes a good accompaniment. Every tristate-area driver
should experience this cool convergence once in a while.
After that, Frazier takes the I-78 west, Garden State
Parkway north to Exit 151, then west on Watchung Avenue, south on Grove Street,
and he’s home—“five boroughs, four major bridges, two airports, two states, and
back in time for breakfast.”
Quite a trip! I enjoyed it immensely.
Three other reporting pieces that afforded me enormous
pleasure: Gary Shteyngart’s “Time Out” (March 20, 2017), Nick Paumgarten’s
“Singer of Secrets” (August 28, 2017), and Burkhard Bilger’s “Feathered Glory”
(September 25, 2017). It was great to see Bilger back in the magazine after a
lengthy absence.
My favorite book reviewer, James Wood, didn’t appear in the
magazine until June. I was worried he’d quit or been let go. But when he did
finally show up, he delivered a masterpiece – “The Other Side of Silence” (June 5 & 12, 2017), a review of W. G.
Sebald’s fiction. It contains a fascinating discussion of the way Sebald uses
photographs in his novels. Wood says,
Few writers have used photographs in quite the way Sebald
does, scattering them, without captions, throughout the text, so that the
reader can’t be sure, exactly, how the writing and the photographs relate to
each other, or, indeed, whether the photographs disclose what they purport to.
Brilliantly, Wood
connects Sebald’s Austerlitz photos with what he says is Austerlitz’s
central theme – retrieval. He writes that the effort of retrieval can be felt
“whenever we stare at one of Sebald’s dusky, uncaptioned photographs, and it is
not coincidental that photography plays the largest role in the two Sebald
books that deal centrally with the Holocaust, The Emigrants and Austerlitz.”
Referring to Austerlitz,
Wood writes,
What does it mean to stare at a photograph of a little
boy who is “supposed” to be Jacques Austerlitz, when “Jacques Austerlitz” is
nothing more than a fictional character invented by W. G. Sebald? Who is the
actual boy who stares at us from the cover of this novel? We will probably
never know. It is indeed an eerie photograph, and Sebald makes Austerlitz say
of it:
I have studied the photograph many times since, the bare,
level field where I am standing, although I cannot think where it
was. . . . I examined every detail under a magnifying glass
without once finding the slightest clue. And in doing so I always felt the
piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who
was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the
challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.
The boy does seem to be demanding something from us, and
I imagine that this is why, when Sebald came across the photograph, he chose
it. Presumably, he found it in a box of old postcards and snapshots, in one of
the antique shops he enjoyed rummaging through. In 2011, while working on an
introduction to “Austerlitz,” I had a chance to examine the Sebald
archive—manuscripts, old photographs, letters, and the like—at the Deutsches
Literaturarchiv, in Marbach am Neckar, and there I found the postcard that
bears the boy’s image. Eager for a “clue,” I turned it over. On the reverse
side, there was nothing more than the name of an English town and a price,
written in ink: “Stockport: 30p.”
Amazing! The origin
of Austerlitz is sourced in the image on this found postcard. In the
novel, Jacques Austerlitz is rescued by the Kindertransport; he averts
the misfortune lying ahead of him. Of Sebald’s writing, Wood says, “What
animates his project is the task of saving the dead, retrieving them through
representation.”
Another critical
piece from 2017 that sticks in my memory is Alex Ross’s reverberant “Tank Music” (July 24, 2017), in which Ross attends a concert at the Tank in Rangely,
Colorado. The Tank is just that – a sixty-five-foot-tall water tank that sound artist Bruce Odland has converted into a performance venue and recording
studio. Ross describes the unique sound it makes:
When my eyes had
adjusted to the gloom—a few portals in the roof provide shafts of light during
the day—I picked up a rubber-coated hammer and banged a pipe. The sound rang on
and on: the reverberation in the space lasts up to forty seconds. But it’s not
a cathedral-style resonance, which dissipates in space as it travels. Instead,
sound seems to hang in the air, at once diffused and enriched. The combination
of a parabolic floor, a high concave roof, and cylindrical walls elicits a
dense mass of overtones from even a footfall or a cough. I softly hummed a note
and heard pure harmonics spiralling around me, as if I had multiplied into
several people who could sing.
Ross is inside the
Tank listening to the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth perform a piece by Judah
Adashi when a storm breaks:
Gusts buffeting the
exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded like a
hundred snare drums. The voices bobbed on the welter of noise, sometimes disappearing
into it and sometimes riding above. As Adashi’s music subsided, the storm
subsided in turn. In my experience, music has never seemed closer to nature.
That “Gusts
buffeting the exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded
like a hundred snare drums” is very beautiful – one of my favorite sentences of
2017.
Fangs through a balloon, an orange balloon
stretched over a jam-jar mouth scrubbed-up
bush standard—fangs dripping what looks
like semen, which is venom, one of the most
deadly, down grooves and splish splash
onto the lens of the distorting glass-bottom
boat we look up into, head of tiger
snake pressed flat with the bushman’s
thumb—his scungy hat that did Vietnam,
a bandolier across his matted chest
chocked with cartridges—pistoleer
who takes out ferals with secretive
patriotic agendas. And we kids watch
him draw the head of the fierce snake,
its black body striped yellow. “It will rear
up like a cobra if cornered, and attack,
attack!” he stresses as another couple
of droplets form and plummet. And when
we say, “Mum joked leave them alone
and they’ll go home,”
he retorts, “Typical
bloody woman, first to moan if she’s bit,
first to want a taste of the anti-venom
that comes of my rooting these black
bastards out, milking them dry, down
to the last drop.” Tiger snake’s eyes
peer out crazily targeting the neck
of the old coot with his dirty mouth,
its nicotine garland. He from whom
we learn, who shows us porno
and tells us what’s what. Or tiger snake
out of the wetlands, whip-cracked
by the whip of itself until its back is broke.
My god, that’s a
great poem! What makes it great is Kinsella’s use of words I can see (“fangs
through a balloon, an orange balloon,” “stretched over a jam-jar mouth,” “fangs
dripping what looks / like semen, which is venom,” “down grooves and splish
splash / onto the lens of the distorting glass-bottom / boat,” “head of tiger /
snake pressed flat with the bushman’s / thumb,” “scungy hat that did Vietnam,”
“a bandolier across his matted chest / chocked with cartridges,” “the fierce
snake, / its black body striped yellow,” “droplets form and plummet,” “the old
coot with his dirty mouth, / its nicotine garland,” “tiger snake / out of the
wetlands, whip-cracked / by the whip of itself until its back is broke”). These
words jump to life as I read them. And I love the poem’s spontaneity; it has
the feel of actual encounter, naked experience, quickly sketched as it’s
happening, or immediately afterwards, while the details are still fresh.
And now, with the few drops of Jonn the Beachcomber still
left in my goblet, I want to propose a toast: Here’s to the greatest magazine
in the world! New Yorker without end,
amen!
