September 6, 2021 Issue

Wow! Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. Six great pieces on food and drink, picked from the magazine’s vast archive: M. F. K. Fisher’s “Once a Tramp, Always …” (September 7, 1968); Anthony Bourdain’s “Hell's Kitchen” (April 17, 2000); Calvin Trillin’s “Breaux Bridge, Louisiana” (May 20, 1972); Dana Goodyear’s “Grub” (August 15 & 22, 2011); Susan Orlean’s “The Homesick Restaurant” (January 15, 1996); and Kelefa Sanneh’s “Spirit Guide” (February 11 & 18, 2013). 

Here’s a choice sample from each:

My father and I ate caviar, probably Sevruga, with green-black smallish beads and a superb challenge of flavor for the iced grassy vodka we used to cleanse our happy palates. [“Once a Tramp, Always …”]

“Where’s that fucking confit?” I yell at Angel, who’s struggling to make blinis for smoked salmon, to brown ravioli under the salamander, to lay out plates of pâté, and to do five endive salads, all more or less at once. A hot escargot explodes in front of me, spattering me with boiling garlic butter and snail guts. [“Hell’s Kitchen”]

Crawfish étouffée means smothered crawfish, and is otherwise indescribable; crawfish bisque is indescribable. [“Breaux Bridge, Louisiana”]

“This is an amuse from the chef,” a waiter said, presenting me with the dish, a composition as spare and earthy as a Japanese garden. “It’s smuggled-in ant eggs.” I rolled the leaf around the tortilla and bit: peppery nasturtium, warm, sweet tortilla, and then the light pop of escamoles bursting like tiny corn kernels. A whiff of dirt, a sluice of beer, and that was it. They were gone by night’s end. [“Grub”]

Until then, there might have been no other place in the world so layered with different people’s pinings—no other place where you could have had a Basque dinner in a restaurant from Havana in a Cuban neighborhood of a city in Florida in a dining room decorated with yodelling hikers and little deer. [“The Homesick Restaurant”]

As the guests sipped, he supplied some real-time tasting notes. “It’s a little bit spicy,” he said. “If you add a little bit of water, then you get the apricot, the peach, the pear—maybe a little bit of gooseberry.” There was some stammering from the translator as she tried to summon the Japanese word for “gooseberry.” [“Spirit Guide”]

Of the six, my favourite is Bourdain’s “Hell’s Kitchen.” I love its intense first-person-present-tense action. For example:

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.

“Prick,” “grab,” “throw,” “heat,” “throw,” “heat,” “take,” “place,” “spin,” “pour,” “sear,” “sauté,” “slide,” “deglaze,” “add,” “sauté,” “deglaze,” “give,” “put,” “heat,” “load” – over twenty action verbs. Bourdain's writing thrillingly enacts the kinetic reality of his Les Halles kitchen. 

Culinary Quests

In conjunction with The New Yorker’s launch of its new Food & Travel Issue this week, the magazine’s online Archive spotlights eight classic New Yorker “culinary journey” pieces: Susan Orlean’s "The Homesick Restaurant" (January 15, 1996); Calvin Trillin’s "Where's Chang?" (March 1, 2010); Adam Gopnik’s "Sweet Revolution" (January 3, 2011); Elif Batuman’s "The Memory Kitchen" (April 9, 2010); Bill Buford’s "Extreme Chocolate" (October 29, 2007); Kelefa Sanneh’s "Sacred Grounds" (November 21, 2011); Jane Kramer’s "Spice Routes" (September 3, 2007); and Dana Goodyear’s "The Missionary" (January 30, 2012).

I relish “culinary journey” writing, particularly a subcategory I call “culinary quests,” in which the writer searches for, say, the perfect pumpernickel bagel (Calvin Trillin’s "The Magic Bagel," March 20, 2000), or a golden-brown Baumkuchen baked the traditional way (Mimi Sheraton’s "Spit Cake," November 23, 2009). My favorite New Yorker “culinary quest” piece is Molly O’Neill’s wonderful "Home For Dinner" (July 23, 2001), a “Letter From Cambodia,” in which O’Neill superbly describes Le Cirque chef Sottha Khunn’s return to his hometown, Siem Reap, to learn how to make the one quintessential Cambodian dish – “sea bass steamed over a broth of lemongrass and galangal (a gingerlike root), thickened with butter and enlivened with chopped tomatoes, chives, and basil” – that has always frustrated him (“He worked and reworked the dish, and it earned him critical praise, but he felt that some minute calibration between sweet and sour continued to elude him. ‘Not yet the perfect balance, the sensation that lets the customer taste the world as I taste it,’ he said”).

“Home For Dinner” ’s tagline (“A leading chef tries to reconcile himself to the past with one perfect meal”) neatly captures the story’s essence. If you enjoy culinary quests, as I do, you’ll likely devour Molly O’Neill’s great “Home For Dinner.”

Credit: The above photo by Hans Gissinger is from Mimi Sheraton’s "Spit Cake" (The New Yorker, November 23, 2009).

The Year In Review: 20 Memorable Lines

Here’s one more list – twenty memorable New Yorker lines of 2015:

1. It is the writer who sees everything, hears everything, and reserves the right to fiddle with the aperture. – James Wood, "Look Again" (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

2. “This is about what you leave out, not what you take off. Writing is selection.” – John McPhee, "Omission" (September 14, 2015)

3. “Mayweather’s eyes get bigger when he fights: he seems intensely aware of his own vulnerability, which is precisely what makes him invulnerable.” – Kelefa Sanneh, "The Best Defense" (May 25, 2015)

4. “Dear God, the drinking.” – Anthony Lane, "Good Fights" (January 5, 2015)

5. “ ‘Did he say scallop sperm?’ He did, and it’s mild, sweet, and a little bit wobbly, like custard.” – Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Shuko" (August 10, 2015)

6. “After straining for a sterner response to the works, I opted to relax and like them.” – Peter Schjeldahl, "Take Your Time" (January 5, 2015)

7. “This, this: this was the madness of the color line.” – Jill Lepore, "Joe Gould's Teeth" (July 27, 2015)

8. “Tastes differ, and Ishiguro is welcome to his Arthurian chain metal.” – James Wood, "The Uses of Oblivion" (March 23, 2015)

9. “Those who order the pear-and-kale salad, curiously wet, will get what they deserve. – Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Brooklyn Bavarian Biergarten" (October 12, 2015)

10. “Riefenstahl might have been both a considerable artist and a considerable Nazis.” – Claudia Roth Pierpont, "Bombshells" (October 19, 2015)

11. “The Wayback Machine is humongous, and getting humongouser” – Jill Lepore, "The Cobweb" (January 26, 2015)

12. “But Walden is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn….” – Kathryn Schulz, "Pond Scum" (October 19, 2015)

13. “I don’t like chocolate chips or see the point of vegan cookies.” – Michael Specter, "Freedom From Fries" (November 2, 2015)

14. “No better way to process a paradox than to have another drink.” – Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Nitehawk Cinema and Lo-Res" (September 21, 2015)

15. “But how deep can a truth be – indeed, how true can it be – if it is not built from facts?” – Kathryn Schulz, "Pond Scum" (October 19, 2015)

16. “Through their decades of vicissitudes, he referred to their marriage as ‘cloudless’—even to his mistress.” – Judith Thurman, "Silent Partner" (November 16, 2015)

17. “Mass violence was buried in the city like strata in rock.” – Raffi Khatchadourian, "A Century of Silence" (January 5, 2015)

18. “Chances are that if you use the Oxford comma you brush the crumbs off your shirtfront before going out.” – Mary Norris, "Holy Writ" (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

19. “You could tattoo the entirety of Max’s dialogue onto his biceps.” – Anthony Lane, "High Gear" (May 25, 2015)

20. “Her spirit vibrates in the greenhouse air. But it can’t make you forget that, for twenty-two bucks at the gift shop, you can become the owner of a Frida oven mitt.” – Peter Schjeldahl, "Native Soil" (May 25, 2015)

Before I conclude, I’d like to give a special shout-out to the writers of “Tables For Two” and “Bar Tab.” These columns are tremendous sources of pleasure. I devour them.

And I want to salute David Denby. His distinguished run as New Yorker movie critic ended this year. I’ll miss his zingers (e.g., “Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque”). And I’ll miss his superb descriptive analyses – this one, for example, from his memorable "Influencing People" (October 4, 2010), a review of David Fincher’s The Social Network:

The scenes of the Winklevosses in their boat, crisply cutting through the water, are ineffably beautiful; the twins are at ease in their bodies and in nature, while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in. The revolution brews amid garbage.

That’s it! Time to clear the decks and make room for next year’s batch. Thank you New Yorker for another wonderful, absorbing, pleasurable, “unimpeachably interesting” (words stolen from Hannah Goldfield’s delectable "Tables For Two: Lupulo") year of reading. I don’t know how you do it, but you do. I love you.

But wait! I forgot to mention the Best Short Story: Martin Amis’s "Oktober" (December 7, 2015)

Best Poem: Meghan O’Rourke’s "Unforced Error" (October 26, 2015)

Best Cover: Mark Ulriksen’s “Streetball” (September 28, 2015)

I could go on. But I won’t. I’m going to mix myself a drink. If I had the ingredients, I’d try a Negligence (“Appropriately, first on the list is the terrific Negligence, which blends gin, basil syrup, lemon, and absinthe into what looks like a green juice cleanse, but is much better for you, depending on who you trust” – Colin Stokes, "Bar Tab: Threes Brewing," June 29, 2015), but I’m fresh out of basil syrup, damn it. My old standby, the Dark and Dirty (dark rum and Coke), will have to do. Here’s to you, New Yorker, you gorgeous creature. You take my breath away.

The Year In Review: Images

Now, a few images from my 2015 New Yorker reading experience, in no particular order, montage-style:

BANANAS: I can still see in my mind’s eye those superbly noticed bunches of bananas hanging on plastic clothes hangers, in the Landsbjörg kitchen tent, at Landmannalaugar campsite, in Nick Paumgarten’s terrific "Life Is Rescues" (November 9, 2015).

KUBANEH IN A FLOWERPOT: One of the year’s most delectable images – Timna’s kubaneh, served steaming hot in a clay flowerpot, “freckled with sesame seeds,” (in Silvia Killingsworth’s wonderful "Tables For Two: Timna" October 26, 2015).

ROSE GOLD APPLE WATCH: I remember the color of the Apple Watch that Jonathan Ive wears, in Ian Parker’s masterful "The Shape of Things to Come" (February 23 & March 2, 2015) – “rose gold, with a band of white rubbery plastic.”

SEALSKIN BOOTS: I love sealskin boots and was delighted to see a pair mentioned in John Seabrook’s Talk story, "Free," February 2, 2015 (“Tagaq, who is thirty-nine and has jet-black hair and a girlish face, had removed her sealskin boots and was sitting barefoot on the floor of the Diker Pavilion, a large oval space on the museum’s ground level”).

RED DUTTON’S TEETH: Dutton, manager and coach of the New York Americans, the first team to play hockey in the old Madison Square Gardens, had teeth that, in Nick Paumgarten’s memorable words, “looked suspiciously like replacements for the set scattered on a frozen pond” ("Amerks," October 5, 2015).

PANTIES: I won’t soon forget those panties at Loosie Rouge, “petite enough to fit the models clustered around the bar, hung like birthday bunting over the liquor bottles” (Becky Cooper, "Bar Tab: Loosie Rouge," August 3, 2015).

JOE GOULD’S TEETH: I think they’re false. They appear as part of a vision that Jill Lepore has at the end of her extraordinary "Joe Gould's Teeth" (July 27, 2015): “I still sometimes picture a door with the word ‘Archive’ etched on smoky glass. I picture it like this: I open the door, sneak inside, and enter an enormous room, cluttered with notebooks stacked on the floor, on shelves, on desks. I reach into my pocket for what I’ve brought. It feels like porcelain. It opens like a clam. And then I back out of that room, as soundlessly as I came, having left behind: Joe Gould’s teeth.” 

FLOYD MAYWEATHER’S EYES: This stuck with me – Kelefa Sanneh’s description of Mayweather’s eyes: “Mayweather’s eyes get bigger when he fights: he seems intensely aware of his own vulnerability, which is precisely what makes him invulnerable” ("The Best Defense," May 25, 2015)

MILK BOTTLE FULL OF GRAVEL: That’s what was on geology professor Todd Halihan’s desk, when Rivka Galchen visited him, as reported in her terrific "Weather Underground" (April 13, 2015). According to Galchen (quoting Halihan), the gravel is from the Arbuckle, a geological formation under Oklahoma.

GLASS OF NEGLIGENCE: Mentioned in Colin Stokes’s wonderful "Bar Tab: Threes Brewing," June 29, 2015 (“Appropriately, first on the list is the terrific Negligence, which blends gin, basil syrup, lemon, and absinthe into what looks like a green juice cleanse, but is much better for you, depending on who you trust. ‘Your mouth might not be able to detect how strong it is, but your liver will,’ a server advised”).

STACKS OF PIZZA BOXES: Only Ian Frazier, with his jeweler’s eye for the overlooked and disregarded, would notice, “In out-of-the-way corners near the refreshment tables, stacks of empty pizza boxes rose to the height of a man” ("Bronx Dreams," December 7, 2015).

FURRY BIRKENSTOCKS: Sensuously described in Rebecca Mead’s delightful "Sole Cycle," March 23, 2015 (“There was a Boston mule made from textured velvet in crimson or gold, inspired by a Persian-lamb coat that Haslbeck had discovered in a flea market. An Arizona sandal had a rose-gold leather foot bed and an upper made from pinkish-peach tweed threaded with iridescent silver. It looked as if it had been cut from the sleeve of a Chanel jacket. Another Arizona sandal, in black leather, had been lined in sapphire-blue shearling”).

STUFFED-SATIN STARS: They were among the contents of Susan Cianciolo’s curio-filled cardboard “kits” that were on show at Bridget Donahue’s gallery last June (see Andrea K. Scott’s marvelous "Boxing Days," June 29, 2015).

OLD WHISKEY BOTTLE FULL OF WATER: This comes from Dana Goodyear’s excellent "A New Leaf" (November 2, 2015). Its main “character,” ocean farmer Bren Smith, drinks water from an old whiskey bottle.

PLAINS INDIAN HEADDRESS: Just one of the more than a hundred and fifty artifacts on display in “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky,” a wondrous show at the Metropolitan Museum last spring, superbly reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl in his "Moving Pictures," March 6, 2015 (“Beadwork, metal cones, and cotton and silk cloth figure in a headdress from the Eastern Plains, circa 1780, along with local stuffs including bison horns, deer and horse hair, and porcupine quills”).

HOOKAH BEER TOWERS: I love this image; it’s from Jiayang Fan’s brilliant "Bar Tab: Play Lounge," February 16, 2015 [“Hookah beer towers (strawberry, mint, melon) are hailed like cabs on a busy avenue”].

Credit: The above photo (detail) is by Dina Litovsky; it’s used to illustrate Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Timna" (The New Yorker, October 26, 2015).

February 9, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week's issue:

1. I like a good argument. Kelefa Sanneh, in his absorbing "Don't Be Like That," takes issue with a new anthology called The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, edited by Orlando Patterson (with Ethan Fosse), which faults black culture for, among other things, “suboptimal cultural traits,” such as devaluation of traditional coparenting and eschewal of mainstream styles of childrearing. Sanneh sees this as a form of “victim-blaming.” The real culprit, he says, is racism. He says of Patterson’s approach, “He contends that black culture can and must change while conceding, less loudly, that ‘thoroughly racist’ whites are likely to remain stubbornly the same.” In the aftermath of Ferguson, Sanneh’s conclusion – “If we want to learn more about black culture, we should study it. But, if we seek to answer the question of racial inequality in America, black culture won’t tell us what we want to know” – seems irrefutable.

2. Last year, Amelia Lester, in her review of Wallflower, wrote one of my favorite lines: “If you feel like eating a carrot-and-black-trumpet-mushroom salad with your second tequila cocktail, you’re in luck, and perhaps it’s the right call—the windows frame an obnoxiously bright Equinox gym, where Lululemoners reading Us Weekly on the elliptical pedal through the night in silent rebuke” ("Bar Tab: Wallflower," The New Yorker, March 31, 2014). This week, she scores another wonderful description, a representation of a Cosme dessert: “a corn-husk meringue with its own hashtag, possessed of an intensely milky taste from the mousse of mascarpone, cream, and corn purée that spills out like lava from its core.” "Tables For Two: Cosme is ravishing; every line surprises and delights.

3. Not to be outdone, Emma Allen, in her terrific "Bar Tab: Winnie's," constructs this verbal wunderkammern: “One evening in Chinatown, a young woman in a Nirvana T-shirt took a break from mixing Hawaiian punches—a juggling act involving eight kinds of liquor, pineapple juice, and grenadine—to pull out a giant laser disk, grab a mic, and perform ‘Santeria,’ by Sublime.” Her review features a great opening line, too: “The narrative arcs of nights spent drinking are sometimes self-imposed (pub crawl begins here, ends there), sometimes forced upon us (I woke up in Ronkonkoma!).”

4. Alex Ross’s "Eyes and Ears" describes a marvelous effect – the way seventeenth-century music played amid Caravaggios brings the paintings alive. He writes,

Throughout the evening, I couldn’t escape the uncanny feeling that the people in the paintings were listening in, as in some spooky Victorian tale of portraits come to life. In the presence of the music, their eyes possibly glowed a little brighter, their flesh a little warmer. In Gallery 621, the effect was all but electric: chaste religious figures seemed on the verge of jumping out of the chiaroscuro shadows and joining the women of TENET, who, in turn, looked ready to step through the frames into the other world. Then, with the applause, the spell was broken: the living walked away, and the pictures fell silent for the night.

Ross’s piece is accompanied by a luminous, delicately hued Riccardo Vecchio illustration, the newyorker.com version of which beautifully shimmers on my computer screen.

Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

Objectivist Takeover?

New Yorker writers divide into two broad categories – Objectivists and Subjectivists. Objectivists write mainly in the third person; they’re loath to say “I.” Subjectivists write mainly in the first person; their pieces read almost like excerpts from their personal journals.

Throughout the magazine’s history, Subjectivism has predominated; I much prefer it. Liebling, Mitchell, Bailey, and Rouché wrote in the first person, as do McPhee, Singer, Frazier, Bilger, Friend, Kolbert, Wilkinson, Remnick, Thurman, Paumgarten, Collins, Batuman, and Mead. But lately, it seems to me, the number of Objectivist pieces appearing in the magazine has been on the rise. Jill Lepore’s “American Chronicles” pieces, Kelefa Sanneh’s “Fish Tales” (March 7, 2011), David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold” (April 4, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011), George Packer’s “A Dirty Business” (June 27, 2011), George Packer’s “Coming Apart” (September 12, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Three Trials for Murder” (November 14, 2011), and Kelefa Sannah’s “Sacred Grounds” (November 21, 2011) are all written in the third person. (Packer and Schmidle may protest the Objectivist charge on the basis of a line or two of first-person perspective buried deep in their otherwise impersonal narratives, but they can’t deny that the gist of their approach is fundamentally Objectivist.) In the magazine’s November 28th issue, all four features are essentially Objectivist: Mattathias Schwartz’s “Pre-Occupied”; Ariel Levy’s “The Renovation”; George Packer’s “No Death, No Taxes”; and Raffi Khatchadourian’s “In The Picture.” I say “essentially” because some of these pieces contain a light sprinkling of “told me” and “said to me” – feeble attempts to mitigate their over-all machined, Objectivist feel and look. The last section of Khatchadourian’s “In The Picture” suddenly turns Subjectivist (“When the video ended, JR had to rush out. He wanted to surprise Nourry by showing her a SoHo rooftop that he had discovered. Two days later, he flew to Edinburgh, and then to Paris, where I caught up with him”), but it’s too little, too late.

I prefer the Subjectivist approach because it’s closest to the most true-to-life form of writing, namely, the journal. A journal tells what happened from the point of view of the writer as he or she actually experienced it. It seems to me that journalism is most effective when it is journal-like. Here are a few examples of quintessential journal-like sentences taken from recent New Yorker articles:

One day, Cagan took me to visit the Aras station, an hour’s drive south-east of Kars, near the Armenian border. (Elif Batuman, “Natural Histories,” October 24, 2011)

Beach trials the next morning were called off owing to rain, so I took a train to Amsterdam and visited the Rijksmuseum. (Ian Frazier, “The March of the Strandbeests,” September 5, 2011)

It was after 6 P.M. when we sat down at Dean’s editing machine, a twelve-thousand-dollar 35-mm. Steenbeck, to look at some rushes. (Emily Eakin, “Celluloid Hero,” October 31, 2011)

One day in July, I watched Grimaud play the pieces on “Resonances,” her current CD, in the Stadhalle, in Bayreuth. (D. T. Max, “Her Way,” November 7, 2011)

At the end of May, when I visited Yusuke Tataki, the worker who was inside Reactor Building No. 4 at the time of the quake, he said that he had passed up offers to go back as a jumper. (Evan Osnos, “The Fallout,” October 17, 2011)

On a recent Saturday, Worsley and I and a few others attempted to whip up the dinner that King George III ate on the evening of February 6, 1789. (Lauren Collins, “The King’s Meal,” November 21, 2011)

Such sentences make pursuit of the story part of the story. They clue the reader in on what the writer is thinking and doing. Most importantly, they help authenticate what’s being described. Objectivist pieces feel and look synthetic. Yes, they’re often magnificently crafted (see, for example, Kelefa Sanneh’s “Sacred Grounds,” The New Yorker, November 21, 2011). But they feel as if they’ve been manufactured (I almost said “made-up”) rather than experienced first-hand.

Fortunately, there are still lots of Subjectivists writing for The New Yorker. But the number of Objectivist pieces appearing in it seems to be on the upswing. The November 28th issue is filled with them. Objectivism appears to be trending at the magazine. I think it should be discouraged.

Credit: The above portrait of Joseph Mitchell is by Al Hirschfeld; it appears in The New Yorker (February 22, 2004), as an illustration for Mark Singer's "Joe Mitchell's Secret."

November 21, 2011 Issue

Mmm, my favorite themed New Yorker, The Food Issue, is here. I love the Wayne Thiebaud “Turkey Dinner” cover. Thiebaud lays on the paint in such delicious thick strokes that I almost want to eat it. John Seabrook’s piece about the SweeTango apple (“Crunch”) is excellent. I particularly liked its last paragraph:

I bought as many SweeTangos as I could carry, walked out onto Broadway, and stood on the sidewalk with an apple in my hand, my fingers not quite encircling its girth, feeling the chill of the Fairway basement in the center of my palm. I stared at the skin, and the lenticels gazed indifferently back at me, as I contemplated man’s long and sometimes discordant relationship with this fruit. Then I set my teeth on its skin, and crunched.

That “feeling the chill of the Fairway basement in the center of my palm” is inspired!

Lauren Collins’s “The King’s Meal” brims with inspired lines (e.g., “‘The only way you can eat like a king is to eat like a king,’ Meltonville had said, liberating a gleaming ladle , part of Hampton Court’s collection, from its bubble-wrap cocoon”).

I smiled and chuckled my way through Calvin Trillin’s wonderful “My Repertoire.” At one point, I read a passage out loud to my daughter, and we both laughed. Here’s the passage:

One of my sons-in-law was not crazy about my salmon hash – I won’t say which one; that sort of thing will come out in good time at the reading of the will – but just about everybody else seemed to like it.

I like the boots that René Redzepi is wearing in the vivid photo by Alfredo Cáliz that illustrates Jane Kramer’s superb “The Food At Our Feet.” When I say “superb,” I’m referring to the second half of the piece. The first part, concerning Kramer’s preparation for her foraging excursion with Redzepi, didn’t grab me. It contains too much information about her “distinguished” friends and their bourgeois surroundings. But at the point where Kramer writes, “I met Redzepi at Noma early the following afternoon,” her piece really takes off. I savored Kramer’s beautiful long lines. For example:

But, at the moment, the food he cherishes is cabbage – from the big, pale cabbages that he slices and steams, at home, in a knob of butter and a half inch of his wife’s leftover tea, to the tiny, vividly green-leaved wild cabbages that sit in pots, basking in ultraviolet light, on a steel counter in the middle of one of Noma’s upstairs kitchens, waiting for the day they’re ready to be wrapped with their stems around a sliver of pike perch and served to customers on a beautiful stoneware plate, between a green verbena sauce and a butter-and-fish-bone foam.

Kelefa Sanneh's "Sacred Grounds" is factually interesting. But in terms of style, it suffers from the same weakness that afflicts all his pieces - an impersonal, almost godlike objectivity that leaves me cold. I much prefer the subjective approach in which the writer establishes his or her presence in the material.

The New Yorker in The New York Review of Books

New Yorker readers know that the magazine’s content is very strong. But if proof is needed, check out the January 13, 2011, issue of The New York Review of Books, which contains four New Yorker-related articles:

• Sue Halpern’s “How Do We Know What We Know?” – a review of Oliver Sacks’s book The Mind’s Eye, which is primarily a collection of pieces published over the past few years in The New Yorker;

• Christian Caryl’s “Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything” (“Raffi Khatchadourian on the New Yorker website speculates that the aim of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ‘is not to reveal a single act of abuse …, but rather to open up the inner workings of a closed and complex system, to call the world in to judge its morality’”);

• Gordon S. Wood’s “No Thanks for the Memories” – a review of New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History;

• Dan Chiasson’s “‘Rude Ludicrous Lucrative’ Rap,” which refers to Kelefa Sanneh’s “now-classic New Yorker piece on Jay-Z [“Word,” December 6, 2010].”

July 26, 2010 Issue

My idea of a good fight story is one that gives me the whole “going to a fight” experience, makes me feel I’m on a night out. A. J. Liebling’s great “Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove” (The New Yorker, September 29, 1951; also included in his brilliant collection of boxing essays The Sweet Science) creates this feeling. Liebling says, “On the night of the fight, I started out early….” And he proceeds to make his way to the Polo Grounds, first stopping at Sugar Ray’s, which is Sugar Ray Robinson’s bar, for a drink and a bite to eat (“I dined on bourbon and the largest, pinkest pork chops I have ever seen, priced at a dollar-sixty-five”). Liebling describes not only the fight (between Sugar Ray Robinson and Randy Turpin) but also the preliminary bouts, the crowd, the ceremonial entrances, the main event (“Robinson acted like a young, nervous fighter; Turpin, eight years his junior and fighting for the first time in this country, was calm as a Colchester oyster”), a post-fight drink in Harlem, and a cab-ride past Sugar Ray’s. What put me in mind of Liebling’s piece is Kelefa Sanneh’s “Boxed In” in this week’s issue. It’s about the fight between Shane Mosley and Floyd Mayweather. I like the opening scene in which Sanneh takes us to a room on the fifteenth floor of the HBO offices in midtown Manhattan, where three hundred and twenty red boxing gloves are laid out on a conference table for Mosley to sign – part of the promotional campaign for the fight, which is two months off. Mayweather has already signed the gloves with a big, flamboyant autograph that leaves little room for Mosley’s signature. The scene is illustrative of the difference between Mosley and Mayweather: Mosley is unassuming; Mayweather is brash. I also enjoyed Sanneh’s description of a press conference, which involved a mock scuffle between the two fighters. Sanneh stitches a brilliant bit of dialogue into this scene: Mayweather looks at Mosley’s suit and says, “That’s off-the-rack.” And Mosley says right back: “This is custom, right here.” For some reason, that “right here” cracks me up – it sounds so grounded and real. As for Sanneh’s description of the actual fight itself, it’s just so-so in the pungent detail department. Sanneh does throw a great one-two combo when he says, “Mosley could see Mayweather’s punches coming, but he couldn’t move quickly enough to avoid them; in the slow-motion replays, you could sometimes see Mosley watching Mayweather’s fist heading toward him. It’s hell to have something all your life and then not have it.” That last sentence is a great line. It’s the reason I stick with Sanneh’s writing. I just wish he wouldn’t be so shy about putting an “I” in his stories now and then.

April 12, 2010 Issue

Kelefa Sanneh’s “Beyond The Pale” in this week’s issue is a cool – perhaps too cool – review of three books on “whiteness.” I count at least ten instances in this piece where Sanneh, instead of expressing outrage in the face of racism, opts for a cooler response: (1) the reference to an overtly racist Glenn Beck quote as an example of Beck’s “adventurous thoughts and memorable language”; (2) the description of Henry Louis Gates’s arrest as “one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows”; (3) his suggestion that “often the most appropriate answer to the question [what do you mean by white culture?] is a joke or a series of jokes”; (4) his description of the congresswoman Helen Chenowith-Hage’s veiled racist comment as an “ingenious euphemism”; (5) his question – “Should we pretend to be surprised?” – in response to the whiteness of Tea Party membership; (6) his question – “But what of it?” in response to the observation that American politics has been segregated for decades; (7) his description of a passage in James Baldwin’s “On Being White … And Other Lies” as being “marvelously splenetic”; (8) his quip about a racist statement by Hippocrates (quoted in one of the books under review - Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History of White People”), which wittily recycles the Chenowith-Hage quotation: “the warm-climate community, a few millennia ahead of schedule”; (9) his sarcasm about the connection the craniologist Johann Kaspar Lavater made between whiteness and weakness: “It is a delicate race, always on the verge of being overrun or adulterated, dethroned or debunked”; (10) the astonishing rationalization of Leigh Anne Tuohy’s racist rant in the movie “The Blind Side,” telling a black man to stay in his own neighborhood, as “refreshing, because there’s no trace of anxiety in her white identity.” Sarcasm, irony, jokiness, breeziness, rationalization – these apparently are the appropriate responses to racism today. Baldwin’s “splenetic” reaction, “marvelous” as it is, is now considered old hat. Gates’s outrage at being arrested in his own home by a white cop is mere entertainment. The message here seems to be: no matter what, stay cool. Personally, I prefer a little anger, politically incorrect though it may be. I think Baldwin’s outrage is more than just marvelous; it’s effective. And the same goes for Gates’s fierce indignation. It’s still possible to be “intellectual” and yet at the same time bring a little heat: see Gates’s great “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” (The New Yorker, October 23, 1995).

February 8, 2010 Issue

I read this issue cover to cover. Here’s what I liked most in Goings On About Town (GOAT) and The Talk Of The Town (TOTT): Yola Monakhov's photo of a girl in green tights suspended in golden light, the blurb about Glasslands Gallery (“this charming, skuzzy venue”), the gorgeous pink-and-brown Eric Ogden photo “Gents” (Is that Penelope Cruz peering out of the men’s washroom?), Nick Paumgarten’s Tables For Two review of Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecote (“The heart leaps at the sight of a waitress, tongs in hand, offering an extra helping of fries. Yes, please.”), and John Seabrook’s story about meeting J. D. Salinger. Salinger’s “Nervy girl! Nervy girl” quote in Seabrook’s piece is strangely memorable. What was he really saying? Obviously, Seabrook and his girlfriend interpreted it as less than approving, because they decided to sleep in separate bedrooms.
Moving into the heart of the magazine, I devoured Jon Lee Anderson’s “Neighbor’s Keeper,” a valuable, gritty eyewitness account of what’s happening in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. The articles by Patrick Radden Keefe (“The Trafficker”) and Kelefa Sanneh (“Revelations”) were interesting enough, but neither contained a really inspiring sentence. Radden Keefe accomplishes the essential task of a good New Yorker reporter: he personally enters the frame of his report and shows us what he finds out. When Radden Keefe says, “One day in November, I drove to the headquarters of the D.E.A.’s Special Operations Division, in a generic office park outside Washington, D.C.,” he moves his piece to the level of real journalism. The same cannot be said for Sanneh, who narrates his piece with what Pauline Kael would call "saphead objectivity." Did he actually visit Tonex’s studio in Lemon Grove? Maybe it’s implicit that he did, but he doesn’t actually say so; his “I” doesn’t enter the story, and that’s a failure of the piece, in my humble opinion. I noticed the same failing in Carlo Rotella’s article (“Class Warrior”) in last week’s issue. For me the highlight of the magazine this week is John McPhee’s “The Patch.” I’m an avid reader of McPhee’s writings. I have all his books. “The Patch,” in which McPhee miraculously blends memories of his dying father with pickerel fishing, is among his finest pieces. If you want to know my idea of what an inspired sentence is, here is one from “The Patch”: “In the repetitive geometries of The Patch, with its paisley patterns in six acres of closed and open space, how did I know it was the same gap?” The specificity of McPhee’s writing is so rich that a sentence, such as the one I just quoted, when lifted from its context, is as gorgeously abstract as anything by DeLillo. The last item in this week’s issue that I wish to comment on is John Lahr’s “The Pathfinder.” Lahr is, in my estimation, a great writer. Even though he moves in and writes about a realm – theatre (or, better still, as Pauline Kael says, theatuh) – that I’m not all that crazy about. I still read him for his glorious writing. His article on the comedian Roseanne Barr (“Queendom Come”) is one of the all-time great New Yorker profiles, right up there with Kenneth Tynan’s Johnny Carson piece (“Fifteen Years of the Salto Motale”). I found “The Pathfinder” stimulating. When Lahr writes that “His [Shepard’s] pieces were abstract flights of illuminated feeling, like the work of the jazz greats – Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Nina Simone – he heard at the Village Gate, more vectors of energy than maps of psychology,” he whets my appetite for a viewing of one of Shepard’s plays. I mean, hey! I love Monk and Mulligan. Maybe Shepard’s work is the crowbar I need to open my mind to the theatuh. My final comment this week is with regard to Mark Doty’s poem “Pescadero,” which I found delightful. Many years ago, Doty’s work was the target of one of Helen Vendler’s cruelest New Yorker reviews (“Comic and Elegiac,” April 8, 1996). Vendler comparatively analyzed two books of poetry, one by August Kleinzahler (“Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow”) and the other by Doty (“Atlantis”). She quickly lets us know which poet she prefers: “Kleinzahler’s poems seem to me far more lively on the page than Doty’s.” She says, “Mark Doty can perform an accomplished description … but then he wants to sermonize.” Of one of his poems, she says his rhythm “seems inert.” She refers to “Doty’s plaintive didacticism.” And she concludes: Kleinzahler’s approach is “the better choice.” I’d never seen two poets compared like this before, one chosen, one rejected. I found myself feeling sorry for Doty, who is the author of one of my favorite New Yorker poems, “A Green Crab’s Shell” (September 11, 1995). But Doty didn’t let Vendler’s attack get to him. He continued to write, and in 2008 won a National Book Award for “Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems.” “Pescadero” is a description of goats (“The little goats like my mouth and fingers, / and one stands up against the wire fence, and taps on the fence board / a hoof made blacker by the dirt of the field, / pushes her mouth forward to my mouth, / so that I can see the smallish squared seeds of her teeth, / and the bristle-whiskers”). I love writing like this. It’s like a highly detailed journalistic fragment or snapshot that Doty lets stand as a portrait in miniature of life in the California town named in the poem’s title. Such a profusion of good things in this issue! But I will have to leave it at that for now.