November 14, 2016, Issue

Who knew that when Alex Ross wasn't covering the musical landscape, he was nosing around Death Valley, communing with lizards, wildflowers, and sculptural rock formations? His “Desert Bloom,” an account of his Death Valley explorations, in this week’s issue, is a delight. He describes Death Valley as “not so much a desert as a surreally varied mountain region with a desert at its heart.” He says, “I have gone back to Death Valley every so often, and this year I have made a series of visits, trying to better understand its allure.”

“Desert Bloom” brims with the kind of sentence – active, specific, first-person – that I devour. For example:

In early March, when the bloom was at its height, I drove from Los Angeles to Beatty, Nevada, northeast of the park, and checked in at a Motel 6.

I went through Daylight Pass, and the entire expanse of Death Valley sprang into view: the dark mountains, the white floor, the perpetual mirage of an ancient lake.

One weekend in April, I rented a Jeep Wrangler and toured the park with Darrel Cowan, a professor of geology at the University of Washington.

In March, I spent a few hours looking at wildflowers with Dianne Milliard, a ranger who had been dividing her time between Death Valley, in the winter, and McCarthy, Alaska, in the summer.

Last summer, I went to see Pauline Esteves, the elder of the Timbisha Shoshone.

I drove to Mahogany Flat, a campground just above eight thousand feet, where I spent the night in a tent.

I read these sentences and immediately sign on for the adventure, happy to be in Ross’s company. There’s no dramatic arc; the “action” is simply “I go here, I see this,” which I love. The piece abounds in thisness: “The dominant presence was desert gold, a sunflower that blossoms on a long, spindly stem”; “Vast slabs of rock descend into the earth at severe angles, like the Titanic making its fatal dive”; “Farther up the slope are bristlecone pines, with sinewy, almost humanoid trunks.”

I also relished the place names – Daylight Pass, Hells Gate, Badwater Basin, Grapevine Mountains, Furnace Creek, Mahogany Flat, Telescope Peak. There’s poetry in those names!

I love pieces that take me places, pieces like Elif Batuman’s “The Memory Kitchen” (Turkey), Geoff Dyer’s “Poles Apart” (New Mexico, Utah), D. T. Max’s “A Cave with a View” (Matera, Italy), Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” (Iceland), Laura Miller’s “Romancing the Stones” (Stonehenge), Keith Gessen’s “Nowheresville” (Kazakhstan). They’re almost pure travelogue – no agenda other than the deep experience of a particular place. Such a piece is Alex Ross’s wonderful “Desert Bloom.” I enjoyed it immensely.

July 6 & 13, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Lawrence Wright’s "Five Hostages" is written in the third person – my least favorite perspective. Nevertheless, the piece totally absorbed me. It’s about five Americans kidnapped in Syria and their families’ fight to save them. It’s beautifully structured. But it has a political aspect I’m not sure I agree with. It’s rough on Obama for the “ineffectiveness” of his policy on terrorist kidnappings. But it wasn’t Obama who put these five people in harm’s way. They voluntarily assumed the grave risk of being kidnapped and murdered when they crossed into Syria. My take-away from this powerful piece is two-fold: (1) ISIS is one of the most barbaric terrorist groups the world has ever seen; (2) outsiders who venture into Syria should do so without illusion; they’re risking their lives.

2. Laura Miller, in her enjoyable "The System," a review of Don Winslow’s novel The Cartel, says of Winslow’s previous novel The Power of the Dog, “But none of it is a laughing matter.” Then, in the next line, she says, “Scratch that. Some of The Power of the Dog is funny.” Her sudden reversal made me smile. It’s an example of a critic winging it. Pauline Kael would approve.

3. And now here’s a collage of my favorite lines in this week’s issue:

The fibrousness of the paper and the uniqueness of each painstaking ridge turn the impassive gray or black surfaces of Park’s canvases into unexpected terrain (“Goings On About Town: Art: Park Seo-bo”) | The film’s good cheer seems less infectious than enforced; the cinematic embrace is stifling, and the good vibes feel overdone, like a present-tense trip of instant nostalgia (Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies: A Poem Is a Naked Person”) | Hitchcock’s ultimate point evokes cosmic terror: innocence is merely a trick of paperwork, whereas guilt is the human condition (Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies: The Wrong Man”) | Once he’d been spotted, a glass of marmalade-colored Languedoc in hand, the music writers made quick work of a plate of prosciutto and calculated an intricate split of their bill (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: The Four Horsemen”) | By the time a late-night June rainstorm appears, and the subway’s lesser, more beige lines are being contemplated, Murphy has migrated from a table to the bar, where the bartender is pouring a quietly effervescent rosé out of a not so quiet magnum (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: The Four Horsemen”) | The distillery is in a brick building with the warm smell of a country club’s oak locker room (Emma Allen, “Bar Tab: Kings County Distillery”) | His breakfast companion, who had been enjoying the gentle intensity of his company—the Concorde doesn’t take an article in British English, he said; he was certain that left-handers were overrepresented in the pilot population; he loves the B and C gates of Heathrow’s Terminal 5; flying back from Vancouver in winter, you can see the Northern Lights almost every night; when a B.A. pilot shows up for work, his iPad must be charged to at least seventy-five per cent—was suddenly put in mind of an ancient activity of her own, going on dates in restaurants that had televisions (Lauren Collins, “Bird’s-Eye View”) | Out on the runway, a queue was forming: a Middle East Airlines A320, bound for Beirut; a KLM 737, heading back to Amsterdam; the state aircraft of the United Arab Emirates, a private 747, half snow goose, half tapir, its snout sniffing the sky (Lauren Collins, “Bird’s-Eye View”) | Schick’s interpretation, which he has been honing for forty years, is a sinuous audiovisual ballet in which hard-hitting, rat-a-tat drum solos intermingle with subtle, whispery sounds, as of a tapped gong or a brushed gourd (Alex Ross, “Outsiders”) | In the course of four movements, this evanescent material acquired mass: droplets of melody and harmony precipitated from the air (Alex Ross, “Outsiders”)

April 21, 2014 Issue

“The Journeys Issue” is here and it contains pieces by two of my favorite writers – Burkhard Bilger and Geoff Dyer. Bilger’s “In Deep” is about an attempt to map a passage in the Chevé system, potentially the world’s deepest cave, located in Oaxaca, Mexico. The project is, in Bilger’s words, “a kind of Everest expedition turned upside down.” The expedition’s leader, Bill Stone, a sixty-year-old veteran deep caver, with a Ph.D. in structural engineering, “has an engineer’s methodical mind and an explorer’s heroic self-image. He’s pragmatic about details and romantic about goals.” Bilger made me smile when he says of Stone, “He had the whiskered weather-beaten look of an old lobsterman.” Two other key figures in the expedition are master cave divers Marcin Gala and Phil Short. They feature in “In Deep” ’s most dramatic sections – the exploration of the J2 system beyond Camp Four.

Of the piece’s many pleasures – the fascinating cave diver details (“Underwear is worn for weeks on end, the bacteria kept back by antibiotic silver and copper threads”), its astute assessment of cave diver character (“But, looking at all the gleaming eyes around the fire, I was mostly reminded of the Island of Lost Boys. Beneath all the mud and gloom and dire admonitions, there burned an ember of self-satisfaction – of pride in their wretched circumstances and willingness to endure it”) – the most piquant, for me, are the cave descriptions (“endless mud-dimmed labyrinth,” “terminal sumps,” “a musty fungal scent drifts up from the cave’s throat,” “a small dark pool under a dome of sulfurous flowstone,” “glistening caverns and plummeting boreholes, stalagmites tall as organ pipes and great galleries draped in flowstone,” “a great chamber filled with mist and spray, its floor split by a yawning chasm,” “a huge borehole stretched into the darkness,” “As for the river, it had found a long crack in the floor less than an inch wide, and spooled through it like an endless bolt of turquoise cloth”).

“In Deep” puts you squarely there, in the dark tunnels and frigid pools with Gala and Short. When I finished reading it and looked up from the page, my eyes felt as “owl-wide and dilated” as Gala’s and Short’s when they finally emerged from J2’s “rocky clutch.”

Burkhard Bilger has written many great New Yorker pieces. “In Deep” is one of his best. I enjoyed it immensely.

Another excellent piece in this week’s “The Journeys Issue” is Geoff Dyer’s “Shipmates,” an account of Dyer’s two-week stay aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George H. W. Bush. Dyer is known for what James Wood calls his “loitering investigation, somehow intense and slackerish, the author not quite pursuing his subject but hanging around it, like a clever aimless boy on a street corner” (“From Venice to Varanasi,” The New Yorker, April 20, 2009). Well, there aren’t any street corners on the George H. W. Bush. Its flight deck isn’t a good place to hang around, not unless you want to get sucked into the intake of a jet engine. Regarding the flight deck, Dyer says, “There was no room for anything even slightly ambiguous.” The idea of a slackerish guy like Dyer placing himself in such a rigidly organized, ultra-efficient, high-risk environment is amusing. He even has to keep his head up (actually down) when he’s below deck. He writes, “I walked the walkways and stoop-ducked through hatches, always focused on a single ambition: not to smash my head, even though there was an opportunity to do so every couple of seconds.”

As Wood has noted, Dyer has “deep descriptive talents.” In “Shipmates,” they’re applied to depict a highly specialized, dangerous world of arresting wires, catapults, F-18 jets, jet blast deflectors, etc. Here, for example, is Dyer’s description of the catapult in action:

The plane is flung forward by a catapult and quickly curves away from the end of the carrier, over the sea. In its wake, there is a wash of steam from the catapult tracks, which are built into the flight deck. After a few moments, the catapult shuttle – a large piston attached through the tracks to the landing gear – comes back like a singed hare at a greyhound race. A minute later, another plane, from a neighboring catapult, blasts into the sky.

“Shipmates” is closer to being straight factual reporting than anything else Dyer has written. But it still has Dyer’s inimitable “I” perspective, which I relish. My favorite scene in “Shipmates” is Dyer’s evening talk with the aircraft’s captain and two other officers:

One night, I met Captain Luther and two fellow-officers as they sat in fold-up chairs on a starboard-side catwalk, smoking cigars in the dark. The sea was nothing but shadow. I couldn’t see the faces, just the red orbs of the cigars’ tips. Then a crew member rigged up a line of blue fairy lights. It was still hard to see, but in a soft romantic way.

I laughed when I read that. Who else but Dyer, in that macho setting, sitting with the commanding officers of perhaps the world’s most powerful warship, would be struck by the lights’ “soft, romantic” effect. He’s subjective to the bone, and that’s what I love about his writing.

A third piece in this week’s issue that must be given its due is Laura Miller’s wonderful “Romancing the Stones.” It’s about her winter solstice visit to Stonehenge in the company of a flock of modern-day Druids. Miller’s description of the Druids gives the piece a surreal specificity. For example:

As I drifted through the crowd, I spotted a plump woman in a tiger-striped catsuit dancing to the beat of a drum circle, a tall man in white robes with a mask made of leaves, and a hobbity fellow in a brown woolly sweater telling an interviewer, “I’m a pagan and I’ve come here to exercise my religious rights.” Someone had made a sign that began with the line “Hello, I am an Earthian,” and surely nobody read past that point. A man in a green Inverness coat and a wide-brimmed felt hat was blowing mightily on a three-foot trumpet made from ox horn. He told me he was the Summoner of the Hearth of the Turning Wheel and urged me to have a go at the instrument. I couldn’t even get it to squeak. Behind a trilithon, people rubbed the padded heads of mallets over gongs, producing a groaning and swelling tone that seemed just right.

That last sentence is very fine! Miller’s previous New Yorker writings didn’t resonate with me. But her lovely “Romancing the Stones” is a revelation. I look forward to seeing more of her work in the magazine.