April 2024 Food Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It’s the 2024 Food Issue, a digital-only issue about the culinary world. What a feast! Adam Iscoe’s “No Reservations,” Helen Rosner’s “Padma Lakshmi’s Funny Side,” Jiayang Fan’s “Another Chinatown,” Patricia Marx’s “Spoiler Alert,” Hannah Goldfield's "Holey Grail" – all excellent! But, for me, the highlight is Gary Shteyngart’s delightful “Shaken and Stirred.” Why? Because it’s sheerly, purely, unimpeachably hedonistic. Shteyngart goes on a Martini tour of some of New York City’s grandest bars, and he does it in the company of some very witty drinkers. Here he’s at the Lobby Bar, in Hotel Chelsea, with his friend Amor Towles:

The Lobby Bar is sumptuous, with a bar top that accommodates a Parthenon’s worth of marble, and banquettes that are cozy and velvety. Amor came properly dressed in a vest for the occasion, while I had hastened off the Amtrak in my country garb. The Dukes Martini was assembled tableside—the ingredients presented on a foldout stand—by a young server skilled in the pouring arts. When it comes to the purist’s dry Martini, there are two things to remember. First, there is a mantra that Amor himself has coined: “Crisp, clear, and cold.” The Lobby Bar follows these directives by freezing the glasses, as well as the gin or vodka. The second is the “vermouth rinse.” In this maneuver, the composition I usually turn to for a dry Martini—one part vermouth to five parts gin—is almost entirely done away with. The vermouth is conscripted only to coat a rather enormous glass and is then tossed away before the gin or vodka, which has been primed with a dash of salt-water solution, is poured. (I have been told that at the original Dukes the vermouth was ignominiously tossed onto the carpet, whereas at the Chelsea it is merely splashed into a tiny glass of olives, perhaps later to be lapped up by an alcoholic dog.) Notably, no ice or shakers are used and the alcohol is neither shaken nor stirred, creating a ninety-five-per-cent undiluted Martini, which, at this volume, functions as a kind of uncontrolled insanity.

I read that and immediately found myself thirsting for a Martini.

Shteyngart and Towles begin drinking. Shteyngart writes,

The first Martini, essentially a vermouth-coated container for what I eyeballed to be two and a half to three shots of juniper-noted, grapefruit-evoking Tanqueray No. Ten gin, immediately put us in a mood. The mood was a good one. I cannot remember whether it was Amor or I who said “I’m feeling very chummy.” Perhaps we both said it. The Dukes Martini came with an array of garnishes, of which I found the lemon peel most conducive to the juniper crispness of the Tanqueray.

Then they each have a Dukes Martini with Ketel One vodka. After that they order shrimp cocktails and split a B.L.T. sandwich to fortify themselves for their third drink, an 1884 Martini. Shteyngart describes it superbly:

This beast is premade with two types of gin—Boatyard Double Gin, from Northern Ireland, and the New York Distilling Company’s Perry’s Tot Navy Strength Gin—which clocks in at a ridiculous 114 proof. This dangerous concoction is then fat-washed with Spanish Arbequina olive oil, after which it is frozen and the olive oil’s fat removed, while vermouth, lemon liqueur, a house-made vetiver tincture, and a few dashes of lemon-pepper bitters are added. A lemon peel is then showily expressed over the glass tableside and a very briny Gordal olive and a cocktail-onion skewer are plopped in. Although more sizable quantities of vermouth and other pollutants are at play than in the classic Dukes Martini, the over-proofed gin does a lot of the talking and one is soon very convincingly drunk.

The Chelsea is just the first stop on this sybaritic binge. Another night Shteyngart goes to the Gotham Restaurant with his friend J. Smith-Cameron. She likes the place because of the bartender, a guy named Billy. They each have a Vesper (“a drink that de-Balkanizes the conflict between vodka and gin by combining both, with a splash of Lillet Blanc serving as the Holy Spirit”). This is followed by two Gibsons. Then Billy mixes them a Martinez. Shteyngart writes,

The cocktails are related, but after the crisp minimalism of a Gibson, the Martinez is akin to encountering a violent early hominid in a downtown bar. Sweet vermouth and maraschino are conscripted alongside the usual gin. Billy uses Carpano sweet vermouth, which, to my palate, provides hints of bitterness instead of overwhelming sweetness. It went down as easy as a Martinez can, and J. and I were now thoroughly drunk. Gotham’s kitchen was closed, so we headed across the street to get burgers at the Strip House to buffer our stomachs. When we left, an hour later, Billy had also crossed the street to get a drink at the bar. There he was, with his sleeves still rolled up, saying goodbye to the evening.

That “It went down as easy as a Martinez can, and J. and I were now thoroughly drunk” made me laugh.

Another night, Shteyngart goes to Tigre, on Rivington Street, on the Lower East Side, with his friend Adam Platty. Shteyngart writes,

Tigre is one of the most beautiful bars of recent vintage that I have seen. Windowless, it glows like a jewel box, and the striking semicircle of the bar is not unlike that of the U.N. Security Council, though studded with booze. Platty remarked that “all these bartenders look like Jesus,” and our handsome open-shirted server so resembled the Lord that I couldn’t help but hum, “Oh, come, let us adore him,” under my breath. The highlight of Tigre’s Martini menu is the vodka-based Cigarette, which Platty immediately qualified as “smoky as fuck.” “It’s old-fashioned, like if you smoked a cigarette while having a Martini,” Jesus told us, which is absolutely on point. Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, the Danish distillery, and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far.

That last sentence is inspired, combining words (“Truman vodka,” “flaming orbit,” Empirical,” “Stephen King,” “pyrokinetic,” “Charlene McGee,” “smoked juniper,” “nicotine and tar”) I’m sure have never been combined before. Reading Shteyngart’s piece. I started to feel tipsy. I wasn’t drinking, but it felt like I was. I was getting drunk on his Martini-drenched prose. 

Shteyngart attends other bars as well: Sunken Harbor Club (Immortal Martini); Dante (Dante Martini); Temple Bar (Plymouth Martini); Bemelman’s Bar (Tanqueray Ten); Le Rock (Au Poivre, Super Sec, L’Alaska, In and Out). It’s quite a Martini marathon! I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Another source of pleasure in Shteyngart's piece are the jazzy, glamorous photos by Landon Nordeman. They enhance the text magnificently.

Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart's "Shaken and Stirred"

Best of 2019: Talk

João Fazenda's illustration for Adam Gopnik's "If You Listen"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Talk of the Town” stories of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Adam Gopnik, “If You Listen,” August 19, 2019 (“The vessels, placed on pedestals of different heights, are configured out of musical order, to emphasize their range and varied provenances. Beer walked among them. ‘This boat sings a G,’ he said, pointing at a Chinese dragon-boat vase. ‘This earthenware temple by William Wyman, from 1977, that’s a beautiful F, and this very early portrait bust by Gaston Lachaise is our A-flat’ ”).

2. Mark Singer, “Man vs. Mouse,” January 7, 2019 (“He arranged ‘a Maginot Line of glue traps’ and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”).

3. Paige Williams, “Boxes,” July 1, 2019 (“Schiffman plucked a Nikon from her backpack and started shooting—moody light at the bedroom windows, a bouquet of bodega roses”).

4. Ian Frazier, “Cookout,” September 30, 2019 (“Cicadas in the trees did their impersonations of various electrical appliances, hydrangea bushes in the yard burst into even more elaborate bloom, and the incoming sunlight, at a rate of a thousand watts per square metre, transformed into culinary heat, seemed to hum”).

5. Rachel Felder, “Avocado Al Dente,” October 28, 2019 (“Miguel Gonzalez wakes up just after 4 A. M. on most weekdays with one thing on his mind: avocados”).

6. Nicholas Schmidle, “The Anti-Perfect,” September 16, 2019 (“ ‘It’s too early for you,’ she scolded one empty can, its ball bearing rattling around inside it”).

7. Patricia Marx, “Viewing Party,” April 1, 2019 (“There, among the chintz furniture and cucumber sandwiches that could have come over on the Mayflower, was ‘1076 Madison,’ an exhibition of Cynthia Talmadge’s paintings depicting the Campbell building. The art works were displayed on easels that on other occasions had supported wreaths, photo collages, and, in one case, a deceased’s cherished dartboard”).

8. Mark Singer, “ ‘The Anti-“Godot,' " April 15, 2019 ("Lean and nimble, he has dark brown hair that aimed in various opposing directions, a horseshoe mustache, a graying goatee, and scruffy extra-in-a-saloon-scene cheeks”).

9. Ben McGrath, “Boom,” January 28, 2019 (“The best place to watch the Tappan Zee Bridge blow up, this past Tuesday, seemed to be slightly north of Lyndhurst, the old Jay Gould estate, in Tarrytown”).

10. Patricia Marx, “New Shade,” January 14, 2019 (“It was a clear morning—the sky was a shade of blue that resembled Benjamin Moore’s Icing on the Cake”).

March 18, 2019 Issue

Rebecca Mead’s “The Perfect Paint,” in this week’s issue, is the latest in a line of recent New Yorker “paint” pieces. The others are Patricia Marx’s “New Shade” (January 14, 2019), Simon Schama’s “Blue as Can Be” (September 3, 2018), and Ian Frazier’s “Patina” (September 19, 2016). Which of these pieces is the most “painterly”? 

In “Perfect Paint,” Mead tells about the success of high-end English paint company Farrow & Ball. Of her visit to the company’s factory, she writes,

When I was visiting, a batch of Hague Blue was being stirred to completion. The enormous vat of paint shimmered like a luxurious pool in a Turkish hammam, and I almost wanted to climb in.

That last line is wonderfully sensuous. 

Patricia Marx, in her Talk story “New Shade,” accompanies color consultant Martin Kesselman on a tour of the home of one of his clients, Stacey Lighthouse. Marx’s description of the color of Lighthouse’s clothes made me laugh:

Lighthouse answered the door, dressed in satin trousers and a matching blouse in Visa Infinite Privilege Card blue, and enthusiastically showed Kesselman around.

Simon Schama’s “Blue as Can Be” is an account of his visit to the Forbes Collection, a color archive at Harvard University. He tells about two tubes of Mummy Brown, “made from the rendered gunk of the Egyptian dead, thought to be rich in the bituminous asphalt used in embalming and as a protection against fungal decay.” In a delightful line, he says, “There was cuttlefish sepia and burnt umber, but if Turner needed a loamy richness he reached for Mummy.”

Ian Frazier, in his superb “Patina,” describes Statue of Liberty green: “the ageless patina of the copper had a texture like extremely fine velour. Some of it shaded to a green-black, parts were dark blue, parts olive.” He says,

When you have Statue of Liberty green on the brain, you see it all around you, especially on infrastructure. Being aware of the color somehow makes the city’s bindings and conduits and linkages stand out as if they’d been injected with radioactive dye. When you look for the color, the city becomes an electric train set you’re assembling with your eyes.

All four pieces are excellent; all of them brim with color. But reviewing them today, I find one hue stands out: Statue of Liberty green. 

February 8 & 15, 2016 Issue

James Wood, in his "Unsuitable Boys," in this week’s issue, says we live in “an age of the sentence fetish.” Well, as the bartender in Ian Frazier’s "Out of the Bronx" says, “Nuttin’ wrong with that!” I relish sentence rhythm, texture, and structure. If that makes me a fetishist, so be it. It makes Wood one, too – he’s the Casanova of sentence fetishists. “First, there is a simple joy to be had from reading the sentences,” he says in “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style.” In "Red Planet," he says,  “His [Cormac McCarthy’s] sentences are commaless convoys.” In "Late and Soon," he says, “His [Per Petterson’s] sentences yearn to fly away into poetry.” In "No Time For Lies," he says, “Her [Elizabeth Harrower’s] sentences, which have an unsettling candor, launch a curling assault on the reader, often twisting in unexpected ways.” I could list dozens of examples of Wood’s intense preoccupation with sentences. I savor them all.

“Diary of a New Yorker Sentence Fetishist” would make a good tagline for this blog. As proof, here are seven sentences from the current issue that I enjoyed immensely:

1. The El Chapo doesn’t feel particularly louche, except that it’s basically a goblet of tequila, with a hint of pisco and citrus (“Very spirit forward,” the server offered optimistically); the Flying Purple Pisco, with purple-potato purée and frothed egg whites, is like a tiny lavender-hued soufflé. [Shauna Lyon, "Tables For Two: Llama Inn"]

2. At the bottom of the stairs, in a barrel-vaulted watering hole, long lines of people waited for the bathroom from whence burst ebullient gaggles of young women and a madly coughing guy in a Thrasher hat. [Nicolas Niarchos, ”Bar Tab: Berlin"]

3. The proprietor of the café—belly, suspenders, glasses on a cord—sidled up to the table. [Lauren Collins, "Dog's Dinner"]

4. Somehow—Jay’s biography, though it comes as close as any source to explaining the how of how, still leaves a reader at the intersection of belief and disbelief—he did magic (specialty: cups-and-balls), played several instruments (dulcimer, trumpet, flute), trick-shot with pistols, demonstrated exquisite ball control at skittles, danced the hornpipe on his leather-encased stumps, married four times, and sired fourteen children (proof, as Jay noted in “Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women,” of “one fully operative appendage”). [Mark Singer, "Sleight of No Hands"]

5. On the advice of sleep doctors, fatigue-management specialists, and know-it-alls on wellness blogs, these tossers and turners drink cherry juice, eat Atlantic perch, set the bedroom thermostat between sixty-seven and seventy degrees, put magnets under the pillow, curl their toes, uncurl their toes, and kick their partners out of bed, usually to little avail. [Patricia Marx, "In Search of Forty Winks"]

6. Sentences expand, even at the cost of some strain, in order to absorb as much of Berlin as possible: “I had no trouble seeing the justice of Manfred’s criticisms when we discussed Rosen-Montag over cigarettes by the Hansa warehouse slated to become a children’s clinic.” [James Wood, "Unsuitable Boys"]

7. Seidel’s elegy has some of the plastered sweetness of a woozy toast. [Dan Chiasson, "Luxe et Veritas"]

What makes these sentences special is that even though they were created to be part of a larger unit of composition, they are beautiful in their own right as stand-alone constructions – the brilliant verbal equivalents of Rauschenberg combines, Cornell boxes, and Calder mobiles.

September 17, 2012 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:

Patricia Marx’s Talk story “Happy Hunting” (The bit about the six-year-old cupping “an oodgy-colored something” is inspired.)

The “Briefly Noted” review of Iain Sinclair’s Ghost Milk (Its description of Sinclair’s prose as “lacerating, off-kilter” is perfect. In my opinion, Sinclair is one of the greats. Maybe someday The New Yorker will do a longer piece on him. He merits fuller analysis.)

Anthony Gottlieb’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” [Contains several witty lines, e.g., “We are, in short, all running apps from Fred Flintstone’s not-very-smartphone,” “American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens." But Gottlieb’s mention of Stephen Jay Gould doesn’t do justice to Gould’s view on evolutionary psychology. For example, Gould would be vehemently opposed to the “snappy slogan” (“Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind”) that Gottlieb says sums up the current line of post-Darwinian thinking. In his “Natural Selection and the Brain” (The Panda’s Thumb, 1980), Gould says, “The brain is vastly overdesigned for what it accomplished in primitive society; thus, natural selection could not have built it.” However, there’s at least this to be said for Gottlieb’s piece: it’s rekindled my interest in Gould’s writing. Gould wrote one of the most powerful book reviews ever to appear in The New Yorker. I’m referring to his extraordinary “Curveball” (November 28, 1994), an evisceration of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. The piece is a fit subject for a “Retrospective Review.” Maybe someday I’ll get around to writing it.]
 

Peter Schjeldahl’s “All Stripes” (Regarding Gerhard Richter’s “STRIPS,” Schjeldahl writes, “I like and don’t like the work.” But when he says earlier in the piece, “I can’t think of any other important art that has seemed to expect so little imaginative participation from a viewer,” I’m left wondering what there is to like about it.)

Anthony Lane’s “Sail Away” (I like reviews that proceed by raising questions, and this piece poses a beauty: “Here is frustration made flesh, with fearsome results; would it be heretical or ungrateful to say that there are times, when Phoenix is in full spate, and when Hoffman is revealing similar ruptures of rage in Dodd’s more genial façade, when there is just too much acting going on, perhaps with a capital ‘A’?”)

January 16, 2012 Issue

“No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said. Patricia Marx intently follows the dictum, but the “things” she writes about (e.g., “a Moschino ‘Great Hits Spring/Summer 2007’ evening bag that looks like two 45-r.p.m. records stitched together with yarn,” “leather spats trimmed with polka-dot grosgrain ribbon,” “an I. Magnin black velvet hat with a marine-blue feather, circa 1945,” “a bristle brush shaped like a cross,” “Urban Decay eyeshadow,” “Murray’s lemony-garlic rotisserie chicken,” “a scoop-necked wool bouclé jacket trimmed with turquoise-like stones,” “sunglasses with taxicab yellow visors over the lenses,” “a flock of ghoulish Tweety Birds with x’d out eyes,” "chunky Marni necklaces made from colorful shapes of melted and stretched bovine horn”) make Williams’s “things” (e.g., wheelbarrow, rainwater) seem pretty tame. This week, in a piece titled “A Bushel and a Peck,” Marx describes, in detail after marvelous detail, the wondrous items she finds at Fairway, Whole Foods, Zabar’s, and other food megastores. Marx’s writing constantly enables us to see and feel the texture of things. Here, for example, is her description of some of the “quality grub” available at Eli’s:

At Eli’s the produce glistens: champagne grapes $4, seasonal), exquisite endive $5.99/lb.). (“My friend can always taste if my endive is from there. She’ll say, ‘Did you get this from the burglars? It’s sooo good.’”) The cheeses are evidently so valuable that some like the drunken goat cheese soaked in wine ($20/lb.) and the Tête de Moine, a Swiss cheese eaten by scraping it with a knife ($20/lb.), must be kept under surveillance in vitrines.

I’m not sure who’s being quoted in the parenthesis, but the sensuous “It’s sooo good” could stand as a tagline for the whole piece. And that detail about how Tête de Moine is eaten (“by scraping it with a knife”) is delectable.

A hallmark of Marx’s style is her habit of asking lots of questions, many of which are amazing – so loaded with specificity, so layered with detail, that they’re almost surreal. Her “A Bushel and a Peck" contains a beauty that went straight into my “Patricia Marx Great Questions” collection:

Oh, the bagels, the thirty-seven varieties of olive (in oil), the fat wedges of Parmigiano Reggiano, organic popcorn, French milled soap that lasts forever, frozen Barney’s Franks ’n Blankets, locally made Ben’s cream cheese, and how about Murray’s lemony-garlic rotisserie chicken (you could eat it till you die), plus six hundred artisanal cheeses from around the world, and, would you believe it, Velveeta and Spam, too?

This is classic Patricia Marx. She’s not really eliciting information; she’s expressing astonishment that Fairway carries all these exotic items and, in addition, has Velveeta and Spam.

When Marx starts a question with “Oh,” as she does in the above quote, look out - a wondrous string of words is about to unfurl. She did it a few years ago in her brilliant “On And Off The Avenue: Marni” (The New Yorker, January 5, 2009):

Oh, and could I also have that strand of fabric-covered beads anchoring a large plastron of midnight-blue resin? And the pendant that looks like a conference pass except that, instead of a name tag inside the clear plastic pouch, there’s a grid of acrylic gems?

These are questions, but they’re also akin to the inventory of the contents of a Joseph Cornell box.

Here are six more examples of Marx’s delightful questions, gathered from various New Yorker pieces she’s written over the last few years:

Are you certain that you have what it takes to shop discount? Do you have the patience to excavate heaps of finery that is frayed, smudged, stretched, faded, pulled, ripped, mis-sized, unstylish, out of season, or never was in season? The grit to see yourself in the glare of fluorescent lighting – if you can even find a mirror? The confidence to have an opinion without being told what it is by an encouraging salesperson? Do you thrill to the ambience of the Department of Motor Vehicles? (“The Price Is Right,” December 8, 2008)

Is the sign in the rest room that warns “No napping” directed at the employees? Or is it for the toddlers who shop here, knowing that Daffy’s is tops for European children’s attire? Wouldn’t that cunning white knit jacket with subtle embroidery be just the thing for a little one to spit up on ($59, reduced from $200)? (“The Price Is Right,” December 8, 2008)

Do you know what several dozen bottles breaking in the back seat sounds like? (“To Shop and Drive in L.A,” March 20, 2006)

Really, now, should a piece of plastic and a couple of breakable hinges cost more than the laptop I’m typing on? (“Four Eyes,” March 29, 2010)

Are toys passé? Would a child give the time of day to a model-train set or to finger paints when, not far from the playroom, the sirens of Penguin Whacker on the iPhone, and Fruit Ninja on the iPad, beckon? (“Toy Stories,” December 6, 2010)

Did you know that Minnesota enacted a law last year requiring all American flags sold there to originate in the land of the free and the home of the sewing machine? (“Made In U.S.A.,” March 16, 2009)

Marx is a terrific writer – where “terrific” means specific, artful, avid, humorous, sensual, quasi-surreal. I enjoy her work immensely.

Postscript: Another pleasure in this week’s issue is John Kinsella’s poem “The Fable of the Great Sow.” I like its kinetic pig energy (“A leap across the gate, a pivot on the wall / Opposite, and over into a neighboring pen”), its pig descriptions (“She was total pig,/Pure sow who’d farrowed litter on litter/To watch them raised to slaughter”), its pig reality (“flies and heat of the shed”). Kinsella is becoming one of my favorite poets. His “Goat” (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010) is brilliant.

March 29, 2010 Issue

Who is The New Yorker’s best fashion writer? I think it’s still Judith Thurman, but Lauren Collins is coming up fast on the inside. Take her “Check Mate” (September 14, 2009), for example. Dig that “tufting scarps of millstone grit” in her opening paragraph. My test for inspired fashion writing is simple; it’s the same one James Wood uses when he’s fondling narrative detail: palpability. Here’s Collins’s description of a Burberry tote bag: “It was made of yellow leather, pale as sorbet, and its surface had been shaved, or chiffonaded, so that it appeared to be covered in thousands of eyelashes.” Now I ask you, is that not one of the loveliest, most palpable things you’ve ever read? Alas, Collins is not in this week’s “The Style Issue.” Thurman is. Her “Face It” didn’t do much for me. The best thing about it is the red-pink-orange Laurie Rosenwald illustration. That and Thurman’s magnificent subjectivity. Her “I” is never very far away from her subject, and I love that. In “Face It,” she takes us with her into an aircraft lavatory and lets us watch her put cream on her face. Not just any cream; its “Boot’s No. 7 Protect & Perfect Intense Beauty Serum,” don’t you know. Thurman gets a smile from me when she says, “I started to protect and perfect myself in the plane’s lavatory, despite a long-standing personal security procedure – I never look in the mirror by that merciless light.” Okay, that’s funny, but it doesn’t pass the test. Where’s the palpability? There’s a smidgin of it in Rebecca Mead’s flyweight “The Prince of Solomeo,” a profile of Brunello Cuicinelli, a sweater maker who lives in a cashmere cocoon of unreality on a mountain top in Umbria. Here’s the smidgin: “In cream-colored velvety corduroy pants and an oatmeal-colored cashmere sweater, he had the plush and contented aspect of a pampered cat.” I confess I could not relate to this pampered puss in the least. Consequently, I only skimmed the rest of the article. Call it palpability; call it tactility; whatever, I’m still in search of it and the magazine this week is damn short of it – which for a so-called “style issue” is surprising, nay, shocking! Let’s look in Alexandra Jacob’s “Fashion Democracy,” shall we? Nope, not there, either, unless you count her marvelous parenthetical “At barneys.com, one must navigate the Clipper around a cone-headed mannequin.” I really like that, but it’s more surreal than it’s palpable, and right now for me it’s either palpable or it’s nothing. Might Patricia Marx’s “Four Eyes,” have what I’m looking for? It contains lots of great eyeglass descriptions, that’s for sure. Consider this beauty: “Some of the riches include sunglasses with taxicab-yellow visors over the lenses; aqua butterfly frames with rhinestones your bubbe might have worn in Miami; folding silver wire rims from the twenties; and a pair of circular specs from the eighteen hundreds whose temples end in loops so that the wearer can pin them to his wig.” But let’s face it: if you’re looking for descriptive texture (and we are, we are), glasses are not where it’s at. For sheer palpability, fabric description is unbeatable. And no one writes fabric better than Judith Thurman. Here’s a sample from her great 2005 Chanel piece, “Scenes From A Marriage”: “the ivory cocktail suit of spun-sugar bouclé, with a dissolving hem; the romantically tiered evening dress of black tulle, with a trompe l’oeil cummerbund of silver threadwork and rhinestones.” I don’t know about you, but I find that “spun-sugar bouclé” in combination with the “dissolving hem” pretty damn ravishing. And I don’t even know what bouclé is. Forget palpability; edibility is the real test.