Best of 2015: Photos

Floyd Mayweather (Photo by Benjamin Lowy)

Here are my favourite New Yorker photos of 2015:

1. Benjamin Lowy’s “The Kitchen Tent,” for Nick Paumgarten’s "Life Is Rescues" (newyorker.com version), November 9, 2015.

2. Pari Dukovic’s “Chaka Khan,” for "Goings On About Town," June 8, 2015.

3. Landon Nordeman’s “Warm Up,” for "Goings On About Town," July 20, 2015.

4. Landon Nordeman’s “DreamYard,” for Ian Frazier’s "Bronx Dreams," December 7, 2015.

5. Ian Allen’s “Chastity Belt,” for "Goings On About Town," May 25, 2015.

6. Benjamin Lowy’s “Landsbjörg,” for Nick Paumgarten’s "Life Is Rescues," November 9, 2015.

7. Dina Litovsky’s “Timna,” for Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two," October 26, 2015.

8. Will Mebane’s “School of Rock,” for "Goings On About Town," November 30, 2015.

9. Charlie Engman’s “Blood Orange,” for "Goings On About Town," December 14, 2015.

10. Meredith Jenks’s “Brooklyn Bavarian Biergarten,” for Amelia Lester’s "Tables For Two," October 12, 2015.

Credit: The above portrait of Floyd Mayweather, by Benjamin Lowy, is from Kelefa Sannah’s "The Best Defense," The New Yorker, May 25, 2015.

Best of 2015: Talk

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2015 (with a choice quote from each selection in brackets):

1. Mark Singer, "All-Nighter," May 11, 2015. (“Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?”)

2. Ian Frazier, "Russophilia," February 16, 2015. (“When undone, scarves with modernistic prints sent out gusts of international perfume.”)

3. Nick Paumgarten, "Hut!," June 22, 2015. (“They flew on the tide, the city sparkling by.”)

4. Lizzie Widdicombe, "Air Bus," June 1, 2015. (“The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups spilled. Marcy said, ‘Wow! I love this part!’ The pilot yelled, ‘Touchdown!’ ”)

5. Nick Paumgarten, "Amerks," October 5, 2015. (“Dutton, eighty-two, had a brush cut, a firm jawline, and teeth that looked suspiciously like replacements for a set scattered on a frozen pond.”)

6. Ian Frazier, "Amo, Amas," August 3, 2015. (“Languages and facts flew like sparks from a grindstone and skidded bluely onto the board.”)

7. Sarah Larson, "Cinephiles," January 19, 2015. (“The waitress brought Murray two rum-and-water options. He took one and said, of the other, ‘You give that to the kids at the orphanage.’ ”)

8. Lauren Collins, "Birds-Eye View," July 6, 2015. (“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.”)

9. Alec Wilkinson, "Hands," June 29, 2015. (“When Elfman arrived, he said that he began collecting when he was travelling the world after graduating from high school. ‘I was in Bamako, Mali, and I bought a standing, smiling skeleton carved from a single piece of bone, probably an elephant bone,’ he said. ‘There was a guy in the market with three of them. I negotiated for a day, with breaks for lunch.’ ”)

10. John Seabrook, "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.”)

Credit: The above portrait of Tanya Tagaq, by Tom Bachtell, is from John Seabrook's "Free," The New Yorker, February 2, 2015.

Best of 2015: GOAT

Here are my favorite “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2015 (with a choice quote from each selection in brackets):

1. Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Shuko," August 10 & 17, 2015). (“ ‘Did he say scallop sperm?’ He did, and it’s mild, sweet, and a little bit wobbly, like custard.”)

2. Sarah Larson, "Bar Tab: Wassail," April 20, 2015. (“Better yet was the Falling Up, with bourbon, apple brandy, Cynar, lemon, fresh ginger, and port. Served in a brandy snifter, piled high with pebbled ice, like a sno-cone, and garnished with an elaborately carved wedge of gala apple, it swirled cloudily in the glass, looking gloriously silly.”)

3. Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Winnie's," February 9, 2015. (“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.”)

4. Andrea K. Scott, "Boxing Days," June 29, 2015. (“It’s a portable survey of Cianciolo’s career, revealing a hunter-gatherer of the flea market and an inveterate archivist of her own process. They’re the shamanic-punk heirs to a lineage of inside-the-box thinkers whose most famous son is Joseph Cornell.”)

5. Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Livingston Manor," March 16, 2015. (“So it is that such throwbacks as wood reclaimed from a Virginia elementary school and a bourbon-and-ginger-spiked egg cream called the Bugsville Fizz coexist with neoteric features like a hearty dark lager from Catskill Brewery (est. 2014), a duck-rillette banh mi, and a woman guilelessly confessing, ‘I never really got into Seinfeld, I think because I was too young.’ ”)

6. Richard Brody, "Bodies of Work," June 22, 2015. (“Fairchild, who performs like a counterculture Gena Rowlands, is irresistibly passionate and volatile even in repose, and Shults displays a bold visual and dramatic sensibility with his impressionistic rearrangement of time and his repertory of darting, whirling, plunging, and retreating camera moves, which seem to paint the action onto the screen.”)

7. Colin Stokes, "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.”)

8. Nicolas Niarchos, "Bar Tab: Dutch Kills," November 2, 2015. (“Behind a brown door on a blasted section of Jackson Avenue, a whip-thin saloon that bears the neighborhood’s name is bringing back a version of the past, with the clink of hand-cut ice in tumblers and the waft of freshly cut orange peel.”)

9. Jiayang Fan, "Bar Tab: Play Lounge," February 16, 2015. (“Hookah beer towers (strawberry, mint, melon) are hailed like cabs on a busy avenue.”)

10. Silvia Killingsworth, "Tables For Two: Timna," October 26, 2015. (“Kubaneh is a Yemenite-Jewish yeast loaf traditionally eaten on the morning of the sabbath, after it has baked overnight at a low temperature. Mesika’s version is served steaming hot in a clay flowerpot, freckled with sesame seeds. Its texture falls somewhere between brioche, challah, and croissant, and it pulls apart like cotton candy.”)

Credit: The above illustration, by Rebecca Monk, is from Jiayang Fan’s "Bar Tab: Play Lounge," The New Yorker, February 16, 2015.

December 21 & 28, 2015 Issue

The year began with Peter Schjeldahl (see his wonderful "Take Your Time," The New Yorker, January 5, 2015); it’s only fitting that it should end with him. He’s enjoyed a prolific 2015 – eighteen “Art World” pieces, all of them dandy, plus contributions to “Goings On About Town” and newyorker.com. I devour all his work. In a magazine loaded with stylish writers, his style is the most distinctive. This week, he has two pieces in the magazine – "The Dripping Point" and "Shades of White." Both are excellent, but in different ways.

 “The Dripping Point,” a “Goings On About Town” note on MoMA’s Jackson Pollock: A Collective Survey, 1934-1954, shows Schjeldahl celebrating one of his favorite artists. He says, “Pollock’s lifelong intensity and, at his peak, sublimity do not pale.” I agree. Whatever turns Schjeldahl on, turns me on, especially when it engenders delectable descriptions like this: “interwoven high-speed skeins in black, white, dove-gray, teal, and fawn-brown oil and enamel bang on the surface while hinting at cosmic distances.” That’s Pollock’s great One: Number 31, 1950, as rendered in Schjeldahl’s inimitable word paint. Reading “The Dripping Point,” I experience double bliss: the subject is unimpeachably interesting; the writing is intensely pleasurable.

The other Schjeldahl piece in this week’s issue – “Shades of White” – is cooler. It’s a review of the Robert Ryman retrospective at Dia Art Foundation. Schjeldahl uses words like “phlegmatic,” “philosophical,” “monkish,” and “mute” to describe Ryman’s all-white abstracts. He says, “At times, the main—or, really, only—event is an emphasis on the way a work is attached to a wall: by bolts, staples, brackets, or flanges.” But Schjeldahl isn’t dismissive. At one point, he says,

If I could have one work from the show, to satisfy my somewhat equivocal appetite for Rymanism, it would be the delicately befuddling “Arista” (1968), a six-foot-square painting on unstretched linen, which is stapled to the wall and abutted, on the wall, by ruled lines in blue chalk. The lines suggest a guide to placement, but there they are in place, themselves, as the most interesting feature of the work. The particular meaning, if any, of a Ryman commonly tiptoes just out of mental reach.

Schjeldahl’s willingness to explore his “equivocal appetite” is one of the qualities that set him apart from other critics. Even though his passion is for Pollock, he’s happy to give Ryman’s austere works their due.

December 14, 2015 Issue

This week’s Pick of the Issue (maybe even Pick of the Year) is Ben McGrath’s excellent "The Wayfarer." It’s about a sixty-three-year-old riverine nomad named Dick Conant, who spent his days paddling his Coleman canoe (“packed as if for the apocalypse, with tarps and trash bags and Army-surplus duffels”), voyaging America’s waterways. McGrath first met Conant on September 1, 2014, on the bank of the Hudson River, at Piedmont, New York. He interviewed him at his campsite and wrote a Talk story about him, called "Southbound," that appeared in the September 22, 2014 New Yorker. Three months later, Conant went missing. His canoe was found upside down near the mouth of Big Flatty Creek, on Albemarle Sound, North Carolina. McGrath endeavors to reconstruct Conant’s last trip – from Plattsburg, N.Y. to Big Flatty Creek, N.C. He talks to a state trooper named Edwin Scollon. Scollon provides a remarkable description of his brief encounter with Conant at Willsboro Point, on the shore of Lake Champlain. Here’s a short excerpt from Scollon’s report:

I found Mr. Conant in a bed that he had made upon a pebbled shoreline and under a canopy of cedars. He hadn’t heard me come around the house and I took a moment to size him up. He looked quite comfortable; he had a book propped up on his midsection and all that was left of his dinner was the can that had once contained it. It was readily apparent to me, from all that he had in and about his canoe, that Mr. Conant was making a long trip. If I hadn’t had a job to do, I would have left him alone. He had made this little piece of shoreline his own for the night and even though he was outdoors, I did feel that I was about to disturb his privacy.

McGrath also talked to a harbor pilot named Dougy Walsh. He, too, had a vivid memory of meeting Conant: “ ‘I was blown away by this guy,’ Walsh recalled. ‘He didn’t have any nautical charts! He was using a road atlas!’ ” McGrath talked to a resident of Trenton, N.Y., named Kevin Jolley. Conant was taking a break from an arduous portage through Trenton, when Jolley encountered him and used his iPhone to video-record a conversation with him. Here’s McGrath’s superb rendering of that conversation:

Scene: Conant, sitting on a street corner, leaning back against a green duffel, boots crossed, maps in his lap, hands knotted over his midsection. He has a Camaro Z28 cap on his head, and a toothbrush and a pen poking out of his breast pockets. The canoe is off to his right, parallel to the curb. A white brick building advertising “Plumbing & Heating Materials” squats in the background. Strewn backpacks and bags, a crate, a blue bucket, a Gatorade bottle: a landlubber’s boating picnic. A man in a motorized wheelchair cruises west, not on the sidewalk but in the street, against the flow of traffic, and doesn’t so much as turn his head to acknowledge the strange voyager.

“Where you headed?” a voice offscreen asks.

“I’m headed down to Florida,” Conant says, laughing.

“What made you stop through Trenton?” another voice asks. “Just the map?”

“Well, no,” Conant says. “I want to get on the Delaware, so I can head down to—there’s a Chesapeake-Delaware Canal that I can take into Chesapeake Bay. Now, Chesapeake Bay’s a large body of water, and I’ll be exposed. But it’s not as large as the Atlantic Ocean.”

The first offscreen voice asks, “Yeah, man, what’s your whole purpose, though?”

Before Conant can finish answering, a black S.U.V. pulls up alongside the curb, looming over the canoeist, and the camera turns away. A woman leans out the window. “Excuse me,” she says. “I’m looking for River View Plaza?”

You can tell from that passage – the Camaro Z28 cap, the toothbrush and pen poking out of Conant’s pockets, the canoe, the backpacks and bags, crate, blue bucket, Gatorade bottle – that McGrath relishes Conant’s details. I do, too. Reading the piece, I thought of James Wood’s observation: “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself” (The Nearest Thing to Life). That’s what McGrath has done in “The Wayfarer”; he’s brilliantly noticed this solitary, authentic, tragic, wanderer and thereby saved him from extinction. To redeem is one of art’s main functions. McGrath has fulfilled it magnificently in this great piece.

Tony Bennett and Bill Charlap's "The Silver Lining"

If Whitney Balliett, the great New Yorker jazz critic, were alive today, I’m sure he’d be savoring Tony Bennett and Bill Charlap’s superb new album, The Silver Lining. Balliett, who died in 2007, was a fan of both Bennett and Charlap. In his classic profile of Bennett, “A Quality That Lets You In” (The New Yorker, January 7, 1974; included in Balliett’s 1979 collection American Singers), he wrote,

He [Bennett] drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer. But Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together. It is pitched slightly higher than Sinatra’s (it was once a tenor, but it has deepened over the years), and it has a rich, expanding quality that is immediately identifiable. It has a joyous quality, a pleased, shouting-within quality.

Bennett was forty-eight when Balliett wrote those words. Now he’s eighty-nine. Amazingly, Balliett’s description still applies. If anything, Bennett’s voice is even richer now than it was in 1974, when Balliett profiled him. And it still has that “joyous quality” that Balliett mentions. Listening to him sing Jerome Kern’s gorgeous songs on The Silver Lining, I’m struck by his expressiveness; he sounds like he really believes the lyrics he’s singing.

Bennett and Charlap’s singer-accompanist relationship seems perfect. To my knowledge this is the first time they’ve performed together. Charlap seems to intuit Bennett’s every melodic move, embracing them, celebrating them. He’s a great jazz pianist. Balliett thought so, too. Here’s some of what he said about him in his wonderful “The Natural” (The New Yorker, April 19, 1999):

His ballad numbers are unique. He may start with the verse of the song, played ad lib, then move into the melody chorus. He does not rhapsodize. Instead, he improvises immediately, rearranging the chords and the melody line, and using a relaxed, almost implied beat. He may pause for a split second at the end of this chorus and launch a nodding, swinging single-note solo chorus, made up of irregularly placed notes – some off the beat and some behind the beat – followed by connective runs, and note clusters. He closes with a brief, calming recap of the melody. His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists. He constantly reins in his up-tempo numbers. He has formidable technique, but he never shows off, even when he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, racing upper-register tintinnabulations, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines; each note is rounded. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us.

That “His sound shines; each note is rounded” is inspired. It exactly describes Charlap’s playing on The Silver Lining. The album is sublime.

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).

December 7, 2015 Issue

Let us now praise Ian Frazier. His "Bronx Dreams," in this week’s issue, tells about an amazing community organization called DreamYard, “the largest arts organization in the Bronx,” that uses art, theatre, and dance to inspire kids to pursue an education. Frazier reports, “Of the kids who participate long-term in the center’s on-site programs, ninety-eight per cent graduate from high school and go on to college—an achievement, considering that the over-all rate of high-school graduation in the Bronx is just above fifty per cent.” Frazier has a deep social conscience, as anyone who’s read his "Hungry Minds" (The New Yorker, May 26, 2008), "Hidden City" (The New Yorker, October 28, 2013), and 'The Antidote" (The New Yorker, September 8, 2014) well knows. In “Bronx Dreams,” his care and respect for the students, teachers, and founders of DreamYard is palpable. And so are his strong feelings for the Bronx. Consider this passage, one of my favorites:

Walking to DreamYard from the subway one morning, I came upon a small crowd along Third Avenue. A steady rain was falling. Police had stopped four young men in a car, and three patrol cars had pulled over—one alongside the vehicle, one ahead, and one behind. People on the sidewalk were recording the stop on their phones. Five policemen and one policewoman stood next to or behind the stopped car, and the two on the passenger side brought the young men out of the car and made them lean over with their hands on it.

One young man had no coat and was getting wet in the rain. He asked the police if he could retrieve his coat from the car. He reached into the back seat, slowly brought out the coat, put it on with great slowness and caution, and again leaned over against the car. On the faces of the detainees as well as of the cops was an expression of deep, almost sorrowful gravity.

That description of the faces – “deep, almost sorrowful gravity” – is inspired. What I like about the passage is its incidental nature – something he saw along the way. Frazier’s attentiveness to such matters is one of the hallmarks of his style. Here’s another example: Frazier attends the Bronx Arts Festival; he observes the DreamYard teachers; he says,

For the DreamYard teachers in the public schools, the festival was like a reunion. They stood in groups talking and showing each other photos on their phones. In out-of-the-way corners near the refreshment tables, stacks of empty pizza boxes rose to the height of a man.

That brilliant found image of the pizza boxes stacked as high as a man is pure Frazier. “Out-of-the-way corners” are his specialty.

Another remarkable piece in this week’s issue is Martin Amis’s "Oktober." It’s labeled “fiction,” but it feels more like a personal essay – Amis’s record of his first-hand experience of Berlin this past October as the flood of Syrian refugees approaches the German border. The piece channels Amis’s consciousness as he winds up his book tour, has tea in a hotel foyer, eavesdrops on a phone conversation at a nearby table, takes part in a brief photo shoot on the street outside the hotel, observes the crowd of Oktoberfesters, orders a drink, reads Nabokov’s Letters to Véra, participates in an interview, chats with the man (Geoffrey) whose phone conversation he’d earlier been listening in on, packs his bag for his flight home, goes to bed, participates in another interview the next morning, walks (because there are no taxis due to Oktoberfest) to the train station, arrives at Munich International, has another encounter with Geoffrey the businessman, boards his flight, flies to New York City, has trouble sleeping, reads Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent, and thinks about the refugee crisis. Set out like this, it sounds mundane. But it’s quite the opposite. For one thing, it brims with life-giving details (e.g., “In great numbers, the Oktoberfesters were streaming past, the women in cinched dirndls and wenchy blouses, the men in suède or leather breeches laced just below the knee, tight jackets studded with medals or badges, and jaunty little hats with feathers, rosettes, cockades”). For another, it constitutes a weird, unsettling compound of Oktoberfest and refugee crisis, drunken merriment and impinging reality, postulating, in its final paragraphs (if I’m reading them right) a return of fascism. (“And even now it was as if a tectonic force had taken hold of Europe and, using its fingernails, had lifted it up and tilted it, politically, causing a heavy mudslide in the direction of old illusions, old dreams of purity and cruelty”). I relish “Oktober” ’s essayistic form. Amis appears to have re-created, with extraordinary fidelity, the texture of his anxiety.

Favorite Books of 2015

Here are five books published in 2015 that I enjoyed immensely:

1. James Wood’s The Nearest Thing to Life, a collection of four extraordinary essays blending personal history with literary criticism. One of the pieces, "Why?," originally appeared in The New Yorker. (See my post here.)

2. Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, a brilliant essay collection on poets and poetry, including two wonderful New Yorker pieces, “American X-Rays: Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry” and “Ardor and Artifice: Merrill’s Mozartian Touch.” (See my posts here and here.)

3. Julian Bell’s Van Gogh: A Power Seething, a superb, concise, stimulating study of Van Gogh’s life and work by one of my favorite art critics. (See my post here.)

4. Michael Hofmann’s Where Have You Been?, a delicious collection of essays on James Schuyler, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski, and Les Murray, among others. It also contains an excellent piece on my favorite Canadian poet, Karen Solie. (See my post here.)

5. Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop, an exquisite study of Bishop’s poetry, including her great New Yorker poem, “At the Fishhouses,” which Tóibín ingeniously connects with James Joyce’s “The Dead.” (See my post here.)

Correction: I see now that Michael Hofmann's Where Have You Been? is not a 2015 book. It was published in 2014. But I read it this year, and so I'm going to keep it on my 2015 list. 

November 30, 2015 Issue

This week’s “Goings On About Town” (GOAT) brims with shuddery pleasures: Will Mebane’s jubilant “School of Rock” photo; Roman Muradov’s whimsical "Celebrating the Holidays" illustration; Richard Brody’s exquisite capsule review of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (“The director’s analytical intellectualism—with an emphasis on the diplomatic maneuvers of empire-building, the tactical complexity of ancient warfare, and the psychological pressure of romance on the levers of power—is heated by the erotic passion of Antony and Cleopatra and the intense bond between Taylor and Burton, which is as entrancing in the movie’s drama as it was in life”); Andrea K. Scott’s wonderful "Seeing Stars" on Rachel Rose’s video “Everything and More” (“unfolds onscreen for eleven minutes and orbits in the mind’s eye for days”); Shauna Lyon’s ravishing "Tables For Two" on Sushi Azabu (“An epic procession begins: a square of piquant cured tuna, a small ceramic cup of velvety uni risotto, a gorgeous pair of cold kumamoto oysters topped with fresh grated wasabi—when announcing this last part, the young sushi chef, Tasuku Murakami, points to the gigantic gnarled green wasabi root displayed in a case: See? It’s very fresh”); Colin Stokes’s sublime "Bar Tab: Caledonia" [“Michael joked, as he served a creamy pint of Belhaven ale alongside a smooth and sweet Bunnahabhain Toiteach (“the ‘bh’ is a ‘v,’ ” he offered helpfully), whose aroma piqued nostrils from a tulip-shaped Glencairn glass”]. That “whose aroma piqued nostrils from a tulip-shaped Glencairn glass” is brilliant! It inspires me to propose a toast. Here’s to GOAT – my favorite part of the magazine.