Interesting Emendations: Calvin Trillin's "Breaux Bridge, Louisiana"

Photo by Peter Frank Edwards, from Calvin Trillin's "Breaux Bridge, Louisiana"

If you read Calvin Trillin’s classic “Breaux Bridge, Louisiana,” in last week’s “Archival Issue,” and were curious about who won the crawfish-eating contest, check out Trillin’s American Fried (1974). Its version of the piece ends with two additional paragraphs, the first of which contains this wonderful description of the eating champ:

The winner, Chester McGear, looked like one of the fraternity boys everyone had been so worried about, although he had actually graduated a couple of years before. He wore a sweatshirt emblematic of having consumed ten pitchers of beer in some tavern in Chicago, and he had a small rooting section that chanted “Go, Chester, Go!” or “Allons, Chester, Allons! or “Come on, Chester, Eat That Meat!” He was on his twenty-second pound of crawfish when his final opponent dropped out. I was pleased to see that McGear acted the part of a traditional eating champ. They never admit to being full. My father always used to tell me about a boy who won a pie-eating contest in St. Joe by eating thirty-three pies and then said, “I wooda ate more but my ma was calling me for supper.” When the reporters went up on the stand to interview McGear, he remained at his place, and as he answered the questions he absently reached toward the platter in front of him and peeled crawfish and popped them into his mouth, like a man working on the peanut bowl during a cocktail party.

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. 

August 30, 2021 Issue

Alejandro Chacoff, in his absorbing “Doom Strolling,” in this week’s issue, reviews Antonio Muñoz Molina’s new novel To Walk Alone in the Crowd, calling it “a cautionary tale about the endangerment of the art of idle walking.” The endangerment, according to Muñoz Molina, as reported by Chacoff, is society’s “retreat into digital life”: “New York, the narrator says, is ‘a city of zombies glued to cell phone screens.’ ” But is that really a threat to the flâneur? For me, the essence of flânerie is walking and looking. It’s a “street photographer” sensibility. Chacoff doesn’t define it this way. He quotes Virginia Woolf and says it’s a matter of “imaginatively experiencing other people’s histories, if only for awhile.” He quotes Baudelaire and says, “Not being at home, not being penned in, is the essential thing.” To me, these are odd definitions of flânerie, omitting its key ingredient: attentiveness. Janet Malcolm, in her great Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011), says, “I noticed it [a mosaic in the Queens Supreme Courthouse] only because one day, during a long recess, I was walking around the courthouse looking for things to notice.” Right there, for me, at least, is the essence of flânerie. You want a concrete example? Consider this:

From a distance, a vertical view would include the table, covered with a white cloth; a Martini in a Martini glass (yellow dab of lemon peel); a pack of Marlboros; a brushed-chrome Zippo lighter; the seated artist, deliberately unshaved, dressed in a white T-shirt and a gray knit hoodie (unzipped; purchased at a Salvation Army store); the awning of the gallery, which says “American Artist, Scott LoBaido”; and, atop all that, on the roof, an unrelated billboard for a personal-injury law firm, with the words “Bite Back” in big letters and a picture of a snarling dog in a spiked collar.

That’s from Ian Frazier’s wonderful “Biting Back” (The New Yorker, October 19, 2020). Frazier, like his New Yorker predecessor, Joseph Mitchell, has a flâneurial sensibility par excellence. The digital age hasn’t diminished it one bit. 

3 for the Road: Nature

This is the ninth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their wonderful nature descriptions.

Part of the deep pleasure these books provide is a thrilling contact with first nature:

Mountains

The mountains go 6,000 to 10,000 feet, to gunsight peaks and to sailing, razory needle peaks. They’re blue, cut with shadows and loaded with snow, and they carry small glaciers slung on their hips. [Notes from the Century Before]

Rivers

We drifted down the Yukon through a windless afternoon. The fast-flowing water was placid and – with its ring boils – resembled antique glass. Down one long straightaway, framed in white mountains, we saw ten full miles to the wall of the coming bend. [Coming into the Country]

Foothills

Beyond the road were foothills, clear-cut timber in patches, like heads shaved for surgery, and beyond the hills were mountains. [Great Plains]

Lakes

The lakes were black, in strange, disorderly Rorschach shapes [Notes from the Century Before]

More Mountains

Now, off to the left of the Twin Otter, the Talkeetna Mountains, behind Larson Lake, were topped with a dusting of snow, and along the whole range the snowline was drawn absolutely level somewhere near five thousand feet, as if someone painting a wall had carefully cut in with a brush to whiten just the high part. [Coming into the Country]

Forest

The forest itself grew taller and vast. The low intervals of brush, the marshes, the pea-vine openings and meadows were stopped up. It was a lightless, impenetrable forest: it was the prototype forest which presents a mad sea-net of heaped, angular, tree-sized sticks as its face. You don’t think of going in; you just look at it, turning your body side-ways on the seat. [Notes from the Century Before]

Grasses

He stopped the truck and said, “Let’s take a look at these grasses. This tall one here is bluestem. This’ll grow eight feet high if it gets enough water. Bluestem is what used to grow everywhere farther east, in places like Iowa. This low, skinny grass here is prairie sand reed. If cattle graze this in the summer they’ll take it right out. We graze it more in the winter. This is thread-leaf sedge. It’s the first thing to green up in the spring. I’ve seen this greenin’ up the tenth of March. Once this was up, the Indian ponies had something to eat, and the Indians could travel. This is little bluestem. Cattle don’t eat that so much. This is eriogonum. Technically, it’s not a shrub or a grass—it’s an herb. It’s green in the spring, gold in the summer, and red all winter. This is Indian rice grass. Stock loves this, but it isn’t a real abundant grass. This is blue grama grass. It’s a low-growing little grass, but it’s nutritious. The whole plant, seeds and all, cures over the summer and makes great winter feed. Grama grasses are what the fifty million buffalo ate. That tall plant over there is soapweed. Cattle love to eat soapweed blossoms. It’s a member of the yucca family. That copper-colored bush growing up in the rocks has a great name—mountain mahogany.” [Great Plains]

More Rivers

At last the Stikine itself confronts us. It’s about the same size as the Spatsizi, but blue and breezy up here, young and emotional, jiggled and studded and glittering. It’s even swifter and more self-assured than the Spatsizi is, as exhilarating as a running sea, and, augmented, adds twenty more yards of width. The blue water brightens the sunshine. There are a hundred swallows flying and kingfishers, ouzels and other birds, even seagulls, mountains on one side and spacious forest everywhere else. The river goes along in major key. This is almost the beginning. There is no canyon yet. Life is easy for it; it’s the young champion conquering day by day. [Notes from the Century Before]

Bears

The bear was about a hundred steps away, in the blueberries grazing. The head was down, the hump high. The immensity of muscle seemed to vibrate slowly – to expand and contract, with grazing. Not berries alone but whole bushes were going into the bear. [Coming into the Country]

Eagles

We went along the canyon a ways and stopped within sight of an eagle nest of sticks and branches built into the rock wall. The nest had enough wood in it for a football-rally bonfire, and it extended from the rock in a sketchy half-sphere. In the middle of the nest we could just see the top of the eagle, looking out like a man in a cupola. [Great Plains]

Wild Horses

Coming back across a grassy range, I meet a loose troop of horses, who slide out of reach like so many fish, wheeling in a flat, careful curve as if they were tied head to haunch: insouciant, bonehead horses, sinister in the face. No wild animal looks any tougher. They have the corrupt, gangster faces of mercenaries and that tight herding instinct. A roan and a white do a little kicking, and when the roan yawns, all the rest catch the yawn. [Notes from the Century Before]

Salmon

Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins. [Coming into the Country]

Trees

Cottonwood trees grow in all the valleys; suddenly there is something between you and the sun. The trees lean at odd angles, like flowers in a vase. In the summers, windrows of cottonwood-seed down cover the ground. Big cottonwoods have bark as ridged as a tractor tire, and the buffalo used to love to rub against it. In the shedding season, the river bottoms would often be ankle-deep in buffalo hair. At sunset, the shadows of the cottonwoods fall across the river and flutter on the riffles. [Great Plains]

Wolves

Her fur was in silver-fox shades and her head was larger than life. I stared at it the next day while she was being skinned. She had grim, snapping eyes set at a spellbinding slant, and a mouth like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors. At the zoo you can watch wolves mouthing their meat like a cobbler turning a shoe in his hands or a tailor handling a bundle of clothes. Oversized as it is, the mouth can be used as a pair of hands. Wolves’ legs are long because they churn for a hundred-and-fifty miles in a line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles in another line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles, all their lives. Their shoulders are large because they fight with their shoulders. And their heads are large to contain their mouths, which are both hands and mouths. Their eyes are fixed in a Mongol slant to avoid being bitten. Nobody nowadays will see a wild wolf. They are an epitome; one keeps count because they are so exceptional a glimpse. [Notes from the Century Before]

More Bears

He picked up salmon, roughly ten pounds of fish, and, holding it with one paw, he began to whirl it around his head. Apparently, he was not hungry, and this was a form of play. He played sling-the-salmon. With his claws embedded near the tail, he whirled the salmon and then tossed it high end over end. As it fell, he scooped it up and slung it around his head again, lariat salmon, and again he tossed it into the air. He caught it and heaved it high once more. The fish flopped to the ground. The bear turned away bored. He began to move upstream by the edge of the river. Behind the big head his hump projected. His brown fur rippled like a field under wind. He kept coming. The breeze was behind him. He had not yet seen us. He was romping along at an easy walk. As he came closer to us, we drifted slowly toward him. The single Klepper, with John Kauffmann in it, moved up against a snagged stick and broke it off. The snap was light, but enough to stop the bear. Instantly, he was motionless and alert, remaining on his four feet and straining his eyes to see. We drifted on toward him. At last we arrived in his focus. If we were looking at something we had rarely seen before, God help him so was he. If he was a tenth as awed as I was, he could not have moved a muscle, which he did now, in a hurry that was not pronounced but nonetheless seemed inappropriate to his status in the situation. He crossed low ground and went up a bank toward a copse of willow. He stopped there and faced us again. Then, breaking stems to pieces, he went into the willows. [Coming into the Country]

Crows

The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. [Great Plains]

Moose

A cow moose with her calf crossed the river in front of camp. She stayed protectively at its side in the rushing water, as black as a silhouette, humped like a horse which has been built up imposingly at the shoulders and reduced at the waist. At the other bank, when the calf paused in knee-deep water to congratulate itself, the cow strode ahead into the trees. [Notes from the Century Before]

Arctic Char

Below one ledge, where water ran white from a pool, we stopped to fish. Stell Newman caught an Arctic char. Bob Fedeler caught another. They were imposing specimens, bigger than the Salmon’s salmon. They were spotted orange and broad-flanked, with lobster-claw jaws. Sea-run Arctic char. They could be described as enormous brook trout, for the brook trout is in fact a char. They had crimson fins with white edges and crimson borders on their bellies. Their name may be Gaelic, wherein “blood” is “cear.” The Alaska record length for an Arctic char is thirty-six inches, and ours were somewhat under that. I tossed a small Mepps lure across the stream, sixe zero, and bringing it back felt a big one hit. The strike was too strong for a grayling – more power, less commotion. I had, now, about ten pounds of fish on a six-pound line. So I followed the fish around, walking upstream and down, into and out of the river. I had been walking the kayak all day long, and this experience was not much different. After fifteen minutes or so, the fish tired, and came thrashing from the water. I took out my tape and laid it on him, from the hooking jaw to the tip of the tail. Thirty-one and a half inches.. Orange speckles, crimson glow, this resplendent creature was by a long measure the largest fish I had ever caught in fresh water. In its belly would fit ten of the kind that I ordinarily keep and eat. For dinner tonight we would have grilled Arctic char, but enough had been caught already by the others. So, with one hand under the pelvic fins and the other near the jaw, I bent toward the river and held the fish underwater until it had its equipoise. It rested there on my hands for a time, and stayed even when I lowered them away. Then, like naval ordnance, it shot across the stream. The best and worst part of catching that fish was deciding to let it go. [Coming into the Country]

Coyote

Along a straightaway, a coyote raced the truck, his tongue flapping beside him like a tie. [Great Plains]

Caribou 

A caribou swam across the lake, buoyant and tireless all the way. She was a pretty bleached tan with two-pronged antlers in velvet, and she splashed the shallows like a filly, muzzling the bugs off her rear. [Notes from the Century Before]

Loons

In the beginning of the twilight, a pair of loons are cruising. They are beyond range. Their heads are up. Their bodies float high. They sense no danger. Their course is obliquely toward the gun. Now we can distinguish the black-and-white shingling on their necks. Silently swimming, they come nearer still. Loons. They are quick. Diving, they can suddenly be gone. He fires. He fires again. The loons elect to sprint down the surface – cacophonous, flailing – their splayfeet spading the water. A pellet or two may have touched them, but it seems unlikely. [Coming into the Country]

Sagebrush

We turned down a fence line through high sagebrush. The truck drove over bushes as high as the hood, and the smell of crushed sage rose. [Great Plains]

Deer

I saw a deer, of all scarce and unlikely things, bounding to keep me in sight as it fled. It looked like a jackrabbit in the supersized landscape, compared with the animals I was anticipating. But its feminine grace gave it importance. [Notes from the Century Before]

More Rivers

The river below us was the product of the sun, and even in autumn and from the helicopter’s high perspective it was awesome to see. Most fast rivers are white, smooth, white, smooth – alternating pools and rapids. This one was white all the way, bank to bank, tumultuous, torrential, great rushing outwash of the Alaska Range. With so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep. The color of the water, where it was flat enough to show, was actually greenish-gray, and its clarity was nil. It carried so much of what had been mountains. Glacier milk, as it is called, contains a high proportion of powdered rock, from pieces broken off and then ground by the ice. The colors of the outwash rivers are determined by the diets of the glaciers – schist, gneiss, limestone, shale. [Coming into the Country]

More Trees

Southward, the prairie grasses get sparser and sparser; sage, greasewood, prickly pear, and mesquite take over. Mesquite trees have eight-inch thorns, delicate leaves like a locust tree’s, and roots that go down a hundred and seventy-five feet. Longhorn cattle grazed on mesquite and dropped the seeds along the way on drives to the north. Today, you can trace the old cattle trails from the air by following the mesquite. When mesquite takes over a field, little else will grow. Around each low tree, the earth is brown and bare. [Great Plains]

Otter

On the way out, we spot an otter and chase its ripples around. On the bank its whole dachshund body gets in operation when it runs; its legs do the work of a centipede’s. [Notes from the Century Before]

More Mountains

The mountain is a sky of rock, seemingly all above you, looming. [Coming into the Country]

Double Rainbow

Eastern Wyoming. Grass long and mussed by wind. Clear water in creeks. Horsehead oil pumps pumping. Storm clouds piling up against Black Hills to east. Searchlight beams of sun coming through holes in clouds. Above the plain, a perfect double rainbow. [Great Plains]

Note the many brilliant figures of speech: mountains with “small glaciers slung on their hips”; crows “crossing the sky like thrown black socks”; a wolf’s mouth “like a bomber’s undercarriage”; salmon making “long, dolphinesque flights through the air”; a river “with so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep”; on and on. Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier create inspired figuration. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

August 23, 2021 Issue

Heidi Julavits’s “The Fire Geyser,” in this weeks issue, has it all: fascinating subject (volcano eruption); exotic setting (Iceland’s Reykjanes Penninsula); personal experience (“I touched the hardened lava. It was the temperature of someone’s lap after a dog or a child has been sitting in it”); vivid description (“The center of the field resembled carbonized oatmeal. The lava near the path reached out with giant panther paws that seemed to demand petting”); arresting details (“There was now a strong and familiar odor. For a New Yorker, the association was immediate: 9/11. The air smelled like cataclysm”). 

It’s an account of Julavits’s trip to the Fagradalsfjall eruption in May of this year. It puts us squarely there at the top of Goggle Hill, looking down at the moving, molten lava fields:

Just beneath me, a bright-orange puddle, streaked with blue, bubbled up in the middle of what had seemed to be an inactive lava field. The puddle steadily grew as the surrounding surface melted away. Then a second puddle opened beside it, widening with the speed of film dissolving in a projector. As the puddles expanded, the heat surged, pushing me back, along with other spectators who’d come to the edge. Gas emanating from the puddles made my lungs constrict, causing light-headedness.

The piece brims with extraordinary description:

Seven or so minutes later, a man announced, in English, “Here it comes!” A notch in the crater’s side brightened as lava surged. Then a fire geyser shot above the crater’s lip, red-orange and slopping. It hung in the air, having apparently negotiated a deal with gravity during its time in the earth’s mantle. The lava gushed over the notch and fed the molten river. Bits of hardened crust floated along the top, resembling shards of black ice. A giant red-orange boulder flew about forty feet into the air, then landed and rolled halfway down the slope. Within seconds, it had seized in place, turning the color of ash.

The crater released an oceanic roar that filled my whole body. Even at a distance, I could feel the intense heat of the fire geyser on my face. If I closed my eyes, I was at the beach on a hot day, and had just emerged from the freezing water and was about to take a nap in the sun.

The lava here had an uneven, ominously scaly appearance, like glitchy dragon skin, and loomed ten feet overhead. It radiated an even heat, as though thrown from a cast-iron stove. This lava was palpably on the move, and it tinkled loudly as its glassy crust shattered. Molten rock, beneath a coating of solidified shards, rolled over itself at the pace of glue, churning the lava field forward and continuing to fill up a valley that, for the moment, still contained it.

“The Fire Geyser” is one of this year’s best pieces. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Law, Photography, Decontextualization

Irving Penn, Three Asaro Mud Men, New Guinea (1970)

I want to cross two very different experiences on each other, hinging them on the process of decontextualization. The first experience is of looking at Irving Penn’s photos in his classic 1974 collection Worlds in a Small Room. The second one is of arguing the unconstitutionality of constructive murder in the case of R. v. Laviolette [1987] 2 SCR 667. 

Penn’s photos are black-and-white portraits of Peruvian peasants, Parisian tradesmen, Cretan old-timers, Spanish gypsies, New Guinea tribesmen, and so on. Penn didn’t photograph them in their natural environments. Instead, he invited them into his portable studio, and photographed them against a neutral backdrop. In his Introduction to Worlds in a Small Room, Penn said, “Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them.” 

Yes, but did it transform them in a good way? That’s the question I struggle with every time I look at these arresting pictures. Janet Malcolm, in a review of an exhibition of Penn’s cigarette butt photos, in which he used the same isolating method he used in Worlds in a Small Room, said, “Penn’s butts efface reality” (Diana & Nikon, 1980). That strikes me as exactly right. The same applies to his Worlds in a Small Room portraits: they remove people from their own context and treat them like botanical or zoological specimens. They efface reality. To me, that’s one of the most damning things you can say about a work of art. 

The word for Penn’s method is “decontextualization” – divorcing something from its original context. It’s a good description for what happens in certain legal cases, too. I was reminded of this point recently when I read Dale Carpenter’s Flagrant Conduct (2012), an absorbing account of Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned America’s sodomy laws. Carpenter shows how Lawrence and Garner’s lawyers, realizing the constitutional potential of their case, repackaged it. They persuaded Lawrence and Garner, who denied engaging in same-sex sodomy, to change their plea from “not guilty” to “no contest.” That eliminated argument on the facts and focused the case solely on the constitutionality of the law they were charged under. As Carpenter says, “Lawrence advanced as a case because nobody wanted to know what the underlying facts were.”

The conversion of raw facts to elegant legal argument fascinates me. I engineered such a conversion in R. v. Laviolette, in which the Supreme Court of Canada struck down constructive murder. The facts were brutal. Three young men went at night to the parish house at Kelly’s Cross, Prince Edward Island, with the intent of robbing it. The oldest of the three, Stephen, went inside and fatally struck the occupant, a priest, on the head with a length of iron pipe. All three were charged with homicide under the doctrine of constructive murder, which holds that if a murder is committed during the course of commission of a felony, such as break-and-enter, all participants in that felony are guilty of murder. 

I represented one of the two men who stayed outside the parish home. At trial, he was found guilty. In the time between his trial and his appeal, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted. On appeal, I argued that constructive murder offended Charter section 7, which guarantees, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” I contended that one of the principles of fundamental justice is that intention to murder is an element of the offence of murder, and that constructive murder eliminates that element. The Prince Edward Island Court of Appeal rejected my argument. We appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. On December 3, 1987, the Court allowed the appeal, striking down the doctrine of constructive murder on the ground that it was inconsistent with Charter section 7.

But I’ve always had a twinge of guilt about Laviolette – the way the case was severed from its grisly facts (iron pipe, smashed skull, loss of a singular life), and repackaged as an abstract constitutional argument about the essential ingredients of murder and the meaning of “principles of fundamental justice.” It effaced reality.  

Echoes and Reverberations

Photo by Thomas Prior, from Eric Klinenberg's "Manufacturing Nature"

One of the pleasures of being a long-time New Yorker reader is noticing the connections. Five recent examples:

1. Eric Klinenberg, in his excellent “Manufacturing Nature” (August 9, 2021), mentions Brooklyn’s Plum Beach: “On a cold day this spring, Orff met me at Plumb Beach, a short, narrow stretch of shoreline at the southern edge of Brooklyn, and a nesting-and-breeding ground for horseshoe crabs.” I read that and immediately thought of Ian Frazier’s “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014), a brilliant piece on horseshoe crabs set, among other places, on Plum Beach (“Farther along the beach, Russian fishermen stood beside their belled fishing poles, impassive and unimpressed as only Russians can be. They had lit fires of damp straw to keep the bugs away; the sharp-smelling smoke coiled around”). 

2. In his piece, Klinenberg visits the wetlands that jut out from the mouth of the Mississippi River. This is a landscape that Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about in her memorable “Under Water” (April 1, 2019): “So thick with simulated sediment were the channels of the Bird’s Foot that they looked as if they were filled with ink.”

3. Also in his piece, Klinenberg mentions the federal levees that line the Mississippi. This triggered a remembrance of John McPhee’s great “Atchafalaya” (February 23, 1987), a piece on the construction of the levees by the Corps of Engineers: "Three hundred miles up the Mississippi River from its mouth—many parishes above New Orleans and well north of Baton Rouge—a navigation lock in the Mississippi’s right bank allows ships to drop out of the river."

4. Elizabeth Kolbert, in her absorbing “The Lost Canyon” (August 16, 2021), refers to the Colorado River Compact, a subject covered in David Owen’s superb “Where the River Runs Dry” (May 25, 2015). Owen, in his piece, travels the length of the Colorado, noting the many signs of water crisis ("Hinojosa Huerta explained that the embankment was a levee, built to protect locals from the river—a function almost impossible to imagine, because the channel of the Colorado was a mile to our east, and there was nothing between it and us but desert"). Kolbert focuses on the alarming depletion of Lake Powell, a giant man-made reservoir on the Colorado. Her piece could be considered a companion to Owen’s report.

5. Also in her piece, Kolbert mentions Floyd Dominy, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation in the nineteen sixties and Glen Canyon Dam’s biggest booster. Dominy is one of four men profiled in John McPhee’s masterful “Encounters with the Archdruid” (March 20, 27 & April 3, 1971): "Dominy begins to talk dams. To him, the world is a tessellation of watersheds. When he looks at a globe, he does not see nations so much as he sees rivers, and his imagination runs down the rivers building dams."

So lots of echoes and reverberations! They add an extra layer of meaning to my New Yorker reading experience. 

August 16, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rivka Galchen’s “The Youthful Universe.” It’s about the amazing seven-ton, ten-billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope, which, when launched, will travel 1.5 million kilometres from Earth and look back thirteen billion years. Galchen beautifully describes how it will operate:

On its way, the telescope will slowly unfurl five silvery winglike layered sheets of Kapton foil, about as large as a tennis court. These sheets, each thinner than notebook paper, will function as a gigantic parasol, protecting the body of the telescope from the light and the heat of the sun, moon, and Earth. In this way, the J.W.S.T. will be kept nearly as dark and as cold as outer space, to insure that distant signals aren’t washed out. Then eighteen hexagons of gold-coated beryllium mirror will open out, like an enormous, night-blooming flower. The mirrors will form a reflecting surface as tall and as wide as a house, and they will capture light that has been travelling for more than thirteen billion years.

For me, the J.W.S.T.’s most interesting capacity is its ability to study exoplanets, i.e., planets outside our solar system. Galchen says, “The J.W.S.T. will be able to describe the atmospheres of these planets, possibly detecting free oxygen or other gases—potential signs of life.”

Galchen’s similes are delightful, e.g., “The Hubble telescope was finally launched in April, 1990, and it sent back fuzzy images of spiral galaxies that looked like melted glaze on a galactic cinnamon roll.” I enjoyed “The Youthful Universe” immensely. 

August 9, 2021 Issue

James Wood, in his absorbing “Coming and Going,” in this week’s issue, returns to an idea he introduced in his great essay “On Not Going Home” (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014), namely, “secular homelessness.” It’s a term that bugs me. It’s vague and inaccurate. The opposite of tragic homelessness isn’t secular; it’s non-tragic. Why define it in terms of its lack of religion? In “On Not Going Home,” Wood says, “What I have been describing, both in my own life and in the lives of others, is more like secular homelessness. It cannot claim the theological prestige of the transcendent.” Come on! Who thinks of refugee life in terms of “the theological prestige of the transcendent”? It’s an unreal analysis. In “Coming and Going,” a review of Sunjeev Sahota’s new novel China Room, he repeats it: 

But the narrator of “China Room,” for all his experience of gray, racist little Englanders, doesn’t inhabit a before and after in quite the same way. Born in England, the relatively fortunate child of immigrants who have already made their difficult journey, and have done so, in part, for him, he has no personal knowledge of before and after. He inhabits something closer to a kind of secular homelessness, shorn of the religious echo of exile. 

But what about political and social echoes? Why focus on religion, or the lack thereof, as homelessness’s defining feature? Wood is obsessed with religion. I guess that’s the answer.

Calasso

Roberto Calasso (Photo by Louis Monie)

I see Roberto Calasso died recently (“Roberto Calasso, Renaissance Man of Letters, Dies at 80,” The New York Times, July 30,2021). I know of his work only indirectly through a wonderful review-essay by Charles Simic, titled “Paradise Lost" (The New York Review of Books, September 20, 2001; re-titled "Literature and the Gods: Roberto Calasso," in Simic’s 2015 collection The Life of Images). 

In his piece, Simic describes Calasso’s re-creation of the myth of Persephone, the goddess of fertility who was carried off into the underworld by Hades. Normally, I have little patience for this sort of thing – it’s too unreal. But the meaning Simic extracts from it is fascinating: 

Our precarious life, fleeting and irreplaceable, has another dimension. That which exists once and only once is beautiful, the myths keep telling us. It is precisely because we are mortal beings that things have a significance and an intense presence at times.

The linking of aesthetics and mortality seems to me inspired! It’s why I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art. Life is transient. We must try to capture it, preserve it, before it disappears.  

August 2, 2021 Issue

Three excellent pieces in this week’s issue:

1. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: We All Scream for Ice Cream,” a review of several blissful new ice creams, including Sea Salt Saba (“Trapani sea-salt base with a swirl of intensely concentrated grape-must syrup”), Red Flag (“sweet cream with strawberry jam and graham crunch”), and Roasted Banana with Coffee Caramel (“surging with dark reduced sugars”). Pleasure is palpable in every paragraph. Sample: 

There are pints to take home, too; availing myself of an insulated bag outfitted with ice packs ($7), I toted several on the subway, including Panna Stracciatella, flecked with dark-chocolate shards, and Somebody Scoop Phil, the brainchild of the sitcom producer turned food personality Phil Rosenthal, featuring a lightly salted malted milk-chocolate base, dense with chunks of Twix and candied peanuts, plus swirls of fudge and panna caramel that oozed obscenely when I peeled off the lid.

2. Nick Paumgarten’s Talk story “Lemonland,” an account of his visit to an intriguing Manhattan installation called Citrovia, created to disguise a giant construction shed. Paumgarten describes it as a “plasticine sanctuary of tangerine lemons and Teletubby trees, a contrived oasis where the lemons are yellow and the sky is always blue.” The air at Citrovia is scented with a custom-made fragrance. Paumgarten delightfully describes it:

It brought to mind the old seventies perfume Love’s Fresh Lemon, from Love Cosmetics (“The subtle way to get fresh with him”), the jangly tang of Mello Yello (“There’s nothing mellow about it”), and smoke-concealment strategies of yore.

3. Ann Patchett’s “Flight Plan,” a personal history piece on learning to live with her flight-obsessed husband. The opening sentence hooked me: “The three of us were in a 1957 de Havilland Beaver, floating in the middle of a crater lake in the southwest quadrant of Alaska.” The piece brims with arresting lines. This one, for example: “The only thing on hand to throw up in were the pilot’s waders, which seemed better (better?) than throwing up on the stamped-metal floor.” And this 138-word beauty:

Considering that about half of all small-craft accidents occur during either takeoff or landing; considering that taking off and landing was all we were doing; considering that the plane was rusted and the pilot had struggled with the aftereffects of Agent Orange and my boyfriend had never landed a plane on water before; considering that this lake was somewhere far from Iliamna and no one knew we were there in the first place; considering that if the plane flipped, as it had been established these planes could do, I would probably not be able to swim through the freezing water in my sack of neoprene (which I had stupidly worn against the cold), and that, if I did make it to the shore, my chances of surviving whatever came next were probably zero—I should have been afraid.

And this: “I saw the headlights against the garage door and went outside in the rain to meet him with my love and my rage and my sick relief.”

That last one is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely.

3 for the Road: First Person

This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of the first person.

All three of these books are written in the first-person major. That, for me, is a compelling aspect of their style. They aren’t second-hand reports (except when they're recounting other people's stories or telling about historical events). Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier were actually there, in northern British Columbia, in Alaska, on the Great Plains, walking trails, canoeing rivers, driving back roads. They’re writing from personal experience, which, for me, is the most concrete form of reality. 

But each of them has a distinctive way of “being there.” Their “I”s differ from each other. Hoagland is much more self-revealing than the other two. He discloses intimate details of his private life. For example,

I’ve been too busy and happy to be lonely, and I must say I’ve missed neither friends nor family, other than my former wife, whom I haven’t seen for two years now anyway, and have been missing right along. Sexually, instead of her, at night I visualize the English girl I lived with in Greece, whom I haven’t seen for nearly a year. She was a lean, dreamy, athletic blonde, born during the Blitz and frozen at the age of nineteen, it seemed to me, though she was five or six years older than that. She dreamed of love and being rich, mostly, and when we went to Izmir from Samos and lived it up, riding in horse-drawn cabs and so on, she crossed her tawny long legs and turned as creamy and smooth as a queen. The populace lined the curbs as we passed. She was loyal and sweet to me, but towards the end of the period we became choked with umbrages and unable to speak to each other except on the politest level. She ran away to another island on a night boat at one point, and after anguishing in uncertainty, I finally went to the police, imagining her death was on my head – I saw us as the petrifying snake and the bird. They thought that I might have murdered her and put a detective on my trail until she came back. Even so, as wordless as we grew after that, we made love better and better, my penis as big as a surfboard underneath us. Whether as the snake or not, from my window I watched her sunbathe and swim much of the day.

There’s nothing even remotely like that in Coming into the Country and Great Plains. McPhee and Frazier stick to what they observe. They look outward, not inward. Occasionally, they tell how they’re feeling:

Tracks suggest that it is something of a trail. I am mildly nervous about that, but then I am mildly nervous about a lot of things. [Coming into the Country]

I made sure I had a place to turn around, and then we started out. I was afraid I’d never get up the steep gully, but I did, my rear wheels tiptoeing along the edges of the ruts. [Great Plains]

Like pictures from pages riffled with a thumb, all these things went through my mind there on the mountainside above the grazing bear. I will confess that in one instant I asked myself, “What the hell am I doing here?” There was nothing more to the question, though, than a hint of panic. I knew why I had come., and therefore what I was doing there. That I was frightened was incidental. I just hoped the fright would not rise beyond a relatively decorous level. [Coming into the Country]

Whenever you see an abandoned house, you wonder. Usually, I was too shy to stop the car and go closer. The way a man in Texas looked at me when he drove up the driveway of an abandoned house as I was peering through the window and writing in my notebook (“busted air conditioner / empty Field Trial high-protein dog food bags / electric-fence transformer / pair of white water skis in corner”) gave me an idea of the way ghosts in these houses might look at me if they existed and could take shape for a moment. [Great Plains]

The trees finally end. I am pleased to see the big river. I make a bench of driftwood, eat cashews and apricots, and wait for Sarge. The walk took a little less than two hours. I don’t feel elevated by that journey, nor am I shy to describe it – just happy that it is complete. I scarcely think I was crazy to do it, and I don’t think I was crazy to fear it. Risk was low, but there was something to fear. Still, I am left awry. I embrace this wild country. But how can I be of it, how can I move within it? I can’t accept anymore the rationale of the few who go unarmed – yet I am equally loath to use guns. If bears were no longer in the country, I would not have come. I am here, in a sense, because they survive. So I am sorry – truly rueful and perplexed – that without means of killing them I cannot feel at ease. [Coming into the Country]

Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was; because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn’t end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met the President; because he never rode on train, slept in a boarding house, ate at table; because he never wore a medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe before going to where he expected to die; because, although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes referred to Red Cloud as Red and Spotted Tail as Spot, they never used a diminutive for him; because, deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena that our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists; because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate. [Great Plains]

(Note that last quotation is all one sentence – a 325-word tour de force that bespeaks Frazier’s deep love for Crazy Horse.)

All three books are self-portraits, as much about the beholder as the beheld. Frazier, in his “Carving Your Name on the Rock,” an essay on the writing of Great Plains (included in the 1991 collection They Went, edited by William Zinsser), calls Great Plains “an internal landscape, a memoir.” He says, “Of course, what you’re really writing about is yourself – Great Plains is an internal landscape, a memoir.” This is true of Notes from the Century Before and Coming into the Country, too.

What selves are portrayed? Hoagland, in his Notes from the Century Before, describes himself as a rhapsodist (“I’m a novelist, not a historian, but at best I’m a rhapsodist too – that old-fashioned, almost anachronist form”). Rhapsodic passages abound. This one, for example:

Swaying and bucking as on a life raft, we scraped over a further series of ridges and peaks. This was the highest flying we had done: we were way up with the snow so that the cabin was cold. But the sunlight washed the whole sky a milky blue. Everywhere, into the haze a hundred miles off, a crescendo of up-pointing mountains shivered and shook. A cliff fell away beneath us as we crossed the lip. The lake down at the base of it was oil-green. We passed over a glacier – blue ice nestled into a saddle. There was no chance to watch for game, the plunging land was life enough. It was a whole earth of mountains, beyond counting or guessing at, colored stark white and rock-brown. To live is to see, and although I was sweating against my stomach, I was irradiated. These were some of the finest minutes of my life.

McPhee rhapsodizes, too, but in a different key – less euphoric, more humorous:

When I have stayed with the Gelvins, I have for the most part occupied a cabin toward the far end of the airstrip – a place acquired not long ago from an old-timer named Curly Allain, who was in his seventies and went south. He had no intention of returning, but he left his cabin well stocked with utensils, food, and linen – a tin of coffee close to the pot, fifty pounds of flour, five pounds of Danish bacon, firewood in three sizes stacked beside the door. Outside, some paces away, I have stood at a form of parade rest and in the broad light of a June midnight been penetrated in the most inconvenient place by a swarm of indecent mosquitoes, and on the same spot in winter, in a similar posture at the same hour, have stared up in darkness from squeaky snow at a green arch of the aurora, green streamers streaming from it all across the sky. At home, when I look up at the North Star I lift my eyes but don’t really have to move my head. Here, I crane back, lift my chin almost almost as far as it will go, and look up at the polestar flirting with the zenith. The cabin is long and low, and its roof is loaded white – mantled eighteen inches deep. Its windows are brown-gold from the light of burning lamps. The air is so still I can hear the rising smoke. Twenty-two degrees below zero. Balls of ice are forming in the beard. I go back inside and comb it off, and jump into a bag of down.

That “The air is so still I can hear the rising smoke” is very fine.

Frazier’s rhapsodies are like arias, soaring, thrilling, passionate: see, for example, the Nicodemus passage I quoted previously. Here’s another one – Great Plains’ extraordinary opening paragraph:

Away to the Great Plains of America, to that immense Western short-grass prairie now mostly plowed under! Away to the still-empty land beyond newsstands and malls and velvet restaurant ropes! Away to the headwaters of the Missouri, now quelled by many impoundment dams, and to the headwaters of the Platte, and to the almost invisible headwaters of the slurped-up Arkansas! Away to the land where TV used to set its most popular dramas, but not anymore! Away to the land beyond the hundredth meridian of longitude, where sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn’t, where agriculture stops and does a double take! Away to the skies of sparrow hawks sitting on telephone wires, thinking of mice and flaring their tail feathers suddenly, like a card trick! Away to the air shaft of the continent, where weather fronts from two hemispheres meet, and the wind blows almost all the time! Away to the fields of wheat and milo and sudan grass and flax and alfalfa and nothing! Away to parts of Montana and North Dakota and South Dakota and Wyoming and Nebraska and Kansas and Colorado and New Mexico and Oklahoma and Texas! Away to the high plains rolling in waves to the rising final chord of the Rocky Mountains!

All three writers are artists to the tips of their fingernails. All three are superb describers of nature. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.