February 7, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three.” It’s another one of the Master’s “reminiscent montages.” This one consists of six segments. They flash back and forth in time. The first is set in 1972; McPhee takes nature writer Edward Abbey on a walking tour of Princeton. The second section travels back to 1948; McPhee is a night watchman at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In the third segment, it’s June 21, 2006; McPhee is on the McKenzie River with one of America’s great fly fishermen, Dr. Lenox Dick. In the fourth, it’s 1960; McPhee has dinner with Henry Luce. The fifth is a double; one part describing a weekend in 2004 that McPhee spent driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries; the other telling about a 1982 trip he and his wife, Yolanda, took to the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, to visit a Bing cherry orchard. In the final segment, McPhee goes way back to when he was ten, and tells about the time he broke into Joe Brown’s sculpture studio in Princeton to steal some clay. 

The piece is quite a mash-up of images – the literary equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine or a Cornell box. I devoured it. The pleasure of it, for me, flows from its wonderful sentences. This one for example: 

Sitting back in the armchair with his legs at full stretch, one boot across the other, he seemed to be aiming through a kind of gun sight formed by his toes. 

And this:

With its haystacks and standing waves and boulder-field eddies below pools of fast flat water, its rhythmic curves, it has the shape of a downhill ski run. 

And this:

In Speyside, on Isla, on Skye, I later interviewed the distillers, including Captain Smith Grant, whose artesian spring, called Josie’s Well, was out in the middle of a field of oats near Ballindalloch, Banffshire, and was providing thirty-five hundred gallons an hour to the stills of The Glenlivet.

“Tabula Rasa 3” is an excellent addition to McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa” series. I enjoyed it immensely. 

January 31, 2022 Issue

Once again John Seabrook’s beloved Ford F-150 pickup appears in his writing. You’ll recall that’s what he was driving when he hit black ice, in his superb “Six Skittles” (April 9, 2018). Now, in “Green Giants,” in this week’s issue, he considers replacing it with an electric version, a Ford F-150 Lightning. And once again, it’s his personal experience of the product that makes his piece so engaging. He attends a car show in Austin, Texas, where the Lightning is on display. He notes, among other things, that the new truck has a “frunk” (“Instead of a hunk of throbbing, greasy metal up front, there’s a lockable storage space large enough to fit two sets of golf clubs, and equipped with a drain so that the frunk can be filled with ice and drinks”). 

He tours the Rouge Electric Vehicle Centre, in Dearborn, Michigan, where the Lightning is assembled:

We came to the largest of the robots, a Fanuc M-2000iA, which can lift a vehicle frame at least thirteen feet into the air. The robot deftly picked up the truck’s eighteen-hundred-pound Korean-made lithium-ion battery, which looked like a rooftop cargo-carrying case. The reinforced high-strength plastic shell contained hundreds of AA-battery-size cells filled with chemicals. The Fanuc placed the battery on the truck’s chassis, and the skillet floated farther down the line.

Most interestingly, he takes one of Ford’s new electric vehicles – a Mustang Mach-E – for a two-hundred-and-sixty-mile test-drive. His description of this trip is, for me, the highlight of the piece. And, as was the case in his wonderful “Scooter City” (April 26 & May 3, 2021), in which he a tries out an e-scooter, the experience is mixed. It starts well. He and his son, Harry, set out from Brooklyn. He notes that the car “can deliver microbursts of acceleration, without cycling through gears, in the way that an electric egg beater can go directly to the high-speed setting, skipping low and medium.” Seabrook enjoys these “microbursts of acceleration.” He says, 

My driver’s brain was far more engaged by these torquey sprints than by a steady rate of high speed. I’m pretty sure Cousin Charlie would have dug it. But the torque wasn’t truly satisfying until I turned on the “propulsion sound” in the “unbridled” mode (it’s a Mustang, remember), so that I heard the speed. Harry shook his head. O.K., Vroomer.

One thing they have to be mindful of is that the car needs to be recharged. At first, their search for a charging station goes smoothly. He writes,

The navigation system correctly calculated that if we drove to the Electrify America direct-current chargers in the Chicopee Marketplace mall, in western Massachusetts, we would have twenty-four per cent of battery life remaining. We arrived after nine, so the vast parking lot was mostly empty. The Mach-E’s G.P.S. led us to the chargers—four plugs in green-glowing, gas-pump-like stations next to a Home Depot. Could this be right? No one else was using them.

They plug in and walk to a restaurant. While they eat, Seabrook monitors the battery’s charging progress on his phone. That's a very cool detail. 

But as they drive north the temperature drops, and, as it does, the projected range of the vehicle keeps diminishing. Range anxiety sets in. Seabrook says, 

The navigation system apparently hadn’t figured this change in weather in its original calculation, which, at least to me, seemed neither seamless nor delightful. It began to rain. We were both showing signs of range anxiety by the time we arrived, at 11:30 p.m., nearing empty. We plugged into a regular outlet in the barn, in the dark.

The next day doesn’t go well. Seabrook writes,

The Mustang didn’t charge much overnight on my 120-volt outlet. The car’s navigation system—or the spotty rural cell coverage—failed to route me to the closest Electrify America chargers, across the state border in New Hampshire, and, for safety reasons, I couldn’t use the FordPass app on my phone to navigate while the car was moving. Ford’s charging infrastructure will inevitably improve as more E.V.s hit the road. Today wasn’t my day. I finally found the charging stations in the West Lebanon Walmart parking lot, but they weren’t working properly, and angry drivers were on the phone with customer service. It was still raining; puddles had formed in the depressions around the chargers, and my feet got wet while I was trying to get a hundred and fifty kilowatts flowing into my car, which isn’t as unsafe as it sounds.

Will Seabrook replace his old gas-fed F-150 with a new electric Lightning? He might not. Towards the end of the piece, he road-tests another electric pickup – Rivian’s futuristically designed R1T. He says, “Still, from my first glimpse of the truck’s front end I was smitten.” Smitten! Oh, oh, that doesn’t bode well for the Lightning. 

“Green Giants” provides an illuminating glimpse of the impending rise of the electric vehicle. I enjoyed it immensely.  

Acts of Attention

Alec Soth, "Tim and Vanessa's, Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania"

Vince Aletti, in his absorbing “Alec Soth’s Obsessive Ode to Image-Making” (newyorker.com, February 1, 2022), quotes Soth on his creative process: “Soth said in the course of a recent walk-through at Sean Kelly, he felt that he could ‘liberate’ himself simply by ‘paying attention to what I see.’ ” I love this comment. “Paying attention to what I see” is, for me, the essence of photography – the essence of art, for that matter. Robert Hass, in his What Light Can Do (2012), writes, 

One of the things I love about the essay as a form – both as a reader and as a writer – is that it is an act of attention. An essay, like a photograph, is an inquiry, a search. It implies attention to and sustained concentration on some subject.

One more corroborative quote – my favourite in all of art writing – Peter Schjeldahl on Vermeer: “Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look” (Let’s See, 2008).

3 for the Sea: Jonathan Raban's "Passage to Juneau"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Passage to Juneau. 

Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau chronicles his 1996 trip through the Inside Passage, from Seattle to Juneau and back, traveling solo aboard his thirty-five-foot sailboat Penelope.

It’s an unforgettable journey through a thousand-mile obstacle course, and what makes it unforgettable is Raban’s tremendous descriptive power. He puts us squarely there, in the cockpit with him, as he steers his boat through the Inside Passage’s maze-like world of channels, islands, inlets, rapids, whirlpools, deadheads, fogbanks, and fishing fleets. For example, here’s his description of sailing down Saratoga Passage’s “long reach of growling water”:

The sea in Saratoga Passage frosted over, as the forecast wind began to fill in from the south. The wrinkled skin of the water became ridged with breaking wavelets; in less than half an hour, the waves were steep, regular, well-formed, hard-driven by the building wind. With the headsail out to starboard, the boat skidded through the sea – the winched sheet bar-taut, the sail molded into a white parabola as rigid as one of Frank Gehry’s curved concrete walls. The wind keened in the steel rigging. At my back, I could hear the forward rush of each new wave, then its sudden, violent collapse in a crackling bonfire of foam. Hauling on the wheel, driving the boat downwind as it tried to slew broadside-on, I was on a jittery high. I hadn’t had such sailing in many months. The three-step waltzing motion of the boat, the throbbing, strings-and-percussion sound of wind and water on the move, came back to me as an old, deep pleasure. But a pleasure tinged, as always, with an edge of incipient panic.

And here’s his depiction of Deception Pass’s chaotic sea:

In the dwindling afternoon light, the water looked as black and thick as tar, its surface lumpy with boils and cratered with eddies. At ten past five, with 55 minutes to go before slack water, I fed the boat gingerly into the stream, running the engine full blast to give it maximum steerageway through the turbulence. It was like driving a car on ice. Each time the boat’s head met a swirl, it went into a sideways skid, and I had to spin the wheel violently to maintain any semblance of control.

And here’s his description of inching through the dense fog of Haro Strait:

A moving blip resolved into the shadow of a fishing boat, faintly imprinted on the fog, but at a reassuring distance of about a hundred yards. Watching the depth-sounder, checking the radar, I felt my way cautiously inside the sheltering arm of Sidney Spit – a mile-long drying sandbar that ran out from the northern end of Sidney Island. Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water, where I let go the anchor, switched off the engine, and found that my hands were incapable of striking a match to light a cigarette. They blundered about in the air, a pair of shaky fists, obstinately declining to take orders from the brain.

That “Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water” is inspired!

One of my favourite passages is this beauty, a description of the water in Cordero Channel:

The only motion was that of the incoming tide, stealing smoothly through the forest at one knot. Where fallen branches obstructed the current near the shore, they sprouted whiskers of turbulence that were steadily maturing into braided beards. The water was moving just fast enough to feel the abrasion of the air against it, and its surface was altering from glassy to stippled with the strengthening flood. Soon the false wind, brushing against the tide, created a trellis-like pattern of interlocked wavelets, their raised edges only a millimetre or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.

How I relish that “just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.” 

Passage to Juneau is structured chronologically, beginning in Seattle on April 1, 1996, ending back in Seattle on or about August 14, 1996. But the narrative is anything but linear. Woven into its intricate fabric is the history of Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 exploration of the Inside Passage. Raban follows Vancouver’s tracks (e.g., “Following Discovery, I ran up Clarence Strait, close to the mountainous and rock-strewn shore of the Cleveland Peninsula”). He evokes Captain Van’s ships Discovery and Chatham so realistically, it’s almost like they’re right there on the water with him; in a sense, they are.  

Midway in Raban’s voyage, at Potts Lagoon, he takes a break and flies back to Seattle to spend a couple of weeks with his wife and daughter. Here the book takes a fascinating turn. In Seattle, Raban learns that his father is dying of cancer. He flies to England to be with him. Suddenly, we’re plunged into the intimate details of Raban’s personal life – his relationship with his father, mother, and brothers, his father’s death (“No more indignities now. I was glad for him”), the funeral and cremation (“Now began the surreal administrative business of death, ‘the arrangements’ ”). This is the messy stuff of real life. I think most travel writers would likely omit it; Raban includes it, and his narrative is the richer for it. After the cremation, Raban flies back to Potts Lagoon and resumes his trip. But his father’s ghost is with him now, haunting the rest of the voyage (“There was no avoiding my father now”).

From Potts Lagoon, he sails through Baronet Passage, stops in Port McNeill, on Vancouver Island, to buy groceries, continues on through Queen Charlotte Strait, shelters in Miles Inlet, heads for Egg Island, then Whirlwind Bay, passes the entrance to Burke Channel, and then joins a convoy of small boats that sail past Bella Bella Island, Spirit Island, and Whiskey Cove, making landfall at Shearwater, a fishing resort on Kliktsoatli Harbour, where there’s a party going on. Next day, out Seaforth Channel into Milbanke Sound:

After twenty minutes of roller-coasting sailing, there was no more than a brisk one-foot chop on a flat sea. Running before the wind, under the clearing sky, I sat back and listened to the twiggy sibilance of the bow-wave as it broke from the hull – air and water getting mashed together like egg whites in a blender. By noon, in fitful sunshine, I was in the riverine steep-sided corridor between Cone and Swindler islands, looking out for the Indian village of Klemtu on its hook-shaped bay.

Then a visit to Klemtu, and, next day, up the Finlayson Channel, past the ruins of Swanson Bay and Butedale, at the southern end of Fraser Reach, then through Grenville Channel, anchoring in Nettle Basin for the night (“The Inside Passage had more wild and empty stretches than anywhere I’d ever been, but Nettle Basin was a sharp reminder that I was a tourist among tourists”). Next day, on to Prince Rupert (“I liked Prince Rupert. The city laundromat, full of fishermen and yacht-tourists, was like a big rowdy bar on Saturday night; the liquor store sold Laphroaig whiskey, though at a fearful price”). Next day, past the rocks of Venn Passage, into the lagoon of Metlalkatla, sheltering in Port Simpson for the night. Next day: Dixon Entrance (“In Dixon Entrance at first light, I had white fingers and a hangover”) and Revillagigedo Channel, packed with fishing boats:

The nets were laid across the grain of the new flood tide, and each boat was making constant small maneuvers to keep itself aligned with its own pearl-string of floats. These American nets were longer than Canadian ones – 300 fathoms, more than a third of a mile – and they bulged and kinked in the turbulence of the current. I was playing a game with shifting goalposts: one promising gap abruptly closed while another line of corks swung open like a door. Biting hard on my lower lip, I veered this way and that, sliding past the colored marker-buoys at walking pace.

Revillagigedo Channel leads to the tight bottleneck of Tongass Narrows, “where the long, thin, jerry-built city of Ketchikan stretched out on a ledge dynamited out of the north shore.” Raban spends a couple of days in Ketchikan (“Across the boardwalk was the Potlatch Bar, a raucous cave into which I unwisely stepped for a beer”). From there, he sails through Clarence Strait, then Zimovia Strait, then past the mouth of the Stikine River (“The water here was a milky soapstone green”), to Wrangell. Then through Wrangell Narrows to Petersburg:

The straggle of sheds and houses along the bank at last thickened into the low, pale, floating city of Petersburg, whose canneries and bunkhouses, built out on stilts over the water, were doubled by their reflections in the oily calm. Boats greatly outnumbered buildings. In the half-mile narrows, Petersburg need no sheltering harbor wall, so the boats were scattered piecemeal along a mile of pilings, moorings, piers, and floating decks, making the town look more like a fleet at anchor than a permanent settlement. The whole place rippled and shimmered.

Then up Frederick Sound, through Stephens Passage to Hobart Bay. Then Gastineau Channel to Juneau (“Even in cruise-ship hours – from ten to five – I liked to walk the fringes of old Juneau”). Raban’s wife and daughter fly there to meet him. The reunion doesn’t go well. Raban’s wife tells him she wants a separation (“My stomach went south”). His joyless voyage back to Seattle is covered in just eleven pages. It includes this bleak observation: “If you want a mirror for your own existence, you need look no further than the tumbling rapids or the strings of dying whirlpools downtide of a piling.”

Passage to Juneau describes Raban’s personal experience of the vast, complex world of the Inside Passage in all its smell-taste-touch-sound-sight-thought-emotion-scoop-of-light magnificence. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Passage to Juneau, including its action, structure, imagery, detail, point of view, and humour. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Redmond O’Hanlon’s superb Trawler. 

January 24, 2022 Issue

Eren Orbey’s “Fault Lines,” in this week’s issue, is an absorbing consideration of a remarkable case of restorative justice. It tells about the successful efforts of a woman to free the man convicted of killing her father. It probes the case from many sides. Orbey talks with the woman, Katie Kitchen. He talks with the offender, Joseff Deon White. He talks with members of Kitchen’s family. He accompanies Kitchen on a visit with White at his home. Orbey’s interest in the case is personal. He discloses that his father was also the victim of murder, and that he, like Kitchen, made efforts to contact the convicted killer. To a degree, Orbey appears to mirror off Kitchen. But he’s also questioning. He writes,

I told Kitchen that, as a child, I had found it comforting to know that my father’s killer hadn’t targeted him in particular—that the murder was, to some extent, a “random act,” as I’d heard her call White’s crime. Like Benninghoven [Kitchen’s sister], though, I chafed at Kitchen’s insistence on ignoring the question of White’s responsibility. In her narrative, the murder was a terrible accident, and White, because of systemic injustices, had been as much a victim as her father. I admired that her mission on White’s behalf was an attempt to live up to her progressive ideals. But I wondered whether she had truly let go of what the mediators had called her “coping story.” Did she accept that White may well have been the one who killed her dad, and that the crime may not have been an accident?

It bothers Orbey that Kitchen seems indifferent to the question of White’s guilt or innocence. But by the end of the piece, he appears to have resolved his frustration:

Indeed, as I reported on Kitchen’s story, I grew less frustrated by the evasive manner in which she and White discussed the murder. It moved me that each seemed attuned to what the other needed from their unusual friendship.

For me, what's tonic about “Fault Lines” is its acceptance of the ambiguity that sometimes exists at the heart of a violent crime. Remember Janet Malcolm's "She couldn't have done it and she must have done it" in her great "Iphigenia in Forest Hills"? Well, it's the same thing here. I applaud Orbey's empathy and fair-mindedness. 

But I have a question: why didn’t White take the stand at his trial? As Orbey points out, “Only White knows for sure whether he had an accomplice and, if he did, what role each of them played in the crime.” He reports that White’s lawyer, Kurt Wentz, “had chosen not to put him on the stand.” Why did he make that decision? 

David Denby on Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation"

Photo from Erin Overbey's "Sunday Reading: A Cultural Review of the Aughts"

Erin Overbey, in her “Sunday Reading: A Cultural Review of the Aughts” (newyorker.com, January 23, 2022), provides “a selection of pieces—a culture review, of sorts—that capture the creative pulse of the early two-thousands.” It’s a wonderful collection that, for me, brings back many pleasurable memories. Included in her collection is David Denby’s brilliant “Heart Break Hotels” (The New Yorker, September 15, 2003), a review of two movies – Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things. Lost in Translation is my all-time favourite film. Denby’s piece is an excellent appreciation of it. He writes,

Coppola doesn’t punch up her scenes; she’s not interested in tension leading to a climax but in moods and states of being. She’s willing to let an awkward silence sit on the screen. Not much happens, but Coppola is so gentle and witty an observer that the movie casts a spell. 

It does indeed. For me, the essence of that spell is the exquisite melancholy of obstructed desire. Denby gets at this when he says of the film’s two main characters, played superbly by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, “The relationship is perched on the edge of eros.” I don’t know of any other movie that explores that edge so tenderly, beautifully, and perceptively. 

January 17, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s “The Great Thaw.” It’s about the impact of permafrost thaw on climate change. What I like about it is that it’s set in Siberia. That’s where two-thirds of the world’s permafrost is located. Yaffa visits Yakutia, in northeastern Siberia. His opening paragraph is terrific:

Flying over Yakutia, in northeastern Russia, I watched the dark shades of the boreal forest blend with patches of soft, lightly colored grass. I was strapped to a hard metal seat inside the cabin of an Antonov-2, a single-¬engine biplane, known in the Soviet era as a kukuruznik, or corn-crop duster. The plane rumbled upward, climbing above a horizon of larch and pine, and lakes the color of mud. It was impossible to tell through the Antonov’s dusty porthole, but below me the ground was breathing, or, rather, exhaling.

A bit later, he follows that up with this beauty:

At the moment, though, I was mainly concerned with the stomach-turning lurches the plane was making as it descended in a tight spiral. We had dropped to a few hundred feet above the ground so that Maximov’s colleague, a thirty-three-year-old researcher named Roman Petrov, could take the final sample, a low-altitude carbon snapshot. The plane shook like a souped-up go-kart. Petrov held his stomach and buried his face in a plastic bag. Then I did the same. When we finally landed, on a grass-covered airstrip, I staggered out of the cabin, still queasy. Maximov poured some Cognac into a plastic cup. A long sip later, I found that the spinning in my head had slowed, and the ground under me again took on the feeling of reassuring firmness—even though, as I knew, what seemed like terra firma was closer to a big squishy piece of rotting chicken.

That detail of the plastic cupful of Cognac is excellent; it totally hooked me on the piece. I also relished its first-person perspective:

To get a sense of how permafrost thaw is changing the landscape, I took a drive out of Yakutsk with Nikolay Basharin, a thirty-two-year-old researcher at the Permafrost Institute. 

Three days later, I caught a flight on a propeller plane leaving Yakutsk for Chersky, a speck of a town on the Kolyma River, near the delta where it empties into the East Siberian Sea. 

One day in Chersky, I visited a site along the river managed by a German research team from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. 

Earlier in the summer, I visited Yamal, a peninsula that juts into the Kara Sea like a crooked finger.

One day in Chersky, Zimov showed me a site where he had tried to mimic the result of a fire on the permafrost. 

Zimov and I were each carrying a long metal probe, the permafrost scientist’s classic field tool. 

Yaffa is in Ian Frazier country. Frazier wrote one of my all-time favourite books – Travels in Siberia (2010), excerpts of which appeared in The New Yorker (August 3, 10 & 17, 2010). In that book, Frazier visits the Academy of Sciences headquarters in Yakutsk, where he views, among other things, a mammoth leg, “with its well-preserved long hair.” Yaffa, in his piece, also views (and actually handles) a mammoth leg. His mammoth leg is in Yakutsk’s Mammoth Museum, so I don’t think it’s the same leg that Frazier saw, but you never know. How many intact mammoth legs can there be? In my favourite scene in “The Great Thaw,” Yaffa writes,

Fedorov brought me to a large walk-in freezer, where lumps of flesh and fur were piled on metal shelves; the crescent bend of a tusk was unmistakable. As Fedorov explained, these mammoth remains, dug up across Yakutia, were being stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting further scientific study. The space was cramped and frigid—so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought. I picked up a leg that once belonged to the Maly Lyakhovsky mammoth, a thick stump with reddish-brown hair. “Look, its footpad is very well traced,” Fedorov said. “You can see its toenails.”

That “so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely.

January 3 & 10, 2022 Issue

Shauna Lyon kicks off the year with a wonderful “Tables For Two.” She reviews Agi’s Counter, a Brooklyn eatery specializing in “Hungarian-inspired breakfast and lunch dishes.” I love breakfast. What’s Agi’s Counter serving? Lyon tells us:

On a recent morning, breakfast included the hearty Leberkase, in which a thick slab of spongy pork pâté is sandwiched, with fried egg and pear mostarda, between even thicker slabs of Pullman-style bread. But it was the tender herb-flecked biscuit—dill aroma meeting your nose as you lean in to bite, spread with mayo and stacked with a soft fried egg and assertive Alpine Cheddar—that made for the perfect morning snack.

Mm, that “dill aroma meeting your nose as you lean in to bite” is very good. I savor it. 

Cécile McLorin Salvant / Jerome Kern / Alec Wilder / Lorenz Hart

Last night, searching Cécile McLorin Salvant’s name on YouTube, I found her 2016 “Live in Budapest,” with Renee Rosnes (piano), Rodney Whitaker (bass), and Louis Nash (drums). What a terrific concert! Salvant sings “Easy to Love,” “The Gentleman Is A Dope,” “Never Will I Marry,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” “All Through the Night,” “Cry Butterfly, Cry,” among others – all swinging! It whetted my appetite for more Salvant. YouTube is loaded with her videos.

I watched one of her singing “Yesterdays,” accompanied by the Aaron Diehl Trio. Wow! That song is gorgeous, drenched in melancholy. Who wrote it? I couldn’t remember. I looked it up in Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song (1972). Answer: Jerome Kern. Wilder writes, “It is an extraordinarily evocative song, simple in construction, narrow in range (a tenth), and unforgettable.” I agree. Reading Wilder, I got thinking about his writing. He wrote one of my all-time favorite New Yorker reviews – “Orange Juice for One” (October 18, 1976), an assessment of a book of tributes to Lorenz Hart called Thou Swell, Thou Witty. Here’s a sample:

Hart was a contemporary of Ira Gershwin, E. Y. Harburg, John Mercer, Otto Harbach, Dorothy Fields, Cole Porter, Howard Dietz, and Oscar Hammerstein II, After careful examination of the work of these people, I still find myself returning to the two who most please and nourish me: Lorenz Hart and John Mercer. And I believe that the reason for this is by no means that they were such masters of their craft but that in their craft they were vulnerable to the point of self-revelation. And in revealing themselves they also revealed their profound need to put to paper their attitudes toward love, life, irony, absurdity, loneliness, and loss. The other lyricists wrote well, but I never sensed that need, that hunger. I was aware of craft and cleverness, style and polish, but no deep self-involvement.

Wilder knew what he was talking about. He wrote at least two songs that have entered the Great American Songbook: “I’ll Be Around” and “While We’re Young.” I’d love to hear Salvant sing them.  

Joan Didion: Narrativist or Nonnarrativist?

Joan Didion (Photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Joan Didion’s “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” has always bugged me. I like to think of myself as a realist. I don’t need stories to live by. Just give me the facts. I’m not alone in thinking this way. Galen Strawson, in his “A Fallacy of Our Age” (included in his Things That Bother Me, 2018), says, “The business of living well is, for many, a completely nonnarrative project.” Didion’s line appears to put her squarely in the narrativist camp. But the piece in which the line occurs – her extraordinary essay “The White Album” – seems to enact nonnarrativity. It’s a collection of fragments that “did not fit into any narrative I knew” (Didion). “I had the keys but not the key,” she says, “the key” being the master narrative that knits all her “disparate images” together. But “The White Album” does show Didion searching for that key. Narrativist or nonnarrativist? Zadie Smith, in her recent “Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking” (newyorker.com, December 24, 2021), says that when Didion wrote “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she meant it ironically, as an indictment of human delusion. I think Smith is right. “The White Album” ’s brilliantly fractured form supports her point.   

Interesting Emendations: Ann Patchett's "Flight Plan"

Illustration by Sam Alden, from Ann Patchett's "Flight Plan"

Ann Patchett’s “Flight Plan” (The New Yorker, August 2, 2021) is one of my favorite pieces of 2021. It has a wonderful opening sentence: “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.” 

Recently, reading the piece again, this time in Patchett’s new essay collection These Precious Days, I was surprised to find the first line altered. It now reads, “Three of us were in a 1947 de Havilland Beaver, floating in the middle of a crater lake in the southwest quadrant of Alaska.” Two revisions, both interesting: “the” is deleted, and “1957” is changed to “1947.” Normally, I relish the use of zero pronouns, but in this case, “the three of us” seems more precise. As for the change in the de Havilland Beaver’s model year, I’m curious; which is it? Does it matter? Not if it’s fiction. But this is a personal history piece, so, yes, accuracy matters. 

I suspect what happened is that Patchett submitted her manuscript to The New Yorker. The magazine fact-checked it, found that “1947 de Havilland Beaver” should be “1957 de Havilland Beaver” and changed it. But when Patchett collected the piece in These Precious Days, she used her original text, ignoring the fact-checked New Yorker version. That’s just my theory; I could be wrong. Whatever the explanation, it’s an unfortunate discrepancy in a piece that seems destined for classic status. 

3 for the Sea: John McPhee's "Looking for a Ship"

This is the first in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll begin with a review of Looking for a Ship. 

If you want to know what life was like aboard an American merchant ship in 1988, this book tells you in detail after fascinating detail. It’s an account of McPhee’s experience travelling on the six-hundred-and-sixty-five-foot Stella Lykes (“as large as most old-time ocean liners”) as it makes a forty-two-day run through the Panama Canal and down the Pacific coast of South America, with stops at such ports as Cartagena, Valparaiso, Balboa, Lima, and Guayaquil. 

It puts you there on the ship’s bridge:

Across the front of the wheelhouse are ten large windows, rounded at the corners, providing an interrupted view of the sea and the enlarging city. The lashed containers are visible now, stacked so high that they block the line of sight from bridge to bow. On top of some of the stacks, riding far up in the sky, are bulldozers and earthmovers and big backhoes that look like thunder lizards. There is a small fire engine, white with red trim.

It takes you down into the hundred-and-ten-degree heat of the engine room:

I have a thermometer with me. When I put it in my pocket, my leg cools it off. A step down from the maneuvering platform is the engineers’ flat, where a logbook lies open on a standing desk and the engine watch can loiter under four large blowers. In the course of a sea watch, the blowers and the water fountain provide the only relief available in four hours. The blowers are a foot in diameter and, somewhere above, are sucking in outside air. It picks up heat on its way down but feels good as it pours out. People stand under the blowers in much the same way that people stand under showers.

It takes you amidships, where there are containers full of thoroughbreds:

As many as seven horses were in one twenty-foot box – in narrow wooden stalls framed within the steel. The two-year-olds were cribbing as if their lives depended on it. They were chewing up the wood of the stalls. Five hundred miles from Guayaquil, they had already made crescent-shaped indentations larger than slices of watermelon. They were chewing the posts as well as the rails.

It tells you what it’s like, lying in your bunk at night, as Stella rolls in the long Pacific swells:

Lying in your bunk, you can feel your brain sloshing back and forth. With your chin on your pillow and your arms spread, you are flying. Bank left. Bank right. Six banks a minute. As the ship heels, creaking, it sounds like a ratchet. Loose objects – “The Voyage of the Beagle,” the “American Practical Navigator,” the Casio HL-802 electric calculator, the Seiko Quartz Snooze-Light alarm – have long since shot across the room, hit the walls, and fallen to the floor, where they move and tumble against one another, like rocks in the bed of a stream.

Stella has thirty-four crewmen – captain, chief mate, second mate, third mate, chief engineer, deck and engineer mechanics, able-bodied seamen, ordinary seamen, among others. McPhee identifies and describes many of them. For example, here’s Captain Washburn:

Back and forth through the wheelhouse he moves, from one bridge-wing door to the other – now indoors, now outdoors and a spin around the binnacle, now indoors, now outdoors and a look over the side. Occasionally, he stops to talk to someone. Sometimes he just stops and talks. Out of the blue, I have heard him say, “A little here, a little there.” Out of the blue, I have heard him say, “If you don’t like to do that, seek gainful employment elsewhere. The army of the unemployed has an opening.” Out of nowhere, I have heard him say, “O.K., ye of little faith, there has been a change in the program; the regular cast has left and the stand-ins are taking over.” With no related dialogue coming before or after, I have heard him say,” Any jackass can do that.” Quite evidently speaking to the ship, he will sometimes say, “I don’t like to lose and I never quit.” Often he asks questions and then provides answers. One day, offering advice to all within earshot, he said, “In Rome, do as the Romanians do.”

Here’s Vernon (Mac) McLaughlin, able-bodied seaman:

“Thirty-nine years at sea,” he said. “All I need is feathers and I’ll get up and fly. I’ll be a seagull.” Like everyone else in the crew – like Victor Belmosa, who was born in Trinidad; like Bill Beach, who was born in Scotland; like Trevor Procter and Bernie Tibbotts, who were born in New Zealand – Mac is an American citizen. He was born on Cayman Brac. The Cayman Islands were British colonial then, and Mac is a self-impelled transfer from the U.K. merchant fleet. The first vessel he worked on was a sailing ship. His father was her third mate. They picked up lumber in Alabama and took it to the Bahamas. When Mac hears the expression “iron men in wooden ships,” he does not develop nostalgia. Moving up to steel, he worked on banana boats, making runs to London from the West Indies, Central America, Ecuador, and Colombia.

Here’s deck-and-engineer mechanic David Carter:

In the winter North Atlantic, the demac David Carter has oftentimes tied himself in his bunk after propping his mattress up and wedging himself against the bulkhead – to avoid getting thrown out and injured by a forty-five or fifty-degree roll. He got his first ship after nearly everyone aboard had been injured. On one voyage, Carter had a big chair in his cabin that was “bouncing off the bulkhead like a tennis ball.” In his unusually emphatic, italic way of speaking, he goes on, “Pots won’t stay on a stove. After a night of no sleep, a full day of work, you get nothing but a baloney sandwich if you’re lucky. They soak the tablecloth so nothing will slide. I hope you won’t get to see that. If you wonder why we party and get drunk when we’re in port, that’s why.

Another subject that McPhee pays close attention to is Stella’s cargo. Here’s what she picks up in Valparaiso:

We picked up three thousand cases of wine, two tons of button-down short-sleeved shirsts, seven hundred bags of pentaerythritol, three hundred and fifty pounds of Chilean bone glue, and a hundred and thirteen thousand pounds of candy. We picked up eight hundred and seventeen desks and eight hundred and seventeen chairs. We picked up eighty-five cartons of umbrellas (on their way to Los Angeles), seven thousand spare tires (New Orleans), six thousand four hundred and eighty toilet pedestals (Chicago), and a hundred thousand pieces of kiln-dried radiate pine (destinations everywhere). We picked up nine tons of fruit cocktail, sixty-three tons of peach chips, sixty-seven tons of raisins, two hundred and thirty thousand gallons of concentrated apple juice, four hundred thousand fresh lemons, four hundred thousand fresh onions, five hundred thousand fresh apples. And then we departed.

I relish lists like that; Looking for a Ship brims with them. But if it’s drama you want, there’s plenty of that in this book, too: pirates, stowaways, and, on the way back to Panama, Stella’s burners go out and she becomes dead in the water. McPhee writes,

An impatient albatross circles the bow. Sirens and alarms continue. From under the stern comes an occasional thump, presumably from the rudder. Maybe it’s a fish. Duke the bosun has tied a white rag to a 5/0 fishhook and put it over the stern on an orange nylon line of quarter-ton test, hoping for a giant fish. The clouds are very dark off the starboard quarter. With our lemons and lollipops and terrycloth towels, our three thousand cases of wine, with our ninety drums of passion-fruit juice, our onions, our umbrellas, bone glue, and balsa wood, our kiln-dried radiate pine, with our glass Nativity scenes and our peach chips, we are dead in the water.

Looking for a Ship is an unusual travelogue. The people and places it’s interested in aren’t in the ports of call; they’re on board Stella. That’s the world it evokes. It does so brilliantly.

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Looking for a Ship, including its action, structure, imagery, detail, point of view, and humour. But first I want to introduce the other two books in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Jonathan Raban’s great Passage to Juneau.