April 11, 2022 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Ernesto’s” describes an intriguing martini:

The enormous round-edged, globe-lit bar is an especially nice place to sit, not least because of the easy-drinking yet civilized cocktails, including the 5 Finger Martini, made with two types of vermouth and sherry instead of the hard stuff, and a bright, effervescent Spanish G. & T., with wheels of lime and grapefruit and sprigs of rosemary in a goblet running over.

2. I enjoyed Ian Frazier’s “Stir-Crazy,” particularly its description of a barking fox: “A barking fox kind of gags and hacks, like a cat coughing up a hair ball, except that the fox sounds as if he’s enjoying it.”

3. James Wood’s idea of what is “real” and “true” has always struck me as fuzzy. He says things like “The real is the atlas of fiction” and “Fiction moves in the shadow of doubt, knows itself to be a true lie.” He doesn’t seem to have much regard for fact, which, for me, is reality’s bedrock.  But, in his “By the Collar,” in this week’s issue, he says something new: “These public events have the irresistible tang of the actual.” He’s talking about the events covered in Fintan O’Toole’s new book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. The irresistible tang of the actual – what a marvellous phrase! It perfectly expresses the quality I value most in art and literature. 

4. A special shout-out to Peter Schjeldahl for spotlighting N. H. Pritchard’s wonderful Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69). This work is new to me; it went straight on to my list of favourite paintings. Schjeldahl says of it, 

“Red Abstract / fragment” (1968-69) is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms. ["All Together Now"]

N. H, Pritchard, Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69)

April 4, 2022 Issue

I love lists of what the artist Philip Guston called “crapola.” Laura Preston’s Talk story, “Incidental Masterpieces,” in this week’s issue, contains a dandy:

Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading “Alone Ave.”; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops.

Preston's list is the verbal equivalent of a Cornell box or a Rauschenberg combine: junk transformed into art. Alchemy! 

Rereadings: Judith Thurman's "Cleopatra's Nose"

This is the first in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Judith Thurman’s splendid Cleopatra’s Nose (2008). 

This is one of my all-time favorite essay collections. Thurman is an excellent analyst and a superb describer. She has a critic’s eye for aesthetic specificity and a journalist’s nose for a good story, especially if it involves sex.

Thurman loves to write about female free spirits. Cleopatra’s Nose throngs with them: Vanessa Beecroft, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Catherine Millet, Diane Arbus, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Rei Kawakubo, Marie Antoinette, Jackie Kennedy, and yes, Cleopatra, to name but a few. Also included are a number of stylish men, e.g., Cristóbal Balenciaga, Richard Avedon, Giorgio Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, Bill Blass, and Hump the Grinder.

Hump the Grinder? It’s the stage name of David Humphries, “the Don King of black hair entertainment.” In 2004, Thurman attended Hump the Grinder’s Hair Wars 10-Year Anniversary & California Hair Grammys in Los Angeles, and wrote about it in a wonderful piece called “Roots,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker. (Thirty-eight of the book’s thirty-nine essays are from The New Yorker.) Here’s her description of Hair War’s sponsor, Big Bad D:

That afternoon, D was dressed in an ensemble worthy of Galliano: a pair of high-waisted patchwork leather samurai pants evocative in pizzazz and volume of a Montgolfier; a red T-shirt inlaid with gold and gems that was slashed to display his awesome pectorals; a belt of scarified alligator skin, with claws still attached, from which hung a pouch containing, he said, freeze-dried gator meat; a rawhide “coolie” hat adorned with stones, pods, and shells; and some $50,000 worth of diamonds, including a bracelet of hazelnut-size beads and a ring, about four inches wide, shaped like a pair of scissors.

Many of the best pieces in this collection are reviews of brilliant haute-couture shows. For example, in “Swann Song,” she’s at the Centre Pompidou for a Saint Laurent extravaganza:

Most couture shows last about twenty minutes. This one roiled on for more than an hour, in waves of staggering beauty, fauvish color, and perverse extravagance – a jacket costing half a million francs, for example, perfectly replicating van Gogh’s Irises in seven hundred hours’ worth of hand-beading by Lesage. There were sumptuously embellished tributes to other painters: Picasso, Matisse, Bracque, Dalí, and Warhol; to poets and writers, among them Aragon and Cocteau; and to exotic native populations – Russian moujiks, Forbidden City courtesans, Castilian matadors, and African queens. There was plenty of cerebral whimsy to offset the noirish sex play: feather minis suitable for a showgirl’s wedding to a peer; a miniscule suede tunic from the sixties worn with high-heeled waders; swanky cocktail dresses that exposed a nipple; a transparent black baby-doll disco nighties trimmed with fur; quite a bit of immaculately white-collared Belle de Jour respectability begging to be corrupted; a strong dose of double-breasted androgyny; and a backless evening gown cut to the cleft of the buttocks, then scored with lace. But while Saint Laurent can sometimes be pedantically outré, he’s never trashy. And he displayed such encyclopedic formal invention and technical virtuosity that the occasional bomb – like a series of umbrella-shaped flowered tea frocks in what looked like a shower-curtain fabric, or a shapeless wool shrift worn with a dowager’s turban – were like a sorbet between courses rather than a disappointment.

That “quite a bit of immaculately white-collared Belle de Jour respectability begging to be corrupted” is pure Thurman. She relishes corruption. In the book’s Introduction, she says, “A mutual interest in corruption is what draws me to Pascal.” 

In one of this collection's most memorable reviews, “Broad Stripes, Bright Stars,” Thurman describes a fashion show set in a Milan canal:

Then, to universal amazement, we beheld—drifting lazily down the canal—two red boots, a white shirt, a pair of dark trousers. They were followed by a boy dressed in a thick vest of what looked like russet-colored steel wool. He lay supine and motionless, his limbs outstretched, his perfectly calm face framed by the swirling mass of his hair. There were sixteen of his fellow-volunteers to come. Though the clothes were soggy and a little blurred, one read them—as the current turned the page—like the hand-colored images in some mildewed yet marvellous old book. Poell’s idea was so poetic that the magical buoyancy of bodies and clothes (kept from sinking by an invisible flotation device) leapt the banks and infected the audience with a fit of joy. It didn’t matter, I thought, what the collection looked like on a hanger or in a shop, because the show had performed a feat that is rare enough in theatre or art and practically unheard of in fashion. It surprised a group of people with an emotion they hadn’t been expecting to feel. That is how a child experiences a sensual revelation, and how it is transformed into a memory of being happy. “Everybody follows fashion,” Poell told me later. “But change goes against the stream.”

My favourite piece in Cleopatra’s Nose is “Night Kitchens,” a delightful account of Thurman’s visit to the kitchens of two of Kyoto’s master tofu-makers. Here’s a sample: 

Kawashima bounded into the restaurant at about eight, as his pretty wife, Keiko, was clearing away the Nakazato pottery on which breakfast is served—rust-and-ash-colored vessels with a dark underglaze and a primal beauty. Tofu-making may have a Zen gestalt, but Kawashima—a sporty fifty-eight-year-old with a goatee and a crewcut—doesn’t make a monklike impression. He is the sort of character the French call a gaillard—a bon vivant bristling with rakish vigor. One keeps up with him at a fast trot. His cottage-scale factory and offices occupy a warren of rooms in a sombre two-hundred-year-old house, with blackened beams, which survived demolition when the arcade was built, and seems out of synch with its festive swags of plastic wisteria. At the back of a rather cramped, unlovely industrial kitchen, baskets of zaru dofu were moving down a conveyor belt, getting wrapped and labelled. (The tofu is handmade, and strictly organic, but the packaging is mechanized, and a small fleet of white delivery vans was waiting at the loading dock.) Kawashima’s younger brother was dressed in kitchen whites, stirring soy milk in a metal vat. It was warm but hadn’t been curdled yet, and he offered me some from the ladle. Its taste was slightly beany, yet elemental, with an ineffable sweetness, as if it came not from a plant but from a breast.

Mm, that last line is crazy-good. The whole book is like that – textured, sensuous, inspired. Highly recommended. 

3 for the Sea: Structure

This is the fourth 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 focus on their structure. 

McPhee’s Looking for a Ship has a curious structure. Unlike most travelogues, it doesn’t follow the journey as it was made through time and space. The book consists of seventeen untitled chapters. The first two, written in the past tense, are set in Charleston, South Carolina, where McPhee and his friend Andy Chase, second mate, look for a ship. They eventually find one, the Stella Lykes, that takes them on a forty-two-day run through the Panama Canal and down the coast of South America, with stops to unload and pick up freight at such ports as Cartagena, Valparaiso, Balboa, Buenaventura, Lima, and Guayaquil. Chapter 3, written in the present tense, plunges us directly into life aboard Stella. The date is August 10, “the twentieth day of the voyage.” Stella is six days out of Guayaquil, Ecuador, heading for Valparaiso, Chile. What happened to the previous nineteen days? What about the ports before Guayaquil – Cartagena, Balboa, Buenaventura? What about the Panama Canal? No mention of any of them. We jump from Charleston to Valparaiso. But be patient; keep reading. McPhee has his own artful way of proceeding. All these ports of call eventually enter the narrative: Valparaiso in Chapter 3; Cartagena in Chapter 4; Guayaquil in Chapters 5, 12, and 13; Balboa and Panama Canal in Chapter 11; Lima in Chapter 12; Buenaventura in Chapter 15.

Looking for a Ship’s structure isn’t determined by chronology. It’s theme-driven. One of its main themes is the strong character and superb seamanship of Stella’s captain – Paul McHenry Washburn. McPhee calls him “the most interesting person on the ship.” Washburn appears in almost every chapter. McPhee describes him on the bridge, interviews him in his office, shows him docking Stella in some tight spots, tells about his personal history, visits him at his home in Jacksonville, shows him outwitting a Caribbean storm, describes him dealing with pirates, stowaways, and Stella’s burners going out. 

Captain Washburn is one of McPhee’s themes. Another is the decline of the American Merchant Marine. It’s this theme that generates the ending of the book, with Stella dead in the water. When I first read Looking for a Ship many years ago, I found this ending abrupt and unsatisfying. The journey seemed prematurely terminated (even though there’s at least one clue – the reference in Chapter 17 to the inspection of Stella’s hull in Port Newark – indicating the ship did make it back to where it started). But, on second reading recently, the ending strikes me as perfect. Stella, floating dead in the water, is a marvellous symbol of the United States Merchant Marine’s predicament. McPhee’s final sentence is consummate:

With our lemons and lollipops and terrycloth towels, our three thousand cases of wine, with out ninety drums of passion-fruit juice, our onions, umbrellas, bone glue, and balsa wood, our kiln-dried radiata pine, with our glass Nativity scenes and our peach chips, we are dead in the water.

Unlike Looking for a Ship, Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau unfolds in a straight chronological line. Events are described in the order they happened. There are no flashbacks. But there is a neat structural wrinkle. Raban braids two narratives: (1) his journey through the Inside Passage; (2) Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 exploratory voyage through the same body of water. The two strands are beautifully interlaced. At times, it’s almost as if Captain Van is sailing right there with him (“I’d planned that day to sail up Admiralty Inlet and cross the strait, meeting Vancouver’s expedition as his small boats made their way south into the sound”). 

The primary narrative – Raban’s account of his trip – moves in the most natural way, day by day, noting details, logging impressions. I relish this journal-like form of writing. The book consists of eight chapters. The first begins in Seattle, in March. The last ends back in Seattle, in August. Chapter 5 contains a surprise, a break in the narrative line. Raban suspends his trip, docks his boat in Potts Lagoon, approximately midway on his voyage, and returns to his Seattle home, where he learns that his father is seriously ill. Raban flies to England to be with him. We go from the labyrinthine channels, mercurial tides, and boiling whirlpools of the Inside Passage to the lawns and gardens of Market Harborough and the modest brick bungalow where his mother and father live. We’re plunged directly into Raban’s personal life, his sometimes prickly relations with his parents and siblings. Raban describes his father’s death, funeral, and cremation. The chapter, called “Rite of Passage,” is forty-six pages long. Its content contrasts sharply with the rest of the book. At the chapter’s end, Raban flies back to Potts Lagoon and resumes his voyage. But his mood has changed (“There was no avoiding my father now”). 

Earlier, I described Chapter 5 as a break in the narrative. But, on reflection, I don’t think it is. It’s part of the chronology of events that happened during the voyage. By including it, Raban shows his fidelity to real life. 

Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler is interestingly structured. The first three chapters are chronological; the remaining eleven are thematic. The book begins at O’Hanlon’s home in Oxfordshire. He receives an excited call from his friend Luke Bullough:

Redmond, you’ve got to get up here, fast. There’s a storm coming in, big style! I have the satellite maps. Force 11, maybe more. Straight for Orkney. And Jason, the Norlantean skipper – he’s called on Cellnet. He’s north-west of Shetland. He says the weather’s horrendous. And getting worse. Perfect! Just what you wanted! He says we sign on at Scrabster, Saturday, two days’ time, 7 a.m., no later. OK? Good. So pick me up at home – 19 Pilot Square, Fittie. Be there! And remember – nothing green.

The first three chapters tell about O’Hanlon’s trip to Fittie to pick up Luke, and then about the two of them continuing on to Scrabster, where they board the Norlantean. The ship then makes a short trip to Stromness, where it takes on supplies and ice, and where O’Hanlon, Luke, and some of the crewmen visit a couple of bars. Then back aboard the Norlantean, and away she goes, away, away to the wild North Atlantic fishing-grounds. In one of my favourite sentences, O’Hanlon describes her departure this way:

The next day, in full, black, northern winter night of four o’clock in the afternoon, in a constant, unvarying wind of such violence that I found it almost impossible to stand on deck, the Norlantean, spotlights blazing, left Stromness.

The rest of the book takes place on the Norlantean. We say goodbye to chronological narration. The trip becomes a series of pungent, vivid, humorous set pieces. For example, Chapter 4 takes place in the fish-room, where O’Hanlon learns to gut Greenland halibut (“my gloves only just got a grip on its smooth slimy skin”). Chapter 5 shows him in the galley, eating clapshot (“I decided that I actually liked minced sheep’s-oesophagus-and-stomach, both lengths of colon, the rectum, the entire alimentary canal, as long as it had that reassuringly acrid background taste of gunpowder”). Chapter 6 describes being in the wheelhouse during a Force 12, Category One hurricane (“I was silent, mesmerized by the lines of foam streaking towards the bow window, lit by the bow searchlight, flying seawater whipped into white by winds gone berserk, like snow in a blizzard, except that the snowflakes had got together, coagulated, as if they were whole long lines of detached wave-crests, coming at me in a solid weighted mass”). 

Each of Trawler's chapters describes a particular aspect of shipboard life. Time seems measured not in days or hours, but in hauls. 

To sum up, Passage to Juneau is chronological; Looking for a Ship is thematic; Trawler is partly chronological and partly thematic. All three structures contain an immense amount of action. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.

March 28, 2022 Issue

In this week’s issue, Nick Paumgarten visits a retirement village in Florida and writes about it. Sound exciting? Actually, it’s terrific! One reason is that the community in question – Latitude Margaritaville, in Daytona – turns out to be a genuinely fun place to live. Another is that Paumgarten, as we know from previous pieces, can be witheringly skeptical about man-made paradises: see, for example, his evisceration of Augusta National in “Unlike Any Other” (The New Yorker, June 24, 2019). So when you start reading this piece, you don’t know how it’s going to go. Will it be a scoff or a spree? It turns out to be a bit of both. Along the way, it affords the pleasure of reading Paumgarten at his descriptive best. For example:

Men with guitars set up outside someone’s garage, and the golf carts appear out of nowhere. Commence the beer pong. Pool parties, poker nights, talent shows, toga parties, pig roasts. Cigar-club meeting, group renewal of wedding vows, a pub crawl in old St. Augustine. Oktoberfest this fall had a “Gilligan’s Island” theme; “Hoodstock” was hippies, Fireball, and multicolored jello shots. The golf carts zip and swerve. 

And:

Late in the day, I found McChesney playing cornhole in the village square with some friends. I joined in for a while, and then we loaded up the cornhole boards and got into his golf cart and, beers in hand, hummed down the cart path, in the pink subtropical twilight, pines and palms whizzing by, a whiff of fry grease lingering in the air.

And:

The night went by in a wash of gentle, well-rehearsed and well-worn folk rock, amid video imagery of reefs, coves, beaches, sailboats, cocktails, Jet Skis, cheeseburgers, and resort developments—a kind of subliminal indoctrination into the blurred line between the wild and the tame, the pristine and the industrialized. 

“Five O’Clock Everywhere” is a wonderful exploration of “retirement the Margaritaville way.” I enjoyed it immensely. 

March 21, 2022 Issue

What’s it like to live in Ukraine right now? Joshua Yaffa’s “The Siege,” in this week’s issue, tells us in detail after immersive detail. Here, for example, is his description of conditions at Kyiv’s Ohmatdyt children’s hospital:

The hospital was facing a crisis with its regular patients. Hundreds of children suffering from severe conditions required urgent treatment and operations. Supplies of expensive and rare cancer medicines were running low; flights were grounded and logistics scrambled, making it impossible to get stem cells for bone-marrow transplants. Given the ongoing risk of missile strikes and air raids, most of the children had been moved to a series of basements in the hospital complex. Inside one, dozens of mattresses were arrayed on a concrete floor. The space was dank and drafty. The ceiling leaked. Mothers rocked their crying children or lay silently with them. Pots of food were kept warm on small stoves. One infant needed a shunt implanted to remove fluid from her brain. A six-month-old girl and her mother had checked in to Ohmatdyt for an operation to regulate the baby’s lymphatic system. “We were all ready, and the war started,” the woman told me.

And here’s his depiction of Kyiv’s International Square, “near where the bulk of Russian forces had massed”: 

There had been a firefight the night before. The carcass of a torched military transport truck lay slumped on the asphalt. A shot-up Army bus with deflated tires stood across the square. Shrapnel and bullet casings crunched underfoot. A group of locals had gathered to take a look.

Everywhere Yaffa goes, he talks with people, noting down their comments. For example:

Later that day, I stopped by Dubler, a stylish café co-owned by a local architect named Slava Balbek. It had been closed for days, but I found a dozen young people seated around a long wooden table finishing a late breakfast. Balbek was conducting a planning meeting with volunteers. He had turned the café into a nonprofit kitchen and delivery hub, sending meals to Territorial Defense units, hospitals, and anyone else left behind. “I went straightaway to my local military-recruitment depot, but they told me they were already full”—in the first ten days of the war, a hundred thousand people reportedly enlisted in the volunteer forces—“so I thought, O.K., how else can I be helpful,” Balbek, who is thirty-eight, and an amateur triathlete, told me. “I’m a good trouble-shooter, and if you leave out the particular horrors of war, this is basically organizational work. You need strong nerves and cold reason.”

My take-away from Yaffa’s absorbing piece is that Ukrainians are an amazing people – united and determined to survive Putin’s brutal invasion. The final paragraph says it all:

War has split Shchastia yet again. Dunets, the civil-military-administration head, was recalled back to the Ukrainian Army, and is fighting with the 128th Brigade. Tyurin, his deputy, stayed on in the city administration, albeit under a new flag. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. “I told them to fuck off,” he said.

Photo by Jérôme Sessini, from Joshua Yaffa's "The Siege"

March 14, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s “Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter,” an account of his overnight visit with journalist Kristina Berdynskykk in an underground space of a Kyiv metro station. Every night, Yaffa says, Kyiv metro stations “fill with as many as fifteen thousand civilians, from young families with inflatable mattresses to babushkas who remember wartime stories from their parents many decades ago.” He says of Berdynskykk,

Along with her sixty-seven-year-old mother, Galina, and seventeen-year-old niece, Nastya, she had secured a place inside a train car, which tends to be a few degrees warmer than the concrete platform. On every surface, several dozen people lay in various angles of awkward recline, surrounded by rolling suitcases and plastic shopping bags.

Yaffa puts us squarely there, in the makeshift bomb shelter, when the lights go down for the night:

After ten, the lights in the station dimmed. People packed up their food and rolled out sleeping bags, the white glow of phone screens casting flickering shadows on the walls of the train car. I crawled into my folded-up blanket, and felt the cold floor beneath me. The muffled rumble of nearby snores felt almost reassuring, a reminder of all the humanity gathered so tightly together. A woman offered me a pillow.

That passage is inspired!

Photo by Emanuele Satolli, from Joshua Yaffa's "Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter"

March 7, 2022 Issue

A special shout-out to The New Yorker for its “Days of War,” a portfolio of Mark Neville’s photos, in this week’s issue. Neville’s portraits catch the remarkable strength of Ukrainian character in the face of Russia's vicious invasion. Joshua Yaffa, in his accompanying text, quotes Neville as follows:

“What I find most remarkable is the resilience of the people there,” Neville says. “As a photographer, I’ve been in many places where people are going through incredible trauma. They would reach out to me for help, for money, to get them out, and I would say, ‘The only way I can help is to take your picture and tell your story.’ But with Ukrainians, and with some of the many hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced, no one—not one—has asked me for anything. The only thing they want is to sit me down and tell me what’s happened to them. They have lost people, seen people wounded terribly, seen their streets obliterated. All I want is for people who are looking at these pictures to recognize a version of themselves. Schoolkids taking gymnastics lessons, people just going about their lives despite the shelling and more. For eight years! Can you imagine?”

Mark Neville, "Days of War" (2022)

Postscript: Jonathan D. Spence 1936 - 2021

Jonathan D. Spence (Photo by Misha Erwitt)

I want to pay tribute to Jonathan D. Spence, who died a few months ago, age eighty-five. Spence was an eminent scholar of Chinese history. And he was a great writer. His style was spare and elegant. I’m not a student of Chinese history. But I enjoyed reading his writing, especially his New York Review of Books pieces: see, for example, “A Master in the Shadows” (April 5, 2012); “The Ball and the World” (December 8, 2011); “The Enigma of Chiang Kai-shek” (May 28, 2009); “Portrait of a Monster” (November 3, 2005).

There’s a sentence in the “Acknowledgments” of his wonderful The Question of Hu (1988) that I cherish:

And just in case all that love and caring from so many people might not prove enough, my aged dog Daisy climbed the narrow wooden steps to my summer study countless times a day, and lay across from me during every word, sighing gently in her sleep over my endless attempts to draw some meaning out of the constantly vanishing past.

February 28, 2022 Issue

Rivka Galchen, one of my favorite New Yorker writers, has a medical piece in this week’s issue. Called “Change of Heart,” it’s about the world’s first transplantation of a pig’s heart into a human. Galchen talks with the surgeon, Bartley Griffith, who performed the operation. She talks with the surgeon, Muhammad M. Mohiuddin, who led the surgery that extracted the heart from a year-old genetically modified pig. She describes the transplantation:

The cold pig heart was delivered to the operating room. “Some people like to blast music in an O.R., but I like to hear pins drop,” Griffith said. “I like to hear the sound of the heart-and-lung machine.” Griffith estimates that he has performed more than a thousand heart transplants, but this one called for a different start: before he made the first incision, he suggested that everyone pause for thirty seconds to “think about what this man is entering into.” He described the transplantation as an opportunity to learn. Griffith told me, “We don’t usually take a moment like that. But I think it relaxed everyone. And then we went to work.” The process of transplanting a heart is both brutal and precise. An eight-inch incision is made in the chest. The breastbone is cut in half with a bone saw. The ribs are opened outward to expose the heart. One large vein and one large artery are connected by tubes to a cardiopulmonary-bypass machine; a third tube washes the organ with a heart-stopping fluid. That’s the beginning.

And, most memorably, she describes what happens when the transplanted pig’s heart starts to beat:

When he first pulled the pig heart out of its container, it looked small and pale. “It had an opaqueness that was off-putting,” he said. “I wondered, Did we do something wacky?” He connected the pig heart to the patient’s vessels. He released the clamp, allowing human blood to flow into the organ. “It was as if we’d turned on a light. And it was a red light. The heart just brightened up. And it went from trembling to pumping.” He demonstrated the movement with his hands. “Hearts don’t just squeeze when they beat, they kind of twist, and this heart—it was doing the hoochy-coochy. It was one of the best hearts I’ve ever seen after transplantation.”

Galchen is a superb describer of complex scientific projects: see, for example, her “Green Dream” (on nuclear fusion), and her “The Eighth Continent” (on the race to develop the moon). She writes clearly and vividly. I enjoy her work immensely. 

3 for the Sea: Redmond O'Hanlon's "Trawler"

This is the third 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 Trawler.

Strap yourself into your chair. Use belts, rope, bungee cords, whatever you can find, because you’re about to enter the wild, chaotic, alien, manic, exotic world of the Nortlantean, an Orkney commercial trawler (“a 38.5 metre-long deep draught mass of iron”), fishing the freezing North Atlantic, in a storm gusting Force 11 to Category One Hurricane:

It was a black night, but the Norlantean’s main stern searchlight was on, and the black night was a white-out of spray, a chaos of whirling streaks of foam – in patches so thick that at first the lines and spirals seemed almost stationary in the inverted cone of the fierce rays of light. And then, as I withdrew my mesmerized gaze from the furthest penetration of the beam (which was not far – just enough to give me a glimpse of the Norlantean’s starboard gunwhale, now rolling down, down, digging in to the waves I couldn’t see, and would she come up? How could she come up? And why did she have to move her whole stern like that, a fast side-to-side rear-end waggle like a cat about to pounce, and then wallow deep down in, and slew obscenely left-to-right in a movement I’d certainly not felt before … ), as I focused on the very brightest patch of spray and bunched foam a yard or two out from the searchlight, I realized that all this torn-up water was moving so very shockingly fast, and I felt sick, but it was not seasickness – no, it was far worse, it was entirely personal, hidden, the steely stomach-squeeze of genuine all-out fear, that sharp warning you get before you panic and disgrace yourself to yourself forever … 

The “I” in the above passage is O’Hanlon. Trawler is the riveting account of his two-week trip aboard the Norlantean, January, 1999. He’s there with his young friend Luke Bullough, a marine biologist (“a man with a vast experience of the real sea: as a research diver in Antarctica; as a Fisheries Patrol officer in the Falklands; on trawlers and research ships in the North Atlantic”). Luke is O’Hanlon’s guide (“Hey, Redmond! Big style! We’re going to have a grand time, you and I”; “I want you to see everything, every chance we get”). And that’s what happens; he does get to see everything – the bridge, the machinery, the galley, the hold, the fish-room, the hauling of the net, and, most memorably, the amazing fish that are caught in that net  – except, for O’Hanlon, it’s not always a “grand time.” For one thing, he gets seasick:

Smacked left, hard, against the steel plates of the inward bulging port-bow and right, hard, against the steel partition of the rusty shower, I pitched to my knees in front of the seatless bowl and held on to the rim with both hands, hard. On the floor to either side were two big circular iron valves, each stamped SCUPPER DISCHARGE O/BOARD. I lowered my face into the bowl. The head-torch lit up every ancient and modern shit-splatter: one, particularly old and black, in front of my nostrils, was shaped like a heart. And then I said goodbye to all that Guiness, to the pig’s supper at the Royal Hotel (£28 for two) and even, perhaps to a day-old bolus of breakfast at Bev’s Kitchen, Nairn.

For another, he has a hard time keeping his balance due to the Norlantean’s constant pitching, rolling, swaying, heaving, surging, and yawing:

Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva, I worked my way out of my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag and, lying back again on the bunk, I pulled on my pants, my trousers. I found my black socks (three to each foot, against the cold) and, bundling forward like a curled foetus, I lodged into my wooly carapace of a sweater. The effort of it: there was no rest anywhere, nothing would stay still … The mind-emptying noise of the engines faltered, throttled back, dipped like a Lancaster bomber coming into land, and a that moment the siren sounded, a piercingly high BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. Other smaller, straining engines came into life directly beneath me, and the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue, gently, very slowly, prone, through the hanging curtains of Luke’s bunk, over his flat blue sleeping-bag, out the other side – and it tipped me off and down on to his linear collection of red, blue and yellow plastic biscuit-boxes. My buttocks, I’m sorry to say, must have landed on his favourite box, his red Jacobs biscuit-box, because under me its top and sides blew-up, releasing a tight stash of small, empty, plastic screw-lid Marine Lab specimen-bottles all over the floor.

Many of the book’s best scenes are set in the fish-room, where the haul is sorted and gutted. O’Hanlon describes it magnificently:

“Come on, we’ll set up here.” He stepped across to the flat steel shelf beside a conveyor belt which divided the cavernous fish-room into two: a steel-sided, steel-grilled trackway that led from a tall, round, stainless-steel table (down to our left) to a closed hatch at my feet. A slosh of seawater, shin-high, washed across the dark brown swollen slippery wooden floorboards with each roll and, as the ship bent shuddering over to port, a part of the wave of slush and foam ladled itself out via the half-open drop-gate of the port scupper. As she rolled further over and down, fresh white seawater powered in, to toss and curl, as the ship righted herself, straight across to starboard, to repeat the process. “Grand!” said Luke, switching on his scales (a red light appeared to the left of the long calibrated dial). “Magic! It works – even in seas like this!” The steel ceiling of the fish-room was a confusion of pipes and cables (some encased in steel tubes, some simply slung and looped); strip lights; fuse boxes. The stainless-steel sides of the hopper occupied about one-fifth of the space, down in the left-hand corner, and from it another shorter conveyor belt led up to the circular rimmed table. To our right, to the right of the bulkhead door to the galley, lay a wide-diameter ribbed tube, an augur of sorts, a length of giant gut. Directly aft, at the end of the rectangular cavern, another open bulkhead door let dimly through to the net-deck, where the big winches for the bridle stood back-lit by the early morning light streaming in from the stern-ramp, from the bright surface of the heaped-up, following sea. 

The fish-room is where we see the fish, not only Greenland halibut, redfish, Blue ling, and Grenadiers, which are what the Norlantean is hunting, but also strange, extraordinary creatures such as a Rabbit fish:

The monstrous chimera, the mythical freak, two or three feet long, was on its back, its creamy underside shiny with slime, its pectoral fins like wings, and where its neck should have been was a small oval of a mouth set with teeth like a rabbit’s. It slid down, flop, on the tray. Its foot-long-rat-tail whiplashed after it.

And a deep-sea octopus:

At the centre of my field of vision, at the bottom of the steep, inward-angled, stainless-steel panels of the tall container, to the right of four Greenland halibut which lay where they’d slid (just below the lower lip of the open drop-gate to the conveyor), there spread across the slopes of the floor, there swirled around Luke’s yellow sea-boots, a semi-transparent globular mass of brown and purple, a gelatinous colourless shine which you could see right through, a something from another world, a dead creature which, as I stared, resolved itself into far too many long viscid arms studded with white boils, eruptions, suckers to hold you fast …

In one of my favorite scenes, Luke mischievously lures O’Hanlon into a startling encounter with an anglerfish:

Expecting some minor curiosity, I stepped into the stainless-steel hopper, right leg first, over the sill – and stopped. My left leg (despite its outer oilskin protection, its inner high yellow rubber sea-boot complete with steel toe-cap) refused to follow. From my brain it received the down-both-legs forked message before I did. It already knew that my right leg, at the level of the lower shin, was one engulfing snap away from a permanent goodbye to a length of oilskin, one half of a right yellow welly complete with its toe-cap of steel, one still flexible ankle and a perfectly usable right foot.

Because six inches from my right shin was a three-foot gape of mouth; and the inside of this mouth was black; the outer lips were black; the whole nightmare fish, if it was a fish, was slimy black. The rim of the projecting lower jaw was set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch, and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting. Above them, beneath the drawn-back curve of the upper lip, curling up to a snarl below the centre of the broad black snout, there was a complimentary set of masonry nails, points down, waiting. And between the globular black eyes, wide apart, fixed on me, were a couple of long black whips, wireless aerials … And, very obviously, there was only one thing on the mind of this monstrous something – it wanted to eat. And it didn’t look, to me, as if it was a picky eater. Discrimination, taste, haute cuisine, no, that was not its thing. Not at all … 

As you can see, I love quoting O’Hanlon. He’s a brilliant writer – where brilliance means specific, attentive, original, vivid, perceptive, vital, humorous. Trawler is one of his masterpieces. 

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss various aspects of these three great books – their action, structure, point of view, sense of place, sense of people, descriptive art, meaning, humour – in more detail. My next post in this series will be on structure.

February 14 & 21, 2022 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. This may be just me, but Miriam Toews’ personal history piece, “The Way She Closed the Door,” in this week’s issue, seems unreal. The device of recounting her life as if she were talking to that youth in the Paris café seems just that – a device. And that river walk is too much, too patterned, too dreamlike to be believable. The same goes for the river cracking up and the cracked window and the piece of glass lodging in her forehead. I’m not saying these events didn’t happen, but the whole thing just seems too shaped, too artful to be a chronicle of real experience. 

2. Michaelangelo Matos’s “Goings On About Town” note on the Black Dog’s new EP “Brutal Minimalism” contains these delightful lines:

The grainy, gray-toned percussion, redolent of cracked concrete walls, and the low-mixed chimes, like faraway train signals, add to the verisimilitude. Even when the beats come forward, they amplify the background details.

3. Perhaps the most beautiful sentence in this week’s issue appears in Anthony Lane’s “Living for the City,” a review of Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World”: “Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle.”