April 22 & 29, 2024 Issue

I love descriptions of art. There’s a beauty in this week’s issue – Jackson Arn’s description of Anni Albers' Pasture (1958):

None of the shapes or colors in “Pasture” (1958), a smallish plot of mainly red and green threads, would be out of place on a roll of Christmas wrapping paper. The trick is that each component lingers long enough to make any change feel like an event; checkerboard red-and-green switches to green-on-black, then green-on-black but with stutters of white and red. Patterns unfold horizontally, but every so often a twisted pair of vertical threads (it’s called a leno weave) slashes its way out of the grid. An invisible logic, mysterious but never precious, presides. Most visual art addresses whoever happens to be looking at it. “Pasture” stares straight through you, at some distant, tranquil future in which primordial beauty is the only kind left.

That “slashes its way out of the grid” is excellent. The whole piece is excellent. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Anni Albers, Pastture (1958)

3 for the River: Action

This is the fifth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their action.

These books are never static. Their protagonists (the authors) are always going somewhere, doing something. Sometimes you hear of stories being described as essayistic. These books aren’t essayistic. They’re thrilling action-adventures. But not in the mindless Hollywood “superhero” sense. The action-adventures here are real, involving real people in real existential situations, e.g., canoeing dangerous Nahanni rapids, avoiding collision with massive Mississippi barge tows, descending the Congo River by pirogue. 

Patterson puts us squarely there with him and his companion, Gordon Matthews, in the Cache Rapid, when their canoe upsets:

As the canoe drove out of the eddy at the head of the rapid it hit the current with a plunge, and a boiling surge of water foamed up along the gunwale. The frightened dogs all shifted to the downside and the canoe lurched and almost filled with water. I managed to swing it back to the shore we had just left, and Gordon jumped with the line. But he was pulled into the river, as Stevens had been, and down we went. The canoe slid backwards over a rock that was just awash: the tail went clean under water while the nose hung in midair with the river driving past on both sides. I could just see Gordon: he had fetched up against a rock with a smack that almost stove his chest in, and there he stayed hanging on to the line very stoutly with both hands. His arms must have been pretty nearly wrenched out of their sockets.

That’s the kind of action I’m talking about. Dangerous River brims with it. Here’s another taste. This time Patterson is alone, attempting to canoe Hell’s Gate Rapid:

I tried that rapid three times, but the current in the canyon was stronger than I had thought, and I was not able to get speed enough on the canoe to drive it up on the crest of the riffle that barred the way. Twice the canoe climbed the ridge, close under the big waves, only to be flung across the river and driven down the canyon, almost touching the cliff on the portage side. At the third and last attempt the eddies worked in my favour: the canoe was climbing the hill of racing water with speed enough (I thought) to take it on and over, when suddenly a gust of wind blew down the river, the nose swung off course and the canoe slid down into the lower whirlpool. It started to spin and then was lifted on the upsurge of a huge boil from below. It was like the heave of one’s cabin bunk at night in some great Atlantic storm. Then the water fell away from beneath the canoe, and I caught a glimpse of the white waves of the rapid, a long way above, it seemed. The canoe rose once more and spun again, and then at last the paddle bit into solid water and drove the outfit out of the whirlpool and down the canyon for the last time, taking a sideways slap, in passing, from a stray eddy and shipping it green as a parting souvenir of a memorable visit. 

There’s action aplenty in Old Glory, too, much of it on the Mississippi River, as Raban tries to navigate its tricky currents and avoid being run down by barge tows. Here’s a sample: 

When I was signaled into the chamber, the moon was up, silvering the slime on the lock wall. I was lowered into the black. The sluices rumbled in their underground tunnels. When the gates opened, they framed a puzzling abstract of mat India ink spotted with scraps of tinsel. 

My eyes weren’t accustomed. I nosed out gingerly, feeling my way through the water that I couldn’t see. The lights on my boat were supposed to make it visible to other people and were no help in making the river visible to me. I went ahead, giving the motor little, nervous dribbles of gas. A flat-topped black buoy, heeling over in the current, went by so close I could’ve leaned out and touched it. I could just make out the irregular bump of Otter Island and steered to the left of it. For a few minutes I congratulated myself on beginning, at least, to get the hang of this business of night navigation. Then I saw the pointed top of another buoy five yards ahead of my bow. A red. I hadn’t been going downstream at all: I’d just crossed the channel at right angles.

The carbide searchlight of a tow (was it across or down from I was?) raked the river. I headed for what I hoped was the shore, and the tow disappeared over my head at terrifying speed. It left no wake behind, and it was only when I saw another, racing by at the same altitude, that I realized that the tows were trucks on a highway. I edged on. Another beam swiveling idly on the water suddenly picked out my boat and held me, half-blinded. The long, growling blast of the siren was as queerly, then scarily, intimate as the cough of a stranger in one’s bedroom. Panicking, I swung the head of the boat and drove it at full tilt. Any direction would do – just not, please not, into the tow. It went past thirty, thirty yards off, a lone towboat without its barges. Its balconied side and back were lit up like a Christmas tree, but from the front it had been as black as the surrounding river. Its high wake caught me broadside; I had miscalculated the direction it would come from; and as I hung in the trough, the boat rolled and the left-hand gunwale began to gouge cleanly into the side of the wave. I was shin deep in water before I could swing the front of the boat around and ride out the swell. 

I found myself blubbering with shock. Had the towboat been pushing a barge fleet, I would be dead now, or drowning, unconscious, under its screws. I had lost all sense of the shape of the river. I didn’t know where the shore was. I didn’t know up from down. The tow’s lights had left the river even darker than it had before. I saw one faint glimmer, and what looked like the distant outline of a tree, but I was frightened that it would turn into another tow, its leading barges a black wedge waiting to suck me under. I drove away from it, then around it, then cautiously approached it. It was an electric light on a pole. Under it, a johnboat, piled with hoop nets was drawn up on the sand.

Action in Tim Butcher’s Blood River takes place on both land and water. Butcher moves through the Congo jungle on a motorbike, dodging rebel soldiers: 

The next 200-kilometre-long stretch was grim. It began well enough with a relatively fast track out of Kabambarre along a well-forested ridge. This was the main access road into the town and I spotted a group of soldiers guarding the entrance to the town. They were gathered around a cooking fire in the ruins of a building, but Benoit repeated his old trick of speeding up, and though the soldiers jumped up, grabbed their weapons and shouted after us, we had already slipped by. 

At the village of Lowa, on the Upper Congo, he shifts to travel by pirogue. This is my favorite part of the journey. It puts Butcher in direct contact with the river (“I let my fingers trail in the river water. It was as warm and soothing as a bath”). As his crew paddles him downriver, Butcher relaxes. He falls asleep. He’s woken by a clap of thunder. A storm approaches. The crew races to get to shore. Butcher’s description of the action is excellent:

“We must find shelter, or the rain will fill the pirogue and we will capsize,” shouted Malike, struggling to make himself heard above the noise of the wind and waves. I thought of the crocodile I had seen the day before. Capsizing would not be good.

As the paddlers made for shore, we raced a curtain of rain that I could hear, but not see, approaching from behind. We lost the race by only a short distance but it was still enough to see me soaked through, struggling to keep my camera bag clear of the water welling in the bottom of the boat. I had felt sorry for the paddlers when I saw how little they brought with them, but now I was the one with the problem of having to deal with wet equipment.

The paddlers had spotted a break in the riverside forest and some tied-up pirogues being clattered by the waves, so I knew we were near a village. Slithering up a muddy bank, we found ourselves at a thatched hut shuddering in the wind. There was nobody to ask permission from, so we just bundled in through the small door and collapsed on the floor. By the time I had retrieved my soggy head torch and cast a light around the room, my four companions were asleep, their limbs all folded together for warmth like the blades on a Swiss Army knife. I turned off the torch and settled myself on the ground, watching as every so often the mud-hut walls glowed to the flicker of lightning outside. 

Action is a prime feature of all three of these great books. Another is acute sense of place. That’ll be the focus of my next post in this series.

Postscript: Helen Vendler 1933 - 2024

Helen Vendler (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell)

Helen Vendler died April 23, 2024, age 90.  She’s one of my all-time favorite writers. I first encountered her work in The New Yorker. I remember the piece – “On Marianne Moore” (October 16, 1978; included in Vendler’s great 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us). I remember the line that hooked me: “Marguerite Young told, in a festschrift for Moore’s seventy-seventh birthday, how the poem ‘Nevertheless’ arose: Moore, seeing in a box of strawberries a misshapen green one, almost all seeds, said, ‘Here’s a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle,’ and found thereby a first line.” 

Here's a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle – I love that line. It belongs to Moore, not Vendler. But credit Vendler for including the circumstances of its origin in her brilliant essay. Vendler was always interested in the “how” of poetry – how it's conceived, how it’s constructed, how it achieves its effects. She was a formalist extraordinaire. Her writing taught me that style matters immensely. As she said of the poets she reviewed in her great Soul Says (1995), “Each has left a mark on language, has found a style. And it is that style – the compelling aesthetic signature of each – that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.” Her responses are among the glories of literary criticism. For example:

On Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe Man”: “Probe after probe enters the reclining figure’s unknown substance: Is he stone? Is he tough bird-tissue? Is he a gnarled root? The probes are successively visual and tactile, and are sometimes two-dimensional (“the grain of his wrists”), sometimes three-dimensional (“the ball of his heel”). The corpse, at this point, is still unressurected: it is stony, wooden, cold, alien, made of disarticulated parts. But as the similes turn to metaphors, the corpse begins to stir.” [The Breaking of Style, 1995]

On Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose”: “The exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness, the evening harmony of settling and clinging and closing and creeping, the delicate touch of each clause, the valedictory air of the whole, the momentary identification with hens, sweet peas, and bumblebees all speak of the attentive and yielding soul through which the landscape is being articulated.” [Part of Nature, Part of Us, 1980]

On James Schuyler’s “Used Hankerchiefs 5¢”: “Hopkins would have liked this writing, with its exquisite texture of letters and sounds, its slippage from description to theory of style, its noticing of visual effects, both accidental (crush marks) and intended (cross-stitching). In this affectionate piece, Schuyler allies himself with an American pastoral aesthetic of the found, the cared-for, and the homemade – with Stevens’ Tennessee gray jar and home-sewed, hand-embroidered sheet, with Elizabeth Bishop’s doilies and hand-carved flute. 'Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?' says Bishop’s Crusoe.” [Soul Says, 1995]

Note that “exquisite texture of letters and sounds.” Vendler relished verbal texture. In her superb “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1989; collected in Soul Says), a review of Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue, she wrote, “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act, the texture of the lines on the page.” It's the art of Vendler's criticism, too. She was a master of it.

April 15, 2024 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s New Yorker: Eric Lach’s “Trash, Trash Revolution” and Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault.”

In “Trash, Trash Revolution,” Lach tours the complex world of New York City’s Sanitation Department. He talks with the City’s Sanitation Commissioner, Jessica Tisch. He describes Tisch’s new program: “Bags off the sidewalks. Clean highways. Citywide organic-waste pickup. Beefed-up enforcement of sanitary laws.” He accompanies two sanitation workers on a midnight collection route in the West Village. He visits the Sanitation Department’s garage in South Brooklyn to discuss illegal dumping with the Sanitation Police. In my favorite part, he rides with Tisch on a trash barge to Port Elizabeth. He writes,

One day, I rode with Tisch on a trash barge to Port Elizabeth. Only after we set off did Tisch ask an aide how long the trip to New Jersey would take. A hundred and forty minutes, the aide said. “A hundred and forty minutes?” Tisch yelled, in disbelief. Ed Whitmore, the owner of the tugboat pushing the barge, went to consult the captain, then returned. “Good news,” he said. With the tide moving the way it was, we could make the trip in about an hour. Soon, white spray was shooting off both sides of the barge as the tug chugged through the water, pushing a thousand tons of rotting cargo across the harbor.

“A thousand tons of rotting cargo” – that’s a lot of garbage! And, as Lach points out, it’s only a fraction of what New York City deals with. He reports that each day the City disposes of twenty-four million pounds of waste – “enough to fill more than two dozen Statues of Liberty.” That’s a disgusting amount. There must be ways to reduce it. Lach doesn’t say. I’d welcome another piece by him addressing this issue. 

Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault” tells about his recent experience embedding with Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion in Tabaivka, a settlement in north-eastern Ukraine, less than ten miles from the front line. The purpose of the 1st Battalion, as Mogelson explains, is “to rapidly deploy to areas along the front that are in danger of collapse.” It is one of Ukraine’s most skilled fighting units, led by a cunning and audacious commander named Perun (his call sign). 

The heart of this riveting piece is an assault by a team of 1st Battalion members on an underground root cellar in the backyard of a farmhouse where a number of Russian soldiers are staying. Here’s an excerpt:

They needed to hit the cellar entrance. Kyivstar’s companion had left him behind and was walking there alone. His call sign was Wolf. He was a welder from a rural village in western Ukraine who, when the war started, had been working in the Czech Republic, sending money home to his wife and their young son and daughter. He’d been with 1st Battalion for about a month, and this was his first mission. Sever hadn’t intended to bring him to Tabaivka, but Wolf was filling in for the soldier who’d broken his leg when their truck crashed into the crater. At the house, Wolf had struck me as the team’s most timid member, sheepishly observing Sanjek and Noah’s shenanigans. When the stormers were leaving for the operation, Banker had scolded Wolf for guzzling a tall can of energy drink, which would make him have to urinate. In the cargo van, right before Banker shut the door, Wolf had said, “Fuck, I forgot my ballistic glasses. Oh, well, whatever.”

He was now doing something inexplicable. Instead of sneaking up to the cellar entrance, he was approaching it openly—revealing himself to anyone who might be watching from inside. “He was confused,” Kyivstar later told me. “I was yelling at him, trying to get him to come back.” He added, with frustration, “There was no need for him to go ahead by himself like that. It was like he was going there to die.”

In the operations center, Perun yelled into the radio, “No! Don’t cross in front of the entrance!” But Wolf couldn’t hear him. He kept walking until he reached the open door. For several long seconds, everyone in the operations center watched as he stood there, motionless. Then he crumpled.

“They got him,” Perun said, not loudly, and not over the radio.

The root cellar withstands the attack. But in the ensuing siege, many Russian soldiers are killed. Mogelson writes,

For the rest of the day, a steady stream of small groups of Russian infantrymen—between two and six soldiers each—walked to Tabaivka from the east. Few made it across the three-hundred-yard gap. The snow had relented, and Boyko easily stalked the groups with the surveillance drone. Perun bounded between the panel and the radio, shouting himself hoarse, calculating azimuths, and correcting the aim of his stormers, snipers, and machine gunners. It was madness: Russians kept marching down the same paths, to the same spots where their comrades had just died. One 1st Battalion machine gunner later told me he had fired his weapon so much that it had kept him warm in his frigid dugout. He couldn’t see the men he was killing. But since they kept reappearing in certain places, he memorized different branches below which he could point his barrel to hit specific coördinates up to a mile away.

Unlike the machine gunner, those of us in the operations center had a bird’s-eye view of the Russians on the receiving end of the barrages: men running and stumbling as they fled the bullets and the shells, crawling after being shot or hit by shrapnel, hiding behind tree trunks and under bushes. At one point, the monitor displayed six Russians hurrying up a road toward the safety of a dense forest. Two of them were helping along a limping soldier who had his arms draped over their shoulders; two others were dragging an injured or dead soldier across the snow on an improvised toboggan. Perun called in cluster munitions on them: a smoking warhead that scudded down, followed by a dozen impacts all around the group. Another 1st Battalion drone pilot was attacking Russians with F.P.V.s. Footage from one of them captured two infantrymen diving away, too late, in the split second before the F.P.V. detonated and its video feed cut out.

“The Assault” is a tremendous piece of war reportage – another in Mogelson’s extraordinary series of dispatches from the front: see, for example, “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023) and “Underworld” (May 29, 2023). 

Taking a Break

Humber Bay Arch Bridge, Toronto (Photo by Tanya Mok, from blogto.com)

Today, Lorna and I travel to Toronto to do some cycling. I’m taking the April 15 New Yorker with me. I’ll post my review when I return. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about April 28. 

On James Wood: Fact v. Fiction

James Wood (Photo by Hans Glave)

Warning: this is a rant. But I'll try to keep it brief.

Can a novel be relied on as biography? To me, the obvious answer is no. A novel is by definition fiction. Therefore, it’s inherently unreliable. James Wood, in his “A Life More Ordinary” (The New Yorker, April 8, 2024) seems to have a different view. He refers to V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. He says that in writing it, Naipaul was “essentially writing the life of his own father, Seepersad Naipaul.” The key word is “essentially.” I take it to mean that, in Wood’s view, Biswas embodies the core of Seepersad’s character, but not every detail. He’s a reasonable facsimile, but not a clone. Is this true? I don’t think so. Wood, in his 1999 essay “The Real Mr. Biswas” (included in his great 2005 collection The Irresponsible Self), points out that Seepersad’s letters to his son Vidia “show that Naipaul’s father was less naïve, much less unlettered, and more worldly than Mr. Biswas.” To me, these are major differences. Seepersad Naipaul is not Mr. Biswas. A House for Mr. Biswas should not be read as his biography. Novelists alter, heighten, and omit facts. In “A Life More Ordinary,” Wood praises Amitava Kumar’s new novel My Beloved Life for its “autobiographical power.” Okay, but novels aren’t autobiography. Or put it this way: they aren’t reliable autobiography. Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because it bugs me to see a great critic like Wood (one of my heroes, actually) seemingly oblivious of the slippery ground he’s on when he blurs the line between fact and fiction. 

Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb "New Yorker" Essayists (Part I)

This is the first post in my series “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists,” a celebration of Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023), in which I’ll select four of my favorite pieces from each collection (one per month) and try to say why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Thurman’s wonderful “First Impressions” (June 23, 2008). 

In this piece, Thurman explores the fascinating world of cave paintings. In the Ardèche region of south-central France, she visits the base camp of a group of researchers dedicated to the study of the Chauvet Cave. She describes the layout and contents of the Chauvet Cave. She says of its stunning End Chamber,

A great frieze covers the back left wall: a pride of lions with Pointillist whiskers seems to be hunting a herd of bison, which appear to have stampeded a troop of rhinos, one of which looks as if it had fallen into, or is climbing out of, a cavity in the rock. As at many sites, the scratches made by a standing bear have been overlaid with a palimpsest of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition that bear claws were an expressive tool for engraving a record—poignant and indelible—of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.

Thurman discusses the meaning of cave art. She considers several scenarios, including Jean Clottes’ controversial theory on shamanism. She writes,

When Clottes joined forces with Lewis-Williams, he had come to believe that cave painting largely represents the experiences of shamans or initiates on a vision quest to the underworld, where spirits gathered. The caves served as a gateway, and their walls were considered porous. Where the artists or their entourage left handprints, they were palping a living rock in the hopes of reaching or summoning a force beyond it. They typically incorporated the rock’s contours and fissures into the outlines of their drawings—as a horn, a hump, or a haunch—so that a frieze becomes a bas-relief. But, in doing so, they were also locating the dwelling place of an animal from their visions, and bodying it forth.

In my favorite part, she goes with a guide inside the Niaux Cave and describes her experience:

The floor near the mouth was fairly flat, but as we went deeper it listed and swelled unpredictably. Water was dripping, and sometimes it sounded like a sinister whispered conversation. The caves are full of eerie noises that gurgle up from the bowels of the earth, yet I had a feeling of traversing a space that wasn’t terrestrial. We were, in fact, walking on the bed of a primordial river. Where the passage narrowed, we squeezed between two rocks, like a turnstile, marked with four lines. They were swipes of a finger dipped in red pigment that resembled a bar code, or symbolic flames. Further along, there was a large panel of dots, lines, and arrows, some red, some black. I felt their power without understanding it until I recalled what Norbert Aujoulat had told me about the signs at Cussac. He was the second modern human to explore the cave, in 2000, the year it was unearthed, some twenty-two thousand years after the painters had departed. (The first was Cussac’s discoverer, Marc Delluc.) “As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper, noting where they’d broken off stalagmites to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say, ‘We’re sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.’ ”

They make their way to “one of the grandest bestiaries in Paleolithic art” – the Black Salon, a rotunda a hundred and thirty feet in diameter:

Scores of animals were painted in sheltered spots on the floor, or etched in charcoal on the soaring walls: bison, stags, ibex, aurochs, and, what is rarer, fish (salmon), and Niaux’s famous “bearded horses”—a shaggy, short-legged species that, Clottes writes in his new book, has been reintroduced from their native habitat, in Central Asia, to French wildlife parks. All these creatures are drawn in profile with a fine point, and some of their silhouettes have been filled in with a brush or a stumping cloth. I looked for a little ibex, twenty-one inches long, that Clottes had described to me as the work of a perfectionist, and one of the most beautiful animals in a cave. When I found him, he looked so perky that I couldn’t help laughing. Alard was patient, and, since time loses its contours underground, I didn’t know how long we had spent there. “I imagine that you want to see more,” he said after a while, so we moved along.

“First Impressions” is an absorbing tour of some of the world’s most spectacular prehistoric art. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man" Revisited

O. J. Simpson (Photo by Vince Bucci)

“If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit,” Johnnie Cochran told the jury, in O. J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial. And that’s what they did – they acquitted. It’s one of the most breathtaking verdicts in the history of criminal law, flying in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming evidence of guilt. Simpson’s death this week brought back memories of that riveting trial. It also reminded me of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s New Yorker essay on the case – “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” (October 23, 1995). Last night, I reread it. What an extraordinary piece of writing! It begins brilliantly:

“Every day, in every way, we are getting meta and meta,” the philosopher John Wisdom used to say, venturing a cultural counterpart to Émile Coué’s famous mantra of self-improvement. So it makes sense that in the aftermath of the Simpson trial the focus of attention has been swiftly displaced from the verdict to the reaction to the verdict, and then to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict, and, finally, to the reaction to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict—which is to say, black indignation at white anger at black jubilation at Simpson’s acquittal. It’s a spiral made possible by the relay circuit of race. Only in America.

Gates looks at the case from many angles. He sees it as counternarrative: “To believe that Simpson is innocent is to believe that a terrible injustice has been averted, and this is precisely what many black Americans, including many prominent ones, do believe.” He sees it as blacks’ distrust of the justice system: “Wynton Marsalis says, ‘My worst fear is to have to go before the criminal justice system.’ Absurdly enough, it’s mine, too.” He sees it as soap opera: “So there you have it: the Simpson trial – black entertainment television at its finest.” He sees it as black prowess in the courtroom: “By the same token, the display of black prowess in the courtroom was heartening for many black viewers.” I found it heartening, too. And inspiring. Johnnie Cochran became one of my heroes. 

Most compellingly, Gates sees it as “racial reduction” and argues strongly against it. He says,

Yet to accept the racial reduction (“WHITES V. BLACKS,” as last week’s Newsweek headline had it) is to miss the fact that the black community itself is riven, and in ways invisible to most whites.

He goes on to say that he himself was convinced of Simpson’s guilt and was “stunned” by the verdict. 

I think it’s fair to say that many people reacted the same way. I remember being at the Merchantman Pub, in Charlottetown, when the verdict came down. The place was packed. All eyes were on the TV screen above the bar. There were four other lawyers at my table. We took bets on whether the verdict would be guilty or not guilty. I was the only one who bet not guilty. Why? It had nothing to do with race. I’d been following the trial and I was impressed with the way Simpson’s defence team had shredded the prosecution’s case – no search warrant, improperly stored DNA, and so on, not to mention that bloody glove found at the murder scene that didn’t fit Simpson’s hand. I felt there was a good chance the jury would throw the case out. 

One aspect of the trial that Gates doesn’t discuss is Simpson’s wealth, which enabled him to hire some of the best defence attorneys in America. That’s an advantage most of us don’t have. I’m not downplaying the so-called “race divide.” It was surely a major factor in Simpson’s case. But his trial also illustrates a wealth divide. People who can afford to hire top notch lawyers to defend them are more likely to avoid being found guilty than people who can’t.

Gates concludes his piece by likening OJ’s trial to an “empty vessel” into which each of us pours our own meanings. I agree. The verdict is endlessly interpretable.

April 8, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Robert Sullivan’s delightful “Talk” story “Find a Grave." It’s about three members of Dervish, a band from Ireland’s County Sligo, and their search for the grave of Michael Coleman, a Sligo fiddler. Coleman is buried in St. Raymond’s Cemetery, in the Bronx. The trio rent a vehicle and use GPS to find St. Raymond’s. The process isn’t straightforward. Sullivan writes, “Kelly was busy with his phone. The cemetery offices, he discovered, were closed, and the precise location of Coleman’s grave was inscrutable.” But they persist and eventually find Coleman’s grave. They gather around it and play a tune in Coleman’s honor:

Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called “Sligo Maid.” Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. “That’s Coleman!” Kelly said. Tunes started up again as a plane departed LaGuardia.

Kelly smiled. “This is a big moment for us.”

“It’s practically spiritual,” Mitchell said.

After a while, they packed up their instruments. Clouds had covered the sun. Mitchell put his hands in his pockets and shivered. “It’s cold, lads,” he said.

The piece is practically a prose poem. I love it. Sullivan is a master “Talk” story writer. This is one of his best.

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #7 "George V. Higgins's Profane Style"

George V. Higgins (Photo by Benno Friedman)

This is the fourth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “George V. Higgins’s Profane Style” (August 29, 2014):

My favorite part of James Wood’s superb "Away Thinking About Things" (The New Yorker, August 25, 2014), a review of James Kelman’s new story collection If It Is Your Life, is his consideration of the way Kelman “repeats and refines ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ ”:

A single sentence will deploy the same word differently. “If it was me I’d just tell them to fuck off; away and fuck I’d tell them, that’s what I’d say if it was me,” the narrator thinks in “The One with the Dog.” There is also “fucking” as a kind of midsentence punctuation (functioning like “but”): “She would just fucking, she would laugh at him.” And also as impacted repetition: “Fuck sake, of course she would; what was the fucking point of fucking, trying to fucking keep it away, of course she’d be fucking worrying about him,” Ronnie thinks in the story “Greyhound for Breakfast.”

Reading that, I immediately thought of my favorite novelist, George V. Higgins, and the resonant way he deployed “fuckin’ ”:

The Digger leaned on the bar. “Lemme tell you something, Harrington,” he said, “you take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life. I went out to Vegas there and I said, ‘Fuck me, fuck me.’ And they fucked me. Then I get that gaff job. I got unfucked.” [The Digger’s Game, 1973]

"You take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life" is a very powerful line. Its use of “fuckin’” to modify “smooth” is what powers it.

Higgins also used the contraction “fuck’re” to great effect. “Where the fuck’re you taking me?” Jackie Brown says in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1971). In The Rat on Fire (1981), Don says to Mickey, “The fuck’re you doin’ there?”

One of Higgins’s most memorable uses of “fuckin’ ” occurs near the end of his brilliant Cogan’s Trade (1975):

“There’s all kinds of reasons for things,” Cogan said. “Guys get whacked for doing things, guys get whacked for not doing things, it doesn’t matter. The only thing matters is if you’re the guy that’s gonna get whacked. That’s the only fuckin’ thing.”

That’s the only fuckin’ thing. Higgins/Cogan is talking about impending violent death. “Fuckin’ ” is used here to underscore the brute reality of being “the guy that’s gonna get whacked.” “Fuckin’ ” gives the line its existential hardness. The passage is a memento mori delivered Boston underworld style.

5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #1 "The Survival of the Bark Canoe"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy's Blog

This is the first post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” (The New Yorker, February 24 & March 3, 1975).

This superb piece chronicles McPhee’s one-hundred-and-fifty-mile canoe trip through the North Maine Woods in August, 1974. He travels with four others – Henri Vaillancourt, Vaillancourt’s friends Rick and Mike Blanchette, and McPhee’s friend Warren Elmer – in two bark canoes. The canoes were made by Vaillancourt, a young man in his mid-twenties, who is a master builder of bark canoes. 

The piece unfolds in twelve sections. In the first two, McPhee visits Vaillancourt at his home in Greenville, New Hampshire, and observes him building a canoe. Here’s his description of Vaillancourt shaping the stempiece, the part that establishes the profile of the bow or the stern:

He plunged the laminated end of the piece into a bucket of water and left it there for a while, and then he built up the fire with scraps from the floor. In a coffee can he brought water to a boil. He poured it slowly over the laminations, bathing them, bathing them again. Then he lifted the steaming cedar in two hands and bent it. The laminations slid upon one another and formed a curve. He pondered the curve. It was not enough of a curve, he decided. So he bent the piece a little more. “There’s an awful lot of it that’s just whim,” he said. “You vary the stempiece by whim.” He liked what he saw now, so he reached for a strip of basswood bark, tightly wound it around the curve in the cedar, and tied it off. The basswood bark was not temporary. It would stay there, and go into the canoe. Bow or stern, the straight and solid part of the stempiece would run down from the tip, them the laminated curve would sweep inward, establishing the character of the end – and thus, in large part, of the canoe itself.

I relish descriptions like that – descriptions of process. McPhee is a master of them. In his hands, they’re like prose poems. This piece features several of them.

In Vaillancourt’s yard, McPhee sees two completed canoes. He writes,

Their bark, smooth and taut, was of differing shades of brown, trellised with dark seams. I guess I had expected something a little rough, rippled, crude, asymmetrical. Their color was pleasing. Turn them over – their ribs, thwarts, and planking suggested cabinetwork. Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable. In the sunlight of that cold November morning, they were the two most beautiful canoes I had ever seen. 

Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable – I love that line. As McPhee points out, Vaillancourt’s canoes are modeled on the canoes of the Malecites: 

So Henri Vaillancourt builds Malecite canoes. Before all other design factors, he cares most about the artistic appearance of the canoes he builds, and he thinks the best-looking were the canoes of the Malecites. The Malecites lived in New Brunswick and parts of Maine. Vaillancourt builds the Malecite St. John River Canoe and the Malecite St. Lawrence Canoe. He builds them with modifications though.

At the end of section two, Vaillancourt mentions that he’s planning a canoe trip in Maine – down the Penobscot River and on to the Allagash lakes. McPhee asks if he can go with him. Vaillancourt agrees, but adds a condition: “Bring your own food.” It’s a hint of another side of Vaillancourt, an unattractive side, one that emerges more fully on the trip and nearly ruins it.

True to form, McPhee doesn’t start his account of the canoe trip at the beginning. Instead, he plunges in, in medias res: “It is five-fifteen in the morning, August 12th, and Henri is up splitting wood.”

Incidentally, that mention of the date (August 12) is the only indication in the piece of when this trip occurred. There’s no mention of the year. The piece appeared in The New Yorker in two parts – February 24 and March 3, 1975. My guess is that the trip occurred in August of the previous year. This is consistent with what McPhee says about Vaillancourt’s age. He says that Vaillancourt built his first canoe in 1965, when he was fifteen, and that he’s “in his mid-twenties now.”

The crew put their canoes into the West Branch of the Penobscot River. They paddle down the Penobscot to Chesuncook Lake. They camp on Gero Island. The move north on the northernmost arm of Chesuncook Lake. They go up Umbazooksus Stream. They cross Umbazooksus Lake. They portage at Mud Pond Carry. They paddle the Allagash Lakes – Chamberlain, Eagle, Churchill – fighting the north wind all the way. 

Here's a taste of the group’s growing frustration with Vaillancourt, particularly with his insistence on pushing onward even though neither canoe is very good in heavy wind: 

We dig into the lake. We paddle and bail, bail and paddle – draining the bilge with drinking cups. We are struggling to get to the north end, about three miles away, and gambling that the wind will not rise to an even higher level before we are in the lee of the north-end woods. Why do we need these miles now? Why does Henri have this compulsion to move? Is he Patton? Sherman? Hannibal? How could he be, when the only regimentation he can tolerate is the kind he creates as he goes along? These are thoughts not composed in tranquility but driven into the mind by the frontal wind. Why do we defer to him? Why do we look to his decisions? Is it only because he made the canoes, because the assumption is that he knows what is best for them and knows what they can do and ought not to do? His judgment draws attention to itself, right enough. On the Penobscot River, he went “out for a spin” in heavy, gray dusk and was gone long after dark – much longer than he wished or intended. What was he doing? He was struggling to pick his way through boulders and up a set of minor rapids he could not see. A camper on the riverbank, that same day, asked him if his canoe was not too low in the freeboard for paddling on open lakes, and he said, “Not really. They don’t really ride low. You can design a canoe to do anything.” But here he is on Chamberlain Lake, bailing six inches of water from between his knees and whisking with his paddle, while Warren, like a tractor, pulls the canoe. A suspicion that has been growing comes out in the wind: Henri’s expertise stops in “the yard”; out here he is as green as his jerky.

That last line makes me smile every time I read it. McPhee has a caustic side; it seldom appears in his writing. But once it’s triggered, as it is in this piece, watch out!  

Notice, in the above passage, McPhee’s use of the present tense (“We dig into the lake. We paddle and bail, bail and paddle – draining the bilge with drinking cups”) – one of his favorite techniques for conveying immediacy. It’s one of my favorite aspects of his writing.

The five men make it to the end of Chamberlain Lake. They portage half a mile to Eagle Lake. The wind and the white caps are even worse there than they were on Chamberlain. Their shore location is an ugly one – the junk-littered site of a former logging track. McPhee describes it:

Unfortunately, this is a bad place to spend a night, because the mechanized loggers gave it a century’s fouling and the century isn’t over yet. Rust is everywhere – rusty spikes, rusty hunks of the conveyor. To accommodate incoming logs, landfill was shoved into the lake, so the shore is artificial and swampy and strewn with boulders and still jagged with the corpses of water-killed trees.

They stay there and wait for the wind to decline. Three hours later, the wind seems to calm down. Vaillancourt decides it’s time to move. It’s at this point that disaster strikes. McPhee vividly describes the moment:

With everything aboard, the three of us prepare to step in. We do not know that two iron spikes set in timber, stand upright underwater, the tip of each less than an inch from the underside of the floating canoe. We step in, one at a time, and we give the canoe a shove. It does not move. Water spurts upward in fountains, fast enough to swamp us instantly. 

Jumping out, we shout to Henri. We unload the canoe, lift it ashore, and roll it over. Rick is struggling to his distress. His canoe, a treasure to him, has two ugly holes in it, large enough and ragged enough to make one wonder how it can continue the trip. Henri, examining the wounds, curses Rick for negligence, for irresponsibility, for failure as custodian of a bark canoe. Rick does not try to demur.

Now, all at once, Henri stops his harangue and changes utterly. The man who has been pouting, sucking grass, and cursing the wind all afternoon is suddenly someone else – is now, in a sense, back in his yard, his hands on a torn canoe. The lacerations are broad., and the bark around them is in flaps with separating layers. “Make a fire,” he says, and Warren and I off move off for wood. “Rick, Mike, get bark. Get strips of bark. A cut a green stick.”

Vaillancourt performs remarkable surgery on the canoe. McPhee describes his performance in detail. Here’s a sample:

It was now too dark for him to see. He calls for the flashlight, and I get it from my pack and shine it on the canoe as he works. He removes the pot from the fire and – with a flat stick – paints the entire damaged area with pitch while the Blanchettes, one at each end, hold the canoe level. Henri pulls out the tail of his shirt and cuts it off. It is broadcloth, and he cuts out of it a circular piece, which he presses down onto the pitch. Calling for the pot again, he paints on more pitch, until the cloth is completely covered. Then, as the pitch cools, he presses it repeatedly with his thumb, licking his thumb as he goes along to keep it from sticking. The finished patch is a black circle, about six inches in diameter. It is in the center of the bottom of the canoe. “At home I’ll cut an eye of bark and put a rim around it,” Henri says. “Then the patch, you know, will look better.”

The next morning, the men load their canoes and head out. The lake is calm. They’re almost across when the wind suddenly reappears. Waves rise quickly. McPhee writes,

Henri has begun to bail with exceptional vigor. His canoe is showing trouble – taking in more water than before. The land widens again to either side, and we move onto Churchill Lake, where the waves are as high and the wind as strong as they were at any time on Chamberlain. The lake inclines to the northeast, and the wind is quartering on us now. A thousand yards out, Henri turns to face it. He cannot take even the small amount of extra water that comes with quartering waves. His canoe is filling up. Racing a serious leak, he and Warren cut straight through the wind. Ahead of them is a strip of sand-and-pebble beach. Bailing as they go, they make it. We are two and a half hours, and nine miles, from breakfast – not bad against a rising head wind and with another sick canoe.

The leak is due to a flaw in the canoe’s construction: 

A longitudinal seam connecting two pieces of bark below the waterline has broken its sewing, and a gap has opened. When he made the canoe, he sewed that area too close to the edge of the bark, and the root stitching has now broken through to the edge. It is a wonder the canoe did not founder.

Again, Vaillancourt is able to make the repair. McPhee describes his procedure beautifully. Here’s an excerpt:

Henri takes a close look at the position of the break in the seam and is pleased to find that it is directly under a rib. “Good,” he says. “The repair won’t show.” And he taps the rib aside. His awls are at home, but he has picked up a nail somewhere, and he uses it now to bore holes through the planking and the bark. The root is soon moving through the planking and out through the bark and back again in a set of cobbler’s stitches – Henri reaching around the canoe, hugging it, to draw the sewing tight. He is sewing not only bark to bark (near the original seam) but also bark to planking, to give the repair increased authority. When the sewing is finished and tied off, bright sutures mar the planking, but Henri taps the rib back in, and – as he said it would – it completely hides the job.

The expedition continues via lake, portage, and stream to remote Allagash Lake. They paddle toward the lake’s south end. In one of my favorite passages of the piece, McPhee describes the scene:

On the water, in the post-dawn light, the canoes slide across a mirror so nearly perfect that the image could be inverted without loss of detail. The lake is absolutely still, and mist thickens its distance and subdues in gray its islands and circumvallate hills. Warren and Henri are perhaps a hundred feet farther out than we are, and appear to be gliding through the sky: Henri’s back straight, his hand moving forward on the grip of his paddle, his dark knitted cap on his head, his profile French and aquiline; Warren under the bright tumble of hair, his back bending. Their canoe was alive in the forest only months ago, and now on the lake it is a miracle of beauty, of form and symmetry, of dark interstitial seams in mottled abstractions of bark.

We’re in the final chapter of the piece now. It’s been quite a trip! And it’s not over yet. From Allagash Lake, the group has to go another twenty miles to get to the roadhead at Caucomgomoc Lake. Three of the twenty miles are grueling portage. Henri behaves miserably. He falls in the mud. He curses McPhee for failing to guide him. He’s terse and angry. On Caucomgomoc Lake, he plows his canoe directly into the waves. McPhee writes,

We round the last bend and swing into Caucomgomoc. It is two miles wide, and we have about six miles to go – to its far, northwestern corner. Coming directly at us across the lake are the highest waves we have seen yet, driven by a western wind. Henri, in his own drive for the finish, moves straight out onto the water and begins to plow headlong for the farther shore. His caution – what there was of it on Eagle and Chamberlain – is gone. To me, it seems a certainty that we are going to swamp, that we will complete the day with a long, slow swim, dragging the canoes to shore. I check my boots, my pack, to make sure they are firmly tied. I am ready to shrug and see what happens. Warren, however, is not. Having absorbed Henri in silence for something like a hundred and fifty miles, he now turns suddenly and shouts at the top of his lungs, “You God-damned lunatic, head for shore!” The canoes turn, and head for shore.

It's an unforgettable scene. Writing about it thirty-seven years later, in a piece titled “Editors & Publishers” (The New Yorker, July 2, 2012), McPhee discloses that his description of the incident isn’t quite accurate. What Warren Elmer really said was “You fucking lunatic, head for the shore!” For the 1975 piece, to get it published in The New Yorker, edited at that time by the finicky William Shawn, McPhee had to tone down the profanity slightly.

My summary of “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” outlines the main stages of its journey, but fails to do justice to its artistry. The piece is structured like a bark canoe. The center thwart is the trip; the ribs are the many topics that McPhee touches on along the way, e.g., loons, Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, birch bark, the history of the fur trade, voyageurs, James Dickey’s Deliverance, deer, log-driving, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm’s The Penobscot Man, freeze-dried food. Here, for example, is his wonderful description of the cry of the loon:

But it is with another sound – a long cry in the still of the night – that the loon authenticates the northern lake. The cry is made with the neck stretched forward, and it is a sound that seems to have come up a tube from an unimaginably deep source – hardly from a floating bird. It is a high, resonant, single unvaried tone that fades at the end toward a lower register. It has caused panic, because it has been mistaken for the cry of a wolf, but it is far too ghostly for that. It is detached from the earth. The Crees believed that it was the cry of a dead warrior forbidden entry to Heaven. The Chipewyans heard it as an augury of death. Whatever it may portend, it is the predominant sound in this country. Every time the loon cry comes, it sketches its own surroundings – a remote lake under stars so bright they whiten clouds, a horizon jagged with spruce.

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of McPhee’s best. 

Apri 1, 2024 Issue

I’m not a fan of classical music. But I love piano. Anytime Alex Ross reviews a piano concert, I pay attention. In this week’s issue, he assesses a recent Carnegie Hall performance by the thirty-seven-year-old German pianist Igor Levit. Here’s what he has to say:

Extreme virtuosity is required to play the “Eroica” transcription, and Levit supplied it. The rapid-fire sotto-voce chords that launch the Scherzo went off with purring finesse; the coda of the first movement became an exuberant one-man stampede. Just as impressive was Levit’s ability to sustain tension across spare textures, as at the desolate end of the Funeral March. Acoustical mirages beguiled the ears: in the trio of the Scherzo, brassy E-flat-major triads evoked a trio of hunting horns. Most of all, Levit demonstrated a comprehensive, from-the-gut understanding of a work that even the most gifted conductors struggle to grasp whole. You felt that you were listening not to a symphony in reduced form but to the greatest of all Beethoven sonatas.

Wow! “Extreme virtuosity,” “purring finesse,” “exuberant one-man stampede,” “comprehensive, from-the-gut understanding” – praise doesn’t get much better than that. I think I’ll have to give Igor Levit a listen.