Innholdsfortegnelse for May 14, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

JOAN ACOCELLA is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her most recent book is Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints. She is writing a biography of Mikhail Baryshnikov. MATTHEW AUCOIN is a composer and conductor. He is Artist-in-Residence at Los Angeles Opera and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. His new opera, Eurydice, had its world premiere in Los Angeles in February. IAN BOSTRIDGE is an opera singer and a song recitalist. He is the author of Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession and Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650–1750. EDWARD CHANCELLOR is the author of Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation and the editor of Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle: A Money Manager’s Reports 2002–2015. He is currently writing a history of interest. JAMES FENTON…

On July 4, 1775, just his second day serving as commander-in-chief of the American revolutionary forces, George Washington issued strict orders to prevent the spread of infection among his soldiers: “No person is to be allowed to go to Fresh-water pond a fishing or any other occasion as there may be a danger of introducing the small pox into the army.” As he wrote later that month to the president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, he was exercising “the utmost Vigilance against this most dangerous Enemy.” On March 8, 2020, well over two months after the first case of Covid-19 had been confirmed in the United States, Dan Scavino, assistant to the president and director of social media at the White House, tweeted a mocked-up picture of his boss…

The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture by Orlando Figes. Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 562 pp., $35.00 Pauline Viardot (1821–1910) was one of the most extraordinary women of the nineteenth century. She was raised in a family where, as Liszt put it, “genius seemed to be hereditary.” Her father, Manuel Garcia, born in Seville in 1775, was the first Almaviva in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (1816). In 1825, with the backing of Lorenzo da Ponte (the librettist for Mozart’s three great comic operas, then teaching Italian at Columbia), Garcia was the first to bring Italian opera to New York City. Viardot’s brother, Manuel, a reportedly indifferent baritone, eventually settled in London, where he became the most famous voice teacher of the day and invented the laryngoscope, a…

Taste wood. Taste stone. Taste glass.Do you have a preference? Leave the shape of your facein every pillow in your apartment. Listen to the sirens outside rising and falling.When a thought comes that will lead youinto the past or future, dismiss it. Sit at first light on a bench in the squareand stay completely stilluntil you begin to distinguish the callsof all the different birds.List those birds in alphabetical— Lie down for a while on the grasswith your arms wideso you make the shape of a cross.Face down the blank skyand what you feel at your backis the planet, the whole planet,bracing itself. At 4:25 PM make sure you face southwest. In your kitchen the function of the objectsis to reestablish your aloneness. Watch the ant crossing the tundraof your…

Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts by Samuel Greenberg, edited and with an essay by James Laughlin; new, expanded edition edited by Garrett Caples. New Directions, 72 pp., $11.95 (paper) On December 20, 1923, Hart Crane, recovering in Woodstock after several months in the “insidious impurity” of New York City and flushed with the effects of his latest poetic stimulant, wrote to the literary critic Gorham Munson: This poet … was a Rimbaud in embryo. Did you ever see some of the hobbling yet really gorgeous attempts that boy made without any education or time except when he became confined to a cot? [William Murrell] Fisher has shown me an amazing amount of material, some of which I am copying and will show you when I get back. No grammar, nor…

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel. Henry Holt, 757 pp., $30.00 Halfway through The Mirror and the Light, I began dreaming of gooseberry fool. This summer, if restrictions ease and the supermarket shelves are stocked again, I intend to prepare an aromatic custard in a white dish, made with sour gooseberries, “tiny bubbles of green glass,” and eat it while it is warm. For this dish you need fresh hens’ eggs and a pitcher of cream; you need to be a prince of the church to afford the sugar. His uncle stands over him. The custard quakes in waves of sweetness and spice. “Nutmeg,” he says. “Mace. Cumin.” It is the winter of 1536 and Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal of England, now in his early fifties and…

The White Helicopter a play by Alvis Hermanis, at the New Riga Theater, Riga, Latvia, opened November 21, 2019, with additional performances planned for 2020. (The theater is temporarily closed.) In 1967 Clive Barnes, of The New York Times, flew home from a trip to Russia and reported that in a class at the Vaganova Choreographic Institute, the Kirov Ballet’s school, he had encountered “the most perfect dancer I have ever seen.” That was a weighty announcement. Barnes, the Times’s lead dance critic, had seen a lot of dancers, and this one, Mikhail Baryshnikov, was only nineteen. Because Baryshnikov became an extraordinary dancer so young, many people failed to realize he was also an extraordinary actor. One of the earliest performances I ever saw him in was a Soviet movie,…

Sibyl Kempson Claudia La Rocco Aditi Machado Chantal Maillard Tinashe Mushakavanhu Sawako Nakayasu Tammy Nguyen Aleksandr Skidan Magdalena Zurawski Steven Zultanski Mirene Arsanios Omar Berrada Sergio Chejfec Don Mee Choi Kunci Study Forum & Collective Iris Cushing Simon Cutts Nicole Cecilia Delgado Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves Dimitra Ioannou twenty essays on poetics, translation, performance, collective work, pedagogy, and small press publishing—each offering a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral 2020 Pamphlet Series $100 for 20 pamphlets uglyducklingpresse.org/subscribe…

Private Lives Public Spaces an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through July 1, 2020. (The museum is temporarily closed. Movies from the exhibition can be seen online at moma.org.) People told me motherhood would feel like deprivation—losing time, losing sleep, losing freedom—but in the beginning it felt more like sudden and exhausting plenitude. Turns out there were more hours in the day if you never slept. My baby opened a seam in the night and pulled me into the strange dark world beyond, those silent hours between 2 and 5, when she slept on my chest as I watched terrible reality television about aspiring Australian models, or paced the living room looking across the street at the single lit window on our block, wondering, Who?…

When the first cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan became known, some New Yorkers may have foreseen the catastrophe that was to crash upon us, but few could have predicted the astonishing performance of New York’s unloved governor, Andrew Cuomo, when it did. Prior to the pandemic, his reputation was that of a top-dog machine politician par excellence—a bullying, controlling, charmless power broker, reviled by progressives, accepted by Republicans, and tolerated by the rest. Though he easily won reelection to a third term in 2018, his power was significantly diminished. Six of the eight members of a group of Democratic centrists in the State Senate, who had unfailingly provided Cuomo with the swing votes he needed to exercise almost absolute control over state laws, were defeated at the polls. They were…

Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect an exhibition at the Petit Palais, Paris, December 11, 2018–March 31, 2019; the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, October 4, 2019–January 5, 2020; and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, January 31–September 13, 2020. (The museum is temporarily closed. Works from the exhibition can be seen at themorgan.org.) Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Bâtisseur de Fantasmes catalog of the exhibition edited by Laurent Baridon, Jean-Philippe Garric, and Martial Guédron, with the collaboration of Corinne Le Bitouzé. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Éditions Norma, 191 pp., $49.50 Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu—three French architects of the late eighteenth century, dreamers, revolutionaries, megalomaniacs at times, for whom the revolution came as a professional and near-personal catastrophe. Although they worked in the age of neoclassicism, and although interest in their productions was revived in…

Bad Gateway by Simon Hanselmann. Fantagraphics, 162 pp., $29.99 One More Year by Simon Hanselmann. Fantagraphics, 220 pp., $24.99 Megg and Mogg in Amsterdam by Simon Hanselmann. Fantagraphics, 160 pp., $19.99 Megahex by Simon Hanselmann. Fantagraphics, 207 pp., $29.99 Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar may be the most famous evocation of depression in fiction. The fullness of Esther Greenwood’s mental illness is slow to reveal itself, to the characters and to the reader, masked in part by her intellect and caustic wit, as well as her deceptive ability to move through life while not taking part or pleasure in it. “I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself,” Esther says. “I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in…

A CURRENT LISTING Arman Fragmentation: Concerto for 4 Pianos, 1998 Silkscreen on Saunders Waterford paper 26" x 40", edition of 100 Other prints by Arman available Marlborough Graphics 545 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 (212) 463-8634 info@marlboroughgallery.com Monday–Saturday, 10AM–6PM Elizabeth Dworkin, Frozen River 2010, oil on board, 42" x 38" Victoria Munroe Fine Art 67 East 80th Street #2 New York, NY 10075 (917) 900-6661 margo@victoriamunroefineart.com The gallery is temporarily closed. Wishing good health to all. Please check our website for updates: victoriamunroefineat.com Pat Adams, Works from the 1970s and 80s installation view. Alexandre Gallery 724 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor New York, NY 10019 (212) 755-2828 alexandregallery.com Please visit the gallery’s new virtual viewing room at www.alexandregallery.com to see Pat Adams: 1970s and 80s We will look forward…