Innholdsfortegnelse for June 26, 2017 i The New Yorker

Nick Paumgarten (“Rambling Man,” p. 36) has been a New Yorker staff writer since 2005. Jiayang Fan (“The Third Person,” p. 22) became a staff writer in 2016. William Trevor (Fiction, p. 56), who died in November, was the author of dozens of novels and short-story collections. In 2008, he won the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature. Carrie Battan (The Talk of the Town, p. 18; Pop Music, p. 60), a contributing writer for newyorker.com, has written pop-music criticism for the magazine since 2015. James Seay (Poem, p. 42) is the author of four poetry collections, including “Open Field, Understory: New and Selected Poems.” He is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Steve Coll (Comment, p. 17),…

It is di!cult enough to get one overscheduled rap star in a room during business hours; it’s a herculean task to get ten of them there before noon. On a Monday in April, Vanessa Satten, the editor-in-chief of XXL, the hip-hop magazine, pulled o" this feat for the tenth time. The occasion was a daylong photo shoot for the cover of the magazine’s annual Freshman Issue, which anoints ten new artists as the rising stars of hip-hop. The selection process involves hundreds of rappers coming to XXL’s o!ces to pitch themselves and to play new music. (Kendrick Lamar, Future, and Chance the Rapper have all made the list.) The identities of the chosen ten are kept secret; even the artists and their managers don’t know who else has been selected…

A couple of weeks ago, at Trump Tower, on the same spot where Donald Trump announced his Presidential bid, Eric Danziger, the C.E.O. of Trump Hotels, formally launched a new line of three-star hotels, called American Idea, which will cater to lower- income, rural areas of the country. It was the most blatant instance yet of the Trump family’s profiting from its political power—in this case, by shifting from its long-standing focus on luxury markets in order to make money from the very demographic that put Trump in the White House. Within the hotel industry, the event raised eyebrows for another reason: it was unbelievably haphazard. Danziger, though a veteran of the industry, had almost nothing to show his audience. There was no Web site or marketing material, and the…

The cacao-farming community of Daban, in Ghana, is seven degrees north of the equator, and it’s always hot. In May, I met with several elders there to talk about the electricity that had come to the town a few months earlier, when an American startup installed a solar microgrid nearby. Daban could now safely store the vaccine for yellow fever; residents could charge their cell phones at home rather than walking to a bigger town to do it. As we talked, one of the old men handed me a small plastic bag of water, the kind street venders sell across West Africa—you just bite o! a corner and drink. The water was ice-cold and refreshing, but it took me an embarrassingly long moment to understand the pleasure with which he…

In the past decade, the path from defiant outsider to success as an insider has grown astonishingly short. Although politics provides the most glaring current example of this phenomenon, pop music may have been a forerunner. In that arena, nobody has exposed our outsider fetishism as clearly as Lorde. The precocious New Zealand singer and songwriter, who was born Ella Yelich-O’Connor, emerged in !"#$, when she was sixteen, with a fully formed sound and perspective that, ostensibly, stood in stark contrast to the musical landscape around her. She was positioned as an antidote to a pop world obsessed with flash and glamour, someone who insisted on stripping away artifice and cutting to the heart of the collective teen-age experience. On her impressive and understated full-length début, “Pure Heroine,” she managed…

In the Paris of the early eighteen-nineties, at the height of the Decadence, the man of the moment was the novelist, art critic, and would-be guru Joséphin Péladan, who named himself Le Sâr, after the ancient Akkadian word for “king.” He went about in a flowing white cloak, an azure jacket, a lace ru!, and an Astrakhan hat, which, in conjunction with his bushy head of hair and double-pointed beard, gave him the aspect of a Middle Eastern potentate. He was in the midst of writing a twentyone- volume cycle of novels, titled “La Décadence Latine,” which follows the fantastical adventures of various enchanters, adepts, femmes fatales, androgynes, and other enemies of the ordinary. His bibliography also includes literary tracts, explications of Wagnerian mythology, and a self-help tome called “How…

ROTH’S AMERICAN IDENTITY Philip Roth gives an eloquent account of how his high-school reading of Midwestern and Southern writers took him beyond his Newark Jewish childhood and shaped his American sensibility (“I Have Fallen in Love with American Names,” June 5th & 12th). He relished becoming “a free American,” part of a vast, victorious “colossus.” But the list of writers who inspired him—including Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Thomas Wolfe, all born between 1871 and 1900—betrays how America’s presumption of white male superiority shaped him, as well as his taste in literature. Willa Cather (born in 1873) and Zora Neale Hurston (born in 1891) are conspicuously absent. David Leverenz Eagles Mere, Pa. Roth ends his essay with a sense of his “irrefutably American” identity as a novelist, which reminded…

159 W. 10th St. (212-243-1928) On a balmy afternoon in the spring o? 1966, three young men from the Mattachine Society, an early gay-rights organization, entered Julius’, a no-frills tavern in Greenwich Village, and announced to the bartender that they were homosexuals. “The State Liquor Authority said people had to be orderly, and men kissing or dancing together was considered disorderly,” Dick Leitsch, the lead organizer o? the “sip-in,” recalled hal? a century later, over a cup o? co?ee at Julius’. “As soon as I said the word ‘homosexualenerations. On a recent Friday evening, the Tony Award-winning actor John Cameron Mitchell dropped by in sweatpants for an Absolut Citron and soda; he lives three blocks away and co-hosts a monthly dance party at Julius’ called Mattachine, in tribute to Leitsch…

Bobby Cannavale, the actor, was recently lying on his back on a massage table, talking to Alaina Hesse, his physical therapist. “I wake up sometimes, and I have this limp and I’m, like, What if someone chases me, and it’s on a badknee day? I need to be able to get away.” Cannavale, who is forty-seven, was wearing shorts and a gray T-shirt on which an image of Vince Carter’s famous dunk, during the &''' Olympics—over the head of Frédéric Weis, of France—had been remade with President Trump in the place of Weis. Hesse was investigating the area around Cannavale’s left knee. The table was at Neurosport Physical Therapy, in midtown, whose décor— strip lighting, brown carpets—gave it the air of foreclosed o"ce space being used to store stolen exercise…

Yu Ruojian was pleased to learn that his target ran a sex shop. Someone who worked in retail would be used to talking to strangers, and it would be easy, posing as a customer in such an intimate store, to bring the conversation around to personal matters. In March last year, he visited the store, in Wuxi, a city about seventy miles from Shanghai, where he lives. He told the proprietor, a gregarious woman in her forties whom I’ll call Wang, that he was looking for herbal remedies to help a friend whose marital relations were hampered by shyness. They chatted for half an hour before exchanging contact details. “I’ll be back to pester you soon enough,” Yu said as he left. “You’d better!” Wang responded, unaware that she’d walked…

In the chronicles of Father John Misty, the thirty-six-year-old singer- songwriter whose real name is Josh Tillman, the cardinal psychedelic encounter has him naked in a tree, in Big Sur, in !"#", zonked on magic mushrooms. At the time, Tillman was the drummer for Fleet Foxes, the popular indie folk band, and was living in Seattle. He’d also made eight mostly neglected albums of gloomy folk music under the name J. Tillman. Amid interpersonal discord, creative frustration, and turning-thirty discontent, he split town in an Econoline van, with a big bag of mushrooms, and meandered down the coast. One day, he went for a hike, and, as the psilocybin kicked in, he began to shed layers of clothing, until he found himself perched on a limb, stripped bare before an…

taught the accordionout of a small emporiumon the lower east sidewe went to his shopto buy an accordion for jackwalter steered us awayfrom the fancier instrumentskeeping our purchase modesti hired the main squeeze orchestra(walter’s all-girl accordion band)to play at my fancy eventwalter was tickled when he got his picture takenwith tom hankswhen jack practiced downstairsi wouldn’t danceexactly but loosened to the soundin an accordion air "ows acrosssteel rods while fingersmanipulate right and leftmanuals on a chromaticbuttonboarddynamics are determined with air not keysnow in the silencei feel the squeeze…

In person, A. E. Housman was so shy and furtive that Max Beerbohm once compared him to “an absconding cashier.” For such a crabbed and elusive figure, though, he continues to draw a surprising amount of attention: books, articles, musical tributes, even a Broadway play, Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love.” Academics know him the way he is mostly depicted in that play—as a formidable classicist, probably the greatest of his generation. But the real source of his fame is a single small volume of poetry, “A Shropshire Lad,” which has never been out of print since it was published, in !"#$. Somehow, these sixty-three short lyrics, celebrating youth, loss, and early death, became for generations of readers the perfect evocation not merely of what it feels like to be…

“Home—So Di!erent, So Appealing” is a big, keen show, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, of works made since "#$% by forty-two mostly topnotch Latino and Latin- American artists, spanning styles from Pop to Conceptual. It tells many stories and is a story in itself. The Getty Foundation contributed funds for it, as part of a push, called “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA,” to highlight Latino and Latin- American art in and for Southern California. The worthiness of the aim— politic, if not political—is one thing, boding more rectitude than rapture. But another is the tour de force that the show’s curators have brought o! by putting multifarious works—paintings, sculpture, photographs, videos, installations— in orbit around a primordial idea: home, where you hang your hat, if you have one,…

Decades before hip-hop was born, in New York, swing dancers (like the couple pictured above) favored a hop called the Lindy. On June !" and June #$, even novices will have a chance to get into the swing on Pier Forty-five, o% Christopher Street, in Hudson River Park. The festivities kick o% at six-thirty, with a dance lesson; then, at seven-fifteen, the Baby Soda Jazz Band starts to play and a dance party ensues. As of July !!, the action switches to salsa, with a tutorial followed by a d.j. every Tuesday until August !&. THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Hamlet Oscar Isaac stars in Sam Gold’s production o? the tragedy, featuring Keegan-Michael Key as Horatio. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. In previews.) Harbored As part o? the River…

Skankfest The organizers o? this three-day festival, which is held in celebration o? free speech and positivity in the comic community, aim to reshape the relationship between comedians and audiences. More than a hundred top comics will converge on Long Island City to record live podcasts, take part in meet and greets, host contests, and more, across various stages. Guests include Reggie Watts, Artie Lange, Michelle Wolf, and Jim Ga?gan. With so many intense personalities swirling about, the envelope will be pushed on more than one occasion: at the Naked Roast, for example, several comedians strip down to their funny bones and lob improvised insults at one another. I? nude crackups aren’t your thing, you can bounce between the food venders and the tattoo booths. (The Creek and the…

New Yorkers are accustomed to things disappearing. Every week, it seems, some beloved old diner, art-supply store, or punk den folds, to be supplanted by a CVS. (Latest heartbreak: Sunshine Cinema, on the Lower East Side.) Requiems follow. Then city life resumes, at its punishing clip. For the past ten years, a blogger going by the pseudonym Jeremiah Moss has refused to let go, grouchily chronicling each demise. The first entry of Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, in July, !""#, mourned the Greenwich Village speakeasy Chumley’s, which had closed after a chimney collapsed. When it reopened, not long ago, as a restaurant serving thirty-six-dollar cod, Moss was aghast. “The powers-that-be have bodysnatched Chumley’s,” he wrote. In !"%&, Moss turned from elegist to activist, when he launched a movement to save the…

The &rst legs are minute claws,small hands, cheliped.Following are the walking legsand swimmerets, then tail and 'ipper—all of which I peel.Then put into the mixof buttermilk and eggthe contradicted body,on which there was clawed hand for leg.Shrimpers worked in the nightwith simple lights o$shoreour land, to trawl and bring to landwhat once was the living thing,complex in even its primal tract.Elemented and soiled, not yet voided.Gulf Shrimp !"/#$ CountRegular %!".&&/ lb.You save %'Valid (/#&-(/)!.A deal. Whole Foods.To shake in a bag of pankoand fry in my FryDaddy,though neglecting to debride, remove the vein.And for my puppy Summathere is the sac of gonads—male or female, I know not which—glistening memento of pursuit, colonizingwhitherso tide or tidings sway.As in the a!airs of men,no gulf stream setting forever in one direction.Firm truth, but…

The boy, whose first lesson with Miss Nightingale this was, said nothing. But, gazing at the silent metronome, he smiled a little, as if the silence pleased him. Then his fingers touched the piano keys and, when the first notes sounded, Miss Nightingale knew that she was in the presence of genius. Now in her early fifties, slender, soft-spoken, a quiet beauty continuing to distinguish her features, Miss Elizabeth Nightingale considered that she was fortunate in her life. She had inherited a house upon the death of her father and managed without skimping on what she earned as a piano teacher. She had known the passion of love. She might have married, but circumstances had not permitted that: for sixteen years, she had instead been visited by a man she…

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, by Helena Kelly (Knopf ). Do we read Jane Austen’s novels as she intended? In this riveting literarybiographical study, the answer is a resounding no. Arguing that Austen wrote under “totalitarian” conditions and was obliged to veil her political messages, Kelly performs an interpretive coup that is dazzling, dizzying, and, occasionally, dubious. “Pride and Prejudice” is a parable of the French Revolution, with Darcy a member of the out-of-touch nobility and Lizzie a radical “constructed to be a conservative’s nightmare”; “Mansfield Park” is a referendum on the Church of England and its ties to slavery. Kelly is relentless in pursuing her arguments: no passing detail goes unexamined, and, to her, every word of Austen might be encoded. Whether or not you agree with Kelly’s conclusions,…

“Is she any good?” Dick, a sculptor, asks. He’s talking about Chris, a filmmaker, who is sitting right next to him at the table. But he asks the question around her, of Chris’s husband, a Holocaust scholar named Sylvère, who is a fellow at an arts institute run by Dick. “Unfortunately,” Dick explains to Sylvère, as the two men lock eyes, “most films made by women aren’t. That. Good.” Stung, Chris spits out a list of prominent female directors—Chantal Akerman, Jane Campion—as clips of their films appear on the screen, like P.T.S.D. flashbacks of cinema history. Then she stumbles into the restaurant bathroom, knock-kneed with sexual arousal, and stares in the mirror. It’s the show’s primal scene. For Chris, Dick’s judgment works as a “neg,” the titillating insult that a…