Innholdsfortegnelse for December 3, 2018 i The New Yorker

James Baldwin (“Letter from a Region in My Mind,” p. 30), a novelist, essayist, poet, and playwright, died in 1987. His many works include “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “Giovanni’s Room.” This piece is an excerpt of a 1962 New Yorker essay, which is published, by Vintage, in “The Fire Next Time.” Nancy Franklin (“No Place Like Home,” p. 40) joined The New Yorker in 1978 and was the magazine’s television critic from 1998 to 2011. Frank McCourt (“New in Town,” p. 20), who died in 2009, won the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir “Angela’s Ashes.” Veronica Geng (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25) contributed to the magazine for nearly two decades. She died in 1997. Hilton Als (“Spinning Tales,” p. 26), the magazine’s theatre critic, is an…

SEPTEMBER 30, 2002 For nearly half his life, Louis Armstrong lived at 34-56 107th Street, in Corona, Queens. When Armstrong and his fourth wife, Lucille, bought the place, in 1943, it was a boxy two-story wooden house in a mostly white neighborhood; today, it is a boxy two-story brick-faced house in an area that is mostly Hispanic. On a recent afternoon, Michael Cogswell, the director of the Louis Armstrong House & Archives, was standing in front of the house, discussing plans for its future. He gestured toward the attached garage, which contained a ladder, an old door, and an assortment of unidentifiable junk. “This is the visitors’ center,” he said purposefully, if prematurely. Sometime in the next year, the Armstrong house is scheduled to open to the public as the…

JANUARY 21, 11956 The Maples had moved just the day before to West Thirteenth Street, and that evening they had Rebecca Cune over, because now they were so close. A tall, always slightly smiling girl with an absent manner, she allowed Richard Maple to slip off her coat and scarf even as she stood softly greeting Joan. Richard, moving with extra precision and grace because of the smoothness with which the business had been managed—though he and Joan had been married nearly two years, he was still so young-looking that people did not instinctively lay upon him hostly duties, and their reluctance worked in him a corresponding hesitancy, so that often it was his wife who poured the drinks while he sprawled on the sofa in the attitude of a…

Tunde Olaniran is, in his own words, a miracle. The multi-threat singer-songwriter, producer, choreographer, activist, and Flint, Michigan, native makes music that redefines what it means to live in a queer black body that is often politicized before it’s humanized. “Stranger,” his second album, is at once triumphant and defiant; songs like the exuberant title track blur the lines between celebration and revolution. Olaniran, who recently described his shows as equal parts performance, spell, and ritual, appears at Rough Trade on Nov. 29. ART “Andy Warhol” Whitney Museum Almost everything on display in this splendid, though inevitably too small, retrospective, organized by the museum’s senior curator, Donna De Salvo, feels, even now, definitively new. The show hits the most famous points—the Marilyns and the Elvises, the Jackies and the…

AUGUST 23, 1993 Recently, my friend Gene asked if I’d let a friend of his use my apartment while I was away. I declined, and then, later, he mentioned that the person needing a place to stay happened to be Tina Turner. I was sorry I’d said no, because, even though I don’t know Tina personally, I had just seen the movie about her—“What’s Love Got to Do with It”—and I think that it would have been cool to have her stay in my apartment. It’s a two-bedroom on the Upper West Side, which I have decorated as if it were owned by a mid-ranking official of the Chinese Communist Party. I like how it’s turned out. However, I don’t know if it would be to Tina’s liking. In the…

FEBRUARY 13 & 20, 2006 Never having met Timothy O’Brien, the Times reporter who finds himself on the receiving end of a five-billion-dollar libel-and-defamation suit from Donald Trump, I don’t presume to know whether he’s having fun yet. But I doubt that I’m alone among members of the Fourth Estate in experiencing a twinge of envy. Talk about pennies from Heaven! Overnight, sales of O’Brien’s book “TrumpNation,” the vivisection of the alleged mogul which prompted the litigation, moved it from 123,329 to 466 in the Amazon.com rankings. Trump’s complaint says that O’Brien has damaged his business reputation by lowballing his net worth. According to Forbes, he is “worth” $2.7 billion; according to Trump, “read Forbes and double it.” O’Brien reports that the true figure is in the range of $150…

AUGUST 26 & SEPTEMBER 2, 1996 In 1982, we were twenty-one. Miss V.’s parents were Latvians who had immigrated to New Jersey; I was the child of Barbadians who had immigrated to Brooklyn. We wanted to be known in New York, which was the only part of America we were interested in then. Our parents were cut off from America because it was not their home; Miss V. and I cut ourselves off from our parents by making New York our home. Miss V. walked up and down the streets of lower Manhattan in heels too adult for her baby ankles. Occasionally she would fall down in her pretty thrift-store party dress, and we would laugh. We tried to be really evil. We dropped ’ludes. We dropped anyone who had…

Although it is a cold evening,down by one of the fishhousesan old man sits netting,his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,a dark purple-brown,and his shuttle worn and polished.The air smells so strong of codfishit makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofsand narrow, cleated gangplanks slant upto storerooms in the gablesfor the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,is opaque, but the silver of the benches,the lobster pots, and masts, scatteredamong the wild jagged rocks,is of an apparent translucencelike the small old buildings with an emerald mossgrowing on their shoreward walls.The big fish tubs are completely linedwith layers of beautiful herring scalesand the wheelbarrows are similarly plasteredwith creamy iridescent…

Enfranchising cable, silvered by the sea,of woven wire, grayed by the mist,and Liberty dominate the Bay—her feet as one on shattered chains,once whole links wrought by Tyranny. Caged Circe of steel and stone,her parent German ingenuity.“O catenary curve” from tower to pier,implacable enemy of the mind’s deformity,of man’s uncompunctious greed,his crass love of crass priority, just recentlyobstructing acquiescent feetabout to step ashore when darkness fell without a cause,as if probity had not joined our cities in the sea. “O path amid the starscrossed by the seagull’s wing!”“O radiance that doth inherit me!”—affrming inter-acting harmony! Untried expedient, untried; then tried;sublime elliptic two-fold egg—way out; way in; romantic passagewayfirst seen by the eye of the mind,then by the eye. O steel! O stone!Climactic ornament, double rainbow,as if inverted by French perspicacityJohn Roebling’s…

I In a dark time, the eye begins to see.I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;I hear my echo in the echoing wood—A lord of nature weeping to a tree.I live between the heron and the wren,Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. II What’s madness but nobility of soulAt odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!I know the purity of pure despair,My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.That place among the rocks—is it a cave,Or winding path? The edge is what I have. III A steady storm of correspondences!A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,And in broad day the midnight come again!A man goes far to find out what he is—Death of the self in a long, tearless night,All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. IV…

FEBRUARY 13, 2006 My mother gave me my first cookbook. It was 1962, and I began my New York life with her gift of “The Gourmet Cookbook” (Volume I) and several sets of sheets and pillowcases (white, with scallops). “The Gourmet Cookbook” was enormous, a tome, with a gloomy reddish-brown binding. It had been assembled by the editors of Gourmet and was punctuated by the splendid, reverent, slightly lugubrious photographs of food that the magazine was famous for. Simply owning it had changed my mother’s life. Until the book appeared, in the fifties, she had been content to keep as far from the kitchen as possible. We had a wonderful Southern cook named Evelyn Hall, who cooked American classics like roast beef and fried chicken and world-class apple pie. But,…

JULY 31, 1995 High above the East River, on a dark maintenance platform under a well-known bridge, a young jeweller named Gregory crouched and, with the help of a flashlight, studied a fat rubber cord. This was long after midnight a couple of weeks ago. All around Gregory, shadowy figures climbed ladders, spread tarps, covered girders with blankets, and rigged complicated harnesses. Gregory, his jeweller’s concentration fully engaged, inspected the cord—forty feet long unflexed—lying coiled on the platform. It was composed of hundreds of thin beige strands, cinched together every foot or so. There was a fair amount of fraying, particularly toward one end. Gregory fingered the busted strands thoughtfully. Did he really want to bet his life on this thing? A few feet above his head, trains and cars…

NOVEMBER 17, 1962 Take up the White Man’s burden—Ye dare not stoop to less—Nor call too loud on FreedomTo cloak your weariness;By all ye cry or whisper,By all ye leave or do,The silent, sullen peoplesShall weigh your Gods and you. —Kipling. Down at the cross where my Saviour died,Down where for cleansing from sin I cried,There to my heart was the blood applied,Singing glory to His name! —Hymn. I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use the word “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only…

JUNE 26 & JULY 3, 1995 MARCH 10, 1933. Ann called up and said that little gadget I wrote sold to New Yorker for $70. It would be strange if, after all these years of having my writer’s reputation so different from my personal one, the two should finally merge. It has seemed obvious to me for years that I could do light writing better than many of the people now earning good monies at it but I have been consistently turned down and sweating at it spoils it, of course. There’s no sense in working for comedy—it either succeeds or is not. But now it seems to me—having failed completely in all serious work, barely getting a reputation for average, let alone anything else—with this encouragement in the far-too-easy-for-me…

FEBRUARY 21, 1948 Through the wide doorway between two of the painting galleries, Emma saw Alfred Eisenburg standing before “The Three Miracles of Zenobius,” his lean, equine face ashen and sorrowing, his gaunt frame looking undernourished, and dressed in a way that showed he was poorer this year than he had been last. Emma herself had been hunting for the Botticelli all afternoon, sidetracked first by a Mantegna she had forgotten, and then by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, and distracted, in an English room as she was passing through, by the hot invective of two ladies who were lodged (so they bitterly reminded one another) in an outrageous and expensive mare’s-nest at a hotel on Madison. Emma liked Alfred, and once, at a party in some other year, she…

JANUARY 20, 1975 I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age when the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends. Moreover, there was a reserve in him that discouraged familiarity—not that I tested it, ever. I rather gladly respected it as the necessary secretiveness of the great poet, one who must have taught himself early not to talk in prose, loosely and at random, of things that he knew how to say much more satisfactorily in the condensed concentration of poetry. Reticence may be the déformation professionnelle of the poet. In Auden’s case, this seemed…