Innholdsfortegnelse for December 16, 2019 i The New Yorker

In the final days of 1999, Konstantin Ernst prepared to film the Russian President’s annual New Year’s address, just as he had every December for several years. Ernst, who was thirty-eight, with floppy brown hair and a look of perpetual bemusement, had recently become the head of Channel One, the state television network with the largest reach, a post he retains today. The position makes him one of the most powerful men in Russia, with the ability to set the visual style for the country’s political life—at least the part its rulers wish to transmit to the public. The ritual of the New Year’s address began in the seventies, under Leonid Brezhnev, who sat stolidly atop the Soviet hierarchy for two decades, and continued in the eighties under Mikhail Gorbachev,…

At the end of August, I received a postcard. It was a picture of the city of Sevastopol, a soulless port framed by gray buildings, a generic scene, the kind with no story to tell. The card came with a message: “Onward, champion!” Of course, Klaus had never been to Sevastopol. He’d bought the postcard online, from some site like easterneuropeanjunk.com. He knew I’d appreciate the gesture. He closed by declaring that we still had a lot of work ahead of us! That was how he wrote, with exclamation marks. He called me and spent forever mulling over whether we needed to repaint the backstage of the place he’d found. We’d have to do something about the wiring, for sure. He’d worked out a deal to rent the space for…

“How happy we’ll be together,” Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick in July, 1949, weeks before their marriage. Thirty-two years old and divorced from the writer Jean Stafford, Lowell was finishing a stay at Baldpate Hospital, in Massachusetts, after his first serious mental breakdown. But he hopefully prophesied that he and Hardwick, whose romance had begun at Yaddo, the artists’ colony, would soon be “together writing the world’s masterpieces, swimming and washing dishes.” Lowell’s bouts of mania periodically interrupted the literary and domestic success that the two of them managed to create during the next two decades. The cozily titled poem “Man and Wife,” in his landmark confessional volume “Life Studies” (1959), describes the times that Hardwick faced the kingdom of the mad—its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—and dragged me…

WINE, NATURALLY Rachel Monroe, in her article about the rise of natural wine, is right that such wine has become a symbol of virtuous consumption (“On the Nose,” November 25th). But it’s not just socalled natural-wine-makers who are seeking to convey a sense of place in their wines; that’s the goal of all authentic winemakers. I recently attended SommCon, a leading wine conference in San Diego. There were offerings from Washington, Oregon, California, France, Portugal, Italy, New Zealand, and elsewhere; we learned to distinguish characteristics imbued by land, weather, winemaking practices, and the many other factors that go into crafting a bottle. The bottom line for wine drinkers is: Forget the ratings! Keep exploring, and, if you like it, it’s good. Tom GableDel Mar, Calif. Monroe correctly points out that…

Your dog gnaws the rug you made love uponfor the last time.When your lover leftand you rolled yourself inside the rugto sleep in agonyyour dog stayed with you.Your dog chews out the armpits of your lover’s shirtand shreds the underwearyou were wearing when he touched you.That’s devotion.The dog chews your pen and stains his tonguethen licks the white pillows.His way of writing you a poem.He eats the spout off the blue plastic watering can.He starts on the porch,a rotted board, and soon that board ripsaway from the wicked red nails.Your dog eats the nailsand does not die.Although you have no porch,no lover, no rug, no underwear,you understand.The dog is trying to eat your grief.In helpless longingto get close to youhe must destroy what’s close to you.…

It isn’t so much that my brotherDidn’t die young, or that he’s aliveAmong the counties of the mortalBayous I love, at the county line,Or that, at the beginning of theCentury, Texas, in spite of itsHot beauty, is cold as anotherRepublic of magpies keeping theGranite awake, or that the weight ofHis soul is stone poor, dirt, deep farmerThat he is, or was, farming poorly,Poor as a widower hauntingHis own grave—it isn’t evenThe gravestone’s chiselled stoneLetters, or those softened clean off, orThe names and dates you can imagineAs facts of our lives once lived inFailure, but only the consonantsCamouflaged for death that IKeep hearing all day as if all is lost.He’s alive as any cloud fallingAs rain now into the open mouthsOf the dead, alive as a bruiseDisappearing in my body, likePassing…

The Cheffe, by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (Knopf). At the heart of this novel is a character study of a brilliant chef, filtered through the perception of her most obsessive disciple, a much younger man to whom she is fairy godmother, mother, and beloved. His attraction propels a spiralling family psychodrama, whose richness and suspense are surpassed by those of scenes depicting the chef ’s exquisite inventions, from a signature “green-robed leg of lamb” to sweet crabmeat poached in absinthe. NDiaye creates an arresting portrait of a self-effacing genius, as the chef yearns “to leave only a vague, marveling recollection in the eaters’ minds… only a dish, or just its name, or its scent, or three bold, forthright colors on a milky white plate.” Mary…

If your preferred holiday flavor is more dry Martini than eggnog, consider celebrating the season with the cabaret diva Meow Meow, who channels Ute Lemper, Édith Piaf, and other totems of jaded glamour in her mascara-heavy persona. She’s part of a neo-cabaret scene that spikes nostalgia for bygone chanteuses with the danger and urgency of performance art. (She has been known to crowd-surf.) Born Melissa Madden Gray, in Australia, she comes to BAM’s Harvey Theatre, Dec. 12-14, with “A Very Meow Meow Holiday Show.” NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Christian McBride Village Vanguard A nineties wunderkind who has fulfilled his early promise, the extraordinary bassist Christian McBride began as a staunch defender of mainstream jazz. His forays…

Suppose you’ve been asked to write a science-fiction story. You might start by contemplating the future. You could research anticipated developments in science, technology, and society and ask how they will play out. Telepresence, mind-uploading, an aging population: an elderly couple live far from their daughter and grandchildren; one day, the pair knock on her door as robots. They’ve uploaded their minds to a cloud-based data bank and can now visit telepresently, forever. A philosophical question arises: What is a family when it never ends? A story flowers where prospective trends meet. This method is quite common in science fiction. It’s not the one employed by William Gibson, the writer who, for four decades, has imagined the near future more convincingly than anyone else. Gibson doesn’t have a name for…

Anyone who lives in New York for a while will eventually begin to mourn, in some vague way, the idea of an Old New York. The feeling is less one of nostalgia than of having just missed something remarkable. For some people, Old New York is subway tokens and street crime; for others, it’s merely Greenwich Village without a salad franchise on every corner. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the musician and composer Moondog stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, wearing an elaborate Viking costume, selling his political broadsides and musical compositions, eating chocolate bars, and chugging grapefruit juice out of a jug fashioned from an animal horn. Moondog is a potent symbol of Old New York, both as a collective fantasy and as a real…

Let me attest, at the outset, to the hauntingly powerful—and, now, almost twenty-five years on, probably unreplicable—cultural permeation that the songs on Alanis Morissette’s third album, “Jagged Little Pill,” achieved after its release, in 1995. When its popularity began to crest, I was in sixth grade, at a largely black all-boys school, where hip-hop had a monopolistic hold on our pop-artistic attention and almost nobody admitted to watching the rockers and teenyboppers on MTV. Still, I can remember a friend of mine—Assata, named for the Black Liberation Army activist now in permanent exile, in Cuba; that’s how black and unlikely to be playing Alanis at home he was—sticking a finger in my face and shouting, “You! You! You!,” gearing up for but never arriving at Morissette’s famous “oughta know!” Our…