Innholdsfortegnelse for April 13, 2020 i The New Yorker

After everything changed, suddenly and unexpectedly, in New York on September 11, 2001, evidence of catastrophe was there for everyone—for all the world—to see. The damage was both a horrible reminder of what had happened and a portent of what might be still to come. Today, even in some of the cities most afflicted by the coronavirus pandemic, there is no physical devastation, while death and illness, though wide-spread, occur invisibly, behind closed doors. Photographs in newspapers show workers in hazmat suits disinfecting the streets, but few of us have witnessed such scenes for ourselves. The evidence of the calamity is overwhelmingly of absence, of empty streets and tourist spots. As previously glimpsed in filmic depictions of a post-apocalyptic world, aspects of this scenario have an idyllic quality: streets devoid…

Here in the village of X, we remain hopeful. As inhabitants of an old Yankee town, we have always practiced social distance. Half of us still seem to live in the Before Times and half in the New Truth. Our market, post office, and liquor store are full. In a wealthier village nearby, people wear high-end face masks while they shop. In a poorer village with greater exposure to state television, a sign at a café warns of the virus from “Wuhan China.” The virus is surely among us, but it still feels distant, cosmopolitan. How soon before that changes? Will it have changed by the time you’re reading this? I drive by the houses of friends, their front parlors lit. Their lives look so toasty in the morning fog.…

I suspected that things might be getting serious when, at a memorial for an elderly friend, who’d died long before COVID-19 was a pandemic, many of us tried to figure out how to greet one another. The scenario might have amused our friend, who’d died of natural causes, in the arms of his wife, at the age of ninety-three. His memorial was one of the last gatherings on the main campus of Florida International University, which soon afterward moved to online learning. The remarks on our friend’s life and work were preceded by a public-service announcement reminding the sixty or so of us to wash our hands frequently, cough into our elbows, and avoid close physical contact. “It will be hard not to touch,” we said to one another. “We’re…

When Heloise was twelve, in 1986, her father was killed in a car crash. But it was a bit more complicated than that. He was supposed to be away in Germany at a sociology conference, only the accident happened in France, and there were two young women in the car with him. One of them was his lover, it turned out in the days and weeks after the crash, and the other one was his lover’s friend. He’d never even registered at the conference. Didn’t it seem strange, Heloise’s mother asked long afterward, in her creaky, surprised, lightly ironic voice, as if it only touched her curiosity, that the two lovebirds had taken a friend along with them for their tryst in Paris? The lover was also killed; her friend…

A SWIM IN THE SEA Jill Lepore, in her chronicle of plague literature, reads Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, “The Plague,” as a parable (“Don’t Come Any Closer,” March 30th). The virus is Fascism, and the inevitable return of the disease is evidence of the failure of human sympathy. “Men will always become, again, rats,” Lepore writes. But when I read “The Plague” with my ninth- and tenth-grade students in the fall of 2017, we found that Camus’s text offered not just the darkness that Lepore cites but also a complex vision of resistance to it. My students, in their essays, all wanted to analyze the same scene: a moment in which Bernard Rieux, a doctor and the book’s narrator, escapes from the plague-ridden town with his partner in resistance, Jean…

The photographer’s wife and child, in Amman, Jordan, March 21st: “It’s day two of a mandatory curfew—a violation can get you up to a year in jail—and the sun is out after a week of bad weather. Today, the government released a statement explaining the need for such extreme measures, and informing us of what to expect. It also announced that, in the past twenty-four hours, four hundred people were arrested for breaking curfew.”…

In Lyon, an ancient but benevolent law compels bakers to take one day off a week, and so most don’t work Sundays. An exception was the one in the quartier where I lived with my family for five years, until 2013. On Sundays, the baker, Bob, worked without sleep. Late-night carousers started appearing at three in the morning to ask for a hot baguette, swaying on tiptoe at a high ventilation window by the oven room, a hand out-stretched with a euro coin. By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes…

I skipped the Literary Arts departmental meeting of Monday, March 9th, I and I shouldn’t have. Item seven on our agenda, “COVID-19,” suddenly became item No. 1, and the upshot, as I soon learned, was that we, the teachers of creative writing at Brown University, were now to begin the process of teaching writing “remotely,” meaning, as we all have come to know, via Zoom, or Google Hangouts, or Canvas, or Whereby, or Slack, or Padlet, or similar platforms. How I felt about this suggestion of “remote learning” was: what a mess. I teach primarily undergraduates, and all I could think about was the graduating seniors, and the hellish last semester they were going to have, panicky, trapped at home, mitigated in their independence, likely to go without a graduation…

“I like the numbers being where they are.” This was Donald Trump’s justification for attempting to prevent the Grand Princess passengers from disembarking on American soil. (He made the statement on March 6th, a hundred years ago.) I can’t not hear it as a line of poetry. After all, it scans—five alternating stresses, a line of pentameter. And the prosody entangles the statement in my mind with the history of verse, especially since, from antiquity until the early nineteenth century, “numbers” meant poetic meter, the number of syllables or stresses in a line. “Numbers” denoted orders beyond the poetic, too; it named the harmony of the universe. “All is numbers,” the Pythagoreans claimed; Trump’s raising the question of numbers sounds like part of an ancient debate. Alexander Pope: “But most…

Leafing branches of a back-yard plum—branches of water on a dissolving ice sheet—chatter of magpies when you approach—lilacs lean over the road, weighted with purple blossoms—then the noon sun shimmers the grasses—you ride the surge into summer—smell of piñon crackling in the fireplace—blued notes of a saxophone in the air—not by sand running through an hourglass but by our bodies igniting—passing in the form of vapors from a living body—this world of orange sunlight and wildfire haze—world of iron filings pulled toward magnetic south and north—pool of quicksilver when you bend to tie your shoes—standing, you well up with glistening eyes—have you lived with utmost care?—have you articulated emotions like the edges of leaves?—adjusting your breath to the seasonal rhythm of grasses—gazing into a lake on a salt flat and…

The Federal Bureau of Investigation didn’t know what to do about Dorothy Day. It was 1941, and Director J. Edgar Hoover was concerned about Day’s onetime communism, sometime socialism, and all-the-time anarchism. After months of investigating—interviewing her known associates, obtaining her driving record and vital statistics, collecting her clips from newspaper morgues, and reviewing the first of her autobiographies, “From Union Square to Rome” (“an interesting, running account of the life of the authoress”)—the F.B.I. decided that the subject of Bureau File 100-2403-1 would not need to be detained in the event of a national emergency. Day would have disagreed with them: not because she felt she was dangerous but because she knew that the nation was already in an emergency, and had been for some time. The emergency was…

The American poet Joyelle McSweeney’s new book, “Toxicon and Arachne,” is actually two books, bound as one and yoked together by disaster. In “Toxicon,” written while carrying her third child, McSweeney imagines her body as a poisonous, dangerous host, a “nest of scum” or a “jet engine” with a “stork torso” caught inside it. The world that awaits the child is equally, extravagantly lethal: “factory hens” carry “their viral load” while the “zika mosquito” dips its “improbable proboscis/into the human layer/and vomits an inky toxin.” The poems are written in a frightening, crusty impasto, the hard “T” and “x” and “c” of the title mutating from one phrase to another. “Arachne,” the sequel, is named for the child, “8 pounds, black hair, and a heart shoved aside by its guts,”…

APRIL 8 – 14, 2020 Like millions of people around the world, New Yorkers are staying at home. When they must go out—say, to walk the dog in Prospect Park (pictured)—the rule is social distancing. Fondly known as “Brooklyn’s back yard,” the park, which opened in 1867, was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the duo behind Central Park. To enjoy Prospect Park from afar, watch Brooklyn’s own Danny Kaye on location there in the Academy Award-winning 1945 musical “Wonder Man” (streaming on the Criterion Channel). ART Romare Bearden From 1958 to 1962, this revered African-American painter put his vibrant representations of black culture and community on hold in order to experiment with geometric and geological surfaces. Among the magnetic highlights of the DC Moore gallery’s online selection…

I lay awake reviewing the math.Trump had said there were just 15cases in the country. There were 64 then,but only for an hour or two. I was wondering about the numbers we can’t know:at this moment there’s a secret true numberof people actually carrying coronavirus,the same way there is a number of living blades of grass on earth right now.We understand we can’t count them,but we can agree there existsan exact quantity, counted or not. Scientists of the plains and meadows,of our city greens and suburban lawns,of our mowing and grazing patterns,could model a fair estimate, I believe. Sex is one way to count sheep,and when I rose from bed I asked youWhat will happen to funeralsand rituals for burying the dead if there’s really a pandemicand people can’t gatherin…

Shakespeare did his finest work under quarantine, I keep hearing. I wonder how the Bard would regard today’s “craft hour” in our apartment, which ended after eight minutes. I’d Googled “easy art projects anyone can do,” and selected “DIY jellyfish.” We forged ahead, with the same delusional optimism that has fuelled our recent “pantry meals,” when we have three of a recipe’s twelve ingredients. We had to improvise a little, since our shopping list had prioritized diapers, medicine, Clorox wipes, gallon bags of dour legumes and their party-girl cousins, coffee beans. Of the many things I’d failed to foresee: a need for googly eyes, hole punchers, and vials of glitter. We wound up with a Styrofoam coffee cup stabbed through with neon straws. “Mama, this is not a jellyfish,” my…

One measure of my simmering, socially distant derangement is this: after many days at home, I have discovered how much I like to say the word “Fauci.” I walk around my apartment after the President’s press conferences, chanting it like an efficient mantra, or a Dada acting exercise. “Fauci. Fauci? Faucifaucifaucifauci. Fauci!” The surname belongs, of course, to Anthony Fauci, the elfin, permanently smirking immunologist who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and who has become an important player in the Trump Administration’s farcical grapplings with covid-19. His obvious competency would be comforting if his boss weren’t his own kind of communicable plague. For me, the syllables have come untethered from the personality. Fauci. I’m not so much restless, or bored, as trying to ward off horror…

Regent Street, in central London, is a sweeping boulevard laid out by the architect John Nash at the request of his close friend and client the Prince Regent, later King George IV. Nash, who had made his name building country houses for aristocrats, was a Georgian-era precursor of New York’s Robert Moses: a town planner who sought to separate the poorer, more squalid eastern side of London from its newer, grander, wealthier west. Nash’s instrument for dividing London was Regent Street, a wide concourse devoted to luxury shopping. The journalist George Augustus Sala described it in 1858 as “an avenue of superfluities—a great trunk road in Vanity Fair.” When the street celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary, last year, superfluities were still abundantly represented among the retailers that could afford its rents:…

We will have so much to say to one another when the coronavirus crisis is over: distillations from solitude, in cases like mine. At seventy-eight, with bad lungs, I’m holed up with my wife at our country place until a vaccine is developed and becomes available. It’s boring. (Remember when we lamented the distracting speed of contemporary life?) On the scale of current human ordeals, as the pandemic destroys lives and livelihoods, mere isolation hardly ranks as a woe. It’s an ambivalent condition that, among other things, affords time to think long thoughts. One of mine turns to the art in the world’s now shuttered museums: inoperative without the physical presence of attentive viewers. Online “virtual tours” add insult to injury, in my view, as strictly spectacular, amorphous disembodiments of…

Hex, by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight (Viking). This swift-moving, sardonic novel follows Nell, a botanist, as she navigates the fallout of her expulsion from graduate school, owing to the accidental death of a colleague. Although Nell’s research career ends prematurely, she persists in nurturing her interest in poisonous plants by cultivating them in her apartment. She also remains obsessed with her academic adviser, who is otherwise occupied—by her husband’s affair with Nell’s best friend, and, soon enough, by her own affair with Nell’s ex-boyfriend. Dinerstein Knight paints a withering portrait of this web of toxic romances, and of the excesses of academia, while illustrating how both the heart and the mind can be broken and reshaped by changing circumstances. New Waves, by Kevin Nguyen (One World). In this début novel, two…

Who deserves the directing credit for “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness,” which, in the long last week of March, became Netflix’s most popular title? The answer isn’t straightforward. True, it was the documentarians Eric Goode and Rebecca Chailkin, along with a team of presumably traumatized editors, who tamed five years’ worth of footage, new and found, into this outrageous and outrageously viewable seven-part true-crime series. But the subject of “Tiger King,” Joseph Maldonado-Passage, who was born Joseph Schreibvogel and goes by Joe Exotic, is at least as responsible for bringing a unity of vision to the show. I might have passed over “Tiger King” had not so many memes appeared on my timeline, including one, framed as a “coming out of quarantine” fantasy, in which Exotic, pacing with the…