Innholdsfortegnelse for August 31, 2020 i The New Yorker

In February, 1915, D. W. Griffith’s silent film “The Birth of a Nation” opened at Clune’s Auditorium, in Los Angeles. It was advertised as the most amazing motion picture ever made—the “eighth wonder of the world.” Subsequent showings featured orchestras of up to fifty musicians playing a multi-composer score assembled by the movie-music pioneer Joseph Carl Breil. The film, set during and after the Civil War, is based on “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” a baldly racist novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr. In the movie’s climactic scene, Klan members ride forth on horses to save a Southern town from what the film characterizes as oppressive African-American rule. The score for this sequence is dominated by Richard Wagner: a passage from his early opera “Rienzi,” followed…

“Welcome to my mom’s house,” Joe Biden called from the bottom of the stairs, an instant before his sweep of white hair rose into view. The former Vice-President of the United States and the Democratic nominee for President reached the second floor of a cottage at the foot of his property in Greenville, Delaware, a wooded, well-to-do suburb of Wilmington. He wore a trim blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a pen tucked between the buttons, and a bright-white N95 mask. It was ninety-nine days to the election. The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic was approaching a hundred and fifty thousand, three times as many lives as America lost in Vietnam; the economy had crumbled faster than at any other time in the nation’s history; in Portland,…

We were just boys, ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds, five colored and one white. But for our smallclothes, each of us was most-all naked. We stood on the rickety reach of pier, its planks care-laid but well used, us colored boys’ black glistening in the noontime bright, the white one not yet leathered like the sunbeat beefs that free-ranged the island. Our britches and coveralls and burlap shirts lay pell-mell near the spot on the shore where Ebo Joe Meekins knelt, inspecting the line of the skiff he was refitting. The old Negro was either fifty or a thousand, the one age as imponderable to us as the other, and he paid us no more mind than we did him. On the water, cleat-hitched to the pier, rocked the dugout full…

The pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has written profoundly about two subjects for some thirty years: the fraught bond between mothers and daughters, and the brutality of life in proletarian Naples. Her latest work of fiction, “The Lying Life of Adults” (Europa), is a surprising deviation for her. Its narrator, Giovanna Trada, is a woman on the brink of middle age who is recounting the disaffections of her privileged adolescence, some thirty years ago. The teen-ager she conjures is obsessed with her looks, about which she despairs for three hundred pages. Just as doggedly, she moons after a local heartthrob who is dating a skinny friend. Familial rancors, long simmering, lead to the revelation that her parents are flawed human beings. Ferrante has a gift, perhaps even a genius, for…

THE PRICE OF JUSTICE Although Jeffrey Toobin makes a well-reasoned argument against Attorney General William Barr’s overreach in federal prosecutions, the details of the case that he uses to demonstrate the problem are less convincing (Comment, July 20th). Toobin notes that Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, who have been charged with perpetrating a Molotov-cocktail attack on a police car in Brooklyn, are both “well-regarded lawyers.” He then lists their credentials, including their degrees from the law schools of Fordham University and New York University. But these facts do little to support Toobin’s opinion that their prospective legal punishment is “the most egregious example” of Barr’s brand of “federal excess.” Consider the now widely held view that violence is a tool of last resort for those who don’t have a voice…

The Irish actress Jessie Buckley awoke before dawn recently, in a one-bedroom apartment on the forty-third floor of a Chicago high-rise. “I call them hamster apartments,” she said, a few hours later, of her anodyne surroundings: gray couch, dark-wood doors, a view of glass skyscrapers. Buckley was halfway through a two-week quarantine, before shooting the anthology series “Fargo”; she plays a Minnesota nurse, whom she described as “a nice cake with a very dark center.” From the apartment, she’d been hearing the blare of sirens and helicopters, amid days of clashes between rioters and police. But what had woken her up was jet lag, after flying from London days earlier. “By about four o’clock, the blue sky in Chicago turned into an apocalyptic tornado warning, and I’m, like, the County…

Blighted light at the tipOf a branch, why so earlyDo you turn?—leafDipped in vermillion,Close to the end, you pointTo a sidewalk wetOnce with namesSigned in cement to seal,For all time, a vowUttered by twoStanding under the crownOf a tree you cleave to still,For now: solitary witnessStanding alone, limbsCrisscrossing in shadowsBeginning to scrawlLines to a world hell-Bent (with or without intent)On obscuringWhatever they meant.Blighted lightAt the topmost bough,Little flag hailingAnother day, do not goSo early to ruin, green,Do not turn so soon.…

Antigone, dead siblingsare set. As for the living,pick me for a sister. I, too, love a proper funeral.Drag, Dig, and Sisters’ Pop-Up Burial. Landlady,I make the rounds of graveskeeping up my family’stopnotch properties. On a torture instrumentcalled an accordionI stretch my fingersinto those of a witch. My guts have been emptiedlike bellowsfor the best sound. Once we settle your brother,I’ll show you forestsof the unburied dead.We’ll clean the way only two sisterscan clean a house:no bones scattered like dirty socks,no ashes at the bottom of kneecaps. Why bicker with husbands about disheswhen we’ve got mountains of skulls to shine? Labor and retribution we’ll share, not girly secrets. Brought up by dolls and monuments,I have the bearings of a horse and a bitch,I’m waterproof,I’m cement in tears. You can spot my…

Summer, by Ali Smith (Pantheon). Shuttling between the Covid-19 crisis and the Second World War, the final installment of Smith’s Seasonal Quartet follows two pairs of siblings: Sacha and Robert Greenlaw, teen-agers in present-day Britain, and Daniel and Hannah Gluck, who were separated by the country’s wartime internment program. As the novel unfolds, the teen-agers and the now elderly Daniel are drawn together by a theft that took place decades before. Both time lines examine catastrophes—unethical immigration policies, climate change—and the linguistic distortions that accompany them. Sacha, terrified by the Earth’s devastation, considers the face masks of the pandemic: “They’re like nothing at all, dead leaves, blowaway litter, compared to the real masks, the ones on the faces of the planet’s liars.” Antkind, by Charlie Kaufman (Random House). The protagonist…

In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, many New York City venues are closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found around town, as well as online and streaming. AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2020 Pandemic theatre has been mostly virtual, but the downtown arts center HERE is finding novel ways to get spectators out of the house. “Cairns” is a self-guided walk through Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, written and narrated by Gelsey Bell (above). Participants download audio tracks and traverse the grounds, visiting the graves of such trailblazing figures as Do-Hum-Me, the daughter of a Sac and Fox Nation chief, who was hired by P. T. Barnum to perform traditional dances before she died, at the age of eighteen, in 1843. Visit here.org. ART “Judd” Donald…

What’s with the metal-band-worthy name of Storm King, the marvellous sculpture park—or, better, landscape with sculptures in it—about fifty miles north of Manhattan, in Cornwall, New York? I’ve just spent some happy hours there, sprung from months of art deprivation, on the occasion of the Storm King Art Center’s reopening to visitors with timed tickets. The setting is thundery enough, under the mighty brow of one of the highest mountains of the Hudson Highlands, in a valley of variegated hills, lawns, meadows, forest, and waters, along with elegant alterations that include arboreal allées and plantings with deference to native flora—some five hundred acres hosting roughly a hundred art works. I hadn’t known, until I was told during my visit, that the park’s name owes its provenance to the Romantic exasperation…

A few weeks ago, during a visit to the doctor, I laughed out loud when the online check-in portal suggested Old English as my language preference, and not only because I happened to have with me Maria Dahvana Headley’s “Beowulf” (MCD), a new translation of the long poem that is one of the oldest surviving works of literature in the language. Without serious study, no speaker of contemporary English could converse in or even read Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon), a language as distinct from its modern equivalent as many foreign tongues. Of Germanic origin, it contains numerous elements that don’t appear in the modern English alphabet: the diphthong “æ” (ash), as well as two letters that represent the “th” sound, “þ” (thorn) and “ð” (eth). Its unintelligibility is…