Innholdsfortegnelse for September 14, 2020 i The New Yorker

Writing a book is like moving into an imaginary house. The author, the sole inhabitant, wanders from room to room, choosing the furnishings, correcting imperfections, adding new wings. Often, this space feels like a sanctuary. But sometimes it is a ramshackle fixer-upper that consumes time rather than cash, or a claustrophobic haunted mansion whose intractable problems nearly drive its creator mad. No one else can truly enter this house until the book is launched into the world, and once the work is completed the author becomes a kind of exile: the experience of living there can only be remembered. Certain books, particularly novels, invite many readers to inhabit their realms over and over again, and Susanna Clarke’s début, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” published in 2004, is one of…

The messages wishing me a gruesome death arrive slowly at first and then all at once. I am condemned to be burned, raped, tortured. Some include a video of joyful dancing at a funeral, with fists pounding on a wooden casket. The hardest ones to read take aim at my mother, who has been immobilized by the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis since 2014. Most of the messages originate in China, but my mother and I live in New York. As the Covid lockdown has swept the city, I find out that the health aides she depends on are to be banned from her facility and take to Twitter to publicize my despair. But this personal plight as a daughter unexpectedly attracts the attention of Chinese nationalists who have long…

All lions must lean into something other than a roar:James Baldwin, for instance, singing “Precious Lord,”His voice as weary as water broken over his scalpIn a storefront Sanctified Church’s baptismal poolAll those years ago when he wanted to beSomebody’s child and on fire in that being. Lord,I want to be somebody’s child and chosenWater spilling over their scalp, waterTaking the shape of their longing, a deerDiving into evening traffic and the furrow drawnIn the air over the hood of the car—powerAnd wanting to be something alive and open.Lord, I want to be alive and open,A glimpse of power: the shuffe of a mother’s handOver a sleeping child’s foreheadAs if clearing the city’s rust from its face,Which we mostly are: a halo of rust,A glimpse of power—James Baldwin leaningInto the word…

In November, 2012, the Minnesota Department of Revenue notified the musician Venus DeMars that her tax returns would be audited. DeMars, a respected fixture in the Minneapolis rock scene, had performed since the mid-nineties as the lead singer of All the Pretty Horses, a moody, glam-inspired rock band. She and the group had released half a dozen albums and toured throughout the United States and abroad. Her accountant had deducted business expenses, such as money that had gone into touring and performance. But it quickly became apparent that the audit didn’t arise from any arithmetical errors. At stake was whether she was, indeed, an artist. The state tax authorities found her claim dubious. In their view, someone putting most of her money into an endeavor that produced very little return…

Life is short, it is said, though not as short as the vast majority of novels would have us believe. Youth is the plaything of the novel—certainly of the bildungsroman, with its lost illusions and great expectations, and of the midlife novel, whose characters cast off the shackles of adulthood to claim the symbolic passions of an earlier age. Even novels about growing old look back more intently than they look down at the flesh and blood of seventy or eighty. In Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein” and Philip Roth’s “The Dying Animal,” the spectre of death quickens and focusses memory. It compels reminiscences, flashbacks; drives wheezy little men into the arms of younger women whose beauty and vitality they cling to like Odysseus to his rock. There such novels hang, too,…

WHAT HINDERS POLICE REFORM? I was impressed by William Finnegan’s cogent article about the New York City police unions (“The Blue Wall,” August 3rd & 10th). I have been following N.Y.P.D. issues for nearly thirty years, first as an executive at the New York City corporation counsel’s office, and then as a civil-rights lawyer suing N.Y.P.D. officers. Unfortunately, police unions are not the only problem—just the loudest. Many governmental agencies have worked for decades to protect police officers from public scrutiny and accountability. Among the worst enablers are the New York City Law Department, led by a cadre of hardliners whose super-aggressive tactics have prompted several federal judges to rebuke or sanction city lawyers; city comptrollers, who routinely approve millions of dollars in settlements against the police but never condition…

I have slept in many places, for years on mattresses that enteredmy life via nothing but luck, as a child on wet sheets, I could notcontain myself, as a teen on the bed where my father ate his lastpomegranate, among crickets and chicken bones in ditches, in the baregrass on the lavish grounds of a crumbling castle, in a flapping Germancircus tent, in a lean-to, my head on the belly of a sick calf, in a terribledarkness where a shrew tried to stay afloat in a bucket of well water,in a blue belfry, on a pink couch being eaten from the inside by field mice,on bare floorboards by TV light with Mikel on Locust Place, on an amberthrone of cockroach casings, on a carpet of needles from a cemetery pine,in…

The Englishman reminded me of my mother’s lemons. When I was a boy, she would catch the far ferry to the distant mainland to stock up on dried goods. It was a day-long pilgrimage that she made four times a year. Once, while gathering the flour and the dried milk, she had been so surprised, so charmed, by these golden suns that she bought a little sack full of Sicilian lemons. My brothers and I hid together in our narrow pantry and clawed at the waxy flesh, sniffing our claggy fingernails in delight, taken aback that they smelled so green and oily and not a bit like sunshine. My mother made each of us suck one, and then shook with muffled laughter as we winced. We were happy until my…

Life of a Klansman, by Edward Ball (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This brave and often discomfiting portrait examines one of the author’s great-great-grandfathers, a Confederate veteran who lived in New Orleans, where he eked out a living as a carpenter and joined white-supremacist terrorist organizations to rampage against the disappearance of the South’s old racial order. While Ball unflinchingly describes the violence that his ancestor took part in, which left some four thousand African-Americans wounded or dead in Louisiana alone, he rejects a facile morality that could lead modern readers to dismiss these acts as barbaric crimes of long ago. The book finds in its subject the same fears and prejudices that feed present-day tribal identities, cautions against historical amnesia, and invites a broader kind of reckoning. Lying in State,…

“Lines from Life: French Drawings from the Diamond Collection,” at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is a pleasant show of forty-three drawings and a lithograph, largely middling studies for figure paintings, by thirty-three nineteenth-century French artists, some of whom were unfamiliar to me. I loved it! It proved to be just my speed as I return to savoring art in person after half a year’s diet of digital gruel. (The pandemic has schooled us, by deprivation, in the indispensable materiality of art works as made things.) Thirty-two of the drawings, many of them gifts to the Clark, were collected by Herbert and Carol Diamond, who have a house near Williamstown and exercise generally conservative taste with catchy zeal. Styles in the show range from orthodox figure studies, favored…

SEPTEMBER 9 – 15, 2020 “If ever there was a year built for the extreme drama of opera, it’s 2020!” says the scintillant mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato (pictured above, in Barcelona). Her recital in the Metropolitan Opera’s streaming series “Met Stars Live in Concert,” which she performs at the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum, in Germany, on Sept. 12, swings from high tragedy to the depths of compassion, with pieces by Monteverdi, Berlioz, and Handel. It’s an expression, she says, of our longing “to find harmony within ourselves and our world.” ART Katherine Bradford This resourceful painter’s online exhibition, on the Canada gallery’s Web site, is a studio visit of sorts: a glimpse into Bradford’s scaleddown workspace and her vibrant, if pensive, output during a mandatory fourteen-day quarantine in her Maine home. A photograph…

In the summer of 2017, Nina Jankowicz, a twenty-eight-year-old American, was working in Kyiv as a communications adviser to Ukraine’s foreign ministry as part of a yearlong Fulbright fellowship. Jankowicz had an interest in digital diplomacy and in countering disinformation that was matched by a passion for musical theatre: in Washington, D.C., where she lived for several years before moving to Ukraine, she played Sally in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” and Audrey in “Little Shop of Horrors.” So when she came across a Facebook page for a White House protest that called on “resistance activists, showtune lovers, and karaoke fans,” her curiosity was piqued. She later spoke with Ryan Clayton, a progressive organizer involved in the protest. On July 4th, a man dressed in a waistcoat and a…

Word has it that Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Tenet,” is hard to understand. Not so. It’s a cinch—no more difficult than, say, playing mah-jongg inside a tumble dryer, while the principles of quantum mechanics are shouted at you in fluent Esperanto. In case that feels too easy, Nolan fiddles with the sound mix of the movie, thus drowning out important conversations. If you thought that Bane, the villain in Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012), verged on the inaudible, wait for the folks in “Tenet.” Most of them make Bane sound like Julie Andrews. The protagonist of the new film is listed in the end credits as “The Protagonist,” denying us a handhold on his identity. If only he were called Rodney or Little Merv. Of his background we know…

One of the most moving chapters in W.E.B. Du Bois’s collection of essays, “The Souls of Black Folk,” is a fiction, a harrowing hypothesis titled “Of the Coming of John.” It tells the story of two young men bound by the same first name. John Jones, an African-American full of promise, leaves the small town of Altamaha, Georgia, to get an education. Years later, he comes home to find himself alienated by his education and limited in opportunity. From the same town, “the other John,” John Henderson, the white, entitled son of Judge Henderson, sails off to Princeton without a thought for his navigation. The two lives, already linked by name, town, and racial system (John Jones’s sister Jennie works as a maid in the Judge’s house), intersect one fateful…