Innholdsfortegnelse for November 16, 2020 i The New Yorker

“Don’t answer! When you come home and someone says, ‘How ya doing?’ it’s not a question. You just say fine. Every New Yorker knows that. If someone says, ‘How ya doing?’ and you start telling someone how you are, you might as well be wearing a big sign saying ‘I Have No Idea Where I Am.’ So. How ya doing?” Sam Rivera laughed, and his audience wasn’t quite sure whether to laugh with him or not. It was six o’clock on a Thursday evening last fall at the Castle, at 140th Street and Riverside Drive, and the weekly meeting was just beginning. The Castle is the main residential wing of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit organization that has been helping people cope with the aftermath of incarceration since its founding,…

In the hours after Election Day, as Donald Trump seemed on the point of losing the Presidency, he spiralled through emotions like Lear on the heath—raging at Fox News for calling Arizona for Joe Biden, fantasizing about “fraud,” vowing to seek salvation from his appointees to the Supreme Court. Biden, in his campaign, had presented himself as a firebreak, a barrier against the inferno of another four years. But, to Democrats’ disappointment, Americans had not delivered a blunt repudiation of Trump and his values; instead, they had shown themselves to be intractably divided. A century and a half after the Civil War, America was again a cloven nation. Ending Trump’s Presidency would not solve the underlying problems that produced it, leaving Americans to face a haunting question of history: Can…

Weeks diffuse into each other likethey’re sprayed; jetted, they shoot certain:days, times, doodles, kept appointments,next is lull, pool, fading, flash-disperse. I was shook and shocked by death,chanced upon it on a winter walk,proof of plod for miles behind meswept in fog, a wet so thick it blended with the snow thatsettled plenty on the sand. Itwas not yet daybreak, and I’d drivenmiles to walk and think, find peace in sweat and sea racket,that ancient wise asthmatic sound.The light took its lazy time for lifting.In the shift I saw a darker shaping than the gray—at two miles a boatof some proportion, at quarter mile a whale.Since then I’ve been lamenting,moving as if held in gel. At night I dream it, see it stretchedacross the wrack of high tide,belly to the stars—flung…

When Jennifer Egan’s novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad” won the Pulitzer Prize, in 2011, much fuss was made over its penultimate chapter, which presents the diary of a twelve-year-old girl in the form of a seventy-six-page PowerPoint presentation. Despite the nearly universal acclaim that the novel had received, critics had trouble deciding whether the PowerPoint was a dazzling, avant-garde innovation or, as one reviewer described it, “a wacky literary gimmick,” a cheap trick that diminished the over-all value of the novel. In an interview with Egan, the novelist Heidi Julavits confessed to dreading the chapter before she read it, and then experiencing a happy relief once she had. “I live in fear of the gimmicky story that fails to rise above its gimmick,” she said. “But within…

For much of the first half of the twentieth century, it was possible for a curious listener to identify each of the constituent parts of a pop song. A hit such as Frank Sinatra’s “Young at Heart,” which sold more than a million copies in 1953, featured recognizable analog components: strings, horns, flute, brushes on a snare drum, Sinatra’s seductive, lilting vocal. Yet by 1955 the advent of multitrack recording, in which the various parts of a song could be captured separately and then braided together, meant that a recording was no longer merely the document of a live, synchronous performance. Auteurist producers such as Brian Wilson and Phil Spector came to think of sound as pliable—any piece of audio could be denatured and reconstructed. The old way, in which…

THE CURATOR’S DILEMMA Peter Schjeldahl provides a nuanced look at the postponement of the artist Philip Guston’s exhibition—which had been scheduled to go up at four major art museums—because of its depictions of Klansmen (The Art World, October 19th). And yet this moment requires more than a nostalgia for the days of “tolerance for uncongenial expression.” The problem is with discourse itself: liberal values such as open debate and artistic license have been short-circuited. The clash with fascism is not a difference of opinion that can be hashed out with mutual respect. Guston’s swastika and Ku Klux Klan imagery meant something very different just four years ago, before the election of Donald Trump, who has abetted white supremacists. Better not to show the paintings at all than to give such…

Like a haunted river no bridge wants to lay itself down over. Like a taxidermied grizzly in the student union. You cry at a frequency only subatomic insects can hear. That time with him in Houston. Sometimes you flame into a scary flower. An eruption of coherence in the postmodern seminar. You stand in a shallow creek and your reflection floats slowly downstream without you. Alcohol is your emotional-support animal. The fan hums erratically. An unclaimed suitcase of miniature toiletries, burst open on the baggage carrousel. Like an amoeba without an e-scooter. An extra in an epic battle scene, trampled by a non-Equity horse. You’re a red-breasted flute, but everyone else is a dowel. A Zen koan growing in the White House Rose Garden. Sun-damaged curtains in the parlor of…

Gretyl wakes at 6 a.m., as usual, but her stomach feels crampy. These are not what her mother calls the “normal” cramps, which gnash her abdomen for four days each month. These fissures poke her midsection with acidic fingers as she dresses. She hunches while she brushes her teeth, unloads the dishwasher, and mops the kitchen. She walks down to the cellar, carries up stacks of logs, and feeds the woodstove. She toasts bread, but finds she’s not hungry, so puts it in her heavy schoolbag. She doesn’t ask to stay home. Her mother’s warned her that she knows the girl feigns illness because she’s unpopular—a loser!—because she’s lazy and unlikable. The girl knows better than to whine about a stomach ache. As Gretyl leaves, her mother turns in bed…

Toward the end of Shirley Hazzard’s first novel, “The Evening of the Holiday” (1966), a young woman and a man twice her age sit in a parked car in Tuscany, near the ruins of a villa. Sophie is from England, in Italy on holiday. Tancredi is a Sicilian architect who is separated from his wife. They have spent the summer in a stately courtship, and Sophie has mostly managed to not think explicitly about its end. But the time has come for her to return home. There is no immediate obligation calling her back, but she is determined to go. Sophie struggles against their claustrophobic misery. As her mind gyres outward (“All around them, across the countryside, men and women went about their work or sat down to their lunch,…

In an early scene of the HBO drama “The Undoing,” Grace Fraser, played by Nicole Kidman, arrives at the palatial Manhattan apartment of one of the other mothers from her son’s private school. She is there to take part in a planning session for a school fund-raiser, a meeting that devolves into a bitch sesh quicker than anyone can say “classic eight.” “Did you see the David Hockneys?” one woman asks, referring to the home of apparently even-richer school parents, where the fund-raiser is set to take place. “Two of them, on facing walls in the dining room,” another mom answers, as a uniformed maid serves tea. Like “Big Little Lies,” with which it shares David E. Kelley as creator, “The Undoing” has great fun telegraphing the signifiers of wealth.…

NOVEMBER 11 – 17, 2020 The Film Foundation, launched by Martin Scorsese in 1990, is dedicated to the restoration of acknowledged classics and great rarities alike. An ongoing series of its offerings on the Criterion Channel begins, this month, with thirty movies, including Ida Lupino’s film noir “The Bigamist,” Shirley Clarke’s jazz-centric metafiction “The Connection,” Med Hondo’s drama “Soleil Ô,” about race relations in France, and Lino Brocka’s political melodrama “Insiang” (pictured above), set in a slum neighborhood in Manila. MUSIC Busta Rhymes: “Extinction Level Event 2: The Wrath of God” HIP-HOP In 1998, with Y2K on the horizon, the raucous New York City rapper Busta Rhymes considered a potential apocalypse on the album “E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event): The Final World Front,” his manic delivery selling the foreboding sense of…

I’ve been ghosted, I told a friend on a Friday afternoon, when I hadn’t been able to reach Julia for days. The following week, I would be out of town, and Julia—I have changed her name—was scheduled to take care of our dog and our younger son in the hours before my husband got home from work, but she had not replied to my messages for confirmation. It was unlike her. The previous two summers when we’d travelled, she had sent multiple photos and video clips, from our home in New Jersey, to let us know that the dog was happy and the garden was prospering. On the days that I was away, she picked up our son from school and had dinner with him. She transcribed their conversations, about…

Leominster, in the West Midlands area of England, is an ancient market town where the past and the present are jumbled together like coins in a change purse. Shops housed in half-timbered sixteenth-century Tudor buildings face the main square, offering cream teas and antiques. The town’s most lurid attraction is a well-preserved ducking stool, a mode of punishment in which an offender was strapped to a seat and dunked into a pond or a river while neighbors jeered; the device, last employed in 1809, is now on incongruous display inside the Priory Church, which dates to the thirteenth century. Christianity has even older roots in Leominster: a monastery was established around 660 by a recent convert, the Saxon leader Merewalh, who is thought to have been a son of Penda,…

A powerful show of new work by the Washington, D.C., artist Sam Gilliam, at Pace, is his first ever with a major New York dealer, despite past recognition of him at the city’s chief museums and, among other honors, his representation of the United States at the Venice Biennale of 1972. The commercial lacuna calls for an explanation. Gilliam, who is still productive at the age of eighty-six, is a leading light of what is termed the Washington Color School of abstract painting, which came to public attention around 1960 in thrall to the doctrines of Clement Greenberg, who influenced a generation of D.C. artists, including the highly successful Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. The critic posited flatness and appeals to eyesight alone as the destiny of new painting, as…

The Silence, by Don DeLillo (Scribner). Classic DeLillo themes—digital technology, graphology, geopolitics—abound in this slim novel, in which friends gather amid a mysterious cataclysm. On a Sunday in 2022, screens go blank and circuits fail, interrupting a couple’s Super Bowl party and causing a plane to malfunction. As the aircraft goes down, a man on it imagines “all those thousands of passengers before us who have experienced this and then were silenced forever.” DeLillo subordinates the characters’ individuality to a wide-angle view of the blackout, and creates a powerful rendering of a crowd unified by a terrifying event that defies all available models of comprehension. A Lover’s Discourse, by Xiaolu Guo (Grove). Like the Roland Barthes treatise from which it takes its title, this novel unfolds as a series of…