Innholdsfortegnelse for December 7, 2020 i The New Yorker

Back when the world seemed bright and ambitious—another century, it might have been—I managed to convince myself, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, that what I really needed in my life was an assistant. This was December, the month when traditionally I can no longer outrun the clerical tasks that have stalked me since the middle of the year. I had weeks of crinkled receipts to expense: the year-end tax on negligence. I was halfway through the process of contesting the charge on a vaccine shot that my insurance company had refused to cover, and I had to transcribe hours of interviews before I could begin to write—the only use of my time which generates an income. As a moonless night wore on, filled with snacking and monsters,…

“Listen, in the debris field otherwise known as my life, I recall one funny thing—but when I say funny I don’t mean it was funny chuckle-chuckle. It was horrible and obvious, but I didn’t have the capacity to see it then—that was a gift I developed later. At the time, it was like when you’re in the water at the beach, say, staring at something floating in front of you, and your back is turned, and you don’t realize that a monster wave is about to wash over you. Maybe a little pink slipper, like yours, that someone lost is bobbing there in the water, distracting you, while the monster wave is coming up behind you—mannaggia! Except it wasn’t a wave. I was in my car. It was after work,…

Wintering, by Katherine May (Riverhead). This timely memoir details seven months that the author, suffering from a mysterious illness, spent sequestered at home. For May, who saw life as “linear, a long march from birth to death,” the enforced hiatus comes to feel like nonexistence. Yet it inspires unusual investigations—into hibernating animals, deciduous trees, the cultures of places with long winters, and the ritual pauses that once shaped human society. May’s message isn’t about how to be cheery during a personal winter but about how to embrace the “negative presence” of these moments, and to allow the rebirth they naturally engender. “We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us,” she writes. “Given time, they grow again.” We Keep the Dead Close, by Becky Cooper…

THE DOOMED HEROINE OF HENRY JAMES I enjoyed Merve Emre’s piece on the academic Sianne Ngai’s book “Theory of the Gimmick,” and especially its closing critique: “if the propensity for gimmickry is all around us, then it is also nowhere in particular” (Books, November 16th). But I wonder whether Emre inadvertently reproduces Ngai’s tendency to overstate the gimmick’s purview. As she points out, Henry James observes in his preface to “The Wings of the Dove” that exposure to death or danger makes a character inherently interesting. But James’s recognition of what Emre calls a literary gimmick doesn’t stop him from conferring a terminal illness upon one of the novel’s main characters, Milly Theale. Indeed, the preface justifies the choice: “Why should a figure be disqualified for a central position by…

The stars stand upbehind the day. A known dove balanceson its clawat the window. A cosmic incidentof darkness has begun & a mild excess of beautywill be offered to the dead,which they will eat. On a hill the wise man serves the people,your thought splitsin half when he speaks of the oldrevolts, the returnof apocalypse, motive & advancement. A soul can croucha long time while the heartexpands to reach its edges.What is missing past the glitterof the harvest? Friend, you choseto live. How? You did. So manychoices, not just two, encryptedbehind the mystery of the sun, then the hurt was set aside,indeterminate chaoscalled in by love.…

What’s that ticking soundunder the red velvet sofa,breathing a little click-songstolen from South Africa,perched on a windowsillor lost in a coffin drawersinging a half-pint of goodluck, aping such big emotion?Whatever it is, it materializedup here on the second floor,as if from my head—the silenttimekeeper’s rasping alarm.I pace around the room, carefulnot to trip on the tiger rug,to search out the mechanicalnight song of a small being.What good can it bring nowin our highly evolved worldof climate change & huntingdeath stars to give the namesof hermit kings & outlaws.Love, have I always listenedwith my whole damn body,18k. tick of a pocket watch?I rise, gazing into an inlaid boxof hex signs & cheap rings.Now I hardly hear the faintnoise, yet know it is here.I cover my eyes with my lefthand to hear…

Away we go into a Presidential transition, one of the most worrisome since 1860-61, when the unity of the nation hung in the balance. Henry Adams, not quite twenty-three, the grandson and great-grandson of U.S. Presidents, passed that season in Washington, serving as personal secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, a congressman from Massachusetts, while making the social rounds and working behind the scenes as an anonymous correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser. Adams was also drafting a magazine essay and sending voluminous letters to his brother Charles, in which he promised to supply “all the gossip.” These private letters were nevertheless intended, Adams wrote, to be read “a century or two hence,” as a “memorial of manners and habits at the time of the great secession of 1860.”…

On Election Night, I was on the live-streaming Web site Twitch, helping a French friend try to make sense of the incomprehensible for an audience of his compatriots. It was two in the morning across the Atlantic, then three, then four, and still viewers stayed tuned. “This is better than a TV show,” one commented, as we puzzled through various disaster scenarios that seemed equal parts outlandish and plausible. Suspense, villainy, pettiness, infighting, gimmicks galore: the reality-TV politics of our reality-TV President have had us mercilessly hooked, from slow-rolling attempt at a coup to dripping-hair-dye debacle. Spare a sympathetic thought for television writers. How can they hope to compete with the present? Such is the challenge faced by “Roadkill” (on PBS’s “Masterpiece”), David Hare’s new political thriller in four episodes.…

DECEMBER 2 – 8, 2020 The most memorable moment in Heartbeat Opera’s “Fidelio,” from 2018, was a video of several prison choruses—dozens of men and women, including Michael Powell (pictured)—singing. Heartbeat’s new streaming show, “Breathing Free” (Dec. 4-12), pairs excerpts from the Beethoven opera with spirituals and works by Black composers to consider the racial disparities in classical music, the prison system, and beyond. Powell, who was released from prison in May amid a COVID-19 outbreak, joins a panel discussion on Dec. 5. ART Art Club 2000 Is it possible for a project to be a flash in the pan while playing a long game? Yes, judging by an engrossing retrospective of the short-lived New York-based collective Art Club 2000, whose meta-critical photos, videos, and installations look both dated and…

Like Prince Philip, the actor Tobias Menzies, who plays him in Seasons 3 and 4 of “The Crown,” occupies prewar lodgings in London. He shares his home not with Queen Elizabeth II but with a black cat named Bernie, who came to him as a stray. “My cat’s shouting at me,” he said on a recent Zoom from his kitchen, as Bernie piped up in the background. “I might have forgotten to feed him.” Menzies, forty-six, wore eyeglasses and an oxford shirt, an open cabinet behind him exposing cookbooks and a toaster. (“A backstage view,” he said, laughing.) When lockdown began, he had just moved back into his flat, after renovations had required him to couch-surf. “One of the places where I stayed was with Helena, which was delightful,” he…

Wandering around Northwest Pasadena, I pressed my face against the window of a dingy pink stucco house at 265 Robinson Road. It was April, 2019, and in two blocks I had passed thirteen bungalows, duplexes, and multifamily homes that had gone through foreclosure in the past fifteen years. Twelve of them were still unoccupied. No. 265 had been in foreclosure for a year and a half, and the two small houses on the property had long sat empty. But now, inside the rear house, there was a gallon jug of water and a bag of peanuts on a Formica kitchen counter. The walls were a mangy taupe, but African-print sheets hung over the windows. As I walked away, I heard a genteel Southern accent from behind me: “Can I help…

To many musicians’ ears, the word “stream” has an ugly ring: it suggests a utility that can be turned on and off with a faucet. In recent years, concert halls and theatres have found renewed appeal as places of refuge where listeners can escape the addictive injection of data—e-mails, texts, notifications, feeds, alerts—and focus on a single event made by fellow-humans. The near-total disappearance of live performance in the pandemic era has trapped us more than ever in front of screens, where distractions stretch out to the crack of doom. Streamed events lack the psychic imprint of the real, the aura of shared experience: the moment they are done, they tend to evaporate from memory, leaving only ghosts of feeling in their wake. Nonetheless, with no alternative in view, performing-arts…