Innholdsfortegnelse for January 4-11, 2021 i The New Yorker

Sunlight still holds you and givesyour shapelessness to every room.By noon, the kitchen catches your hands,misshapen sun rays. The windowshave your eyes. Taken from me,your body. I reorder my life withabsence. You are everywhere nowwhere once I could not find youeven in your own body. Death meanseverything has becomepossible. I’ve been told I haveyour ways, your laughter haunts my motherfrom my mouth. Everythingis possible. Fatherlightwashes over the kitchen floor.I try to hold a bit of kindnessfor the dead and make of memorya sponge to wash your corpse.Your name is not addict or sir.This is not a dream: you diedand were buried three times. Once,after my birth. Again, againstyour hellos shedding into closing doors,your face a mask I placed over my face.The final time, you beneath my feet. Was Iburied with…

The Kidnapping Club, by Jonathan Daniel Wells (Bold Type Books). This history of eighteen-thirties New York probes the city’s entanglement with the slave economy, which made it “the most potent proslavery and pro-South city north of the Mason-Dixon Line.” Despite the state’s emancipation law of 1817, police marshals and bounty hunters began terrorizing Black communities, abducting several hundred people and selling them into bondage. Alliances between Southern plantation owners and New York bankers, judges, and politicians fostered a system “constructed to cheapen Black lives.” Wells details how the funding of the cotton trade fuelled a nascent Wall Street and admiringly portrays David Ruggles, a Black abolitionist who gave the Kidnapping Club its name and organized to resist it. Dark, Salt, Clear, by Lamorna Ash (Bloomsbury). This seafaring memoir recounts a…

WHY FAULKNER ENDURES Casey Cep, in her review of Michael Gorra’s new book about William Faulkner, writes that “there is no defending Faulkner’s character, only his characters” (Books, November 30th). As with all things Faulkner, the interplay between personal life and fiction is complex. Take, for instance, Faulkner’s relationship with Caroline Barr, whom Cep identifies as the “family’s Black maid … to whom he dedicated his book ‘Go Down, Moses.’” Faulkner may have based the character of Dilsey, in his 1929 masterpiece, “The Sound and the Fury,” on Barr. The book’s final section is often called the “Dilsey chapter.” Almost two decades later, Faulkner added an appendix to the novel, providing more detailed biographies of many of its characters. As in the novel, Faulkner leaves the final words for Dilsey,…

unforgettable though then hardly noticed greentiled ledgejust up to my right in the glistening shower stall, slightly above my openeyes, square window in it, & slender citrinelip onto which I place, gently, this first handful of hair—always I see it—the windowpane up there letting anything in and out thatwishes to passthru—so freely—drops from the steam of the showeron it, the slipping of forever & forever all down thepane, where, beyond the still-wet clump, all seems to shine andmurmur it’s just day, just this day, another day, filled with the onlyof this minute, this split minute, in which if Ireach now I can feelthe years, the fissure in them,these fractions here inside theinstant—oh mine—how mine—moving now sodifferently, as if entering a room with frozen fingers and they sayno you cannot warm…

In the early months of 1803, perhaps the most consequential period of Thomas Jefferson’s Presidency—if not, for him, the busiest—American envoys were in France, Jefferson’s old ambassadorial stomping ground, negotiating the terms of what would later be called the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson, meanwhile, was mulling a book project. He imagined it as a work of comparative moral philosophy, which would include a survey of “the most remarkable of the ancient philosophers,” then swiftly address the “repulsive” ethics of the Jews, before demonstrating that the “system of morality” offered by Jesus was “the most benevolent & sublime probably that has been ever taught.” This sublimity, however, would need to be rescued from the Gospels, which were—as Jefferson put it in a letter to the English chemist, philosopher, and minister Joseph Priestley—written…

How on earth does the title character of “The Flight Attendant,” the best new miniseries on HBO Max, manage to hold down her job? Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) lives with her feet off the ground, both metaphorically and literally. She is the embodiment of all those lightly sexist tabloid monikers: party girl, train wreck, hot mess. In order to get a colleague in the first-class cabin to slide her some liquor, Cassie needn’t do more than pout and blow on her blond curtain bangs. “The Flight Attendant” is superficially a caper, and, with Cassie, it dutifully references the Hitchcock heroine. But the blue of her uniform put me in mind of another pop-culture touchstone: Britney Spears’s flight-attendant themed music video for “Toxic,” in which the singer spills champagne on her…

DECEMBER 30, 2020 – JANUARY 12, 2021 Since 1907, the Times Square Ball (pictured) has dropped in New York City for all but two New Year’s Eves. (The exceptions were the wartime dimouts of 1942 and 1943.) On Dec. 31, the ball descends at midnight, as usual, but the party is virtual: the public isn’t invited to gather in Times Square this year. But there are still festivities—broadcast on TV and live-streamed via nye2021.com—including a performance by Gloria Gaynor, whose rousing disco anthem “I Will Survive” is the perfect song to ring in the New Year. MUSIC Dolores Diaz and the Standby Club: “Live at O’Leaver’s” COUNTRY In 2015, the audio engineer Corina Figueroa Escamilla was living in Omaha with her then husband—Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst—and a housemate, the singer-songwriter…

Not long ago, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Anthony Weiner, the former seven-term congressman, mayoral hopeful, registered sex offender, and cameo star of “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!,” pointed a temperature gun at a guest, grabbed a bright-green hard hat, and stepped onto the factory floor of IceStone. “So, we make countertops here,” Weiner said, of the company that he’s been running since May. Notable clients: NASA (bathrooms), Whole Foods (salad bar), Ed Norton (residence). “Fairly low-tech. It’s like what you did in elementary school making pottery.” Weiner wore an orange zip-up sweater, blue khakis, and tennis shoes. “This checked a lot of boxes for my dream next thing,” he said, rapping his knuckles against a five-hundred-pound slab of Portland cement mixed with broken Heineken bottles, which created the flecked…

When Floristella catches sight of Pianon on the Red House veranda—the side that overlooks Madame Rose Rakotomalala’s jackfruit tree—he gives a martial bellow, charges down the garden path, and attacks his neighbor with a walking stick. And though the two old Italian men, both well over seventy, are ludicrous combatants—Floristella, a diabetic, is ponderously fat, while tall Pianon is skeletal from annual bouts of malaria, so that their skirmish suggests a clash between Falstaff and Ichabod Crane—their energy and passion run high, and no one who witnesses the incident feels inclined to laugh. The owners of the Red House, Senna and his wife, Shay, have left Madagascar and are back home in Italy at the time, but there are plenty of witnesses to give them, later, a detailed report of…

Haley Nahman was having a weird time. She had spent most of the pandemic inside, shuttling around the one-bedroom apartment she shares with her partner, Avi. “Not to paint too bleak a picture, but I’ve started sitting down in the shower,” she wrote, in September, in an e-mail. “I’ve noticed that when you hug your knees to your chest and watch the water pitter-patter against your toes, drips sliding down your nose and into your mouth, it feels almost like getting caught in a warm rainstorm.” She recommended reading Ross Gay’s poem “A Small Needful Fact,” a Jacobin essay about socialism, and a profile of Miranda July in New York magazine. In October, she reflected on the long-term consequences of “collective, inexhaustible despair”; in November, she clarified that, despite sounding…

In 1973, shortly after his last novel, like the others before it, was rejected by publishers, the Italian writer Guido Morselli shot himself in the head and died. He left several rejection letters on his desk, and a short note that read, “I bear no grudges.” It was the kind of gesture one of his protagonists might have performed—a show of ironic detachment that belied a deep and obvious pain. Morselli was sixty years old. Before returning to his family’s home in Varese and ending his life, he had been living in near-isolation for two decades, on a small property in Lombardy, near the Swiss-Italian border. There he tended to the land, made wine, and wrote books that faced diminishing odds of publication. The last one that he finished tells…