Innholdsfortegnelse for April 12, 2021 i The New Yorker

to the answers.’” Glancing around the theatre incredulously, he asked, “Have you guys heard about this?” After the performance, I walked with him to the West Village, eventually ducking into the bar, Julius’, in search of food. Upon entering, Thomas ran into an ex-boy-friend from Australia, who was vacationing in the city. They exchanged a few pleasantries—then, after the ex was out of earshot, he confided to me that the relationship had ended gruesomely. “I’m a bit embarrassed now,” he admitted. “But it’s good narrative for you, isn’t it?” The Australian comedian Josh Thomas was at the oldest gay bar in New York, debating how much to say about a breakup. It was March, 2020, and he was touring with his standup show “Whoopsie Daisy,” in which he riffed on,…

I. HOME When Anar Sabit was in her twenties and living in Vancouver, she liked to tell her friends that people could control their own destinies. Her experience, she was sure, was proof enough. She had come to Canada in 2014, a bright, confident immigrant from Kuytun, a small city west of the Gobi Desert, in a part of China that is tucked between Kazakhstan, Siberia, and Mongolia. “Kuytun” means “cold” in Mongolian; legend has it that Genghis Khan’s men, stationed there one frigid winter, shouted the word as they shivered. During Sabit’s childhood, the city was an underdeveloped colonial outpost in a contested region that locals called East Turkestan. The territory had been annexed by imperial China in the eighteenth century, but on two occasions it broke away, before…

The American painter Helen Frankenthaler always resisted being treated as a “woman painter,” on the ground that artists should never be asked to be representative of anything except their art. Yet Frankenthaler’s life as an artist does make one think hard about adversity and resilience. Impediments impede; they can also inspire. Anyone who goes to Venice to admire the unimaginable richness of the pictures in its churches will find, on retreating to the museum in the Venetian ghetto, where the Jews were forced to pay their jailers to lock them up, that the visual art made by the persecuted was much less compelling than the art of the people who persecuted them. But, then, art is an outlier activity. In the Victorian age, a majority of the great novelists were…

Plunder, by Menachem Kaiser (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). At the start of this memoir, Kaiser, a third-generation Polish-Canadian, sets out to reclaim a building in Poland that his Jewish family owned before the Second World War. Armed with evidence of ownership and of family members’ deaths (only his grandfather survived the Holocaust), Kaiser discovers that, in an increasingly illiberal Poland, ideas of evidence, ownership, and even death have become absurdly fluid. There follows an often hilarious, often poignant odyssey in which Kaiser falls in with a group of Nazi-treasure hunters whose quest has bizarre ties to his own. A light tone belies the book’s seriousness of purpose: to tease out thorny issues of inheritance, reparations, and what it means to honor one’s dead. A Little Devil in America, by Hanif Abdurraqib…

THE NEW LEFT’S LEGACY THE NEW LEFT’S LEGACY Louis Menand’s vivid piece about the New Left, and his detailing of the Free Speech Movement rallies in particular, transported me back to the University of California at Berkeley, where I was a grad student in the early two-thousands (“Change Your Life,” March 22nd). A quote from Mario Savio’s iconic speech was by then hanging on the wall at the Free Speech Movement Café, more decorative than anti-establishment. These days, at Amherst College, where I am a faculty member, there is a palpable tension on campus. The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the racism of the Trump Presidency are still fresh. Yet, with the pandemic forcing students to interact mainly through Zoom, the protests are digital and activism is…

At 1 P.M. on a recent Sunday, faces and distinctive red-rose graphics began appearing in the windows of a Zoom meeting, as Pete Seeger’s “Which Side Are You On?” played in the background. The call’s chat box filled up with names, pronouns, and affiliations, including ten different New York chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (the rose is the group’s logo), from Buffalo to Nassau County. “Big statewide energy,” Stephanie Lemieux, from Brooklyn, wrote. The attendees were volunteers, and their mission was to phonebank registered voters and ask if they supported taxing the rich. In December, the six socialist members of the state legislature, staring down a multibillion-dollar deficit and incensed by Governor Andrew Cuomo’s quiet defunding of social services (Medicaid, housing) during the pandemic, began advocating for a…

Let me tell you, America, this one last thing.I will never be finished dreaming about you.I had a lover once. If you could call him that.I drove to his apartment in a faraway town,like the lost bear who wandered to our cul-de-sacthat summer smoke from the burning mountainaltered our air. I don’t know what became of her.I drove to so many apartments in the day.America, this is really the very last thing.He’d stocked up, for our weekend together,on food he knew I would like. Vegetarianpad Thai, some black-bean-and-sweet-potato chili,coconut ice cream, a bag of caramel popcorn.Loads of Malbec. He wanted to make me happy,but he drank until I would have been a foolnot to be afraid. I’d been drinking plenty, too.It was too late to drive myself anywhere safe.I watched…

Shadows of shadows without canopy,phalanxes of carbonized trunks andsnags, their inner momentum shorted out.They surround us in early morninglike plutonic pillars, like mute clairvoyantsleading a Sursum Corda, like the excrescenceof some long slaughter. All that movesis mist lifting, too indistinct to be calledghostly, from scorched filamentallayers of rain-moistened earth. Whatremains of the forest takes placein the exclamatory mode. Cinderedutterances in a tongue from whicheverything trivial has been volatilized,everything trivial to fire. In a notch,between near hills stubbledwith black paroxysm, we spota familiar sun, liquid glass globedat the blowpipe’s tip. If this landscapeis dreaming, it must dream itself awak You have, everyone notes, a rare talentfor happiness. I wonder howto value that, walking through wreckage.On the second day, a black-backedwoodpecker answers your call, but wesearch until twilight without finding i…

Aspiring young novelists often feel they’re in a race against the clock to get themselves between hard covers and safely into print. It isn’t simply that the canon teems with early birds: Thomas Mann, who published “Buddenbrooks” at twenty-six; F. Scott Fitzgerald, who published “This Side of Paradise” at twenty-three. There is also the competitive incitement of one’s contemporaries. To look on as others your own age, or younger, launch brilliant careers while you remain unpublished and at large can do lasting damage to the nascent literary ego. The longer it goes on, the easier it gets for the apprentice to view his obscurity as a sign, in Mark Twain’s words, “that sawing wood is what he was intended for.” Few writers have borne witness to the slow-healing bruises of…

ART Allison Miller A profusion of symbols—letters of the alphabet, curlicues, flowers—lends this L.A.-based painter’s show at the Susan Inglett gallery a distinctive joie de vivre. The canvases are trapezoidal, which results in a playful forced-perspective effect; if you squint, the pictures almost seem to recede into the wall, as if they were tilting backward. At times, the dynamic compositions (which also feature pixelated lines, collaged strips of calico, and chunky roughed-in geometries) suggest breezy updates of Stuart Davis. Miller is also a wonderful colorist; the diagonal stripes of rose, teal, burgundy, and mustard in “Natural” have the visual pizzazz of a vintage sweater from the nineteen-eighties. But nothing in the show is as charming as “Skyscraper” and its puffy-paint spiderweb. The raised black lines transcend kitsch, despite conjuring Halloween…

When the poet Nathaniel Mackey was young, he would lie in bed and think about where he had gone that day. He was born in Miami in 1947. His father, who had roots in the Bahamas, worked as a butcher. His mother, whose family was from Georgia, raised their four children. They split up when Mackey was about three, and his mother moved with the kids to California, where they eventually settled in Santa Ana. Orange County was still lined with orange groves. “Every night, in bed, I would ref lect on the farthest points north, east, south, and west I had gone in the course of that day,” he told me. “It would not be very far. The farthest east I would have gone might be Bristol Street. The…

He asked Kate out at the reservoir, where she went skinny-dipping in the summer. Early in the morning, before the kids arrived, or sometimes late at night, when the water was almost black. She was towelling her hair when he appeared, and she wasn’t wearing any pants. Her pubic hair was unkempt. Kate was taken aback, but she said yes. As he walked away, she noticed his uncertain footing on the rocks and the spray of eczema, like something coughed up, all over his back and disappearing into his bathing suit. Already she had forgotten his name. When she arrived at the restaurant—white tablecloths, heavy menus, a basket of bread swaddled to keep warm—he was wearing enormous glasses. He stood up and his napkin fell out of his lap. They…

In December, 1963, Life published a special issue on “The Movies.” The United States, the magazine asserted, had fallen behind the rest of the world. Hollywood was too timid, too worried about the national “image.” Meanwhile, Swedish, Japanese, Italian, and French filmmakers were making movies that people talked about. “While the whole film world has been buzzing with new excitement,” the magazine concluded, “Hollywood has felt like Charlie Chaplin standing outside the millionaire’s door—wistful and forsaken.” Exactly four years later, which, in feature-film production time, is virtually overnight, Time, the sister publication of Life, ran a cover story on “The New Cinema.” “The most important fact about the screen in 1967,” it announced, “is that Hollywood has at long last become part of what the French film journal Cahiers du…

I’m not exactly sure when I first read Ernest Hemingway, but I do remember when I first recognized Gertrude Stein’s indelible influence on his sentences. I was in my mid-twenties; a close friend turned me on to her difficult, hilarious, and unclassifiable work. I was no stranger to literary modernism, but to me Stein wasn’t part of that group so much as its mother, one who took a monstrous and roiling joy in exposing what lay underneath conventional narrative: thinking as it was thought. I’m almost certain my friend started me off with Stein’s relatively “easy” 1909 book “Three Lives,” which ends with a story titled “The Gentle Lena.” Halfway through, Stein writes: Herman’s married sister liked her brother Herman, and she had always tried to help him, when there…