Innholdsfortegnelse for June 6, 2022 i The New Yorker

The gear in this jaw does nothing.The muscle in her tongue unlooses onlyRaw noise, but the machinery hasn’t broken;It’s never been used. The baby doesn’t evenKnow yet how to sit. She just lies there,Folded in herself, a scroll whose sutra is writtenWith still-invisible ink, portent no one can readAbout some portion of sun I’ll never see.—But who smithed you, baby?Who sewed this skin and found your name?Who labored in dirt till it took the shape of a word?Who walked the whole way to the orchard’s end treeAnd shook till you dropped to the earth?I was the one who blew the trumpet when you came.…

She was often tempted to be done. She was tempted, but she would never do it. She had principles, and she had pleasures, too, sources of dumb joy. She had her husband and her dog. She had her books. True, books were also a source of anguish, as was her husband. But, on the whole, there was more upside than downside to books and husbands. She taught two classes a semester, and in her spare time made sense of her thoughts in papers submitted to journals of philosophy. She despaired over her low acceptance rate. The adjuncting gig was necessary but paid next to nothing. With her husband, she owned a small clapboard house with green shutters and a decaying front porch where sat a pair of teal Adirondack chairs…

Continuous Creation, by Les Murray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This final collection by the great Australian poet, who died in 2019, encompasses archness, reserve, lament, and tenderness. Murray’s reflections on political and social subjects, including Brexit, bushfires, and his country’s neglect of literature, swing from the charmingly reserved to the jarringly detached. His nature poetry is more charged: there are poems about pippies, green catbirds, Australian pelicans, and a weebill caught in the grille of Murray’s car. The earth’s physical landscape—especially that of rural Australia, one of Murray’s lifelong preoccupations—is rendered with extraordinary, often strange, beauty. Swallows in flight are “whipping over glass”; a willow tree is “jammed/with soft white pearl-shell//a cascade of faces/down tiers and staircases/becoming a shatter.” A Sister’s Story, by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian…

PILLARS OF PINE I was pleased to read Rebecca Mead’s article about the potential of timber as a construction material, and noticed that the all-timber buildings she mentions—including the two-hundred-and-eighty-foot Mjøstårnet, in Norway—are situated in wealthy countries, many in the Global North (“Norwegian Wood,” April 25th & May 2nd). It’s worth adding that all-timber construction has tremendous potential in Africa, too. Recent research, led by the consulting firm Dalberg, shows that substituting wood for steel and concrete in half of new buildings across the continent would, by 2050, result in a cumulative reduction in net emissions of five to ten gigatons of carbon, helping Africa’s rapidly expanding cities to become carbon sinks. Architects are already embracing the innovations of wooden buildings. In the Gabonese capital of Libreville, construction of one…

In recent years, as his odometer headed toward triple digits, Roger Angell became known around our office for the way his cheerful longevity complemented his talent. He was not only the greatest of baseball writers; he had also lived long enough to see Babe Ruth, of the Yankees, at one end of his life and Shohei Ohtani, of the Angels, at the other. Age conferred authority. When Roger covered the Yanks in their late-nineties heyday, Joe Torre, the team’s heavy-lidded chief, would sometimes interrupt one of his avuncular soliloquies to a clutch of young reporters and look to him for affirmation: “Roger, am I getting that right?” Sitting in his office, Roger, much like Torre, held court, telling stories about playing Ping-Pong with James Thurber, editing William Trevor and Donald…

On a rainy afternoon in mid-April, the singer and songwriter Angel Olsen steered a Subaru through Asheville, North Carolina, while a cardboard box of VHS tapes clattered in the back seat. Olsen, who is thirty-five, had recently excavated them from her childhood home, in St. Louis. Some promised footage of significant events—“Angel’s Graduation,” “Angel’s First Day of Preschool”—and others were labelled “THE POKEMON” and “WORLD PREMIERE DARK HORIZON.” After pulling up at a video-restoration shop, Olsen did some hasty sorting in the parking lot, trying to decide which tapes were worth dusting off with a tissue and which ones she could toss. Olsen, who was adopted when she was three years old, has spent much of the past two years figuring out what to hold on to and what to…

“I had always heard stories—‘Don’t go to East Los Angeles Station,’” Rosa Gonzales, a deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, told me. “‘You’re a hard worker. Go somewhere else. East L.A., it’s different from all the other stations.’” But Gonzales, who is Mexican American and was raised in what she calls “the inner city,” was drawn to East Los Angeles, a historically Latino neighborhood that has long contended with gang violence. “It’s a way to give back to my own community,” she said. In 2011, after finishing the academy and a mandatory turn through the custody division, Gonzales reported for training at East L.A. She was one of three female trainees, working alongside approximately a hundred men. She was naïve at first, she said. But a detective told…

JUNE 1 – 7, 2022 The fashion designer and raconteur Isaac Mizrahi has narrated the Guggenheim’s “Works & Process” production of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” for many years. Now he has imagined a companion piece, “Third Bird.” To Prokofiev’s ornithological menagerie, which includes a little bird and a duck, Mizrahi has added an ostrich on the lam from the local zoo. For “Works & Process,” June 3-5, Mizrahi narrates his tale, set to music by Nico Muhly and illustrated with John Heginbotham’s quirky and amiable choreography. As New York City venues reopen, it’s advisable to confirm in advance the requirements for in-person attendance. ART “Faith Ringgold: American People” Ringgold, now ninety-one years old, is sorely overdue for canonical status after a protracted defiance of art-world fashion. First came her…

There is a stretch of coastline in southern Cornwall known for its dragons. The black ones are rare, the green ones rarer; even a dedicated dragon hunter can go a lifetime without coming across a single one. Unlike the dragons of European myth, these do not hoard treasure, cannot breathe fire, and, lacking wings, cannot fly. They are aquatic, in that they always arrive from the sea, and they are capable of travelling considerable distances. One was spotted, like Saoirse Ronan, on Chesil Beach; another made its home on the otherwise uninhabited Dutch island of Griend, in the Wadden Sea. Mostly, though, they are drawn to the windswept beaches of southwestern England—to Portwrinkle and Perranporth, to Bigbury Bay and Gunwalloe. If you want to go looking for these dragons yourself,…

Because there is a meaningin the lily, let there be worship;and in the poplar, let there be height;and in the arborescent heather,let there be growth;and in the copper, first treatmentI give to the vine, let there be harvest. And another meaning, I predict,there is in memory,so let there be outburst.And another, immeasurable,in love, so let there be surrender.And another, definitive,in death, let there be release. (1933-2021) (Translated, from the Portuguese, by Patricio Ferrari and Susan M. Brown.)…

One reaches page 388 of Paula Byrne’s new biography, “The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym” (HarperCollins), before the subject’s career as a published novelist begins. It appears to end on page 482, after a single decade (1950-61) during which six witty books achieved some modest success. Two years later, the author, about to turn fifty, was dropped by her editor, and she quickly disappeared from the reading public’s consciousness. It makes a certain brutal sense that in 1963 this spinster (a term Pym embraced) would be sheared away from British culture, along with Harold Macmillan and below-the-knee hemlines. Pym’s novels are filled with the arrivals of new curates, the struggles of “decayed gentlewomen,” the ditherings of clerical and academic wives. Each selfdenying single woman, like the heroine of “Some Tame…

Wherever there’s a sensitive young man, afraid of life, inexplicably angry, searching restlessly for an audience, you can be fairly sure that a story about his father is about to pour forth. That trope is as true in literature as in life: think of Telemachus, of Oedipus, of Hamlet, poor guys driven to distraction, or long-distance travel, or murder by the spectre of Dad. Patrimonial dysfunction—the kind of deep-rooted stuff that gets grown men singing along to “Cat’s in the Cradle” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone”—is a classic theme, explored and stylishly transposed in a pair of recent plays featuring queer, questioning, father-haunted protagonists. Juicy (Marcel Spears), the beguiling centrifuge of “Fat Ham,” by James Ijames, and Édouard Louis, the autobiographical character in the one-man show “Who Killed My…