Innholdsfortegnelse for November 27, 2023 i The New Yorker

There’s a point at the edge of the fieldin a book I’m reading where a river I thought was missingturns into a film: a case of absence flowering action—a yellow bicycle on a metallic-blue bridge—something like this—a bluish-pink feather, the unsettledgreen in a silver-dark sea, and in a different country, I mean—chapter, the irregularityof autumn fields, the beauty of snow or of thingswhen repeated. Maybe there’s an algorithm creating a sunset—each page, a split secondlater, a lake getting fuller and fuller, a room I’m tryingto fit myself in. Surely there’s an argument to be made against sunsets—how inadequatethey are, how assured and self-indulgent—a recurringintervention in the memory of streets. Consider the rain as two opposite lands—two possible soundtracksfor a sleepless, long week—the principleof uncertainty—the certitude of clarity—something in between. Outside,…

I am a prayerI am a prayer of rain in the desert when the flowering ones need a drinkI am a prayerI am a prayer of sun when there is no end to nightI am a prayerI am a prayer of ocean when there is no more blueI am a prayerI am a prayer of clouds when few make rain songsI am a prayerI am a prayer of roads that lead everywhere but homeI am a prayerI am a prayer of white birds who cannot fly through a storm of fearI am a prayerI am a prayer of fire who arrived to care for humans, then was misused to destroyI am a prayerI am a prayer of wind, whose breathing carries seeds, pollen, and songs to feed the generationsI am…

Nobody is more nostalgic than diarists, who believe that no moment has been fully lived until it’s been recorded and made available for later reawakening. And, for both diarists and non-diarists, probably no nostalgic pangs are keener than those felt for a time through which they never lived at all. My own diary tells me that, in Rome on October 19, 1989, “I knew as I looked up at the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, a sharp, beautiful, half-ruin against the lowering sun, that I was not feeling anything of ancient Rome—just the Rome of my 19th-century Englishmen, the Rome of twilight, crumblings & white melancholy.” I was longing for Keats and Shelley and Arthur Hugh Clough, men I knew through books, and who themselves had visited a Rome they…

Not long ago, in line at Libby’s Italian Pastry Shop, a hundred-year-old bakery in New Haven, I encountered a burly middle-aged man pacing in front of the counter in a state of distress. The cannoli, he was horrified to see, were not being filled with ricotta to order but, rather, had been pre-assembled and were now growing soggy (he was sure) in a large glass display case. He slapped a palm to his forehead. I asked him if he had come to Wooster Square, New Haven’s historically Italian neighborhood, for the pizza. He certainly had not. “I don’t buy Connecticut pizza,” he said scornfully. “I’m from the Bronx. It don’t taste right.” I beg to differ. But, of course, I would: I was born and raised in New Haven, where…

FRUITS OF MANY LABORS As the editor of a book discussed in Yiyun Li’s piece on gardening, I’m happy to know that new readers will find delight in the letters of Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence (“If Not Now, Later,” October 30th). Li recognizes many of the famous and not-so-famous gardeners whose knowledge White and Lawrence drew on. I would like to add to her list of acknowledgments the White and Lawrence families, who preserved the pair’s letters, the countless archivists who make such letters available, and the editors and publishers who work on them. Emily Herring WilsonWinston-Salem, N.C. KEEPING THE LIGHTS ON Dorothy Wickenden’s tribute to lighthouse keepers was a reminder of the debt that America owes them for their vital service (“Last Watch,” November 6th). Her narrative…

When the artist Peter Blegvad was twenty, he developed an obsession with milk—with what he calls the liquid’s “numinousness.” He had just read an interview with Alfred Hitchcock about the scene in “Suspicion” in which Cary Grant’s character, a suspected murderer, carries a glass of milk to his wife’s bedside. The drink—possibly poisoned—seems to glow. In fact, it did glow; Hitchcock had placed a light in the glass. “It was just something about that image of the glass of milk glowing which seemed to reverse the image that I’d been raised on of milk as healthy, beneficial, bone-building,” Blegvad said the other day, from his house in London. The drink seemed to him a “summons to the unconscious to find out more.” He said, “The sense was that milk harbored…

Seventy years ago, before she was galactically famous, before she dropped an “a” from her first name, before she was a Broadway ingénue, before her nose bump was aspirational, before she changed the way people hear the word “butter,” before she was a macher or a mogul or a decorated matron of the arts, Barbra Streisand was, by her own admission, “very annoying to be around.” She was born impatient and convinced of her potential—the basic ingredients of celebrity, and of an exquisitely obnoxious child. When Streisand was growing up in Brooklyn, in the nineteen-forties, she used to crawl onto the fire escape of her shabby apartment building and conduct philosophical debates with her best friend, Rosyln Arenstein, who was a staunch atheist. One day, Streisand told Arenstein that she…

In August, 2003, I was living in London when a weeks-long heat wave seized much of Europe, killing tens of thousands of people. Tarmac melted on the London Orbital Motorway. Portugal lost half a million acres to forest fires. Water levels in the Danube River fell low enough to expose Nazi military ruins—a jeep, a tank. In Paris, mortuaries were so over-whelmed that workers began storing corpses in refrigerated tents. Not long before the heat finally broke, I read an apocalyptic fifty-year climate fore-cast in a U.K. newspaper while sitting on a beach in Essex. When I was finished with the article, I handed the paper to my then boyfriend and declared, “I am never having children.” I really meant it. My kids are now nine and six. This is…

"What am I gonna do when I get “W over you?” the singer Chris Stapleton asks on “What Am I Gonna Do,” the opening track of his new album, “Higher.” Stapleton, like every big-voiced country singer worth his Stetson, recognizes that few feelings are richer—more generative, more vivid, more flush—than fresh heartache. The song, which was written with Miranda Lambert, frets over what happens when the trembling and the yearning and the fear finally give way to more mundane emotions—ambivalence or, worse, acceptance. “What am I gonna drink / When I don’t have to think / About what I’m gonna do without you?” Stapleton worries. The fact that a broken heart can mend is insulting to the grandeur and the spectacle of love. When you’re in the business of singing…

NOVEMBER 22 – 28, 2023 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. In Jen Silverman’s “Spain” (at Second Stage), the elegant performers Marin Ireland and Andrew Burnap—two experts at seeming torn from another time—take us back to 1936, when filmmakers, attempting to do good, make a propaganda film to shift U.S. sympathies toward anti-Fascist freedom fighters. Joseph Stalin happens to be funding their movie, a fact that unbalances their moral calculus. The idea that art might be a cat’s-paw was also crucial to Silverman’s superb novel “We Play Ourselves,” in which a disaffected theatre artist joins a charismatic documentarian’s circle in Los Angeles. What roles do we devise, and at whose invisible command? The camera lens, Silverman tells us, is a mirror, too.—Helen Shaw ABOUT TOWN TELEVISION |…

When the English musician and Smiths co-founder Johnny Marr conceived of his new book, “Marr’s Guitars,” he thought of it as an art book. It is illustrated with closeup photographs of some of the hundred and thirty-two electric and acoustic axes that he owns. The worn and discolored patches on their veneers, fretboards, and knobs—marks of the “loov,” as Marr puts it, that’s been lavished on the instruments—could pass for color-field abstractions. Over French toast at Ladybird, an East Village vegan place, Marr recalled selecting guitars for his collaborator, Pat Graham, to photograph. He soon realized that “Marr’s Guitars” was going to be more than a coffee-table book for fetishists. It became a musical memoir of his encounters with great guitars that, he said, “turned my daydreams into sound.” Each…

When Joyce Carol Oates was thirty-four, she started a journal. “Query,” she wrote on the first page. “Does the individual exist?” She felt that she knew little about herself—for instance, whether she was honest or a hypocrite. “I don’t know the answer to the simplest of questions,” she wrote. “What is my personal nature?” The journal, which she began in 1973, eventually swelled to more than four thousand typed, single-spaced pages. Throughout, she alludes to a secret. “It’s there, it’s always there,” she wrote in 1978. “I wish I could give a name to it, even in code.” She thought about the secret so often, she wrote, that the journal could be named “The Person Who Has Written This Journal Lives a Secret.” She couldn’t “help but wonder (and here…

My mother had two treasures. One was an opal ring, the only present she ever received from my late father. She kept it in a small box and took it out only once or twice a year, on special occasions, for a few short hours. The box, which was covered in deep-blue velvet, made a little sound, like a kitten yawning, when it was opened. When I was alone in the house, I often opened the box to stare at the opal. This wasn’t expressly forbidden, but, child that I was, I somehow felt it was better done in secret. The ring was old, a fact that was apparent from the state of the box. The cardboard had begun to show through in places where the velvet covering had been…

Fear Is Just a Word, by Azam Ahmed (Random House). In 2010, the Zeta drug cartel seized control of San Fernando, Mexico, ushering in a wave of kidnappings and murders. Its tactics were brutal: it forced its hostages to fight one another, and sometimes dissolved its victims’ bodies in acid. Ahmed, a correspondent for the Times, retraces the story of Miriam Rodríguez, whose daughter was abducted, in 2014, and later killed. After government officials proved ineffectual, Rodríguez embarked on a search for justice, eventually uncovering the identities of several people complicit in the murder. Tragically, Rodríguez herself failed to escape the violence: she was shot to death for challenging “the primacy of organized crime.” Beyond the Wall, by Katja Hoyer (Basic). When the victors of the Second World War agreed,…

The artist Betye Saar lives less than two miles from the bars, billboards, and bustle of Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard, but her home, in Laurel Canyon, seems far removed from Sunset’s gleaming capitalism and packaged sex. Saar’s studio and house, where she has lived for more than sixty years—she is now ninety-seven—are dedicated to history, especially American history as it relates to Black women. In her work, that history is often told through pop-culture artifacts, which, in Saar’s hands, take on a witty poetic resonance—an aura—that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Just as Jasper Johns used the flag and beer cans to critique our ideas of the sacred and the disposable, Saar uses objects to address the power of the image in America. But her America is to the left of…

Even the weakest attempt at love takes a strange kind of faith. Most of us have enough problems, after all. We grow up and nurse new hurts as they write themselves, inevitably, across our lives. That much can’t be helped. But romance—which always ends in tears—requires our knowing consent. Who needs to put himself in the way of voluntary pain? Danny (Christopher Abbott), half of the sudden couple at the heart of the two-hander “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” by John Patrick Shanley, from 1984—revived at the Lucille Lortel, under Jeff Ward’s direction—doesn’t want to court that kind of suffering. He’s the most explosive version of a guy you’d probably recognize if you’ve been broke and sad in New York. He’s raw and feral and itching to come to…