Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Pankaj Mishra
Michael Tomasky:
How Trump
Does It
Nathaniel Rich
on Paul Auster
+++ +
The + +
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OSCAR +
+
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MESS +
by Geoffrey OBrien
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Linda Greenhouse:
How Women Got the
Chance
Cathleen Schine
on Elif Batuman
Contents
4 Michael Ignatieff Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra
6 Paula Bohince Poem
THE SPEECH
8 Julian Lucas Morning, Paramin by Derek Walcott and Peter Doig OF ANGELS
12 Michael Tomasky Trump: The Scramble
14 Nathaniel Rich 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
16 Geoffrey OBrien La La Land a film written and directed by Damien Chazelle
18 Christopher Benfey Mans Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War
by Philip F. Gura
Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism by Chris Jennings
Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through Americas Most Radical Idea by Erik Reece
Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table by Ellen Wayland-Smith
We Are as Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America
by Kate Daloz
21 Linda Greenhouse Keep the Damned Women Out: The Struggle for Coeducation
by Nancy Weiss Malkiel
23 Norman Rush Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole
25 Julian Barnes The Pen and the Brush: How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century
French Novels by Anka Muhlstein, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter
28 Vivian Gornick Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins
31 Charles Simic The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner LANGUAGE
33 Cathleen Schine The Idiot by Elif Batuman OF THE SPIRIT
35 Robert Alter The Orange Peel and Other Satires by S.Y. Agnon,
translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey Saks A n I n t ro d uc t i o n t o
The Bridal Canopy by S.Y. Agnon, translated from the Hebrew by I. M. Lask Cl a s s i c a l Mus i c
A Guest for the Night by S.Y. Agnon, translated from the Hebrew by Misha Louvish
To This Day by S.Y. Agnon, translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin Ja n S w a f f ord
A Book That Was Lost: Thirty-Five Stories by S.Y. Agnon,
translated from the Hebrew by Amiel Gurt and others A perfect, lean compendium
Two Tales: Betrothed and Edo and Enam S.Y. Agnon, from a scintillating writer who
translated from the Hebrew by Walter Lever
and six other books by S.Y. Agnon knows profoundly where music
37 Timothy Noah The CEO Who Went Too Far comes from, and the geniuses
39 Fintan OToole Irelands Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth by Mark Williams whove made it best in the
42 Letters from Edward Jay Epstein, Charlie Savage, Steven Weinberg, and Edward Ball Western tradition. Composer
and biographer on the grand
CONTRIBUTORS scale, Jan Swafford has given
ROBERT ALTER is the Class of 1937 Emeritus Professor TIMOTHY NOAH is the Labor Policy Editor for Politico us the last music book well
of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University and the author of The Great Divergence: Americas Growing
of California at Berkeley. His books include Pen of Iron: Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It. ever need. CHRIS LYDON,
American Prose and the King James Bible and a translation GEOFFREY OBRIEN is Editor in Chief of the Library host of Radio Open Source
of the Hebrew Bible. of America. He is the author of The Phantom Empire and
JULIAN BARNESs most recent books are Keeping an Eye Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film, 2002
Open: Essays on Art and The Noise of Time, a novel. 2012, among other books. In Language of the Spirit, Jan
CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is Mellon Professor of Eng- FINTAN OTOOLE is a columnist with The Irish Times Swafford achieves something
lish at Mount Holyoke. He is the author of Red Brick, Black and the Leonard L. Milberg Visiting Lecturer in Irish Let- very difficult: he captures
Mountain, White Clay. ters at Princeton. His book on George Bernard Shaw, Judg-
PAULA BOHINCEs most recent book of poems is Swal- ing Shaw, will be published in the fall. the spirit of music in words.
lows and Waves. NATHANIEL RICH is the author of Odds Against Tomor- His series of short sketches of
VIVIAN GORNICK is at work on a book of rereadings, row and The Mayors Tongue. composers and their works ring
which will be published next year.
NORMAN RUSHs most recent novel is Subtle Bodies. true, and, more importantly,
LINDA GREENHOUSE is Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in
Law at Yale Law School. She writes an opinion column on CATHLEEN SCHINEs latest novel, They May Not Mean send you running to listen to
the Supreme Court and law for The New York Times. Her To, But They Do, will be published in paperback this June.
new book, Just a Journalist, will be published in the fall.
the music for yourself.
CHARLES SIMIC has been Poet Laureate of the United
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF is President of Central European States. His new book, Scribbled in the Dark, a volume of po- EMANUEL AX, pianist
University in Budapest. His books include Isaiah Berlin: A etry, will be published in June.
Life and The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror. MICHAEL TOMASKY is a Special Correspondent for The Reading Jans Swaffords
JULIAN LUCAS is an Associate Editor at Cabinet. Daily Beast and the Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
Language of the Spirit is
like taking a road trip
Editor: Robert B. Silvers Founding Co-editor: Barbara Epstein (19282006)
Senior Editors: Michael Shae, Hugh Eakin, Eve Bowen, Jana Prikryl Publisher: Rea S. Hederman through the land of classical
Contributing Editor: Ann Kjellberg Associate Publisher: Catherine Tice
Assistant Editors: Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Madeleine Schwartz Business Manager: Raymond Shapiro music with your wickedly
Advertising Director: Lara Frohlich Andersen
Andrew Katzenstein, Max Nelson, and Liza Batkin, Editorial Assistants; Nick Binnette, Editorial Intern; Sylvia Lonergan, Researcher; Borden Elniff, Katie Jefferis,
smart but charmingly self-
and John Thorp, Type Production; Janet Noble, Cover Production; Kazue Soma Jensen, Production; Maryanne Chaney, Web Production Coordinator; Michael King,
Technical Director; Meagan Schneider, Advertising Associate, Classifieds and Special Listings; Nicholas During, Publicity; Nancy Ng, Design Director; Janice Fellegara, deprecating best friend. . . .
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Projects; Diane R. Seltzer, Office Manager/List Manager; Patrick Hederman, Rights; Margarette Devlin, Comptroller; Pearl Williams and Erin Schwartz, Assistant Music to Swafford is not a
Comptrollers; Teddy Wright, Receptionist; Microfilm and Microcard Services: NAPC, 300 North Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.
NYRDaily Hugh Eakin, Editor; Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Assistant Editor; Madeleine Schwartz and Lucy McKeon, NYR Gallery Editors. dry, intellectual exercise, but
rather an emotional experience
POWER AND FANTASY touching on the full range
Gideon Rachman: Trumps China Mess Walter Pincus: The Chaos of Immigration
Masha Gessen: Our Russian Nightmares Christopher de Bellaigue: The Sultan of Turkey of feeling of which humans
nybooks.com/daily
Plus: Jenny Uglow on art and autocracy, Christopher Benfey on a visionary printmaker, and more are capable. ELIZABETH
LUNDAY, author of Secret Lives
On the cover: Pankaj Mishra (Dominique Nabokov); Barry Jenkins, the director of Moonlight, accepting the Oscar for Best Picture with the films cast and crew
(Patrick T. Fallon/The New York Times/Redux); students graduating from Radcliffe College, June 1962 (Patricia Hollander Gross/Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe of Great Composers
Institute, Harvard University); Elif Batuman (Korhan Karaoysal). The drawings on the cover and on pages 12 and 14 are by Pancho. The illustrations on pages 13 and
42 are by James Ferguson. The drawings on pages 36 and 40 are by David Levine.
The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, July, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April,
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3
in physics, chemistry, and biology, and he does not engage with the contradic-
Which Way Are We Going? the ordinary, inadequate, decencies of tion he puts forward.
the welfare state. Modernity also in- His critique draws heavily on Jean-
Age of Anger: edented political, economic and social cludes human rights, self-determination, Jacques Rousseaus Discourse on In-
A History of the Present disorder that accompanied the rise of and decolonization. Imperialism, pace equality of 1755. Mishra argues that if
by Pankaj Mishra. the industrial capitalist economy. The Marx, is a contingent rather than neces- we return to Rousseaus indictment of
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, dislocating convulsion that the West sary feature of capitalism. Youd never early capitalist alienation and resent-
406 pp.,$27.00 experienced between 1750 and 1850, he know, from Mishras denunciations of ment, we can better understand con-
argues, is now sweeping through Asia, colonialism, that the last European em- temporary discontents. Rousseaus
Michael Ignatieff Africa, and the Middle East with the pire, the Portuguese, collapsed in 1974; prescient criticism of a political and
same destabilizing effects. Just as the the last empire of them allthe Soviet economic system based on envious
In Pankaj Mishras portrait of our age, dislocations of industrial capitalism Uniondisappeared in 1991. comparison, individual self-seeking
most people are angry: the white work- triggered revolts, uprisings, and terror- Progress of this sort lets no one off and the multiplication of artificial
ing class of the American rust belt be- ism in the West, he argues, the same the hook: inequality, injustice, and en- needs . . . helps us to understand . . .
trayed by the metropolitan elites, the dislocations are engendering aveng- vironmental despoliation all remain, why a cleric like Ayatollah Khomeini
young high school and college gradu- ing rage in the East. This militant but to ignore what modernity has made rose out of obscurity to lead a popular
ates clinging to part-time jobs in Eu- secession from a civilization premised possible for a large part of humanity revolution in Iran. Using Rousseau
rope, and the terrorists who lived in the on gradual progress under liberal- gives the violent nihilists of our time to understand Khomeini is bizarrely
Paris banlieues. All of these different democrat trusteesa civilization felt a victory they do not deserve. Mishra unhelpful. Any actual explanation of
manifestations of rage, Mishra argues, as outrageously false and enfeebling carries the attack on modernity so far Khomeinis rise might want to include
have a common source: resentment at now rages far beyond Europe. as to attempt to deny clear if modest the fall of Mohammed Mossadegh, the
a modernity that promises equal- interference of the CIA, the cruelty and
PAU L K A S M I N G A L L E RY
5 1 5 W E S T 2 7 T H S T R E E T, N E W Y O R K
Big Brother, Paris, 1967, bronze, 60 x 37 x 39 inches, 152.4 x 94 x 99 cm. Inscribed and dated max ernst 5/8 and Susse Fondeur Paris 2016.
Photo: Christian Baraja. Max Ernst artwork 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
April 6, 2017 5
Huntingtonand other unnamed in- with what needs to be done, here and
tellectual robots who keep recycling now, to make modernity fulfill its so
such oppositions as backward Islam often betrayed emancipatory promise.
WINDHAM CAMPBELL PRIZES versus the progressive West, Rational He calls for transformative think-
Enlightenment versus medieval unrea- ing, but offers us only passionate fa-
CELEBR ATING FI VE YEA RS E S T. 2013 son, open society versus its enemies. talism and angry resignation. He does
In place of these false oppositions, not consider what could be done: get-
however, he substitutes the dubious ting money under control in politics,
clich that capitalist modernization defending the rule of law from preda-
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University everywhere is a story of invasions, tory cliques, fighting for the rights of
congratulates the recipients of the 2017 unequal treaties, assassinations, coups, migrants and refugees, finding decent
Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes corruption, and ruthless manipulation jobs for those left behind by economic
and interference, in which the domi- change, reestablishing the norm that
FICTION nant West is invariably the aggressor everyone, especially corporations and
and the East is invariably the virtuous the super-rich, pay their fair share of
Andr Alexis but hapless victim. taxes, getting nations together to slow
the pace of climate change. The list is
Erna Brodber long and accomplishing any of it de-
NONFICTION
Mishras analysis concludes with pends on faith in the capacity of men
a call for transformative thinking, and women to work together to secure
Maya Jasanoff suggesting that the root of the popu-
list anger of the age lies in modernity
their objectives.
It hardly needs to be said that his-
Ashleigh Young itself and the resentment it ignites. The
result is that his argument effectively
tory does not appear to be on the side
of liberal and progressive ideals. We
DRAMA precludes any possibility of a political are in the full gale of a conservative
response. If modernity is the problem, counterrevolution that could last for
Marina Carr what is the cure? We are modernity some time and reshape modernity in a
and we have been so since Rousseau. reactionary direction. If this is the situ-
Ike Holter Modernity endures because it emanci- ation, Mishras analysis may be taken
pates as well as crushes, frees as well as to imply that the best we can hope for
POETRY imprisons. Above all, it is not a malign is to be acute but futile observers, while
fate that can only be endured. Moder- the worst would be to give up political
Ali Cobby Eckermann nity is a reality shaped by human will, activity altogether. What is agonizing
Carolyn Forch capitalist, anticapitalist, liberal, con-
servative, socialist, all pulling in differ-
about our current situation is not that it
is hopeless but that it could have been
ent directions to produce the vast and different. It is the contingency, the
Recipients are awarded $165,000 to fragmented reality in which we have to sheer avoidability of the current situa-
support their writing. Prizes will be conferred live. tion, that should rekindle faith that it
at a ceremony and literary festival at What is missing in Mishras vision can be changed in the future.
Yale University on September 13, 2017.
is any account of the influence of po- Weve had an unforgettable lesson
litical will in changing the course of in the importance of political agency
WINDHAMCAMPBELL .ORG
modernity in the years ahead. He is and the dire consequences of failures
right when he says that we are cur- of political leadership. Had politi-
rently living through an extraordinary cal leadership in the Remain camp in
if largely imperceptible destruction of Britain or the Democratic Party in the
faith in the futurethe fundamental United States mobilized constituencies
optimism that makes reality seem pur- in time and got out their vote, we would
poseful and goal-oriented. But you not be ruled by people with such a de-
cannot reconstruct faith in the future if termination to move us in the opposite
you give no credit to what political faith direction. In both cases, a different
has actually achieved in the past. You outcome was only narrowly defeated.
would not know, reading Age of Anger, Mishras analysis, which removes po-
that democratic struggles for the right litical agency from the story of mo-
to strike, the right to vote, and the right dernity, makes it impossible to grasp
to equality for countless excluded, de- that our present situation could have
spised, and marginalized peoples have turned out very differently. We need to
enlarged the circle of political inclusion remember this if we are to recover the
for millions of citizens. faith in ourselves that we need in order
A writer of Mishras passion and to shape the future in the direction of
erudition might actually have engaged progressive ideals.
Paula Bohince
April 6, 2017 7
Southern Sublime
Julian Lucas
Morning, Paramin ing Walcott through the Montreal tion to the Antilles, juxtaposing Doigs and here, the synecdoche for a history
by Derek Walcott and Peter Doig. Museum of Fine Arts, watching from arrival as a Caribbean painter with the of encroachment that briey impli-
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, behind his wheelchair as he evaluated passing of Walcotts friends (S. H. is cates Doig. But whatever grounds this
108 pp., $35.00 each painting, inaugurating the series the late Seamus Heaney) and the grad- suspicionan older artists misgivings
of exchanges that would become Morn- ual vanishing of the island he knew in about a younger one, a natives about
The solitary artist on the snowy ridge of ing, Paramin. childhood. The verses are an apostro- an islander by adoptionfalls away as
Peter Doigs Figure in Mountain Land- phe to the distant bather in Doigs J. M. the poem unfolds. Walcott admits Doig
scape (19971998) couldnt be farther at Paragon (2004), who appears wad- to that aristocracy of perception that,
from the Caribbean. Back turned, he T he collaborators are in many ways ing in the shallows under a cloudless for him, determines who belongs. My
looks over his easel toward a smatter- fellow travelers, sharing an obstinate orange sky. The title of Doigs painting land is utterly yours.
ing of evergreens on a mauve hillside. It attachment to outmoded mediums alludes to a bay in Trinidad, but Wal- Whether it is ours is another question.
is winter, but there is hardly any white (gurative painting, formal poetry) and cott imagines the view from his home Morning, Paramin has a beauty that
on the canvas, and the distant lime- to themes you might call, almost excludes its read-
April 6, 2017 9
identification of his own artistic matu- Morugawhere Columbus, Walcott W hat does it mean to possess a land-
rity with St. Lucias independence from notes, never set foot. (Everything has scape? Youre welcome to it, Peter
the British Empire. Consecrating his been thoroughly rehearsed, he writes. Doigand yet everything in Morning,
homeland in paint and verse, the poet Doig paints it for what it is: a fable.) Paramin suggests that ownership, even
located himself at the beginning of a A reproduction of an inaccurate reen- certainty of reference, is provisional.
Caribbean tradition. He counted as actment of an illegitimate annexation, Privacy is conveyed by all of the paint-
peers and forebears all those painters the painting is an example of the lay- ings, from the web of frosty branches
who, regardless of origin, got the light ered, interrupted sequences of refer- that conceals the anatomy of The Ar-
right: Winslow Homer, Paul Gauguin, ence that connect Doigs paintings to chitects Home in the Ravine (1991) to
the Trinidadian watercolorist Jackie realityand perhaps a wry reflection the colorful ice marring the reflection
Hinkson, and the Impressionist painter on his own resettlement. of the lodge in Pond Life (1993). But
Camille Pissarro, subject of Walcotts He was criticized in the art world as the painters reticence has particular
long poem Tiepolos Hound (2000). an outsider to his adopted home, a white poignancy for the Caribbean, so be-
A biography in verse, the book traces tourist sampling a poor, brown country. sieged by sun-washed simulacra that it
Pissarros gifted eye and transforma- In an admiring review of Doigs 2015 is almost inextricable from visions of
tive influence (he taught both Czanne show at Denmarks Louisiana Museum paradise or picturesque poverty.
and Gauguin) to his childhood in St. of Modern Art in these pages, Hilton Doigs art refers to a more private
Thomas. Als ventriloquized these naysayers as world, equal parts enchanted and quo-
It is also a lament that Pissarro rarely seekers after an authentic misery tidian, cobbled together from pickup
painted his birthplace. (Walcotts own that the painters work refused: cricket games, idling motorboats, aban-
paintings, most of them watercolors of
Peter Doig
Trinidad and St. Lucia, are reproduced
alongside Pissarros story in mute re-
proach.) Near the poems end, Walcott
addresses a moving plaint to the prodi-
gal of Charlotte Amalie, who aban-
doned the West Indies for Paris and
Pontoise, and deprived his homeland
of a genius. His judgment is unsparing:
You could have been our pioneer.
April 6, 2017 11
Trump: The Scramble
Michael Tomasky
Weekly, daily, indeed sometimes Donald Trump that all campaign finance regulation
hourly, we have trouble believing what might someday be wiped off the books.
we see coming out of the Trump White He just wants the power of his majority,
House. It can be difficult to turn our and if its Trump who happens to be the
gaze from the stupefying parade of facilitator and guarantor of that power,
announcements and events and tweets fine by him.
and leaksand leaks, and leaksthat Ryan is another matter, indeed the
show us a White House at once wholly opposite: he has many policy commit-
undisciplined while trying to impose an ments. You might think that would
ideological discipline upon the nations give him reason to take stands against
capital that finds no modern precedent Trump, but in fact it is precisely his
in either party. policy commitments that keep him
One can select a day almost at ran- tethered to Trump. Ryan wants to dis-
dom and quickly work up a list of four mantle the welfare state. So the devils
or five developments that defy belief. bargain he has made, and this is true
Lets take Friday, February 24, which of many congressional Republicans, is
began with the president speaking at that they will support Trump, let him
the Conservative Political Action Con- deport Muslims and crack down on
ference (CPAC) meeting in the Wash- undocumented Latinos, let him depart
ington suburbs, where he repeated and from party orthodoxy on trade, let him
intensified his earlier charge that the pursue risky and maybe even sinister
news media are the enemy of the peo- policies with Vladimir Putin, turn a
ple (even as he avowed, naturally, that collective blind eye to the manifold
nobody loves the First Amendment ways in which he dishonors the office,
more than he). A little later that day, as long as the president signs whatever
The New York Times, CNN, the Los legislation they bring to his desk that
Angeles Times, Politico, The Huffing- rips the bricks out of the wall of the lib-
ton Post, and Buzzfeed were blocked eral state. They will hope in the mean-
by White House aides from attending time that he doesnt start World War
a briefing with Press Secretary Sean III or hand state secrets to the Russian
Spicer. The three major networks were FSB.
invited, as were right-wing outlets like
Breitbart News.
Those two events would have been T hat assault on the liberal state,
quite enough, but then, late in the day, though, didnt get off to a very happy
a pair of potentially explosive news start. Everyone, I think, was surprised
stories broke, one from the Associated important question historians might you suggested in the earlier seg- by the vigor with which the public
Press describing a draft report by ana- be asking twenty, fifty, seventy years ment, who are helpful to us treated rose to the defense of the Afford-
lysts at the Department of Homeland from now will be not about Trump but properly. So we need to be careful able Care Acthadnt the press told
Security arguing that nationals from about the Republican Partyhow the as we do this. Improving vetting, us that the act was reviled?at those
the seven nations included in Trumps Republicans could have permitted this. something . . . mid-February town hall meetings that
January 27 travel ban did not in fact House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen- senators and congressmen held. Or
constitute a threat to national secu- ate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Raddatz: And yet right now theyre failed to holda number of representa-
rity, and another from The Washington and all the rest of them surely know being detained soso do you sup- tives and senators announced meetings
Post about potentially improper efforts that Trump isnt fit to be president. port this or do you not support and then, fearing that what theyd seen
by the White House to counter Russia- They surely understand the danger of this? happen to their colleagues would fall
related stories. This second story was giving him the enormous war-making on their heads, simply didnt show up. I
particularly powerful, in that it showed authority a president has. They have it McConnell: Its hopefully going have a Facebook friend from my home
the White House trying to enlist mem- in their power to block things like Mus- to be decided in the courts as to state of West Virginia who kept post-
bers of Congress and the intelligence lim bans, which to a person they have whether or not this has gone too ing about trying to see her Republican
communitywhich Trump has so at one point or another declared to be far. I dont want to criticize them senator, Shelley Moore Capito, and her
regularly impugnedto deny reports un-American. for improving vetting. I think we GOP representative, David McKinley.
tying the White House to the Krem- Yet they have obliged Trump since need to be careful. We dont have Capito refused an invitation to attend a
lin. Both were part of the ceaseless the campaigncriticizing him here and religious tests in this country. town hall meeting in Buckhannon, West
flow of news leaked by insiders trying there, when it didnt really matter, but Virginia, where citizens posed their
to advance or block particular schemes when it mattered talking as McConnell Raddatz: In the past, youve called questions to an empty chair. McKinley
brewing in this or that faction of the did in the following cringe-inducing ex- the Muslim ban completely and to- didnt show up during his posted office
administration. change with Martha Raddatz of ABCs tally inconsistent with American hours, my friend wrote, and at length
Somewhere in thereMarch 1, to be This Week. This interview took place in values. While the President says citizens were allowed to come intwo
precisethere was one day of normal- late January, at a crucial moment when this is not an outright Muslim ban, at a timeto meet with a staffer.
ity, the day after the presidents address the country was awaiting the Ninth Cir- even if this is temporary, how is At the events that were held, what
to a joint session of Congress, when he cuits decision on the travel ban, when this order consistent with Ameri- was notable was that the angry people
refrained from ad-libbing about the green card holders were barred from can values? were by and large white, and firmly
failing New York Times or what have entry, and when the nation was desper- middle-American, and a lot of them
you and managed, for a solid hour, to ately in need of leaders to denounce McConnell: Well, if theyre look- probably Republican. Chris Peter-
resemble a typical president. Then, the the obviously unconstitutional execu- ing to tighten the vetting process, son is the sixty-two-year-old Iowa pig
next night, The Washington Post broke tive order: I mean who would be against that? farmer who gained much press cover-
the story that Attorney General Jeff But I am opposed to a religious age by saying to GOP Senator Charles
Sessions had perhaps perjured him- Raddatz: Do you support Presi- test. The courts are going to deter- Grassley:
self at his confirmation hearing under dent Trumps temporary immigra- mine whether this is too broad.
questioning from Minnesota Senator tion ban from these predominantly And with all due respect, sir,
Al Frankenwho has emerged, by the Muslim countries? McConnell did no more there than youre the man that talked about
way, as a serious and important opposi- leave himself the wiggle room neces- the death panels. Were going to
tion leaderand the carnival was back McConnell: Well, I think its a sary to be able to say later that he put a create one great big death panel
in town. good idea to tighten the vetting little daylight between himself and the in this country [because of the
process. But I also think its impor- president. With the occasional excep- fact] that people cant afford to get
tant to remember that some of our tions of John McCain and a small num- insurance.
It is spectacle such as we have never best sources in the war against rad- ber of others, its been this wayor far
seen, but attention must be trained not ical Islamic terrorism are Muslims, worseamong Republicans for a very And Arkansan Kati McFarland de-
solely on the White House. Just a few both in this country and overseas. long time. scribed to her Republican senator, Tom
short weeks into this administration, And we have had some difficulty McConnell is one thing. He has no Cotton, her familys Republican, mili-
and already it seems clear that the most in the past getting interpreters, as policy commitments, beyond his hope tary, and NRA roots before telling him:
April 6, 2017 13
Mixed-Up Kids
Nathaniel Rich
4321 Paul Auster which he drawsAmerican hardboiled
by Paul Auster. fiction, French existentialism, and what
Henry Holt, 866 pp., $32.50 for better or worse is known as magical
realism, combined with a vulnerable
Recent history has done a nice job of confessional immediacy. But in 4 3 2 1
preparing readers for a novel about he has taken up a new, expansive style,
alternative realities. There were signs dominated by paragraph-length sen-
as early as November 2015, when a tences that crash over the reader like
Caltech cosmologist discovered evi- waves, dousing us continually with new
dence of a parallel universe impinging information, the sentences expanding
on our own, that we had passed into to summarize an event instead of paus-
a paranormal realmthat, while we ing to inhabit it, often extending into
were amusing ourselves in the dining the future or the past. This approach
car, an impish railway signal operator favors breadth over depth, as in this
had pulled a switch and the locomo- sentence, to take an example at random
tive had veered off the straight track, from the novel, about Rose Fergusons
diverging into increasingly fantastical photography business:
territories. Subtler, more benign in-
dications included the Chicago Cubs The fortunes of Roseland Photo
winning the World Series, the unprec- were also sinking, not as quickly
edented reversal of stratospheric wind as those of Stanleys TV & Radio,
patterns, and hundreds of sightings of perhaps, but Fergusons mother
menacing clowns luring children into knew the days of studio photog-
the woods. But the election as president raphy were nearly done, and for
of a menacing clown, abetted by white some time she had been reducing
supremacists and Russian espionage, the number of hours she kept the
confirmed that we had entered a real- studio open, from five ten-hour
ity that has already outpaced the most days in 1953 to five eight-hour days
brazen conceits of speculative fiction in 1956 to four eight-hour days in
a reality of rather slipshod design, the 1959 to four six-hour days in 1961
kind of world you might expect to have to three six-hour days in 1962 to
been thought up by a teenager with three four-hour days in 1963, de-
only the most sophomoric understand- voting more and more of her ener-
ing of dramatic irony, the perils of cli- gies to photo work for Imhoff at
ch, and the importance of narrative the Montclair Times, where she
plausibility. had been put on salary as the pa-
None of the four braided alterna- pers chief photographer, but then
tive realities in Paul Austers 4 3 2 1 her book of Garden State notables
is nearly as hamfisted as our own. If was published in February 1965 . . .
anything the novel is distinguished by
the surprisingly muted exploitation of We have not yet reached the midpoint
its high- concept premise. An unpre- of the sentence.
pared reader may not even grasp the One either succumbs to this type of
nature of the premise for at least the prose or doesnt, just as some people
first fifty pages, which unfold like a are susceptible to hypnosis while oth-
traditional bildungsroman, tracing the ers, confronted with a dangling amulet,
ancestry, birth, and early childhood of diverge gradually, four stalks sprouting who is either a family friend, his cousin, simply laugh. 4 3 2 1 is a novel you can
the principal character, Archibald Fer- from a common bulb. or his stepsister; he attends Columbia, lose yourself in. It does not make heavy
guson, born on March 3, 1947, at Beth or Princeton, or skips college alto- demands, except perhaps on your time,
Israel, a second-generation Ameri- gether and moves to Paris; he finds a though a sympathetic reader will glide
can Jew whose father and uncles run Auster loyalists will be unsurprised father figure in a professor, or a stepfa- through it. Auster is a conscientious
a furniture and appliance store called to discover that the closest thing to a ther; he becomes a film critic and mem- host, never penalizing his reader for
3 Brothers Home World. All but the formative disjunctive event in the lives oirist, a journalist and translator, or a losing track of references or minor
most attentive readersthose who of Archie Ferguson involves his re- novelist; he dies in a freak accident, or details, careful to avoid disorientation
might notice, in the third chapter, that lationship to his father, Stanley. The he lives. But because the divergences as he moves between narratives. The
Montclair, New Jersey, has mysteri- formative disjunctive event in Austers between the narratives do not alter transitions are especially artful, creat-
ously morphed into Millburn, New own life was the early, unexpected Fergusons essential character, and at ing the illusion that the narrative is ever
Jersey, that the fathers blue DeSoto death of Samuel Auster, which not times even lack basic plot significance advancing forward in time, even when
has become a bottle-green Plymouth, only became the subject of his first (unless youre from Essex County, it four consecutive chapters all but repeat
or that Aunt Mildred suddenly lives in book, The Invention of Solitude, but is makes no difference whether the Fer- the same time frame in different reali-
Chicago instead of Berkeleymay not refracted to varying degrees through gusons live in West Orange or South ties. It is easy, reading 4 3 2 1, to lose
get the picture for another dozen pages his fifteen novels and four works of Orange), they often seem beside the track of time.
or more. memoir. point. They are also difficult to track,
Eventually, however, it becomes In 4 3 2 1 the filial relationship is tied for the alternating structure means that
clear that Ferguson is not one boy but to the fate of 3 Brothers Home World. roughly a hundred pages pass between T his, in fact, is the point. The passage
four, each living in a slightly different In the first narrative, which reads in the cessation of one thread and its re- of time is one of the novels central sub-
reality. In his various incarnations Fer- this aspect like a wish-fulfillment sce- sumption. The only sane responsethe jects, reflected not only in the sweeping
gusons character is remarkably con- nario, one of Stanleys brothers bur- only possible responseis to submit to sentences but in a mania for catalog-
sistent. He is devoted to his mother, glarizes the furniture store, sending the torrent of narrative and not bother ing markers of time and place. Auster
dreams of becoming a writer, is a fine the family on a trajectory of financial trying to recall whether one happens to pays scrupulous attention to histori-
baseball player, reveres women (and struggle that nevertheless binds them be situated in the reality in which Amy cal events, marking the milestones in
also, in one of the plots, men), and has closer together. In the second, the store Schneiderman attends the University newsreel prose, but he rarely dwells on
irreproachable, if fairly conventional, burns down; with the insurance money, of Wisconsin or the one in which shes them:
taste in literature and film. But the cir- Stanley opens a tennis center, a time- at Brandeis.
cumstances in which he finds himself consuming enterprise that widens a Submission is also the only sensible On March seventh, two hundred
varyslightly. Unlike most novelists gulf between father and son. The third response to 4 3 2 1s prose, which de- Alabama state troopers attacked
who experiment with the premise of Stanley Ferguson dies in the fire, and parts from that of Austers previous 525 civil rights demonstrators
parallel universes (recent examples the fourth buys out his deadbeat broth- books. Auster has never been a showy in Selma as they were prepar-
would include Lionel Shrivers The ers, leading the business to thrive and stylist, favoring flat, declarative sen- ing to cross the Edmund Pettus
Post-Birthday World, Kate Atkinsons the family to disintegrate. tences that belie the eeriness of his Bridge. . . . The next morning, US
Life After Life, Laura Barnetts The Later Archie quits baseball because storytelling. The spellbinding quality Marines landed in Vietnam. . . .
Versions of Us), Fergusons lives do of a freak injury, or a friends death; he of his writing derives from the unusual President Johnson federalized the
not fork at a decisive moment. They falls in love with Amy Schneiderman, mixture of narrative influences from state National Guard. . . .
Tabitha Soren
the syllabi of his freshman courses an altogether different place.
at Columbia. Dostoevsky, Thoreau,
Heinrich von Kleist, and John Cage This explains the rationale behind
help to develop Fergusons conception 4 3 2 1s conceit, but it might just as
of the world and are granted short ap- easily apply to Austers entire body of
preciations; when he defends Kleists work. He began his career by wonder-
prose style, in conversation with a lit- ing what might have happened had his
erary mentor, he appears to be defend- relationship with his father been differ-
ing Austers own style in 4 3 2 1. He ent; what other roads might a stronger
tells and tells but doesnt show much, paternal bond have set him on? He has
says Ferguson of Kleist, which every- since imagined other paths for him-
one says is the wrong way to go about selfas a private detective, a fireman
it, but I like the way his stories charge turned amateur gambler, a St. Louis or-
forward. Its all very intricate, but at the phan born in 1915, a mongrel dog with
same time it feels as if youre reading a a human consciousness, and various
fairy tale. New York writers much like him, who
But most of the proper names scroll are visited by mysterious strangers.
down the page like closing credits, If every person, like Ferguson, has
only occasionally accompanied by a several selves inside him, even many
jot of weightless praise. Carole Lom- selves, a strong self and a weak self, a
bards films are splendid comedies, thoughtful self and an impulsive self,
Isaac Babel is Fergusons number a generous self and a selfish self, then
one short-story writer in the world, self-knowledge lies in the promiscu-
and he calls James Baldwin the best ous inhabitation of multiple identi-
American writer, a surprising opinion Minor League baseball players in a championship game, 2014; ties. Among these many paths for the
for a person of his political disengage- photograph by Tabitha Soren from her book Fantasy Life: Baseball and the American Dream, self are those not takenthe shadow
ment, and undermined by the fact that to be published by Aperture in April people that we imagine we could be,
Baldwin, no sooner mentioned, van- if only we had a little more courage, or
ishes from the narrative. The ideas of book. With The Scarlet Notebook, Fer- the premise of 4 3 2 1 but the basis of strength, or wisdom. The world as it
the dozens, if not hundreds, of other guson hopes to write many of Austers novels, he begins for was, as Auster puts it, could never be
writers and filmmakers and artists the first time to write. more than a fraction of the world, for
mentioned are not explored or tested, a book about a book, a book that A different Ferguson, the budding the real also consisted of what could
so one can only guess at the reason for one could read and also write in, novelist, explores the same idea in have happened but didnt. Whether
their inclusion. It would seem that the a book that one could enter as if it a short story called Right, Left, or one finds his fiction exhilarating or
torrent is the point, the unrestrained were a three- dimensional physical Straight Ahead? A character named maddening depends on whether one
deluge of trivia that echoes the deluge space, a book that was the world Lazlo Flute, on a walk through the accepts this mystical view of human
of the prose style and, above all, the and yet of the mind, a conundrum, country, comes to an intersection. In experience. Reality, to Auster, is itself
deluge of storytelling. The approach is a fraught landscape filled with three successive chapters he takes a dif- an interlocking chain of alternative
nothing like Baldwin or Babel, and it beauties and dangers, and little ferent path. After a couple of misadven- realities.
is the opposite of Cage; it is more like by little a story would begin to de- tures, Flute concludes that he should Austers approach stands in opposi-
Scheherazade. velop inside it that would thrust the spend more time with other people and tion to the conventions of most serious
fictitious author, F., into a confron- stop taking so many solitary walks. His contemporary fiction, which attempts
tation with the darkest elements of problems dont arise from choosing one to plunge deeper and deeper into the
I n its sheer expansiveness 4 3 2 1, himself. A dream book. path or another but come from within. soul of a character, revealing the con-
which is more than twice the length of tradictions, usually irresolvable, that
any book that Auster has published, is This is a good description of most of lie within. Auster instead travels out-
unlike anything he has written. Yet it Austers books. E lsewhere Ferguson expresses his side of his characters, into parallel
is also commodious enough to encom- 4 3 2 1 is not nearly the most self- ambition to write fiction that com- universes populated by shadow people
pass everything else he has written. referential of Austers novels; Travels in bines the strange with the familiar, and doppelgangers who, by choice or
Several times Auster writes playfully the Scriptorium (2006), a locked-room that would make room not only for chance, find themselves thrust into
of the book of life (Ferguson some- mystery in which the room is Austers the visible world of sentient beings and worlds that could have happened but
times wondered if he hadnt pulled a own mind, is almost entirely populated inanimate things but also for the vast didnt. One might not want to visit
fast one on the author of The Book of by characters from earlier novels, a and mysterious unseen forces that were those worlds, might consider them a
Terrestrial Life) and 4 3 2 1 is close claustrophobic exercise in performance hidden within the seen. 4 3 2 1 is best frivolous distraction, but for willing
to a Book of Auster, studded with al- art. But 4 3 2 1 is broad enough to allow when Auster does just thatwhen the travelers there is no more congenial
lusions to previous novels. Besides the him to discuss the principles of his own ground beneath the readers feet is guide to this marshy terrain. Though
father-and-son relationships, there writing, and to defend them. Auster spongy, unstable. The novel sputters 4 3 2 1 is not the most successful exam-
are various other familiar Austerities: has been disserved throughout his ca- when it lingers over what Ferguson calls ple of Austers projectit is too heavily
the infatuations with New York City, reer by comparisons to contemporaries the things you already knew, a cat- weighted with the familiar, too stingy
Parisian culture, and old films; the like Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and egory that includes not only the mile- with the strangeit offers the clearest
stories within stories; the search for Don DeLillo, writers to whom he bears stone historical events but the familiar explication of his sensibility. Alterna-
patterns in chaos; the recurring image only a superficial resemblance. Closer coming- of-age plots and the reassuring tive realities have their uses, and for
of a disoriented man locked in a dark analogues are Haruki Murakami and opinions about politics and artthe more than escapist fantasy. It takes a
chamber; the bifurcation (or in this Stephen King, novelists who share screenings of Fellini and Godard at the strong imagination to see the world as
case tetrafurcation) of the self, often his interest in genre conventions and Thalia, the visits to the Met, the Frick, it isnt. It takes an even stronger imagi-
expressed through alter egos, many of their subversion, metafictional loopi- the Museum of Modern Art . . . nation to see the world as it is.
April 6, 2017 15
Lets Face the Music and Dance
Geoffrey OBrien
La La Land mantic problems and career ambitions belonged, insistently and without apol- over. A few minutes more and were
a film written and directed of a couple of young Angelenos. A ogy, to a domain of pleasure, and once into the epilogue. Mias songwhich
by Damien Chazelle Facebook protest singled out Goslings in a long while of ecstasy, while still in the film represents a go-for-broke
Sebastian as the quintessential mans- leaving room for a not unpleasing un- improvisation on which the possibility
The day I went to see Damien Chazelles plainer for his insistence that Stones dercurrent of melancholy. To quarrel of her career will stand or fallhas the
La La Land I was blissfully uninformed Mia, as a prerequisite to any deeper over the precise value of a particular effect of an emotional plea, an attempt
of anything about the film except for the involvement, pay respectful attention musical might seem like arguing about to lay bare real vulnerability. For those
fact that it was a musical and that some to his lectures on pure jazz. That this the value of a day at Jones Beach or a dreamers she salutes a little madness
early viewers had been well pleased by was once again a white guy laying down round of pinball at an amusement ar- is key: the word is more than a little
it. My mood was dark for reasons both the laws of jazz appreciation, and that cadeboth of them, as it happens, ac- jarring. Is it a kind of madness that we
personal and publicthe day itself what he meant by pure jazz seemed tivities that have provided serviceable have been experiencing, or even the
gloomily overcastand the mere word vaguely defined, and that the film as a backdrops for movie musicals. If you wilder reaches of fantasy? The trem-
musical was enough motivation to whole paid only the most token atten- dont like it there is no particular rea- bling of her voice signals a temptation
walk in, with the hope of a few hours tion to LAs extraordinary ethnic diver- son to force yourself; if you do, you will to shatter the very constraints that give
of mood-altering respite. Musicals sity added further layers of polemic. require no justification to indulge. You the film its identity, to break down any
had always offered as their minimum distinction between the disillusioned
Dale Robinette/Lionsgate
all: set in motion a machinery of linked her dream will come to nothing, swiv-
cadences in which you are made to feel els neatly into the triumph of fantasy.
complicit, so that by the time it is done The dream was real after all: Mia gets
you have the illusion of having danced the part, becomes the star of a major
in some parallel world. Its always a film project, and in the twinkling of
parallel world no matter how many real an eye it is five years later and she is
things and places are crammed into it. an international celebrity like the one
The freeway becomes a sound stage, she waited on at the beginning of the
just as the Brooklyn Navy Yard did in movie, in the same coffee shop that
On the Town, in the primal fresh air she now strides into as a fawned- on
moment of the postwar musical. customer. She has a husband, a beau-
tiful child, and then, that very night,
she walks with her husband into a jazz
Chazelle comes to La La Land after club and sees Sebastian at the mike.
two earlier movies that in very different His dream has triumphed too. A happy
ways foreshadow it. His first film, Guy ending, a double happy ending, but the
and Madeline on a Park Bench (2010), wrong one. They get to have the career
was also a musical, of a New Waveish, but not the love, and we are allowed to
cinma vrit sort, filmed in 16mm and imagine that their success may be the
black and white while Chazelle was final disaster.
still a film student at Harvard, and tak- That is not however the true end-
ing an elliptical approach to its wisp John Legend, Emma Stone, and Ryan Gosling in La La Land ing. Chazelle has a better one, a movie
of a love-triangle plot. The musical within a movie that returns us to the
numbers, technically less ambitious, whom perhaps only Mia could love. It from these images of romantic bliss as parallel world of musicalsthe world
reinvent with their rough charm the isnt altogether clear whether the jazz Sebastian and Mia get down to the nuts in which everything happened dif-
shock of someone bursting unexpect- club episode in which he lectures her and bolts of their respective dreams ferently, the lovers never quarreled
edly into song, and with the trumpeter on the origins of jazz (born in a little and the mood becomes less Gene Kelly and were never parted, their careers
Jason Palmer as Guy the film is more flophouse in New Orleans), while and Debbie Reynolds in Singin in the bloomed together, not apart, in Paris of
persuasively imbued with jazz than talking over the music as he complains Rain and more Robert De Niro and course, and they delight in home mov-
Chazelles current offering. about people who talk over the music, Liza Minnelli in Martin Scorseses ies of the child they never hadsealing
The script for La La Land was in is meant as a parodic allusion to earlier New York, New York. Dancing on the it all up securely in the dream of which
fact written right after Guy and Mad- Hollywood birth- of-the-blues riffs in ceiling gives way to the glumness of ev- it was always part. The domain of full-
eline, but could not find financing until pictures like Syncopation and Young eryday wear and tear. The tensions ex- blown unreality that the film has all
the success of Chazelles next feature, Man with a Horn. plode in an obligatory central squabble along wanted to inhabit is finally put on
Whiplash (2014), a skillful demonstra- Nor is it clear whether were being designed to put both leads in as unat- screen. By finding his way to this, Cha-
tion of skills that in many ways is as encouraged to share this malcontents tractive a light as possible, so that when zelle puts his last internal rhyme firmly
disagreeable as its successor is agree- evident distaste for the pretty good Mia finally storms out in the aftermath in place, and makes La La Land some-
able. The boot camp methods of an jazz-funk ensemble for which hes of what was supposed to be a romantic thing it would not otherwise have been.
obsessive jazz teacher harsh enough hired by his old acquaintance Keith one-night reunion in the middle of Se- It seems like enough for one movie.
to drive a student musician to suicide (John Legend), a band whose success bastians tour there is a positive sense
are depictedindeed, mirroredwith earns him good money and gives him of relief that we no long have to be a
a relentlessness that almost succeeds a taste of commercial success. Legend party to their mutual recriminations. In a scene even more ephemeral than
in making the very idea of music un- certainly gets the better of their repar- The musical has hit the ground, and the Mias final reverie of an alternate fu-
appealing. Its rhythmsurged on by tee when he tells Gosling: How can notion of a parallel world is thoroughly ture, La La Landwhich had already
relentless up-tempo drum solosare you be a revolutionary if youre such a washed away in scenes that seriously picked up six Oscars, with Emma
expertly sustained but the curious effect traditionalist? contemplate the possibility that all Stone, Damien Chazelle, and Justin
is of a kind of deliberate anti-musical. Of course it doesnt matter at all if of this will come to nothing, and that Hurwitz among the recipientswas
Goslings Sebastian carries over Sebastian is the great pianistic talent we will be left finally only with a por- announced as winner for Best Picture.
some of Whiplashs queasiness, with hes cracked up to be, any more than it trait of two lonely careerists, with the Moments later, just after one of the
his permanent bad mood and his self- matters if Mias one-woman play, whose emphasis on lonely. There seems to be films producers had declared that re-
righteous disquisitions on jazz shunted catastrophic opening nearly sinks her nothing like a sustaining community in pression is the enemy of civilization,
aside only with difficulty to make room career, is really so good that a top Hol- the offing for either of them, certainly it emerged that due to a slip-up with
for the central love story. The love story lywood agent would immediately want none of the professional camaraderie the envelope (a goof thoroughly in line
is really all the story there is, as Cha- to audition her for a starring movie role. found in Singin in the Rain and The with classic musical plotting) the win-
zelle has carefully eschewed subplots Classic musicals often contrive to make Band Wagon. ner was Moonlight after all.
and serious complications and left wide us identify with people we would not That give-and-take compensated for The disorganized spectacle, as La
deliberate gaps in backstory. Neither want to know if they were not charac- the pressures and disappointments that La Land producers Jordan Horowitz
Sebastian nor Mia seems to have any ters in a musical: people who when they went with a careerin musicals, tradi- and Marc Platt struggled to persuade
close friends (her roommates recede are not singing and dancing may be tionally understood as a career in show everybody that this was not a joke, and
from view after the early scenes), and found whining, sulking, or indulging in business. (It was movie musicals in emotions in both camps were rapidly
there are no competing love interests to bouts of insecure self-aggrandizement, particular that always most effectively readjusted in full view of the televi-
provide standard obstacles and jealous nursing petty anxieties and lashing out promoted the belief that a successful sion audience, made for some real
misunderstandings. At the outset Mia in silly and abrasive lovers quarrels. It show business career was the summa- theatrical excitement after a long eve-
is given a boyfriend, an ambitious cor- is only the fact of being characters in tion of earthly bliss.) The faith in such ning that until then had run purringly
porate type, but she seems completely a musical that rescues their lives from a family of fellow troupers was indis- and unastonishingly. Political decla-
indifferent to him and after she walks treadmill emptiness. pensable to psychic survival in a cold rations that in earlier years had been
April 6, 2017 17
unscheduled disruptions here were a suming the unexpected role of a font The last-reel confusion provided ditch overturning so recently disap-
carefully calibrated part of the pro- of humanitarian values. The New York as perfect a chance-generated reso- pointed in the political spherewhile
gram. This included the commercial Times ran an advertisementthe most lution as possible. The long-shot La La Lands split-second moment of
breaks, which provided a slickly pro- effective of the spotsfor truth itself. Moonlight, a favorite for many, was illusory triumph rhymed nicely with
duced array of advertisements for love, Whatever uneasiness lay outside the the beneficiary of a rare miraculous those bubbly evanescent ecstasies
understanding, and tolerance, with the hall, a surface of buoyant solidarity was reversalmirroring, but this time toward which musicals have always
productions main sponsor Cadillac as- generally maintained. with a happy ending, the sort of last- aspired.
Granger
Mans Better Angels:
Romantic Reformers and as Clintons presumed victory
the Coming of the Civil War in the election approached; she
by Philip F. Gura. isor has become, across a
Belknap Press/ long and grinding careertem-
Harvard University Press, peramentally pragmatic, self-
315 pp., $29.95 consciously hardheaded.
Meanwhile, commentators in-
Paradise Now: creasingly reached for utopias
The Story of dark twin, dystopia, to de-
American Utopianism scribe Donald Trumps dire view
by Chris Jennings. of America. According to James
Random House, 488 pp., $28.00 Poniewozik, writing in The New
York Times, Trump, in his July
Utopia Drive: acceptance speech at the Re-
A Road Trip Through publican National Convention,
Americas Most Radical Idea characterized the United States
by Erik Reece. as a dystopian hellscape and
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, himself as the only leader ca-
346 pp., $28.00 pable of saving it from murder,
terrorism, financial ruin and
Oneida: an uncontrolled wave of im-
From Free Love Utopia migrants. Trumps speech re-
to the Well-Set Table portedly caused the number of
by Ellen Wayland-Smith. inquiries about the words dysto-
Picador, 310 pp., $27.00 pia and dystopian to increase
An engraving of New Harmony, Indiana, the utopian community by 2,000 percent online, momen-
We Are as Gods: founded by Robert Owen in 1825 and dissolved in 1827 tarily crashing the Merriam-
Back to the Land in the 1970s Webster website; meanwhile,
on the Quest for a New America Shakers; in a letter to his sister in 1831, think I had rather keep bachelors hall dystopian novels like 1984 and It Cant
by Kate Daloz. he had even broached (perhaps in jest) in hell than go to board in heaven, and Happen Here have returned, ominously,
PublicAffairs, 355 pp., $26.99 the possibility of joining the sect. His established his own utopian commu- to the best-seller lists.
description of the community at Han- nity of one, on July 4, 1845, on a patch And yet the word utopia has al-
cock begins on a positive note, as he ad- of Emersons land on Walden Pond. ways been double-edged. Coined by
Thomas More, five hundred years
1. mires the central brick dwelling house,
with its floors and walls of polished
What might have inspired a man of
Hawthornes temperamentantisocial, ago, to mean nowhere (hence its
On a sunny August afternoon in 1851, wood, and plaster as smooth as marble, politically reactionary, and suspicious nineteenth- century literary spinoffs
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman and everything so neat that it was a of reform of any kindto join a com- Erewhon and News from Nowhere),
Melville, after a picnic in the Berk- pain and constraint to look at it. But munity dedicated, in Ripleys words, utopia has an ambiguous u (or ou,
shires and a leisurely smoke under the as their guide, an old man wearing a to a more natural union between in- meaning not) that can also be read as
trees, decided, seemingly on impulse, gray, broad-brimmed hat who was one tellectual and manual labor and the the Greek eu, meaning goodhence
to visit the Hancock Shaker Village, on of the elders of the village, leads them substitution of a system of brotherly a good place. Moreover, alternative
the outskirts of Pittsfield, Massachu- to the bedrooms, segregated by sex, cooperation for one of selfish competi- visions of a better society, including
setts. For Melville, who lived nearby, it Hawthornes mood abruptly darkens, tion? Several new books (all written Mores, have historically includedas
was a chance to share the company of as he notes the lack of privacy in the before the election of Donald Trump) a key part of their justificationa grim
the older American writer he most ad- two-to-a-bed alcoves and the rudimen- examine aspects of the many utopian assessment of the dark present. If in
mired, and to whom he would dedicate tary sanitary arrangements. The fact communities founded in the United the background of every utopia there
Moby-Dick, published later that fall. shows, he notes disdainfully, that all States during the first half of the nine- is an anti-utopia, Frank and Fritzie
For Hawthorne, however, it was their miserable pretense of cleanliness teenth century, as well as the larger Manuel wrote in their influential 1979
something of a research trip. Model, or and neatness is the thinnest superficial- question of their extraordinary appeal book, Utopian Thought in the Western
utopian, communities like those es- ity; and that the Shakers are and must to earlier Americans and their possible World, one might say conversely that
tablished by the Shakers were to be the needs be a filthy set. relevance today. in the background of many a dystopia
subject of his next novel, The Blithe- Hawthornes intemperate outburst there is a secret utopia.
dale Romance. During the summer, as suggests how unfit for such a rigidly
preparation, he had immersed himself designed community he himself would
in the horribly tedious volumes of be. And yet, in 1841, fastidious Haw- 2. T he subject of American planned
the French visionary Charles Fourier, thorne made the unlikely decision to Utopian: the word has a strange communities sprawls in all directions,
whose odd fusion of pragmatic and join the utopian community at Brook sound at the troubled start of 2017. and a major challenge for the books
surreal ideas for harnessing human de- Farm, outside of Boston, loosely mod- During the disheartening primary cam- under review is to narrow the scope,
sires to create social harmony had had eled by its founder, a former minister paign of 2016, utopian came to mean in space and time, of an otherwise un-
a surprising vogue in the United States. named George Ripley, on precisely hopelessly unrealistic, even delusional. manageable topic. For Philip Gura,
The day before the picnic, Hawthorne those Fourierist ideas that he had lam- Let me tell you something, Bernie a professor of American literature at
had written in his notebook, Fourier basted in his journals. Ripleys cousin Sanders tweeted in April, as his pros- the University of North Carolina, such
states that, in the progress of the world, Ralph Waldo Emerson had politely pects were dimming, there is nothing model communities are best seen as
the ocean is to lose its saltness, and ac- demurred to join what he referred to, weve said in this campaign that is pie- part of a larger, specifically American
quire the taste of a peculiarly flavored in private, as a perpetual picnic, a in-the-sky or utopian. Nothing. As movement of reform from roughly 1837
lemonade. French Revolution in small, an Age of for his primary opponent, the good to the Civil War. What precipitated
During the 1830s, Hawthorne had Reason in a pattypan. Henry David news is that she is not a utopian, the such experiments in what the reformer
published two stories inspired by the Thoreau wrote with kindred scorn, I conservative columnist Ross Douthat Thomas Wentworth Higginson called
April 6, 2017 19
to the silver-plate cutlery for which it is nards were categorically different from with your own? One young woman
Learn best known.
Oneida was the rare utopian commu-
those of their utopian forebears, and
that while
tells Reece that when she first came
to Twin Oaks, she was ecstatic to be
nity to survive the Civil War, and even living around such cool people and in
Chess it renounced its experiment in free love the communalists of the sixties such a cool place, but she soon came
in 1879, resolved its complex marriages and seventies tried (and often suc- to realize that a lot of my friends here
from a into conventional pairings, and turned
its communitarian flatware production
ceeded) to build strongholds of
cooperation, pleasure, and con-
are just as depressed as my friends back
in graduate school.
into a capitalist joint-stock company. sciousness amid the mercantile bus- Across the long history of Ameri-
3-Time Jennings ventures the upbeat conclu-
sion that such communities were partly
tle of American life, they seldom
described their communities as le-
can utopian yearnings, experiments in
communal living like Twin Oaks seem
the victim of their own successes in vers of millenarian transformation. to have had their primary appeal for
U.S. Champ! consciousness-raising: The decline of young peoplenot the very young, but
American communal utopianism was This seems both overstated and mean- those who have had their first bruis-
Contact three-time U.S. Champ less about the defeat of one idea than spirited. Surely the dwellers on com- ing encounter with things as they are.
Lev Alburt, the only top-echelon it was about the triumph of another, munes around 1970 were hoping to be Such dreamers have, in Hawthornes
the embrace of such civic schemes as levers of social (if not millenarian) words, gone through such an experi-
grandmaster to develop time- free public libraries, universal educa- transformation. ence as to disgust them with ordinary
efficient lessons for beginners. tion, and care for the poor. For Gura,
Granger
Even a single lesson can help the Civil War, in addressing the ca-
you reassess your game and lamitous institution of slavery at the
put you on the right track to heart of American capitalism, taught
Americans that their social problems
major improvementand win- were of such a scale that they could
ning more chess games! For not be addressed by the example of a
personal, even over-the-phone few divinely inspired reformers, and
lessons, call: required pragmatism and compromise
instead.
212.794.8706
Lev Alburt is a brilliant
teacher and his books capture
that brilliance!
4.
And yet, the utopian impulse to cre-
Charles Murray, author of
Human Accomplishments
ate a more perfect society apart from
its corrupt surroundings did not van-
ish with the Civil War, as Erik Reece
makes clear in Utopia Drive, his engag-
ing road trip through Americas most
radical idea. Oneida and Owens New
Harmony are on Reeces itinerary; so is
Walden Pond, and the Shaker commu-
nity at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, near
Reeces home. Im not a social sci-
entist, Reece confesses disarmingly;
Im a guy with a truck, a gas card,
and a few boxes of old books shifting
around in the cab. But Reece also ex-
plores more recent attempts to live in
an alternative, utopian way. An 1879 caricature of the critics of Oneida, the utopian community in central New York
It was only in the back-to-the-land founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 and dissolved in 1881
Chess for the Gifted and Busy
movement of the late 1960s and the
If you have time for only one chess early 1970s that one encounters any- One of Reeces best chapters is set at pursuits, but . . .were not yet so old, nor
book, this is the one for you! thing like a mushrooming of utopian Twin Oaks, in Louisa, Virginia, a back- had suffered so deeply, as to lose their
communities to match the 1840s. Ac- to-the-land experiment founded in faith in the better time to come.
Chess for the Gifted and Busy pro-
cording to Kate Daloz, who grew up on 1967, which he calls one of the coun- Today, as is becoming increasingly
vides you the fastest way to learn
a commune in northern Vermont and trys most stable sustainable communi- clear, we have another generation ap-
to play chess. Its innovative ap- has written a history of the phenom- ties. The residents of Twin Oaks hold palled by what it sees, in the failure of
proach is tailored to those who enon, the 1970s remain the only mo- land, labor, and income in common, its leaders to address the threat of cli-
want to learn quickly, without miss- ment in the nations history when more advocate nonviolence and ecological mate change or the grotesque income
ing out on important ideas! people moved to rural areas than into sustainability, and make decisions in disparity of our wildcat economy. Inter-
Want to learn chess yourself or the cities, briefly reversing two hundred a direct, consensual manner. They live est in the utopian communities of the
years of steady urbanization. The rea- lightly on the land, sharing the work past, from young writers like Jennings
teach the game to a child, but are
sons are well known: a required forty-two hours a weekof and Reece, may be a signal of social
busy with lots of other good activi-
farming and maintaining buildings and experiments yet to come in Trumps
ties? This right-to-the-point book In the shadow of the Vietnam War property. As at Oneida, subsistence America and after. To say that these
by one of the games foremost and amidst widespread social up- agriculturesupplemented by dump- communities no longer exist, Reece
teacher-writer teams makes the heaval, this ever-present American stered beef from the wasteful main- writes of the communes of the 1840s,
most of your time. urge to reinvent ourselves in the stream society they proudly shunis is not the same thing as saying that
If youre already a player, this book wilderness spiked into its largest, insufficient to support the community, they failed. The angel of history may
most influential and most radi- and Twin Oaks has developed a flour- yet salvage their blueprints from the
provides the most time-efficient
cal manifestation ever. That de- ishing trade in hammocks and tofu. detritus of the past. Because, after all,
summary and review of important
cade, as many as a million young At Twin Oaks, interestingly, Reece we still need these ideas so badly. In
techniques for chess veterans, Americans uprooted themselves, finds evidence of some of the same his assessment of the contemporary
even master-level players. almost en masse, abandoning their conflictsmarriage versus looser af- relevance of utopian visionaries, Jen-
To order, send your check for $19.95, urban and suburban backgrounds filiations, for examplethat bedev- nings is more elliptical but no less in-
plus $5 shipping, to: in favor of a life in the countryside. iled utopian communities of the past. sistent: Their disregard for the world
Lev Alburt Echoing Hawthornes Coverdale, he as it is guaranteed that they didnt
P.O. Box 534, Gracie Station Jennings is dismissive of this second identifies the nub of the whole utopia survive long. Our disregard for the
New York, N.Y. 10028 wave of utopian ferment, arguing that problem: What do you do when some- world as it might be could prove just as
GM Lev Alburts books the aspirations of the hippie commu- one elses idea of paradise conflicts grave.
are also available in
fine bookstores
everywhere.
For information on all of Grandmaster Subscribe to The New York Review of Books
Lev Alburts books, go to: on the Web: www.nybooks.com
www.ChessWithLev.com
April 6, 2017 21
men who, after all, had made the ex- coeducation remained so uncertain class but 32 percent of those elected become a product of it. You lose
plicit and increasingly countercultural that the admissions office prepared two to Phi Beta Kappa, and the captain of sight of the simple fact that girls
choice to attend a single-sex college. sets of letters: one, to thank applicants the womens tennis team was deemed are people, just like you and me.
Samuel A. Alito Jr., a member of the for their interest but tell them that the Princetons Best Athlete on the Instead they become things to play
class of 1972, would later join an orga- admission of women had not yet been cover of the alumni magazine. with on allotted days. Things.
nization called Concerned Alumni of authorized, and the other, accepting or
Princeton and would use this affiliation rejecting applicants in the usual man- That was an accurate description of the
as a conservative credential when he ner. Finally, in mid-April, the board If that were the end of the story, we problem, surely, but it also expressed a
applied for a job in the Reagan Justice voted overwhelmingly to go ahead with could all breathe a sigh of relief and naive belief in coeducation as the cure.
Department in 1985. Malkiel doesnt coeducation, encouraged by the knowl- turn the page. But there is much more All too often on all too many cam-
mention this, but she does discuss the edge that Yale had already decided to to say. The admission of women to the puses, it appears, women are still seen
organization at some length, describing do the same thing. (Malkiel also looks Ivy League had serious consequences as they were back then: as things.
its viewpoint as: across the Atlantic at the admission of for the single-sex colleges that had pre- With some 6,900 accredited postsec-
women to formerly all-male colleges at viously attracted many of the brightest ondary educational institutions in the
Everything about the new Prince- the Universities of Oxford and Cam- women. Malkiel looks closely at the im- country, one might question Malkiels
ton was troubling: not only co- bridge. The process there went more pact on Smith and Wellesley, which have focusand Karabels before heron a
education and the admission of smoothly because of institutional dif- survived as womens colleges, and on tiny handful of elite institutions. Surely
significant members of black stu- ferences that spared individual colleges Vassar, which might once have struck a the contemporaneous integration of
dents but also the increasing em- from having to deal with boards and deal with Yale and in the end turned to women into the flagship state univer-
phasis on drawing students from alumni on the question.) coeducation as a survival strategy. Its sities in North Carolina and Virginia
more modest socioeconomic back- In later chapters, Malkiel makes it also clear all these years later that there has symbolic as well as practical signifi-
grounds and from public schools, clear that a seat in the classroom was is still a good deal to learn about cre- cance, to speak nothing of the arrival
the downplaying of the admission just the beginning for these young ating a classroom and campus environ- of women as cadets and midshipmen
of alumni sons, campus protests pioneers who had ventured into an ment in which young women can thrive. at the service academies a few years
over the Vietnam War, the retreat alien landscape. Yale had two ten- The questions the Princeton faculty later. True enough. But Harvard, Yale,
from ROTC, and a philosophical ured women on its faculty. Princeton committee confronted in 1968 have yet and Princeton are not only leaders in
imbalance that tilted toward left- had given tenure to its first woman a to be fully answered. American higher education; they have
ists and liberal-radical[s] among year earlier (informing her of the suc- In a sobering epilogue, Malkiel ob- the power to set priorities and define
the faculty. cessful tenure vote with a letter that serves that coeducation has not re- the purposes of education. Even if their
began Dear Sir). A female student solved longstanding complexities in the motivation was largely self-interested
Challenged during his 2006 Su- who asked the head of Yales history relations between men and women. a bow to the inevitable, a reflection of
preme Court confirmation hearing by department about offering a course in Sexual harassment and assault on cam- a changing world rather than a desire
Democratic senators who read aloud womens history was told, That would pus are rather recent arrivals to the to effect changetheir admission of
inflammatory passages from the orga- be like teaching the history of dogs. A news columns, but they are not new women told the world that at least as a
nizations magazine, Alito testified that Princeton English professor responded phenomena. The roots of this behavior formal matter, women belonged. The
he didnt remember having joined. to a female student who wanted to write are deep. Early in the coeducation ex- recent sexual assault scandalsalong
Princeton invited female high school a paper on women writers: Im inter- perience at Dartmouth, with the continuing severe underrepre-
seniors to apply for admission to the ested in auto mechanics, but I dont try sentation of women among university
class of 1973. But as applications to bring that into the curriculum. Men sitting on the roof of Mas- teachersshow us how much work still
poured in by the hundreds during the But these women were tough, and sachusetts Hall shouted numbers needs to be done.
spring of 1969, when admissions deci- proved themselves soon enough. In from one to ten as women students Coeducation, Malkiel observes, ac-
sions would have to be made, the out- Princetons first coeducational class of walked bywith the numbers companied, but did not cause, more
come of the boards deliberations on 1973, women were 18 percent of the meant as ratings of the womens at- profound social transformations in
tractiveness. The same happened these colleges and universities. Re-
in the dining hall, where men held ferring to increased diversity along ra-
up signs bearing numerical rat- cial and ethnic lines, she adds: Elite
ings as if you had just completed education became less aristocratic and
a dive. One woman reflected, more democratic/meritocraticagain,
No matter how cool you were, in parallel with, but not as a result of,
no matter how self-possessed you coeducation. Keeping their doors
were as a woman and mind you a closed to women was simply unsustain-
lot of us were 18 at the time it was able for institutions at risk of becoming
devastating. anachronisms.
As I finished reading Keep the
Fast forward two generations, and we Damned Women Out, I thought back
have Harvards discovery last fall that to my own graduation from Radcliffe
members of its mens cross- country and in 1968. Our small commencement cer-
soccer teams had for years been issu- emonythere were only three hundred
ing crude and sexualized rankings of women in the classwas held in the
many women. The university canceled Radcliffe yard, a few blocks from the
the soccer season and put the cross- thousands gathered in Harvard Yard
country team on probation. Similar for the university commencement.
behavior came to light at other univer- Our graduation speaker was Walter E.
sities. Harvard has also wrestled with Washington, the mayor of Washington,
the problem of sexual assault on the D.C., great-grandson of a slave and the
premises of the private all-male clubs father of a classmate who was one of the
that exist without official university handful of African-American students.
recognition while continuing to have The Harvard mens graduation
an outsized part in undergraduate so- speaker was the Shah of Iran. In pomp
cial life. and ceremony, we were far outshone.
Incidents like these provide a foot- Some of us, the white armbands on our
note, at once poignant and maddening, robes signifying opposition to the war
to a comment a Yale undergraduate in Vietnam, even felt a little cheated.
made to the Yale Daily News in 1968, The Harvard ceremony up the street
explaining why he favored coeduca- was unfolding on a world stage. Ours
tion. At an all-male college, this young seemed by contrast small bore, domes-
man said, tic if you will. But it now occurs to me
to ask of these two long-ago events:
You get entangled in a weekend- Which represented the past, and which
to-weekend existence, and you the future?
Matt Magee
5XQH, 2011 New York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Childrens Collection, and NYR Comics)
Oil on panel, 48 x 24 inches
Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams
hirambutler.com
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During, Publicity; Abigail Dunn, Marketing Manager; Hilary Reid, Marketing
Associate; Evan Johnston and Daniel Drake, Production; Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights; Yongsun
Bark, Distribution.
Rob Stothard
Essays composite creationpart personal
by Teju Cole. essay; part reflection on twentieth-
Random House, 393 pp., $17.00 (paper) century history; part criticism about
music and philosophyexamining the
Teju Cole is a kind of realm. He has repressed horror that floats over a mag-
written three bookstwo exceptional nificent performance of Beethovens
novels and the volume of essays to be Ninth Symphony. Cole is listening to
considered hereas well as many un- a recording of a particularly brilliant
collected essays, interviews, newspa- realization of the work in 1942 by Wil-
per columns, and a vast online oeuvre helm Furtwngler:
made up of skeins of tweets on fixed
themes, faits divers, e-mail arguments, The adagio is clear and tender,
captioned Instagrams, mixed media ex- played slower than usual. . . . No
ercises, and rants. At the moment he is one who heard it could have failed
credited with more than 13,000 tweets, to be moved to human kindness.
263,000 Twitter followers, 1,035 pho- Could they? (In addition to Hitler,
tos, and around 22,000 fans who offi- both Himmler and Goebbels are
cially like his Facebook page. Even in a in the audience.) . . .
time when many writers are enlarging The previous week, on March 17,
their literary footprints by means of the a Nazi camp had begun operation
Internet, he is a prodigy. Teju Cole on the outskirts of Ramallah during the Palestine Festival of Literature, in Belzec, southeastern Poland.
There is a strong interconnected- June 2014
ness between the different parts of his After this comes a miscellany of
work. Coles personal story, sometimes socialism, in what should humanism be works. He provides a concentrated en- appreciations of the Kenyan sculp-
given straight, sometimes fictionalized, grounded? Two: When liberal empires comium for Sebalds lesser-known ex- tor Wangechi Mutu, the filmmaker
pervades. The bicultural Teju Cole was engage in overseas criminality, what cursions into poetry. In an emotional, Michael Haneke for his film Amour,
born in the US in 1975, raised in Nige- are the responsibilities of that empires but not maudlin, essay he describes a Royal Shakespeare Company per-
ria until his seventeenth year, brought domestic beneficiariesthe lucky, the a visit to Sebalds grave. His atten- formance of Julius Caesar by a black
back to America where he first studied talented, the wealthy? tions to poetry here conclude with an cast, the music of the Australian com-
art and attended medical school, and acute, tender, and comradely tribute to poser Peter Sculthorpe. Cole has his
then went abroad to study African art the somber Tomas Transtrmer: In a eye on instances of art whose power to
history; he later studied Northern Ren- Transtrmer poem, you inhabit space move may not have been appreciated.
aissance art at Columbia. His initial 1. differently; a body becomes a thing, a He writes about a picture of a young
novels brought him a storm of prizes The Literary Sublime mind floats, things have lives, and even woman in a freedom march by Roy
and attention. He is currently a writer non-things, even concepts, are alive. DeCarava,
in residence at Bard College and the The balance favors epiphany. The essay Black Body is a tour de
photography critic for The New York Teju Cole force, an appreciation of James Bald- one of the most intriguing and po-
Times Magazine and is himself an ex- win in his prophetic modes, which etic of American photographers.
hibiting photographer. Cole has said in From A Conversation with Aleksan- touches on what Cole calls Baldwins The power of this picture is in the
an interview that the essays on photog- dar Hemon: question of filiation, that is, his con- loveliness of its dark areas. His
raphy in this collection, which also col- flicted relationship to classic works work was, in fact, an exploration of
lects many of his writings on literature, AH: Where do you stand in rela- from the canon of the oppressing cul- just how much could be seen in the
travel, politics, and art, are the most tion to transcendence? Do you ture. Cole wrestles with his own variant shadowed parts of a photograph.
important of his writings. pursue it? Must we pursue it? of this perennial trouble. On the sub-
Cole is very conscious of the differ- ject of difficult-to-mix feelings, Cole The essays on photography do triple
ence between what one might think TC: As for faith: I dont believe in is clear-sighted. He meets with V. S. duty. Overall, they argue for elevating
of as books aimed at a presumed pos- the Christian god, or the Muslim Naipaul: photography to a level equal to that of
terity and his online works, aimed at one, or the Jewish one. Im senti- the other graphic and plastic arts. They
a real-time and frequently interactive mentally attached to some of the This benevolent rheumy-eyed old give prominence to master photog-
fandom. He discusses this subject in a Yoruba and Greek gods . . . though soul: so fond of the word nigger, raphers such as DeCarava. And they
conversation with the novelist Alek- I dont ask them for favors. so aggressive in his lack of sym- refine the measures used to make dis-
sandar Hemon in the first group of What do I believe in? Imagina- pathy toward Africa, so brutal in criminations regarding quality among
essays in Known and Strange Things. tion, gardens, science, poetry, love, his treatment of women. He knew specimens of photographic art. Cole
For sure, he says, and a variety of nonviolent conso- nothing about that. He knew only is convincing here, but certain parts
lations. I suspect that in aggregate that he needed . . . help walking of the discussiondiscriminations
some of the smartest and most all this isnt enough, but its where across the grand marble-floored of opacity in DeCaravas work, for
interesting literary minds of our I am for now. foyer toward the private elevator. examplestruck me as rather more
generation and the generations to metaphysical than is usual for him. A
come will work in areas that are The pieces in Section I, Reading The tale of this encounter coexists with much fuller complement of representa-
not books as we currently think Things, introduce a selection of the another essay wholeheartedly endors- tive plates would have been helpful; the
of them. . . . But I think some of works of some of the creators of Coles ing Naipauls great A House for Mr. works of Zanele Muholi, Thomas De-
these people will also write books. personal literary sublime. He says, Biswas as a lasting work of imagina- mand, Sergei Ilnitsky, Malick Sidib,
of Andr Acimans discriminations tive sympathy. Seydou Keita, and Glenna Gordon will
Coles essays are brilliantly writ- among the varieties of lavender, found For their artfulness, intelligence, have a different luster when they are
tensharp, intelligentand yield a in his book of essays, Alibis, something and candor, Coles essays on writing encountered in future.
pleasurable sweetness. His prose, in that might apply equally to his own all have something fresh. The next-to-
its variations, is impeccably where he work: The pleasure of reading him re- the-last piece in the Reading Things
wants it to be. His erudition is put to sides in the pleasure of his company. section is a compressed presentation
work humbly. But in encountering He praises Acimans thoroughness, (in the spirit, as Cole acknowledges, 2.
these essays, perhaps the most impor- calling Alibis an extended aria on the of Flauberts Dictionary of Received Being There:
tant quality to grasp is Coles deep sense of smell. In Ivan Vladislavis Ideas) of the bromides and clichs that Travel, and Then Politics
sense of the seriousness of life, which is novel Double Negative, Cole finds an corrupt literary and political discourse
sustained in different registers through- artist who successfully brings the detail and block the powers of written art. Robert Owen, the great patriarch of
out. Rotating through his composi- of photographic high art to life in his For example: SCANDAL . If govern- socialism, was asked what we would do
tions, and sometimes shouldering aside narrative. mental, express suprise that people are once Utopia was established. His reply
their announced subjects, is an array of Cole gets to the heart of Derek Wal- surprised. If sexual, declare it a distrac- was: We shall travel. For Cole, travel
thematic problems routinely confound- cotts poetry: Epiphany became Wal- tion, but seek out the details. itself can yield a kind of second-order
ing to the educated secular leftcentric cotts favorite mode, his instinct, even sublime. Strictly concerning the anat-
urban readerships of today. Here are as he struggled to satisfy each poems omy of travel, Cole has much to say:
two examples among the many that competing demands of originality and T he group of essays called Seeing
Cole discusses. One: In a world that necessity. He reveres the art of W.G. Things pursues instances of sublime When you do visit Zrich or
is post-credal, post-religion, and post- Sebald, and not only the novelistic experience apart from literature. The Cape Town or Bangkok, they are
April 6, 2017 23
very much alike: the amusement Two: ing the opening lines of seven well- Finally, and not to be missed, there
parks have striking similarities, known books: is The White Savior Industrial Com-
the cafs all play the same Bra- There was a feeling during the plex, a revised version of a 2012 essay
zilian music, the malls are inter- years of George W. Bushs presi- Mrs Dalloway said she would in which Cole reflects on the furious
changeable, kids on the school dency that his gracelessness as buy the flowers herself. Pity. and now notorious polemic he deliv-
buses resemble one another, well as his appetite for war were A signature strike leveled the ered in a string of tweets earlier that
and the interiors of middle- class linked to his impatience with com- florists. year (setting off much comment across
homes conform to the same plexity. . . . His successor couldnt the media):
parameters. have been more different. Barack Call me Ishmael. I was a young
This doesnt mean the world is Obama is an elegant and literate man of military age. I was im- 1. From Sachs to Kristof to Invis-
uninteresting. It only means that man with a cosmopolitan sense of molated at my wedding. My ible Children to TED, the fastest
the world is more uniform than the world. He is widely read in phi- parents are inconsolable. growth industry in the US is the
most photo essays acknowledge. . . . losophy, literature, and history . . . White Savior Industrial Complex.
I like Italo Calvinos idea of con- and he has shown time and again Stately, plump Buck Mulligan
tinuous cities, as described in a surprising interest in contem- came from the stairhead bear- 2. The white savior supports bru-
the novel Invisible Cities. He sug- porary fiction. . . . It thrilled me, ing a bowl of lather. A bomb tal policies in the morning, founds
gests that there is actually just one when he was elected, to think of whistled in. Blood on the charities in the afternoon, and re-
big, continuous city that does not the presidents nightstand looking walls. Fire from heaven. ceives awards in the evening.
begin or end: Only the name of
Kunsthalle Hamburg
How Passion for Art Shaped in which France had abandoned its
Nineteenth-Century French Novels Mexican puppet to his fate. Zola, in an
by Anka Muhlstein, unsigned article in La Tribune, piously
translated from the French claimed (as had Manet) that the pic-
by Adriana Hunter. ture was totally nonpolitical, with the
Other Press, 228 pp., $18.95 subject treated from a purely artistic
point of view. When this didnt work,
You see her from a distance, at the end four days later he was pointing out the
of a long enfilade of rooms. As you ap- opposite: the cruel irony of Manets
proach, you notice that she is already picture, which could be read as France
turned toward you. She is in her forti- shooting Maximilian (see illustration
fied underwear: a light blue bodice, on page 26).
white slip, light blue stockings; in her So there was allusion, name-
raised right hand, a powder puff like a checking, and boosterism, either dis-
vast carnation. To the left, over a chair, creetly worked into fiction or overtly
is the blue dress she will soon put on. shouted from newspapers. Balzacs
To the right, though you might not at treatment of painters, as Muhlstein
first observe him, is an impatient, mus- points out, is much more admiring
tachioed figure in evening dress, his top than his treatment of his fellow writers.
hat stillor alreadyon his head. But Whereas Daniel dArthez, the most sig-
once again, you are aware that she has nificant writer he invented, is a cold,
eyes only for you. gray, virtuous character . . . all his paint-
She is Manets Nana, in the Ham- ers are jolly, attractive, unpredictable,
burg Kunsthalle, benefiting from a re- and often practical jokers. This hardly
cent rehang that makes her even more applies, however, to the Balzacian
of a cynosure. Nana is the courtesan painter who made the most impact on
protagonist of Zolas 1880 novel of the real-life artists: Frenhofer, the protago-
same name, and you might reason- nist of The Unknown Masterpiece.
ably assume that Manets painting is, This twenty-page text sets the ficti-
apart from anything else, one of the tious Frenhofer (elderly, so inevitably
great book illustrations. But it is more like a Rembrandt) against the estab-
interesting than this. Nana first ap- lished, middle-aged Pourbuscourt
peared as a minor character in Zolas painter to Henri IVand the aspiring
LAssommoir (1877). Manet spotted young Poussin. Frenhofer, sole pupil
her there, and painted his portrait of of Mabuse, is the driven genius with
her. When Zola saw it, he realized that, impossibly high standards to whom
yes indeed, she was worth a novel in her the others defer; for ten years he has
own right. So, far from Manet illustrat- been secretly working on a portrait
ing Zola, what actually happened was that expresses all he has learned about
that Zola was illustrating Manet. art. Poussin gulls him into showing it,
The close friendship, interaction, and whereupon the supposed masterpiece
parallelism between writers and artists douard Manet: Nana, 1877 is revealedat least to Poussins and
in nineteenth- century France are the Pourbuss eyesas haphazardly ac-
subject of Anka Muhlsteins The Pen Muhlstein wisely limits herself to prose also includes that rather sinister black cumulated colors contained by a multi-
and the Brush. Balzac put more paint- writers, and to five who speak to her cat from the painting. tude of peculiar lines, creating a wall of
ers into his novels than he did writ- most clearly: Balzac, Zola, Huysmans, Zolas public support for Manet and paint. Either Frenhofers conception
ers, constantly name- checking artists Maupassant, anda slight chrono- the Impressionists was loud and vigor- of art is so lofty that it is untranslat-
and using them as visual shorthand logical cheatProust. The result is a ous, and came at just the right time. able into pigment; or, perhaps, what he
(old men looked like Rembrandts, in- personal, compact, intense book that (Sometimes there seems to be a logical has produced is so far ahead of its time
nocent girls like Raphaels). Zola, as a provokes both much warm nodding assembly of rallying forces, at others it that it can be appreciated only centu-
young novelist, lived much more among and occasional friendly disagreement. is a matter of fortune. When Tom Stop- ries later. In a rage (with himself, or the
painters than writers, and told Degas pard spoke at Kenneth Tynans funeral, others?), he destroys all his paintings,
that when he needed to describe laun- he addressed the critics children on and dies that night.
dresses he had simply copied from the O f all the arts, writers most envy behalf of his own generation of play- As a short story, it is somehow both
artists pictures. Victor Hugo was a fine music, for being both abstract and im- wrights: Your father, he told them, rickety and overdense; as a narrative
Gothicky-Romantic artist in his own mediate, and also in no need of transla- was part of the luck we had.) Manet about the nature of art, it has a grasp-
right, and an innovative one too, mix- tion. But painting might come a close certainly expressed hisequally pub- ing intensity, which gave it the longest
ing onto his palette everything from second, for the way that the expres- licgratitude to Zola, painting a cel- afterlife of any art fiction of the cen-
coffee grounds, blackberry juice, and sion and the means of expression are ebrated portrait of the novelist at his tury. In his translation Anthony Ru-
caramelized onion to spit and soot, not coterminouswhereas novelists are desk: pinned on the wall behind is a dolf enumerates the recognition from,
to mention what his biographer Gra- stuck with the one- damn-thing-after- print of Olympia, and clearly visible on and even influence over, Czanne, Pi-
ham Robb tactfully terms even less another need for word and sentence the desk is Zolas pamphlet in praise casso, Giacometti, and de Kooning.
respectable materials. and paragraph and background and of the painter. Zola was a forceful, (The story was also a great favorite of
Flauberts favorite living painter (also psychological buildup in order to heft- detailed, and brightly colored critic, Karl Marx.) Picasso illustrated a livre
that of Huysmanss Des Esseintes) was ily construct that climactic scene. On though he didnt exactly deal in the dartiste with choices that suggest, ac-
Gustave Moreau, and his Salammb the other hand, it is much easier for quiet hint; art was there to describe cording to Rudolf, that he might not
is like a massive, bejeweled, wall- writers (and composers, for that mat- and to change societyboth his and its have read the text very carefully.
threatening Salon exhibitthis being ter) to work in subtle, or not-so-subtle, functions were combative. If the aes-
both the novels strength and its weak- homages to other art forms than it is for thetic argument shaded into the politi-
ness. Baudelaire, Zola, Goncourt, Mau- painters. Thus Zola gives a friendly nod cal, so much the better. T he link between writers and art-
passant, and Huysmans were excellent to Manet in his novel Thrse Raquin, And Zola could be just as keen on ists in nineteenth- century France was
art critics (Monet thought Huysmans where a murdered girl in the morgue is having things both ways as his oppo- strong and largely cordial. But some
the best of all). The subject is enor- described as resembling a languishing nents were. In 1869, when Manets The writers went furtheror imagined, or
mous, and might threaten to go off in courtesan offering up her breasts to Execution of Emperor Maximilian was claimed, they did. Balzac described
every direction. What about photog- us, while the black line around her neck about to be translated into mass-media himself as a literary painter. Muhl-
raphy? And book illustration? And (evidence of strangulation) recalls the form as a lithograph, the authorities stein calls Zola a writer-painter.
sculpture? What about poets and pic- black ribbon around the neck of Olym- banned it. The reasons were clear: the Maupassant hymns the superiority of
tures, both real and imaginary? Anka pia; just to confirm the homage, Zola event was a key moment of geopolitical painting over fiction (though he was
April 6, 2017 25
mainly talking about color). Proust is Monet to Czanne, were very well read, a country house called Les Jardies with him well, thinking of years gone
in Muhlsteins eyes occasionally a kind and some of them drew inspiration from a view over the woods of Versailles. by. Ever yours, with the feeling of
of Cubist. Muhlstein charts the sudden literature, not many of themwith the His colossal initial plans were quickly time passing, Paul Cezanne
irruption of the visual arts into the lives exception of Odilon Redon (Writing scaled back to a skinny three-storey
of nonelite Parisians: first, by the open- is the greatest art)directly envied chalet, but within it, Balzac carried As Alex Danchev wisely comments in
ing of the Louvre as a Central Museum the form. As for what they made of on dreaming, with everything from his 2013 edition of the letters:
of Arts in 1793; later, by the arrival of their literary friends and supporters electric bells to a fireplace of Carrara
vast booty from Napoleons conquests work, there is often more nuance and marble. And the decor? That too Bal- Czannes words have been
(and the tenacious holding on to it less full-heartedness in their response zac had planned. As Robb explains in combed for any hint of telltale
after the empire fell). It was not just than you might expect. Indeed, some, his richly observed biography: emotionoffence, anger, antago-
the thrilling, democratic availability like Van Gogh, writing in 1883, were nism, rancour, shock, sorrow, bit-
of great art that excited writers; it was very unnuanced: Zola has this in com- The walls were bare except for Bal- terness, or merely coolnessas if
also that painters were making it new mon with Balzac, that he knows little zacs charcoal graffiti, which be- the letter might contain the key to
as much, if not more so, than writers. about painting. . . . Balzacs painters came a permanent feature: Here the rift. This exercise in runecraft
So writers now looked at how paint- are enormously tedious, very boring. an Aubusson tapestry. Here has yielded remarkably little, ex-
ers looked. Though Muhlsteins claim Balzac and Delacroix, who met around some doors in the Trianon style. cept for wildly varying assessments
that the visual novel dates from this 18291830, initially had much admira- Here a ceiling painted by Eugne of these few lines, and a tendency
period suggests too much. When was tion for each another; Balzac dedicated Delacroix. Here a mosaic par- to read back into them the knowl-
the noveland before it, poetrynot La Fille aux yeux dor to the painter, quet made of all the rare woods edge of what came later.
visual? and over the years Delacroix copied from the Islands. There was also a
You could say, perhaps, that writers into his journal twenty pages worth of charcoal Raphal facing a charcoal Indeed, its not even clear from
look, whereas painters see. Muhlstein the letter whether Czanne had even
Kunsthalle Mannheim
tells of Proust telling of Ruskin tell- started reading the novel when he ac-
ing of Turner: how the English painter knowledged its arrival, let alone taken
once did a drawing of some ships sil- any offense. And as it turned out, this
houetted against a bright sky and wasnt the painters last letter to the
showed it to a naval officer. The sailor writer: Muhlstein points out that a later
indignantly pointed out that the ships one has very recently turned up. Even
portholes were missing; the painter so, it wouldnt be fanciful to scent some
demonstrated that, given the light, they ambiguity or polite withholding in C-
were in fact invisible; the officer replied zannes words: the more so because
that this might very well be the case, such ambiguity was perfectly expressed
but he knew that the portholes were by Monet, in his letter to Zola. Here is
there. Writers look as hard as they can, a fuller version than the one Muhlstein
but they may well falsely remember a gives:
porthole that is missing from the real-
ity in front of them. Whereas painters How kind of you to send me
have it both ways: they might Turner- LOeuvre. Thank you very much.
ishly omit the portholes, or choose to I always find it a great pleasure
put them in, because they can also see to read your books and this inter-
what the rest of us cant. ested me all the more since it raises
Perhaps the social closeness of questions to do with art for which
French writers to painters in the we have struggled for so many
nineteenth century made some of years. I have just finished read-
them think of themselves more self- ing it and I have to confess that it
consciously as writer-painters. Some of left me perplexed and somewhat
Muhlsteins examples are very striking. anxious.
So, Zola, in Une page damour (1877), You took great care to avoid any
gives five different descriptions of the douard Manet: The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 18681869 resemblance between us and your
same view of Paris, varying by time characters; all the same I am very
of day and season: the link to Monets much afraid that our enemies in
(future) sequence-painting seems in- quotes from Balzac, from thirteen dif- Titian and a charcoal Rembrandt, the Press and among the general
escapable. (And he uses the same ploy ferent novels. none of which ever turned into public will bandy about the name
in LOeuvre.) Then there is his pictur- But a cooling- off happened around the real thing: all signifiers and no of Manet, or at least our names,
ish fascination with mirrors; and the 1842, and thereafter Delacroixs opin- signifieds. and equate them with failure,
way he justifies architectural anachro- ion of the novelist became harsher. By which Im sure was not your inten-
nism in a Parisian cityscape because 1854, four years after Balzacs death, Whether Delacroix knew he was tion. Forgive me for mentioning
he needs the as-yet-unbuilt Opra the painter was fulminating into his down to do a ceiling for the novelist is it. I dont intend it as a criticism; I
and the as-yet-unbuilt church of Saint- journal against the panegyrical pref- doubtful. read LOeuvre with a great deal of
Augustin to give visual structure to his ace to Le Provincial Paris, which pleasure, and every page recalled
description. boasted of Balzacs colossal reputa- some fond memory. You must
But when, for instance, Muhlstein tion and compared him to Molire. As for Zola, his support for Manet know, moreover, what a fan I am of
notes parallels in Zola between the (Delacroix seems not to have known and the Impressionists was much more yours and how much I admire you.
representation of landscape and a that The Editor was almost certainly public, and more publicity- conscious, My battle has been a long one, and
characters state of mind, this is not Balzac himself.) And the next day, the and the painters were properly grate- my worry is that, just as we reach
something new to literature: this is painter went into detail: works like Eu- ful. But their response to his LOeuvre our goal, this book will be used by
the Wordsworthian egotistical sub- gnie Grandet hadnt stood the test of (1885), the centurys most famous novel our enemies to deal us a final blow.
limeor, to take a more local ex- time, he wrote, because of the incur- about art, was complicated. Its pro- Forgive me for rambling on, re-
ample, the pantheistic trance of Emma able imperfection of Balzacs talent. tagonist, Claude Lantierthe brother member me to Madame Zola and
Bovary after she has been seduced by No sense of balance, of structure, of of Nanahas a succs de scandale at thank you again.
Rodolphe in the forest. Contact with proportion. the Salon des Refuss, and founds a
painters doubtless suggested new an- You sense that Balzac was usually plein-air school, but ends up sacrificing This is fascinating, for many reasons:
gles of looking and tweaks of lighting. the wooer, Delacroix the wooed. Also fortune, wife, and child for his art. It the gentleness of the reproach; the
But the books subtitleHow Passion that Balzac perhaps imagined Dela- was loosely assumed for some time that similar mention of the fond memory
for Art Shaped Nineteenth- Century croix to be an artist other than he was. Lantier was based on Czanne (though evoked by the book, rather than praise
French Novelsis overreaching. The (When a flatterer congratulated him Lantier, like Zola, is a naturalist); for its representation of art and art-
fact remains that we dont read Mau- on being the Victor Hugo of paint- further, that the books publication ists; the assumption that the public will
passant for the colors, or Zola for the ing, Delacroix chilled him with the re- had caused a breach between the two identify Lantier with Manet (rather
lighting. We read Zola for the psycho- sponse, You are mistaken, Monsieur, old friends. This theory was based on than Czanne); and perhaps, above
logical truth, the social observation, I am a purely classical artist.) It was the last-known letter from Czanne to all, the sense of vulnerability border-
and the tragic working-out of determin- Balzac, rather than the supposedly Ro- Zola, which reads in full: ing on paranoia about the damage the
ism. Further, the world of Zolathat mantic Delacroix, who was the more novel might do to the cause of Impres-
Homer of the sewers, as the duchess constant dreamer. He imagined giving Mon cher mile, Ive just received sionism, which had already been going
so jauntily puts it in la Rechercheis his lover Mme Ha ska Delacroixs Les LOeuvre, which you were kind strong for fifteen years. The fear that
essentially one of darkness; the world of Femmes dAlgerif only he could have enough to send me. I thank the au- a final blow might be dealt to the
Impressionism essentially one of light. afforded it. One of his saddest dreams thor of the Rougon-Macquart for movementand worse, by a friend and
While many of Frances nineteenth- took place in 1838 when, already on the this kind token of remembrance, ally, rather than a traditional enemy
century painters, from Delacroix to run from creditors, he decided to build and ask him to allow me to wish is revelatory.
April 6, 2017 27
The Love We Dont Know
Vivian Gornick
Whatever Happened to Very soon she began making films of a breakup; the second is shared by a many tuneless days . . . I cant apol-
Interracial Love? her own, as well as writing plays and sto- husband and wife, each reporting sepa- ogize for loving you so little. . . . I
by Kathleen Collins, with a foreword ries. A number of these plays were pro- rately on their long estrangement. Here love everything too little, except
by Elizabeth Alexander. duced to a fair amount of acclaim, and are the directors words in abbreviated the journey, the way the wheels
Ecco, 175 pp., $15.99 (paper) the most distinctive of her films, Losing form: turn . . .you accommodated your-
Ground (1982), was only just this past self instantly to all my whims . . .
A master of the short story that is all year restored and reissued. Somewhere Okay, its a sixth-floor walk-up, fancying them into significant es-
voice, Grace Paley was famous for in the middle of all this she married, three rooms in the front, bath- capades of the soul . . .while . . . I
having come down against the fiction had two children, and by the mid-1970s tub in the kitchen, roaches on the wont apologize for loving you so
of plot and character development be- had endured a painful divorce that be- walls. . . . Okay, lets light it for little . . . no woman living has ever
cause, as she once said, Everyone, real came the inspiration for some of her night. I want a spot on that big been part of my dreams . . . life has
or invented, deserves the open destiny most evocative pieces of prose. A week double bed that takes up most of so many tuneless days.
of life. In Paleys stories the narrating after her second marriage in 1987 she the room . . . Good. Now lets have
voiceurban, ethnic, rooted in lived was diagnosed with breast cancer and a nice soft gel on the young man WIFE
experienceis most often speaking within a year she was dead. None of composing his poems or reading . . .The first time my husband left
directly to the consequences of that her stories was published in her lifetime. at his worktable. And another soft me, I took a small cabin in the
open destiny, which, once pursued, woods. . . . I was going to stay the
Sam Waymon
never fails to take its toll. In one story whole summer. I stayed three
the narrator runs into her ex-husband days. . . . I came back home. . . it
whom she cheerfully addresses as was very hot and lonely . . . I took
Hello, my life, but then has an ex- to crossing the Brooklyn Bridge
change with him that reminds her that in the evenings at the time the sun
he had had a habit throughout the was setting. . . . I took to the read-
twenty-seven years of making a narrow ing of memoirs . . . it was one of my
remark which, like a plumbers snake, finer moments when I discovered
could work its way through the ear that no human life escapes the trib-
down the throat, halfway to my heart. ulation of solitude. . . . the summer
He would then disappear, leaving me grew hotter and lonelier . . . I began
choking with equipment. to feel I was drying out inside . . . it
The voice that speaks those sen- encouraged me to consider a little
tences becomes the story being told. Its light fucking . . . he turned out to be
every inflection deepens and enriches tall, fervently sincere behind thick
the Paley persona that incarnates the bifocals . . . and with a penis about
wisdom of Paley the writer: namely, the size of a pea . . . I took it as an
that women and men remain longing, omen that I was not designed for
passive creatures most of their lives, light fucking . . . .Winter came . . . I
always being acted upon, only rarely rode the subway to Coney Island.
acting themselves. At its most distilled, The cold, lonely stretch of beach,
this wisdom achieves the lucidity of the the abandoned amusement park. . .
poet, or even that of the visual artist. Kathleen Collins, upstate New York, circa 1983
Ive often thought of Paleys sentences And that was just the first time he left
as the equivalent of color in a Rothko The writer upon whom Collins one for the young woman stand- her.
painting. In Rothko, color is the paint- consciously modeled herself was the ing by the stove killing roaches. . . . In the third story the word negro
ing; in Paley voice is the story. playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who Now backlight the young woman appears for the first time, and then al-
wanted to use her blackness to make as she lifts that enamel counter most casually:
the women and men in her audience covering the bathtub and put a lit-
Kathleen Collins, an American writer feel as trapped as did her various char- tle light on him undressing her and I had an uncle who cried him-
who died in 1988 at the age of forty-six, acters in the existential free fall of a nice soft arc on the two of them self to sleep. Yes, its quite a true
leaving behind a trunkful of unpub- ordinary everyday despairpoverty, nude in the doorway. Nice touch. story and it ended badly. That is to
lished manuscriptsstories, plays, a loneliness, ill healthcompounded by Now dim the light. . . No, take it say, one night he cried himself to
journal, an unfinished novelwas a the despair of having been born into way down. She looks too anxious death. He was close to forty. . . . He
natural at this kind of writing. Now, the wrong sex or race or class. and sad. Keep it down. He looks was quite handsome. Negro. But a
nearly thirty years after her death, six- Whatever Happened to Interracial too restless and angry. Down some real double for Marlon Brando. . . .
teen of the stories found in that trunk Love? is, deliberately I presume, so more. . . . Shes just waiting at the It is difficult to separate this story
have been published as a collection arranged that it is not until the fourth window. No, on second thought, from the slight props of race nec-
called Whatever Happened to Inter- story that the reader realizes the writer kill it, he wont come in before essary to bolster it up. I have said
racial Love? In all of them we hear a is both black and a woman. This ar- morning. . . . Now find a nice low he was Negro. . . . In the middle of
voiceblack, urban, unmistakably rangementmade, no doubt, by a level while theyre lying without the night he woke me up, shook
rooted in lived experiencespeaking clever editorreflects a developing per- speaking. No, kill it, theres too me awake with his violent crying
not only to let us know what it felt like spective that not only binds the pieces much silence and pain. and sobbing. . . . How he could cry!
to be living inside that complex iden- together into a book, it tells us how to Now fog it slightly when he comes Give in to his crying, allow it full
tity, but to make large, imaginative use read the book. Sometimes the narrat- back . . . and keep it dim while they possession of his being as if life
of it, the way Paley used her New York ing voice is that of a woman, sometimes sit on the bed. Now, how about a were a vast well of tears and one
Jewishness to explore the astonishment a man; sometimes it speaks in the first nice blue gel when he tells her its must cry to be at the center of
of human existence. person, sometimes in the third. And over. Good. Now go for a little fog it! . . . It was surely perverse, surely
Collins was born in 1942 in Jersey quite often it adopts the convention of while she tries not to cry. Good. bound to the color of his skin. . . .
City, New Jersey, into a middle- class poetic repetition. No matter: at all times Now take it up on him a little while He utterly honored his sorrow,
black familyher father was a state it is distinguished by a similarity of tone he watches her coldly, then up on gave in to it with such deep and
legislatoras conscious of class as it and temperamentcalm, measured, her when she asks him to stay. Nice. boundless weeping that it seemed
was of race. She was educated at Skid- above all unsurprisedand an unwav- Now down a bit while it settles be- as I stood there that he was the
more College where she majored in phi- ering interest in looking as long and as tween them and keep it down while bravest man I had ever known.
losophy and religion. In 1961 she joined hard as it can at what is, and what is not. he watches her, just watches her,
a summer project to help build a youth Taken all in all, this voice develops into then fade him to black and leave her The slight props of race, indeed.
center in a village in the Congo, and the a persona that is striking for the sheer in the shadow while she looks for When it comes to women and men
following year went south with SNCC to richness of its human presence. the feelings that lit up the room. together, Collins is often at her most
help register black voters. However, she playful, making the hunger for sexual
proved not an activist. In 1963 she went Here are the husband and wife: experience seem as comical as, at other
to Paris where she received an MA in The opening stories are two sets of times, it is painful. In one story a college
French literature and cinema studies at monologues on the exquisite pain of HUSBAND student riffs on the beautiful black activ-
the Sorbonne; when she came back to failed love, the first being given by an . . . Its a long improvisation, my ist whom she has settled on as the appro-
New York it was to join the faculty at unidentified film director ostensibly in- life. . . . I was never a pleasure to priate person to rid her of her virginity.
City College of New York as a teacher structing a cameraman (or woman) on have around. . . . Im moody, damn Something, it turns out, easier said than
of film history and screenwriting. how to light a movie being made about it, and restless . . . and life has so done. Charlie Jones is light-skinned,
FE
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Greco-Roman Gods Who Became Human
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5. Ancient Jews Who Were Gods
6. The Life and Teachings of Jesus
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8. The Death of JesusHistorical Certainties
9. Jesuss DeathWhat Historians Cant Know
10. The ResurrectionWhat
Historians Cant Know
11. What History Reveals about the Resurrection
12. The Disciples Visions of Jesus
13. Jesuss ExaltationEarliest Christian Views
14. The Backward Movement of Christology
15. Pauls ViewChrists Elevated Divinity
16. Johns ViewThe Word Made Human
17. Was Christ Human? The Docetic View
18. The Divided Christ of the Separationists
19. Christs Dual NatureProto-Orthodoxy
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April 6, 2017 29
green-eyed, and a freedom rider. Our getting along for a while. Inside the Only once do you know that
narrator knows, she just knows, that he melting pot. Inside the melting pot. kind of man, they say. Only once.
is the right person to initiate her. But The last line of the story is: Its 1963. But she would know them all her
then, to her amazement, Charlie seems Whatever happened to interracial life. One after the other they would
IN MEMORIAM unable to get the job done. Push, the love? turn out to be that kind of man.
narrator tells him, push hard. Hes got Only rarely again in this book will
to be the right person, hes just got to be. the narrating point of view sound as No surprises here. Shocks perhaps, but
Push, Charlie Jones, push. Yes, maam, young as it does in this story; and never not surprises.
says Charlie. But at last: again will it sound accommodating. The narrator in this story is giving
Kenneth J. Charlie Jones.
Yes, maam . . .
The measured voice now complicates
itselftheres iron in itas more and
more it begins to record the slights and
us a view of an inner reality that she
and the daredevil are equally intimate
with. Its as if they had both grown up
It wont go in . . . humiliations and knife thrusts that confined by the accident of skin color
Lorna Simpson
No, maam . . .. . .
1921-2017 And your freedom riding . . .
No, maam . . .. . .
I guess youre not the right
person. . . .
Ariana Mangual
all. Though it has mutated over the cen- If poetry is of no interest to people, its
turies, with the lyric poem becoming in because they were frightened off it in
more recent times the favored mode school and have not bothered to read
of expression, it can still be defined any since, not because poets failed
as language that sounds better and their ideal of poetry.
means more.1 The miracle of poetry Neither do I buy Shelleys lament
is that a three-thousand-year-old poem that the most glorious poetry that
can still speak to us today. If there had has ever been communicated to the
been no continuity of some kind, po- world is probably a feeble shadow of
etry and poets would have been extinct the original conception of the poet,
long ago. which Lerner brings up in support of
That this little-understood and often his theory of the impossibility of po-
marginalized human activity has given etry. Of course, theres some truth to
the world some of the greatest works of it. In Leaving the Atocha Station, his
literature, many of which have outlived young poet agonizes about the incom-
the civilizations and the languages in mensurability of language and experi-
which they were originally composed, ence. Its no news that words fail to
is beyond dispute. Poetry is indeed do justice to what we see or feel; that
something divine, Shelley wrote. we find ourselves struck dumb by too
Hearing an outburst like that, one is li- much beauty or horror. What Lerner
able to conclude that the monkeys who regards as a tragic flaw of poetry is a
came down from the trees cannot live given, the way not being able to make
without poetry, but a cooler head re- a roosters crow heard in a painting is.
minds us, Bread is necessary; poetry Ben Lerner, Sanibel Island, Florida, December 2016 While a feeling of impotence paralyzes
isnt necessary in the way cake isnt anyone who becomes fixated on lan-
necessary. Cake marks important oc- about poetry despite pretending that he attends a poetry reading or when he guage and starts thinking about find-
casions. Still, Molly Peacock goes on they do. When poetry appears mixed teaches a class. What kind of art as- ing the right word not as an aesthetic
to say, Can you imagine living in a city with other, more prosaic elements such sumes, he asks himself, the dislike problem, but as a theological one, its a
without a bakery? Without cake?2 as Shakespeares drama and the prose of its audience and what kind of artist false quandary. Lerner fails to mention
Of course, poets and poetry have had of Pascal and Dostoevsky, or simply as aligns herself with that dislike, even the part that poetic images, metaphors,
enemies. Plato famously condemned the impression of an ordinary sunset, encourages it? An art hated from with- and symbols play in circumventing the
poets propensity to pass off their fan- one trembles as other mortals do. How- out and within, he answers, though he limitations of language.
tasies as truth and banished them from ever, the pharmaceutical extract called doesnt experience it as a contradiction Poems come out of wonder, not out
his ideal Republic. That poets are not pure poetry is a deadly bore. Sugar because poetry and hatred for poetry of knowing, Lucille Clifton once said.
right in the head is a common belief. is good for sweetening coffee, Gom- are inextricable for him. When we sit down to write, we know
Who in their right mind would choose a browicz says, but not for eating by the He quotes Allen Grossmans essay we dont have a guarantee, framed
lifetime of poverty and ridicule? Poets spoonful. The excess of anything wea- on Caedmon, the first English poet and hung over our heads and signed
were accused of perverting morality ries, and so does the excess of poetic whose name we know, an illiterate by every philosopher from Plato to
and corrupting the young, of being language, as well as the sentiment and cowherd who learned the art of song in Derrida, that what we are about to do
blasphemous, unpatriotic, and dirty. It piety that go with it. a dream and awoke as a poet. But the will bear fruit and lead to the truth; we
took extraordinary malice and deter- What Gombrowicz is objecting to, poem he sang upon waking, the legend face a risk and a gamble every poet ei-
mination over the centuries to destroy many readers would agree with. Poetry goes, was not as good as the poem he ther knowingly or unknowingly takes.
nearly every copy of every extant poem is both the most natural and the most sang in his dream. Poetry thus arises American poetry is a kind of do-it-
by Sappho. Even the enlightened eigh- unnatural of arts. Theres undeniably from the desire to get beyond the finite yourself metaphysics. If we have a tra-
teenth century of Hobbes and Locke something contrived about a sonnet and the historicalthe human world of dition in poetryand we doit goes
with their elevation of reason as the or an epic, but to claim that all poems violence and differenceand to reach back to the Transcendentalists and
primary source of authority and legiti- possess this same artificial quality is an the transcendent or divine. . . . Thus their empirical approach to experience,
macy denounced poetry, since a ratio- astonishingly stupid thing to say, espe- the poet is a tragic figure, because a the idea that you eschew abstractions
nal mind finds it intolerable to be in the cially coming from a writer justly ven- poem is always a record of failure. and begin with something concrete,
company of imagination. Metaphor, erated for his intellect. Lerner agrees with Grossman what William Carlos Williams called
the very soul of poetry, was demoted to no ideas but in things. After that, you
a superfluous stylistic ornament. that actual poems are structurally are on your own.
The Romantic movement restored Ben Lerner is an extraordinarily foredoomed by a bitter logic that In order to demonstrate that even
poetry and imagination, but now poets fine writer, the author of three much- cannot be overcome by any level when we read a bad poem we experi-
came to be viewed as either harmless admired collections of poetry and two of virtuosity, [that] only a ruthless ence its radical failure by measuring it
eccentrics or crazed revolutionaries marvelous novels. In his new book, The reading that allows us to measure against an ideal poem, Lerner takes a
Hatred of Poetry, which grew out of an the gap between the actual and close look at The Tay Bridge Disas-
article published by Harpers and from the virtual will enable us to expe- ter by the nineteenth-century Scot-
1
Charles Wright in Quote Poet Un- the speculations on poetry of the poet- rience, if not a genuine poemno tish poet William Topaz McGonagall,
quote: Contemporary Quotations on hero Adam Gordon in Lerners first such thinga place for the genu- widely acclaimed as the worst poet in
Poets and Poetry, edited by Dennis novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, he ine, whatever that might mean. history, and employs Platos so-called
ODriscoll (Copper Canyon, 2008), explores the subject further. He sets the argument from imperfection, which
p. 6. stage by quoting Marianne Moores fa- The bitterness of poetic logic is says that in order to perceive a par-
2
Joyce Wadler, Having Her Cake and mous poem Poetry, in its shortened particularly astringent, Lerner says, ticular thing to be imperfect, we must
Eating Her Couplets, Too, The New 1967 three-line version, and giving an because we were taught at an early have in mind some ideal of perfection;
York Times, April 20, 2000. account of how the poem had been age that we are all poets simply by vir- and we must come to the foregone
April 6, 2017 31
conclusion that it is much harder to for inspection, imaginary gardens could move large numbers of peo- wholeheartedly, and yet some aware-
agree on what constitutes a successful with real toads in them, shall ple in large public settings. ness now and then of the suffering that
poem than it is to agree that were in we have goes on in the world wont hurt a poem.
the presence of an appalling one. Not it. In the meantime, if you Packer seems to be as uninformed Lerners book describes his con-
just McGonagall, but John Keats and demand on the one hand, about the United States as he can be flicted feelings about poetry. It is both
Emily Dickinson, according to Lerner, the raw material of poetry in about the Middle East and the rest a defense of poetry and a defense of
make a place for the genuine by pro- all its rawness and of the world. Poetry readings, with those who hate it. He regards this con-
ducing a negative image of the ideal that which is on the other hand crowds sometimes numbering into tradiction as the dialectic of a vocation
Poem we cannot write in time. genuine, you are interested hundreds, have been a staple of col- no less essential for being impossible. I
in poetry. leges and universities for the last fifty dont think this feeling is as universal
years, with those taking place in New among poets as he believes. What his
Marianne Moore would have lost her Moore is pleased to encounter men- York City listed in the magazine he book lacks is a broader survey of what
patience with this kind of argument. tion of real things in poems, not be- works for. Those attending them do so our poets have thought about poetry.
She knew what she meant by the genu- cause a higher meaning can be imputed eagerly and clearly enjoy themselves, Leaving out the views of every one of
ine and what a poem is and so would to them, but because they recall the de- because they keep coming back. They our major figures, starting with Em-
have Lerner and his readers had he light we experience every time we no- hear a great variety of poets and even erson and going on to the Modernists
quoted the longer version of Poetry tice something we failed and the generations that
Korhan Karaoysal
The Idiot Eliot, Holyoke, Copley Square,
by Elif Batuman. Symphony, Wollaston, Hoosac
Penguin, 423 pp., $27.00 Pier,
Marblehead, Maverick, Fenway
Elif Batuman has generously bestowed Park,
her wit and intelligence and insight on Haymarket, Mattapan, Codman
journalism, and now, even more gen- Yard,
erously, on fiction. The Possessed, her Wonderland, Providence, Beacon
2010 collection of essays subtitled Ad- Hill,
ventures with Russian Books and the Watertown, Reservoir, Mystic
People Who Read Them, is unforget- Mall.
table, perhaps because it is so unpre-
dictable. Part memoir, part literary There is beauty in the world, and
criticism, part travelogue, the essays there are words, too. Selin is searching
echo pleasantly in The Idiot, her first for a connection between them, for the
novel. relationship between language and the
Batuman thanks Dostoevsky in her world. Her first stop on her quest is
acknowledgments, saying, When it Linguistics 101. In class, she is excited
came to titles, and not just titles, what to hear that language is hardwired
writer could ever touch the hem of your into the braininfinite, regenerative,
lofty garment? I have not read Dos- never the same twice, that the high-
toevskys The Idiot since I took it off est law, higher than Holy Scripture, was
the school library shelf thinking it was the intuition of a native speaker. It
a comic novel. Finally, fifty years later, makes sense to her:
I am right. Batumans novel is roaringly
funny. It is also intellectually subtle, Whenever my mother and I were
surprising, and enlightening. It is a talking about a book and I thought
book fueled by deadpan wonder. of something she hadnt thought of,
The Idiot opens on a freshman stu- she would look at me and say admir-
dents first day at Harvard, and perhaps ingly, You really speak English.
you have just sighed and thought, Oh
that again, oh them again, perhaps Ill Elif Batuman, Ko University, Istanbul, May 2011 This lovely aside, both earnest and
just reread Lucky Jim. By all means, ironic, full of affection and insight into
reread Lucky Jim if you are so inclined. Her parents are divorced and her fa- angles in my peripheral vision was Selins mother, a quick and elegant
(I was disappointed when I went back ther, about whom we hear very little, a box of tissues. Unfortunately, they glimpse into their relationship filtered
to it, but you may be luckier.) But be- lives in Maryland. She is smart and were all books. . . . I was thinking through a lens of language theory, is
fore you do, read this book, revel in this hard-working enough to get into Har- about the structural equivalences the kind of thing Batuman does so well.
book, an academic novel that is not only vard, and to recognize Harvards limits between a tissue box and a book: Her subject is often absurdity, her prose
about the absurdity of higher learning and her own. She has never heard of both consisted of slips of white always restrained. Restrained, yet gen-
but is also about the love of learning. Fellini, but her high school beach read- paper in a cardboard case; yet erous to both her characters and her
Batuman has written a romantic com- ing was Camuss The Plague. At one and this was ironicthere was very readers. She sends Selin from theory to
edy about the romance of language, a point, feeling acutely inadequate in a little functional equivalence, espe- theoryphilosophical, linguistic, liter-
metacomic novel of ideas, and an ad- way any of us who has ever been eigh- cially if the book wasnt yours. ary, artistic, mathematicalall of them
venture in grammar. The Idiot is an teen will recognize, Selin thinks of all somehow evoking the complexities of
epic tale of words and the people who the places she has never been and all language. Selin exists in language.
love them and live by them. the things she has never done: T he comic genius of Selin as a char- One of the first things Selin learns
Batumans novel begins in 1995, acter is that she sees absurdity and cre- in Linguistics 101 is all the ways that
when e-mail is still something of a All I had ever done was visit my ates absurdity by how she sees. She is a Noam Chomsky is right and B. F. Skin-
novelty: parents all the timefirst one par- perfect comic creation, and a touching ner is wrong. Language is simply a bio-
ent and then the other, with no one, too: there is no malice in her. This logical faculty, grammar a universal
I didnt know what email was sign of it ever stopping. Worse yet, is an unusual satirical novel in that way. instinct, which means that no one can
until I got to college. I had heard I knew I had no one to blame but Language is the medium and language be bad at it,
of email, and knew that in some myself. If my mother told me not is the comedian, language is the star
sense I would have it. Youll be to do something, I didnt do it. Ev- and the prop, Chaplin and the globe not even toddlers or black people.
so fancy, said my mothers sister, eryones mother told them not to he balances, the hungry fellow and the Thats what the book said: you
who had married a computer sci- do things, but I was the only one shoe he dines on. might think that toddlers and
entist, sending your e, mails. She who listened. Batuman has the comedians gift black people had no grammar, but
emphasized the e and paused be- for understatement, a flawless sense of if you analyzed their utterances,
fore mail. For Selin, trying to accomplish comic timing, and an eye for imagery they were actually following gram-
things is the point of coffee. One that is always curious and never ob- matical rules. . . .
Those are the first lines of the book, of Batumans many literary gifts is her trusive. When Selin puts her coins in
and they set up so much so quietly, so ability, and inclination, to create small, a Coke machine, a can tumbled out The class learns about the Sapir-
amusinglythe narrator, Selin, is not comic bursts of insight into Selins tem- like a body falling down the stairs. Whorf hypothesis, which said that
one of those kids in the avant-garde of perament through observations like When spring finally comes to snowy the language you spoke affected how
popular culture, she is studious and shy, that, particularly about the banalities Cambridge, gray dull snowbanks you processed reality. We learned that
she is embedded in an extended family of student life, even, for example, the began melting to reveal all kinds of it was wrong. And not just wrong,
that feels free to comment on her life, anxious drudgery of placement tests: half-frozen garbage. The air smelled but vile and essentially racist. Selin,
and her aunt speaks with a foreign in- of dirt. You were always tripping over however, is the girl who sees things in
tonation, which Selin finds interesting There was a quantitative reason- dead birds. On a table in a Chinese books her Turkish mother doesnt see.
and whimsical enough to point out, and ing test full of melancholy word restaurant stand bottles of soy sauce In my heart, she confesses, I knew
simultaneously dismisses as annoying. problemsThe graph models the like tiny women. The comedy lurking that Whorf was right. Different lan-
As for e, mails, they become increas- hypothetical mass in grams of a in language and in life informs every guages forced you to think about dif-
ingly important, one of a number of broiler chicken up to eighty weeks aspect of Batumans novel, form and ferent things.
manifestations of language that Batu- of age. subject alike. Humor is not everything
man employs in The Idiot. E-mails will Batuman writes about, but it is every-
indeed make Selin feel fancy; they will Or an interview to get into a freshman where in what she writes. O ne of my favorite parts of The Idiot
make her miserable as well, as she em- seminar when Selin has a horrible cold, Batuman cherishes language, the involves a Turkish verb tense. Batu-
barks on a campus e-mail epistolary the professor droning on about the sounds and sense and nonsense. When man finds in this tense not so much a
romance that is eloquent, emotionally differences between creative and aca- Selin rides the subway into Cam- Whorfian worldview as a novelists
awkward, and suitably pretentious. demic writing. Selin sits before him bridge, she finds herself reorganizing world. Family relationships, hierarchy,
Selin grew up as an only child in New the names of the Boston transit sta- resentment, rivalry, fear, motherly af-
Jersey with her Turkish mother, a rela- nodding energetically and trying to tions into an evocative, almost lyrical fectionmuch is revealed about Selin
tionship that is both deep and relaxed. determine whether any of the rect- sequence: in Batumans discussion of a point of
April 6, 2017 33
Turkish grammar. In Turkish, Batuman a kind of built-in bewilderment, it was sons having to do with declension, has a too, you know. You dont have to
explains, there is a suffix that can be at- automatically funny, she writesan chance after-class encounter with Ivan, wait for me to call.
tached to verbs that changes the mean- uncanny description of her own style. a mathematician from Hungary. It is Okay, I said sadly: so he wasnt
ing of the tense. If you add the suffix -mi Selins discomfort with and pleasure a classic romantic meetinggirl drops going to call me.
to a verb, it means you did not yourself in the -mi tense also helps us to un- glove, boy picks up glove, gives glove
see or experience what you are relating. derstand the romance on which she is backtransformed into charming Batu- And college life goes on. Selins best
The suffix is a way of indicating in- about to embark. It begins in her Rus- man farce: Sonya! It was Ivan, extend- friend Svetlana teaches her to play
direct knowledge or hearsay, as if you sian class. The class is reading a primer, ing a floppy blue slipper. You dropped squash, to which her response is, The
added it seems or I heard or ap- Nina in Siberia, each chapter unfolding it. The slipper is one of her hideous blue rubber ball was so small, so fast
parently to whatever you are saying. with only the grammar theyve learned new ski gloves. She and Ivan are often and crazy. To think this world was too
Selin experiences it as an accusatory by that point, eccentric wooden ex- paired up in class for conversations deterministic for some people! There
or tattletale tense. When you heard amples of which Batuman generously in Russian based on their readings in is a series of disastrous attempts by
-mi , you knew that you had been in- shares throughout the novel. In an early Nina in Siberia, a tale that is not going Selin to teach English as a second lan-
voked in your absencenot just you chapter, the absence of grammatical so well for Nina. Ivan the Hungarian guage. She runs along the river and eats
but your hypocrisy, cowardice, and lack possibilitiesno dative case, no verbs of mathematics student, playing the part in the dining hall and wins a prize for a
of generosity. She associates it primar- motionis tellingly appealing to Selin: of Ivan the Russian physics student who story she wrote. Through it all, there is
ily with a cousin. You complained-mi ran off to Novosibirsk, has something the mystery of Ivan, of what he wants,
to your mother, the cousin would say. The story had a stilted feel, and yet he must tell Nina, played by Selin: what she wants, what either of them is
Or The dog scared-mi you. When- while you were reading you felt to- willing to say or do.
ever Selin hears -mi , she feels caught tally inside its world, a world where Well, he said. He looked at the For the summer, Selin plans to go to
out. The dog did scare her. She did com- reality mirrored the grammar floor and then looked at me. Lines Paris with Svetlana and then join her
plain to her mother. The -mi tense constraints, and what Slavic 101 appeared on his forehead. I have mother in Turkey. At Ivans sugges-
was one of the things I complained to couldnt name didnt exist. There a wife, he said. And its not you. tion, she adds a detour to her journey.
my mother about. was no went or sent, no inten- I knew it wasnt realI knew She joins a group of students who are
She later writes a research paper on tion or causalityjust unexplained it was just a story. But my stom- to be implanted in Hungarian villages
-mi and begins to feel something like appearances and disappearances. ach sank, my breath caught in my in order to spread American culture.
affection for it and its nuanced facility. throat, a wave of nausea rose in my He is staying in Budapest, and the
She learns that it is called the eviden- Poor Nina goes to Siberia to find her chest. implication is that she will see him on
tiary or inferential tense and that it is boyfriend, Ivan, a student of physics weekends, though by the time Selin
often used in speaking to children, as in who sneaks off to the collective rein- Spurned by a fictional character, Selin leaves for Paris, she has stopped an-
What seems to have happened to the deer research farm, Siberian Spark, in has fallen in love. swering his e-mails. Selin believes that
doll? The suffix, three simple letters, Novosibirsk, leaving only a mysterious language, like math, is a self-sufficient
allowed the speaker to assume the won- farewell letter. As The Idiot proceeds, system, but it is clearly insufficient for
der and ignorance that children live in. Nina in Siberia becomes a more and C hecking her e-mail one day and find- a girl in love. Especially with someone
Batumans attention to a Turkish suf- more random, bizarre mirror of Selins ing only a request to chip in two dollars who already has a girlfriend.
fix is not an aimless diversion, although own relationship with a senior in her for someones birthday cake, Selin im- Selin in Paris is not too different
it is diverting. Aside from their sheer Russian class who is also named Ivan. pulsively writes an e-mail to Ivan. Her from Selin in Cambridgefunny, in-
grammar-groupie pleasure, these pas- Her wistful gratitude to the textbooks letter is a play on the fictitious Ivans nocent, world-weary. What she sees is
sages simultaneously demonstrate and grammatical restraints prepares us, if letter to Nina. When Ivan receives it, new, but in some ways everything she
describe what Batuman is doing. She not her, for the confused, passive deter- she writes, she will be in Siberia. She sees every day is new to Selin. Svetlana
has, first of all, created a character who mination of her first love. is quitting school because questions of and her family, extremely rich Serbs,
herself lives in wonder and ignorance. The romance begins when Selin, who articulatory phonetics no longer inter- some of whom live in Paris, are an aw-
In addition, the evidentiary -mi has is called Sonya in Russian class for rea- est her: fully entertaining crew:
I will live and work in Novosibirsk The boy who convinced you to go
on the collective farm Siberian to Hungary, he must be very hand-
Peplum may be Blutchs masterpiece: a grand, strange Spark. I know that you will under- some, Svetlanas aunt Bojana
dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a stand me and that it will be better told me. You can find an excel-
gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful this way. I will never forget you. lent coffee in Budapest. I see that
woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still
Yours, you are looking at my tea tray. Do
be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name
Selin (Sonya) you like it? Its quite a good tray. I
and with the frozen maiden in tow, makes his way
will make it a gift to you. But not
toward Romeseeking power, or maybe just survival,
as the world unravels.
And so, cloaked in the flat intona- nowonly when you get married.
tions of a nonsensical Russian primer,
Famous in his native France and nearly unknown here, an epistolary flirtation begins. Ivan In the Louvre, Svetlana finds herself
the cartoonist who goes by Blutch (real name: Christian writes back a day later to tell her that strongly identifying with a tiny medi-
Hincker) has a magnificently expressive line, so bold he had a dream she would cheat on him eval Madonna confronting a silver
and ragged that it often looks as if hes snapped his with his future girlfriends ex-boyfriend whale, apparently indoors, but Selin
brush in half and is mashing its splintered end into the and can she please tell him the plot of a identifies with none of the women in
drawing board. Russian soap opera they are supposed the paintings. When she finally does
PEPLUM Douglas Wolk, The New York Times Book Review to have been watching all semester. He find something in a painting she identi-
Blutch does, in fact, have a girlfriend, but the fies with, it is a sideboard.
Translated from the French EVENTS WITH BLUTCH correspondence continues. Ivan begins And then theres Hungary. Ivan has
and with an introduction Saturday, April 1st, 2pm writing letters about fate and freedom. given her a phrasebook, Just Enough
by Edward Gauvin MoCCA Arts Festival He seemed really worried about the Hungarian:
Ink48 Hotel, 653 11th Avenue at 48th Street possibility that we might not have free
In conversation with David Mazzucchelli will. Lucretius and quantum theory The toilet is blocked. The gas is
Wednesday, April 5th, 7pm came into it. Selin finds the idea that leaking. The boiler is not work-
Blutchs art is truly exquisite, Albertine free will might indeed have limits to be ing. I have a toothache. I have bro-
rendering battles, orgies 972 Fifth Avenue at 79th Street a relief. Ivan, though, writes, I am on ken my dentures. I have lost (my
and conversations in dense, In conversation with Richard McGuire and the boundary of being a scientist, and contact lenses, a filling, my bag,
inky lines akin to Mattotti, but so far the only scientific explanation for my car keys, my car, everything).
Dan Piepenbring
completely his own and com-
Thursday, April 6th, 6pm free will is that it is an illusion. I dont Someone has stolen (my car, my
pletely haunting . . . . The book
requires rereading to grasp Maison Franaise at Columbia University like that. passport, my money, my tickets,
the scope of storytelling and 515 W 116th Street, Buell Hall, 2nd Floor As the year progresses, the intensely my wallet, everything). . . . Dont
linework, which is effortless Masters of the Graphic Novel: Blutch and Burns desultory relationship continues with hang up. Theres a delay. Im sorry
enough to make the greatest In conversation with Charles Burns and e-mail and the occasional awkward, Im late. I dont understand you. I
American cartoonists jealous. Franoise Mouly though rather sweet, meeting. Selin is think this is wrong. No, not that.
Publishers Weekly
Events are co-sponsored by NYR Comics and Europe Comics.
so tuned in to every shade of meaning Thats enough, thank you. I wont
when they meet that she misinterprets take it, thank you. Please stop.
what Ivan says with startling precision:
New York Review Comics will be at Table F 202 Selin does not encounter the many ca-
in the exhibit hall of the MoCCA Arts Festival,
See you later, I said. lamities anticipated by Just Enough
April 1st and 2nd, 11am 6pm,
Metropolitan West, 639 W 46th Street. Yeah, eventually, he said. Hungarian during her stay, but emo-
Stop by and have a look at our new books. You notice were not very good at tional misadventure does await her
Available in bookstores, call Tickets to the MoCCA Arts Festival are $5 per day. getting in touch. there. Luckily, she is very young, and
(646) 215-2500, or visit www.nyrb.com Well get better, I said. ahead of her lies a lifetime of words and
He frowned. You can call me, all the worlds they bring with them.
S.Y. Agnon (18881970), who was tive leitmotifs. The dreamlike surreal-
awarded the Nobel Prize for Litera- ist stories Agnon began to write in the
ture in 1966, is the one modern master 1930s are in some ways reminiscent of
among writers of Hebrew fiction. Jef- Kafka, though in one interview he ve-
frey Saks has undertaken a heroic task hemently denied any connection, say-
in assembling the Agnon Library, using ing that he had only one or two books
existing translations, which generally by Kafka on his shelves and that the
have been revised, and commissioning main thing for him as a writer was what
English versions of previously untrans- the Holy One inspired in his heart.
lated books. It is not quite a complete With characteristic slyness, he added
works because some books could not that his wife, on the other hand, owned
be included for reasons of copyright Kafkas collected works.
or on other grounds. The most unfor- In a 1916 letter to Salman Schocken,
tunate omission is Agnons modernist the department store magnate and,
masterpiece, Only Yesterday (1945), a later, publisher who became his pa-
wrenching and richly inventive novel tron, he expressed his profound admi-
about a naive young Zionists failed at- ration for Flaubert, whom he would
tempt to take root in the land, which have read in German translation. This
unfolds in Jaffa and Jerusalem in the was a writer, he said, who mortified
early years of the twentieth century. himself in the tent of art, pointedly
Agnon House
Shmuel Yosef Agnon (his original substituting art for Torah in a well-
family name was Czaczkes) was born known rabbinic idiom. Flaubert was his
in Buczacz, a town of about 15,000, model for the painstaking devotion to
over half of whom were Jews, that at the writers craftAgnon assiduously
one time belonged to Poland, was part revised much of his work, and in the
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from years immediately after World War I
the late eighteenth century until the end he transformed some of the effusive
of World War I, and is now in western stories of his first decade of writing into
Ukraine. In an Orthodox home, under beautifully disciplined prose. I suspect
the supervision of his learned father, that he also learned from Flaubert the
he was given a thorough education in narrative technique of free indirect
the classic Jewish texts, from the Bible discourse, in which a character speaks
with its medieval Hebrew exegetes to through the voice of the narrator, which
the Talmud, and he would draw on this he frequently used as an instrument of
background extensively throughout psychological characterization.
his career. But his family also engaged Despite all this, Agnon often wrote
a German tutor for him, and he read as a traditional teller of Hebrew tales
Goethe, Schiller, and other German for whom the corpus of European liter-
writers with his mother. The adolescent ature was remote. In one of his stories
Agnon was drawn to Zionism, a move- he refers to Homer, the master [rav] of
ment then less than ten years old, and the poets of the Gentiles, using pay-
in 1908, when he was nineteen, he im- tan as the word for poet, a term that
migrated to Palestine. usually designates a composer of litur-
Like most of the young Zionists of S. Y. Agnon, 1908 gical verse. The stylistic pretense here
that era, he proceeded to abandon the is that Homer belongs to an unfamil-
religious practice of his childhood. The iar realm, though in Agnons haunting
Hebrew stories he began to publish in THE TOBY PRESS S.Y. AGNON LIBRARY novella Betrothed he has an important
Palestine quickly attracted attention, EDITED BY JEFFREY SAKS part in the protagonists fateful pas-
the first being Agunot (Abandoned sion for the sea and the Mediterranean
Women), a story of unhappy lovers The Orange Peel A Simple Story world of origins. Scholem, in an inter-
written as if it were a folktale, from and Other Satires translated from the Hebrew view on Israeli television a few years
which he took his rather somber new translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. after Agnons death, was asked by
name. by Jeffrey Saks. 259 pp., $16.95 (paper) the critic Dan Miron what he made of
In 1913, for reasons that remain ob- 177 pp., $16.95 (paper) Agnons Orthodoxy. Scholem shrewdly
scure, he moved to Germany. Whether responded that for Agnon art was the
or not he intended a long stay, he was Two Scholars Who Were crucial consideration and that he was
The Bridal Canopy in Our Town and Other Novellas
caught there by World War I, and he translated from the Hebrew religious because it served his purposes
did not return to Palestine until 1924, translated from the Hebrew as an artist.
by I. M. Lask. by Paul Pinchas Bashan and others.
married and with two children. He 444 pp., $19.95 (paper) His religious identity is clearly insep-
settled permanently in Jerusalem and 288 pp., $16.95 (paper) arable from the unique path he chose as
returned to Orthodox observance. He A Guest for the Night a Hebrew stylist, and that in turn poses
appears to have used his German years translated from the Hebrew From Foe to Friend a constant challenge for translating his
to immerse himself in European culture by Misha Louvish. and Other Stories work. My language, he writes, is a
while continuing to write Hebrew fic- 531 pp., $16.95 with illustrations by Shay Charka. simple language, the language of all the
tion. He also did some teaching at Franz 48 pp., $19.95 generations that preceded and of all
Rosenzweigs Frankfurt Lehrhaus, col- To This Day the generations to come. His Hebrew
laborated with Martin Buber in collect- translated from the Hebrew Shira is essentially the Hebrew of the early
ing Hasidic tales, and began a lifelong by Hillel Halkin. translated from the Hebrew rabbis, which means the Hebrew of the
friendship with Gershom Scholem, the 186 pp., $24.95; $14.95 (paper) by Zeva Shapiro. Mishnah and the Midrash compiled
great historian of Jewish mysticism. 811 pp., $19.95 early in the Common Era, with at some
A Book That Was Lost:
moments a trace of Yiddish inflections
Thirty-Five Stories
In Mr. Lublins Store and occasional limited concessions to
Agnon is in some respects an anoma- translated from the Hebrew
by Amiel Gurt and others. translated from the Hebrew the modern language. His hyperbolic
lous modernist. Early on, he had an by Glenda Abramson. invocation of the language of all the
600 pp., $14.95 (paper)
affinity for European gothic writers, 281 pp., $24.95 generations reflects his classicizing
and gothic motifs such as the Dance of Two Tales: bent: for him, rabbinic Hebrew is as liv-
Death, ghostly brides, and revenants Betrothed and Edo and Enam A City in Its Fullness ing and subtly expressive a vehicle as it
occur in many of his stories. He might, translated from the Hebrew edited by Alan Mintz was eighteen hundred years ago, and by
one conjectures, have been drawn to by Walter Lever. and Jeffrey Saks. using it he means his works to be simi-
Thomas Manns recurrent theme of the 171 pp., $16.95 (paper) 617 pp., $29.95 larly long-lasting.
conflict between eros and the calling of It is scarcely the language of the
the artist and to Manns use of narra- most recent generation of Hebrew
April 6, 2017 35
speakers. When I taught a graduate Every detail is taken out of its nar- rather like a nineteenth-century Euro- cent, has abandoned his Talmud studies
seminar on Agnons novellas at Berke- rative chain and observed close up; pean novel. By this time, Agnon had to go wandering every day in the for-
ley a few years ago, several of the stu- it does not lose the readers inter- already begun writing experimental est outside his town, presumably Buc-
dents were young Israelis with whom est, for it belongs to one total uni- fiction, but his major modernist novels zacz. He takes with him a copy of the
I had to spend some time in class ex- verse, which endows each detail and novellas still lay ahead. Hebrew Bible but informs us that he is
plaining rabbinic terms and idioms and with rich meaning and depth. reading the Prophets and the Writings,
identifying the allusions to biblical and possible sources of poems and stories,
later texts. Agnons Hebrew, of course, Harshav links this kind of discourse R eaders who make their way through and not the Torah, the compendium of
is wonderfully apt for all the stories and with traditional methods of Talmud Jeffrey Sakss series will see that Agnon laws and the primary point of depar-
novellas that use the device of a tradi- study as they have been folklorized is often deeply immersed in the ances- ture for the Talmud. He is the artist as
tional teller of taleswho often proves in Yiddish-speaking culture, and he tral world of piety. He sincerely loved a young man.
to be ironic or subversive beneath the fi nds its aftermath in the writings of the sacred books that were its founda- There is an obvious antithesis be-
mask of tradition. In the novels and Freud, Kafka, Saul Bellow, and others. tion, and he shows genuine reverence tween the town, where people con-
stories that deal with people in modern In some cases, Agnon uses such for his forebears devotion to God and stantly worry about making a living,
settings, the prose often has the effect episodic discourse to good artistic ef- Torah. Nevertheless, the pious impulse and the forest, which is represented as
of generating pervasive ironies because fect, as in A Guest for the Night, which in his writing is not always what meets both edenic and wild. (The use of op-
of the cultivated discrepancy between doesnt have much of a plot but never- the eye, and it is well to keep in mind posites is also suggested in the Hebrew
the Late Antique coloration of the He- theless creates a powerful portrayal of Scholems observation that the religios- words for forest and town, which
brew and the world of the characters, the devastation wreaked by World War are anagrams of each other.) In this
often characterized by secular values, I on the narrators hometown, to which S. Y. Agnon forest, however, there lurks an escaped
the ambiguities of sexual freedom, and he has come from Jerusalem for an ex- multiple murderer called Franciszek.
the ravages of modern war. tended stay and where he finds a world That the killer bears the same name as
of maimed bodies and people with the the gentle saint who spoke to the birds
bleakest prospect for any collective is one of several reversals of received
In view of the distinctive charm and future. He calls the town, here and notions in the story.
force and the literary echoes of this elsewhere, Szybusz, an obvious sub- The narrators parents are, of course,
writing, I sometimes have suspected stitute for Buczacz, which sounds like alarmed that their son should insist on
that Agnon may be one of those writ- a Polish name but in Hebrew means continuing his visits to a dangerous
ers, like Pushkin, who are absolutely breakdown or distortion. In other place, but he is not in the least fright-
brilliant in the original and dont come instances, the cultivation of Jewish dis- ened by the prospect of encountering
across very well in translation. But this course seems a little self-indulgent and the murderer, which as readers we sense
could not be altogether true. Walter can be annoying to the reader, as in his will occur. First, however, he meets an
Benjamin, reading Agnon in the Ger- posthumously published novel, In Mr. enigmatic old man who decides to tell
man translations of his early work in Lublins Store, set in Leipzig during himtheir conversation would have
the 1920s, was convinced that he was World War I. to be in Polishwhat happens in the
a great writer. Edmund Wilson, the Much of his longer fiction, however, initial chapters of Genesis, concluding
fi rst American critic to draw attention follows the patterns of the European with Abel rose up and killed Cain. Of
to him, came to the same conclusion in art novel, as do his exquisitely wrought course, Cain could have killed Abel,
an essay for The New Yorker in the late novellasAnd the Crooked Shall Be ity ultimately served Agnons aims as but he who must die, dies. The narra-
1950s. Made Straight (admired by Walter an artist. tor makes no comment on this startling
The many translators Jeffrey Saks Benjamin), Hill of Sand, In the Prime A case in point is the large cycle of switch of killer and victim, though it
has gathered for his series by and of Her Life, Betrothed, and Edo and stories A City in Its Fullness, edited by will be recalled at the end of the story.
large respond creditably to the chal- Enam. The most striking example of Agnons daughter after his death. The
lenge, though there is, understand- Agnon as a European writer is the stories, some folkloric, many realistic,
ably, some unevenness. Even a single novel A Simple Story (1935), set in Szy- all take place in a Buczacz of centuries When the narrator fi nally comes
ill- considered word-choice can throw busz at the beginning of the twentieth past. Agnon wrote them relatively late upon Franciszek, the two speak ami-
a translation out of kilter. In one story, century. Like many of Agnons sto- in life, brooding over the fate of his cably, and the escaped murderer offers
when a ragged stranger appears at a ries and novels, it is a tale of doomed hometown, where almost the entire the young man a swig of schnapps from
synagogue in Buczacz, we realize be- love. Hirshl, the passive protagonist, is Jewish population was slaughtered on the flask fastened to his belt. The nar-
fore long that he must be the Elijah of hopelessly in love with his poor cousin a single day by the Nazis. Though the rator accepts, but before he drinks, be-
Jewish folklore. Again and again in this Bluma Nachtnight flower in both stories are from time to time punctu- cause he is, after all, an observant Jew,
English version, he is called the va- German and Yiddishwho has come ated by angry denunciations of the kill- he pronounces in Hebrew the requisite
grant, but the Hebrew heilekh means to work as a servant in his parents ers, one must agree with the American blessing, which ends with the words
no such thing. A heilekh is a wayfarer, a house. As prosperous bourgeois shop- scholar Alan Mintz that for Agnon the for everything comes about through
traveler on foot, with none of the nega- keepers, however, the parents arrange truest response to the Holocaust is to His word. Franciszek asks him to
tive connotations of vagrancy, which a marriage for him with the daughter of create literarily the fullness of Jewish translate and then has him repeat the
would scarcely suit the harbinger of an affluent farmer. After the wedding, life before that dark shadow was cast. words in Hebrew, shehakol nihyeh bid-
the messiah. Elsewhere, translations Hirshls obsession with Bluma contin- Several of the early stories in the cycle varo. He ponders what the young man
are at points marred by errors in Eng- ues to grow and his mind deteriorates are virtually hagiographic, celebrating has told him the words mean, repeat-
lish idiom or grammar (even like for until he has a psychotic breakdown, prodigies of devotion to Torah scholar- edly muttering, Maybe its so. Then
as, or who for whom.) This is brilliantly rendered by Agnon. In the ship and to the scrupulous observance he tries to parrot the Hebrew, man-
unfortunate because Agnons Hebrew end, he returns to sanity and reconciles of all the minute details of rabbinic law. aging only a mangled version of the
is meticulously correct and exhibits with the wife his parents have chosen As the book progresses, however, fi rst wordtchokl. The narrator goes
perfect pitch in the rabbinic idiomatic for him, but it is a reconciliation suf- we begin to encounter shocking tales home, careful to reveal nothing of his
usage it has adopted. These are, how- fused with bitter irony, for it entails of vindictiveness, greed, gluttony, and meeting in the forest.
ever, no more than small flaws. succumbing to their world of coin- the heartless exploitation of the help- After a time, Franciszek is captured
The anomaly of Agnon as a modern- counting, social conventionality, and less poor. Even a story that ostensibly and subsequently led out for a public
ist is manifested in the two quite dif- complacent materialism. extols an extreme act of piety, about execution with much of the towns pop-
ferent aspects of his fiction. Many of A Simple Story is the most Flauber- a man who dies of hunger in the for- ulation present. The townspeople show
the novels and stories with a modern tian of Agnons novels, and in keeping est, though he has food, because he mixed feelings toward the condemned
setting have a mastery of form that with its French model, it is the most refuses to eat in the absence of water man, some wanting to see him killed,
shows Agnon as a peer of Mann, Her- perfectly constructed. He often draws for the ritual washing of hands, makes others fi nding themselves strangely
mann Broch, and modernists such as on Flauberts technique of free indi- piety look like craziness. A City in Its sympathetic toward him. But since
Faulkner and Joyce whom he may or rect discourse to represent Hirshls Fullness, at fi rst glance a loving com- mans imagination, the narrator stra-
may not have read. (When I visited him consciousness and his habitual fail- memoration of the ancestors whose tegically remarks, cannot match the
as a student at his home in 1960, there ure to recognize the real nature of his descendants were murdered, turns out attribute of cruelty he possesses, they
was a copy on his desk of A Portrait of own desires. Also Flaubertian is the to have a subversive undercurrent, as in accepted despite themselves the ver-
the Artist as a Young Man, just then reiteration of motifsroosters, geese, much of Agnon. As an artist he was too dict of the judges. The narrator ends
translated into Hebrew.) But there are cigarettes, coins, and much elsethat deeply committed to an unblinking vi- up standing close to the gallows, and
also works, including one important have their own fraught presence and sion of things as they are to sustain an as the noose is about to tighten around
novel, A Guest for a Night (1941), that help pull the novel tightly together. aura of reverence. Franciszeks neck, he is heard to utter
seem loosely associative, anecdotal, ep- And Agnon surely would have sympa- In the Forest and in the Town, a a single word, tchokl. The other by-
isodic. In texts written by some writers thized with Flauberts animus against story fi rst published in 1938 and not standers are perplexed, but the narra-
of the Jewish Diaspora, the critic Ben- the bourgeoisie. All the bourgeois fig- yet included in the Agnon Library (it tor thinks he understands: when the
jamin Harshav writes, ures in the novel are Jews, but they are should be translated in one of the two killer fi rst heard the declaration for
also preeminently European, and this remaining volumes), offers an instruc- all comes about through His word,
each detailed observation is is a thoroughly European novel. Writ- tive clue to Agnons larger enterprise. he wondered whether it was true; now,
treated for its autonomous value. ten between the two world wars, it feels The fi rst-person narrator, an adoles- at the moment of death, he accepts his
April 6, 2017 37
and federal employment taxes for her Puzder told The Riverfront Times that its request that she turn over all epi-
until after his nomination. there was no physical abuse at any sodes on domestic violence that shed
Similar problems concerning domes- point in time. Both Puzder and Fier- aired between 1985 and 1990. (There
tic help previously derailed the nomi- stein acknowledged that police were turned out to be twenty.) The com-
SUMMER IS AROUND nations of Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood called to the house. mittee was able to identify Fierstein
THE CORNER for attorney general during the Clinton The documents cited in the River- because only one episode featured a
administration and the nomination of front Times article were sealed the day woman named Ann in wig and sun-
Linda Chavez for labor secretary dur- after Puzders nomination. But Mari- glasses. But Winfrey made it a condi-
ing the administration of George W. anne LeVine, a reporter at Politico, tion of providing the tapes that only
Bush. But the view in the transition, retrieved from the St. Louis County senatorsnot even committee staff-
SUNGLASSES FOR an unidentified Trump official assured court some documents from a separate erscould review the episode.
BABIES & TODDLERS The Huffington Posts Grim, was that filing in 1988 that Puzder appeared to Word got out only three days before
Sunglasses are essential in keeping eyes safe disqualifying a candidate based on the have overlooked. (The couple divorced Puzders hearing was to take place
from UV damage, and these provide 100% household help was very much the old in 1987.) These included a petition in that HELP Committee senators were
UVA and UVB protection. Made of flexi- model. The new model was to sigh re- which Fierstein alleged that in the 1986 reviewing the video. The March 1990
ble rubber frames and impact- and shatter- gretfully and confirm. Wilbur Rosss episode Puzder assaulted and bat- date of the episode (High Class Bat-
resistant lenses that wont break when you firing of an undocumented house- tered her, leaving her with two rup- tered Women) quickly leaked, and
bend, twist, or step on them. The soft mate- keeper after he was nominated to lead tured discs and two bulging discs. LeVine learned that another guest on
rial is comfortable and lightweight. They are Trumps Commerce Department did the show was Charlotte Fedders, a well-
designed to fit kids faces and dont pinch not impede his Senate confirmation, All of the muscles, bones, liga- known victim of domestic violence
the temples or nose. Color: Blue and the Senate confirmed White House ments and soft tissue of the face, whose husband, John, had abruptly lost
#05-BAB02 Babies Budget Director Mick Mulvaney after chest, back, shoulders, and neck his job as enforcement chief in Presi-
(t most 6 months to 3 years) $24.95 he admitted to not paying $15,000 in were violently wrenched, strained, dent Ronald Reagans Securities and
#05-BAB06 Toddlers employment taxes on a nanny. swollen, contused and otherwise Exchange Commission after The Wall
(t most 3 to 7 years) $24.95 Yet on February 15, when Puzder injured. Street Journal reported he was a wife-
abruptly lost a crucial half- dozen Re- beater. 3 Charlotte Fedders had kept a
publican votes, the decisive cause, we Puzder again denied assaulting Fier- VHS tape of the episode and quickly
were asked to believe, was Puzders stein. The court denied her request for agreed to share it. On the program,
cleaning lady. The Washington Post $350,000 in damages on the grounds Fierstein said that when she went pub-
explained, It was Puzders hiring of that the divorce agreement signed the lic with her charges of abuse Puzder
BIFOCAL SUN READERS an undocumented worker for domestic year before had settled all her previous said to her, I will see you in the gutter.
Unisex bifocal sun readers are great when workas well as his support for more claims against Puzder. This will never be over. You will pay
you want to have the power to look down liberalized immigration policiesthat for this. It was, of course, impossible
and read and then look up and see clearly pushed several Senate Republicans to know whether Fierstein was lying.
through the top of the lens into the distance.
Optimal 400 UV Sun Protection. Comes
away. Puzder, as chairman of a corpo- F iersteins first retraction of the as- But she did not seem, on the tape, to
ration heavily dependent on low-wage sault claims, LeVine discovered, be obviously mendacious or unhinged.
with a soft pouch that can also clean your immigrant labor, did support a path to turned out to be a condition of a 1990 Politico posted its story, with video
glasses! citizenship for undocumented workers, child- custody agreement with Puzder. snippets and a transcript of Fiersteins
$19.95 each in colors:
as Trump does not. But if that were the Fiersteins subsequent insistence that comments, at 1:00 AM on February
Black (shown) or Chestnut
problem, why would Trump nominate, her abuse claims against him had been 15.4 By lunchtime CNN was report-
the very next day, a substitute whose a mere ruse to leverage a better divorce ing that there were four to twelve firm
views on immigration were even more settlement wasnt easy to square with Republican no votes (the day before
liberal? And why would Puzders house- the fact that she had first filed them there had been only Republican un-
keeper problem suddenly loom so large before the couple even separated. Nor decideds) and that Senate GOP lead-
SUN GELS READING GLASSES when Rosss and Mulvaneysand Puz- was it a good fit with LeVines discov- ers were advising the White House to
Scojo Gels sun readers offer 100% UV ders, just one day earlierhad not? ery that, eight months before the child- pull the nomination. Within a couple of
protection and are made out of strong yet custody agreement, Fierstein repeated hours, Puzder withdrew.
flexible Swiss TR90 surgical grade plastic. her accusations disguised in sunglasses Twelve days later, the conservative
They are the ultimate in lightweight com- T he actual cause for Puzders loss of and a wig and using the pseudonym talk radio host Hugh Hewitt invited
fort. A plastic case is included. support was a matter few felt like dis- Ann on an episode of The Oprah Win- Puzder on his show to commiserate
$46 each in colors: Tortoise Sun (shown) cussing: allegations made three decades frey Show. If Fierstein didnt identify about his defeat. Puzder said he was
and Midnight/Black Sun ago by his first wife, Lisa Fierstein herself on Oprah, how could her accusa- the victim of a fake news tsunami.
and subsequently retractedthat Puz- tions possibly affect any legal proceed- He didnt say what that news was, and
GEL RETAINERS der had assaulted her physically in their ing? (I should here disclose that I was Hewitt was too much of a gentleman to
Made of stretchy plastic, these 24" holders are home in Clayton, Missouri, an affluent LeVines editor on these stories, and ask.
a perfectly subtle yet fashionable St. Louis suburb. Fierstein has main- once or twice shared a byline with her.) Since Puzder withdrew, some liberal
addition to your eyewear. tained since 1990 that those abuse al- After LeVine reported the fact of Washington policymakers and journal-
Secure, adjustable loops hold legations in the 1980s were lies that she Fiersteins Oprah appearance, Fier- ists have expressed regret that he was
the arms of your glasses. was persuaded to tell by an unscrupu- stein explained in a letter to the Sen- brought down by allegations aired in a
$6 each in colors: lous divorce attorney in order to get a ate Health, Education, Labor, and messy divorce rather than by his views
Midnight (shown), better divorce settlement. Pensions Committee, then considering about American workers. The implica-
Brown, Red, and Crystal But a July 1989 story in The River- Puzders nomination, that shed been tion is that plausible past allegations of
front Times, a weekly newspaper in St. invited onto Oprahs program after the domestic violence dont warrant seri-
Louis, told a different story.2 Citing Riverfront Times story appeared. I ous consideration in assessing a mans
documents filed in St. Louis County was hesitant but encouraged by friends fitness for public office. It perhaps is
Circuit Court in 1986, The River- and became caught up in the notion not coincidental that none of those
front Times said Fierstein alleged that of a free trip to Chicago and being a who have voiced this complaint was a
Puzder champion of women and womens is- woman.
sues, she wrote. I regret my decision March 9, 2017
attacked me, choked me, threw to appear on that show. I never told
me to the floor, hit me in the head Andy about it.
pushed his knee into my chest The obvious next step, for both the 3
Brooks Jackson, Storm Center: John
twisted my arm and dragged me on HELP Committee and the press, was to Fedders of SEC Is Pummeled by Legal
SAND CONSTRUCTION TOYS the floor, threw me against a wall, locate the 1990 Oprah episode and find and Personal Problems, The Wall Street
For the beach, the backyard, the garden, or Journal, February 25, 1985. The article
tried to stop my call to 911 and out what shed said. This proved sur-
just pretend, these sturdy and functional caused a sensation, prompting Char-
kicked me in the back. prisingly difficult. The Oprah Winfrey
toys go way beyond the basic shovel and lotte Fedders to publish a 1987 memoir
Network, which controlled the video
bucket. Weve assembled an unusual set of about the experience titled Shattered
Puzders version, the paper said, was library, put off all press inquiries. (Two
eight building tools (driller, grabber, digger, Dreams. A TV adaptation aired on CBS
brick mold, two trowels, and two castle wall that he had merely grabbed her by intimates of Winfreys later explained in May 1990. The theme of all three was
molds) for your busy construction worker the shoulders and pushed her back to me that angry cattlemen had filed that domestic abuse was not confined to
or future architect thats as fun for teens and to keep her from hurting herself: I an $11 million libel suit against her in lower-income familiesthere were rich
adults as it is for toddlers. Ages 2 and up. dont know if her foot caught or what 1996 over something shed said on her men who beat their wives too, and they
To US addresses only. happened, but she went down on her show about hamburgers. Shed won this were much better able to keep it from
#05-TTCS5 $54.95 back and stayed down on the ground. screwball lawsuit, but resolved never being discovered.
Prices above do not include shipping and handling. again to make available any past episode 4
Marianne LeVine and Timothy Noah,
2
Gianna Jacobson and J. A. Lobbia, deemed even remotely controversial.) Puzders Ex-Wife Told Oprah He
TO ORDER, call 646-215-2500, or shop
online at www.readerscatalog.com Puzder v. Puzder, The Riverfront Winfrey was more responsive to the Threatened You Will Pay for This,
Times, July 26, 1989. HELP Committee, agreeing quietly to Politico, February 15, 2017.
April 6, 2017 39
again and again because it is the nearest clearly defined attributes. Their inhab- fact half-fallen angels who had been
A COLLECTION OF WITTY thing to an account of Celtic religion itants are closer to superstars and su- expelled from heaven for being neutral
AND PROVOCATIVE ESSAYS and in it Caesar tells us that the chief permodels than to the classical gods: in the conflict between God and Satan
BY ROGER SCRUTON god of the Gauls is Mercury, and that as Williams puts it they physically but, being not quite bad enough for
after him come Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, resemble usor would, were we all hell, had been allowed to land in Ire-
and Minerva. It is like a contemporary gorgeous, splendidly dressed young land instead. Or, in a particularly dar-
American going through a gallery of adults in glowing health. These god- ing variation on this theme, perhaps
medieval portraits and telling us that peoples are close enough to mere mor- they were in fact good angels who had
they look like Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, tals that they can fall in love with and come to Ireland to help its people be-
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Taylor Swift, marry each otherthough usually with fore the arrival of Christianity.
and Donald Trump. We have some idea unhappy consequences. In medieval The point about these possibilities is
of what he is seeing but not much idea Gaelic literature, these exquisite deities that they continued to exist simultane-
of what he is looking at. In any case, we acquired the collective name Tatha ously, sometimes within the same story.
simply do not know whether the Irish D, the god-peoples, which later mu- The old gods have a hovering, waver-
gods were precisely the same as those tated into the form now in general use, ing kind of existence. For ordinary
worshiped by the Gauls.2 Tatha D Danann. 3 Irish people, they may have retained
It seems clear enough that one of the By the time of the influential pseudo- a vivid presence in oral tales, but we
Gaulish gods, Lugdus, the most likely history The Book of Invasions, written dont really know how they thought
candidate for Caesars Mercury-like in the eleventh century, the Tatha D about them. For the literate intellec-
deity, was widely worshiped tuals on whose anonymous
in Ireland, though he may W. B. Yeats labors our own knowledge
have had many local ava- depends, the old gods cre-
tars, including the Finn mac ated a field of ambiguity and
Cumaill who ends up on uncertainty that invited lit-
Ingress painting for Napo- erary exploration of the slip-
CONFESSIONS leons ceiling and the other periness and insecurity of
great warrior C Chulainn, human existence itself. In-
OF A HERETIC hero of many poems and deed, the great attraction of
SELECTED ESSAYS plays by Yeats. On the other the Irish gods for writers is
Roger Scruton hand, the single most impor- what they are not. They are
Hardcover and e-book $18.95 tant aspect of the Irish Oth- not sacred. Actual paganism
On sale March 28th erworld is the notion that its had almost certainly died
denizens dwell inside hol- out in Ireland by the early
In this wide ranging selection of essays
low hills called sde. These eighth century when the last
on architecture and modern art, the
environment, politics, and culture, each
were often megalithic tu- of the druids are lumped in a
confession reveals aspects of the muli built as sites of worship law tract with satirists and
authors thinking that his critics would thousands of years before inferior poets and farters
probably have advised him to keep to the emergence of a Celtic and clowns and bandits and
himself. culture in Ireland, but they pagans and whores. The
were now understood to be Irish gods have the enor-
Roger Scruton challenges popular opin-
worlds in themselves, much mous advantage for writers
ion on key aspects of our society: What
vaster on the inside than on of not being off-limits. One
can we do to protect Western values
the outside. can say anything one likes
against Islamic extremism? How can
we nurture real friendship in the digital
The people of the sde, about them. As well as being
age of social media and Facebook? later anglicized as shee and a field of ambiguity, they are
How should we achieve a timely death etiolated into Victorian fair- also a realm of imaginative
against the advances of modern med- ies, were dazzlingly beauti- freedom.
icine? How should environmental pol- ful, wealthy, supernaturally powerful, Danann had been reimagined as a race Many of these old gods probably had
icies be shaped by the government? and long-lived or even immortal. The of people who invaded Ireland in the dis- deep roots in pre-Christian Ireland:
This provocative collection seeks to Irish version of Lugdus, called Lug, is tant past and routed the indigenous na- among them are the father figure called
answer the most pressing problems explicitly referred to in early written tives, before themselves being defeated the Dagda; Brigit, who is the exemplar
of our age. sources as from the hollow hills. But by the invading Gaels and relegated to of poetry, medicine, and metalwork;
Roger Scruton is that rarest of
this central aspect of Irish belief is not their new kingdoms in the hollow hills. the aforementioned Lug; the Morrgan,
things: a first-rate philosopher found in Gaul, or even in neighboring The strangeness of this story, which has a goddess of battle who appears as a
who actually has a philosophy . . . Britain. So far as the evidence goes, it the Irish Gaels going to war against and crow or raven; the sea god Mannann;
one of the few intellectually seems to be utterly distinctive to Ire- militarily defeating their own gods, is the warrior king Nada of the Silver
authoritative voices in modern British land. Irelands pre-Christian belief sys- one expression of the difficulty of plac- Arm; the beautiful young lad engus
conservatism. The Spectator tem, then, may well be a mix of Western ing the god-peoples within a Christian (later called Aengus or Angus); and his
European cults adapted to local needs worldview. Having rescued them from mother Band, who was the goddess of
US EVENTS WITH ROGER SCRUTON and entirely indigenous ideas. Given oblivion, Irish Christian writers have the River Boyne. Their pure forms are
Monday, April 3rd, 3pm
the highly localized nature of Irish so- to decide who and what they are. The no longer discernible through the fog
The Achievements of Roger Scruton cietyit was a patchwork of petty king- glory of the old gods, though, is that of oral memory and the thick layers of
James Madison Program at domsit may well be that practices they do not provide answers to those Christian reinterpretation.
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ and beliefs, and even deities, varied questions. They refuse to be defined, But just as many of the original gods
A Panel Discussion with considerably across the island. and thus have to be imagined. were lost in the transition to Chris-
Daniel Cullen, Alicia Gescinska, John The easy way to think of them, from tianity, anonymous medieval writers
Haldane, and Mark Johnston and a a Christian perspective, is as satanic invented hundreds of others and rein-
public lecture by Roger Scruton
For more information visit
What is certain is that by the early demons and sorcerers, and some early terpreted some of the old gods in the
Middle Ages, when these beliefs are Christian writers in Ireland do indeed light of Christianity, of classical learn-
www.jmp.princeton.edu
written down in stories that have been think of them in this way. But the desire ing, and of contemporary needs. Brigit,
Thursday, April 6th, 79pm heavily filtered through Christianity to remember them in writing demands who is now the most popular goddess
The True, the Good, and the Beautiful and literacy, the Irish gods look noth- other possibilities. Were they, perhaps, among contemporary neopagans, was
Wheatley Institution at ing like the Greco-Roman or Norse a race of humans with enhanced capac- conflated with an early Irish Christian
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT pantheons. The sde are not a Celtic ities? Could they be people who had saint of the same name to such an ex-
A public lecture by Roger Scruton
Olympus or Valhalla inhabited by somehow escaped the consequences tent that it is impossible to tell whether
For more information visit
relatively stable families of gods with of the Fall of Adam and Eve? Or were the attributes of the goddess are back-
wheatley.byu.edu
they actual gods who had died out when projections of the saint or vice versa.
Jesus saved mankind from its sins?
New York Review Books is the 2
Similarly, the Greek writer Strabo, One especially ingenious Irish solution
North American distributor of selected titles
from Notting Hill Editions, a UK publisher who wrote between 20 BC and 29 AD,
records a visit by one Artemidorus to
to these ontological questions was the What is especially intriguing, though,
devoted to the best in essay writing. suggestion that the Tatha D were in is that in this process of reinvention,
an unnamed island near Britain where which flourished most fruitfully be-
he witnessed sacrifices being made like
3 tween the eighth and thirteenth centu-
those on the Aegean island of Samo- Notably, the Danann bit was added
thrace to the goddess Demeter. This because Tatha D could also be trans- ries, the Irish poets and prose writers
island might or might not be Ireland lated as the Christian term people of shifted the gods from the realm of na-
Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500, and it might or might not imply the Godit was important not to con- ture to that of culture. They probably
or visit www.nyrb.com
existence of a cult of a Demeter-like fuse the pagan god-peoples with Gods began as spirits of the sun, moon, sea,
mother goddess. people. and rivers, but in medieval Ireland,
April 6, 2017 41
LETTERS foreigners the agency has targeted for abilities appear much as they do in classical The Classifieds
surveillance), and which the government physics. But it is still necessary to bring into
keeps and treats as fair game for use in the laws of nature assumptions about these
THE WORLD OF unrelated investigations. Instead, he says probabilities that I can only understand as
EDWARD SNOWDEN that sentence was about a different type of probabilities of the values found when hu-
The Classifieds
unplanned collection that the government mans decide what to measure. To place an ad or for other inquiries:
To the Editors: is generally supposed to delete (even if no I had an interesting correspondence email: classified@nybooks.com
ninety-day filtering process exists). with Robert Griffiths of Carnegie Mel- tel: (212) 293-1630.
Thank you for printing my letter and Char- But accidental is not the agencys term lon and James Hartle of the University of You may also place an ad through our
lie Savages response [The Facts About of art for the latter type of unplanned col- CaliforniaSanta Barbara regarding an website at www.nybooks.com/clas-
Edward Snowden, Letters, NYR, March lection, which happens when there is a mis- approach to quantum mechanics variously sifieds/
9]. In discussing my footnote, he asserts that take or equipment failure; rather that type is known as decoherent histories or con-
the June 10, 2013, article by Te-Ping Chen called inadvertent. Moreover, I point back sistent histories, which was introduced in Classified Department
makes no mention as to when Snowden to the fact that Epsteins inaccurate claim 1984 by Griffiths and further developed by The New York Review of Books
checked in to the Mira. Actually, her article about a filtering and purging process imme- Hartle and Murray Gell-Mann. The laws 435 Hudson St., Suite 300
does state that Snowden checked in to the diately followed a sentence about the inci- of nature are supposed to attribute prob- New York, NY 10014-3994
Mira on June 1, as I confirmed (www.wsj dental collection of Americans messages abilities to histories of the world, not just
.com/articles/SB10001424127887324904004 and, in the context of the paragraph, its func- to the results of single measurements. I All contents subject to Publishers approval.
Publisher reserves the right to reject or can-
578537062414488652). tion was to undermine the suggestion that had described this approach in detail in my
cel, at its sole discretion, any advertising at
Savage is correct that I was imprecise in PRISMs incidental collection of data about textbook Lectures on Quantum Mechanics any time in The New York Review of Books or
pluralizing reporters in my footnote. Ms. Americans meant that Snowdens exposure but did not cover it in my article, because I on our website. The advertiser and/or adver-
Chen had a coreporter credited, but as Ms. of the system qualified as whistleblowing. thought it has the same drawbacks that I at- tising agency, if any, agree to indemnify the
Chen told me, she was the one who spoke tributed to all instrumentalist approaches. Publisher against any liability or expense re-
to the hotel reservation clerk. Edward Snowden The wave functions for these histories in- sulting from claims or suits based on the con-
As for the issue he takes with me on the volve averaging over most quantities, with tents or subject matter of the advertisement,
PRISM program, I use the word acciden- a few held fixed, as if they were being mea- including, without limitation, claims or suits
tal, whereas he uses the word incidental. sured, but histories with different things for libel, violation of rights of privacy, plagia-
rism, copyright or trademark infringement,
For the NSA, incidental is the deliberate, held fixed are incompatible, and it is hu-
or unauthorized use of the name, likeness,
not accidental, surveillance of people in mans who must choose the particular kind statement, or work of any person.
contact with a target, as in the example I of history to which to attribute probabili-
give in my letter. ties. Griffiths developed a sort of quantum
logic consistent with his approach, but it
Edward Jay Epstein leaves me uncomfortable. Hartle and Gell- PERSONAL SERVICES
New York City Mann may share some of this discomfort, DANIELLES LIP SERVICE. Ebony beauty,
for they have moved toward identifying one adult phone sex, and web cam. (773) 935-4995.
Charlie Savage replies: true kind of history that does not have to www.DaniellesLipService.com.
be selected by people; but they have to at-
UNIQUE EROTIC THERAPY. Extraordinary Touch. Unfor-
Edward Jay Epsteins second letter further tribute weird negative probabilities to his- gettable. Discreet; private. West Village,NYC. By appoint-
demonstrates why readers should approach tories of this kind. My discomfort remains. ment only. (212) 645-4995. www.zeusdarlins.com.
with caution the information he puts for- Jeremy Bernstein, a contributor to these
pages, thinks like Mermin that there is no SEXY, SULTRY, MATURE ITALIAN. Let me blow your
ward. First, contrary to his letters implica- Since Epsteins book is littered with in-
mind. You will never forget me! (917) 520-1131.
tion, his endnote did not cite the June 10, accuracies about basic surveillance facts, trouble with quantum mechanics as it stands,
2013, Wall Street Journal article, Snowdens the simplest explanation is that he just got but he supplied an anecdote that runs in the PRIVATE DATING CLUB SEEKS attractive, successful
Whereabouts Remain Unclear, to which confused here, too. It is surprising that he opposite direction. A visitor to Einsteins of- gentlemen aged 30s-60s+ interested in meeting and dat-
fice in Prague noted that the window over- ing beautiful women. You should be open to enjoying a last-
he now points. Rather, the endnote cited appears to prefer people to believe that he
ing relationship if you meet the right person. Reply w/ bio
the article Snowdens Options for Refuge instead knowingly shifted from discussing looked the grounds of an insane asylum. Ein- and photo via e-mail: Phoebe@SEIClub.com.
Narrow, which the Journal published on- the type of unplanned collection that the stein explained that these were the madmen
line on June 30, and which, as I discussed in government keeps to the type it deletes, who did not think about quantum mechanics. FED UP AND READY to move to France? Were ready to
help: www.escape-to-france.com.
my reply to his first letter, indeed says noth- since that would imply that he deliberately
ing about when Snowden checked in to the misled his readers using a bait-and-switch. Steven Weinberg
Mira Hotel. Faced with the recognition that Austin, Texas
he cited the wrong article, Epstein in this For NYR Boxes only,
letter disingenuously tries to paper over his STEVEN WEINBERG send replies to:
mistake by mischaracterizing which article AND THE PUZZLE OF THE TRIAL OF DYLANN ROOF
I was discussing rather than by forthrightly QUANTUM MECHANICS
explaining what happened. To the Editors:
Second, I acknowledge that the ninth To the Editors: 49
paragraph of this June 10 article, of which In USA v. Dylann Roof [NYR, March NYR Box Number
I was previously unaware, states (in passing My article The Trouble with Quantum 9], I described an incident in the courtroom The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, Suite 300
and without clear sourcing) that Snowden Mechanics [NYR, January 19] provoked a during which the defendants mother, Amy New York, NY 10014-3994
checked in to the Mira on June 1, in apparent flood of comments. Some were from non- Roof, attending the first day of the trial,
contrast to Snowdens statements that he had scientists charmed to learn that physicists collapsed and was treated by emergency
been staying at the hotel since his arrival in can disagree with one another. Here there medical workers. I had placed the episode PERSONALS
Hong Kong eleven days earlier. I remain un- is only room to outline a few comments during the testimony of a witness, Felicia
NEW ENGLAND-BASED attractive, fun-loving, profes-
aware of any other place in the public record from physicists who offered arguments in Sanders; whereas it actually occurred after
sional, mid-sixties woman in happy marriage impacted by
except Epsteins work where this June 1 claim favor of interpretations of quantum me- the opening statement of defense lawyer husbands 17+year Parkinsons with Dementia, seeks com-
independently appears, ranging from numer- chanics that would make it unnecessary to David Bruck. I have revised the online text panionship while still caregiving. Would be happy to hear
ous other news articles about Snowdens time modify the theory. Alas, these interpreta- to reflect the correct sequence of events. from intelligent, sensitive man 55-75. NYR Box 67935.
in Hong Kong to a September 2016 report tions differ from one another, and none
D.C., FIT, ATTRACTIVE (of course) man. 70s; looks 65.
by the House Permanent Select Committee seems to me to be entirely satisfactory. Edward Ball ISO man for touching, holding, and play while we search
on Intelligence, whichseeking to counter (Several letters on this matter received by New Haven, Connecticut together for Nirvana. NYR Box 67940.
the premiere of Oliver Stones movie The New York Review appear in full follow-
MALE NEW ZEALANDER/AUSTRALIAN (dual citizen)
scoured the governments investigative file ing the Web version of this letter.)
seeking husband (or wife). Prenuptial essential. Me: cul-
for material to portray Snowden as a liar. N. David Mermin of Cornell argued with CORRECTION tural sector professional; postgraduate degree; 50. You:
Perhaps someday the Miras records characteristic eloquence for what I (but not decent and genuine. antipodeanbolthole@gmail.com.
will emerge into public view and we will he) would call an instrumentalist approach. In Eli Zaretskys letter in the March 23,
SPIRITED WOMAN, good-looker with a social con-
have more solid information to evaluate In his view, science is directly about the 2017, issue, the second sentence should
science, a New Yorker, poet/educational therapist, keen for
this question. Either way, my central point relation between each persons total expe- have read: However, this is not the case the dance and for the company of a sweet mensch 76+.
remains unchanged: Epstein treated the rience and the outside world that includes with Sigmund Freud [Freud: Whats Left NYR Box 67950.
check-in claim as a factual anchor for his in- that experience. I replied that I hoped for by Frederick Crews, NYR, February 23].
sinuations about what Snowden might have a physical theory that would allow us to We regret the error.
been doing earlier, but at the time he wrote deduce what happens when people make
his book (and still today) the evidence for measurements from impersonal laws that
Letters to the Editor: letters@nybooks.com. All other
this claim was insufficient to establish it as a apply to everything, without giving any correspondence: The New York Review of Books, 435
proven fact. This is part of a recurring pat- special status to people in these laws. I sug- Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994;
tern with his methodology. gested that our difference is just that Mer- mail@nybooks.com. Please include a mailing address
with all correspondence. We accept no responsibility
Finally, I note that Epsteins second let- min thinks I had been hoping for too much. for unsolicited manuscripts.
ter drops his attempt to defend his mistake He agreed, with the understanding that Subscription Services: nybooks.com/customer-service
in telling readers that every ninety days the those hopes are mine, not his. or The New York Review of Books, P.O. Box 9310, Big
NSA filters the trove of e-mails it gathers In contrast, Thomas Banks of Rutgers in Sandy,TX, 75755-9310, or e-mail nyrsub@nybooks.info.
In the US, call toll-free 800-354-0050. Outside the US,
via the PRISM system to purge Americans our correspondence and the draft of a new call 903-636-1101. Subscription rates: US, one year
messages that it accidentally collected with- book, Quantum Mechanics: An Introduc- $79.95; in Canada, $95; elsewhere, $115.
out a warrant. Still, he insists that by ac- tion, described his elegant efforts to avoid Advertising: To inquire please call 212-757-8070, or
cidental he was not referring to the type of bringing human measurement into the laws fax 212-333-5374. WZLWWHUFRP1<5FODVVLHGV
unplanned collection of Americans e-mails of nature. He describes measurement as an Copyright 2017, NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
Nothing in this publication may be reproduced with-
that the NSA calls incidental (which hap- interaction of the system being measured out the permission of the publisher. The cover date of
pens when Americans communicate with with a macroscopic system, in which prob- the next issue will be April 20, 2017.
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