newyorker--2020-06-01--Doing Nothing Isn’t Enough, by Miranda July

These two things happened when I was twenty-five , during a time when I would do free-associative book searches at the Multnomah County Library , in Oregon .
The search always began when I entered the lobby , triggered by the first word I overheard .
So , if someone was talking about having “ branzino for dinner , ” I ’ d search “ branzino ” on the clunky computers , and then scan the author names until I came upon someone who shared a first or last name with someone I knew , and then sometimes not even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at random , stab my finger at a page , and search for whatever word I hit , etc.
, etc.
, until I finally landed on something recommended by my great friend the universe .
I wasn ’ t showy about my technique , but if anyone had been interested I ’ d have very willingly elaborated , maybe as the start of a longer conversation .
It was right after I had checked out one of these conjured books that a security guard swooped up beside me .
This had happened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one couldn ’ t steal from the library , so I was almost certain I was innocent this time .
He scanned the area and then , in a low voice , told me that I was being followed .
“ No , by a man with a blue backpack .
We ’ ve been watching on the cameras.
” “ Only once we noticed you were being followed .
He ’ s gone now , but , since you ’ re leaving , too , we wanted you to be aware.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ friend to pick you up , depending on how you were planning on getting home.
” It sounded to me like I already had a friend to pick me up ; he was wearing a blue backpack .
I mean , those weren ’ t my exact thoughts , but I had a hard time understanding that this was bad , not good , news .
I had thought I was on a lonely , possibly pointless vision quest , so the news that someone had been faithfully following my serpentine path and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over by multiple cameras ?
It was like those stories of models being discovered while shopping for jeans at the mall .
Anything could happen !
I was a person who hoped to have many followers someday—this guy was just early , ahead of his time .
The guard waited with me until my bus came and then I got on it , a minor celebrity—well , not really , but happy .
The second thing happened a week later , same library , but this time as I was coming in .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ had been followed finding and now my ears were poised , ready to receive a new first word .
But instead this happened : a large man walking in front of me fell backward , such that I had to sit down very quickly and kind of catch his head in my lap before letting it slide to the floor in front of my knees .
He was having a stroke or a heart attack .
He wasn ’ t alone ; there was another , very small man with him , whose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ They seemed dislocated , homeless , or maybe just travellers , passing through .
The small man and I both shouted , “ Help !
” and “ Does anyone know CPR ?
” One lady said , “ I do , but I don ’ t feel very confident about my skills , ” and slunk away .
Eventually , a security guard arrived—it wasn ’ t the same one—and then several more eons passed while we waited for an ambulance .
In the meantime , this big man ’ s sweaty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the small man began to lose it in the way you do when seconds might save the person you love most in the world .
He was wringing his hands , like in the cartoons , and whimpering , and every so often he would turn to me and say , “ What do we do ?
What do we do ?
” I ’ m twenty-five , I ’ m still twenty-five , like the week before , so I have no idea what to do , but I know what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that isn ’ t enough .
So I said , “ Let ’ s pray.
” He looked at me with a kind of insane hope , like maybe I had powers , maybe I knew God personally .
I laid both my hands on his friend ’ s massive shoulders and bowed my head .
The small man did the same .
I ’ d only ever seen praying in movies , but it ’ s basically begging , right ?
That ’ s what I did—I begged with all my heart @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that he was dying , right there against my knees , under my hands , on the library floor .
The E.M.T.s asked if we were both going in the ambulance , and I said no , of course , and the little man hurried off with the stretcher .
I just stood there for a few minutes and very quickly there were all new people in the lobby and none of them knew what they had narrowly missed .
A man walked past with a backpack .
It wasn ’ t blue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anyway .
Yes , anything could happen , but also : anything could happen .
So I left .
What was I going to do ?
Random book search ?
No , I never did that again .
Not that I grew up all at once right then , but some things punch you in the face and you fly through the air and land somewhere completely different .
You walk on from there .
♦

These two things happened when I was twenty-five, during a time when I would do free-associative book searches at the Multnomah County Library, in Oregon. The search always began when I entered the lobby, triggered by the first word I overheard. So, if someone was talking about having “branzino for dinner,” I’d search “branzino” on the clunky computers, and then scan the author names until I came upon someone who shared a first or last name with someone I knew, and then sometimes not even check out that book but open it at random, stab my finger at a page, and search for whatever word I hit, etc., etc., until I finally landed on something recommended by my great friend the universe. I wasn’t showy about my technique, but if anyone had been interested I’d have very willingly elaborated, maybe as the start of a longer conversation. It was right after I had checked out one of these conjured books that a security guard swooped up beside me. This had happened elsewhere, more than once, but one couldn’t steal from the library, so I was almost certain I was innocent this time. He scanned the area and then, in a low voice, told me that I was being followed.
“By you?” I whispered.
“No, by a man with a blue backpack. We’ve been watching on the cameras.”
“You were watching me?”
“Only once we noticed you were being followed. He’s gone now, but, since you’re leaving, too, we wanted you to be aware.”
I glanced around.
“Maybe you want to call a friend to pick you up, depending on how you were planning on getting home.”
It sounded to me like I already had a friend to pick me up; he was wearing a blue backpack. I mean, those weren’t my exact thoughts, but I had a hard time understanding that this was bad, not good, news. I had thought I was on a lonely, possibly pointless vision quest, so the news that someone had been faithfully following my serpentine path and that both of us had been watched over by multiple cameras? It was like those stories of models being discovered while shopping for jeans at the mall. Anything could happen! I was a person who hoped to have many followers someday—this guy was just early, ahead of his time. The guard waited with me until my bus came and then I got on it, a minor celebrity—well, not really, but happy.
The second thing happened a week later, same library, but this time as I was coming in. I was probably returning the book I had been followed finding and now my ears were poised, ready to receive a new first word. But instead this happened: a large man walking in front of me fell backward, such that I had to sit down very quickly and kind of catch his head in my lap before letting it slide to the floor in front of my knees. He was having a stroke or a heart attack. He wasn’t alone; there was another, very small man with him, whose first language wasn’t English. They seemed dislocated, homeless, or maybe just travellers, passing through. The small man and I both shouted, “Help!” and “Does anyone know CPR?” One lady said, “I do, but I don’t feel very confident about my skills,” and slunk away. Eventually, a security guard arrived—it wasn’t the same one—and then several more eons passed while we waited for an ambulance. In the meantime, this big man’s sweaty face turned a kind of gray-blue, and the small man began to lose it in the way you do when seconds might save the person you love most in the world. He was wringing his hands, like in the cartoons, and whimpering, and every so often he would turn to me and say, “What do we do? What do we do?”
I’m twenty-five, I’m still twenty-five, like the week before, so I have no idea what to do, but I know what he means—to do nothing, well, that isn’t enough. So I said, “Let’s pray.” He looked at me with a kind of insane hope, like maybe I had powers, maybe I knew God personally. I laid both my hands on his friend’s massive shoulders and bowed my head. The small man did the same. I’d only ever seen praying in movies, but it’s basically begging, right? That’s what I did—I begged with all my heart for the man to live, knowing that he was dying, right there against my knees, under my hands, on the library floor.
The E.M.T.s asked if we were both going in the ambulance, and I said no, of course, and the little man hurried off with the stretcher. I just stood there for a few minutes and very quickly there were all new people in the lobby and none of them knew what they had narrowly missed. A man walked past with a backpack. It wasn’t blue, but I got a bad feeling anyway. Yes, anything could happen, but also: anything could happen. So I left. What was I going to do? Random book search? No, I never did that again. Not that I grew up all at once right then, but some things punch you in the face and you fly through the air and land somewhere completely different. You walk on from there. ♦


newyorker--2020-06-01--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons June 8 & 15, 2020

“ Pains me to say it , but Greg is much more interesting as a book .
”

“Pains me to say it, but Greg is much more interesting as a book.”
Cartoon by Avi Steinberg


newyorker--2020-06-01--Richard McGuire’s “This Side Up”

Richard McGuire’s “This Side Up”

For this year ’ s Fiction Issue , Richard McGuire depicts a New York turned upside down—a feeling that will be familiar to many of the city ’ s residents .
McGuire , a former bassist for the band Liquid Liquid , recently talked to us about the disorienting effects of quarantine , and about what he ’ s been reading lately .
You ’ ve been a New Yorker for a long time .
Has life in the city ever felt so upside down ?
I was here for the AIDS crisis , when the fear of contamination felt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , too , which was horrific .
But this feels much more dystopian than anything I ’ ve experienced .
There are so many people around the world who are being affected .
You live and work downtown , which has been emptied out by the lockdown .
If office workers don ’ t come back in the same numbers , how do you think it might change the neighborhood ?
I can ’ t imagine .
I ’ m taking it one day at a time .
Have you gone to any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
If so , how was it different ?
I haven ’ t travelled much beyond my home and studio in months .
On the first really nice spring day , I took a walk to the river and was appalled by all the sweaty joggers and people on bicycles—many without masks !
I worry what the summer will be like .
Your recent cover “ Noise New York ” features a very different , bygone time .
Doesn ’ t it feel like such another time !
The other day , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Canal Street and Broadway .
Not a soul anywhere !
Do you miss the crowds and the noise ?
Have you discovered any new sounds and sights ?
I don ’ t miss the noise one bit .
Now I wake up hearing birds singing .
I recorded some the other day .
I ’ m starting to notice the different songs .
Maybe I ’ m becoming a birder .
Your image is the cover of our Fiction Issue .
Have you read any good books lately ?
I ’ ve been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ haven ’ t looked at in years .
But , currently , I ’ m reading “ Essays One , ” by Lydia Davis , and Georges Perec ’ s “ An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris , ” which was recommended by a friend .
I bought them both online from a local bookshop , which needs support now more than ever .
See below for other covers by McGuire :

For this year’s Fiction Issue, Richard McGuire depicts a New York turned upside down—a feeling that will be familiar to many of the city’s residents. McGuire, a former bassist for the band Liquid Liquid, recently talked to us about the disorienting effects of quarantine, and about what he’s been reading lately.
You’ve been a New Yorker for a long time. Has life in the city ever felt so upside down?
I was here for the AIDS crisis, when the fear of contamination felt similar. I was here for 9/11, too, which was horrific. But this feels much more dystopian than anything I’ve experienced. There are so many people around the world who are being affected.
You live and work downtown, which has been emptied out by the lockdown. If office workers don’t come back in the same numbers, how do you think it might change the neighborhood?
I can’t imagine. I’m taking it one day at a time.
Have you gone to any of the other parts of the city? If so, how was it different?
I haven’t travelled much beyond my home and studio in months. On the first really nice spring day, I took a walk to the river and was appalled by all the sweaty joggers and people on bicycles—many without masks! I worry what the summer will be like.
Your recent cover “Noise New York” features a very different, bygone time.
Doesn’t it feel like such another time! The other day, I passed the corner that inspired it, Canal Street and Broadway. Not a soul anywhere!
Do you miss the crowds and the noise? Have you discovered any new sounds and sights?
I don’t miss the noise one bit. Now I wake up hearing birds singing. I recorded some the other day. I’m starting to notice the different songs. Maybe I’m becoming a birder.
Your image is the cover of our Fiction Issue. Have you read any good books lately?
I’ve been rediscovering books on my shelves that I haven’t looked at in years. But, currently, I’m reading “Essays One,” by Lydia Davis, and Georges Perec’s “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris,” which was recommended by a friend. I bought them both online from a local bookshop, which needs support now more than ever.
See below for other covers by McGuire:


newyorker--2020-06-01--Edward Hopper and American Solitude

Edward Hopper and American Solitude

I ’ ve been thinking a lot about Edward Hopper .
So have other stay-at-homes , I notice online .
The visual bard of American solitude—not loneliness , a maudlin projection—speaks to our isolated states these days with fortuitous poignance .
But he is always doing that , pandemic or no pandemic .
Aloneness is his great theme , symbolizing America : insecure selfhoods in a country that is only abstractly a nation .
“ E pluribus unum , ” a magnificent ideal , thuds on “ unum ” every day throughout the land .
Only law—we ’ re a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ States , which might sensibly be a Balkans of regional sovereignties had the Civil War not been so awful as to remove that option , come what may .
Hopper ’ s region is the Northeast , from New York to parts of New England , but his perceptions apply from coast to coast .
Born in Nyack in 1882 , and dying in 1967 after living for half a century in an apartment on Washington Square , he couldn ’ t conceivably have developed as he did in any other culture .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to his time .
But his mature art , which took two decades to gestate before consolidating in the nineteen-twenties , is timeless , or perhaps time-free : a series of freeze-dried , uncannily telling moments .
Though termed a realist , Hopper is more properly a Symbolist , investing objective appearance with clenched , melancholy subjectivity .
He was an able draftsman and masterly as a painter of light and shadow , but he ruthlessly subordinated aesthetic pleasure to the compacted description—as dense as uranium—of things that answered to his feelings without @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he painted strikes me as a self-portrait , with brooding windows and almost never a visible or , should one be indicated , inviting door .
If his pictures sometimes seem awkwardly forced , that ’ s not a flaw ; it ’ s a guarantee that he has pushed the communicative capacities of painting to their limits , then a little bit beyond .
He leaves us alone with our own solitude , taking our breath away and not giving it back .
Regarding his human subjects as “ lonely ” evades @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if we had to be those people , but—look !
—they ’ re doing O.K.
, however grim their lot .
Think of Samuel Beckett ’ s famous tag “ I can ’ t go on .
I ’ ll go on.
” Now delete the first sentence .
With Hopper , the going-on is not a choice .
I haven ’ t seen “ Edward Hopper : A Fresh Look at Landscape , ” a large show at the lately reopened Beyeler Foundation , Switzerland ’ s premier museum of modern art @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fine catalogue , edited by the exhibition ’ s curator , Ulf Küster , as occasion enough for reflecting anew on the artist ’ s stubborn force .
I rely as well on memories that we likely share of encountering “ Nighthawks ” ( 1942 ) and “ Early Sunday Morning ” ( 1930 ) , but also , really , anything from his hand .
Once you ’ ve seen a Hopper , it stays seen , lodged in your mind ’ s eye .
The reason , beyond exacting observation and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cleverness .
Hopper was explicit on this score , saying , in 1933 , “ I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.
” Exasperated by questions of what his works meant , he squelched one interviewer by exclaiming , “ I ’ m after ME.
” The remark reflects his debts to European Romanticism and Symbolism , which he absorbed in depth while stripping away any stylistic resemblances .
Highly literate , he read and reread nineteenth-century German and French poetry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a realist mode point back to one of his favorite predecessors , Gustave Courbet .
And a certain smoldering vehemence in Hopper puts me in mind of Théodore Géricault , except tamped down to static views of drab actualities .
Hopper imported , or smuggled , some emotive powers of European traditions to unforgiving American soil .
Having studied in New York with Robert Henri and other preceptors of the Ashcan School , who addressed modernity with vernacular realism , he had three sojourns in Paris .
There he emulated minor Post-Impressionists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ off-kilter compositions .
Back home , while supporting himself as a commercial illustrator , he found a way forward by way of etching .
Heavily inked cows , railroad tracks , and a banal house in “ American Landscape ” ( 1920 ) presaged a direction unlike that of any of his contemporaries .
The closest was his mystically inclined acquaintance Charles Burchfield , whose rapturous treatments of unprepossessing sites in western New York State have aged very well , informing a trend today among young painters toward potent representation .
Less imitable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the thinking , at the very least , of subsequent artists .
Willem de Kooning , as Küster recounts in the catalogue , praised him to an interviewer in 1959 .
De Kooning noted a startling effect of the summarily brushed woods in the background of “ Cape Cod Morning ” ( 1950 ) , in which a woman is seen from the side leaning forward at a bay window and staring at something beyond the picture ’ s right edge : “ The forest looks real , like a forest , like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is , like you turn and actually see it.
” That ’ s on the mark with Hopper : thereness that becomes hereness , in a viewer ’ s eye and mind .
A catalogue essay by David M. Lubin , the esteemed scholar of art history in relation to popular culture , makes a connection that I ’ ve often thought about myself : Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock .
The Yank painter and the Brit cinéaste display remarkable parallels as visual storytellers .
Hitchcock , learning American experience from scratch after immigrating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ age of thirty-nine , acknowledged the influence .
The Bates house in “ Psycho ” reproduces , with simplifications , the already suitably ominous Victorian in Hopper ’ s “ House by the Railroad ” ( 1925 ) .
Lubin concentrates on suspenseful narrative tactics , which I would enlarge to cover methods of composition and aspects of temperament .
Hitchcock storyboarded scenes and shots for his films .
Hopper ( incidentally , an addicted moviegoer ) as much as did the same for his paintings .
I once got to inspect a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made on paper .
Some sheets bore only drawn rectangles : seeking the right proportions for what he had in mind .
Then there were congeries of details with which he auditioned , in effect , particular body parts , architectural features , or other elements that would be knitted into dramatic wholes .
Both he and Hitchcock aimed for the soundness and the suddenness of sights that compress time in service to a pre-imagined vision .
Each knew the feeling—because he felt it—that the effort would trigger in viewers .
Hitchcock shares @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of backgrounds to foregrounds in pictorial space : perhaps someone or something relatively innocuous is nearby and something less calming is yonder .
Lubin offers the example , from “ North by Northwest , ” of the distant crop-dusting plane at work “ where there ain ’ t no crops.
” In certain pictures of rural dwellings by Hopper , woods ( like those in “ Cape Cod Morning ” ) or topographical formations subtly menace a human intrusion .
But in Hitchcock ’ s work , and in Hopper ’ s , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far to the near is often reversed , and what ’ s mysterious , if not sinister , becomes identical with our point of view .
What are we doing here , seeing that ?
Voyeurism—the saddest excitement—may be suggested .
The emotional tug of many of Hitchcock ’ s characters and all of Hopper ’ s requires their unawareness of being looked at .
To see them is to take on a peculiar responsibility .
Hopper often produces the unease even in unpeopled landscapes and views of buildings , as if catching @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , mundanity , or squalor .
The New England coastlines , lighthouses , and sailboats that he painted on summer excursions get off relatively easy .
He liked them .
But they , too , feel taken by surprise , depicted from odd angles of vision .
No judgment is passed on anyone or anything , one way or another .
The naked fact of their existence is provocative enough .
“ Why is there something rather than nothing ?
” cosmologists wonder .
Hopper is all ears for the answer .

I’ve been thinking a lot about Edward Hopper. So have other stay-at-homes, I notice online. The visual bard of American solitude—not loneliness, a maudlin projection—speaks to our isolated states these days with fortuitous poignance. But he is always doing that, pandemic or no pandemic. Aloneness is his great theme, symbolizing America: insecure selfhoods in a country that is only abstractly a nation. “E pluribus unum,” a magnificent ideal, thuds on “unum” every day throughout the land. Only law—we’re a polity of lawyers—confers unity on the United States, which might sensibly be a Balkans of regional sovereignties had the Civil War not been so awful as to remove that option, come what may. Hopper’s region is the Northeast, from New York to parts of New England, but his perceptions apply from coast to coast. Born in Nyack in 1882, and dying in 1967 after living for half a century in an apartment on Washington Square, he couldn’t conceivably have developed as he did in any other culture. His subjects—atomized persons, inauspicious places—are specific to his time. But his mature art, which took two decades to gestate before consolidating in the nineteen-twenties, is timeless, or perhaps time-free: a series of freeze-dried, uncannily telling moments.
Though termed a realist, Hopper is more properly a Symbolist, investing objective appearance with clenched, melancholy subjectivity. He was an able draftsman and masterly as a painter of light and shadow, but he ruthlessly subordinated aesthetic pleasure to the compacted description—as dense as uranium—of things that answered to his feelings without exposing them. Nearly every house that he painted strikes me as a self-portrait, with brooding windows and almost never a visible or, should one be indicated, inviting door. If his pictures sometimes seem awkwardly forced, that’s not a flaw; it’s a guarantee that he has pushed the communicative capacities of painting to their limits, then a little bit beyond. He leaves us alone with our own solitude, taking our breath away and not giving it back. Regarding his human subjects as “lonely” evades their truth. We might freak out if we had to be those people, but—look!—they’re doing O.K., however grim their lot. Think of Samuel Beckett’s famous tag “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Now delete the first sentence. With Hopper, the going-on is not a choice.
I haven’t seen “Edward Hopper: A Fresh Look at Landscape,” a large show at the lately reopened Beyeler Foundation, Switzerland’s premier museum of modern art, outside Basel. I take its fine catalogue, edited by the exhibition’s curator, Ulf Küster, as occasion enough for reflecting anew on the artist’s stubborn force. I rely as well on memories that we likely share of encountering “Nighthawks” (1942) and “Early Sunday Morning” (1930), but also, really, anything from his hand. Once you’ve seen a Hopper, it stays seen, lodged in your mind’s eye. The reason, beyond exacting observation and authentic feeling, is an exceptional stylistic cleverness. Hopper was explicit on this score, saying, in 1933, “I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.” Exasperated by questions of what his works meant, he squelched one interviewer by exclaiming, “I’m after ME.” The remark reflects his debts to European Romanticism and Symbolism, which he absorbed in depth while stripping away any stylistic resemblances. Highly literate, he read and reread nineteenth-century German and French poetry all his life. His poetic liberties in a realist mode point back to one of his favorite predecessors, Gustave Courbet. And a certain smoldering vehemence in Hopper puts me in mind of Théodore Géricault, except tamped down to static views of drab actualities. Hopper imported, or smuggled, some emotive powers of European traditions to unforgiving American soil.
“Nighthawks,” from 1942.
Having studied in New York with Robert Henri and other preceptors of the Ashcan School, who addressed modernity with vernacular realism, he had three sojourns in Paris. There he emulated minor Post-Impressionists with restless variations of tonal contrasts and off-kilter compositions. Back home, while supporting himself as a commercial illustrator, he found a way forward by way of etching. Heavily inked cows, railroad tracks, and a banal house in “American Landscape” (1920) presaged a direction unlike that of any of his contemporaries. The closest was his mystically inclined acquaintance Charles Burchfield, whose rapturous treatments of unprepossessing sites in western New York State have aged very well, informing a trend today among young painters toward potent representation. Less imitable, Hopper has never ceased to influence the thinking, at the very least, of subsequent artists. Willem de Kooning, as Küster recounts in the catalogue, praised him to an interviewer in 1959. De Kooning noted a startling effect of the summarily brushed woods in the background of “Cape Cod Morning” (1950), in which a woman is seen from the side leaning forward at a bay window and staring at something beyond the picture’s right edge: “The forest looks real, like a forest, like you turn on it and there it is, like you turn and actually see it.” That’s on the mark with Hopper: thereness that becomes hereness, in a viewer’s eye and mind.
A catalogue essay by David M. Lubin, the esteemed scholar of art history in relation to popular culture, makes a connection that I’ve often thought about myself: Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock. The Yank painter and the Brit cinéaste display remarkable parallels as visual storytellers. Hitchcock, learning American experience from scratch after immigrating to Hollywood in 1939, at the age of thirty-nine, acknowledged the influence. The Bates house in “Psycho” reproduces, with simplifications, the already suitably ominous Victorian in Hopper’s “House by the Railroad” (1925). Lubin concentrates on suspenseful narrative tactics, which I would enlarge to cover methods of composition and aspects of temperament. Hitchcock storyboarded scenes and shots for his films. Hopper (incidentally, an addicted moviegoer) as much as did the same for his paintings. I once got to inspect a stack of studies that he’d made on paper. Some sheets bore only drawn rectangles: seeking the right proportions for what he had in mind. Then there were congeries of details with which he auditioned, in effect, particular body parts, architectural features, or other elements that would be knitted into dramatic wholes. Both he and Hitchcock aimed for the soundness and the suddenness of sights that compress time in service to a pre-imagined vision. Each knew the feeling—because he felt it—that the effort would trigger in viewers.
Hitchcock shares with Hopper a predilection for jarring relations of backgrounds to foregrounds in pictorial space: perhaps someone or something relatively innocuous is nearby and something less calming is yonder. Lubin offers the example, from “North by Northwest,” of the distant crop-dusting plane at work “where there ain’t no crops.” In certain pictures of rural dwellings by Hopper, woods (like those in “Cape Cod Morning”) or topographical formations subtly menace a human intrusion. But in Hitchcock’s work, and in Hopper’s, especially, the unnerving relation of the far to the near is often reversed, and what’s mysterious, if not sinister, becomes identical with our point of view. What are we doing here, seeing that? Voyeurism—the saddest excitement—may be suggested. The emotional tug of many of Hitchcock’s characters and all of Hopper’s requires their unawareness of being looked at. To see them is to take on a peculiar responsibility. Hopper often produces the unease even in unpeopled landscapes and views of buildings, as if catching nature and habitation defenselessly exposed in disarray, mundanity, or squalor. The New England coastlines, lighthouses, and sailboats that he painted on summer excursions get off relatively easy. He liked them. But they, too, feel taken by surprise, depicted from odd angles of vision. No judgment is passed on anyone or anything, one way or another. The naked fact of their existence is provocative enough. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” cosmologists wonder. Hopper is all ears for the answer.
Politically, Hopper was “a sort of McKinley conservative,” his friend the novelist John Dos Passos remarked. The artist scorned the New Deal art programs of the thirties as sops to mediocrity. Interrupting a vacation on Cape Cod in 1940, he returned to New York to register to vote in order to cast his ballot against Franklin Roosevelt. The orientation leaves no mark in his work that I can detect—Hopper’s artistic passion disallowed the trivia of opinionating—but it chimes with a wary individualism that could seem to refuse agreement about practically everything with almost everybody except his painter wife, Josephine Nivison. Having first met as art students around 1905, they married in 1924 and were symbiotically a unit. (Their closeness strikingly recalls that of Hitchcock’s taut, creatively collaborative marriage with the screenwriter Alma Reville.) Nivison supervised a detailed ledger of all Hopper’s works and served, at her insistence and with his consent, as his only model when he painted nudes. She was as vivacious as he was taciturn. (She once joked that talking with him was like dropping a rock down a well and waiting to hear it hit, in vain.) Hopper’s last painting, “Two Comedians” (1965), pictures the pair of them in commedia-dell’arte costume as Pierrot and Pierrette on a stage, taking a bow.
Nivison aside, or standing guard, Hopper’s independence feels absolute, repelling attempts to associate him with any other artist or social group. In this, he updates and passes along to the future the spirit of a paradigmatically American text, “Self-Reliance,” minus Ralph Waldo Emerson’s optimism. The free, questing citizen has devolved into one or another of millions rattling around on a comfortless continent. Can you pledge patriotic allegiance to a void? Hopper shows how, exploring a condition in which, by being separate, we belong together. You don’t have to like the idea, but, once you’ve truly experienced this painter’s art, it is as impossible to ignore as a stone in your shoe. ♦


newyorker--2020-06-01--A Début Novel’s Immersive Urgency

A Début Novel’s Immersive Urgency

The third protagonist , a physical-education teacher called PT Sir , knew Jivan when she was one of the “ charity students ” at S. D. Gosh Girls ’ School .
Impressed by Jivan ’ s athletic prowess , he took an interest in her , gave her extra food , hoped that she might consider him a mentor .
But she left school early , and never acknowledged the relationship .
Unlike the two other principals , PT Sir is represented in a close third-person present , a voice no less alive than the self-presentations of Jivan and Lovely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from this stiffly moralizing man of military bearing .
When PT Sir sees a news report about the arrest , his mild estrangement curdles into righteous condemnation : Majumdar finds all the resources she needs within this tightly bound trio , steadily widening the novel ’ s vision of Kolkatan , and Indian , life .
Jivan—independent and intelligent , living at home but mentally elsewhere—had been on the way up : “ From an eater of cabbage , I was becoming an eater of chicken.
” She was working as a shop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; she had bought a smartphone on an installment plan .
In prison , she is now among the outcasts : “ We feel we are living at the bottom of a well .
We are frogs.
” Her companions include Yashwi , who has robbed houses : “ In one of them she left a grandfather tied up so tight he suffocated .
But she is a nice girl , always smiling.
” And Nirmaladi , who used to work as a cook , “ until she accepted twenty thousand rupees for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s lunch.
” And Kalkidi , whose husband threw acid on her face , “ but , somehow , she is the one in jail.
” Jivan is visited by an apparently sympathetic journalist , and the encounter allows Majumdar to fill in a little backstory .
We hear something about Jivan ’ s parents : her father is a former rickshaw driver stricken with back problems ; her mother , weather permitting , buys food at an illegal night market and cooks meals to sell on the street at dawn .
When @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one night , Jivan decided to drop out of school and get a job .
And their house—a single room of brick , tin , and tarp near a garbage dump , “ a dump that was so big and occupied by so many crows screaming kaw kaw from dawn to night , it was famous , ” Jivan recounts .
“ I would say , ‘ I live in the house behind the dump , ’ and everybody would know where I meant .
You could say I lived in a landmark @ @ @ @ @ @ @ using small details and fleeting incidents to nudge her fiction into larger suggestion .
Sometimes it ’ s a phrase—walls “ plump with damp ” —or a poignant shorthand , like the one with which Jivan evokes her mother ’ s awkward inaccessibility at home : “ Then my mother cooked , hidden in the kitchen .
An atmosphere of smoke and chili about her deterred conversation.
” When Jivan is arrested , her mother tries to visit her at the police station , and Majumdar ’ s minimal description of her approaching @ @ @ @ @ @ @ came right up to them , her feet in bathroom slippers ” —concisely renders a powerlessness the mother herself doesn ’ t grasp .
Elsewhere , Majumdar gets a brief scene to shimmer .
In prison , Jivan insists that she has the “ right ” to tell her side of the story to the press .
“ You have the right ?
” one of the inmates replies , mockingly : “ Under a smile she buries all else she meant to say.
” When the journalist tells Jivan that his editor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” she laughs in bemusement .
Her story would be better , she says , if her father had not broken his back , if her mother had not been attacked , if she had finished school .
“ Not better like that , ” the journalist says .
“ Then like what ?
” Jivan asks .
Generally , Majumdar abjures commentary and interior analysis in favor of incident , the decisive ramifications of action .
In masterly fashion , she uses very few strokes to help us see how PT Sir @ @ @ @ @ @ @ schoolteacher to a government official .
One day , on his way home from the school , he is drawn to a rally held by the Jana Kalyan ( “ Well being for All ” ) Party , a stand-in for one of India ’ s regional parties .
A Bollywood star is headlining the event ; groups of men are waving saffron-colored flags .
PT Sir is handed a Party flag and his forehead is smeared with red paste : he ’ s in .
At the rally , he ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the thronged , uneducated supporters , lured from the local villages “ by a free box of rice and chicken.
” But then one of these men gets up on the roof of a car and starts yelling “ Praise to the Motherland !
” PT Sir watches as the man pulls a dagger from the waistband of his trousers and waves it in the air , where it glints in the sun .
Alarmed , admiring , he thinks how free this man seems , how unlike his colleagues at school @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a muri walla , a puffed-rice seller , sees the red mark on PT Sir ’ s forehead and the Party flag in his hand , and deferentially gives him a free portion of food : “ For you , no charge.
” PT Sir “ feels the other passengers staring at him .
They must be thinking , who is this VIP ?
” His status has just changed ; a fuse has been lit .
Gradually , PT Sir will bind himself ever more tightly to the inner workings of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is essentially about desire and obstruction , and the question of whether that obstruction is removed or solidified .
Majumdar ’ s story is , in this sense , classically simple .
The two protagonists who may be able to save Jivan find themselves unwilling or unable to do so ; at the same time , their own prospects brighten at the cost of Jivan ’ s freedom , and in relation to their connection to her .
PT Sir soon has reason to see that she is roundly condemned , not least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part of what originally made him attractive to the Party leader , Bimala Pal .
Lovely , so desperate to break into the movie business , is at last noticed by agents and directors because of her link to the infamous Jivan ; yet , the more distance she puts between herself and her former teacher , the more employable she becomes .
It ’ s only at the end of this brief , brave novel that one becomes fully aware of how broad its judgments have been , how fierce and absolute @ @ @ @ @ @ @ open up among and behind these three characters , a large Indian panoply emerges .
The book ’ s surface realism—that great boon to writers—is abundant and busy and life-sown : muri wallas , pillow-fillers , guava sellers , a man who grinds tobacco in his palm , not to mention theatrical agents , schoolteachers , hijras , criminals , and criminal politicians .
But the system that at once supports and undermines this diverse vitality is seen with an unrelentingly cold authorial eye , in all its small and large corruption , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political opportunism , and unalleviated poverty .
At the same time , because societies are complex , and because Megha Majumdar is a sophisticated student of that complexity , her novel gains flight as a tale of competing dynamism .
Her three ambitious and intelligent characters are all moving up , out of the class they were born into ; Jivan ’ s plight is that this ambition , forced by circumstance into a desperate resolve , involves a struggle that she seems fated to lose .
♦

William Faulkner claimed that he wrote “As I Lay Dying” in six weeks, and the speed makes sense—it comports with the quick intimacy of the book’s form, in which a chorus of first-person narrators plunge us into their soliloquies. This novel, hovering somewhere between the older epistolary structure and pure dramatic monologue—between correspondence and a playscript—becomes magically liberated from the more burdensome narrative machinery, that wheezing apparatus of persuasion and pastness. Instead, we get the immediacy of voice, characters pressing themselves on us without any apparent authorial filter in a continuous oral present, even when they are relating their own histories. This is the form that Megha Majumdar uses for her first novel, “A Burning” (Knopf); she may have taken six weeks or six years to write it, but her book has a similar urgency of appeal. Its characters are at the very front of the stage, and we can feel their breath.
Majumdar marshals a much smaller cast of speakers than Faulkner did, and her spare plot moves with arrowlike determination. It begins with a crime, continues with a false charge and imprisonment, and ends with a trial. The book has some of the elements of a thriller or a police procedural, but one shouldn’t mistake its extraordinary directness and openness to life with the formulaic accelerations of genre: Majumdar’s novel is compelling, yet its compulsions have to do with an immersive present rather than with a skidding sequence. Her characters start telling us about their lives, and those lives are suddenly palpable, vital, voiced. I can’t remember when I last read a novel that so quickly dismantled the ordinary skepticism that attends the reading of made-up stories. Early Naipaul comes to mind as a precursor, and perhaps Akhil Sharma’s stupendously vivid novel “Family Life.” Sharma has spoken of how he avoided using “sticky” words—words involving touch and taste and smell—so as to enable a natural velocity; Majumdar finds her own way of achieving the effect.
“A Burning” is about the fateful interactions of three principal characters, who take turns sharing their narratives. At its center is a young Muslim woman named Jivan, who lives in the slums of Kolkata, and who witnesses a terrorist incident that tips her life into turmoil. A halted train at a nearby station is firebombed, and the ensuing inferno kills more than a hundred people. At home, Jivan makes the mistake of posting a politically risky question on Facebook—“If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean that the government is also a terrorist?”—which attracts official attention. The police come for her in the middle of the night. Everything fits: she was seen at the railway station, carrying some kind of package; clothes soaked in kerosene are found at her home; she has been chatting with a “terrorist recruiter” on Facebook; above all, she is, conveniently, poor and Muslim. She is charged with the crime, and spends the rest of the novel in prison, awaiting a trial that will not occur for a year.
There are two people whose testimony could save Jivan, and much of the novel turns on their capacity and their willingness to offer it. One is an aspiring actress named Lovely, who also lives in the slum. Lovely—the name she took at eighteen—is a so-called hijra, a designation that affords intersex and transgender people a recognized status, but a perilously ambiguous and marginal one. She lives in a group house with other hijras; the little community survives by offering occasional “blessings” (for a marriage, a birth), and by begging. With characteristic buoyancy, Lovely calls herself a “he-she” and a “half-half,” and her jaunty, theatrical, yearning voice dominates the book. It is introduced with quick, fearless simplicity:
Sunday morning! Time to go to acting class. With my hips swinging like this and like that, I am walking past the guava seller. “Brother,” I am calling, “what’s the time?” “Eight thirty,” he is grumbling, because he is not wishing to share with me the fruits of his wristwatch. Leave him. I am abandoning my stylish walk and running like a horse to the local train station. . . . Nothing is simple for a person like me, not even one hour on the train. My chest is a man’s chest, and my breasts are made of rags. So what? Find me another woman in this whole city as truly woman as me.
Jivan has been teaching Lovely to read English; the package that she was carrying on the day of the incident contained some books that she was taking to her student. Throughout the novel, Majumdar uses the continuous present tense (“I am abandoning my stylish walk”) and various eccentricities of phrasing (“the fruits of his wristwatch”) to “sound” Lovely’s Bengali into English. This, along with the character’s hardened esprit of the streets, lofts her off the page:
Even a future movie star is having to make money. One morning my sisters and I are spraying rose water in our armpits, braiding our hair, putting bangles on our arms, and together we are going to bless a newborn. The general public is believing that we hijras are having a special telephone to god. So if we bless, it is like a blessing straight from god. At the door of the happy family, I am rattling the lock thuck thuck thuck.
The third protagonist, a physical-education teacher called PT Sir, knew Jivan when she was one of the “charity students” at S. D. Gosh Girls’ School. Impressed by Jivan’s athletic prowess, he took an interest in her, gave her extra food, hoped that she might consider him a mentor. But she left school early, and never acknowledged the relationship. Unlike the two other principals, PT Sir is represented in a close third-person present, a voice no less alive than the self-presentations of Jivan and Lovely, but one which appropriately distances us from this stiffly moralizing man of military bearing. When PT Sir sees a news report about the arrest, his mild estrangement curdles into righteous condemnation:
When he thinks about it, an old anger flickers to life. He had begun to dream of her as a mentee, but she had not considered him a mentor. She had considered him perhaps no more than a source of occasional free food. She had fooled him. . . . Now he knew, there was something wrong with Jivan the whole time. There was something wrong in her thinking.
Majumdar finds all the resources she needs within this tightly bound trio, steadily widening the novel’s vision of Kolkatan, and Indian, life. Jivan—independent and intelligent, living at home but mentally elsewhere—had been on the way up: “From an eater of cabbage, I was becoming an eater of chicken.” She was working as a shop assistant in a clothing store called Pantaloons; she had bought a smartphone on an installment plan. In prison, she is now among the outcasts: “We feel we are living at the bottom of a well. We are frogs.” Her companions include Yashwi, who has robbed houses: “In one of them she left a grandfather tied up so tight he suffocated. But she is a nice girl, always smiling.” And Nirmaladi, who used to work as a cook, “until she accepted twenty thousand rupees for putting rat poison in a family’s lunch.” And Kalkidi, whose husband threw acid on her face, “but, somehow, she is the one in jail.” Jivan is visited by an apparently sympathetic journalist, and the encounter allows Majumdar to fill in a little backstory. We hear something about Jivan’s parents: her father is a former rickshaw driver stricken with back problems; her mother, weather permitting, buys food at an illegal night market and cooks meals to sell on the street at dawn. When she was attacked after visiting the market one night, Jivan decided to drop out of school and get a job. And their house—a single room of brick, tin, and tarp near a garbage dump, “a dump that was so big and occupied by so many crows screaming kaw kaw from dawn to night, it was famous,” Jivan recounts. “I would say, ‘I live in the house behind the dump,’ and everybody would know where I meant. You could say I lived in a landmark building.”


newyorker--2020-06-01--“White Noise,” by Emma Cline

“White Noise,” by Emma Cline

The dreams had mostly stopped .
Still , he found himself awake , blinking in the dark room .
Four A.M .
He lay unmoving for a moment under the duvet .
His T-shirt was stuck to his back—night sweats , the pillow swampy , the sheets damp .
Roll to the other side .
Spread out on the chilly sheets .
Keep the eyes closed .
As soon as both eyes opened , it would be straight to dull business , an organizer already laid out with his morning meds , a bottle of room-temperature Fiji water alongside .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ everything .
Well , not exactly this time , more like 10 A.M. , but , in any case , all would be decided .
He believed , truly , that he would be exonerated .
How could he not be ?
This was America .
Maybe there was a moment , a day or two right when this all began , when he believed that this might be it , the end of the road .
He understood Epstein hanging himself in his cell—because what would life look like , afterward ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ respect , no buffer of fear and admiration that kept you in a kind of pleasant trance , the world shaping itself around you .
And , yes , there was a moment when people no longer returned his calls , looked away from him on the street , no room at the inn , etc .
But , almost as quickly , other people showed up , rushed to fill the void .
Came to his Super Bowl party , let him use country houses , consult with family lawyers .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ house now , for example .
A man wouldn ’ t let another man stay in his home if he was truly a leper .
He was fully awake now , adrenaline lighting up his brain , the itch to make plans , get to work .
He turned on the bedside light and sat against the pillows .
He guzzled the last of the stale water , groped for his legal pad .
It was better , he ’ d learned , after the punishing rounds of discovery , to keep lists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ papers disappeared .
He called Joan .
“ This is off the record , ” he said , instantly .
“ Do you agree ?
” he said .
“ I need a verbal.
” “ A verbal , ” he said .
“ Off the record.
” He heard someone in the background .
“ Who is that ?
” “ Well , get out of bed , O.K.
?
This is for your ears only .
I ’ ll call back in five.
” Joan liked him .
Legitimately liked him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but happy to soft-pedal an actor ’ s D.U.I .
in return for a lengthy profile , gladly accepted screening invitations and was a reliable fixture at after-parties .
They ’ d had fun times .
The junket for the film that he ’ d triaged out of near-disaster : Harvey had hunkered down in Sag and basically rewritten the script , while the director was hauled out of rehab and barely propped up by a team of A.D.s .
An Academy campaign .
The liaison in Japan who took them to Gold @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Uni on filet mignon , a skinny press assistant hanging around who wouldn ’ t touch it .
Who cringed when he put his arm around her , cowering on the banquette .
They ’ d left her at the place , as a joke .
As he remembered it .
Let her try to find her way back to the hotel at 3 A.M. in Tokyo .
This was before phones , when people got legitimately lost .
And , as he remembered , Joan hadn ’ t exactly gone out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or insist they take her home .
She had thought it was funny , too .
Joan answered on the first ring .
“ I want to give you the first interview after I ’ m exonerated , ” he said .
“ I do .
But I want to make sure you have all the facts , all the facts .
’ Cause there is a lot , ” he said , “ a lot that has been suppressed in this case .
You would be shocked to find out even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ buried— ” “ O.K.
, Harvey .
I ’ m just walking downstairs , O.K.
?
Just hold your horses.
” “ And this is off the record , Joan.
” “ This time tomorrow ” —he corrected himself— “ or , you know , tomorrow , not sure when , specifically , this whole case will be revealed for what it is : an elaborate fraud , an attempt to litigate regret and make me a scapegoat .
A fraud , it bears saying , that you and your cohorts at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in .
A lot of very bad actors there , your colleagues .
Some might say there ’ s a civil RICO case to be made against you— ” “ Sorry , my kid has an ear infection , I think she ’ s awake .
Can you hold on a second ?
” He hung up the phone .
Time to get dressed , start the whole mess again .
The Loro Piana half-zip , navy , good American bluejeans .
The ankle bracelet was slim enough that it actually did seem @ @ @ @ @ @ @ light as it was , it messed with his stride , this little annoyance , ever present , never quite fading into the background .
Enough clearance underneath to pull up his thin red socks .
Socks from the place the Pope gets his .
Tomato red , cotton lisle , made in this tiny shop by the Vatican .
He splashed his face with water .
Tightened his belt .
He was losing weight .
Funny that this was what it took , in the end .
Not the hugely expensive doctors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ replace meals , the overnight sleep study at Weill Cornell and daily Pilates instruction .
All it took , it turned out , was total annihilation .
Attempted annihilation , he corrected himself , the threat of annihilation .
“ There ’ s been an assassination attempt , ” he heard in his head , as if from a news announcer , “ an attempt on the President ’ s life.
” This had been a recurring thought lately : an assassination attempt , an assassination attempt .
He had survived an assassination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ describe what they were trying to do to him ?
The shocking , incredible resources they had marshalled against one man ?
He was just a man , just one man in red socks and a too-thin T-shirt , an ache in his left molar , a bad back that was basically on the verge of collapse , all his cartilage scraped away so his spine was a teetering Jenga stack of disks .
A little frightening , the carpeted stairs , his ankles feeling hollow and frail .
He gripped the bannister @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from now on , one of the reasons Vogel had offered the house up , that cheesy elevator .
Downstairs was quiet , the rooms dark , though a few lights were on in the kitchen .
He ’ d assumed no one was awake , but then Gabe stepped out from the pantry .
He was fully dressed , face bright and avid .
“ Good morning , ” Gabe said , smoothly , as if this were a normal hour , as if it weren ’ t only 5 A.M.. Harvey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ job entailed , being perpetually unsurprised .
“ Can I get you a little breakfast ?
Coffee ?
” “ Coffee , yes.
” Harvey patted his stomach , absently .
“ Breakfast , no , not yet .
My juice , the regular.
” “ Certainly .
The breakfast room is all set up .
Let me know if you need anything else .
”

Anastasia opened the door, made a noise of surprise, then left. She returned with the doctor. Together they worked to hoist Harvey back into the chair. His legs felt weak. But he was smiling, a big dopey smile.
“You fell,” the doctor said.
“I didn’t feel anything.”
“That’s normal.”
He had to pee, badly, his bladder glowing.
Anastasia removed the I.V., easing the medical tape from his arm, careful not to rip out the hair. She was so conscientious, he thought. Perfect blond angel.
“Have you. Ever tried it?” he said, with some effort.
“No,” she said. “No, not yet.”
“You should try it,” he said to Anastasia. “You have to try it.”
“I see all the people when they come out, some are crying. But mostly they are happy, they have a good experience. Did you have a good experience?”
“Oh, yes.” Should he try to explain more? “Very good.”
“So maybe I should try it.”
“When’s your birthday? Make him give you one for your birthday. The doctor.”
“Next month, actually.”
“O.K.,” Harvey said. “It’s settled. I’m getting you an infusion for your birthday.”
She laughed, prettily. “Thank you.”
She was not even a little bit afraid of him.
“We’ll just set you right up in bed,” she was saying. “Let’s just lie down for a bit, O.K.?”
He hoped that she never stopped telling him what to do, never stopped explaining what was coming next.
“Right, up we go, right on the bed. Now your legs. Swing them up for me. Very good.”
Harvey lay on the bed.
“Are you gonna stay here?” he mumbled. “Stay with me?”
No response. When he opened his eyes, she was gone—he was alone.
Lunch in the dining room. Gabe pouring ice water from a carafe. A square of black cod, the size and thickness of a pack of cards. Charred broccolini. A scoop of bland white rice, flecked with parsley. He still felt dazed, his thoughts dropping a little bit behind. He wasn’t hungry—a few halfhearted forkfuls of rice. He felt different from the person he had been that morning, like he’d stepped off to the side of himself. His phone buzzed on the tabletop—Rory, the lawyers. He let it go to voice mail. After a few moments, the phone shivered: they had left a message. He read the transcription, auto-generated bythe phone, with one squinted eye:
“Chow had Lee it’s roar a couple be back”
He didn’t click to see the rest of the gibberish, letting his eyes close fully, his head resting on his folded arms.
Kristin texted—five minutes away. Some sense of duty, visiting her father in his hour of need. There had been no way to indicate that he would prefer to be alone, in order to more effectively tranquillize himself: he’d rather spend the day with Anastasia or hunker down in the peaceful bowels of the screening room, knocking himself out with endless episodes. Life was in many ways worse these days, but you had to admit: God had given people the tools they needed to be happy.
Kristin was his oldest daughter, unmarried with an A.D.D. kid, from designer sperm that had apparently not been so designer. Kristin ran a foundation aimed at improving graduation rates, and had signed a public pledge to give away at least half her wealth in her lifetime. Kristin, with her peculiar features, her downy cheeks. Kristin, who wrote an op-ed about choosing not to fly private anymore, for which she was roundly and deservedly mocked. She had never been able to see the wave coming, about to knock her down, though it was the clearest thing in the world.
Rory called again—Harvey answered. “Just wanting to touch base,” Rory was saying. “I don’t want to alarm you, but I know we’re just concerned, about Jurors 3 and 9, especially. We fought tooth and nail to keep them off, and with good reason, and the consultant thinks they could be the vocal ones in a closed room—”
A vague image of the women jurors appeared to him, the one with a spider pin on her lapel, the other in a silky shirt buttoned to the neck, a tight cornrowed bun on her head, always staring his way. In any other situation, he would have been aware of the women’s existence for half a second. If that. He resented having to think about them at all. Which one of them had laughed when they’d shown the photos of his naked body? His arms and legs starfished in that well-lit room?
“Just want to keep you up to date on our thinking,” Rory finished.
“It may make me look dumb, but it’s technically just as dangerous as a motorcycle.” Cartoon by Charlie Hankin Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
“Well,” Harvey said. Should he ask him to repeat himself? “I guess,” he said slowly, “I’m glad to be up to date. On your thinking.”
A nap upstairs, and now the elevator glided soundlessly down to the ground floor, depositing him, the vulnerable human, safely at his destination. He padded toward the front door, one hand trailing lightly along the wall, in case he needed the support. Kristin was milling around the entry hall, Gabe fluttering in the background. She was in a turtleneck and a quilted vest. Silver earrings and pulled-back ponytail. Awfully severe. She looked sober and anxious, her daughter clutching her hand tightly, though she was eleven or twelve.
“Grandpa!” the girl said, when she caught sight of him approaching, hobbling down the hall.
For a moment, Harvey was taken aback, his chest warming with legit joy. She sounded so guileless, Ruby, so cheerful and wholesome. When he smiled at her, already the girl seemed uninterested. Was this an A.D.D. thing?
“Hello, you,” Harvey said. He cleared his throat. He felt less groggy, less glitchy. “Hello, both of you.”
“How are you, Dad?” Kristin said, hugging him with one arm.
“You know.” He zipped and unzipped the half-zip of his sweater. “The bastards try to get you down.” He blinked at the top of the girl’s head. “Sorry. I mean the jerks.”
Kristin patted his upper arm. “Well, we’re here to get your spirits up. O.K.? We’ll think positive.”
He wished Gabe would just take over, like a cruise director, steer them toward the proper activities, keep them all energized and happy, maintain group morale, but Gabe had disappeared. “How was the drive?”
“Easy. Whatever.”
“Boring,” Ruby said. “How come there’s an elevator in a house?”
“For people like me,” he said, “people in pain. It’s easier than the stairs.”
Kristin’s face rippled—who knows why?
“Are you hungry? Come in,” he said. “Let’s sit. Sit down at least—why are we just standing around?”
Gabe had put out silver bowls of potato chips, peanut M&M’s. He appeared in the doorway to take their drink orders: Kristin wanted an espresso and a glass of seltzer, Ruby was already chewing the potato chips and shook her head.
“Water for me, too,” Harvey said.
Ruby sat on the floor, leaned back against Kristin’s legs. Kristin perched primly on the love seat, playing absently with Ruby’s hair. It occurred to him that maybe she, too, was antsy, needed something to occupy herself.
“Having a good trip?” he said.
“We went to Ellis Island,” Kristin said.
“You know, my grandparents are in the . . . book, register, whatever there. Did you see them? Find their names? Your great-grandparents. When they came from Warsaw.”
“Uh, no. You didn’t tell me that.”
“You didn’t tell me you were going.”
A run of beeps from Ruby’s phone, her head bowed in concentration.
“And,” Kristin said, “we saw a matinée of ‘Hamilton.’ ”
“I’ve seen it twice already,” Ruby said. “This one wasn’t even the original cast.”
“That’s true,” Kristin said. “Her friend at school is the kid of—what’s the guy, the guy from ‘Cheers’ who did that Broadway show a few years ago? They were living out here, for the run. Ruby visited for spring break.”
Kristin looked at him expectantly, as if he would have follow-up questions. He folded his hands neatly on his stomach.
“How’s your back?” she said.
“Better,” he said. And it was true, since the infusion he had felt less pain. Had mostly just been less aware of pain, had not returned to the fact of the pain at the end of every thought. “I’m trying this new therapy. New thing, very cutting edge. It was actually much better than the surgery. You should try it,” Harvey said. “It’s not just for, you know, pain.”
How could he communicate what he had experienced earlier, how important it was that his daughter get an infusion as soon as possible? Maybe he could get Anastasia to come back this evening, get Kristin hooked up. Hell, even Ruby. All three of them zonked out in big easy chairs, drifting through space, attended to by a loyal blonde.
“And what about generally?” Kristin said. “Are you O.K.? Are you afraid?”
“Am I afraid?” He blinked, rapidly. “No, I’m not afraid.” That’s what he should try to make clear: how even though you felt, on the infusion, like you were floating through space and would never return to earth, it didn’t scare you.


Untangling Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol ’ s life may be better documented than that of any other artist in the history of the world .
That is because , every few days or so , he would sweep all the stuff on his desk into a storage box , date it , label it “ TC ” —short for “ time capsule ” —and then store it , with all the preceding TCs , in a special place in his studio .
As a result , we have his movie-ticket stubs , his newspaper clippings , his cowboy boots , his wigs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ collection of pornography , the countless Polaroids he took of the people at the countless parties he went to—you name it .
We have copies of bills he sent and also of bills he received from increasingly exasperated creditors , including one ( “ PAY UP YOU BLOWHARD ” ) from Giuseppe Rossi , the doctor who , in 1968 , saved his life after a woman who felt she had been insufficiently featured in his movies came to his studio one day and shot him .
In one box , I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ slice of cake , on a plate .
It wasn ’ t just material objects he kept .
When possible , he taped his phone conversations , and sometimes had an assistant type them up .
He believed in the power of the banal .
This faith was the wellspring of the Pop-art paintings—the Campbell ’ s soup cans , the Brillo cartons—that made him famous in the nineteen-sixties and changed America ’ s taste in art .
After Warhol ’ s death , in 1987 , a museum dedicated to his work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pittsburgh .
The time capsules—six hundred and ten of them—were shipped there and lined up on banks of metal shelving , ready for the person who would work their contents into a fittingly rich biography .
Seven years ago , he arrived : Blake Gopnik , formerly the lead art critic of the Washington Post .
( His brother , Adam , is a writer for this magazine . )
Gopnik is fantastically thorough ; the book is nine hundred pages long—not counting the seven thousand endnotes , available in the e-book edition @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t lose heart , because Gopnik is a vivid chronicler .
Here is a small clip from his description of the repair job Dr. Rossi did on Warhol ’ s innards after the 1968 shooting .
The surgeon found Reading this , I felt as though I were having the operation myself .
Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928 , the youngest of the three sons of Andrej and Julia Warhola , who had immigrated to the United States from a small village in what is now Slovakia .
The townsfolk were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the family was Byzantine Catholic .
( Warhol , as an adult , sporadically went to Mass .
“ Church is a fun place to go , ” he said . )
Slavs were much in demand in Pittsburgh , with its steel mills , because they were reputedly willing to do any kind of work , at any wage .
As a result , they were also the most looked-down-upon ethnic group in the city .
Andrej was a manual laborer ; Julia a domestic .
When she didn ’ t have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ door , often with her sons in tow , selling decorative flowers made from cut-up peach cans .
Andrej died in 1942 .
The two older boys quit school and took full-time jobs .
Andy stayed in school .
For most of his youth , he was cosseted by his family .
When the Warhols acquired a new Baby Brownie Special camera ( $ 1.25 ) , he immediately laid hands on it , and never let it go .
His brothers built him a darkroom in the basement .
Also , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he said that he wanted to make his living showing films .
This was an unusual life plan for a boy of his background , but Julia saved nine dollars—nine days ’ wages from her housecleaning—to buy him a projector .
He showed Mickey Mouse cartoons on a wall in the apartment .
Warhol liked to describe himself as self-educated , a widely accepted claim .
In fact , he went to an excellent art college , the Carnegie Institute of Technology , where a number of his teachers recognized his gifts and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to them , a rare tribute .
The minute he got out of school , in 1949 , he packed his belongings in a paper bag and got on an overnight Greyhound bound for New York City .
He was twenty .
Warhol lived in a series of roach-ridden sublets , usually shares , while trying to break into commercial illustration .
Once , when he was showing samples of his work to the editor-in-chief of Harper ’ s Bazaar , an insect crawled out of his portfolio , to his mortification .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that she gave him an assignment .
Warhol was not shy .
In the Museum of Modern Art , he went up to a staffer and proposed that he design Christmas cards for the gift shop .
( He got the job . )
A friend remembered seeing him in a bookstore , flipping through the record bins to see which labels were doing the most interesting jackets .
Then he went home and cold-called the art directors .
“ He was like a little Czech tank , ” another friend said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ years , and later , found him strange—a “ weird little creep , ” in the words of one .
He was unabashedly homosexual , and in the early fifties that was weird enough .
He liked to do drawings of nude boys , their nipples and crotches dotted with little hearts , like soft kisses .
If he met a man who appealed to him , he might say that he liked to photograph penises , and would this man mind ?
“ No , of course not , ” one self-possessed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you going to use them for ?
” “ Oh , I don ’ t know yet , ” Warhol said .
“ I ’ m just taking the pictures.
” The man unzipped .
Three years after Warhol arrived in New York , his mother turned up on his doorstep .
She explained to one of his friends , “ I come here to take care of my Andy , and when he ’ s okay I go home.
” She stayed for almost twenty years .
The household had a large @ @ @ @ @ @ @ At one point , there were reportedly seventeen of them , mostly named Sam .
( But Julia , pointing , could introduce them separately : “ That ’ s the good Sam , that ’ s the bad Sam , that ’ s the dumb Sam .
.
.
” ) Between the cats and Julia ’ s late-life drinking problem , Warhol seems to have been hesitant to introduce her to his friends .
On the other hand , one boyfriend said he thought Warhol was grateful for her presence , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to have sex .
He would explain to his guest that he didn ’ t want to make any bedroom noises as long as his mother was within earshot .
Warhol claimed that he was a virgin until he was twenty-five , and some people would say that that was no surprise .
All his life , he was pained by his looks .
He was cursed with terrible skin , not just acne but what seems to have been a disorder of pigment distribution , so that his complexion was lighter here @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a bulbous nose , or so he thought , and he got a nose job .
By the time he was in his thirties , he had lost much of his hair .
Thereafter , he glued a toupee to his scalp every morning .
His most celebrated wig was a silver one , which he usually wore with a fringe of his brown hair peeping out at the neck .
These difficulties boded ill for his sex life , and he was widely said to be lousy in bed .
He thought @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” a friend reported .
He ’ d do it with you once or twice , and that was it .
Gopnik , as is his practice , also gives competing evidence : “ Within a few years Warhol was having surgery for anal warts and a tear , and a decade later he was taking penicillin for a venereal disease.
” Warhol ’ s friend and collaborator Taylor Mead said that Warhol “ blows like crazy .
”

Andy Warhol’s life may be better documented than that of any other artist in the history of the world. That is because, every few days or so, he would sweep all the stuff on his desk into a storage box, date it, label it “TC”—short for “time capsule”—and then store it, with all the preceding TCs, in a special place in his studio. As a result, we have his movie-ticket stubs, his newspaper clippings, his cowboy boots, his wigs, his collection of dental molds, his collection of pornography, the countless Polaroids he took of the people at the countless parties he went to—you name it. We have copies of bills he sent and also of bills he received from increasingly exasperated creditors, including one (“PAY UP YOU BLOWHARD”) from Giuseppe Rossi, the doctor who, in 1968, saved his life after a woman who felt she had been insufficiently featured in his movies came to his studio one day and shot him. In one box, I’ve heard, there is also a slice of cake, on a plate. It wasn’t just material objects he kept. When possible, he taped his phone conversations, and sometimes had an assistant type them up. He believed in the power of the banal. This faith was the wellspring of the Pop-art paintings—the Campbell’s soup cans, the Brillo cartons—that made him famous in the nineteen-sixties and changed America’s taste in art.
After Warhol’s death, in 1987, a museum dedicated to his work was established in his home town, Pittsburgh. The time capsules—six hundred and ten of them—were shipped there and lined up on banks of metal shelving, ready for the person who would work their contents into a fittingly rich biography. Seven years ago, he arrived: Blake Gopnik, formerly the lead art critic of the Washington Post. (His brother, Adam, is a writer for this magazine.) Gopnik is fantastically thorough; the book is nine hundred pages long—not counting the seven thousand endnotes, available in the e-book edition or online. But you don’t lose heart, because Gopnik is a vivid chronicler. Here is a small clip from his description of the repair job Dr. Rossi did on Warhol’s innards after the 1968 shooting. The surgeon found
two holes in the arc of the diaphragm muscle, pierced both right and left as the bullet crossed through Warhol’s body; an esophagus severed from the stomach, so that food and gastric acid were spilling out from below; a liver whose left lobe was mashed and bleeding and a spleen utterly destroyed and spilling more blood than any of the other organs. [The] bullet had also cut a ragged hole in Warhol’s intestines, releasing feces and upping the chances of fatal infection.
Reading this, I felt as though I were having the operation myself.
Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928, the youngest of the three sons of Andrej and Julia Warhola, who had immigrated to the United States from a small village in what is now Slovakia. The townsfolk were Carpatho-Rusyns, a Slavic people, and the family was Byzantine Catholic. (Warhol, as an adult, sporadically went to Mass. “Church is a fun place to go,” he said.) Slavs were much in demand in Pittsburgh, with its steel mills, because they were reputedly willing to do any kind of work, at any wage. As a result, they were also the most looked-down-upon ethnic group in the city. Andrej was a manual laborer; Julia a domestic. When she didn’t have enough work, she went door to door, often with her sons in tow, selling decorative flowers made from cut-up peach cans. Andrej died in 1942. The two older boys quit school and took full-time jobs. Andy stayed in school. For most of his youth, he was cosseted by his family. When the Warhols acquired a new Baby Brownie Special camera ($1.25), he immediately laid hands on it, and never let it go. His brothers built him a darkroom in the basement. Also, he fell in love with the movies; he said that he wanted to make his living showing films. This was an unusual life plan for a boy of his background, but Julia saved nine dollars—nine days’ wages from her housecleaning—to buy him a projector. He showed Mickey Mouse cartoons on a wall in the apartment.
Warhol liked to describe himself as self-educated, a widely accepted claim. In fact, he went to an excellent art college, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where a number of his teachers recognized his gifts and kept the work that he turned in to them, a rare tribute. The minute he got out of school, in 1949, he packed his belongings in a paper bag and got on an overnight Greyhound bound for New York City. He was twenty.
Warhol lived in a series of roach-ridden sublets, usually shares, while trying to break into commercial illustration. Once, when he was showing samples of his work to the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, an insect crawled out of his portfolio, to his mortification. The editor felt so sorry for him that she gave him an assignment. Warhol was not shy. In the Museum of Modern Art, he went up to a staffer and proposed that he design Christmas cards for the gift shop. (He got the job.) A friend remembered seeing him in a bookstore, flipping through the record bins to see which labels were doing the most interesting jackets. Then he went home and cold-called the art directors. “He was like a little Czech tank,” another friend said.
Many people who met him in those years, and later, found him strange—a “weird little creep,” in the words of one. He was unabashedly homosexual, and in the early fifties that was weird enough. He liked to do drawings of nude boys, their nipples and crotches dotted with little hearts, like soft kisses. If he met a man who appealed to him, he might say that he liked to photograph penises, and would this man mind? “No, of course not,” one self-possessed British curator replied. “What are you going to use them for?” “Oh, I don’t know yet,” Warhol said. “I’m just taking the pictures.” The man unzipped.
Three years after Warhol arrived in New York, his mother turned up on his doorstep. She explained to one of his friends, “I come here to take care of my Andy, and when he’s okay I go home.” She stayed for almost twenty years. The household had a large, smelly collection of Siamese cats. At one point, there were reportedly seventeen of them, mostly named Sam. (But Julia, pointing, could introduce them separately: “That’s the good Sam, that’s the bad Sam, that’s the dumb Sam . . .”) Between the cats and Julia’s late-life drinking problem, Warhol seems to have been hesitant to introduce her to his friends. On the other hand, one boyfriend said he thought Warhol was grateful for her presence, because it gave him an excuse not to have sex. He would explain to his guest that he didn’t want to make any bedroom noises as long as his mother was within earshot.
Cartoon by Jack Ziegler Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Warhol claimed that he was a virgin until he was twenty-five, and some people would say that that was no surprise. All his life, he was pained by his looks. He was cursed with terrible skin, not just acne but what seems to have been a disorder of pigment distribution, so that his complexion was lighter here, darker there. He also had a bulbous nose, or so he thought, and he got a nose job. By the time he was in his thirties, he had lost much of his hair. Thereafter, he glued a toupee to his scalp every morning. His most celebrated wig was a silver one, which he usually wore with a fringe of his brown hair peeping out at the neck. These difficulties boded ill for his sex life, and he was widely said to be lousy in bed. He thought sex was “messy and distasteful,” a friend reported. He’d do it with you once or twice, and that was it. Gopnik, as is his practice, also gives competing evidence: “Within a few years Warhol was having surgery for anal warts and a tear, and a decade later he was taking penicillin for a venereal disease.” Warhol’s friend and collaborator Taylor Mead said that Warhol “blows like crazy.”
Warhol lied constantly, almost recreationally. He lied about his age even to his doctor. He told Who’s Who that he was born in Cleveland, to the “von Warhol” family. (He had traded in Warhola for Warhol soon after arriving in New York.) He adopted a gentle, whispery voice, into which he might then drop a little grenade. If someone asked how he was, he might say, “I’m okay,” and then, coming closer, he would add, “But I have diarrhea.” Some people thought he was stupid. Not those who knew him well. “Warhol only plays dumb,” a friend said. “He’s incredibly analytical, intellectual, and perceptive.”
His commercial specialty was drawings for women’s-wear ads—above all, shoes. In 1955, the high-end women’s shoemaker I. Miller gave him a contract for a minimum of twelve thousand dollars’ worth of work per year, a lot of money at the time. He also did window dressing, notably for Bonwit Teller. But already he was looking beyond this: he wanted to be a gallery artist. Teachers and classmates from Carnegie Tech provided some connections, and Manhattan’s gay community supplied more. He also had a few special godfathers, attracted to him, it seems, by his charm (not everybody thought he was creepy) and by his drive. Perhaps his most important guide was Emile de Antonio, an artists’ agent, who introduced him all around; he knew John Cage, whom Warhol revered, and lots of collectors. (“I gave a little party for a terribly rich woman I knew,” de Antonio recalled, “and I served just marijuana and Dom Perignon, and Andy did a beautiful menu in French.”) Another useful person was Ivan Karp, the director of the Leo Castelli Gallery, Manhattan’s most prestigious art mart. Through Karp, Warhol eventually met Henry Geldzahler, a curatorial assistant at the Metropolitan Museum, whose job there was to find out who the hot new artists were and tell the curators.
In the fifties, the United States already had a pocket of conceptual art, but the star painters were the Abstract Expressionists, above all Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, with their effortful drips and impastos. At the Ab Exes’ heels were the young Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, part conceptual, part painterly, and edging into “Pop,” a style that used imagery from mass culture—comic strips, movies, advertising—and adopted a light, playful tone, the very opposite of the Abstract Expressionists’ heavy lifting. Warhol, too, was interested in this popular matter and manner, and he was annoyed that other people were, as he saw it, stealing a march on him. According to a famous story, he was complaining about this to friends one night and asked if anyone could think of pop-culture images that no one else had used. A decorator named Muriel Latow said she had a suggestion, but she wanted fifty dollars, up front, before she would reveal it. The unembarrassable Warhol sat down and wrote a check. Then Latow said, “You’ve got to find something that’s recognizable to almost everybody . . . something like a can of Campbell’s Soup.”
Gopnik calls this Warhol’s “eureka moment,” and it is typical of the book’s sophistication that the crucial, seedling idea of Warhol’s Pop art should be attributed, without apology, to someone other than Warhol. Often, artists who are praised for birthing a new trend are not the actual originators but the ones who made the trend appealing to a large public. Warhol had as much of the latter gift as of the former; Gopnik calls him “the Great Sponge.” In any case, the day after Latow shared with him her little brain bomb, Warhol (or his mother, in another version) went to the Finast supermarket across the street and came home with one can of every kind of Campbell’s soup on sale there. By the following year, 1962, he had produced “Campbell’s Soup Cans,” a montage of all thirty-two varieties. Today, this painting hangs in the Museum of Modern Art—“the ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ of the Pop movement,” in the words of Henry Geldzahler. It is both a slap in the face and a great joy: so fresh, so brash, so red and white, so certain that it has covered every kind of soup in the world, from Pepper Pot to Scotch Broth.
In rapid succession, the Campbell’s Soups were followed by Warhol’s other now famous Pop paintings: “Green Coca-Cola Bottles” (1962), “192 One Dollar Bills” (1962), “Brillo Soap Pads Box” (1964), the Marilyn Monroes and Elizabeth Taylors and Marlon Brandos and Elvises. For some, you can easily construct a background narrative. The “Marilyn Diptych,” comprising fifty silk screens of Monroe, fading from garish color to spectral black-and-white, was exhibited just after her death. But I see no story lurking behind the Liz Taylors or the Elvises or, for that matter, the panels of twenty-four Statues of Liberty (1962) or thirty Mona Lisas (1963). All of these ladies, not to speak of Elvis and Brando, were stars, and Warhol, from his childhood until the day he died, was enthralled by celebrity.
He soon became a celebrity himself, if an unusual one. In his thirties, he was famous, in TV interviews, for putting two fingers over his lips and saying things like “er” or “um,” but not much more, as the cameras rolled. (You can see this on YouTube. It is discomforting to watch.) For live interviews, he would often bring along Gerard Malanga, who worked with him, and say, “Why don’t you ask my assistant Gerry Malanga some questions? He did a lot of my paintings.” There was some truth to this. Of the works listed above, all but the 1962 “Campbell’s Soup Cans” were silk screens, usually based on photographs that someone else had taken, and made with Malanga wielding the squeegee. From 1963 to 1972—the period during which he made most of his Pop art—Warhol produced no hand-drawn work.
Running parallel to Warhol’s iconoclasm about authorship was a certain coolness toward his subjects. “For an artist with a lifelong reputation for sucking up to stars,” Gopnik writes, “Warhol also had a lifelong knack for making art that underlined their shortcomings and hollowness.” Probably the most important discussions of Warhol’s work are the books and essays that the philosopher Arthur Danto wrote on him from the mid-sixties onward. These are not exactly art criticism. Their scope is broader. Danto says that Warhol’s work, by disposing of modernism’s assertions that painting should be about the nature of painting, liberated it to go its own way, while the art critics stayed back in the schoolroom, arguing. Danto doesn’t say he loved Warhol’s work, but I think he did. I’m sorry that he liked the Brillo carton—it supplied the title of his book “Beyond the Brillo Box”—better than the Campbell’s soup cans, but he probably enjoyed the irony that the Brillo box Warhol immortalized was designed by an Abstract Expressionist painter, James Harvey, doing a money job on the side. The Ab Exes looked upon Warhol with hatred. At a party in the late sixties, a drunken de Kooning said to Warhol, “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, you’re even a killer of laughter.”
Warhol didn’t kill laughter—he would have been less famous if he had done so—but his humor is muted, deadpan. In 1964, he produced a series of nine silk screens of Jacqueline Kennedy’s face, based on press photos: one that showed her in the famous pillbox hat, just before J.F.K. was shot; the second as Lyndon Johnson was being sworn in, on the airplane back to Washington; the third at Kennedy’s funeral. There was nothing overtly mocking about these works. But in 1964, when, in the public mind, Kennedy’s body was not yet cold, they raised a question: What was Warhol saying? Viewers might have asked the same of his earlier “Death and Disasters” series (1962-65), worked up from photographs of bloodied corpses hanging out of wrecked cars, mangled bodies of people who had jumped to their deaths, the electric chair in which Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, were executed, and so on. Like the soup cans, the silk screens were often cheerfully multiplied and, like the Marilyns and the Liz Taylors, covered with washes of bright color: blue, red, violet, yellow.
In the same year as the “Nine Jackies,” Warhol unveiled silk screens of his “Flowers,” big, blobby hibiscus blossoms against a grassy field. They looked like wallpaper or, as Gopnik suggests, Marimekko dress fabrics. In any case, they were something that, unlike a picture of an electric chair, you might be willing to hang over your living-room sofa. This was what they were apparently designed for, because Warhol (or Malanga) turned out more than four hundred and fifty of them, in different versions—different sizes, different colorways, to use Gopnik’s inspired word—and they sold like hotcakes. Warhol claimed to be proud of them. If I’m not mistaken, Gopnik doesn’t believe him. He quotes Warhol announcing, the following year, that he has retired as an artist. The “Flowers,” Gopnik writes, were “pretty much his last notable Pop paintings.” But, as the author does not flat-out say but repeatedly implies, they were also pretty much Warhol’s last notable paintings, period. “I hate paintings,” he told a reporter in 1966, adding, “That’s why I started making movies.”
He had made his first film in 1963. Titled “Sleep,” it was five and a half hours long, and all it showed was his boyfriend, John Giorno, sleeping. The next year, he followed this up with “Empire,” eight hours, overnight, of the Empire State Building, shot from a window in the nearby Time-Life Building. Thereafter, until the mid-seventies, he made scores of movies, some of them pure and severe, like “Sleep” and “Empire,” and others, such as “The Chelsea Girls” and “Lonesome Cowboys,” shambling and funny and dirty, with drag queens sitting around licking bananas or people having dilatory conversations about sex, or having sex.
But the movies were not just movies. They were the motion-picture wing of what was by now a whole “scene.” In 1964, Warhol moved his professional headquarters into a vast space he came to call the Factory—it had housed a hat factory before he moved in—on East Forty-seventh Street, just west of the United Nations. The place was filthy, but Warhol’s friend Billy Name (né Billy Linich, but Linich was a name, right? So why not just go by Name?) moved in with a pack of fellow speed freaks and transformed the space with tinfoil and spray paint, so that in the end every surface was silver.
Just as Warhol’s movies were not merely movies, the Factory was not merely a place where things were made. It was also a showcase for a certain group of people who clustered around Warhol. Billy Name was one; Gerard Malanga another. Also important was Ondine (Robert Olivo), wild and vicious. Best known to outsiders was Edie Sedgwick, a sweet-faced and rather hapless rich girl who, in black tights and expensive sweaters, often went along on Warhol’s outings, as his “date,” and paid the tab. These and a few others were Warhol’s superstars, as he called them.
In 1966, he also became the manager of a proto-punk rock band, the Velvet Underground, hatchery of Lou Reed, John Cale, and others, all pretty much unknown at that point. One of its members described a typical show: “Some sailors or something were in the audience of five, and we played something and they said, ‘You play that again and we’ll fuck the shit out of you.’ So we played it again.” “Our aim was to upset people,” one of the band’s founders said, “make them vomit.” Warhol knew little about music, and he and the Velvets broke up in less than a year. (“Always leave them wanting less,” Warhol said.) But for a while Warhol’s film showings and performances—notably, “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable” and “★★★★”—were multimedia events, featuring the superstars bopping around in a desultory fashion to the Velvets’ discordant strains while two or more films were projected side by side or, indeed, in superimposition.


newyorker--2020-06-01--Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Dark Mirror , by Barton Gellman ( Penguin Press ) .
In 2013 , the author , reporting for the Washington Post , was among those who brought to light the trove of top-secret N.S.A .
files leaked by Edward Snowden .
Here he delves even deeper into the maze of government secrecy and surveillance , but at the book ’ s core is his wary , exasperating relationship with his source , who slides between principled candor , exaggeration , and evasion .
Gellman takes us through his efforts while reporting to weigh the public ’ s right to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ national-security matters , as he carefully charts the course toward transparency .
Even so , when an N.S.A .
spokesperson accuses him of being “ in love with your source , ” he takes seriously the possibility that her words might bear some truth .
The Compton Cowboys , by Walter Thompson-Hernández ( William Morrow ) .
The history of African-American ranching in California has its roots in the westward migration following the Civil War .
This vivid group portrait of contemporary black cowboys at Richland Farms , in Compton , is a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unrest , gang violence , and confrontations with the police .
The Compton Cowboys met , in the eighties and nineties , in a youth horseback-riding program mostly funded by white donors .
Taking over the ranch as adults , they sought to reclaim the legacy of black cowboys .
Their activities , the author shows , sparked a culture clash in the wider community , but they have also revived interest in the black cowboy life style , indelibly captured in the Cowboys ’ motto : “ Streets raised us .
Horses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , by Dalia Sofer ( Farrar , Straus & Giroux ) .
The ruptures of the 1978 Iranian Revolution govern the life of Hamid , the stoic narrator of this novel , which shuttles between the past and the present day .
Working for years as a government interrogator , Hamid became estranged from his family , who fled to America .
But on a trip to New York , accompanying a government minister on a diplomatic mission , Hamid visits his mother , who asks him to fulfill his father ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Iran .
Sofer shows how one generation ’ s revolt gives rise to another ’ s .
At one point , Hamid , asking the minister for reassurance that history ’ s disturbances will resolve into peace , is told instead that “ the world is inclining toward darkness.
” Tropic of Violence , by Nathacha Appanah , translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan ( Graywolf ) .
This novel by a Mauritian-French writer takes place off the coast of Mozambique , on the island of Mayotte , which is officially part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poorest region .
Migrants flock to Mayotte despite its poverty , in the hope of acquiring French passports .
In Appanah ’ s sobering story , a baby boy , Moïse , abandoned by his migrant mother , is adopted by a nurse , grows into a rebellious adolescent , and becomes entangled with a sadistic teen-age gang leader .
Appanah offers a portrait of a place both beautiful and brutal , suggesting that Mayotte , damaged by colonization , corruption , poverty , and neglect , is fated to afflict its inhabitants @ @ @

Dark Mirror, by Barton Gellman (Penguin Press). In 2013, the author, reporting for the Washington Post, was among those who brought to light the trove of top-secret N.S.A. files leaked by Edward Snowden. Here he delves even deeper into the maze of government secrecy and surveillance, but at the book’s core is his wary, exasperating relationship with his source, who slides between principled candor, exaggeration, and evasion. Gellman takes us through his efforts while reporting to weigh the public’s right to know against the need for secrecy on national-security matters, as he carefully charts the course toward transparency. Even so, when an N.S.A. spokesperson accuses him of being “in love with your source,” he takes seriously the possibility that her words might bear some truth.
The Compton Cowboys, by Walter Thompson-Hernández (William Morrow). The history of African-American ranching in California has its roots in the westward migration following the Civil War. This vivid group portrait of contemporary black cowboys at Richland Farms, in Compton, is a story both of heritage and of urban unrest, gang violence, and confrontations with the police. The Compton Cowboys met, in the eighties and nineties, in a youth horseback-riding program mostly funded by white donors. Taking over the ranch as adults, they sought to reclaim the legacy of black cowboys. Their activities, the author shows, sparked a culture clash in the wider community, but they have also revived interest in the black cowboy life style, indelibly captured in the Cowboys’ motto: “Streets raised us. Horses saved us.”
Man of My Time, by Dalia Sofer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The ruptures of the 1978 Iranian Revolution govern the life of Hamid, the stoic narrator of this novel, which shuttles between the past and the present day. Working for years as a government interrogator, Hamid became estranged from his family, who fled to America. But on a trip to New York, accompanying a government minister on a diplomatic mission, Hamid visits his mother, who asks him to fulfill his father’s wish to have his ashes scattered in Iran. Sofer shows how one generation’s revolt gives rise to another’s. At one point, Hamid, asking the minister for reassurance that history’s disturbances will resolve into peace, is told instead that “the world is inclining toward darkness.”
Tropic of Violence, by Nathacha Appanah, translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan (Graywolf). This novel by a Mauritian-French writer takes place off the coast of Mozambique, on the island of Mayotte, which is officially part of France, and by far its poorest region. Migrants flock to Mayotte despite its poverty, in the hope of acquiring French passports. In Appanah’s sobering story, a baby boy, Moïse, abandoned by his migrant mother, is adopted by a nurse, grows into a rebellious adolescent, and becomes entangled with a sadistic teen-age gang leader. Appanah offers a portrait of a place both beautiful and brutal, suggesting that Mayotte, damaged by colonization, corruption, poverty, and neglect, is fated to afflict its inhabitants in turn.


newyorker--2020-06-01--“Pastoral,” by Melissa Ginsburg

“Pastoral,” by Melissa Ginsburg

I was unincorporated I was without a body I was lots Not lots yet parcels I was ground Where the @ @ @ @ @ shrubs I was Brush and the space Between shacks I lacked Governance I was Lean-tos @ @ @ @ @ earth and Roots of the weak Sweetgum I was pear And turtle sunning I was @ @ @ @ @ the site On the horse ’ s neck Where bats came Nightly to feed I @ @ @ @ @ morning I was Waiting for full dark Again I was waiting For the wound To @ @ @ @ @ a tree a weak Tree strung with nets I was the bat hoping To be @ @ @ @ @ heal myself Fast enough

Audio: Read by the author.
I was unincorporated
I was without a body
I was lots
Not lots yet parcels
I was ground
Where the pipes will go
I was shrubs I was
Brush and the space
Between shacks I lacked
Governance I was
Lean-tos I was dens
In the earth and
Roots of the weak
Sweetgum I was pear
And turtle sunning
I was lungs un-
Breathing I was the site
On the horse’s neck
Where bats came
Nightly to feed I was
The blood coagulating
Into morning I was
Waiting for full dark
Again I was waiting
For the wound
To reopen I was led
To a tree a weak
Tree strung with nets
I was the bat hoping
To be caught I
Couldn’t heal myself
Fast enough