newyorker--2020-10-15--Louise Glück, Whisperer of the Seasons

Louise Glück, Whisperer of the Seasons

Does a more sinister opening exist in literature ?
The hills “ darken ” —we don ’ t know how dark they are , only that they ’ ll get darker .
The oxen with their yoke belong in a sour sort of nursery rhyme or fairy tale ; they sleep like obedient children .
Meanwhile , a sentience gathers above the countryside ’ s ravaged bones .
Glück arranges her details in neat , careful stacks ; in the next line , sheaves are “ piled at the roadside / among cinquefoil , as the toothed moon rises.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cool , sibyllic voice : I often go to Glück for her moods , which shift , within poems and from poem to poem , but always seem pure and specific .
In “ All Hallows , ” ambience predicts argument : after the shadowy hills and the empty fields , the pronouncement about “ barrenness ” confirms what we already know .
By the time the woman materializes—with talking seeds , of all things—it ’ s almost as if the atmosphere is directing the action , like a current carrying the speaker @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intend to visit , a place she might not have wanted to go .
Seasons , our oldest metaphors , are also moods , structures of feeling .
Perhaps this is why Glück turns to them , again and again , to divine the texture of our inner life .
In the poem “ Twilight , ” a man marks , outside his window , the “ green things followed by golden things followed by whiteness.
” In “ The Wild Iris , ” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 , Glück @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gardens—her own , in Vermont , and an allegorical , Eden-like enclosure .
In “ Nostos , ” the window-gazer is a woman , musing about time and apple trees , “ as one expects of a lyric poet.
” Readers might ask why one might expect a lyric poet to lash herself to the cycles of nature .
Glück would claim to be refusing a fantasy .
For her , the idea of escaping change is a form of romance—and romance , as she writes in her essay “ Education of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most struggle to be free of.
” The result is an ascetic style , well suited to both evisceration and incantation .
Glück mistrusts “ music , that quality of language which is felt to persist in the absence of rule ” ; it ’ s not surprising that she feels lured by the seasons , which are themselves rules , instantiations of cosmic order .
October is just one example .
Every season ends , or dies , and so brushes elbows with Glück ’ s principal muse , her ally against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ After all things occurred to me / the void occurred to me , ” says the God of “ End of Summer.
” The void is always occurring to Glück , stalking her speakers through time , myth , and metaphor .
The seeds in “ All Hallows ” evoke the story of the goddess Persephone , who ate six pomegranate seeds and was trapped in the underworld ; her grief-stricken mother , Demeter , invented winter .
Glück herself sounds like winter : chilly and severe , but possessed of a stark @ @ @ @ @ @ @ etherings ( “ I said you could snuggle .
That doesn ’ t mean / your cold feet all over my dick , ” she writes in “ Anniversary ” ) and for lines of seemingly inexhaustible depth .
In “ Celestial Music , ” “ The love of form is the love of endings ” ; in “ Nostos , ” famously , “ We look at the world once , in childhood .
The rest is memory.
” In “ Nostos , ” the invocation of childhood matters , too .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ often a way of imagining youth and age : another preoccupation for Glück .
In her lyric “ Autumn , ” from 2017 , the speaker remembers a conversation with her sister : “ Life , my sister said , / is like a torch passed now / from the body to the mind.
” This is a variation on the end of “ Nostos ” : as children , the sister seems to suggest , we experience the world , and as adults our task is to understand it .
But sometimes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ richness from outside to inside , the hand-off of the torch—goes wrong .
In the next section , there is a smell of smoke .
“ Old people and fire , ” the sister comments .
“ They burn their houses down.
” The poem blinks forward , and the speaker has a vision : “ Stars gleaming over the water / The leaves piled , waiting to be lit.
” Lit by what ?
The speaker ’ s imagination , perhaps .
The world ignites the brain , and then the brain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is seasonal .
“ October ( section I ) ” is part of a book-length poem written in the aftermath of a national crisis .
( The volume was published in 2004 . )
The beginning of that crisis , Al Qaeda ’ s attack on the World Trade Center , occurred on another fall day , with a heart-stoppingly clear sky ; the loss of the towers haunts lines like : “ I can ’ t hear your voice / for the wind ’ s cries , whistling over the bare @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , months or years have passed since some great blow , and the return of trauma finds a figure in the revolving seasons .
The speaker ’ s shock at nature ’ s indifference fuses with a sort of survivor ’ s dream logic .
The terrible thing has already happened—how could it be happening again ?
That sentiment resonates in our present October , when disaster seems the rule , not the exception , and when time itself seems to have lost its bearings .
( Didn ’ t we wash our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this headline ? )
Glück , whose art has always answered to a distant , almost planetary reasoning , is now , strangely , riding a wave of political timeliness .
She is a poet of interiors ; of having and losing ; of desire and its regulation .
“ You want to know how I spend my time ?
” one of her speakers scoffs , sounding for all the world like a fed-up quarantiner .
“ I walk the front lawn , pretending / to be weeding.
” For anyone who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ within Glück ’ s work a glossary of today ’ s moods : rage , vulnerability , despair , gallows humor , irritation , loneliness , an aura of intensity around the mundane .
For Glück , these circuits of sensing and thinking—the inner seasons—enact a theory of life : we feel before we understand , and we understand very little .
There ’ s something implicating about so much disembodied emotion , floating on the page like weather .
Glück is an impersonal poet , whose poems , assembling around you , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ themselves .
The effect isn ’ t exactly comforting , except in the way that being told the truth can be comforting—as if the wife , in “ All Hallows , ” rather than holding out her seeds , had simply explained that you are caught in the turning and swept toward darkness .

Glück is an impersonal artist, whose poems, assembling around you, feel blindingly personal, like the seasons themselves. Photograph by Katherine Wolkoff
Louise Glück, who just won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, is our great October poet. (Robert Frost may be a distant second.) Consider the lyric “All Hallows,” from her collection “The House on Marshland,” from 1975:
Even now this landscape is assembling
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean. . . .
Does a more sinister opening exist in literature? The hills “darken”—we don’t know how dark they are, only that they’ll get darker. The oxen with their yoke belong in a sour sort of nursery rhyme or fairy tale; they sleep like obedient children. Meanwhile, a sentience gathers above the countryside’s ravaged bones. Glück arranges her details in neat, careful stacks; in the next line, sheaves are “piled at the roadside / among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises.” Gradually a space is cleared for a cool, sibyllic voice:
This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And a new character appears:
. . . the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here,
Come here, little one
And the soul creeps out of the tree.
I often go to Glück for her moods, which shift, within poems and from poem to poem, but always seem pure and specific. In “All Hallows,” ambience predicts argument: after the shadowy hills and the empty fields, the pronouncement about “barrenness” confirms what we already know. By the time the woman materializes—with talking seeds, of all things—it’s almost as if the atmosphere is directing the action, like a current carrying the speaker to a place she didn’t intend to visit, a place she might not have wanted to go.
Seasons, our oldest metaphors, are also moods, structures of feeling. Perhaps this is why Glück turns to them, again and again, to divine the texture of our inner life. In the poem “Twilight,” a man marks, outside his window, the “green things followed by golden things followed by whiteness.” In “The Wild Iris,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, Glück studies the growth and decay of two gardens—her own, in Vermont, and an allegorical, Eden-like enclosure. In “Nostos,” the window-gazer is a woman, musing about time and apple trees, “as one expects of a lyric poet.” Readers might ask why one might expect a lyric poet to lash herself to the cycles of nature. Glück would claim to be refusing a fantasy. For her, the idea of escaping change is a form of romance—and romance, as she writes in her essay “Education of the Poet,” “is what I most struggle to be free of.”
The result is an ascetic style, well suited to both evisceration and incantation. Glück mistrusts “music, that quality of language which is felt to persist in the absence of rule”; it’s not surprising that she feels lured by the seasons, which are themselves rules, instantiations of cosmic order. October is just one example. Every season ends, or dies, and so brushes elbows with Glück’s principal muse, her ally against the romance of eternal life. “After all things occurred to me / the void occurred to me,” says the God of “End of Summer.” The void is always occurring to Glück, stalking her speakers through time, myth, and metaphor. The seeds in “All Hallows” evoke the story of the goddess Persephone, who ate six pomegranate seeds and was trapped in the underworld; her grief-stricken mother, Demeter, invented winter. Glück herself sounds like winter: chilly and severe, but possessed of a stark beauty. She is known for ferocious etherings (“I said you could snuggle. That doesn’t mean / your cold feet all over my dick,” she writes in “Anniversary”) and for lines of seemingly inexhaustible depth. In “Celestial Music,” “The love of form is the love of endings”; in “Nostos,” famously, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
In “Nostos,” the invocation of childhood matters, too. That’s because the seasons are often a way of imagining youth and age: another preoccupation for Glück. In her lyric “Autumn,” from 2017, the speaker remembers a conversation with her sister: “Life, my sister said, / is like a torch passed now / from the body to the mind.” This is a variation on the end of “Nostos”: as children, the sister seems to suggest, we experience the world, and as adults our task is to understand it. But sometimes the transition—the migration of life’s richness from outside to inside, the hand-off of the torch—goes wrong. In the next section, there is a smell of smoke. “Old people and fire,” the sister comments. “They burn their houses down.” The poem blinks forward, and the speaker has a vision: “Stars gleaming over the water / The leaves piled, waiting to be lit.” Lit by what? The speaker’s imagination, perhaps. The world ignites the brain, and then the brain returns the favor. This, too, is seasonal.
Lately, I’ve turned to Glück, interpreter of seasons, to reconcile myself to the threats that come with forward motion. “Autumn,” despite its broadly gentle perspective, murmurs with worry. “Fall was approaching”; “the sun was setting”; “How heavy my mind is”; “You must find your footing.” Glück has always been a laureate of danger; she has a sixth sense for dread’s fluctuations. This is especially clear in “October (section I),” which tumbles through anxious questions, a cascade of disbelief: “Is it winter again, is it cold again, / didn’t Frank just slip on the ice, didn’t he heal.” Glück’s speaker has mended injuries and planted seeds, but her progress may have come undone. “Wasn’t my body / rescued,” the speaker asks, or pleads. “Wasn’t it safe?”
“October (section I)” is part of a book-length poem written in the aftermath of a national crisis. (The volume was published in 2004.) The beginning of that crisis, Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center, occurred on another fall day, with a heart-stoppingly clear sky; the loss of the towers haunts lines like: “I can’t hear your voice / for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground.” As “October” begins, months or years have passed since some great blow, and the return of trauma finds a figure in the revolving seasons. The speaker’s shock at nature’s indifference fuses with a sort of survivor’s dream logic. The terrible thing has already happened—how could it be happening again?
That sentiment resonates in our present October, when disaster seems the rule, not the exception, and when time itself seems to have lost its bearings. (Didn’t we wash our hands, didn’t we read this headline?) Glück, whose art has always answered to a distant, almost planetary reasoning, is now, strangely, riding a wave of political timeliness. She is a poet of interiors; of having and losing; of desire and its regulation. “You want to know how I spend my time?” one of her speakers scoffs, sounding for all the world like a fed-up quarantiner. “I walk the front lawn, pretending / to be weeding.”
For anyone who needs it, then, there exists within Glück’s work a glossary of today’s moods: rage, vulnerability, despair, gallows humor, irritation, loneliness, an aura of intensity around the mundane. For Glück, these circuits of sensing and thinking—the inner seasons—enact a theory of life: we feel before we understand, and we understand very little. There’s something implicating about so much disembodied emotion, floating on the page like weather. Glück is an impersonal poet, whose poems, assembling around you, feel blindingly personal, like the seasons themselves. The effect isn’t exactly comforting, except in the way that being told the truth can be comforting—as if the wife, in “All Hallows,” rather than holding out her seeds, had simply explained that you are caught in the turning and swept toward darkness.


newyorker--2020-10-15--The Rise of the Minimony and the Micro-Wedding

For a year and a half , my partner and I had been planning a wedding in Crete , where he grew up .
We were already legally married—town-hall ceremony—but we wanted the big shebang : the long train , the complicated seating plan , loved ones from all over the world spilling wine as they danced the sirtaki .
We chose a date in June and then watched anxiously as the virus spread through January , and then February .
Some time into my own pandemic-wedding purgatory , I began having dreams about my dress fitting in strange and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ droop to the floor at the elbows , cartoon-like , or extend past my hands and behind me , like white lines on a highway .
One day , in late March , after a relentlessly upbeat weekend at home—quarantinis !
CrossFit by Zoom !
—I sat down to postpone our wedding .
I knew how to write the e-mail because I had already received several , from friends in the same boat .
They were always warm , and gracious , and not too self-pitying ; “ What ’ s a wedding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to say .
After I sent the note , I received a flurry of messages of relief and consolation .
One friend , who had moved her own wedding twice , wrote simply , “ Coronavirus is an asshole.
” All through the spring and summer—which is to say , all through wedding season—the virus wreaked havoc on the wedding industry .
“ It was bedlam , ” Laura Krueger , of Kleinfeld Hotel Blocks , which helps couples book accommodations for their guests , told me .
“ There were no protocols @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the wedding-planning Web sites the Knot and WeddingWire set up an emergency hotline for panicked brides and grooms .
“ We had hundreds of calls per day for two months following that , ” Jeffra Trumpower , at WeddingWire , told me recently .
As lockdowns and travel restrictions came into force around the country , “ couples started to call and say , ‘ What do I do ?
I ’ m supposed to get married next weekend.
’ ” At first , people postponed , thinking the pandemic couldn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Then they postponed again .
“ There were stages where it didn ’ t seem like people fully understood the scope or magnitude , ” Andrea Freeman , an event planner in New York , told me .
Slowly , two options , both of them buzzkills , emerged : you could postpone indefinitely or hold the wedding right away , with the appropriate safety guidelines in place ( festive ! )
.
“ The conversations I was having with my clients were very much about , ‘ What is the focus , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a wedding ?
’ ” If the goal was to throw a big party , that wasn ’ t going to happen .
( Although , last month , New York City ’ s sheriff tweeted about breaking up an indoor wedding of nearly three hundred , in Queens . )
“ But if the focus was really to be married , to share that with the most important people in their lives—if they were saying stuff like that to me , then we started a conversation about , O.K.
, here ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this time.
” The wedding industry , floundering through waves of postponements , has developed a suite of options—and a vocabulary—for couples wanting to still splash out on their nuptials , global crisis notwithstanding .
There ’ s now the “ micro-wedding , ” a small ceremony with fifty guests or fewer .
You are encouraged to follow this up with a “ sequel wedding , ” a larger reception , at a later date .
But when even fifty guests seems optimistic ( or , depending on your location , illegal ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , touted enthusiastically by the industry , available : the “ minimony.
” A minimony might have ten guests : parents , siblings , an officiant standing at a distance .
It has all the components of a normal wedding—ceremony , reception , three-tiered cake—shrunk to pandemic proportions .
This is a significant shift .
In a survey conducted by Zola , the wedding-planning and registry company , of more than two thousand engaged couples planning their wedding during the pandemic , half were planning a minimony .
“ Smaller guest lists are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ future for some time , ” Emily Forrest , Zola ’ s director of communications , told me .
In another survey , by the Knot and WeddingWire , of six hundred and eighty-four couples in the U.S. with weddings between September and January , fifty-eight per cent planned to keep their original date , with many opting for a pared-down guest list , and just seven per cent were pulling the plug altogether .
“ People are not cancelling , ” Trumpower said .
All that rejiggering can take a toll on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the planner , told me : “ People are starting to get fatigued , and they ’ re going through different phases of excitement and enthusiasm , and then resignation and upset.
” I recognized the symptoms .
She offers her clients guided meditations and advises them to stay present .
“ At a certain point in time , you can ’ t talk about the flowers and the music anymore , or the flavor of the cake , ” she said .
“ It ’ s about so much more than that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how we handle anything in life.
” Shepherd launched “ Corona Brides ” in April , around the same time she decided to reschedule her own wedding , which was supposed to take place in May .
“ The Las Vegas desert was my dream , ” she told me .
She eventually married closer to her home , in San Antonio , Texas , outdoors , under sprawling oak trees , with an indoor reception in an industrial-chic space filled to half capacity .
( “ People were able to go inside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” she said . )
But she still has the occasional pang ; she told her husband , “ Next time we go to Vegas , I ’ m taking my wedding dress and getting a photo in the desert !
” Since starting the podcast , she has interviewed two dozen pandemic brides .
Some have rescheduled their weddings three times ; others have married in their back yard or at their original venue , meant for ten times as many guests .
Several brides held the ceremony in their kitchen .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ emotions , ” she said .
“ You ’ re almost mourning the loss of a wedding you don ’ t know if you can have or not.
” Shepherd connected me with Kelli and Omar Brown , who got engaged in November and planned to tie the knot quickly .
“ I was , like , Six-month engagement , let ’ s do this !
” Kelli , a bridal-hair stylist , told me .
They booked a whitewashed photography studio and invited around a hundred guests .
But , in late @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Omar ’ s bachelor party in Las Vegas was cancelled .
Kelli threw him one at home , with a makeshift bar and slot machines purchased on Amazon .
A few weeks later , Kelli ’ s bachelorette party was cancelled , and Omar surprised her with mimosas and a D.I.Y .
nail bar .
At that point , Kelli thought , We only have two months left .
Still , they decided not to cancel .
“ We were , like , even if we have to get married in hazmat suits @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get married on that day.
” Kelli had three contingency plans , depending on the state of the pandemic .
Wedding A , she told me , “ was , like , best-case scenario , a hundred people.
” Wedding B would be small and socially distanced , with just family and a few friends .
“ Plan C was literally my husband and I going to the courthouse.
” In the end , Wedding B prevailed .
They cut their guest list to fewer than twenty and seated households on vintage furniture @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and also very safe ” ) .
Omar ’ s brother , a pastor , drove in from Philadelphia to marry them , and they streamed the ceremony on Zoom .
Afterward , they held a drive-through reception .
They handed out individually wrapped cupcakes ; friends decorated their cars and shot confetti out their windows .
One guest texted them to ask , “ What car should I wear ?
” “ It was wonderful , ” Kelli said .
That evening , they drove to Grand Rapids for a wedding-night @ @ @ @ @ @ @ find a police barricade blocking the road .
George Floyd had been killed just five days earlier ; a protest had gathered and was being dispersed by officers in protective gear .
Then the car filled with a cloud of eye-watering smoke .
“ My husband was , like , ‘ Oh , that ’ s tear gas , ’ ” Kelli recalled .
She covered her face with the train of her dress .
Omar , who is Black , briefly went outside , and Kelli , who is white , worried @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were allowed to pass and returned home to their family .
That ’ s not to say they can ’ t be stylish , though .
Celebrities , including Dennis Quaid and Sean Penn , threw tiny ceremonies in recent months .
In July , Princess Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi tied the knot with only a few guests—including Beatrice ’ s grandmother , the Queen—in attendance .
For some , the upheaval has unearthed new opportunities .
Kerry O ’ Donoghue , who postponed a wedding outside Dublin , has spent the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a bridal self-care venture whose products have included a to-go ring cleaner , a CBD “ bouquet toss ” bath bomb , and a “ Smells Like I ’ m Getting Married ” candle .
Karina Valley , who works in communications , launched a shop on Etsy that sells signs to post at your minimony .
Best-sellers include “ Distance makes the heart grow fonder ” and “ Love is infectious , but so is coronavirus.
” She told me , “ Just because you ’ re getting married during a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t have cute signage at your wedding.
” High-end hotels have also embraced the trend , offering bespoke minimony packages .
In London , the Corinthia hotel offers a four-course dinner for up to fifteen guests , with a private chef and sommelier and an overnight stay for the whole party , starting at ten thousand pounds .
Many venues have gone to lengths to encourage social distancing .
Philippe Gouze , director of operations at Blue Hill at Stone Barns , said that the farm-to-table restaurant in Tarrytown , New York @ @ @ @ @ @ @ peel .
“ There ’ s hardly any contact or close interaction , ” he said .
At the Soho Grand Hotel , in New York—which has made use of its penthouse suites , with terraces that overlook the city , for minimonies—guests are advised to forgo buffets , and butler-passed hors d ’ œuvres arrive on individual plates .
Might all these restrictions put a damper on the festivities ?
It ’ s all in the delivery , Brown told me .
One of her couples had custom face masks made to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beautiful mauve , a very Tuscan feel ” ) and sent them out to their guests before the wedding , almost like party favors , along with information about the distance protocols .
“ It was presented to them very beautifully , ” she said .
When it came time to make a decision , I told my partner that I wanted to cancel altogether .
The goal had always been , we admitted a little sheepishly , a big , unruly party ; a minimony wouldn ’ t do .
Anyways , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ too long , and I wasn ’ t sure I could pull off pandemic-chic .
But , in the end , I backed down .
There was so much bad news ; we didn ’ t want to add to it .
We moved the date to a nebulous “ someday , ” an indefinite deferral that preserved , at least in our own minds , the ideal of our wedding—i.e.
, large and sweaty .
I thought about what Freeman , the planner , had said when I asked her if she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wedding for good .
“ I think when all of this is over , ” she said , “ people are going to really need a very big freakin ’ party .
”

Planning a wedding is a faff at the best of times; during a pandemic, it resembles purgatory. You’ve booked the venue, the flowers, the dance floor, and the d.j., only to be told that the venue will not open this year, the florist is out of business, and dancing is illegal. You rebook at a smaller venue—someone’s back yard, maybe—pick your own flowers (“Farmhouse chic!”), and install, at key entry points, hand-sanitizing stations with tasteful signs (“Spread love, not germs”), only to learn that a quarantine has been imposed on out-of-state visitors. Your parents and siblings will no longer be able to attend. They are upset; you will need to reschedule. And so it goes.
For a year and a half, my partner and I had been planning a wedding in Crete, where he grew up. We were already legally married—town-hall ceremony—but we wanted the big shebang: the long train, the complicated seating plan, loved ones from all over the world spilling wine as they danced the sirtaki. We chose a date in June and then watched anxiously as the virus spread through January, and then February. Some time into my own pandemic-wedding purgatory, I began having dreams about my dress fitting in strange and otherworldly ways. The sleeves would inexplicably droop to the floor at the elbows, cartoon-like, or extend past my hands and behind me, like white lines on a highway. One day, in late March, after a relentlessly upbeat weekend at home—quarantinis! CrossFit by Zoom!—I sat down to postpone our wedding. I knew how to write the e-mail because I had already received several, from friends in the same boat. They were always warm, and gracious, and not too self-pitying; “What’s a wedding in all this?” they seemed to say. After I sent the note, I received a flurry of messages of relief and consolation. One friend, who had moved her own wedding twice, wrote simply, “Coronavirus is an asshole.”
All through the spring and summer—which is to say, all through wedding season—the virus wreaked havoc on the wedding industry. “It was bedlam,” Laura Krueger, of Kleinfeld Hotel Blocks, which helps couples book accommodations for their guests, told me. “There were no protocols in place.” On March 13th, the wedding-planning Web sites the Knot and WeddingWire set up an emergency hotline for panicked brides and grooms. “We had hundreds of calls per day for two months following that,” Jeffra Trumpower, at WeddingWire, told me recently. As lockdowns and travel restrictions came into force around the country, “couples started to call and say, ‘What do I do? I’m supposed to get married next weekend.’ ”
At first, people postponed, thinking the pandemic couldn’t last longer than a few weeks. Then they postponed again. “There were stages where it didn’t seem like people fully understood the scope or magnitude,” Andrea Freeman, an event planner in New York, told me. Slowly, two options, both of them buzzkills, emerged: you could postpone indefinitely or hold the wedding right away, with the appropriate safety guidelines in place (festive!). “The conversations I was having with my clients were very much about, ‘What is the focus, really? Why are you really having a wedding?’ ” If the goal was to throw a big party, that wasn’t going to happen. (Although, last month, New York City’s sheriff tweeted about breaking up an indoor wedding of nearly three hundred, in Queens.) “But if the focus was really to be married, to share that with the most important people in their lives—if they were saying stuff like that to me, then we started a conversation about, O.K., here’s what that could look like in this time.”
The wedding industry, floundering through waves of postponements, has developed a suite of options—and a vocabulary—for couples wanting to still splash out on their nuptials, global crisis notwithstanding. There’s now the “micro-wedding,” a small ceremony with fifty guests or fewer. You are encouraged to follow this up with a “sequel wedding,” a larger reception, at a later date. But when even fifty guests seems optimistic (or, depending on your location, illegal), there’s a smaller option, touted enthusiastically by the industry, available: the “minimony.” A minimony might have ten guests: parents, siblings, an officiant standing at a distance. It has all the components of a normal wedding—ceremony, reception, three-tiered cake—shrunk to pandemic proportions.
This is a significant shift. In a survey conducted by Zola, the wedding-planning and registry company, of more than two thousand engaged couples planning their wedding during the pandemic, half were planning a minimony. “Smaller guest lists are definitely a trend we see into the future for some time,” Emily Forrest, Zola’s director of communications, told me. In another survey, by the Knot and WeddingWire, of six hundred and eighty-four couples in the U.S. with weddings between September and January, fifty-eight per cent planned to keep their original date, with many opting for a pared-down guest list, and just seven per cent were pulling the plug altogether. “People are not cancelling,” Trumpower said.
All that rejiggering can take a toll on the bride- and groom-to-be, Freeman, the planner, told me: “People are starting to get fatigued, and they’re going through different phases of excitement and enthusiasm, and then resignation and upset.” I recognized the symptoms. She offers her clients guided meditations and advises them to stay present. “At a certain point in time, you can’t talk about the flowers and the music anymore, or the flavor of the cake,” she said. “It’s about so much more than that. How we get through this is how we handle anything in life.”
Six months after we sent our first wedding postponement e-mail, we had another decision to make. Pandemic-wise, nothing had changed. There was still no vaccine, and cases were rising. Should we postpone again? Cancel altogether? Slash our guest list? I scrolled past images of a socially distanced wedding in which the couple had used giant Teddy bears to separate guests. Where did they get the bears? I wondered. At a certain point, I came across a podcast called “Corona Brides,” in which the host, Jordie Shepherd, a coronavirus bride herself, interviews women (and sometimes couples) navigating the wedding-planning process during the pandemic.
Shepherd launched “Corona Brides” in April, around the same time she decided to reschedule her own wedding, which was supposed to take place in May. “The Las Vegas desert was my dream,” she told me. She eventually married closer to her home, in San Antonio, Texas, outdoors, under sprawling oak trees, with an indoor reception in an industrial-chic space filled to half capacity. (“People were able to go inside and sit with their quarantine family,” she said.) But she still has the occasional pang; she told her husband, “Next time we go to Vegas, I’m taking my wedding dress and getting a photo in the desert!” Since starting the podcast, she has interviewed two dozen pandemic brides. Some have rescheduled their weddings three times; others have married in their back yard or at their original venue, meant for ten times as many guests. Several brides held the ceremony in their kitchen. “It is a roller coaster of emotions,” she said. “You’re almost mourning the loss of a wedding you don’t know if you can have or not.”
Shepherd connected me with Kelli and Omar Brown, who got engaged in November and planned to tie the knot quickly. “I was, like, Six-month engagement, let’s do this!” Kelli, a bridal-hair stylist, told me. They booked a whitewashed photography studio and invited around a hundred guests. But, in late March, Detroit went into lockdown and Omar’s bachelor party in Las Vegas was cancelled. Kelli threw him one at home, with a makeshift bar and slot machines purchased on Amazon. A few weeks later, Kelli’s bachelorette party was cancelled, and Omar surprised her with mimosas and a D.I.Y. nail bar. At that point, Kelli thought, We only have two months left. Still, they decided not to cancel. “We were, like, even if we have to get married in hazmat suits at the courthouse, we’ll get married on that day.”
Kelli had three contingency plans, depending on the state of the pandemic. Wedding A, she told me, “was, like, best-case scenario, a hundred people.” Wedding B would be small and socially distanced, with just family and a few friends. “Plan C was literally my husband and I going to the courthouse.” In the end, Wedding B prevailed. They cut their guest list to fewer than twenty and seated households on vintage furniture nine feet apart (“Very cozy, and also very safe”). Omar’s brother, a pastor, drove in from Philadelphia to marry them, and they streamed the ceremony on Zoom. Afterward, they held a drive-through reception. They handed out individually wrapped cupcakes; friends decorated their cars and shot confetti out their windows. One guest texted them to ask, “What car should I wear?” “It was wonderful,” Kelli said.
That evening, they drove to Grand Rapids for a wedding-night getaway. They arrived late, to find a police barricade blocking the road. George Floyd had been killed just five days earlier; a protest had gathered and was being dispersed by officers in protective gear. Then the car filled with a cloud of eye-watering smoke. “My husband was, like, ‘Oh, that’s tear gas,’ ” Kelli recalled. She covered her face with the train of her dress. Omar, who is Black, briefly went outside, and Kelli, who is white, worried for his safety. Eventually, they were allowed to pass and returned home to their family.
Melissa Brown, who founded Sweet Petite Celebrations, which caters to small weddings, in May, told me minimonies can feel more intimate than larger weddings. “You can really dig in deep to each guest that’s coming and make them personally feel special,” she said. They don’t necessarily come cheaper than larger weddings, though; Brown told me her minimony clients spend, on average, between ten thousand and thirty thousand dollars. One couple sent their loved ones a survey asking them to name their favorite dessert and then served each selection in individual portions. “Very Marie Antoinette,” Brown said. “Very let them eat cake.” Food takes center stage out of necessity, she added. “You’re sitting at a table having a beautiful, upscale dinner party,” she said. “You can’t get up, you can’t mingle, you can’t dance.”
That’s not to say they can’t be stylish, though. Celebrities, including Dennis Quaid and Sean Penn, threw tiny ceremonies in recent months. In July, Princess Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi tied the knot with only a few guests—including Beatrice’s grandmother, the Queen—in attendance. For some, the upheaval has unearthed new opportunities. Kerry O’Donoghue, who postponed a wedding outside Dublin, has spent the past few months building the Mine Company, a bridal self-care venture whose products have included a to-go ring cleaner, a CBD “bouquet toss” bath bomb, and a “Smells Like I’m Getting Married” candle. Karina Valley, who works in communications, launched a shop on Etsy that sells signs to post at your minimony. Best-sellers include “Distance makes the heart grow fonder” and “Love is infectious, but so is coronavirus.” She told me, “Just because you’re getting married during a pandemic doesn’t mean you can’t have cute signage at your wedding.”
High-end hotels have also embraced the trend, offering bespoke minimony packages. In London, the Corinthia hotel offers a four-course dinner for up to fifteen guests, with a private chef and sommelier and an overnight stay for the whole party, starting at ten thousand pounds. Many venues have gone to lengths to encourage social distancing. Philippe Gouze, director of operations at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, said that the farm-to-table restaurant in Tarrytown, New York, serves guests with a long-handled pizza peel. “There’s hardly any contact or close interaction,” he said. At the Soho Grand Hotel, in New York—which has made use of its penthouse suites, with terraces that overlook the city, for minimonies—guests are advised to forgo buffets, and butler-passed hors d’œuvres arrive on individual plates.


newyorker--2020-10-15--Uses for the Bushel of Apples You Picked Last Weekend

Make a fall basket for your next-door neighbors , whom you haven ’ t talked to offline in seven months .
Draw faces on them and have them sit next to you on the couch for movie night .
Juggle them in a viral TikTok video ( quick , while you still can ) .
Eat one a day to keep the doctor away , since they still charge a thirty-dollar co-pay to downplay your foot pain via teleconference .
Carve apple roses in honor of the flowers you ’ d be able to go outside and see if the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Put them into a pot of water and try bobbing for them .
This is the closest you ’ ll get to swimming all year .
Let them ferment in your bathtub until they form a foul but potent cognac , and drink it while watching the confirmation hearings for our new Supreme Court Justice .
Peel off the skin in long strips , let the strips dry , and twist them into pompoms .
Cheer yourself on as you endure your seventeenth Zoom date .
Buy a press and start your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now that you ’ re earning sixty per cent of your salary while doing a hundred and twenty per cent more while working from home .
Dump a few in the Little Free Library around the block in exchange for a guidebook to Canada .
When you ’ re up at night worrying about dictatorships , try stacking the apples into a precarious pyramid , then watch helplessly as it crumbles into ruins .
Throw them all away and have an appletini instead .
It ’ s been a rough year .

Ali Solomon, Sarah Garfinkel, Kerry Elson

Make a fall basket for your next-door neighbors, whom you haven’t talked to offline in seven months.
Draw faces on them and have them sit next to you on the couch for movie night.
Juggle them in a viral TikTok video (quick, while you still can).
Eat one a day to keep the doctor away, since they still charge a thirty-dollar co-pay to downplay your foot pain via teleconference.
Carve apple roses in honor of the flowers you’d be able to go outside and see if the A.Q.I. weren’t three hundred.
Put them into a pot of water and try bobbing for them. This is the closest you’ll get to swimming all year.
Let them ferment in your bathtub until they form a foul but potent cognac, and drink it while watching the confirmation hearings for our new Supreme Court Justice.
Peel off the skin in long strips, let the strips dry, and twist them into pompoms. Cheer yourself on as you endure your seventeenth Zoom date.
Buy a press and start your own craft cidery to supplement your income now that you’re earning sixty per cent of your salary while doing a hundred and twenty per cent more while working from home.
Dump a few in the Little Free Library around the block in exchange for a guidebook to Canada.
When you’re up at night worrying about dictatorships, try stacking the apples into a precarious pyramid, then watch helplessly as it crumbles into ruins.
Throw them all away and have an appletini instead. It’s been a rough year.


newyorker--2020-10-15--Why the Right Keeps Saying That the United States Isn’t a Democracy

As shocking as this sounds , especially from a sitting member of Congress , it is a point of view that comes from a hidebound reading of the Constitution and stems from a selective interpretation of the Framers ’ intent , articulated most directly by James Madison in the Federalist Papers .
“ We may define a republic to be , or at least may bestow that name on , a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people , and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure , for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ behavior , ” he wrote in Federalist No .
39 .
A democracy , by contrast , puts government directly in the hands of the governed .
( Lee clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito , a champion of “ practical originalist ” jurisprudence , which holds that the law should adhere as closely as possible to the meaning of the words in the Constitution at the time it was written .
Lee ’ s argument is a similar kind of textualism . )
The 2016 election was a rude reminder that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Donald Trump ’ s victory was an Electoral College math trick .
But , in fact , we aren ’ t a direct democracy , either , where we all show up in the public square to hash things out .
Plato , you may remember from an intro-to-political-philosophy class , was especially wary of that kind of government , because he doubted that most men—he was writing only about men—possessed the intellectual capacity or the temperament to govern themselves .
The Framers , including Madison , who were similarly suspicious of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a representative democracy , which puts the people one degree of separation from the halls of power .
Our sovereignty as citizens comes from the right to choose the people who we believe best reflect our interests .
The Supreme Court ’ s Citizens United decision , which put those interests up for sale , is a striking example of how the Framers ’ intent has been debased by those who use the claim that America is a republic , and the libertarianism on which that claim feeds , to justify siphoning power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lee says , “ We ’ re not a democracy , ” he ’ s not just being provocative .
He is also pointing out that , from the start , the Founders limited the franchise .
Though it ’ s always refreshing to be reminded that it took constitutional amendments and acts of Congress to extend voting rights to Black Americans , women , and Native Americans , it ’ s equally heartening to remember that American democracy , for all its shortcomings and its flaws , has proved to be elastic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ expanded to include the excluded .
It is a testament to the inherent dynamism of the electorate that it continues to survive every attempt to diminish it by those whose fear of “ the public ” —as in public health and public education—is masked by appeals to “ liberty.
” Lee ’ s words also underscore something else : that many on the right view voting as an existential threat .
At a gathering of evangelicals back in 1980 , Paul Weyrich , a Republican strategist and a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our Christians have what I call the ‘ goo-goo syndrome ’ ?
Good government .
They want everybody to vote .
I don ’ t want everybody to vote .
Elections are not won by a majority of people .
They never have been from the beginning of our country , and they are not now .
As a matter of fact , our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
” Gerrymandering and restrictive voter-I.D .
laws are products of this sentiment , as are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , legal impediments to casting ballots , and voter suppression propagated through social media .
These efforts , which began before Donald Trump ’ s Presidency , intensified when he took office , and have escalated as the 2020 election approaches .
Lately , we ’ ve watched as Republican-controlled state legislatures , Republican-appointed judges , and Republican secretaries of state shutter polling places , limit the number of ballot drop boxes , undo the restoration of felons ’ voting rights , and prevent absentee voting .
The hacking of this election—through the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ courts and the legislatures , which are exploited to erode and subvert democratic norms—is under way , and it has been for years .
The paradox of American democracy is that its survival is a choice ; it persists solely at the discretion of an electorate that can , if it so wills , dismantle it .
If the polls are accurate , Trump ’ s reëlection bid is in trouble .
Early voting in swing states indicates that more Democrats have voted than Republicans , and groups that supported Trump in 2016 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , are abandoning him .
Apparently , Trump sees cheating as his best chance to win , so he has been denouncing voting by mail , actively kneecapping the U.S .
Postal Service , loudly complaining about voter fraud , injecting all sorts of misinformation into the media , and doing nothing to deter Russian meddling in the election .
We need to be concerned about foreign intrusions , such as those that Microsoft revealed on October 12th , and others reported by the intelligence community two days later .
We also need @ @ @ @ @ @ @ links in our election infrastructure that can be sabotaged : machines that don ’ t produce paper backups and can ’ t be audited ; machines that tally the vote using unreadable barcodes , which prevent voters from checking their accuracy ; electronic poll books that are not subject to cybersecurity review ; and unpatched software that leaves voting machines vulnerable to manipulation , to name just a few .
Democracy relies on trust .
Not trust in democracy itself but trust in one another .
When we vote , we come together @ @ @ @ @ @ @ understanding that we will submit to the collective will .
Trust permeates the system : we trust that our vote will be counted accurately ; we trust that the people we ’ re choosing to represent us have our best interests and those of the country at heart .
The most sacred trust is that , when the votes are all tallied , the losing candidate will walk away with grace .
Donald Trump , abetted by Attorney General William Barr , who earlier this month deputized federal prosecutors to investigate claims of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is busy abusing this trust .
If , ultimately , Trump , Barr , and others were to subvert the election , Mike Lee ’ s claim that we aren ’ t a democracy will turn out to have been prescient .
Read More About the 2020 Election • The fall and rise of Kamala Harris .
• When a sitting President threatens to delay a sacrosanct American ritual like an election , you should listen .
• To understand the path Donald Trump has taken to the 2020 election , look at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
• What happens if Trump fights the election results ?
• The refusal by Mitch McConnell to rein in Trump is looking riskier than ever .
• Sign up for our election newsletter for insight and analysis from our reporters and columnists .

If the most urgent questions raised by this election season have been “What kind of democracy do we live in?” and “What kind of democracy do we want to live in?,” then Senator Mike Lee, of Utah, has an answer. Just hours before the F.B.I. revealed a plot by members of a white-supremacist militia to kidnap the governor of Michigan, the Republican senator let loose a volley of tweets that could be interpreted as a shorthand version of the gospel of many on the right. “Democracy isn’t the objective: liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are,” Lee wrote. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” Earlier, he had written, “We’re not a democracy.”
As shocking as this sounds, especially from a sitting member of Congress, it is a point of view that comes from a hidebound reading of the Constitution and stems from a selective interpretation of the Framers’ intent, articulated most directly by James Madison in the Federalist Papers. “We may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior,” he wrote in Federalist No. 39. A democracy, by contrast, puts government directly in the hands of the governed. (Lee clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a champion of “practical originalist” jurisprudence, which holds that the law should adhere as closely as possible to the meaning of the words in the Constitution at the time it was written. Lee’s argument is a similar kind of textualism.)
The 2016 election was a rude reminder that we aren’t a popular democracy. Donald Trump’s victory was an Electoral College math trick. But, in fact, we aren’t a direct democracy, either, where we all show up in the public square to hash things out. Plato, you may remember from an intro-to-political-philosophy class, was especially wary of that kind of government, because he doubted that most men—he was writing only about men—possessed the intellectual capacity or the temperament to govern themselves. The Framers, including Madison, who were similarly suspicious of the rabble, gifted us instead with a representative democracy, which puts the people one degree of separation from the halls of power. Our sovereignty as citizens comes from the right to choose the people who we believe best reflect our interests. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which put those interests up for sale, is a striking example of how the Framers’ intent has been debased by those who use the claim that America is a republic, and the libertarianism on which that claim feeds, to justify siphoning power away from the electorate.
When Senator Lee says, “We’re not a democracy,” he’s not just being provocative. He is also pointing out that, from the start, the Founders limited the franchise. Though it’s always refreshing to be reminded that it took constitutional amendments and acts of Congress to extend voting rights to Black Americans, women, and Native Americans, it’s equally heartening to remember that American democracy, for all its shortcomings and its flaws, has proved to be elastic. Incrementally but inexorably, it has expanded to include the excluded. It is a testament to the inherent dynamism of the electorate that it continues to survive every attempt to diminish it by those whose fear of “the public”—as in public health and public education—is masked by appeals to “liberty.”
Lee’s words also underscore something else: that many on the right view voting as an existential threat. At a gathering of evangelicals back in 1980, Paul Weyrich, a Republican strategist and a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, asked, “How many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo-goo syndrome’? Good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Gerrymandering and restrictive voter-I.D. laws are products of this sentiment, as are the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, legal impediments to casting ballots, and voter suppression propagated through social media. These efforts, which began before Donald Trump’s Presidency, intensified when he took office, and have escalated as the 2020 election approaches. Lately, we’ve watched as Republican-controlled state legislatures, Republican-appointed judges, and Republican secretaries of state shutter polling places, limit the number of ballot drop boxes, undo the restoration of felons’ voting rights, and prevent absentee voting. The hacking of this election—through the use of such democratic institutions as the courts and the legislatures, which are exploited to erode and subvert democratic norms—is under way, and it has been for years.
The paradox of American democracy is that its survival is a choice; it persists solely at the discretion of an electorate that can, if it so wills, dismantle it. If the polls are accurate, Trump’s reëlection bid is in trouble. Early voting in swing states indicates that more Democrats have voted than Republicans, and groups that supported Trump in 2016, such as white, suburban woman, are abandoning him. Apparently, Trump sees cheating as his best chance to win, so he has been denouncing voting by mail, actively kneecapping the U.S. Postal Service, loudly complaining about voter fraud, injecting all sorts of misinformation into the media, and doing nothing to deter Russian meddling in the election. We need to be concerned about foreign intrusions, such as those that Microsoft revealed on October 12th, and others reported by the intelligence community two days later. We also need to be alert to the many weak links in our election infrastructure that can be sabotaged: machines that don’t produce paper backups and can’t be audited; machines that tally the vote using unreadable barcodes, which prevent voters from checking their accuracy; electronic poll books that are not subject to cybersecurity review; and unpatched software that leaves voting machines vulnerable to manipulation, to name just a few.
Democracy relies on trust. Not trust in democracy itself but trust in one another. When we vote, we come together to articulate our singular will with the understanding that we will submit to the collective will. Trust permeates the system: we trust that our vote will be counted accurately; we trust that the people we’re choosing to represent us have our best interests and those of the country at heart. The most sacred trust is that, when the votes are all tallied, the losing candidate will walk away with grace. Donald Trump, abetted by Attorney General William Barr, who earlier this month deputized federal prosecutors to investigate claims of voter fraud before the polls close, is busy abusing this trust. If, ultimately, Trump, Barr, and others were to subvert the election, Mike Lee’s claim that we aren’t a democracy will turn out to have been prescient.
Read More About the 2020 Election


newyorker--2020-10-15--Amy Coney Barrett Refuses to Tell Brett Kavanaugh Which Beer She Prefers in Supreme Court Fridge

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Conflict erupted between Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh after the Supreme Court nominee refused to tell the Justice which brand of beer she wanted him to stock for her in the Court refrigerator .
Kavanaugh , who has made it his job to keep the office fridge supplied with grain-based beverages , called Barrett to determine her preferences and was astonished when she stonewalled .
“ She was , like , ‘ I ’ m not going to weigh in on something that contentious , ’ and I was , like , ‘ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Kavanaugh said .
“ She was not shitting me .
I was , like , ‘ Dude.
’ ” “ I mean , it ’ s not like I was asking her about some dumb legal case , ” he said .
“ This is important .
This is beer.
” Kavanaugh , who identifies his vast private collection of microbrews and I.P.A.s in the Court fridge with masking-tape labels reading “ BRETT , ” says that his stash is now “ strictly off limits ” to Barrett .
“ If Amy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s there is Old Milwaukee , she better not coming crying to me , ” he said .

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Conflict erupted between Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh after the Supreme Court nominee refused to tell the Justice which brand of beer she wanted him to stock for her in the Court refrigerator.
Kavanaugh, who has made it his job to keep the office fridge supplied with grain-based beverages, called Barrett to determine her preferences and was astonished when she stonewalled.
“She was, like, ‘I’m not going to weigh in on something that contentious,’ and I was, like, ‘You’re shitting me,’ ” Kavanaugh said. “She was not shitting me. I was, like, ‘Dude.’ ”
“I mean, it’s not like I was asking her about some dumb legal case,” he said. “This is important. This is beer.”
Kavanaugh, who identifies his vast private collection of microbrews and I.P.A.s in the Court fridge with masking-tape labels reading “BRETT,” says that his stash is now “strictly off limits” to Barrett.
“If Amy wants a beer and all that’s there is Old Milwaukee, she better not coming crying to me,” he said.


newyorker--2020-10-16--How to Sell Your Clothes at the Local Cool-Girl Thrift Shop

1 .
Break up with your partner and decide that the version of yourself from that relationship is dead .
Purge your closet of items belonging to that unfashionable stranger .
The new you would never wear overalls .
2 .
Take everything you want to sell to the dry cleaners .
You ’ ve already suffered so much rejection , you need this to go as well as possible .
3 .
Sit in your car outside the local Cool-Girl Thrift Shop and listen to some Angel Olsen to get into the right headspace .
4 .
Open your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you see someone who looks like they ’ ve modelled for American Apparel walk into the store .
Glance at your reflection in the rearview mirror and wonder when your pores got so big .
5 .
Wait until the AmApp girl leaves , then make your move .
6 .
Casually ( not desperately ) walk in and give the Karlie Kloss look-alikes behind the counter a noncommittal wave .
7 .
Act like you just noticed the garbage bag of clothes in your hand .
Say something chill , like , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ today ?
No worries if not.
” 8 .
Miss their response because of the blood pumping loudly in your ears and lay your clothes on their altar with your head bowed .
It ’ s very important that you don ’ t make eye contact—you must establish yourself as the submissive .
9 .
Say something nonchalant , like , “ I ’ m just going to look around the store , ” as the Karlies begin to pick through your fashion mistakes with the enthusiasm of a Kardashian at the end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you mill about the store , gently run your fingertips across forty-seven different garments while saying to no one in particular , “ You guys have great stuff.
” The Karlies will not hear you or respond .
12 .
Come to the conclusion that this beret will undo all your past sartorial mistakes .
13 .
Try on the beret .
14 .
Realize that you don ’ t know how to wear a beret .
15 .
Decide to YouTube it when you get home .
17 .
Peruse the jewelry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the Titanic and left them a turquoise ring worth a hundred and seventy dollars .
When you feel a chill run down your spine , you ’ ll know that the Karlies have finished appraising your trash .
18 .
Return to the counter .
Act like you forgot why you even came in .
They can not know how badly you need this .
19 .
Momentarily black out while they tell you that unfortunately all forty pounds of your clothing aren ’ t what they ’ re “ looking for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ever have anything that ’ s more “ sustainable ” or “ on trend ” to definitely let them know .
20 .
Look down and realize that you ’ re still holding the beret .
21 .
Stick it to them by buying the beret .
This will make sense at the time .
22 .
Don ’ t forget to say , “ Thanks so much !
” as you drag your trash bag of clothes like a freshly murdered body out of the store .
23 .
Leave with more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in with .
24 .
Stuff the trash bag of clothes in your trunk and drive around with it for no fewer than eight months , affecting both your gas mileage and your general mental health .
25 .
Never get around to wearing the beret .

1. Break up with your partner and decide that the version of yourself from that relationship is dead. Purge your closet of items belonging to that unfashionable stranger. The new you would never wear overalls.
2. Take everything you want to sell to the dry cleaners. You’ve already suffered so much rejection, you need this to go as well as possible.
3. Sit in your car outside the local Cool-Girl Thrift Shop and listen to some Angel Olsen to get into the right headspace.
4. Open your car door and then close it when you see someone who looks like they’ve modelled for American Apparel walk into the store. Glance at your reflection in the rearview mirror and wonder when your pores got so big.
5. Wait until the AmApp girl leaves, then make your move.
6. Casually (not desperately) walk in and give the Karlie Kloss look-alikes behind the counter a noncommittal wave.
7. Act like you just noticed the garbage bag of clothes in your hand. Say something chill, like, “Oh, are you guys buying today? No worries if not.”
8. Miss their response because of the blood pumping loudly in your ears and lay your clothes on their altar with your head bowed. It’s very important that you don’t make eye contact—you must establish yourself as the submissive.
9. Say something nonchalant, like, “I’m just going to look around the store,” as the Karlies begin to pick through your fashion mistakes with the enthusiasm of a Kardashian at the end of a salad.
10. As you mill about the store, gently run your fingertips across forty-seven different garments while saying to no one in particular, “You guys have great stuff.” The Karlies will not hear you or respond.
11. Happen upon a burgundy beret.
12. Come to the conclusion that this beret will undo all your past sartorial mistakes.
13. Try on the beret.
14. Realize that you don’t know how to wear a beret.
15. Decide to YouTube it when you get home.
16. You’re buying this goddam beret.
17. Peruse the jewelry section and wonder whose great aunt died on the Titanic and left them a turquoise ring worth a hundred and seventy dollars. When you feel a chill run down your spine, you’ll know that the Karlies have finished appraising your trash.
18. Return to the counter. Act like you forgot why you even came in. They cannot know how badly you need this.
19. Momentarily black out while they tell you that unfortunately all forty pounds of your clothing aren’t what they’re “looking for this season,” but if you ever have anything that’s more “sustainable” or “on trend” to definitely let them know.
20. Look down and realize that you’re still holding the beret.
21. Stick it to them by buying the beret. This will make sense at the time.
22. Don’t forget to say, “Thanks so much!” as you drag your trash bag of clothes like a freshly murdered body out of the store.
23. Leave with more clothes and less money than you came in with.
24. Stuff the trash bag of clothes in your trunk and drive around with it for no fewer than eight months, affecting both your gas mileage and your general mental health.
25. Never get around to wearing the beret.


newyorker--2020-10-16--Tong Reimagines Thai After-School Snacks

The other day , I combed my memory for traces of after-school snacks .
What had I eaten after bouncing off the school bus and flinging my backpack by the door ?
The best I could recall , with a hint of horror ( but also amusement , and even longing ) , was a tried-and-true ritual , invented by my best friend , that involved melting a Kraft Single on top of a Snyder ’ s of Hanover hard pretzel in the microwave .
Visions of Maruchan ramen noodles danced in my head .
The inspiration for the reverie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ restaurant in Bushwick , where the menu identifies two of its dishes as favorite after-school treats .
Oh , to be a fourth grader in Thailand !
To look forward , during lessons , to deep-fried shredded-banana-blossom pancakes , as intricately woven as birds ’ nests ; to dip them in sweet , tart cucumber relish and feel their oily , salty crunch between your teeth .
To buy , from a street vender , a wooden skewer of tender charred octopus seasoned with chili , cilantro , and lime .
In fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tong , and specifically adults who drink alcohol .
Kub klaem , or small plates , including the banana-blossom pancakes and the octopus , are “ good with a drink or three.
” The more substantial kub khao are “ good for after drinking.
” That the restaurant , which opened in August , does not have a liquor license yet is only a small hitch .
There ’ s an inviting wine store on the block ( which is more verdant than you might expect in Bushwick ) , and Tong packages @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ ve seen .
Eating it at home with a cold beer from my refrigerator was an undiluted pleasure .
“ A drink or three ” is right , especially if you ’ re sensitive to spice , in which case you may want to keep drinking even after you ’ ve finished the small plates .
Several dishes are of the hurts-so-good variety .
A bowl of Laotian crispy rice with agreeably pink fermented pork sausage , roasted peanuts , lime leaf , and chili was so electrifying one night that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exceptionally delicious that I reached for it for breakfast the next morning .
Drunken noodles , tossed with slivers of long red chilis and whole stalks of pickled green peppercorns , were flecked with ground green bird ’ s eye chili for good measure .
A wonderful southern-style , creamy crab curry set my palate aflame , though it also contained its own relief : cool halves of hard-boiled egg , a mound of vermicelli , frills of sweet-and-sour preserved mustard greens , and crunchy crescents of raw bitter melon .
The milder @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quieter .
For another pancake , head-on whiteleg shrimp were fanned in a circle and encased , fossil-like , in a puffy , slightly sweet batter made with flour , chili paste , fish sauce , sugar , and limewater , then fried to a deep russet .
Mum , an Isan-style dry-cured sausage , marries ground beef and beef liver , which puts its texture somewhere between crumbly and pâté velvety , with a distinct iodine tang .
I won ’ t soon forget a deceptively simple , astonishingly flavorful salad for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the dish almost doubled as a cold soup , the refreshingly vegetal water released by the cucumbers punched up with just the right proportions of anchovy paste , lime zest , and coarsely chopped raw garlic .
It ’ s pretty rare in New York to find Thai food this good outside Elmhurst , Queens , which for years has seemed to have a monopoly on the best Thai chefs .
It ’ s unsurprising , then , to learn that some dishes are literally imported from that neighborhood : the mum is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and owner of Elmhurst ’ s beloved Pata Cafe , and the recipe for pad mhee ko rad , an Isan-style wok-fried noodle dish similar to pad Thai , made with soybean paste and sweet pickled radish , comes from her as well .
Nitmai is the mother of one of Tong ’ s owners ; everyone in the kitchen calls her Mom .
May her progeny proliferate far and wide .
( Dishes $ 8- $ 25 . )
♦

The other day, I combed my memory for traces of after-school snacks. What had I eaten after bouncing off the school bus and flinging my backpack by the door? The best I could recall, with a hint of horror (but also amusement, and even longing), was a tried-and-true ritual, invented by my best friend, that involved melting a Kraft Single on top of a Snyder’s of Hanover hard pretzel in the microwave. Visions of Maruchan ramen noodles danced in my head.
Tong’s khao soi features a chicken drumstick, preserved mustard greens, and two types of noodles: egg and crispy rice. Photograph by Gabriel Zimmer for The New Yorker
The inspiration for the reverie was Tong, a superlative new Thai restaurant in Bushwick, where the menu identifies two of its dishes as favorite after-school treats. Oh, to be a fourth grader in Thailand! To look forward, during lessons, to deep-fried shredded-banana-blossom pancakes, as intricately woven as birds’ nests; to dip them in sweet, tart cucumber relish and feel their oily, salty crunch between your teeth. To buy, from a street vender, a wooden skewer of tender charred octopus seasoned with chili, cilantro, and lime.
In fact, adults are the target demographic at Tong, and specifically adults who drink alcohol. Kub klaem, or small plates, including the banana-blossom pancakes and the octopus, are “good with a drink or three.” The more substantial kub khao are “good for after drinking.” That the restaurant, which opened in August, does not have a liquor license yet is only a small hitch. There’s an inviting wine store on the block (which is more verdant than you might expect in Bushwick), and Tong packages its takeout as carefully and appealingly as I’ve seen. Eating it at home with a cold beer from my refrigerator was an undiluted pleasure.
For a small plate called kor moo yang, slices of grilled pork jowl are served with a spicy tamarind-chili dipping sauce. Photograph by Gabriel Zimmer for The New Yorker
“A drink or three” is right, especially if you’re sensitive to spice, in which case you may want to keep drinking even after you’ve finished the small plates. Several dishes are of the hurts-so-good variety. A bowl of Laotian crispy rice with agreeably pink fermented pork sausage, roasted peanuts, lime leaf, and chili was so electrifying one night that it made me skittery, and so exceptionally delicious that I reached for it for breakfast the next morning. Drunken noodles, tossed with slivers of long red chilis and whole stalks of pickled green peppercorns, were flecked with ground green bird’s eye chili for good measure. A wonderful southern-style, creamy crab curry set my palate aflame, though it also contained its own relief: cool halves of hard-boiled egg, a mound of vermicelli, frills of sweet-and-sour preserved mustard greens, and crunchy crescents of raw bitter melon.
The milder options were no less thrilling, only quieter. For another pancake, head-on whiteleg shrimp were fanned in a circle and encased, fossil-like, in a puffy, slightly sweet batter made with flour, chili paste, fish sauce, sugar, and limewater, then fried to a deep russet. Mum, an Isan-style dry-cured sausage, marries ground beef and beef liver, which puts its texture somewhere between crumbly and pâté velvety, with a distinct iodine tang. I won’t soon forget a deceptively simple, astonishingly flavorful salad for which cucumbers were so heavily salted that the dish almost doubled as a cold soup, the refreshingly vegetal water released by the cucumbers punched up with just the right proportions of anchovy paste, lime zest, and coarsely chopped raw garlic.
The menu identifies the pla muk yang—grilled octopus seasoned with chili, lime, and cilantro—as a favorite after-school snack in Thailand. Photograph by Gabriel Zimmer for The New Yorker
It’s pretty rare in New York to find Thai food this good outside Elmhurst, Queens, which for years has seemed to have a monopoly on the best Thai chefs. It’s unsurprising, then, to learn that some dishes are literally imported from that neighborhood: the mum is made by Sunisa Nitmai, the chef and owner of Elmhurst’s beloved Pata Cafe, and the recipe for pad mhee ko rad, an Isan-style wok-fried noodle dish similar to pad Thai, made with soybean paste and sweet pickled radish, comes from her as well. Nitmai is the mother of one of Tong’s owners; everyone in the kitchen calls her Mom. May her progeny proliferate far and wide. (Dishes $8-$25.) ♦


newyorker--2020-10-16--A “Hamilton” Star’s Left-of-Center Noise-Rap Album

The noise-rap trio Clipping—composed of the rapper , actor , and “ Hamilton ” star Daveed Diggs and the producers @ @ @ @ @ been making left-of-center hip-hop since 2014 .
In the group ’ s ambitious new horror-themed @ @ @ @ @ Bodies Being Burned , ” each song plays into one of the genre ’ s @ @ @ @ @ expression of radical politics .
Nowhere is this overlap more effective than on “ Pain @ @ @ @ @ on the ghosts of lynching victims to haunt the descendants of their killers .

The noise-rap trio Clipping—composed of the rapper, actor, and “Hamilton” star Daveed Diggs and the producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson—has been making left-of-center hip-hop since 2014. In the group’s ambitious new horror-themed album, “Visions of Bodies Being Burned,” each song plays into one of the genre’s tropes, occasionally as an expression of radical politics. Nowhere is this overlap more effective than on “Pain Everyday,” which calls on the ghosts of lynching victims to haunt the descendants of their killers.


“Martin Eden,” Reviewed

As for the time frame , search me .
Given the many squabbles that we see in the movie between left and right—the needs of the collective versus the force of individual will—we could be observing any patch of Italian history from the past century .
Some of the clothes have a tailored nattiness that would fit the nineteen-twenties , yet the soundtrack jangles with Europop from the seventies and eighties , and the televisions are of a similar vintage .
So are the cars .
One thing hasn ’ t changed : as on the page , the hero @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to sea at the age of eleven , and we sense that he ’ s consumed a large slice of the world before the tale begins .
Onscreen , played with bullish vigor by Luca Marinelli , he ’ s a handsome devil , though his looks don ’ t weather well .
More hungry than happy , he is a creature of salty appetites , his entrance into the movie marked by sex and violence .
First , he picks up a young woman , Margherita ( Denise Sardisco ) , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , under the cover of night ; then he wakes to see a defenseless youth being bullied on a nearby wharf and , one punch later , saves the lad and takes him back to his family , the Orsinis .
And that is where Martin ’ s troubles—and his opportunities—burst into life .
The Orsinis are not just rich but languidly rich , and they could have wandered in from a Visconti film .
When Elena ( Jessica Cressy ) , the sister of the rescued kid , approaches Martin to thank @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drifts toward him , in an unfocussed blur , and that physical ease , more than anything she says , prepares us for the fundamental clash that will sustain the movie .
Marcello attends obsessively to his characters ’ motions , rough and smooth , and to what they bespeak .
Martin is a born brawler , and his vaunting stride , ideal for the deck of a ship , is ill-adapted for more tranquil company .
Faced with the enrapturing Elena , he comes across as a blunderer and a rube ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he wipes the sauce from his plate with a hunk of bread while lecturing his hosts on poverty .
On dry land , he is all at sea .
It was during an ocean voyage that London wrote most of “ Martin Eden , ” and the novel—his most autobiographical—suffers from an awkward lurch .
Yet the swell of it suits his theme : In an unjust age , how do you scale the heights of social class ?
Is it enough to be ambitious , and to believe , with a raging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ raised up ?
If you cram your brain , will that suffice ?
The difficult birth of the twentieth century was rife with such anxieties ; you hear them in Knut Hamsun ’ s “ Victoria ” ( 1898 ) , and in the beseechings of Leonard Bast , in E. M. Forster ’ s “ Howards End ” ( 1910 ) , and they resurface in Marcello ’ s film , as Martin says plaintively to Elena , “ I decided that I want to be like you.
” She fixes him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ Mr .
Eden , what you need is an education.
” Sworn to do her bidding , Martin sets about the furnishing of his mind .
If anything , he exceeds his brief , spending what petty cash he has not only on books but on a secondhand typewriter , having resolved to make writing his career— “ to turn myself into one of the eyes through which the world sees.
” A mad plan , guaranteed to wreck the hearty health that he developed during the life aquatic , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ somewhere cheap and quiet to scribble , he takes lodgings in a humble house in the countryside , owned by a widow whom he meets , together with her children , on a train .
One of the blessed virtues of this film is that everything—lovers , landladies , fights , and philosophical ideas—seems to be chanced upon rather than laid down in advance .
Experience is caught on the wing , and then released .
It ’ s no surprise to learn that Marcello made documentaries , short and long , before @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Eden ” is the second of these , after “ Lost and Beautiful ” ( 2015 ) , and rarely will you have seen a choppier or more self-interrupting movie .
It ’ s in color , but the director has a habit of cutting away to clips of old footage , many of them in black-and-white or sepia , snipped from Lord knows where , as if loath to exclude any memories or chance resemblances that occur to him .
The result is more like a dog-eared scrapbook than it is like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lies in trying to work out how the fragments fit in .
Why , for instance , the sudden closeup of a writhing octopus , into which somebody bites ?
Are we meant to recall the scorpions , battling to the death , that appear without explanation in Buñuel ’ s “ L ’ Âge d ’ Or ” ( 1930 ) ?
Or is Marcello alerting us to the tussle of Martin and Elena , who can barely keep their suckers off each other ?
The trouble with writers , as with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t help squirting ink , especially at moments of high emotion .
Undaunted in his quest , Martin mails off story after story to various journals , and finally strikes gold , though Elena deplores the harshness of his work— “ too much death , too much pain , ” she says .
So now it ’ s his turn to propose an education ; he gives Elena a guided tour of his Naples , rowdy and raucous , where he ’ s accosted by prostitutes and pimps .
The camera , handheld @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ride , and Elena , versed in refinement , shies away and clings to Martin ’ s arm .
The film is a romance , of sorts , yet it also wields an anti-romantic ferocity , suggesting that the fissure between rich and poor is , whatever we yearn to think , unbridgeable .
Falling in love can be hard when you ’ re trying to scramble upward at the same time .
All of this confirms that “ Martin Eden ” is lusty with political intent .
Striking workers berate a man @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their union , and Martin gets the same reception when he addresses a crowd of militants , deriding them as “ slaves.
” He also befriends a haggard old radical , Russ Brissenden ( Carlo Cecchi ) , who coughs blood into a handkerchief and counsels socialism , “ the only thing that will save you from the disappointment that ’ s approaching.
” Since the movie showed at festivals , last year , some viewers have complained that its politics feel confused .
Good .
I have little or no wish to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clarity , and , besides , is it not in the hero ’ s eager nature to be swayed by warring instincts ?
As in the original novel , we find him studying Herbert Spencer , the once fashionable and now half-forgotten Victorian philosopher who coined the phrase “ the survival of the fittest.
” But Martin wouldn ’ t be reading Spencer in the mid- to late twentieth century .
He ’ d be reading another Herbert—Marcuse , that is , whose “ One-Dimensional Man , ” from 1964 , spurns the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most shocking , and also the saddest , thing in Marcello ’ s film is the ascendancy of its central figure .
I was certain that Martin would fail , especially after a mortifying soirée at which he serenades Elena with lines of verse .
“ I wrote them , ” he says , “ for my lady.
” ( Wrong .
They were written by T. S. Eliot , and Martin stole them for his lady . )
Then , there is a dinner at the Orsinis ’ , where he snarls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ farce of democracy ” in terms that would not sound out of place in the mouth of a fascist .
Leap ahead a few years , however , and you meet a very different Martin—famous and fêted , with a publisher priming him for a visit to America , and ranks of readers hanging on his pronouncements .
“ The writer Martin Eden does not exist , ” he tells them , describing himself as “ only a hoodlum and a sailor.
” Success has gone to his head and taken root .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ he shouts the words that he dictates to his assistant and gives a wad of banknotes to a revolutionary .
His hair flops lankly over his brow .
Self-loathing is exuded like sweat .
There is more to ponder , in this uncommon movie , than there is to plumb .
Broad rather than deep , and layering the vintage with the modern , it ’ s a collage of shifting surfaces—an appropriate form for a pilgrim soul like Martin , whose gifts , though plentiful , do not include a talent for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ abounds .
Two young children dance in the street , as though unable to stop ; some books are ravenously read , but others are tossed onto a flaming pyre ; and , in the final scene , an old man stalks along a beach , at sunset , crying that “ war has started.
” What war ?
What country , friends , is this ?
Doesn ’ t matter .
All we know is that , for the Martin Edens of this world , there will never be peace .
♦

Who knew that Jack London, of all people, would be having a moment? One of the last films to open in cinemas, before the imposition of lockdown, was “The Call of the Wild.” And now “Martin Eden” shows up. London’s novel of that title, which was first published in 1909, has been adapted—boy, has it been adapted—into a film. It’s in Italian, for starters, and the principal setting has shifted from Oakland to Naples. From one port city, that is, to another; the director, Pietro Marcello, has inherited London’s outward gaze, endlessly craving the next horizon. Never be without a great escape.
As for the time frame, search me. Given the many squabbles that we see in the movie between left and right—the needs of the collective versus the force of individual will—we could be observing any patch of Italian history from the past century. Some of the clothes have a tailored nattiness that would fit the nineteen-twenties, yet the soundtrack jangles with Europop from the seventies and eighties, and the televisions are of a similar vintage. So are the cars.
One thing hasn’t changed: as on the page, the hero is Martin Eden. He first went to sea at the age of eleven, and we sense that he’s consumed a large slice of the world before the tale begins. Onscreen, played with bullish vigor by Luca Marinelli, he’s a handsome devil, though his looks don’t weather well. More hungry than happy, he is a creature of salty appetites, his entrance into the movie marked by sex and violence. First, he picks up a young woman, Margherita (Denise Sardisco), and makes love to her on a boat, under the cover of night; then he wakes to see a defenseless youth being bullied on a nearby wharf and, one punch later, saves the lad and takes him back to his family, the Orsinis. And that is where Martin’s troubles—and his opportunities—burst into life.
The Orsinis are not just rich but languidly rich, and they could have wandered in from a Visconti film. When Elena (Jessica Cressy), the sister of the rescued kid, approaches Martin to thank him for his good deed, she drifts toward him, in an unfocussed blur, and that physical ease, more than anything she says, prepares us for the fundamental clash that will sustain the movie. Marcello attends obsessively to his characters’ motions, rough and smooth, and to what they bespeak. Martin is a born brawler, and his vaunting stride, ideal for the deck of a ship, is ill-adapted for more tranquil company. Faced with the enrapturing Elena, he comes across as a blunderer and a rube; invited to lunch with the Orsinis, he wipes the sauce from his plate with a hunk of bread while lecturing his hosts on poverty. On dry land, he is all at sea.
It was during an ocean voyage that London wrote most of “Martin Eden,” and the novel—his most autobiographical—suffers from an awkward lurch. Yet the swell of it suits his theme: In an unjust age, how do you scale the heights of social class? Is it enough to be ambitious, and to believe, with a raging heart, that you deserve to be raised up? If you cram your brain, will that suffice? The difficult birth of the twentieth century was rife with such anxieties; you hear them in Knut Hamsun’s “Victoria” (1898), and in the beseechings of Leonard Bast, in E. M. Forster’s “Howards End” (1910), and they resurface in Marcello’s film, as Martin says plaintively to Elena, “I decided that I want to be like you.” She fixes him with her calm blue gaze and replies, “Mr. Eden, what you need is an education.”
Sworn to do her bidding, Martin sets about the furnishing of his mind. If anything, he exceeds his brief, spending what petty cash he has not only on books but on a secondhand typewriter, having resolved to make writing his career—“to turn myself into one of the eyes through which the world sees.” A mad plan, guaranteed to wreck the hearty health that he developed during the life aquatic, but that’s his choice. Needing somewhere cheap and quiet to scribble, he takes lodgings in a humble house in the countryside, owned by a widow whom he meets, together with her children, on a train. One of the blessed virtues of this film is that everything—lovers, landladies, fights, and philosophical ideas—seems to be chanced upon rather than laid down in advance. Experience is caught on the wing, and then released.
It’s no surprise to learn that Marcello made documentaries, short and long, before turning to feature films. “Martin Eden” is the second of these, after “Lost and Beautiful” (2015), and rarely will you have seen a choppier or more self-interrupting movie. It’s in color, but the director has a habit of cutting away to clips of old footage, many of them in black-and-white or sepia, snipped from Lord knows where, as if loath to exclude any memories or chance resemblances that occur to him. The result is more like a dog-eared scrapbook than it is like a regular narrative, and the fun lies in trying to work out how the fragments fit in. Why, for instance, the sudden closeup of a writhing octopus, into which somebody bites? Are we meant to recall the scorpions, battling to the death, that appear without explanation in Buñuel’s “L’Âge d’Or” (1930)? Or is Marcello alerting us to the tussle of Martin and Elena, who can barely keep their suckers off each other?
The trouble with writers, as with cephalopods, is that they can’t help squirting ink, especially at moments of high emotion. Undaunted in his quest, Martin mails off story after story to various journals, and finally strikes gold, though Elena deplores the harshness of his work—“too much death, too much pain,” she says. So now it’s his turn to propose an education; he gives Elena a guided tour of his Naples, rowdy and raucous, where he’s accosted by prostitutes and pimps. The camera, handheld and jolting, goes along for the ride, and Elena, versed in refinement, shies away and clings to Martin’s arm. The film is a romance, of sorts, yet it also wields an anti-romantic ferocity, suggesting that the fissure between rich and poor is, whatever we yearn to think, unbridgeable. Falling in love can be hard when you’re trying to scramble upward at the same time.
All of this confirms that “Martin Eden” is lusty with political intent. Striking workers berate a man who warns them against the demands of their union, and Martin gets the same reception when he addresses a crowd of militants, deriding them as “slaves.” He also befriends a haggard old radical, Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi), who coughs blood into a handkerchief and counsels socialism, “the only thing that will save you from the disappointment that’s approaching.” Since the movie showed at festivals, last year, some viewers have complained that its politics feel confused. Good. I have little or no wish to watch a film that flaunts its ideological clarity, and, besides, is it not in the hero’s eager nature to be swayed by warring instincts? As in the original novel, we find him studying Herbert Spencer, the once fashionable and now half-forgotten Victorian philosopher who coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest.” But Martin wouldn’t be reading Spencer in the mid- to late twentieth century. He’d be reading another Herbert—Marcuse, that is, whose “One-Dimensional Man,” from 1964, spurns the blandishments of existing political programs.
The most shocking, and also the saddest, thing in Marcello’s film is the ascendancy of its central figure. I was certain that Martin would fail, especially after a mortifying soirée at which he serenades Elena with lines of verse. “I wrote them,” he says, “for my lady.” (Wrong. They were written by T. S. Eliot, and Martin stole them for his lady.) Then, there is a dinner at the Orsinis’, where he snarls at the liberal establishment and “the farce of democracy” in terms that would not sound out of place in the mouth of a fascist. Leap ahead a few years, however, and you meet a very different Martin—famous and fêted, with a publisher priming him for a visit to America, and ranks of readers hanging on his pronouncements. “The writer Martin Eden does not exist,” he tells them, describing himself as “only a hoodlum and a sailor.” Success has gone to his head and taken root. Spoiled, gaunt, and sick, he shouts the words that he dictates to his assistant and gives a wad of banknotes to a revolutionary. His hair flops lankly over his brow. Self-loathing is exuded like sweat.
There is more to ponder, in this uncommon movie, than there is to plumb. Broad rather than deep, and layering the vintage with the modern, it’s a collage of shifting surfaces—an appropriate form for a pilgrim soul like Martin, whose gifts, though plentiful, do not include a talent for staying still. Restlessness of every sort abounds. Two young children dance in the street, as though unable to stop; some books are ravenously read, but others are tossed onto a flaming pyre; and, in the final scene, an old man stalks along a beach, at sunset, crying that “war has started.” What war? What country, friends, is this? Doesn’t matter. All we know is that, for the Martin Edens of this world, there will never be peace. ♦