“Rwanda”

Should he tell his niece how sorely he was tempted to throttle the man that afternoon when he conjured up just the two of them alone in the men ’ s room of a Rwandan courthouse .
Disappointed himself , when he didn ’ t finish him off then and there .
When the hateful old man ’ s time up , wouldn ’ t his moans for morphine or death be music to my ears , he thinks .
Mehr Licht the last words attributed to a dying Goethe .
German words , niece , meaning “ more light @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like Mehr Licht when translated into English .
More dark , that old darkie will gasp .
Darkness to hide him , to cover up his fears , his rage , his betrayals , his shame .
But no point , he had decided that day in a faraway courthouse , no point in killing a nasty old man .
Tutsi corpses don ’ t return to life no matter how high the piles of Hutu corpses .
Or vice versa .
At home in his bedroom , old-man eyes stare into emptiness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , loosening laces , removing shoes , rolling down crusty-toed , silk socks .
Why commit a crime , he had asked himself .
Risk his freedom killing the bastard when surely disease will rot his old body and perform a more impeccable , patient , subtle , sustained , excruciating assassination than he could ever hope to achieve .
Story of any country ’ s citizens massacring fellow-citizens is many stories coming true , he will say to his niece .
Also many stories becoming untrue .
Yours .
Ours .
Thought @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crucified .
Halal .
Kosher .
Bled white .
Sanctified .
Eaten .
Goodness born inside each person along with evil , my dear , but goodness doesn ’ t prosper like evil prospers .
The woes an old , naked man—warden , keeper of the flame , keeper of coloreds , fellow-colored , colored fellow—has inflicted upon others defy words .
Best revenge not to take his life , but to wish more years on him .
Life everlasting interrupted daily , every hour on the hour , by death of one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than he deserves , his niece or someone else might suggest .
Too much mercy for a person who remains , until their dying day , willing to abuse others .
How many times to please himself had he , like the old man , violated another person ’ s trust .
Acted as if he knew the world going to end in a quick minute and no consequences that matter would follow his actions .
As if whatever comes next could never matter more than the sweet pleasure of pretending no tomorrow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about .
No questions asked .
No hesitation .
Just a game , after all .
Of course , more than contempt had motivated him to spy through a window on an evil old colored man fumbling around in a dark room .
Whose story was he attempting to tell anyway .
To whom .
He already understood more than enough about the man .
Knows him much too well .
Bitter , bitter knowledge .
Studies him because he fears him .
And you should fear him , too , girl , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will say .
Beware .
Beware .
Sorry as I am to admit it , dear heart , yours truly is very much like him .
Both of us men who should know better .
No excuse .
Way , way , way too greedy .
Too busy .
Way too selfish .
Too accomplished at getting what we want .
Everything .
Nothing .
No matter who or how many we destroy .
Close to the water ’ s edge , he turned left , headed uptown , in the direction of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ guardrailed , concrete walkway , but on a path through growing things—grass , bushes , shrubs , moss , flowers , weeds , trees—life someone had the good sense to preserve or plant and create park-like stretches paralleling the river .
On his side of tall , black cyclone fences that protected tennis courts , running tracks and ball fields , he saw the same discarded paperback book he had been noticing for a couple days , a pale , bulky lump still lying there atop late-May grass , near the mud-colored path @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many footsteps , the skittering trail he was negotiating , only a bit wider than a shoe length , mile of path , improvised about a yard away from fifteen-foot-high black wire fences .
Curiosity he had managed to resist on previous sightings won this time .
He stopped , used a foot to turn it over , and discovered the book ’ s title , “ Snow , ” on its torn cover , a novel by coincidence he happened to have read , its author a famous Turkish writer , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writer ’ s name , remember more about the book , unable to take another step until he forced himself to remember more , embarrassed , ashamed when he couldn ’ t .
Silence of the morning , stillness of the streets on his way to the East River all he could recall .
Then snow .
Instantly the green grass , the brown earth , the book are buried under whiteness .
Huge snowflakes filling the air around him .
If it had been a scene he read in the novel ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it as “ magical realism.
” But no , it was not words .
No .
Snow present .
Snow a deluge of giant flakes slowly descending , snow dropping into the East River , turning edges of water into icy sheets , snow beginning to obscure tall towers—most completed , some under construction , crowned by skeletal arms of cranes—looming a half mile away on the river ’ s opposite bank , snow falling until it buries that distant cityscape and all the buildings disappear .
Will he ever be able to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ already understands—smart pretty niece by way of smart pretty niece—and maybe she will help him understand better ) the painful complicity of inhabiting a world that holds his imprisoned brother , and holds another who is a prison .
Not exactly reparations , I say to my brother during the second phone call to me he ’ s been permitted after a hearing that denied parole , an old colored man ( is he a soul brother of the bête noire my dreams spy on ) presiding .
My brother turned down for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eligible , after twenty-five years , to apply once a year for parole .
Not exactly reparations , I smile and wag my head , though my brother can ’ t see me do it nor do I quite hear his little laugh nor see that smart-aleck smirk that wrinkles up my brother ’ s face since he was twelve .
Silence on the other end of the phone line connecting us , him trapped inside , me trapped outside stone walls , but I keep talking , carefully of course , since @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can be used against him .
Say the story I saw on the NBC Nightly News not exactly reparations after four hundred years of damage , but maybe a step in the right direction .
Whadda you think , man .
Story the feel-good bit in these godawful times Lester always tacks on at the end of each broadcast .
A project in a laundromat to teach preschool ghetto kids to read .
Good idea , huh , though maybe a better idea , the best idea , just to stop pretending altogether @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Give a damn .
Probably my own bad mood as much as anything else , bro , but that piece made me so mad , so ashamed , I wanted to scream .
Cry .
Enslavement a terrible crime—just about everybody concedes that fact today—but all the victims and perpetrators dead , we ’ re told , if we ask .
Not spoken about if no one asks .
America ’ s gaping , cosmic black hole and here they come with another Band-Aid to patch it .
Cringed when I saw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grownups read , kids spozed to be learning to read inside some ugly fuck .
.
.
damn laundromat in a raggedy-ass neighborhood .
Let it bleed , I thought .
Better to let it bleed .
All of us falling one day , sucked into a black hole , but some of us encumbered with all the shit they ’ ve stolen will fall through faster , and the rest of us left behind , separated a blessed minute from those ruthless , greedy , toxic thieves at last , and maybe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a little smidgen of peace then .
Laundromat .
Yeah .
Yeah .
Huge , barn-ass , noisy room and preschoolers stuck there anyway on wash day with mamas or grandmamas or aunts or big sis or whoever washes everybody ’ s clothes so why not .
It ’ s available , cheap , plenty clients on hand regularly .
Just bring in a couple volunteers and organize the locals , encourage them to read to the little burr-heads instead of just sitting around half the day smoking dope or doing nothing while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Why not get the women involved who spawn too many colored kids .
Teach them to sit their babies down and read to them instead of letting them run wild inside a filthy laundromat .
And if mama missed that alphabet class in school , teach mama the alphabet , too .
Makes perfect sense in a way .
You know .
Like , yes , please give our children a little extra head-start push .
So niggers don ’ t fail because they start out—first day in kindergarten—far behind other kids .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ rule says niggers got to catch up .
Four hundred years and we ain ’ t caught up yet .
Makes sense and no sense .
Teaching ghetto kids to read a couple hours a week in some loud , crowded , funky laundromat , bro .
As if it ’ s the best school the richest country on earth can afford for them .
What kind of fucking catch-up is that .
Four hundred years and counting of starting out unequal .
That amounts to some serious left-behind .
Four hundred years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ catch up while our clothes getting clean .
Why not slam up every single colored one of us into laundromats and lock the doors .
Only let out a few , now and then .
Ones who read well .
She sticks the check from her uncle back in its envelope , envelope in her bag to deposit next day in the bank after work .
Money her uncle sent for her other uncle , the one she ’ s seen only a few times in life , and never outside prison , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she was born , money her uncle had asked her to begin taking charge of this year , money in a lump sum he sends for her to dispense to his brother , her uncle said , both to connect her more closely with her imprisoned uncle and to encourage more visits to the prison , his hope .
Requesting that she dole out to his brother in small , regular amounts the money he sends her , either when she visits and can put cash directly into a prison account or JPay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ equally available to her college-educated uncle wherever he is , she ’ s tempted to remind him , though he always claims the Internet “ befuddles him.
” Smallish portions , he schools her .
Best not to forward too much money at one time because my younger sibling has a fondness for gambling and we don ’ t want to tempt him , do we , dear heart , my uncle said .
Little bro ’ s fondness for risk and his boundless optimism insure he ’ ll keep chasing after other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all the little taste of good money in his hand , my uncle says , talking over the phone in that odd , elaborate way of his she thinks he must be as fond of as he claims his younger brother fond of gambling .
Her uncle had asked her once , Do you truly believe you ’ re colored .
Hey .
Don ’ t be looking at me all cross-eyed , young lady .
A serious question .
Do you , we , all of us still believe we are colored @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are .
Colored .
Different .
A damned shame .
Her odd uncle , book writer , wanderer , seldom in town .
Her dead mom ’ s uncle , really , Grandma ’ s older brother .
Her dead mom her grandma ’ s eldest daughter , the man ’ s actual niece , and that makes her what—great-niece , niece-in-law , second niece—whatever to this man she ’ s standing next to on her grandmother ’ s porch and always called Uncle since she was a baby , the wannabe front @ @ @ @ @ @ @ step up to Grandma ’ s house .
Her house , too .
For many years , she and her mom , after her beautiful mom got divorced , got sick , living there with Granddaddy and Grandma , her grandma who still misses a lost daughter seven years gone , mourns her lost daughter as fiercely , unconsolably , it seems and does not seem possible , as she does , daughter of that lost daughter who misses and mourns her mom , yes she does , still does very much , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crooked front porch where she stands in the dark after family had gathered to talk and eat and drink themselves holiday-silly and each one finally at this late hour has had more than enough and begins peeling away into smaller family groups .
Or a few , like her , alone , though her uncle beside her now , middle of the night , isn ’ t it , and dangerous out there in the streets , and Uncle makes it his habit , whenever he ’ s around , to escort each @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the porch until she ’ s locked in her car , motor running , lights on and car rolls off , up or down the dark , steep hillside upon which his sister ’ s house perches .
Uncle there , bodies lightly touching when his arm goes round her shoulders and he leans down , kisses her cheek , and if her cheek just a wee bit higher or he leaned lower , his lips might have brushed hers , but didn ’ t , no lip brushing because she ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also unafraid like her , and believes , like her mom did , neither in sin , nor in everlasting romance of any mouth , uncle or anybody else on her mouth , knows better , raised better by her dead mom who nods gently , whispers best not , of course not , girl , best go on and get your behind down those treacherous slabs of broken concrete that serve as steps up and down from the sidewalk to your grandma ’ s red front door .
Glad now she chose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the family party .
Don ’ t break your butt , girl , careful , careful now , get yourself down step by step till your feet on solid street and your car door locked , and you got yourself sitting behind the wheel , girl .
Her uncle tall .
Not as tall as tall , gorgeous Riley .
Thirty smiling foot of Riley in skimpy running shorts , T-shirt , fanciest of training shoes postered for months up on a wall next to Kmart entrance to the mall .
Liked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Maybe if he shared fewer of those dumb notions guys his age , especially fine ones like finest Riley , share .
Gim me some .
Get me some .
Cop me a piece of pussy .
What in the world did they think we carry around down there between our legs , her mom asked once , think we can break off and wrap it up and send it home with them or they can grab and show off to their friends .
Her uncle had asked her , If you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doubt about it , world going to end very , very soon , would you tell other people .
With that knowledge buzzing around in your brain , my dear , what would you do .
Then her uncle had stopped talking .
Stopped explaining experiments or games , stopped asking questions .
Looked at her .
Waited .
Waited .
As if he expected an answer .
Since she had no idea what to reply , she asked him , What would you do , Uncle .
He smiled at her , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If I knew sure enough the world about to end , think I ’ d probably kidnap you , girl , and run far away with you , and my , my , wouldn ’ t that be a trip , and wouldn ’ t people talk .
And she had smiled back , smile deep as his smile because she believed her old uncle just talking , just teasing .
Long , long way for both of them to go .
♦

Then snow. Instantly the green grass, the brown earth, the book are buried under whiteness. Huge snowflakes filling the air around him. If it had been a scene he read in the novel’s pages, he might have dismissed it as “magical realism.” But no, it was not words. No. Snow present. Snow a deluge of giant flakes slowly descending, snow dropping into the East River, turning edges of water into icy sheets, snow beginning to obscure tall towers—most completed, some under construction, crowned by skeletal arms of cranes—looming a half mile away on the river’s opposite bank, snow falling until it buries that distant cityscape and all the buildings disappear.
Will he ever be able to express to her (or maybe she already understands—smart pretty niece by way of smart pretty niece—and maybe she will help him understand better) the painful complicity of inhabiting a world that holds his imprisoned brother, and holds another who is a prison.
III.
Not exactly reparations, I say to my brother during the second phone call to me he’s been permitted after a hearing that denied parole, an old colored man (is he a soul brother of the bête noire my dreams spy on) presiding. My brother turned down for the fifth straight year since he became eligible, after twenty-five years, to apply once a year for parole. Not exactly reparations, I smile and wag my head, though my brother can’t see me do it nor do I quite hear his little laugh nor see that smart-aleck smirk that wrinkles up my brother’s face since he was twelve. Silence on the other end of the phone line connecting us, him trapped inside, me trapped outside stone walls, but I keep talking, carefully of course, since our conversations are monitored and my words can be used against him. Say the story I saw on the NBC Nightly News not exactly reparations after four hundred years of damage, but maybe a step in the right direction. Whadda you think, man. Story the feel-good bit in these godawful times Lester always tacks on at the end of each broadcast. A project in a laundromat to teach preschool ghetto kids to read. Good idea, huh, though maybe a better idea, the best idea, just to stop pretending altogether they give a fuck. Excuse me. Give a damn. Probably my own bad mood as much as anything else, bro, but that piece made me so mad, so ashamed, I wanted to scream. Cry. Enslavement a terrible crime—just about everybody concedes that fact today—but all the victims and perpetrators dead, we’re told, if we ask. Not spoken about if no one asks. America’s gaping, cosmic black hole and here they come with another Band-Aid to patch it. Cringed when I saw those video clips of kids listening to grownups read, kids spozed to be learning to read inside some ugly fuck . . . damn laundromat in a raggedy-ass neighborhood. Let it bleed, I thought. Better to let it bleed. All of us falling one day, sucked into a black hole, but some of us encumbered with all the shit they’ve stolen will fall through faster, and the rest of us left behind, separated a blessed minute from those ruthless, greedy, toxic thieves at last, and maybe then at the end we might get a little smidgen of peace then.
Laundromat. Yeah. Yeah. Huge, barn-ass, noisy room and preschoolers stuck there anyway on wash day with mamas or grandmamas or aunts or big sis or whoever washes everybody’s clothes so why not. It’s available, cheap, plenty clients on hand regularly. Just bring in a couple volunteers and organize the locals, encourage them to read to the little burr-heads instead of just sitting around half the day smoking dope or doing nothing while all those machines rumbling, tumbling. Why not get the women involved who spawn too many colored kids. Teach them to sit their babies down and read to them instead of letting them run wild inside a filthy laundromat. And if mama missed that alphabet class in school, teach mama the alphabet, too. Makes perfect sense in a way. You know. Like, yes, please give our children a little extra head-start push. So niggers don’t fail because they start out—first day in kindergarten—far behind other kids. Except everybody knows ain’t no rule says niggers got to catch up. Four hundred years and we ain’t caught up yet.
Makes sense and no sense. Teaching ghetto kids to read a couple hours a week in some loud, crowded, funky laundromat, bro. As if it’s the best school the richest country on earth can afford for them. What kind of fucking catch-up is that. Four hundred years and counting of starting out unequal. That amounts to some serious left-behind. Four hundred years’ worth. And we spozed to catch up while our clothes getting clean. Why not slam up every single colored one of us into laundromats and lock the doors. Only let out a few, now and then. Ones who read well.
IV.
She sticks the check from her uncle back in its envelope, envelope in her bag to deposit next day in the bank after work. Money her uncle sent for her other uncle, the one she’s seen only a few times in life, and never outside prison, where he’s been since before she was born, money her uncle had asked her to begin taking charge of this year, money in a lump sum he sends for her to dispense to his brother, her uncle said, both to connect her more closely with her imprisoned uncle and to encourage more visits to the prison, his hope. Requesting that she dole out to his brother in small, regular amounts the money he sends her, either when she visits and can put cash directly into a prison account or JPay it through Internet, the second option equally available to her college-educated uncle wherever he is, she’s tempted to remind him, though he always claims the Internet “befuddles him.” Smallish portions, he schools her. Best not to forward too much money at one time because my younger sibling has a fondness for gambling and we don’t want to tempt him, do we, dear heart, my uncle said. Little bro’s fondness for risk and his boundless optimism insure he’ll keep chasing after other folks’ bad money until he loses all the little taste of good money in his hand, my uncle says, talking over the phone in that odd, elaborate way of his she thinks he must be as fond of as he claims his younger brother fond of gambling.
Her uncle had asked her once, Do you truly believe you’re colored. Hey. Don’t be looking at me all cross-eyed, young lady. A serious question. Do you, we, all of us still believe we are colored just because they keep telling us we are. Colored. Different. A damned shame.
Her odd uncle, book writer, wanderer, seldom in town. Her dead mom’s uncle, really, Grandma’s older brother. Her dead mom her grandma’s eldest daughter, the man’s actual niece, and that makes her what—great-niece, niece-in-law, second niece—whatever to this man she’s standing next to on her grandmother’s porch and always called Uncle since she was a baby, the wannabe front porch not much larger than a final step up to Grandma’s house. Her house, too. For many years, she and her mom, after her beautiful mom got divorced, got sick, living there with Granddaddy and Grandma, her grandma who still misses a lost daughter seven years gone, mourns her lost daughter as fiercely, unconsolably, it seems and does not seem possible, as she does, daughter of that lost daughter who misses and mourns her mom, yes she does, still does very much, especially now, on this narrow, crooked front porch where she stands in the dark after family had gathered to talk and eat and drink themselves holiday-silly and each one finally at this late hour has had more than enough and begins peeling away into smaller family groups. Or a few, like her, alone, though her uncle beside her now, middle of the night, isn’t it, and dangerous out there in the streets, and Uncle makes it his habit, whenever he’s around, to escort each solitary family female outdoors, a sentinel on the porch until she’s locked in her car, motor running, lights on and car rolls off, up or down the dark, steep hillside upon which his sister’s house perches. Uncle there, bodies lightly touching when his arm goes round her shoulders and he leans down, kisses her cheek, and if her cheek just a wee bit higher or he leaned lower, his lips might have brushed hers, but didn’t, no lip brushing because she’s tough like her mom, though also unafraid like her, and believes, like her mom did, neither in sin, nor in everlasting romance of any mouth, uncle or anybody else on her mouth, knows better, raised better by her dead mom who nods gently, whispers best not, of course not, girl, best go on and get your behind down those treacherous slabs of broken concrete that serve as steps up and down from the sidewalk to your grandma’s red front door. Glad now she chose sneakers and jeans not heels and dress for the family party. Don’t break your butt, girl, careful, careful now, get yourself down step by step till your feet on solid street and your car door locked, and you got yourself sitting behind the wheel, girl.
Her uncle tall. Not as tall as tall, gorgeous Riley. Thirty smiling foot of Riley in skimpy running shorts, T-shirt, fanciest of training shoes postered for months up on a wall next to Kmart entrance to the mall. Liked Riley lots. Maybe still with him. Maybe if he shared fewer of those dumb notions guys his age, especially fine ones like finest Riley, share. Gimme some. Get me some. Cop me a piece of pussy. What in the world did they think we carry around down there between our legs, her mom asked once, think we can break off and wrap it up and send it home with them or they can grab and show off to their friends.
Her uncle had asked her, If you found out, a secret, no doubt about it, world going to end very, very soon, would you tell other people. With that knowledge buzzing around in your brain, my dear, what would you do. Then her uncle had stopped talking. Stopped explaining experiments or games, stopped asking questions. Looked at her. Waited. Waited. As if he expected an answer. Since she had no idea what to reply, she asked him, What would you do, Uncle. He smiled at her, then closed his eyes and whispered, If I knew sure enough the world about to end, think I’d probably kidnap you, girl, and run far away with you, and my, my, wouldn’t that be a trip, and wouldn’t people talk.
And she had smiled back, smile deep as his smile because she believed her old uncle just talking, just teasing. Long, long way for both of them to go. ♦


The Mail

I was grateful to Andrew Marantz for his engagement with questions concerning civil disobedience ( “ The Anti-Coup , ” November 23rd ) .
He emphasized the success of nonviolence as a tactic , prompting me to think back to the sixties and early seventies , when civil disobedience in response to the Vietnam War was widespread .
While the commitment to nonviolence was undeniably tactical , it was also a spiritual choice , evidenced by the roles that Quakers and the Catholic left played in organizing the movement .
I understand spiritual commitment as an alignment with something bigger @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people are willing to risk their well-being for the sake of a cause greater than their own interests remains surprising and powerful .
Understanding this less tangible aspect of nonviolent action feels important in the present moment .
Marantz ’ s piece shows how far acceptance of nonviolent resistance has come in the U.S .
I was a student at Harvard in 1969 , when the political scientist Gene Sharp , whose ideas Marantz discusses , was a research associate , working out of the Center for International Affairs , which many students @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kissinger had an office there before joining the Nixon Administration . )
I was considering filing for conscientious-objector status and needed help thinking that through .
One day , I saw a notice on a campus bulletin board about a series of talks Sharp was giving on civil disobedience .
He demonstrated how saying no to violence but yes to nonviolent resistance was perhaps the most powerful way to stop oppression .
It is refreshing , fifty years later , to see tenured professors at respected institutions , like Erica Chenoweth , also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as an effective mainstream weapon against autocracy and totalitarianism .
I enjoyed Louis Menand ’ s philosophical exploration of knowledge through “ Jeopardy !
” and Wikipedia ( Books , November 23rd ) .
As a high-school teacher for more than twenty years , I have witnessed the move from “ knowing things ” to “ looking things up.
” And , while I have no preference for either , I agree with Menand : knowing things might be entertaining , but knowledge isn ’ t always trustworthy and may not even prove @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new mantra with my students : It ’ s not what you know , it ’ s the questions you think to ask .
Maybe Alex Trebek ’ s search for questions will prove to be his greatest legacy .
Menand suggests that “ the reason most people today who work in and on digital media have such warm feelings about Wikipedia ” may be because of the site ’ s “ hacker ethos.
” Yet there are inherent problems with the simple principle that anyone can edit .
Fewer than twenty per @ @ @ @ @ @ @ women ; as a result , the site often exhibits and perpetuates gender bias .
Only nineteen per cent of its biographical pages feature women , and many articles on gendered topics lack a neutral point of view .
This is frightening , given that Wikipedia is now many people ’ s go-to information source .
As one of the women who have entered the fray , I have found editing gender bias out of Wikipedia to be a Sisyphean task .
If , as Menand asserts , “ Wikipedia is neoliberalism applied @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another example of how the invisible hand has failed to create an equitable society .
Letters should be sent with the writer ’ s name , address , and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail @ newyorker.com .
Letters may be edited for length and clarity , and may be published in any medium .
We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we can not reply to every letter .

A Potent Tactic
I was grateful to Andrew Marantz for his engagement with questions concerning civil disobedience (“The Anti-Coup,” November 23rd). He emphasized the success of nonviolence as a tactic, prompting me to think back to the sixties and early seventies, when civil disobedience in response to the Vietnam War was widespread. While the commitment to nonviolence was undeniably tactical, it was also a spiritual choice, evidenced by the roles that Quakers and the Catholic left played in organizing the movement. I understand spiritual commitment as an alignment with something bigger than divisive self-interest. The fact that people are willing to risk their well-being for the sake of a cause greater than their own interests remains surprising and powerful. Understanding this less tangible aspect of nonviolent action feels important in the present moment.
Gendo Allyn Field
Lebanon, N.H.
Marantz’s piece shows how far acceptance of nonviolent resistance has come in the U.S. I was a student at Harvard in 1969, when the political scientist Gene Sharp, whose ideas Marantz discusses, was a research associate, working out of the Center for International Affairs, which many students visited only during protests. (Henry Kissinger had an office there before joining the Nixon Administration.) I was considering filing for conscientious-objector status and needed help thinking that through. One day, I saw a notice on a campus bulletin board about a series of talks Sharp was giving on civil disobedience. He demonstrated how saying no to violence but yes to nonviolent resistance was perhaps the most powerful way to stop oppression. It is refreshing, fifty years later, to see tenured professors at respected institutions, like Erica Chenoweth, also at Harvard, studying and supporting nonviolence as an effective mainstream weapon against autocracy and totalitarianism.
Allen Gilbert
Worcester, Vt.
The Right Questions
I enjoyed Louis Menand’s philosophical exploration of knowledge through “Jeopardy!” and Wikipedia (Books, November 23rd). As a high-school teacher for more than twenty years, I have witnessed the move from “knowing things” to “looking things up.” And, while I have no preference for either, I agree with Menand: knowing things might be entertaining, but knowledge isn’t always trustworthy and may not even prove useful. I have taken up a new mantra with my students: It’s not what you know, it’s the questions you think to ask. Maybe Alex Trebek’s search for questions will prove to be his greatest legacy.
Kyle Reynolds
Wolfeboro, N.H.
Menand suggests that “the reason most people today who work in and on digital media have such warm feelings about Wikipedia” may be because of the site’s “hacker ethos.” Yet there are inherent problems with the simple principle that anyone can edit. Fewer than twenty per cent of Wikipedia’s editors are women; as a result, the site often exhibits and perpetuates gender bias. Only nineteen per cent of its biographical pages feature women, and many articles on gendered topics lack a neutral point of view. This is frightening, given that Wikipedia is now many people’s go-to information source. As one of the women who have entered the fray, I have found editing gender bias out of Wikipedia to be a Sisyphean task. If, as Menand asserts, “Wikipedia is neoliberalism applied to knowledge,” it is yet another example of how the invisible hand has failed to create an equitable society.
Michele Beaulieux
Chicago, Ill.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.


newyorker--2020-12-07--“New York,” by Charles Simic

“New York,” by Charles Simic

No one sees me in your streets Though I ’ m still there Loitering and stopping To peek into empty @ @ @ @ @ lone pigeon .

No one sees me in your streets
Though I’m still there
Loitering and stopping
To peek into empty stores
And talk to a lone pigeon.


newyorker--2020-12-07--Nabokov, Steinberg, and Me

Nabokov, Steinberg, and Me

As an unformed kid , I envied his self-assurance and Olympian disdain .
I tried to imitate the style , dropping into conversations half-cribbed Nabokov-like phrases ( “ I scorn the philistine postcoital cigarette ” ) .
Once I happened upon a slim volume of his in the New York Public Library which no one I ’ ve met has heard of .
It contained a line that I treasured like a rare archeological find .
Published in 1947 , the book is a short anthology of verse by three Russian poets—Pushkin , Lermontov , and Tyutchev—with Nabokov ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he explains each poet to an American audience .
In the introduction to Pushkin , he describes the poet ’ s end , when he received a fatal wound in a duel with the French ballroom roué Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d ’ Anthès , the alleged lover of his wife .
About the later career of this pomaded zero who killed Russia ’ s greatest poet , Nabokov adds that d ’ Anthès went back to France , got elected to some office or other , “ and lived to the incredible and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a darkened , fantasy-filled theatre in which , after a long or short while , the houselights are turned on , and the brightness makes you blink , and then you see the candy wrappers under the seats and the lines for the bathrooms .
That moment can happen at any time .
For me the lights in the Nabokov theatre—a glorious , twinkling venue—got turned fully on when I was in my thirties , during what was for me the waning end of our modern long version of childhood .
Afterward I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about “ Lolita.
” Across the street , past the Gellatlys ’ house , and past their back yard , was the house of my friend Don .
He and I read “ Lolita ” at about the same time .
Just as Humbert pleaded his love for Lolita before the “ winged gentlemen of the jury , ” we expounded to each other on our love for various beautiful girls at Hudson High School .
These girls were like Lolita , with their field-hockey sticks , and book bags , and scuffed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ starred in a famous , best-selling book by a high-class foreign author .
Therefore , the girls who rode Bus 8 with us were themselves worthy of the loftiest regard—worthy of having love poems written to them , or of being painted by the old-time Italian painters whose names we didn ’ t remember from trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art .
Suddenly it was artistic to be these girls , and to be us , in love with them .
The world seemed all in a sweat over this fictional girl @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and acted like girls we got to be next to , and hopelessly far from , every day .
Tony had a younger sister , Rosa , who was as rosaceous as all girls and women of that name deserve to be .
She had long , dark hair and dark eyes , and at an early age she grew into the kind of plum-tinted look so admired by the old-time painters of her ancestresses .
Once , I was riding my bike and I saw her and her friend Barb leaning on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 80 , known to us as the Ohio Turnpike , and watching the traffic .
That such beauty could be found on a tarry two-lane road among farm fields in Ohio proved that God was everywhere .
Or—maybe better—that art could be anywhere , even in our unartistic ( as compared with Europe ) U.S.A. Oh , winged gentlemen , and my mom , of the jury !
Mr. Nabokov , the defendant , gave that gift to us Americans , to me .
I was too shy to say anything to these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they give me a mocking look as I pedalled by ?
If they were challenging me to step into Ohio ’ s centrifugal jet stream , jump the wire fence , stand on the turnpike ’ s apron , stick out my thumb , and disappear down the highway like the light diminishing to a dot in the middle of a nineteen-sixties TV screen—well , I did do that , not very many years afterward .
But even when I was in my early teens , and weak with love for Rosa ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been all over western North America as a passenger in the family station wagon , along with my mom and two brothers and two sisters , driven by my Ohio-flung dad .
Like most places , Ohio used to have worse winters than it does now .
My mother ’ s mother suffered from lung trouble , and , when my grandfather retired after forty-two years of teaching in the Cleveland public schools , the doctors recommended that he remove his wife from Ohio ’ s winters to a warmer and drier climate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This decision was one of the best things that ever happened to me .
I was three years old when my grandparents bought a house in a development recently laid out among the cacti of the Sonoran Desert , a short drive from Tucson ’ s main drag .
Give my dad a target such as the one presented by my grandparents ’ four-bedroom ranch-style home and he could not be stopped .
He let Ohio fling him at it like a dart , trailing all of us behind .
We drove to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , sometimes twice a year , throughout the nineteen-fifties and into the sixties , until they died .
After that , we kept making long western journeys—to Los Angeles , San Francisco , the Yukon Territory , or Tok Junction , Alaska , and beyond—almost like annual migrations .
In my work as a freelance writer pursuing one story or another around the West , I sometimes come upon an unchanged stretch of “ old ” 66 , and I ’ ll see something I remember from my childhood , and the tiny @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the place in my brain will still be there , in good condition , though unvisited for sixty years .
Outside Flagstaff , or maybe closer to Winslow , Arizona , while I was doing research for a piece about meteorites , I meandered off the four-lane onto an undisturbed span of old Route 66 , and there was the giant concrete tepee at the gas station where we must have stopped dozens of times .
As a kid , I loved that tepee , with its smooth , cool concrete floor and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , not long ago in Oklahoma , out of the corner of my eye I saw the motel with the Western theme—wagon wheels , oxen yokes , branding irons—where my family had stayed years before .
My dad liked to drive straight through , night and day , but two thousand miles from Hudson to Tucson in one go was a haul even for him .
The motels where we stopped offered sweet oases of pressed sheets and varnished knotty-pine walls and cigarette-smoke-scented furnishings , an interesting change from sleeping on a mattress @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back seats , all five of us siblings jumbled together .
The cigarette smell also signified not-home—neither of my parents smoked—and recalled the Hilltop Motel ’ s nostalgic , heady hints of sin .
We didn ’ t know , nor did Nabokov , that we happened to be living in the golden age of motels .
By the time I was out and driving on my own , most of the old motels had disappeared , replaced by the now familiar chains that try to be identical everywhere .
In no work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vanished Motel Age preserved and celebrated better than in “ Lolita.
” Motels and hotels and lodges dance by like a colorful all-American chorus line in the novel , while recurring road trips move the plot .
After Lolita ’ s mother , whom Humbert has married to get to the daughter , is run over by a car and killed , he takes the girl on a long cross-country ramble , from one motel to the next : Ventriloquizing Humbert , the author goes on to list the places they stayed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , for two more pages .
The only other person to chronicle the Motel Age so well was the artist Saul Steinberg , whom I was lucky enough to know for twenty-odd years before his death , in 1999 , and who gave me a drawing , “ Paradise Cabins ” [ see illustration ] , which closely resembles the Hilltop Motel , home of the nacreous Rosa .
“ Home of the nacreous Rosa ” is not something I would normally write , but when the subject is Nabokov I take on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , although of course it ’ s not , nor is it mine , but a nowhere hybrid voice , like a clumsy Russian hacking of an American Web site .
Nabokov and Steinberg were friends , and Saul once told me that he gave up smoking while visiting the Nabokovs in Montreux .
He just quit , with no program or nicotine chewing gum or anything , and never touched a cigarette again .
He was a decisive guy .
Hearing Saul talk about his road trips all over America , such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his wife , the artist Hedda Sterne , drove a Cadillac they had bought from Igor Stravinsky from New York to Los Angeles , I understood that they and my family could well have crossed paths .
The same is true of us and the Nabokovs .
Vladimir and Véra sometimes went West as soon as classes at Cornell ended for the summer .
Our family often headed for Tucson when I got out of school in June .
The Nabokovs would have been unable to avoid Route 66 , and my family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our grandparents ’ very long driveway .
In theory , we and the Nabokovs could have been on that road simultaneously .
So it ’ s not impossible , either , that when we stopped at the Wagon Wheel Motel ( or wherever ) on 66 the foreign-looking professor and his elegant wife were in a room nearby .
If they saw my dad and mom and their five baby-boomer offspring piling out of our blue Ford station wagon and boisterously occupying the adjoining room , did they admire us blond , frowsy-headed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did ?
Or not ?
Is Gray Star the book ’ s “ capital town ” because Lolita—along with her baby , a stillborn girl—died there ?
Had Lolita lived a normal span of years , the book would not have come out , following its own logic , until our present century , and maybe would not exist even today ; Lolita , born in 1935 , would have been eighty-five in 2020 .
But I don ’ t think that ’ s the real reason that Nabokov made such a significant-sounding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ real-life piece of Russia that I ever saw was Sputnik , crossing the sky over Ohio one night in 1957 .
The second was when I went on a cruise to the Canary Islands with my family in 1973 .
The trip came about because one of us siblings had died .
My brother Fritz , six years younger than me , died of leukemia when he was a sophomore in high school .
The next year , at Christmastime , the spacious country we used to ramble was too small to hold @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , so he took us all on a package cruise .
We drove to J.F.K .
airport , left the car , flew to Spain , got on a ship , and docked one night on Tenerife , in the Canaries .
I came on deck and saw , anchored nearby , a huge , dark ship with a name in Cyrillic letters on its prow .
I asked my dad what they said , and from his tour-book familiarity with the alphabet he sounded out “ Mikhail Lermontov ” ; below the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Lermontov projected the aura of a death star combined with a ghost ship , looming above and aloof from the other ships in the harbor .
When we got home , I bought a paperback translation of Lermontov ’ s “ A Hero of Our Time ” and read it .
I admired how cool , dashing , and romantic Lermontov was .
The name Gray Star and the memory of that ship are somehow near to each other in my mind .
To me the name reads as Soviet , like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ L ” resembling an “ A ” without a crossbar , on the Lermontov ’ s towering black bow .
Gray Star could be the red star of the U.S.S.R. drained to grayness by the cold of the north .
The name speaks of almost unreachable remoteness , and of Polaris , visible to both the Russians and to us , and of gray , beeping Sputnik going by .
The novel ’ s “ capital town ” is situated in our only state that shares a border with Russia .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grandparents ’ lifetimes , Alyaska was a koloniya—a colony—of Russia .
The place where Lolita dies is almost in Russia , and almost not in America .
The site of Lolita ’ s mournful exit points toward Russia without mentioning it .
On the surface , Nabokov does not come off as a Russian writer in the book .
The text does not refer to many works of Russian literature , and he told an interviewer that he intentionally kept all touches of Russianness out of the portrait of Humbert , whose background @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and English , “ with a dash of the Danube.
” Maybe something in Nabokov drew his thoughts Russia-ward despite himself as he devised Lolita ’ s fate .
I don ’ t know if he ever went to Alaska , but he can ’ t have been thinking of ( for example ) the town of Nome as a model for Gray Star .
I stopped in Nome a number of times in my midlife project of going to Siberia by travelling west , continuing my own extension of my family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I flew to such Russian destinations as Chukotka , across the Bering Strait , and because I generally had to wait for tolerable flying weather I spent a lot of time in Nome .
The town consists mostly of frozen mud , quonset huts , and heaps of rusted , twisted metal .
Other Alaskan towns I ’ ve seen look basically the same .
Don ’ t get me wrong , I admire the feistiness of these towns .
But for Lolita to wind up in such a place when she was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then for her to die in childbirth—what kind of medical facilities would they have had in any Gray Star in 1952 ?
—made for a tough finish to an already ruined life .
I do not believe that any real place could have been the inspiration for Nabokov ’ s Gray Star .
We have to imagine the town as more of an abstract notion .
The last time Humbert sees Lolita , she is still in the Lower Forty-eight , living in an unspecified non-coastal state that , judging by the amount @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drive to it from the New York area , could be Ohio .
He is in pursuit of the even bigger pervert than himself who stole Lolita from him , and he finds his beloved in shabby surroundings .
When he arrives , Dick , the husband , who ’ s partly deaf because of a war injury , is working on some repair project out in back of their house with a friend , another vet , who has only one arm .
The friend injures his hand , they come inside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Humbert observes , “ Her ambiguous , brown and pale beauty excited the cripple .
”

I first read “Lolita” fifty years ago, as a teen-ager. When I praised it to my mother—she taught high-school English and was a reader—she said that she hadn’t liked it, that it was a horrible, sad story. I disregarded her opinion, as I did with a lot of what my parents told me. I kept rereading the book, and eventually moved on to all of Nabokov’s other works in English that I could find. Nabokov mentioned landmarks of importance to him in his memoir, “Speak, Memory,” and I sometimes went to visit them. Travelling in Russia, I looked up the town house where his family had lived in St. Petersburg. It’s now a museum, and I’ve been to it three or four times.
As an unformed kid, I envied his self-assurance and Olympian disdain. I tried to imitate the style, dropping into conversations half-cribbed Nabokov-like phrases (“I scorn the philistine postcoital cigarette”). Once I happened upon a slim volume of his in the New York Public Library which no one I’ve met has heard of. It contained a line that I treasured like a rare archeological find. Published in 1947, the book is a short anthology of verse by three Russian poets—Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev—with Nabokov’s translations, accompanied by introductions in which he explains each poet to an American audience. In the introduction to Pushkin, he describes the poet’s end, when he received a fatal wound in a duel with the French ballroom roué Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès, the alleged lover of his wife. About the later career of this pomaded zero who killed Russia’s greatest poet, Nabokov adds that d’Anthès went back to France, got elected to some office or other, “and lived to the incredible and unnecessary age of 90.”
Childhood is a darkened, fantasy-filled theatre in which, after a long or short while, the houselights are turned on, and the brightness makes you blink, and then you see the candy wrappers under the seats and the lines for the bathrooms. That moment can happen at any time. For me the lights in the Nabokov theatre—a glorious, twinkling venue—got turned fully on when I was in my thirties, during what was for me the waning end of our modern long version of childhood. Afterward I understood better what my mother had meant about “Lolita.”
We lived in Ohio, the centrifugal state, where it seemed that if you let go of the front-door knob for just a second the next thing you knew you’d be flung a thousand miles down the highway. Our house, in a rural development in the town of Hudson, had a gravel drive, which led to a gravel street, to a barely paved road, to Interstate Highway 80, and to New York in one direction and San Francisco in the other. Or to Florida or Arizona or Canada or Alaska or anywhere else—the full three hundred and sixty degrees.
“I mean, he does have a point.” Cartoon by Becky Barnicoat Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Across the street, past the Gellatlys’ house, and past their back yard, was the house of my friend Don. He and I read “Lolita” at about the same time. Just as Humbert pleaded his love for Lolita before the “winged gentlemen of the jury,” we expounded to each other on our love for various beautiful girls at Hudson High School. These girls were like Lolita, with their field-hockey sticks, and book bags, and scuffed knees on the school bus. Lolita starred in a famous, best-selling book by a high-class foreign author. Therefore, the girls who rode Bus 8 with us were themselves worthy of the loftiest regard—worthy of having love poems written to them, or of being painted by the old-time Italian painters whose names we didn’t remember from trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Suddenly it was artistic to be these girls, and to be us, in love with them. The world seemed all in a sweat over this fictional girl, Lolita, who looked and talked and acted like girls we got to be next to, and hopelessly far from, every day.
As if there weren’t enough roads waiting to take us away, more kept being built, making obsolete certain previous roads, which then had “old” added to their names. Thus there soon were Route 8 and Old Route 8, Route 14 and Old Route 14. Businesses on the old roads languished, but on Old Route 14, which was near where we lived, a place called the Hilltop Motel hung on for a long while. We knew the family that ran it, whom I’ll call the Carluccis. Tony, their son, was in my grade in school. I liked him and, when I was younger, I sometimes went to his house to play. The family lived in rooms on the second floor of a building whose first floor was the motel’s restaurant, where Tony and I sat on shiny red stools at the counter and ordered hamburgers. Then we went upstairs and played with his electric-football set while adults at a table in the next room drank and talked. Once, Tony pointed out a man in the group and told me that he had just got out of prison. The Hilltop’s accommodations were small cabins, which my parents took an ironical view of, for reasons I did not at first understand.
Tony had a younger sister, Rosa, who was as rosaceous as all girls and women of that name deserve to be. She had long, dark hair and dark eyes, and at an early age she grew into the kind of plum-tinted look so admired by the old-time painters of her ancestresses. Once, I was riding my bike and I saw her and her friend Barb leaning on the railing of a bridge over Interstate 80, known to us as the Ohio Turnpike, and watching the traffic. That such beauty could be found on a tarry two-lane road among farm fields in Ohio proved that God was everywhere. Or—maybe better—that art could be anywhere, even in our unartistic (as compared with Europe) U.S.A. Oh, winged gentlemen, and my mom, of the jury! Mr. Nabokov, the defendant, gave that gift to us Americans, to me.
I was too shy to say anything to these visions, Rosa and Barb. Did they give me a mocking look as I pedalled by? If they were challenging me to step into Ohio’s centrifugal jet stream, jump the wire fence, stand on the turnpike’s apron, stick out my thumb, and disappear down the highway like the light diminishing to a dot in the middle of a nineteen-sixties TV screen—well, I did do that, not very many years afterward. But even when I was in my early teens, and weak with love for Rosa (and Barb), I had already been all over western North America as a passenger in the family station wagon, along with my mom and two brothers and two sisters, driven by my Ohio-flung dad.
Like most places, Ohio used to have worse winters than it does now. My mother’s mother suffered from lung trouble, and, when my grandfather retired after forty-two years of teaching in the Cleveland public schools, the doctors recommended that he remove his wife from Ohio’s winters to a warmer and drier climate. He chose Tucson, Arizona. This decision was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I was three years old when my grandparents bought a house in a development recently laid out among the cacti of the Sonoran Desert, a short drive from Tucson’s main drag. Give my dad a target such as the one presented by my grandparents’ four-bedroom ranch-style home and he could not be stopped. He let Ohio fling him at it like a dart, trailing all of us behind. We drove to Arizona to visit my grandparents every year, sometimes twice a year, throughout the nineteen-fifties and into the sixties, until they died. After that, we kept making long western journeys—to Los Angeles, San Francisco, the Yukon Territory, or Tok Junction, Alaska, and beyond—almost like annual migrations.
Nabokov worked on “Lolita” in the early fifties, during summers off from teaching at Cornell, while he and his wife, Véra, were driving around the country hunting butterflies. In an afterword to a later edition of the book, he said that one of the towns where he wrote it was Portal, Arizona. To get to that place from Ithaca, New York, he very likely would have driven part of the way on the all-time-greatest American touring road, Route 66. If you were going from the Northeast to the Southwest, you probably took Route 66. The pleasures of this road were so many that books, entire careers, have been devoted to remembering and recording them, now that 66 has itself become an “old” road, superseded by Interstate 44, a characterless four-lane.
In my work as a freelance writer pursuing one story or another around the West, I sometimes come upon an unchanged stretch of “old” 66, and I’ll see something I remember from my childhood, and the tiny neural address that held the memory of the place in my brain will still be there, in good condition, though unvisited for sixty years. Outside Flagstaff, or maybe closer to Winslow, Arizona, while I was doing research for a piece about meteorites, I meandered off the four-lane onto an undisturbed span of old Route 66, and there was the giant concrete tepee at the gas station where we must have stopped dozens of times. As a kid, I loved that tepee, with its smooth, cool concrete floor and its racks of postcards. Another time, not long ago in Oklahoma, out of the corner of my eye I saw the motel with the Western theme—wagon wheels, oxen yokes, branding irons—where my family had stayed years before. My dad liked to drive straight through, night and day, but two thousand miles from Hudson to Tucson in one go was a haul even for him. The motels where we stopped offered sweet oases of pressed sheets and varnished knotty-pine walls and cigarette-smoke-scented furnishings, an interesting change from sleeping on a mattress on the station wagon’s folded-down back seats, all five of us siblings jumbled together. The cigarette smell also signified not-home—neither of my parents smoked—and recalled the Hilltop Motel’s nostalgic, heady hints of sin.
We didn’t know, nor did Nabokov, that we happened to be living in the golden age of motels. By the time I was out and driving on my own, most of the old motels had disappeared, replaced by the now familiar chains that try to be identical everywhere. In no work of literature are the wonders of the vanished Motel Age preserved and celebrated better than in “Lolita.” Motels and hotels and lodges dance by like a colorful all-American chorus line in the novel, while recurring road trips move the plot. After Lolita’s mother, whom Humbert has married to get to the daughter, is run over by a car and killed, he takes the girl on a long cross-country ramble, from one motel to the next:
We came to know—nous connûmes, to use a Flaubertian intonation—the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of the Automobile Association describes as “shaded” or “spacious” or “landscaped” grounds. The log kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by its golden-brown glaze, of fried-chicken bones. We held in contempt the plain whitewashed Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell.
Ventriloquizing Humbert, the author goes on to list the places they stayed, and their attractions and proprietors and clienteles, for two more pages. The only other person to chronicle the Motel Age so well was the artist Saul Steinberg, whom I was lucky enough to know for twenty-odd years before his death, in 1999, and who gave me a drawing, “Paradise Cabins” [see illustration], which closely resembles the Hilltop Motel, home of the nacreous Rosa.
“Just because the election is over doesn’t mean we have to stop predicting its outcome.” Cartoon by William Haefeli Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
“Home of the nacreous Rosa” is not something I would normally write, but when the subject is Nabokov I take on a voice I think of as his, although of course it’s not, nor is it mine, but a nowhere hybrid voice, like a clumsy Russian hacking of an American Web site. Nabokov and Steinberg were friends, and Saul once told me that he gave up smoking while visiting the Nabokovs in Montreux. He just quit, with no program or nicotine chewing gum or anything, and never touched a cigarette again. He was a decisive guy.
Hearing Saul talk about his road trips all over America, such as the one in which he and his wife, the artist Hedda Sterne, drove a Cadillac they had bought from Igor Stravinsky from New York to Los Angeles, I understood that they and my family could well have crossed paths. The same is true of us and the Nabokovs. Vladimir and Véra sometimes went West as soon as classes at Cornell ended for the summer. Our family often headed for Tucson when I got out of school in June. The Nabokovs would have been unable to avoid Route 66, and my family always took it, regarding it as our grandparents’ very long driveway. In theory, we and the Nabokovs could have been on that road simultaneously. So it’s not impossible, either, that when we stopped at the Wagon Wheel Motel (or wherever) on 66 the foreign-looking professor and his elegant wife were in a room nearby. If they saw my dad and mom and their five baby-boomer offspring piling out of our blue Ford station wagon and boisterously occupying the adjoining room, did they admire us blond, frowsy-headed children, as my parents thought everybody did? Or not?
In an afterword to a 1970 edition of “Lolita,” Nabokov referred to a place called Gray Star as “the capital town of the book.” After Humbert is out of her life, Lolita, by then married and pregnant but still in her teens, moves to Gray Star with her husband, Dick Schiller. Gray Star is in Alaska, as the larger context makes clear. “Lolita” purports to be a manuscript written in prison by an accused criminal, Humbert Humbert, who is using this made-up name instead of his real one so as not to bring disgrace on anybody with a connection to the story, especially his beloved Lolita. Through his lawyer, the manuscript has come into the possession of an editor and psychologist, John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. The book’s subtitle, “The Confessions of a White Widowed Male,” supplied by Humbert, makes it sound like a case study, perfect for Dr. Ray, who writes a brief foreword explaining the provenance. Ray tells us of Humbert’s and Lolita’s ends. Humbert had expected to die soon, and his wish was that the book not be published until Lolita was also dead. He had hoped that she would outlive him by many years. Dr. Ray informs us that Humbert died of coronary thrombosis in prison in mid-November of 1952, shortly after finishing his manuscript, and that Mrs. Richard Schiller died in childbirth in Gray Star on Christmas Day of the same year. Per Humbert’s wishes as conveyed to his lawyer, Dr. Ray is therefore publishing the manuscript.
Is Gray Star the book’s “capital town” because Lolita—along with her baby, a stillborn girl—died there? Had Lolita lived a normal span of years, the book would not have come out, following its own logic, until our present century, and maybe would not exist even today; Lolita, born in 1935, would have been eighty-five in 2020. But I don’t think that’s the real reason that Nabokov made such a significant-sounding statement about Gray Star.
The first real-life piece of Russia that I ever saw was Sputnik, crossing the sky over Ohio one night in 1957. The second was when I went on a cruise to the Canary Islands with my family in 1973. The trip came about because one of us siblings had died. My brother Fritz, six years younger than me, died of leukemia when he was a sophomore in high school. The next year, at Christmastime, the spacious country we used to ramble was too small to hold my bereft dad and his sad family, so he took us all on a package cruise. We drove to J.F.K. airport, left the car, flew to Spain, got on a ship, and docked one night on Tenerife, in the Canaries. I came on deck and saw, anchored nearby, a huge, dark ship with a name in Cyrillic letters on its prow. I asked my dad what they said, and from his tour-book familiarity with the alphabet he sounded out “Mikhail Lermontov”; below the name was the hammer and sickle. The Lermontov projected the aura of a death star combined with a ghost ship, looming above and aloof from the other ships in the harbor. When we got home, I bought a paperback translation of Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time” and read it. I admired how cool, dashing, and romantic Lermontov was.
The name Gray Star and the memory of that ship are somehow near to each other in my mind. To me the name reads as Soviet, like the big gray letters, the brutalistic “L” resembling an “A” without a crossbar, on the Lermontov’s towering black bow. Gray Star could be the red star of the U.S.S.R. drained to grayness by the cold of the north. The name speaks of almost unreachable remoteness, and of Polaris, visible to both the Russians and to us, and of gray, beeping Sputnik going by. The novel’s “capital town” is situated in our only state that shares a border with Russia. And, as recently as Nabokov’s grandparents’ lifetimes, Alyaska was a koloniya—a colony—of Russia. The place where Lolita dies is almost in Russia, and almost not in America.
The site of Lolita’s mournful exit points toward Russia without mentioning it. On the surface, Nabokov does not come off as a Russian writer in the book. The text does not refer to many works of Russian literature, and he told an interviewer that he intentionally kept all touches of Russianness out of the portrait of Humbert, whose background he made Swiss, Austrian, French, and English, “with a dash of the Danube.” Maybe something in Nabokov drew his thoughts Russia-ward despite himself as he devised Lolita’s fate. I don’t know if he ever went to Alaska, but he can’t have been thinking of (for example) the town of Nome as a model for Gray Star. I stopped in Nome a number of times in my midlife project of going to Siberia by travelling west, continuing my own extension of my family’s chronic westering. From Nome I flew to such Russian destinations as Chukotka, across the Bering Strait, and because I generally had to wait for tolerable flying weather I spent a lot of time in Nome. The town consists mostly of frozen mud, quonset huts, and heaps of rusted, twisted metal. Other Alaskan towns I’ve seen look basically the same. Don’t get me wrong, I admire the feistiness of these towns. But for Lolita to wind up in such a place when she was seventeen years old and pregnant, and then for her to die in childbirth—what kind of medical facilities would they have had in any Gray Star in 1952?—made for a tough finish to an already ruined life. I do not believe that any real place could have been the inspiration for Nabokov’s Gray Star. We have to imagine the town as more of an abstract notion.


newyorker--2020-12-07--“A Teacher”: A Series Best Saved for Fourth-Period Health Class

This dream sequence opens the third episode of “ A Teacher , ” a promising but emotionally vacant exploration of an illicit student-teacher relationship , based on an indie film of the same name .
( Both were created by the filmmaker Hannah Fidell . )
The miniseries , on FX on Hulu , wishes to splash cold , purifying water on a permitted perversion , a subject of memes and giddy Post headlines : the sexual abuse of boys and young men by women .
Claire Wilson ( Kate Mara ) is a new English teacher at Westerbrook High @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Even though all the trappings of suburban life are available to her , she is unhappily married to a man named Matt ( the heartbreaking Ashley Zukerman ) .
The one thing that ’ s missing is a baby , which Matt seems to want more than Claire does .
It ’ s not the most imaginative backstory—Claire is the daughter of an alcoholic , the suggested source of all her problems—but Mara ’ s muted physicality makes the character believable .
Claire is a woman who is not in touch with her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is not in touch with herself .
She does not understand why she gets a thrill from swiping a tube of lipstick from the grocery store , or why the stares of the boys at school make her blush .
Claire has attracted the attention of one student in particular , Eric Walker , the captain of the boys ’ soccer team , who is portrayed by Nick Robinson .
The twenty-five-year-old actor , here playing a high-school senior , has starred in a number of teen films ( most notably , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ usually as the subdued heartthrob—the kid who is not popular but , rather , adjacent to popularity , and therefore good at keeping a secret .
As Eric , Robinson projects the fragility of a young man who feels emasculated by his lot in life : the absence of his father , the fact that he must work at a local diner in order to keep up with his wealthier friends at school .
( Although there are virtually no Black kids at this school , the soundtrack to the students ’ party @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hits , a detail that feels both canny and racially loaded . )
Claire takes a special interest in Eric , agreeing to tutor him for the SAT , for free , outside school .
“ You can call me Claire , ” she tells him .
The series is set in 2013 , which is when the original “ A Teacher ” premièred at Sundance .
In the chaotic , intervening years we have reached a deeper understanding of the spectrum of gendered sexual violence , and the show wears its 2020 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ten episodes , each bookended by content warnings that “ sexual situations as well as depictions of grooming that may be disturbing ” will be on display .
But sharing politics with a viewership is not the basis of a successful show : the disclaimers convey both an admirable sense of responsibility and an alienating timidity .
Maybe “ A Teacher ” will stir awareness of the insidious patterns of abuse , but its storytelling doesn ’ t rise to the complexity of its subject matter .
Claire and Eric feel like stock @ @ @ @ @ @ @ post-show roundtable discussion in mind .
They are sophisticated banalities—improvements on past tropes , but banalities nonetheless .
It seems wrong to watch “ A Teacher ” on anything other than a TV cart that has been rolled into fourth-period health class .
That ’ s not to say it isn ’ t watchable .
It is—compulsively so .
Mara and Robinson are both excellent at committing to their characters ’ delusions .
The series is also stodgily linear , more like a film than a collection of episodes , and so getting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gravity .
There is a compelling friction , too , in the occasional clash of genre ; the grim drama sometimes drifts into a register of campy degradation that ’ s reminiscent of Lifetime movies and We TV shows .
I found myself clinging to every jock ’ s clichéd invocation of Ms. Wilson ’ s hotness .
Satire can be a defter tool than condemnation .
“ A Teacher ” is missing that shock of confrontation .
FX , which is home to other auteurish explorations of women on the edge—Courteney Cox @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dirt , ” Glenn Close ’ s ruthless litigator in “ Damages ” —should have been a natural fit for an honest examination of a predatory educator .
But , wary of accidentally titillating its viewers , the series has instead chosen to keep them at a frustrating distance .
The show is strongest early on , when it allows itself to tunnel into the messy dynamic between Claire and Eric .
She teases him when he is surprised that she listens to Frank Ocean ; he follows her on Instagram , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can understand .
Their intimacy is unhealthy .
It is also real .
At times , it is difficult to distinguish the nurturing from the predation .
Eric dreams of attending the University of Texas , which is Claire ’ s alma mater , and , one day , she surprises him with a tour of the campus .
There ’ s an interesting opacity to Claire ’ s motivations .
She is not a strategist , an opportunist , or a sociopath .
The power of this abuser is that she is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the first time , after class , she recoils and seems genuinely surprised , despite her heavy flirtations with him .
Her delusions appear to be fuelled by a subscription to traditional gender roles : she uses the force of Eric ’ s maleness to justify their sexual relationship .
He started it , Claire convinces herself .
Their first sexual encounter , in her Volvo , after the school ’ s homecoming dance , is prefaced by Claire coquettishly asking Eric for consent .
It ’ s a different kind of toxic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ used to seeing onscreen .
This murkiness doesn ’ t last for long .
Once Claire and Eric consummate their relationship , the series becomes much more doctrinaire , backing away from the subtler aspects of their connection : bonding over family history , Eric ’ s vulnerable economic position .
A switch has been flipped ; Claire becomes cartoonishly crazed by her desire for Eric .
( After their trysts , poor Eric flexes in the mirror , grunting , “ I ’ m the man !
” ) The sex scenes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aspect , and feel more like filler .
“ A Teacher ” is careful not to arouse ; any sex is balanced out by the show ’ s flat dialogue and indie aesthetic , which are designed to fill the audience with dread .
The second half of the series devolves into a mess of shallow sociological observations , improbable time jumps , and after-school-special fearmongering .
Perhaps “ A Teacher ” could have benefitted from a narrator , as “ Tampa ” did with Celeste .
Planting the story firmly in Claire @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s—thereby granting the victim the perch of protagonist—would have grounded it .
Instead , we are jostled between the two characters , watching the inevitable crash from afar .
Spoilers ahead : Fidell ’ s movie ended when the student-teacher relationship was exposed ; the series continues long past that , chronicling the aftermath of the affair .
For this , it deserves credit .
Claire and Eric ’ s final rendezvous trembles with a desperation and an ugliness that is difficult to watch .
Claire is ostracized , and Eric is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a job , and he can ’ t keep his grades up .
Sex , for both of them , is sexless .
Strangers expect deviance from the boy who fucked his teacher , and from the teacher who fucked her student .
Their sexual partners expect them to act out a role .
No wonder .
♦

A high-school classroom is drenched with club lighting. Electronic dance music thumps as an overgrown, hoodied boy pads over to a desk, where his lustful teacher awaits him. She drops to her knees, a swift demonstration of her style of authority. Suddenly, an audience of students materializes. Confusion replaces pleasure, and the expression on the boy’s face lasts well after his alarm clock rings.
This dream sequence opens the third episode of “A Teacher,” a promising but emotionally vacant exploration of an illicit student-teacher relationship, based on an indie film of the same name. (Both were created by the filmmaker Hannah Fidell.) The miniseries, on FX on Hulu, wishes to splash cold, purifying water on a permitted perversion, a subject of memes and giddy Post headlines: the sexual abuse of boys and young men by women.
Claire Wilson (Kate Mara) is a new English teacher at Westerbrook High School, in Austin, Texas. Even though all the trappings of suburban life are available to her, she is unhappily married to a man named Matt (the heartbreaking Ashley Zukerman). The one thing that’s missing is a baby, which Matt seems to want more than Claire does. It’s not the most imaginative backstory—Claire is the daughter of an alcoholic, the suggested source of all her problems—but Mara’s muted physicality makes the character believable. Claire is a woman who is not in touch with her body, and, as a result, is not in touch with herself. She does not understand why she gets a thrill from swiping a tube of lipstick from the grocery store, or why the stares of the boys at school make her blush.
Claire has attracted the attention of one student in particular, Eric Walker, the captain of the boys’ soccer team, who is portrayed by Nick Robinson. The twenty-five-year-old actor, here playing a high-school senior, has starred in a number of teen films (most notably, “Love, Simon”), usually as the subdued heartthrob—the kid who is not popular but, rather, adjacent to popularity, and therefore good at keeping a secret. As Eric, Robinson projects the fragility of a young man who feels emasculated by his lot in life: the absence of his father, the fact that he must work at a local diner in order to keep up with his wealthier friends at school. (Although there are virtually no Black kids at this school, the soundtrack to the students’ party scenes consists entirely of Top Forty rap hits, a detail that feels both canny and racially loaded.) Claire takes a special interest in Eric, agreeing to tutor him for the SAT, for free, outside school. “You can call me Claire,” she tells him.
The series is set in 2013, which is when the original “A Teacher” premièred at Sundance. In the chaotic, intervening years we have reached a deeper understanding of the spectrum of gendered sexual violence, and the show wears its 2020 politics on its sleeve. There are ten episodes, each bookended by content warnings that “sexual situations as well as depictions of grooming that may be disturbing” will be on display. But sharing politics with a viewership is not the basis of a successful show: the disclaimers convey both an admirable sense of responsibility and an alienating timidity.
Maybe “A Teacher” will stir awareness of the insidious patterns of abuse, but its storytelling doesn’t rise to the complexity of its subject matter. Claire and Eric feel like stock characters who have been designed with a post-show roundtable discussion in mind. They are sophisticated banalities—improvements on past tropes, but banalities nonetheless. It seems wrong to watch “A Teacher” on anything other than a TV cart that has been rolled into fourth-period health class.
That’s not to say it isn’t watchable. It is—compulsively so. Mara and Robinson are both excellent at committing to their characters’ delusions. The series is also stodgily linear, more like a film than a collection of episodes, and so getting sucked in is a simple matter of gravity. There is a compelling friction, too, in the occasional clash of genre; the grim drama sometimes drifts into a register of campy degradation that’s reminiscent of Lifetime movies and We TV shows. I found myself clinging to every jock’s clichéd invocation of Ms. Wilson’s hotness. Satire can be a defter tool than condemnation.
Unlike her male counterpart, the female sexual predator is an aberration. We don’t know what to do with her, how to make the style of her abuse distinct without fetishizing it. In 2013, Alissa Nutting published “Tampa,” a caustic first-person novel about Celeste Price, a deranged middle-school teacher who molests a fourteen-year-old student and hides behind the veil of conventional beauty. The book is stomach-turning, but it is also gripping, in large part because of the sociopathic charisma of its narrator, who has no affection for her prey. By being entirely unapologetic, Celeste is evidence of an offensive truth.
“A Teacher” is missing that shock of confrontation. FX, which is home to other auteurish explorations of women on the edge—Courteney Cox’s workaholic tabloid editor in “Dirt,” Glenn Close’s ruthless litigator in “Damages”—should have been a natural fit for an honest examination of a predatory educator. But, wary of accidentally titillating its viewers, the series has instead chosen to keep them at a frustrating distance.
The show is strongest early on, when it allows itself to tunnel into the messy dynamic between Claire and Eric. She teases him when he is surprised that she listens to Frank Ocean; he follows her on Instagram, where she posts cryptic captions that only he can understand. Their intimacy is unhealthy. It is also real. At times, it is difficult to distinguish the nurturing from the predation. Eric dreams of attending the University of Texas, which is Claire’s alma mater, and, one day, she surprises him with a tour of the campus.
There’s an interesting opacity to Claire’s motivations. She is not a strategist, an opportunist, or a sociopath. The power of this abuser is that she is weak. When Eric kisses her for the first time, after class, she recoils and seems genuinely surprised, despite her heavy flirtations with him. Her delusions appear to be fuelled by a subscription to traditional gender roles: she uses the force of Eric’s maleness to justify their sexual relationship. He started it, Claire convinces herself. Their first sexual encounter, in her Volvo, after the school’s homecoming dance, is prefaced by Claire coquettishly asking Eric for consent. It’s a different kind of toxic femininity than the one we’re used to seeing onscreen.
This murkiness doesn’t last for long. Once Claire and Eric consummate their relationship, the series becomes much more doctrinaire, backing away from the subtler aspects of their connection: bonding over family history, Eric’s vulnerable economic position. A switch has been flipped; Claire becomes cartoonishly crazed by her desire for Eric. (After their trysts, poor Eric flexes in the mirror, grunting, “I’m the man!”) The sex scenes, while unavoidable, lack a psychological aspect, and feel more like filler. “A Teacher” is careful not to arouse; any sex is balanced out by the show’s flat dialogue and indie aesthetic, which are designed to fill the audience with dread.
The second half of the series devolves into a mess of shallow sociological observations, improbable time jumps, and after-school-special fearmongering. Perhaps “A Teacher” could have benefitted from a narrator, as “Tampa” did with Celeste. Planting the story firmly in Claire’s perspective, or in Eric’s—thereby granting the victim the perch of protagonist—would have grounded it. Instead, we are jostled between the two characters, watching the inevitable crash from afar.
Spoilers ahead: Fidell’s movie ended when the student-teacher relationship was exposed; the series continues long past that, chronicling the aftermath of the affair. For this, it deserves credit. Claire and Eric’s final rendezvous trembles with a desperation and an ugliness that is difficult to watch. Claire is ostracized, and Eric is fetishized. She can’t get a job, and he can’t keep his grades up. Sex, for both of them, is sexless. Strangers expect deviance from the boy who fucked his teacher, and from the teacher who fucked her student. Their sexual partners expect them to act out a role. No wonder. ♦


newyorker--2020-12-07--A California Councilwoman’s Quest to Keep Restaurants Open

Two days before Thanksgiving , while many Americans were home spatchcocking turkeys , Monica Rodriguez , a member of the Los Angeles City Council , dashed off an emergency resolution to stop a ban on outdoor dining that was set to go into effect the following day .
The government had offered no data to back up the notion that eating outside increases the spread of COVID-19 , and Rodriguez , a Democrat and the first woman to represent L.A. ’ s seventh district ( deep valley , taquerias and take-out joints ) , noted that seven hundred thousand jobs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the county to reconsider , and to “ reserve the tightest restrictions for activities that data prove are the leading causes of outbreaks.
” “ Like , everybody that went out to celebrate the Dodger game , ” she said the next day , on a video call , or “ churches still holding gatherings without proper protective gear.
” She had a salt-and-pepper bob and wore large tortoiseshell glasses .
She called the application and enforcement of the county ’ s COVID restrictions “ inconsistent , ” and added , “ It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ She cited New York City , where her husband was born , as a model for how restaurants should function .
“ I saw some of the tents on Instagram , ” she said , referring to the sidewalk bubbles in which New York restaurants are serving meals .
“ I thought , Oh , my God , look at what they ’ re doing , and how quickly they ’ re doing it .
It was phenomenal.
” Rodriguez ’ s resolution passed eleven to three in the L.A. City Council and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ awaiting a response from the mayor .
But the outdoor-dining ban will be in place for a minimum of three weeks ( indoor dining has been banned since July ) , and any loosening of restrictions will have to be approved by the county .
Rodriguez has asked the county to provide data to support the ban .
Restaurants , she said , “ were operating all summer , and we didn ’ t have a problem .
So I want to understand : how do we all of a sudden have a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a judge ordered county health officials to provide scientific evidence justifying the ban .
( At least one county supervisor who supported the ban seems conflicted : hours after Sheila Kuehl called outdoor dining “ a most dangerous situation , ” she dined on the patio of a Santa Monica Italian restaurant . )
Rodriguez , who is forty-six , grew up in the San Fernando Valley and started working for the city at twenty , interning at city hall .
Prior to being elected to the city council , in 2017 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s board of public works .
In that role she worked with restaurateurs , helping the owners of Jon & Vinny ’ s navigate sidewalk dining , and expediting the opening of Petit Trois , a Hollywood bistro helmed by the French chef Ludo Lefebvre .
( “ He was , like , ‘ Zee city permeets ees terrible , ’ ” she recalled . )
In 2014 , Rodriguez and her husband met Doug Rankin , Lefebvre ’ s director of culinary operations .
“ She ’ s the only person I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Rankin said .
“ I can reach out and be , like , ‘ Hey , what the fuck ’ s going on ?
’ ” Last fall , the restaurateur Jeff Ellermeyer asked Rankin to be the executive chef of a French bistro in Silver Lake .
( It ’ s called Bar Restaurant , to the chagrin of the uninitiated who Google it . )
On the final night of outdoor dining before the ban took effect , Rankin wistfully surveyed the more than two dozen patrons lingering at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Bar Restaurant .
He wore a navy-blue apron and a face mask , which he lowered , intermittently , to sip from a tumbler of extra-dirty Martini .
In July , Ellermeyer had spent ten thousand dollars on heat lamps , potted olive trees , and outdoor speakers .
“ Plus all the gear—fucking thermometers and shit , ” Rankin said .
“ When you ’ re asked to do everything , and you comply , and then complying is still not enough.
” He shook his head .
“ If they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ three weeks , we ’ re gon na give you P.P.P .
again , and make sure your people are paid ’ —cool.
” He added , “ By the way , show me the data that says we should shut down , first of all.
” Behind him , an engine revved , and he turned around to address the driver , who was one of his sous-chefs .
“ You ’ re leaving ?
” Rankin asked .
“ All right , buddy , I ’ ll see you soon.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That ’ s one of my right-hand guys .
What we realized , after doing the math , is that we can only keep three of the four of us in the kitchen , even at a reduced rate .
We had to have the conversation about who was in the best position in their life to be furloughed.
” The sous-chef ’ s girlfriend works from home .
The rest , including Rankin , are breadwinners .
“ He made the decision to furlough himself , ” Rankin said .
“ You @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a conversation like that with people ?
Like , ‘ Hey , who ’ s losing their job ?
’ ” “ For me , what ’ s weird about the whole thing is that it ’ s kind of skewed my political views a little bit , ” he went on .
“ Like , am I a Democrat ?
Because if this is what that is , I ’ m not into it.
” ♦

Two days before Thanksgiving, while many Americans were home spatchcocking turkeys, Monica Rodriguez, a member of the Los Angeles City Council, dashed off an emergency resolution to stop a ban on outdoor dining that was set to go into effect the following day. The government had offered no data to back up the notion that eating outside increases the spread of COVID-19, and Rodriguez, a Democrat and the first woman to represent L.A.’s seventh district (deep valley, taquerias and take-out joints), noted that seven hundred thousand jobs were at stake. She called on the county to reconsider, and to “reserve the tightest restrictions for activities that data prove are the leading causes of outbreaks.”
“Like, everybody that went out to celebrate the Dodger game,” she said the next day, on a video call, or “churches still holding gatherings without proper protective gear.” She had a salt-and-pepper bob and wore large tortoiseshell glasses. She called the application and enforcement of the county’s COVID restrictions “inconsistent,” and added, “It’s frustrating as all hell.” She cited New York City, where her husband was born, as a model for how restaurants should function. “I saw some of the tents on Instagram,” she said, referring to the sidewalk bubbles in which New York restaurants are serving meals. “I thought, Oh, my God, look at what they’re doing, and how quickly they’re doing it. It was phenomenal.”
Rodriguez’s resolution passed eleven to three in the L.A. City Council and (as of last Friday) is awaiting a response from the mayor. But the outdoor-dining ban will be in place for a minimum of three weeks (indoor dining has been banned since July), and any loosening of restrictions will have to be approved by the county. Rodriguez has asked the county to provide data to support the ban. Restaurants, she said, “were operating all summer, and we didn’t have a problem. So I want to understand: how do we all of a sudden have a problem now?” Last week, a judge ordered county health officials to provide scientific evidence justifying the ban. (At least one county supervisor who supported the ban seems conflicted: hours after Sheila Kuehl called outdoor dining “a most dangerous situation,” she dined on the patio of a Santa Monica Italian restaurant.)
Rodriguez, who is forty-six, grew up in the San Fernando Valley and started working for the city at twenty, interning at city hall. Prior to being elected to the city council, in 2017, she was the vice-president of L.A.’s board of public works. In that role she worked with restaurateurs, helping the owners of Jon & Vinny’s navigate sidewalk dining, and expediting the opening of Petit Trois, a Hollywood bistro helmed by the French chef Ludo Lefebvre. (“He was, like, ‘Zee city permeets ees terrible,’ ”she recalled.) In 2014, Rodriguez and her husband met Doug Rankin, Lefebvre’s director of culinary operations. “She’s the only person I know that’s in the conversation,” Rankin said. “I can reach out and be, like, ‘Hey, what the fuck’s going on?’ ”
“I think we can do without that, Eddie.” Cartoon by Mort Gerberg Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Last fall, the restaurateur Jeff Ellermeyer asked Rankin to be the executive chef of a French bistro in Silver Lake. (It’s called Bar Restaurant, to the chagrin of the uninitiated who Google it.) On the final night of outdoor dining before the ban took effect, Rankin wistfully surveyed the more than two dozen patrons lingering at tables set out in the parking lot of Bar Restaurant. He wore a navy-blue apron and a face mask, which he lowered, intermittently, to sip from a tumbler of extra-dirty Martini. In July, Ellermeyer had spent ten thousand dollars on heat lamps, potted olive trees, and outdoor speakers. “Plus all the gear—fucking thermometers and shit,” Rankin said. “When you’re asked to do everything, and you comply, and then complying is still not enough.” He shook his head. “If they told me, ‘Shut down for three weeks, we’re gonna give you P.P.P. again, and make sure your people are paid’—cool.” He added, “By the way, show me the data that says we should shut down, first of all.”
Behind him, an engine revved, and he turned around to address the driver, who was one of his sous-chefs. “You’re leaving?” Rankin asked. “All right, buddy, I’ll see you soon.” He turned back and explained, “That’s one of my right-hand guys. What we realized, after doing the math, is that we can only keep three of the four of us in the kitchen, even at a reduced rate. We had to have the conversation about who was in the best position in their life to be furloughed.” The sous-chef’s girlfriend works from home. The rest, including Rankin, are breadwinners. “He made the decision to furlough himself,” Rankin said. “You know how hard it is to have a conversation like that with people? Like, ‘Hey, who’s losing their job?’ ”
“For me, what’s weird about the whole thing is that it’s kind of skewed my political views a little bit,” he went on. “Like, am I a Democrat? Because if this is what that is, I’m not into it.” ♦