newyorker--2020-03-02--The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile

You can visit all the addresses in the course of a long day .
Bertolt Brecht lived in a two-story clapboard house on Twenty-sixth Street , in Santa Monica .
The novelist Heinrich Mann resided a few blocks away , on Montana Avenue .
The screenwriter Salka Viertel held gatherings on Mabery Road , near the Santa Monica beach .
Alfred Döblin , the author of “ Berlin Alexanderplatz , ” had a place on Citrus Avenue , in Hollywood .
His colleague Lion Feuchtwanger occupied the Villa Aurora , a Spanish-style mansion overlooking the Pacific ; among its amusements @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , whose novel “ Grand Hotel ” brought her a screenwriting career , had a house on Amalfi Drive , near the leftist composer Hanns Eisler .
Alma Mahler-Werfel , the widow of Gustav Mahler , lived with her third husband , the best-selling Austrian writer Franz Werfel , on North Bedford Drive , next door to the conductor Bruno Walter .
Elisabeth Hauptmann , the co-author of “ The Threepenny Opera , ” lived in Mandeville Canyon , at the actor Peter Lorre ’ s ranch .
The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , meeting with Max Horkheimer , who lived nearby , to write the post-Marxist jeremiad “ Dialectic of Enlightenment.
” At a suitably lofty remove , on San Remo Drive , was Thomas Mann , Heinrich ’ s brother , the august author of “ The Magic Mountain.
” In the nineteen-forties , the West Side of Los Angeles effectively became the capital of German literature in exile .
It was as if the cafés of Berlin , Munich , and Vienna had disgorged their clientele onto Sunset Boulevard .
The writers were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ community that also included the film directors Fritz Lang , Max Ophuls , Otto Preminger , Jean Renoir , Robert Siodmak , Douglas Sirk , Billy Wilder , and William Wyler ; the theatre directors Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner ; the actors Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr ; the architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra ; and the composers Arnold Schoenberg , Igor Stravinsky , Erich Wolfgang Korngold , and Sergei Rachmaninoff .
Seldom in human history has one city hosted such a staggering convocation of talent .
The standard myth of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Central Europe against the supposed “ wasteland ” or “ cultural desert ” of Southern California .
Indeed , a number of exiles fell to scowling under the palms .
Brecht wrote , “ The town of Hollywood has taught me this / Paradise and hell / can be one city.
” The composer Eric Zeisl called California a “ sunny blue grave.
” Adorno could have had Muscle Beach in mind when he identified a social condition called the Health unto Death : “ The very people who burst with proofs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for prepared corpses , from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy.
” Anecdotes of dyspeptic aloofness belie the richness and the complexity of the émigrés ’ cultural role .
As Ehrhard Bahr argues in his 2007 book , “ Weimar on the Pacific , ” many exiles were able to form bonds with progressive elements in mid-century L.A .
Even before the refugees from Nazi Germany arrived , Schindler and Neutra had launched a wave of modernist residential architecture .
When Schoenberg taught at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such native-born radical spirits as John Cage and Lou Harrison .
Surprising alliances sprang up among the newcomers and adventurous members of the Hollywood set .
Charlie Chaplin and George Gershwin played tennis with Schoenberg .
Charles Laughton took the lead in a 1947 production of Brecht ’ s “ Galileo.
” Nevertheless , even the most resourceful of the émigrés faced psychological turmoil .
Whatever their opinion of L.A. , they could not escape the universal condition of the refugee , in which images of the lost homeland intrude on any attempt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ excruciating dissonance between their idyllic circumstances and the horrors that were unfolding in Europe .
Furthermore , they saw the all too familiar forces of intolerance and indifference lurking beneath America ’ s shining façades .
To revisit exile literature against the trajectory of early-twentieth-century politics makes one wonder : What would it be like to flee one ’ s native country in terror or disgust , and start over in an unknown land ?
Two of Germany ’ s leading novelists had the good fortune to be away on lecture tours as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ February 11 , 1933 , two weeks after Hitler became Chancellor , Thomas Mann travelled to Amsterdam to deliver a talk titled “ The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner.
” A onetime conservative who had embraced liberal-democratic values in the early nineteen-twenties , Mann was attempting to wrest his favorite composer from Nazi appropriation .
He did not set foot in Germany again until 1949 .
In the same period , Feuchtwanger , a German-Jewish writer of strong leftist convictions , was touring the U.S. , speaking on such topics as “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He died in L.A. , in 1958 .
At first , many of the exiles fled to France .
Few of them believed that Hitler ’ s reign would last long , and a trip across the ocean seemed excessive .
Feuchtwanger and others settled in Sanary-sur-Mer , on the Riviera , where the Mediterranean climate offered a dry run for the Southern California experience .
The onset of the Second World War , in 1939 , instantly destroyed this temporary paradise .
The fact that the émigrés were victims of repression did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ French internment camps .
Feuchtwanger captured the surreal misery of the experience in his nonfiction narrative “ The Devil in France , ” which has been reissued under the aegis of the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library , at U.S.C .
The devil in question was the same shrugging heartlessness that later enabled the deportation of nearly seventy-five thousand French Jews to Nazi death camps .
When , in 1940 , Germany invaded France , Feuchtwanger was in dire danger of being captured by the Gestapo .
His wife , Marta , helped arrange an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don a woman ’ s coat and shawl .
That September , a motley group that included Franz Werfel , Alma Mahler , Heinrich Mann and his wife , Nelly , and Thomas Mann ’ s son Golo hiked across the Pyrenees , from France into Spain .
Mahler carried a large bag containing several of her first husband ’ s manuscripts and the original score of Anton Bruckner ’ s Third Symphony .
High-placed friends conspired to keep these celebrity refugees safe .
Eleanor Roosevelt , an avid reader of Feuchtwanger ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saw a photograph of the author in a French camp .
A New York-based organization called the Emergency Rescue Committee dispatched the journalist Varian Fry to France to facilitate the extraction of writers and other artists , often by extralegal means .
Such measures were required because American immigration laws limited European nationals to strict quotas .
If the quotas had been relaxed , many more thousands of Jews could have escaped .
Fry , the first American to be honored at Yad Vashem , the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem , ignored his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as many people as possible , including those without name recognition .
Anna Seghers , a German-Jewish Communist who spent the war in Mexico City , painted a brutal picture of the crisis in her novel “ Transit ” ( 1944 ) , which New York Review Books republished in 2013 , in a translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo .
Refugees in France must negotiate a bureaucratic maze of entrance visas , exit visas , transit visas , and American affidavits .
The main character ’ s plan for escape relies on his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( one who is actually dead , by suicide ) .
Another ’ s path to freedom depends on transporting two dogs that belong to a couple from Boston .
All around Marseille are “ the remnants of crushed armies , escaped slaves , human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth , and having at last reached the sea , boarded ships in order to discover new lands from which they would again be driven ; forever running from one death to another .
”

You can visit all the addresses in the course of a long day. Bertolt Brecht lived in a two-story clapboard house on Twenty-sixth Street, in Santa Monica. The novelist Heinrich Mann resided a few blocks away, on Montana Avenue. The screenwriter Salka Viertel held gatherings on Mabery Road, near the Santa Monica beach. Alfred Döblin, the author of “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” had a place on Citrus Avenue, in Hollywood. His colleague Lion Feuchtwanger occupied the Villa Aurora, a Spanish-style mansion overlooking the Pacific; among its amusements was a Hitler dartboard. Vicki Baum, whose novel “Grand Hotel” brought her a screenwriting career, had a house on Amalfi Drive, near the leftist composer Hanns Eisler. Alma Mahler-Werfel, the widow of Gustav Mahler, lived with her third husband, the best-selling Austrian writer Franz Werfel, on North Bedford Drive, next door to the conductor Bruno Walter. Elisabeth Hauptmann, the co-author of “The Threepenny Opera,” lived in Mandeville Canyon, at the actor Peter Lorre’s ranch. The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno rented a duplex apartment on Kenter Avenue, meeting with Max Horkheimer, who lived nearby, to write the post-Marxist jeremiad “Dialectic of Enlightenment.” At a suitably lofty remove, on San Remo Drive, was Thomas Mann, Heinrich’s brother, the august author of “The Magic Mountain.”
In the nineteen-forties, the West Side of Los Angeles effectively became the capital of German literature in exile. It was as if the cafés of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna had disgorged their clientele onto Sunset Boulevard. The writers were at the core of a European émigré community that also included the film directors Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir, Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, and William Wyler; the theatre directors Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner; the actors Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr; the architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra; and the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Seldom in human history has one city hosted such a staggering convocation of talent.
The standard myth of this great emigration pits the elevated mentality of Central Europe against the supposed “wasteland” or “cultural desert” of Southern California. Indeed, a number of exiles fell to scowling under the palms. Brecht wrote, “The town of Hollywood has taught me this / Paradise and hell / can be one city.” The composer Eric Zeisl called California a “sunny blue grave.” Adorno could have had Muscle Beach in mind when he identified a social condition called the Health unto Death: “The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy.”
Anecdotes of dyspeptic aloofness belie the richness and the complexity of the émigrés’ cultural role. As Ehrhard Bahr argues in his 2007 book, “Weimar on the Pacific,” many exiles were able to form bonds with progressive elements in mid-century L.A. Even before the refugees from Nazi Germany arrived, Schindler and Neutra had launched a wave of modernist residential architecture. When Schoenberg taught at U.S.C. and U.C.L.A., he guided such native-born radical spirits as John Cage and Lou Harrison. Surprising alliances sprang up among the newcomers and adventurous members of the Hollywood set. Charlie Chaplin and George Gershwin played tennis with Schoenberg. Charles Laughton took the lead in a 1947 production of Brecht’s “Galileo.”
Nevertheless, even the most resourceful of the émigrés faced psychological turmoil. Whatever their opinion of L.A., they could not escape the universal condition of the refugee, in which images of the lost homeland intrude on any attempt to begin anew. They felt an excruciating dissonance between their idyllic circumstances and the horrors that were unfolding in Europe. Furthermore, they saw the all too familiar forces of intolerance and indifference lurking beneath America’s shining façades. To revisit exile literature against the trajectory of early-twentieth-century politics makes one wonder: What would it be like to flee one’s native country in terror or disgust, and start over in an unknown land?
Two of Germany’s leading novelists had the good fortune to be away on lecture tours as the Nazis were taking over. On February 11, 1933, two weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, Thomas Mann travelled to Amsterdam to deliver a talk titled “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner.” A onetime conservative who had embraced liberal-democratic values in the early nineteen-twenties, Mann was attempting to wrest his favorite composer from Nazi appropriation. He did not set foot in Germany again until 1949. In the same period, Feuchtwanger, a German-Jewish writer of strong leftist convictions, was touring the U.S., speaking on such topics as “Revival of Barbarism in Modern Times.” He died in L.A., in 1958.
At first, many of the exiles fled to France. Few of them believed that Hitler’s reign would last long, and a trip across the ocean seemed excessive. Feuchtwanger and others settled in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Riviera, where the Mediterranean climate offered a dry run for the Southern California experience. The onset of the Second World War, in 1939, instantly destroyed this temporary paradise. The fact that the émigrés were victims of repression did not save them from being thrown into French internment camps. Feuchtwanger captured the surreal misery of the experience in his nonfiction narrative “The Devil in France,” which has been reissued under the aegis of the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, at U.S.C. The devil in question was the same shrugging heartlessness that later enabled the deportation of nearly seventy-five thousand French Jews to Nazi death camps.
When, in 1940, Germany invaded France, Feuchtwanger was in dire danger of being captured by the Gestapo. His wife, Marta, helped arrange an elaborate escape, which required him to don a woman’s coat and shawl. That September, a motley group that included Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler, Heinrich Mann and his wife, Nelly, and Thomas Mann’s son Golo hiked across the Pyrenees, from France into Spain. Mahler carried a large bag containing several of her first husband’s manuscripts and the original score of Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony.
High-placed friends conspired to keep these celebrity refugees safe. Eleanor Roosevelt, an avid reader of Feuchtwanger’s books, became alarmed when she saw a photograph of the author in a French camp. A New York-based organization called the Emergency Rescue Committee dispatched the journalist Varian Fry to France to facilitate the extraction of writers and other artists, often by extralegal means. Such measures were required because American immigration laws limited European nationals to strict quotas. If the quotas had been relaxed, many more thousands of Jews could have escaped. Fry, the first American to be honored at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, ignored his narrow remit and worked heroically to help as many people as possible, including those without name recognition.
“Myra, if you really mean it about restructuring, let’s lose the shepherd and keep the sheepdogs.” Cartoon by Victoria Roberts Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Anna Seghers, a German-Jewish Communist who spent the war in Mexico City, painted a brutal picture of the crisis in her novel “Transit” (1944), which New York Review Books republished in 2013, in a translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo. Refugees in France must negotiate a bureaucratic maze of entrance visas, exit visas, transit visas, and American affidavits. The main character’s plan for escape relies on his having been mistaken for a noted writer (one who is actually dead, by suicide). Another’s path to freedom depends on transporting two dogs that belong to a couple from Boston. All around Marseille are “the remnants of crushed armies, escaped slaves, human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth, and having at last reached the sea, boarded ships in order to discover new lands from which they would again be driven; forever running from one death to another.”
By 1941, the full company of exiles had arrived in Los Angeles, blinking in the sun. Their daily routines were often absurd. Several writers, including Heinrich Mann and Döblin, were granted one-year contracts at Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. These offers had little to do with active interest in their talent; rather, the motivation was to help them obtain visas. Required to play their part in this benevolent charade, Mann and Döblin reported for work each day, even though their English was poor and their ideas had no hope of being produced. Once the contracts ran out, the two struggled financially. Döblin wrote, “On the West Coast there are only two categories of writers: those who sit in clover and those who sit in dirt.”
Such doleful tales raise the question of why so many writers fled to L.A. Why not go to New York, where exiled visual artists gathered in droves? Ehrhard Bahr answers that the “lack of a cultural infrastructure” in L.A. was attractive: it allowed refugees to reconstitute the ideals of the Weimar Republic instead of competing with an extant literary scene. In addition, film work was an undeniable draw. Brecht’s anti-Hollywood invective hides the fact that he worked industriously to find a place as a screenwriter, and co-wrote Fritz Lang’s “Hangmen Also Die!” Even Thomas Mann flirted with Hollywood; there was talk of a film adaptation of “The Magic Mountain,” with Montgomery Clift as Hans Castorp and Greta Garbo as Clavdia Chauchat.
The real explanation for the German literary migration to L.A., though, has to do with the steady growth of a network of friendly connections, and at its center was Salka Viertel. Donna Rifkind pays tribute to this irresistibly dynamic figure in “The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood” (Other Press), and New York Review Books recently reissued Viertel’s addictive memoir, “The Kindness of Strangers.” Viertel worked tirelessly to obtain visas for endangered artists, and to help them find their footing when they arrived. Weimar on the Pacific might never have existed without her.
Viertel had been in L.A. since 1928, when her husband, the director Berthold Viertel, received a studio contract. Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, and Erich von Stroheim had already given Hollywood a German accent. Salka had been an actor on the German stage; she now turned to screenwriting, collaborating frequently with Garbo, one of her closest friends. Bohemians rotated through her house. (Christopher Isherwood lived for a while in an apartment over the garage.) She regularly threw parties, curating conversations among a dazzling assortment of guests—everyone from Schoenberg to Ava Gardner—and then repairing to the kitchen to prepare her much lauded Sacher Torte. Rifkind reports that Thomas Mann once showed up at the wedding of strangers because he had heard that Viertel’s torte would be served.
Rifkind persuasively argues that Viertel was far more than a bon vivant: she had a genius for fostering creative relationships. Franz Waxman fell into a career as a Hollywood composer after striking up a conversation with the director James Whale in Viertel’s living room. Brecht and Charles Laughton first met there. To be sure, not all of Viertel’s mediations panned out. She facilitated a legendarily unsuccessful meeting between Schoenberg and the studio head Irving Thalberg, who was seeking a composer for an adaptation of Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth.” As Viertel relates in her memoir, Schoenberg told Thalberg that he would need complete creative control, and that the actors would have to conform to pitches and rhythms specified in his score.
That story is often cited for comic effect, to illustrate the irreconcilability of European values with those of Hollywood. When Thalberg complimented Schoenberg on his “lovely music”—one of the composer’s less challenging scores had recently been played on the radio—Schoenberg snapped, “I don’t write lovely music.” For Rifkind, the anecdote demonstrates that Viertel was not a mere observer in this social world but its master of ceremonies: “She was the mutual contact who first made it possible for the composer and the producer to meet. She was the diplomat with a firm grasp of the complexities of both milieus.” Even if Schoenberg wrote nothing for Hollywood, his influence on film scoring was immense.
The émigré community certainly needed Viertel’s diplomacy. The struggling authors resented the popular ones. Misunderstandings arose between political refugees—those who had been aligned with the left or had strongly protested Nazism—and Jewish refugees, whose political sympathies ranged widely. The Austrians tended to band together; the musicians spoke their own language. The two opposing poles were Brecht and Thomas Mann, who had long disliked each other. Brecht saw Mann as a grandiose narcissist with no empathy for lesser spirits. Mann recoiled from Brecht’s combativeness, although when he read “Mother Courage and Her Children” he was forced to admit that “the beast has talent.”
Feuchtwanger, Werfel, Döblin, and Thomas and Heinrich Mann were all mainstays at the Viertel salons. On one occasion, they and dozens of others gathered to celebrate Heinrich’s seventieth birthday. The brothers rose in turn, each pulling a sheaf of papers from his coat pocket and reading an exhaustive appreciation of the other’s work. Afterward, Viertel told the writer Bruno Frank how much the spectacle had moved her. Frank responded, “They write and read such ceremonial evaluations of each other every ten years.”
The array of personalities was formidable and eccentric. The Manns, scions of an old North German merchant family, were bourgeois to the core. Thomas had “the reserved politeness of a diplomat on official duty,” Viertel wrote; Heinrich, the “manners of a nineteenth-century grand seigneur.” Feuchtwanger was tan and fit, though he liked nothing more than to withdraw into his vast library and burrow into rare books. Döblin, of Pomeranian-Jewish background, had a cutting wit, which was often directed at Thomas Mann. Werfel, the son of German-speaking Jews in Prague, was the most politically conservative of the group, prone to outbursts against the Bolsheviks. Nonetheless, he was well liked—a mystic in a crowd of skeptics.
All five novelists had been alert to political danger in their work of the nineteen-twenties and early thirties. Feuchtwanger’s breakthrough novel, “Jew Süss,” contains harrowing evocations of anti-Jewish violence in eighteenth-century Germany; his “Success,” set in Munich in the early twenties, caricatures Hitler as a pompous thug. In Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” the ex-convict Franz Biberkopf supports himself, in part, by selling the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. Thomas Mann’s novella “Mario and the Magician” is a parable of Fascist manipulation. Heinrich Mann had been more farsighted than any of them, as Thomas acknowledged in his birthday speech at Viertel’s. Heinrich’s “Der Untertan,” or “The Underling,” written before the First World War but not published until 1918, is the definitive portrait of German nationalism curdling into chauvinism and anti-Semitism.


newyorker--2020-03-02--Prep for Prep and the Fault Lines in New York’s Schools

Simons knew nothing about management , or what it would take to raise money from wealthy people for an annual budget .
“ To me , a board was a piece of wood , ” he said .
But he had strong opinions about what the kids should learn .
He also “ had a work ethic to beat the band , ” according to Dominic Michel , who worked as a deputy to Simons for many years .
Simons held staff meetings that stretched into the evening , and he assigned his students piles of homework .
When he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ admissions director at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School , she said , “ Gary , if by the end of the first summer there are four or five kids still standing , pin a badge on each one of them and quit while you ’ re ahead.
” I was accepted by Prep in the spring of 1996 , at the age of eleven , and my life has , in many ways , ordered itself around this early and somewhat arbitrary triumph : when I was a kid , I did well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ soft and oversensitive only child , afraid of failure .
During my first week of classes , I would sit at home , in my makeshift study at the dining-room table , holding my head in my hands , overawed by the amount of work I was being asked to do .
The kids I met at Prep were bright and hyperverbal ; even the ostensibly cool among them had an obvious nerdiness that they had stopped hiding now that they were away from their normal schools .
Rounds of Magic : The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turned gladiatorial at lunch ; Tamagotchis—small electronic Japanese toys on which you ’ d tend to a digital creature—were passed around like samizdat pamphlets .
We were a hundred or so of a kind , all humming with the seductive feeling of having been called out from a crowd .
Grouped into small units of about ten , and placed under the charge of high-school-age and college-age advisers who ’ d gone through the program before us , we quickly developed fellow-feeling .
What we had most in common were noodgy , hard-driving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ d push their children to attend supplemental schooling for a year and a half .
Some of my new friends had horror stories about their schools .
They talked about walking through metal detectors and sitting through fights in classrooms where there were more than thirty or forty students .
That wasn ’ t my experience .
I ’ d been attending a Catholic boys ’ school in Harlem , where all the students were black or Latino , except for one white kid named Alex , who always looked bewildered .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the names of the books of the Bible .
I had to write weekly essays for a class called Literature , Speech , and Writing and recite them aloud .
The sweet , stern woman who taught the class judged our performances , on composition and delivery , and gave chocolate to those who did best .
When I was in trouble—I was often in trouble—I ’ d have to stay after school and write some bland penitential sentence a hundred times , until my wrist was sore and the meat of my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ JUG , for Justice Under God .
At Prep , the only G whose justice we feared was Gary .
On many Friday afternoons , at lunch , in the Trinity cafeteria , Simons would stand before us , his mustache hiding his mouth , and rattle off a fresh list of kids who had left or been dropped from the program , because they couldn ’ t keep up .
Even more powerful than the fear of dismissal was a kind of wonder at our exotically well-resourced surroundings .
Trinity ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sinks , Bunsen burners and goggles , powerful microscopes we used to scrutinize slides of our own cells .
There was an Olympic-size pool in the basement and turf on the fenced-in roof , both open to us at recess .
We were being prepared academically , but we were also being made to understand anew what a school could be .
Our instructors gave us a foretaste of the eccentric and informal adults we would meet at the prep schools where we would later be placed .
I studied Latin with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fun of Caecilius , the Pompeian nobleman who was our textbook ’ s protagonist .
( “ Caecilius est in horto , ” we ’ d recite .
“ And now , ” the teacher would say , pantomiming horror at an exploding volcano , “ Caecilius mortuus est.
” ) The literature curriculum moved swiftly through lighter fare , such as Conrad Richter ’ s “ The Light in the Forest ” and Maia Wojciechowska ’ s “ Shadow of a Bull , ” to potentially age-inappropriate stuff , like Richard Wright @ @ @ @ @ @ @ read the latter under the close attention of kids in their second Prep summer , who told us younger ones the pages where we could find the hanging of a kitten and loose bits of racial-sexual reverie .
If you were having trouble in class , you were supposed to ask for a meeting with a teacher .
For no reason I can determine , apart from my mother over my shoulder in the dining room—sometimes she ’ d sit at the computer and transcribe my essays as I spoke them aloud , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the program , and made it through .
Two decades later , on a July afternoon , I visited Trinity again , where a new batch of Prep kids was missing out on a lovely day .
Bluish light streamed into the classrooms as if to tease the suckers within .
The typical Prep contingent has about a hundred and twenty-five students .
They are bused from all over the city to wherever Prep ’ s courses are being held—usually Trinity—and divided into classes according to math aptitude .
Every first-year kid takes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of intensive writing instruction , a period of history , a period of laboratory science , and one or two periods of math .
Most also take Latin .
I peeked in on a second-summer literature class , where students were talking about Odysseus and his lonely though by no means solitary ramble around the ancient world ’ s mythical-physical map .
The teacher wanted to know what the students thought about his character—what it meant when he asked for and accepted help , and whether his virtues in any way mitigated his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up one by one , each adding to the class ’ s group portrait of the wave-tossed , homesick man .
I recognized the approach : Prep ’ s teachers often use literature to teach something akin to ethics , and to illustrate the values that might be useful in succeeding at , say , a challenging new school .
Elsewhere , in a long-standing Prep class called Problems and Issues in Modern American Society , students discussed the carceral state and its effects on black communities .
I saw love and care @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : the bright backpacks , the pressed clothes , the manners and the syntax that had been hammered into place by parents anxious about how their children might be seen in the world .
( My mother hunted slang and unconjugated verbs as if they were big game . )
Like the parents in Brownsville , they had noticed something amiss in the system that was supposed to steward their kids , and they had made a bid for control .
I knew how radically these efforts might change one ’ s life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ best friends are Prep alums ; much of what I have that is good I can trace back to the program .
The change isn ’ t only personal .
No matter the context , certain privileges accompany being thought smart : teachers kindle your ego ; people listen when you talk .
And , at a mostly white private school , in a society eager for signs of success , each plucked-out black or brown kid carries an unspoken message .
With every new way of seeing comes , subtly , a @ @ @ @ @ @

One professor, a white woman with graying hair who wore a series of rumpled shirts, wept while recounting the events of the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad. By the time she finished, my eyes were puddling, too. I studied the Hebrew Bible with an instructor in his seventies who tape-recorded each of his digressive lectures, intent on one day turning them into a book. A garrulous Southerner taught me early American literature: Winthrop, Edwards, Mather. A fastidious graduate student with a sideline in editing technical manuals taught a seminar on Japanese cinema and another class focussed solely on Kurosawa; I took both, and now, rereading my essays for those classes, I can see that I was starting to learn how to make my close readings bearable as prose. When I finally graduated, at a huge, happily impersonal ceremony at Radio City Music Hall—Chuck Schumer was the featured speaker—I was living in New York again, writing speeches for minor executives at an N.G.O., a few months away from turning thirty. “Twelve Years an Undergraduate,” I joked with my friends.
Gary Simons stepped down as Prep’s director shortly before I first left for Middlebury, in 2002. His ouster registered as an earthquake among the alumni, who regarded him both as a father figure and as a remote, eccentric guru. Simons had long presented himself as a kind of educator-saint, and his air of extra-professional intensity had started to wear thin with the board. He had insisted on involvement in every aspect of Prep’s operations—including maintaining personal relationships with students, which the board found inappropriate but Simons felt was intrinsic to his work. Although Simons was in tune with the individualism of the age, his shambly persona, tendency to micromanage, and allergy to compromise put him out of step with the era’s technocratic drift.
“By the end,” Peter Bordonaro, the longtime director of Prep 9, told me, “he was sort of impossible to deal with.” A stocky seventy-five-year-old with a dark mustache, Bordonaro, who left the program six years ago, has a philosophical air but speaks with the blunt diction of a lifelong teacher. He is a beloved figure among Prep alumni. We met on a cool day not long after Christmas, at a diner in the West Village. He told me that he’s tried not to obsess over Prep since he left, and that he was working on a memoir of his time in Vietnam. He recalled a day, in 1999, when Simons charged into his office and presented him with a memo titled “Prep for Prep in 2000.” In it were ten brief—brief for Simons—ideas on how Prep should adjust to a new millennium. One was a plan to focus on young Latino immigrants. “He wanted to find the kids, give them a year of English-language training, and then have them start the preparatory component,” Bordonaro said. These days, I noted, a program like that would register as a fairly unsubtle rebuke of the Trump Administration. Would that play well at private schools? “And the fund-raising—Prep’s always had to avoid seeming partisan,” Bordonaro said.
After leaving Prep, Simons almost immediately started a new nonprofit, Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, which, among other things, searches the country for exceptional high-school students in under-resourced communities and helps them gain admission to prestigious colleges. The program is not restricted to students of color; typically, about a tenth of the kids are white. (Simons stepped down from leda after just a couple of years, because of medical problems.)
Prep for Prep students, circa 2002, showing off the schools to which they had been admitted. Photograph by Joseph Jay Savulich; courtesy Prep for Prep
Hefferren was, in some ways, an obvious choice to replace Simons at Prep. She knew the program well and had an extensive background in fund-raising. The educational landscape in New York was shifting: the year that Hefferren took over Prep, Bloomberg was elected mayor, and assumed unprecedented control of the school system. He closed schools, opened smaller ones, and implemented a program of “school choice,” in which city residents could apply to attend middle and high schools across the city. He also encouraged the growth of charter schools. Nominally public entities, charters are often run and partially financed by private boards of directors; they can hire non-union teachers and can recruit from a broader pool of students than traditional public schools can. They can also, crucially, craft their own curricula. Some of the donor money that once flowed to Prep began drifting toward those institutions. Philanthropists tend to swim in tight schools, often under the influence of a small group of paid charitable advisers. Ed Boland told me, “Now we often hear, ‘I’m very attracted to how successful your program has been, but I’d rather support public schools.’ ” Prep’s budget is now thirteen million dollars; its partner schools offer more than thirty-five million dollars in financial aid to Prep students annually.
This past fall, Leslie-Bernard Joseph—whom I’d seen talk, a year before, with Hefferren at the Schomburg Center—received Prep’s annual Alumni Prize. He accepted the award at a private ceremony for generous donors, and took the opportunity to make an announcement. “Prep cannot say with integrity that it fulfills its mission until it has diverse executive leadership that reflects the communities it serves and represents,” he said. “What got us here will not get us through.” He said that he wanted the five thousand dollars that came with the prize to be used to help fund the search for a new chief executive.
Hefferren, approaching her twenty-fifth anniversary with Prep, had, in fact, already submitted her resignation to the board. Less than a month after the donor ceremony, she announced that she would step down in the summer of 2020. The time had come for “Prep’s next chapter,” she said, in a statement, and for her “to explore life outside of Prep.” I spoke with her shortly after her announcement, and asked what that next chapter might be. She reiterated the value of Prep’s current mission. “Not so long ago, people were thinking about, you know, have we reached a post-racial society,” she said. “And I think that in the last couple of years people are saying, ‘Now, more than ever, Prep for Prep’s work is vital.’ ” The board’s search for a new chief executive, led by the firm Spencer Stuart, is under way.
In January, I called Joseph at his office in Brooklyn, to ask what he thought of Prep’s future. He’d said in his speech that “Prep’s mission has never been about just getting us into private school,” and I asked him to elaborate. “We got really good at this one thing, and that became who we are,” he said. “Companies that get really good at one thing tend to fall off the face of the earth when they don’t change with the times.” Maybe the organization could begin to branch out—by, say, selling Prep’s curriculum to failing school districts and helping them to implement it. Prep, he seemed to be saying, was too small: the organization needed to help more kids, even if it did so in different ways. Perhaps it could reach beyond New York, and perhaps it could reach those who aren’t scooped up in its talent search. It’s not enough to promote a “talented tenth,” Joseph said, referring to W. E. B. DuBois’s notion that “the Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” He added, “Our success alone does not open any doors.”
Forty years after the 1968 strike, the middle school where it began, J.H.S. 271, was closed by Bloomberg, for poor performance. The building is now home to three separate schools, including the Ocean Hill Collegiate Charter School. During Bloomberg’s tenure, New York’s graduation rates improved, but segregation deepened—the city’s public schools are as segregated now as they were under John Lindsay. In the interim, millions of black children have passed through the system, some served well enough, others hardly at all, none of them ever able to simply assume that the education offered to them by their government would prepare them for the wider world. (A school-desegregation plan that includes a proposal to abolish “gifted” education is being considered under New York’s current mayor, the liberal Democrat Bill de Blasio.)
We are all embedded within systems, but each life—each child—is an unrepeatable anecdote. According to the adults I knew when I was a kid, the worst thing in the world was to be a “statistic,” subsumed into a mass of low expectations and bad outcomes determined by color and class and sustained by a bureaucracy that was, at best, inept and, at worst, intractably racist. Education, then, was triage; escape was a higher-order concern than reform. Parents murmured about how So-and-So had got her daughter into Such-and-Such school, and had spirited the kid away from a school system whose failures symbolized—and, in many ways, flowed out of—a larger set of brutal social facts.
Before her announcement, I asked Hefferren whether Prep, by its nature, helps to keep broader inequalities intact. “We’re going to help create principals, superintendents, education commissioners—people who are going to really change that system,” she said. Among Prep graduates, education is the second-most-popular field of work. Is it their—is it our—responsibility to change the system now? Are we succeeding? When I spoke with Nikole Hannah-Jones, she criticized Prep’s philosophical orientation, but also told me that she does not begrudge the choice some black parents make to send their kids to such programs. “The onus of fixing the system” should not fall on them, she said.
I thought of conversations I’d had over the years with all the Prep alums I know, about what the program had and hadn’t done. One friend, a fellow Horace Mann graduate and a son of Nigerian immigrants, who now lives in Amsterdam and is perpetually astonished at the thick web of public services there, told me, over dinner near his home, “If Gary Simons had devoted his life to single-handedly turning around the whole system, he’d have died (a) sooner and (b) without having changed that much.” And here we were, two kids from nothing much, gently arguing over dinner at a bistro across the ocean from where we grew up. Another alum pointed out to me, at a birthday party, that her son was only a generation removed from the material want she had known, and two generations from the Haiti her parents had left. Yes, it would be good for well-off people to send their kids to public schools, she thought. But, no, she couldn’t afford for the “experiment” to start with her son.


newyorker--2020-03-02--The Man Behind Trump’s Facebook Juggernaut

In September , at a resort hotel in the Coachella Valley , the California Republican Party held its fall convention .
Brad Parscale—forty-four , six feet eight , balding , prolifically bearded—walked onstage in shirtsleeves and tilted the microphone upward , mumbling a self-deprecating joke about being “ awkwardly tall.
” Parscale has lived in a red county in California and a blue county in Texas , and he now splits his time between Washington , D.C. , and two luxury properties in South Florida , yet he still speaks with the neutral accent of Topeka , Kansas , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the top staffers on Donald Trump ’ s 2016 campaign .
“ I was the digital-media director , ” he said .
“ So , yes , all that crazy Facebook stuff was my idea.
” Other former Trump-campaign officials fill their calendars with paid speaking gigs , padding their remarks with jingoistic platitudes or rapturous accounts of Trump ’ s improbable victory .
Parscale appears in public less often .
When he does , he gets to the point .
“ We have turned the R.N.C .
into one of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” he said .
He was referring to the Republican National Committee , which has raised two hundred and sixty-three million dollars for the 2020 elections .
( The Democratic National Committee has raised just over a hundred million . )
As Parscale explained , the Trump campaign has been operating more or less full time since 2016 , continually improving its “ technology and data operations.
” During this period , the campaign and the R.N.C .
have essentially merged , sharing staff , voter data , and other resources .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ nominee for President , and some of their systems for acquiring and sharing data are considered outdated by comparison .
“ You can not just build an app , or build out data , in the few months you have from the Convention , ” Parscale said .
“ The Democrats will have that problem this time .
As they all interfight , we are building for our future.
” Two years ago , Parscale was named the manager of Trump ’ s 2020 campaign .
“ I know everybody wants me to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he joked to the audience .
“ Not possible .
I ’ ve already done that once.
” Before Parscale worked for the campaign , he was a digital marketer in San Antonio with no political experience .
Referring to his work for Trump in 2016 , he has said , “ I was thrown into the Super Bowl , never played a game , and won.
” But it might be more apt to compare Parscale to the technicians who operated Watson , the I.B.M .
supercomputer , while it successfully competed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Machine learning and social-media algorithms are upending most aspects of contemporary life , including politics .
One of Parscale ’ s advantages was that he recognized this fact and didn ’ t hesitate to make full use of it .
In previous elections , Presidential campaign managers tried to be strategic about where to hold public events , which slogans to emphasize in which media markets , when to give an interview to Elle or to Esquire .
These were forms of targeting .
We are now in the era of microtargeting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2012—the year of Facebook ’ s I.P.O.
, then the largest in Silicon Valley history—and will continue , inarguably , long past 2020 .
It ’ s no longer good enough to run one radio ad in Scranton and another one in Pittsburgh .
These days , campaigns can carve the electorate into creepily thin segments : Gold Star moms near military bases , paintball-playing widowers in the Florida Panhandle , recovering addicts in Michigan ’ s Upper Peninsula .
And , for anyone who wants to reach a specific audience with an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a platform as potent as Facebook .
No matter how many bad press cycles or localized boycotts the company endures , the number of users keeps expanding ; on average , those users are growing older , and that presumably redounds to Trump ’ s advantage .
“ I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win , ” Parscale said , in October , 2017 , on “ 60 Minutes.
” “ Facebook was the method—it was the highway which his car drove on.
” The instant a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worked on the losing campaign is recast as a dunce , and everyone on the winning side is reborn as a genius .
In 2016 , three weeks after Election Day , Harvard ’ s Institute of Politics hosted a panel discussion featuring leaders of Hillary Clinton ’ s campaign and Trump ’ s campaign—the first public reunion of the now dunces and the now geniuses .
It got heated .
“ I would rather lose than win the way you guys did , ” Jennifer Palmieri , Clinton ’ s director of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you wouldn ’ t , respectfully , ” Kellyanne Conway , one of Trump ’ s campaign managers , said .
Later in the discussion , Mandy Grunwald , another Clinton adviser , rephrased Palmieri ’ s rebuke as a backhanded compliment .
“ I don ’ t think you guys give yourselves enough credit for the negative campaign you ran , ” she said , alluding to “ the fake Facebook stuff , or the great dark-arts stuff you were pumping out there.
” Turning to Parscale , she went on , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all about that , because it ’ s so hard for us to track.
” “ I ’ d agree , ” he said .
“ That ’ s the beauty of Facebook.
” Another morning-after-Election Day tradition is the postmortem .
Every political demise has a hundred etiologies .
Still , when it comes to the 2016 election , we can ’ t seem to help ourselves : Was it the Russians ?
The letter from James Comey ?
The weather in Wisconsin ?
These days , the culprit many people settle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s a tendency to turn it into a catchall explanation , ” David Plouffe , a Democratic strategist who was Barack Obama ’ s campaign manager in 2008 , told me recently .
“ Which is understandable , given how powerful it is , and how hard it is for most people to understand.
” Plouffe came to prominence at a time when social media was generally perceived as innocuous , even liberatory .
He and his team made extensive use of digital fund-raising , organizing , and advertising ; after Obama @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as innovators .
“ At the same time , the digital stuff is not a magic potion , ” he continued .
“ It ’ s an ever-evolving tool .
A tool that the Trump campaign , whatever else you want to say about them , used quite effectively.
” ( Plouffe is now an adviser to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative , a philanthropic organization set up by Facebook ’ s founder and C.E.O.
, Mark Zuckerberg , and his wife , Priscilla Chan . )
Between June and November of 2016 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ million dollars , most of which went toward digital advertising .
Some of the ads were standard fare about national security or the debt ; others were designed to help Trump ’ s mendacity and nativism go viral on social media , where lies and fractious memes are disproportionately likely to be amplified .
Facebook did not maintain an archive of its political ads until 2018 , so some of the 2016 campaign ’ s dodgier efforts may be lost to history .
But we do know that Trump tweeted an image , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Hillary Clinton ’ s face , a Jewish star , and a pile of cash ; that one of Parscale ’ s staffers made an ad featuring audio of Hillary Clinton referring to African-Americans as “ superpredators ” ( the intention was to microtarget the ad to black Facebook users in swing states ) ; and that Defeat Crooked Hillary , a Facebook page funded by a pro-Trump super PAC , disseminated several conspiratorial videos , including one insinuating that Clinton was taking illicit drugs and another alleging that she had undisclosed @ @ @ @ @

In September, at a resort hotel in the Coachella Valley, the California Republican Party held its fall convention. Brad Parscale—forty-four, six feet eight, balding, prolifically bearded—walked onstage in shirtsleeves and tilted the microphone upward, mumbling a self-deprecating joke about being “awkwardly tall.” Parscale has lived in a red county in California and a blue county in Texas, and he now splits his time between Washington, D.C., and two luxury properties in South Florida, yet he still speaks with the neutral accent of Topeka, Kansas, where he grew up. He was one of the top staffers on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. “I was the digital-media director,” he said. “So, yes, all that crazy Facebook stuff was my idea.” Other former Trump-campaign officials fill their calendars with paid speaking gigs, padding their remarks with jingoistic platitudes or rapturous accounts of Trump’s improbable victory. Parscale appears in public less often. When he does, he gets to the point.
“We have turned the R.N.C. into one of the largest data-gathering operations in United States history,” he said. He was referring to the Republican National Committee, which has raised two hundred and sixty-three million dollars for the 2020 elections. (The Democratic National Committee has raised just over a hundred million.) As Parscale explained, the Trump campaign has been operating more or less full time since 2016, continually improving its “technology and data operations.” During this period, the campaign and the R.N.C. have essentially merged, sharing staff, voter data, and other resources. The Democrats do not yet have a nominee for President, and some of their systems for acquiring and sharing data are considered outdated by comparison. “You cannot just build an app, or build out data, in the few months you have from the Convention,” Parscale said. “The Democrats will have that problem this time. As they all interfight, we are building for our future.” Two years ago, Parscale was named the manager of Trump’s 2020 campaign. “I know everybody wants me to do it from my laptop,” he joked to the audience. “Not possible. I’ve already done that once.”
Before Parscale worked for the campaign, he was a digital marketer in San Antonio with no political experience. Referring to his work for Trump in 2016, he has said, “I was thrown into the Super Bowl, never played a game, and won.” But it might be more apt to compare Parscale to the technicians who operated Watson, the I.B.M. supercomputer, while it successfully competed against two humans on “Jeopardy!” Machine learning and social-media algorithms are upending most aspects of contemporary life, including politics. One of Parscale’s advantages was that he recognized this fact and didn’t hesitate to make full use of it.
In previous elections, Presidential campaign managers tried to be strategic about where to hold public events, which slogans to emphasize in which media markets, when to give an interview to Elle or to Esquire. These were forms of targeting. We are now in the era of microtargeting, which began, arguably, in 2012—the year of Facebook’s I.P.O., then the largest in Silicon Valley history—and will continue, inarguably, long past 2020. It’s no longer good enough to run one radio ad in Scranton and another one in Pittsburgh. These days, campaigns can carve the electorate into creepily thin segments: Gold Star moms near military bases, paintball-playing widowers in the Florida Panhandle, recovering addicts in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. And, for anyone who wants to reach a specific audience with an actionable message, there has never been a platform as potent as Facebook. No matter how many bad press cycles or localized boycotts the company endures, the number of users keeps expanding; on average, those users are growing older, and that presumably redounds to Trump’s advantage. “I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win,” Parscale said, in October, 2017, on “60 Minutes.” “Facebook was the method—it was the highway which his car drove on.”
The instant a Presidential election is over, everyone who worked on the losing campaign is recast as a dunce, and everyone on the winning side is reborn as a genius. In 2016, three weeks after Election Day, Harvard’s Institute of Politics hosted a panel discussion featuring leaders of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Trump’s campaign—the first public reunion of the now dunces and the now geniuses. It got heated.
“I would rather lose than win the way you guys did,” Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s director of communications, said.
“No, you wouldn’t, respectfully,” Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s campaign managers, said.
Later in the discussion, Mandy Grunwald, another Clinton adviser, rephrased Palmieri’s rebuke as a backhanded compliment. “I don’t think you guys give yourselves enough credit for the negative campaign you ran,” she said, alluding to “the fake Facebook stuff, or the great dark-arts stuff you were pumping out there.” Turning to Parscale, she went on, “I’m fascinated to hear all about that, because it’s so hard for us to track.”
“I’d agree,” he said. “That’s the beauty of Facebook.”
Cartoon by Liana Finck Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Another morning-after-Election Day tradition is the postmortem. Every political demise has a hundred etiologies. Still, when it comes to the 2016 election, we can’t seem to help ourselves: Was it the Russians? The letter from James Comey? The weather in Wisconsin? These days, the culprit many people settle on is the Internet. “There’s a tendency to turn it into a catchall explanation,” David Plouffe, a Democratic strategist who was Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, told me recently. “Which is understandable, given how powerful it is, and how hard it is for most people to understand.” Plouffe came to prominence at a time when social media was generally perceived as innocuous, even liberatory. He and his team made extensive use of digital fund-raising, organizing, and advertising; after Obama’s victory, they were hailed as innovators. “At the same time, the digital stuff is not a magic potion,” he continued. “It’s an ever-evolving tool. A tool that the Trump campaign, whatever else you want to say about them, used quite effectively.” (Plouffe is now an adviser to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization set up by Facebook’s founder and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan.)
Between June and November of 2016, Parscale’s firm was paid ninety-four million dollars, most of which went toward digital advertising. Some of the ads were standard fare about national security or the debt; others were designed to help Trump’s mendacity and nativism go viral on social media, where lies and fractious memes are disproportionately likely to be amplified. Facebook did not maintain an archive of its political ads until 2018, so some of the 2016 campaign’s dodgier efforts may be lost to history. But we do know that Trump tweeted an image, originally circulated on anti-Semitic message boards, of Hillary Clinton’s face, a Jewish star, and a pile of cash; that one of Parscale’s staffers made an ad featuring audio of Hillary Clinton referring to African-Americans as “superpredators” (the intention was to microtarget the ad to black Facebook users in swing states); and that Defeat Crooked Hillary, a Facebook page funded by a pro-Trump super PAC, disseminated several conspiratorial videos, including one insinuating that Clinton was taking illicit drugs and another alleging that she had undisclosed ties to Vladimir Putin.
The point of all this, of course, was to sway the election in Trump’s favor, and, given the election’s narrow margins, it’s highly possible that it worked. (The Internet Research Agency, a troll farm associated with Putin, purchased thirty-five hundred Facebook ads between 2015 and 2017; Parscale and his team bought millions.) None of this is evidence of election-related malfeasance, however. Most social platforms have rules against harassment, hate speech, and violent threats, but they have usually granted exceptions to those rules when the boundaries are tested by a Presidential campaign, or by the President. Parscale used Facebook to move fast and break things, but it seems that the things he broke were long-standing norms, not laws. However, the Internet has disrupted global politics so rapidly, and regulators have been so slow to adjust to the new reality, that there weren’t many relevant laws to break.


newyorker--2020-03-02--Anne Enright on Rupture and Repetition

Anne Enright on Rupture and Repetition

In your story in this week ’ s issue , “ Night Swim , ” a woman and her eight-year-old son are talking in the car on the way to a playdate .
How hard is it to capture the rhythms of that kind of parent-child chat ?
Yes , rhythm is the key to writing dialogue , because it holds the power and also the playfulness in whatever relationship we are sketching on the page .
This chat between mother and son has some of the mirroring call-and-response that happens when a mother is doing her job properly—especially as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all the control .
He manages his mother not just with his inescapable questions but also by falling silent—either to withhold information or to build suspense .
I found it easy enough to do , but I was surprised , as I wrote , at how controlling Ben sounded , at least by the standards of adult dialogue .
He gets a bit spooky , almost , toward the end .
I think children bully their parents sometimes .
Anxiety , in particular , can be a powerful method of control .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time in her life , when she was rasher and possibly coping with mental illness .
The flashbacks are triggered by her son ’ s questions and by the streets she ’ s driving on .
Do you think they also emerge from some kind of internal reckoning ?
Well , no—and that is why the story is also a little gothic .
The past seems to return without warning .
I am sure you know the story “ The Demon Lover , ” by Elizabeth Bowen .
In it , a woman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she promised to marry twenty-five years earlier and who was subsequently reported missing in action , presumed killed .
She finds the letter in an empty house and hurries away but , when she gets into a taxi , she discovers that it is driven by the man she has been trying to escape .
The nightmare logic that informs modernism—the feeling that cause and effect have been reversed or do not matter—is also the logic of mental breakdown .
It is all about rupture and repetition , not progression , growth , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into the lake for a night swim , her friends are disapproving .
She feels that she ’ s making a “ big statement , ” but what is that statement ?
I am sure that her friends would ask the same thing .
This is very challenging behavior .
She is also naked .
When she wakes up the next morning , she vows that she ’ s “ giving up death.
” Was the swim a way of teasing the notion of suicide ?
Or was it just attention-seeking ?
This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ own intentions .
She took off her clothes to escape ( or invite ) desire and , in the middle of the lake , she discovered instead the awful desirability of death .
How much of that younger woman is left in the older one ?
She has the brief sense that her death wish coats her , like water .
This is like the feeling of shame itself , which can , I think , be experienced almost externally , as a horripilation .
Goosebumps !
She is visited by her previous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We don ’ t get much sense of the woman ’ s background , of what drove her behavior in her twenties , or whether her stay in the St. Clare ’ s “ facility ” changed anything .
Did you have a picture of those things in your mind as you were writing , or are they mysterious to you as well ?
She wears a loose linen summer dress and fancy underwear .
The dress is , moreover , blue—you know the shade I mean .
Could I make her more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ espadrilles ?
You ’ re about to publish a new novel , “ Actress , ” about a mother and daughter with a somewhat fraught relationship .
Did some of the energy of that book seep into this story , or is it completely unconnected ?
“ Actress ” is a novel bursting with social and psychological content .
It is hugely interested in connection and disconnection , performance , beauty , melancholy , you name it .
It is , almost embarrassingly , about everything , all at the same time .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They are the solution to their own riddles or non-riddles and , as such , they stay self-contained and indifferent to the rest of my work .
There is nothing I can do about this .
I had a chat with someone about swimming at night , we spoke about our children , I thought briefly about death : there it was .
I continue to be interested in the fact that children come out of your body , that giving birth is like pulling the sleeve of death inside out .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or have a turkey live inside you ?

Photograph by Sarah Lee / eyevine / Redux
In your story in this week’s issue, “Night Swim,” a woman and her eight-year-old son are talking in the car on the way to a playdate. How hard is it to capture the rhythms of that kind of parent-child chat?
Yes, rhythm is the key to writing dialogue, because it holds the power and also the playfulness in whatever relationship we are sketching on the page. This chat between mother and son has some of the mirroring call-and-response that happens when a mother is doing her job properly—especially as the child, Ben, has nearly all the control. He manages his mother not just with his inescapable questions but also by falling silent—either to withhold information or to build suspense. I found it easy enough to do, but I was surprised, as I wrote, at how controlling Ben sounded, at least by the standards of adult dialogue. He gets a bit spooky, almost, toward the end. I think children bully their parents sometimes. Anxiety, in particular, can be a powerful method of control.
The mother has sudden memories of an earlier time in her life, when she was rasher and possibly coping with mental illness. The flashbacks are triggered by her son’s questions and by the streets she’s driving on. Do you think they also emerge from some kind of internal reckoning?
Well, no—and that is why the story is also a little gothic. The past seems to return without warning. I am sure you know the story “The Demon Lover,” by Elizabeth Bowen. In it, a woman receives a letter from a man whom she promised to marry twenty-five years earlier and who was subsequently reported missing in action, presumed killed. She finds the letter in an empty house and hurries away but, when she gets into a taxi, she discovers that it is driven by the man she has been trying to escape.
The nightmare logic that informs modernism—the feeling that cause and effect have been reversed or do not matter—is also the logic of mental breakdown. It is all about rupture and repetition, not progression, growth, and change.
When the woman jumps into the lake for a night swim, her friends are disapproving. She feels that she’s making a “big statement,” but what is that statement?
I am sure that her friends would ask the same thing. This is very challenging behavior. She is also naked.
When she wakes up the next morning, she vows that she’s “giving up death.” Was the swim a way of teasing the notion of suicide? Or was it just attention-seeking?
This is not a person who knows her own intentions. She took off her clothes to escape (or invite) desire and, in the middle of the lake, she discovered instead the awful desirability of death.
How much of that younger woman is left in the older one?
She has the brief sense that her death wish coats her, like water. This is like the feeling of shame itself, which can, I think, be experienced almost externally, as a horripilation. Goosebumps! She is visited by her previous self, not inhabited by her.
We don’t get much sense of the woman’s background, of what drove her behavior in her twenties, or whether her stay in the St. Clare’s “facility” changed anything. Did you have a picture of those things in your mind as you were writing, or are they mysterious to you as well?
She wears a loose linen summer dress and fancy underwear. The dress is, moreover, blue—you know the shade I mean. Could I make her more middle class? Perhaps a pair of espadrilles?
You’re about to publish a new novel, “Actress,” about a mother and daughter with a somewhat fraught relationship. Did some of the energy of that book seep into this story, or is it completely unconnected?
“Actress” is a novel bursting with social and psychological content. It is hugely interested in connection and disconnection, performance, beauty, melancholy, you name it. It is, almost embarrassingly, about everything, all at the same time.
My short stories are only about themselves. They are the solution to their own riddles or non-riddles and, as such, they stay self-contained and indifferent to the rest of my work. There is nothing I can do about this. I had a chat with someone about swimming at night, we spoke about our children, I thought briefly about death: there it was.
I continue to be interested in the fact that children come out of your body, that giving birth is like pulling the sleeve of death inside out.
Would you rather live inside a turkey, or have a turkey live inside you?
I love my life.


newyorker--2020-03-02--How South Korea Is Composting Its Way to Sustainability

Trash is new .
During the nineteenth century , New York was dirty but much of its garbage consisted of leftovers and scraps and other items to reuse .
Sunday ’ s roast became Monday ’ s hash ; Monday ’ s bread became Wednesday ’ s bread pudding .
Pigs roamed the streets , eating old lettuce and radish tops .
“ Swill children ” went from house to house , collecting food scraps that they sold to farmers as fertilizer and animal feed .
Bones became glue .
Old grease was turned into tallow candles , or mixed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ packaging was almost nonexistent .
In nearly every decade of the nineteenth century , the city ’ s population doubled .
New York began to dump its excess into the Atlantic Ocean .
In 1895 , George Waring , a former military officer , became sanitation commissioner .
“ Colonel Waring ’ s broom .
.
.
saved more lives than a squad of doctors , ” the social reformer and journalist Jacob Riis wrote , of the man who put sanitation workers in white suits .
Waring made New York households and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; he diverted horse manure for use as fertilizer .
Food waste was turned into soap , grease , or compost , or carted to pig farms in New Jersey .
Some of the ash became cinder blocks .
Some went for expanding the footprint of Rikers Island .
Three years after his appointment , Waring died , of yellow fever .
His sorting program continued until the First World War , when it was abandoned because of labor and material shortages .
By 1918 , the city was again dumping waste into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ landfills .
The story of New York ’ s garbage hasn ’ t changed as much in the past century as you might imagine , given that we now have the technology to 3-D-print a baby Yoda , or to run a car on old vegetable oil .
Paper and plastic are separated , but recycling of organics—food waste , yard waste , pretty much anything that rots—remains voluntary , even though such material makes up about a third of New York ’ s trash .
All but five per cent of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ landfills .
Organic waste doesn ’ t just stink when it ’ s sent to landfills ; it becomes a climate poison .
Yes , we ’ ve been schooled again and again in the importance of recycling—by friends , by pious enemies , even by “ Wall-E. ” But the recycling of organics is arguably more important than that of plastics , metal , or paper .
Composting transforms raw organic waste into a humus-like substance that enriches soil and enhances carbon capture .
In landfills , starved of oxygen , decomposing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whose warming effects , in the long run , are fifty-six times those of CO .
The United States has greater landfill emissions than any other country , the equivalent of thirty-seven million cars on the road each year .
Last April , the New York State legislature enacted laws requiring large businesses and institutions to recycle their food waste , but New York City is exempt from the new rules .
In 2013 , when Michael Bloomberg was in his final year as mayor of New York , he instituted an organics-recycling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mandatory in a few years .
Bill de Blasio , who was the public advocate at the time , supported that vision , but as mayor he has failed to fund it .
I live not far from Times Square , near a food-cart-storage facility , a family-run butcher shop , and a La Quinta hotel ; one of the lower floors of my building houses a catering business .
Since the sides of the street are reserved exclusively for cars , there ’ s no room for dumpsters .
Instead , each @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bags appears , as if left by malign elves .
Sometimes there are bags of kaiser rolls and tired fruit .
A caramel-colored goo oozes onto the sidewalk .
Walking by the trash embankment the other evening , I startled one of our neighborhood rats , which sped across the curb and down a sewer drain .
All of which I find , to be honest , totally normal .
I landed in Seoul , South Korea , on a hazy morning in early October , the day before Typhoon Mitag was expected @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Korean Peninsula .
Today , South Korea recycles ninety-five per cent of its food waste , but twenty-five years ago almost nothing was recycled .
In the nineteen-nineties , following the country ’ s rapid industrialization and the movement of its people from rural areas to the cities , the trash dumps at the cities ’ edges overflowed .
Poor families lived near the dumps ; many of them picked through the garbage for plastics and metals to sell .
Food scraps , an incidental petri dish for disease , made the dumps @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ We had people lying down in the road in front of the garbage trucks to prevent more being brought to the landfills , ” Kim Mi-Hwa , the head of the Korea Zero Waste Movement Network , told me .
“ The government saw that it had to do something.
” The K.Z.W.M.N.
’ s office is about the size of a California closet .
It ’ s on the twelfth floor of a modern office tower , the Gwanghwamun Platinum Building , down the street from shops that offer hourly rentals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worn for ceremonies .
I arrived with Lucia Lee , my interpreter .
We set our shoes among a small crowd of slippers near the door .
Kim , a youthful fifty-seven-year-old woman dressed in a blue-and-white striped button-up , pulled folding wooden chairs out from under a small central table .
A young woman brought the three of us ceramic mugs of buckwheat tea .
The office had the efficiency of a ship ’ s cabin .
Kim ’ s activism dates back to the nineteen-eighties , when she studied nutrition and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ involved in the pro-democracy student movements , and was a leader campaigning for equal rights for women .
K.Z.W.M.N .
was formed , in 1997 , from a network of thirty-one grassroots organizations .
“ Our primary work is to advocate for change in government policies , for laws , ” Kim said .
“ We also have a lot of programs aimed at educating the public.
” K.Z.W.M.N .
was instrumental in advancing Seoul ’ s ban on plastic bags , which went into effect at the end of 2018 .
During @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that is now a landscape of high-rises and skyscrapers was largely farmland .
“ After the Korean War , food waste was not a problem—people were starving , ” she said .
“ We took our food scraps outside and fed them to the cows and pigs.
” In 1995 , South Korea replaced its flat tax for waste disposal with a new system .
Recycling materials were picked up free of charge , but for all other trash the city imposed a fee , which was calculated by measuring the size and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it was illegal to send food waste to landfills and dumps ; citizens were required to separate it out .
The new waste policies were supported with grants to the then nascent recycling industry .
These measures have led to a decrease in food waste , per person , of about three-quarters of a pound a day—the weight of a Big Mac and fries , or a couple of grapefruits .
The country estimates the economic benefit of these policies to be , over the years , in the billions of dollars .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ bags for their food scraps , which are disposed of in automated bins , usually situated in an apartment building ’ s parking area .
The bins weigh and charge per kilogram of organic waste .
At the Energy Zero House , a model apartment complex in Seoul , a slim woman wearing dark clothes demonstrated how the “ smart ” composting bin worked .
The bin resembled an industrial washer-dryer with a cheerful teal top , and had instructions for use in both Korean and English .
She waved a small card @ @ @ @ @ @ @ card , in front of a scanner .
The lid opened in a slow , smooth , and slightly uncanny fashion .
In went the waste .
A weight registered in red L.E.D .
Then the lid lowered , with similar robotic indifference .
Nearby was a separate cannister for used cooking oil .
A tidy latticed structure covered the area , like a bus stop .
For a Seoul family , the cost of food-scrap recycling averages around six dollars a month .

The thirteen thousand tons of food waste produced daily in South Korea now become one of three things: compost (thirty per cent), animal feed (sixty per cent), or biofuel (ten per cent). “People from other countries ask me very often, ‘How did South Korea achieve this success?’ ” Kim said. Sometimes it is attributed to the fancy technology that weighs and tracks the compost, and to the R.F.I.D. chips used in some municipalities to insure that households pay in proportion to the amount of waste they produce. “That is important,” she told me. “But also I say the government shouldn’t act directly. There needs to be an intermediary between the government and the people. Groups like us. That can explain back and forth. People don’t want to hear it straight from the government.” Setting up waste-processing sites was difficult, in part because there were fears that such sites would become sources of stink or disease, like the landfills. “We went door to door to talk to residents. We would bring people in for a tour of the food-waste facility. We would educate people about how it was healthy. I’ve been shouted at a lot,” Kim said, laughing. “But things change. People are used to it now. These days, we focus on offering seminars at local centers, or wherever people gather.” She added, “We have the most difficulty in wealthy neighborhoods and neighborhoods with foreigners.”
My interpreter, Lucia Lee, was twenty-six years old, “but in Korean I’m twenty-seven,” she said. She told me that the nine months of gestation are included in one’s age. Before becoming an interpreter, Lucia had worked at a hospital reading pathology slides, a job she chose because her sister had died of cancer. She found the work discouraging: “You aren’t really able to help people.” She began to travel, for months at a time, which surprised her friends, because she had always been frugal, not even buying coffee when they met. Living abroad, she soon learned other languages, including English, and decided to go to school in order to work as an interpreter. “My parents come from a very conservative area outside of Seoul,” she told me. “In my family they have a scholarship, but it’s only for boys.” By “my family,” she meant an extended group of relations involving some two thousand people. She paid for her schooling herself.
On our way to meet Lee Eun-Su, the founder of the Nowon Urban Farming Network, an organization that has a hundred and thirty members, Lucia told me that she had loved reading up on composting—she wanted to make sure that she would be familiar with any specialized vocabulary. Being environmentally conscious is “popular” among young people, she said. “When I visited Taiwan, I saw drinks being served with stainless-steel straws in a restaurant.” The Taiwanese government had placed limitations on the use of plastic straws. “I thought the straws were ‘cool,’ so I purchased one when I got back to Korea.” She smiled. She said that Seoul is now also imposing limits on plastic straws. For her birthday, she bought gifts for her friends—reusable water bottles. At the end of our subway ride, she showed me where the tickets were recycled.
Lee Eun-Su, a slim, cheerful, and energetic fifty-five-year-old, told me that he “wakes up thinking about urban farming and goes to sleep to dream about urban farming.” He is very much a city person. His parents moved to Seoul from the countryside when he was young. “It was the best decision they made in their lives,” he said. He comes from a family of four children. His father was too ill to work, and his mother made money selling things in the street. The Nowon district, where Lee lives, is a middle-class neighborhood known for its good schools.
Lee used to work installing cable in apartment buildings. He found himself in basements and on roofs. “That was when I saw all this unused space,” he said. “A waste!” He moved into a small apartment with his family, and now makes a modest living as a landlord, so that he can devote himself to promoting urban farming throughout Seoul. “It’s like a university, and I get to be a professor,” he said. He tapped his chest and grinned. “I was the one who proposed growing mushrooms in the basements,” he added. Sunnier urban-farm spaces grow lettuces, cabbages, peppers, peas, and flowers. Many of the organics-recycling bins in Seoul have the capacity to transform waste into compost, which can then be distributed to urban farms, sometimes in the same apartment complex. In the past decade, the number of such farms in Seoul has increased from sixty-six to more than two thousand.
In a concrete high-rise bordered by a covered highway, we headed into the basement by ducking beneath a staircase lined with pictures of four varieties of mushroom. Each fungus looked spookier than the next: the shiitake, the golden oyster, the deer horn, the lion’s mane.
Gathered in the basement were members of the building’s Urban Farming Committee. They were mostly older women, faces brightened with lipstick. They led us around their projects, small rooms lit by bluish lights. Cylinders of gauze-wrapped compost sat on metal racks; from the cylinders emerged what looked like sepia alien hands: deer-horn mushrooms. The rooms were humid and cool, and smelled like loam. A delicate tubular watering system wove throughout the metal racks. The effect was part sci-fi, part night club.
On a table in an adjacent space, a crowd of full-grown deer-horn mushrooms, potted and wrapped in cellophane, might have been cousins to Christmas poinsettias. We were each given a pot. It was the day before the Korean holiday known as Gaecheonjeol, or National Foundation Day. (The holiday commemorates the founding myth of the Korean people, which involves a bear and a tiger that both wanted to be human. Only the bear was patient enough.) One of the women explained that the mushrooms are often used to make a tea that is sometimes sweetened with dates.
Later, Lee showed us the composting system he had set up in a building where he keeps a tiny, crowded office. He has a lot of uses for compost: he has transformed the entire roof area—and a platform above it, near the cable and the water system—into a garden, where he grows marigolds, squash, mint, a date tree, and more. Lee has also made a “green curtain,” a trellis of various climbing vines, above the building’s parking area. Under an eave, a large barrel had been set up on a rotating metal stand, like a Foosball figure on a pole; this makes it easy to turn the compost, to aerate it. Lee unscrewed the lid of the barrel, revealing a dark mixture inside that smelled slightly of cleaning product.
In the course of weeks or months, billions of microorganisms feed on the carbon and nitrogen in the composting mixture. Dry and brown organic matter provides carbon; green matter provides nitrogen. As the microorganisms process the mixture, they need oxygen, which is usually generated by stirring. Not enough oxygen, and the compost will smell like rotten eggs; too much nitrogen, and the compost will smell like ammonia; a good ratio of elements, and the compost will simply smell like fresh earth.
Lee deposited a small bucket of food scraps into the barrel, sprinkling wood chips (for more carbon) on top. He then poured in a brown liquid from an old detergent bottle—microorganisms. He restored the lid and rotated the barrel a few times. “That’s it,” he said. Then we went out for bubble tea.
During a brief break, I called home. My six-year-old shouted into the phone, “So they’re good at composting—come home now! And bring Pokémon souvenirs!” In my next chat across the globe, my mom said that, when she was a kid, in Tel Aviv, composting was done the old-fashioned way: people went into the street with buckets, gathered horse dung, and spread it in their gardens. She said that we make simple things complicated these days. She said they had bedbugs when she was a kid, too, and it wasn’t a big deal; they just took care of it.
Antonio Reynoso, the chair of the sanitation committee of the New York City Council, told me, “I got my start as an environmental-justice advocate, and even I thought of composting as, like, this nice niche thing you might do in a garden.” Reynoso is thirty-six. He grew up on the south side of Williamsburg, the son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Until recently, his neighborhood received forty per cent of the city’s trash. “Trash goes to predominantly black and brown neighborhoods,” he said. We were in his small office, near City Hall. On a wall hung three maps: of New York’s bike paths, Brooklyn Public Library branch locations, and District Thirty-four, which Reynoso represents. Reynoso was first exposed to trash activism in 1998, when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried to put two more incinerators in his neighborhood, after the closing of the Fresh Kills landfill, on Staten Island. Hispanic activists working in alliance with the Hasidic Jewish community helped quash the plan.
In New York, a million tons of organic waste are deposited in landfills each year. “Yet trash is always on the back burner of climate activism,” Reynoso said, pointing out that trash wasn’t even part of the Green New Deal until July, 2019, when Representative Ilhan Omar added the Zero Waste Act. Mayor de Blasio campaigned on a program of “Zero Waste,” promising to reduce landfill dumping by ninety per cent by 2030, but, in a recent press conference, seven years later, he said both that this is “an urgent, urgent goal” and that “I think what has happened here is that, you know, we have to look at the whole thing from scratch and come back with a plan that will get us there by 2030.” In 2018, de Blasio neglected to fund expansion of the organics-recycling program. The 2020 budget proposed by his administration for the New York City Department of Sanitation’s waste-prevention, reuse, and recycling programs was nine per cent lower than it was for 2019.
Reynoso is working to get mandatory organics recycling passed by the City Council before the end of the year. He believes that he has the support and the votes to get this done. “Some things should be worked out through public discourse, and some things are just a given,” he said. “Organics is one of those things. On environmental justice, you have to be willing to spend political capital.”
The city’s organics-recycling program has so far diverted only a tiny fraction of waste from landfills. Curbside pickup is available for three and a half million New Yorkers, but only a small number take advantage of it. The city’s sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, who grew up and lives in Park Slope, insists that there is enthusiasm for the program. “That some people will haul their food waste half a mile to a drop-off at the farmers’ market tells you something about their commitment,” she told me. I asked if she thought many people were aware of the connection between food waste and climate change. “Not really,” she said. “Not even in Park Slope”—a famously liberal neighborhood, which has had a coöperative organic grocery store since 1973.
Mandatory organics recycling could save money. Sanitation trucks would have waste to pick up throughout the city, as opposed to gathering bits and pieces from participating households. (Organics collection currently averages between one and two tons per truck shift, a fraction of the capacity of ten to twelve tons.) There’s even a small amount of money to be made from selling compost, though for now much of it is given away in the interest of generating enthusiasm and awareness. And the amount of waste that New York sends to landfills—some of which are as far away as South Carolina, all of which are in poor areas—would be reduced.
The D.S.N.Y. spent four hundred and twenty-two million dollars last year to send trash to landfills—about a third of its budget. Making organics recycling mandatory was estimated in a 2016 report by the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscally conservative think tank, to cost somewhere between a hundred and seventy-seven million and two hundred and fifty-one million dollars a year. City Hall had no counter-estimate to offer, but those figures include the onetime costs of updating trucks. “Climate justice is not cheap,” Reynoso said. But, he added, “it is the right thing to do.” The city’s current contracts with composting and biogas facilities can handle a modest two hundred and fifty tons a day. However, Reynoso said, “we could pass mandatory organics recycling and make the goes-into-effect date be tomorrow.”
New Yorkers would need to learn a bit, too. Councilman Reynoso’s district participates in the voluntary organics-recycling program, as does mine. About a third of New Yorkers can sign up to have their organic waste collected from their homes, in brown bins, but many people are unaware of the program. Even in participating districts, only about ten per cent of organic matter is diverted from landfills. I asked a middle-aged man listening to music if he knew what a brown bin nearby was for. “Bones?”


newyorker--2020-03-02--“March 3,” by Eileen Myles

“March 3,” by Eileen Myles

The quick exchange of emails between the former lovers creates a soft hole in the day and the night before .
It snowed but it was supposed to be larger & everything ’ s closed the streets are wet I hear and I won ’ t step into them .
One poem for today but no many little ones .
The coffee slightly altered is good my bare feet in bed ready to work .
I work in the field of dreams where I have met you many times .
I feel closer , to you this morning and probably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because of our notes was flooded with ghosts .
When I was young I liked the emptiness of my home & now like it or not here is this sweet accumulation .
The cameras all that everything I do can ’ t touch the single statement of breeze & loss & quaint beauty things I ’ ve had since I was a kid the secrets of my home .
I feel con demned by this chaotic museum of stuff & yes I desire to photograph it the bowls u liked the cup u @ @ @ @ @ @ @ used to be special & now I carouse in bed w myself in it .
I don ’ t know if this will ever be different and that is the feeling of this .
One empty wall is the least I can do for myself .
Late at night I enjoy the brown pages of a cowboy show teevee on my lap till practically dawn interesting written by a gambler The excellent moments the man barges in and says do you ever think about film .
The poetry of accident haunts like a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fades and a new one .
I begin to write about dying .
THIS story ends .
It begins to be part of the plot and do I love you for your distance from it or could I love you because you are close or your exciting difference so smart .
I love myself .
The squeaky little voice that says in here owning the void and grooving on it .
Voice over you ’ re not so bad and then I begin to work .
My dead mother is around my lover @ @ @ @ @ @ @ calling anyone is that the tub in which I die .

Audio: Read by the author.
The quick
exchange
of emails
between
the former
lovers creates
a soft hole
in the day
and the
night
before. It snowed
but it was
supposed
to be larger &
everything’s
closed the streets
are wet
I hear and I
won’t
step into
them.
One poem
for today
but no
many little
ones. The coffee
slightly
altered
is good
my bare
feet in
bed ready
to work.
I work
in the field
of dreams
where I
have met
you many
times. I feel
closer, to
you this
morning
and probably
last night
when the
doorway
slightly
opened
because
of our
notes
was flooded
with ghosts.
When I was
young
I liked the
emptiness
of my
home &
now like
it or not
here is
this sweet
accumulation.
The cameras
all that
everything
I do can’t
touch
the single
statement
of breeze &
loss & quaint
beauty
things I’ve
had since
I was a
kid
the secrets
of my home.
I feel con
demned
by this
chaotic
museum
of stuff &
yes I
desire
to photograph
it the
bowls u liked
the cup
u touched
& me in a teeshirt
that used
to be special
& now I
carouse in
bed w myself
in it. I don’t
know if
this
will ever
be different
and that
is the
feeling of
this.
I feel like
a tree
the invisible
part of friendship
and drinking
together
and warning.
One empty wall
is the least
I can do
for myself.
Late at night
I enjoy
the brown
pages of a cowboy
show
teevee
on my lap
till practically
dawn
interesting
written
by a gambler
oh I have
so many
shows
one in Florence
one day
you were
taking a shower
I think
I thought
I love
this television
because
it’s become
the way
to love
the road
of becoming
is a screen
belonging
on it in
my dream.
The excellent
moments
the man
barges in
and says
do you ever
think
about
film. The poetry
of accident
haunts
like a circus
tent over
my days
and that
fades
and a new
one. I
begin to
write
about dying.
THIS
story ends.
It begins
to be part
of the plot
and do I
love you
for your
distance
from it
or could
I love you
because
you are
close
or your
exciting
difference
so smart.
I love
myself.
The squeaky
little voice
that says
in here
owning the void
and grooving
on it. Voice
over
you’re not
so bad
and then
I begin
to work.
My dead
mother
is around
my lover
not far
keeping u
here by
not calling
anyone
is that the tub
in which
I die.
Weir-doo
woo woo
woo
what’s that
bird.
because
I don’t
have kids
and this
is such
a blessing.


Buh-Bye, Plastic Bags!

On Sunday , New York ’ s ban on single-use plastic bags went into effect .
Before saying farewell , @ @ @ @ @ archetypes of the form .

On Sunday, New York’s ban on single-use plastic bags went into effect. Before saying farewell, we revisited a few iconic archetypes of the form.


Cartoon Caption Contest

Each week , we provide a cartoon in need of a caption .
You , the reader , submit your @ @ @ @ @ three finalists , and you vote for your favorite .
Anyone age thirteen or older @ @ @ @ @ To read the complete rules , click here .

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit your caption here, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To read the complete rules, click here.
Cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop