newyorker--2020-11-09--The Secret Sounds of “Song Exploder”

The Secret Sounds of “Song Exploder”

For much of the first half of the twentieth century , it was possible for a curious listener to identify each of the constituent parts of a pop song .
A hit such as Frank Sinatra ’ s “ Young at Heart , ” which sold more than a million copies in 1953 , featured recognizable analog components : strings , horns , flute , brushes on a snare drum , Sinatra ’ s seductive , lilting vocal .
Yet by 1955 the advent of multitrack recording , in which the various parts of a song could be captured separately @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a recording was no longer merely the document of a live , synchronous performance .
Auteurist producers such as Brian Wilson and Phil Spector came to think of sound as pliable—any piece of audio could be denatured and reconstructed .
The old way , in which a finite number of fallible people played in a room until they got it right , had been obliterated .
In the past few decades , that sense of pliability has only ballooned .
Technology has evolved so fast and so forcefully that the notion of going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ professionals , seated behind a panel of glass , turn knobs and adjust levers—feels nearly quaint .
Records can be made at home , using software such as Ableton Live or GarageBand , which can then be augmented with any number of plug-ins , expanding the palette of available sounds .
Many of these production techniques were first adopted by hip-hop or electronic artists , but they are now ubiquitous ; this means that trying to determine the origin of any single sound on a modern recording is difficult .
Instrumentation , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , has become opaque .
For fans who favor streaming services , the absence of liner notes , which once offered detailed production and songwriting credits , only exaggerates the mystery .
Is that an actual violin , a synthesizer that sounds like a violin , a sample of a synthesizer that sounds like a violin , or a raccoon playing a kazoo that has been digitally manipulated to sound like a violin ?
In 2014 , the electronic musician Hrishikesh Hirway launched a biweekly podcast , “ Song Exploder , ” that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Each episode sees a guest artist dissect a song he or she has written , recorded , or produced , considering the provenance and punch of its individual components .
The premise might sound vaguely clinical , or even joyless—music , of course , is about more than its parts—but “ Song Exploder , ” which is in its sixth year and has recently been adapted into a Netflix series , is warm , deep , and illuminating .
The show is rooted in Hirway ’ s expansive curiosity about how , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a while , his central question— “ How did you get from nothing to this ?
” —begins to feel applicable to nearly every endeavor we undertake .
At the start of each episode , Hirway delivers a brief introduction in a soft , steady voice , and then mostly disappears .
The choice to edit his own questions out of the show feels egoless—especially in the podcast business , which seems to reward a kind of unabashed garrulousness—and it lends his interviews a rambling , barstool intimacy .
The episodes are short @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and end with Hirway playing the deconstructed song in its entirety .
( For much of 2019 , “ Song Exploder ” was hosted by the musician and songwriter Thao Nguyen , who followed a similar format . )
Though Hirway started out interviewing primarily independent or independent-leaning musicians ( the first year featured the Postal Service , the Microphones , Spoon , and Julia Holter , among others ) , his purview has expanded to include more mainstream acts , including U2 , Lorde , Ghostface Killah , Iggy Pop , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Nine Inch Nails , and the Killers .
One of the more visceral pleasures of “ Song Exploder ” is how it makes plain certain enigmas of music production .
Hirway wrangles control of an artist ’ s digital recording files—often called “ stems ” —and some of the best episodes reveal the earthly source of every single piece of audio on a record .
One entry takes on “ Shook Ones , Pt .
II , ” a 1995 single by the Queens-based Mobb Deep .
The rapper Prodigy , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ died in 2017 , but the remaining member , Havoc , walks Hirway through how he constructed the song in his bedroom , in the Queensbridge projects , using records borrowed from his father and equipment purchased by Prodigy ’ s grandmother .
Havoc extracted the song ’ s beat by pitch-shifting two seconds of a scratched copy of Herbie Hancock ’ s “ Jessica , ” created the bass line by manipulating a single piano note , and took the track ’ s signal sound—a bright , rising , atonal wail that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jones record .
For an interested listener , the episode can feel like briefly putting on a pair of X-ray specs .
Though Hirway has a technician ’ s ear , he is just as deft at distilling the animating impulse behind a piece of music .
His goal isn ’ t merely to demystify production ; he wants to study the idea or feeling that carried an artist through a song ’ s creation .
One of my favorite episodes is from 2017 , when Hirway interviewed the drummer Lars Ulrich and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both of the metal band Metallica , about “ Moth Into Flame , ” a cut from the group ’ s tenth LP , “ Hardwired .
.
.
to Self-Destruct.
” For slightly younger artists , the process of songwriting is often a frantic journey of self-discovery .
But Metallica , which formed in 1981 , has been doing this work for a long time .
In recent years , the band has developed a clear and consistent schedule : drop the kids off at school , and clock in to HQ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ band ’ s professionalism gently deflates the idea of art-making as dramatic—I found the episode gripping .
“ Moth Into Flame ” is an unruly and vertiginous song ; it can make a listener feel as if she were going slightly too fast on a highway off-ramp .
After Hetfield developed the riff during a sound check , Ulrich took it home and began to think about an arrangement .
He wanted the drums to sound especially big , in homage to the metal band Mastodon .
“ I ’ m letting you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ here , ” Ulrich says , laughing .
“ I ’ ve never really talked about this stuff in this detail.
” Hetfield describes the lyrics as a response to the intoxication of fame and the brutality of life on the road .
For him , songwriting is work , but it is also a deliberate and necessary process , and has been for forty years .
“ This saves my life daily , ” he says .
“ This is therapy for me .
We ’ re writing these songs because we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ something of a motif in the series .
For many artists , writing music is a way of seeing , understanding , and metabolizing their innermost desires .
“ I ’ ve always known what I ’ m interested in and what I ’ m feeling because of the way my music sounds , ” the singer and songwriter Maggie Rogers says , in an episode focussed on her song “ Alaska.
” In the current season , the pop star Selena Gomez speaks about how her single “ Lose You to Love @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her heartbreak after a wildly publicized split from Justin Bieber .
“ Honestly , I ’ m exhausted , but I just want to tell the truth .
I want to let go of this feeling that I had , ” Gomez said .
Hirway is considerably more visible on the Netflix adaptation than he is on the podcast , but the lightness of his touch—he is precise , informed , and gentle—seems to invite these sorts of confession .
The television show unpacks four songs : Alicia Keys ’ s “ Three @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Losing My Religion , ” Lin-Manuel Miranda ’ s “ Wait for It , ” and “ LA , ” by the R. & B. singer Ty Dolla $ ign , who was born Tyrone Griffin , Jr. , in 1982 .
“ This is intense , ” Griffin says at the start of his episode , taking a seat across from Hirway .
Griffin ’ s début album , “ Free TC , ” was released in 2015 ; he named the record after his brother , who is serving a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first-degree murder , and who Griffin believes was unjustly incarcerated .
“ LA , ” which opens the album , is glossy but mournful , and TC ’ s voice appears toward the end of the song .
The track also features guest performances by Kendrick Lamar , Brandy , and James Fauntleroy , and prominent use of a talk box , a device that allows a musician to “ talk ” through her instrument , by singing or speaking into a plastic tube .
( “ One of the greatest instruments ever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Griffin nervously smokes a cigarette , and listening to him explain each element of the song—the bass , which was inspired by his father ’ s funk band , Lakeside ; the sparsely deployed strings , which were arranged and conducted by Benjamin Wright , the former musical director for Aretha Franklin—is revelatory .
“ Songs to me are all about space , different explosions at different times , ” he says .
In the episode about “ Wait for It , ” from the musical “ Hamilton , ” Lin-Manuel Miranda clarifies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Morris-Jumel Mansion in New York City ’ s Washington Heights neighborhood .
The house was built in 1765 , for the British colonel Roger Morris and his wife , Mary , but was later commandeered by George Washington ; in 1810 , Stephen Jumel , a French wine merchant , moved in with his wife , Eliza .
After Jumel died , in 1832 , Eliza married Aaron Burr .
“ Wait for It ” is written from Burr ’ s woeful point of view , and it laments Alexander Hamilton ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ m not standing still , I am lying in wait , ” Burr seethes . )
When Miranda was working on the song , he would visit the mansion , loiter in Burr ’ s bedroom , and write .
Yet inspiration does not always arrive when we are ready to receive it .
Miranda figured out the chorus to “ Wait for It ” not at Burr ’ s mansion but while walking to a party in Williamsburg , Brooklyn .
“ I was listening to the loop , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same time , ” he recalls .
Hirway asks Miranda if he still has the voice memo .
We watch Miranda ’ s face as he plays it back .
The recording is crude , hurried , and breathless .
As he listens , Miranda appears embarrassed , proud , and , briefly , bewildered .
The memo works as a reminder that songs are built by experts , but still , to some small and ineffable extent , divined .
♦

For much of the first half of the twentieth century, it was possible for a curious listener to identify each of the constituent parts of a pop song. A hit such as Frank Sinatra’s “Young at Heart,” which sold more than a million copies in 1953, featured recognizable analog components: strings, horns, flute, brushes on a snare drum, Sinatra’s seductive, lilting vocal. Yet by 1955 the advent of multitrack recording, in which the various parts of a song could be captured separately and then braided together, meant that a recording was no longer merely the document of a live, synchronous performance. Auteurist producers such as Brian Wilson and Phil Spector came to think of sound as pliable—any piece of audio could be denatured and reconstructed. The old way, in which a finite number of fallible people played in a room until they got it right, had been obliterated.
In the past few decades, that sense of pliability has only ballooned. Technology has evolved so fast and so forcefully that the notion of going into a studio—a room in which trained professionals, seated behind a panel of glass, turn knobs and adjust levers—feels nearly quaint. Records can be made at home, using software such as Ableton Live or GarageBand, which can then be augmented with any number of plug-ins, expanding the palette of available sounds. Many of these production techniques were first adopted by hip-hop or electronic artists, but they are now ubiquitous; this means that trying to determine the origin of any single sound on a modern recording is difficult. Instrumentation, in the most general sense of the word, has become opaque. For fans who favor streaming services, the absence of liner notes, which once offered detailed production and songwriting credits, only exaggerates the mystery. Is that an actual violin, a synthesizer that sounds like a violin, a sample of a synthesizer that sounds like a violin, or a raccoon playing a kazoo that has been digitally manipulated to sound like a violin?
In 2014, the electronic musician Hrishikesh Hirway launched a biweekly podcast, “Song Exploder,” that works as a tonic for such confusion. Each episode sees a guest artist dissect a song he or she has written, recorded, or produced, considering the provenance and punch of its individual components. The premise might sound vaguely clinical, or even joyless—music, of course, is about more than its parts—but “Song Exploder,” which is in its sixth year and has recently been adapted into a Netflix series, is warm, deep, and illuminating. The show is rooted in Hirway’s expansive curiosity about how, exactly, art is made. After a while, his central question—“How did you get from nothing to this?”—begins to feel applicable to nearly every endeavor we undertake.
At the start of each episode, Hirway delivers a brief introduction in a soft, steady voice, and then mostly disappears. The choice to edit his own questions out of the show feels egoless—especially in the podcast business, which seems to reward a kind of unabashed garrulousness—and it lends his interviews a rambling, barstool intimacy. The episodes are short, often between fifteen and twenty minutes, and end with Hirway playing the deconstructed song in its entirety. (For much of 2019, “Song Exploder” was hosted by the musician and songwriter Thao Nguyen, who followed a similar format.) Though Hirway started out interviewing primarily independent or independent-leaning musicians (the first year featured the Postal Service, the Microphones, Spoon, and Julia Holter, among others), his purview has expanded to include more mainstream acts, including U2, Lorde, Ghostface Killah, Iggy Pop, the Roots, Björk, Norah Jones, Nine Inch Nails, and the Killers.
One of the more visceral pleasures of “Song Exploder” is how it makes plain certain enigmas of music production. Hirway wrangles control of an artist’s digital recording files—often called “stems”—and some of the best episodes reveal the earthly source of every single piece of audio on a record. One entry takes on “Shook Ones, Pt. II,” a 1995 single by the Queens-based Mobb Deep. The rapper Prodigy, who made up half of the duo, died in 2017, but the remaining member, Havoc, walks Hirway through how he constructed the song in his bedroom, in the Queensbridge projects, using records borrowed from his father and equipment purchased by Prodigy’s grandmother. Havoc extracted the song’s beat by pitch-shifting two seconds of a scratched copy of Herbie Hancock’s “Jessica,” created the bass line by manipulating a single piano note, and took the track’s signal sound—a bright, rising, atonal wail that appears before the chorus—from an old Quincy Jones record. For an interested listener, the episode can feel like briefly putting on a pair of X-ray specs.
Though Hirway has a technician’s ear, he is just as deft at distilling the animating impulse behind a piece of music. His goal isn’t merely to demystify production; he wants to study the idea or feeling that carried an artist through a song’s creation. One of my favorite episodes is from 2017, when Hirway interviewed the drummer Lars Ulrich and the singer and guitarist James Hetfield, both of the metal band Metallica, about “Moth Into Flame,” a cut from the group’s tenth LP, “Hardwired . . . to Self-Destruct.” For slightly younger artists, the process of songwriting is often a frantic journey of self-discovery. But Metallica, which formed in 1981, has been doing this work for a long time. In recent years, the band has developed a clear and consistent schedule: drop the kids off at school, and clock in to HQ before 9 A.M. Perhaps because of this—the band’s professionalism gently deflates the idea of art-making as dramatic—I found the episode gripping. “Moth Into Flame” is an unruly and vertiginous song; it can make a listener feel as if she were going slightly too fast on a highway off-ramp. After Hetfield developed the riff during a sound check, Ulrich took it home and began to think about an arrangement. He wanted the drums to sound especially big, in homage to the metal band Mastodon. “I’m letting you in on a lot of trade secrets here,” Ulrich says, laughing. “I’ve never really talked about this stuff in this detail.” Hetfield describes the lyrics as a response to the intoxication of fame and the brutality of life on the road. For him, songwriting is work, but it is also a deliberate and necessary process, and has been for forty years. “This saves my life daily,” he says. “This is therapy for me. We’re writing these songs because we need them.”
The therapeutic impulse is something of a motif in the series. For many artists, writing music is a way of seeing, understanding, and metabolizing their innermost desires. “I’ve always known what I’m interested in and what I’m feeling because of the way my music sounds,” the singer and songwriter Maggie Rogers says, in an episode focussed on her song “Alaska.” In the current season, the pop star Selena Gomez speaks about how her single “Lose You to Love Me” was an attempt to exorcise her heartbreak after a wildly publicized split from Justin Bieber. “Honestly, I’m exhausted, but I just want to tell the truth. I want to let go of this feeling that I had,” Gomez said.
Hirway is considerably more visible on the Netflix adaptation than he is on the podcast, but the lightness of his touch—he is precise, informed, and gentle—seems to invite these sorts of confession. The television show unpacks four songs: Alicia Keys’s “Three Hour Drive,” R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Wait for It,” and “LA,” by the R. & B. singer Ty Dolla $ign, who was born Tyrone Griffin, Jr., in 1982. “This is intense,” Griffin says at the start of his episode, taking a seat across from Hirway. Griffin’s début album, “Free TC,” was released in 2015; he named the record after his brother, who is serving a sentence of sixty-seven years to life for first-degree murder, and who Griffin believes was unjustly incarcerated. “LA,” which opens the album, is glossy but mournful, and TC’s voice appears toward the end of the song. The track also features guest performances by Kendrick Lamar, Brandy, and James Fauntleroy, and prominent use of a talk box, a device that allows a musician to “talk” through her instrument, by singing or speaking into a plastic tube. (“One of the greatest instruments ever created,” Griffin declares.) Griffin nervously smokes a cigarette, and listening to him explain each element of the song—the bass, which was inspired by his father’s funk band, Lakeside; the sparsely deployed strings, which were arranged and conducted by Benjamin Wright, the former musical director for Aretha Franklin—is revelatory. “Songs to me are all about space, different explosions at different times,” he says.
In the episode about “Wait for It,” from the musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda clarifies his process by walking Hirway around the Morris-Jumel Mansion in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood. The house was built in 1765, for the British colonel Roger Morris and his wife, Mary, but was later commandeered by George Washington; in 1810, Stephen Jumel, a French wine merchant, moved in with his wife, Eliza. After Jumel died, in 1832, Eliza married Aaron Burr. “Wait for It” is written from Burr’s woeful point of view, and it laments Alexander Hamilton’s swift success in politics. (“I’m not standing still, I am lying in wait,” Burr seethes.) When Miranda was working on the song, he would visit the mansion, loiter in Burr’s bedroom, and write.
Yet inspiration does not always arrive when we are ready to receive it. Miranda figured out the chorus to “Wait for It” not at Burr’s mansion but while walking to a party in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I was listening to the loop, and recording an a-cappella voice memo at the same time,” he recalls. Hirway asks Miranda if he still has the voice memo. We watch Miranda’s face as he plays it back. The recording is crude, hurried, and breathless. As he listens, Miranda appears embarrassed, proud, and, briefly, bewildered. The memo works as a reminder that songs are built by experts, but still, to some small and ineffable extent, divined. ♦


newyorker--2020-11-09--Shirley Hazzard and the Art of Outsized Intimacy

Sophie struggles against their claustrophobic misery .
As her mind gyres outward ( “ All around them , across the countryside , men and women went about their work or sat down to their lunch , talked and laughed—or wept , as they wept now ” ) , she tries to “ fit this love into some immense , annihilating context of human experience , assailing it with her sense of proportion.
” Tancredi , wryly credited with being the one “ who knew more about proportion , ” lifts his head .
“ What could be worse than this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What could be worse ?
” The chapter ends soon afterward , and the next one opens half a year later , during a winter of record-breaking freezes and deaths .
These contrasts in scale—individual and historical , intimate and epic—occur throughout the novels of Shirley Hazzard , whose writing , like her name , tends to begin demurely enough , all weak tea and lace curtains , but grows quietly comic , and then abruptly calamitous .
Her characters know poetry by heart , believe in honor , and speak in epigrams @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , by plane crashes and shipwrecks , fatal battles , and grave illnesses .
They travel widely and suffer emotional devastation .
Hazzard , who died in 2016 , at the age of eighty-five , once described her reading life as one of “ impassioned humility.
” This is the effect of her books , too , in which vast , inhuman forces circumscribe her characters ’ most personal experiences .
She was , as she told the Paris Review , skeptical of fiction that was “ hard , cool , indifferent ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ an intensification of life , ” not merely a skillful recapitulation of it .
“ Woollahra Road , ” which closely heels to the consciousness of a small Depression-era Australian child , was , in 1961 , the first story of Hazzard ’ s that the magazine published .
It now appears , along with twenty-seven others , in “ Collected Stories ” ( Farrar , Straus & Giroux ) , edited by Brigitta Olubas , a literary scholar from the University of New South Wales who has edited a collection of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work on a biography .
The stories , most of which were written in the nineteen-sixties , are often set in exotic locations—the Gulf of Corinth , South China , Florence—and are filled with short sentences of tossed-off-sounding sophistication : “ The War Crimes people gave parties that lasted all night ” ; “ The Danish couple and the Greek guide speak French among themselves.
” In “ The Picnic , ” from 1962 , Hazzard came upon a theme that preoccupied her for a lifetime : the way love can be at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of our minds , permanent .
Nettie and Clem—distant relatives by marriage , illicit lovers long ago—sit in awkward silence on a hillside .
The story contains hardly any dialogue .
It is the first time they have seen each other in a decade .
Clem takes note of Nettie ’ s inappropriate dress , which she has ( predictably , he thinks ) stained .
Nettie observes Clem ’ s faded face and dreary caution .
Their private thoughts construct a history of their relationship and reveal what they both deny to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ each other ’ s very cognition ; that each still intrudes on the other ’ s thoughts almost every day ; that they are themselves , in some ways , because of each other .
Although they have not been together in years , they have , in this sense , never quite been apart .
Love , which takes place in the mind , is eternal , “ the only state ” in which “ all one ’ s capacities ” are engaged .
The entire story spans just a few minutes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we see Hazzard practicing the floor routines of her later novels , sticking all the landings if not always having yet worked out the full choreography .
The erudite similes and lethally precise adjectives are there , as are the astute observations about domestic phenomena .
The sentences of shocking wisdom appear freakishly often .
The intelligence is relentless .
Hazzardians will read “ Collected Stories ” with impatient pleasure , reminded from the first page that , once they are through , they can start rereading the novels .
Her early education @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its young charges with poetry , but it soon became impossible to ignore the conflagration that had overtaken Europe and the Pacific .
Already Hazzard was familiar with the wounded veterans of the Great War who hobbled down the streets of Sydney , and , as a child , she had once been evacuated to the countryside with her fellow-students .
“ I had been raised in the climate of war , ” she wrote half a century later , having by then published five books of fiction absolutely rife with combat imagery @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrived there at the age of sixteen , less than two years after the attack .
She saw a city where ( as a character in one of her novels puts it ) “ the crust of the earth had been lifted off only to reveal more man-made horrors beneath.
” The family was en route to Hong Kong , where Hazzard ’ s father had accepted a diplomatic post .
Once there , having quit school , she found a job working for British intelligence ; on her time off , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reverence for tradition , and had a love affair with a British Army officer .
After her sister contracted tuberculosis , the family relocated to New Zealand .
Hazzard said that the move was “ a sort of death.
” Heartbroken in Wellington , she studied Italian and read Leopardi .
The family moved again , in 1951 , to New York City , where Hazzard took an underpaid secretarial job in the “ dungeons ” of the United Nations , a hellish experience on which she drew heavily in “ People in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ linked satirical stories published in 1967 .
Though her disappointment in the institution , with its squandering of talent and its misplaced ideals , is the subject of two nonfiction books of hers , “ People in Glass Houses ” conjures the dark comedy of a place where co-workers banter on rugs donated by the Republic of Panama and officials carry on about freedom as though it were “ some extinct creature being pickled in a jar of spirits.
” Like one of her fictional U.N. employees , Hazzard has said that she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the Suez Crisis , when , at the age of twenty-five , she was sent to Naples for a year .
In a “ blitzed town ” where the streets had been littered with both shrapnel and Vesuvian ash , Hazzard learned to take ceremony seriously and to live amid history .
In 1963 , the year that “ Cliffs of Fall , ” her first story collection , appeared , she married Francis Steegmuller , the recently widowed Flaubert scholar .
The couple settled in Manhattan but spent half of every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Graham Greene , after Hazzard met the novelist in a café and helpfully supplied him with the last line of a Robert Browning poem he was struggling to remember .
( Their friendship was the subject of Hazzard ’ s “ Greene on Capri , ” a short memoir , published in 2000 and filled with sentences like “ We were speaking of Dryden.
” ) By the decade ’ s end , she had published her first two novels , “ The Evening of the Holiday ” ( 1966 ) and “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) .
Delightfully outmoded and set in Italy—whose summer sky , in a lapse of cosmic good taste , is colored “ an injudicious paint-box azure ” —both are about self-knowledge , love , and epicurean errands .
( Hazzard bristled at comparisons to Henry James , whose “ greatness ” she conceded only with reservations . )
Still , like a Jamesian character , she felt herself , in Italy , to be “ living more completely among the scenes and sentiments of a humanism the New World could not provide ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ themselves all around her .
It was the country ’ s constant “ admixture of immediacy and continuity , of the long perspective and the intensely personal ” that , in the coming decades , bloomed in each of her books .
Though Hazzard ’ s politics were left-leaning , her self-presentation was decidedly Old World—starched shirts , a closet full of Chanel tweeds .
In an act of treasonous grooming , she wore her hair pinned up in a bouffant through the late nineteen-sixties and seventies .
She spoke in a muted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of all the English-speaking countries in which she had lived .
“ If a highly intelligent and principled moth were able to talk , ” the art critic John Russell once said about Hazzard , “ that is what she would sound like.
” A young friend lovingly characterized her as “ preposterous , though not absurd , ” and recalled her speaking “ in full , long paragraphs without line breaks.
” With far-flung origins , an itinerant coming of age , and a husband a quarter century her senior , Hazzard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her contemporaries .
She disliked television and , later , literary theory and personal computers .
Her fiction , which is about straight , white , well-read expatriates who speak to one another in mannered , idea-dense dialogue , was old-fashioned even at the time ( “ Victorian , ” per the book reviews ) .
Yet , if the turbulence of privileged spheres feels familiar , the intensity and precision of her focus does not .
“ Scruple was a tiny measure , used perhaps by a jeweler or a chemist , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Great Fire ” ( 2003 ) , Hazzard ’ s final and most autobiographical novel .
Leith , a wounded British soldier travelling through postwar Asia , has fallen in love with the much younger Helen Driscoll , an Australian teen-ager living in occupied Japan : “ He had never dealt , in love or otherwise , in such minute quantities.
” These are the quantities—subjective , invisible to the naked eye—with which Hazzard most often deals .
The intellectual thrill of her work arises from her ability to describe the small , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ consider irreducible .
A character in her 1964 story “ Comfort ” notes that “ not kind ” was a more damning characterization of a person than “ cruel , ” as it “ implied having understood the principle of kindness and having rejected it.
” Confidence , another observes in “ The Party , ” published two years earlier , is “ one of those things we try to instill into others and then hasten to dispel as soon as it puts in an appearance.
” Then , the corrosive rejoinder : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Venus ” opens , like a fairy tale , in the middle of a storm .
Ted Tice , a young man carrying a decaying suitcase , appears at the door of his future employer , an arrogant astronomer of wealth and stature .
At the astronomer ’ s lavish English country home , Ted meets Grace and Caroline Bell , two beautiful orphaned sisters—one fair , one dark—who have left their far-off kingdom of Australia in search of a new life in a more civilized world .
Grace , the fair @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s son , a seething civil servant named Christian Thrale .
Ted falls in love with the dark sister , Caroline , who herself is in love with Paul Ivory , a manipulative playwright engaged to an aristocrat from a nearby manor .
From this cut-diamond opening , the rest of the novel ’ s plot flickers and refracts .
Caroline , known as Caro , has an affair with Paul and , when it ends , is overtaken by a desperate depression .
She is rescued by a gallant American of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Christian and Grace temporarily fall in love with other people .
The years pass , Ted rises to professional prominence and gets married himself .
Still , he loves Caro , who has become for him a legend .
And then a rival dies , a lifelong love is returned .
When calamity strikes , we realize it was always to be so—that breadcrumbs , dropped for years , have made a trail leading straight to tragedy .

Toward the end of Shirley Hazzard’s first novel, “The Evening of the Holiday” (1966), a young woman and a man twice her age sit in a parked car in Tuscany, near the ruins of a villa. Sophie is from England, in Italy on holiday. Tancredi is a Sicilian architect who is separated from his wife. They have spent the summer in a stately courtship, and Sophie has mostly managed to not think explicitly about its end. But the time has come for her to return home. There is no immediate obligation calling her back, but she is determined to go.
Sophie struggles against their claustrophobic misery. As her mind gyres outward (“All around them, across the countryside, men and women went about their work or sat down to their lunch, talked and laughed—or wept, as they wept now”), she tries to “fit this love into some immense, annihilating context of human experience, assailing it with her sense of proportion.” Tancredi, wryly credited with being the one “who knew more about proportion,” lifts his head. “What could be worse than this?” he asks Sophie. “What could be worse?” The chapter ends soon afterward, and the next one opens half a year later, during a winter of record-breaking freezes and deaths.
These contrasts in scale—individual and historical, intimate and epic—occur throughout the novels of Shirley Hazzard, whose writing, like her name, tends to begin demurely enough, all weak tea and lace curtains, but grows quietly comic, and then abruptly calamitous. Her characters know poetry by heart, believe in honor, and speak in epigrams. Their biographies are revised, drastically, by plane crashes and shipwrecks, fatal battles, and grave illnesses. They travel widely and suffer emotional devastation.
Hazzard, who died in 2016, at the age of eighty-five, once described her reading life as one of “impassioned humility.” This is the effect of her books, too, in which vast, inhuman forces circumscribe her characters’ most personal experiences. She was, as she told the Paris Review, skeptical of fiction that was “hard, cool, indifferent”; she thought that literature should be “an intensification of life,” not merely a skillful recapitulation of it.
Hazzard was in her late twenties when she completed her first short story. She mailed her only copy to this magazine from Tuscany, where she was living in a vineyard-surrounded villa with a family of anti-Fascists. It was one of roughly thirty thousand unsolicited manuscripts that The New Yorker received annually at the time, but William Maxwell, the fiction editor, pulled it out of the slush pile and instructed Hazzard to send more.
“Woollahra Road,” which closely heels to the consciousness of a small Depression-era Australian child, was, in 1961, the first story of Hazzard’s that the magazine published. It now appears, along with twenty-seven others, in “Collected Stories” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), edited by Brigitta Olubas, a literary scholar from the University of New South Wales who has edited a collection of academic essays on Hazzard and is at work on a biography. The stories, most of which were written in the nineteen-sixties, are often set in exotic locations—the Gulf of Corinth, South China, Florence—and are filled with short sentences of tossed-off-sounding sophistication: “The War Crimes people gave parties that lasted all night”; “The Danish couple and the Greek guide speak French among themselves.”
In “The Picnic,” from 1962, Hazzard came upon a theme that preoccupied her for a lifetime: the way love can be at once perishable and, in its reshaping of our minds, permanent. Nettie and Clem—distant relatives by marriage, illicit lovers long ago—sit in awkward silence on a hillside. The story contains hardly any dialogue. It is the first time they have seen each other in a decade. Clem takes note of Nettie’s inappropriate dress, which she has (predictably, he thinks) stained. Nettie observes Clem’s faded face and dreary caution. Their private thoughts construct a history of their relationship and reveal what they both deny to themselves: that they have lastingly altered each other’s very cognition; that each still intrudes on the other’s thoughts almost every day; that they are themselves, in some ways, because of each other. Although they have not been together in years, they have, in this sense, never quite been apart. Love, which takes place in the mind, is eternal, “the only state” in which “all one’s capacities” are engaged. The entire story spans just a few minutes.
In “Collected Stories,” we see Hazzard practicing the floor routines of her later novels, sticking all the landings if not always having yet worked out the full choreography. The erudite similes and lethally precise adjectives are there, as are the astute observations about domestic phenomena. The sentences of shocking wisdom appear freakishly often. The intelligence is relentless. Hazzardians will read “Collected Stories” with impatient pleasure, reminded from the first page that, once they are through, they can start rereading the novels.
The globe-trotting cosmopolitanism of Hazzard’s own life emerged out of a childhood in what she described as “a remote, philistine country.” Growing up in Sydney, Australia, with a bipolar mother and an alcoholic father, Hazzard yearned for the authority of England, with its smoking chimneys, hedgerows, and correctly timed seasons. When it was winter in Australia, it was summer everywhere that seemed to count. “Literature had not simply made these things true,” she writes in “The Transit of Venus,” her 1980 masterpiece. “It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.”
Her early education was conducted at a school that primed its young charges with poetry, but it soon became impossible to ignore the conflagration that had overtaken Europe and the Pacific. Already Hazzard was familiar with the wounded veterans of the Great War who hobbled down the streets of Sydney, and, as a child, she had once been evacuated to the countryside with her fellow-students. “I had been raised in the climate of war,” she wrote half a century later, having by then published five books of fiction absolutely rife with combat imagery.
Hiroshima was a wasteland when Hazzard arrived there at the age of sixteen, less than two years after the attack. She saw a city where (as a character in one of her novels puts it) “the crust of the earth had been lifted off only to reveal more man-made horrors beneath.” The family was en route to Hong Kong, where Hazzard’s father had accepted a diplomatic post. Once there, having quit school, she found a job working for British intelligence; on her time off, she read literature with an autodidact’s reverence for tradition, and had a love affair with a British Army officer. After her sister contracted tuberculosis, the family relocated to New Zealand. Hazzard said that the move was “a sort of death.” Heartbroken in Wellington, she studied Italian and read Leopardi.
The family moved again, in 1951, to New York City, where Hazzard took an underpaid secretarial job in the “dungeons” of the United Nations, a hellish experience on which she drew heavily in “People in Glass Houses,” a collection of linked satirical stories published in 1967. Though her disappointment in the institution, with its squandering of talent and its misplaced ideals, is the subject of two nonfiction books of hers, “People in Glass Houses” conjures the dark comedy of a place where co-workers banter on rugs donated by the Republic of Panama and officials carry on about freedom as though it were “some extinct creature being pickled in a jar of spirits.”
Like one of her fictional U.N. employees, Hazzard has said that she was granted a “miraculous” reprieve by the Suez Crisis, when, at the age of twenty-five, she was sent to Naples for a year. In a “blitzed town” where the streets had been littered with both shrapnel and Vesuvian ash, Hazzard learned to take ceremony seriously and to live amid history. In 1963, the year that “Cliffs of Fall,” her first story collection, appeared, she married Francis Steegmuller, the recently widowed Flaubert scholar. The couple settled in Manhattan but spent half of every year in Capri. There they befriended Graham Greene, after Hazzard met the novelist in a café and helpfully supplied him with the last line of a Robert Browning poem he was struggling to remember. (Their friendship was the subject of Hazzard’s “Greene on Capri,” a short memoir, published in 2000 and filled with sentences like “We were speaking of Dryden.”)
By the decade’s end, she had published her first two novels, “The Evening of the Holiday” (1966) and “The Bay of Noon” (1970). Delightfully outmoded and set in Italy—whose summer sky, in a lapse of cosmic good taste, is colored “an injudicious paint-box azure”—both are about self-knowledge, love, and epicurean errands. (Hazzard bristled at comparisons to Henry James, whose “greatness” she conceded only with reservations.) Still, like a Jamesian character, she felt herself, in Italy, to be “living more completely among the scenes and sentiments of a humanism the New World could not provide”; centuries seemed to collapse in on themselves all around her. It was the country’s constant “admixture of immediacy and continuity, of the long perspective and the intensely personal” that, in the coming decades, bloomed in each of her books.


newyorker--2020-11-09--Our Love-Hate Relationship with Gimmicks

The word “ gimmick ” is believed to come from “ gimac , ” an anagram of “ magic.
” The word was likely first used by magicians , gamblers , and swindlers in the nineteen-twenties to refer to the props they wielded to attract , and to misdirect , attention—and sometimes , according to “ The Wise-Crack Dictionary , ” from 1926 , to turn “ a fair game crooked.
” From such duplicitous beginnings , the idea of gimmickry soon spread .
In Vladimir Nabokov ’ s novel “ Invitation to a Beheading , ” from 1935 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ counting the hours to his execution by describing the “ marvelous gimmicks ” of her childhood .
The most shocking , she explains , was a trick mirror .
When “ shapeless , mottled , pockmarked , knobby things ” were placed in front of the mirror , it would reflect perfectly sensible forms : flowers , fields , ships , people .
When confronted with a human face or hand , the mirror would reflect a jumble of broken images .
As the son listens to his mother describe her gimmick , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and pity , “ as if something real , unquestionable ( in this world , where everything was subject to question ) , had passed through , as if a corner of this horrible life had curled up , and there was a glimpse of the lining.
” Behind the mirror lurks something monstrous—an idea of art as device , an object whose representational powers can distort and devalue just as easily as they can estrange and enchant .
Trick mirrors are gimmicks , but they are also metaphors for how gimmicks work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In “ A Visit from the Goon Squad , ” Egan transforms a clunky corporate technology into an ingenious storytelling technique by embedding it in the older technology of the novel .
Seen in this context , the PowerPoint ’ s history as a management tool begins to vanish behind the story of a young girl ’ s life—the novelist ’ s version of the magician ’ s final act , when he folds his assistant in a trunk and makes her disappear .
Teetering between novelty and banality , Egan ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wonder out of a crude communication method .
Yet its single-use success—no other writer could get away with repeating her trick—reminds us that the literary marketplace , as Theodor Adorno once observed of the art world , favors “ work with a ‘ personal touch , ’ or more bluntly , a gimmick.
” The seductive wonders of Nabokov ’ s mirror or Egan ’ s PowerPoint are harder to find in the gimmicks of the present .
Recent headlines offer up a wide range of gimmicks rushed into production to contain the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , antiviral cars ) , as well as products and ideas whose sudden obsolescence ( “ fun ” workplaces , airline miles ) reveals that they were gimmicks all along .
Donald Trump ’ s threat to veto the National Defense Authorization Act , in order to stop Confederate names being removed from military bases ; Kanye West ’ s announcement of his Presidential run ; and Amazon ’ s new surveillance drone , the Ring Always Home Cam , have attracted scorn as “ gimmicks ” —promotional shticks , dangerous stunts .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ a literary technique also the word used to describe the buffoonery , the cruelty and carelessness , of contemporary political and economic life ?
What is in a word as minor as “ gimmick ” ?
For Sianne Ngai , a professor of English at the University of Chicago and the author of “ Theory of the Gimmick ” ( Harvard ) , the answer is : everything , or at least everything to do with the art consumed and produced under capitalism .
One of the most original literary scholars at work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of unravelling the social and political histories that shape our aesthetic judgments ( “ How beautiful !
How hideous !
” ) of novels , films , and photographs , as well as of show tunes and YouTube videos , bath toys and smiley faces .
Her work draws attention to the public dimensions of apparently private reactions to art , and to the world in which these aesthetic experiences arise—a “ capitalist lifeworld , ” she writes , where art is increasingly trivial and artifice reigns supreme , where fun and fright @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alienating magic as Nabokov ’ s mirror .
Although Ngai ’ s books are conceptually and philosophically dense , their appeal comes from how they tap into our ordinary use of language .
Unless I collect art , or live in a many-windowed house at the edge of a westerly peninsula , where the sea is gilded by the sun and silvered by the moon , I am unlikely to have regular encounters with things I would call “ beautiful ” or “ sublime , ” and I may well find the rush @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But not a day goes by when I do not call something—my son ’ s stuffed animals , a dress , a poem by Gertrude Stein— “ cute , ” or a novel or an essay “ interesting.
” And I can ’ t count the number of times I ’ ve called a kitchen gizmo my husband swears we really , really need ( but we really , really don ’ t ) or a colleague ’ s online persona “ gimmicky.
” “ Theory of the Gimmick ” finds in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ duelling forces of aesthetic attraction and repulsion that shape all Ngai ’ s work .
“ ‘ You want me , ’ the gimmick outrageously says , ” she writes .
“ It is never entirely wrong.
” As with all aesthetic judgments , calling something a gimmick begins simply , with a feeling of pleasure or displeasure , or some uncertain mingling of the two .
Consider the pandemic-era robot chef : behind its flashiness and the obvious expense of producing it , behind the hypnotic slicing and dicing of its hands @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doubt it will underperform , cooking meals only as well as a Roomba cleans a house .
No doubt it will occasion gruesome comic mishaps—say , if the cat tries riding it .
None of this needs to be explained ; I know a gimmick when I see one .
My judgment is elicited by my perception of what Ngai identifies as the gimmick ’ s defining feature : “ dubious yet attractive promises about the saving of time , the reduction of labor , and the expansion of value.
” Although my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ response , it also demands agreement or invites confrontation , and more brazenly so than other judgments .
Should a fan of robot chefs and Roombas question why I harbor such unwarranted suspicions about them , I will feel compelled to convince him that my suspicions ought to be felt universally .
But I will also delight in a newfound sense of superiority , my belief that only I am discerning enough to see that these devices are overvalued , too good to be true .
Every gimmick , Ngai tells us , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , there must be a person , or an entire market society , who will affirm the value of what the skeptic judges to be—in the words of Ron Padgett ’ s poem “ Gimmicks ” — “ cheap , tricky , fast , without substance , even immoral.
” But when Marx accompanies Moneybags into “ the hidden abode of production , ” he draws back the glittering green curtain on wage and profit , exposing how value is created : the exploitation of labor .
Though Moneybags requires his worker to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ earn his wage , the worker needs only six of those hours to produce his means of subsistence : the daily cost of the food , clothing , and housing he needs to replenish his “ muscle , nerve , brain ” and reproduce his labor-power .
In the six hours he works beyond that , “ he creates no value for himself , ” Marx writes .
“ He creates surplus-value which , for the capitalist , has all the charms of a creation out of nothing.
” The wage makes all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if it were compensated labor , when , in fact , half of it is not .
Cloaked by the “ magic and necromancy ” of money , capital ’ s “ trick ” is its command of unpaid labor and time to create value .
Behind the appealing illusion of free , happy exchange sits a hollow and untrustworthy reality , a gimmick .
Leaning long and hard on Marx , Ngai argues that the capitalist ’ s boundless quest to increase surplus labor prompts him to find new ways of enhancing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the magic of machinery , ” Marx writes—not just one machine but a system of machines , “ a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories , and whose demon power .
.
.
at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.
” These contrivances intensify capital ’ s gimmick by increasing the efficiency of labor-power , eking out more work from the same twelve-hour day .
Yet intensifying labor also makes it redundant—the same number of laborers can , with less work , convert an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The devices designed to make capitalism ’ s trick slicker contain the seeds of the contradiction that drives it to crisis : they also eliminate labor , and along with it the surplus-value on which capital depends .
According to Ngai , calling something a gimmick indicates our discomfort with capitalism ’ s sneaky distortion of the relationship between value , labor , and time .
The gimmick is both an aesthetic and an economic judgment .
Think back to Egan ’ s PowerPoint .
Compared with the intricacy of the rest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like a mechanical shortcut—what Ngai would call a “ labor-saving trick , ” and what a critic or a creative-writing professor might describe as “ unearned.
” At the same time , the PowerPoint appears to be working too hard to get our attention .
The ambivalence about whether the PowerPoint is , as the cliché goes , working hard or hardly working becomes even more telling when we learn that its design was outsourced to an unpaid worker : Egan ’ s sister , a consultant , who , as Egan reveals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chapter for me because I couldn ’ t seem to crunch the numbers competently.
” The female family member who volunteers her labor recalls Rosey , the robot maid in “ The Jetsons , ” perennially unpaid and verging on obsolescence , as well as the trio of strippers from the Broadway show “ Gypsy , ” who , as Ngai reminds us , sing “ You Got ta Get a Gimmick.
” Why do gimmicks so often feature a woman performing undervalued labor ?
In a memorable moment in James Joyce ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recalls suggesting to his former boss , a stationer , that he could drum up business by placing in front of his store “ a transparent show cart with two smart girls inside writing .
.
.
.
Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once .
Everyone dying to know what she ’ s writing.
” Bloom ’ s gimmick grabs attention by conflating sex with intellectual labor and , in the process , devaluing both .
The smart girls may be paid to sit there , but they are not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for men to ogle them .
“ Have a finger in the pie .
Women too , ” Bloom boasts , hinting that business and sex might be dispensed by the same gimmick .
For Ngai , no novelist knows this dynamic better than Helen DeWitt , who draws sexual and intellectual labor together with zany brilliance in “ Lightning Rods.
” DeWitt ’ s sleazy hero , Joe , proposes to solve the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace by founding a temp agency staffed by women who provide male employees @ @ @ @ @ @ @ harassing full-time employees .
He also comes up with a gimmick , the Lightning Rod : a contraption that divides a woman in half , like the magician sawing his lovely assistant in two .
Her front half performs intellectual labor—reading Proust , applying to law school—while her back end , Ngai explains , protrudes “ through a hidden door into a bathroom stall for the male user to fuck.
” Once Joe has cornered the market on sex , he persuades his clients to outsource all their temporary hiring to his company @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comedy of DeWitt ’ s gimmick—a woman embedded in a machine embedded in a sex service embedded in a temp agency—confirms the depressing reality of those whom capitalism exploits most ruthlessly : women .
It ’ s not just that women ’ s labor in the workplace is increasingly contingent and precarious ; women are also disproportionately responsible for many forms of unwaged labor—domestic work , child rearing , arguably even sex .
“ Capitalism ’ s ultimate labor-saving device is just simply a woman , ” Ngai concludes , for women are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ used to further cheapen labor in general.
” Perhaps the earliest accusation of literary gimmickry was made by Samuel Johnson .
In 1775 , during a meeting of the Literary Club , he attacked Jonathan Swift ’ s “ Gulliver ’ s Travels , ” declaring , “ When once you have thought of big men and little men , it is very easy to do all the rest.
” It is telling that his criticism hinges on the idea of ease .
Swift ’ s trick of scale let him avoid the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ novelist ’ s duty , making him instead the kind of writer who , as Johnson wrote elsewhere , scribbled “ without the Toil of Study , without Knowledge of Nature , or Acquaintance with Life.
” The high-concept premise of “ Gulliver ’ s Travels ” was a shortcut , a con by which Swift could smuggle in tired social satire , using fantastic creatures , instead of ordinary humans , as mouthpieces for his ideas .
From here , one could see the history of prose fiction as a series of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ cutting down their predecessors ’ sleights , puncturing the inflated plaudits they had garnered .
To the narrator of Jane Austen ’ s “ Emma , ” sentimental romances , like the ones Emma imagines herself in and that Austen ’ s novels ironize , turn on coded letters , word games , and other vehicles “ for gallantry and trick.
” Both romance and realism , according to G. K. Chesterton , were “ tricks and tricks alone , ” and he railed against the “ technical dodges ” of realists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ It is a trick to make a heroine , in the act of accepting a lover , suddenly aureoled by a chance burst of sunshine , and then to call it romance , ” Chesterton wrote .
“ But it is quite as much of a trick to make her , in the act of accepting a lover , drop her umbrella , or trip over a hassock , and then call it the bold plain realism of life.
” Gimmickier still , to Henry James , was the novelist who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or death , “ the very shortest of all cuts to the interesting state.
” James ’ s late works , which Ngai considers at length , threaten women with something different : the corny insinuations , or verbal gimmicks , of men who refuse to acknowledge the care and sexual attention that women have given them .

When Jennifer Egan’s novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad” won the Pulitzer Prize, in 2011, much fuss was made over its penultimate chapter, which presents the diary of a twelve-year-old girl in the form of a seventy-six-page PowerPoint presentation. Despite the nearly universal acclaim that the novel had received, critics had trouble deciding whether the PowerPoint was a dazzling, avant-garde innovation or, as one reviewer described it, “a wacky literary gimmick,” a cheap trick that diminished the over-all value of the novel. In an interview with Egan, the novelist Heidi Julavits confessed to dreading the chapter before she read it, and then experiencing a happy relief once she had. “I live in fear of the gimmicky story that fails to rise above its gimmick,” she said. “But within a few pages I totally forgot about the PowerPoint presentation, that’s how ungimmicky your gimmick was.”
The word “gimmick” is believed to come from “gimac,” an anagram of “magic.” The word was likely first used by magicians, gamblers, and swindlers in the nineteen-twenties to refer to the props they wielded to attract, and to misdirect, attention—and sometimes, according to “The Wise-Crack Dictionary,” from 1926, to turn “a fair game crooked.” From such duplicitous beginnings, the idea of gimmickry soon spread. In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Invitation to a Beheading,” from 1935, a mother distracts her imprisoned son from counting the hours to his execution by describing the “marvelous gimmicks” of her childhood. The most shocking, she explains, was a trick mirror. When “shapeless, mottled, pockmarked, knobby things” were placed in front of the mirror, it would reflect perfectly sensible forms: flowers, fields, ships, people. When confronted with a human face or hand, the mirror would reflect a jumble of broken images. As the son listens to his mother describe her gimmick, he sees her eyes spark with terror and pity, “as if something real, unquestionable (in this world, where everything was subject to question), had passed through, as if a corner of this horrible life had curled up, and there was a glimpse of the lining.” Behind the mirror lurks something monstrous—an idea of art as device, an object whose representational powers can distort and devalue just as easily as they can estrange and enchant.
Trick mirrors are gimmicks, but they are also metaphors for how gimmicks work, eliciting both charm and suspicion. In “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” Egan transforms a clunky corporate technology into an ingenious storytelling technique by embedding it in the older technology of the novel. Seen in this context, the PowerPoint’s history as a management tool begins to vanish behind the story of a young girl’s life—the novelist’s version of the magician’s final act, when he folds his assistant in a trunk and makes her disappear. Teetering between novelty and banality, Egan’s novel manages to squeeze a drop of wonder out of a crude communication method. Yet its single-use success—no other writer could get away with repeating her trick—reminds us that the literary marketplace, as Theodor Adorno once observed of the art world, favors “work with a ‘personal touch,’ or more bluntly, a gimmick.”
The seductive wonders of Nabokov’s mirror or Egan’s PowerPoint are harder to find in the gimmicks of the present. Recent headlines offer up a wide range of gimmicks rushed into production to contain the spread of the coronavirus (robot chefs, antiviral cars), as well as products and ideas whose sudden obsolescence (“fun” workplaces, airline miles) reveals that they were gimmicks all along. Donald Trump’s threat to veto the National Defense Authorization Act, in order to stop Confederate names being removed from military bases; Kanye West’s announcement of his Presidential run; and Amazon’s new surveillance drone, the Ring Always Home Cam, have attracted scorn as “gimmicks”—promotional shticks, dangerous stunts. Why is a word used to describe a literary technique also the word used to describe the buffoonery, the cruelty and carelessness, of contemporary political and economic life? What is in a word as minor as “gimmick”?
“No way! It’s your turn. I got whacked all day yesterday.” Cartoon by Mick Stevens Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
For Sianne Ngai, a professor of English at the University of Chicago and the author of “Theory of the Gimmick” (Harvard), the answer is: everything, or at least everything to do with the art consumed and produced under capitalism. One of the most original literary scholars at work today, Ngai has made a career of unravelling the social and political histories that shape our aesthetic judgments (“How beautiful! How hideous!”) of novels, films, and photographs, as well as of show tunes and YouTube videos, bath toys and smiley faces. Her work draws attention to the public dimensions of apparently private reactions to art, and to the world in which these aesthetic experiences arise—a “capitalist lifeworld,” she writes, where art is increasingly trivial and artifice reigns supreme, where fun and fright merge to create the same arresting, alienating magic as Nabokov’s mirror.
Ngai’s first scholarly book, “Ugly Feelings,” published in 2005, examined a set of negative emotions—irritation, envy, paranoia, anxiety—that she described as “minor and generally unprestigious” compared with the “grander passions” of love, anger, and sympathetic uplift, which have historically animated so much of art and literature. The passivity and inscrutability of these ugly feelings, which Ngai tracked in works from “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to “Single White Female,” offered a frustrated response to the sense of limited agency—to living and working, especially as a woman or a nonwhite person, in a “highly differentiated and totally commodified world.” Her next book, “Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting” (2012), placed the three ambivalent assessments in its subtitle at the heart of aesthetic theory, arguing that they best captured the nature of aesthetic experience in “the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.” The cuteness of a sculpture by Takashi Murakami, for instance, fetishized the helpless; the zaniness enacted by Lucille Ball or Richard Pryor showcased the incessant activity of a person who was always working.
Although Ngai’s books are conceptually and philosophically dense, their appeal comes from how they tap into our ordinary use of language. Unless I collect art, or live in a many-windowed house at the edge of a westerly peninsula, where the sea is gilded by the sun and silvered by the moon, I am unlikely to have regular encounters with things I would call “beautiful” or “sublime,” and I may well find the rush and roar of such Romantic descriptions embarrassing. But not a day goes by when I do not call something—my son’s stuffed animals, a dress, a poem by Gertrude Stein—“cute,” or a novel or an essay “interesting.” And I can’t count the number of times I’ve called a kitchen gizmo my husband swears we really, really need (but we really, really don’t) or a colleague’s online persona “gimmicky.” “Theory of the Gimmick” finds in the pervasiveness of the gimmick the same duelling forces of aesthetic attraction and repulsion that shape all Ngai’s work. “ ‘You want me,’ the gimmick outrageously says,” she writes. “It is never entirely wrong.”
As with all aesthetic judgments, calling something a gimmick begins simply, with a feeling of pleasure or displeasure, or some uncertain mingling of the two. Consider the pandemic-era robot chef: behind its flashiness and the obvious expense of producing it, behind the hypnotic slicing and dicing of its hands, I sense its fraudulence. No doubt it will underperform, cooking meals only as well as a Roomba cleans a house. No doubt it will occasion gruesome comic mishaps—say, if the cat tries riding it. None of this needs to be explained; I know a gimmick when I see one. My judgment is elicited by my perception of what Ngai identifies as the gimmick’s defining feature: “dubious yet attractive promises about the saving of time, the reduction of labor, and the expansion of value.”
Although my calling something a gimmick registers a subjective response, it also demands agreement or invites confrontation, and more brazenly so than other judgments. Should a fan of robot chefs and Roombas question why I harbor such unwarranted suspicions about them, I will feel compelled to convince him that my suspicions ought to be felt universally. But I will also delight in a newfound sense of superiority, my belief that only I am discerning enough to see that these devices are overvalued, too good to be true. Every gimmick, Ngai tells us, needs a dupe. For every skeptic, there must be a person, or an entire market society, who will affirm the value of what the skeptic judges to be—in the words of Ron Padgett’s poem “Gimmicks”—“cheap, tricky, fast, without substance, even immoral.”
For Ngai, the problem of the gimmick—the mismatch between how it appears and the value it creates—is also the fundamental problem of capitalism as explained by Karl Marx. In “Capital,” Marx tells the story of capital’s relation to value with the help of a gimmicky character he introduces as “our friend, Moneybags.” Moneybags is an “embryo capitalist”—no mustache, no top hat yet—looking for a special commodity to buy, one whose consumption will create value, allowing him to make money from money. Luckily, Moneybags meets a worker. He buys the worker’s “labor-power” by paying him a wage, sells whatever product the worker makes, and appropriates the difference between the two—what Marx calls “surplus-value”—as profit. That, at least, is how capitalist relations appear in the market, “the noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of men.”
“I don’t lift weights. I got this way because I wipe down the equipment really, really hard.” Cartoon by Drew Dernavich Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
But when Marx accompanies Moneybags into “the hidden abode of production,” he draws back the glittering green curtain on wage and profit, exposing how value is created: the exploitation of labor. Though Moneybags requires his worker to labor for twelve hours a day to earn his wage, the worker needs only six of those hours to produce his means of subsistence: the daily cost of the food, clothing, and housing he needs to replenish his “muscle, nerve, brain” and reproduce his labor-power. In the six hours he works beyond that, “he creates no value for himself,” Marx writes. “He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing.” The wage makes all labor performed during the workday appear as if it were compensated labor, when, in fact, half of it is not. Cloaked by the “magic and necromancy” of money, capital’s “trick” is its command of unpaid labor and time to create value. Behind the appealing illusion of free, happy exchange sits a hollow and untrustworthy reality, a gimmick.
Leaning long and hard on Marx, Ngai argues that the capitalist’s boundless quest to increase surplus labor prompts him to find new ways of enhancing his trick. He turns to “the magic of machinery,” Marx writes—not just one machine but a system of machines, “a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power . . . at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.” These contrivances intensify capital’s gimmick by increasing the efficiency of labor-power, eking out more work from the same twelve-hour day. Yet intensifying labor also makes it redundant—the same number of laborers can, with less work, convert an ever-expanding quantity of raw materials into products. The devices designed to make capitalism’s trick slicker contain the seeds of the contradiction that drives it to crisis: they also eliminate labor, and along with it the surplus-value on which capital depends.
According to Ngai, calling something a gimmick indicates our discomfort with capitalism’s sneaky distortion of the relationship between value, labor, and time. The gimmick is both an aesthetic and an economic judgment. Think back to Egan’s PowerPoint. Compared with the intricacy of the rest of her novel, the PowerPoint seems like a mechanical shortcut—what Ngai would call a “labor-saving trick,” and what a critic or a creative-writing professor might describe as “unearned.” At the same time, the PowerPoint appears to be working too hard to get our attention. The ambivalence about whether the PowerPoint is, as the cliché goes, working hard or hardly working becomes even more telling when we learn that its design was outsourced to an unpaid worker: Egan’s sister, a consultant, who, as Egan reveals, “made the graphs in the chapter for me because I couldn’t seem to crunch the numbers competently.”
The female family member who volunteers her labor recalls Rosey, the robot maid in “The Jetsons,” perennially unpaid and verging on obsolescence, as well as the trio of strippers from the Broadway show “Gypsy,” who, as Ngai reminds us, sing “You Gotta Get a Gimmick.” Why do gimmicks so often feature a woman performing undervalued labor? In a memorable moment in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Leopold Bloom recalls suggesting to his former boss, a stationer, that he could drum up business by placing in front of his store “a transparent show cart with two smart girls inside writing. . . . Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she’s writing.” Bloom’s gimmick grabs attention by conflating sex with intellectual labor and, in the process, devaluing both. The smart girls may be paid to sit there, but they are not paid for the writing they do or for men to ogle them. “Have a finger in the pie. Women too,” Bloom boasts, hinting that business and sex might be dispensed by the same gimmick.


newyorker--2020-11-09--“Spumante,” by Colin Channer

“Spumante,” by Colin Channer

Weeks diffuse into each other like they ’ re sprayed ; jetted , they shoot certain : days , times , doodles , kept appointments , next is lull , pool , fading , flash-disperse .
I was shook and shocked by death , chanced upon it on a winter walk , proof of plod for miles behind me swept in fog , a wet so thick it blended with the snow that settled plenty on the sand .
It was not yet daybreak , and I ’ d driven miles to walk and think , find peace in sweat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ asthmatic sound .
The light took its lazy time for lifting .
In the shift I saw a darker shaping than the gray—at two miles a boat of some proportion , at quarter mile a whale .
Since then I ’ ve been lamenting , moving as if held in gel .
At night I dream it , see it stretched across the wrack of high tide , belly to the stars—flung shells and gravel— throat-part grooved , fins unflappable , balletic flukes symmetric in their pointing , how they fused : all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sea dirge , wet air matte , toned silver , and I hunched in the hood of my parka , God-awed before shavasana , stilled as if the glassy eye that looked to me had fixed me in a century of tintype .
Ah-gah-pay .
I ’ ve only recently discovered love of animals—well , Kili , Nan , and Rebus , three dogs .
Now I ’ ve partly taken leave of language , have given incoherence due .
I know what it ’ s like to be mammal filled with deepest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stillness intermitted by quake roar , tectonic slipping , lava fissures , ship propellers drilling , the human croons of whales .
There is slave in me , fat heritage , no fluke I ’ m invested with hurt , echo of the hunted , located , natural rights redacted , meagered to resource .
All is flux as I ’ m collapsing love and distance , moving through the gel , my life , edging the canals of my city , clomping up its hills , memory aerosol , head in self @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have , watching at him contemplate the vista from a landlocked house , hills becoming pods of transmigrating giants : Greylock .
Berkshire range .
There ’ s thirst for music in this less than solid state .
Ampless back in my office , I knee-prop my Fender , ancient black thing .
Strum it casual , weep ; suck salt in darkness , fingers guessy , lazing up the sound .
Still , something brusque runs up me : shuddered wood , that deep flesh shook that makes string music fuse to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thing in me .
I know what now love is , know tentative for sure its incoherence , jelly analog , is mine for life .
The windows stay black and phlegmatic as the air outside begins to heave with rain .
I hum , thumbing , fashion something of a home , some succor , pulse quick but steady as I deep dive to dub .
With it comes the baleen wheeze of mouth organs , plangent blue whoop .
I am dub and dub is water .
Exile , I wish @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plunging , life spumante .
I ’ d slip my hold on you like magma shot for islands every single time you breach .

Audio: Read by the author.
Weeks diffuse into each other like
they’re sprayed; jetted, they shoot certain:
days, times, doodles, kept appointments,
next is lull, pool, fading, flash-disperse.
I was shook and shocked by death,
chanced upon it on a winter walk,
proof of plod for miles behind me
swept in fog, a wet so thick
it blended with the snow that
settled plenty on the sand. It
was not yet daybreak, and I’d driven
miles to walk and think,
find peace in sweat and sea racket,
that ancient wise asthmatic sound.
The light took its lazy time for lifting.
In the shift I saw a darker shaping
than the gray—at two miles a boat
of some proportion, at quarter mile a whale.
Since then I’ve been lamenting,
moving as if held in gel.
At night I dream it, see it stretched
across the wrack of high tide,
belly to the stars—flung shells and gravel—
throat-part grooved, fins unflappable,
balletic flukes symmetric
in their pointing, how they fused:
all this in half-light, all this in sea dirge,
wet air matte, toned silver,
and I hunched in the hood of my parka,
God-awed before shavasana,
stilled as if the glassy eye that looked to me
had fixed me in a century of tintype.
Ah-gah-pay. I’ve only recently discovered
love of animals—well, Kili, Nan, and Rebus,
three dogs. Now I’ve partly taken leave
of language, have given incoherence due.
I know what it’s like to be mammal
filled with deepest ocean sounds:
oblivion, solitude, stillness
intermitted by quake roar,
tectonic slipping, lava fissures,
ship propellers drilling,
the human croons of whales.
There is slave in me, fat heritage,
no fluke I’m invested with hurt,
echo of the hunted, located, natural
rights redacted, meagered to resource.
All is flux as I’m collapsing
love and distance, moving through the gel,
my life, edging the canals of my city,
clomping up its hills, memory aerosol,
head in self cloud, getting Melville
as I should have, watching at him
contemplate the vista from a landlocked house,
hills becoming pods of transmigrating giants:
Greylock. Berkshire range.
There’s thirst for music in this less than solid
state. Ampless back in my office,
I knee-prop my Fender, ancient black thing.
Strum it casual, weep;
suck salt in darkness, fingers guessy,
lazing up the sound. Still, something
brusque runs up me: shuddered
wood, that deep flesh shook
that makes string music fuse to you.
The thumbing further breaks the thing in me.
I know what now love is,
know tentative for sure its
incoherence, jelly analog, is mine for life.
The windows stay black and phlegmatic
as the air outside begins to heave with rain.
I hum, thumbing, fashion something of a home,
some succor, pulse quick but steady as I deep dive
to dub. With it comes the baleen
wheeze of mouth organs, plangent blue whoop.
I am dub and dub is water.
Exile, I wish you could have lived in me,
plunging, life spumante. I’d slip my hold
on you like magma shot for islands
every single time you breach.


newyorker--2020-11-09--Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Briefly Noted Book Reviews

The Silence , by Don DeLillo ( Scribner ) .
Classic DeLillo themes—digital technology , graphology , geopolitics—abound in this slim novel , in which friends gather amid a mysterious cataclysm .
On a Sunday in 2022 , screens go blank and circuits fail , interrupting a couple ’ s Super Bowl party and causing a plane to malfunction .
As the aircraft goes down , a man on it imagines “ all those thousands of passengers before us who have experienced this and then were silenced forever.
” DeLillo subordinates the characters ’ individuality to a wide-angle view of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rendering of a crowd unified by a terrifying event that defies all available models of comprehension .
A Lover ’ s Discourse , by Xiaolu Guo ( Grove ) .
Like the Roland Barthes treatise from which it takes its title , this novel unfolds as a series of vignettes .
Guo ’ s narrator , a recent immigrant to London from China , addresses each episode to her Australian lover .
After the Brexit referendum , the couple attempt to reconcile their differences in class , race , and family history through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and language .
( “ Perhaps I should learn a man ’ s character by paying attention to the way he uses verbs , ” the woman says , after a particularly frustrating miscommunication . )
Their ideological disagreements give way to more practical considerations of belonging as they move from England to Australia to Germany , wondering , at each uprooting , if the new locale will assuage their alienation .
A World Beneath the Sands , by Toby Wilkinson ( Norton ) .
In 1798 , when Napoleon embarked upon his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hundred “ savants , ” tasked with unlocking the secrets of ancient Egypt .
The era of Egyptology , vividly detailed in this history , had arrived , with successive European powers using “ ownership ” of Egypt ’ s archeological riches to assert cultural supremacy .
Wilkinson focusses squarely on Western personalities ( Egyptian perspectives are largely absent ) , yet this is not a glorifying account .
For every scholarly triumph ( the deciphering of the Rosetta stone , say ) , there is an outrage : artifacts smuggled , workers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all , Wilkinson amply conveys the pettiness , racism , and condescension that underpinned the looting of a civilization .
Grieving , by Cristina Rivera Garza , translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker ( Feminist Press ) .
In this collection of essays , journalism , and criticism , a noted novelist turns an erudite eye on the damage wrought in Mexico by drug wars , migration , violence against women , and neoliberalism ’ s erosion of communitarian life .
Mining experiences from a lifetime lived in both the United States @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the vulnerability of the human body and to writing ’ s potential as a tool of resistance .
For all the losses tallied , the pieces are imbued with optimism and an activist ’ s passion for reshaping the world .
In an essay from 2016 , just after Donald Trump ’ s electoral victory , she writes that “ perhaps time is just beginning and our lives have just begun .
”

The Silence, by Don DeLillo (Scribner). Classic DeLillo themes—digital technology, graphology, geopolitics—abound in this slim novel, in which friends gather amid a mysterious cataclysm. On a Sunday in 2022, screens go blank and circuits fail, interrupting a couple’s Super Bowl party and causing a plane to malfunction. As the aircraft goes down, a man on it imagines “all those thousands of passengers before us who have experienced this and then were silenced forever.” DeLillo subordinates the characters’ individuality to a wide-angle view of the blackout, and creates a powerful rendering of a crowd unified by a terrifying event that defies all available models of comprehension.
A Lover’s Discourse, by Xiaolu Guo (Grove). Like the Roland Barthes treatise from which it takes its title, this novel unfolds as a series of vignettes. Guo’s narrator, a recent immigrant to London from China, addresses each episode to her Australian lover. After the Brexit referendum, the couple attempt to reconcile their differences in class, race, and family history through high-minded discussions about art, originality, and language. (“Perhaps I should learn a man’s character by paying attention to the way he uses verbs,” the woman says, after a particularly frustrating miscommunication.) Their ideological disagreements give way to more practical considerations of belonging as they move from England to Australia to Germany, wondering, at each uprooting, if the new locale will assuage their alienation.
A World Beneath the Sands, by Toby Wilkinson (Norton). In 1798, when Napoleon embarked upon his Egyptian campaign, he brought along some hundred “savants,” tasked with unlocking the secrets of ancient Egypt. The era of Egyptology, vividly detailed in this history, had arrived, with successive European powers using “ownership” of Egypt’s archeological riches to assert cultural supremacy. Wilkinson focusses squarely on Western personalities (Egyptian perspectives are largely absent), yet this is not a glorifying account. For every scholarly triumph (the deciphering of the Rosetta stone, say), there is an outrage: artifacts smuggled, workers abused, sex slaves bought. Above all, Wilkinson amply conveys the pettiness, racism, and condescension that underpinned the looting of a civilization.
Grieving, by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker (Feminist Press). In this collection of essays, journalism, and criticism, a noted novelist turns an erudite eye on the damage wrought in Mexico by drug wars, migration, violence against women, and neoliberalism’s erosion of communitarian life. Mining experiences from a lifetime lived in both the United States and Mexico, Rivera Garza returns repeatedly to the vulnerability of the human body and to writing’s potential as a tool of resistance. For all the losses tallied, the pieces are imbued with optimism and an activist’s passion for reshaping the world. In an essay from 2016, just after Donald Trump’s electoral victory, she writes that “perhaps time is just beginning and our lives have just begun.”


newyorker--2020-11-09--Delaware Voters Await Joe Biden: “We Just Need Him”

Outside the parking-lot fence and next to a mini-mall , about thirty journalists and a ragtag group of citizens were gathered , shivering , huddled over smartphones , watching the results come in and not come in .
Von Michael Todd , a math professor at Delaware Tech , was wearing a mask bearing Pac-Man ’ s workplace , the blue labyrinth .
“ This is my city !
” he said .
“ When do we ever have a Presidency in our city ?
Where you can see Biden come out here ?
” Not that he hadn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He had—at the train station one day .
And he knew where Biden got his groceries : Janssen ’ s .
“ All celebrations aside , ” Todd said , “ we need someone with a plan.
” He enumerated the plans that were needed : a plan for the virus , a plan for police to peacefully interact with African-American men like himself , and a plan for education in the Covid era .
“ I ’ m a plan person , ” he said .
The hours passed with no results @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and went , but , aside from the journalists , there were never more than thirty people waiting to celebrate the President-elect in his home town .
It did not feel like a party .
Crystal Adkins , a social worker , and her daughter Makayla , twenty , had not left their car .
In the driver ’ s seat , Crystal was making her way through some pasta from Target .
Makayla was on her phone .
At least sixty million people had voted for Trump , and this had rattled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ believe the world right now , ” Crystal said .
“ It means that everything that happened in the last four years—hurting people , the children being taken away from their parents , the derogatory statements that he ’ s made about women and families and people—it all meant nothing .
I mean , who are we ?
Who are we now , to want another four years of this ?
” Makayla had been in high school , just outside of Wilmington , in 2016 .
“ The day after Trump was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some students , and even one teacher , came to school wearing MAGA stuff .
And I was , like , ‘ I thought we were friends , but I guess we ’ re not friends.
’ ” “ And it brings me here tonight , ” Crystal said , “ because I just want to be as close as I can to Biden , because we need him .
We just need him.
” An hour passed with no clarity , and Crystal and Makayla went home .
The journalists packed up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The next day was balmy and bright , and the election was trending Biden ’ s way .
Another small crowd of locals amassed at the fence , under the flag , with word that Biden would make an announcement soon .
It was not expected to be an acceptance speech , but even a glimpse was enough for Bob and Tricia Beichner , who were sitting on a curb .
Bob ’ s mouth was hidden behind a Grateful Dead mask , but his white Polo sweater and dad jeans hinted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ve actually been a lifelong Republican , ” he said .
“ The day that I left the Republican Party was the day after the nomination process in 2016.
” Bob had lived in New York when Trump was a tabloid fixture ; he couldn ’ t believe he was being taken seriously as a candidate .
“ I went to the Delaware Department of Elections and I changed my party affiliation.
” Since the 2016 election , Bob and Tricia have been baffled about the national psyche and about the friends they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t know a single soul who voted for him , ” Tricia said .
“ All my Facebook friends , from high school , college , not a peep.
” Slowly , though , she realized that a startling number of them were Trump supporters .
“ And I ’ m struggling .
I ’ m really struggling now with friendships.
” There was a commotion near the Chase Center , and everyone turned to see a caravan of police S.U.V.s , Secret Service vehicles , an ambulance , and what looked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speed by .
“ There he is !
” Bob said , and waved to one of the cars .
“ I saw him !
” Afterward , in the small—perhaps envious ?
—audience by the fence , there was some doubt about whether Bob had actually seen Biden .
With the clocks having just been set back , afternoon turned to night somewhere around noon .
The results were still murky , and the crowd , such as it was , dwindled to nothing .
The only people left were three Secret @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , looking at their phones .
Then , just after nine , in the darkness and under the vast ﬂag , an Indian-American group of six—two friends , with their wives and kids , all from Wilmington—arrived .
They took pictures of the ﬂag , of each other , and of the empty parking lot where Biden may or may not eventually declare himself the winner .
Approached by a reporter , they nominated the second-youngest of the group , seventeen-year-old Risha Kumar , to be their spokesperson .
( The Trump supporter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ father , was demure . )
“ We ’ re just excited to take photos near here , because it ’ s kind of a historic event , right ?
” Risha said , her eyes bright , searching for each next word .
“ Honestly , there ’ s not really been any big politician in history from Delaware , so it ’ s just cool to have someone who ’ s from the local political scene on the national stage.
” Being so young , Risha ’ s overlooking Biden ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , could be forgiven .
It turned out that she knew her history .
“ I honestly think that the No .
1 issue is how much Americans trust their government .
I think that a lot of Americans trust the democratic system , but do we really trust the people who are in power ?
And I think that without trusting the people who are in power at least a little bit , we can ’ t even compromise , and we ’ ve become so saddened by the situation .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pattern .
It ’ s kind of just been going down in our government since Nixon.
” ♦

The Wilmington sky was a limitless black, and an American flag that looked forty feet tall was billowing between two construction cranes. It was Election Night, and Joe Biden was scheduled to speak in a parking lot behind the Chase Center. Attendance inside the lot was invitation-only, and people were expected to stay in their cars. They’d been lining up for hours, presumably keeping warm.
Outside the parking-lot fence and next to a mini-mall, about thirty journalists and a ragtag group of citizens were gathered, shivering, huddled over smartphones, watching the results come in and not come in. Von Michael Todd, a math professor at Delaware Tech, was wearing a mask bearing Pac-Man’s workplace, the blue labyrinth. “This is my city!” he said. “When do we ever have a Presidency in our city? Where you can see Biden come out here?” Not that he hadn’t seen Biden in person before. He had—at the train station one day. And he knew where Biden got his groceries: Janssen’s.
“All celebrations aside,” Todd said, “we need someone with a plan.” He enumerated the plans that were needed: a plan for the virus, a plan for police to peacefully interact with African-American men like himself, and a plan for education in the Covid era. “I’m a plan person,” he said.
The hours passed with no results. Outside the fence, people came and went, but, aside from the journalists, there were never more than thirty people waiting to celebrate the President-elect in his home town. It did not feel like a party.
Crystal Adkins, a social worker, and her daughter Makayla, twenty, had not left their car. In the driver’s seat, Crystal was making her way through some pasta from Target. Makayla was on her phone. At least sixty million people had voted for Trump, and this had rattled them both.“I can’t believe the world right now,” Crystal said. “It means that everything that happened in the last four years—hurting people, the children being taken away from their parents, the derogatory statements that he’s made about women and families and people—it all meant nothing. I mean, who are we? Who are we now, to want another four years of this?”
Makayla had been in high school, just outside of Wilmington, in 2016. “The day after Trump was elected,” she said, “some students, and even one teacher, came to school wearing MAGA stuff. And I was, like, ‘I thought we were friends, but I guess we’re not friends.’ ”
“And it brings me here tonight,” Crystal said, “because I just want to be as close as I can to Biden, because we need him. We just need him.”
An hour passed with no clarity, and Crystal and Makayla went home. The journalists packed up; nothing would be decided that night. The next day was balmy and bright, and the election was trending Biden’s way. Another small crowd of locals amassed at the fence, under the flag, with word that Biden would make an announcement soon. It was not expected to be an acceptance speech, but even a glimpse was enough for Bob and Tricia Beichner, who were sitting on a curb. Bob’s mouth was hidden behind a Grateful Dead mask, but his white Polo sweater and dad jeans hinted at fiscal conservatism.
“I’ve actually been a lifelong Republican,” he said. “The day that I left the Republican Party was the day after the nomination process in 2016.” Bob had lived in New York when Trump was a tabloid fixture; he couldn’t believe he was being taken seriously as a candidate. “I went to the Delaware Department of Elections and I changed my party affiliation.” Since the 2016 election, Bob and Tricia have been baffled about the national psyche and about the friends they thought they knew. “I didn’t know a single soul who voted for him,” Tricia said. “All my Facebook friends, from high school, college, not a peep.” Slowly, though, she realized that a startling number of them were Trump supporters. “And I’m struggling. I’m really struggling now with friendships.”
There was a commotion near the Chase Center, and everyone turned to see a caravan of police S.U.V.s, Secret Service vehicles, an ambulance, and what looked like a modified Brink’s truck speed by. “There he is!” Bob said, and waved to one of the cars. “I saw him!” Afterward, in the small—perhaps envious?—audience by the fence, there was some doubt about whether Bob had actually seen Biden.
With the clocks having just been set back, afternoon turned to night somewhere around noon. The results were still murky, and the crowd, such as it was, dwindled to nothing. The only people left were three Secret Service agents sitting in a white tent, looking at their phones. Then, just after nine, in the darkness and under the vast ﬂag, an Indian-American group of six—two friends, with their wives and kids, all from Wilmington—arrived. They took pictures of the ﬂag, of each other, and of the empty parking lot where Biden may or may not eventually declare himself the winner.
Approached by a reporter, they nominated the second-youngest of the group, seventeen-year-old Risha Kumar, to be their spokesperson. (The Trump supporter in the family, Risha’s father, was demure.) “We’re just excited to take photos near here, because it’s kind of a historic event, right?” Risha said, her eyes bright, searching for each next word. “Honestly, there’s not really been any big politician in history from Delaware, so it’s just cool to have someone who’s from the local political scene on the national stage.” Being so young, Risha’s overlooking Biden’s forty-four years in Washington, D.C., could be forgiven. It turned out that she knew her history.
“I honestly think that the No. 1 issue is how much Americans trust their government. I think that a lot of Americans trust the democratic system, but do we really trust the people who are in power? And I think that without trusting the people who are in power at least a little bit, we can’t even compromise, and we’ve become so saddened by the situation. And I think that this has been a pattern. It’s kind of just been going down in our government since Nixon.” ♦