newyorker--2020-02-10--The Terror and the Fascination of Pompeii

If you were writing a biography of Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus—or Pliny the Younger , the author of one of the most famous collections of letters surviving from the early Roman Empire—it would be hard not to start with the eruption of Mt .
Vesuvius , on the Bay of Naples , in 79 A.D. , for Pliny was the only writer to leave us an eyewitness account of the catastrophe .
The English classicist Daisy Dunn , in her book “ The Shadow of Vesuvius : A Life of Pliny ” ( Liveright ) , wisely does not resist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ explosion is probably the paradigmatic natural disaster .
When we think of the worst thing Mother Nature could do to us , we are likely to think of Vesuvius .
Likewise , Pompeii , the hardest hit of the communities lying at the base of the volcano , is , for many people , the world ’ s most compelling archeological site .
Although some two thousand of the town ’ s inhabitants were killed , much of their world—the tools they gardened with , the paving stones they walked on , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their brothels ( “ Posphorus fucked here ” ) , the loaves of bread left baking in the oven , marked off into eight portions , just like a modern pizza—survived , however altered , under the layers of ash and pumice and rock that the volcano dumped on it .
Today , these things stand as a kind of textbook of how the citizens of Campania , the region over which Vesuvius loomed , lived in the late first century .
Who , before the excavations of Pompeii , knew that many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rudimentary kitchens , seem to have eaten takeout for dinner ?
But if you go to Pompeii , as millions of tourists do each year , you can view the storefront food shops with the pots , sunk in their counters , that once contained fish stews , boiled lentils , and so on , ready to be bought and carried home .
And who , apart from those who have survived a war , knew what a person dying from thermal shock looked like ?
Archeologists examining Pompeii and neighboring cities eventually @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many of them surrounded by a bubble of empty space , which marked the outline of the victims ’ flesh .
At a town just south of Vesuvius , known in ancient times as Oplontis , you can see the so-called Resin Lady , a facsimile created by pumping transparent epoxy resin into such a void .
The Resin Lady is lying face down and spread-eagled , just as she was when she was found .
Around her are the objects she was carrying when she died : some jewelry , an iron @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the traces of a cloth bag holding a small collection of coins , five silver and seven bronze .
Apparently she thought that , wherever she was going , she might need money .
Her mouth is open , in a silent scream .
In front of this , one turns away , ashamed of having looked .
There is more , at least quantitatively .
Herculaneum , on the coast , lay upwind from Vesuvius , giving the inhabitants time to seek shelter from the blast .
Hundreds of people , Dunn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the shore , where a series of arched vaults , probably boat stores , was set back from the coast.
” Each vault was barely ten feet wide by thirteen feet deep .
The people who could not fit inside one of the vaults—many men ceded their places to women and children—remained exposed on the shore .
A recent study suggests that those in the shelters may in fact have met slower and more agonizing deaths , perhaps by asphyxiation , than those outside , who were probably killed instantly by the heat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ black material found in Herculaneum as the brain matter of one of the victims , vitrified by the eruption ’ s pyroclastic flow—burning clouds of gas and ash .
As this avalanche poured down on the coast at a speed of at least sixty miles an hour , the temperature on the ground rose to about seven hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit .
Lead melts at six hundred and twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit .
The terrible day dawned prettily .
Pliny the Younger , seventeen years old , was staying at a villa in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Vesuvius , with his mother , Plinia , and her brother , Gaius Plinius Secundus , usually known as Pliny the Elder .
( I will call the nephew Pliny , and the uncle the Elder . )
Plinia was the first to notice that something strange was going on across the bay .
Atop Vesuvius , there was a cloud that looked like an umbrella pine , Dunn says , “ for it was raised high on a kind of very tall trunk and spread out into branches.
” Plinia went @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brother .
The Elder was the admiral of Rome ’ s navy , which , at that time , was docked at Misenum .
He put down his book and called for his shoes , so that he could climb to a higher vantage point and see what was happening .
The Elder , who was fifty-five , was not just a military man .
He was also a naturalist—the greatest , perhaps , that the ancient world produced .
He proudly claimed that his thirty-seven volume “ Natural History ” contained facts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as many as two thousand volumes by Greek and Roman geographers , botanists , physicians , artists , and philosophers .
In the book , he described his homeland , Campania , as a blessed spot , with The fertility of the region ’ s vineyards was famous .
Some said that this was because of soil enriched by volcanic explosions , but Vesuvius had been dormant for around seven hundred years .
Who remembered ?
There were frequent earthquakes in the area , but people were used to this .
They didn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to anything going on inside their noble mountain .
When the Elder saw the strange cloud over Vesuvius , he decided to set sail across the bay to see what was going on .
Although he gave the appearance of being unworried , he launched several quadriremes—large warships with two banks of oars , each oar pulled by two men—presumably with the thought of evacuating as many people as possible .
He asked his nephew to come with him , but Pliny said he had some writing to do and would rather stay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aimed straight for Vesuvius but couldn ’ t land there , because the debris from the eruption was falling so fast that it formed islands in the shallows .
So the fleet turned toward Stabiae , a port nine miles south , and there the Elder went ashore , to the house of a friend , Pomponianus .
Thinking ( so Pliny conjectures ) to set an example of calm , he asked for a bath and dinner .
Even as flames began leaping from the mountain , he told his companions that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by frightened peasants , and he went off to take a nap .
But , during the night , Pomponianus ’ family , feeling the house sway above them , decided it was time to leave and woke their guest .
The party strapped pillows over their heads to protect themselves , and made a run for it .
The Elder headed to the shore , hoping that he might find some way to escape by sea .

If you were writing a biography of Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus—or Pliny the Younger, the author of one of the most famous collections of letters surviving from the early Roman Empire—it would be hard not to start with the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, on the Bay of Naples, in 79 A.D., for Pliny was the only writer to leave us an eyewitness account of the catastrophe. The English classicist Daisy Dunn, in her book “The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny” (Liveright), wisely does not resist the temptation. For Westerners, that explosion is probably the paradigmatic natural disaster. When we think of the worst thing Mother Nature could do to us, we are likely to think of Vesuvius. Likewise, Pompeii, the hardest hit of the communities lying at the base of the volcano, is, for many people, the world’s most compelling archeological site. Although some two thousand of the town’s inhabitants were killed, much of their world—the tools they gardened with, the paving stones they walked on, the graffiti they scratched on the walls of their brothels (“Posphorus fucked here”), the loaves of bread left baking in the oven, marked off into eight portions, just like a modern pizza—survived, however altered, under the layers of ash and pumice and rock that the volcano dumped on it.
Today, these things stand as a kind of textbook of how the citizens of Campania, the region over which Vesuvius loomed, lived in the late first century. Who, before the excavations of Pompeii, knew that many ordinary Romans, having only small, rudimentary kitchens, seem to have eaten takeout for dinner? But if you go to Pompeii, as millions of tourists do each year, you can view the storefront food shops with the pots, sunk in their counters, that once contained fish stews, boiled lentils, and so on, ready to be bought and carried home.
And who, apart from those who have survived a war, knew what a person dying from thermal shock looked like? Archeologists examining Pompeii and neighboring cities eventually came upon rooms full of skeletons, many of them surrounded by a bubble of empty space, which marked the outline of the victims’ flesh. At a town just south of Vesuvius, known in ancient times as Oplontis, you can see the so-called Resin Lady, a facsimile created by pumping transparent epoxy resin into such a void. The Resin Lady is lying face down and spread-eagled, just as she was when she was found. Around her are the objects she was carrying when she died: some jewelry, an iron key (to what?), the traces of a cloth bag holding a small collection of coins, five silver and seven bronze. Apparently she thought that, wherever she was going, she might need money. Her mouth is open, in a silent scream. In front of this, one turns away, ashamed of having looked.
There is more, at least quantitatively. Herculaneum, on the coast, lay upwind from Vesuvius, giving the inhabitants time to seek shelter from the blast. Hundreds of people, Dunn writes, “made their way to the shore, where a series of arched vaults, probably boat stores, was set back from the coast.” Each vault was barely ten feet wide by thirteen feet deep. The people who could not fit inside one of the vaults—many men ceded their places to women and children—remained exposed on the shore. A recent study suggests that those in the shelters may in fact have met slower and more agonizing deaths, perhaps by asphyxiation, than those outside, who were probably killed instantly by the heat. Other researchers have identified some glassy black material found in Herculaneum as the brain matter of one of the victims, vitrified by the eruption’s pyroclastic flow—burning clouds of gas and ash. As this avalanche poured down on the coast at a speed of at least sixty miles an hour, the temperature on the ground rose to about seven hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Lead melts at six hundred and twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit.
The terrible day dawned prettily. Pliny the Younger, seventeen years old, was staying at a villa in Misenum, across the Bay of Naples from Vesuvius, with his mother, Plinia, and her brother, Gaius Plinius Secundus, usually known as Pliny the Elder. (I will call the nephew Pliny, and the uncle the Elder.) Plinia was the first to notice that something strange was going on across the bay. Atop Vesuvius, there was a cloud that looked like an umbrella pine, Dunn says, “for it was raised high on a kind of very tall trunk and spread out into branches.”
Plinia went into the house and spoke to her brother. The Elder was the admiral of Rome’s navy, which, at that time, was docked at Misenum. He put down his book and called for his shoes, so that he could climb to a higher vantage point and see what was happening.
A loaf of bread found in a bakery in Pompeii. Much of the world of the town’s inhabitants has been preserved. Photograph from De Agostini / Getty
The Elder, who was fifty-five, was not just a military man. He was also a naturalist—the greatest, perhaps, that the ancient world produced. He proudly claimed that his thirty-seven volume “Natural History” contained facts gleaned not just from observation but from as many as two thousand volumes by Greek and Roman geographers, botanists, physicians, artists, and philosophers. In the book, he described his homeland, Campania, as a blessed spot, with
plains so fertile, hills so sunny, glades so safe, woods so rich in shade, so many bountiful kinds of forest, so many mountain breezes, such fertility of crops and vines and olives, fleeces of sheep so handsome, bulls with such excellent necks, so many lakes, and rivers and springs which are so abundant in their flow, so many seas and ports, the bosom of its lands open to commerce on all sides and running out into the sea with such eagerness to help mankind!
The fertility of the region’s vineyards was famous. Some said that this was because of soil enriched by volcanic explosions, but Vesuvius had been dormant for around seven hundred years. Who remembered? There were frequent earthquakes in the area, but people were used to this. They didn’t suspect that it was owing to anything going on inside their noble mountain.
When the Elder saw the strange cloud over Vesuvius, he decided to set sail across the bay to see what was going on. Although he gave the appearance of being unworried, he launched several quadriremes—large warships with two banks of oars, each oar pulled by two men—presumably with the thought of evacuating as many people as possible. He asked his nephew to come with him, but Pliny said he had some writing to do and would rather stay home. The Elder’s boats aimed straight for Vesuvius but couldn’t land there, because the debris from the eruption was falling so fast that it formed islands in the shallows. So the fleet turned toward Stabiae, a port nine miles south, and there the Elder went ashore, to the house of a friend, Pomponianus. Thinking (so Pliny conjectures) to set an example of calm, he asked for a bath and dinner. Even as flames began leaping from the mountain, he told his companions that these were surely just burning houses abandoned by frightened peasants, and he went off to take a nap. But, during the night, Pomponianus’ family, feeling the house sway above them, decided it was time to leave and woke their guest. The party strapped pillows over their heads to protect themselves, and made a run for it. The Elder headed to the shore, hoping that he might find some way to escape by sea.
Back in Misenum, meanwhile, Pliny and his mother decided that they, too, had to escape. They tried to go by carriage, but the roads were clogged with other people fleeing, so they got out and ran. The darkness was complete: “Not so much a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had gone out in a locked room,” Pliny wrote. Plinia begged her son to leave her and go on alone, but he refused. The two eventually found their way to safety. The Elder, on the opposite shore, did not. When the darkness lifted, his body was found on the beach. He was heavyset and had a weak windpipe. He probably died of asphyxiation from the ash. Dust from the explosion reached all the way to Africa, Pliny writes.
Of the two Plinys, Dunn focusses on the younger. Clearly, she would rather have done otherwise. The Elder was more famous, rightfully so. As his nephew said, the older man did things that deserved to be written about and wrote things that deserved to be read. His “Natural History”—Penguin Classics has a good abridged translation, by John F. Healy—is not merely huge but piquant and readable. Of bees, for example, he writes:
The bees have a wonderful way of supervising their work-load: they note the idleness of slackers, reprove them and later even punish them with death. Their hygiene is amazing: everything is moved out of the way and no refuse is left in their work areas. Indeed the droppings of those working in the hive are heaped up in one place so that the bees do not have to go too far away. They carry out the droppings on stormy days when they have to interrupt work. As evening draws in, the buzzing inside the hive diminishes until one bee flies round, as though giving the order for “lights out,” and makes the same loud buzzing with which reveille was sounded, just as if the hive were a military camp. Then suddenly all becomes silent.
How wonderfully, punctiliously factual that is, but also with a subtle moral. Reading the Elder’s work, you come to feel that you know him. In fact, however, he told us almost nothing about himself.
That, no doubt, is the reason that Dunn chose to concentrate not on him but on his nephew. Pliny’s letters, as published in his lifetime, ran to nine volumes, and a tenth was added after his death. (Here, too, there’s a Penguin Classics abridged edition, this one translated by Betty Radice.) In them, we learn pretty much everything about this man’s public life, and also a lot about the other well-placed Romans whom he corresponded with, such as the historians Tacitus and Suetonius, not to speak of the emperors he served, Domitian and Trajan. Pliny went to work as a lawyer at the age of eighteen, and he had other vocations as well. He was a poet, a senator, a public official. But in all his jobs he seems to have landed in the second- or third-best spot. The law court he worked in was the one that handled civil cases—wills, inheritance, fraud—not the juicy murders and other foul deeds for which the Roman Empire is famous. Later, he was appointed to a public office, but as the Curator of the Bed and Banks of the River Tiber and of the City’s Sewers. Is that the job you would have wanted in imperial Rome? Later still, he was sent, as Trajan’s imperial legate, to Bithynia (northern Turkey), where his main responsibility was to inspect the colony’s finances. He wrote long letters to Trajan, asking whether he should do this or that. The letters took two months to arrive in Rome, and the answers took two months to get back. Reading them, you sense that Trajan often wished Pliny would just go ahead and make whatever decision seemed reasonable.


newyorker--2020-02-10--“December,” by Cecily Parks

“December,” by Cecily Parks

It was never supposed to snow here , and yet it was snowing , big flakes tearing down over the Edwards Plateau like the sky had crumbled .
My friend and I drank cold wine while our children played inside with masks on a big white bed .
Another afternoon , my daughters sang a song about lords and camp that I didn ’ t understand , but they didn ’ t like me to ask what it meant , and instead of answering rolled down the hill in their pajamas .
Their first secret .
Then : first bright-red @ @ @ @ @ @ @ note taped to the door saying don ’ t come in .
I went to the museum instead and stared a long time at the draft on which Anne Sexton had scrawled “ At last I found you , you funny old story-poem !
” and felt a happy envy , happy for her but not for me .
Then : first time on ice skates , chick-chicking around the rink , a string of beads draped over one daughter ’ s head and my gold necklace still tangled by the sink .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the fence shadows when we threw golden hay to the ponies who lived outside all winter .
The black-and-white barn cat was still alive and ate nervously in the garage , where snow chains glittered on the floor .
One night I told a restaurant it was my husband ’ s birthday and they gave us a sundae .
It was his birthday , and at this point we were far from the Edwards Plateau .
I can ’ t remember when we left for that trip but I know on the last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home and in the airport , waiting for the plane , I arranged our winter coats so that mine was holding everyone else ’ s .

It was never supposed to snow
here, and yet
it was snowing, big flakes tearing down
over the Edwards Plateau like the sky
had crumbled. My friend and I drank
cold wine while our children played
inside with masks
on a big white bed. Another afternoon,
my daughters sang a song about lords
and camp that I didn’t
understand, but they didn’t like me
to ask what it meant, and
instead of answering rolled down the hill
in their pajamas. Their
first secret. Then:
first bright-red manicure, first
chipped nail, first note taped to the door
saying don’t come in. I went
to the museum instead
and stared a long time
at the draft on which Anne Sexton
had scrawled “At last I found you, you funny
old story-poem!” and felt a happy
envy, happy for her
but not for me.
Then: first time on ice skates,
chick-chicking around the rink, a string
of beads draped over one daughter’s head
and my gold necklace still tangled
by the sink. Snow
rolled over the prairie and held
the fence shadows when we threw
golden hay to the ponies who lived outside
all winter. The black-and-white barn cat
was still alive
and ate nervously in the garage,
where snow chains glittered on the floor. One night
I told a restaurant it was my husband’s birthday
and they gave us a sundae. It was
his birthday, and at this point
we were far from the Edwards Plateau.
I can’t remember when we left for that trip but I know
on the last day of December we had to go home
and in the airport, waiting for the plane, I arranged
our winter coats so that mine
was holding everyone else’s.


newyorker--2020-02-10--Haruki Murakami on How Memory Can Trigger a Story

Your story in this week ’ s issue , “ With the Beatles , ” involves a man thinking about two girls from his high-school years , one whom he glimpsed only once , and another who was his first serious girlfriend .
The former he remembers for a passionate gesture―the way she clutched a Beatles LP to her chest “ as if it were something precious.
” He remembers the other girl as “ charming , ” but , although they dated for years , she was never quite the one for him .
Why do you think the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so memorable , and the girl he knew for years wasn ’ t ?
For the narrator , the first girl , the one he passes in the hallway at school , is a kind of symbol .
In this case , a symbol of yearning .
Symbols don ’ t age , aren ’ t full of contradictions , and probably don ’ t disappoint anyone .
She is a lot like the symbol that appears at the beginning of F. Scott Fitzgerald ’ s “ My Lost City , ” whom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tell the truth , I have almost exactly the same memory myself .
When I was in high school , I passed a girl in the hallway , a girl whose name I didn ’ t know , who was clutching a copy of “ With the Beatles ” to her as if it were something precious .
That scene was etched in my mind and became a symbol , for me , of adolescence .
Sometimes scraps of memory like that can be the trigger that brings a story into being .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ is different from a symbol .
And sometimes nothing can fill in the gap between the two—between symbol and reality .
This story is fiction , of course , but my guess is that most people have experienced something similar .
At the center of the story are a few hours that the narrator spends with his girlfriend ’ s older brother .
The brother tells him that he suffers from bouts of total memory loss .
How does that idea of lost time―of part of the brother ’ s life disappearing , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the middle of the second movement of a Mozart symphony to the middle of the third―connect to the rest of the story ?
The narrator doesn ’ t know how much of what his girlfriend ’ s older brother tells him is true , or how seriously to take it .
But he is strangely drawn to the brother , and the same is true of the author .
In fiction , you need a third party whom you are strangely drawn to .
The brother is a supporting character , but still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be the mastermind who sets the plot in motion .
( Of course , this is completely my own personal impression . )
While he is with the brother , the narrator reads aloud a section from the story “ Spinning Gears , ” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa , a story that was written shortly before Akutagawa committed suicide .
In the end ( spoiler alert ! )
, it is the girlfriend , not her brother , who commits suicide .
Did you have that end in mind for her when you started @ @ @ @ @ @ @ makes clear why Sayoko committed suicide .
I don ’ t think anyone can know what really lay behind it .
Even I , the author , don ’ t know .
Normally , the darkness that people hold within themselves is unseen .
It erupts when you don ’ t expect it , in a form and a place you can ’ t anticipate , and , in most cases , by the time it becomes apparent it ’ s too late to do anything about it .
Sayoko ’ s brother @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that kind of crisis in his life , but she wasn ’ t .
Or perhaps the more he rose up , the more she sank down .
Years later , the narrator learns only the results of all this .
Could someone have saved Sayoko ?
No one can say .
All we can do is save someone in the here and now .
The narrator admits that he was never very enthusiastic about the Beatles .
Their music was just the wallpaper surrounding his youth , and he didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to it .
Did you share that feeling with your character ?
I was pretty snobby when I was a teen-ager , and I was crazy about jazz and classical music .
It ’ s true that the Beatles were basically musical wallpaper .
I heard their songs a lot on the radio but always kind of half listened .
And I didn ’ t buy their records .
It wasn ’ t until the nineteen-eighties , when I was living on an island in Greece , that I went down to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from start to finish on my Walkman .
I listened to it over and over and was blown away by their music for the first time .
In your last story in the magazine , “ Cream , ” a girl invites a boy to a piano recital .
When he arrives , there is no recital and no sign of the girl .
In “ With the Beatles , ” the narrator ’ s girlfriend invites him to her house , and , when he arrives , she has disappeared .
What @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to you as a fiction writer ?
I tend to be drawn to what ’ s missing .
You come across something missing , suddenly , when you don ’ t expect it—like , you ’ re walking across a field and fall into a dried-up well .
I don ’ t know why , but I ’ m attracted to that sort of situation .
Something that should be there isn ’ t , someone who should be there isn ’ t .
And that ’ s when the story begins .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , from the Japanese , by Philip Gabriel .

Photograph by Kevin Trageser / Redux
Your story in this week’s issue, “With the Beatles,” involves a man thinking about two girls from his high-school years, one whom he glimpsed only once, and another who was his first serious girlfriend. The former he remembers for a passionate gesture―the way she clutched a Beatles LP to her chest “as if it were something precious.” He remembers the other girl as “charming,” but, although they dated for years, she was never quite the one for him. Why do you think the first girl, seen once, was so memorable, and the girl he knew for years wasn’t?
For the narrator, the first girl, the one he passes in the hallway at school, is a kind of symbol. In this case, a symbol of yearning. Symbols don’t age, aren’t full of contradictions, and probably don’t disappoint anyone. She is a lot like the symbol that appears at the beginning of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “My Lost City,” whom he names “the girl.”
To tell the truth, I have almost exactly the same memory myself. When I was in high school, I passed a girl in the hallway, a girl whose name I didn’t know, who was clutching a copy of “With the Beatles” to her as if it were something precious. That scene was etched in my mind and became a symbol, for me, of adolescence. Sometimes scraps of memory like that can be the trigger that brings a story into being.
But the reality we actually deal with is different from a symbol. And sometimes nothing can fill in the gap between the two—between symbol and reality. This story is fiction, of course, but my guess is that most people have experienced something similar.
At the center of the story are a few hours that the narrator spends with his girlfriend’s older brother. The brother tells him that he suffers from bouts of total memory loss. How does that idea of lost time―of part of the brother’s life disappearing, as though he’d jumped from the middle of the second movement of a Mozart symphony to the middle of the third―connect to the rest of the story?
The narrator doesn’t know how much of what his girlfriend’s older brother tells him is true, or how seriously to take it. But he is strangely drawn to the brother, and the same is true of the author. In fiction, you need a third party whom you are strangely drawn to. The brother is a supporting character, but still I get the sense that he may be the mastermind who sets the plot in motion. (Of course, this is completely my own personal impression.)
While he is with the brother, the narrator reads aloud a section from the story “Spinning Gears,” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, a story that was written shortly before Akutagawa committed suicide. In the end (spoiler alert!), it is the girlfriend, not her brother, who commits suicide. Did you have that end in mind for her when you started writing the story?
The story never makes clear why Sayoko committed suicide. I don’t think anyone can know what really lay behind it. Even I, the author, don’t know. Normally, the darkness that people hold within themselves is unseen. It erupts when you don’t expect it, in a form and a place you can’t anticipate, and, in most cases, by the time it becomes apparent it’s too late to do anything about it.
Sayoko’s brother was (probably) able to weather that kind of crisis in his life, but she wasn’t. Or perhaps the more he rose up, the more she sank down. Years later, the narrator learns only the results of all this. Could someone have saved Sayoko? No one can say. All we can do is save someone in the here and now.
The narrator admits that he was never very enthusiastic about the Beatles. Their music was just the wallpaper surrounding his youth, and he didn’t go out of his way to listen to it. Did you share that feeling with your character?
I was pretty snobby when I was a teen-ager, and I was crazy about jazz and classical music. It’s true that the Beatles were basically musical wallpaper. I heard their songs a lot on the radio but always kind of half listened. And I didn’t buy their records. It wasn’t until the nineteen-eighties, when I was living on an island in Greece, that I went down to the beach and listened to the White Album from start to finish on my Walkman. I listened to it over and over and was blown away by their music for the first time.
In your last story in the magazine, “Cream,” a girl invites a boy to a piano recital. When he arrives, there is no recital and no sign of the girl. In “With the Beatles,” the narrator’s girlfriend invites him to her house, and, when he arrives, she has disappeared. What is it about this scenario that appeals to you as a fiction writer?
I tend to be drawn to what’s missing. You come across something missing, suddenly, when you don’t expect it—like, you’re walking across a field and fall into a dried-up well. I don’t know why, but I’m attracted to that sort of situation. Something that should be there isn’t, someone who should be there isn’t. And that’s when the story begins.
Haruki Murakami’s answers were translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel.


newyorker--2020-02-10--Crochet for a Cause

Crochet for a Cause

“ I ’ m starting with the base , which is a tree , ” the street artist London Kaye said .
“ Once I get that up , I ’ ll add all the adorable koalas and goodness and things .
I ’ m excited !
” It was a face-numbingly cold early morning on a corner of Wooster and Spring Streets , and the wind cut like a knife , but Kaye , whose medium is crochet , appeared upbeat .
With a white cap pulled low over her long blond hair , and wearing a pair of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ swath of crocheted yarn she had made earlier to a chain-link fence across from the SoHo Chanel store .
Kaye , who is thirty-one and based in Los Angeles , was in town to install the large-scale sets—multicolor crochet creations attached to a wire-fence backdrop—that she ’ d made for “ Beyond Babel , ” a dance performance inspired by “ Romeo and Juliet , ” which is being put up at Judson Church , off Washington Square .
On the plane from L.A. , she had lugged an army duffel full of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out to the audience members .
“ It takes me a minute and a half to make a heart , ” she said .
While in town , Kaye decided to undertake another project : a ten-foot-by-eight-foot yarn installation of outback animals encircling a sapling , to raise awareness of the Australian wildfires .
“ I like making things that have to do with current events , but that also make people happy , ” she said , cocking her head to consider the placement of a wool branch she had just tied @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bag , she unfurled a life-size rust-colored yarn kangaroo .
“ Look , he ’ s got a little joey , too !
” she said .
Kaye studied classical ballet as a child and learned to crochet as a teen .
“ When I was in ninth grade , I hurt my back badly , dancing , and that ’ s when it took off , ” she said , attaching a supine gray koala to the fence , then thrusting her hands into her pockets to warm them .
“ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scarves to my friends .
I was always the weird girl who would bring yarn to parties.
” She went to N.Y.U .
on a dance scholarship , and when she graduated she began working at the Apple Store in the meatpacking district .
One day , in 2013 , the fibre artist Agata Oleksiak , known as Olek—who has yarn-bombed monuments such as the Wall Street bull and the Astor Place Cube—came in to buy a computer .
“ I thought she looked so cool , ” Kaye said .
“ She @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Olek left the store , Kaye reprinted the receipt so she could Google her name later .
“ That ’ s what led me to yarn-bombing , ” she said .
Realizing that her hobby could find a larger canvas , she took a scarf that she ’ d made— “ shocking pink and lime green and fuzzy ” —and wrapped it around a tree outside her Bed-Stuy apartment .
She kept going , pursuing projects that mixed a dash of twee with a heap of ambition : a thousand yarn hearts tied @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Day ; a giant crocheted Jonas Brother tacked up in Williamsburg during Winter Storm Jonas ; an enormous woollen green-pepper pizza slice outside an East Village pizza joint .
To every installation , she affixed a card with her Instagram handle .
Soon , companies began approaching her : Kaye has yarn-bombed a school bus for a Gap ad ; a Brooklyn Starbucks ; fourteen REDValentino store windows ; and a Miller Lite billboard in Times Square .
The branded projects allowed her to leave her job at the Apple Store and have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ street art .
Even though her creations often get taken down quickly , either by passersby or by property owners , she persists .
A few years ago , on the side of a Bushwick building , Kaye installed three enormous crocheted figures—the twins from “ The Shining ” holding hands with the boy protagonist from Wes Anderson ’ s “ Moonrise Kingdom ” —and earned the ire of local activists , who saw the work as a sign of the neighborhood ’ s creeping gentrification .
“ It was the wrong piece @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
She stood on tippy-toe on a collapsible stool .
“ These three huge white children .
It ’ s a painful memory , but it was a lesson.
” She tugged the top of a koala ’ s ears over the fence ’ s jagged edge .
“ You can stretch and manipulate the yarn in such organic ways , ” she said .
A bespectacled woman in a purple felt hat approached the fence , her eyes watery from the cold .
“ Oh , this is adorable , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scene .
“ I tried to learn to crochet recently , because I wanted to make stuff for my baby granddaughter , but I was so bad at it.
” She laughed .
“ The friend who taught me was very patient , but somehow .
.
.
my fingers .
.
.
” The woman looked down at her hands .
“ Once you learn , it becomes so relaxing and meditative , ” Kaye said encouragingly .
She turned to the fence , her own fingers flying nimbly , fastening a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Crochet is very forgiving.
” ♦

“I’m starting with the base, which is a tree,” the street artist London Kaye said. “Once I get that up, I’ll add all the adorable koalas and goodness and things. I’m excited!” It was a face-numbingly cold early morning on a corner of Wooster and Spring Streets, and the wind cut like a knife, but Kaye, whose medium is crochet, appeared upbeat. With a white cap pulled low over her long blond hair, and wearing a pair of fingerless gloves, she secured a brown swath of crocheted yarn she had made earlier to a chain-link fence across from the SoHo Chanel store. Kaye, who is thirty-one and based in Los Angeles, was in town to install the large-scale sets—multicolor crochet creations attached to a wire-fence backdrop—that she’d made for “Beyond Babel,” a dance performance inspired by “Romeo and Juliet,” which is being put up at Judson Church, off Washington Square. On the plane from L.A., she had lugged an army duffel full of crocheted hearts with her, to hand out to the audience members. “It takes me a minute and a half to make a heart,” she said.
While in town, Kaye decided to undertake another project: a ten-foot-by-eight-foot yarn installation of outback animals encircling a sapling, to raise awareness of the Australian wildfires. “I like making things that have to do with current events, but that also make people happy,” she said, cocking her head to consider the placement of a wool branch she had just tied to the fence. Rummaging in her bag, she unfurled a life-size rust-colored yarn kangaroo. “Look, he’s got a little joey, too!” she said.
Kaye studied classical ballet as a child and learned to crochet as a teen. “When I was in ninth grade, I hurt my back badly, dancing, and that’s when it took off,” she said, attaching a supine gray koala to the fence, then thrusting her hands into her pockets to warm them. “I loved crochet. I’d sell scarves to my friends. I was always the weird girl who would bring yarn to parties.” She went to N.Y.U. on a dance scholarship, and when she graduated she began working at the Apple Store in the meatpacking district. One day, in 2013, the fibre artist Agata Oleksiak, known as Olek—who has yarn-bombed monuments such as the Wall Street bull and the Astor Place Cube—came in to buy a computer. “I thought she looked so cool,” Kaye said. “She had this crazy crochet bag.” After Olek left the store, Kaye reprinted the receipt so she could Google her name later. “That’s what led me to yarn-bombing,” she said. Realizing that her hobby could find a larger canvas, she took a scarf that she’d made—“shocking pink and lime green and fuzzy”—and wrapped it around a tree outside her Bed-Stuy apartment. She kept going, pursuing projects that mixed a dash of twee with a heap of ambition: a thousand yarn hearts tied around Union Square on Valentine’s Day; a giant crocheted Jonas Brother tacked up in Williamsburg during Winter Storm Jonas; an enormous woollen green-pepper pizza slice outside an East Village pizza joint. To every installation, she affixed a card with her Instagram handle.
Soon, companies began approaching her: Kaye has yarn-bombed a school bus for a Gap ad; a Brooklyn Starbucks; fourteen REDValentino store windows; and a Miller Lite billboard in Times Square. The branded projects allowed her to leave her job at the Apple Store and have given her the freedom to pursue her street art. Even though her creations often get taken down quickly, either by passersby or by property owners, she persists. A few years ago, on the side of a Bushwick building, Kaye installed three enormous crocheted figures—the twins from “The Shining” holding hands with the boy protagonist from Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom”—and earned the ire of local activists, who saw the work as a sign of the neighborhood’s creeping gentrification. “It was the wrong piece on the wrong building,” Kaye said. She stood on tippy-toe on a collapsible stool. “These three huge white children. It’s a painful memory, but it was a lesson.” She tugged the top of a koala’s ears over the fence’s jagged edge. “You can stretch and manipulate the yarn in such organic ways,” she said.
A bespectacled woman in a purple felt hat approached the fence, her eyes watery from the cold. “Oh, this is adorable,” she said, taking in the woodland scene. “I tried to learn to crochet recently, because I wanted to make stuff for my baby granddaughter, but I was so bad at it.” She laughed. “The friend who taught me was very patient, but somehow . . . my fingers . . . ” The woman looked down at her hands.
“Once you learn, it becomes so relaxing and meditative,” Kaye said encouragingly. She turned to the fence, her own fingers flying nimbly, fastening a wool leaf atop a wool branch. “Crochet is very forgiving.” ♦


newyorker--2020-02-10--When Historical Fiction Goes Magical

When Historical Fiction Goes Magical

A list of history ’ s mythic tricksters , Lewis Hyde says in his book “ Trickster Makes This World ” ( 1998 ) , would be endless .
Since the trickster is culture ’ s ultimate shape-shifting , boundary-crossing figure , “ there will be some sort of representative wherever humans invent boundaries , which is to say , everywhere.
” Hyde refers in passing to one of Europe ’ s most notorious tricksters , Till Eulenspiegel , who enters folk literature in the early sixteenth century but is supposed to have flourished earlier , in the fourteenth , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hero across his native Germany , the Netherlands , and Bohemia .
Till was likely as ambiguous as the culture required : a dangerous vagrant , a folk hero , a journeyman magician , a bawdy circus performer , a jester and prankster who , like the Shakespearean Fool , recklessly needled those in power into looking honestly at themselves .
Like most great comic figures , the trickster embodies a kind of secular eternity—being unruly life itself , he is as unkillable as the Devil .
Just as he is about to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ away , to furnish another tale .
Our less playful era tends to simplify such survivalism , awarding superhuman status to triumphant comic-book heroes or to grimly effective action figures , who survive so that they can reappear in lucrative sequels—Jason Bourne swimming away in the East River toward the next installment .
“ Tyll ” ( Pantheon ) , a new novel by the German writer Daniel Kehlmann , turns back to the earlier ambiguity , reanimating the old German chronicle of mobile mischief by placing its protagonist , Tyll Ulenspiegel , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Europe ruined by the Thirty Years ’ War ( 1618-48 ) .
I dimly recall studying that catastrophic event , best known perhaps for the brief appearance of “ the Winter King ” and for the Peace of Westphalia , which brought it to an end .
Yet the conflict was one of comprehensive brutality and misery : millions were killed or displaced by battle , looting , and plague .
At narrative ground level , the war is useful to Kehlmann as a plot prodder .
Tyll is caught up in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from one side to another , hides out in a destroyed abbey , is apprehended by the Kaiser ’ s men , joins the court-in-exile of “ the Winter Queen ” as a licensed Fool , and so on .
We are offered vivid descriptions of villages burned to the ground , forests cut down , stinking encampments , the hungry and the sick wandering without help .
This comes with the historical territory .
Kehlmann , a confident magician himself , plays his bright pages like cards .
But he has a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gradually , as the grand climacteric of his chosen war steadily justifies its presence in the novel .
A remote historical period , rollicking picaresque episodes , tricksters and magic , ancient foggy chronicles—all the dangers of the historical novel are here .
The reader fears the modern writer ’ s alienation from these distant events , the threat of steaming information dumps , comedy at once broad and shallow , untethered realism ballooning into pure fantasy .
It ’ s a pleasure to report that “ Tyll ” indulges in none of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ generically possible ) .
Kehlmann is a gifted and sensitive storyteller , who understands that stories originate within communities , and that such stories are convincingly dramatized when the novelist selflessly inhabits his characters ’ perspectives .
Historical fiction makes the challenge of this authorial disappearance more acute , but also simpler : when a world view is remote , the appropriate novelistic response is to suppress any itching modernity and become that world view in order to salvage it for contemporary readers .
We see the novelist vanish in this way as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the rich limits of the life that Tyll will eventually escape .
Here is the boy Tyll , ceaselessly practicing how to walk a tightrope .
He falls , and falls again : “ It is not possible to walk on a rope .
That is clear .
Human feet aren ’ t made for it .
Why attempt it at all ?
” Around him is the village , the only world he knows .
Most of the nearby fields are owned by Peter Steger : “ Most of the animals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , for they have his brand on their necks.
” Here is Jakob Brantner ’ s cowshed , and Martin Holtz ’ s bakery , and here is the miller , Claus Ulenspiegel , Tyll ’ s father , sitting at a table , doing what pleases him best : speculating .
What is time ?
Does Hell exist ?
What are stars , and how many are there ?
“ Recently the boy had asked him how many stars there actually are , and because only a short while ago Claus had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pride , able to give him an answer.
” Tyll “ has heard his father say everything that can be said.
” Claus is an autodidact who has scavenged a large library ; the book that most fascinates him is the one he hasn ’ t read , because he doesn ’ t know Latin .
He ’ s the village sage , a dispenser of healing balms and spells , a Christian who trusts in the protection of painted pentagrams .
When his wife collapses , he draws one on her forehead @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was born in Bedlem , baptized in tho flem Jordan .
Also tho flem astode , also astond thi blode .
In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti .
.
.
.
He knows only roughly what this means , but the spell is ancient and he knows none stronger to stanch bleeding.
” ( Kehlmann ’ s shrewd translator , Ross Benjamin , vigorously grasps the offered challenges . )
Claus ’ s activities excite the attention of two roving Jesuit inquisitors , Dr. Tesimond and Dr. Kircher , characters who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out of Kafka ( and who are modelled on their historical counterparts , Oswald Tesimond and Athanasius Kircher ) .
They trick Claus into further speculation , then torture a confession of heresy out of him , easy enough since he is so humble .
“ It ’ s obvious that he did something wrong in his stupid head , or else he wouldn ’ t be here , ” Claus reflects , in prison .
At his trial , he artlessly admits to helping the sick “ according to the old way @ @

A list of history’s mythic tricksters, Lewis Hyde says in his book “Trickster Makes This World” (1998), would be endless. Since the trickster is culture’s ultimate shape-shifting, boundary-crossing figure, “there will be some sort of representative wherever humans invent boundaries, which is to say, everywhere.” Hyde refers in passing to one of Europe’s most notorious tricksters, Till Eulenspiegel, who enters folk literature in the early sixteenth century but is supposed to have flourished earlier, in the fourteenth, crossing back and forth like a picaresque hero across his native Germany, the Netherlands, and Bohemia. Till was likely as ambiguous as the culture required: a dangerous vagrant, a folk hero, a journeyman magician, a bawdy circus performer, a jester and prankster who, like the Shakespearean Fool, recklessly needled those in power into looking honestly at themselves.
Like most great comic figures, the trickster embodies a kind of secular eternity—being unruly life itself, he is as unkillable as the Devil. Just as he is about to be captured and defeated, he slips away, to furnish another tale. Our less playful era tends to simplify such survivalism, awarding superhuman status to triumphant comic-book heroes or to grimly effective action figures, who survive so that they can reappear in lucrative sequels—Jason Bourne swimming away in the East River toward the next installment. “Tyll” (Pantheon), a new novel by the German writer Daniel Kehlmann, turns back to the earlier ambiguity, reanimating the old German chronicle of mobile mischief by placing its protagonist, Tyll Ulenspiegel, in a deeply imagined early-seventeenth-century world, a Europe ruined by the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48).
I dimly recall studying that catastrophic event, best known perhaps for the brief appearance of “the Winter King” and for the Peace of Westphalia, which brought it to an end. Yet the conflict was one of comprehensive brutality and misery: millions were killed or displaced by battle, looting, and plague. At narrative ground level, the war is useful to Kehlmann as a plot prodder. Tyll is caught up in battles and royal intrigues; he switches from one side to another, hides out in a destroyed abbey, is apprehended by the Kaiser’s men, joins the court-in-exile of “the Winter Queen” as a licensed Fool, and so on. We are offered vivid descriptions of villages burned to the ground, forests cut down, stinking encampments, the hungry and the sick wandering without help. This comes with the historical territory. Kehlmann, a confident magician himself, plays his bright pages like cards. But he has a deeper purpose, which is revealed only gradually, as the grand climacteric of his chosen war steadily justifies its presence in the novel.
A remote historical period, rollicking picaresque episodes, tricksters and magic, ancient foggy chronicles—all the dangers of the historical novel are here. The reader fears the modern writer’s alienation from these distant events, the threat of steaming information dumps, comedy at once broad and shallow, untethered realism ballooning into pure fantasy. It’s a pleasure to report that “Tyll” indulges in none of that (or as little as is generically possible). Kehlmann is a gifted and sensitive storyteller, who understands that stories originate within communities, and that such stories are convincingly dramatized when the novelist selflessly inhabits his characters’ perspectives. Historical fiction makes the challenge of this authorial disappearance more acute, but also simpler: when a world view is remote, the appropriate novelistic response is to suppress any itching modernity and become that world view in order to salvage it for contemporary readers.
We see the novelist vanish in this way as Kehlmann establishes, in his early pages, the rich limits of the life that Tyll will eventually escape. Here is the boy Tyll, ceaselessly practicing how to walk a tightrope. He falls, and falls again: “It is not possible to walk on a rope. That is clear. Human feet aren’t made for it. Why attempt it at all?” Around him is the village, the only world he knows. Most of the nearby fields are owned by Peter Steger: “Most of the animals too, which is easy to tell, for they have his brand on their necks.” Here is Jakob Brantner’s cowshed, and Martin Holtz’s bakery, and here is the miller, Claus Ulenspiegel, Tyll’s father, sitting at a table, doing what pleases him best: speculating. What is time? Does Hell exist? What are stars, and how many are there? “Recently the boy had asked him how many stars there actually are, and because only a short while ago Claus had counted, he was, not without pride, able to give him an answer.” Tyll “has heard his father say everything that can be said.”
Claus is an autodidact who has scavenged a large library; the book that most fascinates him is the one he hasn’t read, because he doesn’t know Latin. He’s the village sage, a dispenser of healing balms and spells, a Christian who trusts in the protection of painted pentagrams. When his wife collapses, he draws one on her forehead and starts to speak: “Christ was born in Bedlem, baptized in tho flem Jordan. Also tho flem astode, also astond thi blode. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. . . . He knows only roughly what this means, but the spell is ancient and he knows none stronger to stanch bleeding.” (Kehlmann’s shrewd translator, Ross Benjamin, vigorously grasps the offered challenges.)
Claus’s activities excite the attention of two roving Jesuit inquisitors, Dr. Tesimond and Dr. Kircher, characters who reappear in the novel like sinister sidekicks out of Kafka (and who are modelled on their historical counterparts, Oswald Tesimond and Athanasius Kircher). They trick Claus into further speculation, then torture a confession of heresy out of him, easy enough since he is so humble. “It’s obvious that he did something wrong in his stupid head, or else he wouldn’t be here,” Claus reflects, in prison. At his trial, he artlessly admits to helping the sick “according to the old way”:
I always did my best . . . I read the future of those who wanted to know it in water and bird flight. Peter Steger’s cousin, not Paul Steger, the other one, Karl, I told him not to climb the beech tree, not even to find treasures, don’t do it, I said, and the Steger cousin asked: A treasure in my beech tree? And I said: Don’t do it, Steger, and Karl said: If there’s a treasure there, I’m going up, and then he fell and smashed his head. And I can’t figure it out, even though I think about it all the time, whether a prophecy that would not have come true if I hadn’t made it is actually a prophecy or something else.
Claus knows what lies ahead, and goes to his death obediently, along with a local woman accused of witchcraft. The village hangman bluntly assures him that execution has improved: “In the past you were all burned to death. That takes time, it’s not pleasant. But hanging is nothing. It happens quickly. You climb onto the scaffold and before you know it, you’re standing before the Creator.”
The day after his father’s trial, Tyll skips out of the village, accompanied by Nele, a young woman he has persuaded to join him. Nele is odd, restless—she knows it is her fate to marry the Steger son, but she doesn’t care to—and, like Tyll, a good dancer. The couple hitch a ride with a talentless balladeer named Gottfried, whom the reader finds performing a lamentable new song about a devilish miller who can only be Claus. Tyll’s uncanny lack of a conscience—an almost ghostly absence of soul—can be gauged by his speedy adaptability: far from mourning, he improves Gottfried’s public performance by dancing along to it. We can’t help delighting in Tyll’s puckish amorality—the liberating alternative to both the pious rectitude of the established order and the pious superstitions of his father.
“Well, there is one more procedure I’ve always wanted to try.” Cartoon by Kim Warp Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
The book’s narrative is daringly discontinuous. Tyll and Nele now vanish, only to reappear in a new section that jumps ahead to the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Somehow, in the ensuing decades, Tyll has established himself as the Holy Roman Empire’s most celebrated jester, and the Kaiser wants him for his own household. From Vienna, the imperial capital, the Kaiser sends an envoy, Martin von Wolkenstein, to find Tyll and bring him back. Wolkenstein takes three sturdy soldiers with him, and eventually finds Tyll, who is poorly disguised as a monk—and who happily joins Wolkenstein’s posse as it makes its adventurous way back to Vienna, a journey that takes in the last battle of the Thirty Years’ War.
Despite the grimness of the surroundings and the lancing interventions of history, the novel’s tone remains light, sprightly, enterprising. Kehlmann has an unusual combination of talents and ambitions—he is a playful realist, a rationalist drawn to magical games and tricky performances, a modern who likes to look backward. He made his name with his first novel to be translated into English, “Measuring the World” (2006), a vital and absurdly readable account of the intersecting lives of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855). But “Measuring the World” was a more conventional novel than “Tyll.” Because so much is known about the lives of these two celebrated figures, the book relaxed into easy biographical embroidery (“Alexander von Humboldt was famous in all of Europe for an expedition to the tropics he had led twenty-five years earlier. He had been to New Spain, New Granada, New Barcelona, New Andalusia, and the United States,” and so on.) The episodic adventurousness of “Measuring the World” was sometimes purchased, one felt, at the cost of intensity and depth of inquiry.
“Tyll” is vivified by the remoteness of its setting and the mythical obscurity of its protagonist, which oblige Kehlmann to commit his formidable imaginative resources to wholesale invention, and to surrender himself to the curious world he both inhabits and makes. At once magister and magician, he practices the kind of novelistic modesty that can be found at the heart of classic storytelling. The writer animates a perspectival fictional universe that flutters with many relative truths—the strange and wonderful world views of the individual characters. Kehlmann’s publishers call his novel a work of “magic realism and adventure,” which is not wrong; a talking donkey and a dying dragon make their appearances. But magic realism is also simply a great fidelity to the perspectives of its characters. The miraculous, in Gabriel García Márquez, is, more often than not, a character’s vision of the supernatural, the veracity of which hangs in the communal air. In “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the mythical-sounding “most beautiful woman who had ever been seen,” whom Aureliano Segundo treks across “the hallucinating plateau” to find, is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen; “the hallucinating plateau” is the place where he suffered hallucinations.


To My Relatives

If you are reading this , I am dead .
Or I am close to death .
Or you have been snooping through my papers .
Let ’ s assume that I am dead .
I HEREBY REQUEST that you , my relatives and kin , carry out my wishes regarding the following : MY LETTERS : As you will see in the garage , boxes No .
12 through 26 contain my letters .
I have saved every letter I have ever received , including letters from collection agencies .
Please go through the letters , reading each one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unimportant letters .
I donate the important letters to you , my relatives , to divide fairly among yourselves .
I urge you to go back through the “ unimportant ” letters and see if there might still be some important ones in there .
MY PETS : Please adopt and provide loving homes for my dogs , Snappy and Bitey ; my cat , Sprayer ; and my goldfish , Methuselah .
MY CLOTHING : Please help yourself to my suits .
You will notice that , because of my unusual physique @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Extra Large and Extra Extra Extra Large , while the suit jackets are size Tiny and Extra Tiny .
MY LIBRARY : Please donate my collection of books—all five of them—to the local library .
PORNO : Also , please donate my pornography collection ( boxes 30 to 45 ) to the local library .
MY COINS : In the attic , you will find many , many quart jars of pennies .
I ’ m not sure how many .
Please spend these pennies on whatever you would like .
You may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bank .
However , I ’ m told that banks will not accept pennies unless they are wrapped in coin wrappers .
Maybe that could be a family project , to remember me by .
MY GUNS : As some of you know , I have many guns , scattered throughout the house .
Most are loaded , so please be careful opening drawers , closets , and medicine cabinets .
MY PUSH LAWNMOWER : Please donate this to Goodwill , after first cleaning off all the bits of grass and dog poop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the years .
Also , please sharpen the blades with the hand sharpener ( somewhere in box 28 ) .
Oil and rebalance the wheels .
MY CAR : Sorry , but it ’ s still stuck in the surf at Party Beach .
It ’ s yours if you can tow it out .
MY “ MURDER ” : Please send an anonymous letter to the police , claiming that my friend Don killed me .
MY SAFE-DEPOSIT BOX : Attached to this letter is a key .
It is the key @ @ @ @ @ @ @ key to the bank and open the box .
Inside you will find another key .
This is the spare key to the box .
Take both keys to the bank officer in charge of safe-deposit boxes and close out the account .
You may have to fill out some paperwork and pay for back rent .
TRAPDOOR : The trapdoor no longer works .
I think the neighborhood kids broke it .
Please cover the button with a piece of duct tape .
SKULL : As you ’ ve probably noticed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shelf in the dining room .
This was sold to me as the skull of Khrushchev , the Russian leader .
It was a damned lie !
I don ’ t even think it ’ s Russian !
Still , it ’ s pretty cool .
First dibs gets it .
( Suggestion : as a funny gag , put a cigarette between its teeth , like he ’ s smoking it . )
MY WIND CHIMES : As you know , I have more than a hundred wind chimes hanging down from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ help yourself .
Unfortunately , some of the wind chimes have been damaged by the next-door neighbors .
MY REMAINS : Please have me cremated .
Then form the ashes into the shape of me .
Then deep-fry me .
Then bury me with full military honors ( even though I was never in the military ) .
MY HOUSE : A real-estate agent told me that my house , if it were totally renovated ( plumbing , electrical , roof , etc . )
, and if the bats and raccoons and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attic , and if somehow the house ’ s “ tilt ” could be fixed , would sell for about what I paid for it forty years ago .

Dear Relatives,
If you are reading this, I am dead. Or I am close to death. Or you have been snooping through my papers.
Let’s assume that I am dead. I HEREBY REQUEST that you, my relatives and kin, carry out my wishes regarding the following:
MY LETTERS: As you will see in the garage, boxes No. 12 through 26 contain my letters. I have saved every letter I have ever received, including letters from collection agencies. Please go through the letters, reading each one, and divide them into important and unimportant letters.
I donate the important letters to you, my relatives, to divide fairly among yourselves. I urge you to go back through the “unimportant” letters and see if there might still be some important ones in there.
MY PETS: Please adopt and provide loving homes for my dogs, Snappy and Bitey; my cat, Sprayer; and my goldfish, Methuselah.
MY CLOTHING: Please help yourself to my suits. You will notice that, because of my unusual physique, the suit pants are size Extra Extra Large and Extra Extra Extra Large, while the suit jackets are size Tiny and Extra Tiny.
MY LIBRARY: Please donate my collection of books—all five of them—to the local library.
PORNO: Also, please donate my pornography collection (boxes 30 to 45) to the local library.
MY COINS: In the attic, you will find many, many quart jars of pennies. I’m not sure how many. Please spend these pennies on whatever you would like. You may want to cash them in at the bank. However, I’m told that banks will not accept pennies unless they are wrapped in coin wrappers. Maybe that could be a family project, to remember me by.
MY GUNS: As some of you know, I have many guns, scattered throughout the house. Most are loaded, so please be careful opening drawers, closets, and medicine cabinets.
MY PUSH LAWNMOWER: Please donate this to Goodwill, after first cleaning off all the bits of grass and dog poop that have got stuck on it over the years. Also, please sharpen the blades with the hand sharpener (somewhere in box 28). Oil and rebalance the wheels.
MY CAR: Sorry, but it’s still stuck in the surf at Party Beach. It’s yours if you can tow it out.
MY “MURDER”: Please send an anonymous letter to the police, claiming that my friend Don killed me.
MY SAFE-DEPOSIT BOX: Attached to this letter is a key. It is the key to my safe-deposit box. Take the key to the bank and open the box. Inside you will find another key. This is the spare key to the box. Take both keys to the bank officer in charge of safe-deposit boxes and close out the account. You may have to fill out some paperwork and pay for back rent.
TRAPDOOR: The trapdoor no longer works. I think the neighborhood kids broke it. Please cover the button with a piece of duct tape.
SKULL: As you’ve probably noticed, there is a human skull on the shelf in the dining room. This was sold to me as the skull of Khrushchev, the Russian leader. It was a damned lie! I don’t even think it’s Russian! Still, it’s pretty cool. First dibs gets it. (Suggestion: as a funny gag, put a cigarette between its teeth, like he’s smoking it.)
MY WIND CHIMES: As you know, I have more than a hundred wind chimes hanging down from the eaves of my house. Please help yourself. Unfortunately, some of the wind chimes have been damaged by the next-door neighbors.
MY REMAINS: Please have me cremated. Then form the ashes into the shape of me. Then deep-fry me. Then bury me with full military honors (even though I was never in the military).
MY HOUSE: A real-estate agent told me that my house, if it were totally renovated (plumbing, electrical, roof, etc.), and if the bats and raccoons and yellow jackets could be expelled from the attic, and if somehow the house’s “tilt” could be fixed, would sell for about what I paid for it forty years ago.
I smell another family project! ♦


newyorker--2020-02-10--Can Slavery Reënactments Set Us Free?

Can Slavery Reënactments Set Us Free?

A gunshot echoed over starlit forest near the town of Marine on St. Croix , Minnesota .
It was late October , already frigid , and chasers had pushed our group of ten fugitives to the edge of a lake .
For a moment , we ’ d hesitated , shouts drawing closer as the black water winked , but the shot drove us all straight in .
My legs went numb ; Elyse , a high-school sophomore , exclaimed , “ My God !
” Submerged to the waist , I waded through marsh grass and lamplight toward our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bank .
The Drinking Gourd shone overhead with exaggerated clarity .
This was my third Underground Railroad Reënactment .
An hour had elapsed by the time we crossed the lake : seven teens , two elementary-school teachers , one “ abolitionist , ” and me .
I had no idea where we were , only that it was about two hundred miles from Canada , where Justin Trudeau had just won reëlection after a blackface scandal , and forty from the waters of Lake Minnetonka , in which Prince orders Apollonia to “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” As we stepped ashore , I thought of my enslaved forebears , wondering what they might make of our strange tribute .
“ That ’ s what you ’ re concerned about , your ChapStick ?
” Elyse chided Max , a blond boy in a blue hat and checkered Vans .
His lip balm was ruined—as was my notebook—but the baby doll he ’ d sworn to carry North was dry .
( Elyse dubbed him Mother Max . )
The whispers stopped with the arrival of our conductor , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I was still smarting from a branch to the forehead when he stopped to deliver the night ’ s sixth lecture : “ My name is Henry David Thoreau .
This is Walden Pond.
” For more than three decades , students have reënacted escapes on the Underground Railroad at schools , camps , churches , museums , and juvenile-correction centers across the United States .
Millions have undergone an experience that can range from a board game to an immersive nightlong ordeal , complete with horseback-riding paddy rollers and an armed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ living-history lesson is another ’ s exercise in leadership training , anti-racist therapy , or even behavioral reform .
Many believe that Underground Railroad Reënactments , or U.G.R.R.s , have the power to morally transform American youth .
You might call it the fugitive cure .
Though it ’ s left an impression on everyone from Lena Dunham to Disney ’ s former chairman Michael Eisner , the U.G.R.R .
began in Minnesota , with a small organization currently known as the Kambui Education Initiative .
Last fall , I flew to Minneapolis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the year .
It took place at Wilder Forest , a thousand-acre recreation area now home to the charter school River Grove .
A forty-minute drive from the city , past horse farms and slivers of lake , it ’ s rustic enough to pass for the nineteenth century , when St. Paul ’ s real Underground Railroad spirited the captives of summering slaveholders through woods not far from these .
I took inventory of my fellow-participants in the school ’ s cafeteria .
To my left sat two white elementary-school teachers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from a local arts program , three black and one Asian , laughed and gossiped .
The final trio , two white boys and a black girl , were friends from high-school orchestra .
After learning about the simulation from his father , Will invited Max and Elyse , who agreed to attend despite initially finding the idea “ sketchy.
” When I asked if they ’ d studied slavery , they shook their heads .
“ We ’ re stuck in the Monroe Doctrine , ” Elyse said sadly , as though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ began near sunset , with the arrival of Chris Crutchfield .
A gregarious Morehouse graduate with a neat mustache and a slightly beaverish smile , Crutchfield , fifty , began running U.G.R.R.s in the nineteen-eighties .
Now he ’ s the program ’ s foremost evangelist , a passionate outdoorsman who teaches litigation at a local college and serves as a deputy director of the Ramsey County correctional department .
“ Freedom is like air , ” Crutchfield said , as we finished a breath-holding contest .
“ And , just like we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ air , we ’ re also swimming in a sea of freedom .
It ’ s not completely free—just like the air isn ’ t completely clean—but the freedom we enjoy right now , compared to the freedom that enslaved Africans had , is unbelievable.
” Volunteers stood to dramatize moments in the lecture .
Elyse represented a woman being auctioned ; Max , a hunger striker force-fed on a slave-ship deck .
We assembled in tight lines to approximate the Middle Passage , and Crutchfield illustrated the mortality rate by walking up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ d be dead , you ’ d be dead—Julian , you ’ re dead.
” Still , the emphasis was on uplift , the power of a courageous example to convert the hard-hearted to liberty ’ s cause .
Crutchfield relayed the story of Eliza in Harriet Beecher Stowe ’ s “ Uncle Tom ’ s Cabin , ” a runaway who carries her infant across the thawing ice of the Ohio River , and whose bravery became a staple of nineteenth-century melodrama .
Her real-life counterpart , he told us , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turn , helped spark the Civil War .
The moral force of one flight transformed America , and , through reënactment , might very well do so again : “ It ’ s about one person deciding they want freedom , and inspiring the whole country to do the right thing.
” Identifying with fugitives is nothing new in America .
“ I am the hounded slave , I wince at the bite of dogs , ” Walt Whitman wrote , in “ Song of Myself.
” D. H. Lawrence once described the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ escaped slaves.
” More recently , the runaway has emerged as the emblematic figure of a renovated national mythology , hero of a land that increasingly sees its Founding Fathers as settler-colonist génocidaires .
In their stead rises a patriotism centered on slavery and abolition , and a campaign to set the country ’ s age-old freedom cult on a newly progressive footing .
“ I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves , ” Michelle Obama said at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 .
No words @ @ @ @ @ @ @ slavery as the nation ’ s narrative cornerstone and its citizens ’ most consequential inheritance .
This America ’ s founding mother is Harriet Tubman—in the recent film “ Harriet , ” Cynthia Erivo ’ s Tubman leads black Union Army soldiers in a tableau that evokes Emanuel Leutze ’ s “ Washington Crossing the Delaware ” —and its year zero is 1619 , when the first slave ships docked in Virginia .
Last year , the Times Magazine proposed the date as the country ’ s birthday ; in the opening essay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and their descendants were the true “ perfecters of this democracy.
” “ Democracy has to be born anew every generation , and education is its midwife , ” John Dewey , a forerunner of today ’ s experiential educators , wrote .
But how does one “ teach ” slavery as a matter of experience ?
The rise of remembrance culture created an imperative not only to honor but in some way to relive .
What may have begun with the neo-slave narratives of the nineteen-seventies and eighties , like Octavia Butler @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Morrison ’ s “ Beloved , ” migrated to popular explorations of slavery ’ s afterlife .
In 1993 , the year Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature , Disney announced a ride , never completed , in which visitors would “ feel what it was like to be a slave [ and ] to escape through the Underground Railroad .
”

He began to incorporate horses, dogs, large casts of conductors, and, in one instance, a rented paddle steamer, which he transformed into a slave ship by blacking out the windows and carpeting the lower deck in straw. It was the second part of a three-day simulation for sixty black teens, which began at an ersatz African village, continued with real farm labor and a night escape, and ended with a mind trick: Kambui took participants to breakfast at a local restaurant, where, by prearrangement, white staff members denied them service.
“It was pure gold,” Karen McKinney, who played a slave trader on the boat, told me. Now a scholar of Biblical studies, and a longtime advocate of experiential learning, McKinney believes that, with the right instructor, “risky” simulations can be pedagogically invaluable.
“Kamau was an action figure,” Melvin Carter III told me. Once among McKinney’s captives, and now St. Paul’s first African-American mayor, he remembers the experience as a crucial life lesson. When Carter and three friends staged a “rebellion,” refusing to stand for a slave auction, Kambui picked one of them up and threw him into the St. Croix River. Carter wrote down what he said next: “Fellas, I appreciate your resolve. But look around you. The women, children, and old folks you all love will need men like you to be strong enough to suffer whatever it takes to be around when they need protection. Don’t just take yourself out of the game for nothing.”
In Paul Beatty’s satirical novel “The Sellout,” the protagonist’s father is a practitioner of “Liberation Psychology,” who cultivates his son’s race consciousness through a variety of cruel, Pavlovian experiments. (The punch line is that his son grows up to own a slave and reëstablish segregation in modern California, as a way to foster black solidarity.) With similar zeal, Kambui fixated on the contemporary notion that black adolescents faced a crisis of character. Amid the racist law-and-order panic of the nineteen-nineties, when Minneapolis was briefly known as “Murderapolis,” he volunteered with a Twin Cities group of black men called Save Our Sons (S.O.S.), which mentored local boys thought to have criminal proclivities. The founder was Melvin Carter, Jr., a St. Paul police sergeant and the father of the current mayor. U.G.R.R.s were “one of the keys to recapturing our youth,” Carter told me when we spoke at Golden Thyme. “You get these inner-city tough kids up in the woods and they cry like babies.”
Outdoor education has often served to forge collective identity. Lord Baden-Powell modelled the Boy Scouts on his experiences in the British Army. Twentieth-century American summer camps encouraged white middle-class kids to reënact “Indian” life in redface, as though to siphon some Native essence from the landscape. Perhaps, for Kambui, the U.G.R.R. was a black variation on the same ritual, a way of freeing the land by making young people feel free within it.
At the same time, Yamro described his father’s reënactments as a break with his black-nationalist past: “He went from being a hard-core revolutionary to being a hard-core humanist, working with children of all races.”
At Wilder, Kambui introduced the U.G.R.R. to thousands. His increasingly diverse runaways ranged in age from four to seventy; they included local schoolkids, visiting outdoor instructors, and white-collar workers on corporate retreats. Kambui presented the simulation to journalists and at conferences. Underground Railroad Reënactments began to mushroom across the United States. They took place in Niagara, where costumed Tubmans hustled groups to Canada across the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, and at Y.M.C.A.s from Ohio to Alabama. At Conner Prairie, a living-history museum in Indiana, they became so convincing that credulous participants have physically attacked actors.
It’s one of the marvels of America that an idea can begin with Malcolm X and land at Disney. In the early nineties, when the company’s executives wanted an Underground Railroad attraction for a planned American-history theme park, they called Kambui. He rejected the idea, and the park itself was soon abandoned following outrage in the national press. William Styron—whose 1967 novel, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” once sparked its own slavery scandal—scoffed at Disney for believing that enslavement could be evoked through “virtual effects or virtual reality.”
Yet more than one fugitive had tried to do just that. William Wells Brown, an author and a former fugitive who wrote that slavery was unrepresentable, also travelled with a slavery-themed moving panorama, the Oculus Rift of its era. So did Henry (Box) Brown. A minister described Brown’s “Mirror of Slavery” as “admirably calculated to make an unfading impression upon the heart and memory, such as no lectures, books, or colloquial correspondence can produce, especially on the minds of children and young people.” Kambui, too, wondered how to reach the millions who would never attend his reënactments.
In the early nineteen-nineties, Kambui met Rich Bergeron, a designer at the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, a civic-minded software company best known for the computer game the Oregon Trail. A classroom cult classic, the program conveyed pioneer hardship through player frustration. Bergeron began to wonder if something similar could be done with fugitive escapes. He took a MECC team on one of Kambui’s reënactments, and the eventual result was Freedom!, America’s first computer game about slavery.
Beth Daniels was one of five programmers who worked on Freedom!, and, when I visited her home in Minneapolis, she showed me a computer older than I was: a squat, square Apple IIGS. The opening menu, framed by a pixel-art plantation tableau, appeared on the sixteen-color display. It was a surprisingly elegant image, evocative of Jacob Lawrence.
“Nowadays, we’re used to talking about serious games,” Daniels told me. “But that didn’t exist in the nineties. We had no words for what we were creating.”
Freedom!—which MECC billed as an educational simulation, not as a game— forced users to make their way across hostile territory without a map, uncertain whom they could trust, and dependent on clues like the North Star for orientation. Daniels is still proud of the “freedom font,” which obscures place-names when the player-character cannot read. The first time I played, it took me seven tries and two hours to find freedom.
Kambui took an active advisory role in the program, and his influence is clear in the emphasis on wilderness survival. More fatefully, he pushed for period dialect and characters with a distinctly “African” look. The all-white team deferred to him.
In the fall of 1992, MECC shipped the simulation to one in every three school districts in the country. Controversy began building shortly thereafter. Minnesota’s oldest black newspaper criticized characters’ “exaggerated features” and “ignorant” speech (“I sees a runnin’ look in yo’ eyes,” one says). The company announced plans for a dialect-free revision, but it was too late. Within months, Freedom! made national news following a high-profile protest at an Indiana school district; MECC recalled the product. “Slavery was not a game in our history,” one parent declared. In January, 1993, the company instructed schools to return or destroy their copies.
The prestige of games has since risen. In 2013, a mass-market adventure called Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry, which stars a ninja-like plantation liberator, won wide acclaim for grappling with enslavement. Meanwhile, Freedom! successors proliferate in schools and museums; Scholastic, National Geographic, and Cincinnati’s Freedom Center all offer digital Underground Railroads. But, in a striking reversal, U.G.R.R.s, which had been gaining popularity in 1993, are now on the outs.
Among the reënactment narratives that participants have shared online, a common sentiment is incredulity. “Weird fever dream or did this happen???” a young woman wrote on Twitter, describing a “fucked up slavery LARP where all of us white children had to pretend to be slaves on a plantation.”
Participants in other U.G.R.R.s report activities that began without warning, involved cages and screaming confrontations, or incorporated no discussion of race and American slavery. One teen told me about lying face down in wet grass for thirty minutes at Camp Joy, in Ohio, waiting to be “sold off.” Counsellors yelled, told kids not to look them in the eyes, and substituted the words “pig” and “piggy” as racial slurs. (Camp Joy is run in partnership with the Cincinnati Police Department.) Complaints typically involve white adults “playing slavery” with black children, but the potential for trauma knows no color; in one local news broadcast, black reënactors at a Detroit church reduced several black fifth graders to sobs in an eldritch antebellum basement.
I don’t remember my first U.G.R.R., but a childhood friend, who now works in education, told me that our third-grade class attended one at a camp in Pennsylvania. “You’ve probably repressed the memory,” she said. Perhaps. Lena Dunham, however, remembers hers clearly. “What were we going to learn from being lashed together with our classmates and chased by a pony?” she wrote in her 2014 memoir. “Would we suddenly empathize, be able to fully imagine the experience of the American slave?”
Her skepticism was timely. A year earlier, in 2013, the parents of a black student in Connecticut filed a human-rights complaint about a U.G.R.R. conducted by Nature’s Classroom, which had incorporated the activity into outdoor retreats with hundreds of Northeastern middle and elementary schools. Their seventh-grade daughter described name-calling, make-believe cotton picking, and in-character threats to cut her Achilles tendon. “Scare the crap out of the group,” reads one official script from the organization, which also calls for mock slave auctions and pantomimed railroad-gang labor. Her parents denounced the simulation on national television, and called it “sanctioned social and emotional abuse.” Nature’s Classroom suspended the program, though its director, John G. Santos, still defends it. (The organization “backed away for nothing but political reasons,” he told me, while conceding that the reënactment’s age barrier should have been higher.)
In 2016, after a similar incident in Michigan, the Y.M.C.A. insisted that its affiliates stop running slavery simulations. By 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center had declared them “inappropriate for any student.” A new consensus deemed U.G.R.R.s traumatic, trivializing, and, in the words of a former participant, “white culture.”
The Kambui Initiative has so far escaped the backlash. Harriet Tubman never lost a passenger; Chris Crutchfield has never been sued. Of the several dozen people I’ve accompanied on my three Minnesota U.G.R.R.s, nearly all responded positively. The simulation has a perfect safety record and a solid reputation, and regularly features in local celebrations of Juneteenth. Alanna Galloway, a thirty-five-year-old union organizer who plays Harriet Tubman, told me that she frequently meets former participants around the Twin Cities, where, years ago, almost every summer camp included a reënactment: “I’ll be in Target and somebody will come up to me and say, ‘I remember you—you were Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad eight years ago.’ ”


newyorker--2020-02-10--Barry Blitt’s “Origin Story”

Barry Blitt’s “Origin Story”

In February , 1925 , Rea Irvin , The New Yorker ’ s first art editor , designed the cover of the magazine ’ s inaugural issue .
That cover ’ s central character , a dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle , would come to be known as Eustace Tilley , and he has graced the cover of the magazine nearly every February in the ninety-five years since .
This is all a matter of historical record—but Barry Blitt , in this year ’ s Anniversary Issue , tells a different origin story .
We recently talked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
You ’ ve drawn many a Eustace Tilley .
Is there something pleasing about revisiting familiar forms ?
Well , certain familiar forms are probably traumatic to revisit , but Tilley is a joy to draw repeatedly .
All the hard work has been done for you—it ’ s a beautifully designed image .
Hard to make a mess of those shapes and colors , though I give it the old college try .
What do you think makes Tilley such an enduring image ?
Oh , it ’ s funny and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trying to get me to say the word “ iconic , ” aren ’ t you ?
You also did the spots for this issue .
Doing variations on a theme seems like a useful way of generating ideas .
What other methods do you use ?
Those tiny spots were the most fun I ’ ve had drawing in a while , even if there ’ s a lot less pressure when the image is so small .
( Now that I ’ m enthusing about them , I ’ m really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ small . )
And , yeah , it felt like an exercise , working out the variations .
My only other method is to wait until a deadline looms .
I find panic helps get the ink flowing .
Who are your favorite drawers of animals ?
T. S. Sullivant or Arthur Rackham—and , more recently , John Cuneo or Anita Kunz .
I ’ m forgetting lots of other favorites , I ’ m sure .
For more variations on Eustace Tilley , see below :

In February, 1925, Rea Irvin, The New Yorker’s first art editor, designed the cover of the magazine’s inaugural issue. That cover’s central character, a dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle, would come to be known as Eustace Tilley, and he has graced the cover of the magazine nearly every February in the ninety-five years since. This is all a matter of historical record—but Barry Blitt, in this year’s Anniversary Issue, tells a different origin story. We recently talked to Blitt about drawing a familiar face.
You’ve drawn many a Eustace Tilley. Is there something pleasing about revisiting familiar forms?
Well, certain familiar forms are probably traumatic to revisit, but Tilley is a joy to draw repeatedly. All the hard work has been done for you—it’s a beautifully designed image. Hard to make a mess of those shapes and colors, though I give it the old college try.
What do you think makes Tilley such an enduring image?
Oh, it’s funny and unique and timeless. You’re trying to get me to say the word “iconic,” aren’t you?
You also did the spots for this issue. Doing variations on a theme seems like a useful way of generating ideas. What other methods do you use?
Those tiny spots were the most fun I’ve had drawing in a while, even if there’s a lot less pressure when the image is so small. (Now that I’m enthusing about them, I’m really beginning to worry about them appearing so small.)
And, yeah, it felt like an exercise, working out the variations. My only other method is to wait until a deadline looms. I find panic helps get the ink flowing.
Who are your favorite drawers of animals?
T. S. Sullivant or Arthur Rackham—and, more recently, John Cuneo or Anita Kunz. I’m forgetting lots of other favorites, I’m sure.
For more variations on Eustace Tilley, see below: