newyorker--2020-08-17--David Gilbert on John Hughes and Being Seventeen

Your story in this week ’ s magazine , “ Cicadia , ” follows three seventeen-year-olds on their way to a party in suburban Cincinnati , in 1986— “ Best friends cruising together .
On the cusp of senior year.
” When did you first start thinking about these boys and that party ?
How important is the eighties setting ?
O.K.
, so on December 11 , 2015 , I was watching “ Last Year at Marienbad ” —yeah , yeah , I was in a mood—and halfway through the film the oblique nature of the narrative sort of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decided I was watching this profound cinematic experiment in repetition , in terms of the acting and the roles played , right down to the looping character of projected film , of life captured but then remaining forever static , the built-in essence of this drama .
Like I said , I was in a mood .
So I wrote myself this e-mail ( verbatim ) : This was the beginning of “ Cicadia.
” But I could never figure out how to crack the code .
The minute attempts at communication within @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meaning , which , budding endlessly , would become meaningless .
The basic mechanism of the multitrack plot .
It was like geometry , and I ’ m horrible at geometry .
So four years passed , my thoughts occasionally flexing around the idea , until I was watching “ Ferris Bueller ’ s Day Off , ” probably for the fiftieth time , and I wondered , Hmm , what it would be like for Ferris if he was forced to relive this day every time someone pushed play .
Like his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he only existed for an hour and forty-three minutes of run-time .
That was his life .
Maybe he was confused .
Maybe he was lonely .
Feeling trapped .
Maybe he wondered if the same was true for Cameron , for Sloane , for Jeanie , for Mr. Rooney , if they were all stuck , unable to acknowledge their shared predicament .
That ’ s interesting , I thought .
And complicated .
I might be bad at geometry , but I love problem-solving in writing .
So I set out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ John Hughes movie and to try to convey , under the surface , the psychology of this setup .
Are you confused ?
Because I am .
And for a while , that was the problem with the story .
It was confusing and too attached to its oblique cleverness .
Enter Nietzsche and the concept of the eternal return and my grad-school philosophy class with Fred McGlynn , at the University of Montana .
This was back in 1994 .
Fred is easily one of the best teachers I ever had .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fred ’ s distinctive rasp .
Fred ’ s enthusiasm and sense of humor and massive brain , displayed in clouds of chalk dust and smoke .
I ended up taking three courses with him—I hope you ’ re well , Fred—and I always sparked to Nietzsche ’ s idea of eternal return , and I thought maybe I could mix memory and recurrence into the story , and create a more universal impression of how we experience the past and how it operates on the present and the future .
We ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And we ’ re always coming of age .
Or at least I am .
We see events unfold through the point of view of one of the boys , Max .
He ’ s always prided himself on his B-minus persona , but he ’ s much smarter than that .
The story captures him at a point where he ’ s thinking about whether to leave that old persona behind .
How aware is Max of what he might lose ?
I don ’ t think Max is really aware of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ picture within this small world .
He ’ s stuck in his head .
But he is acutely aware of the micro-losses .
The repercussions of his casual disdain .
The misunderstandings .
The missed connections .
The mistaken assumptions .
The inevitable betrayals .
He has a desire for meaning that ’ s bigger than himself but also contains himself , a.k.a .
the adolescent urge .
But , unlike in “ Groundhog Day , ” there ’ s no possible liberating version of the day , no sloughing of ego , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ along with a bit of hope , of course , in the form of change , which happens via profound noticing .
In this endless present , Max needs to see something fresh every day .
And there ’ s always something fresh to notice and to feel .
The story takes place as a seventeen-year brood of cicadas is hatching .
Were the cicadas—and the title—an integral part of the story from the outset ?
Or did the idea of metamorphoses come as you were writing ?
There was a small cicada @ @ @ @ @ @ @ loved searching for the exoskeletons left behind on the trees , almost like Easter but , instead of hunting for eggs , they hunted for the terrestrial remnants of cicadas .
They ’ d pick the husks from the trees , their lingering grip on the bark always a surprise .
And the anatomical detail was amazing .
A perfect cicada sculpt .
And I was calling them “ cicadias , ” and my daughters were always correcting me .
Cicada , Dad !
Cicada , Dad !
But I kept on messing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that way , and I thought of arcadia , and these cicadas dropped into the “ Last Year at Marienbad ” / “ Ferris Bueller ’ s Day Off ” idea like a match into a puddle of gasoline—I often need a third thing to trigger things—and I was , like , Yes , yes , of course , the story should happen during a cicada brood , and then I recalled going to a high-school-graduation party thrown by Holly Brown , in Cincinnati , in 1986 , during one of those massive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ everywhere , a freaky plaguelike marvel , and I thought , I ’ ll use Cincinnati and that memory .
“ Cicadia ” unspools over one night in 1986 , yet there ’ s a sense in which it ’ s the story of a night that ’ s being told over and over—it could be a night that ’ s about to happen or a night that ’ s already happened .
How important is that sense of a shifting perspective ?
* Like I said above , really , really important @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on both planes .
Those are my favorite kinds of stories .
I wanted Max to be cynical and optimistic , not only because of the hellish circumstances and his own coping methods but also because of the nature of teen-agers when it comes to the present and the future .
They haven ’ t yet discovered the blurring past .
Or it can seem that way .
By the end , Max is humbled by time .
Like we all are .

Photograph by Tim Knox / eyevine / Redux
Your story in this week’s magazine, “Cicadia,” follows three seventeen-year-olds on their way to a party in suburban Cincinnati, in 1986—“Best friends cruising together. On the cusp of senior year.” When did you first start thinking about these boys and that party? How important is the eighties setting?
O.K., so on December 11, 2015, I was watching “Last Year at Marienbad”—yeah, yeah, I was in a mood—and halfway through the film the oblique nature of the narrative sort of opened up to me, and I decided I was watching this profound cinematic experiment in repetition, in terms of the acting and the roles played, right down to the looping character of projected film, of life captured but then remaining forever static, the built-in essence of this drama. Like I said, I was in a mood. So I wrote myself this e-mail (verbatim):
A story of a performance, done 10,000,000 times. The dialogue forced, insisted upon them, for this performance. All the players aware of the hell they are in.
Told from multiple point of views. All the action and dialogue the same, fated, but the voices inside their head aware and conscious of what’s going on.
Kind of like “Groundhog Day” with theater being the metaphor. All stuck in the same role.
This was the beginning of “Cicadia.” But I could never figure out how to crack the code. The minute attempts at communication within the closed system. The budding of meaning, which, budding endlessly, would become meaningless. The basic mechanism of the multitrack plot. It was like geometry, and I’m horrible at geometry. So four years passed, my thoughts occasionally flexing around the idea, until I was watching “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” probably for the fiftieth time, and I wondered, Hmm, what it would be like for Ferris if he was forced to relive this day every time someone pushed play. Like his soul had been captured in Panavision and he only existed for an hour and forty-three minutes of run-time. That was his life. Maybe he was confused. Maybe he was lonely. Feeling trapped. Maybe he wondered if the same was true for Cameron, for Sloane, for Jeanie, for Mr. Rooney, if they were all stuck, unable to acknowledge their shared predicament. That’s interesting, I thought. And complicated. I might be bad at geometry, but I love problem-solving in writing. So I set out to create my own version of a John Hughes movie and to try to convey, under the surface, the psychology of this setup.
Are you confused? Because I am.
And for a while, that was the problem with the story. It was confusing and too attached to its oblique cleverness.
Enter Nietzsche and the concept of the eternal return and my grad-school philosophy class with Fred McGlynn, at the University of Montana. This was back in 1994. Fred is easily one of the best teachers I ever had. Fred constantly smoking in the classroom. Fred’s distinctive rasp. Fred’s enthusiasm and sense of humor and massive brain, displayed in clouds of chalk dust and smoke. I ended up taking three courses with him—I hope you’re well, Fred—and I always sparked to Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, and I thought maybe I could mix memory and recurrence into the story, and create a more universal impression of how we experience the past and how it operates on the present and the future. We’re all caught in our loops. And we’re always coming of age. Or at least I am.
We see events unfold through the point of view of one of the boys, Max. He’s always prided himself on his B-minus persona, but he’s much smarter than that. The story captures him at a point where he’s thinking about whether to leave that old persona behind. How aware is Max of what he might lose?
I don’t think Max is really aware of the bigger picture, only the big picture within this small world. He’s stuck in his head. But he is acutely aware of the micro-losses. The repercussions of his casual disdain. The misunderstandings. The missed connections. The mistaken assumptions. The inevitable betrayals. He has a desire for meaning that’s bigger than himself but also contains himself, a.k.a. the adolescent urge. But, unlike in “Groundhog Day,” there’s no possible liberating version of the day, no sloughing of ego, just the deep understanding of imperfection, along with a bit of hope, of course, in the form of change, which happens via profound noticing. In this endless present, Max needs to see something fresh every day. And there’s always something fresh to notice and to feel.
The story takes place as a seventeen-year brood of cicadas is hatching. Were the cicadas—and the title—an integral part of the story from the outset? Or did the idea of metamorphoses come as you were writing?
There was a small cicada hatch last summer, and my daughters loved searching for the exoskeletons left behind on the trees, almost like Easter but, instead of hunting for eggs, they hunted for the terrestrial remnants of cicadas. They’d pick the husks from the trees, their lingering grip on the bark always a surprise. And the anatomical detail was amazing. A perfect cicada sculpt. And I was calling them “cicadias,” and my daughters were always correcting me. Cicada, Dad! Cicada, Dad! But I kept on messing up, because my brain is weird that way, and I thought of arcadia, and these cicadas dropped into the “Last Year at Marienbad”/“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” idea like a match into a puddle of gasoline—I often need a third thing to trigger things—and I was, like, Yes, yes, of course, the story should happen during a cicada brood, and then I recalled going to a high-school-graduation party thrown by Holly Brown, in Cincinnati, in 1986, during one of those massive seventeen-year broods, and the cicadas were everywhere, a freaky plaguelike marvel, and I thought, I’ll use Cincinnati and that memory.


newyorker--2020-08-17--Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Briefly Noted Book Reviews

The Golden Thread , by Ravi Somaiya ( Twelve ) .
This taut investigative history delves into the death of Dag Hammarskjöld , the second Secretary-General of the United Nations , who was killed in a plane crash in 1961 , en route from Congo to Northern Rhodesia .
The crash was ruled an accident , but Somaiya ’ s painstaking re-creation of events all but proves the role of foul play .
The first half of the book establishes motive , showing how Hammarskjöld ’ s efforts to rid Congo of foreign influence had thrust him into the center @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country ’ s mineral resources , including cobalt and uranium , used in nuclear weapons .
Contemporary accounts show that Hammarskjöld was mistrusted by the Americans , the Soviets , and the Congolese , and , while there ’ s no smoking gun here , Somaiya gathers more than enough evidence to justify his plea for the C.I.A .
to release pertinent documents that have been too long under wraps .
To Start a War , by Robert Draper ( Penguin Press ) .
Draper takes on a monumental and tragic subject––the Bush @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in 2003––with consummate skill .
The old saw is that the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai , when asked what he thought of the French Revolution , replied , “ It ’ s too early to tell.
” And yet Draper , by writing now , is able to interview all the crucial witnesses inside the Bush White House and the national-security establishment .
His scrupulous reporting and judicious analysis yield a close-to-definitive picture of all the vanity , misdirection , ignorance , and colossal misjudgments that led to the bloodiest American misadventure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , by Daniel Hornsby ( Knopf ) .
This novel of troubled faith and unlikely connection features an elderly pot-taking priest , mystically inclined and at odds with Catholic conservatism .
On a road trip across the Midwest to confront a pedophile priest who was once his teacher , he encounters a wounded coyote , a runaway teen-ager , and a tattooed bar owner who gives him a gun .
He tries to emulate early Christian hermits and ruminates on the “ via negativa , ” the belief that you can ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not .
If you approach faith any other way , he muses , “ you wind up making God in your own image and forget to look for Him anywhere else.
” Life Events , by Karolina Waclawiak ( Farrar , Straus & Giroux ) .
When Evelyn , the protagonist of this novel , enters a training program for people to learn “ to help other people die , ” it seems to be a distraction from her disintegrating marriage and her strained relationship with her aging parents .
As the “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ preparations—compiling lists of passwords , writing letters of forgiveness—Waclawiak gives us a sidelong examination of death .
Vivid portraits of those who have chosen to end their lives leave a lasting impression , as do Evelyn ’ s long drives in the California desert , during which she conceives of the wilderness as taking “ the land back from people , to turn it back over to vast nothingness .
”

The Golden Thread, by Ravi Somaiya (Twelve). This taut investigative history delves into the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, who was killed in a plane crash in 1961, en route from Congo to Northern Rhodesia. The crash was ruled an accident, but Somaiya’s painstaking re-creation of events all but proves the role of foul play. The first half of the book establishes motive, showing how Hammarskjöld’s efforts to rid Congo of foreign influence had thrust him into the center of a Cold War struggle for the country’s mineral resources, including cobalt and uranium, used in nuclear weapons. Contemporary accounts show that Hammarskjöld was mistrusted by the Americans, the Soviets, and the Congolese, and, while there’s no smoking gun here, Somaiya gathers more than enough evidence to justify his plea for the C.I.A. to release pertinent documents that have been too long under wraps.
To Start a War, by Robert Draper (Penguin Press). Draper takes on a monumental and tragic subject––the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq, in 2003––with consummate skill. The old saw is that the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai, when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, replied, “It’s too early to tell.” And yet Draper, by writing now, is able to interview all the crucial witnesses inside the Bush White House and the national-security establishment. His scrupulous reporting and judicious analysis yield a close-to-definitive picture of all the vanity, misdirection, ignorance, and colossal misjudgments that led to the bloodiest American misadventure since the Vietnam War.
Via Negativa, by Daniel Hornsby (Knopf). This novel of troubled faith and unlikely connection features an elderly pot-taking priest, mystically inclined and at odds with Catholic conservatism. On a road trip across the Midwest to confront a pedophile priest who was once his teacher, he encounters a wounded coyote, a runaway teen-ager, and a tattooed bar owner who gives him a gun. He tries to emulate early Christian hermits and ruminates on the “via negativa,” the belief that you can’t know God, only what God is not. If you approach faith any other way, he muses, “you wind up making God in your own image and forget to look for Him anywhere else.”
Life Events, by Karolina Waclawiak (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). When Evelyn, the protagonist of this novel, enters a training program for people to learn “to help other people die,” it seems to be a distraction from her disintegrating marriage and her strained relationship with her aging parents. As the “exit guides” lead their clients through preparations—compiling lists of passwords, writing letters of forgiveness—Waclawiak gives us a sidelong examination of death. Vivid portraits of those who have chosen to end their lives leave a lasting impression, as do Evelyn’s long drives in the California desert, during which she conceives of the wilderness as taking “the land back from people, to turn it back over to vast nothingness.”


newyorker--2020-08-17--Alice Oswald’s Homeric Mood

Alice Oswald’s Homeric Mood

When I am falling asleep , I sometimes hear voices .
They are not hallucinations—I am perfectly aware that they are inside my own head .
It feels as if my brain had pulled them down from the airwaves , or up from storage in my synapses .
Their speech has meaning , though it comes in snatches .
The closer I get to going under , the more indistinct the buzz becomes , until I am hearing not language but an oceanic murmur .
Alice Oswald eerily evokes that state in her eighth and most enigmatic volume of poetry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Sea ” ( Norton ) .
The book has had several incarnations .
It began as a collaboration with the British artist William Tillyer , to accompany a 2018 show of his lyrical , semi-abstract watercolors .
Her wall text and his images were later published as an art book ; Oswald then rewrote the text to stand on its own—or perhaps , like the sea , to keep moving .
In an endnote to the American edition , she writes , “ The poem is designed to be mobile.
” I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nobody ” by the sea .
This morning , the tide is coming in aslant , while a black cormorant skims the waves in a straight line , from left to right , as if it were writing a sentence .
I keep looking out the window , partly to rest from an exertion that feels like swimming in open water , but partly to ask the waves for help in deciphering Oswald ’ s dreamlike dissolves : Oswald studied classics at Oxford , and “ Nobody ” is the second of her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ Memorial : A Version of Homer ’ s Iliad , ” published in 2011 , was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize , which Oswald had won nine years earlier , for her second book , “ Dart.
” But the prize now had a new sponsor—a hedge fund—and Oswald withdrew the poem from consideration .
Explaining her decision in the Guardian , she defined her art as a form of dissidence .
“ I think it ’ s often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me , poetry is the great unsettler .
It questions the established order of the mind .
It is radical , by which I don ’ t mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing , but that it works at the roots of thinking.
” “ Memorial ” thinks radically about violence , and it has earned a place in the canon of great antiwar poems .
Simone Weil believed that the Iliad itself was a great antiwar poem , perhaps the greatest treatise ever written on the nature of force , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and she argued that conviction in a celebrated essay , published in 1940 , during the Nazi occupation of Paris .
There are echoes of Weil ’ s mystical activism in Oswald ’ s “ version ” of the Iliad ( the British edition was subtitled “ An Excavation of the Iliad ” ) , although in paying homage to Homer ’ s masterpiece with one of her own , she tacitly reproaches his hero worship , a foundation of patriarchies .
Oswald ’ s work is not widely known in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ England she is justly considered a major poet .
Last year , she became the first woman to serve as the Oxford Professor of Poetry , a chair established in 1708 which has , since then , been held by forty-five white men , including Matthew Arnold , W. H. Auden , and Seamus Heaney .
Edmund Blunden , who assumed the professorship in 1966 , the year Oswald was born , was the last incumbent obliged to give a biennial oration in Latin .
Oswald could certainly manage a speech in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stage to mesmerizing effect , according to those who have heard her perform her longer works , including “ Memorial ” and “ Nobody , ” by heart .
In oral cultures , bards have been revered for their power to enrapture .
Oswald , who acted in her youth ( she met her husband , the playwright Peter Oswald , when he cast her in a student production of Shakespeare ) , has noted that the fear of forgetting one ’ s lines , or of losing one ’ s place , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tradition .
In her view , that anxiety helped to keep the poetry alive .
Too many artists to name have appropriated Homer .
A notable recent one—Oswald ’ s compatriot Christopher Logue , who died at eighty-five , the year that “ Memorial ” was published—spent four decades writing “ War Music , ” a multivolume modernist adaptation of the Iliad that he never finished , but that runs to more than three hundred pages .
Logue , who cheerfully admitted he knew no Greek , offended purists with what one critic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
( Logue ’ s epithet for Aphrodite was “ Miss Tops and Thongs.
” ) Oswald , at the other extreme , dispenses with narrative .
She distills the carnage of the Iliad into an elixir of grief : two hundred and fourteen capsule obituaries of the fallen on both sides—young foot soldiers throwing themselves at death , or helplessly being thrown at it .
It would be a searing lament for any murderous conflict since the Bronze Age ( when the Trojan War may or may not have been fought ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Memorial , ” in 2020 , is Oswald ’ s determined focus on the lives that didn ’ t matter , except to the families gutted by their loss .
The briefest of her cameos are often the most devastating :

Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And the spring breathes new leaf into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves
When you remember them remember this
Dead bodies are their lineage
Which matter no more than the leaves
But what Oswald sees, more clearly than Homer could—not least, perhaps, because she is a woman and a mother—is the obscenity of the human sacrifice. The last of her obituaries leaves nothing to be said: “And HECTOR died like everyone else.” The chasteness of her style recalls that of a different memorial, one that is also a roll call: Maya Lin’s monument to the American dead of the Vietnam War. In both cases, you find yourself mourning other people’s children as if they were your own.
“Memorial” waylaid Oswald from her poetry’s Ithaca: the English countryside. Her mother, Lady Mary Keen, is a well-known garden designer, whose job often came with housing, and the four Keen children grew up on the estates where Lady Mary was employed. After Oxford, Oswald studied horticulture and became a gardener herself. Until recently, she lived with her husband and children in Devon, at a bend of the River Dart, where she worked in an unheated writing hut. (The family now lives in Bristol.) She relishes research in the field, and she spent three years following the river’s course and interviewing people whose livelihoods depend on it: a salmon poacher, a tin extractor, a worker in a woollen mill. In “Dart” (2002), their voices—which have the twang of folk song, along with its stoic nonchalance toward hardship—flow together with mythical and imagined ones. “A Sleepwalk on the Severn” (2009) was another river project that got Oswald out in her Wellingtons, with a notebook, at ungodly hours. She aimed to chart the phases of the moon as it rose, in the course of a month, over the flooded fields and chalky cliffs along the Severn’s banks, recording the effect of the moonlight on water and voices. “This is not a play,” she advises the reader—paradoxically, since she presents it as one, with stage directions and dialogue, some of it slapstick, for a cast of locals. Her disclaimers are worth attention. They speak to the mistrust that she wants you to feel toward the way that language betrays reality by stabilizing it.
Light, time, water, weather, growth, and decay: transience is Oswald’s muse, and it inspires startling, almost fugitive leaps of syntax and perception. She often asks one of her senses to do the work of another: her eyes to feel, her touch to hear, almost as if she were retraining them, like participants in an acting workshop instructed to change places with someone or something alien—a stranger, a foe, a bird, a plant, even a corpse—and to inhabit that otherness. In a poem from her collection “Falling Awake” (2016), she seems to envy the clouds reflected in a puddle, which are “without obligations of shape or stillness.” “I’m going to flicker for a moment,” she announces in another poem, “and tell you the tale of a shadow . . . not yet continuous / no more than a shiver of something.” In “A Rushed Account of the Dew,” she writes:
I want to work out what it’s like to descend
out of the dawn’s mind
and find a leaf and fasten the known to the unknown
with a liquid cufflink
and then unfasten to be brief to be almost actual
Anyone who has tried to write an artful sentence knows that it involves fastening the known to the unknown by some mysterious process that takes place “at the roots of thinking,” where the brain wrests an idea from an inchoate mass of sensory data and encodes it in parts of speech that another mind can decrypt. Pedestrian language bears few traces of the staggering richness and particularity that are lost in the transaction. The work of visionary poets like Rimbaud or Gérard de Nerval, or of modernists, like Pound in the late “Cantos,” who write at the edge of intelligibility, gives you a glimpse of what it signifies “to be almost actual” while refusing to simulate reality. Oswald belongs to their lineage, and she writes at that edge, too. But, in “Nobody,” she goes over it.
Cartoon by Amy Hwang Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Oswald’s intention in “Memorial,” she tells us in the preface, was to translate the “atmosphere” of the Iliad, seeking “translucence” rather than fidelity. That is what she aims to accomplish in “Nobody.” In another of her brief prefaces (many of her books require a word of explanation), she writes that “this poem lives in the murkiness” between two stories from the Odyssey. One is of King Agamemnon’s murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegistheus. The other is of Odysseus’ ten-year voyage home from Troy. But a minor figure in the tale seems to have hijacked the telling: a court poet whom Agamemnon hired to guard his wife when he sailed off to war. Aegistheus, the evil usurper, maroons the poet on a stony island so that he and the Queen can commit adultery undisturbed. Presumably, the castaway goes mad with thirst and solitude, since Oswald seems to be channelling his delirium:
These voices flit about quick-winged
with women’s faces or land on a clifftop singing
so that here and there you find fading contrails of song
and a swimmer slooshing along breathing in and out
with the purple sea circling his throat always
thinks he can hear something which nevertheless escapes him
The title “Nobody” is a gender-neutral translation of Outis, the alias that Odysseus uses to deceive the Cyclops. (For centuries, it was rendered in English as “Noman.”) But it also alludes to the bodiless anonymity of the sea, and to the unmoored voices that the castaway hallucinates. They ostensibly belong to the main characters of the Odyssey, though a few, like Icarus, seem to have flown into the poem from elsewhere in Greek mythology—or from the future. Oswald’s sea proves no less vulnerable to pollution by the debris of modernity than oceans everywhere. The poet pacing his rocky outcrop is “dry as an ashtray”; a drowning man’s will to live—his “upwardness”—keeps him afloat “like a wedge of polystyrene.”
“Memorial,” for all its translucence, feels carved in stone; its combatants are conjured so precisely that their sufferings become indelible. “Nobody” is written in disappearing ink. None of its phantoms have a stable contour, and if you are not a student of the classics you can chafe at Oswald’s donnish presumption that you should recognize their fleeting apparitions. (Their names do appear, teasingly, in an unpunctuated frieze that runs across the bottom half of six pages, in Attic-style font, bleached out in places, bold in others, as if randomly timeworn.)
An “old sea-god sometimes surfaces”—Proteus, perhaps—shifting shape to avoid capture:
and became a jellyfish a mere weakness of water
a morsel of ice a glamour of oil
and became a fish-smell and then a rotting seal
and then an old mottled man full of mood-swings
Odysseus materializes from the murk more distinctly, telling a listener how he took leave of “our hostess who is a goddess long-haired inhuman / but her language is human except when she sings.”
A woman who may be that hostess wryly addresses a messenger: “You’ve come to remove my lover / who is tired of this hotel life.” We last glimpse her as she “shrieks and flies up laughing and loud-speakering / and turns and dives unable to be anything for long / and the black wave covers her.”
The Odyssey plays loose with chronology, almost like a modern novel, though without sacrificing suspense. The tension in “Nobody” is generated by bewilderment, as one shimmering mirage supplants another. It unsettles your senses the way some avant-garde music does, and its vexing beauty invites surrender to incomprehension. But rarely does it unsettle your heart. Oswald’s perceptions are variously too personal, unique to her; or too impersonal, too purely literary; or, in the case of her phantoms, too disassociated to forge a sustained connection between sensation and insight. The intimacy of her best work is absent. I even felt, at times, that she had devised the poem as a cognitive experiment to test a reader’s tolerance for disorientation.
As an experiment, however, “Nobody” dramatizes Oswald’s audacity with language. The extremes she goes to may have been emboldened by Tillyer. He turned eighty in 2018, and their show was one of five mounted by his London gallerist to celebrate a career of mercurial engagement, formal and spiritual, with the flux of nature. In that respect, his work and Oswald’s have an obvious affinity. Yet Oswald says she hates being told that she is “a nature poet.” Perhaps she’s mindful that the pastoral idyll, since Theocritus, has been a luxury for poets and readers with clean fingernails. More to the point, Oswald has spent her writing life refusing to be told who she is. Like Proteus, she keeps wriggling out of confinement to one body, and its finality. ♦


newyorker--2020-08-17--A Drive-By Eulogy for New York City’s Record Stores

On a Wednesday afternoon just before lockdown started , the indie-rock band Real Estate played a series of brief , guerrilla-style concerts outside former locations of three of the city ’ s most beloved and now defunct record stores : Rocks in Your Head ( 157 Prince Street ; 1978-2006 ) , Other Music ( 15 East Fourth Street ; 1995-2016 ) , and Kim ’ s ( 124 First Avenue ; 1987-2014 ) .
Real Estate had just released its fifth album , “ The Main Thing , ” and wanted to salute the shops that had nurtured its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ out-stores , ” and announced the events on social media .
No permits had been acquired .
The record store has been eulogized plenty , but , for anyone who came of age before the streaming era , it was a formative and necessary space .
Now that music is a digital commodity , it ’ s easy to dismiss record collecting as a pretentious affectation , but the practice continues to hold a certain kind of outré allure .
( “ High Fidelity , ” Nick Hornby ’ s 1995 novel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ record-store owner , was made into a film in 2000 , and then adapted again this year , as a Hulu TV series , starring Zoë Kravitz . )
New York still has excellent record stores—Record Shop , in Red Hook , or Academy Records Annex , in Greenpoint , or 2 Bridges Music Arts , in Chinatown—but they have come to feel like obscure specialty markets .
Record Store Day , a holiday devised to celebrate brick-and-mortar shops , was postponed this spring , owing to Covid-19 , and is now being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ August 29th .
One hopes that there will still be record stores to celebrate .
On the day of the “ out-stores , ” the sun was shining .
A small scrum of Real Estate fans gathered in lower Manhattan .
The band ’ s setup was ad hoc : a couple of battery-powered amplifiers , an electric guitar , a small keyboard , an electric bass , and an acoustic guitar .
The audience members didn ’ t seem worried that this might be the last live music they ’ d see @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Ridgewood , New Jersey , in 2008 .
The band is expert at communicating a particular type of suburban ennui : the bliss and boredom of cruising quiet , wooded streets ; getting stoned ; and fantasizing about life elsewhere .
The group was named while the singer and guitarist Martin Courtney was acquiring his real-estate license—an evergreen ( if slightly demoralizing ) backup plan for aspiring musicians .
At each location , the band erected a large white placard that resembled a tombstone , listing the name of the shuttered shop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Music is now occupied by a café called Broken Coconut .
A pair of young women in N.Y.U .
gear walked by and paused .
“ Who is that ?
” one asked .
“ Not the Jonas Brothers , ” her friend assured her .
Another woman stopped and removed her headphones .
“ I was just listening to you !
” she told the bassist , Alex Bleeker .
The band played four songs— as many as it could get away with without exhausting the patience of the café ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , climbed into a rented van , and headed east , toward First Avenue .
“ Thanks for doing this—this was awesome !
” someone yelled as they pulled away .
Courtney was driving .
“ I ’ m surprised by how well this is going , ” he said , laughing .
“ I thought the vibe would be us playing and people just walking by , ” Bleeker added .
“ We played an in-store at Other Music when our album ‘ Days ’ came out .
We grew up on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Jersey , and , right when we were getting into what we thought was super-esoteric music , we would come into the city .
These stores were our meccas .
I would buy whatever was playing on the stereo.
” A few minutes later , they arrived at the former location of Kim ’ s—now a juice bar and organic market—where a crowd had already gathered outside .
Courtney let the others out of the van as he tried to find parking on Avenue A .
It took him a while .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to sing ?
” Bleeker asked the people in the crowd , as they waited for Courtney to return .
A woman in an apron emerged from the juice bar , surveyed the situation , shrugged , and went back inside .
The band played for a little less than half an hour .
It opened with “ November , ” a new song .
“ When I was just nineteen , I was not here nor there , but I recall being alive , ” Courtney sang .
His voice was high @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right way to eulogize the space .
Midway through the set , a twenty-three-year-old man appeared on the fire escape of an apartment building next door .
He had tousled hair and a bewildered expression .
Last November , he moved to the East Village from Northern California .
Real Estate had been a considerable influence on his high-school and college bands .
He heard the music from his living room , and had gone outside to see what was happening .
“ It was a pretty surreal moment , ” he said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ living in New York is like.
” ♦

On a Wednesday afternoon just before lockdown started, the indie-rock band Real Estate played a series of brief, guerrilla-style concerts outside former locations of three of the city’s most beloved and now defunct record stores: Rocks in Your Head (157 Prince Street; 1978-2006), Other Music (15 East Fourth Street; 1995-2016), and Kim’s (124 First Avenue; 1987-2014). Real Estate had just released its fifth album, “The Main Thing,” and wanted to salute the shops that had nurtured its rise. The band called the shows “out-stores,” and announced the events on social media. No permits had been acquired.
The record store has been eulogized plenty, but, for anyone who came of age before the streaming era, it was a formative and necessary space. Now that music is a digital commodity, it’s easy to dismiss record collecting as a pretentious affectation, but the practice continues to hold a certain kind of outré allure. (“High Fidelity,” Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel about the romantic devastations of an obsessive record-store owner, was made into a film in 2000, and then adapted again this year, as a Hulu TV series, starring Zoë Kravitz.) New York still has excellent record stores—Record Shop, in Red Hook, or Academy Records Annex, in Greenpoint, or 2 Bridges Music Arts, in Chinatown—but they have come to feel like obscure specialty markets. Record Store Day, a holiday devised to celebrate brick-and-mortar shops, was postponed this spring, owing to Covid-19, and is now being held on three dates, beginning on August 29th. One hopes that there will still be record stores to celebrate.
On the day of the “out-stores,” the sun was shining. A small scrum of Real Estate fans gathered in lower Manhattan. The band’s setup was ad hoc: a couple of battery-powered amplifiers, an electric guitar, a small keyboard, an electric bass, and an acoustic guitar. The audience members didn’t seem worried that this might be the last live music they’d see for a while.
Real Estate formed in Ridgewood, New Jersey, in 2008. The band is expert at communicating a particular type of suburban ennui: the bliss and boredom of cruising quiet, wooded streets; getting stoned; and fantasizing about life elsewhere. The group was named while the singer and guitarist Martin Courtney was acquiring his real-estate license—an evergreen (if slightly demoralizing) backup plan for aspiring musicians.
At each location, the band erected a large white placard that resembled a tombstone, listing the name of the shuttered shop and its years in business. Other Music is now occupied by a café called Broken Coconut. A pair of young women in N.Y.U. gear walked by and paused. “Who is that?” one asked. “Not the Jonas Brothers,” her friend assured her. Another woman stopped and removed her headphones. “I was just listening to you!” she told the bassist, Alex Bleeker. The band played four songs— as many as it could get away with without exhausting the patience of the café’s staff. The musicians thanked the crowd, climbed into a rented van, and headed east, toward First Avenue. “Thanks for doing this—this was awesome!” someone yelled as they pulled away.
Courtney was driving. “I’m surprised by how well this is going,” he said, laughing. “I thought the vibe would be us playing and people just walking by,” Bleeker added. “We played an in-store at Other Music when our album ‘Days’ came out. We grew up on the other side of the river, in Jersey, and, right when we were getting into what we thought was super-esoteric music, we would come into the city. These stores were our meccas. I would buy whatever was playing on the stereo.”
A few minutes later, they arrived at the former location of Kim’s—now a juice bar and organic market—where a crowd had already gathered outside. Courtney let the others out of the van as he tried to find parking on Avenue A. It took him a while. “Any of you guys know how to sing?” Bleeker asked the people in the crowd, as they waited for Courtney to return. A woman in an apron emerged from the juice bar, surveyed the situation, shrugged, and went back inside.
The band played for a little less than half an hour. It opened with “November,” a new song. “When I was just nineteen, I was not here nor there, but I recall being alive,” Courtney sang. His voice was high and wistful. It felt like the right way to eulogize the space. Midway through the set, a twenty-three-year-old man appeared on the fire escape of an apartment building next door. He had tousled hair and a bewildered expression. Last November, he moved to the East Village from Northern California. Real Estate had been a considerable influence on his high-school and college bands. He heard the music from his living room, and had gone outside to see what was happening. “It was a pretty surreal moment,” he said. “I guess this is what living in New York is like.” ♦


newyorker--2020-08-17--The Samuel Johnson of Emoji

The Samuel Johnson of Emoji

When lockdown came to Britain , Jeremy Burge did what any self-respecting tech-industry C.E.O .
would do : he hunkered down in his fifty-three-foot-long boat , Dottie M , far from the virulent crowds of the big cities .
But Burge wasn ’ t bobbing in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean .
His safe haven was in the brownish-gray waters of Alvecote Marina , just outside Tamworth , a nondescript town in the English Midlands .
He had little choice : the boat is his home , and it was already in berth .
It ’ s narrower than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unusual tech C.E.O .
He has never raised money .
He has no employees .
His official title is Chief Emoji Officer .
And his tech company is a reference Web site that he started in 2013 , after he noticed a doughnut emoji on his iPhone keyboard and wondered if it had always been there .
Google and Wikipedia were no help .
Thus was born Emojipedia—described by the radio host Molly Wood as a “ Merriam-Webster for emoji ” and the actor Stephen Fry as “ a kind of Académie Française @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Internet ’ s most comprehensive emoji directory , encompassing all platforms , versions , and operating systems .
Burge is the Samuel Johnson of emoji .
“ It ’ s not a world-changing origin story , ” Burge said one recent morning in his floating living room .
A gentle rain disturbed the stillness of the canal .
The latest issues of The Tillergraph and Towpath Talk— “ The UK ’ s number ONE read for all waterways users ” —sat on a coffee table .
Dottie M is one of around thirty-four @ @ @ @ @ @ @ four miles per hour—through the two thousand-odd miles of narrow canals winding through England ’ s countryside and industrial towns .
In the summer , Burge cruises for four to ten hours a day , up to four days a week , depending on the weather .
The rest of the time , he works on updating Emojipedia .
But in one way Burge did change something about the world : in 2014 , he declared July 17th World Emoji Day , choosing the date depicted on Apple ’ s calendar emoji .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s going to do a World Emoji Day , and it ’ s gon na be annoying , ” he said .
“ It ’ s gon na be some dumb thing that people are gon na make us talk about.
” So he decided to do it first .
It has since become a real thing : the day has been celebrated by Kim Kardashian ( who launched “ Kimoji ” -themed fragrances ) , the Empire State Building ( which lit up “ emoji yellow ” ) , and Pepsi @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cans and bottles ) .
The day has also helped raise Emojipedia ’ s profile—on World Emoji Day in 2017 , Burge was invited to join the crew of “ The Emoji Movie ” to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange .
He has advised police and defense lawyers and is on Unicode ’ s Emoji Subcommittee , the body that standardizes emoji across platforms .
Until recently , Emojipedia averaged thirty-three million page views a month , earning enough ad revenue to cover Burge ’ s salary , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ generate a tidy profit .
Last year , Burge and his fiancée had saved up enough money to leave their rental in London and fulfill their dream of living on a boat .
When covid-19 hit , Emojipedia ’ s traffic suddenly shot up , hitting fifty million page views in April .
At first , visitors were looking up things like “ face with medical mask ” and “ the microbe ” emoji—Apple ’ s version conveniently looks like a coronavirus cell .
But , as more people started to work from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out ways to add context to their messages , leading them to the site .
Then came the Black Lives Matter protests , and suddenly the “ raised fist with medium-dark skin tone ” was everywhere .
Unicode introduced skin-tone variations for emoji in 2015 .
Until then , every human emoji was white—except the “ man with turban , ” who was brown , and the “ man with Gua Pi Mao , ” who was Asian .
Now the default is Simpsons yellow , with five other skin-tone options .
A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ skin tones complicate matters .
Why not just make them all blue ?
( “ If you look at the numbers alone , you would get rid of the skin tones , ” he said .
“ The yellow one is like eighty per cent of the use.
” ) Emoji , which originated in Japan in the nineteen-nineties , are frequently controversial .
Most professionals were depicted as men until 2016 , when female alternatives were added .
Redheads and people with curly hair finally found representation in 2018 .
A gender-neutral @ @ @ @ @ @ @ transgender flag will appear on emoji keyboards later this year .
Demands for the Australian Aboriginal flag and the Kurdish flag remain unmet .
So do requests for mixed-race families .
Today , there are twenty-seven emoji for families of various sizes , but they are all yellow .
Unicode considered seven options , from removing the families altogether to creating families with every possible combination of skin tones .
That would add 7,230 emoji to the standard 3,304 .
( Apple ’ s first set had 471 . )
In the end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : do nothing .
“ The way you could have avoided a lot of issues is if you removed humans from the emoji set earlier on , ” Burge said .
Now , at the very least , “ stop adding humans.
” ♦

When lockdown came to Britain, Jeremy Burge did what any self-respecting tech-industry C.E.O. would do: he hunkered down in his fifty-three-foot-long boat, Dottie M, far from the virulent crowds of the big cities. But Burge wasn’t bobbing in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean. His safe haven was in the brownish-gray waters of Alvecote Marina, just outside Tamworth, a nondescript town in the English Midlands. He had little choice: the boat is his home, and it was already in berth. It’s narrower than a subway car.
Burge is an unusual tech C.E.O. He has never raised money. He has no employees. His official title is Chief Emoji Officer. And his tech company is a reference Web site that he started in 2013, after he noticed a doughnut emoji on his iPhone keyboard and wondered if it had always been there. Google and Wikipedia were no help. Thus was born Emojipedia—described by the radio host Molly Wood as a “Merriam-Webster for emoji” and the actor Stephen Fry as “a kind of Académie Française for your iPhone.” It is the Internet’s most comprehensive emoji directory, encompassing all platforms, versions, and operating systems. Burge is the Samuel Johnson of emoji.
“It’s not a world-changing origin story,” Burge said one recent morning in his floating living room. A gentle rain disturbed the stillness of the canal. The latest issues of The Tillergraph and Towpath Talk—“The UK’s number ONE read for all waterways users”—sat on a coffee table. Dottie M is one of around thirty-four thousand vessels chugging serenely—the speed limit is four miles per hour—through the two thousand-odd miles of narrow canals winding through England’s countryside and industrial towns. In the summer, Burge cruises for four to ten hours a day, up to four days a week, depending on the weather. The rest of the time, he works on updating Emojipedia.
But in one way Burge did change something about the world: in 2014, he declared July 17th World Emoji Day, choosing the date depicted on Apple’s calendar emoji. “It struck me that probably someone’s going to do a World Emoji Day, and it’s gonna be annoying,” he said. “It’s gonna be some dumb thing that people are gonna make us talk about.” So he decided to do it first. It has since become a real thing: the day has been celebrated by Kim Kardashian (who launched “Kimoji”-themed fragrances), the Empire State Building (which lit up “emoji yellow”), and Pepsi (which put the things on its cans and bottles). The day has also helped raise Emojipedia’s profile—on World Emoji Day in 2017, Burge was invited to join the crew of “The Emoji Movie” to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. He has advised police and defense lawyers and is on Unicode’s Emoji Subcommittee, the body that standardizes emoji across platforms. Until recently, Emojipedia averaged thirty-three million page views a month, earning enough ad revenue to cover Burge’s salary, pay a handful of contractors, and generate a tidy profit. Last year, Burge and his fiancée had saved up enough money to leave their rental in London and fulfill their dream of living on a boat.
“There’s also my theory that we all come from a bad dream I’m having.” Cartoon by Carolita Johnson Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
When covid-19 hit, Emojipedia’s traffic suddenly shot up, hitting fifty million page views in April. At first, visitors were looking up things like “face with medical mask” and “the microbe” emoji—Apple’s version conveniently looks like a coronavirus particle. But, as more people started to work from home and communicate digitally, they sought out ways to add context to their messages, leading them to the site. Then came the Black Lives Matter protests, and suddenly the “raised fist with medium-dark skin tone” was everywhere.
Unicode introduced skin-tone variations for emoji in 2015. Until then, every human emoji was white—except the “man with turban,” who was brown, and the “man with Gua Pi Mao,” who was Asian. Now the default is Simpsons yellow, with five other skin-tone options. A common argument Burge encounters is that emoji skin tones complicate matters. Why not just make them all blue? (“If you look at the numbers alone, you would get rid of the skin tones,” he said. “The yellow one is like eighty per cent of the use.”)
Emoji, which originated in Japan in the nineteen-nineties, are frequently controversial. Most professionals were depicted as men until 2016, when female alternatives were added. Redheads and people with curly hair finally found representation in 2018. A gender-neutral option was introduced last October. The transgender flag will appear on emoji keyboards later this year. Demands for the Australian Aboriginal flag and the Kurdish flag remain unmet. So do requests for mixed-race families. Today, there are twenty-seven emoji for families of various sizes, but they are all yellow. Unicode considered seven options, from removing the families altogether to creating families with every possible combination of skin tones. That would add 7,230 emoji to the standard 3,304. (Apple’s first set had 471.) In the end, Unicode opted for the simplest choice: do nothing. “The way you could have avoided a lot of issues is if you removed humans from the emoji set earlier on,” Burge said. Now, at the very least, “stop adding humans.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misidentified the type of microbe that makes up the coronavirus.


newyorker--2020-08-17--The Therapeutic Power of Gardening

The Therapeutic Power of Gardening

In mid-March , in the tense week before the British government announced its belated coronavirus-induced lockdown , certain everyday products became extraordinarily hard to find .
Panicked buyers swept up fundamentals of alimentation and elimination : yeast , flour , bathroom tissue .
More surprising , the horticulture industry experienced a surge in demand .
In the week before the lockdown began , sales of plants , seeds , and bulbs were reportedly up thirty-five per cent from 2019 .
Seed packets , especially for tomatoes and lettuces , were in limited supply .
As Britain faced the COVID crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and one way it could still be attained was in the reliable germination of a windowsill pot of watercress or a garden-patch row of chard .
Eight out of ten people in Britain live in a home with a private garden ; one in ten at least has access to a balcony , a terrace , a patio , or a communal garden .
The national affection for gardening sustains a horticulture industry that is worth about thirty billion dollars a year to the U.K. economy .
British consumers spend more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , many of them sprawling outdoor emporiums that feature cafés offering quiches and cream teas , and playgrounds for children bored by the begonias .
The Horticultural Trade Association , founded in 1899 , estimates that half of all adults in the U.K. engage in some sort of gardening , and in the past six months—which included an unusually prolonged stretch of warm , dry weather—Britons have been able to do more gardening than ever .
Once the lockdown began , the Royal Horticultural Society , the nation ’ s leading garden charity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ searches for how to grow potatoes—and the number of people asking how to compost , or how to divide perennials , was six times higher than the previous year ’ s figure .
I was among the Londoners who thought to counter potential disruptions in the food-supply chain by growing edible plants .
I spent countless hours searching online for seeds , which , I imagined , I could cultivate in the three planters that the previous occupant of my home had left on a roof terrace ; they had become unkempt and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and I moved in , last year .
Eventually , I found an online nursery that still had seedlings , and I ordered a dozen plugs of arugula and spinach .
They did not travel well : when a package of trays eventually arrived , two weeks later , the soil had mostly been shaken out into the bubble wrap , and the seedlings looked like blasted blades of grass .
Despite my efforts to tuck the roots gently back into the soil and resuscitate the plants with daily watering , they were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I tossed the trays in the rubbish .
I ’ ve never been a gardener , but my parents energetically cultivated the modest back yard of my childhood home , in Weymouth , a coastal town a hundred and twenty miles southwest of London .
When I was young , the garden was largely given over to a lawn , so that my brother and I could play , but my father kept a small vegetable patch where he grew runner beans , tomatoes , and marrows , and we had a plum @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the lawn ’ s edges , my parents planted beds with fragrant roses and tall daisies ; hostas flourished in the shady , sluggy corners .
My father died eight years ago ; my mother , who is now eighty-nine , still lives in the house .
Over the decades , the lawn has become smaller and the beds more lush and abundant , planted with clumps of geraniums and clouds of lavender .
Until a few years ago , my mother clipped the green-gold griselinia hedges herself ; she has now surrendered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a weather-beaten retired firefighter about twenty years her junior , who mows the lawn and prunes the bigger shrubs .
Most days when the weather is fine , my mother spends hours in the garden , weeding or potting up seedlings , or drinking a cup of coffee on a bench , amid the sweet-smelling shelter of honeysuckle .
Somewhere between a conifer and a cooking-apple tree , my father ’ s ashes are scattered .
“ Shane will be here maybe for the last time , ” she wrote to me in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ senior citizens should isolate completely .
“ It will be interesting to see the grass turn into a meadow this summer.
” “ When we sow a seed , we plant a narrative of future possibility , ” Sue Stuart-Smith , a British psychiatrist and psychotherapist , writes in her new book , “ The Well-Gardened Mind.
” A surprise best-seller in the U.K. , it came out in America earlier this summer .
In recent years , the benefits of gardening to mental health have become widely acknowledged in Britain .
Primary-care @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prescription ” to do something like volunteer at a local community garden , believing that such work can sometimes be as beneficial as talk therapy or antidepressants .
Some hospitals have been redesigned to incorporate gardens , spurred by findings that patients recovering from catastrophic injuries can heal more quickly if they have access to outdoor spaces with plants .
Stuart-Smith ’ s book compares the uses of gardening in historical and contemporary mental-health treatments , and reports on empirical research into gardening ’ s effects on mood .
( Laboratory rats whose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ energetic and sociable than those whose cages include a wheel , a ladder , and a tunnel . )
She draws on thirty years of clinical practice .
Previously the lead psychotherapy clinician in the county of Hertfordshire , she now works for an affiliate of the British Medical Association which provides mental-health support to doctors .
She is also informed by her own proximity to gardening on an unusually elevated plane : her husband of thirty-four years , Tom Stuart-Smith , is one of the country ’ s best-known garden designers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Queen ; in 2002 , he created a public garden at Windsor Castle to commemorate the monarch ’ s Golden Jubilee .
In “ The Well-Gardened Mind , ” Sue Stuart-Smith seeks to go beyond the truism that getting out in the garden is good for you .
“ Much of the research that ’ s been done has been by environmental psychologists , who look at things like attention and cognition , ” she told me recently .
“ That ’ s all very important .
But I was interested in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the level of metaphor.
” Her book describes a middle-aged patient , Kay , whom she was treating for depression .
As a child , Kay had experienced neglect and violence ; as an adult , she often had conflicts with her two adolescent sons , whom she raised alone , in a flat with a small garden that the boys had destroyed with their antics .
When her sons moved out , Kay reclaimed the garden .
One day in therapy , she made a striking observation : “ It is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ good.
” Stuart-Smith explains that feeling one is good—rather than merely feeling good—is an example of gardening ’ s reparative power .
Gardening provided Kay a refuge and an engagement with the world beyond herself ; it also gave her confirmation of her capacity to provide care and tenderness , in a less fraught context than that of her family relationships .
In making a case for the profound , if sometimes obscure , significance with which we imbue our gardens , Stuart-Smith draws especially on the work of the British psychoanalyst and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1971 , at the age of seventy-four .
Winnicott argued for the crucial importance of play in a child ’ s evolving sense of self .
He was also known for his writings on the foundational bond between mothers and their children , and developed the concept of “ holding ” to describe the infant ’ s earliest experience of its mother not as a separate individual but as a merged being who provides necessary support for its continued existence .
Winnicott proposed the concept of a “ transitional ” space , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ owing to its mother ’ s early care , begins to relinquish a sense of being merged with her .
In such a space—which may be found in a game of peekaboo , as a baby experiments with losing and then refinding her mother—a child explores the possibilities of separation through play , experiencing what Winnicott characterized as the paradoxical feeling of being “ alone , as an infant and small child , in the presence of mother .
”

In mid-March, in the tense week before the British government announced its belated coronavirus-induced lockdown, certain everyday products became extraordinarily hard to find. Panicked buyers swept up fundamentals of alimentation and elimination: yeast, flour, bathroom tissue. More surprising, the horticulture industry experienced a surge in demand. In the week before the lockdown began, sales of plants, seeds, and bulbs were reportedly up thirty-five per cent from 2019. Seed packets, especially for tomatoes and lettuces, were in limited supply. As Britain faced the COVID crisis, reassurance was difficult to come by, and one way it could still be attained was in the reliable germination of a windowsill pot of watercress or a garden-patch row of chard.
Eight out of ten people in Britain live in a home with a private garden; one in ten at least has access to a balcony, a terrace, a patio, or a communal garden. The national affection for gardening sustains a horticulture industry that is worth about thirty billion dollars a year to the U.K. economy. British consumers spend more than three billion dollars annually at garden centers, many of them sprawling outdoor emporiums that feature cafés offering quiches and cream teas, and playgrounds for children bored by the begonias. The Horticultural Trade Association, founded in 1899, estimates that half of all adults in the U.K. engage in some sort of gardening, and in the past six months—which included an unusually prolonged stretch of warm, dry weather—Britons have been able to do more gardening than ever. Once the lockdown began, the Royal Horticultural Society, the nation’s leading garden charity, saw a dramatic spike in Internet searches for how to grow potatoes—and the number of people asking how to compost, or how to divide perennials, was six times higher than the previous year’s figure.
I was among the Londoners who thought to counter potential disruptions in the food-supply chain by growing edible plants. I spent countless hours searching online for seeds, which, I imagined, I could cultivate in the three planters that the previous occupant of my home had left on a roof terrace; they had become unkempt and weedy since my husband, son, and I moved in, last year. Eventually, I found an online nursery that still had seedlings, and I ordered a dozen plugs of arugula and spinach. They did not travel well: when a package of trays eventually arrived, two weeks later, the soil had mostly been shaken out into the bubble wrap, and the seedlings looked like blasted blades of grass. Despite my efforts to tuck the roots gently back into the soil and resuscitate the plants with daily watering, they were totalled; a few weeks later, I tossed the trays in the rubbish.
I’ve never been a gardener, but my parents energetically cultivated the modest back yard of my childhood home, in Weymouth, a coastal town a hundred and twenty miles southwest of London. When I was young, the garden was largely given over to a lawn, so that my brother and I could play, but my father kept a small vegetable patch where he grew runner beans, tomatoes, and marrows, and we had a plum tree and a pear tree. Along the lawn’s edges, my parents planted beds with fragrant roses and tall daisies; hostas flourished in the shady, sluggy corners. My father died eight years ago; my mother, who is now eighty-nine, still lives in the house. Over the decades, the lawn has become smaller and the beds more lush and abundant, planted with clumps of geraniums and clouds of lavender. Until a few years ago, my mother clipped the green-gold griselinia hedges herself; she has now surrendered the more strenuous tasks to Shane, a weather-beaten retired firefighter about twenty years her junior, who mows the lawn and prunes the bigger shrubs. Most days when the weather is fine, my mother spends hours in the garden, weeding or potting up seedlings, or drinking a cup of coffee on a bench, amid the sweet-smelling shelter of honeysuckle. Somewhere between a conifer and a cooking-apple tree, my father’s ashes are scattered. “Shane will be here maybe for the last time,” she wrote to me in March, after the government announced that senior citizens should isolate completely. “It will be interesting to see the grass turn into a meadow this summer.”
“When we sow a seed, we plant a narrative of future possibility,” Sue Stuart-Smith, a British psychiatrist and psychotherapist, writes in her new book, “The Well-Gardened Mind.” A surprise best-seller in the U.K., it came out in America earlier this summer. In recent years, the benefits of gardening to mental health have become widely acknowledged in Britain. Primary-care doctors increasingly give patients a “social prescription” to do something like volunteer at a local community garden, believing that such work can sometimes be as beneficial as talk therapy or antidepressants. Some hospitals have been redesigned to incorporate gardens, spurred by findings that patients recovering from catastrophic injuries can heal more quickly if they have access to outdoor spaces with plants. Stuart-Smith’s book compares the uses of gardening in historical and contemporary mental-health treatments, and reports on empirical research into gardening’s effects on mood. (Laboratory rats whose cages contain soil and logs are more energetic and sociable than those whose cages include a wheel, a ladder, and a tunnel.) She draws on thirty years of clinical practice. Previously the lead psychotherapy clinician in the county of Hertfordshire, she now works for an affiliate of the British Medical Association which provides mental-health support to doctors. She is also informed by her own proximity to gardening on an unusually elevated plane: her husband of thirty-four years, Tom Stuart-Smith, is one of the country’s best-known garden designers, with clients ranging from Victoria Beckham to the Queen; in 2002, he created a public garden at Windsor Castle to commemorate the monarch’s Golden Jubilee.
In “The Well-Gardened Mind,” Sue Stuart-Smith seeks to go beyond the truism that getting out in the garden is good for you. “Much of the research that’s been done has been by environmental psychologists, who look at things like attention and cognition,” she told me recently. “That’s all very important. But I was interested in the unconscious aspects of gardening—the symbolism, and the level of metaphor.” Her book describes a middle-aged patient, Kay, whom she was treating for depression. As a child, Kay had experienced neglect and violence; as an adult, she often had conflicts with her two adolescent sons, whom she raised alone, in a flat with a small garden that the boys had destroyed with their antics. When her sons moved out, Kay reclaimed the garden. One day in therapy, she made a striking observation: “It is the only time I feel I am good.” Stuart-Smith explains that feeling one is good—rather than merely feeling good—is an example of gardening’s reparative power. Gardening provided Kay a refuge and an engagement with the world beyond herself; it also gave her confirmation of her capacity to provide care and tenderness, in a less fraught context than that of her family relationships.
In making a case for the profound, if sometimes obscure, significance with which we imbue our gardens, Stuart-Smith draws especially on the work of the British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, who died in 1971, at the age of seventy-four. Winnicott argued for the crucial importance of play in a child’s evolving sense of self. He was also known for his writings on the foundational bond between mothers and their children, and developed the concept of “holding” to describe the infant’s earliest experience of its mother not as a separate individual but as a merged being who provides necessary support for its continued existence. Winnicott proposed the concept of a “transitional” space, in which the child, feeling sufficient security owing to its mother’s early care, begins to relinquish a sense of being merged with her. In such a space—which may be found in a game of peekaboo, as a baby experiments with losing and then refinding her mother—a child explores the possibilities of separation through play, experiencing what Winnicott characterized as the paradoxical feeling of being “alone, as an infant and small child, in the presence of mother.”
A garden, Stuart-Smith suggests, can be a Winnicottian “in-between” space that allows the inner and the outer worlds to coexist simultaneously—“a meeting place for our innermost, dream-infused selves and the real physical world.” The meditative and repetitive aspects of gardening can function as a form of play for grownups who have otherwise stopped playing—or who, like Stuart-Smith’s patient Kay, were denied the possibility of doing so safely as children. Gardening can be especially helpful for people suffering from P.T.S.D. Stuart-Smith describes research done by two professors at the University of Copenhagen, Dorthe Poulson and Ulrika Stigsdotter, at a Danish arboretum. One war veteran there said that only in the company of trees did he feel safe enough to close his eyes. Another reported that trees offered him mute, complete acceptance: “There is a tree, and I am sitting here, no expectations, no questions, no nothing.”
Gardening can also help heal a mind wounded by more ordinary forms of grief, such as bereavement. Contemplating the restorative effect of working the soil in her own yard, Stuart-Smith writes that, “in the safe curtilage of the garden, I am in the kind of company that allows me to be alone and enter my own world.” When I read those words this spring, while sitting by my withered arugula on the terrace of the house where I have largely been confined, I reflected that my urge to sow seeds was about more than keeping my fridge stocked. Gardening provided a way of being alongside my mother, whom I could not visit, as she pottered, alone, in the space of my childhood.
A few weeks into the lockdown, I introduced myself to Sue and Tom Stuart-Smith in a Zoom call. They were at home, in the garden, and behind them I could see a breeze-rippled sea of pink and purple blooms, backed by rounded green embankments of hedges and towering trees. Sue was doing her clinical work remotely, rather than in London. Tom’s many public projects had been put on hold: a garden that he designed for the Hepworth Wakefield art gallery, in Yorkshire, which was supposed to have been completed this spring, would remain unfinished for now. “But with private clients the owners are all now at home, and are really on the case,” Tom said. “Rather than one desultory e-mail a month saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a cutting garden?,’ I’m getting one a day saying, ‘What’s this plant here?’ ” The Stuart-Smiths weren’t surprised that the pandemic had led Britons to become even more consumed with gardening. Sue said, “Whenever there’s a crisis—be it a war, or the aftermath of war, or a natural disaster—we see this phenomenon of urgent biophilia.” She noted that, in the First World War, infantrymen created gardens in their trenches, growing not just vegetables to eat but also flowers. “We gain sustenance from nature’s regeneration,” she said.
The Stuart-Smiths met in 1978, as undergraduates at Cambridge University. Sue was studying English, and would have gone on to do a Ph.D. in Romantic poetry, but as she was starting her final year her father died, at the age of forty-seven, from bone-marrow failure. The combination of her grief and her discovery of Freud, in a class covering morality and philosophy, helped her decide instead to become a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. “I wanted a more direct interaction with the world,” she said. Tom, meanwhile, was studying zoology, but an adolescent fascination with gardening intensified at Cambridge. There, he got to know Geoffrey Jellicoe—one of the most distinguished gardeners of the twentieth century, whose practice drew on both Renaissance architecture and Jungian theory—and Lanning Roper, a witty American landscape designer known for combining structure with exuberance. For the first time, Tom saw gardening as a professional option for himself. After graduating, he went to Manchester, to train as a landscape architect.
When the Stuart-Smiths married, in 1986, Sue was enrolled at University College Hospital, in London, and Tom had started his career. “I did an underground nuclear bunker for the R.A.F.,” he told me. “I did a reservoir, in Devon.” Sue was not a gardener—she had long viewed gardening as outdoor housework—but she embraced Tom’s interest as she accompanied him on visits to the famous gardens of England: Sissinghurst, in Kent, where Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson amassed one of the country’s great plant collections; Knightshayes, in Devon, with its sculptural topiary and its acclaimed kitchen garden. Meanwhile, they read together the psychoanalytic thinkers, such as Winnicott, whose theories Sue was learning to put into practice. “There was a kind of shared territory,” Sue told me.
When they were first married, they lived in a house with a tiny garden in Queen’s Park, in northwest London. In 1987, Tom’s parents offered them the opportunity to make a home in a dilapidated seventeenth-century barn that they were restoring across the lane from Serge Hill—the estate where both Tom and his mother had grown up, in Hertfordshire. Tom’s father, Sir Murray Stuart-Smith, was at the time a High Court judge; his mother, Lady Joan Stuart-Smith, was the head of the local magistrates’ court. “My father had a passion for building, and in those days High Court judges had three-month holidays,” Tom explained. “Over two summers, they took on a team of bricklayers, and my mum was the project manager, and my dad was the chief hod carrier, and they renovated the barn.” Sue, having been bereaved of her father, was eager to put down roots; by the time they moved in, their daughter, Rose, had been born. (Two sons, Ben and Harry, followed.) But the barn-renovation project had its tensions. “My father’s approach was very practical, while my approach is partly practical, but also aesthetic,” Tom recalled. “He would be laying a terrace and I would come along and say, ‘Oh, God, this is absolutely terrible.’ ” An opportunity for autonomy was presented by the garden, which was Tom’s to coax from a stony, north-facing hillside.
“Ah, this is going to be another one of those series where the only two minority characters, who have nothing in common, fall in love.” Cartoon by Sarah Akinterinwa Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
The Barn garden, as the five-acre site is now known, serves not just as a family home but also as a laboratory for Tom’s practice. He is celebrated for designs that are both sensuous and cerebral, combining man-made forms and structures—a clipped hedge, a grid of paths—with patterns created by wild nature. At a private house on the Norfolk coast, an orchard-like space enclosed by tall hedges and wood fencing incorporates fringed staghorn sumac trees, which are underplanted with boxwood arranged to recapitulate the forms of detritus that washes up on a nearby beach. Working with a couple in North London who had a small child, Stuart-Smith transformed a two-thousand-square-foot back yard into a fantastical, stylized forest that looks like something out of Maurice Sendak, with half a dozen or so giant fern trees imported from Tasmania quivering amid grasses and lumpy mounds of boxwood. At the far end of the yard is a sandpit and a children’s secret garden—“a place to hide,” as Tom puts it.


newyorker--2020-08-17--The Urgency of Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles”

In 1993 , the photographer Richard Avedon made a portrait , in edgeless black-and-white , of the playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith , to accompany an article in this magazine by John Lahr .
In the picture , Smith wears a dark , baggy jacket , and her English garden of loosely coiled hair tickles at her shoulders and clavicle .
Her face is hard to parse .
Her scrunched brows are like thin awnings over her eyes , which stare intensely ; there ’ s a tension in her mouth that draws one side slightly higher than the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an attempt to mask a sudden laugh .
Smith looks serious and funny , formidable and unpredictable , and—not unlike the works of confessional-historical theatre with which she has made her name—capable at once of intimate empathy and detached appraisal .
The photograph conveys what her plays confirm : that a whole world of thought and emotion can be made , through art , to live and accrue new meanings in just one person ’ s mind and body .
Smith , now sixty-nine , has devoted her career to making panoramic documentary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her talents as a journalist and as an uncanny , soul-embodying mimic .
For her one-woman shows , she conducts hundreds of interviews about high-profile civic events and , through a miracle of compression , presents verbatim the answers of her subjects , one after the other , retelling recent history as a kind of audiovisual collage .
Her most famous plays , “ Fires in the Mirror : Crown Heights , Brooklyn and Other Identities ” ( 1992 ) —about the 1991 Black-Jewish conflict in Crown Heights—and “ Twilight : Los Angeles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about the riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of four policemen accused of beating Rodney King , illustrate the power of her method .
Both tally the reasons for and the results of civic eruption and interracial strife .
Smith is in dialogue with the soul-funk legends Sly & the Family Stone , whose funniest and darkest joke was a song called “ There ’ s a Riot Goin ’ On , ” which consisted of four seconds of total silence .
Yeah , there ’ s a riot , but who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s dramatic invention is spiritually descended from the Living Newspaper tradition of political theatre , which reached the height of its influence in America in the nineteen-thirties , under the aegis of the Federal Theatre Project .
Living Newspapers narrated current events—sometimes framed by frank propaganda—for Depression-era audiences .
You might think of Smith ’ s plays as Living Magazines : thoroughly reported , yes , but shot through with a chorus of sensibilities , curated into a higher coherence .
Editing is key to Smith ’ s art ; she makes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Voices come in concert if not always in conversation .
They differ in timbre , perhaps , but Smith places them so precisely that their parallels in attitude or style or content become apparent .
When her people contradict one another directly , in succession , the collision clears the way for epiphany .
Smith ’ s plays take pluralism as a given , but subtly synthesize it into a unified whole .
( Another way to say this is that Smith delivers in art what America has chronically failed at in practice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s residency at the Signature Theatre , in New York , during the 2019-20 season , which was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic .
It was to be an extension of her great experiment : “ Fires ” and “ Twilight ” would be staged with new actors—which is to say , without Smith .
Might these voices , now almost thirty years removed from the moment of their utterance , still hold together if sung by someone else ?
Based on the evidence of “ Fires , ” directed last fall @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a tentative yes .
The show was performed by Michael Benjamin Washington , and its mixture of empathy and terrifying neutrality was still intact .
As Washington riffled through personages—Al Sharpton , Lubavitcher housewives , a Caribbean father shocked into silence by the death of his child—the audience moved with him toward an awful comprehension of the riots ’ costs .
Pershing Square Signature Center shut down before the new “ Twilight ” could hit the stage .
It ’ s a shame , a situation that I hope will be rectified whenever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rejoin one another on the aisles .
Happily , the Public Broadcasting Service has made its “ Great Performances ” production of “ Twilight : Los Angeles , ” directed by Marc Levin , available to stream on pbs.org .
The PBS version of “ Twilight ” —which first aired in 2001—is more than simply a recording of Smith ’ s original play .
It opens in 1999 , seven years after the riots ; Smith is back in town , again looking for answers .
Has there been some salutary result of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ didn ’ t get any better , ” a wide-eyed older woman says in response to Smith ’ s questions .
Daryl Gates , the former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department , still thinks , from the fresh vantage of the turn of the century , that the brutal beating of Rodney King by officers under his charge “ had nothing to do with race.
” These newer scenes are woven into the film ’ s fabric , but most of the show focusses on Smith ’ s original material .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ minimalistic sets , shot with a calm naturalism by the cinematographer Maryse Alberti , giving the production a hint of the immediacy of the theatre .
Here , though , the great physical limitation of Smith ’ s stage plays—the imperative to change costumes and characterizations on the fly , presenting a human panoply through a series of quickly achieved vocal and physical transformations—is gone .
I missed that constraint , which typically yields gold for Smith .
Except for a few quick changes , each of her characters has his or her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to see her hurriedly morph , perhaps her most impressive ( and metaphorically humane ) trick .
It ’ s still miraculous to watch Smith work .
She plays Rodney King ’ s aunt , Angela King , with a reproving , sulky comedy that nearly masks her deep pain about her nephew , and the racial strife that followed the attack on him .
“ We wasn ’ t raised like this .
We wasn ’ t raised with no black and white thing , ” Smith says , as King .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” the “ s ” comes out as a hard hiss instead of the usual “ z ” sound , and that quirk of pronunciation opens up a whole world of personality and ethnic perspective .
Then , suddenly , she ’ s talking mournfully about Rodney ’ s beaten face .
“ It was a hell of a look , ” she says .
As Charles Lloyd , the defense attorney for Soon Ja Du—a Korean shopkeeper who killed a fifteen-year-old Black girl , Latasha Harlins , in an incident that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helped to catalyze the riots—Smith is again ruefully comic .
The lawyer ’ s patter becomes a kind of sick boxing commentary : “ I mean , this fight was no contest .
I ’ ll take the girl.
” For a second , we ’ re the implicated jury , caught up in the spectacle and almost forgetting that blood has been shed .
Smith knows what is funny , what is tragic , what is monstrous about her characters , and knows which words—which barely perceptible movements of the face—contain those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that life as an ethnic minority , living in close quarters with other tossed-aside people , is full of violent paradoxes .
One of the rigors of Smith ’ s work is the way she draws the shapes of possible alliances—Black and Jewish in the case of “ Fires ” ; Black , Chicano , and Korean in the L.A. of “ Twilight ” —that are troubled , perhaps fatally , because their participants have been pushed into material competition .
It ’ s excruciating to watch her portray a Korean woman , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she weighs the righteousness of Black struggle against the bitter invisibility of her own community .
A better government than we have would reanimate the Federal Theatre Project and commission hundreds of Smith-style projects , inviting communities around the country into a more complete understanding of themselves .
The moment of justice and clarity toward which “ Twilight ” so ardently strives will look like this : somebody with her ears open and her heart ready .
She steps onstage only when all the knowledge she ’ s been seeking—terrible and strange , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in her body as in her mind .
♦

In 1993, the photographer Richard Avedon made a portrait, in edgeless black-and-white, of the playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith, to accompany an article in this magazine by John Lahr. In the picture, Smith wears a dark, baggy jacket, and her English garden of loosely coiled hair tickles at her shoulders and clavicle. Her face is hard to parse. Her scrunched brows are like thin awnings over her eyes, which stare intensely; there’s a tension in her mouth that draws one side slightly higher than the other—this could be a put-on sneer or an attempt to mask a sudden laugh. Smith looks serious and funny, formidable and unpredictable, and—not unlike the works of confessional-historical theatre with which she has made her name—capable at once of intimate empathy and detached appraisal.
The photograph conveys what her plays confirm: that a whole world of thought and emotion can be made, through art, to live and accrue new meanings in just one person’s mind and body. Smith, now sixty-nine, has devoted her career to making panoramic documentary plays that depend for their power on her talents as a journalist and as an uncanny, soul-embodying mimic. For her one-woman shows, she conducts hundreds of interviews about high-profile civic events and, through a miracle of compression, presents verbatim the answers of her subjects, one after the other, retelling recent history as a kind of audiovisual collage.
Her most famous plays, “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities” (1992)—about the 1991 Black-Jewish conflict in Crown Heights—and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” (1993), about the riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of four policemen accused of beating Rodney King, illustrate the power of her method. Both tally the reasons for and the results of civic eruption and interracial strife. Smith is in dialogue with the soul-funk legends Sly & the Family Stone, whose funniest and darkest joke was a song called “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” which consisted of four seconds of total silence. Yeah, there’s a riot, but who can really speak its language?
Smith’s dramatic invention is spiritually descended from the Living Newspaper tradition of political theatre, which reached the height of its influence in America in the nineteen-thirties, under the aegis of the Federal Theatre Project. Living Newspapers narrated current events—sometimes framed by frank propaganda—for Depression-era audiences. You might think of Smith’s plays as Living Magazines: thoroughly reported, yes, but shot through with a chorus of sensibilities, curated into a higher coherence.
Editing is key to Smith’s art; she makes distant world views sometimes painfully proximate. Voices come in concert if not always in conversation. They differ in timbre, perhaps, but Smith places them so precisely that their parallels in attitude or style or content become apparent. When her people contradict one another directly, in succession, the collision clears the way for epiphany. Smith’s plays take pluralism as a given, but subtly synthesize it into a unified whole. (Another way to say this is that Smith delivers in art what America has chronically failed at in practice.)
Smith began a playwright’s residency at the Signature Theatre, in New York, during the 2019-20 season, which was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was to be an extension of her great experiment: “Fires” and “Twilight” would be staged with new actors—which is to say, without Smith. Might these voices, now almost thirty years removed from the moment of their utterance, still hold together if sung by someone else? Based on the evidence of “Fires,” directed last fall by Saheem Ali, the answer was a tentative yes. The show was performed by Michael Benjamin Washington, and its mixture of empathy and terrifying neutrality was still intact. As Washington riffled through personages—Al Sharpton, Lubavitcher housewives, a Caribbean father shocked into silence by the death of his child—the audience moved with him toward an awful comprehension of the riots’ costs.
Pershing Square Signature Center shut down before the new “Twilight” could hit the stage. It’s a shame, a situation that I hope will be rectified whenever it’s safe for people to rejoin one another on the aisles.
Happily, the Public Broadcasting Service has made its “Great Performances” production of “Twilight: Los Angeles,” directed by Marc Levin, available to stream on pbs.org. The PBS version of “Twilight”—which first aired in 2001—is more than simply a recording of Smith’s original play. It opens in 1999, seven years after the riots; Smith is back in town, again looking for answers. Has there been some salutary result of the chaos? “I think it didn’t get any better,” a wide-eyed older woman says in response to Smith’s questions. Daryl Gates, the former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, still thinks, from the fresh vantage of the turn of the century, that the brutal beating of Rodney King by officers under his charge “had nothing to do with race.”
These newer scenes are woven into the film’s fabric, but most of the show focusses on Smith’s original material. She portrays her interviewees in front of minimalistic sets, shot with a calm naturalism by the cinematographer Maryse Alberti, giving the production a hint of the immediacy of the theatre. Here, though, the great physical limitation of Smith’s stage plays—the imperative to change costumes and characterizations on the fly, presenting a human panoply through a series of quickly achieved vocal and physical transformations—is gone. I missed that constraint, which typically yields gold for Smith. Except for a few quick changes, each of her characters has his or her own scene; rarely do we get to see her hurriedly morph, perhaps her most impressive (and metaphorically humane) trick.
It’s still miraculous to watch Smith work. She plays Rodney King’s aunt, Angela King, with a reproving, sulky comedy that nearly masks her deep pain about her nephew, and the racial strife that followed the attack on him. “We wasn’t raised like this. We wasn’t raised with no black and white thing,” Smith says, as King. When she says the word “Chinese,” the “s” comes out as a hard hiss instead of the usual “z” sound, and that quirk of pronunciation opens up a whole world of personality and ethnic perspective. Then, suddenly, she’s talking mournfully about Rodney’s beaten face. “It was a hell of a look,” she says.
As Charles Lloyd, the defense attorney for Soon Ja Du—a Korean shopkeeper who killed a fifteen-year-old Black girl, Latasha Harlins, in an incident that, along with the King assault, helped to catalyze the riots—Smith is again ruefully comic. The lawyer’s patter becomes a kind of sick boxing commentary: “I mean, this fight was no contest. I’ll take the girl.” For a second, we’re the implicated jury, caught up in the spectacle and almost forgetting that blood has been shed. Smith knows what is funny, what is tragic, what is monstrous about her characters, and knows which words—which barely perceptible movements of the face—contain those truths.
She knows, too, that life as an ethnic minority, living in close quarters with other tossed-aside people, is full of violent paradoxes. One of the rigors of Smith’s work is the way she draws the shapes of possible alliances—Black and Jewish in the case of “Fires”; Black, Chicano, and Korean in the L.A. of “Twilight”—that are troubled, perhaps fatally, because their participants have been pushed into material competition. It’s excruciating to watch her portray a Korean woman, her eyes full of tears, as she weighs the righteousness of Black struggle against the bitter invisibility of her own community.
A better government than we have would reanimate the Federal Theatre Project and commission hundreds of Smith-style projects, inviting communities around the country into a more complete understanding of themselves. The moment of justice and clarity toward which “Twilight” so ardently strives will look like this: somebody with her ears open and her heart ready. She steps onstage only when all the knowledge she’s been seeking—terrible and strange, contradictory and tough to take—lives as much in her body as in her mind. ♦