The New Yorker - November 9, 2015.pdf

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NOV. 9, 2015
N O V E M B E R 9, 2 0 1 5
5
21
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
George Packer on refugees and the U.S.;
remembering Lindsay; African art treasure;
New York’s pencil king; songs and cookies.
george Packer
26
35
36
42
52
THE REPUBLICAN CLASS WAR
Will the G.O.P. finally address inequality?
Alexis wilkinson
Alexis okeowo
UNPLANNED PARENTHOOD
HANDEL IN KINSHASA
The rise of a self-taught orchestra.
nick paumgarten
LIFE IS RESCUES
Saving people is a favorite Icelandic pastime.
nathan heller
BLOOD TIES
A college romance and a double-murder case.
FICTION
“HONEY BUNNY”
jUlianne Pachico
66
THE CRITICS
THE CURRENT CINEMA
anthony lane
74
77
81
82
84
“Spotlight,” “Trumbo.”
BOOKS
alexandra schwartz
Mary Gaitskill’s “The Mare.”
Briefly Noted
POP MUSIC
Carrie battan
The decline of dance music.
THE ART WORLD
peter schjeldahl
Frank Stella at the Whitney Museum.
POEMS
craig raine
JIM JARMUSCH
48
70
“Bitch”
“Verdict with Guitar”
COVER
John Cuneo
“Rolling Out the Gold Carpet”
DRA
WINGS
Michael Maslin, Julian Rowe, Robert Mankoff, Frank Cotham, Bruce Eric Kaplan,
Paul Noth, Carolita Johnson, Liana Finck, Drew Dernavich, Harry Bliss, Roz Chast, P. C. Vey,
Edward Steed, Will McPhail, Matthew Diffee, Tom Chitty, Danny Shanahan, Farley Katz
SPOTS
M. H. Jeeves
CONTRIBUTORS
george packer
(COMMENT, P. 21; “THE REPUBLICAN CLASS WAR,” P. 26)
nathan heller
(“BLOOD TIES,” P. 52)
is a staff writer.
is the author of “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New
America,” for which he won a National Book Award.
nick paumgarten
(THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 22; “LIFE IS RESCUES,”
P. 42)
has been writing for the magazine since 2000.
alexis okeowo
(“HANDEL IN KINSHASA,” P. 36)
is a staff writer and a
grew up in Colombia and now
lives in England. She recently finished a short-story collection
entitled “The Lucky Ones.”
julianne pachico
(FICTION, P. 66)
jim jarmusch
(POEM, P. 70)
is a filmmaker, a writer, and a noise mu-
fellow at the New America Foundation.
mary norris
(THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 24)
started working at
The
sician. His next films, “Paterson” and “Gimme Danger,” will be
released in 2016.
is a staff writer and
film critic for the magazine. “Nobody’s Perfect” is a collection of his
New Yorker
essays.
anthony lane
(THE CURRENT CINEMA, P. 74)
alexandra schwartz
(BOOKS, P. 77)
won the Nona Balakian Cita-
New Yorker
in 1978. Her book, “Between You & Me: Confessions of
a Comma Queen,” was published in April.
is an award-winning
photographer who, in addition to covering armed conflicts in the
Middle East for the past decade, has lately begun chronicling adven-
ture around the world.
benjamin lowy
(PHOTOGRAPHS, PP. 42, 46)
tion for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics
Circle earlier this year.
carrie battan
(POP MUSIC, P. 82)
has published four
books, including “The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory,” which
came out in October.
john seabrook
(THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 25)
is a writer living in Brooklyn.
Her work has appeared in various publications, including the
Times
Magazine, GQ,
and the Web site Pitchfork.
peter schjeldahl
(THE ART WORLD, P. 84)
, the magazine’s art critic,
is a recent Harvard
graduate and a former president of the
Harvard Lampoon,
and a
writer for the HBO show “Veep.”
alexis wilkinson
(SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 35)
craig raine
(POEM, P. 48)
, a poet, novelist, and critic, and the founder
and editor of
Areté,
has a new book, “My Grandmother’s Glass Eye:
A Look at Poetry,” coming out early next year.
was awarded the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing in 2008.
His most recent book is “Let’s See.”
JOHN cuneo
(COVER)
has received several prizes from the Society of
Illustrators, including the Hamilton King Award, for his
New Yorker
cover “Dog Meets Dog.” A collection of his personal drawings
will be published next year.
NEWYORKER.COM
Everything in the magazine, and more
than fifteen original stories a day.
ALSO:
DAILY COMMENT
/
CULTURAL COMMENT:
Opinions and analysis by
SLIDE SHOWS:
Photographs from a tour of duty with members of
Joan Acocella, Jiayang Fan,
and others.
VIDEO:
Photographers gather on Iceland’s Jökulsárlón lagoon,
the Icelandic volunteer search-and-rescue team. Plus, art works
from the Frank Stella retrospective at the Whitney.
PODCASTS:
On Politics and More,
John Cassidy
joins
Dorothy
jockeying to capture the perfect picture of the treacherous
landscape. Plus, on the latest episode of “Comma Queen,”
Mary
Norris
discusses the difference between “I” and “me.”
HUMOR:
A Daily Cartoon on the news, by
Kaamran Hafeez.
Wickenden
for a discussion about the most recent Republican
debate. On the monthly Fiction Podcast,
Deborah Treisman
and
Lydia Davis
talk about a short story written by Davis’s father, Robert
Gorham Davis, which was published in the magazine in 1943.
SUBSCRIBERS:
Get access to our magazine app for tablets and smartphones at the App Store, Amazon.com, or Google Play. (Access varies by
location and device.)
2
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 9, 2015
THE MAIL
THE FOREST FOR THE TREES
Kathryn Schulz writes about Henry David
Thoreau’s narcissism, priggishness, “dour
asceticism,” and lack of fellow-feeling
(“Pond Scum,” October 19th). Those
qualities were eloquently anatomized
by Perry Miller, in “Consciousness in
Concord” (1958), and again, by Richard
Bridgman, in “Dark Thoreau”(1982).
But in contrast to Schulz’s piece, which
exhibits the same lack of generosity that
she ascribes to Thoreau, those books
thoroughly engage the complex ques-
tion of why Thoreau’s passion for na-
ture seemed to him to require the (im-
possible) exclusion of the social world.
Anyone who has read Thoreau with
sympathy will flinch at the picture of
him in Schulz’s piece. In response to
Thoreau’s journal entry dated April 11,
1852—“It appears to be a law that you
cannot have a deep sympathy with both
man and nature. Those qualities which
bring you near to the one estrange you
from the other”—one might permit one-
self to be repelled or, rather, to think,
How extraordinary to be governed by
such an economy. When Thoreau writes,
“I desire to speak somewhere
without
bounds; like a man in a waking moment,
to men in their waking moments,” it be-
comes clear that we are not actually ex-
cluded. What if Thoreau’s intention,
as described in the journal entry from
August 17, 1851, to “watch nature always
with my moods!,” required deep solitude?
Sharon Cameron
Kenan Professor of English, Emerita
Johns Hopkins University
New York City
Many readers interpret Thoreau’s famous
misanthropy less as his looking down on
people than as his effort to elevate the
natural world. Instead of pursuing a nar-
cissistic project, Thoreau might be seen
as demonstrating the possibility of step-
ping out of social ruts. He seeks to place
life in the context of history, natural sur-
roundings, and the alternative modes of
other cultures. “Walden” makes no claim
to consistency or universality. Its author
is alive to his personal contradictions.
Where he fails, he exhorts us to try for
ourselves to look up from our daily lives
and broaden our vision, and he does so
in confident and muscular prose, rich
with metaphor. Yes, he was sexist, but he
was also an abolitionist, a conservation-
ist, and a pacifist who inspired Gandhi.
By the way: the only scum floating on
Walden Pond is the Walden Pond Scum,
a group of kayakers learning Greenland
kayaking techniques; I’m a member. We
pay tribute to Thoreau’s curiosity about
Native Americans, whom he approached
as respectfully as he did everyone on the
“wrong side” of Route 2 from the citizens
of Concord, whose closed-mindedness
he disdained.
Sanjay Gulati
Harvard, Mass.
It’s often a mistake to name single truths
when reading Thoreau. He once recalled
that the Hindus understood Kabir’s po-
etry to have four senses (“illusion, spirit,
intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the
Vedas”), whereas in New England “it is
considered a ground for complaint if a
man’s writings admit of more than one
interpretation.” One of the “senses” in
Thoreau that Schulz misses is the sense
of humor. “Especially the transcenden-
tal philosophy needs the leaven of humor
to render it light and digestible,” he wrote.
Schulz points to Thoreau’s refusal of a
doormat for his cabin: “It is best to avoid
the beginnings of evil.” She comments,
“I am not aware of any theology which
holds that the road to Hell is paved with
doormats.” I think he knew how to leaven
idealism with a touch of exaggeration.
Maybe nineteenth-century Yankee humor
is too dry for the modern ear.
Lewis Hyde
Richard L. Thomas Professor of
Creative Writing, Kenyon College
Gambier, Ohio
Schulz’s critique misses a crucial point
about Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Gov-
ernment.” He argues that the fundamen-
tal moral obligation of each person is to
follow his or her conscience. This is not
a theory of government but a theory of
moral obligation. Nor is it a claim of per-
sonal infallibility; it is possible that a per-
son who is following his conscience may
encounter someone with a conflicting
belief, and that one or both persons may
have cause to rethink their position. Tho-
reau might agree with Schulz that “it is
the point of democracy to adjudicate,”
but only to a point. Majority rule does
not adequately settle disputes over per-
sonal moral obligation.
Elizabeth A. Linehan
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Saint Joseph’s University
Philadelphia, Pa.
A close, sensitive reading of Thoreau re-
veals a complex man deeply connected
to family and community. He was an ec-
centric, to be sure, but also a passionate
man of genius. One of the lesser-known
realities of Thoreau’s life was his warm
relationship with the children of Con-
cord. Edward Emerson, the son of Ralph
Waldo, became concerned by the mis-
conceptions that surrounded his friend—
the kind that Schulz perpetuates. Ed-
ward, writing in 1917, recalled Thoreau
as “the best kind of an older brother,”
adding that he was troubled “by the false
impressions given by accredited writers
who really knew him hardly at all.” He
describes the “humble persons whom the
literary men would never find out, like
those who helped in the pencil mill, or
in a survey, or families whom he came
to know well and value in his walking
over every square rod of Concord, or
one of the brave and humane managers
of the Underground Railroad, of which
Thoreau was an operative.” He also writes
that “Thoreau, though brusque on oc-
casions, was refined, courteous, kind and
humane; that he had a religion and lived
up to it.” Schulz’s “gotcha” criticism can-
not erode the lasting value of contextual
reading.
Lucille Stott
Brunswick, Me.
C
ORRECTION
: The subhead of “The
Memory Keeper” (October 26th) iden-
tified Svetlana Alexievich, the Nobel
Laureate in Literature, as Russian. She
writes in Russian, but she is Belarusian.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail
to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be
edited for length and clarity, and may be pub-
lished in any medium. We regret that owing to
the volume of correspondence we cannot reply
to every letter or return letters.
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 9, 2015
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