Throughout the profile, Hemingway, drinking hard, employs a kind of skin-tightening lingo that he called “Indian Talk.” It wouldn’t have offended the sensibilities of the day, but even then it would have seemed hackneyed: “He read book all way up on plane. He like book, I think.” Sometimes the boxing and baseball metaphors that he … Read more
There was more flaying than I expected, though not necessarily more than I wanted, at “Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet.” Any visitors going to the Met’s exhibition in search of tranquillity will find a fifteenth-century flaying knife, a pair of flayed cadavers embroidered onto a rug, and another flayed cadaver, with colorful guts … Read more
One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust recounts the arresting novelty of a telephone call or an airplane sighting. For T. S. Eliot, the products of industrial capitalism can appear either literally (“a record on the gramophone” in “The … Read more
The saga of my Jewish conversion began twenty-five years ago, when I got engaged to my first husband. He’d grown up in an Orthodox family, and his parents, my future in-laws, were devastated that he was marrying a non-Jew; under religious law, a child is born a Jew only if the mother is Jewish, so … Read more
In a Faustian bargain, there’s little suspense about how things will end. The Devil doesn’t hand anything over—beauty, knowledge, power—without first laying down some heavy hints. And so it goes as the lights dim for the musical “Death Becomes Her,” by the songwriters Julia Mattison and Noel Carey and the book writer Marco Pennette, at … Read more
If you remember anything about this painting, may it be that the dog’s name is Noble. The black poodle in the bottom left greets us as a silhouette with a few shiny parts: teeth, eye, damp nose, pink tongue. The teeth could crack bone; the tongue wants to be friends. Not a very dignified pose … Read more
Kenneth Lonergan’s “Hold On to Me Darling,” a discursive, queasily romantic comedy about the emptiness of American celebrity, is back for another stint Off Broadway. At the Lucille Lortel, the director Neil Pepe is largely reprising his Atlantic Theatre production from eight years ago; the “Hold On” cast features three of the same actors, and … Read more
Chop down a poplar tree. Other kinds of wood could work, too, but poplar is an especially soft one, and your task is to trim it into thin planes. These you’ll need to coat in a barrier of plaster and animal glue—naked wood is highly absorbent, and you can’t have it drinking down everything you … Read more
In the early weeks of 2008, as Barack Obama was fighting Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Presidential nomination, many Party members felt obliged to pick a side, and to lend their voices to the side they picked. Few of these voices were as powerful as that of John Lewis, a congressman from Georgia and a … Read more
Meanwhile, our other hero, Mal Arvorian, is growing up under a similar constraint. Mal has an ability that, even in the Archipelago, is rare in humans: she can fly, although only when wearing a coat given to her by a stranger at birth and only when the wind is blowing. In a different sense, however, … Read more
