I watched too much Turner Classic Movies at an early age. It can be a burden: all my celebrity crushes have been dead for at least twenty years, and to this day I think that marcelled hair looks normal. But my obsession with films of the 1930s and 1940s can also instill another bias in…
Fyodor Dostoevsky published the first installment of The Brothers Karamazov in February, 1879. The novel was the culmination of a decade of ideological strife, during which Dostoevsky had noted a steady slide toward populism. Socialism, the passion of Dostoevsky’s youth, was an enthusiasm still on the march. The author of The Brothers Karamazov was a…
Next time her skull is sliced open, she must have a mind limber as rubber, bending to the pain. Under the bright lights of the icy theater she will melt, allowing the saw’s buzz to fade into the sound of the surgeon entering her interior, surveying the field of tumors for the bad one. When…
She wanted a crypt like the temple of Dendur, an enormous monolith unshakeable as their marriage. He favored the granite sarcophagus gaily decorated with Victorian swirls and oak leaf cornices. She wanted poplars tall and straight—leafy and shameless as Italian trees of summer, if sadly deciduous. He preferred cypresses, their constancy through the seasons: shrubs—yew…
1. Precocious in her dotage, she teeters like a top unravelling, now spinning, now faltering, now lunging across living room carpets, over William Morris tendrils and Bokara medallions, past the leather sofa and beyond, arriving at the south window. She stoops over the hope chest with her watering can, drenching the amaryllis, dotting orchids and jade with ice, then pruning the cactus…
Some years ago, deep into a confounding research assignment for which I had been combing through the website of the South Dakota legislature, I stumbled upon the recorded testimony of a woman describing in detail her own rape and torture, and the tortures of her sisters by the same hands. In her account the acts,…
I How close to the world can one be? How far from the world should one be? Those questions represent two mentalities, two doctrines — the aspiration to nearness, the suspicion of nearness; engagement as a form of strength, engagement as a form of weakness; the hunger for reality, the horror of reality; the nobility…
I It was Friday, October 16, 2020, the last day of school before the All Saints’ Day break at the Bois-d’Aulne middle school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on the outskirts of Paris. In front of the school, a man named Abdullakh Abouzeidovich Anzorov decapitated Samuel Paty, a professor of history, geography, and civics. The knife-wielding executioner was…
SICILIANS AND GREEKS To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica is reissuing his books, one a week for twenty weeks. In theory, I have read most of them: when I first lived in Italy, I used to buy them at the newsstand in…
Russia is a country of symbols. Major political shifts here are always accompanied by a change of outward trappings, as a graphic demonstration of a rupture with the old. In March 1917, as the Russian throne stood empty after the abdication of the last Czar, the crowned double-headed eagles — the symbols of the fallen…
Epidemics are not part of America’s collective memory. The colonial era’s smallpox and yellow fever epidemics, the three cholera epidemics of 1832, 1849, and 1866, the great flu pandemic of 1918 — none of these left a deep imprint on the national consciousness. None fit into a larger national story, at least none that Americans…
At the museum of his life, his leather duffle coat is behind glass. It felt like a poem-protection center. It was my responsibility to go home, put food out in the same place every day, talk to the people who came to eat, then organize them, food and poetry being a nourishment that shares a…
